Mideast: The New Muslim Brotherhood

Don't look now, but the face of radical Islam has changed dramatically across the Middle East.
by Stephen Glain
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

April 30, 2007 issue - Zeki Bany Arshead is the Muslim Brotherhood's new man in Amman. The general secretary of the Islamic Action Front, the Brotherhood's Jordanian chapter, might be expected to spout the rhetoric of his predecessors—heavy on Qur'anic injunctions and talk of a Pan-Arabic Islamic "caliphate." So what's all this about democracy? "Our minimum demand," he says from his businesslike offices in downtown Amman, "is for freedom of expression and assembly, real elections with multiple parties, rule of law, an independent judiciary and a free press."

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Shortly After March 1994: US Learns Bin Laden Gave Prominent Muslim Activist Money for Blind Sheikh

From "Context of 'Shortly After March 1994: US Learns Bin Laden Gave Prominent Muslim Activist Money for Blind Sheikh' "
COOPERATIVE RESEARCH

Abdo Mohammed Haggag, speechwriter for the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, makes a deal and agrees to testify against Abdul-Rahman in an upcoming US trial. [New York Times, 6/26/1994] He soon reveals that bin Laden has been paying for Abdul-Rahman’s living expenses since Abdul-Rahman moved to the US in 1990 (see July 1990). This is one of the first things that causes US intelligence to become interested in bin Laden. [Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, 2002, pp. 147-148] Further, Haggag reveals that the money was funneled through Abdurahman Alamoudi and his organization, the American Muslim Council. “Investigators tried to prove Alamoudi was a terror middleman but could not find ‘smoking gun’ evidence. That allowed Alamoudi to became a politically connected Muslim activist and co-founder of the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veteran Affairs Council, which helps the US military select Muslim chaplains.” [New York Post, 10/1/2003] This same year, Alamoudi will be one of the founders of Ptech, a US computer company with suspected terrorism ties (see 1994). It will later be alleged that he was able to operate with impunity for years due to his close ties to Grover Norquist, a powerful Republican lobbyist (see March 20, 2002). In 2004, the US will sentence him to 23 years in prison for illegal dealings with Libya (see October 15, 2004).

Murder by Cricket

by Patricky Hruby
ESPN E-Ticket

KINGSTON, Jamaica — The body is gone, long since removed, stuffed into a black zip-up bag, chilled to 40 degrees. Lifeless and embalmed.

Yet still the detective is taking pictures.

Actually, he's not taking pictures. He's telling another guy to take pictures, which makes sense, since the other guy is holding a big black camera and the detective is holding a small black notebook. The detective wears dark pants, a dark tie and a white, short-sleeve button-down; he sports a close-cropped, drill sergeant haircut and a tattoo on his right forearm. He says he's from Scotland Yard. Won't say anything else. He studies the room like a cheat sheet, gives orders with an authoritative English accent — the unmistakable voice of a long-abandoned empire — making quick, fastidious notes in his ledger. Shoot over here. Stand under the CCTV cameras. Get this angle. Hovering nearby are five other men, watching intently, all wearing tucked-in short-sleeved shirts of their own. I assume they're detectives as well; pistol handles peek out from their waistbands, little periscopes of deadly intent, and as far as I know, the hotel isn't hosting a handgun convention.

While all of this is going on — the pointing and bulb-flashing and stone-faced milling about — I'm taking pictures of the detectives, trying to act inconspicuous, pretending I'm genuinely interested in the cricket paraphernalia dotting the room, the bronze statue of West Indies legend George Headley and the oil painting of a demonic-looking Sri Lanka bowler and the multicolored national flags of former British colonies hanging from the ceiling like superhero capes on a laundry line. Only I think the detectives see through me because they keep moving out of my digital camera's frame, subtly but unmistakably, and I realize I would make a lousy CIA agent and an even worse paparazzo.

Nobody else in the lobby pays us much mind.

Nobody else pays much mind because the whole irredeemably postmodern scene — a guy taking pictures of a guy taking pictures — isn't unusual. Not anymore. Not here at the Jamaica Pegasus in downtown Kingston, not after everything that has happened, not with the sports talk radio hosts broadcasting live from the plush brown leather love seats and the tabloid reporters bivouacked around the poolside bar and the three uniformed police officers guarding the elevator exit on the 12th floor, where they're up and out of their borrowed ballroom chairs before the polished metal doors even finish sliding open, ready and eager to detain you for questioning, even though you're just looking for the gym. No. The capacity for shock has long since left the building.

These are the facts: On March 18, Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, a genial Englishman, was found unconscious, likely already dead, in this very hotel, behind the cream-colored door of Room 374. A chambermaid discovered his naked body, slumped on the bathroom floor, between the toilet and the tub, blood and vomit spattered against the white tile walls. Hands and feet turned blue. Woolmer, 58, was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead of undetermined causes; four days later, police changed the cause of death to asphyxia as a result of manual strangulation. Murder. Murder in the Pegasus, where the cops held a news conference, and another half-dozen after that, transforming this otherwise sleepy, marble-tiled waiting area into the epicenter of an international newsquake, concentric rings of breathless rumor and half-substantiated speculation, all radiating out from the biggest and most awful story to hit international cricket since … well, ever.

And yes, just to be clear: We're talking about cricket.

Cricket, the sport of afternoon tea and sliced cucumbers and pristine white outfits. And now, a bona fide murder mystery, where investigators have no named suspects, no clear motive and no certain cause of death. A murder mystery in which all of the above has created a factual and narrative vacuum, filled by a raft of increasingly crazy yet strangely plausible theories, spouted and dismissed and exhumed by fans and reporters and local taxi drivers alike, a deranged yet irresistible game of Clue. A crazy fan in the bathroom with a towel. The Indian mafia with exotic poison. Pakistani Intelligence in league with al-Qaida, financed by Chinese offshore accounts.

Who killed Bob Woolmer? Such is the macabre riddle hanging over the Cricket World Cup, a 16-nation tournament taking place throughout the Caribbean that concludes Saturday with the final in Barbados. How does a cricket coach end up dead in the first place? Such was the question consuming me. After all, I wouldn't be surprised by a boxer dying of a massive brain hemorrhage, or a football player breaking his neck in a violent tackle, or Stephen Jackson getting shot at a strip club. But death by cricket? This was new, and terrible, and potentially very scary, because if cricket isn't safe, what is?

Cricket, spiritual cousin to lawn bowling. Gentility with bats. An unhurried sporting pursuit in which the escapist pleasure lasts not 90 minutes or two halves or four quarters, but for days and days of blissful remove called a Test match, which really seems to be a test of one's socio-economic ability to take an extended intercontinental vacation. Cricket, that enduring Victorian hand-me-down, resolutely fair and mannered, of which noted cricket author and West Indian nationalist/Marxist historian C.L.R. James once wrote, "The British tradition soaked deep into me was that when you entered the sporting arena, you left behind you the sordid compromises of everyday existence."

Cricket. A harmless country game. Only here is Woolmer's body, stashed in the basement of a Kingston funeral home for weeks, awaiting repatriation to his wife and two sons in South Africa — a process delayed by both a postponed coroner's inquest and one of the largest and most complex investigations in the history of Jamaican law enforcement, an investigation waiting on the results of toxicology tests that have yet to be completed. According to Jamaican authorities, Woolmer may finally head home by the end of the week.

But the mystery surrounding him isn't going anywhere.

And though four Scotland Yard detectives and an Interpol pathologist and the Pakistani detective who headed up the Daniel Pearl case are now on hand to jump-start a whodunit unfolding at the rate of a melting glacier, only one thing seems clear: If Woolmer had been something other than a cricket coach — worked as a BASE jumper, perhaps — he probably would still be breathing.

How could this be? I wanted to know. I needed to know. I had made an entire career out of following games, the better to avoid real life; now, real life was intruding in the most horrific way possible, the most unexpected way possible, in the form of very real, sordid death. One that compelled me to catch a flight to Antigua, and then Jamaica, in order to poke my nose into a strange and unfamiliar world.

A world — and a sport — that can kill.

They don't call them 'fanatics' for nothing
A deranged fan. A deranged fan did it. Distraught, inconsolable, enraged that Pakistan has just crashed out of the tournament by losing to Ireland — the international cricket equivalent, I'm told, of the Seattle Seahawks falling to a slightly above-average high school football team — and in the mood for vengeance.

Justice.

It wouldn't be hard. Just go to the Pegasus. Wait for the team bus to return from nearby Sabina Park Stadium, where the Irish fans are probably still making merry at the party stand, dancing and grinning and getting sloshed — it is St. Patrick's Day, after all — and where a Pakistan side ranked No. 4 in the world has just laid an egg the size of Humpty Dumpty, losing to an Irish side largely composed of part-time players. Let the dazed Pakistani pros and their deflated coach slouch into the lobby, mingle with fans and officials, soak themselves in a warm bath of commiserative nods and get-'em-next-times. Be still. Watch. See Woolmer head upstairs, early, around 7:30, leaving behind the self-described worst day of his coaching career, apparently making good on a postgame news conference promise to sleep on his future as Pakistan's skipper.

Now stop. Wait. Bide your time. Let it get late, quiet, calm. Slip into the elevator, hit the plastic button for the 12th floor. Walk down the hall. Knock on Woolmer's door. Show him a jersey, a hat, a program. Ask for an autograph.

Grab his throat.

So goes one of the murder scenarios, one I initially dismissed as preposterous, in a bad Wesley Snipes/Robert De Niro flick sort of way. But then … well, then I start reading the papers.

Dateline, India: Following a loss to Sri Lanka, a cricket fan in Bilihar dies of a heart attack.

Dateline, Pakistan: A senior politician calls for the national cricket program to undergo "major surgery." Sans anesthetic.

Dateline, India: A loss to Bangladesh prompts a 17-year-old fan in the Samastipur district to die of shock, while irate fans attack the home of star Mahendra Dhoni.

Suddenly, the Cameron Crazies seem like dilettantes. Surfing the Web, I come across the story of Mahadeb Swarnakar, 28, a cricket fan from Shaktinagar, a village 60 kilometers north of Calcutta. Swarnakar wanted to watch the India-Sri Lanki match on a neighbor's color television; his wife wanted him to watch at home, on a black-and-white set. They fought. He hanged himself.

His wife tried to do the same, only the rope broke.

Here's the truly batty part: Nobody I meet finds any of the above disturbing. Or even particularly noteworthy. They don't even find it ironic, never mind that the official World Cup theme song is titled "The Game of Love and Unity." Woolmer's murder? Horrible, terrible, yes yes. A very great tragedy, of course. Absolutely not cricket. But the obsessive passion that may have led to his murder? Cricket all the way.

In my hotel's lobby bar, I share a drink with Ashish Panjabi and Deveinder Singh, a pair of middle-aged cricket fans, mild-mannered as can be. Until we talk World Cup. Panjabi gives me an earful — about spoiled, uninspired players, money-grubbing corporate sponsors, cynicism and corruption. He's simultaneously salient and unhinged; he ought to be drowning out the Sri Lankan equivalent of Woody Paige on a Southeast Asian version of "Around the Horn." The whole time, he's only drinking water, not buzzed in the slightest.

Singh sits and smiles, nodding intently. I ask Panjabi a simple question: Why would anyone hang themselves over cricket?

"Cricket is a religion," he says. "You're born and bred into it. For your whole life."

I can't relate. Not in the slightest. I mean, sure, I love college basketball as much as anyone, and probably detest Duke more than most. Yet even in my pettiest, most spiteful moments — read: any time one of those annoying armed-for-life AmEx ads comes on — I've never wanted to literally whack Coach K, leaving him vomit-drenched and blue on a bathroom floor.

On the other hand, Woolmer's still dead, and a fan might be to blame. So I go to a game.

New Zealand versus Bangladesh. Second round. The gleaming new Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in Antigua, halfway between the airport and the capital city of St. John's, beneath a hazy, sun-splashed sky, buffeted by a steady tropical breeze. Twenty minutes from anywhere, just like every place else on the island.

Women on the grass in tank tops. Shirtless men in slathered-on sunscreen. Concession stands selling vodka and champagne. The smell of coconut oil. I see Aussies in Milwaukee Bucks caps — a nod to Andrew Bogut, I suppose — and West Indies kids dressed like extras in a rap video. On the north stand concourse, the tournament mascot — some sort of neon-orange ferret — poses with fans for pictures.

I turn my attention to the field, the better to see what I've been missing. Answer: not much. Cricket is languid. Much like baseball, but on Quaaludes. Everything takes an eternity, especially the at-bats, which play out like Paul O'Neill working the count in hell's softball league. I fixate on a New Zealand fielder, a guy named Bond. Black shirt, black pants, black hat, black wraparound shades. He's dressed to fight high-tech vampires. Standing in the equivalent of deep left field, he's basically removed from the action; during the 20 minutes I watch him, not a single ball comes his way.

Still, he fidgets. Swings his arms. Claps his hands. Crouches on every bowled ball, staring intently at the batter, alert as a fire alarm. Ready to move. And here, I realize, is the sport in a nutshell: a game of perpetual focus, not wham-bam fireworks, a game akin to a candle in an empty wine bottle, perfectly attuned to slow-burn obsession.

Thwack! Swinging from a one-legged crouch, a Bangladeshi batsman uppercuts a six, the equivalent of a home run. The ball arcs over the left-field fence, a crazy quilt of sponsor signs, landing in the party stand area, near the in-stadium swimming pool. The crowd erupts — only not for Bangladesh.

In-dee-ya!
Clap-clap-clap!
In-dee-ya!
Clap-clap-clap!

Turns out the place is full of India fans from Dubai, England and New Jersey, great big groups of partisans, clad in the national team's distinctive baby blue jerseys. They all bought tickets months ago, assuming India would reach the tournament's second round; when the squad bombed out — a failure as stunning as Pakistan's — they decided to come anyway, in part because the $100 game tickets are nonrefundable, in part because, well, they're still playing cricket, and cricket is a hell of a drug.

It's also a national identity. Under British rule, cricket was the one arena where the subjugated natives could be equal — even ass-kickingly superior — to their imperial overlords; throughout the West Indies, the sport helped inspire national independence movements.

Today, cricket remains intensely political. When India and Pakistan meet, the games recall Clausewitz's definition of politics: war by other means. In both nations, government officials manage the national team: In India the dropping of the last national team captain was debated in Parliament; in Pakistan, the entire cricket apparatus serves at the pleasure of chief patron President Pervez Musharraf. (Not surprisingly, fans hate this. Imagine Nancy Pelosi sticking Jason Kapono on the USA Basketball roster, to curry votes with UCLA alumni.) A few years ago in England, conservative pol Norman Tebit famously suggested Asian immigrants be subjected to a loyalty "cricket test" — as in, do they root for England and if it not, give 'em the boot.

The game of love and unity, indeed.

Later that evening, I catch an Irish newscast. The subject is Woolmer. The footage is old, recorded just hours after Pakistan's loss sent pubs across the planet into delirium. Only I don't see any joy. I see the good people of Pakistan, born and bred into cricket, take to the streets, burning effigies — a practice usually reserved for the Great Yankee Satan himself, George W. Bush — screaming and chanting, Woolmer murdabad! Woolmer murdabad!

Death to Bob Woolmer.

A long history of corruption — and worse
A match fixer. A match fixer did it. A bookie from Dubai. A gangster from Karachi. Somebody somewhere who lost a bundle. Somebody somewhere with even more to lose. Emerging from a safe house, armed with ever-shifting cell phone numbers, materializing from the shadows of the vast subcontinental sports gambling syndicates like a crocodile from a muddy swamp. Reptilian. Single-minded. Because Woolmer, see, he must have known. Known about the payoffs, the pregame calls to the players, the subtle little fixes that no one ever sees, the suspicious movements in the Mumbai betting markets a month before the Ireland-Pakistan game. The endemic corruption that has long bedeviled the sport. Must have known too much, must have been ready to talk, perhaps in one of his forthcoming books, perhaps with a quiet, behind-the-scenes phone call. And even if he didn't know, he could've known, and if you step back and do the math, the mere possibility is more than enough.

Enough for Woolmer to be silenced.

Silenced like Hanif "Cadbury" Kodvavi, once Pakistan's top bookie, linked to disgraced cricket star Salim Malik, found dead in Johannesburg in 1999, reportedly shot 67 times — and, for good measure, hacked into pieces. Or silenced like former South African captain Hansie Cronje, cricket's fallen angel, the God-fearing, born-again Christian who took money from bookmakers, confessed to a judge, earned a lifetime ban, triggered an ocean-spanning slew of scandals and investigations and died in a mysterious 2002 plane crash.

Cronje, who once played for Woolmer.

Again, it wouldn't be hard. Sip some tea at the Pegasus cafe, right next to the hotel lobby. Nibble on a croissant. Let Woolmer head upstairs, order room service, a last meal of lasagna. Let him open his laptop, e-mail his wife, Gill, around 3 a.m., vent his depression and disbelief at the Ireland loss. Let him send a second message to Pakistani cricket board chairman Nasim Ashraf, announcing his immediate resignation as coach, his intention to return home to Cape Town, where he plans to open a cricket academy.

Make your move. Room 374. Tap the door. Talk your way inside. Grab a towel. Wrap it around Woolmer's throat.

Make sure he never speaks again.

In the shaded yellow seats of Viv Richards Stadium's north stand, K. Phillip Kutty, a friendly Indian man with soft, rounded features, asks me what I know about Woolmer's murder.

I give him an honest answer: not bloody much.

"The people behind it, it's the mafia," he says, eyebrows lowering like a garage door. "It's 100 percent a pre-planned murder. Any other excuse for it is bulls—-. It's the mafia, the millions in money pouring in."

Kutty turns his head, points over his right shoulder. A pudgy man in a tan T-shirt and a gray baseball cap, part of Kutty's group, sits one row back and four seats down. He's wearing headphones, which appear to be plugged into some sort of PDA. He watches the game intently, making careful notes on a flip pad.

"That guy," Kutty says, "he's betting in England right now."

Three things to know about cricket gambling: first, it's huge. Dubai bookmakers took in a reported $25 million on a World Cup match between India and Sri Lanka, and some experts estimate that as much as $1 billion can be bet globally on a single game. Second, much, if not most, of that wagering is illegal, because India and Pakistan forbid gambling for religious and moral reasons. So organized crime controls all the action, sometimes violently so. Third, cricket punters (the English term for bettors) can wager on just about anything: the winning team, run totals, starting lineups, even if the first ball bowled will be wide. Would you put money on Steve Nash's first assist coming on a two-handed chest pass? No? Then don't even think about betting on cricket.

All of this makes the sport pathologically vulnerable to fixing. Getting most of the players on a team to throw a game, a la the Black Sox, is hard; getting a single player to bowl one ball wide or pass inside lineup information is fairly trivial. Between 1999 and 2001, cricket was rocked by a series of fixing scandals. By the time the International Cricket Council's newly formed anticorruption unit released a comprehensive report at the end of 2001 — a 77-page document containing allegations of kidnapping, murder and fixing dating back to the 1970s — Pakistan had banned Malik for life, India had done the same to former team captain Mohammad Azharuddin and fellow star Ajay Sharma, Cronje had given South Africa a black eye, and Australian stars Shane Warne and Mark Waugh were found to have accepted money from an Indian bookie in exchange for inside information during a 1994 tour of Sri Lanka.

In 2003, former London police commissioner Paul Condon — author of the ICC report and the first head of the anti-corruption unit — declared cricket to be virtually free of match fixing. Shortly thereafter, Kenyan captain Maurice Odumbe was suspended five years for taking money from Indian bookie Jagdish Sodha, a man previously accused of trying to bribe English players to underperform.

Unsurprisingly, Condon's most recent speech on the topic struck a different chord. Speaking in the British House of Lords just weeks before Woolmer's death, Condon warned against endemic fixing and corruption, links to the mafia and terrorism, then dubbed the problem a "spreading cancer."

Had the cancer metastasized? James Fitzgerald, an ICC spokesman and former Irish cricket journalist, agreed to speak on the condition we not discuss the Woolmer investigation. Fitzgerald was surprisingly candid, in a way that only someone who won't discuss specifics can be. The vast sums bet on cricket? Potentially problematic, no question. But also a sign of the sport's relative health. "It indicates interest," he said. "It indicates that a large percentage of people have faith in cricket."

Fitzgerald has a point: There's a lot of fiscal faith in cricket these days, and not just on the part of punters. Thanks to a fortuitous confluence of fan passion, television and the booming economies of Southeast Asia, cricket is enjoying a financial Big Bang. To wit: Sky Sports and ESPN recently partnered to pay a reported $1.1 billion for ICC broadcast rights for the next eight years, and an ICC that reportedly had a $150,000 deficit in 1992 is expected to earn a $239 million profit on the current World Cup.

The sport's nouveau riche reality is visible on the sponsor signs ringing the Viv Richards Stadium outfield: Visa, LG, Johnnie Walker. It's evident at the ticket and concession stands, where a shaded seat goes for $100 and a bottle of Gatorade costs $8. It even pops up along the narrow, winding island road that leads from downtown St. John's to the stadium, where Pepsi billboards proclaiming We Love West Indies Cricket — only featuring India star Sachin Tendulkar — share space with handmade signs promoting a local "Gals Garn Wild" show taking place right … after … the game!

Maybe this is the way of modern sports: Stoke fan passion and disposable income like particles in a nuclear reactor, generating a chain reaction of light, heat and revenue. All the while, hope the whole thing doesn't go Three Mile Island.

Andrew Miller, who writes for the Web site Cricinfo, tells me about Cronje, and how Woolmer — then South Africa's coach — defended his captain to the last. Even though Cronje planned his fixes in the team dressing room, right in front of the teenage attendants, and later said it was all so easy it bored him.

"We all have a gut feeling fixing goes on," Miller says. "Trying to stamp it out is like trying to stamp out breathing. Think about it: you're only a sportsman for 10 years. You come from a poor country, a poor family, from a place not rooted in the traditions of cricket. I can almost understand."

Pakistan captain Inzamam-ul-Haq and assistant coach Mushtaq Ahmed were both fined as a result of the same match-fixing investigation that brought down Malik. West Indies star Marlon Samuels was allowed to play in the World Cup despite links to an Indian bookmaker. Woolmer's friends and family insist that he knew nothing, that his forthcoming books — one a coaching manual, the other autobiographical — contain no bombshells. Could he really have been naive? About Cronje and all the rest? Miller fidgets in his seat.

"Not to speak ill of the dead — I knew Bob and he was a very nice man — but he must have known more," he says. "At least more than he let on."

A very trusting man
Unless he didn't. Unless his love of cricket left him blind to the sport's larger sins. True story: When the English national team toured Pakistan in 2005, Woolmer noticed that a player he once coached in English domestic cricket, Ian Bell, had a small flaw in his batting grip. Bell wasn't expected to play against Woolmer's Pakistan squad, so the coach told his former pupil about the problem.

Injuries subsequently forced Bell into the English lineup. He finished as the team's leading scorer.

"That's the kind of man Bob was," says Vic Marks, a former English national team player and a cricket writer with the British newspaper the Observer. "A very trusting man. In South Africa, he was in the same locker room as Cronje, and he was as stunned by everything as everyone else. That leads you to think there was a naivety there. Otherwise, you start to get conspiratorial."

Marks played against Woolmer in English cricket; as a journalist, he came to know the man behind the competitor. During Pakistan's tour of England last summer, he met Woolmer in Canterbury for a short chat, that mushroomed into a 2-hour discussion of cricket and life.

"He was so good at the intimate details of the game," Marks says. "Maybe he didn't always see the bigger picture."

Born in India to English parents — his father put a bat and ball in his crib — Woolmer learned the game playing for Kent, in a rhododendron-strewn setting Marks likens to the Garden of Eden. Woolmer's mentor was Colin Cowdrey, a former ICC president and England captain, widely considered one of the game's great sportsmen. By 1976, Woolmer had established himself as a talented, well-liked, almost archetypal English player, a Cricketer of the Year and leading candidate for a future national team captaincy.

That never happened. In 1977, Woolmer became the youngest of six English players to join World Series Cricket, a rival to traditional international Test matches, sponsored by an Australian tycoon during a fight over television rights. The seeming cash grab — very not cricket — made Woolmer a near-pariah. He further sullied his professional reputation four years later, playing in a controversial apartheid-era tour of South Africa, which was under sanctions. Woolmer insisted before an English cricket board that he was doing it to promote interracial harmony. He never played for England again. In 1984, he retired from the sport with a back injury, then immigrated to South Africa to coach high schoolers in Cape Town's poor, black townships.

Woolmer returned to England three years later, coaching at Kent and then at Warwickshire, where he pioneered the use of a seldom-used reverse sweep shot that has since become a cricket staple. Subsequently appointed coach of the South African national team, Woolmer introduced laptop computers and detailed statistical analysis to the sport — think "Moneyball" — and during the 1999 World Cup outfitted Cronje with a radio earpiece, a practice that has since been banned.

Woolmer was successful in both places — South Africa fell just short of the '99 World Cup final — but also presided over controversy: Rumors of widespread recreational drug use dogged the Warwickshire locker room, and the Cronje affair was a huge blow to international cricket. His tenure in Pakistan, where he lived alone in a small Lahore apartment, was marked by more of the same: Woolmer pushed the nation's cricket board to begin drug-testing, a move that resulted in two of his best bowlers being banned for steroid use; over Woolmer's objection, the team refused to take the field after being accused of ball-tampering during a game against England last year, earning an unprecedented international forfeit (Pakistan was later cleared of the charge); unconfirmed reports suggest Woolmer had a hard time relating to a religious faction within the squad, led by Inzamam, that practiced a conservative form of Islam.

A trusting man. With a talent for pissing people off.

"To take on Pakistan is a real challenge as a coach," Marks says. "You have lots of talent, but it is all enmeshed in politics. And on a personal level, it was a huge sacrifice. But again, Bob showed his unconventional streak."

Marks can't shake the feeling that Woolmer's death is somehow entwined with the sport he loved, a sport gone quietly mad, in which one of Woolmer's favorite phrases on the golf course — the ball's in the lake; nobody died — no longer applies.

"It's such a horrid thing," Marks says with a sigh. "And to seem that it happened as the result of cricket, as opposed to a personal issue — that's remarkably alarming, isn't it? It causes you to question your own game. It's not so daft to say that if Pakistan had beaten Ireland, he would still be alive."

Not so daft. I write this down.

No possibilities ruled out
There's another possibility: Woolmer wasn't murdered. His death was simply a tragic accident. Police say his body showed no obvious outward signs of violence, no telltale red bruises on his neck. His room showed "very little" of the same. No signs of forced entry. His passport and credit cards were found in a drawer. The laptop he forlornly packed into a bag at the end of the Ireland game wasn't taken. Pakistani player Danish Kaneria was staying in an adjacent room. West Indies captain Brian Lara was sleeping across the hall. Both men say they heard nothing — no shouting, no screaming, no wheezing.

Not a sound.

Woolmer suffered from Type 2 diabetes, was under tremendous stress. Unconfirmed reports claim that he had been drinking cotch, that an empty bottle was found in his room. Perhaps he had a seizure, a blackout, lost his footing, fell into the sink or bathtub and fatally injured his neck. Perhaps Woolmer perished after the chambermaid discovered him, when his body was moved and a house doctor and nurse attempted to resuscitate him, when at least six Pakistani players reportedly entered his room, all before he was placed in a diplomatic car and taken to the hospital where doctors pronounced him dead. Perhaps the autopsy, initially inconclusive, was botched. Garfield Blake, president of the Jamaican Association of Clinical Pathologists, says that to go from inconclusive to strangulation is odd, that the two diagnoses are "poles apart."

Or maybe this is all foolish tail-chasing. Maybe Woolmer really was murdered, only he wasn't just strangled. Maybe he was poisoned first. That's the rumor the day before I arrive in Kingston, with a British tabloid claiming police received an anonymous phone tip that Woolmer was murdered with aconite, a nasty little substance that causes nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of power in the limbs, a slow shutdown of one's internal organs and, finally, death by asphyxiation. Investigators refuse specific comment. But they acknowledge that they've received information about possible poisons.

"I'm sure they have," a British reporter says, voice dripping with sarcastic contempt. "And the call probably came from the reporter who wrote the story."

In two weeks, British papers will report that Woolmer was possibly murdered with snake venom, and that police have identified an unnamed suspect from hotel camera security footage. The cops neither confirm nor deny both stories. But for now, there's only one way to clear everything up: Talk to Deputy Commissioner Mark Shields, the 48-year-old former Scotland Yard cop heading up the investigation. Only Shields isn't talking. Not anymore. Turns out I'm late to the party. One week earlier, before I arrived, Shields gave news briefings in the Pegasus lobby, formal and informal, sometimes more than once a day. He confirmed that Woolmer's body showed no visible signs of life when it was found. That the lack of marks on his neck was "not unusual," given the "circumstances surrounding" Woolmer's death. (Prompting speculation that Woolmer was strangled with towels, which reportedly were found near his body). Shields said that while police believe Woolmer may have known his killer — he was found naked, after all — no motives or scenarios have been ruled out entirely, not even a random stranger coming in off the street to kill Woolmer on a homicidal whim.

Shields also confirmed that police are digitizing and analyzing almost a day's worth of hotel security camera footage, that detectives had looked to question three Pakistani fans linked to the team — two from the United States — in order to clear them from the investigation, that statements, fingerprints and DNA samples were taken from every member of the Pakistani squad, that three members of the team had been questioned a second time before being allowed to leave Jamaica, and that two Pakistani diplomats from Washington, D.C., had been given a tour of the crime scene.

And now? Not a word. Shields' lips are sealed. He's ticked off at the media, and with good reason: While I was in Antigua, the Sunday Mail ran a piece dubbing Shields a "sexy man in a sexy job" and detailing his rather active social life, which apparently includes a 24-year-old fashion designer girlfriend and invitations to all the best cocktail parties. The evening after Woolmer died, the story said, Shields was spotted at a soccer match. In a follow-up report, the paper claimed that Shields planned to take an Easter vacation to London to visit his two sons, a trip Shields subsequently canceled.

"He wasn't too happy with that," says another English reporter.

The assembled English press isn't too happy with the Mail, either: The paper urinated in the pool for everyone else. Is Shields, tall and handsome, less a dogged Jim Rockford than a male Charlie's Angel? I can't say; I never managed to contact him. But I do find it slightly disconcerting that he has a Yahoo! e-mail address on his business card. And I'm told the locals have a nickname for him: Disco Cop.

My first morning in Kingston, I eat breakfast with a local reporter. He describes the political pressure on the Woolmer investigation as intense, almost disruptive: Governments around the Caribbean have largely staked their continuing viability on a successful World Cup; cost overruns, unexpectedly low turnout and Woolmer's death have given opposition parties plenty of campaign ammunition. And locals hate nothing more than "murder in paradise" stories.

Then there's the media mini-invasion, Omaha Beach with expense reports, by turns irritating and comical. One British paper sent four different writers — four! — all looking to scoop their rivals. And, of course, each other.

"Watching them try to avoid each other all week was ridiculous," the reporter says between gulps of fruit juice. "They can't get scoops because there's nothing to scoop. So they've all been here with nothing to do. It's like going to church and not putting money in the tin for these guys."

Chuckling, he asks whether I've seen today's edition of The Sun, probably the most shameless Fleet Street tab. I shake my head.

"They've got pictures of Woolmer's room."

We're sitting next to a window in the Kingston Hilton, just down the street from the Pegasus. Through the glass, you can see the building's 12th floor; I wonder aloud whether a photographer rappelled down the side. The reporter laughs, but I later discover I'm half-correct: The Sun photogs rented a room a few floors above Woolmer's, then used a rope to lower a camera rigged with a 10-second timer.

"It's terrible, isn't it?" marvels Barry Wigmore, a Florida-based reporter with the Daily Mail. "But in a way, you have to admire them."

Barry is right: It is terrible, and you do have to admire them. Because here, writ small, is the full and total awfulness of human ingenuity, the same twisted imaginative power that allows disco cops to solve murders from the scantiest of clues while letting the rest of us play along in the media and at home, one "CSI"-shaming theory at a time. I think back to an Indian cricket fan I met in Antigua, a doctor who once lived in Colorado.

"It's the JonBenet Ramsey case of the Caribbean," he told me. "A lot of finger pointing. But you'll never know."

Which, in turn, means one thing: somebody somewhere is already writing a book about this. And probably shopping the TV movie rights.

He lived — and died — for cricket
They hold a memorial service. Actually, they hold two memorial services. Neither one with Woolmer's body.

The first takes place in a Pakistani cathedral, led by an archbishop, two weeks after Woolmer's death. Players and cricket officials fill the pews. I watch the footage on BBC News: a framed picture of the former coach, smiling, clad in a white team polo shirt, flanked by burning candles. Tears. A moment of silence. The laying of wreaths, one on behalf of President Musharraf. Everything solemn and dignified. Heartfelt. Nothing like a few days earlier, when Pakistani players returning from Jamaica are greeted at Karachi airport by jeering fans, some screaming, "Go to hell!"

A second service. This time in South Africa, attended by Woolmer's friends and family, teary-eyed and still in shock. But also proud. They remember a generous man, a gentle soul, a hero who helped the national team emerge from the shame and poison of apartheid, from two decades of international sanctions, who coached mixed-race boys' teams before almost anyone else would. A man who shook hands with the Queen of England but also worked with children in Cape Town's most downtrodden townships. Allan Donald, a former South Africa player and close friend, reads a statement on behalf of Woolmer's widow Gill and sons Dale and Russell, thanking an entire world of well-wishers for their condolences. Another friend wonders if cricket has now lost its moral compass. Nasim Ashraf, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, announces that an indoor cricket center in Lahore will be named after the coach.

Woolmer, he says, lived cricket. Loved cricket. Died for cricket.

I write this down, too.

A mind-numbing conspiracy theory
Who killed Bob Woolmer? Here's the only conclusion I can draw with any degree of certainty: Hang around cricket long enough — like, say, a week — and you'll end up through the looking glass. Way through the looking glass. Oliver Stone-on-the-Kennedy-assassination territory.

I talk to a Guy. A Guy who knows stuff. A Guy in the information acquisition business. I can't tell you more. Sorry. We meet in the lobby of the Pegasus, at night. I suggest we get a drink. He walks me past the hotel gym, past the poolside bar, past the chatty barkeeps and the tabloid writers downing Red Stripes. We sit at the far end of the pool, on white plastic chairs, in near darkness.

This is what he tells me:

He says Jamaica's ruling political party is gunning for an unprecedented fifth consecutive term, that the current prime minister is widely liked but considered a bit dumb, the current government is counting on the World Cup to help it win the upcoming elections, a sound strategy in a sports-mad nation where high school track meets are shown on prime-time television.

He says Woolmer's murder has shot this all to hell, though, and that the failure to catch his killer, or killers, has added to a growing, widespread discontent with the tournament and the people in charge.

He says Woolmer was definitely murdered. Of this, he has no doubt.

He says he saw a picture of Woolmer's body, there was a mark on Woolmer's neck, on the right side, just below the jaw line, that suggests physical trauma.

He says he's spoken to someone in international intelligence, someone well-placed, and that ever since the United States cut off much of al-Qaida's funding after the Sept. 11 attacks, the terrorist group has used illegal sports gambling in India and Pakistan as a major source of revenue.

He says al-Qaida has ties to Dawood Ibrahim, the Al Capone of India, a man accused of masterminding a 1993 bombing that killed 257 people in Mumbai, a man with ties to the bookmaker allegedly linked to Samuels, a man rumored to have lost millions on the Ireland-Pakistan match.

He says al-Qaida also has ties to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the former — and some say current — patron of Afghanistan's Taliban.

He says the ISI is intertwined in both the Pakistani government and Pakistani cricket, and that one of the members of the Pakistani cricket team's traveling party is actually an ISI operative.

He says that al-Qaida may have put a lot of money on the Pakistani team, and may have been disappointed in its poor performance. Murderously so.

He says that Woolmer may have found himself between a rock and a hard place, because despite what his friends and family have said, the coach knew about larger-scale corruption and was going to blow the whistle.

He says Woolmer found out that three international umpires were being paid off, and that the ISI had set up offshore banking accounts for them.

He says the bank accounts were financed with Chinese money. I ask why. He doesn't elaborate.

He says he believes the ISI is involved in Woolmer's murder. He says someone in the Pakistan team party knows what happened, and during Pakistan's final World Cup game — against Zimbabwe, after Woolmer's death — a member of the team party was spotted with his feet up, drinking champagne, and the champagne-sipper in question is probably ISI. He says all of the above is why Pakistan dispatched two diplomats to Jamaica.

While mouthing the word "diplomats," he makes air quotes with his hands.

He says the Jamaican police have no suspects and no motive, and yet a coroner's inquest has been scheduled. He says this is a way to drag things out.

He says he does not believe the Jamaican police will solve the case.

He says after Woolmer, the real victim in the case is Jamaica, because this is the World Cup, not a shooting in downtown Kingston, and that the country led newscasts around the planet for two days.

He says the best thing for Jamaicans is for Woolmer's body to leave the country.

He says all this, a jigsaw puzzle without a box, and then he says he has to leave. I close my notebook. My fingers hurt. We shake hands. He heads inside. I turn around, take a last look at the pool, the bar, the half-empty bottles of beer. I want to ask him whether any of this head-spinning madness can possibly be true, whether he grasps the implications of everything said and unsaid, the bigger picture beyond the boundaries of this strange and unfamiliar sport: Cricket is daft because the world is daft, and the truly daft thing about it is that it takes a dead man to notice.

But he's already gone.

Who killed Bob Woolmer?
The detective is gone. The lobby is quiet. No police, no photographers. A few people are watching an England-Sri Lanka game, shown on four televisions scattered around the room. The Brits are totally out of it. I'm sitting on a plush, cream-colored recliner, typing notes into my laptop; across from me sits a man with tree-trunk forearms, arms crossed, facing a television, snoring lightly.

I put on some headphones, zone out. When I open my eyes, I notice that the room is filling up. A group of young Jamaican guys — none older than 25, tops — plops down on the couch next to me. They're watching the game. So are two British writers, who have moved closer to the big-screen TV at the center of the lobby.

England, it seems, is making a comeback.

I don't completely understand how cricket works. Doesn't matter. I take off my headphones. England needs 12 runs to win. They have six balls left. The game is being played in Antigua. On the television screen, I see British fans jumping up and down in the stadium pool; in the stands, Sri Lankan fans are leaning forward in their seats, chins on palms, wide-eyed and nervous. An England batter strokes a hit. The Jamaican guys are clapping, whooping it up. Big shot! Big shot! Perversely enough, they're rooting for Sri Lanka. The British journalists are clapping, too.

Thwack! The run chase is on. Seven runs needed from four balls. Thwack! Five from three. Four from two. One of the British writers stands up, places his hands atop his head. It's too much to bear. Mr. Tree-trunk Forearms is wide awake, sitting up straight as a flagpole. The lobby is full.

Last ball. This is it. The Sri Lankan bowler races toward the wicket, lets the ball go. One hop. The batter swings and misses completely, the ball shattering the little white thingamjig resting atop the three wooden stumps behind him. It's the equivalent of a strikeout. Game over. The Jamaican guys erupt in cheers. The British journalists look heartsick. On the screen, one of the party pool kids buries his face in his hands, sobbing. A beautiful young Sri Lankan girl shakes her hips, dancing around her seat, waving a national flag like a shipwrecked sailor swinging an orange-smoke rescue flare.

Who killed Bob Woolmer? The truth is that no one really knows, and maybe no one will ever know, and the only people who might know aren't saying. Yet take a picture: Right here, right now, none of that matters. For a moment, what matters is the moment, the joy in the lobby and despair in the stadium pool, the fleeting sense of complete and total remove — from toxicology reports and match fixing, coroner's inquests and potentially deadly towels, from the sins of cricket and life itself, the horror of Room 374 and the dark secrets lurking within. All of it a waking nightmare, half-forgotten but lingering, a crime scene photograph stuffed into the junk drawer of our collective dread, yellowing and sinister. The blood and the vomit. The last, silent gasps of a man left to die on the altar of a country game. The sordid compromises of everyday existence we call sport.

Iran Exonerates Six Who Killed in Islam’s Name

by Nazila Fathi
THE NEW YORK TIMES

TEHRAN, April 18 — The Iranian Supreme Court has overturned the murder convictions of six members of a prestigious state militia who killed five people they considered “morally corrupt.”

The reversal, in an infamous five-year-old case from Kerman, in central Iran, has produced anger and controversy, with lawyers calling it corrupt and newspapers giving it prominence.

“The psychological consequences of this case in the city have been great, and a lot of people have lost their confidence in the judicial system,” Nemat Ahmadi, a lawyer associated with the case, said in a telephone interview.

Three lower court rulings found all the men guilty of murder. Their cases had been appealed to the Supreme Court, which overturned the guilty verdicts. The latest decision, made public this week, reaffirms that reversal.

“The objection by the relatives of the victims is dismissed, and the ruling of this court is confirmed,” the court said in a one-page verdict.

The ruling may still not be final, however, because a lower court in Kerman can appeal the decision to the full membership of the Supreme Court. More than 50 Supreme Court judges would then take part in the final decision.

According to the Supreme Court’s earlier decision, the killers, who are members of the Basiji Force, volunteer vigilantes favored by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, considered their victims morally corrupt and, according to Islamic teachings and Iran’s Islamic penal code, their blood could therefore be shed.

The last victims, for example, were a young couple engaged to be married who the killers claimed were walking together in public.

Members of the Basiji Force are known for attacking reformist politicians and pro-democracy meetings. President Ahmadinejad was a member of the force, but the Supreme Court judges who issued the ruling are not considered to be specifically affiliated with it.

Iran’s Islamic penal code, which is a parallel system to its civic code, says murder charges can be dropped if the accused can prove the killing was carried out because the victim was morally corrupt.

This is true even if the killer identified the victim mistakenly as corrupt. In that case, the law requires “blood money” to be paid to the family. Every year in Iran, a senior cleric determines the amount of blood money required in such cases. This year it is $40,000 if the victim is a Muslim man, and half that for a Muslim woman or a non-Muslim.

In a long interview with the Iranian Student News Agency, a Supreme Court judge, Mohammad Sadegh Al-e-Eshagh, who did not take part in this case, sought Wednesday to discourage vigilante killings, saying those carried out without a court order should be punished.

At the same time, he laid out examples of moral corruption that do permit bloodshed, including armed banditry, adultery by a wife and insults to the Prophet Muhammad.

“The roots of the problems are in our laws,” said Mohammad Seifzadeh, a lawyer and a member of the Association for Defenders of Human Rights in Tehran. “Such cases happen as long as we have laws that allow the killer to decide whether the victim is corrupt or not. Ironically, such laws show that the establishment is not capable of bringing justice, and so it leaves it to ordinary people to do it.”

The ruling stems from a case in 2002 in Kerman that began after the accused watched a tape by a senior cleric who ruled that Muslims could kill a morally corrupt person if the law failed to confront that person.

Some 17 people were killed in gruesome ways after that viewing, but only five deaths were linked to this group. The six accused, all in their early 20s, explained to the court that they had taken their victims outside the city after they had identified them. Then they stoned them to death or drowned them in a pond by sitting on their chests.

Three of the families had given their consent under pressure by the killers’ families to accept financial compensation, said Mr. Ahmadi, the lawyer.

Such killings have occurred in the past. A member of the security forces shot and killed a young man in 2005 in the subway in Karaj, near Tehran, for what he also claimed was immoral behavior by the victim.

A judge caused outrage in 2004 in Neka, in the north, after he issued a death sentence for a 16-year old girl for what he said were chastity crimes. After the summary trial, he had her hanged in public immediately, before the necessary approval from the Supreme Court.

Neither man has been punished.

“Such laws are not acceptable in our society today,” said Hossein Nejad Malayeri, the brother of Gholamreza Nejad Malayeri, who was killed by the group in Kerman. “That means if somebody has money, he can kill, and claim the victim was corrupt.”

Bush Family in the House of Moon

by Bill Berkowitz
TALK TO ACTION

George H.W. Bush to speak at the Rev. Sun Myung Moon-owned Washington Times' 25th anniversary celebration in mid-May

When former President George H.W. Bush takes the stage to deliver the keynote address in honor of the 25th anniversary of the ultra-conservative Washington Times newspaper in mid-May, it will not be the first time he has spoken in support of one of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's enterprises.

And whatever fee Bush will realize from his appearance, it is only one aspect of what author Kevin Philips has termed Moon's "close" relationship with the Bush family.

While the elder Bush -- and other family members -- have benefited both financially and politically from this relationship with Moon, the head of the Unification Church has a more varied agenda in mind, one that might include a pardon from current President George W. Bush.

(In the 1980s, Moon served a 13-month sentence in jail for tax evasion. Not wanting "convicted felon" as part of his legacy, he is hoping for a pardon before Bush leaves office.)

From Koreagate to Bush 43

The Bush family/Moon relationship dates back "to the overlap between Bush's one-year tenure as CIA director (1976) and the arrival of in Washington of Moon, whose Unification Church was widely reported to be a front group for the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency [KCIA]," Phillips wrote in his bestselling book "American Dynasty -- Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush."

During a time when the activities of the KCIA were the subject of a U.S. congressional investigation -- dubbed Koreagate -- Phillips pointed out that "within Washington councils, Bush was a powerful voice against any unnecessary crackdown on the U.S. activities of allied intelligence services."

"One of George H.W. Bush's first tasks as director of the CIA was managing the 'Koreagate' scandal, in which the government of South Korea and its intelligence agents had waged espionage against the U.S, government," Fred Clarkson, a co-founder of Talk2Action and the author of "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy" -- which includes a chapter on the Moon organization -- told me in an e-mail exchange.

"Some of those agents were leading members of Moon's Unification church. Some members managed to infiltrate Congressional staffs -- primarily Democrats," he said.

After the founding of Moon's Washington Times in the early 1980s, the newspaper consistently supported the Ronald Reagan-Bush team in its version of the events surrounding the Iran-Contra scandal. According to Clarkson, "the Moon organization was part of the private supply lines to the Nicaraguan contras, The Washington Times was given special access and provided consistently flattering coverage and the newspaper also set up a special fund for private funding of the contras."

In 1996, the relationship became decidedly financial when the former president traveled to Latin America to help Moon launch Tiempos del Mundo (Times of the World). At the time Bush called Moon's flagship U.S. publication, the Washington Times, "an independent voice" and assured the crowd that "Tiempos del Mundo... [will be] the same thing." According to published reports Bush received at least 100,000 dollars for his participation in that event.

More recently, Moon's Washington Times Foundation funneled a million dollars to Bush's presidential library through the Houston, Texas-based Greater Houston Community Foundation.

Moon has also contributed to the financial wellbeing of other Bush family members. In 2005, Neil Bush, the former president's son and current president's brother, accompanied Moon on a few legs of the reverend's "World Peace King Bridge-Tunnel" tour, showing up at his side in the Philippines and Taiwan.

Late last year, Business Week reported Neil Bush's Ignite! Inc. -- an educational software company featuring what it calls "curriculum on wheels," or COWs -- received a million dollars from "a foundation linked to the controversial Reverend Sun Myung Moon... for a COWs research project in Washington-area schools."

But perhaps the most tangible aspect of the close relationship between the Bush family and Rev. Moon is the unbending support the Washington Times has given to George W. Bush since he announced he was running for the presidency. In recent years, the newspaper's editorial and opinion pages have consistently supported the president's "war on terror" and war in Iraq.

In the House of Moon

"The Rev. Moon is a monster in the laboratory of conservative politics; no one wants to think about him, yet in order to ensure his continued support they must periodically feed his appetite for tribute," John Gorenfeld, an investigative reporter and a longtime chronicler of Moon's activities, said in an e-mail. "One of Moon's paybacks at Times-sponsored events is to have his picture taken and rub shoulders with the politically powerful and well-connected."

"Besides the gift of the support of the Washington Times, Bush and his son have accepted large amounts of money from Moon's church," said Gorenfeld, the author of a forthcoming book about the Rev. Moon and U.S. politics.

"In the Clinton years, George and Barbara Bush toured Japan with Moon, as well as Argentina. He is believed to have taken over a million dollars. More recently, a Moon company funneled 250,000 dollars to the fund for George W. Bush's inauguration."

Moon's enterprises extend far beyond the Unification Church, says Steve Hassan, an expert on cults and a licensed mental health counselor who was once a leader in the Moon organization.

"There are a number of business and political fronts; it's a multi-billion-dollar international conglomerate headed by a demagogue who claims that he's the greatest guy in history, who wants to abolish democracy, end or destroy the United Nations and set up a theocracy for his heirs to rule," Hassan told me in a telephone interview.

When the elder Bush takes to the podium next month, it would be surprising if the close relationship between the Bush family and Moon is scrutinized by the mainstream media, since it has been basically ignored or glossed over for decades, Hassan insists.

"It infuriates me, as one who has been in the group and often heard Moon say that he wanted to destroy democracy and take over the world, that the mainstream media has not gotten this story right," he said. "While they have talked about corporate lobbying, they've neglected to discuss the lobbying and political influence of cults. Moon has been basically mainstreamed."

Hassan also noted that Moon's operation in the U.S., which began with the "street recruiting" of members -- especially in university towns -- has shifted to lavish dinners and awards ceremonies where Moon is able to hobnob with powerful political figures and later claim their allegiance.

"Having George H.W. Bush come and speak at the Washington Times anniversary event is definitely a coup," Hassan pointed out.

"That George H.W. Bush has such a long term alliance with the theocratic Rev. Moon, who for all of his flag waving is on record as hating American constitutional democracy, is disturbing and will no doubt come to be seen as a defining aspect of Bush's political career, before, during and since his presidency," Fred Clarkson added.

"Bush's headlining the Washington Times' 25th anniversary event couldn't be more appropriate, since the Rev. Moon and Bush's fortunes, political and otherwise have been closely intertwined for decades."

German army in 'racist video' row

A video aired on German TV has shown an army recruit on firing practice being ordered to pretend he was in New York's Bronx facing hostile African Americans.

In the grainy 90-second video, the instructor tells the soldier to swear as he fires his gun.

US civil rights leader, Al Sharpton, said it was outrageous to depict blacks as "target practice".

New York officials say they are saddened and frustrated that the Bronx district is depicted so negatively.

"Clearly these folks don't know anything about African-Americans or the Bronx," said Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrion Jnr, who recently returned from a trip to Germany to promote tourism to the district.

He has demanded an apology from the Germany military over the clip.

Skulls

During the filmed training session, an instructor tells the soldier: "You're in the Bronx, a black van pulls up in front of you and three African-Americans get out and start really insulting your mother... act!".

The soldier then fires his gun several times and shouts obscenities in English, as the instructor encourages him to curse even louder.

The clip was filmed in a forest in July 2006, near the barracks of the northern German town of Rendsburg .

The German army said it has been aware of the video since January and was investigating it.

It is the latest in a series of scandals to hit the German military.

A group of 18 army instructors are on trial in the country accused of abusing and humiliating recruits during training in 2004.

Last year, German newspapers published images of German soldiers serving in Afghanistan posing with skulls.

How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Former Federal Bureau of Investigation director William Sessions once condemned Russia's rising mafia. "We can beat organized crime," he told a Moscow security conference in 1997.

Today, Mr. Sessions is a lawyer for one of the FBI's "Most Wanted": Semyon Mogilevich, a Ukraine-born Russian whom the FBI says is one of Russia's most powerful organized-crime figures.

Mr. Sessions is trying to negotiate a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice for his client, who is charged with racketeering and is a key figure in a separate Justice Department probe of energy deals between Russia and Ukraine.

A number of notable Washington insiders are earning big fees these days by representing controversial clients from the former Soviet Union.

