UFO science key to halting climate change: former Canadian defense minister

AFP

OTTAWA - A former Canadian defense minister is demanding governments worldwide disclose and use secret alien technologies obtained in alleged UFO crashes to stem climate change, a local paper said Wednesday.

"I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation ... that could be a way to save our planet," Paul Hellyer, 83, told the Ottawa Citizen.

Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told the newspaper.

Such alien technologies could offer humanity alternatives to fossil fuels, he said, pointing to the enigmatic 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico -- which has become a shrine for UFO believers -- as an example of alien contact.

"We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know. Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough," he said.

Hellyer became defense minister in former prime minister Lester Pearson's cabinet in 1963, and oversaw the controversial integration and unification of Canada's army, air force and navy into the Canadian Forces.

He shocked Canadians in September 2005 by announcing he once saw a UFO.

Arizona Republic publishes puff piece on Chandler 9/11 Conference

by Stephen Lemons
PHEONIX NEW TIMES BLOGS
THE FEATHERED BASTARD

Following the East Valley Tribune’s verbal BJ of the 9/11 Accountability Conference taking place in Chandler this weekend, the Arizona Repugnant ran a totally uncritical puff piece on the confab in today’s paper by reporter Luci Scott. Unlike the Trib piece, it was buried on B6 of the Valley and State section; but like the Trib piece, it reported on this crackpot symposium as if it were as benign as a Star Trek convention. Not only did Scott ignore the controversy over Holocaust denier Eric Williams heading the conference up until the beginning of February, she employed full credulity in handling wacko statements by the participants and organizers. Take this bit of fantasy from moon-howler Jim Marrs, one of the speakers who will be present:

“No one has offered up any proof of who these hijackers actually were,” [Marrs] said. “According to the European media, half (of the alleged hijackers) are still alive in the Middle East, meaning their identities were stolen.”

Marrs’ untruth has its origins in a much-cited article in the BBC news online from September 2001, which discussed the then confusion swirling around the hijackers’ identities. The BBC later corrected any confusion over the matter, but conspiracy theorists have latched onto such reports — reports often due to similarities in names. The tale has mutated like an online game of “telephone” to become the Marrs fiction that “half (of the alleged hijackers) are still alive in the Middle East.”

Aware that conspiracy theorists were exploiting the BBC’s original report, BBC editor Steve Herrmann made a post about it this past October on his “Editors” blog, seeking to straighten out any confusion:

A five-year-old story from our archive has been the subject of some recent editorial discussion here. The story, written in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was about confusion at the time surrounding the names and identities of some of the hijackers. This confusion was widely reported and was also acknowledged by the FBI. The story has been cited ever since by some as evidence that the 9/11 attacks were part of a US government conspiracy.

We later reported on the list of hijackers, thereby superseding the earlier report. In the intervening years we have also reported in detail on the investigation into the attacks, the 9/11 commission and its report.

We’ve carried the full report, executive summary and main findings and, as part of the recent fifth anniversary coverage, a detailed guide to what’s known about what happened on the day. But conspiracy theories have persisted. The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names.

In an effort to make this clearer, we have made one small change to the original story. Under the FBI picture of Waleed al Shehri we have added the words “A man called Waleed Al Shehri…” to make it as clear as possible that there was confusion over the identity. The rest of the story remains as it was in the archive as a record of the situation at the time.

We recently asked the FBI for a statement, and this is, as things stand, the closest thing we have to a definitive view: The FBI is confident that it has positively identified the nineteen hijackers responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Also, the 9/11 investigation was thoroughly reviewed by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States and the House and Senate Joint Inquiry. Neither of these reviews ever raised the issue of doubt about the identity of the nineteen hijackers.

If Scott or any of her editors at the Repugnant had bothered to use the Google search engine on their ‘puters, they might have discovered information on the conference’s anti-Semitic ties, the controversy over Eric Williams being involved, and the origins of some of the fables being peddled by the 9/11 conspiracy crowd. But both Scott and her editors are LAZY JOURNALISTS! I called Scott, and all she could muster in response was “I don’t like to comment on my work.” Don’t like to comment? What sort of pathetic excuse for a reporter are you? How can you be a member of the fourth estate and not be prepared to defend your reporting, or lack thereof? What a joke.

Why US Shields Japan's WWII Denials

by Jerry Meldon
CONSORTIUM NEWS

Editor's Note: Over the years, we have written a number of stories about Rev. Sun Myung Moon's influence-buying schemes inside U.S. conservative political circles – and the federal government's odd refusal to aggressively enforce laws when Moon's operation is caught in legally questionable activities. [See, for instance, Moon/Bush 'Ongoing Crime Enterprise'.]

In this guest article, Jerry Meldon examines the mysterious roots of the money that has funded right-wing Asian politics since World War II and that has sometimes spilled over into the United States:

On Feb. 19, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso took exception to a U.S. congressional resolution introduced by Rep. Mike Honda, D-California, calling on Japan to “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility” for coercing 200,000 Asian women into slavery as “Comfort Women” (wartime prostitutes) for 3.5 million Japanese soldiers. Mr. Aso said he considers the accusation groundless and extremely regrettable.

Six decades after World War II, can it really be that Japanese officials are still distorting history and insulting the Chinese, Koreans, Philippinos and others across Asia whom Hirohito’ s forces savagely brutalized and robbed?

And why does Washington turn a deaf ear?

The answers may be rooted in what transpired behind closed doors in Tokyo when Japan was occupied by the U.S. military in the post-war years .

Sterling and Peggy Seagrave suggest a motive in their eye-opening – and at times stomach-turning – 2003 book, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of Allied occupying forces, secretly joined hands with Japanese war criminals.

Rather than convict, imprison and throw away the keys, MacArthur coddled those responsible for one of history’s bloodiest wars of aggression. When the U.S. occupation ended in 1952, he released all those who were still in custody.

And it may have gone a lot further than that.

According to Gold Warriors, e ven as the United States “introduced democratic reforms and a new constitution … [it ] put Japan back under the control of men who were devotedly undemocratic … [insisting] that Japan never stole anything and was flat broke … [when, in reality, America had given it ] huge infusions of black money.”

Washington even had Article 14 of the 1951 Japan Peace Treaty state : “It is recognized that Japan should pay reparations to the Allied Powers for the damage and suffering caused by it during the war. Nevertheless it is also recognized that the resources of Japan are not presently sufficient … [Therefore] the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan.”

As historian Christopher Simpson put it , the United States thereby insured “that the vict ims of the war – rape camp survivors, slave laborers and POWs – [would] be left with nothing.”

Furthermore, according to the Seagraves, “records of Japan’s looting and economic conspiracy have been removed from Western archives and databases, remain under secret classification and will not be made public for another half-century.”

The cover-up notwithstanding, the Seagraves somehow penetrated the veil of secrecy and reported that the source of the black money that MacArthur bestowed on the Japanese. They wrote that after arriving in Japan, the general’s aides located $100 billion in gold, platinum and other treasures that Hirohito’s forces had systematically plundered from occupied Asian nations and buried deep underground.

When MacArthur reported this to Washington, President Harry S. Truman’s brain trust – which included John McCloy, who as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany would authorize the early release of many Nazi war criminals – decided to devote the fortune to covert operations such as the bankrolling of rightist political parties and the recruitment of war criminals as U.S. intelligence agents for the Cold War that was just beginning.

