How Ford stood by 'real friend' Nixon

Unpublished tapes, documents shed light on the deep relationship between them

Bob Woodward
WASHINGTON POST

Washington -- Months before Richard Nixon set Michigan congressman Gerald Ford on the path to the White House, Nixon turned to Ford, who called himself the embattled president's "only real friend," to get him out of trouble.

During one of the darkest days of the Watergate scandal, Nixon secretly confided in Ford, at the time the House minority leader. He begged for help. He complained about fair-weather friends and swore at perceived rivals in his own party. "Tell the guys, goddamn it, to get off their ass and start fighting back," Nixon pleaded with Ford in one call recorded by the president's secret taping system.

And Ford did. "Anytime you want me to do anything, under any circumstances, you give me a call, Mr. President," he told Nixon during that May 1, 1973, conversation. "We'll stand by you morning, noon and night."

This and other previously unpublished transcripts of their calls, documents and personal letters provide a portrait of an intensely personal friendship dating to the late 1940s but so hidden that few others were even aware of it. Until now, the relationship between the two presidents has been portrayed largely as a matter of political necessity, with Nixon tapping Ford for the vice presidency in late 1973 because he was a confirmable choice on Capitol Hill.

But the tapes, documents and two lengthy recent interviews with Ford before his death this week, conducted for a future book and unpublished until after his death, show that the close political alliance between the two men seriously influenced Ford's eventual decision to pardon Nixon, the most momentous decision of his short presidency and almost certainly the one that cost him any chance of winning the White House in his own right two years later. Ford became president on Aug. 9, 1974; he pardoned Nixon just a month later.

"I think that Nixon felt I was about the only person he could really trust on the Hill," Ford said during the 2005 interview.

Ford returned the feeling.

"I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma," Ford said in the interview.

That acknowledgment represents a significant shift from Ford's previous portrayals of the pardon that absolved Nixon of any Watergate-related crimes. In earlier statements, Ford had emphasized the decision as an effort to move the country beyond the partisan divisions of the Watergate era, playing down the personal dimension.

A key window into their close friendship and political alliance was that May 1973 call. It was the day after Nixon had gone on television to announce the resignations of his two top aides, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and the Watergate cover-up was unraveling. The president knew it and was eager for Ford's reassurance that his political situation on Capitol Hill was not as grave as it seemed.

"You've got a hell of a lot of friends up here," Ford told him, "both Republican and Democrat, and don't worry about anybody being sunshine soldiers or summer patriots."

"Well, never Jerry Ford," Nixon replied. "But if you could get a few congressmen and senators to speak up and say a word, for Christ's sakes."

Ford was played a copy of that tape in 2005. Although the existence of Nixon's secret taping system had been publicly disclosed in 1973, no such tapes of Ford had come to public attention, and the former president seemed stunned. "I remember vividly that," he said, recalling how Nixon often turned to him to get things done on the Hill. He added that he considered himself to be Nixon's "only real friend."

At times, their friendship was the gossipy sort, as two longtime politicians sorted through the Washington rumor mill. They were so comfortable with each other that they openly traded nasty personal assessments of others.

On April 6, 1971, for example, Nixon called Ford to find out what was going on with House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, D-La. Boggs had just taken to the House floor saying that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was regularly wiretapping members of Congress, and Nixon wanted to know why Boggs was going public.

"He's nuts," Ford told Nixon in the call picked up by Nixon's secret taping.

"He's on the sauce," Nixon said, suggesting the majority leader was drinking. "Isn't that it?"

In their personal correspondence, extending over decades, the two men conveyed a sense of personal bond that went beyond public niceties, demonstrated in dozens of letters in Ford's confidential files that he allowed a reporter to review and copy.

Their friendly notes to each other continued until not long before Nixon's death in 1994. In 1978, for example, Nixon wrote to buck up Ford after Ford's former press secretary wrote a tell-all memoir, "It Sure Looks Different From the Inside," in which he gave details of Betty Ford's addiction to alcohol and various medications. "Dear Jerry, I thought Ron Nessen's comments on Betty were contemptible. Tell Betty her many friends won't believe him and for her few enemies -- The hell with them. Sincerely, Dick."

9/11, Steven Jones, and Me - Part 3

From LDS PATRIOT

Don’t you just love egg nog? Me too.

For part 3, I would like to tell the story of what happened when I went to one of Professor Jones’ presentations at UVSC (Utah Valley State College) that was held on Wednesday, 1 Feb 2006, at 7:00 pm. UVSC is about a 15-minute drive from BYU. At the time of this presentation, I had already had email interaction with Professor Jones, as described in part 2.

I knew that there was going to be a question and answer period at the end of the presentation, so I typed up the best question I could think of: Why demolish WTC 7 when it was going to fall down on its own anyway? And then I provided the testimony of the firemen and the transit data, etc. that I covered in part 2. In preparation, I also printed up our entire email conversation and made notes as to questions I might ask him during his presentation.

I arrived and found that two of my friends were there. One was the guy I mentioned before who introduced me to Professor Jones’ work and the other was videotaping the presentation. You can probably find that presentation video online somewhere - I’m the one whose head explodes about 1 1/2 hours into it.

I sat down in the middle of the audience and they announced that the question and answer period would be at the end and that Professor Jones would not be taking any questions during the presentation. Oh, and the questions would be written and handed in, reviewed, and then given to Professor Jones. Cool - I already had mine typed up, so I handed it in and sat back to soak in the content of the presentation.

I was annoyed by the number of times “WTC 7 wasn’t even hit by a jet” and “no other steel high-rise has ever collapsed because of fire” were repeated, but I got over that. He brought more political and religious information into his presentation than he does in his paper. I’m ok with people having an opinion on political and religious issues, but when billed as “Professor Jones - physicist”, I expected more material that deals with his area of expertise.

I saw one slide that had the infamous photo of the “column cut at an angle” on it. Professor Jones said that it’s still under investigation but the message I got as he talked about it was that this was one of the core columns that was cut with thermite at an angle so that the building would come down. The people all around me were full of “ooh’s” and “aah’s” and were just giddy about how this was surely the smoking gun that would blow the cover off the official government story. I believe it was at this point that I figured out that I was probably in an audience of mostly “true believers” of government conspiracy theories.

Well, I had seen that diagonally cut column before but hadn’t really looked into it. Since then, I have. It turns out that excavation crews cut steel columns at a diagonal because the melting steel runs down, pre-heating the cut so that even though it’s a longer cut, it cuts faster. I then found this page that has other columns being cut at a diagonal by excavation personnel.

This is what bothers me so much about conspiracy theorist methods. They dig deep enough to find something that looks like it matches their beliefs but then they stop digging. Did they go so far as to ask an excavator if that would be a normal cut? Did they Google around to find the page that the photo in question originally came from?

