It’s not Adderall or Oxy. It’s Klonopin. And doctors are doling it out like candy, causing a surge of hellish withdrawals, overdoses and deaths.

June 1, 2011  |

You could argue that the deadliest “drug” in the world is the venom from a jellyfish known as the Sea Wasp, whose sting can kill a human being in four minutes—up to 100 humans at a time. Potassium chloride, which is used to trigger cardiac arrest and death in the 38 states of the U.S. that enforce the death penalty is also pretty deadly . But when it comes to prescription drugs that are not only able to kill you but can drag out the final reckoning for years on end, with worsening misery at every step of the way, it is hard to top the benzodiazepines. And no “benzo” has been more lethal to millions of Americans than a popular prescription drug called Klonopin.

Klonopin is the brand name for the pill known as clonazepam, which was originally brought to market in 1975 as a medication for epileptic seizures. Since then, Klonopin, along with the other drugs in this class, has become a prescription of choice for drug abusers from Hollywood to Wall Street. In the process, these Schedule III and IV substances have also earned the dubious distinction of being second only to opioid painkillers like OxyContin as our nation’s most widely abused class of drug.

Seventies-era rock star Stevie Nicks is the poster girl for the perils of Klonopin addiction. In almost every interview, the former lead singer of Fleetwood Mac makes a point of mentioning the toll her abuse of the drug has taken on her life. This month, while promoting her new solo album, In Your Dreams, she told Fox that she blamed Klonopin for the fact that she never had children. “The only thing I’d change [in my life] is walking into the office of that psychiatrist who prescribed me Klonopin. That ruined my life for eight years,” she said. “God knows, maybe I would have met someone, maybe I would have had a baby.”

Nicks checked herself into the Betty Ford Clinic in 1986 to overcome a cocaine addiction. After her release, the psychiatrist in question prescribed a series of benzos—first Valium, then Xanax, and finally Klonopin—supposedly to support her sobriety. “[Klonopin] turned me into a zombie,” she told US Weekly in 2001, according to the website Benzo.org, one of many patient-run sites on the Internet offering information about benzodiazepine addiction, withdrawal and recovery. Nicks has described the drug as a “horrible, dangerous drug,” and said that her eventual 45-day hospital detox and rehab from the drug felt like “somebody opened up a door and pushed me into hell.” Others have described Klonopin’s effects as beginning with an energized sense of euphoria but ending up with horrifying sense of anxiety and paralysis, akin to  sticking your tongue into an electric outlet, or suddenly feeling that your brain is on fire.

When benzodiazepines first came to market in the 1950s and 1960s, they were prescribed for a range of neurological disorders such as epilepsy as well as anxiety related disorders such as insomnia. But over time, a loophole in federal drug-control laws known as the “practice of medicine exception” has permitted psychiatrists and other physicians to prescribe the drugs for any perceived disorder or symptom imaginable, from panic attacks to weight control problems. Much in the same way, Valium became infamous as “mother’s little helper,” a sedative used to pacify a generation of bored and frustrated suburban housewives.

Alcoholics and drug addicts are most likely to run into Klonopin during detox, when it is used to prevent seizures and control the symptoms of acute withdrawal. Klonopin takes longer to metabolize and passes through your system more slowly than other benzos, so in theory you don’t need to take it so frequently. But if you like the high it gives you, and  keep increasing your dosage, the addictive effects of the drug accumulate quickly and can often be devastating. The drug’s label clearly specifies that it is “recommended” only for short-term use—say, seven to 10 days—but once exposed to the pill’s seductive side-effects, many patients come back for more. And not surprisingly, many doctors are happy to refill prescriptions to meet this consumer demand. In the process, countless numbers of people swap one addiction for another, often worse than the initial addiction they were trying to treat. Although benzodiazepines are rarely reported to be the cause of single-drug overdoses, they show up with great frequency in deaths from so-called combined drug intoxication, or CDI. In recent years there have been thousands of deaths caused by this lethal combination. The drug has also help hasten the death of a wide list of otherwise healthy celebrities. :

In 1996, Actress Margaux Hemingway committed suicide by overdosing on a barbiturate-benzodiazepine cocktail. Weeks later, Hollywood movie producer Don Simpson (Beverly Hills Cop) also died from an unintentional benzo-based overdose. Klonopin was one of 11 different prescription drugs—all written by the same doctor—found in the body of Playboy centerfold model Anna Nicole Smith, who OD’d in 2007. Thereafter, the well-known Los Angeles author, David Foster Wallace, who was suffering from a profound depression when a doctor prescribed him Klonopin, went into his backyard on a September evening and hanged himself with a leather belt he had nailed to an overhead beam on his patio. Klonopin has been striking down more than just troubled celebrities, however. In 2008, reports began to surface of soldiers returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder who were dying in their sleep, the victims of a psych-med cocktail of Klonopin, Paxil (an antidepressant), and Seroquel, an antipsychotic that is routinely prescribed by VA hospitals.

Hospital emergency room visits for benzodiazepine abuse now dwarf those for illegal street drugs by a more than a three-to-one margin. This trend has been increasing for at least the last five years. In 2006, the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration published data showing that prescription drugs that year were the number two reason for ER admissions to hospitals for drug abuse, slightly behind illicit substances like heroin and cocaine. But a survey released by the agency earlier this year claims that benzos, opioids and other prescriptions meds are now responsible for the majority of drug-related hospital visits.

Scientists can’t say for sure what Klonopin does when ingested, except that it dramatically affects the functioning of the brain. This much we know: If your brain is on fire with electrical signals—like, say, you’re having an epileptic seizure—a dose of clonazepam will help put out the flames.  It does so by lowering the electrical activity of the brain,  specifically which electrical activities it suppresses is something that no one really seems to know for sure. And therein lies the reason why clonazepam, like nearly the entire class of benzos, causes such unpredictable reactions in people. Put simply, the brain is just too complex a structure for its owners to understand—and when you start monkeying around with the way it functions, it’s anybody’s guess what is going to happen next.

Here’s how the respected neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick, Jr., describes the brain in his book When The Air Hits Your Brain: Parables of Neurosurgery: “The human brain: a trillion nerve cells storing electrical patterns more numerous than the water molecules of the world’s oceans.” So, if clonazepam is given to a patient with a history of epileptic seizures, it is likely to bring the symptoms under control. But give the same drug to a person suffering from a completely different problem (an eating or sleeping disorder, for example), and it might actually cause an epileptic seizure.

Clonazepam has wreaked such havoc on people partly because it is so highly addictive; anyone who takes it for more than a few weeks may well develop a dependence on it. As a result, you can be prescribed Klonopin as a short-term treatment for, say, insomnia, and wind up so hooked on it that you’ll begin frantically “doctor shopping” for new prescriptions if the first physician who gave it for you refuses to renew the prescription. As with all benzos, use of Klonopin for more than a month can lead to a dangerous condition known as “benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome,” featuring elevation of a user’s heart rate and blood pressure along with insomnia, nightmares, hallucinations, anxiety, panic, weight loss, muscular spasms or cramps, and seizures.

Along with Klonopin, here are the three other benzos that, by general agreement, have made it into the top ranks of the world’s worst and most widely abused drugs: temazepam, alprazolam, and lorazepam.

Temazepam: Sold in the U.S. under the brand name Restoril, this benzo was developed and approved in the 1960s as a short-term treatment for insomnia. It is basically what is commonly called a “knockout drop.” Taken even in relatively modest dosages, temazepam can produce a powerfully hypnotic effect that numbs users and makes them extremely compliant and susceptible to control. But thanks to the “practice of medicine exception” physicians can prescribe it for anything they want.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union reportedly used temazepam extensively to keep political dissidents in a drugged-out state in government-run psychiatric hospitals. Both the CIA and the KGB are also said to have also used the sleeping pill in prisoner interrogations and in research into mind-control, brainwashing and social engineering.

Temazepam is sometimes referred to as a “date rape” drug, and it figures frequently in drug-related crimes of violence. In the drug world underground, where it is often sold as an alternative to heroin and crack cocaine, it goes by such street names as “tams,” “Vitamin T,” “terminators,” “big T,” “mind eraser” and “Mommy’s Big Helper.” Common side-effects include confusion, clumsiness, chronic drowsiness, impaired learning, memory and motor functions, as well as extreme euphoria, dizziness and amnesia.

Alprazolam: Brand name Xanax, this benzo now accounts for as many as 60% of all hospital admissions for drug addiction, according to some research. What’s more, violent and psychotic responses to Xanax are not limited to humans. In May 2009, a 200-lb chimpanzee being kept as a house pet by a Stamford, Conn., woman went on a rampage after being dosed with Xanax, escaping into the neighborhood and ripping off the face of a friend of its owner.

Lorazepam: Brand name Ativan, this drug has figured in an array of well-publicized homicides and suicides by those using it. Ativan surfaced in the 2000 divorce case between Washington, D.C., socialite Patricia Duff and her husband, Wall Street billionaire Ronald Perelman. In deposition testimony, Perelman acknowledged taking Ativan as an anti-anxiety drug during his separation from Duff and the commencement of divorce proceedings. The period was marked by numerous outbursts by Perelman and at least two physical assaults on Duff. In 2008, news reports revealed that Ativan was being used by the U.S. Customs Service to keep suspected terrorists sedated while deporting them to detention facilities abroad.

You can buy any of these “feel-good” drugs without a doctor’s signature by simply typing the name into any Internet search engine. Instantly, you’ll be presented with dozens of websites, both foreign and domestic, where you can make your purchase, no prescription required. (Most of the websites accept all major credit cards.)

Why has all this happened? In large measure you can thank the 47,000 members of the American psychiatric profession for this dreadful state of affairs. Neither the pharmaceutical industry nor the psychiatric profession would be anywhere near as lucrative as they are today without their mutual support system. Together they have created a marketing juggernaut that over the last 20 years has spawned a seemingly nonstop gusher of profits that is only now beginning to slow—and probably only temporarily.

The scholarly journals of the psychiatric profession were filled with early warnings, beginning almost 50 years ago, from those who could see where the encroaching influence of the drug companies was destined to lead the profession. Now, even the medical journals themselves have been corrupted by the hidden hand of Big Pharma. In 2008, the New York Times reported that a survey of the six top medical journals showed that on average almost 8% of the bylined articles published in their pages were ghostwritten by freelance writers, then published under the names of cooperating doctors and researchers to give the pro-drug messages contained in the articles the appearance of impartiality. The scheme is bankrolled, of course, by the company that makes the drug.

Consider Dr. Joseph Biederman, the world-renowned Harvard University psychiatrist and father of modern psychopharmacology for children, who, it now turns out, has been taking secret “consulting fees” from drug companies for years. Biederman is widely credited with legitimizing the concept of “bipolar disorder” as a chemical imbalance in the brain that can be corrected with psychiatric drugs. But documents uncovered by Senate investigators probing ties between the psychiatric profession and the drug industry, which have resulted in an explosion in medically approved uses for psychiatric drugs for children, show that Biederman received more than $1.6 million in undisclosed payments since 2000 from the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing the drugs he was encouraging parents to give to their children if they appeared to be “bipolar.”

No surveys that I am aware of have ever been conducted regarding the public’s impression of what psychiatrists actually do. But from pop culture media characters such as the fictional female psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi in the HBO series The Sopranos, the general belief seems to be that psychiatrists are learned and humane professionals who counsel their patients through hour-long “talk therapy” sessions in their offices once a week, and more frequently than that if necessary to help them resolve their conflicts.

In fact, many do nothing of the sort. It may be only a patient’s first session with a psychiatrist that lasts any meaningful amount of time. In this initial consultation the psychiatrist relies on the DSM manual as the diagnostic tool to decide precisely what the patient suffers from. Once that is established, the psychiatrist can begin prescribing psych meds as therapy, free of fear about the danger of a medical malpractice suit lurking down the road.

The follow-up sessions (weekly, monthly, etc.) that come after the initial consultations—that is, the sessions that are portrayed on The Sopranos as the occasions when Mafia killer Tony Soprano sits down in Dr. Melfi’s darkened office and pours out his guts about his troubled childhood—usually last as little as 15 minutes. During these so-called “med checks,” a psychiatrist typically charges $100 or more for asking the patient little more than how he or she is responding to the prescribed medication—a question that can usually be answered by a quick glance at the patient’s demeanor.

At the end of such a med-check, the psychiatrist may decide to renew the patient’s current prescription, substitute or add a new one—or even offer the patient a free sample of some new psych-med, courtesy of a sales rep from a pharmaceutical company. At four med-checks per hour, a psychiatrist with enough patients to fill up his workdays can easily make $120,000 annually from his med-check practice alone and still take a month-long summer vacation.

It’s obvious that this system incentivizes doctors financially to keep prescribing drugs in order to keep patients returning for med-checks. But Big Pharma offers a whole host of additional income opportunities. Last year, ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize–winning public-interest investigative website, did an extensive report on the financial compensation drug companies shower on physicians. Well-titled “Dollars for Docs,” this series included a database of more than 17,000 doctors who accepted “speaker fees” and other money from eight drug companies in 2009 and 2010 totaling $320 million.

That accounting is only the tip of the iceberg, however, as most pharmaceutical companies have refused to disclose their physician payments. Not surprisingly, most doctors interviewed by ProPublica denied that their medical decisions and prescribing habits were influenced by drug company payments. The new healthcare reform bill calls for greater transparency, requiring all drug-makers to disclose all fees paid to all doctors by 2014. Until then, you can type your doctor’s name into the database to find out if he or she is on the pharma take, and for how much.

Year after year, the IMF praised Mubarak’s ‘progress’. Signing up to its $3bn loan now hardly seems a break with the past

Hosni Mubarak’s last finance minister, Youssef Boutros-Ghali, was a graduate of the IMF. Photograph: Stephen Jaffe/Reuters

News that the Egyptian interim government has struck a deal with the IMF through which the fund will hand Egypt a $3bn loan has met with differing reactions. It was greeted with relief by some, as proof of the country’s positive economic prospects in the medium and long term, and a rebuttal to those scaremongers who have been loudly warning that Egypt is on the verge of bankruptcy because of the revolution and of the continuing protests and street activities.

But many people, myself included, were unhappy with this news and the impact such a loan will have on deepening the country’s debt and mounting debt servicing burden.

And there’s a more disturbing detail – this is the IMF for God’s sake. I recall repeatedly demonstrating over the past 10 years against the Hosni Mubarak regime and chanting against the “Fund” and the “Bank”, meaning the IMF and the World Bank. “We will not be governed by the Bank, we will not be governed by imperialism”, we chanted, “and here are the terms of the Bank: poverty, hunger and rising prices.”

The IMF and the World Bank have for years been pushing the neoliberal measures implemented by Mubarak and his governments, piling praise on him for his courage and achievements.

Year after year, the international experts would commend the Egyptian economic “progress” and “performance” while the majority of Egyptians watched as their lives deteriorated and their living conditions worsened. A survey by the International Republican Institute found that 60% of the population felt their living standards had fallen over the previous year, and that this was one of the key reasons for participation in the 25 January revolution.

Year after year, we watched how the rich and powerful got richer and even more powerful. Year after year, we waited in vain for the successive economic growth to trickle down to the poor and working masses. None was forthcoming.

And while the IMF and similar international institutions called on Egypt to eliminate “waste and efficiencies” such as social measures or food subsidies, they maintained a polite silence on the outrageous corruption perpetrated by the country’s ruler, his family and their friends and cronies. Mubarak’s last finance minister, Youssef Boutros-Ghali, a graduate of the IMF who served as chair of its policy advisory committee, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for corruption related to improper use of cars impounded by Egypt’s customs service. Boutros-Ghali was sentenced in absentia as he was one of the few clever officials that left the country as soon as the protest that led to the bringing down of Mubarak’s regime started in January.

I believe that this country’s future lies not with the same highly paid, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats of the IMF, nor with their sacred indicators of budget deficits and market economics. Our future lies with a new home-grown economics that caters for the majority of Egyptians, the schools where their children are educated, the hospitals where they receive healthcare, and the jobs that guarantee them decent and honourable living.

Our revolution, before it called for bringing down Mubarak, has called for “social justice and human dignity” and we will not stop until that is achieved.

Here is an exclusive interview with James G. Rickards, a leading practitioner in the realm of capital markets, national security and geopolitics, on inter alia “quantative easing as a success,“ the currency wars of the past and the present, and the question why you are fighting every central bank in the world in case you own gold.

By Lars Schall

James G. Rickards is Senior Managing Director of Tangent Capital Partners (http://www.tangentcapital.com/), a registered broker-dealer and merchant bank, and Senior Managing Director of Omnis, Inc. (http://www.omnisinc.com/), a research and consulting firm in McLean, Virginia, USA. He is also co-head of Omnis’ practice in Threat Finance & Market Intelligence and a member of the Board of Directors. Moreover, he serves as Principal of Global-I Advisors, LLC, an investment banking firm specializing in the intersection of capital markets and geopolitics. Mr. Rickards is a seasoned counselor, investment banker and risk manager with over thirty-five years experience in capital markets including all aspects of portfolio management, risk management, financing, regulation and operations.

Mr. Rickards’ career spans the period since 1976 during which he was a first hand participant in the formation and growth of globalized capital markets and complex derivative trading strategies. He has held senior executive positions at sell side firms (Citibank and RBS Greenwich Capital Markets) and buy side firms (Long-Term Capital Management and Caxton Associates) as well as technology firms (OptiMark). He has directly participated in the release of U.S. hostages in Teheran, Iran in 1981 as well as in the 1987 Stock Market Crash and the 1990 collapse of Drexel. He was the principal negotiator of the government-Federal Reserve Bank of New York-sponsored rescue of LTCM in 1998.

Mr. Rickards is a graduate school visiting lecturer at Northwestern University and the School of Advanced International Studies. He has delivered papers on econophysics at the Applied Physics Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Mr. Rickards has written articles published in academic and professional journals in the fields of strategic studies, cognitive diversity, network science and risk management. He is a member of the Business Advisory Board of Shariah Capital, Inc., an advisory firm specializing in Islamic finance and is also a member of the International Business Practices Advisory Panel to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) Support Group of the Director of National Intelligence.

Mr. Rickards holds an LL.M. (Taxation) from the New York University School of Law; J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School; M.A. in international economics from the School of Advanced International Studies, Washington DC; and a B.A. degree with honors from the School of Arts & Sciences of The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

His advisory clients include private investment funds, investment banks and government directorates. Mr. Rickards is licensed to practice law in New York and New Jersey and various Federal Courts and has held all major financial industry licenses. He has been a frequent speaker at conferences sponsored by bar associations and industry groups in the fields of derivatives and hedge funds and is active in the International Bar Association. He has been interviewed in The Wall Street Journal and on CNBC, Fox, CNN, NPR and C-SPAN and is an OpEd contributor to the New York Times, Financial Times and the Washington Post.

James G. Rickards lives in Connecticut, U.S.A.

In addition to the following interview, I also want to recommend a comprehensive interview that I’ve conducted with Mr. Rickards in the past, “The central banks don’t consider it manipulation, they consider it  part of their job,“ at:

http://www.larsschall.com/2010/12/12/%E2%80%9Cthe-central-banks-dont-consider-it-manipulation-they-consider-it-part-of-their-job%E2%80%9C/.

Mr. Rickards, you’ve stated not so long ago: “Quantative Easing is dead, long live Quantative Easing.“ What do you mean by that?

What I meant was that formerly the QE program by which the Federal Reserve purchases intermediate-term treasury notes in the open markets, those in the three, five, seven and ten years maturity, that program is officially over June 30th, and I did expect that it will not be continued after June 30th – this is what I meant by: “QE is dead.“ However, the Fed has been doing this for almost two years, and at this point through the program they have acquired so many assets that their balance sheet is now almost $ 3 trillion. When they started this program it was less than $ 1 trillion, it was close to $ 900 billion, but today the balance sheet will approaching at the end of June $ 3 trillion, the exact number right now is about $ 2.6 trillion, but they will be buying some more assets between now and June 30th.

The point is when your balance sheet is that large you have securities that mature over time – two years ago, if you bought a two year note, that note is maturing sometime in the next few months, and when that happens the Treasury sends you the money, and then you can keep the money. But in the case of the Fed because they create the money in the first place if the system sends money to the Fed, that money goes out of existence, it actually reduces the money supply. But the Fed can choose to go out and buy more securities by using their reinvestment buying power. So even though they will not expanding their balance sheet they will be continuing to buy securities to keep interest rates low. So that is what I meant by: “Long live QE.“ In other words, they are going to continue QE, but in a different form.

Is this perpetual, even though maybe modified QE in your view by any measure successful – or does this depend on which side of the proverbial “printing press“ one does stand?

That’s a good question. In order to define success you have first to figure out what the goal was and see if you have reached that goal. And there is a lot of misunderstanding on that point. A lot of critics of the Fed have said that their goal was to monetize the federal debt in the form of printing money. Well, that is not the goal of QE, never was. The goal of QE was to keep interest rates low, and in particular the Fed wanted to create a situation with what they call negative real interest rates. A real interest rate is simply the interest rate that you have to pay, so it’s called the nominal interest rate minus inflation. For example, if the interest rate is 2 percent, but inflation is 4 percent, then the real interest rate is negative 2 percent, or 2 – 4. And when you have negative interest rates this of course encourages people to borrow, because they can pay back the debt in cheaper dollars – not only is the borrowing cost zero, it is below zero, and therefore you can pay back the debt in cheaper dollars, so you don’t have to pay back as much as you have borrowed in the first place in real terms. So that is the Fed’s goal.

Now you have to ask yourself how does the Fed measure inflation? They don’t actually use the inflation numbers that are reported every month. They use intermediate-term inflationary expectations. This is not the inflation of today, but the inflation that consumers and borrowers think might be in existence two, three, four, five years from now, because that is the one that really matters. If you borrow money for thirty years on a mortgage or you borrow money for five years for a car loan, and you’re trying to figure out the real interest rate you don’t use today’s interest rate, you use your expected interest rate over the next five years, or in the case of the mortgage the interest rate over the next thirty years. In order to do that, the Fed looks at what they call the TIPS spread – we have an interest rate in the United States called TIPS, which is Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. Those are protected against inflation. The interest rate on TIPS is only the interest rate you need to compensate for risk, but there is no inflation element build into it. With the other treasury notes you have to worry about inflation. So the Fed looks at ten-year rates and then they look at the ten-year TIPS rate to figure out the difference, and that difference, in theory, represents intermediate-term inflationary expectations. That is sort of what they are targeting.

So the whole point of QE is to buy notes in the five to ten years spectrum, keep those nominal interest rates low and keep the TIPS spread low as a way of keeping the inflation expectations low. And in that sense the Fed has been successful. People are continually amazed given the U.S. debt situation, the U.S. money printing situation and the potential high inflation why the interest rates are as low as they are. One reason is, the Fed is buying enough securities to keep the interest rates low. They don’t have to buy them all, they don’t have to monetize the debt, they only have to buy enough. On that measure I would say yes, QE has been a success and will continue to be a success, because as I have mentioned the balance sheet is so large that the buying power by itself is enough to  buy sufficient securities to keep interest rates low.

The global commodity rally, that is now under pressure, seems largely liquidity driven via cheap borrowed money. Do you think that there’s a direct link between monetary policies in the United States and the Arab revolts via higher food and energy prices?

Two times yes. But let’s take the first part of the question: is there a link between monetary policies and higher inflation prices? I think the answer is absolutely yes. We have seen this many times in the past. For example, in the early 1930?s commodities prices collapsed around the world, and that was partly caused by too tight monetary policy, and in that case the Fed was not expanding monetary policy enough, and that too tight monetary policy was collapsing commodity prices and causing generalized deflation all over the world. In the 1970?s we saw then the opposite: we saw a very loose monetary policy. At the beginning of the 1970?s, oil was about $2 per barrel, by the end of the 1970?s it was $12 per barrel and soon on its way to $20. That was in part due to a very loose monetary policy by the Fed. There is clear evidence in this. We saw this again and again.

We see it again today. The only difference today is that we have a more globalized world, we have more economies participating in the world economy to compete with each other for exports and market share. Labor in Asia now competes with labor in the United States. All of that was not true, certainly not to that extent in the 1930?s and the 1970?s. Also, the world is on a de facto dollar standard – dollars make up 60 percent of global reserves and an even higher percentage in global trade, of course, the price of oil and other global commodities are set in dollars. When you have money printing, what is happening is that inflation is showing up, but it is not showing up in the United States at first, it is showing up all over the world – in China, Malaysia, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil and many other countries.

That is because of the exchange-rate mechanism. These countries are trying to keep their currencies low relative to the dollar, which means they have to buy dollars by printing their local currencies in their local markets. The result of that is they are creating a flood of other currencies. That is why the inflation is showing up around the world and not in the United States. Little by little that is changing. We are at a point where a lot of those countries are starting to revalue their currencies upward. This will limit the inflationary pressure in their own countries, but it means that the inflationary pressure will now come back to the United States in the form of higher import prices when we buy foreign goods. This process will take some time to play out, but it will ultimately force the inflation back into the United States. With that all said, there is no doubt that the easy monetary policy of the Fed is responsible for higher commodity prices around the globe.

Now, given that, yes, this is absolutely one of the contributing factors to the unrest in Northern Africa, the Middle East, but also in some parts of China, which haven’t grown to the extend elsewhere, but the fact that they are happening at all is significant. Sure, there are many other factors, for instance large numbers of unemployed young adults. But rising food prices is sometimes what it takes to get the people out on the streets. The longing for freedom and liberty and the unemployment situation actually have been persisting for a longer period of time, but the rising food prices may be that sort of proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back which causes civil unrest to come alive. So the Fed is doing a lot of damage, not only to the U.S. dollar and the global economy, but I would also say that they are actually provoking a lot of unrest around the world.

Would you then also say that war and monetary policies are in general intertwined subjects or at least could be?

There is no question that they can be. Again, we saw this in the 1930?s, there was a long sort of currency war fought by the major powers from the 1920?s to the 1930?s, which had to do in part with the debt situation coming out of World War I. In Germany you had massive reparations to pay to France and Great Britain, many others had massive war debts that were used to finance the war costs by Great Britain and France to the United States, so you had a world in debt, the whole world was in debt to each other, and that was what precipitated these currency wars, these beggar thy neighbor currency devaluations of one against the other, and finally all major currencies devalued against gold, which happened in stages between 1931 and 1936. But none of the economic problems were solved, the real solution would have been just to forget about the debt, but that did not happen until very late in the process and only in stages, and by then when it did happen a lot of the damage was done in Germany with the rise of the Nazi Party, which lead directly to World War II. So that sort of currency war turned into a shooting war.

Therefore, I think that one can’t underestimate the potential for these global international economic effects to turn into actual violent warfare. That did not happen in the second currency war during the 1970?s and the early 1980?s, but there is always that potential, yes. First, you have a currency war in which the countries try to devalue their currencies against each other, but that usually doesn’t work – all advantage is only temporary in that situation. Then you go into trade wars. What the countries cannot achieve with the currency devaluation they try to do in the form of tariffs, capital controls, embargos, unfair trade practices etc. But that also tends to fail. It might protect certain industries in the short-run, but it tends to reduce world trade and growth, and that causes even more economic stress. Finally, countries will always find excuses for conflicts that can absolutely lead into military conflicts. Those are things that I think the central bankers underestimate.

Now that you’ve mentioned the “Currency Wars“ of the past, let us look at the current one of our time. Isn’t the real battle royal in that “Currency War“ the one between gold and all fiat currencies, especially the U.S. dollar?

That’s where it will end up. I agree that this is the endgame. You start out by devaluing with each other, but that ends up in failure, and so you need something to devalue against – and gold is always the last resort, because gold is the one thing that doesn’t devalue on its own. For example, if the U.S. devalues the dollar against the Chinese currency, and then the euro devalues against the dollar, U.S. exports might be helped, but the dollar devaluation could be hurt by the euro devaluation, so as I have said no one is really further ahead and you’re not getting the inflation that you want. But one way you can always get inflation is the devaluation against gold – or even maybe the devaluation against gold is the inflation. Anyway, the purpose of this is to cheapen the currency, help exports and lift commodity prices across the board.

This has happened two times, of course. In 1933 President Roosevelt devalued the dollar against gold, and in 1971 Richard Nixon did the same thing. I think it will happen again. The currency war is playing out for a while, but they don’t really get what they want and so at the end of the day they have to devalue against gold. For instance, you will see a lot of up and down between the euro and the dollar, the cycle is repeating over and over and over, back and forth, and as a trader you can make a lot of money on the swings between the euro and the dollar, but as an investor it really doesn’t matter very much. My analogy for this is that the passengers on the Titanic can go to a higher deck or to a lower deck, but they can’t go all off the ship. The life boat, if you will to pursue that metaphor, is gold. That is the one thing they can all devalue against. I think this is where it all will end up.

In 2009 you have said on air at CNBC: “When you own gold you’re fighting every central bank in the world.” What has lead you to that conclusion?

Well, there are about 160.000 tonnes of gold in existence, that would be all gold that was ever mined, whether it’s jewelry, central bank reserves, industrial applications or artistic applications, etc. That is approximately all the gold ever mined. About 30.000 tonnes of that gold is in the hand of central banks, which is not quite 20 percent of all the gold. They are able to use that to manipulate the price of gold through central bank sells, central bank releasing of gold, or not selling it, but simply holding on to it. There is good evidence that central banks have pursued all those different policies from time to time. As an investor, even as a very large investor in the area in the tens or hundred of millions, which is pretty large, or even upwards to billions for some big institutions,  those amounts are still relatively small compared to central bank gold holdings. So you’re a little bit in the short-run at the mercy what central banks choose to do.  Although fortunately right now what I see is that central banks are not unhappy with the price of gold going up.

There were times in the past when they wanted to keep the lit on the price of gold to avoid inflation. But now is not one of those times. Now is the time when the Federal Reserve in fact wants inflation because they desperately want to reduce the real value of the U.S. debt and a depreciation of the dollar is one way to do that. So they do want the price of gold go up. However, they don’t want it to go up too quickly. They want an “orderly adjustment,“ that is the exact word that they use –  orderly as opposed to disorderly. What does that mean? It means that gold goes up 10 or 15 percent a year, which it has by the way, of course, ten years in a row. If it increases that way they do not mind it, because it cheapens the dollar which is what they want. But what they don’t want is to see it maybe double in six month period or a spike, because that might cause a panic buying of gold, a panic dumping of the dollar, and that can get out of control.

My point is simply that I think gold is a very good asset to own, I think it does preserve wealth and will go up in value, although it is not really going up in value – what happens is, of course, that the dollar is going down, nevertheless you will protect yourself against the collapse of the dollar. So investors should own it to some extend and in dollar terms it will go higher, but don’t speculate that it will happen too fast because the central banks are on the other end of the trade and they don’t want that to happen.

Mr. Rickards, a  huge chunk of the foreign gold reserves located at the New York Fed belongs to Germany. What are your thoughts related to the German gold reserve in custody at the NY Fed? Let’s assume you would be the head of the Deutsche Bundesbank with the best interests of the German people in mind – and also keeping in mind that we’re heading to currencies backed by gold: what would you do then in that respect?

It depends on the German gold policy. If Germany wants to leave the monetary policy to the U.S. and is willing to accept whatever policy plans the U.S. comes up with, they should probably leave it where it is. That is a question of confidence. But if Germany wants to pursue its own policies or perhaps have a more gold backed euro or maybe even go back to a Deutsch Mark, then they should bring it to Germany and store it in secure vaults under control of the Deutsche Bundesbank. The reason for this is: as long as it is stays in the United States it is vulnerable to confiscation by the United States. So you really don’t have the control over your own monetary policy as long as your gold is in other hands. During the Cold War, given the Russian threat, I am sure it made sense and was a smart move to have the German gold in New York. But today I would rather be concerned about the Federal Reserve printing presses than about Russian tanks, and thus I would like to have it in Frankfurt.

How do you react to all that “precious metals are in a bubble“ talk? Is this rather amusing for you to observe and to hear?

Yes. It tells me that people who are making that claim are not really familiar with the gold market. It’s funny how there are a certain number of people whom I would consider as true gold experts, but most people on Wall Street, for example, may have some analytical skills, but they are not real experts in gold, they seem to go from trend to trend – one month we see them talking on TV about tech stocks, the next month they are talking about corn or ethanol, and the month after that they are talking about gold. Those people tend to flip from topic and topic. They use for that the very same analytical techniques and are not really prepared to understand that much about gold.

Having said that, I want to argue that gold is definitely not in a bubble. Here is why: First, the trade is very, very uncrowded. I talk to large institutional investors all the time, and they have zero allocation in gold or very small, maybe one percent or one and a half percent. You look at these portfolios and they have 50 percent stocks, 40 percent bonds, the rest hedge funds. To me gold is the most under allocated asset in the world. If gold would simply go up from one percent to two percent in portfolios, there is not enough gold in the world anywhere near current market prices to support that shift. There is an enormous potential to go up just on a extremely modest allocation in the direction of gold.

Secondly, there are ways to measure if gold was in a bubble. You simply take the official gold supply numbers, multiply that by the market price and compare that number with the money supply. If you do that within the United States, you would come to a result of 17 percent. But in 1980, when gold was at $850 per ounce, that number was actually over 100 percent. In other words, at that point gold was so high that every holder of a dollar could have gone to the Fed, cashed in for gold and the United States still would have gold left over. In that situation, where the market value of gold is higher than 100 percent of the money supply, that is arguably a bubble. But we are nowhere near that number today, it is not 100 percent, it is about 17 percent. The two things together tell me that we are not in a bubble.

What would be the most important signals (beyond positive real interest rates) that the end of the bull market in gold is near?

Well, I gave you two metrics to explain why gold is not in a bubble. I would watch them also when we get closer to a bubble territory. For example, gold at $7000 an ounce with the current money supply and the current supply of gold, then we would be back where we were in 1980, and that might indicate a bubble. But we have plenty of room between $1500 and $7000. And remember also: a bubble can always overshoot.

What is your opinion related to the decision of the University of Texas endowment which bought $1 billion of physical gold?

That is very significant, because obviously it is a large endowment with access to the best financial minds of the world, very well advised, and they took that decision, which I believe is a good decision, they will make money on it, and I think it will open a door. It will make it more respectable for other endowments to do the same. There is a little bit like a herding mentality among asset managers and endowment managers, and even if they think there is good case for gold they don’t want to buy it because they fear to be embarrassed or marginalized at conferences as gold nuts. But when a very well advised and respectable endowment of that size such as the University of Texas endowment buys gold it sends a signal to others that they should looking at it. That increases the trend of purchasing gold, which of course is very bullish for the price.

