hi everyone, just to let y'all knwo i'm in the process of moving and so don't have internet access, so sorry in advance for late replies to anything. 1ce everything is set up expect lots of new stuff going on here, many new tracks as well as maybe a video or 2.

resistance
freedom
peace
illogik

http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health-fitness/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2_printer.shtml

Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?

By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal
May 11, 2007 - 11:45:03 PM

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.

Captain Charles Moore Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life's purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita's course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. "The doldrums," sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean's top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

The area's reputation didn't deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He'd seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.
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It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the "Eastern Garbage Patch," Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

"Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic." This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore's Long Beach home. The workshop is surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas, guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air earthiness that reflects his '60s-activist roots, which included a stint in a Berkeley commune. Composting and organic gardening are serious business here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline above it.
graph showing annual plastic production growth in US
This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. "How about a nice, fresh boysenberry?" he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He's a striking man wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore's calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out. "We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump," he says with a shrug. "That's what we wanted to see."

Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what's going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies, which he'd set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle. After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for analyzing the gyre's contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the Garbage Patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic has grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.
photo of deformed sea turtle
At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren't alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. There's a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there's growing—and disturbing—proof that we're ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. "Every one of us has this huge body burden," Moore says. "You could take your serum to a lab now, and they'd find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren't around in 1950." The fact that these toxins don't cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they're benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.
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In simple terms, plastic is a petroleum-based mix of monomers that become polymers, to which additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability, and other qualities. When it comes to these substances, even the syllables are scary. For instance, if you're thinking that perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) isn't something you want to sprinkle on your microwave popcorn, you're right. Recently, the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) upped its classification of PFOA to a likely carcinogen. Yet it's a common ingredient in packaging that needs to be oil- and heat-resistant. So while there may be no PFOA in the popcorn itself, if PFOA is used to treat the bag, enough of it can leach into the popcorn oil when your butter deluxe meets your superheated microwave oven that a single serving spikes the amount of the chemical in your blood.

Other nasty chemical additives are the flame retardants known as poly-brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). These chemicals have been shown to cause liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and memory loss in preliminary animal studies. In vehicle interiors, PBDEs—used in moldings and floor coverings, among other things—combine with another group called phthalates to create that much-vaunted "new-car smell." Leave your new wheels in the hot sun for a few hours, and these substances can "off-gas" at an accelerated rate, releasing noxious by-products.

It's not fair, however, to single out fast food and new cars. PBDEs, to take just one example, are used in many products, incuding computers, carpeting, and paint. As for phthalates, we deploy about a billion pounds of them a year worldwide despite the fact that California recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We're eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day.
Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.

On land, things are equally gruesome. "Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect," says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: "Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby's reproductive organs." And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to "steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They're particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing." Dr. vom Saal's research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. "We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate's stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer," he says. "That's enough to scare the hell out of me." At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.
dead bird
As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren't enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that "prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats." In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: "These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year." Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America's staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc.

This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows that appears on products doesn't always signify endless reuse; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.

"There's no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic," Moore says, pointing out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different products, things that don't go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling plastic doesn't always result in less use of virgin material. It also doesn't help that fresh-made plastic is far cheaper.
jar of plastic pulled from ocean
Moore routinely finds half-melted blobs of plastic in the ocean, as though the person doing the burning realized partway through the process that this was a bad idea, and stopped (or passed out from the fumes). "That's a concern as plastic proliferates worldwide, and people run out of room for trash and start burning plastic—you're producing some of the most toxic gases known," he says. The color-coded bin system may work in Marin County, but it is somewhat less effective in subequatorial Africa or rural Peru.

"Except for the small amount that's been incinerated—and it's a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists," Moore says, describing how the material's molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it's exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.
Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade, or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the stuff 144 years ago, and science's best guess is that its natural disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year, we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question of why we're creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never really goes away.

Ask a group of people to name an overwhelming global problem, and you'll hear about climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And
yet nurdles, lentil-size pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.

The United States banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large in the environment, where they latch on to plastic because of its molecular tendency to attract oils.

The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nurdles become supersaturated poison pills. They're light enough to blow around like dust, to spill out of shipping containers, and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table.
One study estimated that nurdles now account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. And once they're scattered in the environment, they're diabolically hard to clean up (think wayward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, 2,100 miles northeast of New Zealand and a 12-hour flight from L.A., they're commonly found mixed with beach sand. In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as he walked through an area where railcars unloaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore's voice becomes strained and his words pour out in an urgent tumble: "It's not the big trash on the beach. It's the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We're breathing them, the fish are eating them, they're in our hair, they're in our skin."

Though marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic litter migrate to the gyre largely from land. That polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek, if it doesn't get picked up and specifically taken to a landfill, will eventually be washed out to sea. Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. "That corresponds to a quarter of the earth's surface," Moore says. "So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes."

It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 1865, a few years after Alexander Parkes unveiled a precursor to man-made plastic called Parkesine, a scientist named John W. Hyatt set out to make a synthetic replacement for ivory billiard balls. He had the best of intentions: Save the elephants! After some tinkering, he created celluloid. From then on, each year brought a miraculous recipe: rayon in 1891, Teflon in 1938, polypropylene in 1954. Durable, cheap, versatile—plastic seemed like a revelation. And in many ways, it was. Plastic has given us bulletproof vests, credit cards, slinky spandex pants. It has led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science. And who among us doesn't own a Frisbee?
Plastic has its benefits; no one would deny that. Few of us, however, are as enthusiastic as the American Plastics Council. One of its recent press releases, titled "Plastic Bags—A Family's Trusted Companion," reads: "Very few people remember what life was like before plastic bags became an icon of convenience and practicality—and now art. Remember the 'beautiful' [sic] swirling, floating bag in American Beauty?"

Alas, the same ethereal quality that allows bags to dance gracefully across the big screen also lands them in many less desirable places. Twenty-three countries, including Germany, South Africa, and Australia, have banned, taxed, or restricted the use of plastic bags because they clog sewers and lodge in the throats of livestock. Like pernicious Kleenex, these flimsy sacks end up snagged in trees and snarled in fences, becoming eyesores and worse: They also trap rainwater, creating perfect little breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

In the face of public outrage over pictures of dolphins choking on "a family's trusted companion," the American Plastics Council takes a defensive stance, sounding not unlike the NRA: Plastics don't pollute, people do.

It has a point. Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet—do our products have to be quite so lethal? Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren't disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world's oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations? "If 'more is better' and that's the only mantra we have, we're doomed," Moore says, summing it up.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. "If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you'd find a little line of plastic," he told The Seattle Times last April. "What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren't able to reproduce. They didn't last very long because they killed themselves."

Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Green architect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but among Fortune 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard known as "cradle to cradle" in which all manufactured things must be reusable, poison-free, and beneficial over the long haul. His outrage is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a common child's bath toy. The duck is made of phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive harm. "What kind of people are we that we would design like this?" McDonough asks. In the United States, it's commonly accepted that children's teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, and textiles will be made from toxic materials. Other countries—and many individual companies—seem to be reconsidering. Currently, McDonough is working with the Chinese government to build seven cities using "the building materials of the future," including a fabric that is safe enough to eat and a new, nontoxic polystyrene.

Thanks to people like Moore and McDonough, and media hits such as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, awareness of just how hard we've bitch-slapped the planet is skyrocketing. After all, unless we're planning to colonize Mars soon, this is where we live, and none of us would choose to live in a toxic wasteland or to spend our days getting pumped full of drugs to deal with our haywire endocrine systems and runaway cancer.

None of plastic's problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that, eventually, wisdom will trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin: The National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is aggressively using satellites to identify and remove "ghost nets," abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb and excessive packaging is afoot. And in August 2006, Moore was invited to speak about "marine debris and hormone disruption" at a meeting in Sicily convened by the science advisor to the Vatican. This annual gathering, called the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, brings scientists together to discuss mankind's worst threats. Past topics have included nuclear holocaust and terrorism.

The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore's catamaran, Alguita, which lives in a slip across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it's floating, a sturdy, eight-foot-long two-seater. Moore stands on Alguita's deck, hands on hips, staring down at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same. He has just informed Moore that he came across the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just offshore. The two men shake their heads in bewilderment.

"That's probably a $600 kayak," Moore says, adding, "I don't even shop anymore. Anything I need will just float by." (In his opinion, the movie Cast Away was a joke—Tom Hanks could've built a village with the crap that would've washed ashore during a storm.)

Watching the kayak bobbing disconsolately, it is hard not to wonder what will become of it. The world is full of cooler, sexier kayaks. It is also full of cheap plastic kayaks that come in more attractive colors than battleship gray. The ownerless kayak is a lummox of a boat, 50 pounds of nurdles extruded into an object that nobody wants, but that'll be around for centuries longer than we will.