So, I think it was scheduled to be a two-hour presentation with a lot of time for questions at the end. Professor Jones was going into detail about how the government went around telling people that the air at ground zero was safe to breathe when it really wasn’t - fair enough - put those people in jail. He seemed to be picking out whatever he could to sell the audience on the idea that we couldn’t trust the government and so there was one more reason to believe in a demolition theory. I thought this was going to be about physics.

He took up so much time talking about all of this other non-physics stuff that he only left a few minutes at the end for questions. There was a guy reading through the questions and handing them to Professor Jones. Mine was on an 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper and the rest were on quarter page sheets, so mine stood out. It contained details about the firemen testimony and so it was longer than the other questions, but it was still only about a quarter page of text.

I watched the guy reading through my question and handing Professor Jones other questions over and over again until they were out of time. It was a bit frustrating. So I went up afterward and got my printed question from “the question guy” and went up to Professor Jones and waited for him to get done talking to some people who were also asking questions.

It was finally my turn to talk to him. At this point, Professor Jones didn’t know who I was and that I had been conversing with him via email. This was the first time we had seen each other face to face. I told him about the various firemen testimonies of severe damage to WTC 7 and the transit data and how they had set up a collapse zone hours before it collapsed on its own. I read a lot of testimony to him. He said - no lie - “I don’t think there was that much damage.” What? I said that these were firemen standing at the base and inside of WTC 7 on that day telling us what they saw. I asked him on what basis did he think there wasn’t that much damage. We were being rushed out of the room at that point since others had reserved the room. I think my head exploded again in the car on the way home - I can’t remember for sure.

I didn’t hear from him for several months after that until about two months ago when he contacted me again asking if I had any other unresolved issues with his paper. It was a bit strange. I asked him a few questions about chain of custody and he replied with a partial chain of custody that didn’t include dates or names. I then asked him a few more questions and gave him new links to video and photos of the badly damaged south side of WTC 7. He didn’t respond. I sent it again. No response. I received delivery receipts for both emails and so I’m pretty sure he got them.

So, that was a strange story, eh? It left me puzzled about what was going on in his mind to so flatly reject relevant testimony about the condition of WTC 7. It does go against the demolition theory and he’s heavily invested in that theory being true but I don’t know if that’s what’s causing him to ignore this testimony. Hopefully, he’ll reply again and I’ll find out what’s going on.

In part 4, I will go through the current version of his entire paper and bring up any other unresolved issues I see. I’ll be posting that soon. See you then.

Flunking Our Future

by Maureen Dowd
THE NEW YORK TIMES

The only sects that may be more savage than Shiites and Sunnis are the Democratic feminist lawmakers representing Northern and Southern California.

After Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman had their final catfight about who would lead the House Intelligence Committee, aptly enough at the Four Seasons’ hair salon in Georgetown, the new speaker passed over the knowledgeable and camera-eager Ms. Harman and mystifyingly gave the consequential job to Sylvestre Reyes of Texas.

Mr. Reyes promptly tripped over the most critical theme in the field of intelligence. Jeff Stein, interviewing the incoming chairman for Congressional Quarterly, asked him whether Al Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” the lawmaker guessed.

As Mr. Stein corrected him in the article: “Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an Al Qaeda clubhouse, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.”

Mr. Stein followed up with a Hezbollah question: “What are they?” Again, Mr. Reyes was stumped.

“Hezbollah,” he stammered. “Uh, Hezbollah. Why do you ask me these questions at 5 o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish?” (O.K. ¿Qué es Hezbollah?)

Sounding as naked of essentials as Britney Spears, the new intelligence oversight chief pleaded that it was hard to keep all the categories straight. Thank heavens Mr. Stein never got to Syrian Alawites.

Many Americans, including those in charge of Middle East policy, are befuddled and fed up with the intransigent tribal and religious fevers of the region. As Bill O’Reilly sagely remarked, “I don’t want to ever hear Shia and Sunni again.” But it is beyond the job description of top officials to wish the problems away, especially when the entire region is decomposing before our bleary eyes.

If Mr. Reyes had been reading the newspaper, he might have noticed Mr. Stein’s piece on The Times’s Op-Ed page two months earlier, in which, like a wonkish Ali G, he caught many intelligence and law enforcement officials, as well as members of Congress, who did not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite.

“Too many officials in charge of the war on terrorism just don’t care to learn much, if anything, about the enemy we’re fighting,” he concluded. “And that’s enough to keep anybody up at night.”

The lack of intellectual urgency about our Middle East wars is chilling. The Iraq Study Group reported that our efforts in Iraq are handicapped by the fact that our embassy of 1,000 has only 33 Arabic speakers, just six who are fluent.

W., of course, failed a foreign affairs pop quiz and still became a close ally of the Pakistani dictator he referred to as “General ... General.”

Once they have the job, the incentive of politicians to study is somewhat dulled. Charles Z. Wick, who headed the U.S. Information Agency during the Reagan years, sent a memo to his staff saying that he and the president needed to know if France was a member of NATO. Mr. Reagan had already been the president for years, The Times’s Steve Weisman reported, when he expressed surprise at learning that the Soviets had most of their nuclear weapons on land-based missiles, while America had relatively few.

One possibility is that Mr. Stein’s questions were just too darn hard. He should have pitched a few warm-ups, like: How many sides are there in the Sunni Triangle? Or, which religious figure, Muhammad or Jesus, has not been the subject of a Mel Gibson film?

Perhaps the questions could be phrased Jeopardy-style, as in: “The name shared by two kings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.” (What is Abdullah?)

A multiple choice might be easier on harried policy makers. For instance, which of the following quotes can be attributed to Dick Cheney?

a) “So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people: greedy, barbarous and cruel.”

b) “Don Rumsfeld is the finest secretary of defense this nation has ever had.”

c) “Certain things are not known to those who eat with forks.”

Or this: Is the Shiite crescent a) a puffy dinner roll, b) a new Ramadan moon, or c) an arc of crisis?

Once our leaders get a grasp of the basics, we can hit them with a truly hard question: Three and a half years after the invasion of Iraq, with nearly 3,000 American troops dead and the Iraqis not remotely interested in order or democracy, what on earth do we do now?

9/11, Steven Jones, and Me - Part 2

From LDS PATRIOT

During the month of November 2005, Professor Jones and I went back and forth via email about the contents of his paper. His paper has been updated since then so I have gone through our discussions and I have only kept the parts of them that still pertain to the current version of his paper located here. All page references below refer to the current version of the paper as of the date of this post.

Item 1 - On page 9, there is a photo of what Jones asserts is evidently “now solidified metal” that used to be molten. It turns out that this photo is of cement and other materials, including paper, that are part of several floors of material that were compressed during the collapse. Here are two of the original photos with the caption that explains what it really is.

Item 2 - On page 22 in the above report Professor Jones states:

“…further investigation and analyses are indeed needed, including serious consideration of the controlled-demolition hypothesis which is neglected in all of the government reports (FEMA, NIST and 9-11 Commission reports).”

But on page 6 of the NIST report, it says in bold red letters:

“NIST has seen no evidence that the collapse of WTC 7 was caused by bombs, missiles, or controlled demolition.”

So, they do address that they have not found any evidence that would support a controlled demolition theory. I asked Professor Jones if he thought that NIST was wicked (i.e. not telling the truth about what they found) or incompetent. He ultimately replied:

“I think the FEMA and NIST fellows were tightly constrained in what they could say, not evil. NIST states they were under non-disclosure restrictions, for example.”

So even though NIST explicitly states that they have found no evidence that WTC 7 was demolished, it seems to me that Professor Jones states that they neglected addressing controlled demolition and that the reason for this is that they were tightly regulated.

I would think that being regulated would mean that you don’t say anything about demolition even if you had found something, not that you lie and say the opposite of what your findings are. I think that they weren’t lying and that they really didn’t find any evidence of demolition and by saying so, they did in fact address the issue.

Apart from this, there is firsthand testimony gathered from firemen and rescue personnel during the few weeks after 9/11 during debriefing interviews. Several links to these interviews posted at www.nytimes.com can be found here. Some of this information also comes from www.firehouse.com.

In summary, the firefighters at WTC 7 say that there was a huge 20-story tall hole down the south side of WTC 7 that went inside the building 1/4 to 1/2 of the depth of the building, there was a large bulge between floors 10 and 13 that they put a transit on to measure its movement to predict collapse potential, there were strange creaking noises coming out of WTC 7, the building was leaning to one side, they saw from the structural damage combined with transit and laser doppler vibrometer data (another tool used to measure collapse potential) that the building would soon collapse on its own.

They set up a collapse zone a couple of hours before it collapsed to let it fall. Once it fell, they went back in to work on the debris pile. There are photos and video of the severe damage and smoke billowing out of the entire south side of WTC 7 here and here.

I have never seen these photos or video in a demolition theory presentation. I was only shown the basically undamaged north side and a small part of the southwest corner that’s damaged. I think they do this to create a need to investigate a demolition theory in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe they just didn’t look hard enough for evidence that would go against investigating a demolition theory.

Perhaps NIST had access to all this information and saw that a demolition theory was not necessary and that is why they didn’t address it except to say that they didn’t see any evidence of demolition. I have sent Professor Jones the testimony above about the severe damage to WTC 7, for example, but I have yet to find that information in his paper.

Why would he exclude this important testimony about the state of WTC 7 from his paper? I don’t know either. I also heard Professor Jones during an interview with Alex Jones saying that there was little damage to WTC 7 and that was AFTER I gave him the above testimony and references. Like I said, this testimony makes a demolition theory not necessary and perhaps that is why it is ignored.

Item 3 - On pages 2 and 22 of Professor Jones’ paper, it says:

“I invite you to consider the collapse of the 47-story WTC 7, which was never hit by a jet.” and “No major high-rise building has ever collapsed from fire…”

These statements are misleading in a few ways. First, with regard to WTC 7, yes, it wasn’t hit by a plane, it was hit by a huge chunk of the North World Trade Center Tower that did the damage explained above. Also, that other steel high rise buildings haven’t collapsed like the towers (and WTC 7) did that day is interesting but mostly irrelevant. The example photos of buildings falling on their sides in his presentations and other buildings that withstood fires were built differently and were not hit by airplanes or other buildings in combination with fires.

There is also the Madrid Windsor Tower that is often used to show that a huge raging fire didn’t destroy a building, but only selected photos are used. Look here to see the photos the conspiracy theorists don’t want you to see. Yes, if you look at the side of the building they don’t show you (that’s a recurring theme) the steel collapsed but the cement remained at the Windsor Madrid tower.

But this all ends up being a straw man argument anyway. Consider the research of Asif Usmani - a structural engineer from Edinburgh University who specializes in fire’s effect on structures. He contends that the steel didn’t need to melt or even loose much strength - all it had to do was expand. Another paper exists here. (Dang! I had to pay $25 for an earlier, less complete copy of that document and now it’s free and has more information in it - oh well.)

The floors of the towers expanded with fire across three floors. These floors buckled (as is shown in photos) because they couldn’t push the core in or the outer walls out. Once they buckled, the load was transferred to adjacent floors and also through the hat truss to the core. As each floor buckled, more load was put on the core until a global collapse initiated. The outer walls buckled inward up to 55 inches before the collapse, just as his computer models predicted. His models took about 50 minutes to collapse completely and the temperatures were fairly low.

Item 4 - On page 23 it says:

Horizontal puffs of smoke and debris are observed emerging from WTC-7 on upper floors, in regular sequence, just as the building starts to collapse. (The reader may wish to view the close-up video clip again.) The upper floors have evidently not moved relative to one another yet, from what one can observe from the videos. In addition, the timing between the puffs is less than 0.2 seconds so air-expulsion due to collapsing floors (see Chertoff, 2005) is evidently excluded. Free-fall time for a floor to fall down to the next floor is significantly longer than 0.2 seconds: the equation for free fall, y = ½ gt2, yields a little over 0.6 seconds, as this is near the initiation of the collapse. However, the presence of such “squibs” proceeding up the side of the building is common when pre-positioned explosives are used…”

The puffs come from the damaged area of WTC 7 as seen in the above photos and video of the south side. The penthouse falls into the building and then we see puffs of debris coming out of the windows in regular succession. It wouldn’t surprise me to see puffs of debris coming out of a building that has already started to collapse. Even the regularity of the puffs wouldn’t surprise me. If these were explosives, not only would they be seen before the building starts to fall (I saw the building start to fall one frame before the first puff came out - perhaps I’m looking at a different video), but they seem to be in the wrong place. Why put them at the top edge of the building? Also, why are we calculating floor to floor pancake times when WTC 7 didn’t pancake according to video accounts. The floors were connected to each other and a shock wave through the floors would go as fast as the speed of sound in the materials it was traveling through. With the penthouse dropping before the puffs, why is it such a mystery that air pressure from within the building as it collapsed would want to escape out of the already broken windows? Anyway, this really is moot since the collapse was expected hours before (without demolition), according to the firemen on the scene.

Item 5 - On page 32, it says:

“The 110-story towers of the World Trade Center were designed to withstand as a whole the forces caused by a horizontal impact of a large commercial aircraft. So why did a total collapse occur? (Bazant and Zhou, 2002, p. 2.)”

This is dishonest and misleading. I gave Professor Jones a more accurate quote:

“According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, however, WTC towers 1 and 2 were designed to withstand the impact of a 707 lost in fog, looking to land. The modeled aircraft was a 707 weighing 263,000 lb (119,000 kg) with a flight speed of only 180 mph (290 km/h), as would be used in approach and landing situations ([2], page 17). The 767s that actually hit the towers had a kinetic energy more than seven times greater than the specifically modeled 707 impact.” (wikipedia.org)

To which he replied:

“That was Bazant and Zhou’s statement in full on this matter - and I’m analyzing their paper at this point. The towers did withstand the impact, and so stood for 52 and 102 minutes afterward.”