One of the most notorious crooks MacArthur embraced was yakuza godfather Yoshio Kodama. With the exalted rank of rear admiral in the Japanese navy, Kodama had overseen the wartime looting of Asia’s criminal infrastructure. In the process, he stashed away a personal fortune estimated at $13 billion.

Arrested as a Class A war criminal, he made a deal with MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Gen. Charles Willoughby. Kodama handed the CIA $100 million in return for his release from Sugamo Prison. Returning to the underworld, he regained control of the Asian heroin traffic.

According to the Seagraves and others, he also remained a CIA asset until his death in 1984. It was apparently in that capacity that he became a major behind-the-scenes political force, primarily in Japan but, indirectly, across the Pacific as well.

Together with his fellow racketeer and Class A war criminal Ryoichi Sasakawa, Kodama underwrote the creation of two Japanese political parties that later combined to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Except for a brief hiatus when voters had had their fill of corruption, the conservative LDP has ruled Japan ever since. According to sources cited by the Seagraves, the LDP secretly contributed to the 1960 presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.

The LDP was not the only organization which Kodama and Sasakawa bankrolled, that lavished the gangsters’ ill-begotten wealth on American politicians. They also underwrote the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, which owns the right-wing daily, the Washington Times.

When Gen. Park Chung Hee staged a coup and installed himself as South Korea’s dictator in 1961, he designated the Unification Church to be his political arm. Successive South Korean leaders have used it to influence U.S. foreign policy.

A 1978 congressional inquiry found that Moon’s organization, in coordination with South Korea’s CIA-molded intelligence agency, the KCIA, paid off several U.S. congressmen. Rep. Richard Hanna, D-California, and Otto Passman, D-Louisiana, accepted approximately $200,000 each.

Hanna was slapped with a six-to-30-month sentence and spent a year behind bars. Passman managed to have himself tried in his home town and was acquitted. Fortunately for Reps. Cornelius Gallagher, D-New Jersey, and William Marshall, R-Ohio, the five-year statute of limitations ran out before they could be prosecuted. Three others congressmen were reprimanded for lying about their gifts.

Kodama and Sasakawa, together with followers of Rev. Moon, also underwrote the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL) as a propaganda mill for the dictatorships of Taiwan and South Korea. In 1966, the APACL expanded to become the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) . European neo-nazi terrorists and Latin American death squad leaders attended WACL conferences in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ronald Reagan – whose 1981 presidential inauguration was attended by the godfather of Central America’s death squads, Mario Sandoval Alarcon – sent the following message to the 1985 WACL convention in Dallas:

“I commend you all for your part in this noble cause. Our combined efforts are moving the tide of history toward world freedom. We must persevere and never falter. I send all you who help in your crusade for liberty my best wishes. God bless you.”

The previous year, Congress had blocked continued White House funding for the counter-revolutionary Nicaraguan contras. Undaunted, the Reagan administration solicited donations from private right-wing sources, including the two organizations that Kodama and Sasakawa had spawned. WACL and the Unification Church each obliged the Reagan team with generous donations that kept the contras afloat.

In that same period, WACL also contributed heavily in the United States to right-wing candidates running against progressive incumbents. One such beneficiary, WACL conferee Steven Symms, unseated the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Frank Church, D-Idaho. A prominent Vietnam War critic, Church had chaired a 1975 Senate investigation that uncovered CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders.

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, a picture emerges of CIA-controlled Japanese wartime loot being funneled by Japanese war criminals, via rightist Asian conduit organizations, to American politicians.

Maybe that explains why Washington turns a deaf ear when Japanese officials sanitize their country’s wartime atrocities. After all, the bruised feelings of a couple of billion Asian mainlanders is a small price to pay for keeping a lid on the truth.

Holocaust denier Eric D. Williams attends 9/11 Accountability Conference; Prof. James Fetzer defends anti-Semite

by Stephen Lemons
PHEONIX NEW TIMES BLOGS
THE FEATHERED BASTARD

Despite statements on 911Accountability.org that Eric D. Williams had “stepped down from involvement in the 9/11 Accountability Conference,” Williams was present today (Friday) at a “press conference” for the opening of the symposium at the Crown Plaza San Marcos in Chandler, and I have been informed that Williams will actually have a vendor booth at the conference on Saturday and Sunday. This is astonishing considering the controversy that’s swirled ’round Williams and the conference since it was revealed that Williams had authored the Holocaust-denying tome The Puzzle of Auschwitz, which asserts that there were no killer gas-chambers at Auschwitz, and that there was no Final Solution planned and implemented by the Nazis against European Jews.

Because of Williams’ involvement, several speakers dropped out of the conference, including Dylan Avery, the boy-wonder behind Loose Change, the one genuine star of the 9/11 conspiracy movement. The fact that the conference, headed by convicted felon Kent “Cow Killer” Knudson, has allowed Williams to participate despite disavowing him in the past and claiming (wrongly) that he had never been the Conference Director, should completely discredit this conference and Knudson, and serve as proof of the conference’s willingness to accept Holocaust-deniers and anti-Semites into their midst. Further demonstrating the movement’s tolerance of anti-Semites was panelist Jim Fetzer’s defense of Eric Hufschmid, whose site Erichufschmid.net is filled with anti-Semitic tripe.

“In my opinion Eric Hufschmid’s work — his book Painful Questions, for example, is an exemplar of excellence in research,” asserted Fetzer at one point during the media event. “He was a pioneer. He tackled this difficult subject. I realize that on various grounds, he’s a controversial guy. That part I’m not addressing.”

This freak Hufschmid argues that “Zionists” pull the strings of white supremacists in the U.S. He also states that: “The Jews are lying about the gas chambers and ovens;” ” The Jews helped Hitler and the Nazi party get control of Germany;” ” The Jews instigated both world wars;” and “The Jews created anti-Semitism in Germany to drive Jews out of Europe and into Palestine, and to unify Jews, and to bring pity to Jews.”

And this dood is “an exemplar of excellence”? Hey, don’t hog that tailpipe, Jim, give me a whiff too.

For the most part, the “press conference” was a pep rally for the conspiranuts. At one point the moderator asked those who were actually from the news media to raise their hands, and about three hands went up out of a room full of 60 persons or so. And it’s not like the other two guys were from The New York Times. At one point I got booted from the room by some pretend security guards working for the “troofers.” But to the credit of the moderator, whom I believe was Phil Berg, he had me ushered back in and allowed me to ask a couple of more questions. After the press conference, such as it was, I spoke civilly with a number of activists, including Don Harkins, who admitted writing an editorial in his Idaho Observer newspaper defending former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke for attending that Holocaust-deniers’ conference in Tehran last year. I also went up to Eric Williams and asked him why he was present, and he genially stated that he had a right to be there, though he would answer no questions about his Holocaust-denying ways.

A lot of those present accused me of engaging in guilt by association, but my retort to that is sometimes birds of a feather flock together. Also, it’s one thing to accept, say, Purdue University as a source, and it’s another to accept some fruitcake Holocaust-denier as a source. The credibility of a source does count for something. I mean, if a member of the Aum Shinrikyo cult asserts that Shoko Asahara has been railroaded by the Japanese government and is actually a man of peace, then I might suspect that the source for that information is a little compromised. The same thing happens if a rabid anti-Semite assures me that the Israeli mossad was behind 9/11.