And as Moore stands on deck looking into the water, it is easy to imagine him doing the same thing 800 miles west, in the gyre. You can see his silhouette in the silvering light, caught between ocean and sky. You can see the mercurial surface of the most majestic body of water on earth. And then below, you can see the half-submerged madhouse of forgotten and discarded things. As Moore looks over the side of the boat, you can see the seabirds sweeping overhead, dipping and skimming the water. One of the journeying birds, sleek as a fighter plane, carries a scrap of something yellow in its beak. The bird dives low and then boomerangs over the horizon. Gone.

© Copyright 2007 Best Life Magazine

Hey all, just adding this important story, one that is getting NO PRESS (or hardly any) with the US bombing another country again, ILLEGALLY, but it's in Africa so who cares right? The Horn of Africa is vital to getting oil and other goods from/to Europe from/to Asia, and the US puppets in Ethiopia are using the threat of 'al CIAda' as an excuse to overthrow the government.

much more info over at GNN

http://www.gnn.tv/threads/22702/Somalia_Burning_A_Bad_News_Roundup


Air strikes On Somalia: A New Stage In Washington's Illegal "Terror" War

By Chris Marsden

11 January, 2007
World Socialist Web

US air strikes against targets in the south of Somalia have claimed a substantial number of civilian lives. The bombing campaign, begun Sunday night and continued on Monday, mark a major escalation in the Bush administration's lawless use of violence to achieve Washington's strategic aims under the auspices of its "global war on terrorism."

The attacks mark the first direct US military intervention in Somalia since 1994, when President Clinton ordered US troops withdrawn following the "Blackhawk Down" episode that led to the deaths of 18 Army commandos during street fighting in Mogadishu. The recent attacks, part of an intensified attempt to establish American hegemony over the entire Horn of Africa, have heightened the threat that the conflict in Somalia will ignite a regional war with unforeseeable consequences.

The attacks on Hayi, 30 miles from Afmadow, and on a remote island 155 miles away, involved a US Air Force AC-130 gunship launched from a base in Djibouti. A Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) spokesman said, "So many dead people were lying in the area. We do not know who is who, but the raid was a success."

Yesterday, two helicopter gunships, described by a Somali official as American, attacked Afmadow, a town close to the Kenyan border, killing 31 civilians, including two newlyweds, according to witnesses.

Following the first attacks the president of the US-puppet interim administration, Abdullahi Yusuf, dutifully stated, "The US has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania." Washington alleges the targeted villages were sheltering Islamist fighters, including members of Al Qaeda.

Prior to these assaults, the US had already dispatched three warships to patrol the Somali coast and has also sent an aircraft carrier. The US air strike took place at the southernmost tip of Somalia, which is the scene of heavy fighting between Ethiopian forces and Islamist militias and is where the US has stationed its ships.

The direct US military intervention is in part a product of the Bush administration's inability to rely on various proxies it had hoped would be able to advance Washington's plans.

The US response to the driving out of its military from the capital Mogadishu in 1993 was first to turn to the UN in an effort to subjugate the country, then to back various warlords and finally to sponsor the creation of the TFG. However, this only fuelled anti-US sentiment and encouraged popular support for the Union of Islamic Courts.

The US-backed December 24 invasion of Somalia by up to 15,000 well-armed Ethiopian troops, backed by MIG jet fighters, appeared to easily sweep away the poorly-equipped Islamist militia. But having successfully ousted the UIC regime by using Ethiopia, Washington has nothing to replace it with that can stabilize the country. Instead, the conflict unleashed in Somalia together with Washington's plans to encourage other states to act as its military proxies threatens to destablise the entire Horn of Africa.

As well as pitched battles in the south near the border with Kenya, street fighting has continued in Mogadishu and elsewhere—led by an alleged 3,500 militiamen but involving local workers and youth angered by the military presence of Somalia's long-time enemy. Somalia is overwhelmingly Muslim and has twice been at war with its much larger neighbour. Ethiopia, with its Christian ruling elite, is viewed as a puppet of the US.

Hundreds of people have taken to the streets of the capital, Mogadishu, in protests during which at least three civilians have been killed—forcing yet another delay in a planned campaign by the "transitional government" to seize the large quantities of arms held by the city's residents.

Numerous reports speak of the Islamist militants having avoided a direct conflict with Ethiopian troops, but still having the potential to wage a guerrilla campaign. Ted Dagne, a regional specialist at the Congressional Research Service, said, "It looks as if the Islamists have been defeated, but what they have done is gone underground." And a diplomatic source commented, "A lot of the militia more or less melted away. They're still present; they're still armed, and there's a real possibility that they could become an insurgency if a political settlement can't be devised."

In addition, the warlords previously backed by the US but suppressed by the UIC have seized their chance to reassert their presence in Mogadishu.

Ethiopia was happy to curry favour with Washington by acting on its behalf in bringing down the UIC. And it was well rewarded for doing so. USA Today has noted that Ethiopia, which has a population more than seven times greater than Somalia's, received nearly $20 million in US military aid since late 2002. It cited Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter on the "close working relationship" with the US, including intelligence sharing, arms aid and training—with 100 US military personnel currently working in Ethiopia.

USA Today continued, "Advisers from the Guam National Guard have been training Ethiopians in basic infantry skills at two camps in Ethiopia, said Maj. Kelley Thibodeau, a spokeswoman for US forces in Djibouti."

US involvement in Ethiopia's occupation is coordinated from Djibouti, which serves as the US military training and operations centre for the Horn of Africa. The comparatively tiny state was formerly French Somaliland and, as its name suggests, is primarily ethnically Somali. It is bordered by Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia and has a large coastline on the strategically vital Red Sea and Gulf of Aden overlooking Yemen.

The US established an 1,800-strong Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa based at Camp Lemonier in 2002. It conducts "host nation anti-terrorism training" for various states, including Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Seychelles, Sudan, Yemen and Somalia.

However, the US can ill-afford to have its own troops deployed for a long period in Somalia. The US 5th fleet stated last month that a naval strike group sent to the Persian Gulf in order to threaten Iran would be available to help off the coast of Somalia. But should hostilities against Iran escalate, along with the deployment of thousands of additional troops to Iraq, this will leave US forces massively overextended.

The ships involved in the Somali operation belong to the Bahrain-based Combined Task Force 150, a multinational force that includes ships from the US, Canada, France, Germany, Pakistan and the United Kingdom. Its remit included the waters of the Gulf of Oman, North Arabian Sea, parts of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden, and the Red Sea.


Washington's unreliable proxies

Washington cannot rely on the repressive Ethiopian regime of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi indefinitely. Ethiopia is loathe to mount a protracted policing operation. Zenawi has stated that he would like to withdraw his troops within a matter of weeks. Its population is split almost equally between Christians and Muslims, including many ethnic Somalis in the eastern desert region, the Ogaden, and the intervention faces substantial popular opposition at home.

But so far there is no concrete plan to replace them with an alternative force.

Somalia's puppet regime has no significant and stable military of its own. It claims to have a force of 10,000, but this is undoubtedly an exaggeration. The January 6 Washington Post reported on a meeting where Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi assembled a "revived Somali national army . . . in the sand-blown yard of the former parliament, a hollowed-out building splashed with grenade blasts and scrawled with apocalyptic graffiti.

"About 1,000 men sat in the sun, soldiers who had been inactive for 15 years, old men with graying beards wearing whatever shade of camouflage they found at the market or dug out of storage. Few had boots; most wore leather loafers, sandals or thin-soled tennis shoes. They squinted at the newly ascendant, who was swept into power last week on the strength of Ethiopian soldiers now pointing machine guns at the crowd.

"They all stood to sing the Somali national anthem, with many soldiers simply moving their lips, having forgotten the words. When it was over, 100 or so civilians heckled the new force—'Traitors!'—and Gedi zipped off in convoy. Even at such orchestrated events in Mogadishu, it is unclear who is in control, and the same could be said of Somalia itself."

The transitional government is reported to be seeking to buttress this force with around a thousand soldiers from the northern Somali regional autonomy of Puntland, the home region of interim President Abdullahi Yusuf, and by making alliances with various warlords—this is a recipe for disaster.

The Bush administration is attempting to overcome its difficulties by assembling a military force from various African states. In January 2005, the member states of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD)—Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda and Somalia—proposed a military mission to Somalia. The UN encouraged this by partially lifting a 1992 arms embargo on Somalia—one that in fact was never really applied. Late last year the International Contact Group on Somalia, which includes the US, European Union and several African nations, proposed an 8,000-strong force be created to shore up the transitional government, then under siege by the Islamist militia. UN resolution 1725, adopted December 6, authorised the creation of such a regional force by IGAD and the African Union.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer has announced that Washington will provide $24 million in additional funding to support development and peacekeeping efforts in Somalia, of which at least $10 million will go towards funding the proposed intervention force. This is in addition to the $16.5 million pledged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The EU has also pledged an extra €36 million (US$47 million) in aid, on top of €15 million already set aside to finance an African peacekeeping force.