The most interesting story in the future for me is the point in time when the Middle East countries will no longer sell their oil and natural gas for paper money. When do think will they be paid for it with precious metals?

Well, this is all part of an evolution away from the dollar. It has a number of ways to go. I do think that what may happen is that gold will be used as a pricing mechanism. In other words, Middle Eastern and also Russian natural resource exporters may begin to price their goods in units of gold, but accept dollars, but the problem, of course, is that the amount of dollars won’t be fixed. Simple example: right now oil is, I use rounded off numbers, around $ 100 a barrel and gold is around $1500 an ounce, so it takes 15 barrels of oil to purchase one ounce of gold.

By the way, if you look at the oil to gold ratio it has been very constant for a very long period of time. Of course, the price of oil has moved between $30 per barrel and $150 per barrel, and the price of gold has moved between $200 an ounce and $1500 an ounce, but if you look at the ratio, it always hovers around that 15 or 16 to 1 ratio, and that tells you something about the real intrinsic value of commodities.

But be that as it may, you could have a situation where somebody in Saudi Arabia says: From now on a barrel of oil will be 1/15 of an ounce of gold. Now, if you want to pay me in dollars that’s fine, but you have to do the dollar-gold conversion (to figure out how many dollars you owe me in a world of an increasing gold price) that means that you have to pay more dollars for a barrel of oil. So even if they accept dollars you can still have a world where it’s priced in gold, but gold is convertible to dollars and you can pay with dollars but you have to pay a lot more.

I think that is one of a number of solutions on the table. Another one is of course the SDR. The IMF is trying to promote the use of SDR as a basket of currencies. But none of this is feasible yet. It will require some years to study, it will require a conversion process and some pre-announcement for the market. But the bottom-line on the whole thing is: the exporters of natural resources and manufactured goods in the Middle East, in Russia, China, Brazil, they all have indicated deep, deep dissatisfaction with the current international monetary system and the role of the U.S. dollar in particular, so I think you will see some shifting away from that in the years ahead.

And what are your thoughts in that regard related to the war in Libya?

I think that is a small matter within the monetary system, but very important from an energy perspective. People have underestimated the ability of Colonel Gaddafi to remain in power, and part of the reason why they have underestimated it is because they may have been unaware of the fact that he has, as the Financial Times and others have reported, over 100 tonnes of physical gold. And interestingly, his gold is not in New York, it is in Tripoli, and he is actually able to use it to pay his troops. Even though he is now out of the international financial system and his paper assets have been frozen, he still enjoys some freedom with that physical gold. 

Bitcoin—a pseudonymous cryptographic currency designed by an enigmatic, freedom-loving hacker, and currently used by the geek underground to buy and sell everything from servers to cellphone jammers. No, this isn’t a cyberpunk artifact from Snow Crash or Neuromancer; it’s a real currency currently valued several times higher than the US dollar, the British pound, and the Euro.

Bitcoin is a virtual currency, designed to allow people to buy and sell without centralized control by banks or governments, and it allows for pseudonymous transactions which aren’t tied to a real identity. In keeping with the hacker ethos, Bitcoin has no need to trust any central authority; every aspect of the currency is confirmed and secured through the use of strong cryptography.

Over the last few months, Bitcoin’s value has risen by an order of magnitude as the sagas of Wikileaks and Anonymous (among others) have highlighted the limits of a financial system which relies on centralized intermediaries. With a current estimated market capitalization of about $100 million, Bitcoin has recently graduated from a theoretical techno-anarchic project patronized by libertarians and hackers to a full-fledged currency prompting comment from technologists and economists. At the time of this writing, one Bitcoin (BTC) is worth about US$15.

So how does Bitcoin work? Is it really secure? And is it here to stay—or just another digital currency fad? Glad you asked.

Complexities of cryptographic currencies

The problem with purely digital currencies is that of double-spending. Economists in the audience will note that digital products like a movie or a text file are non-rivalrous. If you have a copy of my pseudo-trip-rock band’s new MP3 album, there’s still just as much MP3 to go around for everyone else who wants one. That’s not a problem for files, but it is a problem with currency, since the whole point is that there’s a limited supply. If you use a dollar at the grocery store today, you can’t go out and spend that same dollar at a bar tomorrow.

The usual solution to the double-spending problem is a trusted intermediary. PayPal makes sure that you can’t spend the same dollars twice by deducting them from your account before they get added to someone else’s account. Visa, MasterCard, and every other bank and payment processor do the same. However, this centralized approach is the one that enigmatic creator Satoshi Nakamoto specifically tried to avoid in the original Bitcoin design. The idea was to use cryptography to create verifiable transaction records without the need to trust anyone but your own calculations.

The Bitcoin solution uses cryptography and an open transaction register. Whenever you spend a Bitcoin, you cryptographically sign a statement saying that you have transferred the coin to a new owner and you identify the new owner by their public crypto key. Whenever they need to spend the coin, the new owner uses his private key to sign it over to some further owner. As soon as a transaction takes place, the recipient (who has a very strong incentive to ensure that you don’t spend the coin twice) publishes the transaction to the global Bitcoin network. Now every Bitcoin user has incontrovertible evidence that the coin has been spent, and users won’t accept that coin from anyone but the new owner.

Mining and make-work

As a digital currency, Bitcoin suffers from a tangibility problem. Unlike other currencies traded online, you can’t go to a bank and withdraw physical coins, so what are they? More importantly, where do they come from? Coins are essentially agreements between all the Bitcoin nodes to accept a particular coin as currency. They are created gradually according to a precise protocol in order to reward those who contribute and maintain the network, control the rate of creation of the currency, and maintain the integrity of the transaction list.

In a process known as mining, individual Bitcoin users attempt to generate new coins by checking the integrity of the transactions list. They confirm the previous transactions and attempt to solve a difficult proof-of-work problem which involves exhaustively trying different solutions. There are a very large number of such potential solutions, so the likelihood of finding the solution depends how many other people are looking for it and how much computing power you devote to the problem. The first client to find the solution announces its good fortune to the whole network and earns a little reward for itself in the form of some shiny new Bitcoins.

By finding the newest solution to the proof-of-work problem, a Bitcoin client confirms the history of previous transactions and moved the transaction register forward, allowing new debits and credits to form part of the next block that can be mined to earn more coins. Future coins can’t be mined in advance, because the computation to find the new block (and hence create new Bitcoins) relies on the the chain of previous blocks and the history of transactions since the most recent block.

The number of new coins generated per block gradually decreases over time. It started out at 50 BTC, but will dwindle to zero sometime in future when all 21 million coins have been generated. Fortunately, coins can be divided down to the eighth decimal place, which may prove increasingly useful if their value grows.

What’s a few coins between friends?

One of the difficulties with a novel currency like Bitcoin is adoption and valuation. The same was true when the greenback paper dollar was first introduced, and it’s a real problem with any means of exchange. After all, a currency is little more than something useless but rare which everyone agrees to trade for useful things, whether apples or assault rifles. National currencies have the advantage that governments demand them in taxes and require them to be accepted, which provides both a particular market and a high rate of adoption.

So, why would anyone exchange their hard-won dollars for Bitcoins, or accept Bitcoins in exchange for real products like a carton of milk or a subway ride? As a currency, Bitcoin has a number of desirable features which are not found together in any other currency. Cash has features like anonymity and eminent portability, but also comes with the downside that you have to physically move it from place to place to use it. Credit cards and other trust-based electronic currencies can be used instantly over any distance, but you have to attach your real identity to the purchase.

An anonymous Bitcoin transaction

Bitcoins combine the advantages of the two methods. Using Bitcoins, I can buy a racy t-shirt from Tibet and computer time from China without either merchant knowing who I am, or my bank knowing what I bought. This is useful not just for those purchasing questionable items (the downside of anonymous currency flows), but also for those who don’t want merchants, banks, or card companies to be able to build up detailed profiles of their life, likes, and habits.

Since they’re useful, some people want to use Bitcoins. Since some people want to use them, merchants have an incentive to accept them in order to attract the business of those customers.

This simplified economic model is not uncontested. Ars tech policy contributor Tim Lee has publicly criticized Bitcoin’s economic model, both from the point of view of external market forces and over the internal incentive structures inherent to the protocol. Tech and economic policy commentator Jerry Brito provides a counterpoint, emphasizing Bitcoin’s decentralizaion, which makes it very hard to control, but concedes that it is very hard to distinguish between a currency bubble and currency value.

Bitcoin’s anonymity has already attracted Congressional attention. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) this weekend blasted Silk Road, an online drugs outlet that allegedly relies on TOR to obfuscate Internet traffic and Bitcoins for payment. “It’s an online form of money laundering used to disguise the source of money, and to disguise who’s both selling and buying the drug,” Schumer said.

June 9, 2011 9:26 AM PDT

by Lance Whitney

Responding to a recent report from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization condemning Anonymous, the online “hacktivist” group has issued a public response warning the global organization not to challenge it.

Claiming that the NATO report singled it out as a threat to “government and the people,” Anonymous defended some of its recent actions in the name of freedom and dissent. In its message (Google cached version), it also asserted that NATO fears the group not because it’s a “threat to society,” but because it’s a “threat to the established hierarchy.”

Issued last month by Lord Joplin, general rapporteur of NATO, the report warned member nations about the rising threat of “hacktivism,” or carrying out cyberattacks for political purposes. Singling out Anonymous, NATO described several of the group’s most recent actions, including the distributed denial-of-service attacks against MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Amazon, and others that had cut off services for WikiLeaks.

Noting that Anonymous has become more sophisticated, the NATO report cautioned that it could hack into sensitive government, military, and corporate information and described a strong response against the group.

“Today, the ad hoc international group of hackers and activists is said to have thousands of operatives and has no set rules or membership,” said the report. “It remains to be seen how much time Anonymous has for pursuing such paths. The longer these attacks persist the more likely countermeasures will be developed, implemented, the groups will be infiltrated and perpetrators persecuted.”

In its response, Anonymous tried to soften its stance in parts by saying that it doesn’t want to threaten anyone’s way of life or terrorize any nation. But it made clear its reaction to NATO’s report.

“Finally, do not make the mistake of challenging Anonymous,” warned Anonymous in its message. “Do not make the mistake of believing you can behead a headless snake. If you slice off one head of Hydra, ten more heads will grow in its place. If you cut down one Anon, ten more will join us purely out of anger at your trampling of dissent.”

NATO’s report also provided a larger look into the growing danger of cyberattacks and how governments should respond to them. In the report, Joplin asked the question of how NATO should react if one of its member nations was the victim of a cyberattack.

“Can one invoke Article 5 of the Washington Treaty after a cyber attack?” asked the report. “And what response mechanisms should the Alliance employ against the attacker? Should the retaliation be limited to cyber means only, or should conventional military strikes also be considered?

Both the U.S. and the U.K. have recently made their own positions clear–that they consider cyberwarfare another form of warfare, and one potentially subject to a response using conventional military weapons.

Anonymous has issued a response to a recent NATO report, warning NATO not to challenge it.

(Credit: Screenshot by CNET)

By Fiona Macrae
Last updated at 12:58 AM on 21st May 2011

They have long been famed for their love of lavish banquets and rich recipes.  But what is less well known is that the British royals also had a taste for human flesh.

A new book on medicinal cannibalism has revealed that possibly as recently as the end of the 18th century British royalty swallowed parts of the human body.

The author adds that this was not a practice reserved for monarchs but was widespread among the well-to-do in Europe.

Medicinal cannibalism: Both Queen Mary II and her uncle King Charles II both took distilled human skull on their deathbeds in 1698 and 1685 respectively, according to Dr Sugg

Even as they denounced the barbaric cannibals of the New World, they applied, drank, or wore powdered Egyptian mummy, human fat, flesh, bone, blood, brains and skin.

Moss taken from the skulls of dead soldiers was even used as a cure for nosebleeds, according to Dr Richard Sugg at Durham University.

Dr Sugg said: ‘The human body has been widely used as a therapeutic agent with the most popular treatments involving flesh, bone or blood.

‘Cannibalism was found not only in the New World, as often believed, but also in Europe.

‘One thing we are rarely taught at school yet is evidenced in literary and historic texts of the time is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.

‘Along with Charles II, eminent users or prescribers included Francis I, Elizabeth I’s surgeon John Banister, Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, William III, and Queen Mary.’

New world: Depiction of cannibalism in the Brazilian Tupinambá tribe as described by Hans Staden in 1557. Whether true or not, the myth ignored the fact that Europeans consumed human flesh

The history of medicinal cannibalism, Dr Sugg argues, raised a number of important social questions.

He said: ‘Medicinal cannibalism used the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory.

‘Whilst corpse medicine has sometimes been presented as a medieval therapy, it was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain.

‘It survived well into the 18th century, and amongst the poor it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria.

‘Quite apart from the question of cannibalism, the sourcing of body parts now looks highly unethical to us.

‘In the heyday of medicinal cannibalism bodies or bones were routinely taken from Egyptian tombs and European graveyards. Not only that, but some way into the eighteenth century one of the biggest imports from Ireland into Britain was human skulls.

‘Whether or not all this was worse than the modern black market in human organs is difficult to say.’

This painting of Charles I’s execution in 1649 shows people surging forward to mop up the former king’s blood. It was thought to have healing properties

The book gives numerous vivid, often disturbing examples of the practice, ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas.

A painting showing the 1649 execution of Charles I showed people mopping up the king’s blood with handkerchiefs.

Dr Sugg said: ‘This was used to treat the “king’s evil” - a complaint more usually cured by the touch of living monarchs.

‘Over in continental Europe, where the axe fell routinely on the necks of criminals, blood was the medicine of choice for many epileptics.

‘In Denmark the young Hans Christian Andersen saw parents getting their sick child to drink blood at the scaffold. So popular was this treatment that hangmen routinely had their assistants catch the blood in cups as it spurted from the necks of dying felons.

‘Occasionally a patient might shortcut this system. At one early sixteenth-century execution in Germany, ‘a vagrant grabbed the beheaded body “before it had fallen, and drank the blood from him..”.’

The last recorded instance of this practice in Germany fell in 1865.

History: Author Dr Richard Sugg, from Durham University, delves into the dark world of medicinal cannibalism in his new book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

Whilst James I had refused to take human skull, his grandson Charles II liked the idea so much that he bought the recipe. Having paid perhaps £6,000 for this, he often distilled human skull himself in his private laboratory.

Dr Sugg said: ‘Accordingly known before long as “the King’s Drops”, this fluid remedy was used against epilepsy, convulsions, diseases of the head, and often as an emergency treatment for the dying.

‘It was the very first thing which Charles reached for on February 2 1685, at the start of his last illness, and was administered not only on his deathbed, but on that of Queen Mary in 1698.’

Dr Sugg’s research will be featured in a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary with Tony Robinson in which they reconstruct versions of older cannibalistic medicines with the help of pigs’ brains, blood and skull.

The book, called Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, will be published on June 29 by Routledge and charts the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians.

The waters off Libya are a NATO no-fly zone, which is good news to poachers: No inspectors. No surveillance.

June 1, 2011  |

A war is raging in Libya, but it’s not the one in the news.

Its battles are set in the dazzling Mediterranean offshore. Its warriors are foreign, their motives mostly mercenary.

Their casualties? Atlantic bluefin tuna. Although it’s not an officially endangered species — with help from the Obama administration — overfishing has reduced bluefin populations by 80 percent since 1970. A single bluefin typically sells for $75,000, and that’s what will happen to those caught off Libya, unless Captain Paul Watson, armed with international law and big serrated knives, wins this war.

Two ships from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a nonprofit Watson founded in 1978, nine years after cofounding Greenpeace, are now speeding toward Libyan seas. French, Spanish, German, Italian and Maltese poachers ply these waters with impunity, although the EU has outlawed all fishing here due to Libya’s civil war. It’s a NATO no-fly zone, which is good news to poachers: No inspectors. No surveillance.

Except, that is, for the Sea Shepherd’s 60-foot helicopter-mounted flagship Steve Irwin and its small, swift scout vessel.

“Any boat we find will be an illegal boat,” warns Watson, who says he liberated 800 tuna off Libya last year.

Bluefin are not killed upon being caught, but hauled live in huge underwater nets to shore stations “where they can be fattened up” like feedlot steers, Watson explains. Sea Shepherd divers slit those nets with knives.

It’s the latest in a long series of rip-roaring and highly controversial rescue missions involving blades and ballistics, fire and ice, stink-bombs and blood. Sea Shepherd vessels ram Japanese whalers, get rammed back, and rock wildly under water-cannon fire on Animal Planet’s Whale Wars and in Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist, a new documentary directed by SSCS veteran Peter Brown.

Sea Shepherd crews have scuttled — that is, sunk — at least 10 whaling vessels. Sea Shepherd ships ram whalers, foul their propellers, intercept their harpoons, block their slipways to prevent loading, and barrage them with bottles of foul-smelling butyric acid. In return, Sea Shepherd vessels have been rammed, burned, flash-grenaded, fired upon, and depth-charged — including by a Norwegian naval vessel.

Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist calls Sea Shepherd a “vigilante organization,” its members “a band of pirates” and “the world’s most wanted environmental heroes.” Watson’s many honors include the Amazon Peace Prize and inclusion among the Guardian’s “50 People Who Could Save the Planet.” He has been beaten, suffocated, immersed in icy seas, and even shot in the chest by opponents, he says. He’s been arrested in many countries and charged with many crimes, including attempted murder, but never convicted.

“We don’t do anything illegal. We target illegal operations. Everybody’s so concerned about private property. They think private property is sacred.” But if that private property is being used to flout conservation codes, all deals are apparently off.

“We’re an interventionist organization fighting against poaching on the high seas.”

Recently, Watson was appalled to learn — from Wikileaks, of all places — that Barack Obama colluded with the Japanese government to disempower the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

In a confidential November 2009 cable Wikileaks released this year, the Japanese government asked the US government to revoke SSCS’ tax-exempt status. This cable cited the head of Japan’s fisheries agency as saying that US action against SSCS would “positively influence Japan’s negotiating position” regarding future negotiations over the number of whales legally killed every year. Monica Medina, the Obama administration’s representative to the International Whaling Commission, replied promptly that “the USG” — United States government — “can demonstrate the group does not deserve tax exempt status based on their aggressive and harmful actions.”

“It’s illegal for the US to use the IRS as a weapon against an organization in collusion with a foreign government,” says Watson, whose group has maintained tax-exempt status since 1981. “Obama was making secret deals with Japan. No other president has done this. Every president since Reagan has stood fast on the whaling issue. This is the first administration to swerve. This president has reneged on every offer he ever made for us. I voted for him. That’s what really gets me,” says Watson, who was a Green Party candidate in Vancouver’s 1995 mayoral race.

After last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Watson “wanted to go to the gulf with a boat and clean animals. We were told, ‘If you so much as touch an animal that’s covered with oil, you’ll go to jail.’ So we couldn’t rescue a single animal, because BP owns Obama. He’s an industry guy.”

On May 27 of this year, the Obama administration officially declined to grant endangered species status to the Atlantic bluefin.

“At least Republicans are honest,” Watson says.

So he battles for tuna, cod, salmon, dolphins and the heavily overfished Chilean seabass, which Watson insists cannot be caught sustainably, no matter what their packaging says at Whole Foods. (He says the word “sustainable” is a euphemism for “business as usual.”) He battles for sea cucumbers, whose population has been decimated in the breathtakingly beautiful, mercilessly poached South Pacific. He fights for sharks, as detailed in the gory 2006 documentary Sharkwater. He fights for fur seals, although “I think we won this one. We got the EU to ban seal pelts. Seal pelts are now worthless in Europe.”

And because he fights for whales, “Japan treats Sea Shepherd like we’re a nation they’re at war with. It’s sheer arrogance. They think nobody can tell them what to do.”

In 2009, SSCS insiders went undercover at a trendy California sushi restaurant they’d heard served whale to trusted customers. Sneaked-out samples were DNA-identified as whale. The restaurant closed, its owner and chef slammed with federal charges. Last week, a Los Angeles seafood dealer pled guilty to providing the meat.

“But we know there’s still a large distribution in whale meat among sushi restaurants in America,” Watson says.

“A small group of people will pay a lot of money to eat endangered species. There’s a special thrill in ordering something it’s a federal crime to eat.”

That thrill is alive and well. Mitsubishi Corporation hoards massive quantities of frozen bluefin, hoping to cash in on the species’ collapse.

“Mitsubishi has a five-year supply of bluefin,” Watson explains. “They’d like to get a ten-year supply, because diminishment translates to scarcity and scarcity translates to higher prices. If they drive the bluefin into extinction, we’re looking at a million-dollar fish. So there’s no interest in conserving them.

“I call it the economy of extinction.”

Whale Wars‘ fourth season, which starts this Friday, “will hopefully be our last, because we’ve succeeded in driving the Japanese whaling fleet out of the Southern Ocean. They can move, but they know we will find them.”

So it’s on to Libya — and then the Faroe Islands, a North Sea Danish protectorate where thousands of pilot whales are slaughtered every year for sport. In a tradition known as “the Grind,” massive quantities of whales — entire pods at a time — are corraled into shallow bays, gaffed, slashed, and slain. The sea turns Clamato-red. The crowds rejoice.

“It’s barbaric, a big orgy of slaughter. We’ve got pictures of people ripping fetuses out of pregnant females for fun.”

Five-time Faroese prime minister Atli Dam told Watson “that it’s part of their culture and that God gave this to them. Well, you can’t use culture as a justification for destroying the planet.”

Last fall, he placed a dead baby pilot whale before the Danish Embassy in Paris. The carcass lay in a coffin, atop a European Union flag. Noting that Norway and Iceland can’t join the EU because both kill whales, yet the Faroes enjoy EU benefits through Danish subsidies, Watson demanded that Denmark stop supporting the Faroes until they outlaw the Grind.

“We speak the one language everyone understands: economics,” Watson says. “We don’t try appealing to these people’s morals or ethics, because I don’t believe they have any.”

STEVE LADURANTAYE - The Globe and Mail

Now that’s cross-border shopping: Canadians bought $9.4-billion of U.S. real estate in the last year.

Canadians were the largest foreign buyers of U.S. real estate in the 12 months ending March 31, according to the U.S. National Association of Realtors annual survey, accounting for 23 per cent of all sales to foreigners.

China moved into second place at 9 per cent, while Mexico, Britain and India tied at 7 per cent. Together, foreign buyers spent $43-billion.

From the study:

The total U.S. existing home sales market was approximately $1.07-trillion in the 12-months ending in March 2011. Foreign clients purchased an approximate $41-billion share of homes, the same as the previous year. In addition, recent immigrants (who have moved to the U.S. within the past 2 years) and individuals with visas for more than six months purchased an additional $41-billion, for $82-billion, up from $66-billion reported in 2010.

International buyers came from a total of 70 countries; the top five (Canada, Mexico, China, U.K., and India) accounted for 53 percent of transactions. Most states had at least one international transaction, but four states – Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas – accounted for 58 per cent of transactions.

Proximity to the home country, convenience of air transportation, and climate and location appear to be important considerations to purchasers.

The average price paid by international buyers was $315,000, compared to the overall U.S. average of $218,000. Comparable median prices were $200,000 and $170,000. Approximately 61 per cent of international purchasers bought single family detached homes; the comparable figure for overall U.S. sales was 88 per cent. Approximately 3 per cent of international sales involved the purchase of commercial property.

Almost 80 per cent of agents reported that the value of the U.S. dollar had an impact on international sales. U.S. home prices have declined in recent years in both dollars and euros. When the euro’s value relative to the dollar increases, the real price of a U.S. home to a euro based purchaser declines.

May 20, 2011, 10:27 AM EDT

By Caroline Alexander and Grant Smith

(Updates with council in second paragraph, analysts’ comments starting in fourth, OPEC role starting in sixth.

May 20 (Bloomberg) — The top Iranian legal authority said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s assumption of control over the Oil Ministry this month violates the constitution, signaling a deepening rift in the hierarchy as Iran chairs OPEC.

The Guardian Council, partly appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that it was “unlawful” for Ahmadinejad to have taken up the post, citing Article 135 of Iran’s constitution, state-run Fars news agency reported today.

Ahmadinejad declared himself caretaker of the Oil Ministry in a May 15 interview on state television, a day after dismissing Masoud Mir-Kazemi and two other ministers as part of a plan to combine several departments to improve efficiency.

The council’s comment “ties into a specific point of conflict,” Scott Lucas, an Iran expert at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., said in a phone interview. “It suggests the Guardian Council is pretty much on side with the supreme leader on setting the limits on what Ahmadinejad can do.”

Iran, the second-largest crude producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, took over the group’s one-year rotating presidency on Jan. 1. Traditionally, the OPEC president, who is the sitting oil minister of the country holding the presidency at the time, gives a public speech on behalf of the organization at the start of each ministerial conference.

OPEC Meeting

It wasn’t clear whether the council’s interpretation of the law will have an impact on Ahmadinejad’s attendance at the June 8 meeting of the 12-member bloc in Vienna. Fars reported on May 18 that he would attend the gathering. Ministers will decide whether to raise output limits for the first time since 2008 at this year’s initial OPEC meeting.

Iran is often in favor of limiting oil output to keep prices high. Saudi Arabia, the group’s largest member, typically advocates levels that don’t damp economic growth.

The Iranian president returned to work May 2 after a week- long absence that followed a conflict between him and Khamenei over Ahmadinejad’s acceptance of Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi’s resignation.

Today’s comments by the council show “an increasingly open power struggle,” Samuel Ciszuk of IHS Global Insight said in a telephone interview in London. “He’s challenging his conservative opponents to pretty high degree, and the conservative faction is not backing down.”

Post-Election Protests

Ahmadinejad was re-elected to a second term in June 2009 amid fraud allegations, which sparked the most widespread demonstrations in the country since the 1979 revolution that brought Shiite Muslim clerics to power. The leadership responded to the post-election dissent by authorizing the use of force, arresting thousands. Khamenei backed Ahmadinejad at the time, saying his victory was a “celebration” for the nation.

Article 135 of Iran’s constitution requires that ministers dismissed by the president remain in their position until a replacement is appointed, according to Fars. The president is allowed to select a temporary caretaker for departments without a minister, for a period of up to three months, it said. The council has yet to release its verdict on the matter.

Oil is Iran’s biggest source of foreign revenue, with the price of Iran Light crude gaining 22 percent so far this year to $108.65 a barrel. The ministry oversaw efforts to boost refinery processing to avoid shortages of gasoline following U.S. pressure to curb international sales of the motor fuel to Iran.

–Editors: Heather Langan, Philip Sanders

To contact the reporters on this story: Caroline Alexander in London at calexander1@bloomberg.net; Grant Smith in London at gsmith52@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net; Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net.

By Keith Barry May 23, 2011

Update 5:30 p.m. May 24: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will require that all new vehicles have an event data recorder. The agency is at this point only considering such a requirement.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will later this year propose a requirement that all new vehicles contain an event data recorder, known more commonly as a “black box.” The device, similar to those found in aircraft, records vehicle inputs and, in the event of a crash, provides a snapshot of the final moments before impact.

That snapshot could be viewed by law enforcement, insurance companies and automakers. The device cannot be turned off, and you’ll probably know little more about it than the legal disclosure you’ll find in the owner’s manual.

The proposal looks to some like a gross overreach of government authority, or perhaps an effort by Uncle Sam, the insurance industry and even the automakers to keep tabs on what drivers are doing. But if you’re driving a car with airbags, chances are there’s already one of these devices under your hood.

Automakers have long installed electronic data recorders in their automobiles, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has since late 2006 required automakers to tell consumers about the devices. That federal rule also outlines what information is recorded and stipulates that it be used to increase vehicle safety.

Now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is considering a proposal that would “expand the availability and future utility of EDR data” — in other words, a possible requirement that all automobiles have the devices. The proposal is expected sometime this year. A separate discussion would outline exactly what data would be collected.

Both proposals follow rules adopted in 2006, and how they affect you depends upon where you live and what data points it records. How much it will affect you in the future may depend on a new set of standards that spell out exactly what data is collected and who can access it.

An Incomplete Record
On August 17, 2002, two teenage girls in Pembroke Pines, Florida, died when their vehicle was struck by a Pontiac Firebird Firehawk driven by Edwin Matos. The girls were backing out of their driveway; investigators accessed the vehicle’s data recorder and discovered Matos had been traveling 114 mph in a residential area moments before impact.

Matos was convicted on two counts of manslaughter, but his lawyer appealed the admission of the data recorder evidence, arguing it may have malfunctioned because the car had been extensively modified. The attorney also argued the evidence was based on an evolving technology. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the conviction, however, establishing precedent in that state that data gleaned from event data recorders is admissible in court.

There are two important facts to note in this case. First, Matos was driving in Florida, one of 37 states with no statutes barring the disclosure of such data. While car companies initially claimed ownership of the data, courts eventually ruled that it belongs to vehicle owners and lessees. No federal laws govern access to black box data, and state laws eventually clarified how much data other parties could access.

“The state statutes, starting with one in California, arose out of consumer complaints about insurance companies getting the data without the vehicle owner even knowing that the data existed or had been accessed,” said Dorothy Glancy, a lawyer and professor at Santa Clara Law with extensive experience studying issues of privacy and transportation.

In most of the 13 other states, however, Matos’ black box data still would have been available to police officers armed with a warrant.

“Law enforcement generally has access to the data,” Glancy said.

The second important fact is that, though the court denied Matos’ appeal, the question of the data’s validity remained. Most manufacturers currently use proprietary systems that require specialized interpretation, and many individual event data recorders do not survive crashes intact. Other courts have ruled against the admission of the data.

Setting a Standard

The lack of uniformity concerns Tom Kowalick. He chairs the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers P1616 Standards Working Group on Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorders, one of three panels aiming to set universal standards for event data recorders (EDR).

“Until recently, there has been no industry-standard or recommended practice governing EDR format, method of retrieval, or procedure for archival,” Kowalick said. “Even for a given automaker, there may not be standardized format. This lack of standardization has been an impediment to national-level studies of vehicle and roadside crash safety.”

Standards proposed in 2008 would ensure that data once available only to automakers IS publicly accessible. The new standards would make accessibility universal and prevent data tampering such as odometer fraud.

“It also addresses concerns over privacy rights by establishing standards protecting data from misuse,” Kowalick said.

The standards also propose specific guidelines and technology to prevent the modification, removal or deactivation of an event data recorder.

Those regulations would, in theory, make black box data more reliable than what is currently collected. But they also would prevent drivers from controlling the collection of information — information that they own.

“I am not sure why consumers would want a system in their vehicles that they could not control,” Glancy said.

For What Purpose?

Before shunning new cars and buying a 1953 MG TD to avoid secret tracking devices, it helps to see how the information gleaned from event data recorders is used.

General Motors has been a leader in event data recorder technology, installing them in nearly all vehicles with airbags since the early 1990s. It currently installs Bosch EDRs in all vehicles sold in North America. The technology has evolved and now collects as many as 30 data points, said Brian Everest, GM’s senior manager of field incidents.

“In the early ’90s we could get diagnostic data, seatbelt use and crash severity,” Everest said. “Currently, we can get crash severity, buckle status, precrash data related to how many events the vehicle may have been in and brake application.”

The newest vehicles also can determine steering input and whether lane departure warning systems were turned on.

That info is invaluable in determining how a car responds in a crash. With a vehicle owner or lessee’s permission, crash investigators with access to the data pass on the EDR records to GM, which can determine whether vehicle systems or driver error contributed to an accident. They also can discover what vehicle systems and technologies prevented serious injuries or death.

“It’s about trying to understand what a particular system’s performance did before a crash,” Everest said.

In addition to helping a manufacturer prevent future crashes or injuries, it can also help in defending an automaker against claims of vehicle defects.

“In a great many cases, we can use data to understand whether it had any merit to it or not,” Everest said.

Sometimes the information vindicates an automaker, such as in the case of Toyota’s recent unintended acceleration debacle. Investigators could look directly at vehicle inputs to determine what occurred in each case. In other cases — a problem with unintended low-speed airbag deployment in a 1996 Chevrolet Cavalier, for example — the data reveals a legitimate vehicle defect and leads to a recall being issued.

Safety In The Future

While automakers might like to examine every aspect of a crash, there comes a point where too much data would overload researchers and the relatively inexpensive computers used in vehicles. The last thing car makers — or consumers — want is to increase the price of a vehicle to pay for super-sophisticated event data recorders.

“We’re definitely supportive of additional data,” Everest said. “The drawback on parameters is that you want to understand how it would affect the system,” balancing the need for data with the computing power available from a low-cost EDR.

Other concerns involve law enforcement access to enhanced electronic data recorders or whether dealers or insurance companies could use that data to deny or support claims.

“It usually depends on state law whether they need a subpoena or a warrant,” Glancy said. “Lots of data just gets accessed at the crash scene or the tow yard, as I understand actual practice.”

Whether that information was accessed and interpreted by a trained professional would determine how it held up in court. Insurance companies’ access and use of the data would again be up to state law, said Glancy.

Several insurance companies contacted by Wired.com declined to comment on the issue, but Leah Knapp, a spokesperson for Progressive Insurance, offered that company’s policy. “Our position on EDRs is that we would only use that data in a claims investigation with customer consent or if we’re required to do so by law,” she said. Knapp stressed that manufacturer-installed EDRs are different than incentive programs run by insurance companies that offer a discount for customers who voluntarily install monitoring devices on their vehicles.

Though dealers have access to EDR records, Everest said he knew of no instance where the information was used to void a warranty claim by proving that a customer abused a vehicle.

“Automakers have a duty to warn vehicle owners about safety recalls and the like,” Glancy said. “But you would have to look at the particular warranty to see what would be covered and what would not.” Still, she said she’d “expect that they would” eventually be able to access such data.

It comes down to a balancing act between an individual’s right to privacy and automakers’ need for data to determine the cause of a crash, between the need for a robust reporting system and the computing power available, between state interests in protecting consumers and insurance companies. Whether that balance tilts in favor of drivers remains to be seen — but at least EDR standards ensure a level starting point.

MAY 17–The Drug Enforcement Administration probe that has ensnared a well-known rap music manager is focusing on the shipment of kilos of cocaine from Los Angeles to New York by a narcotics ring that stashed the drug in “road cases” delivered to recording studios, The Smoking Gun has learned.

Payment for the cocaine was sent back to the West Coast in vacuum-sealed packages that were coated with mustard, the pungent smell of which was intended to conceal from drug-sniffing dogs the scent of narcotics on the currency.

To date, the ongoing investigation–which is being overseen by prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn–has resulted in felony charges against about six defendants, several of whom are connected to the rap music industry.

Additionally, an arrest warrant has been issued for James Rosemond, the manager who represents the L.A. rapper The Game. The 46-year-old Rosemond, a convicted felon with a lengthy rap sheet, is pictured in the above mug shot.

In addition to representing The Game (real name: Jayceon Taylor), Rosemond’s Czar Entertainment web site lists Mike Tyson and singer Sean Kingston as clients. His “affiliated artist” roster–whatever that is–includes gangster rapper Rick Ross, R&B singer Akon, and former Haitian presidential candidate Wyclef Jean. In fact, Rosemond was traveling with Jean in Port-au-Prince in March when the performer was reportedly “shot.”

Rosemond’s brother Kesner, 49, has already pleaded guilty to a trafficking charge stemming from the DEA investigation. Kesner Rosemond, who has previously spent a combined total of 12 years in prison on gun and narcotics charges, faces a mandatory minimum of ten years in prison for his latest felony conviction. But Rosemond, pictured in the below mug shot, is likely to be hit with a more severe sentence–perhaps in excess of 15 years–when he is sentenced next month.

The DEA probe began in late-2009 when agents discovered that members of the narcotics ring were sending kilos of cocaine from L.A. to New York City via overnight delivery services like Federal Express. In return, packages of cash were being sent to Mail Boxes Etc. locations in L.A., where they were picked up by the cocaine suppliers.

At one point, federal agents seized three Federal Express boxes containing a total of $452,270 in cash that had been picked up by Maynard Coleman, an alleged member of the drug trafficking ring, at a Beverly Hills mail drop. The currency was found inside plastic bags that were “filled with yellow mustard,” according to an affidavit sworn by Agent Steven Miller.

During subsequent surveillance, Coleman was spotted driving on two different occasions to Mail Boxes Etc. with Henry Butler, whom the DEA identified as one of the ring’s principal cocaine suppliers. Miller reported that investigators last July recovered five kilos of cocaine that Butler sought to mail with the aid of Coleman (who says he works as a “producer/engineer” for Malibu Music Co.) and an unidentified woman.

As a result, Coleman and Butler were charged with drug trafficking.

Butler, who pleaded guilty in mid-March, has been cooperating with federal investigators for several months and has provided significant details about the trafficking operation (during a March 17 plea hearing, federal prosecutor Todd Kaminsky referred to a clause in Butler’s “cooperation agreement”).

While Butler, 45, is scheduled to be sentenced in late-July, that appearance will likely be postponed due to his continuing assistance to the government.

Butler’s cooperation could spell trouble for James Rosemond, whom Butler initially met through his involvement in the music industry. That relationship, a source told TSG, eventually grew to include the trafficking of cocaine.

While charges against Rosemond have not been unsealed, a close associate of his, Khalil Abdullah, was named last month in a five-count indictment charging him with narcotics distribution, cocaine possession, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. The last count stems from the 37-year-old Abdullah’s alleged attempt to pressure Butler into not cooperating with federal officials.

In a sworn affidavit, DEA Agent Arthur Tracy described how members of the narcotics ring transitioned from using Federal Express to move its cocaine to shipping narcotics “in ‘road cases’ that normally store music equipment to various music studios in New York City.” Then, once “Abdullah or his underlings retrieved the road cases from the studios and distributed the cocaine in New York, they would then transport millions of dollars of proceeds from narcotics sales in road cases to music studios in Los Angeles.”

During the course of the DEA probe, Tracy reported, “the government developed evidence demonstrating that Abdullah was one of the leaders” of the cocaine trafficking operation. Abdullah, who is being held without bail, is a convicted felon who has served time for robbery.

In a recent court filing, prosecutors noted that while Abdullah spent time inside recording studios, he “does not work in the music industry and has instead operated businesses in the security industry as well as the hair-extension industry over the past several years.”

Five years into President Felipe Calderon’s war with the drug cartels, a growing number of Mexicans are tired of shopworn excuses from a government which appears to be incapable of protecting the public from murderers and kidnappers. Life in a country which is increasingly being recognized as a “failed state” is leading more and more citizens to the realization that self-defense is the right and responsibility of every human being. That realization is leading to more and more Mexicans procuring firearms, often despite the Mexican regime’s harsh laws regulating their ownership. Angela Kocherga reports for KHOU in Houston that the growing trend toward private gun ownership in Mexico is a result of the government’s utter failure to protect the people:

Despite strict gun-control laws in Mexico, crime scenes are riddled with bullet holes. Both drug cartels and common criminals have guns.  Now more private citizens are arming themselves for protection, even if it means breaking the law.
“People are desperate,” said Rogelio “Chief” Bravo, a private investigator in El Paso who has worked for clients just across the border in Ciudad Juarez too.  “They’re telling the government, if you can’t protect us, let us protect ourselves.”

Government pronouncements regarding the regime’s seemingly-endless war against the drug cartels have taken on a surreal character. For example, Mexico’s chief law enforcement official — Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna (pictured above) — recently declared that it would be at least another four years (and perhaps as many as seven years) before there would be any significant progress in the war against the cartels. And the secretary’s primary concern appeared to be advocacy of President Calderon’s sweeping plans for consolidating the country’s police departments. Meanwhile, the cartels often perpetrate their crimes with little concern for ever being held accountable for their actions; in the city of Apodaca, for example, the police chief and eleven of his bodyguards were recently kidnapped. (As of this date, no further information regarding the missing police officers is available.)

According to Kocherga’s report for KHOU, the people of Mexico actually have a legal right to own firearms set forth in the nation’s constitution. However, the nation’s laws have undermined that right to the point where it is virtually impossible for private citizens to own firearms in a caliber capable of use for self-defense.

Many ordinary residents in Mexico believe guns are banned.
“The Mexican constitution allows people to possess firearms,” explained John Hubert, a certified-concealed hand gun instructor in El Paso. “But over the years the government has passed so many requirements and laws and restrictions that it’s basically almost impossible.”
Hubert and his wife, who is also a certified concealed handgun instructor, own the El Paso Shooters Academy.
They’ve trained licensed gun owners in Texas who are dual Mexican citizens.
“They live here in the states and they also live over there. They’re doing it for protection,” said Kathy Hubert. “We’re kind of phasing that out, unless we know who they are.”
She recalled one family in Mexico who wanted tactical training.
“These people did have a ranch and they had guns. They were doing it for protection, coming over here for more training,” she said.
Gun owners in Mexico by law must register their weapons with the military, which is the only authorized gun dealer. Any weapon above 22 calibers is only authorized for military use.

Consider the fact that the cartels regularly equip their thugs with fully automatic, high caliber weapons, the possession of a “legal” firearm is of little use for self-defense. With a constitutional right purportedly whittled down to nothing more than a right to own a firearm suitable for “plinking,” the people of Mexico have essentially been stripped of their constitutional right to own firearms.

A year ago, President Calderon had the audacity to blame the second amendment rights of Americans for the drug-related violence in Mexico. Since that time, however, the alleged complicity of the American government in both arms and drug smuggling has fundamentally undermined any credibility which Calderon’s claims ever could have mustered.

On the other side of the border, local Texas law enforcement officials have little use for the dezinformatsia spread by Barack Hussein Obama. Obama has mocked citizens who are concerned about the flood of illegal aliens across the Mexican border, and cavalierly dismissed the reasonable fears of the residents of border states who have witnessed the Mexican violence spilling over the border. As reported by BorderlandBeat, the violence which the cartels have unleashed frequently spills over the border:

Texas officials rebuffed President Barack Obama’s claim that the U.S.-Mexico border is secure and told a congressional panel Wednesday that cartel-related crimes in this country are under-reported.
Steve McCraw, Texas Department of Public Safety director, said 22 murders, 24 assaults, 15 shootings and five kidnappings in Texas were linked to Mexican cartels since 2010.
“There are consequences when you don’t secure the border,” McCraw told the subcommittee. “There has been a proliferation of organized crime in Texas.”

For Mexicans and Americans, self-defense is both a right and a responsibility. The tragedy is that the governments that should be committed to the defense of that right are more concerned with restricting the rights of their citizens than stopping the criminals who are spreading chaos and death on both sides of the border.

Suzanne Edwards

May 17, 2011

The New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) has received a lot of media attention lately, as the area has been subject to record flooding, monster tornadoes , increased seismic activity, thousands of mysterious Red Winged Blackbird and fish deaths, sinkholes, and most recently, levees being bombed by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Although initially when many people hear the name “New Madrid” automatically think it is located somewhere in Spain, this sleeping giant’s fault line actually lies smack dab in the middle of the Midwestern and Southern United States. The name does however share some Spanish roots, as it is named after the town of New Madrid (located in the state of Missouri). Back in 1788 when this town was part of the Louisiana territory, it had been a colony of Spain. Historically, this town is best known for notoriously being ravaged by 1000 earthquakes between 1811-1812 when the “Great Quakes” measuring magnitude 7+ rattled the region. It is from this town’s name and the infamous wrath that plagued it, that the name “New Madrid Seismic Zone”was born.

The New Madrid Fault Line runs 150 miles and lies beneath the states of: Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee. It not only crosses 5 state lines, it also cuts the Mississippi River in three places and the Ohio River in two places.

Although hidden, the fault is active, and measures more than 200 measured events a year. Outside of the west coast, it is the highest earthquake risk in the United States. Although not as active as the San Andreas Fault in California, when this sleeping giant awakens , the destruction covers 20 times the punch because of the mere scope of the geographic area it encompasses. Recently, Arkansas was (for the most part), the area along the fault that saw the most recent seismic activity. In fact, the number of quakes Arkansas experienced in 2010 was almost equivalent to what the state experienced in the entire twentieth century.

The active faults within the NMSZ are poorly understood and cannot easily be studied like other active fault regions (like California) because they are not expressed at the ground surface. Complicating matters further, the faults are hidden beneath a couple hundred feet of thick layers of soft river deposited soils called alluvium. Since alluvium is very soft, it erodes in a very short time or may be quickly covered over by new deposits, thereby quickly hiding evidence of earthquake fault lines.

According to some scientists, the possibility of a major earthquake measuring 7.5 or greater happens every 200 years. The last time it occurred in this region was the Great New Madrid Earthquake of 1811-1812 so I guess we are right on schedule should the giant awaken from his 200 year slumber.

FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is conducting a National Level exercise within the New Madrid region. On May 16th. The purpose of this training exercise is to simulate the catastrophic nature of an earthquake of this magnitude within this region. With 2011 being the bicentennial anniversary of the great quakes of 1811-1812 holding these exercises at this time is quite fitting.

One does not have to look very long for information about the New Madrid fault line the web is a buzz with countless conspiracy theory views of how HAARP(High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) will initiate a quake in this region. Many bloggers question why FEMA ordered emergency blankets, underwater body bags, food and water for 7 million survivors within the New Madrid Seismic region, and question why they would spend so much money on something that may happen? Other bloggers speculate that natural gas “fracking” is causing disastrous cracking in the fault line, weakening it further, and that if an earthquake does happen, the natural gas locations would blow in a domino effect like fashion one after the other. Other conspiracy Theorist warn that several nuclear facilities lay along the New Madrid Fault Line and that what recently occurred in Fukushima Japan could actually occur on US soil. Other bloggers point out the striking resemblance of geographic flooding in the NMSZ region as almost identical to that depicted in a future map of the USA (put by the US Navy) that shows the US West Coast , The New Madrid Seismic Zone area , as well as the Eastern seaboard as being all submerged under water. Others speculate that the US Geological Centre (USGC) is taking down larger scale earthquakes in the NMSZ as quickly as they prop up on their website and that there is an ever growing mass media “black out” on mysterious events that have plagued the USA.

With the active fault lines not visible to the naked eye, making it difficult for scientist to study, it may be difficult with 100% accuracy to speculate when the next “Great Quake” will occur. If it does occur within our lifetime, it is estimated that its effects would damage 20 or more states with the state of Missouri alone having sustained at least $6 billion in loss and damages. It is difficult to fathom the devastation of such an event. Something like this could literally split the US in two causing their economy to plummet further and the loss of life would be enormous. Only Mother Nature knows when “Her Giant” will awaken, but I do hope that this “Giant” will remain asleep for a very long time experiencing only dreams of awakening.

Alexa Olesen Associated Press

BEIJING — Watermelons have been bursting by the score in eastern China after farmers gave them overdoses of growth chemicals during wet weather, creating fields of “landmines” instead of the bounty of fruit they wanted.

About 20 farmers around Danyang city in Jiangsu province were affected, losing up to 45 hectares of melon, China Central TV said in an investigative report.

Prices over the past year prompted many farmers to jump into the watermelon market. All of those with exploding melons apparently were first-time users of the growth accelerator forchlorfenuron, though it has been widely available for some time, CCTV said.

The farmers used it during an overly rainy period and put it on too late in the season, causing the melons to burst open, CCTV said, citing agricultural experts.

Chinese regulations don’t forbid the drug, and it is allowed in the U.S. on kiwi fruit and grapes. But the report underscores how farmers in China are abusing both legal and illegal chemicals, with many farms misusing pesticides and fertilizers.

Farmer Liu Mingsuo ended up with three hectares of ruined fruit and told CCTV that seeing his crop splitting open was like a knife cutting his heart.

“On May 7, I came out and counted 80 (burst watermelons) but by the afternoon it was 100,” Liu said. “Two days later I didn’t bother to count anymore.”

Intact watermelons were being sold at a wholesale market in nearby Shanghai, the report said, but even those showed telltale signs of forchlorfenuron use: fibrous, misshapen fruit with mostly white instead of black seeds.

The government has voiced alarm over the widespread overuse of food additives like dyes and sweeteners that retailers hope will make food more attractive and boost sales.

Though Chinese media remain under strict government control, domestic coverage of food safety scandals has become more aggressive in recent months, an apparent sign that the government has realized it needs help policing the troubled food industry.

The CCTV report quoted Feng Shuangqing, a professor at the China Agricultural University, as saying the watermelon problem showed that China needs to clarify its farm chemical standards and supervision to protect consumer health.

The broadcaster described the watermelons as “landmines” and said they were exploding by the hectare in the Danyang area.

Many of farmers resorted to chopping up the fruit and feeding it to fish and pigs, the report said.

By MARK MAZZETTI and EMILY B. HAGER

Correction Appended

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.

The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.

The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.

In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.

The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.

“The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.”

Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.

Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr. Prince’s company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops in Jordan and other countries over the years.

The U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment.

For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses, obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity. He hopes to earn billions more, the former employees said, by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments.

Knowing that his ventures are magnets for controversy, Mr. Prince has masked his involvement with the mercenary battalion. His name is not included on contracts and most other corporate documents, and company insiders have at times tried to hide his identity by referring to him by the code name “Kingfish.” But three former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements, and two people involved in security contracting described Mr. Prince’s central role.

The former employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from halfway around the world, Mr. Prince’s subordinates were following his strict rule: hire no Muslims.

Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims.

A Lucrative Deal

Last spring, as waiters in the lobby of the Park Arjaan by Rotana Hotel passed by carrying cups of Turkish coffee, a small team of Blackwater and American military veterans huddled over plans for the foreign battalion. Armed with a black suitcase stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of dirhams, the local currency, they began paying the first bills.

The company, often called R2, was licensed last March with 51 percent local ownership, a typical arrangement in the Emirates. It received about $21 million in start-up capital from the U.A.E., the former employees said.

Mr. Prince made the deal with Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The two men had known each other for several years, and it was the prince’s idea to build a foreign commando force for his country.

Savvy and pro-Western, the prince was educated at the Sandhurst military academy in Britain and formed close ties with American military officials. He is also one of the region’s staunchest hawks on Iran and is skeptical that his giant neighbor across the Strait of Hormuz will give up its nuclear program.

“He sees the logic of war dominating the region, and this thinking explains his near-obsessive efforts to build up his armed forces,” said a November 2009 cable from the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi that was obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

For Mr. Prince, a 41-year-old former member of the Navy Seals, the battalion was an opportunity to turn vision into reality. At Blackwater, which had collected billions of dollars in security contracts from the United States government, he had hoped to build an army for hire that could be deployed to crisis zones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He even had proposed that the Central Intelligence Agency use his company for special operations missions around the globe, but to no avail. In Abu Dhabi, which he praised in an Emirati newspaper interview last year for its “pro-business” climate, he got another chance.

Mr. Prince’s exploits, both real and rumored, are the subject of fevered discussions in the private security world. He has worked with the Emirati government on various ventures in the past year, including an operation using South African mercenaries to train Somalis to fight pirates. There was talk, too, that he was hatching a scheme last year to cap the Icelandic volcano then spewing ash across Northern Europe.

The team in the hotel lobby was led by Ricky Chambers, known as C. T., a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had worked for Mr. Prince for years; most recently, he had run a program training Afghan troops for a Blackwater subsidiary called Paravant.

He was among the half-dozen or so Americans who would serve as top managers of the project, receiving nearly $300,000 in annual compensation. Mr. Chambers and Mr. Prince soon began quietly luring American contractors from Afghanistan, Iraq and other danger spots with pay packages that topped out at more than $200,000 a year, according to a budget document. Many of those who signed on as trainers — which eventually included more than 40 veteran American, European and South African commandos — did not know of Mr. Prince’s involvement, the former employees said.

Mr. Chambers did not respond to requests for comment.

He and Mr. Prince also began looking for soldiers. They lined up Thor Global Enterprises, a company on the Caribbean island of Tortola specializing in “placing foreign servicemen in private security positions overseas,” according to a contract signed last May. The recruits would be paid about $150 a day.

Within months, large tracts of desert were bulldozed and barracks constructed. The Emirates were to provide weapons and equipment for the mercenary force, supplying everything from M-16 rifles to mortars, Leatherman knives to Land Rovers. They agreed to buy parachutes, motorcycles, rucksacks — and 24,000 pairs of socks.

To keep a low profile, Mr. Prince rarely visited the camp or a cluster of luxury villas near the Abu Dhabi airport, where R2 executives and Emirati military officers fine-tune the training schedules and arrange weapons deliveries for the battalion, former employees said. He would show up, they said, in an office suite at the DAS Tower — a skyscraper just steps from Abu Dhabi’s Corniche beach, where sunbathers lounge as cigarette boats and water scooters whiz by. Staff members there manage a number of companies that the former employees say are carrying out secret work for the Emirati government.

Emirati law prohibits disclosure of incorporation records for businesses, which typically list company officers, but it does require them to post company names on offices and storefronts. Over the past year, the sign outside the suite has changed at least twice — it now says Assurance Management Consulting.

While the documents — including contracts, budget sheets and blueprints — obtained by The Times do not mention Mr. Prince, the former employees said he negotiated the U.A.E. deal. Corporate documents describe the battalion’s possible tasks: intelligence gathering, urban combat, the securing of nuclear and radioactive materials, humanitarian missions and special operations “to destroy enemy personnel and equipment.”

One document describes “crowd-control operations” where the crowd “is not armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons (clubs and stones).”

People involved in the project and American officials said that the Emiratis were interested in deploying the battalion to respond to terrorist attacks and put down uprisings inside the country’s sprawling labor camps, which house the Pakistanis, Filipinos and other foreigners who make up the bulk of the country’s work force. The foreign military force was planned months before the so-called Arab Spring revolts that many experts believe are unlikely to spread to the U.A.E. Iran was a particular concern.

An Eye on Iran

Although there was no expectation that the mercenary troops would be used for a stealth attack on Iran, Emirati officials talked of using them for a possible maritime and air assault to reclaim a chain of islands, mostly uninhabited, in the Persian Gulf that are the subject of a dispute between Iran and the U.A.E., the former employees said. Iran has sent military forces to at least one of the islands, Abu Musa, and Emirati officials have long been eager to retake the islands and tap their potential oil reserves.

The Emirates have a small military that includes army, air force and naval units as well as a small special operations contingent, which served in Afghanistan, but over all, their forces are considered inexperienced.

In recent years, the Emirati government has showered American defense companies with billions of dollars to help strengthen the country’s security. A company run by Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser during the Clinton and Bush administrations, has won several lucrative contracts to advise the U.A.E. on how to protect its infrastructure.

Some security consultants believe that Mr. Prince’s efforts to bolster the Emirates’ defenses against an Iranian threat might yield some benefits for the American government, which shares the U.A.E.’s concern about creeping Iranian influence in the region.

“As much as Erik Prince is a pariah in the United States, he may be just what the doctor ordered in the U.A.E.,” said an American security consultant with knowledge of R2’s work.

The contract includes a one-paragraph legal and ethics policy noting that R2 should institute accountability and disciplinary procedures. “The overall goal,” the contract states, “is to ensure that the team members supporting this effort continuously cast the program in a professional and moral light that will hold up to a level of media scrutiny.”

But former employees said that R2’s leaders never directly grappled with some fundamental questions about the operation. International laws governing private armies and mercenaries are murky, but would the Americans overseeing the training of a foreign army on foreign soil be breaking United States law?

Susan Kovarovics, an international trade lawyer who advises companies about export controls, said that because Reflex Responses was an Emirati company it might not need State Department authorization for its activities.

But she said that any Americans working on the project might run legal risks if they did not get government approval to participate in training the foreign troops.

Basic operational issues, too, were not addressed, the former employees said. What were the battalion’s rules of engagement? What if civilians were killed during an operation? And could a Latin American commando force deployed in the Middle East really be kept a secret?

Imported Soldiers

The first waves of mercenaries began arriving last summer. Among them was a 13-year veteran of Colombia’s National Police force named Calixto Rincón, 42, who joined the operation with hopes of providing for his family and seeing a new part of the world.

“We were practically an army for the Emirates,” Mr. Rincón, now back in Bogotá, Colombia, said in an interview. “They wanted people who had a lot of experience in countries with conflicts, like Colombia.”

Mr. Rincón’s visa carried a special stamp from the U.A.E. military intelligence branch, which is overseeing the entire project, that allowed him to move through customs and immigration without being questioned.

He soon found himself in the midst of the camp’s daily routines, which mirrored those of American military training. “We would get up at 5 a.m. and we would start physical exercises,” Mr. Rincón said. His assignment included manual labor at the expanding complex, he said. Other former employees said the troops — outfitted in Emirati military uniforms — were split into companies to work on basic infantry maneuvers, learn navigation skills and practice sniper training.

R2 spends roughly $9 million per month maintaining the battalion, which includes expenditures for employee salaries, ammunition and wages for dozens of domestic workers who cook meals, wash clothes and clean the camp, a former employee said. Mr. Rincón said that he and his companions never wanted for anything, and that their American leaders even arranged to have a chef travel from Colombia to make traditional soups.

But the secrecy of the project has sometimes created a prisonlike environment. “We didn’t have permission to even look through the door,” Mr. Rincón said. “We were only allowed outside for our morning jog, and all we could see was sand everywhere.”

The Emirates wanted the troops to be ready to deploy just weeks after stepping off the plane, but it quickly became clear that the Colombians’ military skills fell far below expectations. “Some of these kids couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” said a former employee. Other recruits admitted to never having fired a weapon.

Rethinking Roles

As a result, the veteran American and foreign commandos training the battalion have had to rethink their roles. They had planned to act only as “advisers” during missions — meaning they would not fire weapons — but over time, they realized that they would have to fight side by side with their troops, former officials said.

Making matters worse, the recruitment pipeline began drying up. Former employees said that Thor struggled to sign up, and keep, enough men on the ground. Mr. Rincón developed a hernia and was forced to return to Colombia, while others were dismissed from the program for drug use or poor conduct.

And R2’s own corporate leadership has also been in flux. Mr. Chambers, who helped develop the project, left after several months. A handful of other top executives, some of them former Blackwater employees, have been hired, then fired within weeks.

To bolster the force, R2 recruited a platoon of South African mercenaries, including some veterans of Executive Outcomes, a South African company notorious for suppressing rebellions against African strongmen in the 1990s. The platoon was to function as a quick-reaction force, American officials and former employees said, and began training for a practice mission: a terrorist attack on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the world’s tallest building. They would secure the situation before quietly handing over control to Emirati troops.

But by last November, the battalion was officially behind schedule. The original goal was for the 800-man force to be ready by March 31; recently, former employees said, the battalion’s size was reduced to about 580 men.

Emirati military officials had promised that if this first battalion was a success, they would pay for an entire brigade of several thousand men. The new contracts would be worth billions, and would help with Mr. Prince’s next big project: a desert training complex for foreign troops patterned after Blackwater’s compound in Moyock, N.C. But before moving ahead, U.A.E. military officials have insisted that the battalion prove itself in a “real world mission.”

That has yet to happen. So far, the Latin American troops have been taken off the base only to shop and for occasional entertainment.

On a recent spring night though, after months stationed in the desert, they boarded an unmarked bus and were driven to hotels in central Dubai, a former employee said. There, some R2 executives had arranged for them to spend the evening with prostitutes.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Abu Dhabi and Washington, and Emily B. Hager from New York. Jenny Carolina González and Simon Romero contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia. Kitty Bennett contributed research from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 19, 2011

An article on Sunday about the creation of a mercenary battalion in the United Arab Emirates misstated the past work of Executive Outcomes, a former South African mercenary firm whose veterans have been recruited for the new battalion. Executive Outcomes was hired by several African governments during the 1990s to put down rebellions and protect oil and diamond reserves; it did not stage coup attempts. (Some former Executive Outcomes employees participated in a 2004 coup attempt against the government of Equatorial Guinea, several years after the company itself shut down.)

Correction: June 7, 2011

An article on May 15 about efforts to build a battalion of foreign mercenary troops in the United Arab Emirates referred imprecisely to the role played by Erik Prince, the founder of the security firm Blackwater Worldwide. He worked to oversee the effort and recruit troops. But Mr. Prince does not run or own the company Reflex Responses, which has a contract with the government of the U.A.E. to train and deliver the troops, according to the company president, Michael Roumi. An article on May 16 repeated the error.

By Greg Weston

The same day Canada publicly refused to join the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a high-ranking Canadian official was secretly promising the Americans clandestine military support for the fiercely controversial operation.

The revelation that Canadian forces may have secretly participated in the invasion of Iraq is contained in a classified U.S. diplomatic memo obtained exclusively by CBC News from the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

On March 17, 2003, two days before U.S. warplanes launched their attack on Baghdad, prime minister Jean Chrétien told the House of Commons that Canadian forces would not be joining what the administration of then U.S. president George W. Bush dubbed the “coalition of the willing.”

Chrétien’s apparent refusal to back the Bush administration’s invasion, purportedly launched to seize weapons of mass destruction possessed by Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein (which were never found), was hugely popular in Canada, widely hailed as nothing less than a defining moment of national sovereignty.

But even as Chrétien told the Commons that Canada wouldn’t participate in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Canadian diplomats were secretly telling their U.S. counterparts something entirely different.

The classified U.S. document obtained from WikiLeaks shows senior Canadian officials met that same day with high-ranking American and British diplomats at Foreign Affairs headquarters in Ottawa.

The confidential note, written by a U.S. diplomat at the gathering, states that Foreign Affairs official James Wright waited until after the official meeting to impart the most important news of all.

According to the U.S. account, Wright “emphasized” that contrary to public statements by the prime minister, Canadian naval and air forces could be “discreetly” put to use during the pending U.S.-led assault on Iraq and its aftermath.

At that time, Canada had warships, aircraft and over 1,200 naval personnel already in the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, intercepting potential militant vessels and providing safe escort to other ships as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, the post-Sept. 11, 2001, multinational war on terrorism.

‘While for domestic political reasons… [Canada] has decided not to join in a U.S. coalition,… they are also prepared to be as helpful as possible in the military margins’ —Secret U.S. diplomatic cable

The U.S. briefing note states: “Following the meeting, political director Jim Wright emphasized that, despite public statements that the Canadian assets in the Straits of Hormuz will remain in the region exclusively to support Enduring Freedom, they will also be available to provide escort services in the Straits and will otherwise be discreetly useful to the military effort.

“The two ships in the Straits now are being augmented by two more en route, and there are patrol and supply aircraft in the U.A.E. [United Arab Emirates] which are also prepared to ‘be useful.’

“This message tracks with others we have heard,” the U.S. diplomat wrote in his briefing note to State Department bosses in Washington.

“While for domestic political reasons… the GOC [Government of Canada] has decided not to join in a U.S. coalition of the willing,… they are also prepared to be as helpful as possible in the military margins.”

‘Please destroy cable’

The original U.S. briefing cable, dated the day of the meeting, was marked “unclassified.” Two days later, the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa issued an urgent internal notice to “please destroy previous cable,” replacing it with the same message but marked “confidential.”

The Canadian official involved, James Wright, is now Canada’s high commissioner in London. He declined to comment for this report.

The U.S. ambassador to Canada at the time, Paul Cellucci, says he couldn’t be at the meeting in Ottawa that day — he was stranded in a snowstorm in the U.S. — but the version of events in the leaked memo “sounds right.”

“The message from the Canadians was pretty clear,” Cellucci told CBC News. “We are not putting boots on the ground in Iraq. We will say good things about the United States and not-so-good things about Saddam Hussein.”

And finally: “We will keep our ships in the Persian Gulf helping in the war on terror — and any way else we can help.”

Exactly what that meant for the Canadian naval ships and surveillance aircraft in the Gulf region at the time — and how much they ultimately became involved in the Iraq war — remains a matter of considerable debate.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the duties of the Canadian ships had been mainly to protect other vessels from attacks by militants and to intercept craft suspected of gun-running and other potentially militant-related activities.

The issue is what, if anything, changed after the Chrétien government decreed those ships and aircraft couldn’t be involved in intercepting vessels connected to the Iraq war.

Three months before the Iraq invasion, the then Canadian defence minister John McCallum, right, met with U.S. counterpart Donald Rumsfeld, left, whose diplomats had told him to keep his expectations ‘modest’ for what Canada might contribute to the war. (CBC)

Eugene Lang, chief of staff to then defence minister John McCallum, says there was no end of internal debate over whether the Canadian Forces were being put into a mission impossible.

“How do you know if something is connected to terrorism or Iraq? When you are intercepting unknown boats, you don’t know what you have taken over until you have taken it over.”

Lang says that after “painful” consultations with federal lawyers, the Department of National Defence issued Canadian naval commanders in the Gulf clear orders not to engage in anything to do with Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“But who knows whether in fact we were doing things indirectly for Iraqi Freedom? It is quite possible.”

McCallum’s former chief recalled a bitter internal battle over whether to pull the Canadian ships out of the Gulf altogether to avoid any confusion.

“For a long time, the [Canadian] military pushed really hard not to be in Afghanistan, and instead be part of a full-blown boots-on-the-ground Iraq invasion,” Lang said.

“So the military was dead set against pulling out [of the Gulf], and in the end the government decided we would stay mainly, I think, for Canada-U.S. relations.”

Former defence minister McCallum recalls he and his officials having “extremely long and detailed meetings to make sure that we were not in fact committing to help the war in Iraq.”

“Now, what happens on the high seas is not something I can prove or disprove, but those were the orders that the military had.”

U.S. didn’t seem to care

Ironically, after all the fuss, the Americans didn’t seem to care whether Canada contributed a lot of military might to the Iraq mission.

A former senior Canadian bureaucrat said: “The Americans knew we were stretched to the limit on the military side, and they really just wanted a political endorsement of their plan to go into Iraq.”

Former U.S. ambassador Cellucci concurred: “We were looking for moral support. That’s all we were looking for.… We were looking for ‘we support the Americans.’ ”

Flight deck crew watch as a U.S. F/A-18 Hornet launches from an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf one week into the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Canada had two warships nearby at the time, and secretly offered to make them ‘useful’ to the U.S., a leaked American document says. (Steve Helber/Associated Press)

Then defence minister McCallum met with his counterpart, U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, three months before the Iraq invasion. McCallum recalls Rumsfeld never even mentioned Canada’s possible military contribution to Iraq.

A U.S. diplomatic briefing note prepared for Rumsfeld prior to the meeting states: “As for what Canada might bring to the table, our expectations should be modest.”

The memo, also obtained by CBC News from WikiLeaks, goes on to say: “Canada probably would need to use assets currently devoted to Operation Enduring Freedom, including a naval task group [in the Gulf] and patrol and transport aircraft.”

If the secret U.S. memos cast doubts on Canada’s status as a refusenik of the Iraq war, the public also didn’t exactly get the whole truth about a group of Canadian soldiers the government admitted were in Iraq.

From the outset, the Chrétien government said a “few” Canadian soldiers embedded with the U.S. and British militaries as exchange officers would be allowed to remain in their positions, even if they wound up in Iraq.

While the revelation caused a ruckus in Parliament, it all sounded relatively innocuous at the time.

But Lang, defence minister McCallum’s chief of staff, says military brass were not entirely forthcoming on the issue. For instance, he says, even McCallum initially didn’t know those soldiers were helping to plan the invasion of Iraq up to the highest levels of command, including a Canadian general.

That general is Walt Natynczyk, now Canada’s chief of defence staff, who eight months after the invasion became deputy commander of 35,000 U.S. soldiers and other allied forces in Iraq. Lang says Natynczyk was also part of the team of mainly senior U.S. military brass that helped prepare for the invasion from a mobile command in Kuwait.

The Department of National Defence refused to comment on Natynczyk’s role, if any, in the invasion of Iraq.

Ever since he could remember, Ibrahim Boakye had a knack for understanding how things worked. There were things he could just do that no other kids– let alone adults– could understand. By the time he was five-years-old everyone had stopped questioning it, and neighbors were calling on him to fix their broken toasters, irons, or anything that was the least bit mechanical.By his early teens, he was getting things out of the dump and fixing them for fun. Soon after that, he was teaching himself to code. He’s made an outsized living no one in his family could have anticipated by outsmarting other people on computers ever since. It’s never been about money or even in those early days about doing good deeds around the neighborhood. He gets an intoxicating rush from solving the hardest technical problem he can find and from knowing that he’s the best.

As I sat in a hotel lobby in Lagos listening to his story, I couldn’t help being reminded of Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide fame. Levchin grew up in Soviet Russia and had the same knack, that same innate ability to understand how machines worked. He learned to code on whatever he could find– calculators, pen and paper, old Soviet microcomputers. When his family moved to America, he rebuilt things he found in dumpsters too. Watching the nightly news on a old black-and-white TV helped teach him English.

For Levchin, it was also about the thrill. He once got in trouble with the FBI for cracking video game codes for a Chicago crime boss. He didn’t really think about the fact that he was doing something illegal, he just loved the challenge. And like Boakye, he’s made an outsized living no one in his family could have anticipated by outsmarting other people on computers ever since. His rush also comes from solving the hardest technical problem he can find, and from knowing that he is the best.