Finally, as I’ve mentioned previously, the 9/11 moonbats and Holocaust-deniers have the same m.o., as far as cherry-picking the facts they’ll believe or disbelieve, the circular reasoning, the conspiratorial mindset, the use of half-truths, and so on. The presence of Eric Williams and others with questionable views of the Holocaust at this conspiracy convention does tend to bolster the charge by Paula Zahn of CNN and others that there is a virulent strain of anti-Semitism which runs throughout the movement.

More on the 9/11 Conference as the event continues. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it down there on Saturday, but I am planning to go Sunday. Also present as an interested observer and interrogator was Pat Curley of ScrewLooseChange. The guy’s practically a walking, debunking encyclopedia. I wish I could transplant all of his knowledge of these nutbars into my brain for future use. He knows the facts so well he dances rings around ‘em. He’s the Yoda of 9/11-denial debunkers. And he has an awesome, detailed, blow-by-blow description of what went down today on his site, so please check it out.

CIA files show how postwar 'spies' snookered U.S. intelligence

by Joseph Coleman
AP

TOKYO — Col. Masanobu Tsuji was a fanatical Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunted after World War II for massacres of Chinese civilians and complicity in the Bataan Death March.

And then he became a U.S. spy.

Newly declassified CIA records, released by the U.S. National Archives and examined by The Associated Press, document more fully than ever how Tsuji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. intelligence in the early days of the Cold War.

The documents also show how ineffective the effort was, in the CIA's view.

The records, declassified in 2005 and 2006 under an act of Congress in tandem with Nazi war crime-related files, fill in many of the blanks in the previously spotty documentation of the occupation authority's intelligence arm and its involvement with Japanese ultra-nationalists and war criminals, historians say.

In addition to Tsuji, who escaped Allied prosecution and was elected to parliament in the 1950s, conspicuous figures in U.S.-funded operations included mob boss and war profiteer Yoshio Kodama, and Takushiro Hattori, former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948.

The CIA also cast a harsh eye on its counterparts — and institutional rivals — at G-2, the occupation's intelligence arm, providing evidence for the first time that the Japanese operatives often bilked gullible American patrons, passing on useless intelligence and using their U.S. ties to boost smuggling operations and further their efforts to resurrect a militarist Japan.

The assessments in the files are far from uniform. They show evidence that other U.S. agencies, such as the Air Force, were also looking into using some of the same people as spies, and that the CIA itself had contacts with former Japanese war criminals. Some CIA reports gave passing grades to the G-2 contacts' intelligence potential.

But on balance, the reports were negative, and historians say there is scant documentary evidence from occupation authorities to contradict the CIA assessment.

The files, hundreds of pages of which were obtained last month by the AP, depict operations that were deeply flawed by agents' lack of expertise, rivalries and shifting alliances between competing groups, and Japanese operatives' overriding interest in right-wing activities and money rather than U.S. security aims.

"Frequently they resorted to padding or outright fabrication of information for the purposes of prestige or profit," a 1951 CIA assessment said of the agents. "The postwar era in Japan ... produced a phenomenal increase in the number of these worthless information brokers, intelligence informants and agents."

The contacts in Japan mirror similar efforts in postwar Germany by the Americans to glean intelligence on the Soviet Union from ex-Nazis. But historians say a major contrast is the ineffectiveness of the Japanese operations.

The main aims were to spy on Communists inside Japan, place agents in Soviet and North Korean territory, and use Japanese mercenaries to bolster Taiwanese defenses against the triumphant Communist forces in mainland China.

Some of the missions detailed by the CIA papers, however, bordered on the comical.

The Americans, for instance, provided money for a boat to infiltrate Japanese agents into the Soviet island of Sakhalin — but the money, boat and agents apparently disappeared, one report said. In Taiwan, the Japanese traded recruits for shiploads of bananas to sell on the black market back home.

The operatives also were suspected of having murky links with the Communists they were assigned to undermine, the documents say. The CIA also said some agents sold the same information to different U.S. contacts, increasing their earnings, and funneled information on the American military back into the Japanese nationalist underground.

The files and historians strongly suggest that American lack of knowledge about Japan or interest in war crimes committed in Asia, and a reliance on operatives' own assessment of their intelligence skills, made U.S. officials, in the words of one CIA report, "easy to fool for a time."

"This was a bunch of Japanese nationalists taking the G-2 for a ride," said Carol Gluck, a specialist in Japanese history at Columbia University and adviser to the archives working group administering declassification of the papers. "One thing that was interesting was how absolutely nonsensical it was, of no use to anybody but the people involved. Almost funny in a way."

The informants, many of whom were held as war criminals after Tokyo's surrender and subsequently released, operated under the patronage of Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, a German-born, monocle-wearing admirer of Mussolini, a staunch anti-Communist and, as the chief of G-2 in the occupation government, considered second in power only to his boss, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Some of Willoughby's proteges were seen as prime war trial material by Allied prosecutors.

But even as the occupation authorities were recrafting Japan into a democracy, their focus was shifting to containing the Soviets. Willoughby saw the military men as key to making Japan an anti-Communist bulwark in Asia — and ensuring that Tokyo would rapidly rearm, this time as a U.S. ally.

Historians long ago concluded that the Allies turned a blind eye to many Japanese war crimes, particularly those committed against other Asians, as fighting communism became the West's priority.

Chief among the Japanese operatives was Seizo Arisue, Japan's intelligence chief at the end of the war. Arisue had been a key figure in the pro-war camp and in forging Japan's alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the 1930s.

According to the files, Arisue was soon ensconced in G-2, working with former Lt. Gen. Yorashiro Kawabe, who was a military intelligence officer in China in 1938 — to organize groups of veterans and others for underground operations.

These groups consisted of former war buddies and often retained the same chains of command and militarist ideology of the war machine that ground much of Asia into submission in the 1930s and '40s.

"It shows how we acquiesced to the Japanese ... in order to continue to build up Japan as our ally," said Linda Goetz Holmes, author of Unjust Enrichment: How Japan's Companies Built Postwar Fortunes Using American POWs.

"The whole thing was Cold War fear and an awful lot of postwar compensation issues ... all of that was subservient to our total fear of Russia," said Holmes, also a historical adviser for the declassification project.

Indeed, that new focus brought some of Japan's most notorious wartime killers under U.S. sponsorship.

Tsuji, for instance, was wanted for involvement in the Bataan Death March of early 1942, in which thousands of Americans and Filipinos perished, and for allegedly co-signing an order to massacre anti-Japanese Chinese merchants in Malaya.

Yet none of that seemed to matter much to American intelligence. The U.S. Air Force attempted unsuccessfully to recruit him after he was taken off the war crimes list in 1949 and came out of hiding, and CIA and U.S. Army files show him working for G-2. In the 1950s he was elected to Japan's parliament. He vanished in Laos in 1961 and was never seen again.

The Army considered him a potentially valuable source, but the CIA was not impressed with Tsuji's skills as an agent. The files show he was far more concerned with furthering various right-wing causes and basking in publicity generated by controversial political statements.

"In either politics or intelligence work, he is hopelessly lost both by reason of personality and lack of experience," said a CIA assessment from 1954. Another 1954 file says: "Tsuji is the type of man who, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings."

