GOP Chairman Walks Out of Meeting

[When the Patriot Act was first rushed into law in the wake of 9/11, it was -- according to interview comments given to me by House members like Rep. Ron Paul (R), TX and Cynthia McKinney (D), GA -- largely unread by many legislators in either house. It contained some of the most offensive violations of the US Constitution yet witnessed in a nation rushing into totalitarianism and a global energy war. As we reported to you then, the act contained many provisions with built-in "sunset" clauses. Those clauses provided that some of the most draconian parts of the act would expire (hopefully with the end of the national emergency) this year. Now it comes time for the state to retain powers it never intended to surrender and it is clear as to what approach will be taken by GOP leadership. To find out what is at stake if congress makes these sections of the act permanent, please see "The 'F' Word." This remains the most comprehensive analysis of the Patriot Act yet published. You may have forgotten, but FTW has not. We were way ahead of the curve then and we're way ahead of it now.

The key question for you to answer is whether or not you really believe any effective opposition (other than for show purposes) can (or will) be mounted in Congress. If you do, please tell us what courage congress has mustered to successfully oppose anything since 9/11 of this significance. Nonetheless we may well have to try, if for no other reason than to awaken a few other citizens who may become allies. Thankfully, as I documented in Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, a great many municipalities and even a few states have passed resolutions opposing the Patriot Act. Let's see how much courage they show now when it is needed most. Will they grasp that a deeper resistance is now essential?

But if you really think pressuring Congress is going to reverse all that has happened since 9/11, we have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn, lots of hydrogen and zero-point energy to permit you to continue your patterns of consumption, and some stocks we want you to put your pension funds into after refinancing your already overvalued home. Read this story and weep for us all. - MCR]

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

WASHINGTON -- The Republican chairman walked off with the gavel, leaving Democrats shouting into turned-off microphones at a raucous hearing Friday on the Patriot Act.

The House Judiciary Committee hearing, with the two sides accusing each other of being irresponsible and undemocratic, came as President Bush was urging Congress to renew those sections of the post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism law set to expire in September.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the panel, abruptly gaveled the meeting to an end and walked out, followed by other Republicans. Sensenbrenner declared that much of the testimony, which veered into debate over the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, was irrelevant.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., protested, raising his voice as his microphone went off, came back on, and went off again.

"We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it," he said.

Democrats asked for the hearing, the 11th the committee has held on the act since April, saying past hearings had been too slanted toward witnesses who supported the law. The four witnesses were from groups, including Amnesty International USA and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, that have questioned the constitutionality of some aspects of the act, which allows law enforcement greater authority to investigate suspected terrorists.

Nadler said Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, was "rather rude, cutting everybody off in mid-sentence with an attitude of total hostility."

Tempers flared when Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., accused Amnesty International of endangering the lives of Americans in uniform by referring to the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a "gulag." Sensenbrenner didn't allow the Amnesty representative, Chip Pitts, to respond until Nadler raised a "point of decency."

Sensenbrenner's spokesman, Jeff Lungren, said the hearing had lasted two hours and "the chairman was very accommodating, giving members extra time."

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, speaking immediately after Sensenbrenner left, voiced dismay over the proceedings. "I'm troubled about what kind of lesson this gives" to the rest of the world, he told the Democrats remaining in the room.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, in a statement, said the hearing was an example of Republican abuse of power and she would ask House Speaker Dennis Hastert to order an apology from Sensenbrenner.

Former Bush Team Member Says WTC Collapse Likely A Controlled Demolition And 'Inside Job'

Highly recognized former chief economist in Labor Department now doubts official 9/11 story, claiming suspicious facts and evidence cover-up indicate government foul play and possible criminal implications.

A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

"If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling," said Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, a former member of the Bush team who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.

Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, also believes it's 'next to impossible' that 19 Arab Terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding the scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11.

"It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7," said Reynolds this week from his offices at Texas A&M. "If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.

"More importantly, momentous political and social consequences would follow if impartial observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right."

However, Reynolds said "getting it right in today's security state' remains challenging because he claims explosives and structural experts have been intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.

From the beginning, the Bush administration claimed that burning jet fuel caused the collapse of the towers. Although many independent investigators have disagreed, they have been hard pressed to disprove the government theory since most of the evidence was removed by FEMA prior to independent investigation.

Critics claim the Bush administration has tried to cover-up the evidence and the recent 9/11 Commission has failed to address the major evidence contradicting the official version of 9/11.

-- Photos showing people walking around in the hole in the North Tower where 10,000 gallons of jet fuel supposedly was burning..

--When the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower's flames had already vanished, burning for only 16 minutes, making it relatively easy to contain and control without a total collapse.

--The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was suffocating, indicating without added explosive devices the fires could have been easily controlled.

--FDNY fire fighters still remain under a tight government gag order to not discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a similar 9/11 gag order.

--Even the flawed 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible."

-- Fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.

-- WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds.

-- WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams.

-- In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC leaseholder, told the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 that. "may be the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.

-- It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.

Despite the numerous holes in the government story, the Bush administration has brushed aside or basically ignored any and all critics. Mainstream experts, speaking for the administration, offer a theory essentially arguing that an airplane impact weakened each structure and an intense fire thermally weakened structural components, causing buckling failures while allowing the upper floors to pancake onto the floors below.

One who supports the official account is Thomas Eager, professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at MIT. He argues that the collapse occurred by the extreme heat from the fires, causing the loss of loading-bearing capacity on the structural frame.

Eagar points out the steel in the towers could have collapsed only if heated to the point where it "lost 80 percent of its strength," or around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Critics claim his theory is flawed since the fires did not appear to be intense and widespread enough to reach such high temperatures.

Other experts supporting the official story claim the impact of the airplanes, not the heat, weakened the entire structural system of the towers, but critics contend the beams on floors 94-98 did not appear severely weakened, much less the entire structural system.

Further complicating the matter, hard evidence to fully substantiate either theory since evidence is lacking due to FEMA's quick removal of the structural steel before it could be analyzed. Even though the criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be kept for forensic analysis, FEMA had it destroyed or shipped overseas before a serious investigation could take place.

And even more doubt is cast over why FEMA acted so swiftly since coincidentally officials had arrived the day before the 9/11 attacks at New York's Pier 29 to conduct a war game exercise, named "Tripod II."

Besides FEMA's quick removal of the debris, authorities considered the steel quite valuable as New York City officials had every debris truck tracked on GPS and even fired one truck driver who took an unauthorized lunch break.

In a detailed analysis just released supporting the controlled demolition theory, Reynolds presents a compelling case.

"First, no steel-framed skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly hit by aircraft, the third not," said Reynolds. "These extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires made it all the more important to preserve the evidence, mostly steel girders, to study what had happened.

"On fire intensity, consider this benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia's Meridian Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that 'beams and girders sagged and twisted, but despite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage.' Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance to what we observed at the WTC."

After considering both sides of the 9/11 debate and after thoroughly sifting through all the available material, Reynolds concludes the government story regarding all four plane crashes on 9/11 remains highly suspect.

"In fact, the government has failed to produce significant wreckage from any of the four alleged airliners that fateful day. The familiar photo of the Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania shows no fuselage, engine or anything recognizable as a plane, just a smoking hole in the ground," said Reynolds. "Photographers reportedly were not allowed near the hole. Neither the FBI nor the National Transportation Safety Board have investigated or produced any report on the alleged airliner crashes."

Gordon Brown has a new idea about how to "make poverty history" in time for the G8 summit. With Washington so far refusing to double its aid to Africa by 2015, the chancellor is appealing to the "richer oil-producing states" of the Middle East to fill the funding gap. "Oil wealth urged to save Africa," reads the headline in the Observer. Here is a better idea: instead of Saudi Arabia's oil wealth being used to "save Africa", how about if Africa's oil wealth was used to save Africa - along with its gas, diamond, gold, platinum, chromium, ferroalloy and coal wealth?

With all this noblesse oblige focused on saving Africa from its misery, it seems like a good time to remember someone else who tried to make poverty history: Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was killed 10 years ago this November by the Nigerian government - along with eight other Ogoni activists, he was sentenced to death by hanging. Their crime was daring to insist that Nigeria was not poor at all but rich, and that political decisions made in the interests of western multinational corporations kept its people in desperate poverty. Saro-Wiwa gave his life to the idea that the vast oil wealth of the Niger delta must leave behind more than polluted rivers, charred farmland, rancid air and crumbling schools. He asked not for charity, pity or "relief", but for justice. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People demanded that Shell compensate the people from whose land it had pumped roughly $30bn worth of oil since the 1950s. The company turned to the government for help, and the Nigerian military turned its guns on demonstrators. Before his state-ordered hanging, Saro-Wiwa told the tribunal: "I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial ... The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come."

Ten years later, 70% of Nigerians still live on less than $1 a day and Shell is still making superprofits. Equatorial Guinea, which has a major oil deal with ExxonMobil, "got to keep a mere 12% of the oil revenues in the first year of its contract", according to a report on the CBS news programme 60 Minutes - a share so low it would have been scandalous even at the height of colonial oil pillage. This is what keeps Africa poor: not a lack of political will but the tremendous profitability of the current arrangement. Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place on earth, is also its most profitable investment destination. It offers, according to the World Bank's 2003 Global Development Finance report, "the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world". Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are so unspeakably rich. The idea for which Saro-Wiwa died fighting - that the resources of the land should be used to benefit the people of that land - lies at the heart of every anti-colonial struggle in history, from the Boston Tea Party to Iran's turfing
out of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan. This idea has been declared dead by the EU's constitution, by the national security strategy of the US (which describes "free trade" not only as an economic policy but a "moral principle") and by countless trade agreements. And yet it simply refuses to die.

You can see it most clearly in the relentless protests that drove Bolivia's president, Carlos Mesa, to offer his resignation. A decade ago, Bolivia was forced by the IMF to privatise its oil and gas industries on the promise that it would increase growth and spread prosperity. When that didn't work, the lenders demanded that Bolivia make up its budget shortfall by increasing taxes on the working poor. Bolivians had a better idea - take back the gas and use it for the benefit of the country. The debate now is over how much to take back. Evo Morales's Movement Toward Socialism favours taxing foreign profits by 50%. More radical indigenous groups, which have already seen their land stripped of its mineral wealth, want full nationalisation and more participation - what they call "nationalising the government".

You can see it too in Iraq. On June 2 Laith Kubba, spokesman for the Iraqi prime minister, told journalists that the IMF had forced Iraq to increase the price of electricity and fuel in exchange for writing off past debts: "Iraq has $10bn of debts, and I think we cannot avoid this." But days before, in Basra, a historic gathering of independent trade unionists, most of them with the General Union of Oil Employees, insisted that the government could avoid it. At Iraq's first anti-privatisation conference, delegates demanded that the government simply refuse to pay Saddam's "odious" debts and opposed any attempts to privatise state assets, including oil. Neoliberalism, an ideology so powerful it tries to pass itself off as "modernity" while its maniacal true believers masquerade as disinterested technocrats, can no longer claim to be a consensus. It was decisively rejected by French voters when they said no to the EU constitution, and you can see how hated it has become in Russia, where large majorities despise the profiteers of the disastrous 1990s privatisations and few mourned the recent sentencing of oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

All of this makes for interesting timing for the G8 summit. Bob Geldof and the Make Poverty History crew have called for a million people to go to Edinburgh and form a giant white band around the city centre on July 2 - a reference to the ubiquitous Make Poverty History bracelets. But it seems a shame for a million people to travel all that way to be a giant bauble, a collective accessory to power. How about if, when all those people join hands, they declare themselves not a bracelet but a noose - a noose around the lethal economic policies that have already taken so many lives, for lack of medicine and clean water, for lack of justice. A noose like the one that killed Ken.

BACKGROUND BOOKS:

RICHARD JANNACCIO, SELLING THE WEST NILE VIRUS VACCINE
THE SUNSHINE PROJECT

Biowarfare and "domestic violence"

Monday, June 13, 2005

Last week the body of Dr Leonid Strachunsky, described as "World Health Organization expert and head of the anti-microbe Therapy Research Institute," was found in his Moscow hotel room. He had arrived from Smolensk, en route to the United States, and died of blunt-force trauma to the head. (Some stories identify the murder weapon as a champagne bottle.) His laptop and mobile phone were missing.

According to MosNews, "some sources link Wednesday's murder of...Strachunsky, who specialized in creating microbes resistant to biological weapons, to [a] hepatitis outbreak" which, according to the latest report, has afflicted more than 500 people in Russia's Tver region. However, a Moscow police source tells Interfax that the murder was "probably domestic violence."

There's likely no intentionality behind the hepatitis outbreak. The Tver governor is probably right; it's nothing but "tainted food," just as last winter 120 children in North Ossetia were likely accidentally poisoned by contaminated milk, and the drops of mercury that Russians have found in fruit juice and candy are presumably isolated incidents of industrial sabotage. But there should be a degree of uncertainty about such stories in every nation that conducts bioweapons research, because its purpose is to hone the kill potential of the natural world, and researchers' test subjects have often been their fellow citizens.

Americans should know this. That most still don't - or do and don't care - makes me wonder, and not merely figuratively, what they're putting in the water.

And in the air, even. In the Fall of 1999, field tests began for a vaccine developed by OraVax Corporation, under license to the Army biowarfare lab at Fort Detrick (from which the anthrax of the attacks of 2001 was sourced), to a genetically-altered Japanese encephalitis virus the Army had created. Coincidentally encephalitis, in the form of West Nile Virus, also broke out in New York City.

Leonard Horowitz, in Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare, cites the conclusions of researcher Patricia Doyle that "the sudden emergence of WNV, never before a public concern, was likely a deliberate release to 'test that city's biowarfare response, and make at least one corporation a sizable profit.'" (One year before becoming the exclusive manufacturer of WNV vaccine, OraVax had been delisted by NASDAQ, and was facing insolvency.)