From prominent businessmen -- some facing criminal allegations -- to top politicians, well-known ex-Soviets are lining up to hire help with criminal cases, lobbying and consulting. These figures, many of whom made fortunes in the wide-open 1990s amid the Soviet Union's disintegration, hire Washington insiders to help rehabilitate their reputations in the West or to persuade investors and regulators they are committed to good corporate governance.

Sensitive foreign clients are nothing new for Washington's lobbying industry. Among others, Jack Abramoff -- convicted of fraud and bribery last year -- represented clients in Pakistan and Russia, while former Liberian President Charles Taylor, awaiting trial on war-crimes allegations, once employed his own Washington lobbyist.

But recent years have seen a growing number of former Soviet officials and industrialists seeking assistance in the U.S. capital. Many are playing an increasingly important role in the global economy, as they wrest ever-greater control of Eurasia's vast energy reserves and other natural resources. All have become politically powerful in their home countries as well, making them -- and by extension their U.S. advisers -- key players in Western efforts to promote regional stability.

Among recent examples:

Below, a selection of documents relating to the Washington dealings of figures from the former Soviet Union.

The FBI has placed Semyon Mogilevich on its "Most Wanted" list; the Justice Department has charged him with conspiracy, fraud and money laundering. Former FBI director William Sessions is representing the Ukrainian-born Russian in hopes of getting a deal with Justice.
* * *
Bob Dole was handsomely compensated for getting a U.S. visa for controversial Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. But some lobbyists don't make clear who their clients are or where they get their fees. Barbour Griffith & Rogers said it worked for Friends of Ukraine, but tax records show the group was operated out of the lobby firm's own office.
* * *
A group called the Republican Party of the Ukraine, headed by Energy Minister Yuri Boyko, also used a Washington lobbyist but the bills were ultimately paid by a company registered on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Mr. Boyko is a key player in controversial energy deals involving another Ukrainian businessman named Dimytro Firtash, who according to a federal lawsuit also hired Washington firms.

For a $560,000 fee, Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, helped a Russian billionaire accused by rivals of bribery obtain a visa to visit the U.S. in 2005, among other things.

Leonid Reiman, a powerful member of Russia's cabinet and close ally of President Vladimir Putin, uses a Washington public-relations consultant. Mr. Reiman is under federal investigation in the U.S. over money laundering and is locked in a high-stakes battle with Moscow conglomerate Alfa for control of a Russian telecommunications empire. Alfa has paid Barbour Griffith & Rogers -- the influential lobbying firm co-founded by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour -- nearly $2 million in lobbying fees.

Paul Manafort, a former adviser to Mr. Dole's presidential campaign, has advised a Ukrainian metals billionaire and his close political ally, Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich. Mr. Yanukovich, who favors closer ties with Mr. Putin's administration, is embroiled in a power struggle with pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.

In some cases, the details of how these ex-Soviet clients made their fortunes are murky -- and the source, amount and purpose of the fees they pay Washington consultants can be as well. In 2005, for example, Ukrainian politician Yuri Boyko used a Caribbean shell company to pay a Washington lobbyist for help arranging meetings with top Republicans.

Mr. Boyko, currently Ukraine's minister of energy, was the architect of gas deals between Russia and Ukraine now being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for possible ties to the alleged mafia client of Mr. Sessions. Mr. Boyko said the $98,000 in fees was paid by a small political party he heads. Annex Holdings, the Caribbean firm that paid Mr. Boyko's lobbyist, also had a stake in the gas deals, corporate records show.

At times, even clients' names are camouflaged by lobbyists -- despite federal laws making clear that they aren't allowed to disguise identities by taking fees from intermediaries. Without such rules, says prominent Washington ethics lawyer Jan Baran, "you would just have a bunch of shell organizations identified as clients of lobbyists and lobbying firms."

In 2004, for instance, a United Kingdom shell company called Foruper Ltd., which had no assets or employees, paid Barbour Griffith $820,000. Foruper was established by an attorney who structured the natural-gas deals being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department. Prosecutors are investigating whether there are ties between the attorney who set up Foruper and Mr. Mogilevich, Mr. Sessions's client.

In its filings, Barbour Griffith said the fees were for "promotion of greater cooperation and financial ties between Eastern Europe and the West."

In 2002 and 2003, a group called "Friends of Ukraine" paid Barbour Griffith $320,000. Tax records show that Friends of Ukraine, which no longer exists, was headquartered at Barbour Griffith's own office in Washington. The group's chairman was firm partner Lanny Griffith. Mr. Griffith said in an email that the firm as a policy doesn't discuss client matters but added that Barbour Griffith "has been scrupulous in our compliance" with laws governing the disclosure of lobbying clients.

Barbour Griffith is locked in a legal battle with associates of Mr. Reiman, the Russian minister, whose Washington adviser is a former Wall Street Journal reporter named Mark D'Anastasio. Mr. D'Anastasio said he once helped Mr. Reiman as a favor to a friend but doesn't work for him.

Longstanding federal laws require Americans to register with the federal government if they do lobbying or public-relations work for foreign clients. But details in those filings often offer only a vague sense of the work being done.

Mr. Dole, for instance, disclosed in lobby filings with the U.S. Senate his work for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. He described it as involving "U.S. Department of State visa policies and procedures."

Mr. Deripaska, who has close ties to the Kremlin, emerged from Russia's "aluminum wars" of the 1990s with a virtual monopoly on the nation's aluminum production.
Mr. Deripaska has long been dogged by allegations from business rivals in courts in the U.S. and U.K. that he used bribery, intimidation and violence to amass his fortune. Those accusations, which he denies, have never been substantiated and no criminal charges have been filed. But for years they helped keep the State Department from granting him a visa.

In 2003, the Russian industrialist paid $300,000 to Mr. Dole's law firm, Alston & Bird, according to lobbying reports. After that, Mr. Dole worked to persuade U.S. officials his client isn't a criminal and that his business operations are transparent, said people with knowledge of the matter. In 2005, the State Department reversed itself and granted the visa. Mr. Deripaska then paid Mr. Dole and his firm an additional $260,000, filings show.

Mr. Deripaska traveled to Washington in 2005 and also made trips to the U.S. last year, said people with knowledge of the situation.

Mr. Dole and a State Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Simon Moyse, a London-based spokesman for Mr. Deripaska, said the businessman currently possesses a multiple-entry U.S. visa. He declined to comment further or provide documentation of Mr. Deripaska's visa status.

The former Dole strategist Mr. Manafort and a former Dole fund raiser, Bruce Jackson, have received fees and donations from Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, the political patron of Ukrainian Prime Minister Yanukovich.

Messrs. Manafort and Jackson played prominent roles in the Ukrainian's recent visit to Washington. The visit included meetings with U.S. officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney. A company controlled by Mr. Akhmetov donated $300,000 in 2005 to a human-rights charity run by Mr. Jackson and his wife, an Internal Revenue Service document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal shows. Mr. Jackson said he was grateful for the support.

Mr. Manafort, who isn't registered as a consultant to the Ukrainian leader, didn't respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Sessions's client, Mr. Mogilevich, is accused in a 45-count racketeering and money-laundering indictment in Philadelphia of masterminding an elaborate stock fraud using a web of shell companies in Europe. The Justice Department also is investigating whether there are any ties between Mr. Mogilevich and a recent series of billion-dollar natural-gas deals between Russian gas giant OAO Gazprom and Ukraine, people familiar with the matter said. The probe is being led by the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section.

According to people familiar with the matter, Mr. Sessions recently approached former colleagues at Justice with an unusual offer: Mr. Mogilevich would provide the U.S. with intelligence on Islamist terrorism if prosecutors opened negotiations to resolve his legal problems in the U.S. Federal prosecutors rejected that offer, lawyers and others familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Sessions's firm and a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

The Mogilevich talks were brokered by a prominent Washington security expert named Neil C. Livingstone, who was briefly in the news during the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal for his work on terrorism issues with White House aide Oliver North.

He declined to discuss the Mogilevich talks, other than to say they involved "very sensitive issues."

Until recently, Mr. Livingstone was chief executive of GlobalOptions, a Washington corporate-intelligence firm he founded. Mr. Sessions sits on the firm's advisory board. Most of its clients, the firm says, "operate in Russia and the Caribbean."

GlobalOptions has worked with former Soviet businessmen in the past. In 2004, Mr. Livingstone said, lobbyists at Barbour Griffith introduced GlobalOptions to a Cyprus-based firm called Highrock Holdings. Highrock is controlled by Dimytro Firtash, a Ukrainian businessman who acknowledges the company's major shareholders once included Mr. Mogilevich's wife.

In 2003-2005, Mr. Firtash brokered several billion-dollar deals between Gazprom and the government of Ukraine. They netted big profits for Highrock -- and criticism from the U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine at the time for the deals' lack of transparency.

Mr. Livingstone said Highrock hired GlobalOptions in 2004 to help it win federal safety certification for passenger jets it hoped to export to Central Asia.

However, in a recent lawsuit filed by GlobalOptions against Highrock claiming unpaid bills, the security firm alleged that Mr. Firtash hired GlobalOptions for an unspecified "special operation" on behalf of a Ukrainian government official. The two sides ceased litigating the suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, after the bill was paid, but the suit was never withdrawn.

"We have no knowledge of a company called GlobalOptions," a spokesman for Mr. Firtash said, adding that he severed his ties to Mr. Mogilevich several years ago.

neue Ausbildungsart bei der Bundeswehr?

Link: sevenload.com

TRANSLATION FROM 1:08

Training instructor: You're in the Bronx, a black van pulls up in front of you and three African-Americans get out and start really insulting your mother... act!

Trainee: Motherfucker! Motherfcuker!

UK reporters union to boycott Israel

George Conger
THE JERUSALEM POST

Britain's National Union of Journalists denounced Israel on Friday for its "military adventures" in Gaza and Lebanon, called on the government to impose sanctions and urged a boycott of Israeli goods.

By a vote of 66 to 54, the annual delegate's meeting of Britain's largest trade union for journalists called for "a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions, and [for] the [Trades Union Congress] to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government."

Some of the union's 40,000 members decried its "trendy lefty" agenda. Other motions before the four-day meeting in Birmingham, which ends Sunday, included condemnations of the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and support for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

The boycott motion was the third clause of a larger anti-Israel resolution proposed by the union's South Yorkshire branch that condemned Israel's "savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon" last summer and the "slaughter of civilians in Gaza" in recent years.

Motion 38 also called for supporting the NGOs Jews for Justice, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and the Council for the Advancement of British-Arab Understanding.

After an hour of debate, a motion to sever the boycott clause from the condemnation motion was adopted. The motion condemning Israel's "savage" behavior toward Palestinian civilians in the wake of "the defeat of its army" by Hizbullah passed by a wide margin.

Following two abortive hand counts, the boycott motion passed by 66 to 54.

The Daily Telegraph's Washington correspondent, Toby Harnden, characterized the vote as "inane, ineffectual, counterproductive and insulting to the intelligence."

"Why should my dues be spent on anti-Israel posturing of which I and many other members want no part?" Harnden wrote on his Telegraph blog, condemning the motion as "tendentious and politically-loaded propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness."

Craig McGinty, a freelance journalist and member of the Union of Journalists asked on his blog, "How boycotting any nation's goods, whether it's Israel, China or Umpah Lumpah Land will help improve the lot of both staff and freelance journalists."

Former Guardian reporter and Yahoo Europe news director Lloyd Shepherd quipped that he now looked "forward to similar boycotts of Saudi oil (abuse of women and human rights), Turkish desserts (limits to freedom of speech) and, of course, the immediate replacement of all stationery in the NUJ's offices which has been made or assembled in China."

On the same day the National Union of Journalists condemned Israel, the organization's international affiliate, the International Federation of Journalists, called on the Palestinian Authority to secure the release of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped five weeks ago by Palestinian gunmen in Gaza.

IFJ general-secretary Aidan White urged the "Palestinian government to do everything in its power to make sure [Johnston] is released immediately."

The kidnapping had done "great harm not just to journalism but to the development of the region in general by making it impossible for journalists to work safely and report on developments there," he said.

Johnston's kidnapping was not on the NUJ's agenda.

Fugitive says he met missing ex-FBI agent in Iran

FINANCIAL TIMES

An American fugitive living in Iran since he murdered an Iranian opposition activist in the US in 1980 has revealed that he met a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent shortly before the latter disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish a month ago.

US authorities have been anxiously seeking information about the former agent, Robert Levinson, for several weeks. The Iranian foreign ministry says it is trying to clarify his whereabouts. US officials suspect he is in Iranian detention.

European diplomats in Washington hesitate to describe Mr Levinson as a "hostage", saying details of his case remain murky.

They are concerned that the US, Britain and Iran are stumbling into a newphase of tit-for-tat prisoner-taking that was kicked off when the US detained five Iranian officials in Iraq in January, sparking anger in Tehran.

The US State Department has revealed few details about Mr Levinson's visitto Iran, insisting he was there on purely private business.

But Dawud Salahuddin, an American who converted to Islam and was given refuge in Iran in 1980, shed light on the mystery when he confirmed to the Financial Times in Tehran that he had met Mr Levinson in a hotel on Kish on March 8.

Mr Salahuddin, known in Iran as Hassan Abdulrahman, said he was detained by officials in plain clothes at 11pm and taken from the room he shared with Mr Levinson to be questioned about his Iranian passport. Mr Salahuddin was freed the next afternoon and told by the officials that Mr Levinson had flown back to Dubai.

"I don't think he is missing, but don't want to point my finger at anyone. Some people know exactly where he is," Mr Salahuddin said. "He came only to see me."

According to Mr Salahuddin, the meeting was only to put Mr Levinson in touch with Iranian authorities to help his investigations on smuggling of cigarettes as part of the former agent's work for a tobacco company.

"What he was trying to do in Kish was to find a channel to introduce him to authorities in Tehran to help find out about networks involved in smuggling of cigarettes, because his contractor company has been losing a lot of money."

His account of their meeting confirmed the suspicions of friends of Mr Levinson in the US who believe he was arrested after meeting Mr Salahuddin.

Mr Salahuddin has admitted in interviews to killing Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former Iranian diplomat under the shah, in Maryland in 1980, shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.

In the past he has expressed an interest in returning to the US to face justice. He has also written about his long-distance relationship with a police detective, the late Carl Shoffler, who wanted to get him back to the US.

US officials have stressed that Mr Levinson, whose expertise lies in Russian criminal gangs and counterfeiting, was not in Kish on US government business.

Mr Salahuddin is worried about Mr Levinson's health but he is also confident "he is well taken care of" by Iranian authorities.

He insisted Mr Levinson was innocent, blaming both Iranians for their "paranoia" about Americans and the US for its foreign policy which had made the former FBI agent "an innocent victim".

How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War

Intelligence Failures Surrounded Inquiry on Iraq-Niger Uranium Claim

by Peter Eisner
WASHINGTON POST

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

READ FULL STORY

The Ball Lightning Automatic Fighter

Excerpted from Intercept—But Don't Shoot by Renato Vesco.

“ . . . Parallel with the formation of the special S.S. Air Corps, the S.S. Technical General Staff had not only espoused Marshal Goering's pressing demands for the preparation of the ‘decisive’ fighter, but had implemented them by having all the aeronautic advances of the past two years sent to the industrial combine of the ‘G. Werke.’ Thus the principle of the symmetrical circular aircraft was combined with direct gyroscopic stabilization; synthetic fire-damp was combined with the multiple-batteried blower cannon; a gelatinous organic metallic hypercombustible was combined with the total reaction turbine; television-controlled flying was combined with vertical take-off and landing; armor that was sensitive to small-caliber projectiles and radio control that was free of enemy jamming were combined with the active blinding of enemy radar; infrared search ‘eyes’ were combined with electrostatic weapon firing. This marked the rapid development of the Feuerball, which finally became a weapon. The Kugelblitz (Ball Lightning), which apparently for greater safety combined the electrostatic firing device with an analogous short-wave device manufactured by the Patent-Verwertungs Gesellschaft of Salzburg, lumped together in a single compact mass the wings, tail, and fuselage of ordinary planes, but it had nothing in common with them in either form or performance. It was the first example of the ‘jet-lift’ aircraft.”
Vesco, 1971: pp 156-157.

“After a single lucky wartime mission, the Kugelblitz was subsequently destroyed by technical detachments of retreating S.S. troops, and thanks to the instructions that had been given to the investigators of the T Force by the exceedingly strict British military censorship, nothing else has come out since then.

Even if ufologists do not know it or refuse to admit it, the Kugelblitz, older brother of the Feuerball antiradar device, is the second authentic antecedent of the present-day flying saucers and it is with them—and with the other German devices of the same family (spinning bombs, lenticular bombs, ramming fighters, and flying spheres)—that the true history or, if you like, the prehistory of the UFO question begins. . . . ”
Vesco, 1971: p 157.

The Anti-Radar Feuerball

Excerpted from Intercept—But Don't Shoot by Renato Vesco.

Subsequently other flyers encountered the mysterious Foo Fighters, but having learned their lesson from the fate of their colleagues, they never mentioned them in their flight reports.

Pilots McFalls and Baker were the ones who broke this imposed silence. They too were from the 4i5th Squadron, and their very short but detailed report forced Air Force intelli-gence to consider the matter seriously:

"At 0600 [on December 22], near Hagenau, at 10,000 feet altitude, two very bright lights climbed toward us from the ground. They leveled off and stayed on the tail of our plane. They were huge bright orange lights. They stayed there for two minutes. On my tail all the time. They were under perfect control [by operators on the ground]. Then they turned away from us, and the fire seemed to go out." The rest of the report was censored. Apparently it went on to mention the plane's radar and its sudden malfunctioning.

Two nights later the same pilots were flying over the Rhine when they were "attacked" by a glowing red ball that suddenly "changed into an airplane which did a wing over! Then it dived and disappeared." Additional censored lines.

Knowledge of these facts, which were being increasingly repeated, finally caught the attention of military publications. During the last days of December 1944, stories were leaked to the American Legion Magazine, which published the personal opinions of several U.S. Intelligence officers and suggested that the Foo Fighters were radio-controlled devices that the Germans sent up to baffle the radar of the night raiders. Picking up the story, the newspapers dug up Hitler's threatening speeches boasting of the imminent use of certain secret weapons capable of compromising or at least delaying the Allied victory.

In an effort to dissipate apprehension, on January 1, 1945, the science editor of the Associated Press, Howard W. Blakeslee, gave a radio talk in which he accepted the official view of Intelligence and assured his vast audience that the balls of light reported by flyers over France were simply St. Elmo's fire—natural and spontaneous lights produced by mutual electrostatic induction by the very craft flying the missions. And since the lights were immaterial, radar could not pick them up.

The Yellowstone Yo-Yo

Excerpted from Intercept—But Don't Shoot by Renato Vesco.

On July 7, 1947, a twin-engined P-38 fighter that had been converted into a photoreconnaissance plane for the photo-graphic service of U.S. Army Ordnance was flying at about 30,000 feet in the direction of the Air Force base in Bozeman, Montana.

The sky along the extreme northern edge of Yellowstone National Park was completely free of clouds. Except for a little trouble with the oil system of the engines—a not particularly serious matter, in any case—the flight was proceeding rou-tinely.

Suddenly the photographer shouted: "Look! They're coming! They've almost caught up with us!"

"What? Who's coming?" asked the astonished pilot. What could possibly threaten this lonely flight? The war had been over, definitely over, for some time.

"Those things the papers are always talking about."

For a few moments the sinister shadow of a new Pearl Harbor hovered in the minds of the American airmen. The "cold war" was by then an unpleasant but obvious political state of affairs, and hadn't the immense Asian north shown it-self to be an impenetrable fortress hostile to tlie Western peoples?

The European news release of an American wire service that had somehow learned about this militarily "classified" episode quoted Lieutenant Vernon Blair:
". . . And then turning around to speak to the photographer I saw the yo-yo behind me, I call it a yo-yo because I surpris-ingly thought of that toy that I used to play with as a child. We had orders to shoot them down at any cost, but I didn't remember that until afterwards, and although I was flying at 360 miles per hour, the strange aircraft quickly overtook me. I was, however, able to observe it for a few seconds; it had the shape of a very flat oyster and was, as it seemed to me, about fifteen feet or so broad, and about three feet thick. It was flying without making any sound, I mean any sound louder than that produced by my own plane, and emitting a light, luminous trail. Then, as soon as it had overtaken me and 1 was about to try to follow it, 1 saw it open in two, just like an oyster, and flutter down. 1 noticed that it was catching up with at least a dozen yo-yos proceeding in an irregular formation, almost like fighters peeling off for an attack."

"Are you sure that they were metallic objects and not, for example, simply shiny spots moving of their own accord or the effect of some such mirage?"

"The mysterious aircraft seemed to be made of aluminum. They were pearl-gray in color and on the upper side they all had a shining bubble of some transparent material."

"Did you see who was flying them? And why didn't you take any pictures?"

"We wasted some time watching them fly by and trying to determine whether there was anyone on board. They moved quicker than we could act!"

"Did the leader by any chance graze your plane?"

"No, absolutely not. I have no idea why he fell. Perhaps he was already having mechanical trouble or perhaps he accidentally got into my slipstream and was torn apart. As I said, we were going pretty fast.""

The photographer confirmed that he did not have time to aim his large vertical camera at the formation because the objects flew by too rapidly, and his report on the event coincided in its main particulars with that of the pilot (who was described by his direct superiors as a "serious and honest officer, who takes his job seriously"). He added that since he had concentrated his attention on one of the craft that had briefly approached the P-38 more closely than the others, it seemed to him that he had glimpsed a man, the pilot, inside, lying flat in the cabin and looking out the glass porthole in the front of the bubble.

The Great Air "Migration" of 1946

Excerpted from Intercept—But Don't Shoot by Renato Vesco.

Among the fragmentary news stories that reported the trans-fer by the Canadian government of the Turbo-Research Ltd. plants to the Hawker Siddeley Group there were several that referred to the imminence of other radical changes in the local aircraft industry, which because of war production needs had grown quite large, especially in the eastern part of the country, over the preceding five years.

Plans were laid for a sort of gigantic "migration" to the western area of the Dominion, with the formation of research, testing and production centers—centering on the urban area of Vancouver—for new types of planes and engines that would be "Canadian designed and Canadian built" and for the local production of "special fuels." The whole thing was to be ac-complished in record time.

The greatest impulse toward this development, which was rapidly brought to a conclusion, came in the spring of 1946, when Professor B. S, Shenstone—described by the technical journals as a "Canadian scientist with a brilliant scientific background" and an expert in, among other things, problems dealing with the control of the boundary layer—was named general manager and technical assistant to vice-president W. N. Deisher of Avro-Canada. Previously he had been an assistant director in the Ministry of Aircraft Production's office in charge of the development of projects relating to postwar air trans-port.7

But we had an authoritative indication of what was develop-ing in Canada in the fall of 1945, when a brilliant aeronautical future was openly being predicted in England for its overseas dominion. For example, The Aeroplane wrote: "The recent purchase [July 1] of the Victory Aircraft,Ltd., plant at Malton, Ontario, which is at present engaged in the production of the Lincoln bomber, by the Hawker-Siddeley Co., might mean that Canada will become the British Empire's aircraft production centre within the next ten years."8

At the beginning of 1946 the British group also took over the plants of Turbo-Research of Leavside and put them under the administration of its Gas Turbine Division in Malton. Turbo-Research was a government body created in 1944 on the model of the British Power Jets for the study of local problems of jet propulsion. It had an experimental station in Winnipeg.

Foreign aeronautical circles were considerably surprised by all this activity. True, the aeronautical industry was in a state of economic crisis. But the crisis certainly could not be overcome by selling a factory that promised to be highly productive and an experimental center that still had something new to contribute to jet propulsion, which, it should not be forgotten, was then taking its first steps.

It was thought that if the Canadian government had decided that it was a good idea to get rid of the factory and experimental center, perhaps that meant that Canada intended to concentrate its money and energies in some other direction.
When the UFOs appeared over Canada, the country's first crisis in the aviation industry had been laboriously overcome.

Avro Saucers for the Far North?

Excerpted from Intercept—But Don't Shoot by Renato Vesco.

At the beginning of 1953, when no one was thinking about flying discs, they suddenly began to appear in the columns of Canadian newspapers.

On February 11, the Toronto Star announced in a banner headline that flying saucers should no longer be confined to the realm of fantasy, because they were actually being developed in one of Avro-Canada's hangars at the Malton airfield. Two columns of details and the news that the device was supposed to have a top speed of 1500 mph gave the clear impression that the writer had obtained his information from a; very well-informed, if not completely candid, source that obviously worked somewhere in the powerful company.

Certain government experts who were immediately inter-viewed by reporters from the nearby capital sought to extricate themselves from the awkward situation by evasively declaring:

"The Defense authorities are examining all ideas, even revolutionary ones, that have been suggested for the development of new types of supersonic aircraft, also including flying discs. This, however, is still in the beginning phase of research and it will be a number of months before we are able to reach anything positive and seven or more years before we come to actual production."

According to the Star, on February 16 C. D. Howe, minister of defense production, told the House of Commons that "the government was constantly studying 'new concepts and new designs' for fighters . . . adding weight to reports that Avro is even now working on a mock-up model of a 'flying saucer' capable of flying 1500 miles per hour and climbing straight up in the air."

On February 27 the company involved also joined the chorus of "surprising" revelations. The president of the firm, Crawford Gordon, Jr., wrote in its house organ: "Like all aircraft companies who want to stay in business, we are directing a substantial part of our efforts towards new ideas and advanced designs.

"One of our projects can be said to be quite revolutionary in concept and appearance. The prototype being built is so revolutionary that when it flies all other types of supersonic aircraft will become obsolescent. This is all that Avro-Canada are going to say about this project."

After this vague and inconclusive statement, there were almost two months of relative calm. It seemed that the story was about to starve to death from lack of further specifics and that it would go the way of other journalistic revelations. But this was not to be. On April 21, the Toronto Star published the following: "Field Marshal Montgomery . . . became one of a handful of people ever to see Avro's mock-up of a 'flying saucer,' reputed to be capable of flying 1500 miles an hour. A guide who accompanied Montgomery quoted him as describing it as 'fantastic.'. . . Security precautions surrounding this super-secret are so tight that two of Montgomery's escorts from Scotland Yard were barred from the forbidden, screened-off area of the Avro plant."

This news, which was much more authoritative since a noted military personage was involved, gave rise to the strangest deductions. Later, on April 22 and 23, even the austere London Times opened its columns to news from the distant Dominion concerning those flying saucers, which it had hitherto severely banned from its cautious news columns.

On April 24, the Toronto Star confirmed its February story, adding that some of Canada's most noted aeronautical engineers were secretly working on a mysterious flying disc made of metal, wood, and plastics, which would allegedly be the "weapon of the future." For some time, said the Star, there had been rumors that an aircraft of this type was being built in Malton, but no one had got definite confirmation on it.

According to Air Vice Marshal D. M. Smith, what Field Marshal Montgomery had seen was the preliminary study of construction plans for a gyroscopic fighter that could take off vertically and fly at a speed of 1500 mph. A gas turbine would revolve around the pilot, who would be positioned at the center of the disc.

Japan revises role in WWII Okinawa

Textbooks will no longer say army ordered civilians to commit suicide as conflict ended

by Norimitsu Onishi
THE NEW YORK TIMES

(04-01) 04:00 PDT Tokyo -- In another sign that Japan is pressing ahead in revising its history of World War II, new high school textbooks will no longer acknowledge that the Imperial Army was responsible for a major atrocity in Okinawa, the government announced late Friday.

The Ministry of Education ordered publishers to delete passages stating that the Imperial Army ordered civilians to commit mass suicide during the Battle of Okinawa, as the island was about to fall to American troops in the final months of the war.

The decision was announced as part of the ministry's annual screening of all public school textbooks. The ministry also ordered changes to other delicate issues to dovetail with government assertions, even though the screening is supposed to be free of political interference.

"I believe the screening system has been followed appropriately," said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has long campaigned to soften the treatment in textbooks of Japan's wartime conduct.

The decision on the Battle of Okinawa came as a surprise because the ministry had never objected to the description in the past. It followed recent denials by Abe that the military had coerced women into sexual slavery during the war, despite acknowledgements by previous governments that the comfort women were kidnapped and forced into military brothels.

The results of the annual textbook screening are closely watched in China, South Korea and other Asian countries. So the fresh denial of the military's responsibility in the Battle of Okinawa and in sexual slavery -- long accepted as historical facts -- is likely to deepen suspicions in Asia that Tokyo is trying to whitewash its militarist past.

Shortly after assuming office last fall, Abe transformed the Defense Agency into a full ministry. He has said that his most important goal is to revise the American-imposed pacifist constitution, which forbids Japan from having a full-fledged military with offensive capabilities.

Some 200,000 Americans and Japanese died during the Battle of Okinawa, one of the most brutal clashes during the war. It was the only battle on Japanese soil involving civilians, but Okinawa was not just any part of Japan.

Japan officially annexed Okinawa -- a kingdom that, to this day, has retained some of its own culture -- in the late 19th century. During World War II, when many Okinawans still spoke a different dialect, Japanese troops treated the locals brutally. In its history of the war, the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum presents Okinawa as being caught in the fighting between America and Japan -- a starkly different view from Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine war museum, which presents Japan as a liberator of Asia from Western powers.

During the 1945 battle, during which one-quarter of the civilian population was killed, the Japanese army showed indifference to Okinawa's defense and safety. Japanese soldiers used civilians as shields against the Americans, and convinced locals that victorious U.S. soldiers would go on a rampage of killing and raping. With the impending victory of U.S. troops, civilians committed mass suicide, urged on by fanatical Japanese soldiers.

"There were some people who were forced to commit suicide by the Japanese army," one old textbook explained. But in the revision ordered by the ministry, it now reads, "There were some people who were driven to mass suicide."

Other changes are similar -- the change to a passive verb, the disappearance of a subject -- and combine to erase the responsibility of the Japanese military. In explaining its policy change, the ministry said that it "is not clear that the Japanese army coerced or ordered the mass suicides."

As with Abe's denial regarding sexual slavery, the ministry's new position appears to discount overwhelming evidence of coercion, particularly the testimony of victims and survivors themselves.

"There are many Okinawans who have testified that the Japanese army directed them to commit suicide," Ryukyu Shimpo, one of the two major Okinawan newspapers, said in an angry editorial. "There are also people who have testified that they were handed grenades by Japanese soldiers" to blow themselves up.

The editorial described the change as a politically influenced decision that "went along with the government view."

Abe, after co-founding the Group of Young Parliamentarians Concerned About Japan's Future and History Education in 1997, led a campaign to reject what nationalists call a masochistic view of history that has robbed postwar Japanese of pride.

Yasuhiro Nakasone, a former prime minister who is a staunch ally of Abe's, recently denied what he wrote in 1978. In a memoir about his Imperial Navy experiences in Indonesia, titled "Commander of Three Thousand Men at Age Twenty-Three," he wrote that some of his men "started attacking local women or became addicted to gambling.

"For them, I went to great pains, and had a comfort station built," Nakasone wrote, using the euphemism for a military brothel. But in a meeting with foreign journalists a week ago, Nakasone, now 88, issued a flat denial. He said he had actually set up a "recreation center," where his men played Japanese board games like go and shogi.