Europe's secret plan to boost GM crop production

Gordon Brown and other EU leaders in campaign to promote modified foods


By Geoffrey Lean
The Independent

Gordon Brown and other European leaders are secretly preparing an unprecedented campaign to spread GM crops and foods in Britain and throughout the continent, confidential documents obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveal.

The documents – minutes of a series of private meetings of representatives of 27 governments – disclose plans to "speed up" the introduction of the modified crops and foods and to "deal with" public resistance to them.

And they show that the leaders want "agricultural representatives" and "industry" – presumably including giant biotech firms such as Monsanto – to be more vocal to counteract the "vested interests" of environmentalists.

News of the secret plans is bound to create a storm of protest at a time when popular concern about GM technology is increasing, even in countries that have so far accepted it.

Public opposition has prevented any modified crops from being grown in Britain. France, one of only three countries in Europe to have grown them in any amounts, has suspended their cultivation, and resistance to them is rising rapidly in the other two, Spain and Portugal.

The embattled biotech industry has been conducting a public relations campaign based round the highly contested assertion that genetic modification is needed to feed the world. It has had some success in the Government, where ministers have been increasingly speaking out in favour of the technology, and in the European Commission, with which its lobbyists have boasted of having "excellent working relations".

The secret meetings were convened by Jose Manuel Barroso, the pro-GM President of the Commission, and chaired by his head of cabinet, Joao Vale de Almeida. The prime ministers of each of the EU's 27 member states were asked to nominate a special representative.

Neither the membership of the group, nor its objectives, nor the outcomes of its meetings have been made public. But The IoS has obtained confidential documents, including an attendance list and the conclusions of the two meetings held so far – on 17 July and just two weeks ago on 10 October – written by the chairman.

The list shows that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany sent close aides. Britain was represented by Sonia Phippard, director for food and farming at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The conclusions reveal the discussions were mainly preoccupied with how to speed up the introduction of GM crops and food and how to persuade the public to accept them.

The modified products have to be approved by the EU before they can be sown or sold anywhere in Europe. But though the Commission officials are generally strongly in favour, European governments are split, causing the Council of Ministers, on which they are represented, to be deadlocked.

In that event the bureaucrats on the Commission wave them through anyway. They are legally allowed to do this, but overruled governments and environmental groups are unhappy.

The conclusions of the first meeting called for the "speeding up of the authorisation process based on robust assessments so as to reassure the public", while the second one added: "Decisions could be made faster without compromising safety."

But the documents also make clear that Mr Barroso is going beyond mere exhortation by trying to get prime ministers to overrule their own agriculture and environment ministers in favour of GM. They report that the chairman "recalled the importance for prime ministers to look at the wider picture", "invited the participants to report the discussions of the group to their heads of governments", and "stressed the importance of drawing their attention to ongoing discussions in the Council [of Ministers]".

Helen Holder of Friends of the Earth Europe said: "Barroso's aim is to get GM into Europe as quickly as possible. So he is going straight to prime ministers and presidents to tell them to step on their ministers and get them into line."

The conclusions of the meetings on public opposition are even more incendiary. The documents ponder "how best to deal with public opinion" and call for "an emotion-free, fact-based dialogue on the high standards of the EU GM policy". And they record the chairman emphasising "the role of industry, economic partners and science to actively contribute to such a dialogue". He adds that "the public feels ill-informed" and says "agricultural representatives should be more vocal". And in a veiled swipe at environmental groups he says that the debate "should not be left to certain stakeholders who have a legitimate but vested interest in it".

What they say

'We have to feed an extra 2.5 billion people. It would be extraordinary if we chose not to exploit the most important breakthrough in biological science'

Professor Allan Buckwell

'New developments will benefit the world's poorest farmers: GM rice that is drought-resistant; transgenic crops with genes to protect against disease'

Lord Dick Taverne, Sense About Science

'GM crops pose unacceptable risks to farmers and the environment and have failed to increase yields despite funding at a cost of millions to UK taxpayers'

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, FoE

'GM crops do not increase yields. Scientists have found genetically engineered insecticide in crops can leak and kill beneficial soil fungi'

Peter Melchett, Soil Association

Q & A: The trouble with modified crops

How much GM is grown in Europe?

Very little. The documents boast the area increased by 21 per cent last year, proving "growing interest". But it still only covered 0.119 per cent of Europe's agricultural land.

What are the problems?

Mainly environmental. Official trials in Britain showed that growing GM crops was worse for wildlife than cultivating conventional ones. Worse, genes escape from the modified plants to create superweeds and to contaminate normal and organic crops, denying consumers a choice to be GM-free.

Do they endanger health?

Hard to tell. Some studies show that they may do, others (including almost all those by industry) are reassuring. The trouble is that very few truly independent, peer-reviewed research has been done. Most consumers have sensibly concluded that they would sooner be safe than sorry, particularly as they get no benefit from buying GM.

Can they feed the world?

Almost certainly not. Despite all the hype, present GM varieties actually have lower yields than their conventional counterparts. The seeds are expensive to buy and grow, so wealthy developing-world farmers would tend to use them and drive poor ones out of business, increasing destitution. The biggest agricultural assessment ever conducted – chaired by Professor Robert Watson, now Defra's chief scientist – recently concluded that they would not do the job.

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Reading This Will Change Your Brain

A leading neuroscientist says processing digital information can rewire your circuits. But is it evolution?

By Jeneen Interlandi | NEWSWEEK

Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small's new book, "iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. "Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise. The brain's plasticity—it's ability to change in response to different stimuli—is well known. Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes' brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That's because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that's not the same thing as evolution.

To see how the Internet might be rewiring us, Small and colleagues monitored the brains of 24 adults as they performed a simulated Web search, and again as they read a page of text. During the Web search, those who reported using the Internet regularly in their everyday lives showed twice as much signaling in brain regions responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning, compared with those who had limited Internet exposure. The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain's capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.

Small says these differences are likely to be even more profound across generations, because younger people are exposed to more technology from an earlier age than older people. He refers to this as the brain gap. On one side, what he calls digital natives—those who have never known a world without e-mail and text messaging—use their superior cognitive abilities to make snap decisions and juggle multiple sources of sensory input. On the other side, digital immigrants—those who witnessed the advent of modern technology long after their brains had been hardwired—are better at reading facial expressions than they are at navigating cyberspace. "The typical immigrant's brain was trained in completely different ways of socializing and learning, taking things step-by-step and addressing one task at a time," he says. "Immigrants learn more methodically and tend to execute tasks more precisely."

But whether natural selection will favor one skill set over the other remains to be seen. For starters, there's no reason to believe the two behaviors are mutually exclusive. In fact, a 2005 Kaiser study found that young people who spent the most time engaged with high-technology also spent the most time interacting face-to-face, with friends and family. And as Small himself points out, digital natives and digital immigrants can direct their own neural circuitry—reaping the cognitive benefits of modern technology while preserving traditional social skills—simply by making time for both.

In the meantime, modern technology, and the skills it fosters, is evolving even faster than we are. There's no telling whether future iterations of computer games, online communities and the like will require more or less of the traditional social skills and learning strategies that we've spent so many eons cultivating. "Too many people write about this as if kids are in one country and adults are in another," says James Gee, a linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What the future brain will look like is still anybody's guess.