But there’s a big difference between the two. Levchin immigrated to the US at 16, went to University of Illinois and was inspired by the example of Marc Andreessen. He moved to Silicon Valley at the best possible time for an aggressive, insanely-competitive coder to move to Silicon Valley. A company as complex and lasting as PayPal was hardly all luck and timing, but Levchin took advantage of being in the right place at the right time and meeting the right people, most notably PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

By contrast, Boakye grew up in a poor section of Lagos. In a way, his timing was also serendipitous: The Internet’s emergence in Nigeria breathed new life into an old national scam: The 419 letter. And a new generation was making hay out of the naiveté of millions of new Internet users. For Nigeria’s massive unemployed population– some fifty million people today– this was every bit the gold rush that Silicon Valley was in the 1990s. And the “entrepreneurs” concocting these schemes late night after the doors were locked in Nigeria’s Internet cafes needed a brilliant coder who was more motivated the bigger the challenge. Boakye was one of the best in the country.

Like Levchin, he took advantage of being in the right place at the right time and having the right skills. Only most would say he met the wrong kind of people. At his peak he was making as much as $50,000 per day as a freelancer hacking into bank systems, stealing social security numbers and credit cards, and exposing the Web’s deepest vulnerabilities for Nigeria’s “Yahoo boys,” called that because they were known for using Yahoo email addresses.

Boakye has since left the life of crime, he says. We met my last day in Lagos; one of nearly a dozen interviews I did with current and reformed Yahoo boys in Nigeria. I won’t detail how I got the meetings, because of the elaborate personal assurances of safety. I’ve taken pains to disguise any details about the man whose name is obviously not really Ibrahim Boakye. Appropriately, I got that name off the most recent 419 email I found in my spam folder. Some of the juiciest parts of the accounts I won’t detail here, lest it put the people who personally vouched for me at risk.

Finding Yahoo boys to talk to me was near-impossible; a big change from a few years ago. The 419 scammers used to be the rockstars of Nigeria’s underground world. “Girls wanted to date us because we were smart,” one told me. “We could get money out of white men using only our brains and a computer.” There was also the justification that this was some how a revenge for colonialism; when white men took Africa’s natural resources without consent. And– as is the case with every black market– there was the lure of all that cash. Skills were flaunted in cafes, whole organizations were built out, and even rap songs were written glorifying 419.

It’s much harder to make money today. That’s mostly because Internet companies have made it harder, through restricting mass emails and educating people not to purchase any goods from Nigeria. Most ecommerce sites block Nigerian ISPs. And consumers have gotten smarter, too, the Yahoo boys say. The Nigerian government has also made greater efforts to crack down, under International pressure and pressure from the country’s legitimate tech entrepreneurs who are furious at the Yahoo boys for globally sullying the country’s reputation. The people still doing it have been driven underground, forced to keep a low profile. They don’t talk about what they do even with friends. They can’t trust anyone. One current scammer told me he couldn’t invite friends over because of the noticeable stench in his bedroom from all the stacks of money stashed under his bed.

For most of the day, I sat transfixed listening to their stories. Of course it was impossible to know whether they were telling the truth about everything. But so many of the individual stories corresponded to one another, and the complex systems of scamming were too elaborate to have been made up on the spot. Each boy would start telling his stories shyly, but once he got going he couldn’t help but boast about his methods. Sometimes the hardest thing about committing the perfect crime can be keeping your genius to yourself.

Boakye’s sheer hacker genius was the most astounding. It’s not just technical ability– he tries to figure out how the person who set up the security system he’s trying to break thinks, and outsmart him at his own game. If he can’t crack the software, he studies the hardware and learns its vulnerabilities.

The way he described the chess match with this unknown nemesis reminded me of another entrepreneur in the Valley: Dennis Fong. Fong spent his teens as a professional gamer, better known by the name “Thresh.” He rarely lost thanks to an uncanny ability to anticipate opponents’ moves. Opponents called it “Thresh ESP,” and it earned him six-figure computing endorsement deals. The way Boakye explained how he breaks into multi-national banks was identical to Thresh’s approach. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s hacked into at least one of my accounts by now just out of curiosity. I asked him not to do anything malicious, and he promised he wouldn’t. But we were both pretty convinced he could.

As a person, I found these meeting more terrifying than my run in with Bones and his machete men in Alaba. As a business reporter, I couldn’t stop the broad smile from spreading across my face as we spoke, even breaking out in laughter once or twice. It’s the same Cheshire cat grin I get when I meet any amazing entrepreneur, anywhere in the world. You know them after five minutes of conversation. And several of these guys just had it. Born into a different circumstance, they could be on the cover of any magazine, ringing the opening bell at the Nasdaq.

This is the darkside of what we know in Silicon Valley: That great entrepreneurs can come from anywhere in the world. Sometimes some of the best technical minds fall into a life of crime. And just like corporate giants can’t keep a hot startup from disrupting them; law enforcement can’t keep people like Boakye from accessing your information.

There weren’t just stunning personality comparisons between someone like Boakye and Fong or Levchin, there were stunning industry comparisons. Like entrepreneurs in the Valley, the industry has evolved to the point where few of them need to be hard-core techies. Today, the Nigerians focus on user experience– put a less euphemistic way, their job is to find the mark and rope him or her in. Any hardcore hacking work is outsourced to Vietnam, India or elsewhere– particularly now that Boakye has retired from crime. One Yahoo boy told me he met his Vietnamese partner online when he tried to scam him. The man wrote back, “I’m not going to fall for this, but I know what you are doing and I can help you.” The world is flat for criminals too.

Don’t let the clunky syntax on these emails fool you. The Yahoo boys I met are masters of human manipulation. The latest scam revolves around online dating. Yahoo boys find a lonely man– sometimes a single man who wants a mail-order bride; sometimes a married one with kids who wants an escape on the side. They key with 419 scams is always finding someone who wants a easy shortcut in money or love. An elaborate relationship over IM begins. One boy I met excelled at these. He says he just closes his eyes and pretends it’s a woman on the other end he’s seducing. He uses carefully constructed porn clips for video chats; other scammers hire actresses to portray the fictional girls.

This Yahoo boy carries on five to seven relationships at once, playing the dutiful girlfriend to each– down to helping them pick out their clothes for work everyday. When one suitor lost a job, he used the Web to help find him an interview and pumped up his confidence to apply. He gave him several months to get back on his feet before asking for more cash. One time, he even sent the mark cash, to show how much he — or “she”– cared. “I take care of them,” he says. “They are the people who feed me.”

He helps build them up; he listens to their problems. He makes them feel loved. He calls each an innocuous pet name, lest he accidentally type the wrong message into the wrong chat window. He asks for a little bit of money here and there, until men are sending him steady amounts from each paycheck. He says it takes exactly one month for a man to fall in love with him, and once he has a man’s heart, no woman can take it.

This isn’t a short con, this is a long term game of constant maintenance. He creates fictional Web pages to back up the fictional girl’s story, so if the man Google’s her, he finds seemingly legitimate confirmation. When he goes to church, he tells them “she’s” going to church. When he makes dinner he tells them “she’s” making dinner. He’s less a 419 scammer, and more a long-distance emotional prostitute, providing a service men appear to be happy to pay for. Like any great entrepreneur, this Yahoo boy knows his customer. “if you get their heart, you have control,” he says. “You white people have very flexible hearts. We’ve seen it. That’s why there can be no true love in Nigeria. Your closest friends rip you off here.” He continued, “I wish I could stop. I’m not into the black man power like some people. I don’t want to make someone sell their house; I don’t want to take everything. I just can’t find a job. If I had a junior brother I wouldn’t teach him. You get addicted to it.”

Just like you have people in the Valley looking to flip products and those in it for the long haul; in the 419 world you have kids who try it out for easy money, and those who commit to it. To be successful today you have to work as many hours as a Valley Internet entrepreneur and have just as long term of a focus. There’s just as much creative problem solving involved; this is something you can’t really teach. A lot of these Yahoo boys told me they’ve tried to take on apprentices, but few of them last. It’s not the glamorous, quick-money world it used to be. Today being a scammer takes smarts and stamina.

Nigeria is undoubtably one of the juiciest markets in the emerging world, and by many accounts the juiciest in all of Africa. And legitimate tech entrepreneurs will be understandably upset about Western reporters fixating on the 419 world. But if they want to stay in Nigeria, they’ll have to get used to it. These kids, the circumstances that created them, and the lasting impact of the damage they’ve done to people aren’t issues the country can shrug off no matter how much it would like to. “We use our brains to get what we want. For us it’s the only way to live and survive,” one boy said. “As long as technology keeps advancing, there is no way to stop us.”

It’s Nigeria’s central issue that it will have to face, own up to, and tackle if the country is going to play a greater role in the global economy. Ignoring it is like ignoring China’s lack of political freedom; India’s deep poverty and infrastructure problems; or the civil war going on in Brazil’s favelas between drug lords and the frequently corrupt policemen cracking down on them. The reason Westerners tend to fixate on these issues isn’t because we’re opting for easy stereotypes. It’s because they are each huge problems without easy solutions. Problems that have to be faced. And you face them by talking to the real people behind them, not by sweeping them under a rug, assuming they’re all two-dimensional villains or dismissing them as a made up stereotype.

One of the active scammers I spoke with is supporting his whole family, including several siblings he is putting through university, so they have a chance at a better life. But one of them has been out of school for years, and still can’t find a job. It’s not a ringing endorsement to go legit. This guy doesn’t feel great about what he does, but he says he has no other option. He goes to church several times a week, where he wrestles with it. He tells himself he is on God’s path, and he has faith it ends with him leaving this life behind.

He’s describing the hope of anyone who is touched by the genius and the opportunity in Nigeria, as I was during my trip. That this stunning raw talent can find a way to stop relying on bilking Westerners out of cash and start using their wily genius to create local jobs.

by Ron Ridenour / May 5th, 2011

1. Libya is Africa’s largest exporter of oil, 1.7 million tons a day, which quickly was reduced to 300-400,000 tons/day due to US-NATO bombing.

Libya exports 80% of its oil: 80% of that to several EU lands (32% Italy, 14% Germany, 10% France); 10% China; 5% USA.

2. Gaddafi has been preparing to launch a gold dinar for oil trade with all of Africa’s 200 million people and other countries interested. He has been working with this since 2002 together with Malaysia. As of recently, only South Africa and the head of the League of African States were opposed. Before the invasion of Iraq, Hussein was in agreement as was Sudan, Burney, then Indonesia and United Arab Emirates, also Iran.

French President Nickolas Sarkozy called this, “a threat for financial security of mankind”. Much of France’s wealth—more than any other colonial-imperialist power—comes from exploiting Africa.¹

3. Central Bank of Libya is 100% owned by state (since 1956) and is thus outside of multinational corporation control (BIS-Banking International Settlement rules for private interests). The state can finance its own projects and do so without interest rates, which reduce the costs by half of private banks. Libya’s central bank (with three branches in the east including Benghazi) has 144 tons of gold in its vaults, which it could use to start the gold dinar. (China, Russia, India, Iran are stocking great sums of gold rather than relying only on dollars.)

4. Gaddafi-Central Bank used $33 billion, without interest rates, to build the Great Man-Made River of 4,000 kilometers with three parallel pipelines running oil, gas and water supplying 70% of the people (4.5 of its 6 million) with clean drinking and irrigation water. This provides adequate crops for the people making it a competitive exporter of vegetables with Israel and Egypt.

The Central Bank also financed Africa’s first communication satellite with $300 million of the $377 cost. It started up for all Africa, December 26, 2007, thus saving the 45-African nations an annual fee of $500 million pocketed by Europe for use of its satellites and this means much less cost for telephones and other communication systems.

5. The opposition led by former Gaddafi ministers and some Eastern clan leaders set up a central bank in Benghazi to replace Libya’s central bank even before they have set up a government or an organized army. It was immediately recognized by Paris stock exchange and soon other Westerners. This is the first time in history rebels have set up a bank before victory or before having a government.

6. There is evidence from Gaddafi defectors (especially Nouri Mesmari), under France protection that France started preparing a Benghazi based rebellion against Gaddafi from November 2010, in order to stop his plans to switch from the dollar to a new gold currency. US politician, Rep. Dennis Kucinich confirms this.²

On December 23, 2010, Libyans Ali Ounes Mansour, Farj Charrant and Fathi Boukhris met with Mesrami and French officials in Paris. Those three are now part of the Benghazi-based leadership.

US General Wesley Clrak (ret.) told Democracy Now (2007) that ten days after September 11, 2011 another general had told him that the Bush government was planning to invade: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. What they have in common is that they were not members of banks within the BIS, and most of them have lots of oil. Hussein had agreed with France President Jacques Chirac to switch from dollars to Euros in oil trading six months before Bush invaded.

7. While Gaddafi had turned much of his oil sales toward the West, inviting in many of the major oil companies for great profits (BP, EXXON Mobil, Shell, Total, etc), he did not join the US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq as did most of the oil rich Middle Eastern governments. Nor did he sign on with AFRICOM, a US-inspired pact oriented towards US economic and military benefit in Africa also oriented to isolate China from Africa’s natural resources. In fact, China has 50 major economic projects going in Libya with $18 billion investment. Before the US-NATO invasion, there were 30,000 Chinese workers on these and other projects. Much of China’s investment is destroyed.

8. Human Rights Watch (which some call an imperialist-oriented NGO) reported that there has been no civilian bloodbath by Gaddafi. In Misurata, for example, with 400,000 population (second largest city), after two months of war only 257 people were killed, including combatants. Of 949 wounded, only 22 (3%) were women.³

9. As France took the lead, along with UK, to threaten Gaddafi militarily, Gaddafi threatened (March 2) to throw western oil companies out of Libya. With more blustering from the west, Gaddafi invited (March 14) Chinese, Russian and Indian oil companies to take their place. On March 17, the US-France-UK got want they wanted for starters from the UN. Resolution 1973, calling only for a no-fly strategy and not a regime shift or troop landings, was not backed by key big powers: China, Russia, Brazil, India and Germany. Of the 28 NATO countries, only 14 are involved in the Libyan campaign and only six of those are in the air war.

Denmark is one of those six. It spent 70 million kroner ($12 million) in the first two weeks of bombing. By April 30, it had dropped 297 bombs on Libya. Denmark’s 2011 defense-war budget is $4 billion annually (22.4 billion kroner) out of $130 billion (671 billion kroner) budget. It uses more money than ever for wars: $250 million annually in Afghanistan, three times 2008 expenditures–$14 billion total in nine years. It used $½ billion in five active years at war in Iraq and continues there with less.

What the US-NATO-EU hopes to achieve is to eliminate the half-reliable partner Gaddafi and replace him with a neo-liberal oriented government that will do their bidding: sign on AFRICOM, kick China out, reverse the government central bank to a BIS private enterprise, continue using dollars of course, and have the lackey leaders join in their permanent war age throughout the Middle East and Africa.

New neo-liberal socio-economic policies would eliminate what the Gaddafi government has provided the entire population through state subsidies funded with oil export sales: the highest standard of living in Africa with free, universal health and education care, and the possibility of studying abroad at state expense; $50,000 for each new married couple to get started with; non-interest state loans; subsidized prices of cars much lower than in Europe; the cheapest gasoline and bread prices in the world (similar to Venezuela); no taxes for those working in agriculture.

This is not to say that Gaddafi is all that one would want in a leader, but he is definitely not as bad as most of US-NATO allies, such as dictators in the Middle East and some in Africa, Asia, and certainly Israel. Their friendly governments in Saudia Arabia—which sent troops to good neighbor Bahrain to murder hundreds of unarmed protesters condoned by the US—Yemen, Oman, Jordon where the governments murder hundreds of unarmed protestors. In fact, the only armed insurrection occurring in the Arabic countries is in Libya. It seems the US doesn’t like supporting non-violent demonstrators and would rather see them dead. And that is yet another, and one of the most important, reasons for US-NATO taking over Libya: to stop the progressive, dynamic uproar throughout the Arabic world. If these mostly youth-led revolts could actually win, which would mean replacing the imperialist-backed system and not just a dictator here or there, it might lead to an anti-capitalist revolution.

1. See: “The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System” by Peter Dale Scott; “Bombing of Libya – punishment for Gaddafi for his attempt to refuse US dollar” as cited by Ellen Brown in “Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking.” For this and other points see also: “Euro-US War on Libya: Official Lies and Misconceptions of Critics” by James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya; plus other articles on the subject. [?]
2. See: “French plans to topple Gaddafi on track since last November” by Franco Bechis. [?]
3. Boston Globe, April 14. [?]

During the worldwide online celebration, did you post on Facebook or tweet the happy fact that Osama Bin Laden is dead? So many people “liked” an “Osama bin Laden is Dead” page on Facebook that it went viral. But according to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, “Facebook in particular is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.”

While talking to Russia Today about recent revolutions in the Middle East and the role of social media, Assange explained that Facebook is “the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. Intelligence.”

In the interesting interview, Assange added that it’s not just Facebook, but Google and Yahoo as well as all other major U.S. organizations have developed built-in interfaces for U.S. Intelligence. It helps get around the costly and time-consuming serving of subpoenas.

Not that Facebook is run by U.S. Intelligence agencies, but instead of handing out records “one by one,” it saves Facebook time and money to have “automated the process” for spying. Assange believes that all Facebook users should understand that by adding friends, it connects the dots, builds the databases, and does “free work for United States intelligence agencies.”

The EFF previously warned that Big Brother wants to be your friend for social media surveillance. It’s no surprise that U.S. Intelligence trawls millions of websites, Twitter feeds, YouTube, and blog posts, looking for connections between people, groups, and events. That job must surely be a madhouse right now. To sort through the sea of online chatter, the DoD and U.S. Intelligence allegedly use real time search, data mining, and predictive analytics provided by Psydex. Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, both provided funding for the company Recorded Future which offers a Temporal Analytics Engine for predictive analysis, allowing people to “visualize the future, past, or present.”

Big Brother using link or predictive analysis is not new. Nor is the question of how online companies work with Intelligence. Consumer Watchdog had even questioned the relationship of Google and NSA. All intelligence agencies data mine social media. But right now, the military may not need to use its army of fake social media puppets to spread propaganda online. Just as Bin Laden’s death was a needed psychological victory for most Americans, hopefully the masses cheering the death of Bin Laden will be a huge psychological blow to terrorist networks. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “Our message to the Taliban remains the same, but today, it may have even greater resonance. You cannot wait us out. You cannot defeat us, but you can make the choice to abandon al Qaeda and participate in a peaceful, political process.”

There may be lots to talk about in Assange’s revelations of built-in online surveillance, just as we could look at how SEAL Team 6 used facial recognition devices to identify the terrorists, but right or wrong, I’m too happy today.

Last night, there wasn’t much sleep for many of us, but there was an incredible swell of American pride during cheers and chants of “USA! USA! USA!” Just be wise about what you do or say online as it’s one giant tool for surveillance by U.S. Intelligence. In the same token, who knows what We the People might see? As Business Insider pointed out, it’s doubtful the U.S. will release the video that President Obama watched live of the Bin Laden raid, “but in this age of Wikileaks, anything’s possible.”

Special thanks to heroes of U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6. That Boom, head shot, was literally a “Monster Kill” heard around the world.

Yesterday, I posted the photo below of the tail section of the craft draped over a wall in Bin Laden’s compound. While it looked pretty much like a Black Hawk tail, I couldn’t for the life of me, figure out what the weird, flat piece of wreckage emerging from the tarp was. I just assumed that the airframe had been mangled badly enough that it looked weird. It could very well be some sort of shield designed to reduce the heat, noise or radar signature of the tail rotor. (The noise reduction efforts didn’t work all that well.) The possibility of a stealthy chopper being used in the raid explains why the Pakistani troops where in such a hurry to cover up all of the wreckage with blankets and cart if off so quickly. Who knows if this is the Pakistani cooperation White House officials said they received for the mission or if the PAF just scored a major tech boost. Good on Steve Trimble for spotting it and pointing out that now is the time to start speculating wildly about what type of bird this is.

Update: The Daily Mail has some additional photos of the wreckage here. The WSJ has these images. These shots appear to show that the SEALs and other American special operators were largely successful in destroying the fuselage of the chopper before Pakistani troops could secure the site. It looks like the tail section remained intact due to the fact that it was hanging over the compound wall, separated from the rest of the wreck. Oh, and check out these satellite images of the crash site. Here’s the latest image of the bird’s tail, it gives you a great sense of the overall tail assembly.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) now predicts that the size of China’s economy will surpass America’s by 2016, far earlier than most mainstream economists have been forecasting. Some analysts ridiculed the Fund’s prediction, but others warned that it could happen even sooner.The IMF forecast calculated that in five years, using GDP figures based on “purchasing power parity,” the Chinese economy would represent just over 18 percent of the world total, up from around 14 percent right now. According to the Fund’s projections, China’s adjusted GDP will rise from about $11.2 trillion in 2011 to $19 trillion by 2016.

The $15 trillion U.S. economy, which currently accounts for almost 20 percent of global GDP, would decrease to about 17.7 percent of the international total by 2016. During the next five years, according to the IMF forecast, it will grow by a mere $3.5 trillion.

The figures were posted on the Fund’s website two weeks ago with little fanfare, but began making headlines in recent days after being discovered by a reporter. According to news reports, the forecast represents the first time that the IMF has officially put a date on the expected shift in global economic power.

Ten years ago, the U.S. economy was about three times larger than China’s, despite the fact that China has more than four times as many people. But over the last decade, the gap has been closing quickly.

The Chinese economy has been growing fast as the communist dictatorship started to allow some semblance of capitalism and markets to emerge. The regime has been engaged in a massive campaign of industrial espionage that allowed it to steal untold amounts of valuable technology and secrets from Western companies, too.

Some economists also argue that China’s policy of undervaluing its currency has helped it gain a significant competitive edge in exports, at least in the short-term. And the Chinese dictatorship, instead of waging foreign wars and doling out foreign aid, has been aggressively buying up resources, companies and raw materials around the world.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has become increasingly less competitive over the last decade. Burdened with growing, unsustainable government borrowing and spending; multiple undeclared foreign wars; an economy-destroying regulatory regime; never-ending bailouts; and a monetary policy that serves to transfer the people’s wealth into the hands of well-connected insiders; growth in America is lagging behind. And that trend is only accelerating.

Of course, Chinese GDP per capita still pales in comparison with American figures — the average economic output of a person in China was less than a tenth of an average American’s in 2009. And for right now, at least, the U.S. dollar and American capital markets still reign supreme in the world economy. On top of that, despite the obvious troubles plaguing the U.S. economy, China’s may be facing big problems, too.

A wide spectrum of analysts and economists believe that the Chinese economy is rushing toward disaster after an unsustainable - largely centrally planned - expansion over the last decade. Malinvestment in everything from “high-speed rail” to empty shopping malls and ghost cities is becoming increasingly apparent despite the communist regime‘s efforts to hide it.

But some analysts and media outlets are still taking the IMF forecast very seriously. Brett Arends of MarketWatch, apparently the first to pick up the story, urged readers to heed the date 2016.  “Put that in your calendar,” he wrote. “It is the end of the Age of America.” He called the IMF forecast a “bombshell.”

“It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years,” Arends noted. “And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market.”

He suggested the IMF’s new method of calculating the figures - using purchasing power parity instead of the “largely meaningless comparison” using exchange rates - was a better way to do it. “Exchange rates change quickly. And China’s exchange rates are phony,” he wrote, pointing to the communist regime’s market manipulation to deliberately undervalue its currency.

And the changes to come will be dramatic, Arends predicted. While the U.S. and Great Britain — the last hegemonic world power before America — theoretically live under constitutional government with respect for civil liberties and property rights, China does not.  “The Age of China will feel very different,” he warned.

And most mainstream media outlets that picked up the story, including some run by the Chinese dictatorship, took a similar stance. The Economic Times, for example, called the IMF prediction a “warning shot across America’s bow.” The Asian News International wire service stated: “The rise of the Chinese market will end the ‘Age of America’ a decade before most analysts had expected.” An anchor with Russia Today wondered if the announcement meant “free-market capitalism” was a failure.

In the U.K., the Daily Mail warned that “[t]he ramifications for the U.S. — and indeed any country that has allied itself politically and monetarily to the superpower — are unsettling.” The British paper even claimed with apparent certainty that whoever was elected president in 2012 “will have the dubious honour of presiding over the fall of the United States.”

But not everyone was quite as pessimistic. The International Business Times, for example, claimed the IMF forecast and a related prediction by the World Bank “shouldn’t be trusted at all.” The piece said the institutions’ economists “have little imagination and assume that current conditions will continue indefinitely.”

Analysts at the liberty-oriented Daily Bell said the IMF prediction was “perhaps a bit premature,” suggesting that a future China may even be even smaller than it is today following a much-anticipated downturn. “We’re not sure the IMF believes its own projections,” the report stated, noting that the economic crisis was not confined to Western nations.

“Central banking and fiat money has created a mess not just in the West but around the world, and the Chinese are struggling in that trap just as much as the West is,” the analysts pointed out. “The result in our view will be continued pressure by the elites for a one-world government and a one-world currency.”

Of course, as MarketWatch’s Arends noted, sudden changes or unforeseen events could alter the future economic outlook significantly. If, for example, China were to suddenly dump all or even some of its estimated $3 trillion in U.S. dollar holdings, both countries would suffer huge losses. But while the American economy and the U.S. dollar could be damaged beyond repair, a Chinese recovery could, theoretically at least, rely more on its domestic market and other countries.

The seriousness and urgency of the IMF forecast is hard to discern. Analysts’ opinions are all over the map. If reasonably accurate, a “New World Order” led by a cabal including communist China’s regime — as billionaire socialist George Soros advocates — could be here very soon. And considering the brutality exhibited by the Chinese dictatorship even in recent weeks, the prospect is frightening to critics.

On the other hand, the IMF is run by a self-described socialist who regularly promotes stronger world government and even a global currency managed by an international central bank. And IMF economists — instead of offering real solutions such as sound money and respect for the Constitution — urged the American government in a recent report to drastically increase taxes to alleviate obvious problems.

Analysts will continue to debate the merits of the forecast and the IMF’s methodology. But no matter when exactly the Chinese economy overtakes America’s, the communist dictatorship — probably even more than the current anti-constitutional administration in Washington waging at least three publicly acknowledged wars — represents a serious threat to freedom around the world. Communism, obviously, did not fall with the Berlin Wall.

by Shoestring    source: 9/11 Blogger   April 11, 2011

“There were a number of false reports out there. What was valid? What was a guess? We just didn’t know.”

- Colonel Robert Marr, battle commander at
NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector on 9/11

Although it has been widely reported that four commercial aircraft were hijacked over the United States on September 11, 2001, what is less well known is that while the terrorist attacks were taking place and for many hours after, numerous additional aircraft gave indications that they had been hijacked or, for other reasons, were singled out as potential emergencies. More than 20 aircraft were identified as possible hijackings, according to some accounts, and other aircraft displayed signs of emergencies, such as losing radio communication with air traffic controllers or transmitting a distress signal.

Reports about these false alarms have revealed extraordinary circumstances around some of the incidents and bizarre explanations for how they arose. For example, it has been claimed that the pilots of one foreign aircraft approaching the U.S. set their plane’s transponder to transmit a code signaling they had been hijacked simply to show authorities that they were aware of what had been taking place in America that morning. [1] Another aircraft reported as transmitting a distress signal while approaching the U.S. was subsequently found to have been canceled, and still at the airport. [2]

There may be innocent explanations for some of the less serious false alarms, such as those simply involving the temporary loss of radio communication with the plane, which is a common occurrence and happens on a daily basis. [3] But, viewed in its entirety, the evidence appears highly suspicious and raises serious questions. Why, for example, were there so many false alarms on September 11? Why did so many of them involve false reports of hijackings or aircraft falsely signaling that they had been hijacked? The details of specific incidents that have been reported, which I describe below, show that these false alarms must have been something more than just the results of confusion caused by the terrorist attacks.

MILITARY EXERCISES INCLUDED SIMULATED HIJACKINGS
One possibility to consider is that some of the false alarms related to training exercises taking place on September 11. There is evidence supporting this contention. For example, shortly after 9/11, the New Yorker reported, “During the last several years, the government regularly planned for and simulated terrorist attacks, including scenarios that involved multiple plane hijackings.” [4] And we know that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the military organization responsible for defending U.S. airspace, was in the middle of a major exercise called Vigilant Guardian on September 11. [5] This exercise is known to have been scheduled to include at least one simulated plane hijacking on the morning of 9/11. [6] And in the week before 9/11, it included at least four simulated plane hijackings. [7]

The possibility that these false alarms were deliberate and intended to fulfill a sinister purpose needs to be seriously examined. Were they coordinated and pre-planned by rogue insiders working in the military and other U.S. government agencies, so as to ensure the attacks succeeded?

Were the false alarms that occurred at the same time as the attacks intended to cause confusion, and divert personnel and resources, thereby impairing the emergency response to the attacks? Colonel Robert Marr, the battle commander at NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) on 9/11, has indicated that this is what they achieved. He recalled: “There were a number of false reports out there. What was valid? What was a guess? We just didn’t know.” Major General Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States NORAD Region (CONR) on 9/11, similarly recalled, “A number of aircraft [were] being called possibly hijacked … there was a lot of confusion, as you can imagine.” [8]

And were the false alarms that occurred after the attacks ended intended to prevent principled and honest military or government employees from promptly assessing what had happened, and determining how, against the odds, the attacks had succeeded? As Vanity Fair reported, tape recordings of the operations floor at NEADS reveal that “there was no sense that the attack was over with the crash of United 93,” the last of the four hijacked aircraft. Instead, “the alarms go on and on. False reports of hijackings, and real responses, continue well into the afternoon. … The fighter pilots over New York and DC (and later Boston and Chicago) would spend hours darting around their respective skylines intercepting hundreds of aircraft they deemed suspicious. … No one at NEADS would go home until late on the night of the 11th.” [9]

By tying up personnel, the false alarms could also have prevented anyone from making public information that contradicted the official 9/11 story that was being put out, and that would raise questions about who was actually responsible for the attacks. By the time a person with such information was free to reveal it, after the crisis calmed down, the official story would already have been extensively promoted to the public and generally accepted as true, and so it would be too late to effectively disclose information that would cast serious doubt on that account.

UP TO 29 PLANES REPORTED AS HIJACKED
Several accounts have indicated the large number of false alarms that occurred on September 11. For example, sometime between the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrator, Jane Garvey, received a call from Leo Mullin, the CEO of Delta Air Lines. Mullin complained: “We can’t find four of our planes. Four of our transponders are off.” [10] (A transponder is a device that sends an aircraft’s identifying information, speed, and altitude to air traffic controllers’ radar screens.)

After the World Trade Center was hit the second time at 9:03 a.m., the FAA told all air traffic control facilities around the U.S. to notify it of anything unusual that occurred. In response, facilities reported numerous incidents. [11] According to author Pamela Freni, “Upward to two-dozen [aircraft] were listed at one time, but ultimately the number was whittled to 11 highly suspicious cases.” The list included the third and fourth aircraft targeted in the attacks–American Airlines Flight 77 and United Airlines Flight 93–and nine false alarms. [12]

Regarding, specifically, incorrect reports of planes being hijacked, the 9/11 Commission Report stated, “During the course of the morning, there were multiple erroneous reports of hijacked aircraft.” [13] Defense Department spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, who was in the Pentagon during the attacks and for most of the rest of September 11, has recalled: “There were lots of false signals out there. There were false hijack squawks, and a great part of the challenge was sorting through what was a legitimate threat and what wasn’t.” [14] Larry Arnold has said, “By the end of the day, we had 21 aircraft identified as possible hijackings.” [15] Robert Marr recalled, “At one time I was told that across the nation there were some 29 different reports of hijackings.” [16]

I describe below details of some of the flights that were among the false alarms on September 11. Firstly, I examine nine flights that were mistakenly considered to have been hijacked. I then examine flights for which we either do not know the nature of the false alarm, due to the lack of available information (so the aircraft may have been a suspected hijacking, but this fact has not been reported), or the emergency is known to have been something other than a suspected hijacking, such as a loss of radio contact with the aircraft.

AIRCRAFT FALSELY REPORTED AS HIJACKED ON 9/11

• Flight 11 Reported as Still Airborne After Hitting WTC
The first of the “multiple erroneous reports of hijacked aircraft,” according to the 9/11 Commission, was a report that American Airlines Flight 11 was still airborne and heading toward Washington, DC, more than half an hour after this plane crashed into the World Trade Center. [17]

Colin Scoggins, the military liaison at the FAA’s Boston Center, called NEADS at 9:21 a.m. and said: “I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air, and it’s on its way towards–heading towards Washington. … It was evidently another aircraft that hit the tower.” However, Boston Center controllers were not tracking this alleged flight, heading toward Washington, on radar. Instead, according to Vanity Fair, “The plane’s course, had it continued south past New York in the direction it was flying before it dipped below radar coverage, would have had it headed on a straight course toward DC.” Scoggins has claimed he got the erroneous information about the flight from an FAA teleconference he was monitoring. He said he thought someone was overheard “trying to confirm from American [Airlines] whether American 11 was down,” and that “somewhere in the flurry of information zipping back and forth during the conference call this transmogrified into the idea that a different plane had hit the tower, and that American 11 was still hijacked and still in the air.” [18]

• United Airlines Plane Reported as Hijacked, but Still at Airport
Another early false report of a hijacking occurred at 9:25 a.m., when Marcus Arroyo, the security division manager for the FAA’s eastern region, called Mark Randol, the manager of the FAA’s Washington, DC, Civil Aviation Security Field Office, and alerted him to several hijackings. Arroyo mentioned Flight 175 and Flight 77 (the second and third aircraft actually targeted that morning), but also said, incorrectly, that another aircraft, United Airlines Flight 177, had been hijacked. Randol’s staff soon discovered that Flight 177 was still on the ground at Logan International Airport in Boston, being held at the gate there. [19] No explanation has been given for why Flight 177 was falsely reported as a hijacking.

• Delta 1989 Gave Numerous Indications of Being Hijacked
Delta Air Lines Flight 1989 was a Boeing 767 bound from Boston to Los Angeles, which repeatedly acted suspiciously and was repeatedly suspected of being hijacked. The aircraft was first suspected of being hijacked at around 9:30 a.m. when controllers at the FAA’s Cleveland Center who were monitoring it mistakenly thought the sounds of Flight 93 being hijacked, heard over radio, had come from Delta 1989. But they soon decided that Flight 93 was the source of the communications and that Delta 1989 was not hijacked. [20]

However, at around 9:40 a.m., Colin Scoggins at the FAA’s Boston Center called NEADS and said the Boston Center believed Delta 1989 was a hijacked aircraft. [21] It is unclear why Scoggins made this claim, and also why he considered it his responsibility to call NEADS about Delta 1989, since the flight was at that time being tracked by the Cleveland Center, not the Boston Center. [22] The 9/11 Commission Report suggested that Boston Center managers had noted the similarities between Delta 1989 and the two aircraft that had hit the WTC: all were 767s flying from Boston to Los Angeles, which had taken off around the same time. The managers also remembered a radio transmission the center heard, apparently made by a hijacker on Flight 11, saying, “We have some planes,” and consequently “guessed that Delta 1989 might also be hijacked.” [23]

Over the next 30 to 35 minutes, Delta 1989 repeatedly behaved strangely, creating further suspicion that it might have been hijacked. Delta Air Lines instructed the flight to land in Cleveland, but did not inform air traffic control of this. Consequently, Cleveland Center controllers became suspicious when the plane’s pilot contacted them, requesting an immediate change of course. Their level of concern increased when he failed to respond to a message as his plane descended toward Cleveland. [24] Then controllers at another facility had their suspicions of the flight increased when the pilot failed to use standard, and highly important, terminology in his radio communications with them. [25]

Delta 1989 landed at Cleveland Hopkins Airport at around 10:18 a.m. and was directed to a remote area. [26] FBI agents and a police SWAT team approached it, in case any problems arose. [27] It was about two hours after the plane landed that the passengers were allowed off, and it was around mid-afternoon before it was finally confirmed that the flight had never been hijacked. [28]

• Continental Airlines Plane Transmitted Hijack Signal Three Times
Another incident appears to have occurred at around 9:35 a.m., as it was reported at 9:36 a.m., in a phone call between John White, a manager at the FAA’s Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, and Doug Davis, the special assistant for technical operations in air traffic services at FAA headquarters. White told Davis that Continental Airlines Flight 321, which was “en route from Cleveland to Denver,” had “squawked hijack three times.” In other words, the pilot had set the plane’s transponder to transmit the code of “7500,” which signals that the flight has been hijacked. But, White added, “we have made contact with the pilot and the pilot has told us everything is okay.” Just over an hour later, White informed Davis that Flight 321 was “on the ground at Peoria,” Illinois, and the FBI was “approaching the aircraft at this time.” Although White told Davis, “We are trying to determine why he squawked hijack,” further details of this false alarm are unreported. [29]

• American Airlines 189 Sent Text Message Signaling a Hijacking
Employees at the American Airlines System Operations Control (SOC) center in Fort Worth, Texas, became concerned when they temporarily lost communication with one of their planes, and the center also received a message from that plane incorrectly signaling it had been hijacked. Radio contact was lost with the Boston-to-Seattle flight at 9:45 a.m. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Everyone in the room [at the SOC] was convinced it was a … hijacking.” [30]

Evidence indicates this aircraft was American Airlines Flight 189. [31] Donald Robinson, a dispatcher at the SOC, received what he has called a “hijack message” from Flight 189, via the ACARS text messaging system. Robinson then sent a text message back to the plane’s pilots, asking them if they were “squawking” the universal code for a hijacking. Ten minutes after communication with Flight 189 was lost, contact was restored. The problem, according to the Wall Street Journal, was due to a “radio glitch.” Though Robinson suggested that the pilots may have sent the “hijack message” accidentally, he admitted that it was “unknown why the cockpit sent this message.” [32]

• Possible Hijacked Aircraft Heading to U.S. from Canada
Around 10:00 a.m., a Canadian NORAD unit called NEADS and told it that a suspected hijacked aircraft was heading south from Canada, toward Washington, DC. [33] Few details were revealed about this plane. A member of staff at NEADS informed their colleagues that it was from an “unknown departure airport,” and they did not “know any codes or anything” else about it. [34] When someone at NEADS then called the Canadian unit for more information, the person who answered the call only said they had seen “something on the chat”–meaning NORAD’s computer chat system–about a “possible” aircraft. A few minutes later, the Canadian unit called NEADS again and said the suspected hijacking was a false alarm. The caller said the unit’s intelligence team was “not assessing that there’s an actual aircraft problem. It’s just that there could be problems from our area.” He added, “There’s no actual aircraft that we suspect as being a danger.” [35]

• Korean Airlines 85 Repeatedly Indicated it was Hijacked
One of the aircraft mistakenly suspected of being hijacked on September 11 about which most has been reported is Korean Airlines Flight 85. This plane gave several indications that it had been hijacked, was tailed by fighter jets, and was even threatened with being shot down by the military.

KAL 85 was a Boeing 747 with 215 people on board, flying from Seoul, South Korea, to New York. It had been due to land in Anchorage, Alaska, for a refueling stop when problems began. Shortly before midday, it was discovered that the plane’s pilots had sent a text message that included the letters “HJK,” the code for a hijacking. [36] Then, after KAL 85 entered their airspace at around 1:00 p.m., Anchorage air traffic controllers asked the pilots coded questions over radio to see if the plane had indeed been hijacked. But instead of giving reassurance that the plane was safe, the pilots switched their transponder to “7500,” the code signaling a hijacking. KAL 85 continued transmitting this code for the next 90 minutes, until it landed. [37] In fact, according to an official report, “There were five separate and ongoing indicators of a hijacking situation” on KAL 85, although the report did not specify what those indicators were. [38]

NORAD launched fighter jets to follow KAL 85, ordered that the plane be directed away from Anchorage, and threatened to have it shot down if it refused to change course. [39] KAL 85 was redirected to Whitehorse Airport in Canada. It was escorted there by fighters and landed without incident at 2:54 p.m. [40] Only on the following morning, after a bomb-sniffing dog searched the plane and its cargo was checked, did the Royal Canadian Mounted Police finally confirm that KAL 85 was never hijacked. [41]

KAL 85 has subsequently been treated with much secrecy. The FAA, NORAD, and Transport Canada have declined to answer questions about it. [42] Korean Airlines refused to make available a tape recording of conversations between the pilot and airline officials in Anchorage, and has not even revealed the names of the members of the plane’s flight crew on September 11. [43]

In light of the possibility that some of the false alarms on September 11 related to training exercises taking place that day, it is notable that, a few days earlier, one of those exercises included a scenario where an aircraft remarkably similar to KAL 85 was hijacked. On September 6, NORAD’s exercise Vigilant Guardian included a simulated scenario in which a plane, Korean Airlines Flight 357, was taken over by terrorists. KAL 357, like KAL 85, was a Boeing 747 flying from Seoul to Anchorage. And on September 6, similar to what it did in response to KAL 85 five days later, NORAD ordered its Alaskan region to intercept and shadow the hijacked plane, and directed fighter jets to get in a position to shoot the plane down if necessary. [44]

• San Diego to Denver Flight Suspected as Hijacked
At some unspecified time, apparently early in the afternoon, it has been reported that NORAD’s operations center in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, was receiving “reports of a hijacking out of San Diego, California,” that was “headed to Denver.” Eventually, the aircraft identified itself and landed uneventfully. Further details of this flight are unknown. [45]

• Possibly Hijacked U.S. Airways Flight Approaching From Spain
The last aircraft incorrectly suspected of being hijacked on September 11, according to CONR’s Larry Arnold, was a U.S. Airways flight approaching the United States from Madrid, Spain. [46] At 3:20 p.m., it was reported over an FAA teleconference that the White House was saying this flight was heading to Philadelphia International Airport, and the military was scrambling fighter jets in response to it. Accounts conflict over whether the U.S. Airways plane was Flight 930 or Flight 937. [47] Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, who was in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center below the White House, has recalled, “When we first got word [of the flight], we got word that it was only 30 minutes or so outside of U.S. airspace.” Libby indicated that the plane’s transponder had been transmitting the code for a hijacking, saying, “I think it was one of those ones where there was an actual report that it was showing hijacking through some electronic signal.” [48]

After a short time, the flight was found to be secure. Arnold has recalled that Robert Marr called him from NEADS and said, “We just talked to the airline, and that aircraft is back on the ground in Madrid.” [49] According to Libby, “It turned out that, I think, it was only 35 minutes out of Spanish airspace, not out of our airspace.” [50]

OTHER AIRCRAFT EMERGENCIES, AND UNSPECIFIED AIRCRAFT EMERGENCIES, ON 9/11

• Coast Guard Reported Three Suspicious Aircraft, but One Flight ‘Never Existed’
As previously mentioned, there were some false alarms on September 11 for which the specific nature of the emergency is unstated. These may have been suspected hijackings or they may have been something else, like the loss of radio contact or the loss of a transponder signal. An example of this is an incident that occurred shortly after 11:00 a.m., when three suspicious flights were reported as approaching the U.S.

At 11:18 a.m., it was reported on an FAA teleconference that the Coast Guard in Norfolk, Virginia, had received distress signals from Air Canada Flight 65, Continental Airlines Flight 57, and United Airlines Flight 947. Whether these distress signals were the “7500? transponder code signaling a hijacking, or something else, is unreported. The three aircraft were reported as being over the Atlantic Ocean. Jeff Griffith, the deputy director of air traffic at FAA headquarters, subsequently instructed John White at the FAA’s Command Center to alert NORAD to the aircraft, and to also notify the Air Traffic Services Cell (ATSC), an office at the Command Center manned by military reservists.

By 11:46 a.m., it was determined that the distress signals were false alarms. It was reported on the FAA teleconference that “all three aircraft … are accounted for” and “all are OK.” The United Airlines plane returned to Europe and the Continental Airlines flight landed in Gander, Canada. Remarkably, it was discovered that Air Canada 65 hadn’t even been airborne. White reported that it “landed last night and was scheduled to depart today, but the flight’s canceled.” [51] According to an ATSC chronology of the events of 9/11, this flight “never existed.” [52]

• FAA Command Center Compiled List of 11 Suspicious Aircraft
As mentioned earlier, following the second attack in New York, the FAA’s Command Center instructed air traffic control facilities to notify it of anything unusual. In response, according to Linda Schuessler, the deputy director of system operations at the Command Center, “we started getting more and more calls about bomb threats, about aircraft that we had lost communication or radar identification with.” This led to the center compiling a list of 11 aircraft “that we had gotten unusual information on, that we thought seemed worthy of keeping a closer eye on.” The list included two of the planes targeted in the terrorist attacks, Flight 77 and Flight 93. [53]

Various accounts have indicated details of the other flights singled out by the Command Center. A 9:10 a.m. entry in a chronology of events at the Command Center on September 11 mentioned seven aircraft for which the center was providing “coordination to assist in finding,” although evidence indicates that at least some of these aircraft only aroused suspicion later on than 9:10 a.m. One of the aircraft was Delta Air Lines Flight 1989 (see above). The other six, and the few details we know about them, are as follows:

- American Airlines Flight 2247: At 10:04 a.m., the FAA’s Fort Worth Center reported this flight to the Command Center. The aircraft, going from Orlando, Florida, to Shreveport, Louisiana, was “NORDO,” meaning radio contact with it had been lost. Communication was restored by 10:17 a.m.

- U.S. Airways Flight 41: The FAA’s Memphis Center reported this plane, going from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Los Angeles, to the Command Center. The reason for the report is unknown.

- Northwest Airlines Flight 197: The Command Center appears to have been alerted to this plane, en route from Lansing, Michigan, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, at 10:03 a.m. The reason for the report is unknown. Flight 197 subsequently landed in Marquette, Michigan.

- United Airlines Flight 641: United Airlines lost contact with this plane at around 10:00 a.m., but persistent attempts to communicate with it were eventually successful. The flight subsequently landed in Detroit, Michigan.

- United Airlines Flight 57: This aircraft was reported as missing sometime between 10:55 a.m. and 11:15 a.m. It appears to have been reported to the Command Center by controllers at Denver International Airport, for reasons that are unknown. It subsequently landed in Garden City, Kansas.

- U.S. Airways Flight 633: At 10:55 a.m., controllers at Philadelphia International Airport reported that they had “lost” this flight, which was heading to Las Vegas. The Command Center chronology indicated that the plane subsequently landed at the Philadelphia airport, at 11:14 a.m. [54]

Other accounts have mentioned three additional suspicious aircraft that were on the Command Center’s list. (However, if these accounts are correct, it would indicate that the list included 12 aircraft, not 11.) One of the aircraft was a U.S. Airways flight heading to Chicago that was not communicating with air traffic controllers. [55] Another was a TWA flight that was refusing to land in Pittsburgh, and instead wanted to fly on to Washington. The third was a Midwest Express flight that disappeared from radar over West Virginia. [56]

Schuessler has recalled that Command Center personnel later “continued to say [they had] a little discomfort about the information [they] received” about these suspicious flights. But, she said, “We followed up with the security people and got enough information that the specialists here felt very comfortable that they understood the situation.” [57]

• United Airlines Worker in England Received Suspicious Call from Pilot
At around 11:16 a.m. (U.S. Eastern time), a United Airlines aircraft maintenance officer at a facility in London, England, received a brief but suspicious phone call from an unidentified aircraft, in which the caller–apparently the plane’s pilot–sounded distraught, possibly as if he was being choked. The maintenance officer recognized the call as coming from a particular type of satellite phone that is available on Boeing 767s and 777s, although he believed it was most likely from a 777. He told the 9/11 Commission that the caller sounded strange, and that this was the “only phone call that he’d ever received of that nature in the 10 years he’s been on the job for United.”

The maintenance officer contacted a United Airlines maintenance facility at San Francisco International Airport to report the suspicious call, and it in turned notified the FBI. The FBI was told that the maintenance officer had said the caller from the plane “sounded as if they were being choked,” although the maintenance officer later claimed he was unsure whether this had been the case. [58]

• Other Suspicious Flights
We know of numerous other flights on September 11 that raised concern, although the reported details of these are scant. Andrew Studdert, United Airlines’ chief operating officer at the time of the attacks, told the 9/11 Commission that at around 10:00 a.m., as well as losing contact with Flight 641 (see above), United lost contact with two more of its planes, Flights 399 and 415. Studdert also said that between 10:55 a.m. and 11:15 a.m., as well as Flight 57 (see above), eight other United planes were reported as missing. These were Flights 103, 634, 1211, 1695, 2101, 2102, 2256, and 2725. All of them were eventually located at various airports. [59] Furthermore, a Secret Service timeline stated that at 10:55 a.m., United Airlines Flight 182, from Boston to Seattle, was “unaccounted for.” [60]

As previously mentioned, the temporary loss of radio contact with aircraft is a common occurrence. [61] And an order issued by the FAA at 9:45 a.m., for all aircraft over the U.S. to land at the nearest airport, presumably complicated interactions between pilots and air traffic controllers. [62] But can these factors account for a single airline losing communication with so many of its planes, all on the same day, and all within such short spaces of time? And on September 11, 2001, of all days, when two of the aircraft targeted in the terrorist attacks belonged to that particular airline?

Additionally, Studdert told the 9/11 Commission that throughout the morning of September 11, United Airlines received “a torrent of reported bomb threats; explosions are reported at two airports, and there are reports of other threats and other hijackings.” These turned out to be “misunderstandings or hoaxes,” but, Studdert commented, “the presumed threats cannot be dismissed in the high uncertainty of the moment.” [63]

It seems reasonable to assume there were other false alarms that have not yet come to light. If Larry Arnold’s claim of “21 aircraft identified as possible hijackings” or Robert Marr’s claim of “29 different reports of hijackings” are anywhere near accurate, then there must have been additional false reports of hijackings beyond what I have described.

Who or what caused these false alarms? What effect did they have on the ability of the military and other U.S. government agencies to respond to the actual attacks, and to then assess how those attacks had been able to succeed? These questions have not yet been adequately addressed, and need to be investigated thoroughly.

NOTES
[1] Lynn Spencer, Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11. New York: Free Press, 2008, p. 196.
[2] Draft: The Air Traffic Organization’s Response to the September 11th Terrorist Attack: ATC System Assessment, Shutdown, and Restoration. Federal Aviation Administration, March 21, 2002, p. S-26; “Full Transcription; Air Traffic Control System Command Center, National Traffic Management Officer, East Position; September 11, 2001.” Federal Aviation Administration, October 21, 2003.
[3] See Donald A. Robinson Jr., interview by the FBI. Federal Bureau of Investigation, September 11, 2001; “Memorandum for the Record: Staff Visit to the Boston Center, New England Region, FAA.” 9/11 Commission, September 22-24, 2003.
[4] “September 11, 2001.” New Yorker, September 24, 2001.
[5] William M. Arkin, Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2005, p. 545.
[6] Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes.” Vanity Fair, August 2006.
[7] “NORAD Exercises: Hijack Summary.” 9/11 Commission, n.d.
[8] Leslie Filson, Air War Over America: Sept. 11 Alters Face of Air Defense Mission. Tyndall Air Force Base, FL: 1st Air Force, 2003, p. 73.
[9] Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live.”
[10] “Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Jane Garvey.” 9/11 Commission, October 21, 2003; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 186.
[11] Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 125-126.
[12] Pamela Freni, Ground Stop: An Inside Look at the Federal Aviation Administration on September 11, 2001. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc., 2003, p. 65.
[13] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, p. 28.
[14] “Chilling Audio From 9/11 Hijack Played at Hearing.” Paula Zahn Now, CNN, June 17, 2004.
[15] “Conversation With Major General Larry Arnold, Commander, 1st Air Force, Tyndall AFB, Florida.” Code One, January 2002.
[16] Robert A. Baker, “Commander of 9/11 Air Defenses Retires.” Newhouse News Service, March 31, 2005.
[17] 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 26, 28.
[18] Ibid. p. 26; Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live.”
[19] “Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Mark Randol, Former Manager of the Civil Aviation Security Field Office in Washington, DC.” 9/11 Commission, October 8, 2003.
[20] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, “Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board.” USA Today, August 12, 2002; “Memorandum for the Record: Interview With John Werth, Air Traffic Controller, Area 4, Lorain Sector.” 9/11 Commission, October 1, 2003; “Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Kim Wernica, Operations Manager at Cleveland ARTCC on 9/11.” 9/11 Commission, October 2, 2003.
[21] Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live”; Untitled Chronology of FAA and NEADS Communications on September 11, 2001. 9/11 Commission, n.d.
[22] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, “Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board”; Alan Levin, “For Air Controller, Terror Still Vivid 7 Years Later.” USA Today, September 11, 2008.
[23] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, “Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board”; 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 27-28.
[24] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, “Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board”; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 167-168.
[25] “DAL 1989 Order of Events.” Federal Aviation Administration, September 16, 2001.
[26] Ibid.; Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, “Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board.”
[27] Michael O’Mara, “9/11: ‘Fifth Plane’ Terror Alert at Cleveland Hopkins Airport.” WKYC, September 11, 2006; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 270.
[28] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, “Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board.” For more information about Delta Airlines Flight 1989, see “Was Delta 1989 Part of a Live-Fly Hijacking Exercise on 9/11?” Shoestring 9/11, July 22, 2009.
[29] “Full Transcription; Air Traffic Control System Command Center, National Traffic Management Officer, East Position; September 11, 2001?; Miles Kara, “Transcript of East NTMO, Line 4530, Admin Line.” 9/11 Commission, November 4, 2003.
[30] Donald A. Robinson Jr. interview by the FBI; Scott McCartney and Susan Carey, “American, United Watched and Worked in Horror as Sept. 11 Hijackings Unfolded.” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2001.
[31] For example, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics database of “Airline On-Time Data” reveals that Flight 189 was the only American Airlines plane going from Boston to Seattle that day.
[32] Donald A. Robinson Jr. interview by the FBI; Scott McCartney and Susan Carey, “American, United Watched and Worked in Horror as Sept. 11 Hijackings Unfolded.”
[33] Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live.”
[34] NEADS Audio File, Mission Crew Commander Position, Channel 2. North American Aerospace Defense Command, September 11, 2001.
[35] NEADS Audio File, Identification Technician Position, Channel 4. North American Aerospace Defense Command, September 11, 2001; “NEADS CDs.” 9/11 Commission, n.d.
[36] Alan Levin, “Korean Air Jet May Have Narrowly Missed Disaster.” USA Today, August 12, 2002; Zaz Hollander, “High Alert.” Anchorage Daily News, September 8, 2002.
[37] Alan Levin, “Korean Air Jet May Have Narrowly Missed Disaster”; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, pp. 277-278.
[38] September 11, 2001, Whitehorse International Airport Emergency: Public Findings Report. Whitehorse, Yukon: Yukon Government, November 13, 2001, p. 17.
[39] Alan Levin, “Korean Air Jet May Have Narrowly Missed Disaster”; Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 278.
[40] Alan Levin, “Korean Air Jet May Have Narrowly Missed Disaster”; Zaz Hollander, “High Alert.”
[41] September 11, 2001, Whitehorse International Airport Emergency, p. 18.
[42] Zaz Hollander, “False Sept. 11 Hijack Signal Put Air Force on Alert.” Anchorage Daily News, September 29, 2001; September 11, 2001, Whitehorse International Airport Emergency, p. 27; Alan Levin, “Korean Air Jet May Have Narrowly Missed Disaster.”
[43] Zaz Hollander, “False Sept. 11 Hijack Signal Put Air Force on Alert”; Stephanie Waddell, “9/11 Documentary to be Released Next Year.” Whitehorse Daily Star, December 31, 2010.
[44] “NORAD Exercises: Hijack Summary.” For more details about Korean Airlines Flight 85, see “Was Korean Airlines Flight 85 a Simulated Hijack in a 9/11 Training Exercise?” Shoestring 9/11, April 18, 2010.
[45] Rebecca Grant, The First 600 Days of Combat. Washington, DC: IRIS Press, 2004, p. 26.
[46] “Chronology of Events (All Times are Local Eastern Daylight Time).” Federal Aviation Administration, September 11, 2001; “Conversation With Major General Larry Arnold.”
[47] “ADA-30 Operations Center Activity Report, September 11-14, 2001.” Federal Aviation Administration, September 2001; “Chronology of Events (All Times are Local Eastern Daylight Time)”; “Eastern Region Operations Center Log: Chronological Events of Hijacking Crisis.” Federal Aviation Administration, January 2, 2002.
[48] Lewis Libby, interview by Newsweek magazine. White House, November 16, 2001.
[49] “Eastern Region Operations Center Log”; Leslie Filson, Air War Over America, p. 88.
[50] Lewis Libby, interview by Newsweek magazine.
[51] Draft: The Air Traffic Organization’s Response to the September 11th Terrorist Attack, pp. S-26, S-29, S-33; “Full Transcription; Air Traffic Control System Command Center, National Traffic Management Officer, East Position; September 11, 2001.”
[52] Untitled Air Traffic Services Cell Chronology of Events. U.S. Air Force, September 11, 2001.
[53] David Bond, “Crisis at Herndon: 11 Airplanes Astray.” Aviation Week & Space Technology, December 17, 2001.
[54] Untitled FAA Command Center Chronology of the Events of September 11, 2001. Federal Aviation Administration, September 11, 2001; “Statement of Andrew P. Studdert to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.” 9/11 Commission, January 27, 2004; “Suspect Aircraft of September 11, 2001.” 9/11 Commission, n.d.
[55] Lynn Spencer, Touching History, p. 126.
[56] Marilyn Adams, Alan Levin, and Blake Morrison, “Part II: No One Was Sure if Hijackers Were on Board.”
[57] David Bond, “Crisis at Herndon.”
[58] Ray Kime, interview by the FBI. Federal Bureau of Investigation, September 11, 2001; “Memorandum for the Record: Interview With Rich Belme, Manager of United Airlines SAMC in San Francisco, CA.” 9/11 Commission, November 21, 2003; “Memorandum for the Record: Interview With [Name Redacted], United Airlines.” 9/11 Commission, November 21, 2003.
[59] “Statement of Andrew P. Studdert to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.”
[60] “Secret Service Timeline, Unclassified Extract.” United States Secret Service, September 11, 2001.
[61] See Donald A. Robinson Jr., interview by the FBI; “Memorandum for the Record: Staff Visit to the Boston Center, New England Region, FAA.”
[62] U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Statement of Jane F. Garvey, Administrator, Federal Aviation Administration, Before the House Subcommittee on Aviation, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. 107th Cong., 1st sess., September 21, 2001; 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 29.
[63] “Statement of Andrew P. Studdert to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.”

By Richard Chirgwin • Get more from this author

Yandex, which last week announced its intention to list on NASDAQ, says it has been forced by Russian authorities to hand over financial information about an anti-corruption blogger to Russia’s domestic security agency, the FSB.

Alexei Navalny, who operates the http://rospil.info RosPil whistle-blower Website in Russia, had complained on his blog that some financial contributors were receiving threatening telephone calls over their support for the site. Contributions through Yandex to RosPil are made using “Yandex Money”.

Yandex has now confirmed that it provided information about both Navalny and his contributors after being approached by the FSB. Chief editor Yelena Kolmanovskaya has reportedly told the Echo radio station on Moscow that Yandex is upset at the intrusion into RosPil’s affairs.

“We ourselves are unhappy about the situation and share our users’ outrage,” Kolmanovskaya said.

Yandex’s SEC filing for its IPO illustrates the thorny relationship between media and government in Russia. “The legal system in Russia and other countries in which we operate can create an uncertain environment for investment and business activity,” the filing notes.

It cites “selective enforcement of laws or regulations” as an example of such risk, stating that this is perceived as being “motivated by political or financial considerations.”

To date, RosPil’s site claims that it has reported fraud valued at more than 1.6 billion rubles, or more than US$50 million. While Navalny’s targets have included very large Russian organizations such as oil players Rosneft and Transneft, the anti-corruption Website also exposes routine small-scale dodginess across much smaller government departments.

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Sarah Lacy May 14, 2011

It was when they pulled out the machetes that I started to worry.I’d seen men with machetes in Africa before, but they were rusty, practical tools used for clearing away brush by the side of the highway. These were long, shiny and housed in decorative sheaths, pulled out ostensibly so the men could sit down more comfortably, but done with a clear, understated flair. They were more like sultan swords than jungle tools.

The kicking in my six-month pregnant belly had gone eerily silent since we entered the vigilante court at Alaba. I reassured myself that I’d been through things like this before. The time I went to visit Brazilian entrepreneur Marco Gomes’ hometown in the crime-ridden slums of central Brazil, comforted only by his reassurance that “No foreigner has ever died in my hometown, because no foreigner has ever been to my hometown.” And the time I was driving along the boarder between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and armed Rwandan guards stopped our car, wordlessly got in the backseat and hitched a ride for several miles. And then there was the time we were charged by a baboon.

Looking at those beady baboon eyes rushing towards me, I was instantly convinced I was losing an arm. Now, in this Nigerian “courtroom,” my husband was looking at the machetes having the same thought. I was just hoping they didn’t realize he’d slipped the camera’s memory card in his pocket. I tried to pat my stomach as apologetically as I could. Sorry, son. Welcome to life as my kid.

Sometimes I write provocative leads that aren’t quite what they seem. Like the time I said I was in a wheelchair getting a blood transfusion in Singapore. As the second graph explained, I was actually at a hospital-themed bar where you sit in wheelchairs and drink out of IV bags. My cocktail was called a “blood transfusion.”

But this time, I’m not being hyperbolic or clever. There’s no twist coming. My husband, our unborn child and I were actually sitting in a Nigerian vigilante court being tried for– as near as I could tell– taking photos and not respecting authority. The makeshift courthouse looked like a set of a Western. The judge was named “Bones.” The police? Well, there was a station not too far from here, but the police ceded Bones authority in Alaba. They didn’t what to get involved.

It could have been a scene in a movie. That irony wasn’t lost on us, because our accusers, the people speaking for us, and the judge, jury and — well, let’s just call them the guys with the machetes– were there to protect the interests of the rough-and-tumble world of the Nigerian filmmaking. They call it Nollywood.

Nollywood sprung up a few decades ago and is the second largest film industry in the world by volume. Producers churn out

hundreds of movies a month, most shot on a shoe-string budget of about $15,000 per picture. We visited a set of a film called “The Stripers.” It reminded me of the photos in Larry Sultan’s book about low-frills porn sets, “The Valley,” sans sex and nudity of course.The film– a romantic comedy where one of Nollywood’s hottest actresses turns a gay man straight– was shot in an empty suburban house rented for a few days with a crew of no more than ten. The assistant did the hair and makeup, and the producer did most everything else.

There are few theatrical releases in Nollywood. Most of these movies– which Nigerians consume as rabidly as Brazilians devour their telenovelas–  are seen on local TV stations and sold over DVDs. And these producers move fast: Last week we saw a movie on the market called “Dead at Last: Osama Bin Laden, Complete Season One: Life and Death.”

Like most industries in emerging markets, Nollywood is developing in a very different time than Hollywood or even Bollywood developed, and that alone means it’s developing in a very different way. On the plus side, cheap modern digital production tools have made it all possible. But rampant digital piracy means there’s no honeymoon period for producers to build an industry around protected copyrights. They produce content millions of people love, but most of these scrappy street producers are constantly operating on shoe-string budgets, lucky to break even on each film.

Alaba International Market is where the producers all have their store-fronts and distribution hubs. We met dozens of them inside a long, dark cave-like hallway where each producer operated out of a cell-sized office, filled with paper records, movie posters pasted over movie posters, and spindles of thousands of DVDs.

Some of these producers are highly-educated entrepreneurs following their passion the same way the best entrepreneurs in

Silicon Valley have. We met one man named Ulzee, a Nollywood pioneer who decided to make movies after getting a science degree. (Pictured right.) His wife, trained as a lawyer, joined him along the seemingly crazy journey. His biggest hit was “Osuofia in London,” one of the first Nollywood films to get international attention. He shot it on location in London and it cost about $6,500 to make– a jaw-dropping investment for a Nollywood picture back in 2003. But it grossed more than $650,000.

Much like the 419 scam business, members of Nigeria’s 50 million-person unemployed class see the glamorous, seemingly easy money of Nollywood and have flooded into the business. Ulzee doesn’t respect many of them, saying they aren’t artists. They shoot once and release the same movie with four different covers just to make an extra buck. Of course, given the rampant piracy that’s destroyed their margins, you can understand why these producers are constantly trying to milk revenues out of the same film.

Here’s what makes the mood at the Alaba market so tense: Before you get to that hallway of producers peddling their movies in

their cell-like offices, you walk past the open air markets where the software and DVD pirates have set up shop. Unlike Hollywood where the producers  reside in glamourous offices and pirates operate the the shadows and basements of the Internet, in Alaba the content creators and those destroying their hopes of revenues reside in the same place, selling the same product side-by-side. Fire-and-brimstone evangelical preachers set up keyboards and microphones in the middle of the street to save souls, only adding to the chaos. (Video of some of this in the next post.) So I could understand why Bones and his council occasionally need some machetes to keep the peace.After 40 weeks in emerging countries, markets tend to blur together, but Alaba was unlike any place I’ve seen before. It was rawly and intensely Nigerian. Nigeria isn’t a culture based on pleasantries. A local saying painted on the backs of trucks sums it up: “No Paddy for Jungle,” or no one has friends in the jungle.

And Lagos is like a jungle. On Victoria Island– the ritzy section of Lagos– incomes are high even for a dual economy, thanks

to oil and corruption. The most basic four-star hotels cost upwards of $500 a night, and the rich buy up rooms for a whole year or more, artificially constricting supply. Plots of land cost millions and a middle-of-the-road dinner for two without drinks can run $100 or more. But on the mainland in Lagos, you see the real Nigeria, the one where one-third of the population is unemployed. I talked to people furious by the corruption in the country, and what they felt was an unfair nepotism among the rich that made it almost impossible to climb the societal ladder.Even the people I met in “easy money” businesses such as scamming and Nollywood toil entrepreneur’s hours to build their fortunes, constantly under pressure to outsmart the people out to kill their livelihoods– whether that’s law enforcement in the case of scammers or pirates in the case of Nollywood.

The tension is palpable. Stuck in traffic on the freeways, we saw fist-fights break out. Unlike some other developing countries where hawkers will smile and flatter Westerners in an attempt to sell them outrageously priced goods, Nigerians don’t play that game. They’re happy to sell you something if you show the cash. Otherwise, keep moving. They have little use for smiling, nodding and pandering. It’s not necessarily that there’s more anger, resentment or corruption in Nigeria than the rest of the emerging world; Nigerians just wear it on their sleeves.

Part of me loves that. The warm hospitality many people showed us– in both poor and rich areas of the city– was genuine. You know where you stand in these places; it’s all out in the open. But it makes walking through these markets intimidating. Look at a hawker and smile on the wrong day, and you’ll get screamed at just for being there. As one 419 scammer told me, “If I can’t even trust a man with the black flesh, why should I ever trust you?”

Our guide through Nollywood was an entrepreneur named Jason Njoku (seen on the right in this photo, haggling with producers). His parents are Nigerian, but he grew up in the United Kingdom. He became entranced with Nollywood a few years ago and was bored with London. So he moved here, stunning his family and friends. He started Iroko Partners to catalog this vast Nollywood inventory and give it a new global distribution life on the Web. It sounds like a recipe for a city boy to get fleeced, but so far that hasn’t been the case.Njoku spent weeks trolling the Alaba markets introducing himself to producers and trying to explain to them how a YouTube channel could be an answer for revenues, not simply another channel for the pirates to steal their intellectual property. Once he sold a few of the bigger ones like Ulzee, word spread and more producers piled in. Just four months in to his business, Njoku has bought the online rights to 500 movies from 100 different one-man production houses. Last month his YouTube channel had 1.1 million uniques, 8 million streams, and is on pace to do more than $1 million in revenues this year from YouTube ads. Those numbers are massive for a Nigerian-based Web company, particularly in such a short time. Facebook has one of the largest user-bases here, feeling ubiquitous in the city. And yet it has less than three million users.

Njoku is playing a long-game. Most of his traffic is from outside Nigeria, because broadband penetration is still so low there. He’s paying more than he would have to for rights; about $3,000 per film, roughly what TV stations pay. That immediately returns about one-third of the production costs, a welcome surprise for a new medium that most of these producers had never really considered before. He provides a lot of other value-added services too, like creating an IMDB-equivalent for the messy Nollywood industry, and watching all movies to strip out things like the unauthorized use of a Beyonce song. In the future, he’s going to provide French subtitles so the movies can find new audiences in surrounding West African nations.

The checks have endeared Njoku to this rag-tag community of producers. One of Njoku’s several cell phones rings constantly with producers calling him to check on contracts, release dates and when they’re getting their next checks.

And that loyalty came in handy about the time a screaming mob broke out in Alaba over the presence of two unknown Americans taking pictures. I’m still not sure if they actually thought we were spying on their business or just wanted to extort us for cash. I’m still not sure whether it was the pirates, the producers or other rabble rousers who were the instigators. The ring leader appeared to be a terrifyingly huge, enraged, bald guy wearing a tight, white muscle shirt that said “SKULL SHIT” in big letters.

We barricaded ourselves in Ulzee’s cell-like office until it died down. We didn’t have another choice. We were half way down a long, dark hallway of offices, and there was no way out without going through the mob. Ulzee’s wife, who’d been lounging on some boxes when we arrived, sprung into action, explaining to the accusers that we were their guests and welcome to do what we wanted.

Eventually, the chaos died down, we promised not to take anymore pictures and we tried to leave. But as soon as we left the office, it erupted again and the crowd encircled us. The screaming intensified, echoing through the cave-like hallway. I tried to go back into Ulzee’s office, but the doors were being locked behind me by Bones’ crew. We were trapped, and the angry faces were circling in tighter, the screaming unintelligible as it echoed from wall-to-wall.

“Trust me, it’s better that this plays out here than on the street,” Njoku said. “Half of the people yelling are on our side.”

News of the uproar reached Bones, the man entrusted to keep the peace between producers, pirates and rare interlopers like ourselves. And that’s when we were summoned to his court. A phalanx of producers escorted us through the streets making sure no more harm came to us before we got there. “Don’t worry,” Njoku whispered. “As long as I have my checkbook, they still need me alive.”

We sat on one bench. The producers sat on the other. And that’s when Bones and the machete-men strolled in. After hearing all the  evidence, our insistence that we respected his authority, the producers vouching for us, and of course, some cash changed hands, the machetes stayed sheathed and they let us go.

Njoku didn’t break a sweat. Rather than convincing me he was trying to regulate something that couldn’t possibly be regulated, the whole episode made me more bullish on his company. It was clear how much the legitimate entrepreneurs in this community valued him, the depth of his relationships after just four months, and his innate understanding for navigating crisis in a terrifying situation.

If a businesss like this were being built in the West, there’d be few barriers to entry. Someone can always just pay higher license fees. But in a country like Nigeria, these sort of relationships, this kind of trust in a place where no one trusts anyone are more solid barriers to entry than patents.

The demand is there. The supply is there. Nollywood will emerge out of this chaos as something hugely profitable. There’s suspicion, competition and chaos surrounding the market, but that’s business in emerging markets. At the end of the day the producers weren’t unreasonable. They asked that next time Njoku bring guests, he give them a heads up and they’d provide protection. They’re justifiably suspicious because their industry is finally starting to take off, and they sit next to the people trying to eroding it every day. And my bet is that when Nollywood does take off, Njoku will be one of the guys to reap the benefits.

Of course, we couldn’t leave without pressing our luck and asking to take Bones & Co.’s picture. It’s below, and he’s on the bottom right. Note: Those smiles were nowhere to be seen before the cash changed hands.

The reported location of the compound housing Osama bin Laden is 2.5 miles (4 km) northeast of the center of Abbottabad and three-quarters of a mile (1.3 km) southwest of the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA). Abbottabad is about 100 miles from the Afghanistan border, where the major searches had taken place). It is on the far eastern side of Pakistan (only about 20 miles from India). Google Earth maps show that the compound was not present in 2001, but was present on images taken in 2005.

Diagram of bin Laden compound released by the Department of Defense.

Comparison of the compound site prior to construction and after the compound’s construction released by the Department of Defense.

Photo from March 23, 2001 highlighting the lack of bin Laden’s compound.

Photo from June 15, 2005 highlighting the bin Laden Compound with smaller fencing and less fortifications.

Photo from June 15, 2005 demonstrating the proximity of bin Laden’s compound to the Pakistan Military Academy.

Photo from January 15, 2011 released by DigitalGlobe with the Bin Laden compound in the center.

Photo from May 2, 2011 with the bin Laden compound at the center released by GeoEye.

A closeup on the bin Laden compound in a post-raid photo from May 2, 2011 released by GeoEye. Notice what appear to be burn marks on the ground at the southern wall of the compound where the fuselage of the U.S. helicopter was initially located.

A photo taken by a local resident and released by the Associated Press. It shows the wreckage of the downed U.S. helicopter next to the southern wall of the compound before it was later removed. Photo originally published by Cryptome.

Apr 06, 2011 - 06:04 AM

By: Ron_Holland

Oil at $200 plus a barrel will be the least of America’s problems when the Saudi Monarchy falls.

“If something happens in Saudi Arabia it (oil) will go to $200 to $300 (a barrel). I don’t expect this for the time being, but who would have expected Tunisia?” ~ Former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani 4/5/11

The most important question facing the United States today is whether the freedom revolutions sweeping the Middle East will impact the authoritarian regime of Saudi Arabia and the major oil producers surrounding this nation of major oil reserves? The second question is if the government is overthrown, will the new government continue the practice of pricing oil in depreciating dollars rather than consider new options?

The future value of the dollar and the dollar status as the world’s reserve currency depend heavily on the outcome of these two questions. This is why the price of gold could soar and the dollar move dramatically lower when the Saudi Monarchy is overthrown. I fear, the probable American military reaction to this scenario threatens what remains of our republic and may be compared by future historians as comparable in scope to Caesar’s march across the Rubicon in Roman history.

“I don’t think that what the King is doing now is sufficient to prevent an uprising. Saudi Arabia is a time bomb, but one that is constantly being reset,” ~ Jaafar Al Taie, managing director of Manaar Energy Consulting

Today, I’m warning about the risk of a dollar and Treasury bond threat which could make the real estate collapse or 2008 market meltdown mere footnotes in comparison. Today in the Middle East, either by stupidity or design, the Federal Reserve’s perpetuation of the dollar and treasury debt Ponzi schemes is now dependent on the survival of a few dictatorial regimes staying in power in the Persian Gulf while surrounded by spreading freedom revolutions.

This is the most dangerous region in the world and the focal point for conflict between Iran and America, the freedom revolution and authoritarian regimes, Sunni and Shiite, Israel and the Arab world, vast oil resources and the oil needs of the West and China, and where the decision will be made to price oil in depreciating dollars or in other currency alternatives. Of all the conflicts and threats in the region, I believe the question as to whether oil continues to be priced in dollars and the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency for now and the risk of a US dollar and debt collapse are the greatest threats facing America and the West.

The real estate bubble and financial meltdown as well as the new stock market bubble are misdemeanors in criminality compared to the Federal Reserve mistake of allowing our currency and debt to be dependent and held hostage based on the survival of a few corrupt authoritarian leaders in fake nations created by London politicians many years ago.

The Saudi Monarchy Will Fall Sooner Rather Than Later

The democracy index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit for 2010 places Libya 158th out of 167 and Saudi Arabia 160th of all nations in terms of an authoritarian government verses a democracy. I fear the oil producing nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar and the U.A.E. could eventually fall to freedom revolutions which have mutated into movements outside the control of the United States. Whether the current radical elements in the revolutionary movements will move to the forefront and possibly take control depends a lot on the current authoritarian regimes reaction to the freedom revolutions in each nation as well as future United States actions to safeguard the future of oil reserves and the dollar.

The fear of these movements sweeping the region is why the Obama Administration postponed actions which could have toppled Gaddafi weeks ago because another perceived victory there would have dramatically increased the growth and blitzkrieg effect of the revolutionary movements thus making them unstoppable and a real threat to first Bahrain and then Saudi Arabia etc. I previously discussed how the Libyan civil war is just a sideshow and deception to buy time and slow down what had been a cake walk by revolutionaries across the Middle East. The real action is in the Persian Gulf and the region is called the Persian Gulf because historically most of the region was under Persian (Iranian) influence.

Washington has successfully in the past chosen stability and tyranny in the region over the Arab people in the streets and now we are going to pay the price through the unintended consequences of our foreign policy in the region. This foreign policy failure when combined with Washington and Federal Reserve economic policies could be a lethal combination for the United States as well as the future of our children and grandchildren.

Our nation may well suffer severe economic consequences, a dollar and debt mini-collapse as well as the risk of a major war in the Persian Gulf region requiring an increasing degree of police state controls at home, the possible return of the draft and even a more authoritarian government in Washington. This is the dark future engineered by the Anglo-American monetary elites, some Washington politicians and the Federal Reserve which have put our currency at such risk.

The United States cannot allow new revolutionary governments outside our control to replace current regimes with political leaders which could threaten the dollar, our national debt and the US economy. If this becomes a risk, I fear the US military could be ordered to intervene and do whatever is necessary to either prop up or install new governments that will still continue to price oil in dollars. Frankly speaking should this situation develop, this may actually be the only way to defend a collapsing fiat dollar regardless of my personal views against military intervention.

The daily news reports continue to show the spread of revolutionary activity across the Middle East now directly impacting Syria, Jordan, Yemen and other nations around the periphery of Saudi Arabia. It appears the new social media driven freedom movements attack both US backed authoritarian regimes and enemies like Libya and Syria. What is often not recognized but apparent is the initial foreign intelligence involvement in the early birth of these revolutionary movements.

Regardless of their initial birth as engineered opposition movements by foreign intelligence, as has often been the case since the early 20th century, today these freedom movements have taken on a life of their own. They now threaten not only out of favor authoritarian leaders and enemy regimes but in the case of the United States, the modern day empire which covertly spawned the initial birth of the revolutions today.

Don Tapscott below certainly explains the situation in the region far better than I can and this is what we now face in the Middle East.

The real situation is “Revolution is not happening because of the current systems in place, it is happening despite them,” he said. “In the Middle East the old thinking has been support tyrants because they provide stability and keep the oil flowing; the young people are revolting against this very kind of thinking….Technology is enabling revolutions across the Middle East. Young people do not want to be subjects anymore. Until now revolutions have had a leader, technology has changed that,” ~ Don Tapscott, the co-author of “Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World.”

The Law of Unintended Consequences

The US should have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan how the law of unintended consequences from aggressive military, political or covert actions in a complex system like the Middle East can often create undesirable outcomes far different from what was hoped. Just as our invasion of Iraq destroyed the major bulwark against Shiite Iran and actually created another Iranian ally. Also our Afghanistan venture destabilized Pakistan, and today the freedom revolutions are slowly surrounding the House of Saud and the major Persian Gulf oil producing and US debt holding nations. We should also remember how our blind backing of the Shah of Iran and his excesses helped bring about the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Khomeini led Islamic state and the problems we are dealing with today.

An excellent analogy of the unintended consequences is the long-term result of Germany introducing Lenin and communism to Czarist Russia during World War One. This was successful in the near term to take Russia out of the war and end Germany’s two front war. But the long-term result was a 70 year battle between the communist system and the West which created both the Cold War and contributed to the rise of Hitler in Germany as an alternative against a communist takeover in the 1930’s. Even now, most of the fabricated nations in the Middle East were actually created in London and Paris following the Treaty of Versailles and our oil and dollar controlled foreign policies there are a direct result of fake countries and boundaries created following the First World War almost a century ago.

America’s Weakest Point is the Persian Gulf

“The importance of maneuvering so your enemy is hit in his weakest points.” ~ Sun Tzu’s, The Art of War

Although the United States is unassailable from a military standpoint in the region, the Washington dollar and Treasury debt are our weakest points and the entire world knows this.

If you have noticed, whenever Saudi Arabia is mentioned, the establishment news coverage is always followed by a comforting statement stressing how the House of Saud will somehow escape the political change in the region. The fall of the Saudi monarchy or serious unrest in the Shiite oil producing region of Saudi Arabia is the “elephant in the room” that no one wants to discuss or write about and why the threat is being ignored and going unaddressed.

The reason is all of the oil produced in the Persian Gulf region outside of Iran is currently priced in US dollars thus allowing the United States and the Federal Reserve to create more dollars at will. 87% of the oil exported out of the Persian Gulf is priced in US dollars and as I explained last week in The Great Anglo-American Gaddafi Deception, the pricing of oil in dollars is a major contributor to maintaining the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

I believe the Washington Treasury debt and US dollar Ponzi scheme would risk collapse if these five nations mentioned above should threaten or seriously consider pricing oil in gold, Euros, SDR’s or any other currency other than dollars. In addition, Israel wouldn’t survive even with its feared Samson option for more than a few months if the US should lose in the region. Therefore the existence of Israel and the economic survival of the United States, our fiat dollar and the continued rollover of our Treasury debt are very dependent on friendly governments controlled and protected by Washington maintaining power at any price in the Persian Gulf.

Thus our economic future is only guaranteed by fake monarchs and Washington backed puppet regimes staying in power in the region. These are authoritarian regimes and dictatorships because the countries are artificial nations with questionable national boundaries. These nation states only began when needed by the British colonial office almost a century ago in London. In fact, the actual delineation of national borders only started with the first oil concessions in the 1930’s as the United Kingdom needed to map the different oil deposits and this was when the European modern nation state concept was first forced on the region by European powers.

Washington’s Greatest Fear Are the Color Revolutions Sweeping the Middle East

In Libya, the rebels are called the Interim National Council (INC) and apparently run by a former Libyan colonel Khalifa Hifter, who broke with Gaddafi over 20 years ago and has lived a quiet life with no visible means of support only a few miles from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Remember, the rebel forces were initially at the gates of Tripoli, when any kind of military or even diplomatic action would have overthrown Gaddafi but now once again they have been pushed back and cornered in Benghazi for the second time in several weeks after the use of air power.

Certainly the rebels have sadly been reduced to “dogs of war” and held on a leash by the US and allied elites in order to continue the sideshow action for entertainment and nightly news coverage as the new freedom revolutionaries are taught that victory can only be achieved by working within the confines of the Anglo-American paradigm.

What Will China Do? China can manipulate the foreign policy of the United States in the same way the United States forced the United Kingdom to withdraw its forces back during the Suez crisis. This was in 1956 when the UK, France and Israel invaded Egypt to take control over the Suez Canal. Washington threatened to dump the US Government’s Sterling Bond holdings if Great Britain didn’t withdraw troops and the invasion ended.

What Will Iran Do? – They are masters at thinking long-term and I do not believe they will take any action to provoke a wounded beast like the Washington Empire. Iran has not invaded another nation in hundreds of years while you well know America’s sordid track record of aggression, drone attacks, aerial bombing and military occupation. Why should they? Their intelligence services were behind the fake weapons of mass destruction evidence in Iraq and they provoked the Bush Administration into invading Iran and toppling their major opponent in the Middle East. They will just sit back and let us do ourselves in.

What Should Americans Do?

• First, we need to audit and eliminate the Federal Reserve which is the vehicle the monetary elites use to enslave our nation and most of the rest of the world.
• Second, follow the real news on the Middle East with alternative news sites and email letters like LewRockwell.com, The Daily Bell and the Swiss Mountain Vision newsletter for which I’m also a contributing editor.
• Third, get as much of your wealth as possible legally and following all of the new reporting requirements out of the threatened fiat dollar currently being destroyed by Washington and the Federal Reserve. Consider other investments, currencies and real estate denominated in the Euro, Swiss franc etc. as well as gold and natural resource stocks. None of your wealth will be safe inside the United States if the dollar status as the reserve currency is compromised by the fall of Saudi Arabia and other friendly governments selling oil for dollars in the region.
• Store large amounts of gold outside the US in protected and safe jurisdictions in Europe, Australia and Switzerland in secure storage programs like Global Gold located in Switzerland.
• Finally oppose all future military activities in the Middle East as the unintended long-term consequences of US control in the region have historically far outweighed any near-term military gain advocated by the Neocons or profits for a few elite controlled financial institutions and international corporations.

If the Saudi Monarchy and other Persian Gulf dictators are overthrown by the current revolutionary movements, the debate will be shifted from should we go to war and occupy the region and restore stability (which actually means they continue to rollover treasury debt and price oil in dollars) to like the trial runs of 9/11 and the Fed induced meltdown, do we choose military action or risk economic and dollar collapse. Both Congress and the American people showed their preference for stability at any price including war and loss of liberties. Therefore I fear our conditioned response is already assured.

In the final analysis, the monetary elites are probably correct that their continued survival and parasitic control over much of the West can only be assured by full occupation of the oil resources of the region rather than depending on the former strategy of authoritarian regimes now shown to be weak and subject to powerful freedom movements.

Although all efforts will be made to stay outside the Moslem Holy cities of Mecca and Medina, a new foreign occupation of the Middle East although cloaked in some UN, NATO or Arab organization agreement will still be seen by the people in the street as another crusade for oil and against the Moslem world. This will be magnified if the US and their former colonial masters also utilize the forces of Israel in this repeat version of the 1956 Suez Crisis and takeover of the Suez Canal.

This kind of action although maybe necessary for the survival of the dollar and oil supplies could begin the end of the West as we know it. But then again, maybe that is the goal of the Anglo-American elites moving toward global governance and control by a few wealthy and powerful families? Maybe they can only succeed in their goals of one world government if they world they govern has become so desperate, poverty stricken and tired of permanent war that we will accept any limitation on our wealth and liberties to just survive.

After all, in the end, most people will sacrifice freedom and liberty for stability. It worked for the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and since the end of World War Two in the Middle East. Why would this not work in Europe and America?

I guess Benjamin Franklin was right.”They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” We did this after the 9/11 attack, and we again allowed this to happen after the Federal Reserve created bubble and financial meltdown in 2008. I fear if history is any guide, America and the West will follow the same course of action again in the Middle East but this time straight to the slaughter house of perpetual war and the risk of economic poverty at home.

Cpl. Jeremy Morlock with Staff Sgt. David Bram

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

Bravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the company’s 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields.

To provide perimeter security, the soldiers parked the Strykers at the outskirts of the settlement, which was nothing more than a warren of mud-and-straw compounds. Then they set out on foot. Local villagers were suspected of supporting the Taliban, providing a safe haven for strikes against U.S. troops. But as the soldiers of 3rd Platoon walked through the alleys of La Mohammad Kalay, they saw no armed fighters, no evidence of enemy positions. Instead, they were greeted by a frustratingly familiar sight: destitute Afghan farmers living without electricity or running water; bearded men with poor teeth in tattered traditional clothes; young kids eager for candy and money. It was impossible to tell which, if any, of the villagers were sympathetic to the Taliban. The insurgents, for their part, preferred to stay hidden from American troops, striking from a distance with IEDs.

While the officers of 3rd Platoon peeled off to talk to a village elder inside a compound, two soldiers walked away from the unit until they reached the far edge of the village. There, in a nearby poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. “The general consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it,” one of the men later told Army investigators.

The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution.

He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. His name, they would later learn, was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. He was wearing a little cap and a Western-style green jacket. He held nothing in his hand that could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. The expression on his face was welcoming. “He was not a threat,” Morlock later confessed.

Morlock and Holmes called to him in Pashto as he walked toward them, ordering him to stop. The boy did as he was told. He stood still.

The soldiers knelt down behind a mud-brick wall. Then Morlock tossed a grenade toward Mudin, using the wall as cover. As the grenade exploded, he and Holmes opened fire, shooting the boy repeatedly at close range with an M4 carbine and a machine gun.

Mudin buckled, went down face first onto the ground. His cap toppled off. A pool of blood congealed by his head.

The loud report of the guns echoed all around the sleepy farming village. The sound of such unexpected gunfire typically triggers an emergency response in other soldiers, sending them into full battle mode. Yet when the shots rang out, some soldiers didn’t seem especially alarmed, even when the radio began to squawk. It was Morlock, agitated, screaming that he had come under attack. On a nearby hill, Spc. Adam Winfield turned to his friend, Pfc. Ashton Moore, and explained that it probably wasn’t a real combat situation. It was more likely a staged killing, he said – a plan the guys had hatched to take out an unarmed Afghan without getting caught.

Back at the wall, soldiers arriving on the scene found the body and the bloodstains on the ground. Morlock and Holmes were crouched by the wall, looking excited. When a staff sergeant asked them what had happened, Morlock said the boy had been about to attack them with a grenade. “We had to shoot the guy,” he said.

It was an unlikely story: a lone Taliban fighter, armed with only a grenade, attempting to ambush a platoon in broad daylight, let alone in an area that offered no cover or concealment. Even the top officer on the scene, Capt. Patrick Mitchell, thought there was something strange about Morlock’s story. “I just thought it was weird that someone would come up and throw a grenade at us,” Mitchell later told investigators.

But Mitchell did not order his men to render aid to Mudin, whom he believed might still be alive, and possibly a threat. Instead, he ordered Staff Sgt. Kris Sprague to “make sure” the boy was dead. Sprague raised his rifle and fired twice.

As the soldiers milled around the body, a local elder who had been working in the poppy field came forward and accused Morlock and Holmes of murder. Pointing to Morlock, he said that the soldier, not the boy, had thrown the grenade. Morlock and the other soldiers ignored him.

To identify the body, the soldiers fetched the village elder who had been speaking to the officers that morning. But by tragic coincidence, the elder turned out to be the father of the slain boy. His moment of grief-stricken recognition, when he saw his son lying in a pool of blood, was later recounted in the flat prose of an official Army report. “The father was very upset,” the report noted.

The father’s grief did nothing to interrupt the pumped-up mood that had broken out among the soldiers. Following the routine Army procedure required after every battlefield death, they cut off the dead boy’s clothes and stripped him naked to check for identifying tattoos. Next they scanned his iris and fingerprints, using a portable biometric scanner.

Then, in a break with protocol, the soldiers began taking photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. Holding a cigarette rakishly in one hand, Holmes posed for the camera with Mudin’s bloody and half-naked corpse, grabbing the boy’s head by the hair as if it were a trophy deer. Morlock made sure to get a similar memento.

No one seemed more pleased by the kill than Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the platoon’s popular and hard-charging squad leader. “It was like another day at the office for him,” one soldier recalls. Gibbs started “messing around with the kid,” moving his arms and mouth and “acting like the kid was talking.” Then, using a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears, he reportedly sliced off the dead boy’s pinky finger and gave it to Holmes, as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.

According to his fellow soldiers, Holmes took to carrying the finger with him in a zip-lock bag. “He wanted to keep the finger forever and wanted to dry it out,” one of his friends would later report. “He was proud of his finger.”

After the killing, the soldiers involved in Mudin’s death were not disciplined or punished in any way. Emboldened, the platoon went on a shooting spree over the next four months that claimed the lives of at least three more innocent civilians. When the killings finally became public last summer, the Army moved aggressively to frame the incidents as the work of a “rogue unit” operating completely on its own, without the knowledge of its superiors. Military prosecutors swiftly charged five low-ranking soldiers with murder, and the Pentagon clamped down on any information about the killings. Soldiers in Bravo Company were barred from giving interviews, and lawyers for the accused say their clients faced harsh treatment if they spoke to the press, including solitary confinement. No officers were charged.

But a review of internal Army records and investigative files obtained by Rolling Stone, including dozens of interviews with members of Bravo Company compiled by military investigators, indicates that the dozen infantrymen being portrayed as members of a secretive “kill team” were operating out in the open, in plain view of the rest of the company. Far from being clandestine, as the Pentagon has implied, the murders of civilians were common knowledge among the unit and understood to be illegal by “pretty much the whole platoon,” according to one soldier who complained about them. Staged killings were an open topic of conversation, and at least one soldier from another battalion in the 3,800-man Stryker Brigade participated in attacks on unarmed civilians. “The platoon has a reputation,” a whistle-blower named Pfc. Justin Stoner told the Army Criminal Investigation Command. “They have had a lot of practice staging killings and getting away with it.”

From the start, the questionable nature of the killings was on the radar of senior Army leadership. Within days of the first murder, Rolling Stone has learned, Mudin’s uncle descended on the gates of FOB Ramrod, along with 20 villagers from La Mohammad Kalay, to demand an investigation. “They were sitting at our front door,” recalls Lt. Col. David Abrahams, the battalion’s second in command. During a four-hour meeting with Mudin’s uncle, Abrahams was informed that several children in the village had seen Mudin killed by soldiers from 3rd Platoon. The battalion chief ordered the soldiers to be reinterviewed, but Abrahams found “no inconsistencies in their story,” and the matter was dropped. “It was cut and dry to us at the time,” Abrahams recalls.

Other officers were also in a position to question the murders. Neither 3rd Platoon’s commander, Capt. Matthew Quiggle, nor 1st Lt. Roman Ligsay has been held accountable for their unit’s actions, despite their repeated failure to report killings that they had ample reason to regard as suspicious. In fact, supervising the murderous platoon, or even having knowledge of the crimes, seems to have been no impediment to career advancement. Ligsay has actually been promoted to captain, and a sergeant who joined the platoon in April became a team leader even though he “found out about the murders from the beginning,” according to a soldier who cooperated with the Army investigation.

Indeed, it would have been hard not to know about the murders, given that the soldiers of 3rd Platoon took scores of photographs chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan. The photos, obtained by Rolling Stone, portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing Afghan civilians is less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals,” one soldier explained to investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.” One photo shows a hand missing a finger. Another depicts a severed head being maneuvered with a stick, and still more show bloody body parts, blown-apart legs, mutilated torsos. Several show dead Afghans, lying on the ground or on Stryker vehicles, with no weapons in view.

In many of the photos it is unclear whether the bodies are civilians or Taliban, and it is possible that the unidentified deaths involved no illegal acts by U.S. soldiers. But it is a violation of Army standards to take such photos of the dead, let alone share them with others. Among the soldiers, the collection was treated like a war memento. It was passed from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, UFC fights and films such as Iron Man 2. One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who asked.

The collection also includes several videos shot by U.S. troops. In a jumpy, 30-minute clip titled “Motorcycle Kill,” soldiers believed to be with another battalion in the Stryker Brigade gun down two Afghans on a motorcycle who may have been armed. One of the most chilling files shows two Afghans suspected of planting an IED being blown up in an airstrike. Shot through thermal imaging, the grainy footage has been edited into a music video, complete with a rock soundtrack and a title card that reads ‘death zone.’

Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos – an effort that reached the highest levels of both governments. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and President Hamid Karzai were reportedly briefed on the photos as early as May, and the military launched a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib. Investigators in Afghanistan searched the hard drives and confiscated the computers of more than a dozen soldiers, ordering them to delete any provocative images. The Army Criminal Investigation Command also sent agents fanning out across America to the homes of soldiers and their relatives, gathering up every copy of the files they could find. The message was clear: What happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan.

By suppressing the photos, however, the Army may also have been trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. In one image, two dead Afghans have been tied together, their hands bound, and placed alongside a road. A sign – handwritten on cardboard from a discarded box of rations – hangs around their necks. It reads “Taliban are Dead.” The Pentagon says it is investigating the photos, but insists that there is little more investigators can do to identify the men. “It’s a mystery,” says a Pentagon spokesman. “To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure they know where to take it next. All we have is two apparently dead Afghans handcuffed to each other against a mile marker. We don’t know much beyond that. For all we know, those two guys may have been killed by the Taliban for being sympathizers.”

But such statements suggest that the Pentagon isn’t following every lead. A Stryker vehicle in the photos, for example, bears identifying marks that are clearly visible in the image. And according to a source in Bravo Company, who spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity, the two unarmed men in the photos were killed by soldiers from another platoon, which has not yet been implicated in the scandal.

“Those were some innocent farmers that got killed,” the source says. “Their standard operating procedure after killing dudes was to drag them up to the side of the highway.”

Army prosecutors insist that blame for the killings rests with a soldier near the bottom of the Stryker Brigade’s totem pole: Calvin Gibbs, a three-tour veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who served as a squad leader in 3rd Platoon. Morlock and five soldiers charged with lesser crimes have pleaded guilty in exchange for testifying against Gibbs, who faces life in prison for three counts of premeditated murder.

The 26-year-old staff sergeant has been widely portrayed as a sociopath of Mansonesque proportions, a crazed killer with a “pure hatred for all Afghans” who was detested and feared by those around him. But the portrait omits evidence that the Army’s own investigators gathered from soldiers in Bravo Company. “Gibbs is very well-liked in the platoon by his seniors, peers and subordinates alike,” Spc. Adam Kelly reported, adding that Gibbs was “one of the best NCOs I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with in my military career. I believe that because of his experience, more people came back alive and uninjured than would have without him having been part of the platoon.” Another soldier described Gibbs as an “upbeat guy, very funny. He was one of those guys you could talk to about anything and he would make you feel better about the situation.”

At six-feet-four and 220 pounds, Gibbs could certainly intimidate those around him. Growing up in a devout Mormon family in Billings, Montana, he had dropped out of high school to get an equivalency degree and enlist in the Army. He plunged into soldiering, accumulating a slew of medals in Iraq, where the line between legitimate self-defense and civilian deaths was often blurry at best. In 2004, Gibbs and other soldiers allegedly fired on an unarmed Iraqi family near Kirkuk, killing two adults and a child. The incident, which was not prosecuted at the time, is now under investigation by the Army.

Before he joined Bravo Company in November 2009, Gibbs worked on the personal security detail for one of the top commanders in Afghanistan, a controversial, outspoken colonel named Harry Tunnell. Tunnell, who at the time was the commander of 5th Stryker Brigade, openly mocked the military’s approach to counterinsurgency – which emphasizes the need to win the support of local civilians – as better suited to a “social scientist.” “Political correctness dictates that we cannot talk about the oppressive measures employed during successful counterinsurgency campaigns,” he wrote. Tunnell also pushed his men to go after “guerrilla hunter killers,” insisting that the enemy “must be attacked relentlessly.”

When Gibbs left Tunnell’s detail and arrived at the front, he quickly became an extreme version of a relentless attacker. After he took command, Gibbs put a pirate flag on his tent. “Hey, brother,” he told a friend. “Come down to the line and we’ll find someone to kill.” A tattoo on his left shin featured a pair of crossed rifles offset by six skulls. Three of the skulls, colored in red, represented his kills in Iraq. The others, in blue, were from Afghanistan.

By the time Gibbs arrived, morale in the Stryker Brigade had hit rock bottom. Only four months earlier, the unit had been deployed to Afghanistan amid a chorus of optimism about its eight-wheeled armored vehicles, a technological advancement that was supposed to move infantry to the battlefield more quickly and securely, enabling U.S. troops to better strike against the Taliban. By December, however, those hopes had dissolved. The Taliban had forced the Strykers off the roads simply by increasing the size and explosive force of their IEDs, and the brigade had suffered terrible casualties; one battalion had lost more soldiers in action than any since the start of the war. Gibbs, in fact, had been brought in after a squad leader had his legs blown off by an IED.

The soldiers were bored and shellshocked and angry. They had been sent to Afghanistan as part of a new advance guard on a mission to track down the Taliban, but the enemy was nowhere to be found. “To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference between local nationals and combatants,” one soldier later confessed. During the unit’s first six months in Afghanistan, the Taliban evaded almost every patrol that 3rd Platoon sent out. Frustrations ran so high that when the unit came across the body of an insurgent killed by a helicopter gunship in November 2009, one soldier took out a hunting knife and stabbed the corpse. According to another soldier, Gibbs began playing with a pair of scissors near the dead man’s hands. “I wonder if these can cut off a finger?” Gibbs asked.

The Pentagon’s top command, rather than addressing the morale problems, actually held up the brigade as a media-worthy example of progress in the war. The month after the helicopter incident – only four weeks before the killings began – the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, paid a heavily publicized visit to the area. The military’s strategy of counterinsurgency, he reminded members of 5th Stryker Brigade, required them to win hearts and minds by protecting the population. “If we’re killing local civilians,” he cautioned, “we’re going to strategically lose.”

Gibbs had a different idea about how to breathe new life into 3rd Platoon. Not long after he arrived, he explained to his fellow soldiers that they didn’t have to wait passively to be attacked by the enemy’s IEDs. They could strike back by hitting people in towns known to be sympathetic to the Taliban. “Gibbs told everyone about this scenario by pitching it – by saying that all these Afghans were savages, and we had just lost one of our squad leaders because his legs got blown off by an IED,” Morlock recalled. Killing an Afghan – any Afghan – became a way to avenge the loss.

The members of Bravo Company began to talk incessantly about killing Afghans as they went about their daily chores, got stoned or relaxed over a game of Warhammer. One idea, proposed half in jest, was to throw candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village and shoot the children who came running to pick up the sweets. According to one soldier, they also talked about a second scenario in which they “would throw candy out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run the children over.” Another elaborate plan involved waiting for an IED attack, then using the explosion as an excuse to kill civilians. That way, the soldiers reasoned, “you could shoot anyone in the general area and get away with it.”

“We were operating in such bad places and not being able to do anything about it,” Morlock said in a phone interview from the jail at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. “I guess that’s why we started taking things into our own hands.”

After killing the Afghan boy at La Mohammad Kalay, members of 3rd Platoon were jubilant. “They were high-fiving each other about having killed the guy,” one soldier recalled. They put the corpse in a black body bag and stowed it on top of their Stryker for the ride back to FOB Ramrod. No sooner had they arrived at the base than they were recounting the tale to soldiers they barely knew.

A few hours after the shooting, during a routine checkup at the base’s clinic, Holmes and Morlock bragged about having killed an insurgent to Alyssa Reilly, a fair-skinned, blond medic who was popular among the men in the unit. Reilly later paid the soldiers a social visit, and they all sat around playing spades. When it came time for their wager, Morlock and Holmes said they would bet a finger. Then they tossed the finger that Gibbs had sliced from Mudin’s body on the card pile. “I thought it was gross,” Reilly told investigators.

Morlock was particularly eager to volunteer the truth to his fellow soldiers, evidently unconcerned about how they would react to his having murdered an unarmed Afghan. The same evening he shot Mudin, several members of Bravo Company convened in the privacy of a Stryker vehicle for a nightcap of hashish, a common activity among the unit. Hash supplied by Afghan translators was a major part of the daily lives of many soldiers; they smoked up constantly, getting high in their vehicles, their housing units, even porta-potties. Now, in the tanklike interior of the Stryker, surrounded by its mesh of wires and periscopes and thermal-imaging computers, Morlock passed the hash and recounted the killing in detail, even explaining how he had been careful not to leave the grenade’s spoon and pin on the ground, where they might have been used as evidence that a U.S. weapon had been involved in the attack. For the same reason, he’d also been careful to brush away traces of white explosive powder around Mudin’s body.

Before the military found itself short of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid whom the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track. In those days, he was constantly in trouble: getting drunk and into fights, driving without a license, leaving the scene of a serious car accident. Even after he joined the Army, Morlock continued to get into trouble. In 2009, a month before he deployed to Afghanistan, he was charged with disorderly conduct after burning his wife with a cigarette. After he arrived in Afghanistan, he did any drug he could get his hands on: opium, hash, Ambien, amitriptyline, flexeril, phenergan, codeine, trazodone.

As Morlock bragged about the killing, word of the murder spread back home to families and friends. Soldiers e-mailed photos to their buddies and talked about the killing during visits home. On February 14th, three months before the Army launched its investigation, Spc. Adam Winfield sent a Facebook message to his father, Chris, back in Cape Coral, Florida. A skinny, bookish 21-year-old, Winfield was pissed off at being disciplined by Gibbs. “There are people in my platoon that have gotten away with murder,” he told his father. “Everyone pretty much knows it was staged. . . . They all don’t care.” Winfield added that the victim was “some innocent guy about my age, just farming.”

During Facebook chats, Winfield continued to keep his father in the loop. “Adam told me that he heard the group was planning on another murder involving an innocent Afghanistan man,” Chris Winfield, himself a veteran, later told investigators. “They were going to kill him and drop an AK-47 on him to make it look like he was the bad guy.” Alarmed, the elder Winfield called the command center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and told the sergeant on duty what was going on. But according to Winfield, the sergeant simply shrugged it off, telling him that “stuff like that happens” and that “it would be sorted out when Adam got home.” Tragically, commanders at the base did nothing to follow up on the report.

Back in Afghanistan, Winfield was having second thoughts about reporting the incident. He believed the killings were wrong, but he had finally earned a place in the “circle of trust” erected by Gibbs, who had started off thinking of him as too “weak” to belong to the kill team. Reversing course, he begged his father to stop contacting the Army, saying that he feared for his life. Winfield said Gibbs had warned him that if he told anyone about the murder, he would “go home in a body bag.” His father agreed to keep the matter quiet.

Given the lack of response from their superiors, the soldiers of 3rd Platoon now believed they could kill with impunity – provided they planted “drop weapons” at the scene to frame their victims as enemy combatants. The presence of a weapon virtually guaranteed that a shooting would be considered a legitimate kill, even under the stricter rules of engagement the military had implemented as a key element of counterinsurgency. A drop weapon was the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. And in the chaotic war zone, they were easy to find.

The military keeps close track of the weapons and ammunition it issues to soldiers, carefully documenting every grenade exploded, every magazine expended. So Gibbs made it his business to gather “off the books” weapons through a variety of channels. He got friendly with guys in the Afghan National Police and tried to trade them porn magazines in exchange for rocket-propelled grenades; he cajoled other units to give him munitions; he scrounged for broken and discarded UXO – unexploded ordnance – until he had collected a motley arsenal of random weaponry, old frag grenades, bent RPG tails, duct-taped claymore mines, C-4, mortar rounds. His best find was a working AK-47 with a folding butt stock and two magazines, which he pulled from the wreckage of an Afghan National Police vehicle that had been blown up near the base’s gate. Gibbs placed the AK-47 and the magazines in a metal box in one of the Strykers. Later, a corporal named Emmitt Quintal discovered the gun and wondered what it was doing there. As he recalled, Staff Sgt. David Bram “sat me down and explained to me that it was basically to cover our ass if anything happened.”

Two weeks after the murder of Gul Mudin, something did.

It was the night of January 27th and the platoon was driving along the highway near their forward operating base. Suddenly, through their thermal imaging, they spotted a human heat signature on the side of the road – a potentially suspicious sign, since the Taliban often operate at night, using the cover of darkness to plant IEDs.

The patrol stopped 100 yards away from the man, and a handful of soldiers and an interpreter got out of their vehicles. They could see that the man was crouched down, or curled up like a ball close to the ground. As they approached, the man stood up and held his arms in front of his chest. To the soldiers, the motion was either an indication that he was cold, or that he was hiding a suicide-bomb vest.

Shouting to the man in Pashto, the soldiers illuminated him with intense, high-power spotlights and ordered him to lift up his shirt. But the man began to pace back and forth in the blinding white light, ignoring their calls. “He was acting strange,” recalls a soldier. For several minutes the man shuffled around as the soldiers fired warning shots at him. The bullets skipped around him.

Then – ignoring the warnings – the man began walking toward the troops. “Fire!” someone yelled. Gibbs opened fire, followed by at least five other soldiers. In the course of a few seconds, they expended approximately 40 rounds.

The man’s body lay on the ground. He turned out to be completely unarmed. According to official statements made by several soldiers, he also appears to have been deaf or mentally disabled. Above his beard, a large portion of his skull was missing, blown away by the hail of bullets. Spc. Michael Wagnon collected a piece of the skull and kept it as a trophy.

It was the team’s second killing of an unarmed man in as many weeks, and the second time they violated a body. But rather than investigate the shooting, the platoon’s officers concentrated on trying to justify it. When 1st Lt. Roman Ligsay radioed Capt. Matthew Quiggle, the platoon’s commanding officer, and informed him that the same unit had shot an unarmed Afghan male, the captain was furious. “He strongly believed that we had illegitimately killed a local national,” recalls Quintal.

Quiggle ordered Ligsay to search until they found a weapon. “Lt. Ligsay was pretty freaked out,” Quintal recalls. “He was positive he was going to lose his job.” For the next hour the platoon swept the area with their flashlights looking for weapons, but they couldn’t find anything.

Then Staff Sgt. Bram ordered Quintal to hand him the AK-47 magazine that Gibbs had stowed in the metal box in the Stryker. A private named Justin Stoner passed it down. A few minutes later, a voice called out in the darkness. “Sir!” Bram yelled. “I think I found something.”

Lt. Ligsay walked up and saw the black magazine lying on the ground. He called it in, and the platoon breathed a sigh of relief. The members of the kill team knew it was a drop magazine, but it turned the shooting into a legitimate kill.

“The incident was staged to look like he may have had a weapon,” Stoner told investigators. “Basically, what we did was a desperate search to justify killing this guy. But in reality he was just some old, deaf, retarded guy. We basically executed this man.”

Under the rules of engagement, however, the U.S. military still considers the man responsible for his own death. Because he ignored the platoon’s warnings and moved in their direction, no one has been charged in his killing – even though the Army now knows he was gunned down by soldiers intent on shooting unarmed civilians for sport.

Within a month, according to the Army, Gibbs executed another civilian and planted a weapon on the body. It was during Operation Kodak Moment, a routine mission to photograph and compile a database of the male residents of a village called Kari Kheyl. On February 22nd, the day of the mission, Gibbs hid the AK-47 he had stolen from the Afghan National Police in a black assault pack. As the platoon made its way through the village, he went to the hut of Marach Agha, a man he suspected of belonging to the Taliban, and ordered him outside.

First Gibbs fired the AK-47 into a nearby wall and dropped the weapon at Agha’s feet. Then he shot the man at close range with his M4 rifle. Morlock and Wagnon followed up with a few rounds of their own. With the scene staged to his satisfaction, Gibbs called in a report.

Staff Sgt. Sprague was one of the first to respond. Gibbs claimed that he had turned a corner and spotted the man, who had fired at him with the AK-47, only to have the rifle jam. But when Sprague picked up the Kalashnikov, it seemed to be in perfect operating condition. A short time later, as he walked down a dusty alley in the village, Sprague himself came under attack from small-arms fire. He responded instinctively by squeezing the trigger on the AK-47 – and the gun fired “with no problems at all.”

Sprague reported the discrepancy to Lt. Ligsay. When the body was identified, relatives also reported that Agha was a deeply religious man who would never have taken up arms. He “did not know how to use an AK-47,” they told Ligsay. Once again, however, no action was taken, nor was Gibbs disciplined.

With their commanding officers repeatedly failing to investigate, the kill team was starting to feel invulnerable. To encourage soldiers in other units to target unarmed civilians, Gibbs had given one of the “off the books” grenades he had scrounged to a friend from another battalion, Staff Sgt. Robert Stevens. “It showed up in a box on my desk,” recalled Stevens, a senior medic. “When I opened the box, I saw a grenade canister, which had a grenade in it and a dirty green sock.” Figuring the sock was some kind of joke, Stevens threw it away. Later, when he saw Gibbs, he mentioned getting the grenade.

“Did you get the other thing?” Gibbs asked.

“What, the sock?” Stevens said.

“No, what was in the sock,” Gibbs replied.

Inside the sock, Gibbs had placed a severed human finger.

Stevens got the message. On March 10th, as his convoy was driving down Highway 1, the central road connecting Kandahar to the north, Stevens stuck his head out of his Stryker’s open hatch and tossed the grenade. It detonated a few seconds later than he had anticipated, and when it blew, it thudded into the vehicle. Stevens immediately began firing at a nearby compound of huts, yelling at another platoon member to do the same. “Get the fuck up, Morgan!” he screamed. “Let’s go, shoot!”

No casualties were reported from the incident, but it earned Stevens an Army Commendation Medal and a Combat Medical Badge. Stevens later admitted that he had concocted the ambush not only because he wanted to get rid of the illegal grenade but because he “wanted to hook up the guys in the company” with their Combat Infantryman Badges, 14 of which were awarded in the aftermath of the shooting. All of the awards were revoked when the Army learned the attack had been faked.

The assault staged by Stevens suggested a new way to target Afghan civilians. In addition to approaching targets on foot, Gibbs decided to use his Stryker as a shooting platform, affording greater mobility with the protection of armor. In a perverse twist, the vehicle that had proved ineffective at combating the Taliban was about to be turned on the very people it was supposed to defend.

On March 18th, during a maintenance run to Kandahar Airfield, the unit drove past a populated area of the city. According to one soldier, Gibbs opened the hatch of the moving Stryker and tossed out a grenade. As it exploded with a loud bang, shrapnel hit the Stryker. “RPG!” Gibbs shouted. “RPG!” Sgt. Darren Jones, who had discussed faking attacks with Gibbs, opened fire indiscriminately on the local residents, who frantically scrambled to avoid the incoming rounds. Gibbs raised his M4 and laid down fire as well.

There is no way to know how many, if any, casualties resulted from the fusillade. Lt. Ligsay, who was in the same Stryker with Gibbs and Jones, maintains that he mistakenly believed the attack to be genuine and ordered the convoy to keep moving. The platoon did not return to the area to conduct a battle damage assessment, and no charges were ever filed in the incident.

A few weeks later, sometime in late March or early April, members of 3rd Platoon fired on unarmed civilians twice on the same day, indicating a growing sense of their own invincibility. Five soldiers were part of a patrol in a grape field in the Zhari District when they spotted three unarmed men. According to Stevens, Gibbs ordered the soldiers to open fire, even though the men were standing erect and posed no threat. All five soldiers fired their weapons at the men, but they managed to escape unscathed. Gibbs was not pleased. “He mentioned that we needed to work on our accuracy,” Stevens recalled, “because it did not appear that anyone was hurt.”

That same evening, while manning a guard tower overlooking a field in the Zhari District, soldiers from 3rd Platoon were directly told not to shoot at an elderly farmer who had been granted permission to work his land nearby. Despite the warning, two soldiers reportedly shot at the farmer as if he were an armed combatant. They once again failed to hit their target, but the officer in charge was furious. “This farmer has never been a problem,” he later told investigators. “He’s 60 to 70 years old.”

One morning that spring, Gibbs approached Morlock flashing what looked like a small metal pineapple. “Hey, man, I’ve got this Russian grenade,” he said. Gibbs added that the weapon would be the perfect tool to fake another attack, since the Taliban were known to carry Russian explosives. Morlock liked the idea. The night before, talking with a bunch of soldiers outside their bunk rooms, he had announced that he was looking to kill another haji, a pejorative term that U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan use for Muslims. One soldier who took part in the conversation dismissed it as idle talk. “I didn’t really think anything of it,” he told investigators, “because soldiers say stuff like that all the time.”

The morning of May 2nd, the platoon was on a routine patrol in a village called Qualaday, a few miles from base. Following standard procedure, the unit’s leaders entered a house to talk with a man who had previously been arrested for having an IED. That inadvertently left the rest of the platoon free to roam the village looking for targets, without having to worry about an officer’s supervision.

Outside the house, Morlock was overheard instructing Winfield in how a grenade explodes, cautioning him to remain on the ground during the blast. Then the two soldiers moved off with Gibbs. Nearby, in a compound filled with children, they picked out a man with a white beard and escorted him outside. “He seemed friendly,” Winfield recalled. “He didn’t seem to have any sort of animosity toward us.”

Gibbs turned to his men. “You guys want to wax this guy or what?” he asked. Morlock and Winfield agreed that the man seemed perfect.

Gibbs walked the Afghan to a nearby ditch and forced him to his knees, ordering him to stay that way. Then he positioned Morlock and Winfield in a prone position behind a small berm no more than 10 feet away. “To be honest,” Morlock later told investigators, “me and Winfield thought we were going to frag ourselves, ’cause we were so fucking close.”

With everyone in position, Gibbs took cover behind a low wall and chucked a grenade toward the Afghan. “All right, dude, wax this guy!” he shouted. “Kill this guy, kill this guy!”

As the grenade went off, Morlock and Winfield opened fire. Morlock got off several rounds with his M4. Winfield, who was armed with the more powerful SAW machine gun, squeezed off a burst that lasted for three to five seconds.

Gibbs shouted for Morlock to proceed with the next stage of the plan. “Get up there and plant that fucking grenade!”

The man lay where he had fallen. One of his feet had been blown off by the blast; his other leg was missing below the knee. Morlock ran up and dropped the Russian pineapple grenade near the dead man’s hand. Gibbs walked up to the body, stood directly over it, and fired twice into the man’s head, shattering the jaw.

Later, when the scene had calmed down – after soldiers had pushed away the dead man’s wife and children, who were screaming, hysterical with grief, and Morlock had spun the story to the higher-ups – Gibbs took out a pair of medical shears and cut off the corpse’s left pinky finger, which he kept for himself. Then, wearing a surgical glove, he reached into the dead man’s mouth, pulled out a tooth and handed it to Winfield.

Winfield held the tooth for a while. Then he tossed it aside, leaving it behind on the ground at Qualaday.

This time, though, the villagers refused to be placated. The dead man, it turned out, was a peaceful cleric named Mullah Allah Dad. Two days later, the murder provoked an uproar at a districtwide council attended by Capt. Quiggle, the unit’s commanding officer. The district leader launched into a blistering attack of the platoon. “He pretty much told us that we planted the grenade in order to shoot the guy,” recalled 1st Lt. Stefan Moye, who escorted Quiggle to the meeting.

But the next day, instead of launching an inquiry into the platoon’s behavior, Quiggle dispatched Moye to the scene of the shooting to do damage control. With Gibbs hovering nearby, the lieutenant found two elderly villagers who claimed to have seen Mullah Allah Dad with a grenade. Relieved, Moye urged them to spread the word. “This is the type of stuff that the Taliban likes to use against us and try to recruit people to fight against us,” he said.

His mission accomplished, Moye left the village feeling that the platoon could return to its usual rhythms. “After that,” he said, “everything was normal.”

Things might have remained “normal,” and the killings might have continued, if it hadn’t been for what began as a trivial spat between bunkmates. Around midnight, the same evening that Moye returned from pacifying village elders, Pfc. Stoner walked into the company’s tactical operations center to register a complaint. Stoner, who had helped plant the AK-47 magazine on the civilian murdered by the highway, said he was sick and tired of other soldiers in the unit using his room as “a smoke shack for hash.” Worried that the lingering odor would get him busted, he had asked them to find another place to get stoned. They had refused, pausing only to remove the battery from the room’s smoke detector.

“They baked the room many times until it stank constantly,” Stoner said. “I was worried for my own job.” Emphasizing that he wasn’t a snitch, Stoner told the sergeant on duty that he didn’t want to get his fellow soldiers in trouble. Then, growing emotional, he mentioned that “he and a bunch of other guys had executed a local national out on Highway 1.” The sergeant didn’t take the story seriously enough to report it up the chain of command. “I thought he was just upset and needed to talk to someone about the incident,” he later recalled. Instead of alerting his superiors about the murder allegation, the sergeant simply assured Stoner that the matter of hash smoking in his room would be handled quietly, and that his identity would be kept confidential.

But discretion wasn’t exactly the unit’s strong suit. By the next day, everyone knew that Stoner had ratted them out. “Everyone began to panic,” Quintal recalls. Gibbs, who didn’t care for hashish, gathered members of the kill team in his room. “We need to address the situation with Stoner,” he reportedly said. “Snitches get stitches.”

On May 6th, Gibbs and six other soldiers descended on Stoner’s room, locking the door behind them, and attacked Stoner while he was sitting on his bed. Grabbing him by the throat, they dragged him to the floor and piled on, striking him hard but taking care to avoid blows to the face that might leave visible bruises. “I’ve been in the Army four years,” Morlock said as he pummeled Stoner in the stomach. “How could you do this to me?” Before leaving, they struck Stoner in the crotch and spit in his face.

A few hours later, Gibbs and Morlock returned to Stoner’s room. As Stoner sat on his bed, still dazed from the assault, Morlock explained that the beating would not happen again, so long as Stoner kept his mouth shut “from fucking now on.” If Stoner were disloyal again, Gibbs warned, he would be killed the next time he went out on patrol. “It’s too easy,” he added, explaining that he could hide Stoner’s body in a Hesco barrier, one of the temporary structures used to fortify U.S. positions.

Then Gibbs reached into his pocket and took out a bit of cloth. Unfolding it, he tossed two severed fingers on the floor, with bits of skin still hanging off the bone. If Stoner didn’t want to end up like “that guy,” Morlock said, he better “shut the hell up.” After all, he added, he “already had enough practice” at killing people.

Stoner had no doubt that Morlock would follow through on the threat. “Basically, I do believe that Morlock would kill me if he had the chance,” he said later.

But the beating proved to be the kill team’s undoing. When a physician’s assistant examined Stoner the next day, she saw the angry red welts covering his body. She also saw the large tattoo across Stoner’s back. In gothic type, beneath a grinning red skull flanked by two grim reapers, it read:

what if im not the hero

what if im the bad guy

Stoner was sent to talk to Army investigators. In the course of recounting the assault, he described how Gibbs had thrown the severed fingers on the floor. The investigators pressed him about how Gibbs came by the fingers. Stoner told them it was because the platoon had killed a lot of innocent people.

At that point, the investigators asked Stoner to start from the beginning. When had the platoon killed innocent people? Bit by bit, Stoner laid out the whole history, naming names and places and times.

As other members of the platoon were called in and interviewed, many confirmed Stoner’s account and described the shootings for investigators. Morlock, who proved particularly gregarious, agreed to speak on videotape. Relaxed and unconcerned in front of the camera, he nonchalantly described the kills in detail.

Morlock’s confession kicked off an intense search for evidence. When the Army’s investigators were dispatched to FOB Ramrod, they went straight to the top of a Hesco barrier near Gibbs’ housing unit. Right where Morlock said it would be, they found the bottom of a plastic water bottle containing two pieces of cloth. Inside each piece of cloth was a severed human finger. But then a strange thing happened. When investigators compared prints of the two fingers to those in the company’s database, the prints didn’t match up. Either the records were screwed up, which was quite possible, or there were more dead guys out there who were unaccounted for.

Last week, on March 23rd, Morlock was sentenced to 24 years in prison after agreeing to testify against Gibbs. “The Army wants Gibbs,” says one defense lawyer. “They want to throw him in jail and move on.” Gibbs insists that all three killings he took part in were “legitimate combat engagements.” Three other low-level soldiers facing murder charges – Winfield, Holmes and Wagnon – also maintain their innocence. As for the other men in Bravo Company, five have already been convicted of lesser crimes, including drug use, stabbing a corpse and beating up Stoner, and two more face related charges. In December, Staff Sgt. Stevens was sentenced to nine months in prison after agreeing to testify against Gibbs. He was stripped to the lowest service rank – private E-1 – but over the protests of military prosecutors, he was allowed to remain in the Army.

So far, though, no officers or senior officials have been charged in either the murders or the cover-up. Last October, the Army quietly launched a separate investigation, guided by Brig. Gen. Stephen Twitty, into the critical question of officer accountability. But the findings of that inquiry, which was concluded last month, have been kept secret – and the Army refuses to say whether it has disciplined or demoted any of the commanders responsible for 3rd Platoon. Even if the commanding officers were not co-conspirators or accomplices in the crimes, they repeatedly ignored clear warning signs and allowed a lethally racist attitude to pervade their unit. Indeed, the resentment of Afghans was so commonplace among soldiers in the platoon that when Morlock found himself being questioned by Army investigators, he expressed no pity or remorse about the murders.

Toward the end of Morlock’s interview, the conversation turned to the mindset that had allowed the killings to occur. “None of us in the platoon – the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant – no one gives a fuck about these people,” Morlock said.

Then he leaned back in his chair and yawned, summing up the way his superiors viewed the people of Afghanistan. “Some shit goes down,” he said, “you’re gonna get a pat on the back from your platoon sergeant: Good job. Fuck ‘em.”

You know how we’ve been covering the efforts of U.S. Uncut, the growing campaign to stop corporate tax dodgers from exploiting overseas tax havens? Well here’s an excellent example of why such efforts are desperately needed, from the front page of the New York Times:

General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

How can that be, you ask?

The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm….The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

If that doesn\’t make your blood boil, I don\’t know what would.

Corporations argue that the U.S.\’s top corporate tax rate of 35% is prohibitively high and puts them at a disadvantage against foreign companies. But even if you buy that argument (and I do not, because I think corporations should be responsible for paying taxes in countries in which they reap huge profits), it\’s hard to swallow when the corporation in question — and not just any corporation, but the biggest in the world – is claiming a tax benefit. Not only did GE not pay any taxes in the U.S. last year, it effectively got money back from the U.S. government.

But wait, there\’s more! ThinkProgress dug up a speech given by GE CEO Jeffery Immelt at West Point in 2009. Titled “Renewing American Leadership,” the speech contains a rather ironic take-down of corporate greed:

Few of us will ever do what many of you will do for duty, honor and country. But America doesn’t expect heroism from all of us. […] Wherever our talents lie, and whenever our conscience requires, we must all, to the best of our abilities, help keep America the great face for good it has long been. We are trying to do that at GE. […]

I think we are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership, and maybe leadership in general. Tough-mindedness, a good trait – was replaced by meanness and greed – both terrible traits. Rewards became perverted. The richest people made the most mistakes with the least accountability.

And Immelt dared give that speech to the nation\’s future military leaders — a group that knows a thing or two about true sacrifice.

Brazil looks likely to elect an extraordinary leader next weekend

By Hugh O’Shaughnessy
Sunday, 26 September 2010

The world’s most powerful woman will start coming into her own next weekend. Stocky and forceful at 63, this former leader of the resistance to a Western-backed military dictatorship (which tortured her) is preparing to take her place as President of Brazil.

As head of state, president Dilma Rousseff would outrank Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, and Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State: her enormous country of 200 million people is revelling in its new oil wealth. Brazil’s growth rate, rivalling China’s, is one that Europe and Washington can only envy.

Her widely predicted victory in next Sunday’s presidential poll will be greeted with delight by millions. It marks the final demolition of the “national security state”, an arrangement that conservative governments in the US and Europe once regarded as their best artifice for limiting democracy and reform. It maintained a rotten status quo that kept a vast majority in poverty in Latin America while favouring their rich friends.

Ms Rousseff, the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant to Brazil and his schoolteacher wife, has benefited from being, in effect, the prime minister of the immensely popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former union leader. But, with a record of determination and success (which includes appearing to have conquered lymphatic cancer), this wife, mother and grandmother will be her own woman. The polls say she has built up an unassailable lead – of more than 50 per cent compared with less than 30 per cent – over her nearest rival, an uninspiring man of the centre called Jose Serra. Few doubt that she will be installed in the Alvorada presidential palace in Brasilia in January.

Like President Jose Mujica of Uruguay, Brazil’s neighbour, Ms Rousseff is unashamed of a past as an urban guerrilla which included battling the generals and spending time in jail as a political prisoner. As a little girl growing up in the provincial city of Belo Horizonte, she says she dreamed successively of becoming a ballerina, a firefighter and a trapeze artist. The nuns at her school took her class to the city’s poor area to show them the vast gaps between the middle-class minority and the vast majority of the poor. She remembers that when a young beggar with sad eyes came to her family’s door she tore a currency note in half to share with him, not knowing that half a banknote had no value.

Her father, Pedro, died when she was 14, but by then he had introduced her to the novels of Zola and Dostoevski. After that, she and her siblings had to work hard with their mother to make ends meet. By 16 she was in POLOP (Workers’ Politics), a group outside the traditional Brazilian Communist Party that sought to bring socialism to those who knew little about it.

The generals seized power in 1964 and decreed a reign of terror to defend what they called “national security”. She joined secretive radical groups that saw nothing wrong with taking up arms against an illegitimate military regime. Besides cosseting the rich and crushing trade unions and the underclass, the generals censored the press, forbidding editors from leaving gaps in newspapers to show where news had been suppressed.

Ms Rousseff ended up in the clandestine VAR-Palmares (Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard). In the 1960s and 1970s, members of such organisations seized foreign diplomats for ransom: a US ambassador was swapped for a dozen political prisoners; a German ambassador was exchanged for 40 militants; a Swiss envoy swapped for 70. They also shot foreign torture experts sent to train the generals’ death squads. Though she says she never used weapons, she was eventually rounded up and tortured by the secret police in Brazil’s equivalent to Abu Ghraib, the Tiradentes prison in Sao Paulo. She was given a 25-month sentence for “subversion” and freed after three years. Today she openly confesses to having “wanted to change the world”.

In 1973 she moved to the prosperous southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where her second husband, Carlos Araujo, a lawyer, was finishing a four-year term as a political prisoner (her first marriage with a young left-winger, Claudio Galeno, had not survived the strains of two people being on the run in different cities). She went back to university, started working for the state government in 1975, and had a daughter, Paula.

In 1986, she was named finance chief of Porto Alegre, the state capital, where her political talents began to blossom. Yet the 1990s were bitter-sweet years for her. In 1993 she was named secretary of energy for the state, and pulled off the coup of vastly increasing power production, ensuring the state was spared the power cuts that plagued the rest of the country.

She had 1,000km of new electric power lines, new dams and thermal power stations built while persuading citizens to switch off the lights whenever they could. Her political star started shining brightly. But in 1994, after 24 years together, she separated from Mr Araujo, though apparently on good terms. At the same time she was torn between academic life and politics, but her attempt to gain a doctorate in social sciences failed in 1998.

In 2000 she threw her lot in with Lula and his Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers’ Party which set its sights successfully on combining economic growth with an attack on poverty. The two immediately hit it off and she became his first energy minister in 2003. Two years later he made her his chief of staff and has since backed her as his successor. She has been by his side as Brazil has found vast new offshore oil deposits, aiding a leader whom many in the European and US media were denouncing a decade ago as a extreme left-wing wrecker to pull 24 million Brazilians out of poverty. Lula stood by her in April last year as she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, a condition that was declared under control a year ago. Recent reports of financial irregularities among her staff do not seem to have damaged her popularity.

Ms Rousseff is likely to invite President Mujica of Uruguay to her inauguration in the New Year. President Evo Morales of Bolivia, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay – other successful South American leaders who have, like her, weathered merciless campaigns of denigration in the Western media – are also sure to be there. It will be a celebration of political decency – and feminism.

Female representation: A woman’s place… is in the government

In recent years, female political representation has undergone significant growth, with dramatic changes occurring in unexpected corners of the globe. In some countries women are dominating cabinets and even parliamentary chambers. By comparison, the UK falls far behind, with only 22 per cent of seats in the Commons currently held by women.

Bolivia In the Bolivian cabinet, 10 men are now matched by 10 women. In 2009, women won 25 per cent of seats in the lower chamber, and 47 per cent in the upper chamber.

Costa Rica In 2010, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Argentina In 2009, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber and 47 per cent in the upper chamber.

Cuba In 2009, women won 41 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Rwanda In 2009, women won 56 per cent of seats in the lower chamber and 35 per cent in the upper chamber.

Mozambique In 2009, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Angola In 2009, women won 38 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Switzerland Has a female-dominated cabinet for the first time. In 2007, women won 29 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Germany In 2009, the cabinet had six women and 10 men. That year, women won 33 per cent of lower chamber seats.

Spain Nine women compared with eight men in cabinet. In 2008, women won 37 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Norway Equal numbers of men and women in the cabinet. Women won 40 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Denmark Nine women and 10 men in cabinet. In 2007, women won 23 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Netherlands Three women and nine men in cabinet. In 2010, women won 41 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Charlotte Sewell

To safely enclose and robotically dismantle the 25-year-old makeshift confinement sarcophagus at Chernobyl, contractors are now erecting a massive steel structure weighing more than 29,000 metric tons

By Charles Q. Choi  | Thursday, March 17, 2011 | 13

Computer simulated image of the construction of the New Safe Confinement. Image: Novarka

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine—Imagine a metal arch taller than the Statue of Liberty. Now picture it sliding a distance of roughly three football fields, making it the largest movable structure ever . Under this steel rainbow engineers are planning to entomb the site of the worst nuclear accident in history, the destroyed reactor at the Chernobyl power plant, using robotic cranes to dismantle the ruins and keep its deadly remains from poisoning the rest of the planet.

After reactor No. 4  exploded at Chernobyl in 1986 due to errors in both design and operation it sent plumes of radioactive dust as far away as Japan and the U.S. To contain the fallout, the Soviet Union constructed a metal and concrete structure commonly known as the sarcophagus over the wreckage.

“It was really quite a remarkable feat, but after 25 years, it’s in danger of collapse,” civil and environmental engineer Eric Schmieman of Battelle Memorial Institute explains in an interview in Kiev.

The sarcophagus, technically known as the Shelter Object, was made of more than 7,000 metric tons of metal and 400,000 cubic meters of concrete. It was erected as quickly as possible to limit worker exposure to radiation, and was never meant to last forever. In many ways it was designed “like a house of cards,” Schmieman says, with pieces of metal essentially leaning against each other and hooked together. “There are no welded joints or bolted joints—it wouldn’t take much of a seismic event to knock it down.”

At the same time, when the sarcophagus was completed, “there were over 1,000 square meters of openings in the roof where joints didn’t match up,” Schmieman says. These holes allowed water in, resulting in corrosion that is hastening the structure’s decline. Since then, workers have patched many of these holes, but 100 square meters of gaps remain. To help keep radioactive matter from leaking , a dust- suppression system inside relies on sprinklers that periodically spray a watery solution to prevent it from becoming airborne.

Now, to safely enclose the ailing sarcophagus, the French consortium Novarka is working on a replacement: the New Safe Confinement, a steel structure 110 meters high at its tallest point, 164 meters wide, spanning across 257 meters and weighing more than 29,000 metric tons. In comparison, the Statue of Liberty from the ground to the tip of its torch is about 93 meters high, says Schmieman, who helped lead New Safe Confinement’s conceptual design .

Because the destroyed reactor is still highly radioactive, to protect workers, the arch will not be constructed over the sarcophagus. R ather, it will be assembled nearby from prefabricated segments each about 25 meters high and weighing an average of 300 metric tons. Once complete, hydraulic jacks will then slide the arch approximately 300 meters on Teflon bearings during the course of a week to enclose the sarcophagus. Walls on either side  of the structure, making it resemble an aircraft hangar, will help isolate debris. “All told, it has a design life of 100 years,” Schmieman says.

Inside the structure, three robotic cranes capable of lifting up to 50 metric tons each will be equipped with tools to help dismantle the sarcophagus, using drills, manipulator arms and concrete crushers, along with vacuum cleaners that can suck up to 10 metric tons of dust. The cranes will also employ radioactivity monitors as well as cameras to help remotely operate the tools . Once the sarcophagus and its contents are dismantled , it remains to be seen where the most radioactive material will be buried, but there are facilities to store the less radioactive remains.

During the first week of March, I saw deep trenches and large steel piles here meant for the foundation of the arch. Currently, the goal is to finish the New Safe Confinement by 2014, although contractors are giving themselves a year leeway. “Keep in mind, this is a one-of-a-kind structure, and nothing like this has ever been attempted,” Schmieman cautions. “Further, Chernobyl is one of the most hazardous working sites in the world, and we frequently discover unexpected radiological hazards in excavation works. The combination of these factors introduces many uncertainties into any schedule.”

In addition, some of the money needed to complete the project has yet to be raised. Twenty-nine countries have pledged funds to the Shelter Implementation Plan creating the New Safe Confinement, but so far another $835 million are needed; also, the storage facility designed to hold spent nuclear fuel from reactor Nos. 1 to 3 still requires funding to the tune of $195 million . Fundraising events to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the disaster in April are now underway, according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is managing these efforts.

“I am fully aware that this is a considerable amount of money which is particularly difficult to raise at a time of universal fiscal constraints,” Thomas Mirow, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, said in a statement. “Nevertheless, we must not forget that it is in the best interest of Ukraine and the international community to bring to a successful conclusion the important work we have started in Chernobyl.”

The sacrifices made by the clean up workers immediately after the Chernobyl tragedy are driving those at the project to work to a much higher standard, says structural engineer Randy Jorissen , deputy manager for technical direction for the New Safe Confinement. “All they did to limit the extreme disaster, giving their lives for the task—I just hope we learned our lesson and that it never happens again,” he says. “It’s very satisfying to me to be part of a very significant effort to bring to a conclusion what those heroes started 25 years ago.”

By PHIL WHABA | REUTERS

Published: Mar 19, 2011 00:31 Updated: Mar 19, 2011 00:31

NEW YORK: Nike plans to raise the prices on its shoes and sports clothing markedly in 2012 to cope with the rising costs of oil, cotton and transportation that are hurting its profitability. The shares in the world’s largest athletic shoe and clothing maker plunged 7 percent on fears that already stretched margins will come under even greater pressure this year and next. It reported a lower-than-expected quarterly profit on Thursday, hurt by rising production costs.

The company expects margin pressures to persist this year, intensifying in the current quarter.

“This is evidence that rising input costs are hurting Nike’s profit,” said Giri Cherukuri, a portfolio manager with OakBrook Investments, which owns Nike shares. “Nike’s margins will be under pressure for the rest of the year.”

To contend with that, Nike executives said the company would ramp up and broaden its price increases.

Gross margins, which slipped 1.1 percentage points to 45.8 percent during the third quarter, were further hurt by the greater use of air freight to ship products and meet consumer demand.

The company said there had been some product shortages and that suppliers would increase their capacity.

Nike forecast its gross margin during the current quarter will be 3 percentage points below year-earlier levels, but that pressure on margins would ease later in the year as price increases kick in.

“Beginning in spring 2012, we’ll take more significant price increases across a broader range of styles,” Chief Financial Officer Don Blair said on a conference call.

Blair said on the call it was too early to know how the crisis in Japan might affect its business in that country, which accounted for 3.8 percent of third-quarter sales.

Net income in the fiscal third quarter rose 5.2 percent to $523 million, or $1.08 a share, compared with $497 million, or $1.01 cents a share, in the year-earlier quarter.

That was below analysts’ average expectation of $1.12 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The company’s shares fell $5.81, or 6.8 percent, to $79.60 following the earnings report, after closing at $85.41 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Revenue in the quarter ended February 28 rose 7.3 percent to $5.08 billion and comparable sales at Nike stores rose 13 percent.

Future orders, excluding currency exchange rates — a key measure of sales growth — rose 9 percent, in line with the estimates of several Wall Street analysts.

UBS analyst Michael Binetti had expected 10 percent growth and added he believed investors were looking for an increase of 8 percent to 9 percent. McAdams Wright Ragen forecast growth of 8 percent to 9 percent, while Barclays Capital was at 7 percent to 9 percent and Citi at about 8 percent.