Kodama was another unsavory player. A virulent anti-communist and superbly connected smuggler and political fixer, Kodama commanded a vast network of black marketeers and former Japanese secret police agents in East Asia.

The CIA, however, concluded he was much more concerned about making money than furthering U.S. interests. A gangland boss, he later played a major role in the Lockheed Scandal, one of the country's biggest post-World War II bribery cases. He died in 1984.

"Kodama Yoshio's value as an intelligence operative is virtually nil," says a particularly harsh 1953 CIA report. "He is a professional liar, gangster, charlatan and outright thief... Kodama is completely incapable of intelligence operations, and has no interest in anything but the profits."

Nowadays, the most powerful legacy of the U.S. occupation is the democratic freedoms and pacifism built into Japan's 1947 constitution. But the U.S. association with Japanese war criminals illustrates how Washington embraced nationalist and conservative forces after World War II, helping them reassert their grip on the government once the occupation ended in 1952.

"Its hard to imagine back in those days how intent the U.S. was on rapid remilitarization of Japan," said John Dower, historian and author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.

"When we talk about the emergence of neo-nationalism or a strong right wing in Japan today, this has very deep roots and it involves a very strong element of American support," he said.

Yet the ex-war criminals failed to rebuild a militarist Japan. "Prewar right-wing activists who escaped war crime charges in fact did not have much influence in the postwar period," said Eiji Takemae, historian and author of The Allied Occupation of Japan.

To the Americans, he said, "they were in fact not very useful."

Accused Terrorist Is Big GOP Donor

by Justin Rood
ABC NEWS: THE BLOTTER

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) won't say what it plans to do with thousands of dollars in campaign donations it received from an accused terror financier.

Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari gave $15,250 to the NRCC since 2002, according to FEC records published on the Web site opensecrets.org.

On Friday, Alishtari pled not guilty to funding terrorism and other crimes, including financial fraud.

The NRCC is the main political group dedicated to helping the Republican party win seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Reached Monday morning for comment, an NRCC spokeswoman declined to discuss the matter on the record.

The indictment against Alishtari unsealed in Manhattan federal court Friday charges him with providing material support to terrorists by transferring $152,000 between banks to allegedly be used to purchase night-vision goggles and other equipment needed for a terrorist training camp.

Alishtari, aka Michael Mixon, was paid for his efforts to collect and transfer the funds, which included $25,000 sent from a bank in New York to a bank in Montreal, Canada, the indictment alleges.

Police and FBI agents arrested Alishtari in New York City on Friday. A day earlier, agents raided his Ardsley, N.Y. home, according to the "Lower Hudson Journal News." When a reporter for the paper reached a woman claiming to be Alishtari's wife on Friday and informed her of the charges, she cried and said he was innocent, the paper reported.

The NRCC would not confirm it had received donations from Mr. Alishtari, or that he had received numerous awards from the organization, as is claimed by an online list of personal accomplishments that appears to have been posted by Mr. Alishtari.

The list says he was made a life member of the NRCC's "Inner Circle" and was named New York State Businessman of the Year by the group in 2003 and 2004.

The NRCC "Businessperson of the Year" fundraising campaign, which gave such "awards" to at least 1,900 GOP donors, has been derided as a telemarketing scam by political watchdogs.

Read Brian Ross' previous investigation on the NRCC's "Person of the Year" fundraising campaign.

The online list also claims Alishtari was appointed to the president's "USNRCC White House Business Advisory Group."

An archived Web site for one of Alishtari's companies, GlobalProtector.net, claims it had demonstrated a "Web filter" technology for officials at the Department of Defense's Miami, Fla.-based Southern Command (SouthCom), which coordinates U.S. military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean and oversees the controversial Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

SouthCom spokesman Steve Lucas would not confirm or deny any contacts between Alishtari and officials there. SouthCom personnel he spoke with said SouthCom does not use the company's software, and could not rule out the possibility they had received a sales pitch from him or another company representative.

A database of unclassified federal contracts at FedSpending.org does not show SouthCom or any other government branch awarded business to Alishtari's company.

A call to the telephone number which had been listed on GlobalProtector's site connects to a recorded message offering the caller to "spark up your days and nights" by calling a 1-800 phone chat line.

Iranian Scientist’s Death Stirs Talk of an Atomic ‘Whodunit’

by Marc Perelman
FORWARD

The escalating confrontation between Iran and the West has produced an atomic “whodunit,” with fingers pointing across the Middle East.

Last month, Iran reported the death of Ardeshir Hassanpour, 44, one of the country’s leading nuclear scientists. The news fueled a wave of rumors and conspiracy theories in cyberspace. [CONTINUE ORIGINAL ARTICLE]

Italy Indicts 26 Americans in C.I.A. Abduction Case

by Ian Fisher
THE NEW YORK TIMES

ROME, Feb. 16 — An Italian judge today ordered the first trial involving the American program of kidnapping terror suspects on foreign soil, indicting 26 Americans, most of them C.I.A. agents, but also Italy’s former top spy.

The indictments covered the episode in which a radical Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, who disappeared near his mosque in Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, says he was kidnapped. The cleric, known as Abu Omar, was freed this week from jail in Egypt, where he says he was taken and then tortured. [READ ENTIRE ARTICLE]

U.S. Muslims Asked to Write in Support of FL Prof On Hunger Strike

From News.Yahoo.com

To: LEGAL AFFAIRS EDITORS
Contact: Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR National Communications Director, +1-202-488-8787,

+1-202-744-7726, ihooper@cair.com, Rabiah Ahmed, CAIR Communications Coordinator, +1-202-488-8787, +1-202-439-1441, rahmed@cair.com, or Amina Rubin, CAIR Communications Coordinator, +1-202-488-8787, arubin@cair.com, all of Council on American-Islamic Relations

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Council on American- Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on American Muslims and other people of conscience to write letters in support of Dr. Sami Al-Arian, a former Florida professor currently on a hunger strike in federal detention to protest his treatment by U.S. authorities.

Family members report that Al-Arian collapsed on the 23rd day of his fast and has been moved from Virginia to a medical facility in North Carolina.

CAIR asked that letters urging Al-Arian's release be sent to Judge Gerald Lee of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and President Bush.

Al-Arian began his hunger strike more than three weeks ago after being given a sentence of up to 18 months for refusing to testify before a grand jury in Virginia. His attorneys say an earlier plea agreement freed him from further cooperation with the government. Supporters say the government's actions amount to a form of harassment.

SEE: Al-Arian Goes on Hunger Strike (Arab American News) http://www.arabamericannews.com/newsarticle.php?articleid=7555

In 2005, a Florida jury rejected federal charges that Al-Arian operated a cell for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was scheduled for release and deportation in April.

SEE: No Guilty Verdicts in Al-Arian Trial (Tampa Tribune) http://news.tbo.com/news/MGBAT3MOWGE.html

The American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT), a national coalition of major American Muslim organizations, recently said the new prison sentence given to Al-Arian amounted to unconstitutional "double jeopardy."