Fair enough. He gave the full quote from Bazant and Zhou, but I gave him the complete quote. Ok, so now he has the complete quote. Does he remove the less correct, misleading quote from the paper and replace it with the more complete and accurate quote that I gave him? No. The incomplete and misleading quote is still in the paper to this day. He then discusses the misleading quote:

“Correct - the WTC Towers were designed to withstand forces caused by large commercial aircraft - we can agree on that.”

That’s a true, but misleading statement, especially when you know what the whole quote says.

Item 6 - on page 41, it says:

“Ryan’s estimate is that the probability that fires and damage (the “official theory”) could cause the Towers complete collapse is less than one in a trillion, and the probability is much less still when the complete collapse of WTC7 is included”

I asked him the following questions about this estimation:

How can you do a probability calculation on an event with such an incredible amount of unknowns? Did Ryan input the amount of core damage that was done into his statistical calculations? If so, where did he get that data? If not, where did he get his numbers? Could you provide me with the inputs and the formula used to come up with that number? Was an airplane flying into those core columns part of the calculation?

He didn’t get back to me on those questions. I really think it smells funny to put a “one in a trillion” estimate out there with no calculations to back it up.

Apparently, Mr. Ryan didn’t know about the damage to the south side of WTC 7 that gave the firemen the idea that the probability of collapse was close to 1 in 1. He also apparently didn’t know about Dr. Asif Usmani’s work that put the probablilty of collapse of the towers at some number quite a bit less than a trillion to 1.

If you combine those two probablities, you get a more likely overall chance of the three buildings collapsing. Yeah, I don’t know the exact probability, but it seems that Mr. Ryan doesn’t have all the inputs, including the firemen testimony above, or it would seem to be less than a 1 in a trillion chance.

Item 7 - On page 28, it says:

“And these explosives also readily account for the turning of the falling Towers to fine dust as the collapse ensues. Rather than a piling up with shattering of concrete as we might expect from non-explosive-caused progressive collapse (”official theory”), we find that most of the Towers material (concrete, carpet, etc.) is converted to flour-like powder WHILE the buildings are falling.”

As we might expect? Who is expecting this? Exactly what type of concrete were the floors made out of again? What amount of energy would it take to convert that into dust? Is there a more reasonable explanation than explosives all over every floor?

I think so and I think I’ll believe people who knew what kind of concrete was used and actually did calculations to find out what would happen. Look here if you dare.

Item 8 - On page 29 it says:

“But then - and this I’m still puzzling over - this block turned mostly to powder in mid-air!”

I just watched video of this again and the upper floors remain intact all the way until they disappear into the cloud of concrete dust below them. I don’t know which video he was watching.

Even if it did turn into dust because of explosives, how on earth would you do that without having fire or other explosive evidence other than just dust? And don’t say nukes - even Professor Jones doesn’t buy the nuke or the “high energy particle beam” theories.

Item 9 - On page 43, it says:

“Remarkably, the explosive demolition hypothesis accounts for all the available data rather easily. The core columns on lower floors are cut using explosives, near-simultaneously, along with explosives detonated up higher so that gravity acting on now-unsupported floors helps bring down the buildings quickly. The collapses are thus symmetrical, rapid and complete, with accompanying squibs — really very standard stuff for demolition experts….It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings, and set off after the two plane crashes - which were actually a diversion tactic.”

I disagree. How would cutting core columns on lower floors cause a collapse of the building directly above the impact but not just below the impact? How would it cause the south tower to tilt and rotate above the impact point but not below? Why would it not fall from the ground floors straight down?

And how on earth does a physics professor make an assertion that the plane crashes “were actually a diversion tactic”? What? Um, where are your physics calculations for such an assertion? I think that statement gives us a glimpse into his underlying beliefs that could be driving him to reject any data that goes counter to that belief. I could be wrong though. You decide.

Item 10 - This quote was in his paper back when I reviewed it with him but it has now been removed:

“And that fact should be of great concern to Americans and to all those threatened by American military and security units in the wake of the 9-11 events.”

Regardless of the reason that he put this in his paper originally, it stinks like anti-war agenda bias and it weakens his objectivity. Could it be just another glimpse into his underlying belief driving what I think is his practice of pathological science - where his underlying belief drives the types of data he looks for? I don’t know either. You decide.

Item 11 - Chain of custody. Professor Jones discusses some ground zero samples on page 13:

“We are studying residues found in solidified slag as well as in dust from the WTC collapses, in order to determine the nature of the reactions which produced this molten material. We have performed electron-microprobe, X-ray Fluorescence and other analyses on samples of the solidified slag and on the WTC dust. The provenience of the WTC dust sample is an apartment at 113 Cedar Street in New York City, NY. A memorial constructed from structural steel from the WTC Towers located at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, is the source of previously-molten metal samples. Porous, solidified splatter found with the compacted dirt from this memorial is being analyzed.”

I think if these samples are real, that this is really where Professor Jones’ time should be spent. It’s in his area of expertise and it’s physical evidence.

My only problem is that since his theory amounts to charging our own government with large scale cold blooded murder, his chain of custody (or provenience) needs to be better than this. I believe he has more detail for his chain of custody but I haven’t seen it published yet. I would like to see the names, dates, and locations of each sample from ground zero all the way to his hands. That is what would be required for a murder case.

If the chain of custody isn’t bulletproof, then it could be argued that someone just gathered up some slag from a thermite experiment they did in their back yard and sent it to Professor Jones and that would be the end of his case.

Next up, I would like to describe his reaction when I came to one of his presentations with firemen testimony in my hand. It was very strange. I would also like to go through his current paper and address any new information he has added since my last review of it.

Just to reiterate, I am not here to beat up on Professor Jones or to just do anything I can to prove him wrong. I think he should do the research he’s doing and I think his findings should be published. I do not however think that his solid research dealing with physics and metal samples should be hidden in a sea of already debunked or questionable or misleading material.

This would end up being a bunch of red herrings for the government or others to pick at - like I’m doing right now. I’d like these inaccuracies and misleading items to be reworded or removed so that the focus can be clear and solid and if there was something fishy going on on 9/11, it can be discovered.

Liquid coal: A cheaper, cleaner 21st century fuel?

by Steve James

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When railroads ruled, it was the sweating firemen shoveling coal into the furnace who kept the engines running.

Now, nearly two centuries after Stephenson's "Rocket" steam locomotive helped usher in the Industrial Revolution, that same coal could be the fuel that keeps the jet age aloft.

But with a twist: The planes of the future could be flown with liquid fuel made from coal or natural gas.

Already the United States Air Force has carried out tests flying a B-52 Stratofortress with a coal-based fuel.

