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Separating Facts from Fiction - Why the Official Account of 9/11 is contradicted by genuine Scientific Research

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

with Gordon Ross and Calum Douglas

7.00pm on Friday 8th June at The Mahatma Gandhi Hall, Indian YMCA, 41 Fitzroy Square, London W1 (nearest tube Warren St or Great Portland St).

Admission Free

We would to like warmly to invite you all to an evening with Gordon Ross, M.Eng and Calum Douglas.  
 
Gordon Ross holds two Engineering degrees and is author of several published scientific papers. Calum Douglas is an Engineering undergraduate from Oxford Brookes University and senior researcher at Pilots for 911 Truth.  
 
Mr Ross has been researching the collapse of the WTC towers and Mr Douglas provided exclusive date from the Flight Data Recorder of Flight 77 alleged to have impacted the Pentagon on 9/11.
 
The pair will give an authoritative presentation of their research to a public audience in central London on the 8th of June.  Their intended audience will be made up of both sceptics and interested parties who want to hear more.  
 
We invite you to join us, whether it is to challenge their analysis or to find out more about the debate over the science of 9/11, which the mainstream media has failed to address. 9/11 has been used as a pretext for the unending “war on terror”, the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the continuing assault on our traditional freedoms in the UK.   All concerned citizens need to take an interest in getting to the truth of the tragic events of 9/11.

Feel welcome to come along and join us for what should be a challenging and entertaining event; our aim is not to preach to our choir but to challenge all sections of society to think again about how well the official story of 9/11 stands up to scrutiny under the cold eye of science.  

Have Your Say: Separating Facts from Fiction - Why the Official Account of 9/11 is contradicted by genuine Scientific Research
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Forty Years of Occupation

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Stephen Lendman 

This June will mark an anniversary that will live in infamy for the people affected by the event it commemorates following a far greater one 19 years earlier on May 14, 1948. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its so-called “Six-Day (preemptive) War” against three of its neighboring Arab states - Egypt, Jordan and Syria - claiming it was in self-defense to avoid annihilation Israeli leaders later admitted was spurious and false cover for a large-scale long-planned, calculated war of aggression it believed it could easily win and did.

The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s (1977 - 83) August, 1982 speech saying: “In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

Two time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974 - 77 and 1992 - 95) told French newspaper Le Monde in February, 1968: “I do not believe Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offense against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”

General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: “Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it.”

General Haim Barlev, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief told Ma’ariv in April, 1972: “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.”

Other Israeli leaders and generals voiced the same sentiment that in June, 1967 Israel was under no threat, yet preemptively undertook a war of aggression falsely telling the world it had no other choice. It had a clear one. It could have chosen peace, but didn’t and never did earlier or since to the present because discretionary aggressive wars of choice serve Israeli interests as they do its US imperial partner.

In 1967, it was the Jewish state’s third major aggressive war that grew out of the founding of Zionism in 1897 by Theodor Herzl aiming to establish a permanent Jewish state. He planned the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, became its first president, and envisioned a permanent Jewish homeland in Palestine justified by what Professor Norman Finkelstein called the “colossal hoax” Jews got there first establishing their ancestral home on “a land without people for a people without land.” It became the state of Israel in May, 1948 during the new Jewish state’s first preemptive aggressive so-called “War of Independence” Palestinians call “al-Nakba” - the catastrophe.

From it, Jewish forces seized 78% of British Mandatory Palestine establishing the state of Israel May 14 when the Mandate ended. It was 40% more territory than UN Resolution 181 of November, 1947 allowed with a 56 - 44% division that already gave Israel most of the fertile land, nearly all urban and rural territory, and 400 of over 1000 Palestinian villages their residents lost by UN mandate, with no right of appeal, to the Jewish population comprising one-third of the total at that time.

The 1948 negotiated cease-fire line became known as the “Green Line.” Egypt occupied Gaza, and Jordan controlled the West Bank. It was Israel’s moment of triumph. The war lasted six months, expelling and killing about 800,000 Palestinians. It destroyed 531 Palestinian villages, 11 urban neighborhoods, and was a clear case of ethnic cleansing international law calls a crime against humanity. Guilty Israeli leaders were never held to account for it or forced to admit what, in fact, they indisputably did according to recently declassified Israeli archival material Israeli historian Ilan Pappe used for his important new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Noted British journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger calls him “Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.”

In his book, Pappe documented Israeli crimes including cold-blooded mass-murder; destruction of homes, villages and crops; rapes; other atrocities; and massacres of defenseless men, women and children shown no mercy. It happened because British Mandate forces did nothing to stop it, and when neighboring Arab states finally intervened, they acted pathetically without conviction against a superior Israeli fighting force easily able to defeat the small, ill-equipped and unmotivated token forces matched against it.

Israel’s second war of aggression was launched along with Britain and France October 29, 1956 against Egypt following President Nasser’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal. Invading forces gave in to US and Soviet pressure to cease fighting eight days later, and after the Federal Reserve began selling large amounts of British pounds undermining the dollar-pound exchange rate. It ended when Israel withdrew its last troops March 8, 1957.

On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its third major war of aggression but hardly its last with another one always planned and ready to unleash on the flimsiest pretext almost no other nation could get away with. It did it for the usual reasons nations go to war when under no external threat to do it - territory, resources (for Israel Golan’s water was key), and a desire for unchallengeable regional dominance. As it always did since, Israel falsely claimed its security was threatened by creating myths Syria was shelling Israeli farmers; legitimate, non-threatening Egyptian military exercises masked a preparation for war; and that “incendiary Arab rhetoric” proved it. With plans set and a date picked, Foreign Minister Abba Eban flew to Washington May 26 to inform Lyndon Johnson of Israel’s intentions and was assured the US backed them.

The war began preemptively June 5 and proved to be an impressive display of overwhelming power with Israel destroying 90% of Egypt’s 300 + aircraft on the ground and two-thirds of the Syrian Air Force the first day. After 24 hours of conflict, Israeli Air Force (IAF) Commander Mordechai Hod announced the combined Arab air forces were destroyed, and the devastating toll on them proved it. Israel lost a mere 19 fighter aircraft while Egypt lost about 300, Syria 60, Jordan 35, Iraq 15, and Lebanon one or more. The Palestinians were about to lose much more - the remaining Gaza and West Bank parts of their nation leaving them stateless.

On day 2, Israel invaded Gaza and the West Bank; on day three Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) entered northern Sinai, devastated Egyptian brigades, captured Jerusalem, and got Jordan to surrender. On day four, the IDF invaded Haram Al-Sharif and central Sinai, and by day five had advanced to the Suez Canal, taking all of Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights. The war was practically over before it began, but Israeli forces showed no mercy using their unopposed air power to massacre thousands of defenseless Egyptian troops on the ground. It was a turkey shoot made possible largely because Washington supported it providing Israel with the latest munitions including tarmac-shredding explosives preventing undamaged planes from taking off making them sitting ducks to follow-up attacks. In addition, a US carrier group provided intelligence and communications help standing ready to intervene if needed.

Though nothing like today, even then Washington showed its commitment to Israel, and ignoring and covering up the USS Liberty incident highlights it. The intelligence ship was in the Mediterranean about 13 nautical miles off the Sinai Peninsula when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked it with full knowledge it was a US vessel as the senior Israeli lead pilot later admitted. Thirty-four on-board were killed after which Johnson Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an inquiry that concluded the incident was a case of “mistaken identity” despite knowing full well it wasn’t. Later, retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer said the incident was “one of the classic all-American cover-ups” for a close ally Washington has made excuses and allowances for ever since along with providing huge amounts of financial aid and modern weaponry and munitions in near-limitless amounts.

Israel used what it got then for its one-sided blitzkrieg ending June 10 with Israeli forces completing the job left unfinished following their 1948 “War of Independence.” They took the remaining 22% of ancient Palestine comprising Gaza and the West Bank, and on June 6, 2007 will have held the territories for 40 repressive years of the longest continuous illegal occupation in the world under which Palestinians (including Israeli citizens and Palestinian Christians) lost their personal, political and economic freedoms under Israeli rule affording those rights only to Jews.

Worldwide Solidarity Actions Opposing the Illegal Occupation

To commemorate this infamous anniversary, the International Coordination Network on Palestine (ICNP) was launched at the annual UN civil society conference in 2006. It supports the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people under their banner, “The World Says No to Israeli Occupation.” ICNP called for global days of protest June 9 - 10 demanding an end to the occupation; the realization of the Palestinians’ inalienable rights including their right to self-determination; their Right to Return to their homeland; and to establish an independent, sovereign Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem where it rightfully belongs.

ICNP is building nonviolent global action campaigns for boycotts, divestment and economic and political sanctions. In addition, it engages in a wide range of educational and cultural activities with the same aims in mind. It insists governments across the world stop providing Israel economic, political and military support and work instead together to end an occupation that never should have been tolerated in the first place. It wants it replaced with a “just and lasting peace.”

Hundreds of other organizations, networks and groups across the world are also mobilizing for a global protest day June 9. One of them is the “Occupation 40″ coalition calling for “six days” of actions (from June 5 - 10) marking 40 hellish years of occupation. In addition, a Global Day of Action was called for on Saturday, June 9. The coalition is comprised of grassroots Israeli groups and organizations, peace activists, artists, student groups, internal Palestinian refugees, anarchists, animal rights activists, and leftist groups including socialists and communists. There will be a six-day convergence in Israel including demonstrations, direct actions, discussions and cultural events.

“Occupation 40″ is also calling for international direct actions against the illegal occupation from June 5 - 10 including economic punishment against corporations profiting from an occupation that cost Palestinians their homeland. The planned agenda for these days is as follows:

– June 5: An international action day against militarization, wars and occupations in advance of the June G-8 summit in Germany.

– June 6 - 8: Protests against the G-8 by Palestinian and Israeli activists and Palestinian Solidarity groups across Europe where German authorities are already cracking down in advance of the June 6 - 8 summit of world leaders taking place at the German resort of Heiligendamm in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommen on the Baltic coast.

Wherever George Bush travels, unprecedented levels of security are needed the result of intense worldwide anger against him and his administration showing up in mass public actions justifiably protesting his presence. As a result, the Heiligendamm resort is being turned into a luxurious armed military fortress with a huge protective wall around it costing $17 million a German newspaper called “the equivalent of a maximum security prison (in reverse) to keep people out.”

In addition, the Baltic Sea surrounding the resort will be patrolled by nine naval vessels supplementing 16,000 local police and 1100 soldiers guarding the area to keep protesters several miles from the meeting. Add to that the police state-style raids now ongoing targeting global justice and leftist organizations across the country on the phony pretext they’re involved in the “creation of a terrorist organization.”

– June 6 - 12: Protest action days against the occupation in Palestine, Israel and internationally.

– June 9: A mass rally in London along with a Global Day of Action Against the Occupation.

– June 10 - 11: A protest, teach-in and lobby in Washington, DC.

All these actions across the world are intended to send Israel, G-8 governments and all nations around the world “a message they cannot ignore.”

Life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)

IDF occupation forces continue assaulting Palestinian civilians and property daily in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and while November 8, 2006 wasn’t typical, it shows how horrific some attacks have been. It began November 1 with Operation Autumn Clouds when Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) attacked Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza launching their largest assault on the territory since the late June Operation Summer Rains deadly one killing at least 240 mostly civilian men, women and children. In one November, 2006 week, 80 innocent civilians were dead, hundreds wounded, and many bodies afflicted with terribly disfiguring cuts, burns and hard to explain loss of limbs unseen before that had to have been from experimental bombs and shells likely containing radiation or other chemical materials able to burn human flesh. More on this below.

The attack culminated November 8 when Israeli tanks shelled Palestinian homes killing at least 20 and wounding 60 more in what’s now called the Beit Hanoun massacre. Ironically, or maybe intentionally, it happened the day after IDF forces withdrew following the week-long Operation Autumn Clouds operation that already devastated the town and its people. The Beit Hanoun massacre wasn’t typical. But it highlights how, on any pretext at any time, Israeli forces freely attack defenseless Palestinians with unrestrained viciousness maybe just to show they can get away with almost anything.

Mel Frykberg in the April 26 - May 2 issue of Al-Ahram Weekly reports some of the worst of what Israel is doing (unreported in the West) in his article called Israel’s lab in Palestine. He wrote about Gaza-based doctors recently reporting severe wounds clearly made by horrific experimental weapons inflicting shocking damage with graphic web site pictures painful to view:

– disfiguring burns caused by intense heat requiring amputation;

– legs sliced from victims’ bodies “as if a saw was used to cut through bone;”

– the absence of shrapnel in or near wounds but the presence of a powder-like substance on victims’ bodies and internal organs identified by lab analysis as carbon and tungsten (microscopic shrapnel) with many affected patients dying several days later; and

– internal organs severely burned in the absence of external wounds.

The article further explained Italian RAI News 24 satellite TV reported on a laboratory analysis of substances taken from victims alleging Israel used “dense inert metal explosives (DIME)” last summer in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and that a high concentration of carbon, copper, aluminum and tungsten points to a DIME weapon this time. RAI News 24 indicated military experts said DIME weapons are “carbon-encased missile(s) that shatter on impact into minuscule splinters (simultaneously exploding with) blades of energy-charged, heavy metal tungsten alloy (HMTA) powder (like) cobalt and nickel or iron, with a carbon fibre casing. It turns to dust on impact….burning and destroying….everything within a four-metre range.”

In addition to causing severe disabling and dismembering injuries, DIME weapons leave carcinogenic fallout (like depleted uranium - DU - or other toxic chemical pollutants) in areas targeted by them resulting in environmental contamination with virtually certain large increases in future cancers for people living close by and exposed.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) on the ground in the territories documents it all daily, and its weekly report ending May 17 reads like all others depending on how horrific each week is with some hugely more so than others as Palestinian victims can attest. PCHR (and other groups) publish an account of daily incursions, assaults, shootings, targeted assassinations, aircraft intrusions and attacks, arrests, torture, home demolitions, restrictions on movement, crop destruction, land theft, and countless other types of harassment and humiliations making life in occupied Palestine repressive and unbearable for its residents who somehow resist and endure.

In nearly all cases, Israeli actions are unprovoked or barely so like responding with overwhelming force to children throwing rocks or Palestinians defending their homes, neighborhoods or communities from repeated IDF incursions. Palestinians only have crude and light weapons against the world’s fourth most powerful military with nearly every imaginable modern weapon including sophisticated nuclear ones and delivery systems to use them effectively. Specifically during this one week, IDF ground forces killed six Palestinians in Gaza and a baby in his mother’s womb in the West Bank. They also wounded 36 Palestinians and a French solidarity activist.

In Gaza on May 15, IDF border forces killed a Palestinian National Security Forces officer fleeing Fatah-Hamas armed clashes with US and Israeli fingerprints all over this renewed fighting aimed at toppling the unity government. To do it, Fatah security forces were supplied with millions of dollars in funding, weapons and Egyptian-based training for this type operation ebbing and flowing with renewed fighting erupting on any pretext when cease-fires break down.

On May 16, Israeli forces killed three Executive Force members of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior. They also wounded 27 other Palestinians (including two journalists and a civilian bystander) by Israeli air attacks on a Rafah Executive Force site. On the same day, two Hamas members were killed and three others wounded by air attacks in northern Gaza. Earlier on May 10, IDF forces near Khan Yunis burnt large areas of Palestinian agricultural land in Khuza’a village in a deliberate act of military vandalism.

Also, on May 10, the IDF attacked Israeli solidarity and Palestinian civilian and international activists’ peaceful demonstration protesting the construction of the Annexation/Apartheid wall in Bal’ein village west of Ramallah wounding three Palestinian adults, one child and a Swiss solidarity activist. On May 13, an Israeli settlement guard shot from “zero range” wounding a Palestinian taxi driver.

From May 10 - 17, IDF forces conducted at least 26 military incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank arresting 41 civilians including seven children. That brings the number of Palestinians arrested in the West Bank alone this year to 1,164. Israeli forces also demolished one home and arrested two Palestinians in Gaza. Throughout this period, the IDF continued imposing a tightened siege on the OPT severely restricting movement including in occupied East Jerusalem and at border crossings through which essential humanitarian goods and services must have access but often don’t when most needed.

The important Rafah International Crossing Point has been closed since June 25, 2006 except for three days. Because of this and other crossing point restrictions, markets aren’t getting food, stores aren’t getting goods, and hospitals don’t have vital medical supplies, with most Palestinian patients unable to travel to them in Israel or the OPT anyway as needed. In addition, Palestinians have been prevented from fishing in the Mediterranean for nearly one year depriving them of their livelihood and the people of the food they harvest from the sea.

In recent days, Israel launched heavy air strikes against Hamas government Gaza targets killing 36 mostly Palestinian civilians and wounding 97 others through May 21 as well as destroying dozens of homes and parliamentary sites. This is on top of renewed Israeli-instigated Fatah-Hamas armed clashes in Gaza killing 47 and injuring scores more through May 19. On May 18, independent Palestinian writer Laila El-Haddad wrote on the Electronic Intifada web site of a recent “terrifying 24 hours (with) sporadic gunfire and ghostly streets.”

She mentioned a phone call from her father describing a (US-supplied F-16-caused) “tremendous explosion (sending) intense shockwaves through our house….so powerful….it blasted off the windows from my cousin’s home in the neighbourhood behind us. This attack was followed by another then another, and then another.” There were six Israeli (F-16) air strikes in one morning with “Israeli tanks….amassing at Gaza’s northern border, and unmanned Israeli drones whirring menacingly overhead in great numbers patrolling ghostly skies….preparing..for yet another strike against an already bleeding, burning, and battered Gaza” from Israeli terror attacks.

Tony Karon, writing in the Electronic Intifada May 15, notes the current conflict “has assumed a momentum of its own” Palestinian leaders are unable to contain because Washington and Israel want it that way in the wake of Hamas’ victory in the January, 2006 elections. He then adds ominously this may end up “turning Gaza into Mogadishu” just the way the Bush administration is now “busy turning Mogadishu into Mogadishu all over again.”

The “If Americans Knew” web site also publishes and keeps current shocking information on the daily toll in the OPT. Some of its disturbing figures affecting Palestinians from September 29, 2000 (the first day of the Second Intifada) to the present at the hands of Israeli forces are as follows:

– 934 Palestinian children have been killed in most cases while engaging in normal daily activities like going to school, playing, shopping, or being in their homes. PCHR reports a total of 4284 Palestinian deaths through March 23, 2007.

– A known total of 31,307 Palestinians have been injured, mostly civilians, and mostly under the same circumstances children were killed. The B’Tselem Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories reports these numbers are extremely conservative while the internationally respected Palestine Red Crescent Society reports much higher totals that are likely more accurate. In addition, these figures exclude large numbers of Palestinians who die when unable to reach medical care in time because of Israeli checkpoints, road closures, curfews and other restrictions on mobility in the OPT. Also, no accurate records are available on the large number of avoidable Palestinian deaths resulting from deprivation and/or disease following the first time ever imposition of sanctions on an occupied people from early 2006 to the present.

– The cite reports US financial aid to Israel is $7,023,288 per day, but the true number is far higher including:

- around $3 billion or more annually in direct aid;

- billions more in loans as needed;

- millions annually for immigrant resettlement;

- multi-billions in waved loan repayments;

- billions more in military aid, financial help to develop Israel’s defense industry, transfer of state-of-the-art technology and the latest US weapons, and US guarantees for Israel’s access to oil;

- $22 billion Israel got over the past 50 years through the sale of its below-market paying bonds that have financed half its development - meaning the colonization of annexed Palestinian land; military aid for its imperial aggressive wars; and still more as needed and requested.

Tiny Israel today (with six million Jews) gets more US financial aid (in all direct and indirect forms) than all other countries in the world combined.

In addition, a 2006 “Washington Report” piece by Shirl McArthur estimated the minimal amount of US aid to Israel since 1948 in an article titled “A Conservative Estimate of Total US Aid to Israel: $108 billion.” Again, the true number is far higher. Over the same period to the present, US aid to the Palestinians was “zero” except what’s supplied for “security” for Israel and now to aid quisling Fatah forces fight the democratically elected Hamas government Israel, Washington and the West won’t recognize.

– Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions ignoring them all. The Palestinians have been targeted by none.

– One Israeli corporal is held prisoner by the Palestinians. At least 10,756 Palestinians are now imprisoned by Israel, most held on “administrative” or no charge, and according to the B’Tselem Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories the great majority of them are abused or tortured. PCHR reports from 1967 through 1994 alone, 775,000 Palestinians were imprisoned for periods ranging from one week to life.

The Israeli human rights organization HaMoked Center for the Defense of the Individual confirms this in an April, 2007 report it jointly published with B’Tselem titled “Utterly Forbidden - The Torture and Ill-Treatment of Palestinian Detainees. It’s based on testimonies of dozens of Palestinians arrested, interrogated and tortured by Israel’s ISA, formerly known as the General Security Service. In addition, even Israeli authorities openly admit using “exceptional” interrogation methods and “physical pressure” against Palestinian detainees that translated means “torture.” However, B’Tselem reports the State Attorney’s Office “covers up these illegal acts, thereby assisting in the breach of international law and of High Court of Justice’s prohibitions.”

It hardly needs mentioning international laws ban torture for any reason, but it never deterred Israel or the US from using it freely. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlawed it in 1948. The Fourth Geneva Convention banned any form of “physical or mental coercion” in 1949 requiring detainees at all times to be treated humanely. The European Convention affirmed this in 1950, and in 1984, the UN Convention Against Torture became the first binding international instrument dealing exclusively with banning torture in any form for any reason. Israel and the US both have contempt for international law mutually affirming the other’s right to act as it pleases with no protests heard in the West or hardly anywhere else.

– 4170 Palestinian homes have been demolished according to a B’Tselem November 15, 2004 report titled “Through No Fault of Their Own.” The Israeli Committee Against House Demotions (ICAHD) reports a far larger number calling them “the hallmark of the Occupation.” It cites the demolition of around 12,000 Palestinian homes (on their own land in their own country) since June, 1967 to the present, leaving about 70,000 Palestinians “without shelter and traumatized.”

B’Tselem reports three types of demolitions:

– 1. As “clearing operations” to meet Israeli “military needs.”

– 2. Administration demolitions of houses built “without a permit” meaning Israel won’t let Palestinians build homes on their own land.

– 3. Demolitions for punitive reasons against Palestinians “suspected” of attacking Israeli (occupying) soldiers or civilians. In many cases, adjacent homes are destroyed as well.

PCHR reports other destruction of land and property from September 29, 2000 through June, 2005 including 31,500 dunums (31.5 million square meters) of mostly agricultural land in Gaza or 10% of the territory’s arable land total. Israel seized the land for illegal settlement development. In addition, 656 businesses, factories and schools were either destroyed or damaged over this period.

– World Bank data estimates Palestinian unemployment at 40%. The true figure, however, is much higher, at least 70% and likely higher still, while available employment is grossly inadequate to meet essential human needs in most cases. It’s the result of Israeli and western political and economic sanctions imposed on the democratically elected Hamas government after January, 2006. It was the first time ever an occupied people were put under a virtual midieval siege in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention obligating the international community to protect an occupied civilian population. Instead, a state of belligerency was imposed causing chaos and mass human misery, deprivation, starvation, illness and disease so far unaddressed and worsening. Almost none of this is reported in the dominant western media.

As early as June 28, 2002, PCHR reported 40 - 50% of Palestinians were living below the internationally recognized poverty line of $2 a day with the figure in Gaza 81%. Two-thirds of them were called the “new poor,” having been impoverished since the outbreak of the Second Intifada September 29, 2000. Nearly five years later, the figures are far higher.

– Israel currently has over 400,000 Jews living in 121 Jewish-only settlements and 102 “outposts” on stolen Palestinian land violating Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention stating “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population in the territory it occupies.” The number continues growing with deputy Jerusalem mayor Yehoshua Pollack announcing in May 20,000 new homes will be built in Arab East Jerusalem on more land annexed from its legal residents Israel is systematically ethnically cleasning toward making the entire city 100% Jewish.

In addition, 500 more houses will be built in Abu Dis village, southeast of Jerusalem with new home construction aimed at creating territorial continuity between Jerusalem and “Gush Etzion” settlement bloc, south of Bethlehem, and between Jerusalem and “Beit Eil” settlement, north of Ramallah. Toward the same end, the Israeli government allocated $1.5 billion in US taxpayer aid May 13 to developing Jerusalem settlement neighborhoods to reduce an increasing Palestinian population in the city.

At the same time, Palestinians in Salama and Fqaiqees villages, east and south of “Noghohot” settlement, west of Hebron, were ordered to stop building 10 houses and a mosque on their own land in their own country. Then on May 11, Israeli settlers in “Sousia” setttlement, south of Hebron, attacked Palestinian farmers on their agricultural land near the settlement without provocation.

End the Illegal Occupation Now

For 40 years under occupation on one-fifth of their original land and nearly 60 years after the “Nakba,” Palestinians are forced to endure the most appalling repression no one should have to face for a single day. Five million of them, including 1.4 million Israeli citizens, are denied all rights afforded Jews only and are subjected to daily abuse and neglect along with regular IDF assaults against which they’re defenseless. The Palestinians suffer for it, and the world community is silent except, like Israel, to shamefully call the victims the victimizers.

Then there are the five million refugees in the Palestinian diaspora (by some estimates the number is seven million) including 260,000 internally displaced and living inside Israel. Those outside the country are denied the absolute universal “Right of Return” affirmed in UN Resolution 194 passed in December, 1948 resolving that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property….made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

This “Universal Right” was also established in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as various Geneva Conventions Israel won’t recognize just as it ignores over five dozen UN resolutions condemning or censuring it for its actions against the Palestinians or other Arab people, deploring it for committing them, or demanding, calling on or urging the Jewish state to end them. One of them was UN Resolution 273 passed May, 1949 giving Israel UN membership conditional on its implementing Resolutions 181 of November, 1947 partitioning Palestine 56 - 44% in its favor and 194 passed December, 1948 giving Palestinians their absolute universally accepted “Right of Return.”

From 1948, when Palestinians lost 78% of their homeland, to 1967 when they lost the rest to a hostile foreign occupier, to the present, life in the OPT has been oppressive, intolerable and criminally imposed on a defenseless people helpless against it and unsupported ever since in their courageous struggle for liberation one day they’ll achieve because they’ll never give up till they have what they rightfully and legally deserve. For 40 years under occupation they have no recognized state of their own, no right of citizenship, and no power over their daily lives.

They live in a constant state of fear in the virtual open-air prisons of Gaza and the West Bank under Israel’s racist apartheid laws even the Israeli High Court shamefully upholds. They’re strangled economically and politically; denied free movement in their own country from a structure of roadblocks, checkpoints, electric fences and a land-grabbing “Apartheid Separation wall” the World Court in the Hague ruled (14 - 1) is “contrary to international law” because it “destroyed and (illegally) confiscated” property, it greatly restricts Palestinian movement, and it “severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of (the) right to self-determination.”

For its Jewish citizens, Israel is nominally democratic, although far from perfect at the least. For its Arab Muslim and small Christian population, it’s a daily struggle for survival under the harshest conditions of all kinds imaginable those outside the territories and most Jews in Israel can’t possibly understand and too few even try. For 40 brutal years, Israel has illegally controlled all aspects of Palestinian life in the OPT with an iron fist it freely swings on the slightest pretext. It cantonized the indigenous population under deplorable conditions in refugee camps and bantustans surrounded and cut off from all other ones. It rules defenseless people by intimidation and repressive military might. It denies Palestinian people their right to a truly sovereign independent state and won’t allow Muslims, Christians and other non-Jewish legal residents in greater Israel the same rights as Jews including the right of citizenship and safety under one sovereign nation for everyone entitled to it.

Israel claims it wants peace but never negotiated in good faith to get it. The current so-called “road map” is a cruel hoax going nowhere. It’s as fraudulent as all other phony peace efforts before it. Beginning with Camp David in 1978, the US bribed Egypt with billions in “baksheesh” in return for peace with Israel leaving Palestinians out in the cold. The predictable result was festering anger that exploded in what became the First Intifada in 1987 killing hundreds of Palestinians that finally led to the Oslo Accords and their so-called Declaration of Principles in 1993. Under them, Israel got what it wanted giving back nothing more in return than the right of Palestinians to be Israeli enforcers in their own land. So highly touted and praised when signed, it offered no Right of Return, no independent Palestinian state, no portion of Jerusalem as a capital, and no Palestinian control over their own daily lives free from a foreign occupier. From then till now, things only got worse.

Oslo I led to Oslo II in 1995 that divided the West Bank into the way it exists today in Areas “A,” “B,” “C,” and “D”; “H-1″ and “H-2″ in Hebron; nature reserves (in the OPT) for Jews only; closed military areas; security zones; and “open green spaces” for Jewish-only housing developments in over half of Arab East Jerusalem (slowly being stolen entirely) leaving Palestinians confined to unconnected cantons surrounded by growing Israeli settlements, restricted roads, and all kinds of impediments restricting free movement preventing any semblance of normal daily life.

So-called “permanent status” talks then began in July, 2000 at Camp David resulting in another insulting betrayal. Portrayed in the West as a generous offer in good faith, it was, in fact, just another example of US-Israeli duplicity leaving out entirely what Palestinians most want - a free and sovereign state or a single multi-ethnic one with Jews and Palestinians having equal rights, the Right of Return, a portion of Jerusalem as a capital or the entire city as capital for both, and an end to foreign occupation. All that was offered in exchange for “peace” Israeli-style is what they now have - life locked down in unconnected cantons on mostly scrub land in virtual open-air prisons surrounded by expanding Israeli settlements continuing to encroach on Palestinian lands fast disappearing as Israelis take what they want dunum by dunum.

Again justifiable festering anger erupted into the Second (al-Aqsa Mosque) Intifada in September, 2000 following former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the holy al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem (the Noble Sanctuary for Muslims and Temple Mount for Jews and Christians). It became far worse following elections for Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) seats on January 25, 2006 when, fed up with years of Fatah-led corruption and betrayal, Palestinians democratically elected a Hamas government Israel, Washington and the West acted savagely against since to destroy because its leaders won’t act as a quisling government the way Fatah’s Yasser Arafat and current Fatah Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, and his powerful National Security Advisor and “Gaza warlord,” Mohammed Dahlan (controlling Fatah security forces), were always willing to do and Abbas and especially Dahlan still are. For Hamas’ courage and dedication to their people, the Palestinians have paid dearly ever since and still do. This must end.

It’s long past time people of conscience everywhere take a public stand and demand 40 years of illegal repressive occupation end so Palestinians can finally have what all people have a right to expect and demand - to live freely in their own land the way international law mandates with nations supporting it accepting nothing less.

Palestinians and their legions of supporters worldwide aren’t waiting for conflict resolution that won’t ever come unless enough committed people everywhere demand their leaders act on it. A growing effort is building to convince them by calling for an organized global campaign for boycott, divestment and political and economic sanctions against Israel the same way they developed in the 1980s against the South African apartheid state that finally brought results.

It must include a demand that the world community of nations ends the “last taboo” of silence when it comes to Israel. It must be willing to expose and denounce what no longer can be tolerated that current South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils calls worse than apartheid saying Israel “behav(es) like fascists when they do certain things (like attacking Palestinians with helicopter gunships and tanks).” What better time to do what Kasrils is surely calling for than on the 40th anniversary of the longest continuous occupation in the world that no longer can be tolerated.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sj.lendman.blogspot.com and listen each Saturday to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.

Have Your Say: Forty Years of Occupation
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David Hicks’ trial was a political fix by two governments

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Tim McCormack

NOW that David Hicks is back in Australia to serve out the rest of his sentence at Yatala, it is opportune to reflect on the implications of his “trial” for the future of the US military commission process. It is not a pretty picture.

One of Major Michael Mori’s recurrent criticisms of the proposed US military commissions (mark I and II) was the complete lack of judicial independence from the executive arm of the US Government. He repeatedly used a cricketing analogy, likening the trial process to the absurd scenario of dispensing with the independent umpire and allowing the bowlers themselves to determine whether or not to declare the batsmen out lbw.

Although the outcome for David Hicks is unquestionably more favourable than he could have expected, the manner in which that outcome was achieved constituted an appalling indictment of the military commission process. Any antecedent doubts about Mori’s characterisation of the inherently political character of the process were obliterated in the course of the proceedings in Guantanamo Bay.

Throughout the week of the “trial”, we were repeatedly assured by US military authorities that we were witnessing a “fair and transparent process”. The most transparent reality for me was the utter opacity of virtually all issues of substance — resolved as they were outside the courtroom and beyond public scrutiny (or else avoided altogether by the convenience of the guilty plea). The pre-trial agreement was negotiated in Washington before the trial even began and those negotiations excluded both the sitting judge and the prosecution.

Despite that fact, the trial began as if there were no such agreement and, even after the existence of the agreement was revealed, the trial proceeded as if the agreement did not exist.

The single most glaring example of procedural irrelevance involved the jury of 10 senior officers drawn from the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and flown to Guantanamo Bay on the aircraft of the Defence Secretary. The officers, of the rank of colonel or equivalent, received instructions from the judge that they could award a maximum sentence of seven years for the charge of providing material support to a terrorist organisation. The jury listened to impassioned pleas from the prosecutor for the maximum sentence and from the defence for leniency.

They retired for two hours and returned to deliver the maximum sentence. Only after their role had concluded and they were excused from the court did they discover that their determination was utterly irrelevant to the actual sentence Hicks will serve. What must they have thought when they discovered that their efforts were superfluous?

So much of what transpired in the courtroom seemed to constitute an elaborate charade — an absurd pretence of fairness and transparency in the face of a blatant political fix. At the final news conference the prosecutor, Colonel Mo Davis, could only explain the incongruity of his repeated assertions that Hicks deserved a 20-year sentence but only got nine months by conceding that “I did not negotiate this deal” and it was done by Mori “over my head” in Washington.

This transparent lack of transparency exposed two governments desperate to get the case resolved and off the agenda and prepared to accept an extraordinarily short term of imprisonment for one of the “worst of the worst” of the world’s terrorists.

One non-government organisation representative observing the trial contrasted to the media at the end of the process the party line that “David Hicks is a serious threat to our way of life and when the facts finally come out folks will understand why he is such a dangerous person” with the reality that he received a sentence equivalent to a drunk-driver who hasn’t hurt anyone.

The pre-trial agreement meant that the US Government could avoid any scrutiny of the actual evidence it had against Hicks and the manner in which it was obtained. The agreement also obviated the need for the judge to deal with the potentially serious defence motion on prosecutorial misconduct by Davis in the public suggestions that Mori may have violated the US Code of Military Justice by arguing against the fairness of the commission process.

But the conveniences of a pre-trial agreement could not obscure the fact that the content of the agreement and the way it was negotiated confirmed the inherently political character of the military commission process and the potentially irreparable damage to the rule of law in persisting with it.

The Bush Administration is intending to spend $US150 million ($A181 million) to construct a new, state-of-the-art courtroom facility at Guantanamo Bay exclusively for future trials by military commissions.

The Hicks case quite possibly provided the strongest imaginable ammunition for those in the US who want to terminate the military commission process immediately.

If the building project goes ahead, the edifice will stand as a monument to a perversion of the long and admirable tradition in the US of commitment to justice and the rule of law.

So much of what transpired in the courtroom seemed to constitute an elaborate charade — an absurd pretence of fairness and transparency in the face of a blatant political fix. At the final news conference the prosecutor, Colonel Mo Davis, could only explain the incongruity of his repeated assertions that Hicks deserved a 20-year sentence but only got nine months by conceding that “I did not negotiate this deal” and it was done by Mori “over my head” in Washington.

This transparent lack of transparency exposed two governments desperate to get the case resolved and off the agenda and prepared to accept an extraordinarily short term of imprisonment for one of the “worst of the worst” of the world’s terrorists.

One non-government organisation representative observing the trial contrasted to the media at the end of the process the party line that “David Hicks is a serious threat to our way of life and when the facts finally come out folks will understand why he is such a dangerous person” with the reality that he received a sentence equivalent to a drunk-driver who hasn’t hurt anyone.

The pre-trial agreement meant that the US Government could avoid any scrutiny of the actual evidence it had against Hicks and the manner in which it was obtained. The agreement also obviated the need for the judge to deal with the potentially serious defence motion on prosecutorial misconduct by Davis in the public suggestions that Mori may have violated the US Code of Military Justice by arguing against the fairness of the commission process.

But the conveniences of a pre-trial agreement could not obscure the fact that the content of the agreement and the way it was negotiated confirmed the inherently political character of the military commission process and the potentially irreparable damage to the rule of law in persisting with it.

The Bush Administration is intending to spend $US150 million ($A181 million) to construct a new, state-of-the-art courtroom facility at Guantanamo Bay exclusively for future trials by military commissions.

The Hicks case quite possibly provided the strongest imaginable ammunition for those in the US who want to terminate the military commission process immediately.

If the building project goes ahead, the edifice will stand as a monument to a perversion of the long and admirable tradition in the US of commitment to justice and the rule of law.

Tim McCormack is the Australian Red Cross professor of international humanitarian law at the Melbourne Law School. He attended the proceedings against David Hicks in Cuba in March as an adviser to the defence team on law-of-war issues.

Have Your Say: David Hicks’ trial was a political fix by two governments
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Our oceans are turning into plastic

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.

Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

“Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. The workshop is surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas, guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air earthiness that reflects his ’60s-activist roots, which included a stint in a Berkeley commune. Composting and organic gardening are serious business here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline above it.

This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. “How about a nice, fresh boysenberry?” he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He’s a striking man wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore’s calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out. “We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump,” he says with a shrug. “That’s what we wanted to see.”

Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies, which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle. After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the Garbage Patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic has grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

In simple terms, plastic is a petroleum-based mix of monomers that become polymers, to which additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability, and other qualities. When it comes to these substances, even the syllables are scary. For instance, if you’re thinking that perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) isn’t something you want to sprinkle on your microwave popcorn, you’re right. Recently, the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) upped its classification of PFOA to a likely carcinogen. Yet it’s a common ingredient in packaging that needs to be oil- and heat-resistant. So while there may be no PFOA in the popcorn itself, if PFOA is used to treat the bag, enough of it can leach into the popcorn oil when your butter deluxe meets your superheated microwave oven that a single serving spikes the amount of the chemical in your blood.

Other nasty chemical additives are the flame retardants known as poly-brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). These chemicals have been shown to cause liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and memory loss in preliminary animal studies. In vehicle interiors, PBDEs—used in moldings and floor coverings, among other things—combine with another group called phthalates to create that much-vaunted “new-car smell.” Leave your new wheels in the hot sun for a few hours, and these substances can “off-gas” at an accelerated rate, releasing noxious by-products.

It’s not fair, however, to single out fast food and new cars. PBDEs, to take just one example, are used in many products, incuding computers, carpeting, and paint. As for phthalates, we deploy about a billion pounds of them a year worldwide despite the fact that California recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day.
Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.

On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.

As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.” In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.” Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc.

This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows that appears on products doesn’t always signify endless reuse; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.

“There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore says, pointing out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different products, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin material. It also doesn’t help that fresh-made plastic is far cheaper.

Moore routinely finds half-melted blobs of plastic in the ocean, as though the person doing the burning realized partway through the process that this was a bad idea, and stopped (or passed out from the fumes). “That’s a concern as plastic proliferates worldwide, and people run out of room for trash and start burning plastic—you’re producing some of the most toxic gases known,” he says. The color-coded bin system may work in Marin County, but it is somewhat less effective in subequatorial Africa or rural Peru.

“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.
Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade, or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year, we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never really goes away.

 Ask a group of people to name an overwhelming global problem, and you’ll hear about climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And
yet nurdles, lentil-size pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.

The United States banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large in the environment, where they latch on to plastic because of its molecular tendency to attract oils.

The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nurdles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re light enough to blow around like dust, to spill out of shipping containers, and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table.
One study estimated that nurdles now account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. And once they’re scattered in the environment, they’re diabolically hard to clean up (think wayward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, 2,100 miles northeast of New Zealand and a 12-hour flight from L.A., they’re commonly found mixed with beach sand. In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as he walked through an area where railcars unloaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore’s voice becomes strained and his words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s not the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We’re breathing them, the fish are eating them, they’re in our hair, they’re in our skin.”

Though marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic litter migrate to the gyre largely from land. That polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek, if it doesn’t get picked up and specifically taken to a landfill, will eventually be washed out to sea. Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1865, a few years after Alexander Parkes unveiled a precursor to man-made plastic called Parkesine, a scientist named John W. Hyatt set out to make a synthetic replacement for ivory billiard balls. He had the best of intentions: Save the elephants! After some tinkering, he created celluloid. From then on, each year brought a miraculous recipe: rayon in 1891, Teflon in 1938, polypropylene in 1954. Durable, cheap, versatile—plastic seemed like a revelation. And in many ways, it was. Plastic has given us bulletproof vests, credit cards, slinky spandex pants. It has led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science. And who among us doesn’t own a Frisbee?
Plastic has its benefits; no one would deny that. Few of us, however, are as enthusiastic as the American Plastics Council. One of its recent press releases, titled “Plastic Bags—A Family’s Trusted Companion,” reads: “Very few people remember what life was like before plastic bags became an icon of convenience and practicality—and now art. Remember the ‘beautiful’ [sic] swirling, floating bag in American Beauty?”

Alas, the same ethereal quality that allows bags to dance gracefully across the big screen also lands them in many less desirable places. Twenty-three countries, including Germany, South Africa, and Australia, have banned, taxed, or restricted the use of plastic bags because they clog sewers and lodge in the throats of livestock. Like pernicious Kleenex, these flimsy sacks end up snagged in trees and snarled in fences, becoming eyesores and worse: They also trap rainwater, creating perfect little breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

In the face of public outrage over pictures of dolphins choking on “a family’s trusted companion,” the American Plastics Council takes a defensive stance, sounding not unlike the NRA: Plastics don’t pollute, people do.

It has a point. Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet—do our products have to be quite so lethal? Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren’t disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world’s oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations? “If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed,” Moore says, summing it up.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. “If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you’d find a little line of plastic,” he told The Seattle Times last April. “What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren’t able to reproduce. They didn’t last very long because they killed themselves.”

Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Green architect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but among Fortune 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard known as “cradle to cradle” in which all manufactured things must be reusable, poison-free, and beneficial over the long haul. His outrage is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a common child’s bath toy. The duck is made of phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive harm. “What kind of people are we that we would design like this?” McDonough asks. In the United States, it’s commonly accepted that children’s teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, and textiles will be made from toxic materials. Other countries—and many individual companies—seem to be reconsidering. Currently, McDonough is working with the Chinese government to build seven cities using “the building materials of the future,” including a fabric that is safe enough to eat and a new, nontoxic polystyrene.

Thanks to people like Moore and McDonough, and media hits such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, awareness of just how hard we’ve bitch-slapped the planet is skyrocketing. After all, unless we’re planning to colonize Mars soon, this is where we live, and none of us would choose to live in a toxic wasteland or to spend our days getting pumped full of drugs to deal with our haywire endocrine systems and runaway cancer.

None of plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that, eventually, wisdom will trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin: The National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is aggressively using satellites to identify and remove “ghost nets,” abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb and excessive packaging is afoot. And in August 2006, Moore was invited to speak about “marine debris and hormone disruption” at a meeting in Sicily convened by the science advisor to the Vatican. This annual gathering, called the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, brings scientists together to discuss mankind’s worst threats. Past topics have included nuclear holocaust and terrorism.

The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore’s catamaran, Alguita, which lives in a slip across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it’s floating, a sturdy, eight-foot-long two-seater. Moore stands on Alguita’s deck, hands on hips, staring down at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same. He has just informed Moore that he came across the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just offshore. The two men shake their heads in bewilderment.

“That’s probably a $600 kayak,” Moore says, adding, “I don’t even shop anymore. Anything I need will just float by.” (In his opinion, the movie Cast Away was a joke—Tom Hanks could’ve built a village with the crap that would’ve washed ashore during a storm.)

Watching the kayak bobbing disconsolately, it is hard not to wonder what will become of it. The world is full of cooler, sexier kayaks. It is also full of cheap plastic kayaks that come in more attractive colors than battleship gray. The ownerless kayak is a lummox of a boat, 50 pounds of nurdles extruded into an object that nobody wants, but that’ll be around for centuries longer than we will.

And as Moore stands on deck looking into the water, it is easy to imagine him doing the same thing 800 miles west, in the gyre. You can see his silhouette in the silvering light, caught between ocean and sky. You can see the mercurial surface of the most majestic body of water on earth. And then below, you can see the half-submerged madhouse of forgotten and discarded things. As Moore looks over the side of the boat, you can see the seabirds sweeping overhead, dipping and skimming the water. One of the journeying birds, sleek as a fighter plane, carries a scrap of something yellow in its beak. The bird dives low and then boomerangs over the horizon. Gone.

© Copyright 2007 Best Life Magazine

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Bush Authorizes New Covert Action Against Iran

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Brian Ross and Richard Esposito

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.

“I can’t confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime,” said Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA senior official who dealt with Iran and other countries in the region. 

A National Security Council spokesperson, Gordon Johndroe, said, “The White House does not comment on intelligence matters.” A CIA spokesperson said, “As a matter of course, we do not comment on allegations of covert activity.”

The sources say the CIA developed the covert plan over the last year and received approval from White House officials and other officials in the intelligence community.

Officials say the covert plan is designed to pressure Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment program and end aid to insurgents in Iraq.

“There are some channels where the United States government may want to do things without its hand showing, and legally, therefore, the administration would, if it’s doing that, need an intelligence finding and would need to tell the Congress,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official.

Current and former intelligence officials say the approval of the covert action means the Bush administration, for the time being, has decided not to pursue a military option against Iran.

“Vice President Cheney helped to lead the side favoring a military strike,” said former CIA official Riedel, “but I think they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides.”

The covert action plan comes as U.S. officials have confirmed Iran had dramatically increased its ability to produce nuclear weapons material, at a pace that experts said would give them the ability to build a nuclear bomb in two years. 

Riedel says economic pressure on Iran may be the most effective tool available to the CIA, particularly in going after secret accounts used to fund the nuclear program.

“The kind of dealings that the Iranian Revolution Guards are going to do, in terms of purchasing nuclear and missile components, are likely to be extremely secret, and you’re going to have to work very, very hard to find them, and that’s exactly the kind of thing the CIA’s nonproliferation center and others would be expert at trying to look into,” Riedel said.   

Under the law, the CIA needs an official presidential finding to carry out such covert actions. The CIA is permitted to mount covert “collection” operations without a presidential finding.

“Presidential findings” are kept secret but reported to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and other key congressional leaders.

The “nonlethal” aspect of the presidential finding means CIA officers may not use deadly force in carrying out the secret operations against Iran.

Still, some fear that even a nonlethal covert CIA program carries great risks.

“I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran,” said Vali Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Mideast studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“And this covert action is now being escalated by the new U.S. directive, and that can very quickly lead to Iranian retaliation and a cycle of escalation can follow,” Nasr said.

Other “lethal” findings have authorized CIA covert actions against al Qaeda, terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Also briefed on the CIA proposal, according to intelligence sources, were National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. 

“The entire plan has been blessed by Abrams, in particular,” said one intelligence source familiar with the plan. “And Hadley had to put his chop on it.”

Abrams’ last involvement with attempting to destabilize a foreign government led to criminal charges.

He pleaded guilty in October 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about the Reagan administration’s ill-fated efforts to destabilize the Nicaraguan Sandinista government in Central America, known as the Iran-Contra affair. Abrams was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in December 1992.

In June 2001, Abrams was named by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to head the National Security Council’s office for democracy, human rights and international operations. On Feb. 2, 2005, National Security Advisor Hadley appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, one of the nation’s most senior national security positions.

As earlier reported on the Blotter on ABCNews.com, the United States has supported and encouraged an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, that has conducted deadly raids inside Iran from bases on the rugged Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan “tri-border region.”

U.S. officials deny any “direct funding” of Jundullah groups but say the leader of Jundullah was in regular contact with U.S. officials.

American intelligence sources say Jundullah has received money and weapons through the Afghanistan and Pakistan military and Pakistan’s intelligence service. Pakistan has officially denied any connection.

A report broadcast on Iranian TV last Sunday said Iranian authorities had captured 10 men crossing the border with $500,000 in cash along with “maps of sensitive areas” and “modern spy equipment.”

A senior Pakistani official told ABCNews.com the 10 men were members of Jundullah.

The leader of the Jundullah group, according to the Pakistani official, has been recruiting and training “hundreds of men” for “unspecified missions” across the border in Iran.

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Joke That’ll Get You Arrested

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Via Bruce Schneier

1. Quietly and calmly open up your laptop case.
2. Remove your laptop.
3. Boot it.
4. Make sure the person who won’t leave you alone can see the screen.
5. Open your email client to this message.
6. Close your eyes and tilt your head up to the sky.
7. Then hit this link: http://www.thecleverest.com/countdown.swf

Take note: Please take it a joke, it is a joke and has absolutely no evil intent. Peace to the world!

Do not try this, we are strongly against it in real life, might get you in some legal issues!

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Insurers, builders settle WTC case for $2 billion

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

AMY WESTFELDT

The builders of the World Trade Center site and seven insurers have reached a $2 billion settlement that ends all outstanding legal battles over its multibillion-dollar policy, state officials said today.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer and state Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo announced the settlement after leading two months of talks with the insurers, trade center developer Larry Silverstein and the site’s owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The $2 billion, added to $2.55 billion already paid out since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that destroyed the trade center, is about $130 million less than the amount awarded to rebuild the site after a trial in 2004.

Spitzer called the insurance dispute, which had cost parties on both sides hundreds of millions of dollars, “the last major barrier to rebuilding.”

The deal “ensures that the Port Authority and Silverstein Properties will have the financial resources to meet their obligations and rebuild at the World Trade Center site in a way that will make all New Yorkers proud and fuel the revitalization of lower Manhattan,” the governor said.

The insurers involved include Swiss Reinsurance Co., which held the largest policy on the trade center; Allianz Global Risks U.S. Insurance Co., the former Royal Indemnity Co., Zurich American Insurance Co., Travelers Companies Inc. and Employers Insurance of Wausau.

Silverstein, who leased the twin towers weeks before they collapsed, took out a $3.5 billion policy with dozens of insurers. He went to court after the attacks, arguing that he should receive two payouts because the two hijacked planes that crashed into the towers represented two attacks instead of one.

Silverstein was awarded $4.6 billion in 2004; two juries decided that some of the insurers had to pay twice the policy because the companies’ different insurance policies carried different wording about what would constitute multiple events. The insurers have been in court recently to determine exactly how much they would pay.

The money represents more than half of the funding needed to rebuild the trade center site. Silverstein was originally responsible for rebuilding five office towers, but a year ago agreed to split the rebuilding — and the insurance money — with the Port Authority, which will build the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower and another planned tower.

The Port Authority and Silverstein sued several insurers this year who refused to recognize the agreement.

Today’s agreement ends all court cases; the insurers will not disclose exactly how much each company will pay of the remaining $2 billion, under the agreement.

Silverstein today thanked Spitzer and Dinallo for their intervention, saying they “deserve huge credit for recognizing the importance of settling all outstanding insurance issues, and their tireless work made sure we got it done.”

Roger W. Ferguson, chairman of Swiss Re America Holding Corp., said the deal “fairly and conclusively” resolves the company’s case.

An Allianz official, Andreas Shell, said the insurer is pleased that the trade center case is over. “We, along with the nation and especially the residents of New York, look forward to seeing the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site,” Shell said.

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U.S. Government Gave Airtime to Terrorists, Official Admits

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Justin Rood

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government’s $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

Facing tough questions before a congressional panel last week, Broadcasting Board of Governors member Joaquin Blaya admitted none of the senior news managers at the network spoke Arabic when the terrorist messages made it onto the air courtesy of U.S. taxpayer funds. Nor did Blaya himself or any of the other officials at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the network.

“How does it happen that the terrorists take over?” asked Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, D-N.Y., at a hearing last Wednesday of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee he chairs. “Is there no adult supervision?”

Blaya conceded that the top officials in the network’s chain of command could not understand what was being said on al Hurra broadcasts.

Also, the network’s news division also had no assignment desk, he said. That left decisions over al Hurra’s content in the hands of its reporters and producers, who are, according to Blaya, hastily-hired Arabic-speaking journalists with insufficient understanding of Western journalistic practices or the network’s pro-Western mission.

Blaya’s comments were first reported by Congressional Quarterly.

It has never been al Hurra’s policy to “provide an open, live microphone to terrorists,” Blaya assured lawmakers. “It should not have happened.”

The station’s gaffes have included broadcasting in December 2006 a 68-minute call to arms against Israelis by a senior figure of the terrorist group Hezbollah; deferential coverage of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial conference; and a factually flawed piece on a splinter group of Orthodox Jews who oppose the state of Israel, according to the Wall Street Journal, which has reported the network’s travails for months.

At the hearing, Blaya and other officials assured lawmakers that some of the staffers involved in the controversial broadcasts had been fired. They also said the network now has an assignment desk, staffed by Arabic-speaking editors. And the network’s vice president of news has hired an Arabic speaker to help monitor its broadcasts and ensure the material is consistent with al Hurra’s mission.

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