SEE: U.S. Muslims Call Al-Arian Imprisonment 'Double Jeopardy' http://cair.com/default.asp?Page=articleView&id=2550&theType=NR

CAIR, America's largest Islamic civil liberties group, has 32 offices and chapters nationwide and in Canada. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

CONTACT: CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-488-8787 or 202-744-7726, E-Mail: ihooper@cair.com; CAIR Communications Coordinator Rabiah Ahmed, 202-488-8787 or 202-439-1441, E-Mail: rahmed@cair.com; CAIR Communications Coordinator Amina Rubin, 202-488-8787, E- Mail: arubin@cair.com

SOURCE Council on American-Islamic Relations

History of Lyme Disease as a Bioweapon

Lyme is a Biowarfare Issue

A BRIEF HISTORY BY ELENA COOK

Introduction
The world of Lyme disease medicine is split into two camps – the US government-backed “Steere camp”, which maintains the disease is hard-to-catch, easily cured, and rarely causes chronic neurological damage, and the “ILADS camp”, which maintains the opposite. The Steere camp is intricately bound up with the American biowarfare establishment, as well as with giant insurance and other corporate interests with a stake in the issue. The ILADS doctors lack such connections, but are supported instead by tens of thousands of patients rallying behind them.

Because the Steere camp has been massively funded and promoted by federal agencies, its view has dominated Lyme medicine not just in the US, but across much of the world. The result has been suffering on a grand scale. Below is a concise history of the military aspects of this cover-up.

- - - -

Weapons of Mass Infection
The development of biological weapons has never been confined to dictatorships or “rogue” regimes. During the Second World War America, Britain and Canada collaborated closely on developing offensive bioweapons, and offensive research continued as an openly acknowledged activity of the US scientific establishment during the Cold War. Only in 1972 was this work banned by international treaty. Meanwhile the Maryland-based labs at Fort Detrick, for example, had produced millions of mosquitoes, ticks and other vectors for the purpose of spreading lethal germs.[i] The island of Gruinard, off the coast of Scotland, was only declared habitable again in 1990, nearly fifty years after the British first contaminated it during anthrax experiments. [ii]

Ticks, which vector Lyme disease, have been studied as biowarfare instruments for decades. Such well-known biowar agents as tularaemia and Q-fever are tick-borne. The Borrelia genus of bacteria, which encompasses the Borrelia burgdorferi species-group (to which Lyme disease is attributed), was studied by the infamous WW2 Japanese biowar Unit 731, who carried out horrific experiments on prisoners in Manchuria, including dissection of live human beings. [iii] Unit 731 also worked on a number of other tick-borne pathogens.

After the war, the butchers of Unit 731 were shielded from prosecution by the US authorities, who wanted their expertise for the Cold War. [iv] The US government also protected and recruited German Nazi bioweaponeers under the aegis of the top-secret Operation Paperclip. [v]

Borreliosis, or infection with microbes belonging to the borrelia genus, had been dreaded during the Second World War as a cause of the often-fatal disease relapsing fever. The new post-war era of penicillin meant that many bacterial infections could now be easily cured. However, borrelia were known for their ability to adopt different forms under conditions of stress (such as exposure to antibiotics). Shedding their outer wall, (which is the target of penicillin and related drugs), they could ward off attack and continue to exist in the body.

Lyme disease is not usually fatal, and it is sometimes argued that, with rapidly lethal agents like smallpox and plague available, an army would have no interest in it. However, what is important to understand here is that incapacitating or “non-lethal” bioweapons are a major part of biowarfare R&D[vi], and have been for decades. For example, during the Second World War, brucellosis, chronically disabling but not usually fatal, was a major preoccupation. Military strategists understand that disabling an enemy’s soldiers can sometimes cause more damage than killing them, as large amount of resources are then tied up in caring for the casualties. An efficient incapacitating weapon dispersed over a civilian population could destroy a country’s economy and infrastructure without firing a shot. People would either be too sick to work, or too busy looking after those who were.

The EIS and the “Discovery” of Lyme
Modern Lyme history begins in 1975 when a mother in the town of Old Lyme, Connecticut reported the outbreak of a strange, multi-system disease. The town lies directly opposite the Plum Island biowarfare research lab where, according to former Justice official John Loftus, Nazi scientists brought to the US after WW2 may have test-dropped “poison ticks”. [vii] It should be noted that Loftus’ reputation for gathering accurate, hard-hitting information is strong – strong enough to bring down in disgrace the former Chancellor of Austria and Secretary-General of the UN Kurt Waldheim, after the latter’s wartime SS record was revealed.

While it’s not yet known if Plum Island experimented on Lyme-causing borrelia, the lab’s directors openly admitted to Michael Carroll, author of a recently-published book which is endorsed by two former State Governors, that they kept “tick colonies”. The “hard tick” Amblyomma americanum, a known carrier of Borrelia burgdorferi, was one of the subjects of the Island’s experiments. [viii]This tick is not the one most commonly associated with transmitting Borrelia burgdorferi, but it is implicated in harbouring Borrelia lonestari, believed to be the cause of a “Lyme-like illness” in the American south. [ix]

Carroll’s book reveals a shocking disregard for safety, in this lab handling some of the most dangerous germs on earth. Eyewitnesses described how infected animals were kept in open-air pens. Birds swooping down into the pens could have picked up and spread infected ticks worldwide.

When Polly Murray made her now-famous call to the Connecticut health department to report the strange epidemic among children and adults in her town, her initial reception was lukewarm. However, some weeks later, she got an unexpected call from a Dr David Snydman, of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), who was very interested. He arranged for fellow EIS officer Dr Allen Steere to get involved. By the time Mrs. Murray turned up for her appointment at Yale, the doctor she had expected to see had been relegated to the role of an onlooker. Allen Steere had taken charge – and his views were to shape the course of Lyme medicine for the next thirty years, up till today. [x]

To understand the significance of all this, we need a closer look at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the EIS.

The EIS is an elite, quasi-military unit of Infectious Disease experts set up in the 1950’s to develop an offensive biowarfare capability. Despite the banning of offensive biowar in the 1970’s, the crack troops of the EIS continue to exist, ostensibly for non-offensive research into “emerging disease” threats, a blanket phrase covering both bioweapon attacks and natural epidemics at the same time. Graduates of the EIS training program are sent in to occupy strategic positions in the US health infrastructure, taking leadership at federal and state health agencies, in academia, industry and the media. The organisation also extends its influence abroad, training officers for public health agencies in Britain, France, the Netherlands etc. [xi] [xii]

In fact a high proportion of Steere camp Lyme experts are involved with the EIS. Given that the EIS is a small, elite force, (in 2001 the CDC revealed there were less than 2500 EIS officers in existence since the unit was first created in 1951 [xiii]), it seems incredible that so many of America’s top Infectious Disease experts would devote their careers to what they themselves claim is a “hard-to-catch, easily-cured” disease.

Within a few years of Steere’s “discovery” of Lyme disease (the unique Lyme rash, and certain associated symptoms, had been recognised in Europe nearly a century before), it was announced that its bacterial cause had been identified. The microbe was accidentally found by biowarfare scientist Willy Burgdorfer and was subsequently named for him. Burgdorfer has championed the Lyme patients’ movement and is not suspected of any wrongdoing. However it is not impossible that he was unwittingly caught up in a chain of events that were not as random as they might have seemed.

