As Russ Baker says, with great detail, it's because they work for the same people.
If you can call 'em people.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Very Interesting
Google watch.
Don't be evil.
Among other interesting links from this page:
...The CIA had to stop using a comparatively innocent log-analysis cookie that expired in 10 years, and their document search site isn't even used by many people. Google handles 200 million searches per day, and their cookie expires in 2038. One of Google's leading software engineers, Matt Cutts, had a top-secret clearance and used to work for the National Security Agency. Google doesn't even feel the need to defend their cookie policy; they merely laugh off anyone who inquires about it.
A cult of geeky blogging Google pundits joins in, and ridicules the notion that you'll be using the same computer in 2038. That's not the point. Google's expiration date is a barometer of its insensitivity to privacy issues. When we noticed this in year 2000 (it was the first time we had ever seen such a long-lived cookie), the idea of Google Watch was born. Google's response to other privacy issues since then tells us that we were right.
The purpose of the unique ID is to record your search terms for present or future profiling. Google says that the cookie is needed to set preferences. At the CIA, Google's cookie story would be termed a cover story, because the unique ID is completely superfluous for this function, even when the rest of the cookie is used to do this. In fact, you can set preferences without any sort of cookie at all...
Don't be evil.
Among other interesting links from this page:
...The CIA had to stop using a comparatively innocent log-analysis cookie that expired in 10 years, and their document search site isn't even used by many people. Google handles 200 million searches per day, and their cookie expires in 2038. One of Google's leading software engineers, Matt Cutts, had a top-secret clearance and used to work for the National Security Agency. Google doesn't even feel the need to defend their cookie policy; they merely laugh off anyone who inquires about it.
A cult of geeky blogging Google pundits joins in, and ridicules the notion that you'll be using the same computer in 2038. That's not the point. Google's expiration date is a barometer of its insensitivity to privacy issues. When we noticed this in year 2000 (it was the first time we had ever seen such a long-lived cookie), the idea of Google Watch was born. Google's response to other privacy issues since then tells us that we were right.
The purpose of the unique ID is to record your search terms for present or future profiling. Google says that the cookie is needed to set preferences. At the CIA, Google's cookie story would be termed a cover story, because the unique ID is completely superfluous for this function, even when the rest of the cookie is used to do this. In fact, you can set preferences without any sort of cookie at all...
Ask a Silly Question
Did the U.S. invade Iraq to tap its oil reserves or to make sure they stayed under the sand?
World oil production today stands at more than twice the 15-billion a-year maximum projected by Shell Oil in 1956 -- and reserves are climbing at a faster clip yet. That leaves the question, Why this war?
Did Dick Cheney send us in to seize the last dwindling supplies? Unlikely. Our world's petroleum reserves have doubled in just twenty-five years -- and it is in Shell's and the rest of the industry's interest that this doubling doesn't happen again. The neo-cons were hell-bent on raising Iraq's oil production. Big Oil's interest was in suppressing production, that is, keeping Iraq to its OPEC quota or less. This raises the question, did the petroleum industry, which had a direct, if hidden, hand, in promoting invasion, cheerlead for a takeover of Iraq to prevent overproduction?
It wouldn't be the first time. If oil is what we're looking for, there are, indeed, extra helpings in Iraq. On paper, Iraq, at 112 billion proven barrels, has the second largest reserves in OPEC after Saudi Arabia. That does not make Saudi Arabia happy. Even more important is that Iraq has fewer than three thousand operating wells... compared to one million in Texas.
That makes the Saudis even unhappier. It would take a decade or more, but start drilling in Iraq and its reserves will about double, bringing it within gallons of Saudi Arabia's own gargantuan pool. Should Iraq drill on that scale, the total, when combined with the Saudis', will drown the oil market. That wouldn't make the Texans too happy either...
Greg Palast asks some really good questions, and goes into the history to explain it.
The answer: with peak oil attained, that's money in the bank for Someone.
World oil production today stands at more than twice the 15-billion a-year maximum projected by Shell Oil in 1956 -- and reserves are climbing at a faster clip yet. That leaves the question, Why this war?
Did Dick Cheney send us in to seize the last dwindling supplies? Unlikely. Our world's petroleum reserves have doubled in just twenty-five years -- and it is in Shell's and the rest of the industry's interest that this doubling doesn't happen again. The neo-cons were hell-bent on raising Iraq's oil production. Big Oil's interest was in suppressing production, that is, keeping Iraq to its OPEC quota or less. This raises the question, did the petroleum industry, which had a direct, if hidden, hand, in promoting invasion, cheerlead for a takeover of Iraq to prevent overproduction?
It wouldn't be the first time. If oil is what we're looking for, there are, indeed, extra helpings in Iraq. On paper, Iraq, at 112 billion proven barrels, has the second largest reserves in OPEC after Saudi Arabia. That does not make Saudi Arabia happy. Even more important is that Iraq has fewer than three thousand operating wells... compared to one million in Texas.
That makes the Saudis even unhappier. It would take a decade or more, but start drilling in Iraq and its reserves will about double, bringing it within gallons of Saudi Arabia's own gargantuan pool. Should Iraq drill on that scale, the total, when combined with the Saudis', will drown the oil market. That wouldn't make the Texans too happy either...
Greg Palast asks some really good questions, and goes into the history to explain it.
The answer: with peak oil attained, that's money in the bank for Someone.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
"Highly Classified Planes"
Discussed for you on CNN.
Great kool-aid they're serving...
But it seems like the Masters of Homeland Security are buying it so that means we are, too.
Maj. Gen. Scott Mayes: “If a national disaster is declared, we will be able to use unmanned aerial systems such as Predator and Global Hawk over a disaster area.”
Lovely. I'm sure after the next hurricane all those New Orleans looters will be treated just as fairly as any other citizens of emerging democracies. Of course, some looters will be treated more equally than others.
Great kool-aid they're serving...
But it seems like the Masters of Homeland Security are buying it so that means we are, too.
Maj. Gen. Scott Mayes: “If a national disaster is declared, we will be able to use unmanned aerial systems such as Predator and Global Hawk over a disaster area.”
Lovely. I'm sure after the next hurricane all those New Orleans looters will be treated just as fairly as any other citizens of emerging democracies. Of course, some looters will be treated more equally than others.
Enquiring Minds Want to Know- Ready for What?
Why is it the Dominionistas get all fluttery about a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer in women but don't say a word about a marketing ploy to sell a pill-a-day habit to young men so they'll always be "ready"?
Ghost Dance
To paraphrase a very old quote the Dominionistas have forgotten, those who sow the winds of war, reap the whirlwinds.
This is precisely the thing nobody believes when you tell them.
Chop shop.
...It was Mastromarino who built a business that took from the dead and gave to the living. There are many legitimate businesses that do this, but authorities say Mastromarino’s company, Biomedical Tissue Services, was not one of them.
BTS, they say, secretly carved up hundreds of cadavers without the families of the deceased knowing about it, then peddled the pieces on the lucrative non-organ body parts market.
Even scarier: They say BTS doctored paperwork to hide the inconvenient fact that some of the dead were old and diseased. As a result, they say, the market was flooded with potentially tainted tissue, and an untold number of patients across the country may have received infections along with their dental implants and hip replacements...
...Femurs. Tendons. Heart valves. Swatches of skin from the thighs, stomach and back.
The body parts, though no longer of any value to their owners, became big business for Mastromarino. His lawyer said he was among the first in the industry to figure out that one way to meet the high demand for donated human tissue — traditionally procured in the controlled environment of hospitals — was to turn to funeral homes.
Deals were cut with funeral directors in New York City, Rochester, N.Y., Philadelphia and New Jersey: BTS would pay a $1,000 “facility fee” to harvest body parts on their premises.
Three-man teams were dispatched to mortuaries. Two workers would extract the parts. A third would bag them and put them on ice until they could be stored in a freezer at BTS headquarters.
What’s been portrayed as a gruesome exercise was purely clinical, Cruceta said.
“We took our time with what we did,” Cruceta said. “We never made fun of any of these donors. We always treated everyone with respect.”
Internal documents from BTS suggest the company had, at least on paper, a strict set of rules for obtaining signed consent for the procedures. A script instructed interviewers to tell family members, “We are about to proceed with the medical social history questionnaire. I have about 40 questions and this interview should take about 20 minutes...”
Unfortunately, it seems that no questions were asked in hundreds of cases.
Family members have told investigators no one sought permission for body-part donations. The signatures at the bottom of the questionnaires, they said, were forged.
Mastromarino, through his lawyer, has blamed funeral home directors, insisting it was their job to get consent. The directors say it was the other way around.
As early as September 2003, the FDA detected trouble at BTS.
In a routine inspection, an investigator found evidence the company had failed to properly sterilize its equipment, and had no records of how it had disposed of tissue that failed screening for HIV, hepatitis and syphilis.
But nothing came of it. The FDA backed off after Mastromarino insisted he had voluntarily cleaned up his operation. In a letter, he told officials he would “look forward to your agency revisiting our facility...”
I'm sure no money was exchanged. After all, we're talking about the Federal Government, right?
...The case, said the prosecutor, is like a “cheap horror movie.” But few scary flicks offer the gruesome and gory details of the BTS scandal.
Authorities released photos of exhumed corpses that were boned below the waist like a freshly caught fish. The defendants, they alleged, had made a crude attempt to cover their tracks by sewing PVC pipe back into the bodies in time for open-casket wakes.
It also was alleged that the body of the British-born host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” Alistair Cooke, was among those abused by BTS.
Mastromarino, Cruceta, another cutter and a former mortician have been charged. “What you have before you is nothing short of a case of medical terrorism,” prosecutor Michael Vecchione said at an arraignment.
Lawsuits filed by implant patients accuse BTS of exposing plaintiffs to hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Families of the dead have sued too, claiming the biomedical firm caused distress by desecrating the dead for profit.
Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration shut down BTS amid its own investigation. The agency said it had uncovered evidence the firm failed to screen for contaminated tissue. Parts were recovered from people who had diseases which may have been “exclusionary,” an FDA report said.
Death certificates in the company’s files, the report said, were at odds with those on file with the state: The company’s version made people younger than they actually were, and altered the cause and time of the deaths.
The culprits “were just some irresponsible crooks who were doing this and slipped through the cracks,” said Dr. Stuart Youngner, a Case Western Reserve University medical ethicist and head of the ethics committee at Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, a large nonprofit tissue bank. “The good tissue banks ... don’t do that.”
Well. That settles it.