Orders for Nike brand shoes and apparel scheduled for delivery from March through July 2011 totaled $7.9 billion.

By region, revenue in Nike’s largest market, North America, increased 9 percent to $1.84 billion, while sales in emerging markets and greater China rose 19 percent and 21 percent, respectively. Japan was the only market where sales fell, sliding 8 percent.

The Obama administration has issued a gag order over findings on a recent spike in dolphin mortalities along the US Gulf coast following the BP oil spill, citing a federal criminal investigation over the spill as the reason.

An abnormal dolphin mortality this year along the Gulf coast has become part of a federal criminal investigation over last year’s BP oil spill disaster and as a result, has led the US government to clamp down on biologists’ findings, with orders to keep the results confidential. The dolphin die-off, labeled an “unusual mortality event (UME),” resulted in wildlife biologists being contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service to record the recent spike in dolphin deaths by collecting tissue samples and specimens for the agency, but late last month were privately ordered to keep their results under wraps. Reuters has obtained a copy of the agency letter that states, in part: “Because of the seriousness of the legal case, no data or findings may be released, presented or discussed outside the UME investigative team without prior approval.” One biologist involved with tracking dolphin mortalities for over 20 years and speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters that: “It throws accountability right out the window. We are confused and … we are angry because they claim they want teamwork, but at the same time they are leaving the marine experts out of the loop completely.” Some scientists said they have received a personal rebuke from government officials about “speaking out of turn” to the media over attempts at determining the dolphins’ deaths. Additionally, these scientists say the collected specimens and samples are being turned over to the government for evaluation under a deal that omits independent scientists from the final results of lab tests. Almost 200 dead bottlenose dolphin bodies have been found since mid-January through this week along shorelines of Gulf coast states, including Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Reuters notes. About half of the carcasses are newborns or stillborn infants. That number is around 14 times the average numbers recorded during the same time frame between 2002 and 2007 and has coincidentally occurred during the first calving season since the BP Deepwater Horizon debacle last year in the Gulf. Although many of the dolphin specimens recently collected show no outward signs of oil contamination, lab analysis is crucial in helping to determine their deaths. Some experts believe the recent surge of deaths is the result of dolphins inhaling or ingesting oil during the oil spill, the results of which are just now beginning to show their toll, including a possible upsurge in dolphin miscarriages. The recent spike in dolphin deaths has compounded the dolphin mortality problem, as scientists were already busy attempting to determine the deaths of nearly 90 dead dolphins, mostly adults, that washed up along the US Gulf coast during the weeks and months after the BP disaster. Some are questioning the Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and its delay in providing dolphin samples to laboratories. “It is surprising that it has been almost a full year since the spill, and they still haven’t selected labs for this kind of work,” said Ruth Carmichael, of the independent Dauphin Island Sea Lab, located in Alabama, according to Reuters. “I can only hope that this process is a good thing. I just don’t know. This is an unfortunate situation,” she added. Officials with the NOAA state the confidentiality measures are an integral part of the current investigation over the BP oil spill. “We are treating the evidence, which are the dolphin samples, like a murder case,” said Dr. Erin Fougeres, a Fisheries Service marine biologist, Reuters notes. “The chain of custody is being closely watched. Every dolphin sample is considered evidence in the BP case now,” she added.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/print/article/305096#ixzz1RpPBPtSO

Thursday, March 24, 2011 - by Joel Hruska

It’s been nearly a decade since the music industry declared war against file sharers via its controversial policy of suing individuals supposedly identified via their IP addresses. After all this time one would expect the various companies to present a consistent, united front. As a recent court filing against Limewire shows this is absolutely not the case. Last May, federal district court judge Kimba Wood granted the record industry’s request for a summary judgement against Limewire. With their winning ticket in hand, the RIAA withdrew to contemplate the level of statutory and punitive damages it felt Limewire should pay. The recording studios have never been overly interested in due diligence or common sense but this latest tops all.

Limewire, the plaintiffs allege, owes them between $400 billion and 75 trillion. The latter, written out, comes to 75,000,000,000,000.

We decided to graph a handful of additional values to put the $75 trillion in context. World GDP for 2011 is expected to  be ~$65 trillion, the US national debt is currently $14.25 trillion, and the total median income for all 114,825,428 US households in 2010 is just $5.7 trillion. In other words, every single US household would have to spend all of its income buying nothing but music for over 13 years in order to arrive at what the music industry has deemed a reasonable settlement. Even the lower figure of $400 billion still amounts to seven percent of total household income in the entire country.

The legal question at the center of these absurdly high judgements is whether or not the plaintiffs can demand statutory damages from each individual infringement. A simple example is as follows: Assume that the record industry is able to recover $10 in statutory damages each time Song XYZ is shared. If 10,000 people download Song XYZ, Limewire is on the hook for $100,000 in statutory damages from just one song. If Limewire had a library of 100 songs, each of which is downloaded by 10,000 people, it’d be on the hook for $10 million.

The alternative reading is that the plaintiffs are only eligible to recover statutory damages based on the number of songs shared. If Limeware shared 100 songs, as above, it would be required to pay damages of $10 per song or $1000 total. The enormous gap between these two figures is a genuine problem for modern copyright law. Judge Wood writes: “To the best of this Court’s knowledge, the issue of whether a plaintiff should be able to recover from a secondarily liable defendant multiple awards per work based on the number of direct infringers… has never been addressed in a context where the secondarily liable defendant has enabled hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals to infringe.”

Having acknowledged the problem, she rules that the plaintiffs are only eligible to recover a single statutory reward per work infringed. One of the strongest arguments against the claim that Limewire owes up to $75 trillion is that it violates the judicial precept of absurdity. In arguing that Limewire should be eligible for damages on every individual download, the studios were effectively arguing that Limewire owed it more money than the entire record industry has made since Edison invented the phonograph in 1877.

This decision is important because it both acknowledges a legitimate gap in copyright law while slapping down the recording industry’s blatant stupidity. It’s incredibly ironic that the music studios, who unquestionably have the most to gain from balanced copyright law that addresses digital media while maintaining fair use, instead paint themselves in motley. Even if Wood had agreed with their logic, no higher court would have allowed a $400 billion fine to stand against one company. Ridiculous moves like this leave us wondering how sincere the music industry is when it speaks of finding common ground.

Could it be that America is actually turning less violent? Or are we as violent as ever — but have simply found different ways of assuaging our urges?

March 20, 2011  |

Los Angeles’ violent-crime rates are four times lower now than they were 1992. The interesting thing is, nobody can really explain why.As of December 25, last year, only 293 homicides were reported in LA, along with 781 rapes, 10,734 robberies, and 9,129 aggravated assaults. In 1992, that blood-soaked year of the Rodney King Riots, Los Angeles saw 1,092 murders, 1,861 rapes, 39,222 robberies, and 47,736 aggravated assaults.

These figures echo a nationwide trend. “Crime Rate at 20-Year Low Level,” reads a February 24 headline in the Frederick, Maryland News Post. “Major Crime at 39-Year Low in Elgin,” the Chicago Tribune crowed on February 22. “Fresno’s Murder Rate Is Drastically Down in 2011,” announced that California’s town’s ABC-TV affiliate on February 23. Such headlines are typical these days. Crime’s down. What’s up?

Theories abound. Various agencies, such as the office of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, credit themselves with the shift. But in the din of the applause, some of these theories and claims cancel each other out.

Noting that LA in 1992 “was like a war zone,” LAPD Sgt. Joe Kuns remembers how, that year, no one in their right mind strolled the downtown intersection of First and Main streets for fun after dark. Drug dealers and their customers ruled that corner, he says. It’s a different story now. Brightly lit businesses welcome local residents, who wave happily while walking their dogs.

Why? Some would say it’s because those drug dealers and their customers are now locked up. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of drug-related arrests has nearly doubled nationwide since 1992. Drug-related offenders comprised 6 percent of Minnesota’s incarcerated in 1989; last year, according to the Minnesota Department of Corrections, they comprised 18 percent.

As for exact correlations between drug violations and violent crime, the jury’s still out. A 2009 report by the King’s College London International Centre for Prison Studies found that “given the significant costs of incarceration … in budget terms, but also in terms of the negative impact on community relations, social cohesion and public health — it is hard to justify a drug policy approach that prioritises widespread arrest and harsh penalties for drug users on grounds of effectiveness.”

Gang violence is being quelled as well. One program alone, ICE’s Operation Community Shield, has resulted in over 20,000 gang-related arrests since 2005. Is this helping?

Kuns is quick to assert that assigning any definitive cause to LA’s plunging crime rate “would be intellectually dishonest.” It’s anyone’s guess.

“In meetings with professors from USC and UCLA, we’ve tried to apply methodical approaches to isolate causal relationships between what our department is doing now with what it was doing twenty years ago. I wish there had been a moment when we all looked at each other across the table and said, ‘That’s it, we’ve figured it out.’ But there hasn’t been.”

Kuns does credit community involvement. He says the no-snitch code is dissolving as more people than ever call 911 and anonymous tip lines. Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department spokesman Steve Whitmore agrees.

Even in LA gang strongholds such as Compton, Lynwood, and Lennox, “people have decided that enough is enough.” Admittedly “hesitant to talk about how crime is dropping, because a lot of times the bad guys will hear that and say, ‘We’ll show them,’” Whitmore also credits “the visual saturation of law enforcement, as the sheriff has flooded certain areas of our county with law enforcement and targeted teams. And technology helps.”

Cell phones, texting, and email make crime reporting exquisitely quick, easy, and secret.

Do crimewatch TV shows such as America’s Most Wanted spur viewers into action? Do reality shows such as Cops and The First 48 humanize police, making viewers help rather than hate them? In books such as More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 1998), conservative economist John Lott attributes shrinking crime rates to increased legal gun ownership.

Could it be that America is actually turning less violent? Or are we as violent as ever — but have simply found less interpersonal means of assuaging our urges?

Award-winning University of Hawaii anatomist Milton Diamond believes that one powerful tool in reducing at least one type of violent crime is porn — including kiddie porn.

Published last fall in the scholarly journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, Diamond’s latest academic study tracked crime in the Czech Republic after pornography was legalized there.

“As found in all other countries in which the phenomenon has been studied, rape and other sex crimes did not increase,” Diamond’s report reads. In particular, Denmark and Japan “had a prolonged interval during which possession of child pornography was not illegal.” When kiddie porn was legal in Denmark and Japan, both countries “showed a significant decrease in the incidence of child sex abuse.”

Diamond — who directs UH’s Pacific Center for Sex and Society and won this year’s Kinsey Award for the Scientific Study of Sexuality — does not approve of actual children being used in porn, but rather images of children produced via artwork or computer graphics.

“It’s the lesser of two evils,” he says.

“Why would someone commit a crime if he didn’t have to? Does he say, ‘I’m gonna go out and rape somebody’? Or might he say, ‘Look, there’s a danger in doing that, and I’m horny, so now I’ll masturbate’? If I was a potential rapist, I’d be thinking, ‘Why the hell would I want to go out in the cold when I can stay inside and masturbate?’ Think of all the problems we could solve this way.

“We can’t say that every potential rapist is crazy or stupid. They’re reacting to the same things everybody reacts to.” Pre-Internet and pre-DVD, “they went out and ‘did something’ about those reactions,” Diamond asserts, but now they can stay safely at home, ensconced with electronic fantasies.

“If I have a choice between having real children abused or having child porn on the Net, I say have child porn and save kids. I want the same thing anti-porn protesters want: to stop child abuse. If porn will do it, I’m for it.”

Whatever’s curbing crime these days, it’s making fools of those who predicted that an economic meltdown would turn America into a Mad Maxian hellzone terrorized by bloodthirsty out-of-work stock clerks.

“Murder, Suicide Rates Climb When Jobs Vanish and Economy Slows,” Bloomberg blared, citing a 2009 study published in The Lancet that linked every 1 percent increase in unemployment with a .79 percent increase in homicides. (But according to the same study, every 1 percent increase in unemployment is also linked with a 1.39 percent decrease in car-crash deaths. So in that sense, economic collapse saves nearly twice as many lives as it takes.)

“If you go by the old adage that crime is tied to the economy, then these should be banner years for violent crime,” says the LAPD’s Kuns. “But it’s going in the opposite direction.”

According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual National Crime Victimization Survey, violent and property crime rates were lower in 2008 than at any time since these surveys began in 1973. According to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Reports, violent crime declined 6.2 percent nationwide just in the first half of 2010. Broken down by region, murder/rape/robbery/aggravated assault fell by 7.8 percent in the South, 7.2 percent in both the Midwest and West, and a comparatively — troublingly — small 0.2 percent in the Northeast.

“Economic conditions and crime: This is a very complicated relationship,” says Stanford University law professor Lawrence Friedman, the award-winning author of Crime and Punishment in American History (Basic Books, 1994). “Dire economic circumstances certainly give some people incentives to commit property crimes. But on the whole, it is hard to show a correlation, especially if you look at the broad sweep of history. The period after World War II was one of tremendous economic growth, and yet the violent crime rate went up dramatically” in the US at that time. 

Was it because the war’s end brought home a huge influx of young males, the demographic most likely to commit violent crimes? Clearly the perpetrators of all those postwar murders, rapes, assaults and strongarm robberies weren’t famished bread thieves a la Les Misérables. This should shatter the romance that most criminals commit crimes not by choice but by necessity.

What spurs crime? Greed. Hate. Opportunity. What stems it?

“There’s a growing groundswell of folks accepting their personal ownership of what goes on in their neighborhoods,” Kuns says. “Regardless of their station in life, they’re taking responsibility for the places in which they live and for a reasonable radius around them. They’ve realized that although the police are happy to rescue you when we can — that’s the fun part of our job — the policing of your neighborhood starts with you.”

In some neighborhoods these days, “people literally run out of their houses and try to stop crimes themselves.

“Say every time a crime takes place, we get four or five calls from community members providing information. After a while, the bad guys think, ‘The probability of someone seeing me committing a crime and making that call, and thus the probability of my getting caught, is so high that it’s not worth committing the crime.’

“It’s like game theory.”

Officers took orders from UK police division that employed spy Mark Kennedy, German MPs told

Five undercover police officers from Germany were sent to the G8 protests in Gleneagles to infiltrate activist groups, German police have privately admitted.

The officers took orders from the UK’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), the secretive police division that employed Mark Kennedy to spy on activists across Europe, said Jörg Ziercke, head of Germany’s federal police.

Ziercke made the admissions in a private sitting of the German parliament held at the end of January to discuss Germany’s involvement in the Kennedy case, Der Spiegel reported.

Kennedy, known to activists as Mark Stone or “Flash”, because of his seemingly ready supply of cash, was a regular visitor to Germany and helped organise protests in Heiligendamm, the town near Rostock where the G8 meetings took place in 2007.

According to Der Spiegel, whose reporters claim to have been leaked the minutes from the January meeting, Ziercke admitted that German state authorities had specifically requested Kennedy’s presence in Heiligendamm.

At the same meeting, Ziercke was forced to tell MPs that Kennedy worked for three German states during at least five visits to the country between 2004 and 2009. He worked for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the G8 meeting was taking place, as well as Baden-Württember and Berlin.

The agent was working on a contract brokered directly by the German parliament, who deemed him a trusted agent, Der Spiegel claimed.

Ziercke also told MPs at the Bundestag that Kennedy had a long-term lover in Berlin – in direct violation of a law forbidding police officers having sexual relationships while undercover – and that he had been invited to Germany by the authorities to infiltrate the anti-fascist movement.

While discussing the Kennedy case, Ziercke answered questions about German undercover officers abroad. The minutes do not specify how many agents were sent to Gleneagles, but someone present at the meeting told Der Spiegel that Ziercke talked of five being sent to Scotland.

Thousands of leftwing protesters disrupted the Gleneagles summit by paralysing traffic and throwing stones at the police.

Ziercke allegedly said the secret operation in Gleneagles was merely part of a European-wide project to exchange information from undercover operatives working across a number of countries.

He said the police forces in EU member states help each other by sharing information “regarding Euro-anarchists, militant left extremists and leftwing terrorists”. This sort of co-operation was also common during major international sporting events, he added, and was widely praised by governments. Ziercke said this exchange programme appeared to be useful tool. Police can only tackle organised and conspiratorial international networks by working just as “internationally and conspiratorially”, said Ziercke.

However, he said, police should think again about how to control and monitor these sorts of clandestine operations.

Both the Guardian and Spiegel have already reported that Ziercke told German MPs that the agent committed at least two crimes, but the cases against him were dropped at the behest of German authorities who knew Kennedy’s true identity.

Kennedy first broke the law during protests at Heiligendamm. He later committed arson during a demonstration in Berlin at which he set fire to containers, Der Spiegel said. The newspaper said Kennedy’s involvement in criminal activity raised concerns that he was working as an agent provocateur and not just an observer - and the fact that investigations into both crimes were shelved suggested police authorities wielded an unacceptable influence over the country’s judicial process.

Kennedy spent long periods in Germany and lived with individuals in the anarchist movement during his time in the country. At the same time, he entered 22 different countries across Europe using a fake passport, including Spain, Italy and Iceland – where he helped found the activist movement.

The revelations about Kennedy’s role in Germany come despite the government maintaining its refusal to publicly answer a series of parliamentary questions from opposition politicians.

The Bundestag said “operational reasons” prevented them answering any questions about the country’s co-operation with undercover police officers from other countries, and Kennedy in particular.

The Metropolitan police, which recently took control of the NPOIU, declined to comment.

Tue, Dec 1 2009

By Mohamed Ahmed

HARADHEERE, Somalia (Reuters) - In Somalia’s main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate.

Heavily armed pirates from the lawless Horn of Africa nation have terrorized shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean and strategic Gulf of Aden, which links Europe to Asia through the Red Sea.

The gangs have made tens of millions of dollars from ransoms and a deployment by foreign navies in the area has only appeared to drive the attackers to hunt further from shore.

It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations — and now the gangs in Haradheere have set up an exchange to manage their investments.

One wealthy former pirate named Mohammed took Reuters around the small facility and said it had proved to be an important way for the pirates to win support from the local community for their operations, despite the dangers involved.

“Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 ‘maritime companies’ and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,” Mohammed said.

“The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials … we’ve made piracy a community activity.”

Haradheere, 400 km (250 miles) northeast of Mogadishu, used to be a small fishing village. Now it is a bustling town where luxury 4×4 cars owned by the pirates and those who bankroll them create honking traffic jams along its pot-holed, dusty streets.

Somalia’s Western-backed government of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed is pinned down battling hard-line Islamist rebels, and controls little more than a few streets of the capital.

The administration has no influence in Haradheere — where a senior local official said piracy paid for almost everything.

“Piracy-related business has become the main profitable economic activity in our area and as locals we depend on their output,” said Mohamed Adam, the town’s deputy security officer.

“The district gets a percentage of every ransom from ships that have been released, and that goes on public infrastructure, including our hospital and our public schools.”

RISK VS REWARDS

In a drought-ravaged country that provides almost no employment opportunities for fit young men, many are been drawn to the allure of the riches they see being earned at sea.

Abdirahman Ali was a secondary school student in Mogadishu until three months ago when his family fled the fighting there.

Given the choice of moving with his parents to Lego, their ancestral home in Middle Shabelle where strict Islamist rebels have banned most entertainment including watching sport, or joining the pirates, he opted to head for Haradheere.

Now he guards a Thai fishing boat held just offshore.

“First I decided to leave the country and migrate, but then I remembered my late colleagues who died at sea while trying to migrate to Italy,” he told Reuters. “So I chose this option, instead of dying in the desert or from mortars in Mogadishu.”

Haradheere’s “stock exchange” is open 24 hours a day and serves as a bustling focal point for the town. As well as investors, sobbing wives and mothers often turn up there seeking news of male relatives missing in action.

Every week, Mohammed said, gang members and equipment were lost to the sea. But he said the pirates were not deterred.

“Ransoms have even increased in recent months from between $2-3 million to $4 million because of the increased number of shareholders and the risks,” he said.

“Let the anti-piracy navies continue their search for us. We have no worries because our motto for the job is ‘do or die’.”

Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel.

“I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,” she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony.

“I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the ‘company’.”

• Bobbie Johnson, San Francisco
• Wednesday 27 January 2010 07.00 GMT

Just two weeks after Google said it was the victim of an organised hacking attack, details of a similar sting that targeted three of the world’s biggest oil companies have emerged.

Documents obtained by US newspaper the Christian Science Monitor show that the computer systems of three major energy companies – ExxonMobil, Marathon and ConocoPhillips – were hit by a string of attacks in 2008 aimed at stealing valuable information.

The strikes, which used precision phishing attacks to fool executives into bypassing security procedures, focused on “bid data”, the valuable information collected by the companies on new oil deposits and potential sites for future operations.

According to the Monitor’s investigation, the three companies – which are all based in Texas – were only made aware of the extent of the attacks following an FBI investigation.

None of the companies involved in have made a public comment, but security experts have warned in the past about the growing importance of cybersecurity.

A report late last year by US defence company Northrop Grumman suggested that American systems were being targeted by the Chinese government – which has invested heavily in its ‘informationised’ army.

“First, the values of information systems and networks have never been greater,” said Northrop Grumman’s chief technology officer Robert Brammer in December. “Second, cybersecurity threats have never been greater.”

Though precise details of the Texan attacks remain unclear, they bear similar hallmarks to those used in the strike on Google and more than 30 other American companies, which is now being dubbed Operation Aurora by internet security experts.

Aurora used a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser to access some confidential information, while the Financial Times reported earlier this week that the hackers responsible had also used instant messaging programs to pose as the friends of Google employees in order to obtain protected data such as passwords.

As a result of the attacks, which are said to have originated in China, Google has threatened to protest by uncensoring its search engine in the country - a move that has threatened to escalate relations between Beijing and Washington towards a diplomatic standoff.

The origins of the oil company hackers are not known, but the newspaper said that at least some of the information was sent to computers in China.

It is far from the first time that major companies or systems have been the victim of hacking attacks. According to reports that emerged last year, hackers have targeted a number of major computer networks belonging to governments, private companies or other important schemes.

The $300bn Joint Strike Fighter project - a collaboration between countries including the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Israel - is said to have been compromised, while the US electrical grid was also an apparent target.

News of the attacks on ExxonMobil and others also throws into relief comments made last week by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

In a speech to oil industry executives in Houston, Ballmer scoffed at Google’s stance over the hacking attacks and suggested that information warfare was incredibly common.

“People are always trying to break into other people’s data,” he said. “There’s always somebody trying to break into Microsoft.”

Such attempted break-ins are part of the reason Barack Obama recently suggested that defending from internet attacks was “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face”.

That realisation led to the White House to appoint a new head of cybersecurity last month, while the British government is also planning to institute its own national cyber security centre to combat the growing threat of online warfare and criminal activity.

The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

“Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right,” he said. “They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”

The admission comes just after the eighth anniversary of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations in which the then-US secretary of state relied heavily on lies that Janabi had told the German secret service, the BND. It also follows the release of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memoirs, in which he admitted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction programme.

The careers of both men were seriously damaged by their use of Janabi’s claims, which he now says could have been – and were – discredited well before Powell’s landmark speech to the UN on 5 February 2003.

The former CIA chief in Europe Tyler Drumheller describes Janabi’s admission as “fascinating”, and said the emergence of the truth “makes me feel better”. “I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now,” said Drumheller.

In the only other at length interview Janabi has given he denied all knowledge of his supposed role in helping the US build a case for invading Saddam’s Iraq.

In a series of meetings with the Guardian in Germany where he has been granted asylum, he said he had told a German official, who he identified as Dr Paul, about mobile bioweapons trucks throughout 2000. He said the BND had identified him as a Baghdad-trained chemical engineer and approached him shortly after 13 March of that year, looking for inside information about Saddam’s Iraq.

“I had a problem with the Saddam regime,” he said. “I wanted to get rid of him and now I had this chance.”

He portrays the BND as gullible and so eager to tease details from him that they gave him a Perry’s Chemical Engineering Handbook to help communicate. He still has the book in his small, rented flat in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany.

“They were asking me about pumps for filtration, how to make detergent after the reaction,” he said. “Any engineer who studied in this field can explain or answer any question they asked.”

Janabi claimed he was first exposed as a liar as early as mid-2000, when the BND travelled to a Gulf city, believed to be Dubai, to speak with his former boss at the Military Industries Commission in Iraq, Dr Bassil Latif.

The Guardian has learned separately that British intelligence officials were at that meeting, investigating a claim made by Janabi that Latif’s son, who was studying in Britain, was procuring weapons for Saddam.

That claim was proven false, and Latif strongly denied Janabi’s claim of mobile bioweapons trucks and another allegation that 12 people had died during an accident at a secret bioweapons facility in south-east Baghdad.

The German officials returned to confront him with Latif’s version. “He says, ‘There are no trucks,’ and I say, ‘OK, when [Latif says] there no trucks then [there are none],’” Janabi recalled.

He said the BND did not contact him again until the end of May 2002. But he said it soon became clear that he was still being taken seriously.

He claimed the officials gave him an incentive to speak by implying that his then pregnant Moroccan-born wife may not be able to travel from Spain to join him in Germany if he did not co-operate with them. “He says, you work with us or your wife and child go to Morocco.”

The meetings continued throughout 2002 and it became apparent to Janabi that a case for war was being constructed. He said he was not asked again about the bioweapons trucks until a month before Powell’s speech.

After the speech, Janabi said he called his handler at the BND and accused the secret service of breaking an agreement that they would not share anything he had told them with another country. He said he was told not to speak and placed in confinement for around 90 days.

With the US now leaving Iraq, Janabi said he was comfortable with what he did, despite the chaos of the past eight years and the civilian death toll in Iraq, which stands at more than 100,000.

“I tell you something when I hear anybody – not just in Iraq but in any war – [is] killed, I am very sad. But give me another solution. Can you give me another solution?

“Believe me, there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq. There were no other possibilities.”

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
February 14, 2011

While talking heads like Glenn Beck continue to invoke the threat of radical Islam, they habitually ignore the blindingly obvious, that radical Islam is a creature of the US military-industrial complex. Case in point – the terrorist who trained the London bombers was a US informant and has been freed after serving only four and a half years of a possible 70-year sentence.

Citing his “exceptional co-operation,” in working with US authorities, a New York Judge released Mohammed Junaid Babar despite him pleading guilty to five counts of terrorism, an outcome that has, “Raised questions over whether Babar was a US informer at the time he was helping to train the ringleader of the 7 July tube and bus bombings,” reports the London Guardian.

Babar admits to consorting with high level “Al-Qaeda” terrorists, as well as “providing senior members with money and equipment, running weapons.” He also set up a training camp in Pakistan in 2003 where alleged 7/7 ringleader Mohammad Sidique Khan learned bomb-making techniques.

“Graham Foulkes, a magistrate whose 22-year-old son David was killed by Khan at Edgware Road underground station in 2005, said: “People get four and a half years for burglary. They can get more for some road traffic offences. So for an international terrorist who’s directly linked to the death of my son and dozens and dozens of people to get that sentence is just outrageous.”

But Babar’s release makes perfect sense given the fact that he was likely working for US authorities as an informant while training one of the alleged London bombers.

“A remark from the sentencing judge that Babar “began co-operating even before his arrest”, has raised the possibility, supported by other circumstantial evidence obtained by the Guardian, that he may have been an informant for the US government before his detention by the FBI in April 2004,” writes the Guardian’s Shiv Malik, who in a separate article goes into greater depth on how, “Babar may have been working for the US security services while pretending to be a jihadi – allegations that could imply serious failures to prevent the 7 July bombings.”

The Guardian article describes how a top US terrorism lawyer has seen sealed evidence in the case which “suggests Babar could have been working for the US authorities before his arrest in April 2004.”

“Having reviewed the court transcript himself, bereaved father Graham Foulkes said: “There’s a hint from one or two of the sentences [in the transcript] that do strongly suggest [Babar’s] co-operation was going well beyond his official arrest. And it looks as if the Americans may well have known in detail what Babar was up to in Pakistan [at the time] and that is a very, very serious matter.”

The fact that Babar has served less than 5 years for playing a crucial role in attacks which killed 52 people and injured hundreds more clearly indicates that he is being rewarded by US authorities for his involvement in the 7/7 bombings.

Lest we forget that the the so-called mastermind behind the 7/7 London bombings, Haroon Rashid Aswat, was a British intelligence asset. Former Justice Dept. prosecutor and terror expert John Loftus revealed that the so called Al-Muhajiroun group, based in London, had formed during the Kosovo crisis, during which fundamentalist muslim leaders (Or what is now referred to as Al-Qaeda) were recruited by MI6 to fight in Kosovo.

The revelations about Babar once again underscore the myopic and ludicrous assertions of people like Glenn Beck, who constantly invoke the threat of radical Islam, particularly in the context of recent events in Egypt, while failing to point out that radical Islam is being fostered and fomented by the US military-industrial complex.

Almost every single major terror plot over the last decade plus blamed on “radical Islam” has had the combined or individual fingerprints of US, British, Canadian and Israeli intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement bodies all over it.

9/11

Every single shred of evidence concerning the alleged 9/11 hijackers points to the fact that they were patsies controlled by informants working for the US government.

The US Special Operations Command’s Able Danger program identified the hijackers and their accomplices long before 9/11, but when the head of the program, Colonel Anthony Shaffer, tried to pass the information on to the 9/11 Commission, he was gagged and slandered and the vital information his team had passed on was ignored and buried.

Curt Weldon, Former U.S. Republican Congressman and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, documented how the US government tracked the hijackers’ movements before 9/11.

Louai al-Sakka, the man who trained six of the hijackers, was a CIA informant. A number of the other alleged hijackers were trained at US air bases. In the months prior to 9/11, alleged hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi were renting rooms in a house owned and lived in by an FBI informant.

In a 2002 article entitled The Hijackers We Let Escape, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman documented how, “The CIA tracked two suspected terrorists to a Qaeda summit in Malaysia in January 2000, then looked on as they re-entered America and began preparations for September 11.”

The fact that there were numerous Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists involved in the pre-planning stages of 9/11 is unsurprising given former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds’ testimony that Bin Laden was working for the US right up until the day of 9/11.

On the very morning of 9/11, the money man behind the alleged hijackers, Pakistan’s ISI Chief Mahmoud Ahmad, was meeting with U.S. government and intelligence officials.

Indeed, even after 9/11, the so-called spiritual leader of the very hijackers who allegedly slammed Flight 77 into the Pentagon, Anwar al-Awlaki, was himself invited to dine with Pentagon top brass mere months after the attack.

UNDERWEAR BOMBER

Al-Awlaki was later involved in directing the underwear bomber, who was allowed to board the plane by order of the US State Department aided by a well-dressed man who got Abdulmutallab on the airliner despite the fact that he was on a terror watch list and had no passport. Eyewitness and Delta 253 passenger Kurt Haskell subsequently blew the whistle to state that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was given the bomb by the US government to create a pretext for the implementation of naked body scanners and boost the TSA’s budget.

FORT HOOD SHOOTING

Fort Hood shooter Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan repeatedly communicated with alleged Al-Qaeda leaders for nearly a year before his rampage. The FBI knew Hasan was sending emails to terrorists, but they did nothing, allowed him to remain on a U.S. Army base, and even invited him to participate in Homeland Security exercises. Hasan was also being handled by US agent Al-Awlaki.

FORT DIX

Lawyers in a case relating to the much vaunted 2007 terror plot to attack Fort Dix and kill “as many soldiers as possible” concluded that FBI informants were the key figures behind the operation and that the accused, six foreign-born Muslims, were merely bungling patsies. US agent Al-Awlaki was again involved in training the would-be terrorists.

TORONTO PLOT

The “Toronto 18? terrorists turned out to be “a bunch of incompetent guys who were primarily misled by a delusional megalomaniac”. The explosive fertilizer material the terrorist cell apparently planned to use was in fact purchased by an informant working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, agents of which had radicalized the group. US agent Al-Awlaki was again involved in the plot.

PORTLAND PLOT

The man accused of attempting to blow up a Christmas tree in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, was a befuddled patsy, groomed and radicalized from start to finish by the FBI as part of a radicalization and entrapment program. Shortly after news of the attempted bombing broke, it emerged that the FBI had provided Mohamud with a fake bomb, van, and cell phone (to be used as a detonator) in the incident, as well as thousands of dollars in cash at every step of the plot.

MUMBAI MASSACRE

The man accused of being the mastermind behind the 2008 Mumbai massacre, David Headley, was a US government informant and was also at one time on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency.

SHOE BOMBER

Hundreds of terror suspects have been convicted in civilian federal courts, including convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid who attended the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London. The Finsbury imam at the time was Abu Hamza al-Masri who began working with British Security Services in 1997.

MIAMI PLOT

In the media-lauded Miami terror case in 2007, the supposed ringleader Narseal “Prince Marina” Batiste “had heard of Al-Qaeda, but wasn’t sure what it stood for. The FBI instigators made Batiste swear loyalty to al-Qaida; then had him call on his local buddies to form an ‘Islamic army’ in Miami. None had military training. Some could barely read. But Batiste assured the group in the midst of its collective marijuana buzz of greatness ahead,” wrote Saul Landau.

These were the men who comedian John Stewart referred to as “seven dipshits in a warehouse” after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had ludicrously told the press that the group of semi-retarded gang-bangers had planned to “wage a ground war against America”.

NEW YORK SYNAGOGUE BOMB PLOT

A group of so-called Muslim terrorists were busted in New York for supposedly planning to blow up synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military airplanes flying out of the New York Air National Guard base. The men were provided with fake explosives and inactive missiles by an FBI informant, reported the Christian Science Monitor. Two of the ringleaders of the “deadly” plot which was endlessly hyped by the media turned out to be semi-retarded potheads, exactly as we had predicted would be the case due to the innumerable past cases with the exact same modus operandi.

I could go on for pages and pages listing details of ever major terror plot since and indeed before 9/11 that were blamed on “radical Islam” yet in fact turned out to be completely contrived by the FBI, CIA, Canadian or British authorities.

It is a glaring and manifestly provable fact that radical Islam is being manufactured and provoked by the US military-industrial complex in order to provide itself with an enemy to justify billions every year in weapons sales along with giant federal government slush funds that enrich the coffers of public-private partnerships while crushing the constitutional rights of American citizens.

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Glenn Beck is completely accurate when he says that radical Islam represents a direct threat to the future of freedom in the west. The ultimate “clash of civilizations” is a very real possibility. But by deliberately obscuring the fact that radical Islam is a creature of the US military-industrial complex, a bastard child of the new world order that is being strengthened by our own governments to be used as a weapon against us, Beck and others who regurgitate the same rhetoric are misleading Americans into thinking that radical Islam itself is the new world order, when in fact radical Islam is merely a tool of the new