Burgdorfer was a Swiss scientist who had been recruited by the US Public Health Service in the 1950’s. He was highly experienced with both ticks and borrelia, but after being told that the government were not interesting in funding work with the latter, he switched to work with Rickettsia and other pathogens. [xiv] In 1981, Burgdorfer was sent a batch of deer ticks by a team studying Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever on the East Coast. In charge of the team was one Dr Jorge Benach. [xv] Benach subsequently spent much of his career as a Steere camp Lyme researcher. In 2004 he was chosen as recipient for a $3 million biowarfare research grant. [xvi]

Cutting open some of Benach’ ticks, Burgdorfer noticed microfilaria (microscopic worm young). This was a subject he had been studying recently, only these microfilaria were different. They were exceptionally large, large enough to be seen with the naked eye.[xvii] His curiosity naturally piqued, he opened up several more ticks. There he was surprised to find the spiral-shaped germs of borrelia.

Cultivation is necessary in order to isolate bacteria for study, so that diagnostic tests, vaccines or cures can be developed. Borrelia are very difficult to grow in culture. However, by “lucky coincidence”, another scientist had recently joined the lab where he worked, and had apparently been involved in an amazing breakthrough in this area. So naturally Burgdorfer handed the infected ticks over to him. [xviii]

That scientist was Dr. Alan Barbour, an officer, like Steere and Snydman, of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, with a background in work on anthrax, one of the most terrifying biowarfare agents known. [xix]

EIS man Barbour therefore became the first to isolate the prototype organism on which all subsequent Lyme disease blood tests would be based. [xx] This is very significant, as a huge body of evidence [xxi] indicates the unreliability of these tests, which are routinely used to rule out the disease. Additionally, all DNA detection of the Lyme agent in ticks and animals is ultimately based, directly or indirectly, on the genetic profile of the strain first isolated by Barbour.

Shortly after Barbour’s discovery, other species and strains of the Lyme-causing bacteria were isolated, especially in Europe. They were all classified based on their resemblance to Barbour’s organism, and have been grouped into a category called Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato or “Bbsl” for short. However, a borrelia was subsequently found in the southern US (referred to briefly above) which appears not to be a member of Barbour’s Bbsl group at all.[xxii]

The bacteria, named Borrelia lonestari, often evades detection on Lyme blood tests, is not found using DNA tests, and does not grow in Barbour’s culture medium which is used world-wide for lab study. [xxiii]And yet, it appears to cause an illness identical to Lyme – down to the “bullseye rash”, which, though not present in all patients, is considered unique to Lyme disease.

In 2005 Barbour, who spent much of his career studying the “hard-to-catch, easy-to-cure” Lyme disease, was placed in charge of the multi-million new biowarfare mega-complex based at University of California at Irvine (UCI). [xxiv] Barbour is joined there by his close colleague and fellow Steerite Jonas Bunikis, author of recent papers calling for a restrictive approach to Lyme diagnosis.

The Spread and the Spin
By the late 1980’s it was realised that Lyme disease was rapidly spreading out of control. Cases were reported across America, Europe and Asia. Federal health agencies launched a major propaganda effort to limit diagnosis and so artificially “contain” the epidemic. The National Institute of Health (NIH) appointed biowarfare expert Edward McSweegan as Lyme Program officer. [xxv] Under his leadership the diagnostic criteria was skewed to exclude most sufferers, especially those with chronic neurological illness. McSweegan’s successor at NIH, Dr Phil Baker, is an anthrax expert [xxvi], and has continued his policies.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is another federal body which has had a major impact on how Lyme is diagnosed and treated. Its influence extends abroad, with European public health departments drawing up policies based on CDC guidelines. It should be remembered that it is the CDC which trains the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and much of the leadership of CDC has traditionally been drawn from EIS ranks. Therefore it comes as no surprise to learn that David Dennis, the head of vector-borne diseases at CDC, with massive influence over Lyme issues, was involved with the EIS. However, we could legitimately wonder why, at lower levels of the CDC hierarchy, EIS officers - the nation’s heavyweight infectious disease experts - continue to play such a major role in investigating the supposedly “hard-to-catch, easily cured” Lyme. (For example, EIS officers Martin Schriefer and Captain Paul Mead.) [xxvii].[xxviii]

In 2001, responding to the protest of thousands of patients that standard two or three-week antibiotic courses were not sufficient, the NIH commissioned biowarfare scientist Mark Klempner to study persistence of Lyme infection. ILADS doctors had found that patients left untreated in the early phase often needed long courses of antibiotics, [xxix] sometimes for years. Klempner, however, concluded that persistent Lyme infection did not exist. In 2003 Klempner was appointed head of the new $1.6 billion biowarfare top-security facility being developed at Boston University. Shortly after, the news emerged that there had been an escape of the deadly bug tularaemia which was not properly reported to the authorities. [xxx]

In 2005 the author discovered a document on the NIH website listing Lyme as one of the potential bioterrorism agents studied in BSL-4 (top security) labs. After this was publicised, the NIH announced they had made a “mistake”, and removed the words “Lyme disease” from the page. (At the time of writing, the original is still available in cached Internet archives. [xxxi]) However, at around the same time, a CDC source leaked the identical information to the Associated Press. [xxxii] Moreover, the Science Coalition, comprising entities as prestigious as the American Medical Association, Yale University, and the American Red Cross, maintain a website which, at the time of writing, also lists Lyme as a disease studied for its biowarfare potential. [xxxiii] Could these three major organisations all have, co-incidentally, made the same “mistake”?

In 2004 the UK government denied that Lyme was a threat in Britain and told Parliament that no Lyme research had been conducted since 1999. [xxxiv] Yet the report of the official UK delegation to an international conference on the prevention of bioterrorism revealed that Lyme was being studied at Porton Down, Britain’s top biowarfare facility. [xxxv] Britain, and many other European countries, take their lead on Lyme from a body called EUCALB, rooted in Steere camp methodology. NATO has also been directly involved in moves to “harmonise” European Lyme diagnosis along Steerite lines

A Bug of Many Talents
Lyme’s ability to evade detection on routine medical tests, its myriad presentations which can baffle doctors by mimicking 100 different diseases, its amazing abilities to evade the immune system and antibiotic treatment, would make it an attractive choice to bioweaponeers looking for an incapacitating agent. Lyme’s abilities as “the great imitator” might mean that an attack could be misinterpreted as simply a rise in the incidence of different, naturally-occurring diseases such as autism, MS, lupus and chronic fatigue syndrome (M.E.). Borrelia’s inherent ability to swap outer surface proteins, which may also vary widely from strain to strain, would make the production of an effective vaccine extremely difficult. (A vaccine developed for the public by the Steere camp in collaboration with Glaxo Smithkline was pulled from the market a few years ago amid class action lawsuits [xxxvi].) Finally, the delay before the appearance of the most incapacita
ting symptoms would allow plenty of time for an attacker to move away from the scene, as well as preventing people in a contaminated zone from realising they had been infected and seeking treatment. Often in the early period there is no rash, only vague flu-like or other non-specific symptoms which might be dismissed by GP’s, or ignored by the patient.

The 2003 proposal for a rapid-detection method for biowarfare by Dr JJ Dunn of Brookhaven National Lab seems to add further grounds for suspicion. It is based on the use of two “sentinel” germs – plague and Lyme. [xxxvii]

In 1999 Lyme patient advocacy leader Pat Smith was amazed to find, on visiting an Army base at an old biowar testing ground in Maryland, that the US Dept. of Defence has developed a satellite-linked system that enables soldiers to read, in real-time, off a display on their helmet’s visor, information about the rate of Lyme-infected ticks wherever they may be on earth. Unit commanders could update the database using state-of-the-art portable PCR machines, which test for Lyme DNA in soldiers bitten by ticks. [xxxviii] The use of such cutting-edge technology for a supposedly “hard-to-catch, easy-to-cure” illness seems odd, to say the least!

Lyme is often complicated by the presence of co-infecting diseases in the same tick, e.g. those caused by the microbes of babesia, bartonella, mycoplasma (believed by some researchers to be the cause of Gulf War illness), ehrlichia, microfilaria and encephalitis viruses. Investigations into some of these, too, have been led by American biowar experts.

It could be argued that some of these Lyme researchers have been awarded biowar-related grants simply because they are Infectious Disease specialists, which is a natural terrain from which to recruit. After all, research budgets for biowar have ballooned massively since the anthrax attacks of 2001; there is a demand for large numbers of personnel to work on such projects.

Well, there are two things that could be said here. First, researchers who have spent much or most of their careers studying a “hard-to-catch, easily-cured” disease would not appear to be the best choice as recipients of this type of grant, unless the “easily-cured” disease had some relation to biowarfare. Second, while some infectious disease specialists began to study biowarfare organisms for the first time after 2001, this is not necessarily the case with the Steerites. Klempner, for example, was studying ways to increase the virulence of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, over 20 years ago [xxxix]; Barbour researched anthrax for the Army in the 1970’s. [xl]

The defeat of Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War was followed by the drawing up, by the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) of a list of microbes to be monitored in Iraq. Among them - the borrelia genus in general, and Borrelia burgdorferi in particular. [xli] UNSCOM also included organisms such as ehrlichia and babesia, which are often present in Lyme-infected ticks, and are acquired as concurrent illnesses when a person is bitten.

There are other organisms on the UN list not generally associated, in the public mind, with biowarfare, and it could be argued that the UN was simply being extra cautious by casting a wide net. However, whether Lyme bacteria were present in Iraq at that time or not, they certainly are today, and US Army manuals warn soldiers to protect themselves from the disease [xlii] If we are to accept the traditional Steerite explanation for the rise of Lyme – that it is a natural consequence of a recent population explosion of deer due to reforestation, combined suburbanisation, bringing humans into contact with forests – then the presence of Lyme in the dusty sand dunes of Iraq seems perverse.

And what of the doctors of the opposing camp, those associated with ILADS? ILADS doctors and researchers increasingly find themselves persecuted, victims of spurious charges made against them to Medical Boards, and are hounded out of their professions. At the time of writing, paediatrician Dr Charles Ray Jones, credited by thousands of parents with restoring the health of their disabled children, is under trial, accused of misconduct. A few years ago, Dr Lida Mattman, a Nobel Prize nominee who worked on an alternative culture medium for Lyme, was ordered to shut down operations by police who arrived at her lab with handcuffs. Dozens of doctors who had been treating Lyme successfully according to their clinical judgement, rather than relying on insensitive blood tests or arbitrary limits on antibiotic duration, have been forced to stop. The president of ILADS, Dr Raymond Stricker, has told the press he believes Lyme disease is a bioweapon.


Summary
Lyme disease is the subject of hot controversy, with the “Steere camp” claiming it is an easily cured ailment, while the ILADS camp views it as a severely disabling, multi-symptom neurological disease.

The number of Steere camp Lyme researchers with a background in the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) and/or biowarfare research is too numerous to be pure co-incidence. Two scientists who have played a central role in the Lyme story, Barbour and Klempner, have been placed in charge of new biowar super-labs set up in the aftermath of 9-11, where they are aided by some of their Steerite colleagues. Others, while not in charge of super-labs, are nevertheless in receipt of substantial grants for biowarfare research.

The United States and some of its NATO allies have a long and sordid history of experimentation into biological weapons of mass destruction and mass incapacitation. The Borrelia genus and ticks as biowar vectors have been studied for decades, and recent revelations about the Plum Island disease lab, across the water from old Lyme, Connecticut are worrying. The development of the so-called “non-lethal weapons” has been a major part of biowar science for decades.

Suspicion is further fuelled by the declaration by America’s National Institute of Health that a document on their website listing Lyme as a microbe studied for bioterrorism potential was a “mistake”, just at the time that a CDC source leaked the same “mistake” to the Associated Press. British delegates at an international conference on the prevention of bioterrorism revealed that intense work on Lyme and other tick-borne disease is conducted at the UK’s top biowar lab at Porton Down.

Lyme has been chosen as a “sentinel organism” in a method of rapidly detecting bioweapons, and the whole genus, or category, of borrelia was included among those to be monitored by the UN in Iraq after the first Gulf War. US soldiers in Iraq today are warned by the military to protect themselves against the disease.

It’s possible to see the modern history of Lyme as a string of events with an EIS member at every crucial node. The discovery of new Lyme-causing borrelia, genetically distinct from the Borrelia burgdorferi group first cultured by EIS officer Alan Barbour, throws up the question as to whether the Bbsl organisms he introduced to medicine was the only, (or even the most) relevant borrelia. The testing and diagnostic regimens based on the views of Barbour, Steere, etc and backed by federal health agencies such as CDC and NIH currently condemn huge numbers of Lyme patients to a medical limbo, without treatment or recognition for their disease. The cost in human suffering may be unimaginable.

- - - -
[i] Williams P, and Wallace D, “Unit 731, the Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets”, Hodder and Stoughton 1989, p284

[ii] BBC news website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1457035.stm

[iii] Howard Cole, Chief of Intelligence at America’s Chemical Warfare Service, reported in “Unit 731” , p105

[iv] “Unit 731”. Op cit.

[v] Carroll, Michael “Lab 257-The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory”, Harper Collins 2004

[vi] Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate> https://www.jnlwd.usmc.mil/
vii] “Lab 257” op cit.

[viii] ibid.

[ix] Bacon et al, “Glycerophosphodiester phosphodiesterase gene (glpQ) of Borrelia lonestari identified as a target for differentiating Borrelia species associated with hard ticks”, J Clin Microbiol 2004 May;42(5):2326-8.

[x] Murray, Polly, “The Widening Circle”, St Martin’s Press 1996

[xi] http://www.cste.org/PS/2006pdfs/PSFINAL2006/06-EC-01FINAL.pdf.

[xii] Center for Disease Control website> www.cdc.gov/eis; http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/r010720.htm

[xiii] ibid.

[xiv] Barbour, Alan “Lyme Disease: the Cause, the Cure, the Controversy”, The John Hopkins University Press 1996, p 29.

[xv] “The Widening Circle”, op cit. p.174

[xvi]> > New York State Office of> Science, Technology and Academic Research, NYStar News http://www.nystar.state.ny.us/nl/archives2004/longislandA08-04.htm

[xvii]Beaver, PC and Burgdorfer, W “A microfilaria of exceptional size from the ixodid tick, Ixodes dammini, from Shelter Island, New York” J Parasitol 1984 Dec;70(6):963-6

[xviii] Barbour, Alan “Lyme Disease: the Cause, the Cure, the Controversy”, The John Hopkins University Press 1996 p30.