Still one wonders. If human trafficking is the international problem that continues, one wonders what is done with the merchandise after it's past its prime. It gives a whole new dimension to the problem of what to do with inconvenient bodies.
Unthinkable? Now that's pre-9/11 thinking.
...It was Mastromarino who built a business that took from the dead and gave to the living. There are many legitimate businesses that do this, but authorities say Mastromarino’s company, Biomedical Tissue Services, was not one of them.
BTS, they say, secretly carved up hundreds of cadavers without the families of the deceased knowing about it, then peddled the pieces on the lucrative non-organ body parts market.
Even scarier: They say BTS doctored paperwork to hide the inconvenient fact that some of the dead were old and diseased. As a result, they say, the market was flooded with potentially tainted tissue, and an untold number of patients across the country may have received infections along with their dental implants and hip replacements...
...Femurs. Tendons. Heart valves. Swatches of skin from the thighs, stomach and back.
The body parts, though no longer of any value to their owners, became big business for Mastromarino. His lawyer said he was among the first in the industry to figure out that one way to meet the high demand for donated human tissue — traditionally procured in the controlled environment of hospitals — was to turn to funeral homes.
Deals were cut with funeral directors in New York City, Rochester, N.Y., Philadelphia and New Jersey: BTS would pay a $1,000 “facility fee” to harvest body parts on their premises.
Three-man teams were dispatched to mortuaries. Two workers would extract the parts. A third would bag them and put them on ice until they could be stored in a freezer at BTS headquarters.
What’s been portrayed as a gruesome exercise was purely clinical, Cruceta said.
“We took our time with what we did,” Cruceta said. “We never made fun of any of these donors. We always treated everyone with respect.”
Internal documents from BTS suggest the company had, at least on paper, a strict set of rules for obtaining signed consent for the procedures. A script instructed interviewers to tell family members, “We are about to proceed with the medical social history questionnaire. I have about 40 questions and this interview should take about 20 minutes...”
Unfortunately, it seems that no questions were asked in hundreds of cases.
Family members have told investigators no one sought permission for body-part donations. The signatures at the bottom of the questionnaires, they said, were forged.
Mastromarino, through his lawyer, has blamed funeral home directors, insisting it was their job to get consent. The directors say it was the other way around.
As early as September 2003, the FDA detected trouble at BTS.
In a routine inspection, an investigator found evidence the company had failed to properly sterilize its equipment, and had no records of how it had disposed of tissue that failed screening for HIV, hepatitis and syphilis.
But nothing came of it. The FDA backed off after Mastromarino insisted he had voluntarily cleaned up his operation. In a letter, he told officials he would “look forward to your agency revisiting our facility...”
I'm sure no money was exchanged. After all, we're talking about the Federal Government, right?
...The case, said the prosecutor, is like a “cheap horror movie.” But few scary flicks offer the gruesome and gory details of the BTS scandal.
Authorities released photos of exhumed corpses that were boned below the waist like a freshly caught fish. The defendants, they alleged, had made a crude attempt to cover their tracks by sewing PVC pipe back into the bodies in time for open-casket wakes.
It also was alleged that the body of the British-born host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” Alistair Cooke, was among those abused by BTS.
Mastromarino, Cruceta, another cutter and a former mortician have been charged. “What you have before you is nothing short of a case of medical terrorism,” prosecutor Michael Vecchione said at an arraignment.
Lawsuits filed by implant patients accuse BTS of exposing plaintiffs to hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Families of the dead have sued too, claiming the biomedical firm caused distress by desecrating the dead for profit.
Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration shut down BTS amid its own investigation. The agency said it had uncovered evidence the firm failed to screen for contaminated tissue. Parts were recovered from people who had diseases which may have been “exclusionary,” an FDA report said.
Death certificates in the company’s files, the report said, were at odds with those on file with the state: The company’s version made people younger than they actually were, and altered the cause and time of the deaths.
The culprits “were just some irresponsible crooks who were doing this and slipped through the cracks,” said Dr. Stuart Youngner, a Case Western Reserve University medical ethicist and head of the ethics committee at Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, a large nonprofit tissue bank. “The good tissue banks ... don’t do that.”
Well. That settles it.
Still one wonders. If human trafficking is the international problem that continues, one wonders what is done with the merchandise after it's past its prime. It gives a whole new dimension to the problem of what to do with inconvenient bodies.
Unthinkable? Now that's pre-9/11 thinking.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Surprising They Weren't Relocated to New Orleans
NOAA Blocks Moving Pacific Tsunami Center above Sea Level
Warning Center May Be Unable to Function After First Wave Hits
WASHINGTON - June 12 - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is vetoing an effort to move its Pacific Tsunami Warning Center to high ground that would enable it to function in the aftermath of a tsunami, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). NOAA opposes plans to co-locate the tsunami warning center with Hawaiian state and local civil defense offices 300 feet above sea level on the high slopes of Diamond Head Crater and instead wants to put it in a new office building slated for construction on an island in the middle of Pearl Harbor.
NOAA is insisting that the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center be included within a new $242 million complex it plans to build on Ford Island, a U.S. Navy-owned site in Pearl Harbor on the south coast of Oahu. Hawaii, which has a history of tsunamis, is among the areas with the highest tsunami danger.
The Ford Island site is reachable only by a single, partly floating bridge that must be raised to allow the Navy vessels to escape the harbor. Ford Island would also have to be evacuated in the event of a tsunami, if NOAA followed its own protocols, but if the bridge is raised evacuation may not be possible. By contrast, the Diamond Head Crater location would be sufficiently elevated so as to continue to operate throughout any foreseeable tsunami-related event...
Warning Center May Be Unable to Function After First Wave Hits
WASHINGTON - June 12 - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is vetoing an effort to move its Pacific Tsunami Warning Center to high ground that would enable it to function in the aftermath of a tsunami, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). NOAA opposes plans to co-locate the tsunami warning center with Hawaiian state and local civil defense offices 300 feet above sea level on the high slopes of Diamond Head Crater and instead wants to put it in a new office building slated for construction on an island in the middle of Pearl Harbor.
NOAA is insisting that the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center be included within a new $242 million complex it plans to build on Ford Island, a U.S. Navy-owned site in Pearl Harbor on the south coast of Oahu. Hawaii, which has a history of tsunamis, is among the areas with the highest tsunami danger.
The Ford Island site is reachable only by a single, partly floating bridge that must be raised to allow the Navy vessels to escape the harbor. Ford Island would also have to be evacuated in the event of a tsunami, if NOAA followed its own protocols, but if the bridge is raised evacuation may not be possible. By contrast, the Diamond Head Crater location would be sufficiently elevated so as to continue to operate throughout any foreseeable tsunami-related event...
Notice That Some Sites are Slowiinngg Down?
Even though the traffic isn't so great?
Net Neutrality.
The House has canned it. More here and here. Josh Marshall is counting heads for the Senate vote.
Corporatism isn't capitalism.
Net Neutrality.
The House has canned it. More here and here. Josh Marshall is counting heads for the Senate vote.
Corporatism isn't capitalism.
Making Enemies Faster Than They Can Kill Them Off
The United States' global energy-control strategy, it's now clear to most, was the actual reason for the highly costly regime change in Iraq, euphemistically dubbed "democracy" by Washington. But while it is preoccupied with implanting democracy in the Middle East, the United States is quietly being outflanked in the rush to secure and control major energy sources of the Persian Gulf, the Central Asian Caspian Basin, Africa and beyond.
The quest for energy control has informed Washington's support for high-risk "color revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan in recent months. It lies behind US activity in West Africa, as well as in Sudan, source of 7% of China's oil imports. It lies behind US policy vis-a-vis President Hugo Chavez' Venezuela and President Evo Morales' Bolivia.
In recent months, however, this strategy of global energy dominance has shown signs of producing just the opposite: a kind of "coalition of the unwilling", states that increasingly see no other prospect, despite traditional animosities, but to cooperate to oppose what they see as a US push to control the future security of their energy...
Contrary to advice from older China hands, including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, architect of president Richard Nixon's 1972 opening to China, the White House denied visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao the honor of a full state dinner when he visited in April, serving instead a short "state lunch". Hu was publicly humiliated by a well-known Falungong heckler at the White House press conference.
A few weeks later, Vice President Dick Cheney slapped Russian President Vladimir Putin with the most open attack on Russia's internal human-rights policy as well as its energy policy in a speech in the Baltic state of Lithuania. There, Cheney declared of Russia, "The government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of her people." He accused Russia of energy "intimidation and blackmail". Some days later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reiterated that Russia should be "pressed" on democratic reforms. Rice also slapped China in the face in March during a trip to Southeast Asia, calling China a "negative force" in Asia.
Curiously, Washington has repeatedly accused China of "not playing by the rules", in terms of its oil politics, declaring that China is guilty of "seeking to control energy at the source", as though that had not been US energy policy for the past century.
The significance of taking aim simultaneously at both Russia and China, the two Eurasian giants, the one the largest investor in US Treasury bonds, the other the world's second-most-developed military nuclear power, reflects the realization in Washington that all may not be as seamless in the quest for global domination as originally promised by various strategists in and around the administration of President George W Bush.
Next Thursday, member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), led by China and Russia, will reportedly invite Iran, currently an observer, into full membership. Even if full membership is postponed, as has been mooted, the fact remains that Russia and China both want to seal closer cooperation with Iran in Eurasian energy cooperation.
The SCO was founded in June 2001 by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Its stated goal was to facilitate "cooperation in political affairs, economy and trade, scientific-technical, cultural, and educational spheres as well as in energy, transportation, tourism, and environment protection fields". Recently, however, the SCO is beginning to look like an energy-financial bloc in Central Asia consciously being developed to serve as a counter-pole to US hegemony...
In his recent State of the Union speech, President Putin announced that Russia is planning to make the ruble convertible into other major currencies and to use it in its oil and gas transactions.
A convertible ruble is to be introduced, according to latest Russian statements, on July 1, six months earlier than originally planned. Russia also has stated it plans to shift a share of its now considerable dollar reserves away from the US currency and that it will use 40 billion US dollars to purchase gold reserves.
Russia's state-owned natural-gas transport company, Transneft, has consolidated its pipeline control to become the sole exporter of Russian natural gas. Russia has by far the world's largest natural-gas reserves and Iran the second-largest. With Iran inside, the SCO would control the vast majority of the world's natural-gas reserves, as well as a significant portion of its oil reserves, not to mention the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow corridor for a majority of Persian Gulf oil-tanker shipment to Japan and the West.
Late last month Russia and Algeria, the two largest gas suppliers to Europe, agreed to increase energy cooperation. Algeria has given Russian companies exclusive access to Algerian oil and gas fields, and Gazprom and Sonatrach will cooperate in delivery to France. Putin has canceled Algeria's US$4.7 billion debt to Russia and, for its part, Algeria will buy $7.5 billion worth of Russian advanced jet fighters, air defense systems and other weapons.
On May 26 Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov also announced that his country would definitely supply Iran with sophisticated Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missiles, reportedly as a prelude to supplying even more sophisticated weapons.
Then, in one of the more fascinating examples of geopolitical chutzpah, the Kremlin-controlled Gazprom gas monopoly entered quiet negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert through his billionaire friend, Benny Steinmetz, to secure Russian natural-gas supplies to Israel via an undersea pipeline from Turkey to Israel.
According to the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot, Olmert's office has said it will support the Gazprom proposal. In several years Israel faces a shortage of gas from Tethys Sea drilling and soon from Egypt. Tethys Sea gas is projected to run dry in a few years. British Gas is in talks to supply gas from Gaza but Israel disputes BG's right to drill.
But even with Egypt and Gaza, gas shortages are expected by 2010 unless Israel is able to find new sources. Enter Gazprom and Putin. The gas would be diverted from the under-used Russia-Turkey Bluestream Pipeline, which Russia built to increase its influence over Turkey two years ago. Putin clearly seeks to gain a lever inside Israel over the one-sided US influence on Israeli policy...
Got that straight, Dear Leader? Even the Israelis are starting to bug out...
...China became a net importer of oil in 1993. By 2045, China will depend on imported oil for 45% of its energy needs.
On May 26, crude oil began to flow into China through a newly completed pipeline from Atasu, Kazakhstan, to the Alataw Pass in China's far-western region of Xinjiang, a 1,000-kilometer route announced only last year. It marked the first time oil is being pumped directly into China. Kazakhstan is also a member of the SCO, but had been regarded by Washington since the collapse of the Soviet Union as in its sphere of influence, with ChevronTexaco, Rice's former oil company, the major oil developer.
By 2011 the pipeline with extend some 3,000km to Dushanzi, where the Chinese are building their largest oil refinery, due to completed by 2008. China financed the entire $700 million pipeline and will buy the oil. Last year the China National Petroleum Corp bought PetroKazakhstan for $4.2 billion and will use it to develop oilfields in Kazakhstan.
China is also in negotiations with Russia for a pipeline to deliver Siberian oil to northeastern China, a project that could be completed by 2008, and a natural-gas pipeline from Russia to Heilongjiang province in China's northeast. China just passed Japan to rank as world's second-largest oil importer behind the United States.
Beijing and Moscow are also integrating their electricity grids. Late last month the China State Grid Corp announced plans to increase imports of Russian electricity fivefold by 2010...
Indicative of the way China is doing an end-run around the Western-controlled International Monetary Fund among African states, China's Export-Import Bank recently gave a $2 billion soft loan to Angola. In return, the Luanda government gave China a stake in oil exploration in shallow waters off the coast. The loan is to be used for infrastructure projects. In contrast, US interest in war-torn Angola has rarely gone beyond the well-fortified oil enclave of Cabinda, which ExxonMobil along with Shell Oil have dominated until recently. That is apparently about to change with the growing Chinese interest.
Chinese infrastructure projects under way in Angola include railways, roads, a fiber-optic network, schools, hospitals, offices and 5,000 units of housing developments. A new airport with direct flights from Luanda to Beijing is also planned.
Indirectly, through its support of the Sudanese government, China is also a contender in a high-stakes game of potential regime change in neighboring, oil-rich Chad. This year, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz was forced to back down from plans to cut off World Bank aid because of the threat of an oil-export cutoff by Chad. ExxonMobil is currently the major oil company active in Chad. But Sudan backs Chadian rebels, who were only prevented from toppling the notoriously corrupt and unpopular regime of President Idriss Deby by the 1,500 French soldiers propping up the regime. Washington has joined with Paris in backing Deby.
Sudan has involved Chinese, rather than Western, corporations in exploiting its oilfields, largely as a result of misconceived US sanctions imposed in 1997, which blocked US oil companies from doing business in Sudan. A new Sudan-backed regime in Chad would jeopardize the Chad-Cameroon pipeline and Western oil firms. One can imagine China just might be willing to step into such a vacuum and help Chad develop its oil, especially if the lion's share went to China.
Immediately after his humiliating diplomatic visit to Washington in April, President Hu went on to Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer and long regarded by Washington as in its "oil sphere of interest". In Nigeria, Hu signed a deal whereby the African country will give China four oil-drilling licenses in exchange for a commitment to invest $4 billion in infrastructure...
It's little wonder that some Washington hawks are getting alarmed. Suddenly, the world of potential "enemies" is no longer restricted to the Islam-centered "war on terror". Leading neo-conservative ideologue Robert Kagan wrote a prominent opinion article recently in the Washington Post...
"Until now the liberal West's strategy has been to try to integrate these two powers into the international liberal order, to tame them and make them safe for liberalism. If, instead, China and Russia are going to be sturdy pillars of autocracy over the coming decades, enduring and perhaps even prospering, then they cannot be expected to embrace the West's vision of humanity's inexorable evolution toward democracy and the end of autocratic rule."
Unless there's a War on Terra to fight, that is.
Kagan charged that China and Russia have emerged as the protectors of "an informal league of dictators" that, according to Kagan, currently includes the leaders of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Venezuela, Iran and Angola, among others around the world, who, like the leaders of Russia and China themselves, resist any efforts by the West to interfere in their domestic affairs, either through sanctions or other means...
Obviously, anyone resisting Dear Leader and the IMF must be a dictatorial scourge.
That's true whether the scapegoat du jour is in Eastasia, Eurasia, or Oceania.
The quest for energy control has informed Washington's support for high-risk "color revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan in recent months. It lies behind US activity in West Africa, as well as in Sudan, source of 7% of China's oil imports. It lies behind US policy vis-a-vis President Hugo Chavez' Venezuela and President Evo Morales' Bolivia.
In recent months, however, this strategy of global energy dominance has shown signs of producing just the opposite: a kind of "coalition of the unwilling", states that increasingly see no other prospect, despite traditional animosities, but to cooperate to oppose what they see as a US push to control the future security of their energy...
Contrary to advice from older China hands, including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, architect of president Richard Nixon's 1972 opening to China, the White House denied visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao the honor of a full state dinner when he visited in April, serving instead a short "state lunch". Hu was publicly humiliated by a well-known Falungong heckler at the White House press conference.
A few weeks later, Vice President Dick Cheney slapped Russian President Vladimir Putin with the most open attack on Russia's internal human-rights policy as well as its energy policy in a speech in the Baltic state of Lithuania. There, Cheney declared of Russia, "The government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of her people." He accused Russia of energy "intimidation and blackmail". Some days later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reiterated that Russia should be "pressed" on democratic reforms. Rice also slapped China in the face in March during a trip to Southeast Asia, calling China a "negative force" in Asia.
Curiously, Washington has repeatedly accused China of "not playing by the rules", in terms of its oil politics, declaring that China is guilty of "seeking to control energy at the source", as though that had not been US energy policy for the past century.
The significance of taking aim simultaneously at both Russia and China, the two Eurasian giants, the one the largest investor in US Treasury bonds, the other the world's second-most-developed military nuclear power, reflects the realization in Washington that all may not be as seamless in the quest for global domination as originally promised by various strategists in and around the administration of President George W Bush.
Next Thursday, member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), led by China and Russia, will reportedly invite Iran, currently an observer, into full membership. Even if full membership is postponed, as has been mooted, the fact remains that Russia and China both want to seal closer cooperation with Iran in Eurasian energy cooperation.
The SCO was founded in June 2001 by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Its stated goal was to facilitate "cooperation in political affairs, economy and trade, scientific-technical, cultural, and educational spheres as well as in energy, transportation, tourism, and environment protection fields". Recently, however, the SCO is beginning to look like an energy-financial bloc in Central Asia consciously being developed to serve as a counter-pole to US hegemony...
In his recent State of the Union speech, President Putin announced that Russia is planning to make the ruble convertible into other major currencies and to use it in its oil and gas transactions.
A convertible ruble is to be introduced, according to latest Russian statements, on July 1, six months earlier than originally planned. Russia also has stated it plans to shift a share of its now considerable dollar reserves away from the US currency and that it will use 40 billion US dollars to purchase gold reserves.
Russia's state-owned natural-gas transport company, Transneft, has consolidated its pipeline control to become the sole exporter of Russian natural gas. Russia has by far the world's largest natural-gas reserves and Iran the second-largest. With Iran inside, the SCO would control the vast majority of the world's natural-gas reserves, as well as a significant portion of its oil reserves, not to mention the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow corridor for a majority of Persian Gulf oil-tanker shipment to Japan and the West.
Late last month Russia and Algeria, the two largest gas suppliers to Europe, agreed to increase energy cooperation. Algeria has given Russian companies exclusive access to Algerian oil and gas fields, and Gazprom and Sonatrach will cooperate in delivery to France. Putin has canceled Algeria's US$4.7 billion debt to Russia and, for its part, Algeria will buy $7.5 billion worth of Russian advanced jet fighters, air defense systems and other weapons.
On May 26 Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov also announced that his country would definitely supply Iran with sophisticated Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missiles, reportedly as a prelude to supplying even more sophisticated weapons.
Then, in one of the more fascinating examples of geopolitical chutzpah, the Kremlin-controlled Gazprom gas monopoly entered quiet negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert through his billionaire friend, Benny Steinmetz, to secure Russian natural-gas supplies to Israel via an undersea pipeline from Turkey to Israel.
According to the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot, Olmert's office has said it will support the Gazprom proposal. In several years Israel faces a shortage of gas from Tethys Sea drilling and soon from Egypt. Tethys Sea gas is projected to run dry in a few years. British Gas is in talks to supply gas from Gaza but Israel disputes BG's right to drill.
But even with Egypt and Gaza, gas shortages are expected by 2010 unless Israel is able to find new sources. Enter Gazprom and Putin. The gas would be diverted from the under-used Russia-Turkey Bluestream Pipeline, which Russia built to increase its influence over Turkey two years ago. Putin clearly seeks to gain a lever inside Israel over the one-sided US influence on Israeli policy...
Got that straight, Dear Leader? Even the Israelis are starting to bug out...
...China became a net importer of oil in 1993. By 2045, China will depend on imported oil for 45% of its energy needs.
On May 26, crude oil began to flow into China through a newly completed pipeline from Atasu, Kazakhstan, to the Alataw Pass in China's far-western region of Xinjiang, a 1,000-kilometer route announced only last year. It marked the first time oil is being pumped directly into China. Kazakhstan is also a member of the SCO, but had been regarded by Washington since the collapse of the Soviet Union as in its sphere of influence, with ChevronTexaco, Rice's former oil company, the major oil developer.
By 2011 the pipeline with extend some 3,000km to Dushanzi, where the Chinese are building their largest oil refinery, due to completed by 2008. China financed the entire $700 million pipeline and will buy the oil. Last year the China National Petroleum Corp bought PetroKazakhstan for $4.2 billion and will use it to develop oilfields in Kazakhstan.
China is also in negotiations with Russia for a pipeline to deliver Siberian oil to northeastern China, a project that could be completed by 2008, and a natural-gas pipeline from Russia to Heilongjiang province in China's northeast. China just passed Japan to rank as world's second-largest oil importer behind the United States.
Beijing and Moscow are also integrating their electricity grids. Late last month the China State Grid Corp announced plans to increase imports of Russian electricity fivefold by 2010...
Indicative of the way China is doing an end-run around the Western-controlled International Monetary Fund among African states, China's Export-Import Bank recently gave a $2 billion soft loan to Angola. In return, the Luanda government gave China a stake in oil exploration in shallow waters off the coast. The loan is to be used for infrastructure projects. In contrast, US interest in war-torn Angola has rarely gone beyond the well-fortified oil enclave of Cabinda, which ExxonMobil along with Shell Oil have dominated until recently. That is apparently about to change with the growing Chinese interest.
Chinese infrastructure projects under way in Angola include railways, roads, a fiber-optic network, schools, hospitals, offices and 5,000 units of housing developments. A new airport with direct flights from Luanda to Beijing is also planned.
Indirectly, through its support of the Sudanese government, China is also a contender in a high-stakes game of potential regime change in neighboring, oil-rich Chad. This year, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz was forced to back down from plans to cut off World Bank aid because of the threat of an oil-export cutoff by Chad. ExxonMobil is currently the major oil company active in Chad. But Sudan backs Chadian rebels, who were only prevented from toppling the notoriously corrupt and unpopular regime of President Idriss Deby by the 1,500 French soldiers propping up the regime. Washington has joined with Paris in backing Deby.
Sudan has involved Chinese, rather than Western, corporations in exploiting its oilfields, largely as a result of misconceived US sanctions imposed in 1997, which blocked US oil companies from doing business in Sudan. A new Sudan-backed regime in Chad would jeopardize the Chad-Cameroon pipeline and Western oil firms. One can imagine China just might be willing to step into such a vacuum and help Chad develop its oil, especially if the lion's share went to China.
Immediately after his humiliating diplomatic visit to Washington in April, President Hu went on to Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer and long regarded by Washington as in its "oil sphere of interest". In Nigeria, Hu signed a deal whereby the African country will give China four oil-drilling licenses in exchange for a commitment to invest $4 billion in infrastructure...
It's little wonder that some Washington hawks are getting alarmed. Suddenly, the world of potential "enemies" is no longer restricted to the Islam-centered "war on terror". Leading neo-conservative ideologue Robert Kagan wrote a prominent opinion article recently in the Washington Post...
"Until now the liberal West's strategy has been to try to integrate these two powers into the international liberal order, to tame them and make them safe for liberalism. If, instead, China and Russia are going to be sturdy pillars of autocracy over the coming decades, enduring and perhaps even prospering, then they cannot be expected to embrace the West's vision of humanity's inexorable evolution toward democracy and the end of autocratic rule."
Unless there's a War on Terra to fight, that is.
Kagan charged that China and Russia have emerged as the protectors of "an informal league of dictators" that, according to Kagan, currently includes the leaders of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Venezuela, Iran and Angola, among others around the world, who, like the leaders of Russia and China themselves, resist any efforts by the West to interfere in their domestic affairs, either through sanctions or other means...
Obviously, anyone resisting Dear Leader and the IMF must be a dictatorial scourge.
That's true whether the scapegoat du jour is in Eastasia, Eurasia, or Oceania.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Predicting the Weather on the Rhythm Method
...officially because the Church of Dear Leader sez so.
The NOAA released its annual hurricane season predictions last week.
As Thomas Crowley points out at RealClimate, along with its now-standard explanation that there is a natural cycle of multidecadal (40-60 year) length in the North Atlantic circulation (often referred to as the "Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation"--see Figure), that is varying the frequency of Atlantic tropical cyclones, and that the present high level of activity is due to a concurrent positive peak in this oscillation.
Which is true, as Crowley points out- and which is also likely exacerbated by the global warming conditions.
The NOAA's press release cited above says:
..."For the 2006 north Atlantic hurricane season, NOAA is predicting 13 to 16 named storms, with eight to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which four to six could become 'major' hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher," added retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Ph.D., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator...
Warmer ocean water combined with lower wind shear, weaker easterly trade winds, and a more favorable wind pattern in the mid-levels of the atmosphere are the factors that collectively will favor the development of storms in greater numbers and to greater intensity. Warm water is the energy source for storms while favorable wind patterns limit the wind shear that can tear apart a storm's building cloud structure.
This confluence of conditions in the ocean and atmosphere is strongly related to a climate pattern known as the multi-decadal signal, which has been in place since 1995. Since then, nine of the last 11 hurricane seasons have been above normal...
I hate to bring this up to Dr. Lautenbacher, but
Global Warming Slows the Winds
By Betsy Mason
ScienceNOW Daily News
3 May 2006
Climate models predict that global warming will upset the delicately balanced atmospheric circulation that controls global climate and weather patterns. Now scientists are finding evidence that man-made greenhouse gas emissions may already be tipping the equilibrium, which could have severe repercussions, including altered weather patterns and a decline in important fishing grounds.
A key feature of Earth's atmospheric circulation is a steady flow of tropical air known as the Walker circulation. Warm air rises over the equatorial western Pacific and cools and sinks in the east. This sets up a flow of air over the ocean from high pressure in the east to low pressure in the west. The winds push water from east to west, which causes an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water in the eastern Pacific. Simple climate theories predict that global warming will weaken this circulation.
But is it actually happening? A team led by climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration examined historical weather records from the equatorial Pacific Ocean dating back to 1861. They found that the difference in pressure between the east and west Pacific has declined since that time, suggesting a weakening Walker circulation...
This was also covered in detail in a recent Nature publication (Nature 441, 73-76 (4 May 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature04744). I'm not going to go into details: it's behind their firewall and highly technical. Suffice to say it shows a steady decrease in this wind pattern over the last century.
In that same publication (although a differnt citation:Nature 441, 11 (4 May 2006) | doi:10.1038/441011a), the strife among the NOAA climate scientists is noted:
At issue is whether the historical record of cyclones is complete enough for accurate conclusions to be drawn about changes from past patterns. Many researchers called for the databases to be brought up to date by including modern assessments of past storms, including their intensities. It is a daunting task that, for now, is being done only for the Atlantic basin by Landsea and his colleagues.
Even given the gaps in the database, several new studies suggested that rising sea surface temperatures are having a noticeable effect on cyclones. Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, co-author of one of last year's papers, presented data hinting that not only are hurricanes growing more intense over time, but that the length of the storm season has increased as well. Starting from 1950, he told the meeting, the storm season has grown longer in the Atlantic by about five days per decade, in the northeastern Pacific by eight days per decade, and in the northwestern Pacific by ten days per decade.
In Britain, researchers at the Benfield Hazard Research Centre in Surrey have run climate simulations suggesting that half the recent rise in hurricane activity in the North Atlantic can be explained by the observed increase in sea surface temperature in the region where these hurricanes develop. A warmer ocean would, in theory, provide more fuel for hurricanes to intensify.
And in Japan, a team has used the Earth Simulator supercomputer to run high-resolution simulations of global climate, both in today's conditions and in a world warmed by higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Preliminary results suggest that, in the latter scenario, the number of tropical cyclones would drop by about 30% worldwide. But the number would rise in the Atlantic, and storm intensity would increase worldwide (K. Oouchi et al. J. Meteorol. Soc. Jap. 84, 259–276; 2006).
Now what do you suppose the NOAA has also predicted for this summer?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration today released its 2006 east Pacific hurricane season outlook — predicting a below average season with 12 to 16 tropical storms, of which six to eight could become hurricanes, including one to three major hurricanes of category 3 strength or greater.
An average east Pacific hurricane season features 15 to 16 tropical storms, with nine becoming hurricanes, including four to five major hurricanes...
So it's nice to know even though officially NOAA is saying Al Gore is a very wrong man, and nobody should listen to Jim Hansen, the guys actually handling the data are actually looking at the data- and predicting it the way the global warming models do.
The NOAA released its annual hurricane season predictions last week.
As Thomas Crowley points out at RealClimate, along with its now-standard explanation that there is a natural cycle of multidecadal (40-60 year) length in the North Atlantic circulation (often referred to as the "Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation"--see Figure), that is varying the frequency of Atlantic tropical cyclones, and that the present high level of activity is due to a concurrent positive peak in this oscillation.
Which is true, as Crowley points out- and which is also likely exacerbated by the global warming conditions.
The NOAA's press release cited above says:
..."For the 2006 north Atlantic hurricane season, NOAA is predicting 13 to 16 named storms, with eight to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which four to six could become 'major' hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher," added retired Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Ph.D., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator...
Warmer ocean water combined with lower wind shear, weaker easterly trade winds, and a more favorable wind pattern in the mid-levels of the atmosphere are the factors that collectively will favor the development of storms in greater numbers and to greater intensity. Warm water is the energy source for storms while favorable wind patterns limit the wind shear that can tear apart a storm's building cloud structure.
This confluence of conditions in the ocean and atmosphere is strongly related to a climate pattern known as the multi-decadal signal, which has been in place since 1995. Since then, nine of the last 11 hurricane seasons have been above normal...
I hate to bring this up to Dr. Lautenbacher, but
Global Warming Slows the Winds
By Betsy Mason
ScienceNOW Daily News
3 May 2006
Climate models predict that global warming will upset the delicately balanced atmospheric circulation that controls global climate and weather patterns. Now scientists are finding evidence that man-made greenhouse gas emissions may already be tipping the equilibrium, which could have severe repercussions, including altered weather patterns and a decline in important fishing grounds.
A key feature of Earth's atmospheric circulation is a steady flow of tropical air known as the Walker circulation. Warm air rises over the equatorial western Pacific and cools and sinks in the east. This sets up a flow of air over the ocean from high pressure in the east to low pressure in the west. The winds push water from east to west, which causes an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water in the eastern Pacific. Simple climate theories predict that global warming will weaken this circulation.
But is it actually happening? A team led by climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration examined historical weather records from the equatorial Pacific Ocean dating back to 1861. They found that the difference in pressure between the east and west Pacific has declined since that time, suggesting a weakening Walker circulation...
This was also covered in detail in a recent Nature publication (Nature 441, 73-76 (4 May 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature04744). I'm not going to go into details: it's behind their firewall and highly technical. Suffice to say it shows a steady decrease in this wind pattern over the last century.
In that same publication (although a differnt citation:Nature 441, 11 (4 May 2006) | doi:10.1038/441011a), the strife among the NOAA climate scientists is noted:
At issue is whether the historical record of cyclones is complete enough for accurate conclusions to be drawn about changes from past patterns. Many researchers called for the databases to be brought up to date by including modern assessments of past storms, including their intensities. It is a daunting task that, for now, is being done only for the Atlantic basin by Landsea and his colleagues.
Even given the gaps in the database, several new studies suggested that rising sea surface temperatures are having a noticeable effect on cyclones. Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, co-author of one of last year's papers, presented data hinting that not only are hurricanes growing more intense over time, but that the length of the storm season has increased as well. Starting from 1950, he told the meeting, the storm season has grown longer in the Atlantic by about five days per decade, in the northeastern Pacific by eight days per decade, and in the northwestern Pacific by ten days per decade.
In Britain, researchers at the Benfield Hazard Research Centre in Surrey have run climate simulations suggesting that half the recent rise in hurricane activity in the North Atlantic can be explained by the observed increase in sea surface temperature in the region where these hurricanes develop. A warmer ocean would, in theory, provide more fuel for hurricanes to intensify.
And in Japan, a team has used the Earth Simulator supercomputer to run high-resolution simulations of global climate, both in today's conditions and in a world warmed by higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Preliminary results suggest that, in the latter scenario, the number of tropical cyclones would drop by about 30% worldwide. But the number would rise in the Atlantic, and storm intensity would increase worldwide (K. Oouchi et al. J. Meteorol. Soc. Jap. 84, 259–276; 2006).
Now what do you suppose the NOAA has also predicted for this summer?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration today released its 2006 east Pacific hurricane season outlook — predicting a below average season with 12 to 16 tropical storms, of which six to eight could become hurricanes, including one to three major hurricanes of category 3 strength or greater.
An average east Pacific hurricane season features 15 to 16 tropical storms, with nine becoming hurricanes, including four to five major hurricanes...
So it's nice to know even though officially NOAA is saying Al Gore is a very wrong man, and nobody should listen to Jim Hansen, the guys actually handling the data are actually looking at the data- and predicting it the way the global warming models do.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Priorities
NASA shelves climate satellites
Environmental science may suffer
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | June 9, 2006
NASA is canceling or delaying a number of satellites designed to give scientists critical information on the earth's changing climate and environment.
The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor that was designed to measure soil moisture -- a key factor in helping scientists understand the impact of global warming and predict droughts and floods. The Deep Space Climate Observatory, intended to observe climate factors such as solar radiation, ozone, clouds, and water vapor more comprehensively than existing satellites, also has been canceled.
And in its 2007 budget, NASA proposes significant delays in a global precipitation measuring mission to help with weather predictions, as well as the launch of a satellite designed to increase the timeliness and accuracy of severe weather forecasts and improve climate models.
The changes come as NASA prioritizes its budget to pay for completion of the International Space Station and the return of astronauts to the moon by 2020 -- a goal set by President Bush that promises a more distant and arguably less practical scientific payoff. Ultimately, scientists say, the delays and cancellations could make hurricane predictions less accurate, create gaps in long-term monitoring of weather, and result in less clarity about the earth's hydrological systems, which play an integral part in climate change...
They have money to look for black holes in our solar system (of course, if there were black holes nearby we wouldn't have our solar system), but not enough to monitor what the Company's doing to the planet.
Science and the Company clearly don't mix. Take for example the recent push to throw money at Gulf War Syndrome. For those of you that can't get past the wall at Science:
Scientists usually bristle when U.S. legislators mandate a project that benefits their constituents. But Gulf War illness researchers are especially troubled by such a funding provision inserted by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) in this year's budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The $15 million earmark to the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas not only avoids the traditional peer-review process, but it also marks the rare--and possibly first ever--VA funding of a program outside its research network, and to a researcher whose theory of the debilitating illness hasn't won much scientific support.
"The particular avenue of research being pursued is not one that has found much favor with the scientific community," says Simon Wessely, director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research at King's College London. Adds John Feussner, a former head of VA research now at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, "This takes money directly out of the VA research portfolio. … I can't think of any advantage" from the new Gulf War research program...
...epidemiologist Robert Haley, who for years has reported a strong link between exposure to neurotoxins, such as nerve gas and pesticides, and the puzzling cluster of symptoms that struck thousands of veterans after the 1990-'91 Gulf War.
Haley was initially funded by former presidential candidate and businessman Ross Perot and later by the Department of Defense. He believes that Gulf War illness is "an encephalopathy" marked by abnormalities in brain structures and in the nervous system. Many troops, he believes, were exposed to low levels of nerve gas during the first Gulf War.
Now, Haley expects to pin down how these toxins affect the brain, and how to ease their effects, once and for all. Certainly, there's no shortage of funds: Hutchison expects the center--which Haley says will be called the Gulf War Illness and Chemical Exposure Research Center--will receive $75 million from VA over 5 years. Haley says it will initially focus on brain imaging, a survey of veterans from the first Gulf War, animal studies, and a Gulf War illness research and treatment clinic at the Dallas VA Medical Center...
Haley's Gulf War theories, however, put him in the minority. Animal studies disagree on whether low-dose neurotoxin exposure is deleterious in the long term, and the neurotoxin theory has come up short in expert reviews. In 2004, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in Washington, D.C., concluded that "there is inadequate/insufficient evidence" to forge a link between exposure to low levels of sarin gas and the memory loss, muscle and joint pain, and other symptoms that characterize Gulf War illness. Wessely argues that British troops, which have the same rates of Gulf War illness as seen in Americans, were nowhere near the Khamisayah weapons depot in Iraq, the most cited example of suspected nerve gas exposure during the war. The IOM report notes that an attempt to replicate Haley's findings of genetic susceptibility to nerve gas proved unsuccessful.
A VA committee that included Haley came to a different conclusion. It reported in 2004 that neurotoxin exposure was a "probable" explanation for Gulf War illness and recommended that VA spend at least $60 million over 4 years on Gulf War illness research...
Facts have no bearing on the issue as usual. Facts are messy things to be avoided in all aspects of the war on Terra. Blame everything except the toxic compound the troops are routinely exposed to in this war. And if the world's warming due to human activity, do everything except address the issue responsible, and make it more difficult to actually measure or deal with.
Environmental science may suffer
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | June 9, 2006
NASA is canceling or delaying a number of satellites designed to give scientists critical information on the earth's changing climate and environment.
The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor that was designed to measure soil moisture -- a key factor in helping scientists understand the impact of global warming and predict droughts and floods. The Deep Space Climate Observatory, intended to observe climate factors such as solar radiation, ozone, clouds, and water vapor more comprehensively than existing satellites, also has been canceled.
And in its 2007 budget, NASA proposes significant delays in a global precipitation measuring mission to help with weather predictions, as well as the launch of a satellite designed to increase the timeliness and accuracy of severe weather forecasts and improve climate models.
The changes come as NASA prioritizes its budget to pay for completion of the International Space Station and the return of astronauts to the moon by 2020 -- a goal set by President Bush that promises a more distant and arguably less practical scientific payoff. Ultimately, scientists say, the delays and cancellations could make hurricane predictions less accurate, create gaps in long-term monitoring of weather, and result in less clarity about the earth's hydrological systems, which play an integral part in climate change...
They have money to look for black holes in our solar system (of course, if there were black holes nearby we wouldn't have our solar system), but not enough to monitor what the Company's doing to the planet.
Science and the Company clearly don't mix. Take for example the recent push to throw money at Gulf War Syndrome. For those of you that can't get past the wall at Science:
Scientists usually bristle when U.S. legislators mandate a project that benefits their constituents. But Gulf War illness researchers are especially troubled by such a funding provision inserted by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) in this year's budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The $15 million earmark to the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas not only avoids the traditional peer-review process, but it also marks the rare--and possibly first ever--VA funding of a program outside its research network, and to a researcher whose theory of the debilitating illness hasn't won much scientific support.
"The particular avenue of research being pursued is not one that has found much favor with the scientific community," says Simon Wessely, director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research at King's College London. Adds John Feussner, a former head of VA research now at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, "This takes money directly out of the VA research portfolio. … I can't think of any advantage" from the new Gulf War research program...
...epidemiologist Robert Haley, who for years has reported a strong link between exposure to neurotoxins, such as nerve gas and pesticides, and the puzzling cluster of symptoms that struck thousands of veterans after the 1990-'91 Gulf War.
Haley was initially funded by former presidential candidate and businessman Ross Perot and later by the Department of Defense. He believes that Gulf War illness is "an encephalopathy" marked by abnormalities in brain structures and in the nervous system. Many troops, he believes, were exposed to low levels of nerve gas during the first Gulf War.
Now, Haley expects to pin down how these toxins affect the brain, and how to ease their effects, once and for all. Certainly, there's no shortage of funds: Hutchison expects the center--which Haley says will be called the Gulf War Illness and Chemical Exposure Research Center--will receive $75 million from VA over 5 years. Haley says it will initially focus on brain imaging, a survey of veterans from the first Gulf War, animal studies, and a Gulf War illness research and treatment clinic at the Dallas VA Medical Center...
Haley's Gulf War theories, however, put him in the minority. Animal studies disagree on whether low-dose neurotoxin exposure is deleterious in the long term, and the neurotoxin theory has come up short in expert reviews. In 2004, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in Washington, D.C., concluded that "there is inadequate/insufficient evidence" to forge a link between exposure to low levels of sarin gas and the memory loss, muscle and joint pain, and other symptoms that characterize Gulf War illness. Wessely argues that British troops, which have the same rates of Gulf War illness as seen in Americans, were nowhere near the Khamisayah weapons depot in Iraq, the most cited example of suspected nerve gas exposure during the war. The IOM report notes that an attempt to replicate Haley's findings of genetic susceptibility to nerve gas proved unsuccessful.
A VA committee that included Haley came to a different conclusion. It reported in 2004 that neurotoxin exposure was a "probable" explanation for Gulf War illness and recommended that VA spend at least $60 million over 4 years on Gulf War illness research...
Facts have no bearing on the issue as usual. Facts are messy things to be avoided in all aspects of the war on Terra. Blame everything except the toxic compound the troops are routinely exposed to in this war. And if the world's warming due to human activity, do everything except address the issue responsible, and make it more difficult to actually measure or deal with.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Score One For Reality-Based Science
FDA Approves Cervical Cancer Vaccine
By Jennifer Couzin
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 June 2006
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved the first vaccine that can prevent cervical cancer. The vaccine targets human papillomavirus (HPV), which is widespread in the population. Roughly 500,000 women worldwide develop cervical cancer each year, and supporters hope the preventative will make a dent in the cancer's prevalence.
FDA was under pressure from women's groups to green-light the vaccine, made by Merck and sold under the brand name Gardasil. Last summer, the agency declined to allow Plan B, the morning-after pill, to be sold over the counter, a decision conservative groups endorsed but one that outraged reproductive rights organizations (ScienceNOW, 15 March).
Gardasil targets four strains of HPV, two of which cause about 70% of cervical cancer cases, and two of which cause roughly 90% of genital warts. The vaccine was tested in more than 30,000 women worldwide, most between 16 and 26 years of age. Among those free of HPV, it kept the virus at bay in nearly all of them. Merck has done some studies testing the immune response of males to the vaccine, says Janet Skidmore, a Merck spokesperson, and trials to test the vaccine's ability to prevent genital warts in boys are ongoing.
FDA approved Merck's vaccine for girls and young women aged 9 to 26, with the goal of reaching youngsters before they risk exposure to the virus during sex. Three doses are recommended over six months. Gardisil, which has also been approved in Mexico, doesn't come cheap; according to the company, it costs roughly $120 per dose. "It's low-income women who don't have good access to [HPV] screening and treatment who need this the most, but they may have the most difficulty getting it," says Susan Wood, the former head of FDA's Office of Women's Health. She resigned last year in protest over the agency's handling of Plan B and is pleased with today's approval.
The real test now, says Wood, is how the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will rule. The committee sets recommendations for vaccinations, such as whether schools should require children to receive particular vaccines before enrollment, and is used as a guide by many states. "We should turn attention to ensuring that states take this up as part of a public health strategy to really eliminate cervical cancer in this country, which we now have the ability to do," says Wood. The committee meets next on 29 June.
Glaxo-Smith Kline is also developing a cervical cancer vaccine and has applied for approval in Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia and Latin America. It plans to submit an FDA application late this year. Last week, Glaxo presented data at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, suggesting that its vaccine might be effective in women over 25, based on their immune responses.
Related sites
# Information on Gardasil from FDA
# Questions and answers on HPV
# More on HPV from CDC
By Jennifer Couzin
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 June 2006
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved the first vaccine that can prevent cervical cancer. The vaccine targets human papillomavirus (HPV), which is widespread in the population. Roughly 500,000 women worldwide develop cervical cancer each year, and supporters hope the preventative will make a dent in the cancer's prevalence.
FDA was under pressure from women's groups to green-light the vaccine, made by Merck and sold under the brand name Gardasil. Last summer, the agency declined to allow Plan B, the morning-after pill, to be sold over the counter, a decision conservative groups endorsed but one that outraged reproductive rights organizations (ScienceNOW, 15 March).
Gardasil targets four strains of HPV, two of which cause about 70% of cervical cancer cases, and two of which cause roughly 90% of genital warts. The vaccine was tested in more than 30,000 women worldwide, most between 16 and 26 years of age. Among those free of HPV, it kept the virus at bay in nearly all of them. Merck has done some studies testing the immune response of males to the vaccine, says Janet Skidmore, a Merck spokesperson, and trials to test the vaccine's ability to prevent genital warts in boys are ongoing.
FDA approved Merck's vaccine for girls and young women aged 9 to 26, with the goal of reaching youngsters before they risk exposure to the virus during sex. Three doses are recommended over six months. Gardisil, which has also been approved in Mexico, doesn't come cheap; according to the company, it costs roughly $120 per dose. "It's low-income women who don't have good access to [HPV] screening and treatment who need this the most, but they may have the most difficulty getting it," says Susan Wood, the former head of FDA's Office of Women's Health. She resigned last year in protest over the agency's handling of Plan B and is pleased with today's approval.
The real test now, says Wood, is how the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will rule. The committee sets recommendations for vaccinations, such as whether schools should require children to receive particular vaccines before enrollment, and is used as a guide by many states. "We should turn attention to ensuring that states take this up as part of a public health strategy to really eliminate cervical cancer in this country, which we now have the ability to do," says Wood. The committee meets next on 29 June.
Glaxo-Smith Kline is also developing a cervical cancer vaccine and has applied for approval in Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia and Latin America. It plans to submit an FDA application late this year. Last week, Glaxo presented data at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, suggesting that its vaccine might be effective in women over 25, based on their immune responses.
Related sites
# Information on Gardasil from FDA
# Questions and answers on HPV
# More on HPV from CDC
Al-Zarqawi Gets His Pink Slip
The heroic killing of Al-Zarqawi may have happened indeed due to poor ratings:
1. Zarqawi was replaced as the head of Iraq’s insurgency months ago. Recall the news from earlier this spring that Zarqawi had been replaced as the leader in Iraq by Abdullah bin Rashed Al-Baghdadi (a nom de guerre). Al Qaeda’s Iraq cells had already reorganized before this happened and will readjust again.
2. Al Qaeda’s global leadership was getting sick of their partner in Zarqawi. Last year, Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy Ayman Zawahiri sent a letter to Zarqawi that contained a “striking critique” of Zarqawi’s insurgency strategy. “He comes down like a ton of bricks on what has happened tactically,” one U.S. analyst said describing the letter. Even Iraqis sympathetic with the goals of the insurgency have grown to disapprove of al Qaeda’s actions. Over the last year, there were several instances in which the local population turned on Zarqawi’s followers and attacked them.
In other words, Zarqawi’s star had fallen over the last six months, and there is reason to believe that his falling from favor was a key ingredient in this operation. Someone gave up details on him because they wanted him out...
Retirement has very few benefits when you're a private contractor for the CIA.
1. Zarqawi was replaced as the head of Iraq’s insurgency months ago. Recall the news from earlier this spring that Zarqawi had been replaced as the leader in Iraq by Abdullah bin Rashed Al-Baghdadi (a nom de guerre). Al Qaeda’s Iraq cells had already reorganized before this happened and will readjust again.
2. Al Qaeda’s global leadership was getting sick of their partner in Zarqawi. Last year, Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy Ayman Zawahiri sent a letter to Zarqawi that contained a “striking critique” of Zarqawi’s insurgency strategy. “He comes down like a ton of bricks on what has happened tactically,” one U.S. analyst said describing the letter. Even Iraqis sympathetic with the goals of the insurgency have grown to disapprove of al Qaeda’s actions. Over the last year, there were several instances in which the local population turned on Zarqawi’s followers and attacked them.
In other words, Zarqawi’s star had fallen over the last six months, and there is reason to believe that his falling from favor was a key ingredient in this operation. Someone gave up details on him because they wanted him out...
Retirement has very few benefits when you're a private contractor for the CIA.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
The Company Checks Itself Yet Again, Running as Hard as Possible to Stay in Place
What happens when the bad guys become the Company's kind of people?
What do they say about this in the chocolate-making countries? You know, the kind of people who tried to advise us against our latest land war in Asia.
As the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to dominate headlines, a new front in the war on terrorism has opened in Somalia. At a brutal cost to Mogadishu's civilian population, once-discredited warlords have reinvented themselves as "counter-terrorists", seeking and apparently gaining US support by characterizing their Islamist opponents as agents of al-Qaida. The warlords have grouped together as the Anti-Terrorism Alliance (ATA) and insist they are dedicated to expelling foreign al-Qaida members they allege are sheltered by the Islamic Court Union (ICU). Although nearly all the ATA warlords are cabinet ministers in the new Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) located in Baidoa, they have abandoned the TFG to pursue an unauthorized war against their Islamist rivals in Mogadishu. Allegations of US funding for the unpopular ATA leaders are undermining US efforts to stabilize the region.
Thus far, the efforts of the ATA have not been met with success. No "terrorists" have been detained, and ATA forces have not fared well in combat against the Islamists who continue to control most of Mogadishu...
Former CIA Director Porter Goss is alleged to have visited Kenya in February to coordinate a campaign against al-Qaida with Somali warlords (the US embassy in Nairobi simply states that it has "no information" about such a visit). According to the TFG and Kenyan security sources, this visit was followed by a CIA mission to Mogadishu that distributed as much as US$2 million in funding to ATA warlords (Daily Nation, Nairobi, 11 May). Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer stated that she did not know if the ATA warlords were receiving US assistance, but made clear that "We will work with those elements that will help us to root out al-Qaida and to prevent Somalia becoming a safe haven for terrorists, and we are doing it in the interests of protecting America" (Reuters, 13 May).
TFG frustration with the United States is growing...
Indeed:
WASHINGTON, June 7 — A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has drawn sharp criticism from American government officials who say the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.
The criticism was expressed privately by United States government officials with direct knowledge of the debate. And the comments flared even before the apparent victory this week by Islamist militias in the country dealt a sharp setback to American policy in the region and broke the warlords' hold on the capital, Mogadishu.
The officials said the C.I.A. effort, run from the agency's station in Nairobi, Kenya, had channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to secular warlords inside Somalia with the aim, among other things, of capturing or killing a handful of suspected members of Al Qaeda believed to be hiding there.
Officials say the decision to use warlords as proxies was born in part from fears of committing large numbers of American personnel to counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, a country that the United States hastily left in 1994 after attempts to capture the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his aides ended in disaster and the death of 18 American troops...
Among those who have criticized the C.I.A. operation as short-sighted have been senior Foreign Service officers at the United States Embassy in Nairobi. Earlier this year, Leslie Rowe, the embassy's second-ranking official, signed off on a cable back to State Department headquarters that detailed grave concerns throughout the region about American efforts in Somalia, according to several people with knowledge of the report...
Don't you love it when a CIA effort that's "covert" in Pravda on June 7th is openly discussed in a Swiss e-zine on June 1st?
At TomPaine.com Jim Lobe take's a little different view than Bu$hCo's. Let's call this the Maddy Albright wing of the Company's perspective:
...The takeover of Mogadishu this week by Islamic militias marks a major defeat for the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which had secretly backed a coalition of warlords that has reportedly been routed from the Somali capital.
While the victors, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), sought to assure the international community that they have no intention of setting up a Taliban-style fundamentalist state, U.S. officials have expressed strong concerns about their possible ties to al Qaeda associates believed to be in Mogadishu, including at least one individual who allegedly helped organize the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.
"We do have real concerns about the presence of foreign terrorists in Somalia and that informs an important aspect of our policy with regard to Somalia," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormick on Monday. U.S. officials say their biggest fear is that the UIC will offer safe haven to al Qaeda and other radical Islamists as the Taliban did after it took control of Afghanistan.
Some independent analysts, on the other hand, said the outcome could actually contribute to Somalia's stabilization after 15 years of rule by rival warlords, and even make way for the transitional national government that has been based in Baidoa since its formation in 2004 as part of a national reconciliation process to set up shop in Mogadishu.
"The so-called Islamists provided a sense of stability in Somalia, education and other social services, while the warlords maimed and killed innocent civilians," Ted Dagne, a Horn of Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service, told The New York Times. He said radical Islamists within the UIC were unlikely to wrest control from more-moderate factions...
The warlords, who since the outset of the U.S. "global war on terror" have reportedly been paid by the U.S. to monitor and help "snatch" suspected terrorists in Somalia, began receiving more cash—100,000-150,000 dollars a month, according to the International Crisis Group—to challenge the UIC's militias that were expanding their control over the capital earlier this spring, just as the transitional government in Baidoa was to convene parliament for the first time.
While the operation was reportedly organized by the CIA, the cash reportedly was funneled through the Pentagon's Joint Combined Task Force (JCTF), a 1,800-troop force based in neighbouring Djibouti since shortly after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Defence Department. The JCTF is apparently charged with carrying out surveillance, "snatch", and related operations against suspected terrorist targets in Yemen and the Horn.
"Support for the warlords came at a really bad time and made a lot of people, particularly the Europeans who were trying to support the government, very angry," noted the diplomat, who asked not to be identified. "Convening the parliament was a big objective for everyone, but then it's overshadowed by the fighting in Mogadishu that followed the injection of money for the warlords."
The U.S. move also provoked some controversy within the U.S. government, although at relatively low levels that did not gain the attention of senior policy-makers.
In one case, a Kenya-based U.S. diplomat, Michael Zorick, reportedly submitted a dissent paper to both his State Department bosses and the Pentagon in which he complained that support for the warlords was counter-productive to U.S. aims in Somalia. He was subsequently transferred to the U.S. embassy in Chad.
Indeed, State Department officials and independent analysts have long argued that Washington's single-minded focus on catching suspected terrorists in Somalia, combined with its failure to support efforts to rebuild state institutions and, most recently, to provide real support to the transitional government, would prove self-defeating. But they were overruled by hawks in the White House and the Pentagon.
"The U.S. now has nothing to show for three years of investing in these warlords as the sole element of their counterterrorism strategy in Somalia," noted John Prendergast, a Horn expert at the International Crisis Group here. "It's a travesty that this has been the only strategy Washington has followed after 15 years of no government, no state, in Somalia."
"There simply hasn't been a U.S. comprehensive policy on Somalia; just a counterterrorism policy that takes no account of the political context," noted the foreign diplomat. "Do you give priority to snatching individuals by any means necessary, including backing warlords, at the expense of a wider political process? That's essentially what the U.S. has done. One would hope that this could get them to broaden their thinking, but I think that may be a naïve."
The broad mind might wonder if the real policy might be chaos for Somalia and others in the Empire's real playbook.
[Thanks to jomama for the link.]
Bulletin:Emmanuel Goldstein killed yet again. Stay tuned for updates right after a message from our sponsors.
What do they say about this in the chocolate-making countries? You know, the kind of people who tried to advise us against our latest land war in Asia.
As the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to dominate headlines, a new front in the war on terrorism has opened in Somalia. At a brutal cost to Mogadishu's civilian population, once-discredited warlords have reinvented themselves as "counter-terrorists", seeking and apparently gaining US support by characterizing their Islamist opponents as agents of al-Qaida. The warlords have grouped together as the Anti-Terrorism Alliance (ATA) and insist they are dedicated to expelling foreign al-Qaida members they allege are sheltered by the Islamic Court Union (ICU). Although nearly all the ATA warlords are cabinet ministers in the new Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) located in Baidoa, they have abandoned the TFG to pursue an unauthorized war against their Islamist rivals in Mogadishu. Allegations of US funding for the unpopular ATA leaders are undermining US efforts to stabilize the region.
Thus far, the efforts of the ATA have not been met with success. No "terrorists" have been detained, and ATA forces have not fared well in combat against the Islamists who continue to control most of Mogadishu...
Former CIA Director Porter Goss is alleged to have visited Kenya in February to coordinate a campaign against al-Qaida with Somali warlords (the US embassy in Nairobi simply states that it has "no information" about such a visit). According to the TFG and Kenyan security sources, this visit was followed by a CIA mission to Mogadishu that distributed as much as US$2 million in funding to ATA warlords (Daily Nation, Nairobi, 11 May). Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer stated that she did not know if the ATA warlords were receiving US assistance, but made clear that "We will work with those elements that will help us to root out al-Qaida and to prevent Somalia becoming a safe haven for terrorists, and we are doing it in the interests of protecting America" (Reuters, 13 May).
TFG frustration with the United States is growing...
Indeed:
WASHINGTON, June 7 — A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has drawn sharp criticism from American government officials who say the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.
The criticism was expressed privately by United States government officials with direct knowledge of the debate. And the comments flared even before the apparent victory this week by Islamist militias in the country dealt a sharp setback to American policy in the region and broke the warlords' hold on the capital, Mogadishu.
The officials said the C.I.A. effort, run from the agency's station in Nairobi, Kenya, had channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to secular warlords inside Somalia with the aim, among other things, of capturing or killing a handful of suspected members of Al Qaeda believed to be hiding there.
Officials say the decision to use warlords as proxies was born in part from fears of committing large numbers of American personnel to counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, a country that the United States hastily left in 1994 after attempts to capture the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his aides ended in disaster and the death of 18 American troops...
Among those who have criticized the C.I.A. operation as short-sighted have been senior Foreign Service officers at the United States Embassy in Nairobi. Earlier this year, Leslie Rowe, the embassy's second-ranking official, signed off on a cable back to State Department headquarters that detailed grave concerns throughout the region about American efforts in Somalia, according to several people with knowledge of the report...
Don't you love it when a CIA effort that's "covert" in Pravda on June 7th is openly discussed in a Swiss e-zine on June 1st?
At TomPaine.com Jim Lobe take's a little different view than Bu$hCo's. Let's call this the Maddy Albright wing of the Company's perspective:
...The takeover of Mogadishu this week by Islamic militias marks a major defeat for the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which had secretly backed a coalition of warlords that has reportedly been routed from the Somali capital.
While the victors, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), sought to assure the international community that they have no intention of setting up a Taliban-style fundamentalist state, U.S. officials have expressed strong concerns about their possible ties to al Qaeda associates believed to be in Mogadishu, including at least one individual who allegedly helped organize the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.
"We do have real concerns about the presence of foreign terrorists in Somalia and that informs an important aspect of our policy with regard to Somalia," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormick on Monday. U.S. officials say their biggest fear is that the UIC will offer safe haven to al Qaeda and other radical Islamists as the Taliban did after it took control of Afghanistan.
Some independent analysts, on the other hand, said the outcome could actually contribute to Somalia's stabilization after 15 years of rule by rival warlords, and even make way for the transitional national government that has been based in Baidoa since its formation in 2004 as part of a national reconciliation process to set up shop in Mogadishu.
"The so-called Islamists provided a sense of stability in Somalia, education and other social services, while the warlords maimed and killed innocent civilians," Ted Dagne, a Horn of Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service, told The New York Times. He said radical Islamists within the UIC were unlikely to wrest control from more-moderate factions...
The warlords, who since the outset of the U.S. "global war on terror" have reportedly been paid by the U.S. to monitor and help "snatch" suspected terrorists in Somalia, began receiving more cash—100,000-150,000 dollars a month, according to the International Crisis Group—to challenge the UIC's militias that were expanding their control over the capital earlier this spring, just as the transitional government in Baidoa was to convene parliament for the first time.
While the operation was reportedly organized by the CIA, the cash reportedly was funneled through the Pentagon's Joint Combined Task Force (JCTF), a 1,800-troop force based in neighbouring Djibouti since shortly after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Defence Department. The JCTF is apparently charged with carrying out surveillance, "snatch", and related operations against suspected terrorist targets in Yemen and the Horn.
"Support for the warlords came at a really bad time and made a lot of people, particularly the Europeans who were trying to support the government, very angry," noted the diplomat, who asked not to be identified. "Convening the parliament was a big objective for everyone, but then it's overshadowed by the fighting in Mogadishu that followed the injection of money for the warlords."
The U.S. move also provoked some controversy within the U.S. government, although at relatively low levels that did not gain the attention of senior policy-makers.
In one case, a Kenya-based U.S. diplomat, Michael Zorick, reportedly submitted a dissent paper to both his State Department bosses and the Pentagon in which he complained that support for the warlords was counter-productive to U.S. aims in Somalia. He was subsequently transferred to the U.S. embassy in Chad.
Indeed, State Department officials and independent analysts have long argued that Washington's single-minded focus on catching suspected terrorists in Somalia, combined with its failure to support efforts to rebuild state institutions and, most recently, to provide real support to the transitional government, would prove self-defeating. But they were overruled by hawks in the White House and the Pentagon.
"The U.S. now has nothing to show for three years of investing in these warlords as the sole element of their counterterrorism strategy in Somalia," noted John Prendergast, a Horn expert at the International Crisis Group here. "It's a travesty that this has been the only strategy Washington has followed after 15 years of no government, no state, in Somalia."
"There simply hasn't been a U.S. comprehensive policy on Somalia; just a counterterrorism policy that takes no account of the political context," noted the foreign diplomat. "Do you give priority to snatching individuals by any means necessary, including backing warlords, at the expense of a wider political process? That's essentially what the U.S. has done. One would hope that this could get them to broaden their thinking, but I think that may be a naïve."
The broad mind might wonder if the real policy might be chaos for Somalia and others in the Empire's real playbook.
[Thanks to jomama for the link.]
Bulletin:
Move Along, These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For
Bradblog via Shystee on San Diego's $election:
Well, guess what? Poll workers in San Diego County had much more than just “a few seconds of physical access to the machines” when they stored the voting machines at their own homes on the night prior to yesterday’s election!
You read that correctly. The most vulnerable voting machines ever created and used in an American election were given to random, volunteer poll workers in San Diego to keep in their houses overnight to do with as they please. The systems were “guarded” by little more than a thin strip of plastic “tamper tape” over some, but not all, of each machines’ dozens of vulnerable physical access points.
A spokesperson this morning from the San Diego Registrar of Voters office confirmed to The BRAD BLOG that “Yes, the machines were sent home with poll workers the night before the election.”
Turns out, according to the New York Pravda:
...Ken Mehlman, said Wednesday that Republicans had 160 people in this district helping to get out the vote.
"They made 164,000 phone calls," Mr. Mehlman said.
Democrats said the Democratic National Committee had no similar effort on the ground here...
I wonder what the reaction of the Vegas kossacks will be to this?
I know what the reaction of the DLC or the DNC will be: none whatsoever.
I wonder if Harry Reid (D-MGM Mirage Casino) will mention this when he talks?
Well, guess what? Poll workers in San Diego County had much more than just “a few seconds of physical access to the machines” when they stored the voting machines at their own homes on the night prior to yesterday’s election!
You read that correctly. The most vulnerable voting machines ever created and used in an American election were given to random, volunteer poll workers in San Diego to keep in their houses overnight to do with as they please. The systems were “guarded” by little more than a thin strip of plastic “tamper tape” over some, but not all, of each machines’ dozens of vulnerable physical access points.
A spokesperson this morning from the San Diego Registrar of Voters office confirmed to The BRAD BLOG that “Yes, the machines were sent home with poll workers the night before the election.”
Turns out, according to the New York Pravda:
...Ken Mehlman, said Wednesday that Republicans had 160 people in this district helping to get out the vote.
"They made 164,000 phone calls," Mr. Mehlman said.
Democrats said the Democratic National Committee had no similar effort on the ground here...
I wonder what the reaction of the Vegas kossacks will be to this?
I know what the reaction of the DLC or the DNC will be: none whatsoever.
I wonder if Harry Reid (D-MGM Mirage Casino) will mention this when he talks?
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
What She Said
Statement of September 11th Advocates
Response to "Godless"
We did not choose to become widowed on September 11, 2001. The attack, which tore our families apart and destroyed our former lives, caused us to ask some serious questions regarding the systems that our country has in place to protect its citizens. Through our constant research, we came to learn how the protocols were supposed to have worked. Thus, we asked for an independent commission to investigate the loopholes which obviously existed and allowed us to be so utterly vulnerable to terrorists. Our only motivation ever was to make our Nation safer. Could we learn from this tragedy so that it would not be repeated?
We are forced to respond to Ms. Coulter’s accusations to set the record straight because we have been slandered.
Contrary to Ms. Coulter’s statements, there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored these men and miss them every day.
It is in their honor and memory, that we will once again refocus the Nation’s attention to the real issues at hand: our lack of security, leadership and progress in the five years since 9/11.
We are continuously reminded that we are still a nation at risk. Therefore, the following is a partial list of areas still desperately in need of attention and public outcry. We should continuously be holding the feet of our elected officials to the fire to fix these shortcomings.
1. Homeland Security Funding based on risk. Inattention to this area causes police officers, firefighters and other emergency/first responder personnel to be ill equipped in emergencies. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.
2. Intelligence Community Oversight. Without proper oversight, there exists no one joint, bicameral intelligence panel with power to both authorize and appropriate funding for intelligence activities. Without such funding we are unable to capitalize on all intelligence community resources and abilities to thwart potential terrorist attacks. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.
3. Transportation Security. There has been no concerted effort to harden mass transportation security. Our planes, buses, subways, and railways remain under-protected and highly vulnerable. These are all identifiable soft targets of potential terrorist attack. The terror attacks in Spain and London attest to this fact. Fixing our transportation systems may save lives on the day of the next attack.
4. Information Sharing among Intelligence Agencies. Information sharing among intelligence agencies has not improved since 9/11. The attacks on 9/11 could have been prevented had information been shared among intelligence agencies. On the day of the next attack, more lives may be saved if our intelligence agencies work together.
5. Loose Nukes. A concerted effort has not been made to secure the thousands of loose nukes scattered around the world – particularly in the former Soviet Union. Securing these loose nukes could make it less likely for a terrorist group to use this method in an attack, thereby saving lives.
6. Security at Chemical Plants, Nuclear Plants, Ports. We must, as a nation, secure these known and identifiable soft targets of Terrorism. Doing so will save many lives.
7. Border Security. We continue to have porous borders and INS and Customs systems in shambles. We need a concerted effort to integrate our border security into the larger national security apparatus.
8. Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Given the President’s NSA Surveillance Program and the re-instatement of the Patriot Act, this Nation is in dire need of a Civil Liberties Oversight Board to insure that a proper balance is found between national security versus the protection of our constitutional rights.
September 11th Advocates
Kristen Breitweiser
Patty Casazza
Monica Gabrielle
Mindy Kleinberg
Lorie Van Auken
Brave women.
You realize that by now these women realize at the very least Dear Leader let it happen.
Response to "Godless"
We did not choose to become widowed on September 11, 2001. The attack, which tore our families apart and destroyed our former lives, caused us to ask some serious questions regarding the systems that our country has in place to protect its citizens. Through our constant research, we came to learn how the protocols were supposed to have worked. Thus, we asked for an independent commission to investigate the loopholes which obviously existed and allowed us to be so utterly vulnerable to terrorists. Our only motivation ever was to make our Nation safer. Could we learn from this tragedy so that it would not be repeated?
We are forced to respond to Ms. Coulter’s accusations to set the record straight because we have been slandered.
Contrary to Ms. Coulter’s statements, there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored these men and miss them every day.
It is in their honor and memory, that we will once again refocus the Nation’s attention to the real issues at hand: our lack of security, leadership and progress in the five years since 9/11.
We are continuously reminded that we are still a nation at risk. Therefore, the following is a partial list of areas still desperately in need of attention and public outcry. We should continuously be holding the feet of our elected officials to the fire to fix these shortcomings.
1. Homeland Security Funding based on risk. Inattention to this area causes police officers, firefighters and other emergency/first responder personnel to be ill equipped in emergencies. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.
2. Intelligence Community Oversight. Without proper oversight, there exists no one joint, bicameral intelligence panel with power to both authorize and appropriate funding for intelligence activities. Without such funding we are unable to capitalize on all intelligence community resources and abilities to thwart potential terrorist attacks. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.
3. Transportation Security. There has been no concerted effort to harden mass transportation security. Our planes, buses, subways, and railways remain under-protected and highly vulnerable. These are all identifiable soft targets of potential terrorist attack. The terror attacks in Spain and London attest to this fact. Fixing our transportation systems may save lives on the day of the next attack.
4. Information Sharing among Intelligence Agencies. Information sharing among intelligence agencies has not improved since 9/11. The attacks on 9/11 could have been prevented had information been shared among intelligence agencies. On the day of the next attack, more lives may be saved if our intelligence agencies work together.
5. Loose Nukes. A concerted effort has not been made to secure the thousands of loose nukes scattered around the world – particularly in the former Soviet Union. Securing these loose nukes could make it less likely for a terrorist group to use this method in an attack, thereby saving lives.
6. Security at Chemical Plants, Nuclear Plants, Ports. We must, as a nation, secure these known and identifiable soft targets of Terrorism. Doing so will save many lives.
7. Border Security. We continue to have porous borders and INS and Customs systems in shambles. We need a concerted effort to integrate our border security into the larger national security apparatus.
8. Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Given the President’s NSA Surveillance Program and the re-instatement of the Patriot Act, this Nation is in dire need of a Civil Liberties Oversight Board to insure that a proper balance is found between national security versus the protection of our constitutional rights.
September 11th Advocates
Kristen Breitweiser
Patty Casazza
Monica Gabrielle
Mindy Kleinberg
Lorie Van Auken
Brave women.
You realize that by now these women realize at the very least Dear Leader let it happen.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
ExxonMobil: A Midieval Take on the World's Energy Challenges
Think Progress:
Ian Murray, senior fellow at the Exxon-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes for the National Review on global warming issues. Today, he excerpts some promotional material from a horror movie that he says “mirrors Al Gore’s views” on global warming:
"[G]lobal warming is caused by the widespread sin, immorality, and materialism of our current society. The looting and murders after these disasters struck are further evidence of the Antichrist’s coming. The Bible’s revelation predicts that it will be under these conditions that the mark of the Beast will come upon us."
Corporate greed cynically manipulating society has nothing to do with it.
Apocalypse is very good for those oilmen, however:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices rose on Monday after Iran warned Washington that a "wrong move" in the standoff over Tehran's nuclear ambitions would endanger flows from the Gulf, which pumps nearly a quarter of the world's crude.
The remarks from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei raised concerns growing tension between the West and Iran, the world's No. 4 oil exporter, could disrupt crude shipments from the region. Iranian officials previously had said Tehran would not use oil as a weapon.
"The threat, whilst remote, would be serious in the context of global oil markets operating with little more than 2 million barrels per day of spare capacity," a Citigroup report said.
U.S. crude settled 27 cents higher at $72.60 a barrel after jumping to $73.84 earlier in the day. London Brent rose 34 cents to $71.37...
Ian Murray, senior fellow at the Exxon-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes for the National Review on global warming issues. Today, he excerpts some promotional material from a horror movie that he says “mirrors Al Gore’s views” on global warming:
"[G]lobal warming is caused by the widespread sin, immorality, and materialism of our current society. The looting and murders after these disasters struck are further evidence of the Antichrist’s coming. The Bible’s revelation predicts that it will be under these conditions that the mark of the Beast will come upon us."
Corporate greed cynically manipulating society has nothing to do with it.
Apocalypse is very good for those oilmen, however:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices rose on Monday after Iran warned Washington that a "wrong move" in the standoff over Tehran's nuclear ambitions would endanger flows from the Gulf, which pumps nearly a quarter of the world's crude.
The remarks from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei raised concerns growing tension between the West and Iran, the world's No. 4 oil exporter, could disrupt crude shipments from the region. Iranian officials previously had said Tehran would not use oil as a weapon.
"The threat, whilst remote, would be serious in the context of global oil markets operating with little more than 2 million barrels per day of spare capacity," a Citigroup report said.
U.S. crude settled 27 cents higher at $72.60 a barrel after jumping to $73.84 earlier in the day. London Brent rose 34 cents to $71.37...
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