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Vitamin D is Synthesized From Cholesterol and Found in Cholesterol-Rich Foods

May 25, 2006

by Chris Masterjohn

CHOLESTEROL AND HEALTH

(Please also see my more recent and extensive article, From Seafood to Sunshine: A New Understanding of Vitamin D Safety, as well as my article on vitamin D nutrition during pregnancy and lactation, Vitamin D in the Infant: Requirements and Safety.)

One of cholesterol's many functions in the body is to act as a precursor to vitamin D.Vitamin D can also be obtained from foods. Interestingly, foods that provide this vitamin -- all of which are animal foods -- tend to be high in cholesterol.

Since cholesterol is a precursor to vitamin D, inhibiting the synthesis of cholesterol will also inhibit the synthesis of vitamin D. Since sunlight is required to turn cholesterol into vitamin D, avoiding the sun will likewise undermine our ability to synthesize vitamin D. And since vitamin D-rich foods are also rich in cholesterol, low-cholesterol diets are inherently deficient in vitamin D.

Vitamin D is best known for its role in calcium metabolism and bone health, but new roles are continually being discovered for it, including roles in mental health, blood sugar regulation, the immune system, and cancer prevention. Yet standard modern advice -- take cholesterol-lowering drugs, avoid the sun, eat a low-cholesterol diet -- combined with a recommended daily intake of vitamin D that is only a tenth of what many researchers believe to be sufficient all seems to pave the way for widespread vitamin D deficiency.

Perhaps that's why, according to Dr. John Cannel, President of the Vitamin D Council, most whites and nearly all blacks in modern society are deficient in vitamin D.¹

In This Article:

• Sources of Vitamin D: Sunlight
• Figures 1 and 2: 7-Dehydrocholesterol and Vitamin D
• Sources of Vitamin D: Cholesterol-Rich Foods
• Table: Vitamin D-Rich Foods Are High in Cholesterol
• Are Plants and Irradiated Mushrooms a Source of Vitamin D?
• Figures 3 and 4: A Comparison of Vitamin D₂ and Vitamin D₃
• The Many Functions of Vitamin D: More Than Just Calcium
• Do Cholesterol-Lowering Statins Inhibit Vitamin D Synthesis?
• Requirements: How Much Vitamin D Do We Need?
• Figures 5, 6 and 7: The Different Stages of Activation of Vitamin D
• Toxicity: How Much is Too Much?
• Make Sure to Get Your Vitamin A
• Without Cholesterol, There Is No Vitamin D
• End Notes

Sources of Vitamin D: Synthesis of Vitamin D in the Skin by Sunlight

When sunshine in the UV-B spectrum strikes the skin, it converts a substance in the skin called 7-dehydrocholesterol into vitamin D₃.²

7-dehydrocholesterol is a very close precursor to cholesterol. If you look at our flow chart showing the synthesis of cholesterol, you will see that it shows lanosterol being converted directly to cholesterol. This conversion is actually believed to take more than 18 different steps and hasn't been completely figured out, so it is usually simplified as one step.³ 7-dehydrocholesterol occurs very close to the end of this conversion, so is often referred to as "cholesterol" or "a form of cholesterol."

Figure 1: The Chemical Structure of 7-Dehydrocholesterol

Figure 2: The Chemical Structure of Vitamin D

When atmospheric conditions are ideal and skies are clear, 30 minutes of whole-body exposure of pale skin to sunlight without clothing or sunscreen can result in the synthesis of between 10,000 and 20,000 IU of vitamin D. These quantities of vitamin D are large, and therefore capable of supplying the body's full needs.²

At the same time, the body has two mechanisms to prevent an excess of vitamin D from developing: first, further irradiation converts excess vitamin D in the skin to a variety of inactive metabolites; second, the pigment melanin begins to accumulate in skin tissues after the first exposure of the season, which decreases the production of vitamin D.²

The availability of UV-B rays, however, depends on the angle at which sunshine strikes the earth, making vitamin D synthesis impossible for most people at most latitudes during parts of the year called the "vitamin D winter."⁴

Outside the vitamin D winter, sufficient UV-B rays for full vitamin D synthesis do not suddenly become available: the window of time during each day in which vitamin D synthesis can occur gradually expands as the season progresses, as does the amount of UV-B radiation available within that window.⁴

Many different factors can make the availability of UV-B widely variable during any given time of the year. Clouds alone, for example, can eliminate up to 99 percent of UV-B radiation.⁵

Natural variations in the density of the ozone layer can cause the length of the vitamin D winter to increase or decrease by up to two months. Aerosols and buildings block UV-B radiation, while increased altitude or reflective surfaces such as snow increase exposure to UV-B radiation.⁵

In the past, researchers suggested that any place outside of 34 degrees latitude experiences some degree of vitamin D winter, that the vitamin D winter in Boston extended for four months from November through February, and that the vitamin D winter in Edmonton extended for six months from October through March.⁵

More recently, researchers found that so many factors influence the availability of UV-B light that vitamin D winters under some conditions in Boston and Edmonton could be much shorter, whereas under other conditions, vitamin D winters can even occur at the equator.⁵

Since most of us live at latitudes that are covered by a vitamin D winter for at least part of the year, and since most of us work indoors and wear clothing and sunblock when outdoors in the summer sun, it is necessary for most of us to consume vitamin D in food for at least part of the year, or to supplement with vitamin D.

In order to consume vitamin D as food, we must eat the cholesterol-rich animal foods we are so often told to avoid.

Sources of Vitamin D: Foods High in Vitamin D Are High in Cholesterol

By far the richest source of dietary vitamin D is cod liver oil -- a substance that takes the honor of being the food second richest in cholesterol. At 5.7 milligrams of cholesterol per gram of food, cod liver oil beats out its nearest competitor -- chicken liver -- by 0.09 mg/g, and is one third richer in cholesterol than the notorious egg. It is second only to the expensive delicacy of caviar, which comes in at 5.9 mg of cholesterol per gram.

The second richest source of vitamin D is lard. No, you didn't read that wrong -- lard. Lard ranks #18 on our list of the top 22 foods richest in cholesterol, and is over four times richer in vitamin D than its nearest competitor, herring. Granted, the pigs need to be exposed to sunlight to generate vitamin D.

Other sources of vitamin D include fatty fish, some shellfish, egg yolks, and butter -- foods selected almost entirely from the list of those richest in cholesterol.

The table below shows the overlap between foods' status as cholesterol-rich and vitamin D-rich.

Table: Dietary Sources of Vitamin D₃⁶

Food	Cholesterol per 100 g	Vitamin D per 100 g
Cod liver oil	570 mg*	10,000 IU (up to 25,555 IU)
Herring	12.9 mg	680 IU
Oysters	54 mg	642 IU
Catfish	81 mg	500 IU
Sardines	142 mg	480 IU
Mackerel	95 mg*	450 IU
Salmon	87 mg	320 IU
Caviar	588 mg*	232 IU
Shrimp	173 mg	172 IU
Butter	218 mg	56 IU
Whole Egg (contained in Yolk only)	424 mg	49 IU
All Plant Foods	0 mg	0 IU

The correlation between cholesterol content and vitamin D content certainly isn't perfect, but all of the foods that contain vitamin D contain substantial amounts of cholesterol, and most of the foods high in vitamin D are quite high in cholesterol.

Sources of Vitamin D: Do Plant Foods and Mushrooms Really Contain Vitamin D?

Many "vitamin D" supplements contain vitamin D₂, which is obtained by subjecting ergosterol, a chemical found in plants, to radiation.

Recently, news reports declared that mushrooms subjected to ultraviolet radiation are "[zapped] into a giant serving" of vitamin D.⁷ Like plants, any vitamin D contained in mushrooms is in the form of vitamin D₂.⁸

Should sources of vitamin D₂ really be considered sources of vitamin D?

Some researchers claim that vitamin D₂, also called "ergocalciferol" and called "viosterol" in the old days, and vitamin D₃, also called "cholecalciferol" are equally effective in humans because their ability to bind to the vitamin D receptors in our cells is equal.² But that's not the whole story.

Figure 3: The Chemical Structure of Vitamin D3 (Cholecalciferol)

Figure 4: The Chemical Structure of Vitamin D2 (Ergosterol)

Vitamin D is carried in the blood by vitamin D-binding protein (DBP). DBP is kind of like a savings account for vitamin D. If you didn't have the DBP, you'd be forced to use all your vitamin D as soon as you absorb it, and excrete the rest. This would be a giant waste of vitamin D, because you can only use so much at a time. DBP thus helps to increase the effect of a given dose of vitamin D by holding on to what you don't need at any given moment for later use, and helps prevent toxicity by keeping the portion you don't need at any given moment from being delivered to your cells.²

Although vitamin D₂ binds well to the vitamin D receptor, it has very little affinity for vitamin D-binding protein. For this reason, it is well-known to be useless in chickens and other birds. When vitamin D was seen merely as a cure for rickets, vitamin D₂'s ability to treat rickets in the small amounts needed led researchers to believe it equal in power to vitamin D₃ in humans. Now that researchers are uncovering the need for much higher levels of vitamin D to maintain optimal health, it is becoming clear that vitamin D₂ just doesn't fit the bill.

The researchers Laura Armas, Bruce Hollis, and Robert Heaney showed in 2004 that vitamin D₂'s low affinity for the vitamin D-binding protein makes it nearly ten times less effective at raising long-term vitamin D levels.⁹

If vitamin D₂ has a lower affinity for the DBP, it follows that it is also much more likely to result in toxicity than is vitamin D₃. It is therefore unsurprising that, according to Dr. John Cannel, president of the Vitamin D Council, nearly all cases of toxicity from pharmacological doses of vitamin D resulted from the consumption of vitamin D₂.¹⁰

The vitamin D₂ synthesized from plant sterols should therefore not be considered true vitamin D for humans. Humans should obtain vitamin D from the sun and from the vitamin D-rich fatty animal foods that provide the form of vitamin D with which the sun provides us, and which we have consumed throughout our evolution.

The Many Functions of Vitamin D: More Than Just Bone Health and Calcium

Vitamin D is best known for its role in calcium metabolism, especially for its role in the treatment of rickets. Yet modern science is discovering that it has many more important roles, from mental health and immunity to blood sugar regulation and cancer prevention. In fact, there is some evidence that the vitamin D found in those notoriously "artery-clogging" cholesterol-rich foods may help prevent heart disease.

Cod liver oil was first used as a therapeutic agent in the 1770's, and by the mid-1800's it was well-recognized as a cure for the childhood bone disease, rickets, which is marked by an expansion of the bone's metaphyseal plate and a buildup of unmineralized bone matrix, and its adult equivalent, osteomalacia. Upon the discovery of vitamin A in 1913 as a component of cod liver oil and butterfat, researchers assumed vitamin A to be responsible for cod liver oil's ability to cure rickets. In 1921, however, a team of researchers established that there was a separate component of cod liver oil responsible for its ability to cure rickets, which came to be known as vitamin D.¹¹

In the early 1970's researchers discovered that vitamin D is actually activated into an endocrine hormone within the body, and over the course of the 1980s researchers discovered the vitamin D receptor, which is a nuclear receptor for vitamin D that enters the nucleus and alters the expression of genes once vitamin D binds to it.¹²

Since then, the scope of vitamin D research has broadened immensely. The Vitamin D Council, headed by Dr. John Jacob Cannel, MD, has compiled information on vitamin D's role in the following areas:

• Autoimmune illness
• Cancer
• Chronic pain
• Diabetes
• Heart disease
• Hyperparathyroidism
• Hypertension
• Mental illness
• Multiple sclerosis
• Muscle weakness and coordination
• Obesity
• Osteoarthritis

Dr. Cannel has proposed that a variety of the above conditions be used as indicators for "Vitamin D Deficiency Syndrome," and urges that physicians test the vitamin D levels of patients who exhibit those indicators and treat patients with deficient levels with sunlight or vitamin D supplementation.

Vitamin D Deficiency: Do Cholesterol-Lowering Statin Drugs Inhibit Vitamin D Synthesis?

Researchers know that vitamin D synthesis declines with age -- and so does the concentration of 7-dehydrocholesterol in the skin. Without 7-dehydrocholesterol in the skin, sunlight has nothing to turn into vitamin D. The researchers consider it likely, then, that the decreased synthesis of 7-dehydrocholesterol is responsible for the decreased synthesis of vitamin D that comes with age.²

It follows then, that the cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins, or HMG CoA reductase-inhibitors, which inhibit the synthesis of 7-dehydrocholesterol, also inhibit the synthesis of vitamin D.

(View our flow chart of the cholesterol synthesis pathway here. )

As of May 25, 2006, there are no studies indexed for Medline that tested the effect of statins on vitamin D levels for longer than three months, and only one, single study out of three that tested the effect of statins on vitamin D levels for longer than one month -- conducted a whopping fifteen years ago. The small handful of short-term studies found no effect.¹³

By contrast, researchers who showed that statins induce dramatic deficiencies of coenzyme Q10 in humans first retested coenzyme Q10 levels after six months of administering the statin. They further found that coenzyme Q10 levels kept decreasing over time for over 18 months before settling.¹⁴

We would expect statins to take even longer to cause a drop in vitamin D levels, because, whereas coenzyme Q10 is measured directly in the blood, the 7-dehydrocholesterol takes time to migrate to the surface of the skin and accumulate there. So what is the effect of statins on vitamin D levels one year down the road? Two years? Five? Ten?

The truth is we have no idea, because no one has bothered to study it.

Vitamin D Requirements: How Much Do We Need?

Although the U.S. RDA for vitamin D is a mere 400 IU, modern research is showing that much higher levels are needed to maintain adequate vitamin D status for optimal health.

After vitamin D is obtained from the diet or absorbed from the skin, it is semi-activated to 25 (OH) D or 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the liver. This is the primary storage form of the vitamin that is carried by vitamin D-binding protein in the blood. As needed, 25 (OH) D in the blood is fully activated to 1, 25 (OH)₂ D or 1, 25-dihydroxyvitamin D -- called calcitriol -- in the kidney primarily in response to low calcium levels.

The skin also has the ability to produce small amounts of activated vitamin D, and most of the tissues in the body have the capacity to activate vitamin D when stimulated to do so by the immune system -- completely separate from the calcium-regulated system that governs vitamin D activation in the kidney.²

It is the 25 (OH) D form of vitamin D that is considered the valid test of one's nutritional vitamin D status. If you ask your doctor for a vitamin D test, make sure your doctor orders the 25 (OH) D test and not the 1, 25 (OH)₂ D test.

Figure 5: The Chemical Structure of Vitamin D

Figure 6: The Chemical Structure of 25 (OH) D

Figure 7: The Chemical Structure of 1, 25 (OH)2 D

In order to maximize calcium absorption, blood levels of 25 (OH) D need to be maintained at 30 ng/mL, which, in the absence of UV-B light, would require roughly 2600 IU per day of vitamin D. The risk of fracture continues to decline at even higher 25 (OH) D levels because people with higher vitamin D levels actually fall less often, suggesting a neuromuscular benefit to high levels of the vitamin. Even higher levels of 46 ng/mL are needed to maximize the body's ability to regulate blood sugar, and since dark-skinned agricultural workers in the tropics have 25 (OH) D levels of about 60 ng/mL, it's probable that this is closer to the ideal level.¹⁵

The researcher Robert Heaney showed that people use about 4,000 IU of vitamin D per day when they are running on storage deposits of the vitamin,¹⁵ suggesting that this is the amount we should be consuming from food or supplements during a vitamin D winter.

Since many of us do not get full-body skin exposure even during the summer, and wear sunscreen when we do, it is probably ideal for most of us to consume some lesser amount of vitamin D even during the warmer months.

Dr. Cannel of the Vitamin D Council recommends testing your 25 (OH) D levels periodically if you consume more than 2000 IU of vitamin D just to be on the safe side. He says he personally takes 5,000 IU during the winter, 2,000 IU during the early spring and late fall, and none in the months in between.¹⁶

The Toxicity of Vitamin D

In 1997, the Food and Nutrition Board of the U.S. Institute of Medicine set the limit for the amount of vitamin D that was guaranteed safe to take at 2000 IU per day. According to the vitamin D researcher Robert Heaney, "the vitamin D content experts on the Upper Limits Panel objected to this 2000 IU/day figure on the grounds that extensive clinical experience had established the safety of substantially higher inputs," and several other investigators have since called for the Institute of Medicine to raise the upper limit.¹⁵

According to Heaney, extensive sun exposure produces vitamin D levels equivalent to taking 10,000 IU per day, from which no dangers have ever been observed.

Worse, the upper limit set by the Institute of Medicine is lower than the dose that many people need to take simply to gain sufficient levels of vitamin D. "It would be difficult," wrote Heaney, "to make a policy recommendation to provide the amounts needed for a major sector of the population in the face of [an upper limit] that remained as low as 2000 IU."¹⁵

The vitamin D researcher Reinhold Veith wrote a review in 1999 asserting the safety of 10,000 IU of vitamin D per day and challenging the medical community to produce any evidence for the widespread assumption that doses under 10,000 IU could be toxic.¹⁰

In 2001, Ian Monroe, the chair of the Institute of Medicine's committee on vitamin D toxicity wrote in praise of Veith's work and promised that it would be taken into account at a future meeting of the Institute, but this has yet to happen.

Dr. Cannel searched the literature for case reports of toxicity from pharmacological doses of vitamin D₃. Although he found cases of vitamin D₂ toxicity, he found only one, single case of vitamin D₃ toxicity: one man took vitamin D supplements for two years that were mislabeled, containing up to 430 times the amount of vitamin D as was listed on the label. He took between 156,000 IU and 2,604,000 IU per day for those two years, and "recovered uneventfully after the proper diagnosis, treatment with steroids and sunscreen."¹⁰

(You can read his report on vitamin D toxicity here. )

Vitamin D Safety — Make Sure You Get Your Vitamin A

Animal studies show that vitamins D and A each protect against toxic effects of the other -- suggesting that vitamin toxicity might be more a result of vitamin imbalance than vitamin excess.

In humans, supplementation with vitamin D appears from case reports to allow the average 75-kg human to take an additional 175,000 IU of vitamin A per day before vitamin A toxicity symptoms begin to develop.¹⁷

Vitamin D increases the need for vitamin A in chickens even in small amounts that are insufficient to guarantee freedom from rickets. One study showed that massive doses of vitamin A alone caused bone and growth problems in turkeys, while massive doses of vitamin D alone caused kidney problems -- yet when these doses were combined, the turkeys exhibited no signs of toxicity at all.¹⁷

Since most foods that are high in vitamin D are also high in vitamin A, it makes sense to either consume those foods that provide both, or, if one is to take high doses of vitamin D, to also supplement with vitamin A -- or to take a supplement that provides both, such as cod liver oil.

Likewise, if one is eating vitamin A-rich foods or taking vitamin A supplements, one should also make sure one is getting enough vitamin D.

Without Cholesterol, There Is No Vitamin D

Cholesterol's connection to vitamin D is intimate. It is the synthesis of cholesterol that ultimately provides for the synthesis of vitamin D, and it is cholesterol-rich foods that provide the dietary sources of vitamin D during times of the year when it is impossible for us to make our own.

Vitamin D is not one more reason to consider cholesterol good for the body. The days when vitamin D is seen as a unifunctional vitamin reponsible simply for calcium metabolism and bone health are quickly disappearing into the annals of history. Vitamin D is quickly being recognized as a hormone with myriad important roles in the body -- and thus credit for each of those benefits of vitamin D falls back on its close relative and precursor, cholesterol.

The lesson? Lots of sunshine and cholesterol-rich foods are good for you. If you skip the cholesterol and take vitamin D supplements, make sure they are vitamin D₃ and not vitamin D₂ -- and you can thank our favorite molecule that provided the precursor for the vitamin D in your supplement.

References

1. Cannel, John, "Vit D: When Why Where and How Much," Wise Traditions 2005 November 12, 2005 (lecture).

2. Adams and Hollis, "Vitamin D: Synthesis, Metabolism, and Clinical Measurement." In: Coe and Favus, eds., Disorders of Bone and Mineral Metabolism, Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins (2002) p. 159.

3. Champe et al., Biochemistry: 3rd edition, Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins (2005) p. 219.

4. Webb, et al., "Influence of season and latitude on the cutaneous synthesis of vitamin D3: exposure to winter sunlight in Boston and Edmonton will not promote vitamin D3 synthesis in human skin," J Clin Endocrinol Metab, Vol. 67 No. 2 (1988) 373-8.

5. Engelsen, et al., "Symposium-in-Print: UV Radiation, Vitamin D and Human Health: An Unfolding Controversy: Daily Duration of Vitamin D Synthesis in Human Skin with Relation to Latitude Total Ozone, Altitude, Ground Cover, Aerosols and Cloud Thickness," Photochemistry and Photobiology, 81 (2005) 1287-1290.

6. Unless accompanied by an asterisk, cholesterol facts are from USDA Nutrient Facts, Standard Release 17, http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/Data/SR17/wtrank/sr17a601.pdf and vitamin D facts are from Sullivan, Krispin, "The Miracle of Vitamin D," http://www.westonaprice.org/basicnutrition/vitamindmiracle.html#food Accessed May 24, 2006. An asterisk indicates the fact is obtained from NutritionData: "Nutrition Facts Calorie Counter," http://www.nutritiondata.com. Accessed May 24, 2006.

7. MSNBC: "Light-zapped mushrooms filled with vitamin D," http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12370708/. Published April 18, 2006. Accessed May 24, 2006.

8. Jasinghe, et al., "Bioavailability of vitamin D2 from irradiated mushrooms: an in vivo study." Br J Nutr, Vol. 93 No. 6 (2005) 951-5.

9. Armas, et al., "Vitamin D2 Is Much Less Effective than Vitamin D3 in Humans," The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, Vol. 89 No. 11 (2004) 5387-5391.

10. Cannel, MD, John Jacob, "The Truth About Vitamin D Toxicity," http://www.vitamindcouncil.com/vitaminDToxicity.shtml. Published September 4, 2003. Accessed May 24, 2006.

11. Rosenfeld, Louis, "Vitamine - vitamin. The early years of discovery," Clinical Chemistry, Vol. 43 No. 4 (1997) 680-685.

12. DeLuca, Hector F., "Historical Overview," in Feldman et al., eds., Vitamin D, San Diego: Academic Press (1997) 3-11.

13. Dobs, et al., "Effects of pravastatin, a new HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor, on vitamin D synthesis in man," Metabolism, Vol. 40 No. 5 (1991) 524-8.

14. Folkers, et al., "Lovastatin decreases coenzyme Q levels in humans," Proc Natl Acad Sci USA Vol. 87 No. 22 (1990) 8931-4.

15. Heaney, Robert P., "The Vitamin D requirement in health and disease," Journal of Steroid Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, 97 (2005)13-19.

16. Cannel, MD, John Jacob, "The Vitamin D Newsletter: April 2006 -- Dr. Cannell Answers Readers' Questions," Vitamin D Council: http://www.vitamindcouncil.com/PDFs/April2006-questions.pdf. Published April 1, 2006. Accessed May 25, 2006.

17. Masterjohn, Chris, "Vitamin A on Trial: Does Vitamin A Cause Osteoporosis?" Wise Traditions, Spring 2006.

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Clean Drinking Water

Chlorine – The boon or bane of our drinking water?

As I write this article ensconced in a hotel room in Kolcata (formerly Calcutta), amidst a visit to Ayurvedic interests in India, the importance of methods of controlling water-borne pathogens couldn’t be more at the forefront of my mind. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that as much as 80% of all diseases and over one-third of deaths in developing countries are caused by the consumption of contaminated water and, on average, as much as one-tenth of each person’s productive time is sacrificed to water-related diseases.[1] Diarrhoeal diseases linked with unsafe water are a primary cause of morbidity and mortality in infants and young children in developing countries. Across the globe, the WHO estimates that 1.8 billion episodes of childhood diarrhoea occur annually, mostly in developing countries. This contributes to the death of more than 3 million children and one million adults a year.[2]

In contrast, water-borne diseases are infrequent in the developed world, primarily thanks to widespread chlorination of our water supply. This technological development, which has been applied to virtually every municipal water source in the industrialised world since the 1920s, is often hailed as yielding one of the greatest public health victories of the last 100 or so years.[3 ]

Although there is no doubt that chlorination of drinking water has reduced water-borne diseases to a minor threat for many of us in the west – there is mounting evidence that this benefit it not without considerable cost. In this second article on drinking water, I have chosen to look more closely at health issues relating to the chlorination of drinking water, given that chlorine is far and away the most widely used disinfection agent. I will focus in particular on the health implications associated with chlorination by-products which are formed when chlorine reacts with organic compounds in water, rather than on chlorine itself. These by-products which include compounds belonging to the trihalomethane (THM) group, have increasingly been associated with cancer and adverse reproductive outcomes.[3]

History of chlorination

Early efforts aimed at making drinking water safe in Europe, during the late 1800s, centred on physically filtering out bacteria and other pathogens through sand. Sand filtration became the main method of water treatment in the early twentieth century after German microbiologist Robert Koch, who isolated Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium which causes cholera which had plagued European city-dwellers for centuries, showed that the bacterium could be filtered out through sand. Across the Atlantic, however, it was typhoid (caused by another bacterium, Salmonella typhi) that was the most important threat in drinking water, but partial mitigation was also achieved via sand filtration.

Although this rather crude method, which is still used in water treatment facilities today, provided some relief for Europeans and Americans, it wasn’t until chlorination was introduced as an adjunct to sand filtration in the early 1900s that these diseases were more or less eliminated from the western world.

However, its long history of use has brought with it new problems, including the development of chlorine tolerance or even resistance by certain pathogens, which require higher and higher levels of chlorination to achieve control. Furthermore, the spotlight is increasingly on chlorine and other halogens (such as fluoride) because of the growing body of evidence suggesting direct or indirect health risks. However, risk/benefit assessments, despite being fraught with confounding problems and other difficulties, continue to be used to justify use of chlorine given its low cost, and indications that the health risks caused by waterborne diseases (which include increased risk of cancer) considerably outweigh those of chlorine and its by-products.

Of the four key disinfection agents used, chlorine, chlorine dioxide, ozone and chloramine (chlorine reacted with ammonia), chlorine’s effectiveness (in the higher dose ranges) compares well with the best of the bunch, ozone, except in the case of treating protozoa like Cryptosporidia and Giardia, when it is comparatively ineffective.[4] The use of free chlorine as a disinfection agent, added as chlorine gas, or as sodium hypochlorite (bleach) or calcium hypochlorite, far outstrips the use of any other disinfection agent.

Chlorine – what happens when it’s added to water

Chlorine is generally added to the water supply to control pathogens with the aim of providing a level of free chlorine of at least 0.5 mg per litre (mg/L). Interestingly, levels of 0.6 mg/L or more may provide problems of acceptability by consumers on the basis of taste, while the WHO Drinking Water Guidelines (which many countries have adopted) specify that dosages 10 times greater than the target dose (5 mg/L) should not be exceeded and are deemed safe.[5] However, mounting evidence (see below) suggests that where organic components (e.g. bromates, fulvates or organic matter) are present in water, such levels would be far from safe given the potential for lifetime exposure to significant levels of disinfection by-products (DFBs). These include trihalomethanes (THMs), haloacetic acids (HAAs) and haloacetonitriles (HANs), which have been associated with mutations, cancers and reproductive effects in both animal and human studies.

When chlorine is added to water it hydolyses (reacts with water) more or less completely to form hypochlorous acid (HOCl) as long as the pH is greater than 4 and the chlorine dose does not exceed 100 mg/L (20 times over the WHO guideline threshold). Hypochlorous acid under more alkaline conditions dissociates to the hypochlorite ion (OCl-), which is a considerably less efficient disinfection agent than hypochlorous acid itself. Under alkaline conditions (pH of 9), hypochlorite ions become the dominant species, while at a more acidic pH of 6.5, only about 10% will dissociate to the hypochlorite ion. Accordingly, chlorine will be considerably less efficient (but safer) as a disinfection agent in alkaline waters.[3]

Research has also shown that exposure to THMs increases dramatically (by at least 50%) in hot compared with cold water, with the by-products being absorbed both through the skin and by inhalation.[6] This suggests that exposure to THMs from showers and baths may be at least, if not more, important than exposure from water consumed orally (in drinks and foods). Chloroform, exposure and estimated internal dose due to inhalation and dermal absorption of a 10 minute shower or a half hour bath are equivalent to the dose from ingesting 2 litres of tap water.[7] Uptake is temperature dependent, so that absorption through the skin while bathing is 30 times greater in water at 40°C compared with 30°C.[8] Swimming provides a source of uptake; a one hour swim can result in a chloroform dose of 65 μg/kg, 141 times greater than that received from a 10 minute shower.[9]

Disinfection by-products associated with water chlorination

The first suggestions that chlorination of water might increase cancer risk were proposed during the 1970s, and this has led to further research on risk potential and the discovery that other adverse effects, particularly reproductive ones, might be important.

Cancer

Feeding studies first showed that THMs could cause tumours of the liver, kidney and intestines in rodents during the 1970s.[10] A 1992 meta-analysis by Morris and colleagues from the Division of Biostatistics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, pooled data from 10 relevant case-control and cohort studies, took into account confounding factors and concluded that exposure to chlorination by-products in drinking water causes a 10-40% increase in bladder and colorectal cancers.[11]

However, since only three of these studies included exposure data, the Iowa Womens’ Health Study was established, using a cohort of 28, 237 post-menopausal women, to better assess this association. The results were published by Timothy Doyle and colleagues from the Division of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota in 1997 and provided conclusive evidence that women who lived in communities with higher levels of chloroform (one of the most important THMs) in drinking water, were at “significantly increased risk of cancer, particularly colon cancer”.[12] This cancer happens to be the most common cancer present in both men and women in the UK.

Reproductive effects

In 2000 a group of statisticians at Imperial College London, led by Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, reviewed relevant toxicological and epidemiological evidence on the potential role of chlorination by-products in the induction of adverse reproductive effects. Effects that have been associated with chlorination by-products include spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, reduced birth weight and survival, developmental disabilities and congenital malformations of the cardiovascular and neurological systems (e.g. neural tube defects such as spina bifida).[13] The scientists showed that exposures from showers, baths, drinking water, drinks and foods caused significant absorption of chlorination by-products and these may contribute to increased risk of a diverse range of adverse reproductive effects. However they also demonstrated that the available research is inconclusive and sometimes contradictory, given that it is difficult to compare studies as most use chloroform as the key marker for chlorination by-products and different mixtures of by-products under different conditions may cause significant variations in risk.

What the UK authorities say about chlorination by products

In a letter from the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) to sewerage companies in 1999, the DWI and Department of Health appears to have done everything it can to cover themselves by noting possible risks as well as the need to minimise exposure, while at the same time avoiding the difficult decision of banning chlorination. Michael Rouse, Chief Inspector from the DWI, quoting the Committee on Carcinogenicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (COC) said:

“Overall, the further epidemiological studies fail to provide persuasive evidence of a consistent relationship between chlorinated drinking-water and cancer. It remains possible that there may be an association between chlorinated drinking water and cancer which is obscured by problems such as the difficulty of obtaining an adequate estimate of exposure to chlorination by-products, misclassification of source of drinking water (including the use of bottled water), failure to take adequate account of confounding factors (such as smoking status), and errors arising from non-participation of subjects…. "We therefore consider that efforts to minimise exposure to chlorination by-products remain appropriate, providing that they do not compromise the efficiency of disinfection of drinking-water."

In my view, the COC’s assessment seems to have ignored the crucial Iowa Womens’ Health Study, but, cleverly, in their terms, this one major study does not provide evidence of a “consistent relationship” given that there are no other directly relevant of this nature. Consumers can make up their own minds about what this COC statement means.

How to reduce your risk

While risk assessments continue to favour chlorine as the agent of choice in disinfection because of its low cost and the concomitant high risk of disease from waterborne pathogens, it is unlikely that we will see elimination of chlorine and its by-products from our water supply in the near future. Although on the basis of present scientific knowledge ozonation appears more favourable, some argue that this is only because ozonation by-products have been less well studied than chlorination ones. Ultra-violet also holds promise, but cost effective treatment methods using ultra-violet disinfection have yet to be developed for large scale water treatment.

The WHO provides an interesting perspective on chlorination. It indicates that chlorination of water at point of use in developing countries could lead to a 35-39% reduction in diarrhoeal episodes, while the promotion of hygiene practices such as hand-washing would contribute to a reduction of 45%! Since risk is directly proportionate to dosage, it is important to consider the variety of ways in which exposure to chlorination by-products can be reduced. I have listed some of the most important ways individuals can reduce their exposure below:

• Avoid having very hot, long showers and baths, unless you have installed a full-house filtration system (such as reverse osmosis [RO]) which will eliminate the majority of DBPs
• Use an activated carbon filter attached to your shower head to reduce levels of chlorine when showering
• Swim in salt-water or ozone-disinfected swimming pools wherever possible
• Filter your tap water before drinking it, using a system known to reduce concentrations of chlorination by-products, such as RO. Jug filters (containing activated carbon filters) reduce chlorine concentrations in water, but may have little effect on some of the by-products.
• Drink bottled water from a good, natural source, but ensure it's from a source close to you and not from the other side of the world. See UNISON protest reported 21 August 2008 on this subject
• Use DFB-free water for all drinking and cooking purposes, and where possible, for washing and swimming as well
• When dishwashing in unfiltered tap water, use rubber gloves

References

United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Agenda 21: Programme of Action for Sustainable Development. Chapter 18. Protection of the Quality and Supply of Freshwater Resources, 1992.

World Health Organization. The World Health Report 2006. Bridging the Gap. WHO, Geneva, 2005.

Galal-Gorchev, H. Chlorine in water disinfection. Pure & Appl. Chem., 1996; 68: 1731-1735.

Regli S et al. In: Safety of Water Disinfection: Balancing Chemical & Microbial Risks (Ed. Craun GF), pp. 39-80. ILSI Press, Washington, DC, 1993.

Clark RM et al. In: Safety of Water Disinfection: Balancing Chemical & Microbial Risks (Ed. Craun GF), pp. 181-198. ILSI Press, Washington, DC, 1993.

World Health Organization. Rolling Revision of the WHO Drinking-Water Guidelines. WHO, Geneva, 2004.

Gordon SM, Wallace L, Callaghan P, et al. Effect of water temperature on dermal exposure to chloroform. Environ Health Perspect, 1998; 106: 337–45.

Gordon SM, Wallace L, Callaghan P, et al. Effect of water temperature on dermal exposure to chloroform. Environ Health Perspect, 1998; 106: 337–45.

Levesque B, Ayotte P, LeBlanc A, et al. Evaluation of dermal and respiratory chloroform exposure in humans. Environ Health Perspect, 1994; 102: 1082–7.

Doyle TJ, Zheng W, Hong CP, Sellers TA, Kushi LH, Folson AR. The association of drinking water source and chlorination by-products with cancer incidence among postmenopausal women in Iowa: a prospective cohort study. Am J Public Health, 1997; 87: 1168-1176.

Nieuwenhuijsen MJ, Toledano MB, Eaton NE, Fawell J, Elliott P. Chlorination disinfection byproducts in water and their association with adverse reproductive outcomes: a review. Occup Environ Med, 2000; 57; 73-85.

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Clean Drinking Water

Clean drinking water: is our precious resource contaminated?

by The Alliance for Natural Health

About water

Water is a truly remarkable chemical substance that is arguably our single most important natural resource. If we do not consume water for a few days, we die, whilst we can survive for weeks without food.

Water appears to be unique when compared with the 15 million or so chemicals we know something about. It is its unique and anomalous properties that are, probably more than anything else, responsible for life on our planet. One aspect of its uniqueness that we so often take for granted without giving it thought is that the solid form (ice) is less dense than the liquid form (water). Another unique feature is that, given its very low molecular weight, water would be expected to boil at around –90oC, but it doesn’t! We all know that water is comprised, as its formula H2O suggests, of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, but there is so much more to it than that…

In the water molecule, the single electron of each hydrogen atom is shared with one of the six outer-shell electrons of the oxygen atom (creating two covalent bonds), leaving four electrons that form two non-bonding pairs. So many of the unique properties of water originate from the way in which the size and nuclear charge of the water molecule’s single oxygen atom distorts the electronic charge clouds of the atoms of other elements when these are chemically bonded to it.

Importance of water molecule clusters

Liquid water is much more than millions of discrete H2O molecules. It is actually a highly mobile, vibrating and forever changing cluster of water molecules in which the hydrogen bonds between individual water molecules are continuously breaking and reforming.

We know that water structure, or the arrangement of the molecules in a given volume of water, varies according to many factors including temperature and pressure. We also know that the structure and properties of water within cells, particularly adjacent to membranes in cells or organelles (sometimes referred to as vicinal water), is very different to the structure of bulk water. The key point here is that the unique structure of water within cells is purely a result of the geometry of the surrounding hydrogen bonding sites.

We also know that to get water into cells (cellular hydration), the main purpose of water consumption, there can be advantages in having smaller rather than larger clusters of water. Some scientists argue that a hydrogen-bonded cluster in which four H2Os are located at the corners of an imaginary tetrahedron is an especially favourable (low-potential energy) configuration, but the lifetime of such clusters will be incredibly brief (theoretically measurable in a picosecond [10-12 second] time scale).

The bottom line is that, although there are hundreds of products available that purport to provide us,,often without supporting scientific evidence,,with the correct form of structured water, we should not deviate from the primary object of water in health: water should be delivered to the body to optimize its flow into the body’s cells.

In addition, the body is almost certainly more capable of dealing with water in its pure state, rather than water that is loaded with contaminants, some of which have only become commonplace in our diets or water sources within the last 20 to 50 years.

Is our drinking water contaminated?

On a global scale there is no doubt that pathogenic microbes in water present easily the greatest proven risk to human health.

The World Health Organization and many national or regional authorities have stipulated safe levels for a diverse range of toxins, these levels being based largely on limited data on individual contaminants and on the degree of water purity that is technically and economically feasible from a water treatment viewpoint. These levels have never been developed according to risk assessments on the combined impact of numerous contaminants because the scientific data required to evaluate toxic mixtures in drinking water, as well as in other aspects of our environment, is more or less impossible to obtain.

It is not hard to argue that the existing systems of risk analysis based on detection of individual elements and compounds by mass spectrometry (MS) and high pressure gas liquid chromatography (HPLC) and comparison with ‘accepted standards’ is technically flawed as it ignores the effects of mixtures. Grabbing this problem by the horns is a US company (Environmental Toxicology Laboratory Inc.) that is developing a means of assessing the toxicity of mixtures in drinking water by evaluating the swimming pattern of a chemically ultra-sensitive, flagellate micro-organism when subjected to different quality waters.

The key categories of contaminant in drinking water are summarised in the below:

• Pathogenic organisms
  Chlorination of water exists to control or eliminate pathogens from our water supply, but periodic outbreaks of Escherichia coli, Cryptosporidium, coliforms and gastro-intestinal viruses are testament to the fact that treatment does not always exclude these disease organisms. The double-edged sword is that if we wish to increase the concentration of chemicals in our water to guard against infectious agents, we must also accept the increased risk posed by the chemicals used to treat the water.
  
• Disinfection products
  Sodium hypochlorite, chlorine gas and chlorine dioxide are extremely widely used for water disinfection purposes and there is increasing evidence that these chlorinated compounds can contribute to some very serious health problems. Known harmful effects include eye/skin irritations, stomach discomfort and anaemia. Absorption of chlorine can be greater through the skin from the taking of showers and baths than via drinking water. Most of the long-term health problems associated with chlorine are caused by chlorine by-products. Ozone is also sometimes used for drinking water disinfection, but its use is also not without risk from by-products.
  
• Disinfection by-products
  Hundreds of different compounds can be formed from the reaction of sodium hypochlorite (chlorine) with other compounds present in drinking water and many of these are known to be more hazardous than chlorine itself. They include 3-chloro-4-(dichloromethyl)-5-hydroxy-2(5H)-furanone, or ‘mutagen-X’, also commonly referred to as MX and the trihalomethane (THM) group (e.g. bromodichloromethane, chloroform, bromoform). Additionally, where chlorine dioxide or ozone are used in disinfection to reduce formation of hazardous trihalomethanes, toxic by-products may be formed, such as chlorite (from chlorine dioxide) and bromate (from a reaction between ozone and bromide which may be naturally occurring in source waters). Many members of this group are carcinogenic and they may contribute to liver, kidney and central nervous system disorders. Children and babies (especially the unborn) are particularly vulnerable to such compounds.
  
• Inorganic chemicals
  These comprise a very long list, including various metals such as aluminium (used to clarify water in treatment plants), lead (in old water pipes and solder), cadmium (naturally occurring or from water pipe solder and electroplating); arsenic (naturally occurring in some waters); and also fluoride (naturally occurring and/or added to some water supplies in a misguided attempt to reduce dental caries). While there are many potential adverse effects caused by excessive intakes of any of these inorganic chemicals individually, no one is in a position to elucidate what the combined effects of the multitude of chemicals in a given water supply might be.
  
• Organic chemicals
  These include a large range of industrial chemicals like dichlorobenzene and dichloroethane, pesticides (herbicides, insecticides and fungicides and their breakdown products), dioxins (probably the most inherently toxic group of compounds known), endocrine-disrupting xeno-oestrogens (from contraceptive pills and plasticizers in food and drinking containers and plastic tableware) and a wide range of other persistent compounds discharged by industrial chemical plants, dry cleaners, timber preservation plants, run-off from landfill sites, agriculture, etc. Some of the most persistent compounds still causing problems in the environment are those which are no longer used industrially, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Persistent organochlorine compounds are fat soluble and accumulate over time in the body. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are now known to cause biological effects at any detectable level, with limits of detection being down to around 0.1 nanograms per litre for bisphenol A (a plasticizer) and estradiol (from contraceptive pills). In addition, we don’t know categorically the significance of long-term or lifetime exposures to low levels of mixtures of these compounds but much of the existing scientific evidence suggests that persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and endocrine disrupters may present very substantial, long-term health risks.
  
• Radionuclides
  Alpha and beta particles, as well as radium and uranium are among several radioactive contaminants that have been found in water sources as a result of decay or erosion of both naturally occurring minerals or rocks in the Earth’s surface and of man-made materials or wastes.

Risk assessment of water contaminants

With the rapid development of highly sensitive analytical equipment such as combined High Pressure Liquid Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry and Inductively Coupled Plasma-Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-AES), detection of extremely small quantities of contaminants in drinking water is now feasible. However, it is not just the presence of these contaminants that is an issue, it is how biologically significant their presence is.

Risk assessment approaches are increasingly being used to evaluate the relative importance of contaminants in drinking water, as in other areas of human health. By and large, these assessments are based on dose-response data derived from laboratory tests on surrogate species such as rats and mice for assessing risks in humans and on fish and other wildlife for assessing risks in the environment. More comprehensive risk assessments employ a tiered approach, so that substances that represent zero or minimal risk are eliminated from detailed, time-consuming and expensive risk assessment early in the process. Uncertainty and probability are also incorporated into the more complete risk assessments for contaminants that are thought to present a more serious risk to health.

One of the greatest problems with these classical, risk assessment paradigms used to assess contaminant risks to date is that they have not taken adequately into account the cumulative risks associated with long-term (lifetime) exposures, nor have they taken into account the effects of mixtures of contaminants. The reason for this is almost certainly that governments appreciate the consequences of such comprehensive risk assessment: most drinking water would likely be assessed as unsafe for human consumption.

Taking control of the situation – in your home

So we are left with justifications from myopic, pseudo-science-justified risk assessment regimes, almost as defective as the ones that have been recently used to assess the safety of nutrients, which have been carefully adjusted to inform us that our tap water is safe most of the time. On weighing up a large part of the available evidence, I simply do not believe it.

Using some sort of point-of-use filtration system to reduce the diverse range of contaminants in tap water has to be one of the best investments for any household. If these systems rely on replaceable filters, it is essential that the filter is replaced according to the manufacturer’s specification, otherwise they can themselves release contaminants into the drinking water or become hotbeds of microbial contamination.

References

Anonymous, Current Drinking Water Standards, US Environmental Protection Agency, 2002 (http://www.epa.gov/safewater/mcl.html).

Falconer IR. Are endocrine disrupting compounds a health risk in drinking water? Int J Environ Res Public Health, 2006;3(2):180-4.

Fujimoto T, Kubo K, Aou S. Prenatal exposure to bisphenol A impairs sexual differentiation of exploratory behaviour and increases depression-like behaviour in rats. Brain Res, 2006; 1068(1): 49-55. Epub Dec 27, 2005. Hirose A, Nishikawa A, Kinae N, Hasegawa R. 3-chloro-4-(dichloromethyl)-5-hydroxy-2(5H)-furanone (MX): toxicological properties and risk assessment in drinking water. Rev Environ Health, 1999;14(3):103-20.

Liu K, Cruzan JD, Saykally RJ. Water clusters. Science, 1996; 27: 929-93.

Lower, S. A gentle introduction to the structure of water (website) http://www.chem1.com/acad/sci/aboutwater.html and associated links

Ritter L at al. Sources, pathways, and relative risks of contaminants in surface water and groundwater: a perspective prepared for the Walkerton inquiry. J Toxicol Environ Health A, 2002; 65(1): 1-142. Review.

Rodriguez-Mozaz S, de Alda MJ, Barcelo D. Monitoring of estrogens, pesticides and bisphenol A in natural waters and drinking water treatment plants by solid-phase extraction-liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. J Chromatogr A, 2004; 1045(1-2): 85-92.

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The Last Roundup

Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?

By Christopher Ketcham

Christopher Ketcham writes for Harper's, GQ, and Mother Jones, among other publications. He splits his time between Utah and Brooklyn, NY. This article is reproduced from radaronline.com, is credible and should give our readers an insight into the future of American Democracy..

ARE YOU ON THE LIST? The federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that will override the Constitution in the event of a major terrorist attack (Photo: Illustration by Brett Ryder)

In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

The Continuity of Governance program encompasses national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces. In short, it's a road map for martial lawComey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a very sick man," sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and "literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them there.

Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's men. "There"—he pointed weakly to Comey—"is the attorney general." Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey's presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—"without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified.

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.

ONE NATION, UNDER SURVEILLANCE James Comey testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee (Photo: Getty Images)

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as part of planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government."

Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

DESPERATE TIMES Should another 9/11 occur, Continuity of Governance plans developed during the Cold War go into effect (Photo: Getty Images)

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.

Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a "parallel government" that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

In case of a wide-scale attack, the executive branch becomes the sole and absolute seat of authority. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police stateInterestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes," who were to be held at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish "temporary detention and processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be is not specified.

(Photo: Getty Images)

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time."

CROWD CONTROL New Yorkers walk home on the afternoon of the September 11 attacks (Photo: Getty Images)

A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as "warrantless wiretapping."

In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor "huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records." Authorities employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift through the data, searching for "suspicious patterns." In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it's notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. "The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed," the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. "Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach."

"We're at the edge of a cliff," says Bruce Fein, a top justice official in the Reagan administration. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability"The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU From your late-night e-mails and travel plans to phone records and financial transactions, the government finds you fascinating—and may consider you a potential enemy of the state (Photo: Illustration by Brett Ryder)

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.

A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used "to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time." Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, "What was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be." A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: "Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that 'Main Core' database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project."

If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. "If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues"—the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws—"so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints." Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. "It's clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear." Giraldi continues, "I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many reasons—quite likely including the two of us."

UNDER REAGAN In the 1980s, control of the FBI's "security index" was reportedly transferred to none other than FEMA (Photo: Getty Images)

Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: "In the event of a national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers"—the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example—"if Congress doesn't explicitly prohibit it. It's really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so." Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs in court "when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no notice to persons on the president's 'enemies list.' That means if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president says it is—even in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own favor."

Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crudeThe veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey's suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading: "Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence Finding anyway."

But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of concern. "The capacity for future use of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable," the senior government official says.
In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world-renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won't prevent terrorist conspiracies. "Because there is so little historical terrorist event data," Jonas tells Radar, "there is not enough volume to create precise predictions."

The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in postwar American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities, and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding "security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed "subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).

FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans that contained information gleaned from wide-ranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency's secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate."

JUST IN CASE The Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan" (Photo: Getty Images)

Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code-named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.

North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS-based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?" Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.

HISTORY'S LESSONS Japanese Americans moved to internment camps in World War II In July 2007 and again last August, Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush administration's Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.

But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are "extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around the same time, he told the Oregonian: "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."

None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the question, "As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration?"Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrections—as permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807—but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident."

More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."

"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.'"

CREDIBLE WITNESS James Comey (Photo: Getty Images)

As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)

These days, it's rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. "The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny," Church pointed out in 1975. "And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know."

UPDATE: Since this article went to press, several documents have emerged to suggest the story has longer legs than we thought. Most troubling among these is an October 2001 Justice Department memo that detailed the extra-constitutional powers the U.S. military might invoke during domestic operations following a terrorist attack. In the memo, John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general, "concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations." (Yoo, as most readers know, is author of the infamous Torture Memo that, in bizarro fashion, rejiggers the definition of "legal" torture to allow pretty much anything short of murder.) In the October 2001 memo, Yoo refers to a classified DOJ document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States." According to the Associated Press, "Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program." Attorney General John Mukasey last month refused to clarify before Congress whether the Yoo memo was still in force.

Meanwhile, congressional sources tell Radar that Congressman Peter DeFazio has apparently abandoned his effort to get to the bottom of the White House COG classified annexes. Penny Dodge, DeFazio's chief of staff, says otherwise. "We will be sending a letter requesting a classified briefing soon," she told Radar this week.

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Christopher Ketcham writes for Harper's, GQ, and Mother Jones, among other publications. He splits his time between Utah and Brooklyn, NY. Full story/Permalink