And JetBlue Airways Corp. supports a bill in Congress that would extend tax credits for alternative fuels, pushing technology to produce jet fuel for the equivalent of $40 a barrel -- way below current oil prices.

Major coal mining companies in the United States, which has more coal reserves than Saudi Arabia has oil, are investing in ways to develop fuels derived from carbon.

The technology of producing a liquid fuel from coal or natural gas is hardly new. The Fischer-Tropsch process was developed by German researchers Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in 1923 and used by Germany and Japan during World War II to produce alternative fuels. Indeed, in 1944, Germany produced 6.5 million tons, or 124,000 barrels a day.

And coal-to-liquid (CTL) fuel is already in use elsewhere, like South Africa, where it meets 30 percent of transportation fuel needs.

In addition to being cheaper than oil, advocates point out that the fuel is environmentally friendlier and would also help America wean itself of foreign oil imports.

"America must reduce its dependence on foreign oil via environmentally sound and proven coal-to-liquid technologies," said JetBlue's founder and chief executive, David Neeleman. "Utilizing our domestic coal reserves is the right way to achieve energy independence."

In a recent briefing to power and energy executives, Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, said bio-diesel fuels offer little in the way of reduced carbon dioxide emissions, have enormous production costs and present "serious transmission and infrastructure" problems.

In contrast, CTL transportation fuels are substantially cleaner-burning than conventional fuels.

Popovich warned that the United States risks falling behind economic competitors such as China, which plans to spend $25 billion on CTL plants.

America is "already behind the curve" when it comes to tapping the vast liquid fuel potential that coal offers, said John Ward, of natural resources company Headwaters Inc. , which builds CTL plants.

He said plants in America would likely each produce 40,000 barrels of CTL fuel per day, with a typical plant using 8.5 million tons of coal per year. In contrast, China is focused on building plants capable of producing 60,000 barrels of CTL fuel per day, he said.

"There is significant investor interest in what could be a major growth opportunity," said Paul Clegg, an alternative energy analyst with Natexis Bleichroeder.

"It is a viable technology, but the question is where do hydrocarbon prices go now? Will we continue to see oil above $40 a barrel forever?"

In October, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer and a consortium of energy and technology companies announced the state will be home to one of America's first CTL energy plants.

The $1 billion Bull Mountain plant is slated to produce 22,000 barrels per day of diesel fuel and 300 megawatts of electricity -- enough to power 240,000 homes -- in six years.

Schweitzer and the companies behind the plant, including Arch Coal and DKRW Advanced Fuels LLC, say the production of fuel and electricity will not release the greenhouse gases associated with coal-generated electricity.

Arch has a 25-percent stake in DKRW and the companies are also developing a CTL plant in Medicine Bow, Wyoming.

At a recent coal industry conference, the heads of two of America's Big Four producers talked up CTL development.

Arch Coal Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Steven Leer said it "could be a game-changer." Chemical companies and railroads were asking him about using coal-based liquid fuels.

"It's a whole new group of potential customers," he said.

Peabody Energy Chief Executive Gregory Boyce said of CTL: "Stay tuned, as the sector continues to evolve.

"I have heard reports that China can produce oil for $25 per barrel from coal. We see it more in the $45 range here."

Peabody recently announced an agreement with Rentech to evaluate sites in the Midwest and Montana for CTL projects. The plants could range in size from producing 10,000 to 30,000 barrels of fuel per day and use approximately 3 million to 9 million tons of coal annually.

Another alternative fuel company, Syntroleum , said recently that its ultra-clean jet fuel was successfully tested in a USAF B-52 at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. The bomber flew with a 50/50 blend of CTL and traditional JP-8 jet fuel.

"The program ... is the first step in opening up new horizons for sourcing fuel for military purposes," said Bill Harrison, a fuels expert with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

The flight test was part of the Department of Defense's Assured Fuel Initiative to develop secure domestic sources for the military's energy needs. The Pentagon hopes to reduce its use of crude oil and foreign producers and get about half of its aviation fuel from alternative sources by 2016.

Japan Passes Landmark Patriotism Laws

by Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service

TOKYO, Dec. 15 -- Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government on Friday successfully pushed through landmark laws requiring Japanese schools to encourage patriotism in the classroom and elevating the Defense Agency to the status of a full ministry for the first time since World War II.

Both measures are considered cornerstones of Abe's conservative agenda to bolster Japan's military status and rebuild national pride in a country that had long associated patriotism with its imperialist past. The legislation cleared the upper house of parliament on Friday after winning approval in the lower house last month and will come into effect early next year.

Abe, Japan's first prime minister born after World War II, had made education reform a key issue during his campaign to succeed Junichiro Koizumi in September. His bid to restore patriotism in schools has drawn harsh criticism from Japanese pacifists, who have argued that such a law echoes the state-sponsored indoctrination of children practiced by Japan's past military leaders.

But Abe and other proponents have countered that a renewed embrace of patriotism is an essential step forward for Japan as it gradually emerges from a decades-long sense of guilt over World War II. In recent years, for instance, local municipalities have begun enforcing laws requiring the national anthem to be sung and the Japanese flag flown at certain school ceremonies, despite objections from teachers unions, which remain one of the last bastions of pacifism in Japan.

The education reform law is likely to dramatically increase the number of schools using revisionist textbooks that have been heralded by conservatives here but decried by Japan's wartime victims -- particularly China and South Korea -- as whitewashing its past aggression. Such books, for instance, omit reference to "comfort women," a euphemism for the thousands of Asian women forced into sexual bondage by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s.

"The revision bears the historic significance of clearly showing the fundamental idea of education for a new era," Abe said in a statement lauding the law's passage.

Also approved were a key set of bills upgrading Japan's Defense Agency -- created in 1954 following the end of the American occupation of Japan -- to the status of a full ministry. The move affords greater clout to defense officials in national policymaking and budget decisions, something long considered taboo here in the decades following the war.

The primary mission of Japan's Self Defense Forces -- whose role had long been strictly defined as defense of the home islands -- will now be expanded to include overseas peacekeeping missions. Japan dispatched non-combat troops to Iraq from 2004 until earlier this year, but did so only after Koizumi won special authority from parliament.

The elevation to ministry status also paves the way for the passage of more specific laws that would give Japan greater flexibility to dispatch its forces to international hot spots. More importantly, it could open the door for a larger measure of logistical support by Japan in the event of a regional conflict. Such a move could change the balance of power in East Asia, empowering Tokyo, for instance, to assist the United States in the defense of Taiwan in the event of Chinese aggression. But officials here say it may yet take years before bills that would explicitly permit such actions are drafted and submitted to parliament.

Nevertheless, the upgrading of the defense agency underscores the increasing role of the military establishment in Japan, a nation that, under its pacifist constitution drafted by the United States following World War II, renounced the right to use force to settle international disputes. Japan has largely relied on its security alliance with the United States, which keeps some 50,000 troops in Japan, for deterrence.

But with concerns growing about regional security, particularly as a result of North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons, Japan has begun to shed its pacifist shell. Abe has called for the full redrafting of a new constitution that would allow Japan to officially possess a flexible military again.

9/11, Steven Jones, and Me

From LDS PATRIOT

My name is Robert Cronk and I have been informally investigating the evidence, testimony, and theories surrounding 9/11 for a while now and I have been fascinated by what I have experienced. Hopefully I’ll be able to offer a different point of view than the other multitudes of people out there talking about 9/11.

You’ve seen them. Some of them are selling a DVD or a book. Others seem to be doing it for popularity. Some have actually put their career or reputation on the line. Still others seem to struggle with the pride of “being right” above all else - sometimes I fall into that category too - oops.

In my estimation, most of these people, myself included, believe that they’re on to something that nobody else has found and they believe they are honestly just “seeking the truth.” In many cases, I have found that they have a vested interest in their particular theory being right and in my experience it seems that these vested interests get in the way of really “seeking the truth” above all else. So I’ll throw out my point of view and let you be the judge.

First of all, I’m not an expert in physics, structural engineering, or really any other relevant field involving 9/11. I am a software engineer - a computer geek. You know - I’m one of those guys who sit in a dark cubicle somewhere, eyes glazed over, eating pizza and writing code to make computers do amazing things like send email, balance your checkbook, or let you play solitaire while your boss isn’t looking.

A large part of my career has dealt with accurately comprehending and modeling reality in a computer - that’s what most computer geeks do. For example, if your business deals with money and goods, we would write a program that models the movement of that money and those goods so that you can track it and report on it. This is usually done by combining my own research and evidence with information gathered during interviews with people who are experts in whatever it is we’re trying to model.

I then go through all of the information, resolving conflicts between the evidence and people’s views of reality, and finally come up with (hopefully) an accurate model of reality to program into the computer. Any inaccuracies in the model end up causing problems for the customer and end up making a lot more work for me and so I try to get it right the first time and I try to be rigorous as I build the model - getting all the facts nailed down completely before coding anything up on the computer.

As I have done this over the years, I have learned a lot about figuring out what is true and what is false when I look at a set of information. This is the experience that I use as I investigate 9/11.

What’s that? You want me to be quiet about all of this computer stuff and get to the point? Ok, ok - Back in October of 2005, a friend of mine introduced me to the work of one Professor Steven E. Jones - a professor at BYU. Since that time, I have studied and researched the topics contained in his paper and presentations. I also attended a presentation that he gave at UVSC as well as receiving various versions of the PowerPoint slides used in those presentations.

I have also had continuing email correspondence with Professor Jones regarding the content of his presentations and his paper entitled “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” Throughout this exchange, I have found Professor Jones to be a very kind and civil person as I have interacted with him and I thank him for that.

In this series of articles, I want to describe my interactions with him as well as working through his paper and presentation slides. I would like to tell the story of what I have found.

Why am I doing this? Don’t I have something better to do? I could think of a few things I’d rather be doing, but my goal here is to publish the truth and error that I have found throughout this process.

I believe that this country is becoming more and more divided over these issues and I have found that much of what is dividing us is rooted in misleading quotes, incomplete information, testimony taken out of context, assumptions made in ignorance, all combined with flawed theories that are based on the aforementioned mess.

I want to reveal these things in an objective way to give the casual researcher of 9/11 events another point of view. I will do my best to keep my own feelings and theories out of this discussion. That’s hard to do and I’ll probably fail at times but I’m sure you’ll forgive me.

Currently I do not support any specific theory. I am therefore open to any theory, though I must admit that my research so far has me leaning toward some theories and away from others. Let’s get to it, shall we?

On Tue 18 Oct 2005, I received an email from a friend of mine concerning one Professor Jones from BYU who was investigating the events of 9/11. It had a PowerPoint presentation attached to it. I had been looking into the events of 9/11 for a while at that point and so I was interested in taking a look at it.

The email was a forwarded email from Jones to my friend and then to me. In the part that Professor Jones wrote, he said, “…if any of you spot errors or weak arguments in the enclosed presentation, please let me know.”

I opened up the presentation slides and noticed several things that caught my attention. And when I say “caught my attention”, I mean “errors or weak arguments”. I wanted to discuss these things with Professor Jones directly and so I emailed him the next day.

Before I get to the first email, I would like to explain my approach. It is based on my discussions of several topics with people over the years ranging from whether or not the moon landing happened to what happened on 9/11.

My approach has been influenced by all of my interactions with conspiracy theorists in the past. One thing I try to avoid is what I have called the “conspiracy theory pattern”. It goes like this: First, I find some evidence that refutes one of the theory’s supporting facts, next, the defender of the theory essentially avoids the evidence I presented and then brings up several (usually more than five) other facts that supposedly also support the theory.

This has the effect of keeping the overall theory protected since the issue in question doesn’t get resolved - rather, the theory seems to get even stronger as all of these other supporting (but thus far not proven) “facts” are brought up.

In my experience, it turns out that those other “facts” usually end up being a large pile of debunkable (is that a word?) “maybes”. It’s as though protecting the theory is more important than uncovering the truth - as if they have such a strongly held belief that their theory is true that they refuse to let any of the supporting “facts” be debunked because any debunked “fact” threatens whatever vested interest they may have in the theory being true.

They might also twist a fact into a pretzel shape so that it can fit into their theory. Of course I have found that this happens to most people defending their theories and so this behavior is not necessarily proof of anything, it’s just something to keep in mind as we go through this. My idea is that once all of the facts are proven true or false individually, then and only then can the true ones be gathered together to form a theory.

I didn’t know if Professor Jones would behave this way or not and so I initially tried to avoid the “conspiracy pattern” by asking him not to address multiple items at once. I should have been clearer, as you’ll soon see. I also wanted to address the fact that Professor Jones is a physics professor (i.e. not a structural engineer) and so I was confused as to why he was glossing over, dismissing, and asserting his opinion on so many structural engineering issues that were outside of his area of expertise. He seemed to do this with his various political assertions too - as we’ll see later.

I’ll only cover the first couple of emails and then I’ll switch from this detailed mode to a summary mode where I’ll summarize what we talked about and bring up unresolved issues from his paper and presentation. Professor Jones and I are communicating about these issues via email to this day though there was a period where we had no interaction. This first email will serve as an introduction.

Iran leader uses conference on Holocaust to push agenda

He seeks to spotlight what he sees as Western hypocrisy on issue

by Michael Slackman
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Cairo -- Iran's so-called Holocaust conference this week was billed as a chance to force the West to reconsider the historical record -- and, thereby, the legitimacy of Israel. But why would the Iranians invite speakers with so little credibility in the West, including a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and disgraced European scholars?

That question misses the point. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad portrays such conference participants as David Duke, the former Louisiana Klan leader, and Robert Faurisson of France, who has devoted his life to trying to prove that the Nazi gas chambers were a myth, as silenced truth-tellers whose stories expose Western leaders as the hypocrites he considers them to be.

Just as Soviet leaders used to invite Americans who suffered racial or political discrimination to Moscow to embarrass Washington, Ahmadinejad seems to enjoy pointing out that countries like Germany, France and Austria claim to champion free debate yet have made it illegal to deny the Holocaust.

He has also repeatedly tried to draw a moral equivalency between questioning the Holocaust and the decision in Europe last year to publish cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad. It wins him favor at home and across the Arab world for standing up to the West and allows him to present himself as morally superior to the West.

Across the Middle East, contempt for Jews and Zionism is widespread and utterly mainstream. Many say the Holocaust has been wildly exaggerated and used to justify the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 at the expense of Palestinians, a move viewed as yet another example of Western imperialism.

But there is another important point. Ahmadinejad actually seems to believe that the volumes of documentation, testimony and living memory of the Nazi genocide are at best exaggerated and part of a Zionist conspiracy to falsify history so as to create the case for Israel. As a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, he was indoctrinated with such thinking, a political analyst in Tehran said, and as a radical student leader, he championed such a view.

Now he has a platform to promote his theories -- and to try to position himself regionally as the reasonable man who is simply asking the hard questions.

The two-day meeting included no attempt to come to terms with the nature of the well-documented Nazi slaughter, offering only a platform to those pursuing the fantasy that it never happened. In addition, the organizers of the conference, a small circle around the president, have been building ties with neo-Nazi groups in Europe.

"He is connected to people in Iran who trust his way of doing things and who seriously believe the Holocaust did not take place," said Martin Ebbing, a German journalist based in Tehran who has closely followed the issue with the president. "They seriously believe it."

Evidence of that came in a revealing interview in May with the German magazine Der Spiegel. The interviewer mostly wanted to discuss Iran's nuclear ambitions and the government's refusal to give up uranium enrichment, but the discussion kept returning to the Holocaust. At one point, the exasperated interviewer actually lectured the Iranian president on Germany's culpability.

"In our view, there is no doubt that the Germans -- unfortunately -- bear the guilt for the murder of 6 million," the interviewer said to Ahmadinejad.

The president gave little ground, saying Germans should rid themselves of such guilt. "I will only accept something as truth if I am actually convinced of it," he said.

Anti-Western rage fueled the 1979 Iranian revolution, and Ahmadinejad has tried to rekindle the energy of the revolution by spreading Iran's influence beyond its borders. Battling Washington, chiding Arab leaders and claiming to promote the Palestinian cause have made him extremely popular on the streets from Cairo to Morocco.

Such actions have also helped turn attention away from his inability so far to deliver on promises of economic populism, including a redistribution of Iran's enormous wealth and greater social justice for the bulk of the country that is struggling to make ends meet.

The president's ideas do not resonate in all corners of Iran, though, and some political scientists there say they have served to embarrass officials who, even if they agree, do not want to see a focus on Holocaust denial further isolate Iran from Europe.

"I raise two questions about this conference," said Ahmad Shirzad, a reformist politician and former member of parliament. "First, how much does this solve the problems our people are faced with? And secondly, which one of our goals were realized? It looks like he wants to make news and do provocative things."

Others see an even more ambitious post-Iraq agenda reflected in Ahmadinejad's high profile on the issues of Jews, the Holocaust and Israel.

"It is for public consumption in Arab countries," said Mustafa El-Labbad, editor of Sharqnameh, a magazine specializing in Iranian affairs and published in Cairo. "It is specifically directed toward deepening the gap between the people and their regimes and toward embarrassing the rulers so that the regional power vacuum, especially after Iraq, can be filled by Iran."

Iran Opens Conference on Holocaust

by Nazila Fathi
THE NEW YORK TIMES

TEHRAN, Dec. 11 — Iran held a gathering that included Holocaust deniers, discredited scholars and white supremacists from around the world on Monday under the guise of a conference to “debate” the Nazi annihilation of six million Jews.

Among those representing the United States was the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, whose prepared remarks, issued by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said the gas chambers in which millions perished actually did not exist.

Robert Faurisson, an academic from France, said in his speech that the Holocaust was a myth created to justify the occupation of Palestine, meaning the creation of Israel.

That is what Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has frequently claimed, and it was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements that inspired the Foreign Ministry to hold the conference. The ministry said 67 people from 30 countries were participating in the two days of meetings.

In a welcoming speech, Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies, said the session would provide an opportunity to discuss the Holocaust “away from Western taboos and the restriction imposed on them in Europe.” In several European countries, denial of the Holocaust is a crime.

An accompanying exhibition also denied the Holocaust. One poster with three photographs showed dead bodies and described accounts of their gassing as a myth. Signs pointed to smiling prisoners freed at the end of the war with the label “truth.”

New captions in Persian on other pictures of corpses described them as victims of a typhus epidemic in Europe, not of the Nazi death machine.

Speakers at the conference praised Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments about the Holocaust.

Bendikt Frings, 48, a psychologist from Germany, said he believed that Mr. Ahmadinejad was “an honest, direct man.” He said he had come to the conference to thank the president for what he had initiated.

“We are forbidden to have such a conference in Germany,” he said. “All my childhood, we waited for something like this.”

Frederick Toben, from Australia, said Mr. Ahmadinejad had opened an issue “which is morally and intellectually crippling the Western society.”

“People are imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust,” he added. Mr. Toben said that he was jailed for six months in 1999 for his ideas and that there was a court order in Germany to arrest him if he again spoke against the Holocaust.

Mr. Duke’s speech argued that inventions about what happened to Europe’s Jews were part of a plot. He said, “Depicting Jews as the overwhelming victims of the Holocaust gave the moral high ground to the Allies as victors of the war and allowed Jews to establish a state on the occupied land of Palestine.”

There were also members of anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects in attendance. One Jewish participant in a long black coat and hat wore a badge saying: “A Jew, not a Zionist.”

A 2004 book by an American author, Michael Collins Piper, “The New Jerusalem: Zionist Power in America,” was on sale for $20.

It was not clear how the speakers were assembled. The institute’s Web site invited scholars and researchers to submit their papers in advance. The Foreign Ministry provided little information about the participants, saying that it feared they would be prosecuted by their countries.

The organizers said they planned for “both sides” to be heard, but none of the speeches collected in the ministry’s book or any of the exhibitions spoke of the reality of the Nazi killing. A CD with the stories of 12 Holocaust survivors was said to be available.

The event has sparked outrage in the West.

Germany summoned the Iranian chargé d’affaires to express its anger, and the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, has condemned the conference.

Last summer, Iran created a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust in reaction to the controversy over Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.

The Iranian Jewish community reacted angrily to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments last year and said his words had spread fear among them.

“We consider the Holocaust as a fact and a disgrace for humanity,” the head of the community, Haround Yashayai, said Monday.

Iran President: Israel Will Be Wiped Out

by Ali Akbar Dareini
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's hard-line president said Tuesday that Israel will one day be "wiped out" as the Soviet Union was, drawing applause from participants in a conference casting doubt on the Holocaust.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments were likely to further fuel the outcry prompted by the two-day gathering, which has gathered some of Europe's and the United States' best-known Holocaust deniers.

Anger over the conference could further isolate Iran as the West considers sanctions in the standoff over Tehran's nuclear program.

But Ahmadinejad appeared to revel in his meeting Tuesday with conference delegates, shaking hands with American participants and sitting near six anti-Israel Jewish participants, dressed in black ultra-Orthodox coats and hats.

"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom," Ahmadinejad said during Tuesday's meeting in his offices, according to the official IRNA news agency.

He called for elections among "Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner."

Ahmadinejad has used anti-Israeli rhetoric and cast doubt on the Holocaust to rally anti-Western supporters at home and abroad, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. Several times he has referred to the Holocaust as a "myth" used to impose the state of Israel on the Arab world.

"The Holocaust is the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder," David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader and former state representative in Louisiana, told The Associated Press.

Ahmadinejad announced the conference would set up a "fact-finding commission" to determine whether the Holocaust happened or not. The commission will "help end a 60-year-old dispute," he said.

The Tehran conference was touted by participants and organizers as an exercise in academic freedom and a chance to openly consider whether 6 million Jews really died in the Holocaust, away from Western taboos and the restrictions imposed on scholars in Europe, where some countries have made it a crime to deny the Nazi genocide during World War II.

It gathered 67 writers and researchers from 30 countries, most of whom argue that either the Holocaust did not happen or that it was vastly exaggerated. Many have been jailed or fined in France, Germany or Austria, where it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.

Participants milled around a model of the Auschwitz concentration camp brought by one speaker, Australian Frederick Toben, who uses the mock-up in lectures contending that the camp was too small to kill mass numbers of Jews. More than 1 million people are estimated to have been killed there.

Rabbi Moshe David Weiss, one of six members attending from the group Jews United Against Zionism, told delegates, "We don't want to deny the killing of Jews in World War II, but Zionists have given much higher figures for how many people were killed."

"They have used the Holocaust as a device to justify their oppression," he said. His group rejects the creation of Israel on the grounds that it violates Jewish religious law.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that the conference was "shocking beyond belief" and "a symbol of sectarianism and hatred."

In Washington, the White House condemned Iran for convening a conference it called "an affront to the entire civilized world."

Peak oil era will be hard on Hawaii

by Manfred Zapka and Jim Dator
Star-Bulletin

Editor's note: In the next decade or two, a global energy crisis will be thrust upon us; the changes it brings will be felt first in Hawaii, possibly with a more devastating effect here than in the rest of the world. Hawaii must begin preparations now to cushion the effects, say the authors of this cautionary essay. The writers are a University of Hawaii political scientist and a UH-educated civil engineer. In addition, it was signed by 21 others representing a range of scientific disciplines in Hawaii; three chose to sign as private citizens.

DURING the past months "peak oil" has been the subject of a heated discussion in the media, including in Hawaii. The state's energy security is too important for us to allow discussions of future energy options to become a battle about peak oil, pro or con.

Peak oil ought to be understood as a helpful scientific tool to model the depletion of conventional oil reserves and to develop a sense of urgency for taking steps to mitigate its effects. The peaking of individual oil fields and oil regions has been observed always to follow a similar production curve. Global peak oil is simply an extrapolation from what is known about individual field depletion.

The arrival of peak oil does not mean that we have run out of oil. Rather, it means that production rates will start an inevitable decline. When peak oil arrives there will still be a huge amount of oil in the ground, yet the ability to get it out at reasonable cost and energy will decrease as the reserve depletion accelerates. Peak oil does not signal the end of the world, but the start of a new chapter for the global community.

No serious oil analyst disputes the fact of peak oil. The debate is about when, not if. Most published peak oil dates are between 2010 and 2017, give or take a few years. There is near-universal agreement that our current production base of conventional oil is declining at a rate of 4 percent to 8 percent per year while demand is growing at a rate of about 2 percent per year. The evolving demand-supply gap has to be filled with new conventional oil, unconventional oil, nonpetroleum sources and conservation.

ALL OF THESE can play a role, but all take considerable time, money and effort -- and require prompt decisions and actions that have not yet been sufficiently contemplated, much less made. Moreover, any decisions about alternatives to oil need to be made after assessing their impact on everything else in Hawaii. For example, should we use our land for upscale housing for the rich, or for "affordable housing," or to grow food, or to grow biomass for fuel? Do we have enough land to satisfy all demands via the market, or do we need to develop policies that, together with the market, allocate uses?

The most promising response to peak oil is timely migration to new sources of energy supply and serious conservation. According to a U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored study, peak oil mitigation efforts need to start at least 20 years before peak oil occurs to avoid serious supply shortfalls. The study forecasts catastrophic economic and human consequences if mitigation is delayed until the fuel crunch arrives.

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HAWAII HAS one of the highest rates of per capita oil consumption in the world. Our rate in Hawaii is twice that of the U.S. average; four times the average of Europe and 28 times that of China. Moreover, oil not only fuels our transportation and electricity-generating plants, it also fuels the airplanes that fuel our tourist-based economy and the ships that bring in almost all of our food and consumer goods. Un- or insufficiently mitigated oil supply shortfalls will hit Hawaii much harder than almost any other place in the world.

There are several supply and demand-side opportunities for Hawaii that are attractive and make economic sense. While some might appear to be "uneconomical" now under assumptions of ever-increasing energy supplies and a healthy economy, they will prove to be prudent and forward-looking remedies in the years and decades to come. Hawaii's hope for a sustainable future is best served through serious and meaningful plans to mitigate our over-dependence on oil before any supply shortfalls appear.

BUT LET'S pretend that there are "huge new oil resources" -- as yet undiscovered reserves or new revolutionary oil technologies for increased extraction rates (even though there actually is little chance that we will find the "10 new Saudi Arabias" that we urgently need in the next two decades).

With unabated carbon release through the burning of fossil fuels, global warming still threatens Hawaii in tangible forms. Rising sea levels within the currently anticipated range will inundate wide stretches of land that are home for many residents of Hawaii -- some of the most expensive real estate and beautiful coastline in the world. Critical transport infrastructure (airports, harbors) and fresh water also will be affected by significantly rising sea levels. Lowering our consumption of fossil fuels is one prudent and urgent response to global warming.

Developing technology and policies to lower oil dependence is a great opportunity for Hawaii. Not taking the peak oil seriously or adopting lukewarm mitigation measures might prove to be the most costly mistake we will ever make.

Manfred J. Zapka is a graduate of the University of Hawaii. He works as a consulting engineer and writes on issues concerning technology and change scenarios for the peak oil era. Jim Dator is professor of political science at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies.