As Canada, in large part due to aggressive behind the scenes lobbying, rolls out the not-comprehensively-tested Merck HPV vaccine for girls as young as nine, a look at developments on the vaccine south of the border should cause Canadians serious concern. In the United States a similar lobby campaign by the same company launched the mass HPV vaccination of girls beginning in June last year.
In just little over a year, the HPV vaccine has been associated with at least five deaths, not to mention thousands of reports of adverse effects, hundreds deemed serious, and many that required hospitalization.
Judicial Watch, a U.S. government watchdog, became concerned while noting large donations to key politicians originating from Merck. A freedom of information request from the group in May of this year discovered that during the period from June 8, 2006 - when the vaccines received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - to May 2007 there were 1,637 reports of adverse reactions to the HPV vaccine reported to the FDA.
Three deaths were related to the vaccine, including one of a 12-year-old. One physician's assistant reported that a female patient "died of a blood clot three hours after getting the Gardasil vaccine." Two other reports, on girls 12 and 19, reported deaths relating to heart problems and/or blood clotting.
As of May 11, 2007, the 1,637 adverse vaccination reactions reported to the FDA via the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) included 371 serious reactions. Of the 42 women who received the vaccine while pregnant, 18 experienced side effects ranging from spontaneous abortion to fetal abnormities.
Side effects published by Merck & Co. warn the public about potential pain, fever, nausea, dizziness and itching after receiving the vaccine. Indeed, 77% of the adverse reactions reported are typical side effects to vaccinations. But other more serious side effects reported include paralysis, Bells Palsy, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and seizures.
Judicial Watch informed LifeSiteNews.com that a subsequent request for information on adverse reactions to the HPV vaccine, covering the period from May 2007 to September 2007, found that an additional 1800 adverse reactions have been reported, including more deaths. Exactly how many more deaths occurred will be released in the coming days, Judicial Watch's Dee Grothe informed LifeSiteNews.com.
The LifeSiteNews.com report on the moneyed lobbying efforts of Merck in the U.S. was reported in February. (see http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/feb/07020204.html )
However the Canadian lobby effort by Merck's Canadian affiliate Merck Frosst Canada has been underway using powerful lobbyists with close connections to the politicians who have signed off on massive government funded vaccination programs.
The Toronto Star recently reported that Merck Frosst Canada Ltd hired public relations giant Hill & Knowlton to push the immunization strategies using some well-connected lobbyists: Ken Boessenkool, a former senior policy adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper; Bob Lopinski, formerly with Premier Dalton McGuinty's office; and Jason Grier, former chief of staff to Health Minister George Smitherman.
Harper's Conservative Government approved Merck's HPV vaccine Gardasil in July and later announced a $300 million program to give the vaccine to girls from ages 9-13. That of course is only the beginning of what Merck likely hopes will be a much larger vaccination of all potentially sexually active women in Canada who are not already HPV infected. In August, McGuinty's Ontario Liberals, on the advice of his Health Minister George Smitherman, announced that all Grade 8 girls will have free access to Gardasil.
One of the major complaints by physicians is that the HPV vaccination program has been implemented before adequate testing has been completed. Long-term effects of the vaccine remain unknown. Many are asking why the seemingly reckless rush?
At least one answer to that question comes from the fact that Merck currently is the sole provider of an HPV vaccine with its Gardasil product. A competing HPV vaccine, Glaxo Smith Kline's Cervarix, is set to hit the market in January 2008. As more children are vaccinated with Gardasil, fewer will be able to later receive the necessary repeat boosters of a competing, incompatible vaccine. Merck is in a race to capture as much of the market as it can, consuming many millions of taxpayer dollars.
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/sep/07092004.html
Friday, 28 September 2007
Police are too quick to grab for Taser's power, say critics
When deputies pulled her over, Valinda Otis told them she was pregnant and needed to use the bathroom.When they wouldn't let her go to a nearby restroom, she walked toward it, anyway, she said, and was quickly handcuffed and placed in a patrol car. She screamed and kicked the car door.
That's when a deputy with the King County Sheriff's Office pulled out a Taser, pressed it against her thigh and jolted her with 50,000 volts of electricity.
"It was a sharp pain," said Otis, 24, who was three months pregnant at the time of the September incident. "I kept asking, 'Is it gonna mess up my baby?' "
Tasers have been used locally to end violent standoffs and subdue suicidal people, but a Seattle Post-Intelligencer review found they're also being used routinely in far less threatening situations -- including against juveniles, pregnant women and people who have already been handcuffed.
King County sheriff's deputies have fired Tasers at a teenager who ran after not paying a $1.25 bus fare, a 71-year-old man who was arrested for drunken driving and refused to get into a patrol car, and a partially deaf man who couldn't hear deputies ordering him to stop, reports show.
Some civil rights advocates argue Tasers are being drawn too quickly and in cases in which such extreme force isn't necessary. They worry about potential abuses as more officers rely on the tool to subdue people who they say pose no serious threat to themselves or others.
"We have a problem with the rush to tase and ask questions later," said Sheley Secrest, with the NAACP's Seattle chapter, who has fielded several complaints, including one from Otis. The NAACP wants stricter policies.
Amnesty International released a report today saying police nationwide are abusing the stun guns, and more than 70 deaths in Taser incidents raise questions about whether the devices are safe -- though the company that builds them insists they are.
From January 2003 to June 2004, Seattle police used Tasers in 269 incidents, while King County sheriff's deputies used them in 267 incidents, including 15 cases in which they were displayed as warnings, according to a P-I review of hundreds of use-of-force reports.
Tasers have defused many potentially deadly situations. The painful jolts stopped a man from leaping off Seattle's Aurora Bridge, subdued a man who grabbed an officer's gun and turned it on him, and stopped several knife-wielding people who might have been shot dead, records show.
But King County deputies have shocked at least 10 people who were handcuffed, while Seattle police used the devices on at least three handcuffed people. Such use is discouraged in Phoenix; Las Vegas; Austin, Texas; and other cities.
Nearly a third of those hit were jolted two or more times. King County and Seattle officials say they plan to review multiple shockings.
About three out of four of those shocked by Seattle police were unarmed. Five of six zapped by King County deputies didn't have weapons, though records didn't always note this.
Officials with the King County Sheriff's Office and the Seattle Police Department say Tasers are generally used the way they should be: to control suspects who are aggressive, fight back, actively resist or run away.
But the King County Sheriff's Office has recently tightened its policy after finding some uses "just weren't appropriate" even though they fell within department guidelines, said Chief Sue Rahr, who has been named to replace Sheriff Dave Reichert. The agency also will begin keeping a database of and requiring reports for all Taser incidents.
Rahr declined to comment about specific cases but said deputies are fighting public misperceptions about Tasers.
Pregnant women, the elderly, juveniles and those who are already handcuffed can be violent and threatening, she said. Still, deputies are trained to exhaust all their options "in a case like that because it just doesn't look pretty," she said.
"Even though Tasers sound scary when you crackle them, they are really a much more gentle tool than wrestling with someone. ... It looks like and sounds like a torture tool, and that is not how it is used; that's not the way they're trained to use them," Rahr said.
In the next few months, the Seattle Police Department plans to review multiple shockings with its 280 officers who carry Tasers but maintains that its current policy is effective and restrictive enough.
"It's not a matter of 'we're going to zap you if you don't follow orders,' " said Deputy Chief Clark Kimerer. "There's a context of struggle."
Kimerer says the beauty of the Taser is "that you walk away from it." He and others say it reduces injuries, leaves no permanent scars and potentially saves lives when officers reach for a Taser rather than a Glock 9 mm pistol.
In 2003, for the first time in 15 years, Seattle didn't have any shooting deaths involving officers, and police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said Tasers and other less-lethal tools are partly responsible. Tasers are used in only a small fraction of the 20,000 arrests made each year, said Kerlikowske, who recently volunteered to be shocked with a Taser so he would understand what the experience was like.
Officers don't want to pull the trigger, said Lynnwood Sgt. Wes Deppa. "You feel a lot better at the end of the day knowing you took somebody to jail, and they didn't get hurt, and you didn't get hurt."
A less lethal alternative
Shaped like a gun but battery-operated, a Taser fires two fishhooklike barbs into a person's skin and disrupts a person's muscle control for five seconds. The darts have a range of up to 21 feet; the tool also can be pressed directly against a person to use in stun mode.
The pain can be excruciating, "freezing" someone on the spot, but a person can typically move once the switch is turned off.
Seattle police explored less-lethal weapons four years ago after a series of deadly run-ins with mentally disturbed people. In April 2000, police shot and killed David Walker, a mentally ill man who shoplifted from a Queen Anne store, fired a shot at security guards and brandished a knife. A police task force and a citizens group formed after the incident both recommended Tasers and more crisis training for officers.
Other departments watched how Seattle handled that case and followed suit.
About 6,000 agencies, including more than 150 in this state, have the devices, which are trademarked and manufactured by Taser International, a publicly traded company based in Scottsdale, Ariz.
"Police departments have been desperate to find less-than-lethal alternatives," said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, D.C.
The Rev. Harriet Walden, a member of the citizens group that recommended Tasers to Seattle police, said the weapon can be very effective in handling crisis situations but was never meant to be used on handcuffed or intoxicated people.
"Everybody wants less shootings. The (police) department wants less shootings, too," said Walden, founder of Mothers for Police Accountability. "But we're not advocating that the Tasers be used to torture people. ... The community will have to watch it."
Because the devices typically leave few marks when the darts are fired, critics worry they're too easy to abuse. The stun gun mode has been known to leave burn marks on some people.
Kenneth Ruffer, a SeaTac high school senior, said Seattle police officers were too quick to tase him.
Ruffer said he wasn't fighting two years ago when an officer tased him four times in the back of his neck. The teenager was in the back seat of a friend's car when they were pulled over for a broken light near Rainier Beach. Police became suspicious when he made "furtive movements," police reports show. Ruffer said he was clicking on his seat belt.
In their report, officers said Ruffer tensed up and pulled his hands away when he was patted down. He struggled as they tried to handcuff him, but the teenager also told officers "he didn't want to be handcuffed because he was claustrophobic," the report showed.
"I was in a headlock, face down in the dirt and couldn't breathe. I heard someone say, 'Tase him again,' " the 18-year-old said in an interview.
This fall Ruffer received a $25,000 settlement from the city, which admitted no wrongdoing in the lawsuit. He was never charged with a crime.
"When Tasers first came out, it was a good tool," said Ruffer, whose scars are still visible. But "there's a point where you can overdo it. Just because you have it, you don't always have to use it."
Repeated shocks questioned
King County deputies have used the Taser on 17 juveniles, including a 16-year-old pregnant teen who kicked at a deputy when he tried to pull her from the back of a patrol car. The deputy wrote in his report that she was on drugs and banging her head on the partition window.
The 14-year-old girl stopped for not paying her bus fare in March gave the deputy two different spellings of her name and then took off running, incident reports show. The deputy chased her through Pioneer Square and fired the Taser, but she was "unaware" it was applied, his report said.
Failing to show hands when ordered to do so, running from police or not surrendering hands for cuffing were common reasons for tasing, records show. Local officers also used Tasers to enforce orders to stay on the ground, come out of hiding or get into or out of a patrol car, reports show.
Like Ruffer, several dozen people were zapped multiple times by local officers, the P-I review found.
The citizen board of the Seattle Office of Professional Accountability has asked the Police Department to examine the issue of multiple tasings.
"At some point, when do you stop?" asked Pete Holmes, a board member. "If two tasings, why not three? Why not five? Why not six? When do you say this is not going to work?"
King County deputies stunned a 28-year-old man in the back at least 15 times when they arrested him after he was accused of assaulting his girlfriend, reports show.
High-profile incidents in other cities raise eyebrows.
In southwestern Washington, Olga Rybak was stunned in the back and legs 12 times when she didn't sign an animal-control citation. The Washougal police sergeant who used the Taser was demoted to patrol officer. "It was a poor choice in handling the situation with a Taser rather than other means," said Sgt. Brad Chicks, Washougal's interim police chief. Rybak's attorney, Tom Foley, said the Russian woman spoke limited English and wanted to talk with her husband before signing a citation to impound her dog. He repeatedly stunned her in front of her young children, leaving welts all over her body, Foley said.
"I can't think of any justification for using it like that," he added. "She certainly was not a threat."
In the report released today, Amnesty International says the devices have been used against people who didn't pose a serious threat, such as unruly schoolchildren, people who don't follow orders and unarmed suspects fleeing the scenes of minor crimes. The report cites cases of the tool being used on a 6-year-old mentally disturbed boy in Miami, a handcuffed 9-year-old girl in Arizona and a partially blind 71-year-old Portland woman.
Amnesty International wants officers to stop using the devices until independent tests prove they're safe. Some studies have said there's not enough scientific data to determine whether Tasers are safe for use in all circumstances.
At least 69 people have died nationwide after being shocked by Tasers. Three of those deaths occurred locally, in Olympia, Silverdale and Auburn. (Tomorrow's stories in this series will detail those cases.)
Company officials say Tasers are safe and have never been linked as the direct cause of a death. Those people died from other causes, such as cocaine intoxication or heart problems, they said.
"We've done thorough medical testing," said Steve Tuttle, spokesman for Taser International. "Taser technology saves lives every day."
'I give up, don't shoot'
Several chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union across the country have urged officers to use Tasers only in the most serious situations.
Even some who wanted local police to have the tools are wondering whether the threshold is too low for when officers can shock people.
D'Adre Cunningham, a public defender whose clients have been hit with Tasers, said the devices are sometimes used in mundane situations. Many of her clients were later charged with "contempt of cop," like obstruction.
"Is that really a proper police response to someone mouthing off?" said Cunningham. "What happened before Tasers? We know they didn't shoot all these people. What did they do instead?"
For Otis, the pregnant woman, a traffic stop turned into a painful experience and an arrest for obstruction. Deputies stopped her in September for driving without a license, which they noticed after scanning motel registrations from the previous day. She argued with deputies and screamed when they didn't let her go to the bathroom, the report shows. Two deputies immediately attempted to arrest her.
Olympia police Cmdr. Tor Bjornstad said it isn't always clear-cut when to use Tasers. "There are uses of the Tasers that tend to make people wonder what's going on, but you have to ask yourself what else could have been used?" If officers use a baton, flashlight, pepper spray or their fists, injuries would be far worse, he said.
The year before Tasers were deployed, 11 Olympia officers and seven suspects were injured enough to require a trip to the hospital, Bjornstad said. The next year, only two officers were hurt. Last year, two officers and four suspects were injured.
Sometimes officers don't need to zap at all.
In at least two dozen cases reviewed, the red laser beamed from the Taser or the crackle of electricity fired as a warning were enough to persuade the unwilling to cooperate.
"OK, I give up, don't shoot," one 16-year-old said after seeing a King County deputy aiming the red laser light at his chest, records show. The teenager had tried to hide in a closet when deputies served him with an arrest warrant.
Policies vary widely
Critics believe some policies governing Taser use are too broad in some departments. Such policies and training guides officers in how to use the stun guns.
Last month, Las Vegas police banned the use of Tasers on handcuffed people and discouraged multiple shockings. Two people died this year in Las Vegas after being restrained and shocked multiple times.
Not everyone feels such restrictions are necessary. Lynnwood police don't allow tasing handcuffed suspects but are reconsidering it, Sgt. Deppa said. A handcuffed person can kick, bite or assault an officer, he said. "It's not uncommon for someone in the back of a patrol car to become physically combative," he added.
But there's no real consensus on Taser use among departments. Some agency use-of-force policies don't even mention Tasers. The Port of Seattle's policy gives rules for maintaining the stun guns, but not much guidance on how they should be used.
Others are more specific. Algona tells officers to aim for a person's back, and Federal Way prohibits officers from shooting pregnant women or the elderly "unless other options short of lethal force have failed."
Taser policies vary across the country, and agencies are moving toward more restrictive policies.
In Kansas City, officials adopted a stricter policy this summer after an officer shocked a 66-year-old woman who resisted after she was cited for honking her horn too loudly, Capt. Rich Lockhart said.
"The learning curve is very steep for everybody," Lockhart said.
Officers in Denver and Orlando can no longer use the device on those who "passively resist" -- like failing to move along.
Under King County's new policy, deputies can use Tasers on someone who is passively resisting, or not fighting back, only if they can explain why there was a threat.
King County Sgt. Don Davis, who reviews all Taser incidents, said the changes were partly prompted by an incident involving Javonna Williams. The 27-year-old woman filed a $3 million lawsuit against the Sheriff's Office, saying deputies shot her multiple times in her back, face and mouth.
Deputies contend that Williams was drunk and that they tried to remove her from the disturbance, reports show. She resisted when they tried to handcuff her, so deputies touched her four times on her back with the stun gun, they wrote in the report.
Williams' claim with the Sheriff's Office is still being investigated.
"We had to take a step back and examine the overall policy," said Davis.
Police watchdogs believe it may be time for the community to do the same.
"It was meant for people in crisis," said Walden. "If it's being used for an array of things, maybe the community has to come back together and see how it's being used."
HOW TASERS WORK
* TECHNOLOGY: Tasers use compressed nitrogen to shoot two electrically charged probes at a subject. When the probes connect with a target, they release about 50,000 volts of electric pulses for up to five seconds, which stun by causing the muscles to contract uncontrollably.
* POWER: Gun runs on eight standard AA batteries. Studies show the electrical charges cause no long-term damage to target.
* IMPACT: Target is immobilized in less than half a second. Effects of the shock last several minutes.
* TRACKING: A data port on the back of the gun stores each time and date it was fired.
* BACKUP: If the probes fail to hit the target, there are two electrodes on the front of the unit which can be used as a stun gun.
* RANGE: Tasers carried by police are most effective from 12 to 18 feet, according to the manufacturer.
# Today: Law enforcement agencies locally and nationwide praise the Taser as a lifesaving alternative to the use of firearms by police. But critics say police are too quick to use the weapon in routine situations in which they would never use a gun.
# Tomorrow: Sixty-nine deaths nationwide have been reported after tasings, including three in the Puget Sound area. In five of those cases, medical examiners have partially blamed Tasers. Manufacturer Taser International insists the devices are safe.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/201700_taser30.html
Minister raped me in his Parliament office
A MAN has told how the late Labor minister Bob Collins raped him when he was a 12-year-old, while watching pornographic videos in his Senate office.
Ben Helwend has told the Herald that Collins was a friend of his family in Darwin and offered to pay for his journey to Canberra in 1989 so he could learn about the workings of democracy.
"Over a period of four days in Canberra he penetrated me, masturbated me and had me [perform oral sex]," Mr Helwend, 30, said. "I was just 12. I didn't know anything about sex and I was scared not to do as Mr Collins asked me because I played with his kids and my mum and dad were friends of the Collins family."
The Federal Government has granted Collins, 61, a state funeral in Darwin this Saturday following his death last Friday - just three days before he was due to face a committal hearing in Darwin on child sex offences against another three boys in the western Arnhem Land township of Maningrida some 30 years ago. The charges were dropped on Monday, but now there are claims Collins committed suicide to avoid the humiliation of being prosecuted.
Collins was also charged in Canberra last September with two counts of committing acts of indecency on Mr Helwend and one count of sexual intercourse with the child in the capital when he was a senator in September 1989. Mr Helwend said last night his lawyer had told him those charges had also been dropped.
He has come forward as The Bulletin, published today, details allegations by the Aboriginal actor Tom E. Lewis of being sexually assaulted by Collins.
"It's caused a lot of bitterness, and twistedness in my spirit," Lewis tells the magazine. "I've been beaten, flogged, you name it, when I was a kid. I can forgive those people. I've been ripped and called a f---in' whitefella in a black community. Everything. I can still forgive those people. I've got no room to forgive this Collins. Bullshit. [If] black people rape everybody and anybody who do anything like that, they have their name splattered everywhere."
Collins is being afforded a state funeral on the grounds of protocol, as he was the Northern Territory's first federal cabinet minister.
The journalist Paul Toohey, who wrote the Bulletin story, said the former senator had not died of cancer, as was widely reported. Rather, the NT coroner was planning to investigate whether he killed himself on the eve of his case.
The magazine also quoted an unidentified former Darwin woman saying her former husband had been abused by Collins. The woman had appeared before the NSW Wood royal commission on police corruption, which also investigated police-related pedophile activity, and named Collins in a closed session. Her complaint had gone nowhere.
It also claimed other youngsters molested by Collins years ago had served or were serving jail terms on child-sex charges.
Collins was one of the first ALP members elected to the NT Legislative Assembly in 1977 and as leader of the Opposition encountered opponents for supporting Lindy Chamberlain during her murder trial. In 1987 he was elected senator for the Territory. He served in both the Hawke and Keating ministries until he resigned in 1998.
Mr Helwend said Collins in 1989 had spoken about the Australian government system at the Berry Springs Primary School, an hour's drive south of Darwin, when he was a sixth grader.
"My parents were poor and couldn't afford to send me on a school excursion to Canberra so Collins drove me home and offered to pay for my trip. He fondled me while I was in the car outside home and he kept on doing it and other things when we got to Canberra, in his flat and in his office. He told me he was on the film censorship board or something and showed me pornographic tapes in his parliamentary office."
He recalled the trip to Canberra took place during the 1989 pilots' strike. Other students had to travel from Darwin to Canberra by bus, but he was afforded special privileges as the senator's guest and flew with him. He spent most of the visit under the supervision of the teacher on the excursion but spent the first two nights and the last two sleeping at Collins's flat.
Mr Helwend, who now lives in northern NSW, said he had kept quiet about Collins until he saw a report on breakfast television news in June 2004 that the former senator had been injured when his Toyota LandCruiser rolled in Kakadu National Park.
The report also revealed that Collins was under investigation by NT police for sexually assaulting children at Maningrida, where he kept a market garden before entering politics in 1977.
"I saw the report and thought, 'He's tried to commit suicide,' " Mr Helwend said. "I'd kept it inside me for years. I waited until my dad died before telling my mum six years ago. She couldn't believe it. I mean, they were friends of the family. I played with Robbie, Elizabeth and Daniel [Collins's children from his marriage to Rosemary Tipiloura] when we were kids. I saw one of them a while back but didn't say anything."
Mr Helwend was outraged by the obituaries after Collins's death at his Darwin home.
"They all got it wrong. He wasn't a hero. Whatever he achieved in politics was obscene when you compare it to what he did to me. I don't know what he did to the others, but I know what he did to me. It's with me forever."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/09/25/1190486310966.html
Ben Helwend has told the Herald that Collins was a friend of his family in Darwin and offered to pay for his journey to Canberra in 1989 so he could learn about the workings of democracy.
"Over a period of four days in Canberra he penetrated me, masturbated me and had me [perform oral sex]," Mr Helwend, 30, said. "I was just 12. I didn't know anything about sex and I was scared not to do as Mr Collins asked me because I played with his kids and my mum and dad were friends of the Collins family."
The Federal Government has granted Collins, 61, a state funeral in Darwin this Saturday following his death last Friday - just three days before he was due to face a committal hearing in Darwin on child sex offences against another three boys in the western Arnhem Land township of Maningrida some 30 years ago. The charges were dropped on Monday, but now there are claims Collins committed suicide to avoid the humiliation of being prosecuted.
Collins was also charged in Canberra last September with two counts of committing acts of indecency on Mr Helwend and one count of sexual intercourse with the child in the capital when he was a senator in September 1989. Mr Helwend said last night his lawyer had told him those charges had also been dropped.
He has come forward as The Bulletin, published today, details allegations by the Aboriginal actor Tom E. Lewis of being sexually assaulted by Collins.
"It's caused a lot of bitterness, and twistedness in my spirit," Lewis tells the magazine. "I've been beaten, flogged, you name it, when I was a kid. I can forgive those people. I've been ripped and called a f---in' whitefella in a black community. Everything. I can still forgive those people. I've got no room to forgive this Collins. Bullshit. [If] black people rape everybody and anybody who do anything like that, they have their name splattered everywhere."
Collins is being afforded a state funeral on the grounds of protocol, as he was the Northern Territory's first federal cabinet minister.
The journalist Paul Toohey, who wrote the Bulletin story, said the former senator had not died of cancer, as was widely reported. Rather, the NT coroner was planning to investigate whether he killed himself on the eve of his case.
The magazine also quoted an unidentified former Darwin woman saying her former husband had been abused by Collins. The woman had appeared before the NSW Wood royal commission on police corruption, which also investigated police-related pedophile activity, and named Collins in a closed session. Her complaint had gone nowhere.
It also claimed other youngsters molested by Collins years ago had served or were serving jail terms on child-sex charges.
Collins was one of the first ALP members elected to the NT Legislative Assembly in 1977 and as leader of the Opposition encountered opponents for supporting Lindy Chamberlain during her murder trial. In 1987 he was elected senator for the Territory. He served in both the Hawke and Keating ministries until he resigned in 1998.
Mr Helwend said Collins in 1989 had spoken about the Australian government system at the Berry Springs Primary School, an hour's drive south of Darwin, when he was a sixth grader.
"My parents were poor and couldn't afford to send me on a school excursion to Canberra so Collins drove me home and offered to pay for my trip. He fondled me while I was in the car outside home and he kept on doing it and other things when we got to Canberra, in his flat and in his office. He told me he was on the film censorship board or something and showed me pornographic tapes in his parliamentary office."
He recalled the trip to Canberra took place during the 1989 pilots' strike. Other students had to travel from Darwin to Canberra by bus, but he was afforded special privileges as the senator's guest and flew with him. He spent most of the visit under the supervision of the teacher on the excursion but spent the first two nights and the last two sleeping at Collins's flat.
Mr Helwend, who now lives in northern NSW, said he had kept quiet about Collins until he saw a report on breakfast television news in June 2004 that the former senator had been injured when his Toyota LandCruiser rolled in Kakadu National Park.
The report also revealed that Collins was under investigation by NT police for sexually assaulting children at Maningrida, where he kept a market garden before entering politics in 1977.
"I saw the report and thought, 'He's tried to commit suicide,' " Mr Helwend said. "I'd kept it inside me for years. I waited until my dad died before telling my mum six years ago. She couldn't believe it. I mean, they were friends of the family. I played with Robbie, Elizabeth and Daniel [Collins's children from his marriage to Rosemary Tipiloura] when we were kids. I saw one of them a while back but didn't say anything."
Mr Helwend was outraged by the obituaries after Collins's death at his Darwin home.
"They all got it wrong. He wasn't a hero. Whatever he achieved in politics was obscene when you compare it to what he did to me. I don't know what he did to the others, but I know what he did to me. It's with me forever."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/09/25/1190486310966.html
Sarkozy calls for UN-led 'new world order'
New York - The United Nations should avail itself as an instrument for a "new world order of the 21st century," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Tuesday in his first address to the General Assembly. Sarkozy, who won the presidency this year on a strong reform platform to modernize France, urged the world body to embark on programmes ranging from equal wealth distribution to fighting corruption in his speech full of references to France's past revolutionary ideals.
"In the name of France, I call upon all states to join ranks in order to found the new world order of the 21st century on the notion that the common goods that belong to all of humankind must be the common responsibility for us all," he told the General Assembly.
The UN should ensure access for all human beings to vital resources, such as water, energy, food, medication and knowledge, he said. He called for "more morality" in "financial capitalism" and a fairer distribution of profits, earnings in commodities, raw materials and new technologies.
"There must be a change of mindset and behaviour," Sarkozy said in a long list of demands to the international community.
Known for his admiration of the United States and its culture, Sarkozy said France will remain loyal to its friends and the values it shares with them.
But he warned that loyalty should not be equated with submission, a reference to Paris' disagreement with the US-led war in Iraq.
"What I want to say to the world is that France, faithful to its friends, stands ready to talk to all people, on every continent," he said.
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/113706.html
No coincidence there!
"In the name of France, I call upon all states to join ranks in order to found the new world order of the 21st century on the notion that the common goods that belong to all of humankind must be the common responsibility for us all," he told the General Assembly.
The UN should ensure access for all human beings to vital resources, such as water, energy, food, medication and knowledge, he said. He called for "more morality" in "financial capitalism" and a fairer distribution of profits, earnings in commodities, raw materials and new technologies.
"There must be a change of mindset and behaviour," Sarkozy said in a long list of demands to the international community.
Known for his admiration of the United States and its culture, Sarkozy said France will remain loyal to its friends and the values it shares with them.
But he warned that loyalty should not be equated with submission, a reference to Paris' disagreement with the US-led war in Iraq.
"What I want to say to the world is that France, faithful to its friends, stands ready to talk to all people, on every continent," he said.
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/113706.html
No coincidence there!
'A Coup Has Occurred'
Daniel Ellsberg, the heroic former Defense Department analyst and Army officer who shared the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War with the American people, talked about the looming war against Iran, and the American police state, at American University on September 20.
I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state. If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.
Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.
And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.
It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …
This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.
Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.
Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.
The Next Coup
Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.
The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.
There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.
I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.
I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.
That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to, in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.
It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president – elected or not – with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.
When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country – but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.
They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”
It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.
Founders Had It Right
Now I’m referring to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.
It’s not just “our way of doing things” – it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.
That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …
But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.
Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.
That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – and the public and the media, we have freed the White House – the president and the vice president – from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.
And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.
And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.
What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.
And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.
However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps – anyway not large – possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.
Restoring the Republic
Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.
Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…
We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” – names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.
How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.
I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.
And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a Führer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.
I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.
I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada – who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war – is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously upholding his oath.
The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.
Congressional Courage
On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate – and frankly of the Republicans – that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.
I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.
Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?
I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.
We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.
I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.
And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves – they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.
That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.
September 27, 2007
Daniel Ellsberg is a former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, the US military’s account of activities during the Vietnam War, to the New York Times. The release awakened the American people to how much they had been deceived by their own government about the war. Ellsberg has continued as a political activist, giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/ellsberg2.html
I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state. If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.
Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.
And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.
It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …
This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.
Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.
Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.
The Next Coup
Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.
The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.
There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.
I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.
I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.
That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to, in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.
It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president – elected or not – with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.
When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country – but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.
They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”
It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.
Founders Had It Right
Now I’m referring to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.
It’s not just “our way of doing things” – it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.
That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …
But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.
Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.
That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – and the public and the media, we have freed the White House – the president and the vice president – from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.
And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.
And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.
What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.
And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.
However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps – anyway not large – possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.
Restoring the Republic
Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.
Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…
We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” – names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.
How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.
I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.
And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a Führer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.
I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.
I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada – who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war – is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously upholding his oath.
The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.
Congressional Courage
On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate – and frankly of the Republicans – that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.
I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.
Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?
I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.
We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.
I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.
And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves – they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.
That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.
September 27, 2007
Daniel Ellsberg is a former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, the US military’s account of activities during the Vietnam War, to the New York Times. The release awakened the American people to how much they had been deceived by their own government about the war. Ellsberg has continued as a political activist, giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/ellsberg2.html
An Electronic Concentration Camp: Big Brother in the Sky
Short of hiding out in a cave, far removed from any trace of modern technology, it would seem that there is no longer any escaping the electronic concentration camp in which we live.
Whether we’re crossing the street, queuing up at the ATM or picnicking in the park, we’re under constant scrutiny—our movements monitored by cameras, tracked by satellites and catalogued by a host of increasingly attentive government agencies. No longer does the idea of an omnipresent, omniscient government seem all that far-fetched. And as technology becomes ever more sophisticated, the idea of a total surveillance society moves further from the realm of George Orwell’s science fiction fantasy into an accepted way of life.
In fact, surveillance has become an industry in itself, with huge sectors having sprung up devoted to developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep American citizens under surveillance, with or without their cooperation. The science behind the gadgetry is particularly brilliant. For example, human motion analysis, a pet project of researchers at the University of Maryland, aims to create an individual “code” for the way people walk—researchers refer to it as “finding DNA in human motion.” Dubbed Gait DNA, this surveillance system works by matching a person’s facial image to his gait, height, weight and other elements—all captured through remote observation, thereby allowing the computer to identify someone instantly and track them, even in a crowd.
Soon there really will be no place to hide. Oceanit, a Hawaii-based company that has been working with the Hawaiian National Guard in Iraq, is preparing to roll out sense-through-the-wall technology next year that can “see” through walls by picking up on sensitive radio signals emitted by the human body to determine vital signs such as breathing and heart rates. As Ian Kitajima, the marketing manager for Oceanit pointed out, in addition to telling users whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield, the technology “will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We’ll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they’re actually thinking.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development agency for the Department of Defense, is credited with ensuring that the U.S. remains ahead of the game when it comes to such far-reaching technology. According to a recent BBC news report, “Back in the 70s, while we were working with typewriters and carbon paper, Darpa was developing the Internet. In the 90s, while we pored over maps, Darpa invented satellite navigation that many of us now have in our cars.” DARPA is currently working on technology that will enable users to understand any language spoken to them, as well as fine-tuning the prototype for an unmanned airplane with surveillance cameras that would be able to stay airborne for up to five years.
And on October 1, the government will launch its latest assault on privacy by making data from U.S. satellites available to federal agents. These satellites, which orbit the earth 24 hours a day and have historically provided high-resolution photographs to track climate changes and foreign military movements, will now be used to watch for terrorist activity and drug smuggling, among other things. Yet they are a far cry from the satellite imagery many Americans have become acquainted with through Google Earth and MapQuest. These spy satellites not only take color photos, they also use more advanced technology to track heat generated by people in buildings.
In fact, as the Wall Street Journal points out, “The full capabilities of these systems are unknown outside the intelligence community, because they are among the most closely held secrets in government.” Moreover, the technology is expected to be made available to state and local law enforcement agencies within the year, which raises serious concerns about the deepening ties between domestic law enforcement agencies and the military.
This latest citizen surveillance program comes draped in the familiar government mantra that it will keep us safe from terrorists. As Charles Allen, the chief intelligence officer for the Department of Homeland Security, explained to the Washington Post, “These systems are already used to help us respond to crises. We anticipate that we can also use it to protect Americans by preventing the entry of dangerous people and goods into the country, and by helping us examine critical infrastructure for vulnerabilities.”
Yet despite the government’s best efforts to sell the program, it is nothing less than “Big Brother in the sky,” as Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, aptly termed it. Indeed, since 9/11, the U.S. government has been building an arsenal of surveillance tools aimed directly at American citizens, largely paid for by American taxpayers and fueled by our fears.
For too long now, the American people have been ruled by fear. We are afraid of terrorists, afraid of crime, even afraid of our next-door neighbors. More than anything else, Americans want to feel safe. According to the BBC News, opinion polls show that approximately 75% of Americans want more, not less, surveillance. But there is wisdom in the adage to “be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.”
Implemented with virtually no oversight from Congress, this particular surveillance program will be overseen by the Homeland Security Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is a little like letting the foxes guard the chicken coop. And while some might argue that we at least live in a benevolent surveillance state, one that seemingly has our best interests at heart, I beg to differ. Whether we choose our prison or have it foisted upon us, the end is still the same: a lack of freedom.
http://www.rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=497
Whether we’re crossing the street, queuing up at the ATM or picnicking in the park, we’re under constant scrutiny—our movements monitored by cameras, tracked by satellites and catalogued by a host of increasingly attentive government agencies. No longer does the idea of an omnipresent, omniscient government seem all that far-fetched. And as technology becomes ever more sophisticated, the idea of a total surveillance society moves further from the realm of George Orwell’s science fiction fantasy into an accepted way of life.
In fact, surveillance has become an industry in itself, with huge sectors having sprung up devoted to developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep American citizens under surveillance, with or without their cooperation. The science behind the gadgetry is particularly brilliant. For example, human motion analysis, a pet project of researchers at the University of Maryland, aims to create an individual “code” for the way people walk—researchers refer to it as “finding DNA in human motion.” Dubbed Gait DNA, this surveillance system works by matching a person’s facial image to his gait, height, weight and other elements—all captured through remote observation, thereby allowing the computer to identify someone instantly and track them, even in a crowd.
Soon there really will be no place to hide. Oceanit, a Hawaii-based company that has been working with the Hawaiian National Guard in Iraq, is preparing to roll out sense-through-the-wall technology next year that can “see” through walls by picking up on sensitive radio signals emitted by the human body to determine vital signs such as breathing and heart rates. As Ian Kitajima, the marketing manager for Oceanit pointed out, in addition to telling users whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield, the technology “will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We’ll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they’re actually thinking.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development agency for the Department of Defense, is credited with ensuring that the U.S. remains ahead of the game when it comes to such far-reaching technology. According to a recent BBC news report, “Back in the 70s, while we were working with typewriters and carbon paper, Darpa was developing the Internet. In the 90s, while we pored over maps, Darpa invented satellite navigation that many of us now have in our cars.” DARPA is currently working on technology that will enable users to understand any language spoken to them, as well as fine-tuning the prototype for an unmanned airplane with surveillance cameras that would be able to stay airborne for up to five years.
And on October 1, the government will launch its latest assault on privacy by making data from U.S. satellites available to federal agents. These satellites, which orbit the earth 24 hours a day and have historically provided high-resolution photographs to track climate changes and foreign military movements, will now be used to watch for terrorist activity and drug smuggling, among other things. Yet they are a far cry from the satellite imagery many Americans have become acquainted with through Google Earth and MapQuest. These spy satellites not only take color photos, they also use more advanced technology to track heat generated by people in buildings.
In fact, as the Wall Street Journal points out, “The full capabilities of these systems are unknown outside the intelligence community, because they are among the most closely held secrets in government.” Moreover, the technology is expected to be made available to state and local law enforcement agencies within the year, which raises serious concerns about the deepening ties between domestic law enforcement agencies and the military.
This latest citizen surveillance program comes draped in the familiar government mantra that it will keep us safe from terrorists. As Charles Allen, the chief intelligence officer for the Department of Homeland Security, explained to the Washington Post, “These systems are already used to help us respond to crises. We anticipate that we can also use it to protect Americans by preventing the entry of dangerous people and goods into the country, and by helping us examine critical infrastructure for vulnerabilities.”
Yet despite the government’s best efforts to sell the program, it is nothing less than “Big Brother in the sky,” as Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, aptly termed it. Indeed, since 9/11, the U.S. government has been building an arsenal of surveillance tools aimed directly at American citizens, largely paid for by American taxpayers and fueled by our fears.
For too long now, the American people have been ruled by fear. We are afraid of terrorists, afraid of crime, even afraid of our next-door neighbors. More than anything else, Americans want to feel safe. According to the BBC News, opinion polls show that approximately 75% of Americans want more, not less, surveillance. But there is wisdom in the adage to “be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.”
Implemented with virtually no oversight from Congress, this particular surveillance program will be overseen by the Homeland Security Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is a little like letting the foxes guard the chicken coop. And while some might argue that we at least live in a benevolent surveillance state, one that seemingly has our best interests at heart, I beg to differ. Whether we choose our prison or have it foisted upon us, the end is still the same: a lack of freedom.
http://www.rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=497
9-11: An American Holocaust
"The controlled media in the United States avoids these facts of Israeli prior knowledge because it is clear evidence of Israeli involvement in the terror attacks of 9-11. This is obviously a taboo subject in the Zionist-controlled media."
(Sep. 25, 2007) The thousands of lives lost in the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center were innocent victims of a holocaust - an American Holocaust.
The word "Holocaust" derives from the Greek words "holos" (completely) and "kaustos" (burned sacrificial offering) meaning complete destruction by fire.
The correct usage and meaning of this word, however, have been distorted by Zionist propagandists, who have sought to "trademark" the word as a proper noun to signify the loss of Jewish lives in World War II.
"Totality of destruction has been central to the meaning of holocaust since it first appeared in Middle English in the 14th century, used in reference to the biblical sacrifice in which a male animal was wholly burnt on the altar in worship of God," The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language says about the word's history.
Holocaust means complete destruction by fire with extensive loss of life as it comes from the Greek holokauston, which means "that which is completely burnt."
"Holocaust has a secure place in the language when it refers to the massive destruction of humans by other humans," according to The American Heritage Dictionary's note on usage.
ACTUAL HOLOCAUSTS
I personally know of several actual holocausts in modern times in which there were "massive destruction of humans" by fire caused by other humans: the fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities, most notably Dresden on February 13-14, 1945; the massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993; and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The entire center of Dresden, the beautiful Saxon capital, was completely consumed by fire as a result of the Ash Wednesday fire-bombing raids of February 13 and 14, 1945. According to August Kuklane, an eyewitness, some 600,000 people, including many thousands of refugees, had been living in the city center that was incinerated by British and U.S. incendiary bombs as they slept.
9-11: AN AMERICAN HOLOCAUST
Dresden, Waco, and the World Trade Center were all holocausts in which many human lives were intentionally destroyed by fire.
While we know who was responsible for the holocausts of Dresden and Waco, we still don't know who lit the fires that consumed the twin towers on 9-11 - but we have a pretty good idea.
The U.S. mass media does not use the term "holocaust" to refer to the destruction of thousands of American lives by fire in the World Trade Center because the word has been effectively usurped by Zionist propagandists.
Hence, the word "holocaust" is seldom used to describe actual holocausts.
The controlled media in the United States also completely avoids discussing the evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of the 9-11 holocaust.
Although it is extremely unpleasant to contemplate, it must be remembered that hundreds of innocent Americans and other people were literally roasted alive in the upper floors of the twin towers before they collapsed.
Besides the fires that were caused by the airplane fuel, there is evidence that there were large amounts of Thermite involved in the destruction of the three collapsed towers. Many people chose to jump from the 110-story towers rather than die from the extreme heat they were subjected to.
The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, and Neil Mackay, Scotland's News Journalist of the Year for 2002, could teach American newspapermen something about journalism and what a "free press" really looks like. Mackay wrote an excellent article about the abundance of evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of 9-11. Mackay's piece was published in the Sunday Herald on November 2, 2003:
There was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.
Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA. ”
Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.
After being detained for two months, the five Israeli intelligence agents were returned to Israel on "visa violations." In Israel, three of the men discussed what they had been through on an Israeli television talk show, where Oded Ellner (center in photo below) made this revealing comment:
"The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."
After being returned to Israel, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Oded Ellner, and Yaron Shmuel (from left), three of the jubilant Israelis appeared on television - without the Mossad agents, Sivan and Paul Kurzberg.– almost to the minute."
Mackay asks the question U.S. journalists are afraid to even think: But how can you document an event unless you know it is going to happen?
"Put together," Mackay concluded, "the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9-11, or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA."
The controlled media in the United States avoids these facts of Israeli prior knowledge because it is clear evidence of Israeli involvement in the terror attacks of 9-11. This is obviously a taboo subject in the Zionist-controlled media.
Indeed, the facts indicate that many Israelis knew that 9-11 would take place. Warnings conveyed on the Israeli-owned Odigo instant messaging system two hours before the attacks were precise to the minute.
Odigo, a company partly-owned and financed by the Israeli criminal Kobi Alexander, had its U.S. headquarters only two blocks from the World Trade Center, yet Odigo failed to pass the warning it had received on to the authorities in New York, a move that would have saved thousands of lives.
Two weeks after 9-11, Alex Diamandis, Odigo's vice president, said, "The messages said something big was going to happen in a certain amount of time, and it did
The Washington Post reported very briefly about the evidence of Israeli prior knowledge, within a larger article, on October 4, 2001 on page A-24:
Another possible hint of the plot came two hours before planes crashed into the World Trade Center, when two employees of Odigo Inc. in Herzliya, Israel, received electronic instant messages declaring that some sort of attack was about to take place. The notes ended with an anti-Semitic slur.
"The messages said something big was going to happen in a certain amount of time, and it did -- almost to the minute," said Alex Diamandis, vice president of sales for the high-tech company, which also has offices in Lower Manhattan. He said the employees did not know the person who sent the message, but they traced it to a computer address and have given that information to the FBI.
What is most striking about the media censorship of the Odigo (Comverse) story of prior knowledge of 9-11 is that it was never reported in any of the New York newspapers.
The New York Times only published two articles in which it discussed the five dancing Israelis.
The first, "5 Young Israelis, Caught in Net of Suspicion," was published on October 8, 2001 on page F-3.
The first Times article suggests that the five Israeli agents were completely innocent:
By some accounts, they seemed to be making light of the tragic situation.
Besides the cash [$4,700 in the socks] and the [multiple] passports, one man had fresh pictures of the smoldering wreckage of the trade center in his camera, images he had captured by standing rather conspicuously on the room of the van.
The Times article names the five Israelis as: Oded Ellner, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Yaron Shmuel, and the brothers Paul and Sivan Kurzberg.
The article contains an interesting choice of words used by Yigal Tzarfati, an Israeli consul in New York, who referred to the World Trade Center attacks as "bombings": "This is a huge misunderstanding," Tzarfati told the Times. The five detained Israelis, he said, "have nothing to do with the bombings."
It should be noted that their van had tested positive for explosives - before it was turned over to the FBI. Why did the Israeli diplomat use the word "bombings"?
On November 21, 2001, the New York Times published its second article about the five Israelis in a piece titled "Dozens of Israeli Jews Are Being Kept in Federal Detention."
The article by Tamar Lewin and Alison Cowan, which was published on the day the last two Israeli Mossad agents were returned to Israel, appeared on page B-7:
In New York, immigration officials began deporting five young Israeli moving men who have been in federal custody since Sept. 11. Two of the deportees, Oded Ellner and Omer Gavriel Marmari, landed in Tel Aviv yesterday. The others, Paul Kurzberg and his brother Sivan, and Yaron Shmuel, were expected to fly to Israel today.
The five aroused attention in New Jersey after people noticed them going to unusual lengths to photograph the World Trade Center ruins and making light of the situation. One photograph developed by the F.B.I. showed Sivan Kurzberg holding a lighted lighter in the foreground, with the smoldering wreckage in the background, said Steven Noah Gordon, a lawyer for the five.
As objectionable as their behavior may be, Mr. Gordon said of their long incarceration, ''It's not a crime and they were being treated as if it was.''
The five were asked to take polygraph tests before being allowed to leave. But Paul Kurzberg refused on principle to divulge much about his role in the Israeli army or subsequently working for people who may have had ties to Israeli intelligence, Mr. Gordon said. His client had trouble with one seven-hour polygraph test administered last week, but did better on a second try.
The Forward, New York City's leading Jewish newsapaper, reported on March 15, 2002 that the five Israelis had been on "a Mossad surveillance mission" and their fake moving company was just a "front":
According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.
After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations.
However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.
"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."
However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.
However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.
In the days after the attack, an employee who worked at the Mossad-front company, Urban Moving Systems, told The Record (Bergen, New Jersey) that the Israelis "were joking" about the holocaust that had just occurred within eyesight of their office across the river from the World Trade Center:
An employee of Urban Moving Systems, who would not give his name, said the majority of his co-workers are Israelis and were joking on the day of the attacks.
"I was in tears," the man said. "These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, `Now America knows what we go through.'"
- Finis -
Sources and Recommended Reading
Bollyn, Christopher, "Why was Kobi Alexander Allowed to Flee? - The Israeli Fugitive, Odigo, and the Forewarning of 9/11"; 24 August 2006
Bollyn, Christopher, "Five Dancing Israelis - 9-11 Mossad Agents Admit Mission: 'Our Purpose Was To Document The Event'"; 28 June 2002
Both articles at: http://www.bollyn.com/index/?id=10372
Cowan, Alison L., "Five Young Israelis, Caught in Net of Suspicion"; New York Times, 8 October 2001
Fallis, David S. and Eunjung, Ariana, "Agents Following Suspects' Lengthy Electronic Trail Web of Connections Used to Plan Attack"; Washington Post, 4 October 2001
Lewin, Tamar, with Cowan, Alison L. "Dozens of Israeli Jews Are Being Kept in Federal Detention"; New York Times, 21 November 2001
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980DEEDC163AF932A15752C1A9679C8B63&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/I/Immigration%20and%20Refugees
Lisberg, Adam, "Five Hijack Suspects had Links to 'Material Witness' in Custody in N.Y.C."; The Record (New Jersey), 15 September 2001
Mackay, Neil, "Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 - Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA?"; Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), 2 November 2003
http://web.archive.org/web/20031202162323/http://www.sundayherald.com/37707
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20031102/ai_n12585488
Perelman, Marc, "Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth - Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage," The Forward, 15 March 2002
http://www.bollyn.com
(Sep. 25, 2007) The thousands of lives lost in the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center were innocent victims of a holocaust - an American Holocaust.
The word "Holocaust" derives from the Greek words "holos" (completely) and "kaustos" (burned sacrificial offering) meaning complete destruction by fire.
The correct usage and meaning of this word, however, have been distorted by Zionist propagandists, who have sought to "trademark" the word as a proper noun to signify the loss of Jewish lives in World War II.
"Totality of destruction has been central to the meaning of holocaust since it first appeared in Middle English in the 14th century, used in reference to the biblical sacrifice in which a male animal was wholly burnt on the altar in worship of God," The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language says about the word's history.
Holocaust means complete destruction by fire with extensive loss of life as it comes from the Greek holokauston, which means "that which is completely burnt."
"Holocaust has a secure place in the language when it refers to the massive destruction of humans by other humans," according to The American Heritage Dictionary's note on usage.
ACTUAL HOLOCAUSTS
I personally know of several actual holocausts in modern times in which there were "massive destruction of humans" by fire caused by other humans: the fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities, most notably Dresden on February 13-14, 1945; the massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993; and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The entire center of Dresden, the beautiful Saxon capital, was completely consumed by fire as a result of the Ash Wednesday fire-bombing raids of February 13 and 14, 1945. According to August Kuklane, an eyewitness, some 600,000 people, including many thousands of refugees, had been living in the city center that was incinerated by British and U.S. incendiary bombs as they slept.
9-11: AN AMERICAN HOLOCAUST
Dresden, Waco, and the World Trade Center were all holocausts in which many human lives were intentionally destroyed by fire.
While we know who was responsible for the holocausts of Dresden and Waco, we still don't know who lit the fires that consumed the twin towers on 9-11 - but we have a pretty good idea.
The U.S. mass media does not use the term "holocaust" to refer to the destruction of thousands of American lives by fire in the World Trade Center because the word has been effectively usurped by Zionist propagandists.
Hence, the word "holocaust" is seldom used to describe actual holocausts.
The controlled media in the United States also completely avoids discussing the evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of the 9-11 holocaust.
Although it is extremely unpleasant to contemplate, it must be remembered that hundreds of innocent Americans and other people were literally roasted alive in the upper floors of the twin towers before they collapsed.
Besides the fires that were caused by the airplane fuel, there is evidence that there were large amounts of Thermite involved in the destruction of the three collapsed towers. Many people chose to jump from the 110-story towers rather than die from the extreme heat they were subjected to.
The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, and Neil Mackay, Scotland's News Journalist of the Year for 2002, could teach American newspapermen something about journalism and what a "free press" really looks like. Mackay wrote an excellent article about the abundance of evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of 9-11. Mackay's piece was published in the Sunday Herald on November 2, 2003:
There was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.
Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA. ”
Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.
After being detained for two months, the five Israeli intelligence agents were returned to Israel on "visa violations." In Israel, three of the men discussed what they had been through on an Israeli television talk show, where Oded Ellner (center in photo below) made this revealing comment:
"The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."
After being returned to Israel, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Oded Ellner, and Yaron Shmuel (from left), three of the jubilant Israelis appeared on television - without the Mossad agents, Sivan and Paul Kurzberg.– almost to the minute."
Mackay asks the question U.S. journalists are afraid to even think: But how can you document an event unless you know it is going to happen?
"Put together," Mackay concluded, "the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9-11, or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA."
The controlled media in the United States avoids these facts of Israeli prior knowledge because it is clear evidence of Israeli involvement in the terror attacks of 9-11. This is obviously a taboo subject in the Zionist-controlled media.
Indeed, the facts indicate that many Israelis knew that 9-11 would take place. Warnings conveyed on the Israeli-owned Odigo instant messaging system two hours before the attacks were precise to the minute.
Odigo, a company partly-owned and financed by the Israeli criminal Kobi Alexander, had its U.S. headquarters only two blocks from the World Trade Center, yet Odigo failed to pass the warning it had received on to the authorities in New York, a move that would have saved thousands of lives.
Two weeks after 9-11, Alex Diamandis, Odigo's vice president, said, "The messages said something big was going to happen in a certain amount of time, and it did
The Washington Post reported very briefly about the evidence of Israeli prior knowledge, within a larger article, on October 4, 2001 on page A-24:
Another possible hint of the plot came two hours before planes crashed into the World Trade Center, when two employees of Odigo Inc. in Herzliya, Israel, received electronic instant messages declaring that some sort of attack was about to take place. The notes ended with an anti-Semitic slur.
"The messages said something big was going to happen in a certain amount of time, and it did -- almost to the minute," said Alex Diamandis, vice president of sales for the high-tech company, which also has offices in Lower Manhattan. He said the employees did not know the person who sent the message, but they traced it to a computer address and have given that information to the FBI.
What is most striking about the media censorship of the Odigo (Comverse) story of prior knowledge of 9-11 is that it was never reported in any of the New York newspapers.
The New York Times only published two articles in which it discussed the five dancing Israelis.
The first, "5 Young Israelis, Caught in Net of Suspicion," was published on October 8, 2001 on page F-3.
The first Times article suggests that the five Israeli agents were completely innocent:
By some accounts, they seemed to be making light of the tragic situation.
Besides the cash [$4,700 in the socks] and the [multiple] passports, one man had fresh pictures of the smoldering wreckage of the trade center in his camera, images he had captured by standing rather conspicuously on the room of the van.
The Times article names the five Israelis as: Oded Ellner, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Yaron Shmuel, and the brothers Paul and Sivan Kurzberg.
The article contains an interesting choice of words used by Yigal Tzarfati, an Israeli consul in New York, who referred to the World Trade Center attacks as "bombings": "This is a huge misunderstanding," Tzarfati told the Times. The five detained Israelis, he said, "have nothing to do with the bombings."
It should be noted that their van had tested positive for explosives - before it was turned over to the FBI. Why did the Israeli diplomat use the word "bombings"?
On November 21, 2001, the New York Times published its second article about the five Israelis in a piece titled "Dozens of Israeli Jews Are Being Kept in Federal Detention."
The article by Tamar Lewin and Alison Cowan, which was published on the day the last two Israeli Mossad agents were returned to Israel, appeared on page B-7:
In New York, immigration officials began deporting five young Israeli moving men who have been in federal custody since Sept. 11. Two of the deportees, Oded Ellner and Omer Gavriel Marmari, landed in Tel Aviv yesterday. The others, Paul Kurzberg and his brother Sivan, and Yaron Shmuel, were expected to fly to Israel today.
The five aroused attention in New Jersey after people noticed them going to unusual lengths to photograph the World Trade Center ruins and making light of the situation. One photograph developed by the F.B.I. showed Sivan Kurzberg holding a lighted lighter in the foreground, with the smoldering wreckage in the background, said Steven Noah Gordon, a lawyer for the five.
As objectionable as their behavior may be, Mr. Gordon said of their long incarceration, ''It's not a crime and they were being treated as if it was.''
The five were asked to take polygraph tests before being allowed to leave. But Paul Kurzberg refused on principle to divulge much about his role in the Israeli army or subsequently working for people who may have had ties to Israeli intelligence, Mr. Gordon said. His client had trouble with one seven-hour polygraph test administered last week, but did better on a second try.
The Forward, New York City's leading Jewish newsapaper, reported on March 15, 2002 that the five Israelis had been on "a Mossad surveillance mission" and their fake moving company was just a "front":
According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.
After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations.
However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.
"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."
However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.
However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.
In the days after the attack, an employee who worked at the Mossad-front company, Urban Moving Systems, told The Record (Bergen, New Jersey) that the Israelis "were joking" about the holocaust that had just occurred within eyesight of their office across the river from the World Trade Center:
An employee of Urban Moving Systems, who would not give his name, said the majority of his co-workers are Israelis and were joking on the day of the attacks.
"I was in tears," the man said. "These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, `Now America knows what we go through.'"
- Finis -
Sources and Recommended Reading
Bollyn, Christopher, "Why was Kobi Alexander Allowed to Flee? - The Israeli Fugitive, Odigo, and the Forewarning of 9/11"; 24 August 2006
Bollyn, Christopher, "Five Dancing Israelis - 9-11 Mossad Agents Admit Mission: 'Our Purpose Was To Document The Event'"; 28 June 2002
Both articles at: http://www.bollyn.com/index/?id=10372
Cowan, Alison L., "Five Young Israelis, Caught in Net of Suspicion"; New York Times, 8 October 2001
Fallis, David S. and Eunjung, Ariana, "Agents Following Suspects' Lengthy Electronic Trail Web of Connections Used to Plan Attack"; Washington Post, 4 October 2001
Lewin, Tamar, with Cowan, Alison L. "Dozens of Israeli Jews Are Being Kept in Federal Detention"; New York Times, 21 November 2001
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980DEEDC163AF932A15752C1A9679C8B63&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/I/Immigration%20and%20Refugees
Lisberg, Adam, "Five Hijack Suspects had Links to 'Material Witness' in Custody in N.Y.C."; The Record (New Jersey), 15 September 2001
Mackay, Neil, "Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 - Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA?"; Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), 2 November 2003
http://web.archive.org/web/20031202162323/http://www.sundayherald.com/37707
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20031102/ai_n12585488
Perelman, Marc, "Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth - Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage," The Forward, 15 March 2002
http://www.bollyn.com
Thursday, 27 September 2007
Exposed - Peak Oil Scam Conspiracy
F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL
The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist. On a personal note, I've researched questions of petroleum, since the first oil shocks of the 1970's. I was intrigued in 2003 with something called Peak Oil theory.
It seemed to explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on Iraq. Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP geologist Colin Campbell, and Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis, an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by 2012, perhaps by 2007.
Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to our soaring gasoline and oil prices, to the declines in output of North Sea and Alaska and other fields as proof they were right.
According to Campbell, the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had been discovered since the North Sea in the late 1960's was proof. He reportedly managed to convince the International Energy Agency and the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him correct.
Intellectual fossils?
The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a 'fossil fuel,' a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply.
Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago.
That would mean that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean offshore as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.
An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950's in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to then find more, lots more.
Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR as the world's largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.
Necessity: the mother of invention
In the 1950's the Soviet Union faced 'Iron Curtain' isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national security priority of the highest order.
Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940's: where does oil come from?
In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir'yev announced their conclusions: 'Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.' The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the 'a-biotic' theory-non-biological-to distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins.
If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth at the time of the earth's formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the earth's inner regions.
They also realized old fields could be revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form.
'Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via 'cold' eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,' Porfir'yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is was biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.
Defying conventional geology
That radically different Russian and Ukrainian scientific approach to the discovery of oil allowed the USSR to develop huge gas and oil discoveries in regions previously judged unsuitable, according to Western geological exploration theories, for presence of oil. The new petroleum theory was used in the early 1990's, well after the dissolution of the USSR, to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than forty-five years, to be geologically barren-the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.
Following their a-biotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.
A total of sixty one wells were drilled, of which thirty seven were commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the field discovered compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered successful with a ten percent success rate. Nine of ten wells are typically "dry holes."
That Russian geophysics experience in finding oil and gas was tightly wrapped in the usual Soviet veil of state security during the Cold War era, and went largely unknown to Western geophysicists, who continued to teach fossil origins and, hence, the severe physical limits of petroleum. Slowly it begin to dawn on some strategists in and around the Pentagon well after the 2003 Iraq war, that the Russian geophysicists might be on to something of profound strategic importance.
If Russia had the scientific know-how and Western geology not, Russia possessed a strategic trump card of staggering geopolitical import. It was not surprising that Washington would go about erecting a "wall of steel"-a network of military bases and ballistic anti-missile shields around Russia, to cut her pipeline and port links to western Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia. Halford Mackinder's worst nightmare--a cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the major states of Eurasia, born of necessity and need for oil to fuel economic growth--was emerging.
Ironically, it was the blatant US grab for the vast oil riches of Iraq and, potentially, of Iran, that catalyzed closer cooperation between traditional Eurasian foes, China and Russia, and a growing realization in western Europe that their options too were narrowing.
The Peak King
Peak Oil theory is based on a 1956 paper done by the late Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist working for Shell Oil. He argued that oil wells produced in a bell curve manner, and once their "peak" was hit, inevitable decline followed. He predicted the United States oil production would peak in 1970.
A modest man, he named the production curve he invented, Hubbert's Curve, and the peak as Hubbert's Peak. When US oil output began to decline in around 1970 Hubbert gained a certain fame.
The only problem was, it peaked not because of resource depletion in the US fields. It "peaked" because Shell, Mobil, Texaco and the other partners of Saudi Aramco were flooding the US market with dirt cheap Middle East imports, tariff free, at prices so low California and many Texas domestic producers could not compete and were forced to shut their wells in.
Vietnam success
While the American oil multinationals were busy controlling the easily accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960's, the Russians were busy testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed eleven major oil fields and one Giant field based on their deep 'a-biotic' geological estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and hit black gold of a scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope.
They then went to Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance drilling costs to show their new geological theory worked. The Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam's White Tiger oilfield offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy.
In the USSR, a-biotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their knowledge and the USSR emerged as the world's largest oil producer by the mid-1980's. Few in the West understood why, or bothered to ask.
Dr. J. F. Kenney is one of the only Western geophysicists who has taught and worked in Russia, studying under Vladilen Krayushkin, who developed the huge Dnieper-Donets Basin. Kenney told me in a recent interview that "alone to have produced the amount of oil to date that (Saudi Arabia's) Ghawar field has produced would have required a cube of fossilized dinosaur detritus, assuming 100% conversion efficiency, measuring 19 miles deep, wide and high." In short, an absurdity.
Western geologists do not bother to offer hard scientific proof of fossil origins. They merely assert as a holy truth. The Russians have produced volumes of scientific papers, most in Russian. The dominant Western journals have no interest in publishing such a revolutionary view. Careers, entire academic professions are at stake after all.
Closing the door
The 2003 arrest of Russian Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil, took place just before he could sell a dominant stake in Yukos to ExxonMobil after a private meeting with Dick Cheney. Had Exxon got the stake they would have control of the world's largest resource of geologists and engineers trained in the a-biotic techniques of deep drilling.
Since 2003 Russian scientific sharing of their knowledge has markedly lessened. Offers in the early 1990's to share their knowledge with US and other oil geophysicists were met with cold rejection according to American geophysicists involved.
Why then the high-risk war to control Iraq?
For a century US and allied Western oil giants have controlled world oil via control of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Nigeria.
Today, as many giant fields are declining, the companies see the state-controlled oilfields of Iraq and Iran as the largest remaining base of cheap, easy oil.
With the huge demand for oil from China and now India, it becomes a geopolitical imperative for the United States to take direct, military control of those Middle East reserves as fast as possible.
Vice President Dick Cheney, came to the job from Halliburton Corp., the world's largest oil geophysical services company. The only potential threat to that US control of oil just happens to lie inside Russia and with the now-state-controlled Russian energy giants. Hmmmm.
According to Kenney the Russian geophysicists used the theories of the brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before the Western geologists "discovered" Wegener in the 1960's.
In 1915 Wegener published the seminal text, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which suggested an original unified landmass or "pangaea" more than 200 million years ago which separated into present Continents by what he called Continental Drift.
Up to the 1960's supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, White House science advisor referred to Wegener as "lunatic." Geologists at the end of the 1960's were forced to eat their words as Wegener offered the only interpretation that allowed them to discover the vast oil resources of the North Sea.
Perhaps in some decades Western geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize what the Russians have known since the 1950's.
In the meantime Moscow holds a massive energy trump card.
*** William Engdahl is the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd.. http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net
The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist. On a personal note, I've researched questions of petroleum, since the first oil shocks of the 1970's. I was intrigued in 2003 with something called Peak Oil theory.It seemed to explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on Iraq. Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP geologist Colin Campbell, and Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis, an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by 2012, perhaps by 2007.
Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to our soaring gasoline and oil prices, to the declines in output of North Sea and Alaska and other fields as proof they were right.
According to Campbell, the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had been discovered since the North Sea in the late 1960's was proof. He reportedly managed to convince the International Energy Agency and the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him correct.
Intellectual fossils?
The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a 'fossil fuel,' a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply.
Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago.
That would mean that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean offshore as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.
An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950's in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to then find more, lots more.
Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR as the world's largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.
Necessity: the mother of invention
In the 1950's the Soviet Union faced 'Iron Curtain' isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national security priority of the highest order.
Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940's: where does oil come from?
In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir'yev announced their conclusions: 'Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.' The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the 'a-biotic' theory-non-biological-to distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins.
If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth at the time of the earth's formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the earth's inner regions.
They also realized old fields could be revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form.
'Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via 'cold' eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,' Porfir'yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is was biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.
Defying conventional geology
That radically different Russian and Ukrainian scientific approach to the discovery of oil allowed the USSR to develop huge gas and oil discoveries in regions previously judged unsuitable, according to Western geological exploration theories, for presence of oil. The new petroleum theory was used in the early 1990's, well after the dissolution of the USSR, to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than forty-five years, to be geologically barren-the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.
Following their a-biotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.
A total of sixty one wells were drilled, of which thirty seven were commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the field discovered compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered successful with a ten percent success rate. Nine of ten wells are typically "dry holes."
That Russian geophysics experience in finding oil and gas was tightly wrapped in the usual Soviet veil of state security during the Cold War era, and went largely unknown to Western geophysicists, who continued to teach fossil origins and, hence, the severe physical limits of petroleum. Slowly it begin to dawn on some strategists in and around the Pentagon well after the 2003 Iraq war, that the Russian geophysicists might be on to something of profound strategic importance.
If Russia had the scientific know-how and Western geology not, Russia possessed a strategic trump card of staggering geopolitical import. It was not surprising that Washington would go about erecting a "wall of steel"-a network of military bases and ballistic anti-missile shields around Russia, to cut her pipeline and port links to western Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia. Halford Mackinder's worst nightmare--a cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the major states of Eurasia, born of necessity and need for oil to fuel economic growth--was emerging.
Ironically, it was the blatant US grab for the vast oil riches of Iraq and, potentially, of Iran, that catalyzed closer cooperation between traditional Eurasian foes, China and Russia, and a growing realization in western Europe that their options too were narrowing.
The Peak King
Peak Oil theory is based on a 1956 paper done by the late Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist working for Shell Oil. He argued that oil wells produced in a bell curve manner, and once their "peak" was hit, inevitable decline followed. He predicted the United States oil production would peak in 1970.
A modest man, he named the production curve he invented, Hubbert's Curve, and the peak as Hubbert's Peak. When US oil output began to decline in around 1970 Hubbert gained a certain fame.
The only problem was, it peaked not because of resource depletion in the US fields. It "peaked" because Shell, Mobil, Texaco and the other partners of Saudi Aramco were flooding the US market with dirt cheap Middle East imports, tariff free, at prices so low California and many Texas domestic producers could not compete and were forced to shut their wells in.
Vietnam success
While the American oil multinationals were busy controlling the easily accessible large fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the 1960's, the Russians were busy testing their alternative theory. They began drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed eleven major oil fields and one Giant field based on their deep 'a-biotic' geological estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and hit black gold of a scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope.
They then went to Vietnam in the 1980s and offered to finance drilling costs to show their new geological theory worked. The Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam's White Tiger oilfield offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000 barrels a day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy.
In the USSR, a-biotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their knowledge and the USSR emerged as the world's largest oil producer by the mid-1980's. Few in the West understood why, or bothered to ask.
Dr. J. F. Kenney is one of the only Western geophysicists who has taught and worked in Russia, studying under Vladilen Krayushkin, who developed the huge Dnieper-Donets Basin. Kenney told me in a recent interview that "alone to have produced the amount of oil to date that (Saudi Arabia's) Ghawar field has produced would have required a cube of fossilized dinosaur detritus, assuming 100% conversion efficiency, measuring 19 miles deep, wide and high." In short, an absurdity.
Western geologists do not bother to offer hard scientific proof of fossil origins. They merely assert as a holy truth. The Russians have produced volumes of scientific papers, most in Russian. The dominant Western journals have no interest in publishing such a revolutionary view. Careers, entire academic professions are at stake after all.
Closing the door
The 2003 arrest of Russian Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil, took place just before he could sell a dominant stake in Yukos to ExxonMobil after a private meeting with Dick Cheney. Had Exxon got the stake they would have control of the world's largest resource of geologists and engineers trained in the a-biotic techniques of deep drilling.
Since 2003 Russian scientific sharing of their knowledge has markedly lessened. Offers in the early 1990's to share their knowledge with US and other oil geophysicists were met with cold rejection according to American geophysicists involved.
Why then the high-risk war to control Iraq?
For a century US and allied Western oil giants have controlled world oil via control of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Nigeria.
Today, as many giant fields are declining, the companies see the state-controlled oilfields of Iraq and Iran as the largest remaining base of cheap, easy oil.
With the huge demand for oil from China and now India, it becomes a geopolitical imperative for the United States to take direct, military control of those Middle East reserves as fast as possible.
Vice President Dick Cheney, came to the job from Halliburton Corp., the world's largest oil geophysical services company. The only potential threat to that US control of oil just happens to lie inside Russia and with the now-state-controlled Russian energy giants. Hmmmm.
According to Kenney the Russian geophysicists used the theories of the brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before the Western geologists "discovered" Wegener in the 1960's.
In 1915 Wegener published the seminal text, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which suggested an original unified landmass or "pangaea" more than 200 million years ago which separated into present Continents by what he called Continental Drift.
Up to the 1960's supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, White House science advisor referred to Wegener as "lunatic." Geologists at the end of the 1960's were forced to eat their words as Wegener offered the only interpretation that allowed them to discover the vast oil resources of the North Sea.
Perhaps in some decades Western geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize what the Russians have known since the 1950's.
In the meantime Moscow holds a massive energy trump card.
*** William Engdahl is the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd.. http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net
The Final Phase of the 9-11 Conspiracy Cover-Up
by CHRISTOPHER BOLLYN (BOLLYN.COM)
(PHOTO: Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, an Orthodox Jew and devotee of the State of Israel, oversees all 9-11 litigation.)
(8-27-07) Six years after the worst terrorist atrocity in U.S. history, not a single lawsuit filed by the relatives of the 9-11 victims has gone to trial. With only 21 cases remaining, it appears increasingly likely that the book may be closed on the 9-11 litigation without a single case ever being heard in court.
The 9-11 litigation process is approaching the final phase of the Zionist-run cover-up of what really happened on September 11, 2001.
There are two recent news items, which have not be widely reported, that indicate that the walling up of the truth is nearly complete. There are just a few remaining bricks left to be put into place - about 21 to be precise - and the wall hiding the truth will be finished.
21 CASES REMAIN
The first news item, from September 18, is that 14 of the 35 remaining suits filed by relatives of 9-11 victims, seeking compensation from the airlines and the foreign-owned airport security contractors, were settled out-of-court one week before the first case was to go to trial.
It should be noted that this will not be a 9-11 trial in which any liability or accountability will be determined. In a most unusual reversal of legal procedure, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein has ordered that six trials for damages take place before any trial for liability.
Judge Hellerstein, who oversees all 9-11 litigation, has done this, he says, in the hope that both sides may use the damage figures as a road map toward settlement.
Only 21 cases remain of the original 95 cases filed in federal court. The rest have all been settled or dismissed.
"The rush of settlements leaves open the question of whether any trials will take place," the New York Times reported on September 19, 2007.
HELLERSTEIN GETS SICK WORKER CASES
The second news item, from September 22, is that the lawsuits filed by some 300 workers allegedly sickened from working at Ground Zero will not be heard in New York state courts but will be moved to the federal court of - you guessed it - Alvin K. Hellerstein.
The state's Appellate Division ruled that all claims tied to injury, death or loss of property from the 9-11 attacks fall under the jurisdiction of Manhattan federal court.
This is clearly an incorrect ruling, however, because the worker lawsuits are not against the airlines or the airport security companies, which were relegated to Hellerstein. These "sick workers" cases are against the City of New York, which is clearly not within the judicial purview of the federal mandate of Judge Hellerstein.
This is a very unfair ruling and set-back which corrals all the workers' lawsuits into Hellerstein's courtroom. This ruling overturned a decision by a Manhattan Supreme Court judge, who had allowed the workers' bids for litigation to proceed in state court, even after they filed late notices of claim against the city.
Close to 9,000 lawsuits by workers whose health was affected by working at Ground Zero had already reportedly been filed in the federal court.
These developments reveal how the relatives of those killed on 9-11 have been effectively denied the discovery, justice, and accountability they have sought through litigation.
The law firm of Motley Rice represents all remaining families who lost loved ones aboard the airplanes involved in 9-11, according to firm's press release of September 24, 2007. Alicia Ward, director of communications for Motley Rice, confirmed this and the next court date of November 5.
"Several of our clients chose to settle after we reached the amount that they wanted and after we completed years of discovery and investigations that were more extensive and probing than even that completed by the U.S. government's 9-11 Commission," attorney Joseph F. Rice said. "We gave them answers and accountability which was denied them by the U.S. government's victim compensation program."
The terms of the settlement, however, bar families from discussing the details so it appears highly unlikely that the evidence obtained by the "extensive investigations" and "years of discovery" will ever become part of the public record.
Mike Low, whose 28-year-old daughter, Sara, a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, told the New York Times that he was not deterred by the settlements.
"The frustrating thing is not having a trial date," he said. "The wheels of justice turn excruciatingly slow. It doesn’t change my mind any. My desire and goal is to try to find some answers. I want to know why Abdulaziz Alomari and Mohamed Atta were allowed to walk on planes in Portland, Me., with prohibited weapons. I want somebody to tell me why that happened."
By now, it should be evident that the court of Alvin K. Hellerstein is not likely to produce the answers the Mr. Low wants. Hellerstein's court is clearly part of the apparatus for concealing the truth of what really happened on 9-11.
Why, for example, have individuals peripheral to the 9-11 crimes been put on trial while key suspects like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the confessed "mastermind," are kept locked up in their cells in Guantanamo, Cuba? What kind of discovery is going on there?
If Hellerstein were truly interested in getting answers about how and why 9-11 happened wouldn't he request that KSM be brought to his courtroom in New York city? How can the "mastermind" of 9-11 not be part of the legal process that Hellerstein is overseeing? Why is this key suspect, the "mastermind" of 9-11, being protected?
To understand how a small group of dedicated individuals can conceal the truth of a huge crime it is necessary to know how the cover-up works.
In a criminal cover-up, like that at work with 9-11, there are three main processes that need to be controlled:
1. the investigation - primarily the collection and confiscation of evidence;
2. the interpretation of the event by mass media and appointed official commissions;
3. the prosecution and litigation of lawsuits pertaining to the crime.
It can be assumed that the people involved in the cover-up are connected to the perpetrators of the crime.
In the case of 9-11, the people who controlled each and every one of these three key processes: investigation, interpretation, and prosecution, are Zionist Jews who share a dedication and loyalty to the State of Israel.
The fact that Zionists have played key roles in the covering-up of the truth of 9-11 suggests that the Israeli role in the crimes of 9-11 was much greater than most people realize. That is to say that the Israeli agents monitoring the Arab suspects were actually part of an operation that the Mossad was controlling.
"To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause," Scotland's award-winning journalist Neil Mackay wrote in The Sunday Herald of November 2, 2003:
We are now deep in conspiracy theory territory. But there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to show that Mossad - whose motto is "By way of deception, thou shalt do war" - was spying on Arab extremists in the USA and may have known that September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to withhold vital information from their American counterparts which could have prevented the terror attacks.
Mackay's article concluded:
Certainly, it seems, Israel was spying within the borders of the United States and it is equally certain that the targets were Islamic extremists probably linked to September 11. But did Israel know in advance that the Twin Towers would be hit and the world plunged into a war without end; a war which would give Israel the power to strike its enemies almost without limit? That's a conspiracy theory too far, perhaps. But the unpleasant feeling that, in this age of spin and secrets, we do not know the full and unadulterated truth won't go away. Maybe we can guess, but it's for the history books to discover and decide.
I disagree with Mackay and others who say it is "for the history books to discover and decide." The evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of the attacks is well-documented and the names and roles of the key players in the Zionist cover-up are known.
Understanding the foreign agenda and dual-nationals involved at every point of the cover-up is key to understanding who was truly behind the terrorist mass murder of 9-11.
Christopher Bollyn is an independent journalist who depends entirely on the generous support of readers to fund his research and writing.
The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning
When you add it all up, a single dollar of "real" capital supports $20 to $30 of loans. This spiral of borrowing on an increasingly thin base of real assets, writ large and in nearly infinite variety,ultimately created a world in which derivatives outstanding earlier this year stood at $485 trillion -- or eight times total global gross domestic product of $60 trillion. Without a central governmental authority keeping tabs on these cross-border flows and ensuring a standard of record-keeping and quality, investors increasingly didn't know what they were buying or what any given security was really worth. That is why the current market volatility is much more profound than a simple "correction" in prices. It's a gigantic liquidity bubble unwinding -- a process that could take generations ...
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."-- Alice Walker
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Satyajit Das is laughing. It appears I have said something very funny but I have no idea what it was. My only clue is that the laugh sounds somewhat pitying.
Trading Center
One of the world's leading experts on credit derivatives (financial instruments that transfer credit risk from one party to another), Das is the author of a 4,200-page reference work on the subject, among a half-dozen other tomes. As a developer and marketer of the exotic instruments himself over the past 30 years, he seemed like the ideal industry insider to help us get to the bottom of the recent debt crunch -- and I expected him to defend and explain the practice.
I started by asking the Calcutta-born Australian whether the credit crisis was in what Americans would call the "third inning." This was pretty amusing, it seemed, judging from the laughter. So I tried again. "Second inning?" More laughter. "First?" Still too optimistic.
Das, who knows as much about global money flows as anyone in the world, stopped chuckling long enough to suggest that we're actually still in the middle of the national anthem before a game destined to go into extra innings. And it won't end well for the global economy.
Ursa Major
Das is pretty droll for a math whiz, but his message is dead serious. He thinks we're on the verge of a bear market of epic proportions. The cause: Massive levels of debt underlying the world economic system are about to unwind in a profound and persistent way.
He's not sure if it will play out like the 13-year decline of 90% in Japan from 1990 to 2003 that followed the bursting of a credit bubble there, or like the 15-year flat spot in the U.S. market from 1960 to 1975. But either way, he foresees hard times as an optimistic era of too much liquidity, too much leverage and too much financial engineering slowly and inevitably deflates.
Like an ex-mobster turning state's witness, Das has turned his back on his old pals in the derivatives biz to warn anyone who will listen -- mostly banks and hedge funds that pay him consulting fees -- that the jig is up.
Rather than joining the crowd that blames the mess on American slobs who took on more mortgage debt than they could afford and have endangered the world by stiffing lenders, he points a finger at three parties: regulators who stood by as U.S. banks developed ingenious but dangerous ways of shifting trillions of dollars of credit risk off their balance sheets and into the hands of unsophisticated foreign investors, hedge and pension fund managers who gorged on high-yield debt instruments they didn't understand and financial engineers who built towers of "securitized" debt with math models that were fundamentally flawed.
"Defaulting middle-class U.S. homeowners are blamed, but they are merely a pawn in the game," he says. "Those loans were invented so that hedge funds would have high-yield debt to buy."
The Liquidity Factory
Das' view sounds cynical, but it makes sense if you stop thinking about mortgages as a way for people to finance houses and think about them instead as a way for lenders to generate cash flow and to create collateral during an era of a flat interest rate curve.
Although subprime U.S. loans seem like small change in the context of the multitrillion-dollar debt market, it turns out that these high-yield instruments were an important part of the machine that Das calls the global "liquidity factory." Just like a small amount of gasoline can power an entire truck given the right combination of spark plugs, pistons and transmission, subprime loans became the fuel that underlies derivative securities that are many, many times their size.
Here's how it worked: In olden days, like 10 years ago, banks wrote and funded their own loans. In the new game, Das points out, banks "originate" loans, "warehouse" them on their balance sheets for a brief time, then "distribute" them to investors by packaging them into derivatives called collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.s, and similar instruments. In this scheme, banks don't need to tie up as much capital, so they can put more money out on loan.
The more loans that were sold, the more they could use as collateral for more loans, so credit standards were lowered to get more paper out the door -- a task that was accelerated in recent years via fly-by-night brokers that are now accused of predatory lending practices.
Buyers of these credit risks in C.D.O. form were insurance companies, pension funds and hedge-fund managers from Bonn to Beijing. Because money was readily available at low interest rates in Japan and the U.S., these managers leveraged up their bets by buying the C.D.O.s with borrowed funds.
So if you follow the bouncing ball, borrowed money bought borrowed money. And then because they had the blessing of credit-ratings agencies relying on mathematical models suggesting that they would rarely default, these C.D.O.s were in turn used as collateral to do more borrowing.
In this way, Das points out, credit risk moved from banks, where it was regulated and observable, to places where it was less regulated and difficult to identify.
Turning $1 Into $20
The liquidity factory was self-perpetuating and seemingly unstoppable. As assets bought with borrowed money rose in value, players could borrow more money against them, and it thus seemed logical to borrow even more to increase returns. Bankers figured out how to strip money out of existing assets to do so, much as a homeowner might strip equity from his house to buy another house.
These triple-borrowed assets were then in turn increasingly used as collateral for commercial paper -- the short-term borrowings of banks and corporations -- which was purchased by supposedly low-risk money market funds.
According to Das' figures, up to 53% of the $2.2 trillion of commercial paper in the U.S. market is now asset-backed, with about 50% of that in mortgages.
When you add it all up, according to Das' research, a single dollar of "real" capital supports $20 to $30 of loans. This spiral of borrowing on an increasingly thin base of real assets, writ large and in nearly infinite variety, ultimately created a world in which derivatives outstanding earlier this year stood at $485 trillion -- or eight times total global gross domestic product of $60 trillion.
Without a central governmental authority keeping tabs on these cross-border flows and ensuring a standard of record-keeping and quality, investors increasingly didn't know what they were buying or what any given security was really worth.
A Painful Unwinding
Here is where the U.S. mortgage holder shows up again. As subprime loan default rates doubled, in contravention of what the models forecast, the C.D.O.s those mortgages backed began to collapse. Because these instruments were so hard to value, banks and funds started looking at all C.D.O.s and other paper backed by mortgages with suspicion, and refused to accept them as collateral for the sort of short-term borrowing that underpins today's money markets.
Through late last month, according to Das, as much as $300 billion in leveraged finance loans had been "orphaned," which means that they can't be sold off or used as collateral.
One of the wonders of leverage is that it amplifies losses on the way down just as it amplifies gains on the way up. The more an asset that is bought with borrowed money falls in value, the more you have to sell other stuff to fulfill the loan-to-value covenants. It's a vicious cycle.
In this context, banks' objective was to prevent customers from selling their derivates at a discount, because they would then have to mark down the value of all the other assets in the debt chain, an event that would lead to the need to make margin calls on customers who are already thin on cash.
Now it may seem hard to believe, but much of the past few years' advance in the stock market was underwritten by C.D.O.-type instruments that go under the heading of "structured finance." I'm talking about private-equity takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and corporate stock buybacks -- the works.
So the structured finance market is coming undone; not only will those pillars of strength for equities be knocked away, but many recent deals that were predicated on the easy availability of money will likely also go bust, Das says.
That is why he considers the current market volatility much more profound than a simple "correction" in prices. He sees it as a gigantic liquidity bubble unwinding -- a process that can take a long, long time.
While you might think that the U.S. Federal Reserve can help prevent disaster by lowering interest rates dramatically, as it did Wednesday, the evidence is not at all clear.
The problem, after all, is not the amount of money in the system but the fact that buyers are in the process of rejecting the entire new risk-transfer model and its associated leverage and counterparty risks.
Lower rates will not help that. "At best," Das says, "they help smooth the transition."
http://www.thestreet.com/s/the-credit-crisis-could-be-just-beginning/newsanalysis/investing/10380613.html?puc=_tscana
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."-- Alice Walker
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Satyajit Das is laughing. It appears I have said something very funny but I have no idea what it was. My only clue is that the laugh sounds somewhat pitying.
Trading Center
One of the world's leading experts on credit derivatives (financial instruments that transfer credit risk from one party to another), Das is the author of a 4,200-page reference work on the subject, among a half-dozen other tomes. As a developer and marketer of the exotic instruments himself over the past 30 years, he seemed like the ideal industry insider to help us get to the bottom of the recent debt crunch -- and I expected him to defend and explain the practice.
I started by asking the Calcutta-born Australian whether the credit crisis was in what Americans would call the "third inning." This was pretty amusing, it seemed, judging from the laughter. So I tried again. "Second inning?" More laughter. "First?" Still too optimistic.
Das, who knows as much about global money flows as anyone in the world, stopped chuckling long enough to suggest that we're actually still in the middle of the national anthem before a game destined to go into extra innings. And it won't end well for the global economy.
Ursa Major
Das is pretty droll for a math whiz, but his message is dead serious. He thinks we're on the verge of a bear market of epic proportions. The cause: Massive levels of debt underlying the world economic system are about to unwind in a profound and persistent way.
He's not sure if it will play out like the 13-year decline of 90% in Japan from 1990 to 2003 that followed the bursting of a credit bubble there, or like the 15-year flat spot in the U.S. market from 1960 to 1975. But either way, he foresees hard times as an optimistic era of too much liquidity, too much leverage and too much financial engineering slowly and inevitably deflates.
Like an ex-mobster turning state's witness, Das has turned his back on his old pals in the derivatives biz to warn anyone who will listen -- mostly banks and hedge funds that pay him consulting fees -- that the jig is up.
Rather than joining the crowd that blames the mess on American slobs who took on more mortgage debt than they could afford and have endangered the world by stiffing lenders, he points a finger at three parties: regulators who stood by as U.S. banks developed ingenious but dangerous ways of shifting trillions of dollars of credit risk off their balance sheets and into the hands of unsophisticated foreign investors, hedge and pension fund managers who gorged on high-yield debt instruments they didn't understand and financial engineers who built towers of "securitized" debt with math models that were fundamentally flawed.
"Defaulting middle-class U.S. homeowners are blamed, but they are merely a pawn in the game," he says. "Those loans were invented so that hedge funds would have high-yield debt to buy."
The Liquidity Factory
Das' view sounds cynical, but it makes sense if you stop thinking about mortgages as a way for people to finance houses and think about them instead as a way for lenders to generate cash flow and to create collateral during an era of a flat interest rate curve.
Although subprime U.S. loans seem like small change in the context of the multitrillion-dollar debt market, it turns out that these high-yield instruments were an important part of the machine that Das calls the global "liquidity factory." Just like a small amount of gasoline can power an entire truck given the right combination of spark plugs, pistons and transmission, subprime loans became the fuel that underlies derivative securities that are many, many times their size.
Here's how it worked: In olden days, like 10 years ago, banks wrote and funded their own loans. In the new game, Das points out, banks "originate" loans, "warehouse" them on their balance sheets for a brief time, then "distribute" them to investors by packaging them into derivatives called collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.s, and similar instruments. In this scheme, banks don't need to tie up as much capital, so they can put more money out on loan.
The more loans that were sold, the more they could use as collateral for more loans, so credit standards were lowered to get more paper out the door -- a task that was accelerated in recent years via fly-by-night brokers that are now accused of predatory lending practices.
Buyers of these credit risks in C.D.O. form were insurance companies, pension funds and hedge-fund managers from Bonn to Beijing. Because money was readily available at low interest rates in Japan and the U.S., these managers leveraged up their bets by buying the C.D.O.s with borrowed funds.
So if you follow the bouncing ball, borrowed money bought borrowed money. And then because they had the blessing of credit-ratings agencies relying on mathematical models suggesting that they would rarely default, these C.D.O.s were in turn used as collateral to do more borrowing.
In this way, Das points out, credit risk moved from banks, where it was regulated and observable, to places where it was less regulated and difficult to identify.
Turning $1 Into $20
The liquidity factory was self-perpetuating and seemingly unstoppable. As assets bought with borrowed money rose in value, players could borrow more money against them, and it thus seemed logical to borrow even more to increase returns. Bankers figured out how to strip money out of existing assets to do so, much as a homeowner might strip equity from his house to buy another house.
These triple-borrowed assets were then in turn increasingly used as collateral for commercial paper -- the short-term borrowings of banks and corporations -- which was purchased by supposedly low-risk money market funds.
According to Das' figures, up to 53% of the $2.2 trillion of commercial paper in the U.S. market is now asset-backed, with about 50% of that in mortgages.
When you add it all up, according to Das' research, a single dollar of "real" capital supports $20 to $30 of loans. This spiral of borrowing on an increasingly thin base of real assets, writ large and in nearly infinite variety, ultimately created a world in which derivatives outstanding earlier this year stood at $485 trillion -- or eight times total global gross domestic product of $60 trillion.
Without a central governmental authority keeping tabs on these cross-border flows and ensuring a standard of record-keeping and quality, investors increasingly didn't know what they were buying or what any given security was really worth.
A Painful Unwinding
Here is where the U.S. mortgage holder shows up again. As subprime loan default rates doubled, in contravention of what the models forecast, the C.D.O.s those mortgages backed began to collapse. Because these instruments were so hard to value, banks and funds started looking at all C.D.O.s and other paper backed by mortgages with suspicion, and refused to accept them as collateral for the sort of short-term borrowing that underpins today's money markets.
Through late last month, according to Das, as much as $300 billion in leveraged finance loans had been "orphaned," which means that they can't be sold off or used as collateral.
One of the wonders of leverage is that it amplifies losses on the way down just as it amplifies gains on the way up. The more an asset that is bought with borrowed money falls in value, the more you have to sell other stuff to fulfill the loan-to-value covenants. It's a vicious cycle.
In this context, banks' objective was to prevent customers from selling their derivates at a discount, because they would then have to mark down the value of all the other assets in the debt chain, an event that would lead to the need to make margin calls on customers who are already thin on cash.
Now it may seem hard to believe, but much of the past few years' advance in the stock market was underwritten by C.D.O.-type instruments that go under the heading of "structured finance." I'm talking about private-equity takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and corporate stock buybacks -- the works.
So the structured finance market is coming undone; not only will those pillars of strength for equities be knocked away, but many recent deals that were predicated on the easy availability of money will likely also go bust, Das says.
That is why he considers the current market volatility much more profound than a simple "correction" in prices. He sees it as a gigantic liquidity bubble unwinding -- a process that can take a long, long time.
While you might think that the U.S. Federal Reserve can help prevent disaster by lowering interest rates dramatically, as it did Wednesday, the evidence is not at all clear.
The problem, after all, is not the amount of money in the system but the fact that buyers are in the process of rejecting the entire new risk-transfer model and its associated leverage and counterparty risks.
Lower rates will not help that. "At best," Das says, "they help smooth the transition."
http://www.thestreet.com/s/the-credit-crisis-could-be-just-beginning/newsanalysis/investing/10380613.html?puc=_tscana
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