[xix] University of California at Irvine website http://today.uci.edu/news/media_advisory_detail.asp?key=80

[xx] Barbour, Alan op cit.

[xxi] See 17 pages of citations from peer-reviewed medical literature archived at http://www.lymeinfo.net/medical/LDSeronegativity.pdf

[xxii] Bacon et al, op cit.

[xxiii] Varela et al, “First Culture Isolation of Borrelia lonestari, Putative Agent of Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness “, J Clin Microbiol. 2004 March; 42(3): 1163–1169

[xxiv] UCI Medical Centre http://www.ucihealth.com/News/Releases/06-05BiodefenseResearch.htm

[xxv] McSweegan biography http://advance.uri.edu/quadangles/spr2004/story9.htm - profile6

[xxvi] NIH News> http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/apr2006/niaid-23.htm

[xxvii] CDC http://www.cdc.gov/eis/conference/archives/2003ProgramAbstracts.pdf

[xxviii] NY Academy of Sciences http://www.nyas.org/biodef/speakers.asp

[xxix] ILADS Treatment Guidelines> http://www.ilads.org/guidelines.html

[xxx] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27646-2005Jan21.html

[xxxi] For example, this one at: http://web.archive.org/web/20050208095246/http:/www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/detrick_qa.htm

[xxxii] See MSNBC article featured on http://www.ctlymedisease.org/featurearticle02.htm

[xxxiii] http://www.sciencecoalition.org/glossary/glossary_main.htm

[xxxiv] http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-12-15a.203881.h&s="lyme+disease"

[xxxv] http://www.opbw.org/new_process/mx2004/bwc_msp.2004_mx_wp51_rev.1_E.pdf

[xxxvi] http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,3604,663032,00.html

[xxxvii]> Sherr, V comment in the Lancet http://www.thehumansideoflyme.net/viewarticle.php?aid=60&PHPSESSID=109a322bd7e9529b2e74c151aface839

[xxxviii] http://www.lymediseaseassociation.org/EICSconference.doc

[xxxix] Pollack C, Straley SC, Klempner MS, “Probing the phagolysosomal environment of human macrophages with a Ca2+-responsive operon fusion in Yersinia pestis” Nature. 1986 Aug 28-Sep 3;322(6082):834-6.

[xl] Rees et al, “Epidemiologic and laboratory investigations of bovine anthrax in two Utah counties in 1975” Public Health Rep, 1977 Mar-Apr;92(2):176-86.

[xli] “Note by the Executive Chairman of the Special Commission established pursuant to paragraph 9 (b) (i) of Security Council resolution 687 (1991)” Document date: 17 March 1995 Ref- S/1995/208> http://www.fas.org/news/un/iraq/s/s1995-0208.htm

Terrorists are manipulating stock exchanges to raise funds: NSA

TIMES OF INDIA

NEW DELHI: Manipulation of stock exchanges is the new modus operandi used by terrorist groups to raise funds for their operations and fictitious companies have operated in the Mumbai and Chennai stock exchanges.

Revealing this, National Security Advisor M K Narayanan has said some of these companies were later traced to terrorist groups.

"Isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations have been reported. Stock exchanges in Mumbai and Chennai have, on occasions, reported that fictitious or notional companies were engaging in stock market operations," he said while addressing the 43rd Conference on Security Policy in Munich last week.

Calling for the lifting of banking secrecy and the corporate veil in terrorist-related cases, he said security agencies had detected many instances of funds received via banking channels from so-called safe locations like Dubai and UAE that were intended for terrorist groups.

Squarely blaming certain "official agencies" in Pakistan for pumping millions of dollars for militancy in India, he said jehadi groups had started to establish a network of legitimate businesses to fund their activities.

The terrorist groups are involved in legitimate business enterprises like restaurants, real estate agencies and shipping and use part of their proceeds to siphon off funds for their terrorist activities, he said.

"Among terrorist outfits, the LTTE has a very well- established network of legitimate business, which provides both funds as well as logistics for their activities. Jehadi terrorist organisations have begun to follow suit," Narayanan said.

He said a combination of conventional money laundering techniques, with placement of funds by using the "underground and parallel banking system" (hawala) has made it extremely difficult to track funds utilised for terrorist purposes since no audit or paper trail is available.

Referring to 11 common ways of terrorist funding, the NSA said among them were voluntary contributions on which terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and LTTE thrive, forced and compulsory donations including forcible subscription of their publications, extortion and use of coercive methods.

"The Lashker-e-Taiba, the Hizbul Mujahideen and the Al- Badr (militant outfits which operate in India) are well patronised, including through provisions of funds, by certain official agencies across the border," he said.

Shared objectives such as involvement in "low intensity conflict" provide the excuse for such official support. "A tentative estimate of funds made available to such terrorist outfits annually is in the region of a few million dollars," he said.

The unholy nexus between jehadi groups and non-jehadi terrorist groups seek, and enter into, partnerships with organised criminal syndicates for fund-raising by indulging in kidnapping for ransom and bank robberies, Narayanan said.

Counterfeiting of currency is currently a favourite method adopted (by agencies across the border) to fund terrorist activities directed against India, he said.

The NSA said large amounts of "high quality" counterfeit Indian currency were detected each year and the "normal route" for bringing the forged notes into India was through Nepal and Bangladesh.

Elaborating on the misuse of legitimate banking channels, Narayanan said terrorist groups generally make small transactions so as not to attract attention and to avoid detection. "Use of both real, and fraudulent, ATM cards has also been resorted to at times," he said.

Charities and proceeds from narcotics were among other funding channels for terrorist groups, Narayanan said.

"India believes that there is a need for greater vigilance and stricter provisions so as to make off-shore jurisdiction more transparent. In addition, lifting banking secrecy and the corporate veil in terrorist-related cases would help," he said.

Seeking further international cooperation to tackle the menace of terrorism, he said, "...pooling of strengths by all concerned states is critical to defeat terrorism worldwide."

The conference was attended, among others, by Russian President Vladmir Putin, Iran's National Security Advisor Ali Larijani and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq

The White House
by Craig Unger
VANITY FAIR

The same neocon ideologues behind the Iraq war have been using the same tactics—alliances with shady exiles, dubious intelligence on W.M.D.—to push for the bombing of Iran. As President Bush ups the pressure on Tehran, is he planning to double his Middle East bet?

In the weeks leading up to George W. Bush's January 10 speech on the war in Iraq, there was a brief but heady moment when it seemed that the president might finally accept the failure of his Middle East policy and try something new. Rising anti-war sentiment had swept congressional Republicans out of power. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been tossed overboard. And the Iraq Study Group (I.S.G.), chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, had put together a bipartisan report that offered a face-saving strategy to exit Iraq. Who better than Baker, the Bush family's longtime friend and consigliere, to talk some sense into the president? [READ ENTIRE ARTICLE]

Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue

by Ian Buruma
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Tariq Ramadan, Muslim, scholar, activist, Swiss citizen, resident of Britain, active on several continents, is a hard man to pin down. People call him “slippery,” “double-faced,” “dangerous,” but also “brilliant,” a “bridge-builder,” a “Muslim Martin Luther.” He wants Muslims to become active citizens of the West but four years ago was himself refused permission to enter the U.S. He could not take up the teaching position he’d been offered at the University of Notre Dame. Oxford University took him on as a visiting fellow instead. SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE