Be

Pine Bluff Arsenal

I had a student about 8 years ago, she was a scientist, and worked at the Pine Bluff Arsenal. She moved out of the state because she didn't see any safe way to destroy the weapons.
She thought incineration was a very bad idea. Hope your not downwind.

Arkansas arsenal begins destroying weapons3/29/2005, 11:47 p.m. ETBy DAVID HAMMER The Associated Press

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — The Pine Bluff Arsenal began destroying its stockpile of 3,850 tons of chemical weapons Tuesday, incinerating two rockets laced with sarin nerve gas.
We are making chemical weapons history by destroying weapons stored here more than 60 years," said Dale Ormond, deputy assistant secretary of the Army.
Another 28 rockets were scheduled to be destroyed Wednesday.
The arsenal showed video of the automated process inside the disposal facility. The rockets were punctured with three holes and drained. The chemical agent flowed into an incineration furnace.
Meanwhile, the rocket tubes were sliced into eight pieces and fed into a separate furnace, where they were "safely and irreversibly destroyed," said Randy Long, Pine Bluff Arsenal's site project manager.
Twelve percent of the nation's chemical weapons are stored at the Pine Bluff Arsenal, and the military plans to incinerate all of them by 2010 to comply with an international treaty that says countries must destroy their stockpiles by 2012. Chemical weapons have also been incinerated at other military depots.
M-55 rockets are loaded with sarin nerve gas and have propellants and rocket motors.
Opponents fearful of some kind accident have not had much success in recruiting members in Arkansas, where the community has welcomed the arsenal's jobs and federal funding.
At Anniston, Ala., where disposal of a smaller stockpile started in 2003, authorities distributed gas masks to surrounding communities, but Pine Bluff Arsenal officials determined that was not necessary.
The rockets have been stored at the Pine Bluff Arsenal, about 40 miles south of Little Rock, since the early 1960s.
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posted by ... @ 9:13 PM 1 comments

Read the last sentance and you will feel better!

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050319/toc.asp
Nano Hazards: Exposure to minute particles harms lungs, circulatory systemJanet Raloff
Nanomaterials, the current darlings of industry, are showing up in products ranging from cosmetics to electronics. However, new animal studies indicate that inhaling these microscopic spheres and tubes could cause big trouble, especially for workers who manufacture and handle them.
SMALL-SCALE HAVOC. Healthy mouse-lung tissue (left) contrasts starkly with nanotube-laden scar tissue (center, at right). Right image depicts carbon nanoparticles in a clump (at upper right) in a lung air space and moving through tissue to reach the blood cell below.R. Hunter, Univ. Texas Med. Ctr. (left and center images); Shimada
That message came through loudly in New Orleans last week at the Society of Toxicology meeting, where several dozen reports unveiled details about how nanopollutants interact with the body. Most of the studies focused on the effects of lung exposures because the particles' size—just a few billionths of a meter in diameter—permits them to reach the most vulnerable lung tissue.
John T. James of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, and his colleagues squirted nanoparticles into the respiratory tracts of mice and then examined the rodents after 1 week and after 3 months. Although sootlike carbon nanospheres caused no harm, an equal mass of commercially available carbon nanotubes wreaked significant lung damage, even killing a few animals.
In one especially graphic effect, immune system cells called macrophages trapped nanotubes but then died. The ensuing inflammation scarred lung tissue by creating patches, called granulomas, that entombed the nanotubes.
James describes the doses that his team used as "not terribly unrealistic." He estimates that at the current federal limit for inhaled carbon, workers could receive equivalent doses, scaled for body size, in 17 days.
Petia Simeonova and her coworkers at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown, W. Va., also observed particle-rich lung granulomas in mice receiving similar doses of carbon nanotubes. The researchers also measured damage to mitochondrial DNA in the heart and its aortic artery. Mitochondrial damage foreshadows the onset of atherosclerosis.
Mice that had been exposed to nanotubes showed substantial DNA damage that persisted for at least 6 months. Simeonova also reported substantial oxidative damage—another atherosclerosis risk—in the animals' hearts, aortas, and lungs.
At the meeting, Akinori Shimada of Tottori (Japan) University presented the first series of images depicting nanoparticles moving from lungs into blood. Within a minute of contacting a mouse lung's tiniest airways, carbon nanoparticles began funneling through tiny gaps between surface cells and burrowing into capillaries.
There, the negatively charged nanoparticles glommed on to red blood cells, which ordinarily carry a positive charge. If this attachment reverses the blood cell's surface charge, Shimada speculates, it could foster clumping—even clots.
Researchers from the University of Rochester (N.Y.) reported an increased susceptibility to clotting in rabbits that had inhaled carbon nanospheres. The team damaged blood vessels by shining laser light onto the animals' ears and then measured how long it took for a clot to form.
To mimic bad urban air pollution, the researchers gave the rabbits air containing 70 micrograms of nanospheres per cubic meter for up to 3 hours. In this regimen, clotting took less than half as long as it had in a trial 2 days earlier with the same animals breathing clean air. The effect shows up quickly after exposure, reports Alison Elder, suggesting that nanoparticles travel from the lungs to the bloodstream rather than send clotting agents from the lungs.
Many researchers who acknowledge the potential dangers of nanoparticles point out that industry safely uses countless toxic and dangerous substances. "The important thing is dose," said Anthony Seaton, emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, at the meeting. There should be little problem if industry keeps worker exposures low, he says.

posted by ... @ 8:50 PM 0 comments

Halliburton Destroys Babylon

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. Posted March 25, 2005.