At an ICG meeting in Nairobi, Kenya on January 5, attended by the UN, US, EU, the African Union, Arab League and IGAD states, the nearest thing to a concrete pledge of troops was between 1,000 and 2,000—promised by Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, conditional on the agreement of his parliament. Fraser declared her hope that they would be in place by the end of the month. Ethiopia has also sent ministers to lobby Djibouti, Egypt, Kenya and Sudan to send troops to Somalia.

Even so, analysts have questioned whether Ugandan troops—which are in any case not as well equipped and battle-hardened as Ethiopia's—or any significant numbers of others will materialize. David Shinn, a former ambassador to Ethiopia and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, said, "I can't imagine [Ugandan troops would] go in without others going in, too." There have been rumours that Nigeria and Sudan were willing to send troops, he continued, but until now a peacekeeping force "is still basically the figment of someone's imagination."

Last year, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan sent a letter to the Security Council noting that Uganda and Sudan had become increasingly reluctant to send troops to Somalia as the fighting there intensified and "in the absence of a secure environment."

A secure environment is the last thing that Somalia offers to an invasion force. Kenya's foreign minister, Raphael Tuju, has warned, "Failure to act immediately will lead to a vacuum that would certainly be exploited by the warlords and other extremist forces." Tuju is also lobbying for other countries to send troops. Kenya has closed its borders to the estimated 30,000 recently displaced refugees from Somalia, but presently hosts 160,000. The government has denied reports that 600 refugees, mainly women and children, were deported from a border transit camp at Liboi in government trucks.

Because of these difficulties, the US has endorsed calls by the EU and new UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for the TFG to seek a political accommodation with "moderate" Islamist forces. However interim President Yusuf rejected all such requests, telling Al-Jazeera television that negotiations with Islamists "will not happen . . . We will crack down on the terrorists in any place around the nation."

To all the folks up North, watch yourself, looks like another war is coming in Spring time. The fuct thing is I don't think they can do it without another "terrorist" attack, and a big one this time, dirty bomb, blame it on Iran, then the nukes a flying (plus martial law for y'all in ameriKKKa, something similar for the canucks). Here's the story and the link: http://www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/kuwait/Viewdet.asp?ID=9548&cat=a

KUWAIT CITY: Washington will launch a military strike on Iran before April 2007, say sources. The attack will be launched from the sea and Patriot missiles will guard all oil-producing countries in the region, they add. Recent statements emanating from the United States indicate the Bush administration's new strategy for Iraq doesn't include any proposal to make a compromise or negotiate with Syria or Iran. A reliable source said President Bush recently held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.

According to the source, Vice President Dick Cheney highlighted the threat posed by Iran to not only Saudi Arabia but the whole region. "Tehran is not playing politics. Iranian leaders are using their country's religious influence to support the aggressive regime's ambition to expand," the source quoted Dick Cheney as saying. Indicating participants of the meeting agreed to impose restrictions on the ambitions of Iranian regime before April 2007 without exposing other countries in the region to any danger, the source said "they have chosen April as British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it will be the last month in office for him. The United States has to take action against Iran and Syria before April 2007."

Claiming the attack will be launched from the sea and not from any country in the region, he said "the US and its allies will target the oil installations and nuclear facilities of Iran ensuring there is no environmental catastrophe or after effects." "Already the US has started sending its warships to the Gulf and the build-up will continue until Washington has the required number by the end of this month," the source said. "US forces in Iraq and other countries in the region will be protected against any Iranian missile attack by an advanced Patriot missile system."

He went on to say "although US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice suggested postponing the attack, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney insisted on attacking Tehran without any negotiations based on the lesson they learnt in Iraq recently." The Bush administration believes attacking Iran will create a new power balance in the region, calm down the situation in Iraq and pave the way for their democratic project, which had to be suspended due to the interference of Tehran and Damascus in Iraq, he continued. The attack on Iran will weaken the Syrian regime, which will eventually fade away, the source said.

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah - Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

***NOTE: I posted this over at GNN (guerilla news network, great resource) forgive the mentions if you don't get the context, you can read more here: http://ill_logik.gnn.tv/blogs/20871/More_end_of_the_world_blogging_2012_or_all_isn_t_lost


So reading the great blogs from deadduck Shifty tango Livingston and Snark (in no particular order) I thought I'd add my 2 cents on the whole apocalyptic mess we seem to be in. The question of when came up in Shiftys blog, and I will argue two perspectives.

The first is it already has come. For the passenger pigeons, the plains buffalo, countless native peoples the apocalypse has already come, for most many moons ago. For others such as the polar bears, the plethora of ocean creatures, the rainforests, the peoples of Iraq Afghanistan Haiti and many others, the battle is right fucking now. For human civilization (the main cause of the apocalyptic times) it seems the end is ny.

Ok for the poet in me I would say the end is coming 2012 (Maya peak oil scientist warning to humanity, all 2012). But all ends are new beginnings, for the new age to begin the old one must end. And it seems the signs are pointing to right around now (well 2012 is when i'm thinking, it seems there's still some fuel in the tank pushing us towards the cliff).

It's interesting that in biblical texts (the gory story of civilization) apocalypse seems to be written into the fabric, the story of Eden humanities loss of connection with nature, the conquering of empire over the world. it seems civilization's doom was written in the seed, the roots tangled and suffocating the entire planet by this point in time.

I'm hesitant to grab a sandwich board and roam the streets screaming the end is here (especially since I'm down in Peru and my Spanish sucks), but it seems we're really fucking close. But again i think of all those peoples, human animal and plant who have already faced the apocalyptic times, and those (like Tecemseh Geronimo and so many others) who fought even though all seemed lost, indeed probably was lost (and in hindsight yes was lost). They give me the strength i need to continue on, continue to fight the injustice and horror being wrought upon the earth.

We all die, that is certain, what we do between now and then is what truly matters. We are all here at this point in time for a reason, we all have a duty to do what we can to make this a better place. Truly one of the biggest changes this planet has ever seen is taking place, and truly it might take all life in the process. What to do? It's hard as Shift said, as the change needed is so great, and the forces of greed and power aligned against us also is quite scary.

One of the hardest things for most who want a better world to grasp is the truely demented nature of those in power. They are so twisted by greed and power that it seems obvious they wont relinquish control or change their course willingly. So as Shifty and Jensen write, what does that mean for tactics? Well thats also pretty scary, as the War on Terror seems designed to maintain control of the oligarchs through this coming change, and they pretty much see most of us as expendable. It seems nothing will truly change as long as the power structure remains how it is, with a minority controlling the resources and lives of so many.

We do have allies however, the natural world, as everyone is writting about , is fighting back and it does seem that the world is giving us the hint that we either change now or die. It's a pretty fucked situation, but it seems also like our best chance to change how we operate and what we value.

Organize your communities, spread the word, do anything, everything is needed and indeed the situation so bad that every little bit helps. I have wrestled with what to do, trying at first to share the information I've learned here with friends and family, then organizing classes at the anarchistU in Toronto. realizing how few I could reach that way i turned to my art, as I've learned so much from music, I hoped I could do the same for others. I don't think it's enough, far from it, but I like to think I've tried to do positive things on this planet (indeed before my travels to the south I've had many friends tell me of the impact I've had on their lives, something that really hits mi corizon, each one teach one for real). Hell i even got Derrick Jensen to do a show in the belly of babylon T dot.

But again it so little against what's against us, still everyday brings new opportunities, and mid way through writing this I had an amazing conversation in broken spanish with mi tio (well not actually my uncle but one of my dad's childhood friends, practically family), the first real political conversation i've had with someone down here (my spanish really sucks, pero poco y poco y es mejor). I love that community is still alive here, although the americanization of Peru continues at an alarming rate since my last visit. I plan to travel from here to the amazon and then to Brazil and then Venezuela, I want to learn and grow while adventuring and living in this beautiful land. To see the Amazon again (i was there with my folks when i was 9) is truly burning a fire in my heart, one of the last wild places left on this planet. Also to learn from people and places who still haven't been completely consumed by the beast is an opportunity I cherish, and hopefully Mexico Chiapias and Oaxaca will allow me to grace their soils.

All is open now, I will travel here as I did in the north, with change love and rage in my heart. Rage for that which is happening, love for that which gives me life, and the hope that I can bring a little change to every place my foot falls.

And fucking thank god for firefox being able to restore sessions, as my comp just crashed and I thought I lost half of this piece. ahh technology is wonderful, remember to use the tools we have against them.

You can follow my travels "here":http://myspace.com/illtothalogik got some pics up already, just enjoying the Peruano vidir ahora, got at least 4 months here before the jungle treck begins.

And to finish it all off my anthem for change that I hope will inspire the fire in you as well, Change the World People!!!!

Tu Hermano en
Resistancia
Libertad
Paz
ill

Change the World

so all isn't lost it's the time of change
even tho it seems this whole world's deranged
you got wars famine even tho it aint strange
to this planet but damnit now the range of pains

seems insane damn the cage
they puttin us into fueling the rage
it seems to be to me that they want to enslave
so what we gotta do to get free and make the change

we gotta come to together and break the chains
turn off yer tvs yea free yer brains
lost in a drought we wait for the rains
to give life to our souls take away the pains

stop playing their games its all for their gains
i got 2 bars left so let me explain
we all got the power to make the change
the flame is burning in all of our veins

WE GOT TO CHANGE THIS WORLD
but how when the system got us down
WE GOT TO MAKE THE CHANGE
right now coming to the last round
WE GOT TO REARRANGE
the way we living our lives
WE BREAK FREE OF THEIR CAGE
we survive stay alive THE PEOPLE GONNA RISE UP!!

Hey everybody in internet land, writting from the south, thats waaaaaaaay south in america, south america that is, Peru to be exact. chillin a mi tios casa ahora, but i got my own place im gonna be living out of, and im going to be there manana. its kinda crazy being here, i planned this for so long and now im here. just taking it easy, got 4 months of peruano living to do, might go on to brazil threw the amazon then up to venezuela if everything goes according to plan.

hitting the beach tomorrow looking for some beautiful peruana, see how it goes, its hot here for real.

hope everyone is doing good back in t dot, i dont miss ya yet, but soon im sure.

anyways check back here for pics and stories as they come

resistancia
libertad
paz
ill

Into the Ring with Counterpunch on 9/11..How Alexander Cockburn, Otherwise So Bright, Blanks Out on 9/11 Evidence

http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles/IntoTheRingWithCounterpunchOn911ByMichaelKeefer.htm

by Michael Keefer

The first thing to say by way of preliminaries..and I..d better get it in quickly before someone suggests that I..ve turned up late or over-weight for a pre-match weighing-in..is that I..m not overjoyed with the pugilistic metaphor of my title.

But some sort of response to the volley of attacks on 9/11 researchers and activists with which the Counterpunch website marked the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 seems called for.

Counterpunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn set the tone of these pieces with an article describing theologian and ethicist David Ray Griffin, the author of The New Pearl Harbor (2004) and of The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005), as a ..high priest.. of the ..conspiracy nuts....whom Cockburn denounces as cultists who ..disdain all answers but their own,.. who ..seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant,.. and who ..pounce on imagined clues in documents and photos, [...] contemptuously brush[ing] aside.. evidence that contradicts their own ..whimsical.. treatment of ..eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence...

It..s a characteristically forceful performance, if at times slipshod. (One small sign of carelessness may be the manner in which Cockburn slides from calling 9/11 skeptics a ..coven.. to comparing them, a few sentences later, to ..mad Inquisitors [..] torturing the data..as the old joke goes about economists..until the data confess... Readers brought up to think that the victims and perpetrators of witch-crazes have not customarily been the same people may find this unintentionally amusing.)

Despite the sometimes distinctly nasty tone of this polemic, the idea of exchanging even metaphorical blows with Cockburn and his colleagues is unappealing. The overall quality of the essays that he and Jeffrey St. Clair publish in Counterpunch makes it easy on most days of the week to agree with Out of Bounds Magazine..s description of it..trumpeted on Counterpunch..s masthead..as ..America..s best political newsletter... And I..ve admired Cockburn..s own political essays for many years: he..s written movingly, sometimes brilliantly, on a wide range of subjects ..even if his flashes of brilliance sometimes alternate with breathtaking pratfalls: among them his dismissal, as recently as March 2001, of the evidence for global warming; his scoffing, in November 2004, at the rapidly gathering indications that the US presidential election of 2004 had been stolen; and a year later, his mockery of the well-established theory of peak oil and his adherence to the genuinely daft notion that the earth produces limitless quantities of abiotic oil. One can forgive a journalist..s slender grasp of the rudiments of scientific understanding. But given his self-appointed role as defender of the progressive left against a horde of fools, it..s dismaying to find him sliding as frequently as he does into positions that seem not just quirky but..dare I say it..unprogressive.

Figurative punch-ups? Frankly, I..m not over-fond of boxing, either in itself or as a source of metaphors. A sport whose fullest measure of success is an opponent stretched out senseless on the canvas doesn..t provide any very adequate model for the processes of rational argument and persuasion I..d like to envisage..which might ideally lead, not to oblivion and brain damage, but rather, given a modicum of interpretive clarity, to at least the possibility of mental expansion, illumination, and a change of mind. And if I..m right in thinking that Alexander Cockburn..s understanding of the events of 9/11 and the current state of research into those events is both one-eyed and befuddled, it would hardly seem sporting to ..enter the ring.. against so disadvantaged an opponent.

Yet if one wants to take exception to serious deficiencies in Counterpunch..s treatment of 9/11 evidence and interpretations, the website..s own metaphor seems hard to avoid.

What of my subtitle, then..which I..m afraid is wordy as well as impolite? It sets out to parody the scarcely less elephantine subtitles of two of the three recent Counterpunch articles that I..m going to be commenting on here (read ..em yourself, and weep):

Alexander Cockburn, ..The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts: How They Let the Guilty Parties of 9/11 Slip Off the Hook,.. Counterpunch (9-10 September 2006), http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09092006.html;
Joshua Frank, ..Proving Nothing: How the 9/11 Truth Movement Helps Bush & Cheney,.. Counterpunch (11 September 2006), http://www.counterpunch.org/frank09112006.html.

The subtitle of Cockburn..s diatribe is no doubt meant to be inflammatory..though if I..ve understood him rightly, he..s not literally arguing that the perpetrators of 9/11 would all be behind bars if it weren..t for those 9/11 wackos. Frank..s subtitle might also border on the category of fighting words, were it not that his essay, as he himself predicts, proves nothing. (Students of political rhetoric will note, in passing, how precisely Cockburn..s and Frank..s subtitles exemplify the trope of unintended consequences that Albert Hirschman in his classic study of The Rhetoric of Reaction calls ..the perversity thesis,.. which ..reactive.. or reactionary thinkers since Joseph de Maistre at the time of the French Revolution have deployed to argue that the actions of their deluded opponents ..will produce, via a chain of unintended consequences, the exact contrary of the objective being proclaimed and pursued...)

After the appearance of these two pieces on successive days, Counterpunch honoured a familiar boxing rhythm (quick left and right, pause, sucker-punch) by leaving a gap of several days before releasing a third broadside against 9/11 researchers:
Diana Johnstone, ..In Defense of Conspiracy: 9/11: In Theory and Fact,.. Counterpunch (15 September 2006), http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone09152006.html.
Johnstone..s essay is more substantial than the preceding two. But any reader lured by its title into thinking that Counterpunch was actually permitting real debate on the subject of 9/11 would indeed be suckered. And there is again a problem with subtitles. As I intend to show, this piece offers little in the way of facts, and is defective..though instructively so..in its theorizing.

1. Alexander Cockburn: beyond table-thumping to the evidence
Alexander Cockburn..s attack on ..The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts,.. though rhetorically skilful, is vacuous in substance. It is in large part devoted to arguing that a ..devout, albeit preposterous belief in American efficiency.. is the ..fundamental idiocy.. which leads ..conspiracy nuts.. to think that there must be something suspicious about the massive failures of the US air defense system on 9/11. Anyone even remotely acquainted with military history, Cockburn asserts, would know ..that minutely planned operations..let alone responses to an unprecedented emergency..screw up with monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality, weather and all the other whims of providence...

I..m not interested in defending the efficiency of the American military..or of anyone else..s military, for that matter. (In fact, I could supplement the little catalogue of military ineptitudes that Cockburn presents with some choice additional ones drawn from the period of my own brief spell decades ago with the Canadian navy..among them an incident in which an American destroyer contrived to get itself cut in half by the Australian aircraft carrier Melbourne.) Yet if we attend for a moment not to Cockburn..s overheated rhetorical questions and table-thumping repetition of the capitalized word ..CONSPIRACY,.. but rather to the established and uncontroversial evidence, it is at once obvious that what is at issue is not primarily, as Cockburn thinks, the gap between his own expectations of bungling incompetence and David Ray Griffin..s understanding of what a normal air defense response should have been.

As anyone who presumes to hold forth on this aspect of the 9/11 evidence should know, what is really incriminating about the failure to intercept the aircraft which were flown on that day into the Twin Towers and (by the official account) into the Pentagon is not the simple absence of fighter-interceptors over New York and Washington, but rather the fact that that absence was ensured by a series of concurrent military exercises which had transferred most of the available interceptors out of the northeastern region, and which for a crucial period that morning left the military air traffic controllers responsible for vectoring the remaining fighters into position unable to determine which of the many blips appearing on their radar screens represented actual as opposed to simulated threats. We can add to this what seems the no less incriminating testimony of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta to the 9/11 Commission, which suggests very strongly that Vice President Cheney had ordered a stand-down of missile defenses protecting Washington DC.

Cockburn..s failure to mention this important and well-known evidence tells us one of two things. Either he is unaware of it, in which case one must ask why he thinks it appropriate to hold forth angrily on subjects about which he has not bothered to inform himself; or else he does know about it..in which case he ought to be asking himself what standard of intellectual integrity governed his decision to refrain from mentioning this crucial evidence to his readers.

Midway through his essay, Cockburn offers a curious little detour into the complexities of the JFK assassination, telling us that in his view,
the Warren Commission, as confirmed in almost all essentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, had it right and Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Schoolbook Depository. The evidentiary chain for his guilt is persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracy nuts entirely unconvincing. But of course..as the years roll by, and even though no death bed confession has ever buttressed those vast, CIA-related scenarios..the nuts keep on toiling away, their obsessions as unflagging as ever.

These sentences are a close rhetorical analogue to that fighter..s tactic..more in use among half-crocked bar-room brawlers than boxers, it must be said..known as leading with one..s chin. The ..conspiracy nuts.. Cockburn sneers at include D. B. Thomas of the USDA Subtropical Agriculture Research Laboratory in Texas, who after analyzing the acoustical evidence of gunshots preserved on a Dallas police department recording from Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, concluded in a peer-reviewed study published in 2001 by the journal Science & Justice that the recording ..contains five impulsive sounds that have the acoustic waveform of Dealey Plaza gunfire,.. and that ..One of the sounds matches the echo pattern of a test shot fired from the Grassy Knoll... So much for the Warren Commission..s three (and no more) shots fired by Oswald from the Texas Book Depository: more than three shoots, and more than one shooter, means a conspiracy. And by the way, it..s not strictly true that the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations Report confirmed the Warren Commission Report ..in almost all essentials,.. since the HSCA Report did in fact conclude that the assassination was probably organized by a conspiracy.

Cockburn is welcome to cling, if he wants, to what I..d term the Lone Ranger theory of the Kennedy assassination..but on condition that he devote a short meditation to the name of the Lone Ranger..s native sidekick.

There is more in Cockburn..s essay on the 9/11 evidence: he has a brief fling at the people who doubt that a Boeing 757 could have hit the Pentagon, and exercises his ironic wit for several paragraphs at the expense of the reality-disdaining nuts who think that the towers of the World Trade Center were brought down by planned demolitions. Cockburn scoffs at the paranoid folly of those who believe that The WTC towers didn..t fall down because they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority, and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, they fell because Dick Cheney..s agents methodically planted demolition charges in the preceding days. It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom..party to mass murder..have held their tongues ever since.

Perhaps (although he doesn..t share it with us) Cockburn has evidence that the Twin Towers were so incompetently built as to be especially liable to explosive disintegration into showers of cut steel and pyroclastic clouds of fine-particle dust. But like the 9/11 Commission, he manages quietly to forget about the collapse of WTC 7 late in the afternoon of 9/11: this 47-storey steel-framed tower, which was damaged by debris from the North Tower but not struck by any aircraft, collapsed at free-fall speed into its own footprint in what half a dozen different videos show to have been a classic implosion demolition. Significantly, FEMA and NIST have failed to offer any plausible alternative explanation of this collapse.

As to the questions of how, when, or by whom demolition charges may have been planted: there is evidence, though Cockburn may not be interested in exploring it, of activity on unoccupied floors of the Twin Towers just prior to 9/11 that is consistent with the placing of such charges. Why don..t we try replacing the gag orders that have silenced 9/11 whistleblowers like Sibel Edmonds with an independent criminal investigation, and see what crawls out of the woodwork?

But refuting this rhetoric at length would be tedious. I would prefer instead to quote Paul Craig Roberts.. magisterial rebuke:
The explanation that the three WTC buildings collapsed as a result of damage and fire is a mere assertion. The assertion is not backed up with scientific calculation to demonstrate that the energy from the airliners, fire and gravity was sufficient to collapse the buildings. A number of independent authorities believe that there is a very large energy deficit in the official account of the collapse of the buildings. Until this issue is resolved, the official explanation is merely an assertion no matter who believes it.

The Canadian scientist Frank R. Greening has made the only independent scientific attempt of which I am aware to show that a gravity driven collapse of one of the buildings, WTC 1, was sustainable. His paper is published in The Journal of 9/11 Studies, Vol. 2 (August 2006) and is available online. It is a reply to earlier calculations by Gordon Ross, who concluded otherwise, and is answered in the same issue by Ross, who shows that Greening..s work actually demonstrates the existence of an energy deficit.

It is instructive to read this exchange between competent authorities. Few readers will be able to follow the application of scientific principles and the calculations of the required and available energy. However, it will be clear that the issue is a scientific matter that is over the heads of members of a political commission, pundits, and bloggers, and that it is inappropriate for a pundit, who himself is incapable of following such a discussion, to call those participating in it ..conspiracy nuts...

Elsewhere in the same essay, Roberts notes that Ross is far from being the only scientist to criticize and reject the official explanation of the WTC towers.. collapses. This is indeed the case. Evidence..to my mind conclusive..that the official accounts are physically impossible, and that the three towers of the World Trade Center (the 47-storey WTC 7 as well as the 110-storey Twin Towers) were destroyed by controlled demolitions, has been assembled by physicists, mechanical engineers and other scientifically qualified researchers in a series of recent studies, some of them published in the peer-reviewed Journal of 9/11 Studies. These analyses are supported by the testimony of fire department personnel to secondary explosions in the Twin Towers, by video and photographic evidence that structural steel in the South Tower was being cut and melted (probably by thermate charges) during the final minutes before its collapse, by videos and photographs of the collapses in which ..squibs.. (explosive horizontal ejections of dust and debris) are visible well below the lines of collapse, by numerous reports of molten steel under the ruins of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 weeks after their destruction, and by laboratory analyses of structural steel from the towers which reveal chemical transformations that could not have been caused by gravitational collapse or fire, but may well be effects of thermate cutting charges.

2. Joshua Frank: a litany of complaints and rhetorical questions
Insofar as anything resembling an argument is to be found in Joshua Frank..s short article, it appears in the following litany of complaints and rhetorical questions:

While some BYU physicist rattles his brain over the intricacies of WTC ..7..s collapse, our government is dropping toxic gas on poor peasants in Colombia in attempts to eradicate coca production. While David Ray Griffin pens his next best seller, forests in Alaska and Appalachia are being obliterated in the name of corporate profit. While so many truth seekers attempt to convince us [..] that the Jews who worked in the WTC were told ahead of time not to come to work on 9/11, Lebanon is being invaded and destroyed by Israel.

What..s the Truth Movement doing about the hundreds of thousands of poor non-violent drug offenders who are rotting in US prisons, or the thousands more who are decaying on death row? What are they doing for the teenage girls who slave away in sweatshops piecing together our clothes and sneakers? What have conspiracy theories ever proven, anyway?

Though a powerful sense of his own political virtue pervades these paragraphs, Frank..s stance seems to me ethically wanting as well as logically weak. In saying this, I..m not referring primarily to his shabbily abusive references to Steven Jones and David Ray Griffin. Frank takes 9/11 activists to task for their putative failure to occupy themselves with US crimes in Colombia, ecological issues, the invasion of Lebanon, third-world sweatshops, and the appalling injustices of America..s courts and its domestic gulag. But the same objections could be raised (for example) against the movement of solidarity with Haitian democracy. What have the people who labour in that movement done in support of any of these other issues? Or, as one might with equal force (or feebleness) inquire: How have activists against US crimes in Colombia and Israeli crimes in Lebanon contributed to alleviating the horrors inflicted on Haiti..s poor, most particularly since the 2004 coup and the ensuing UN occupation?

Frank..s complaints are clearly both inane and divisive. For most of us, it is not humanly possible to be doing A, B, and C, if at a given moment we are fully occupied in doing D. Of course, if this is a rule, there have been exceptions to it: St. Thomas Aquinas is reported to have made a practice of composing three distinct texts simultaneously, dictating sections of each in turn to three amanuenses. Perhaps Frank is similarly versatile and efficient, and is able to make significant parallel contributions to all of the important causes he names. But by his own logic, one could still assemble a list of other important causes that he has done nothing to further, and then reproach him for the fact. (It..s an excellent recipe for producing disunity and mutual suspicion on the left, if that..s your goal.)

Are 9/11 researchers and activists in fact the one-string Johnnies that Frank takes them for? My own limited experience would lead me to conclude otherwise. I am personally acquainted with only a handful of people who have been active on 9/11..all of whom however have worked, sometimes for decades and with distinction, on a wide range of social justice, anti-war and ecological issues, both domestic and international.

Yet of course what Frank means is that other kinds of activism are worthy and admirable, while inquiries into the truth of what happened on 9/11 and into the implications of that truth are simply idiotic. People who engage in such inquiries are mere zealots and pretenders: ..how they can seek the truth when they already think they have all the answers is beyond me,.. Frank says piously.

But not too far beyond him, it would seem. Frank himself concedes ..that there are a lot of questions yet to be answered about that dark day five years ago. But of all the inquiries, none, in my opinion, if answered, would ever indicate the US government was behind the bloody affair... So there it is: the questions may be unanswered, but they don..t need to be, because Frank knows already what the only possible answers add up to.
If the illogic of this short piece seems tawdry, the mental laziness Frank..s position authorizes is no less so. I don..t mean to suggest that any activity labeling itself ..9/11 research.. is intrinsically virtuous. Anyone who has observed neo-Gnostic prophet David Icke gliding happily between assessments of 9/11 evidence and pronouncements about the ..Illuminati conspiracy.. and ..reptilian entities in the positions of power [that] manipulate the peoples of the world to fight each other in the five-sense prison,.. or who has taken note of the vicious email blitzing inflicted by Nico Haupt, Gerard Holmgren and Rosalee Grable (alias ..Webfairy..) on what they call ..plane-huggers.. (people naive enough to believe that actual aircraft struck the Twin Towers on 9/11), will know that some of what passes as ..9/11 research.. is silly, inept, and malicious. But only by an act of transparent bad faith can this be used to dismiss out of hand research that adheres to the principles of critical scholarship and the methods of scientific inquiry.

3. Diana Johnstone: problems of method
Diana Johnstone deserves credit for her abstention from the overheated rhetoric of Cockburn and Frank, and for her attempt to analyze the subject methodically. But it is precisely in her interpretive methodology that she goes astray.

Johnstone..s basic error is a repeated assumption that suppositious interpretations of intention should be treated as the primary form of evidence. Thus she proposes, near the beginning of her article, that we attend to ..the symbolism of the attacks... She then uses suppositions about intention to undermine what she calls ..the Bushite conspiracy hypothesis..:
Now, let us suppose that Bushite plotters designed the attacks so that Bush could use them to claim that ..they want to destroy us because of our freedom... The choice of targets should support that claim. Suppose one of the planes had crashed into the Statue of Liberty; that would really carry the message that ..they want to destroy our freedom... For ordinary Americans, it would be just as shocking as the World Trade Center, while costing a lot less to American capitalism (an old gift from France would hardly be missed). For good measure, to show that the terrorists want to kill as many people as possible, they could have crashed into a couple of packed football stadiums.

This approach is peculiar in two respects. First, although I don..t object on principle to speculations about intention, I think they..re more likely to be plausible when they have a more serious anchorage in considerations of political and economic advantage than Johnstone provides. Without dismissing her suppositions out of hand, I would note that she ignores other more material possibilities: for example, that intentions behind the WTC attacks could have included a desire to dispose of functionally obsolete and uneconomical buildings while making it possible to collect massively on their insurance, to generate large put-option stock market windfalls, and to dispose of evidence held by the SEC in WTC 7 relating to the Enron and WorldCom scandals (all of which the attacks very definitely did).

More significantly, Johnstone..s approach inverts any properly analytical ordering of evidence. Unless there is other material, testimonial, photographic or documentary evidence that makes a ..Bushite conspiracy hypothesis.. or an ..al Qaeda hypothesis.. plausible, speculations about intentions that would support one or the other hypothesis are a pure waste of time. As I have already noted, there is strong material, testimonial, and photographic evidence that the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by controlled demolitions..which in turn indicates that people with privileged access to the buildings (whose security was contracted to a company with close Bush family connections) knew in advance that the planes which reached their targets with the help of what appears to have been a planned disabling of the American air defense system would in fact get through. This evidence is supported by analyses of many incriminating details of government foreknowledge, of the attacks themselves, and of the ensuing cover-up that have been published by Michel Chossudovsky and other researchers. Their work has been lucidly summarized in a series of books and articles by David Ray Griffin. Only on a tertiary and supplemental level do questions of intention..among them the stated geopolitical aims expounded by senior members of the Bush administration in the documents published by the Project for the New American Century, and also, if you like, Diana Johnstone..s more suppositious or novelistic speculations..become relevant.

Johnstone remarks that ..the layman cannot easily judge.. between ..conflicting physical interpretations.. of what happened at the Pentagon, ..but can quite well use common sense to question motives and plausibility... She treats the question of what caused the collapses of the WTC towers in the same manner:

The layman has no way to judge between these expert explanations..but neither do experts, since (as physicist Jean Bricmont points out) scientists cannot be sure of the cause of a single event that cannot be repeated experimentally. So we are back to the question of plausibility and motivation.

This is an openly irrationalist rhetorical move. Laymen can..t do science, so we..ll have to get along with common sense..but then scientists can..t do science either, so common sense (untouched, it would seem, by any serious study of the evidence, since that might give it some whiff of the scientific) magically becomes the only set of wheels that anyone has.

One must hope, for Jean Bricmont..s sake, that Johnstone is misquoting or misunderstanding him. In a strict sense, as he perhaps meant to say, every physical event in the universe is a singularity that can never be precisely reiterated. But that does not make iterability absurd, or science impossible..for scientific experiments and modellings do not aspire to precisely repeat (or anticipate) the physical interactions and structural relations they are designed to give us insight into; rather, they provide measurable controlled analogues to those processes. To claim that the collapses of the WTC towers cannot be physically and mechanically modeled, or that the remaining samples of the toxic dust and the structural steel cannot be chemically and structurally analyzed, is irrationalism of a low order.

It might seem surprising that a literary scholar and textual theorist like myself should object to Johnstone..s proceedings..which after all amount to putting novelists and literary critics into the driver..s seat. But I..m afraid bad science also makes bad hermeneutics..and bad hermeneutics results in feeble handling of the textual evidence.

4. Looking away from the 9/11 evidence
Why have otherwise admirable leftist journalists like Cockburn, Frank, and Johnstone been so strangely averse to attending to the evidence about 9/11 alluded to above? One reason may be that even the hypothesis of state complicity in the events of 9/11 entails confronting the possibility that we are living through a moment of major historical transformation and discontinuity.

It is one thing to accept, as an abstract proposition, that the United States may have moved from the end of its republican period into a state of imperial autocracy. Chalmers Johnson..s diagnosis in The Sorrows of Empire is, after all, both scrupulous and unambiguous..as is his conclusion that the American people might conceivably retake control of Congress, reform it along with the corrupted election laws that have made it a forum for special interests, turn it into a genuine assembly of democratic representatives, and cut off the supply of money to the Pentagon and the secret intelligence agencies [...] At this late date, however, it is difficult to imagine how Congress, much like the Roman senate in the last days of the republic, could be brought back to life and cleansed of its endemic corruption.

Johnson..s analysis may well arouse in us a Virgilian sense of lacrimae rerum, of the grief of temporality, and the sadness of ..states doomed to ruin,.. perituraque regna.

But it is another thing altogether to confront in detail the manner in which the transition from republic to autocracy is being orchestrated..not just through the out-of-control militarism that Johnson so finely documents, but also through what Peter Dale Scott has called the ..deep politics.. of a ruling elite which is thoroughly habituated to reliance on covert agencies that are in no way answerable to democratic governance. Yet if we..re going to deal in historical parallels, perhaps we ought to strive for consistency. Rome..s imperial-autocrats-in-the-making never hesitated to shed blood, whether of their compatriots or other nations: why should we imagine our own to be more fastidious, or less Machiavellian?

Another motive for aversion may also be involved: the fear of being mocked as a ..conspiracy theorist.. or ..tinfoil hat wearer,.. with a consequent loss of public credibility and professional respect. If such a fear were no more than what it seems, one might well ask what value there could be to markers of professional standing which block inquiry into historical truths and material realities..or what claims to courage or integrity could be made by public intellectuals who fold their tents at the mere threat of scurrilous handling by opponents. But something more profound may be at work. Peter Dale Scott, who like Chalmers Johnson indulges in what he calls the ..clichéd analogy.. of a comparison between the contemporary United States and Rome in the period of its transition from republic to imperial autocracy, remarks on the refusal of the Roman senatorial class to accept that ..real power had migrated out of.. the civic institutions in which they continued to participate, and had passed into the hands of ..an imperial regime, the armies and the courts of the army commanders... Their motive, though unacknowledged, was quite simple: ..The self-respect of the senatorial classes depended on this denial...

An analogous motive may be in play among our own class of academics and public intellectuals, for whom a migration of power into military, deep-political, and corporate-media hands may for similar reasons be difficult to acknowledge. István Meszáros has proposed that we are currently facing not merely a ..conjunctural crisis.. of the kind that occurred at intervals over the past century, but rather an all-embracing ..structural crisis....one which ..affects the totality of a social complex.. because it throws into question ..capital..s mode of social metabolic reproduction.. up to the ultimate limits of ..the established global structure... It would be no novelty to argue that the Bush regime..s military aggressions, together with its evident contempt for the constraints of republican governance (the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus among them) and its ever-increasing reliance on deep-political manipulations, are part of the corporatist ruling elite..s response to this structural crisis. Understandably enough, public intellectuals who are habituated to conjunctural crises in which their oppositional function was understood by all concerned, and who have in addition made a lifelong habit of ignoring or belittling political analyses which incorporate deep-political factors, have resisted the gathering evidence that these very factors have been decisive in the political transformations pushed through since 9/11.

And yet counter-forces are arguably at work against what Scott calls ..the social function of denial in masking political change... One of them, intellectual integrity, though it might seem a quaint abstraction to invoke in this context, has yet impelled conservative academics and public intellectuals like Paul Craig Roberts and Morgan Reynolds (who in addition to their university careers held senior positions in the Reagan and first George W. Bush administrations, respectively) into vehement opposition to the crimes of the present regime. Both have written powerful analyses of the present administration..s folly and criminality, and both recognize the events of 9/11 as a key element of that criminality.

Another counter-force may be a growing recognition of the delegitimizing power of the 9/11 evidence.

5. Delegitimizing the Bush regime
When Joshua Frank says of the Bush regime that ..this administration, like so many before it, needs to be stopped at once,.. I agree whole-heartedly with the sentiment (although the modifying phrase seems unfortunate: stopping the crimes of previous administrations is now something only time-travellers can hope to do). Let..s pause, then, to think about how the current US administration is to be stopped.

I would suggest that the concept of delegitimation should figure importantly in our reflections. People who have acquiesced in the actions of a government may be persuaded to withdraw their support and even to move into active opposition by evidence that those actions have been ill-judged, rash, or unprincipled. But evidence that a government has acted in ways that unambiguously violate the state..s foundational covenant..in this case the US Constitution and Bill of Rights..and that unambiguously sunder the ruling elite..s claims on the consent and loyalty of citizens and the obedience of state employees, whether civilian or military, cuts much deeper. What is at stake in this case is the legitimacy of the governing elite..and also, to the extent that people can recognize that elite..s declinations from the nation..s foundational democratic principles as systemic in nature, the legitimacy of the system of corporatized governance that has made it possible for such people to acquire and exercise power.

Since regular visitors to websites like Globalresearch.ca, ColdType.net, or Counterpunch scarcely need to be told of the many ways, from electoral fraud to the abolition of habeas corpus, from unconstrained mendacity to military aggression, in which the administration of George W. Bush has demonstrated its illegitimacy, I..m not going to rehearse them all here. But the evidence that on every key aspect of the events of 9/11 the Bush administration has lied, and that the official version of what happened on 9/11 cannot stand up to critical inquiry, does not simply necessitate the development of alternative hypotheses: it also provides what must be one of the strongest and most inescapable arguments against this regime..s legitimacy.

For if the emerging evidence of what happened on 9/11 is cogent enough to stand up in the face of the most rigorous critical examination..and a large part of it demonstrably is..the consequences for the legitimacy of the Bush government are quite literally shattering. If the government merely facilitated this terrorist atrocity through neglect or incompetence, then it abdicated its primary responsibility to protect the lives and property of its citizens. But if the evidence drives Americans to suspect that senior government officials may have been active parties in the catastrophic events of 9/11, and quite possibly their primary organizers as well as their most obvious beneficiaries, then the truly appalling possibility is raised of a treasonous perversion of state power resulting in mass murder. One might well argue that only an independent and bona fide criminal investigation could determine whether the evidence supports such a hypothesis. But it should be evident that officials whose actions are believed by large numbers of people to merit criminal investigation are well on their way to losing political legitimacy.

Rather than arguing in the abstract for the delegitimizing power of the 9/11 evidence, let me give a concrete example of it. Robert Bowman, a retired USAF Lt. Colonel who holds a Ph.D. in physics, was director of Advanced Space Program Development for the USAF in the Ford and Carter administrations. Here..s a part of what he had to say as a speaker at the DC Emergency Truth Convergence organized by the 9/11 Truth Movement in Washington, DC in July, 2005:
You know, our freedoms are not under attack from the remnants of Saddam Hussein..s Baathist party. They..re under attack by the likes of John Ashcroft, they..re trampled by Donald Rumsfeld, they..re disdained by Dick Cheney, and they..re not even understood by George W. Bush. The battle to preserve our freedoms is not taking place in Baghdad and Tikrit and Fallujah. It..s taking place in peace marches and demonstrations in Girardelli Park in San Francisco, in Memorial Park in Oklahoma City, and in Lafayette Park in Washington DC. [...] We, my sisters and brothers, are protecting this nation by speaking truth to power. [...]

And when we speak, this is the truth that we proclaim. This war in Iraq has nothing to do with national security, or freedom or democracy or human rights or protecting our allies or weapons of mass destruction or defeating terrorism or disarming Iraq. It has to do with money, it has to do with oil, and it has to do with raw imperial power. And it..s based totally on lies. Those who forced this war on an unwilling world are guilty of violating the US Constitution, the UN Charter, the Nuremberg principles, and international law. What they have done is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, and treason. [...]

This cabal of neoconservatives from PNAC who planned this war..Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Jeb Bush..even before W. became president, they told us why they had to do it. They said we need to occupy Iraq permanently in order to dominate Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the southern Russian republics around the Caspian Sea. We need to control the entire Middle East and all its oil. [..]

[T]hey knew the American people wouldn..t stand for it, and they said so in their documents..and they said, unless there..s that new Pearl Harbor. Well, 9/11 did supply that..and we..ve been lied to not only about the war, but about 9/11 itself. They ignored the warnings: more than that, we have mounting evidence that..at least..they made it impossible for those planes to be intercepted. If our government had merely [done] nothing, and I say that as an old interceptor pilot..I know the drill, I know what it takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are, I know what they were, and I know what they..ve changed them to..if our government had merely done nothing, and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive. My sisters and brothers, that is treason!
As a combat veteran, I will not stand idly by and watch our security destroyed by a president who went AWOL rather than serve in Vietnam. As one who..s devoted his life to the security of this country, I will not stand by and watch an appointed president send our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs for the oil companies. [...] I joined the air force a long time ago to protect our borders and our people, not the financial interests of Folgers, Chiquita Banana, Exxon, and Halliburton. We..ve had enough corporate wars! No more Iraqs, no more Kosovos, no more El Salvadors, no more Colombias! These are not isolated incidents of stupidity; they..re part of a long, bloody history of foreign policy being conducted for the financial interests of the wealthy few. [...]

As a pilot who flew a hundred and one combat missions in Vietnam, I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..and that includes a renegade president! It..s time for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and the whole oil mafia to be removed from office and indited for treason.

6. Conclusion

The 9/11 evidence is evidently for Bowman neither isolated, nor inert, nor immobilizing. It forms part of what he has come to understand (as he says in this same speech) as ..a new form of colonialism... Though Bowman has been a forceful critic of Reagan..s ..Star Wars.. Strategic Defense Initiative and subsequent missile defense systems, and though his religious commitments as a lay minister may also have exposed him to forms of thought beyond the customary discursive range of air force officers, one might guess that 9/11, which he evidently believes to have been a planned catalyst in the Bush regime..s project of oil geopolitics and aggressive warfare, was also a catalyzing factor in the development of his own understanding of ..corporate wars.. and the ..long, bloody history of foreign policy being conducted for the financial interests of the wealthy few...
As I have already noted, Bowman is not the only conservative one-time senior member of the state apparatus to have been jolted into open opposition by 9/11 and the other crimes of the current administration.
Perhaps it..s time that people on the left allowed themselves to be jolted as well..at the very least, into an honest and painstaking analysis of the evidence.

So, Alexander Cockburn: can we put these stupid boxing gloves away?

Two percent of adults command more than half of the world..s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent possesses just 1 percent, according to a U.N. development institute study released on Tuesday.

While income is distributed unequally across the globe, the geographical spread of wealth..which includes property and financial assets..is even more skewed, the study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the UN University showed.

..Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe and high-income Asia-Pacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90 percent of total world wealth,.. the survey said.

The Helsinki-based institute said this was the first global research on the topic, for which there are only limited data. The study is based on figures from 2000.

Institute director Anthony Shorrocks said if the world..s population was reduced to a group of 10 people, one person would hold $99 (50 pounds) and the remaining nine would share $1.

..The super-rich are even more grotesquely rich than 50 years ago,.. he said.

According to the study, a couple in 2000 needed $1 million in capital to number among the richest 37 million people in the world, the top 1 percent. More than half of that group lives in the United States or Japan.

..The USA and Japan stand out because they have large populations and high average wealth. Although Switzerland and Luxembourg have high average wealth, their populations are small,.. Shorrocks said.

Average per capita net assets in Japan were $181,000, while in the United States the average was $144,000.

The study found that net assets of $2,200 per adult would put a household in the top half of the wealth distribution.

At the bottom of the list came nations such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia, with capital of less than $200 per head.

Still, many in the wealthy West are house-poor, with assets well below this number due to mortgages and other debt.

..Many people in high-income countries have negative net worth and..somewhat paradoxically..are among the poorest people in the world in terms of household wealth,.. the report said.

By Tarmo Virki

http://www.wider.unu.edu/

Let's take a look at the situation on planet earth and the realities facing us in the next years/decades. The majority of wealth on planet earth is held by a tiny minority of people and these people are hell bent on maintaining their position of power regardless of the consequences for the rest of us and the planet. These oligarchs (dominated by the Rothschild family in Europe and Rockefellers in America) have manipulated wars finances and politics for at least the last two centuries, and nothing in their actions or words would lead me to think much will change in the immediate to long term future.

Through the Federal Reserve System (central banks in general) they control the money(s) of the world, using debt as the means to enslave governments and people to them. Through groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg group they create policy and bring new members into the "conspiracy". Through wars they divide the poor into nations to kill each other, while they are the true cause of the suffering inflicted upon the lower class. Through the media they distract and condition the masses to see their (the oligarchs) goals as their own, to worship money and materialism. Through the education system they condition people to follow authority and accept their enslavement into the capitalist system of wage worker.

How much of this is conspiracy and how much just the natural evolution of the hierarchical civilization born out of the agricultural revolution? How are the oligarchs themselves just a product of their own (twisted) conditioning and upbringing? Some say to remove them others would just replace them, and it's the systems of civilization that are to blame. Others believe this group is the prime cause of world wide suffering, and nations we're once fine before the conspiracy infiltrated their country. Myself I don't hold these views as mutually exclusive, and find both have truths in them. Secret Societies and civilization have gone hand and hand since the beginning, and I see them as the excuse used by the elite to justify their control of society, philosopher kings indeed.

Ok so that's where we are, now where are we headed? Industrial civilization is on the verge of collapse, and while I believe this is a good and necessary thing to happen to ensure the survival of life on the planet, the catch is in its collapse civilization might destroy all life on the planet. In the last century industry has ravaged the natural systems of the earth, turning our blue and green jewel into a toxic wasteland, to the betterment of mainly the oligarchs. Exporting the proletariat class from their home nations to the Third World and allowing the middle class bigger scraps and the possibility of joining the ranks of the oligarchs (if they follow their script), kept the whole thing going and allowed them to maintain their position on top of the hierarchy. Now however things are approaching the crisis point.

Oil, the blood in the veins of industrial civilization, is quickly disappearing, well not so much disappearing as peaking and becoming much harder to extract from the earth. The event known as Peak Oil has probably happened, is happening, or very soon will happen (it seems likely we have already peaked sometime between 2000-2006). Without oil the planet cannot support all 6 billion of us (especially if the oligarchs want to consume a disproportionate amount of resources), as industrial agriculture needs huge inputs of oil and natural gas to maintain high yields. And even in its currant form industrial agriculture cannot properly feed even a significant majority of people (this is of course not because there isn't enough food, but because of the insanities of the global economic system, which would not change through the Peak Oil crisis [well it might, but that's up to us]). So up until 100 plus years ago there was never a billion people on the earth for all of humanities 1.5 million year history, and since the industrial revolution and the oil economy there are now 6 billion plus (10-15 billion by 2050 according to the UN). Crisis is imminent.

Ok this seems obvious, at least to me, especially when you consider Peak Oil is only one amongst many crisis facing the world, with deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, species extinction, toxification of the natural world (all mothers on the planet have dioxin in their breast milk), and oh yeah, global warming all basically reaching critical stages right about now. Shit, meet fan. It seems impossible that the oligarchs don't know about all or at least some of these problems, indeed scientists have said for years that it would take 4 additional earths to maintain the western lifestyle for all peoples of the world (conversely 80% less people to maintain the oligarchs lifestyle).

So where does the War on Terror fit into this? And where does 9/11 fit into this? It seems obvious that the oligarchs have been aware of peak oil since at least the 70's, when geologist Hubbert (writing in the 50's, called Hubbert's Peak) predicted the peaking of US domestic oil production (which he was pretty much dead on within a few years). Zbigniew Brzezinski (Trilateral Commission founder along with David Rockefeller, national security adviser to Jimmy Carter demoRat) wrote of the supreme importance of the Middle East, also declaring this would be the scene for the next major world conflict, four years before the 9/11 attacks in his book The Grand Chessboard. The significance of this region which has the largest known reserves of oil on planet seems obvious, especially in the context of Peak Oil and potential rivals for the American Oligarchs dominance of the world, China and Russia (which isn't to say the elites of these nations don't co-operate, or that there is complete unison in the elites of the world; they work together when it is beneficial for them, which in the context of us, the majority of people on the earth versus them, is most of the time; however there still are power plays amongst them). Let's add in some PNAC for fun (the think tank that advocated the invasion of Iraq in the late 90's), composed of many of the current Bush administration members, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Pearl. Add in some Cheney Energy Task Force, and the picture starts to look like the people in power know what the fucks up.

Now it seems 9/11 could fit into the plans of the oligarchs perfectly, indeed many who do not believe in any conspiracy about the events of that day would agree that at the least the Bush gang capitalized on it to the umpteenth degree. All the actual details of what happened have been talked about over and over, and to recap briefly: the bin-Laden/al Queda CIA ISI Saudi connection; the FBI investigations into the then possible hijackers being thwarted at upper levels; the lack of NORAD/fighter response on the day; the lies of the Bush gang about having no knowledge about planes being used as weapons, which was later exposed that they did indeed have knowledge about such a plan, even had war games going on 9/11 simulating that exact event; the war games!!; the remarkable (even for W.) lack of response during the crisis when the Bush team allowed him to stay at a public school while planes we're still hijacked; the suspicious collapse of WTC building 7 despite not being hit by a plane which lead many, myself at least, to question what happened to WTC 1 and 2 (this line of thought is one of the most contentious amongst people who discuss the possible conspiracy of complete insider involvement); the odd lack of plane wreckage at the Pentagon attack site, the strange hole that penetrates many layers of the buildings enforce concrete walls, and the amazing aerial maneuvers performed by the hijackers, also the lack of proper film footage which is known to exist (the Pentagon is the other major bone of contention among the 9/11 crowd and those that disagree with the "truthers"); the insider trading on the airlines involved with the attacks; the fascist overtones in the remarkably quickly written Patriot Act and Homeland Security bill; the war and removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which restored the opium flow worldwide (the western banks needing the liquid cash generated through opium, and cocaine too of course, to keep the economy growing); phewww damn, I'm sure there's many more things, but you get the picture? There was come crazy shit going down that day, and the official version barely scratches anything of substance.

Ok so the elite either knew it was going to happen, allowed it to, orchestrated the whole thing, or merely capitalized on the opportunity the crisis provided, or perhaps parts of all three. I think most reasonable people can agree on that (go back to FOX news if not). Can we further agree that the oligarchs do not have our, or the planets best interests at heart as they push us into the next major conflict? That the people in power will do whatever it takes to maintain their power and the power they hold over society? That the crisis brought on by Peak Oil and environmental catastrophe, threaten the oligarchs position like no other event(s) in recent history have allowed? That they will lie, steal, cheat, kill, use DU, tactical nukes, FEMA detention centers, microchips, police state tactics/mentality, basically do whatever it takes to maintain control? Can we agree on that even if we don't agree on the exact details of what happened on 9/11? And if we can agree on that can we start doing what is necessary to protect our people and planet from the destruction they will/are causing? Can we stop bickering about who has the truth, who is a tool etc?

Ok look, we are coming to one of the greatest conflicts in all human history, and while this probably will result in the death of many people/animals/communities, it also gives us great opportunity to remove the oligarchs who have enslaved or attempted to enslave us and the natural world. They know this, they are scared, they will do whatever it takes to control us and maintain their power. If we can agree on one or all these things then we must start uniting against what is happening. And perhaps we'll fail and they will win, that the earth will be ravaged and all beauty destroyed. But perhaps not. Perhaps this is the time of greatest change, that we are all here during this time for a reason, that we need more people to stand up and resist, if not for justice for people and the planet, then for your own survival. George Bush has already said you're either with us or against us, and I sure as hell aint with them. And no there isn't one thing that will magically solve our problems, that all might be in vain, that humanity might go extinct in the end. But perhaps not, perhaps a different world is possible. Perhaps the oligarchs know this as well, perhaps they are frightened of it.

I think it's time to put aside these petty differences, my enemies enemy is my man. I am one, together we are two, two more and we are four… for our planet, for ourselves, for our children, we must fight. We must fight.

illogik