The U.S.-led destruction on the ancient city is one of the most 'reckless acts of cultural vandalism.'
The sterile term "collateral damage" justifiably brings to mind the human tragedy of war. But the devastating and wanton damage inflicted on the ancient city of Babylon by U.S.-led military forces gives another meaning to the term. In this case, we are witnessing violence against one of the world's greatest cultural treasures. Babylon's destruction, according to The Guardian, "must rank as one of the most reckless acts of cultural vandalism in recent memory." When Camp Babylon was established by U.S.-led international forces in April 2003, leading archeologists and international experts on ancient civilizations warned of potential peril and damage. It was "tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain," according to a damning report issued in January by the British Museum.
The report, drafted by Dr. John Curtis – one of the world's leading archeologists – documents that the military base, built and overseen by Kellog, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, jeopardized what is often referred to as the "mother of all archeological sites." Helicopter landing places and parking lots for heavy vehicles caused substantial damage to the Ishtar Gate, one of the most famous monuments from antiquity. U.S. military vehicles crushed 2,600 year old brick pavement, archeological fragments were scattered across the site, trenches were driven into ancient deposits and military earth-moving projects contaminated the site for future generations of scientists. As several eminent archeologists have pointed out, while the looting of the Iraqi Museum in the first days of the war was horrifying, the destruction of ancient sites has even more dire consequences for those trying to piece together the history of civilization. Making matters worse, the base has created a tempting target for insurgent attacks in recent months. As Yaseen Madhloom al-Rubai reports in the valuable Iraq Crisis Report (No. 117), "It was one of the seven wonders of the world, but ancient Babylon attracts more insurgents than tourists these days."
"Turning Babylon into a military site was a fatal mistake," the Iraqi culture minister told Iraq Crisis Report. "It has witnessed much destruction and many terrorist attacks since it was occupied by Coalition Forces. We cannot determine the scale of destruction now. As a first step, we have completely closed the sites, before calling in international experts to evaluate the damage done to the [ancient] city and the compensation the ministry should ask Coalition forces to pay. We will run a campaign to save the city."
That campaign is finding allies among a growing network of archeologists outraged by the unnecessary destruction of an irreplaceable site. John Curtis, author of the British Museum's report, has called for an international investigation by archeologists chosen by the Iraqis to survey and record all the damage done.
The overall situation in Iraq is overwhelmingly a human tragedy but that does not exempt the U.S. authorities, who set up Camp Babylon, from the consequences of what The Guardian called an act of "cultural barbarism" – carried out in their name by a subsidiary of Halliburton. There must be a full investigation of the damage caused, and Halliburton should be made to offer whatever compensation is possible for the wanton destruction of the world's cultural treasure.

posted by ... @ 9:34 PM 0 comments

More Bush Hypocrisy

Dictators, Tyrants and Fools By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t Perspective
Tuesday 22 March 2005
The greatest strength of the Republican majority in Congress and their allies in the White House is their unfailing ability to say and do anything, no matter how hypocritical or brazen or wrong, in order to win. The second greatest strength of the Republican majority in Congress and their allies in the White House is the simple fact that the news media almost never calls them on this, but that is an essay for another time.
We all know by now about the enormous raft of lies that were fed to the American people and the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Would you be shocked to know, however, that they are doing it again? Earlier this year, the Bush administration told allies in Asia that North Korea had supplied nuclear materials to Libya. This was a bald-faced lie; North Korea sold nuclear materials to Pakistan, an ally of the United States. Pakistan turned around and sold the stuff to Libya, but the Bush crew decided to fire a salvo of lies and disinformation at North Korea, and US allies in Asia.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday the fallout from these lies. "The Bush administration's approach, intended to isolate North Korea," wrote the Post, "instead left allies increasingly doubtful as they began to learn that the briefings omitted essential details about the transaction, U.S. officials and foreign diplomats said in interviews. North Korea responded to public reports last month about the briefings by withdrawing from talks with its neighbors and the United States."
This is why Condi Rice is touring Asia right now; some outraged allies have to be soothed. No, we didn't really lie to you. It's just that we can't make Pakistan look bad under any circumstances, and we surely can't have people know that our ally was selling nuclear materials to Libya. According to the Post, "The White House declined to offer an official to comment by name about the new details concerning Pakistan. A prepared response attributed to a senior administration official said that the U.S. government 'has provided allies with an accurate account of North Korea's nuclear proliferation activities.'"
Yes, the administration provided an accurate account…except for the fact that it was all wrong and designed to cover the backside of a rogue nation ally. These people will say anything. It is their greatest strength.
Take, for another example, the widely promulgated idea that 'Freedom is on the March' in Iraq. Yesterday, according to wire reports, freedom in Iraq looked like this: At least 45 people died in violence in Iraq, including a US soldier. Rebels struck around Iraq, hitting security forces in several parts of the country. In Mosul, a suicide bomber with a fake badge slipped into a building housing the provincial anti-corruption department and detonated himself inside the office of its chief, General Walid Kachmoula, killing him and two of his guards.
Attackers struck again a few hours later, opening fire on the procession bearing Kachmoula's coffin as it made its way to the cemetery, killing two people and wounding 14. Two unidentified bodies, shot in the chest and head, were discovered. In Baquba, gunmen attacked a police station, killing at least four police and wounding two. A truck bomb rammed into the entrance of an Iraqi army barracks, wounding 17 people. In Baghdad, 24 Iraqi rebels were killed and six coalition soldiers wounded in a firefight. In the northern city of Kirkuk, a U.S. soldier was killed and three others wounded when a roadside bomb hit their patrol.
Yet Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Fox News interviewer, "It's a wonderful thing to see 25 million Iraqis liberated, to see their economy improve as it has been, to see their political process move toward democracy."
They will say anything. It is their greatest strength.
Take, for a truly nauseating example, the grotesque charade that has unfolded around Terri Schiavo. Schiavo, as most know by now, is the Florida woman who languishes in a vegetative state while religious conservatives use her parents to keep her alive as a means to score political points. Sunday night saw an unprecedented barnstorming of legislation through Congress, pushed by the Republican majority, to keep Schiavo from being removed from the machines that are keeping her alive. The fact that her husband wants the measures to sustain her life ended, and that Florida law clearly gives him the right to make this decision, did not get in the way of a good chunk of political theater.
The myriad ways in which this issue rings the hypocrisy bells are difficult to quantify. The GOP, party of states rights, the sanctity of marriage, family values and religious freedom, placed the federal government into the role of mother, father, husband, wife, doctor and priest in this matter, and never mind the fact that they bulldozed Florida law again.
There is also the matter of the GOP talking points memo floating around out there which specifically states Ms. Schaivo's condition is a perfect wedge with which to remove Florida's Democratic Senator, Bill Nelson. Never mind the fact that the 'Culture of Life' advocates pushing this are also greasing the skids towards more executions of prisoners, or that they support a war that has killed and wounded well over 200,000 people in Iraq.
The next time you find yourself in a debate about Ms. Schiavo with a person who agrees with Bush and the Congressional majority on this, ask them about Sun Hudson. Hudson was born with a genetic disorder and was sustained by machines from the day of his birth. The Texas hospital housing him decided there was no point in sustaining his care, and Hudson was removed from his machines. He died at five months old.
This happened last week.
Five-month-old Sun Hudson was removed from his life-sustaining machines by a Texas law signed by then-Governor George W. Bush in 1999. The law allows patients deemed unsalvageable by the hospital to be removed from ventilators and other medical apparatus, with a ten-day window given to the families of the stricken to find another facility before the plug is pulled.
Sun Hudson was African-American, and neither Congress nor Mr. Bush came storming to his rescue before his death last week. Believe this: If Ms. Schiavo were an African American child, a Hispanic mother, an Iraqi wife, an Afghani grandmother, an American soldier suffering massive brain trauma from an explosion in Mosul, anyone from Darfur or the Congo, if she had been anything other than a white woman in a Fundamentalist-controlled state, we would have never, ever, heard of her.
The piercing hypocrisy found in this hue and cry over Schiavo is the simple fact that the GOP majority pushing this doesn't give a tinker's damn about her condition or her fate. They want to cobble together some kind of bastardized precedent with this to knock down a woman's right to choose, and they'd like to tag Nelson while they're at it. Beyond that, this is a smokescreen to cover their true intentions.
Understand that whatever these people are making noise about is not what they actually care about. They did it a couple of weeks ago; while shouting about Social Security reform and getting everyone all fired up over that, they passed the Bankruptcy bill, the Gun Manufacturers Shield Law and opened ANWR for drilling. They've known their Social Security 'reforms' have been dead in the water for weeks, but kept pushing them to distract opponents from their true goals, which they reached in fine style.
So it goes with Ms. Schiavo. They don't care about her. They want everyone looking at her, however, while they prepare to destroy the filibuster in the Senate in order to appoint a few far-right judges to the bench. Never mind that the Senate has confirmed 204 of Bush's judicial nominations, blocking only 10, which is an approval rate of 95%. The GOP majority still shouts "Obstructionist!" and is preparing to annihilate the one firebreak given to the minority that keeps truly bad nominees from becoming judges. They will try to do this soon, while everyone is caught up in the saga of the Schiavo feeding tube.
These people will say anything, and use anyone as a pawn, no matter how gross or disrespectful or hypocritical or flatly illegal it may be. They do this, ultimately, because they want everything their own way, with no room for compromise whatsoever. It is their greatest strength. It may also come to be their greatest weakness.
Only dictators, tyrants and fools believe they can have it all their way. Every dictator, tyrant and fool in history who has tried to have it all his way has failed in spectacular fashion. Often, that failure brings about the destruction of their family, their army, or their entire nation. Yet the lessons of history do not resonate with dictators, tyrants and fools. That, more than anything else, is why they always fail.
What we have seen in these last years is mushmouthed dictators in the Executive, petty tyrants in Congress, and fools in between trying to have it all their own way. They will fail, as ever. The backlash comes. Mahatma Gandhi once said, "When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it, always."
Always.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.


Bush Laws in Schiavo Case, Texas at Odds The Associated Press
Tuesday 21 March 2005
Austin, Texas - The federal law President Bush signed to prolong Terri Schiavo's life in Florida appears to conflict with a Texas law he signed as governor, attorneys familiar with the legislation said Monday.
The 1999 Advance Directives Act in Texas allows for a patient's surrogate to make end-of-life decisions and spells out how to proceed if a hospital or other health provider disagrees with a decision to maintain or halt life-sustaining treatment.
If a doctor refuses to honor a decision, the case goes before a medical committee. If the committee agrees with the doctor, the guardian or surrogate has 10 days to agree or seek treatment elsewhere.
Thomas Mayo, an associate law professor at Southern Methodist University who helped draft the Texas law, said that if the Schiavo case had happened in Texas, her husband would have been her surrogate decision-maker. Because both he and her doctors were in agreement, life support would have been discontinued.
The Texas law does not include a provision for dealing with conflicts among family members who disagree with the surrogate decision-maker -- as has happened in the Schiavo case -- although in practice hospital ethics committees would try to resolve such disputes, he said.
The Texas law, Mayo said, tends to keep such cases out of court, allowing life-support decisions to be made privately. However, within the last month two Houston cases went to court. One case resulted in a baby being removed from life support; he died soon afterward. The other led to the transfer of an elderly man to a nursing home.
Bruce Howell, a private health law attorney in Dallas who was involved in updates to the state law in 2003, agreed with Mayo that Bush's signing of the federal law appears to be inconsistent with his actions as governor.
"These are incredibly private decisions," Howell said. "I would hope that this case does not result in federal law overriding what I think was carefully and incredibly well intentionally thought out."
The White House said Monday the law allowing a federal court to intervene in the Schiavo case was narrowly tailored and not intended as a precedent for Congress to step into such battles.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan dismissed the claim that Bush's signature on the Texas law conflicts with his action Monday. "The legislation he signed is consistent with his views," McClellan said.
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posted by ... @ 2:00 PM 0 comments

The Grail Quest and The Destiny of Man

In the early sixteenth century, Pope Leo X is on record as declaring: "It has served us well, this myth of Christ."


Rennes-le-chateau and the Accursed Treasure

What is the most secret of groups - The Priory of Sion

What are the secrets in "The Shepards of Arcadia"

"The painting shows three classical shepherds and a shepherdess standing before a bulky sarcophagus/tomb. One of the shepherds is pointing to the words carved on the face of the tomb which say, again, "Et in Arcadia ego." In point of fact, the finger of the shepherd is directly on the "R" of "Arcadia," which manages to highlight the "RC" combination, which could be taken as a "sign" pointing to the Rose Cross, or Rosicrucians.
Now, the curious fact is that there WAS a tomb found less than 6 miles from Rennes-le-Chateau, on a rocky mount beside the road, which certainly LOOKED like the tomb in this painting! It had no inscription on it, being covered with a thin layer of cement, and, as of this time, I understand that it has been removed altogether to prevent a continuing onslaught of treasure hunters from trampling about on private property. However, it was later shown that this was a tomb of very late construction and could not have been the model for Poussin's painting. But, we will get to that later."
Rennes-le-Chateau

article written by: Laura Knight-Jadczyk

posted by ... @ 6:48 PM 0 comments

Fulcanelli- da Vinci- Secret History of The World

The following is the introduction of the book The Secret History of The World. It is interesting to note that the introduction has been written by Patrick Rivière, a student of Eugene Canseliet .

This book of revolutionary importance is essential reading. With this original work, Laura Knight-Jadczyk shares with us her prodigious discoveries that put into question History as well as our habitual observations concerning the myth of the “Grail”. She does this by revisiting the Bible and comparative mythology, looking closely into parallel universes and hyperspace, and penetrating into quantum physics, genetics, and the mysteries of the diverse creations populating the hyperdimensions of the Cosmos. Throughout her exposé, Laura Knight-Jadczyk refers to two powerful works of the scientist-alchemist Fulcanelli: The Mystery of the Cathedrals and Dwellings of the Philosophers. She applies her vast knowledge to the continuation of his work. Thus, following in the footsteps of Fulcanelli (citing Huysmans) when he denounces the constant lies and omissions from official History over the course of time, Laura Knight-Jadczyk, citing numerous examples, exposes the manipulations in the official history of ancient civilizations of which humanity is the victim. She strives to re-establish the truth, and her answers are often enlightening. According to Laura Knight-Jadczyk, the mysteries of the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Temple refer to a particular, very advanced “technology” – with the aim, for example, of teleportation and changing between space-time dimensions – a secret and sacred science of which only a few great “Initiates” have remained custodians. Christ Jesus was the surest guarantor of this precious legacy, and, although it might displease Dan Brown (author of The DaVinci Code), the genealogical lineage of the “Sangréal” (the “Sang Royal” or “Holy Blood”), is not at all as he believes it to be! The reader of this important work by Laura Knight-Jadczyk will realize that there are completely different conclusions to that mystery. Her erudition cannot but impress the reader during the course of an assiduous reading of this quite astonishing book. As to her inspiration, what can we say, and, from whence could it come, if not the Light of the stars?

Patrick Rivière

Patrick Rivière is a writer and author of numerous works that have been published in France and that have been translated and published in many languages. He is a specialist on the “Grail” (On the Paths of the Grail) and of Alchemy following the path of Fulcanelli.

For more insight into the book, please read "The True Identity of Fulcanelli and The Da Vinci Code" by Laura Knight-Jadczyk, this article is from the book The Secret History of The World.

posted by ... @ 7:46 PM 1 comments

Army 1st Lt. apologizes in Iraq drownings

"[The Iraqi people are] anxious that we honor what we say because they want to be free..."
— G. W. Bush(Source: The Whitehouse)

If it's okay with President Bush, it must be okay with God, right?

Let me see if I can sort this out.
Murder is fine as long as you have been forgiven by God. But, how does one know if they have been forgiven by God I wonder. Does it come to you in a dream? Or, do you just dream it up.


3/16/2005, 5:52 a.m. CTBy ANGELA K. BROWN The Associated PressFORT HOOD, Texas (AP) — An Army platoon leader apologized for his role in forcing three Iraqi civilians into the Tigris River, saying his poor decisions "adversely affected U.S.-Iraqi trust during critical times of reconstruction." Army 1st Lt. Jack Saville, 25, was sentenced to 45 days in a military prison Tuesday as well as ordered to forfeit $2,000 of his $2,970 monthly pay for six months.Prosecutors had recommended Saville, who chose a nonjury trial, be discharged from the Army.

Reading from a statement, the West Point graduate said he has learned from his mistakes and has been forgiven by God."I hope to use these experiences for greater good," Saville said.Saville pleaded guilty Monday to assault and other crimes for forcing two curfew violators into the river at gunpoint in January 2004 near Samarra.

One of the men allegedly drowned.Saville was convicted Tuesday of a lesser assault charge for doing nothing to stop another Iraqi man from being forced into the river near Balad in December 2003.The charges carried a maximum 9 1/2-year sentence, though a plea deal capped the sentence at 15 months; that part of the agreement was kept secret so military judge Col. Theodore Dixon would not be influenced, Army officials said.Earlier Tuesday, former soldier Terry Bowman testified that before the Balad incident, Saville laughed and said it was part of a bet with another platoon over who would do such a thing first. The actual orders, however, were given by Saville's co-defendant, Staff Sgt. Tracy Perkins.

Perkins was acquitted in January of manslaughter in the Samarra incident, but convicted of assault and obstruction of justice in both incidents. He was sentenced to six months.In the Samarra incident, Saville ordered his soldiers to throw cousins Zaidoun and Marwan Hassoun into the river at gunpoint.Saville also had been charged with manslaughter in Zaidoun Hassoun's reported death, but that charge — along with counts of conspiracy and lying to investigators — was dropped in the plea deal.Defense lawyers maintain Zaidoun Hassoun survived, though defense attorney Frank Spinner on Tuesday said he didn't know why the body purported to be his was not exhumed.

A judge in December granted Spinner's request for an exhumation and autopsy.Spinner, who had asked the judge to consider Saville's West Point career and valor in Iraq, said he "can't complain about the sentence.""I asked the judge to use wisdom and to provide an expansive interpretation of Army values," he said.Prosecutors declined to comment.

Saville and Perkins are part of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Carson, Colo., which is part of the 4th Infantry Division based at Fort Hood.Monday's deal included an agreement by Saville to testify against a higher-ranking officer accused of ordering him and other soldiers to execute certain Iraqi suspects if they caught them.Saville said Capt. Matthew Cunningham, his company commander, gave him the names of five Iraqis who "were not to come back alive" if they were caught during a series of raids in Samarra on Jan. 3, 2004.

The Hassoun cousins were not on the list.Cunningham, also stationed at Fort Carson, is under investigation but has not been charged, according to a spokesman for the Fort Hood-based 4th Infantry Division.

posted by ... @ 12:30 PM 0 comments

Strange suicides and car crashes

Untimely Deaths in UkraineStrange suicides and car crashes among foes of the former regime bring calls for investigations.
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer
KIEV, Ukraine — By all official accounts, Yuri Kravchenko died by his own hand.
The former Ukrainian interior minister, scheduled to meet in just a few hours with prosecutors to give testimony in a high-profile case of political murder, aimed a gun at his chin and fired, sending a bullet ripping through his cheek and out his upper jaw. Then he aimed it at his temple and fired again. Suicide, government investigators ruled.
Exactly 13.1% of Ukrainians who responded to a Kiev Post Internet poll believed it was suicide. More than 80% thought Kravchenko was slain this month to prevent him from testifying, possibly implicating former President Leonid D. Kuchma in the decapitation of journalist Georgi Gongadze and other crimes. Many are sure that even if Kravchenko pulled the trigger, he was driven to it by his powerful former friends.
It was also ruled suicide when Transportation Minister Hryhoriy Kirpa, believed to be privy to evidence of large-scale vote-rigging in the fall presidential election, was found shot to death Dec. 27 in his bathhouse.
And when banker Yuriy Lyakh, a business associate of Kuchma's powerful chief of staff, was found dead in his office Dec. 3, stabbed through the neck with a letter opener from his desk, that was a suicide too.
High-profile Ukrainians have come to untimely ends in recent years by hanging themselves from refrigerator doors by their sweaters, swallowing poison and swerving suddenly into oncoming trucks — in fact, more than half a dozen outspoken critics of the Kuchma regime have died in unexplained car crashes. President Viktor Yushchenko nearly died from dioxin poisoning during the election campaign.
Now, with the popular revolution that swept the pro-West Yushchenko into power this year, there are growing demands in parliament to open the files on Ukraine's violent past and determine the fate of dozens of opponents of the former regime whose deaths were dismissed as accidents, suicides or unsolved killings.
Equally strong are demands that Kuchma, the tough-talking post-Soviet leader who accumulated vast power before Ukraine's Orange Revolution swept him and his associates from office, be investigated and tried for what happened during his turbulent reign.
"If Ukraine is to become the 'European' country Yushchenko says it is, it must stop being one … in which skeletons are allowed to rattle eternally in official closets," the Kiev Post editorialized last month. "How can Ukraine move forward if it's weighted down with corpses?"
"Kuchma has committed hideous crimes against the people of Ukraine," said Petro Symonenko, first secretary of the Communist Party. "But I would like to inform you that Kuchma is not going to be held criminally liable. Not a single crime will ever be resolved, for one simple reason: The investigation of these crimes will be a trial of not just Kuchma, but the entire system in this country."
Many are convinced that Yushchenko, whose face is scarred from the poisoning, made a secret pact in the waning hours of the election campaign to allow Kuchma to quietly retire — either to set a precedent for peaceful democratic transition in Ukraine or to protect allies who may have skeletons of their own in Kuchma's closet.
But Ukraine's new leaders insist they are determined to get to the bottom of crimes such as the Gongadze killing and will follow the evidence wherever it leads. There are no deals, Justice Minister Roman Zvarych said in an interview.
"I can respond to this question with absolute certainty. I was Mr. Yushchenko's legal advisor throughout the campaign, and I think I would certainly have been aware … of any assurances, even half-assurances, half-guarantees, nuances or hints that Mr. Yushchenko would have made to Mr. Kuchma. I can tell you that it is impossible."
On Feb. 2, a parliamentary commission presented the country's prosecutor-general with a 26-page report containing what lawmakers claim is evidence that Kuchma and his associates were responsible not only for Gongadze's death but illegal surveillance of political opponents, journalists and nongovernmental organizations, and bribe taking, money laundering and misappropriation that may have reached $10 billion.
Yushchenko made it clear from the beginning that he was going to demand answers for Ukraine's disturbing past, including the 1999 death of popular opposition leader Vyacheslav Chornovil, who was killed when his car crashed into a Kamaz truck blocking the road, not long before his planned run against Kuchma in the presidential campaign.
Ukraine's roads in recent years have also claimed the lives of Valery Malev, Ukraine's former arms export chief, whose car abruptly swerved into a truck in 2002, a few days after tapes secretly recorded by one of Kuchma's bodyguards revealed that he had discussed the export of air defense missiles to Iraq with the president; Anatoly Yermak, a member of the parliamentary committee investigating organized crime and corruption, whose car plummeted off a road in 2003; and opposition politician Oleksander Yemets, who died in 2001 when his car swerved into a ditch.
Who would go to the trouble of staging a car crash? "I asked the very same question to many people," said Chornovil's son, Taras. "The answer was the same: Different security services have different traditions they follow. Here, they have honed their skills of organizing car crashes to such perfection that they prefer this method … even if easier and more obvious methods are available."
Lt. Gen. Oleksander Skipalsky, a former deputy director of the federal security service, or SBU, did not rule out that slayings could have been disguised as traffic accidents. "Of course it's possible," he said in an interview. "As a secret service professional, I can tell you that the most important thing is to formulate the task. And 99% of the time, it will be accomplished."
Kuchma has expressed his sympathy and respect for Vyacheslav Chornovil, and often dismisses as ridiculous the notion that the authorities would resort to violence against political opponents. Before being questioned by the prosecutor-general's office for three hours this month in the Gongadze case, Kuchma said he was ready to answer any questions.
"What motives could I as president possibly have for any actions against Gongadze?" he told reporters. "I did not know him and only saw him once. I didn't even know that he opposed the president. There were lots of other journalists, and you know better than me who kept pestering me."
Prosecutor-General Svyatoslav Piskun said Kuchma would be questioned again in the case and insisted that he had reached no secret agreement to protect the former president from prosecution.
For much of the last two weeks, the country has been gripped anew with the 5-year-old Gongadze case, starting with Piskun's move this month to arrest three senior police officers, now charged with the investigative reporter's murder.
That was followed within days by the death of Kravchenko, who is heard on the Kuchma bodyguard's tapes being ordered by Kuchma to "throw out" Gongadze and "give him to the Chechens." His cryptic suicide note raised as many questions as it answered.
"My dear ones, I'm not guilty of anything," he wrote. "Please excuse me. I fell victim to political intrigues of President Leonid Kuchma and his associates. I am departing from you with a clear conscience. Farewell."
The newly appointed SBU chief, Oleksander Turchynov, told reporters that the first bullet from Kravchenko's 9-millimeter Beretta went through his mouth and out his upper jaw, and was "far from being fatal." The second went through his right temple.
Zvarych, the justice minister, has expressed doubt that the former interior minister could have recovered sufficiently from the shock of the first wound to have delivered the second.
"I have certain doubts personally speaking about whether someone can pull the trigger twice in order to commit suicide," he said. "There's this threshold of pain, I think, that one would need to be able to cross in order to be able to do that, something called a 'pain syndrome,' that I think is very difficult to overcome.
"But whether it was suicide or murder, this pattern [of deaths] has begun to emerge as a result of the psychological aftershock that these people [of the former regime] must be dealing with at this point."
Because of the widespread doubts over the announcement that Kravchenko's death was a suicide, Piskun said Friday he was pursuing the investigation as if it were a homicide to make sure any possibility of foul play could be ruled out.
The apparent suicide of Kirpa has also aroused questions and doubts, not least because of the former transport minister's reputation of being a man accustomed to fighting and winning.
According to several journalists and politicians who knew him, Kirpa had a habit of laying a handgun down prominently on his desk when beginning a meeting with an opponent or subordinate. "It's money and fear that rule this world," he would say. "The money is mine. And the fear is yours."
If he died by his own hand, many want to know, what was he afraid of? And how many others are also afraid?
Reviewing the large number of tapes that apparently rest in the hands of Kuchma's bodyguard, now negotiating his return to Ukraine with senior administration officials, could open a Pandora's box, many analysts say.
The current speaker of the parliament, for example, can be heard on the tapes. Symonenko, the Communist Party chief, has publicly wondered whether the tapes might also include conversations between Kuchma and Yushchenko, who was Kuchma's prime minister in 1999.
Viktor Shyshkin, a former judge and prosecutor-general who served on the commission that investigated Gongadze's death, said the public would hold Yushchenko to account for assuring that the Orange Revolution achieves a moral victory, not merely a change of power.
"In a lot of cases, people go out into the streets for economic reasons, when their stomach gets less than it had before. In our case, the locomotive force was our trampled dignity," he said. "So the betrayal of these spiritual values will by no means be forgiven to Yushchenko."
Part of what Yushchenko owes the revolution is holding Kuchma to account, Shyshkin said.
"We're not bloodthirsty. But what is important is to have the Kuchma regime and what it did condemned in court. This is not vengeance. This is justice."

posted by ... @ 10:08 AM 0 comments

Why am I not suprised.

"Arab Terrorist" With Star of David Tattoo

Signs of the Times


Syria and Lebanon: Big Time Double Standard
March 12, 2005Syria and Lebanon: Big Time Double StandardsIf you were a Syrian, what would you think? Here’s the United Nations, specifically envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian, telling Bashar Assad to get out of Lebanon and be quick about it, or face “economic isolation,” as the Washington Post puts it. Roed-Larsen used UN. Resolution 1559 like a stick against Assad. “If he doesn’t deliver, there will be total political and economic isolation of his country. There is a steel-hard consensus in the international community,” warned another UN official.
Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the south, the outlaw state of Israel has violated literary dozens of UN resolutions (see this list). Israel has racked up violations of international law for raids on Gaza and the West Bank, raids against Syria, raids against Jordan, raids against Lebanon, raids against Iraq, raids against Tunisia, expulsions of Palestinians, annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, and violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
You may remember Roed-Larsen’s comment last year about the “deterioration of law and order in Palestinian areas,” a comment deputy Israeli ambassador Arye Mekel agreed with. If you were a Palestinian, you might be angry with this European bureaucrat for taking the Palestinian Authority to task while Israelis settlers and soldiers murder Arab school children, bulldoze homes (with people still inside), and assassinate your leaders.
If you were a Syrian, you might think there is a double standard at work here. Terje Roed-Larsen has not threatened Ariel Sharon with “total political and economic isolation.” If you were Syrian, you might wonder why the hell some European white man is threatening your country. The last time the United Nations talked like this against Arabs, 500,000 Iraqi children died. If you were a Syrian, you might remember a little bit of history, for instance the fact Lebanon was at one time considered part of Syria—that is until the French arrived and started carving things up in their own interest and against the interests of the Syrians. If you were Syrian, you might realize that in fact most of the borders in the Middle East were contrived by white Europeans for their benefit and when the Arabs refused to pay along with this nonsense thousands of them were slaughtered. Winston Churchill made no bones about it: recalcitrant Arabs should be gassed. Some eighty years after Churchill said this, the United States used mustard gas against the people of Fallujah. For Arabs, nothing much has changed over the last century or so.
If you were Lebanese, no doubt you’d be afraid of the future. “Lebanon confronts nightmare today. As the Syrian army begins its withdrawal from the country this morning, after mounting pressure from President George Bush—whose anger at the Syrians has been provoked by the insurgency against American troops in Iraq—there are growing signs that the Syrian retreat is reopening the sectarian divisions of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war,” writes Robert Fisk. “Have we forgotten 150,000 dead? Have we forgotten the Western hostages? Have we forgotten the 241 Americans who died in the suicide bombing of 23 October 1983? This democracy, if it comes, will be drenched with blood–but the blood will be that of the Lebanese who live here, not that of the foreigners who wish to bestow freedom upon them… in the absence of these ’sisterly’ Syrian soldiers, civil conflict might suddenly—mysteriously—return to Lebanon.”
This is precisely what the Bushcons and the Likudites in Israel want—a return to civil strife and ethnic conflict in Lebanon. As Nasser H. Aruri writes in the foreword to Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was “calculated to produce results deemed beneficial both to American strategic interests and to Israeli expansionist goals. The interests of the Reagan administration and Israel’s Likud government coalesced around three objectives: the destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure in Lebanon, the redrawing of the political map in Lebanon, and the reduction of Syria to manageable proportions.” More than 20 years later, not much has changed, except the diminishment of radical Palestinian elements in Lebanon. “The 1982 ‘operation,’ as well as its predecessor, the ‘Litani Operation’ of 1978, were part of the long-standing Zionist strategy for Lebanon and Palestine,” writes Aruri. “In fact, that strategy, formulated and applied during the 1950s, had been envisaged at least four decades earlier, and attempts to implement it are still being carried out three decades later. On November 6, 1918, a committee of British mandate officials and Zionist leaders put forth a suggested northern boundary for a Jewish Palestine ‘from the North Litani River up to Banias.’ In the following year, at the Paris peace conference, the Zionist movement proposed boundaries that would have included the Lebanese district of Bint Jubayl and all the territories up to the Litani River. The proposal emphasized the ‘vital importance of controlling all water resources up to their sources.’”
Juat about everybody who lives in the Middle East knows what the Zionists are all about—stealing land and water and reducing the Arabs—especially Muslim Arabs—into third class citizens in their own countries. As Hezbollah demonstrated in 2000, when they ran the IDF out of southern Lebanon, this will no longer be as simple as it once was and this is why the Zionists have included the Bushcons in the operation. France and the United States believe they can “moderate” Hezbollah and eventually convince it to disarm and demobilize its militias. It’s not going to happen so long as Israel has a military presence on the border and occupies Shebaa Farms and periodically attacks Lebanese villages and Beirut.
Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians are not stupid. They know the problem is not Hezbollah or even Hamas, but the Americans and the Israelis. “For 30 years, America has tolerated—even supported—Syria’s military presence in Lebanon. In 1976, both the Israelis and the Americans wanted Syrian troops in Lebanon—because they would be able to ‘control’ the 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon–but now Mr Bush’s real concern is Syria’s supposed support for the insurgency in Iraq,” writes Robert Fisk. “The irony is extraordinary: 140,000 American troops occupy Iraq—we shall leave the Israeli occupation forces in Palestinian lands out of this equation—while their President demands the withdrawal of 14,000 Syrian troops from Lebanon. Democracy indeed!”
As almost any Syrian or Lebanese can tell you, democracy has nothing to do with it. The Arab and Muslim Middle East “with its ethnic minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-destructive, as we can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran and now also in Syria, is unable to deal successfully with its fundamental problems and does not therefore constitute a real threat against the State of Israel,” Oded Yinon wrote in the 1980s.
How things change. Both Hezbollah and the persistent resistance in Iraq pose serious threats to the Zionist plan for the Middle East. Bush may push a “Cedar revolution” in Lebanon—hoping for an engineered democracy that will eventually “mainstreamize” Hezbollah and flat line its radical appeal—but this will not happen, as between 500,000 and over a million Lebanese indicated earlier this week: Hezbollah represents resistance to Pax Americana and Pax Israelica. Backing Syria in a corner and threatening to bomb Iran will not change this. In fact, if the United States attacks Iran, this will catalyze Shia radicalism. As an example of how this works, consider how the French and US military headquarters were razed by Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, slaughtering more than 300 servicemen after US warships shelled Muslim areas of Lebanon in support of Amin Gemayel, a Falangist (i.e., fascist) Maronite Christian and Israeli sock puppet.

posted by ... @ 2:28 PM 0 comments

Aliens Don't Like to Eat People That Smoke!

We breath pollutants every day, but we rarely hear about the real cause of air pollution and lung cancer. It seems that most lung cancer is blamed on the smoking, but is this the truth.

What about the positive effects of nicotine?

Schizophrenia, too, has attracted interest. Surveys have suggested that up to 90 per cent of people with the disorder smoke. There are at least two possible reasons: to calm the effects of the illness itself, or to mitigate those of some of the drugs used to control it. On this second point, there have been indications that nicotine can reverse the memory problems and slowness of thought induced by a commonly used medicine, haloperidol.

Attempts to use nicotine in Parkinson's date back to the 1920s when one clinician injected it intravenously into a dozen patients. Although benefits were immediately apparent, little more happened for 50 years.

Independent News : UK, 22 February 2000Nicotine, the scourge of 20th-century medicine, might actually benefit people suffering from debilitating brain disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, according to new scientific studies of the drug.

So what is it about smoking, and nicotine in particular, that prevents or lessens the effects of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases among others? The answer, it seems it to be found in nicotine's capacity to mimic the effects of a molecule found naturally in the body.


So, what's up with that. Full story here.

posted by ... @ 9:02 AM 0 comments

U.S. Used Mustard gas, Nerve gas, and Burning Chemicals on Iraqis in Fallujah

Saturday 5th March 2005 (06h32) : U.S. Used Mustard gas, Nerve gas, and Burning Chemicals on Iraqis in Fallujah.
U.S. used banned weapons in Fallujah - Health ministry
An official in Iraq’s health ministry said that the U.S. used banned weapons in Fallujah
Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli, an official at Iraq’s health ministry, said that the U.S. military used internationally banned weapons during its deadly offensive in the city of Fallujah.
Dr. ash-Shaykhli was assigned by the ministry to assess the health conditions in Fallujah following the November assault there.
He said that researches, prepared by his medical team, prove that U.S. occupation forces used internationally prohibited substances, including mustard gas, nerve gas, and other burning chemicals in their attacks in the war-torn city.
The health official announced his findings at a news conference in the health ministry building in Baghdad.
The press conference was attended by more than 20 Iraqi and foreign media networks, including the Iraqi ash-Sharqiyah TV network, the Iraqi as-Sabah newspaper, the U.S. Washington Post and the Knight-Ridder service.
Dr. ash-Shaykhli started the conference by reporting the current health conditions of the Fallujah residents. He said that the city is still suffering from the effects of chemical substances and other types of weapons that cause serious diseases over the long term.
Asked whether limited nuclear weapons were also used by U.S. forces in Fallujah, Dr. ash-Shaykhli said; “What I saw during our research in Fallujah leads me to me believe everything that has been said about that battle.
“I absolutely do not exclude their use of nuclear and chemical substances, since all forms of nature were wiped out in that city. I can even say that we found dozens, if not hundreds, of stray dogs, cats, and birds that had perished as a result of those gasses.”
Dr. ash-Shaykhli promised to send the findings of the researches to responsible bodies inside Iraq and abroad.
Fallujah residents said napalm gas was used
During the U.S. offensive, Fallujah residents reported that they saw “melted” bodies in the city, which suggests that U.S. forces used napalm gas, a poisonous cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel that makes the human body melt.
In November, Labour MPs in the UK demanded Prime Minister Tony Blair to confront the Commons over the use of napalm gas in Fallujah.
Furious critics have also demanded that Blair threatens the U.S. to pullout British forces from Iraq unless the U.S. stops using the world’s deadliest weapon.
The United Nations banned the use of the napalm gas against civilians in 1980 after pictures of a naked wounded girl in Vietnam shocked the world.
The United States, which didn’t endorse the convention, is the only nation in the world still using the deadly weapon.by : AljazeeraSaturday 5th March 2005

posted by ... @ 2:54 PM 1 comments