Next, we add hand made housing of straw-bale, adobe, log, rammed earth, or other local material, along with attached solar green houses according to many successful contemporary designs. The humans, of course, maintain a stable population and live with a stable biological unit.

Then we add a new human culture based on aiding the life force rather than its consumption and destruction.

Paradise is obviously not a new idea. Richard Heinberg in his book Memories and Visions of Paradise says, ” We are faced with some extraordinary facts. In virtually every culture on Earth we encounter a myth telling how humankind originated in a time of peace, happiness, and miraculous power and, because of some mistake or failure, degenerated to its present condition. Moreover, nearly every tribe and nation reveres the sayings of some ancient prophet who foretold the corrupt human world will one day be consumed in a purifying cataclysm to make way for a renewed Golden Age. And, as if the similarities of these ancient myths and prophecies were not remarkable enough, we are confronted by the additional fact that much of our civilization’s greatest literature and many of its most inspiring theories and experiments seem to derive their vitality and appeal from these mysterious memories and visions of paradise.”

This paradise can be done now. All of these systems have been worked out in the thousands of ecovillages around the planet and in many other similar designs. The above permacultural design has the effect of putting us in biological adaptation to the planet Earth. This is the key and crux of the matter. We as a species must be biologically adapted to the biological energy flows (food chains, biological webs) or we as a species cannot live on the earth. This is not to say that we must adopt a loin cloth and eat roots and berries such as the incredibly successful two million years of our ancestors, but it does mean that we somehow must biologically adapt to the earth. This means that the very foundations of our human culture of materialism must change.

THE CULTURE OF LOOTING

Human agriculture has been one of the most ecologically destructive disasters to hit the planet. When agriculture began and the first plow or digging stick was struck into the breast of Mother Earth, the destruction began. Soil scientists say that it takes between three hundred and a thousand years to accumulate each inch of topsoil in optimum ecologies. This is what agriculture drains from the earth. Surpluses from the life force of the earth is what the civilized are after and have been after for eight thousand years, draining the fertility of the earth through agriculture, overgrazing and deforestation The more surpluses that members of the empire can haul to the capital city, the more their social stature, in a materialistic society. Now that ninety per cent of the large fish in the ocean are gone, we are down to ten per cent of the planetary forest and soil erosion, exhaustion and desertification are racing ahead on all continents, even the unconcerned can see the problem. “Civilization,” since its inception has accomplished its growth by sucking the fertility out of the life force of the planet.

The phrase, “survival of the fittest,” was taken up out of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and made into a violent cultural norm by the British Empire. “Social Darwinism” soon followed. Those who ruled by violence, theft and lies, considered it obvious that they were the ‘best,” and on the forefront of evolution, since they ruled. Those who ruled Babylon in the now ecologically destroyed “fertile crescent, the Han Chinese who ruled a country that was once half covered by a fertile temperate zone forest and those imperial rulers who occupied the once fertile Indus River Valley, no doubt thought they were the “best” – eight thousand years ago. That human culture has descended through the years to the point that “pioneers” on their way to loot the U.S. west, killed thousands of buffalo, took their tongues to market for money and left the carcasses to rot on the plains. This is an appropriate image of the culture of civilization and its ten thousand year project of killing the life force of our planet.

A CULTURE OF ADAPTATION

Another part of Darwin’s theory — that the English ruling class neglected — is the value of biological adaptation. When the banker leans on the farmer, the farmer leans on the soil, for more surpluses. The city dweller eats some of the food and throws the scraps, along with all other organic material in the landfill where its mass becomes an ecological problem. This is a simplified version of the whole of the culture of empire. There is no reward for the upstream supplier of biological energy, there is simply looting.. The ecology that provided the soil is not rewarded with the organic material so as to continue its growth. In many cases the old growth forest that originally provided the topsoil is gone.

In a great cultural turn-around, thousands of ecovillages have sprung up around the planet, pointed toward reversing the civilized cultural values and seeking adaptation to the planetary biology. Biological adaptation is the only way that the human species can be on this planet in perpetuity.

Much concern has been expressed recently about economic collapse, but the big collapse right behind it is what most people in the materialistic society do not see. This is the biological collapse of the life force of our planet. In this late stage of the “crisis of empire,” the only beneficial act one can do is seek biological adaptation in some manner. All other activities are frivolous and pointless.

As the culture of looting crashes in flames, our hope is that some of the thousands of ecovillages around the planet will survive the cataclysm to thrust a new pattern of cultural values, and a new adaptation to the life force, into the future.

Of course, it is not so simple. All processes and events occur in a context – often called environment.

It is not the goal of our historical time to adapt to the conditions that surround us, but to change them. This is long human practice and the slowly accumulated changes to our environment are the reason that we are in the trouble we are in, but we are now being told that we must adapt to the holey ad hoc structures that make claims of “reality” solely because it is what we are supposed to believe.

There is no reason to ‘believe in’ the accepted structures of our time, like economic growth; no reason to believe in Christianity, private property, Islam, American Exceptionalism, progress or hundreds other things, but there is reason to believe in physical “laws”, evolutionary and adaptive process and scientific method. We believe in “facts” as a matter of convenience; we adopt processes because they work. This is one of the oldest and most well worn paths in the human experience.

Experimentation v. authority has been a tension for the whole of human existence; and experimentation began formally winning with the enlightenment. The assumption (belief) that statements could be true and complete, and the property of those with special powers or superior connections (like with a God), began to weaken as people actually looked, measured and theorized. But humans often continue following the old habit and believing in science ‘fact’ when what we need to believe in is science method.

This is not to say that there should be no inhibiting force to rein in and ‘govern’ experimentation. There should; it is called the scientific method and requires that a consensus of experts (authorities) agree based on repeated experimental results comporting with theoretical foundations. This means that ‘facts’ will always be in a state of change, but that the Method can be usefully relied on to bring those ‘facts’ closer and closer, more adaptively useful, to an ultimately unknowable reality. And even the method itself is subject to adaptive changes as the processes uncover better ways to perform its function.

Designs for behavior may or not comport with the best understandings of the moment supplied by a soundly based adaptive process. We see this all the time: * I am better off eating broccoli, free range eggs (and then just the albumen) and high quality sardines. But I like lasagna, beer, ice cream and pie. * Waste chemicals from my small business damage the environment, but it costs so much to dispose of them properly (if that is even possible) that I dump them secretly. * Increasing population and consumption is clearly endangering the ecological stabilities that support and allow the present ecological structures of the earth, but I am benefiting in this moment from the economic growth that is driven by increasing consumption and can’t imagine life without those benefits.

Belief in ‘facts’ is dangerous, potentially dramatically so. Einstein couldn’t ‘believe in’ quantum mechanics because he didn’t believe that the underlying principle of physical order could be probabilistic, even as the experimental data piled higher and higher. Alan Greenspan believed in economic theories that had been come to by ‘echo chamber’ research and Randian philosophy unfounded in human behavioral studies; he liked them like I like ice cream. And at the greatest and most depressing extreme, Henry Paulson (and now Tim Geithner), pathologically, believed in his own righteousness and self-importance, and so was the front man for an on going monumental theft bringing damage and destruction to millions of people all over the earth.

A deeper belief in the adaptive processes of the scientific method could have led Einstein closer to the truth, could have caused Greenspan to question his certainties and moderate his actions and, perhaps, could have caused Paulson to be diagnosed as dangerously sociopathic before he found his way to the highest eyries of power.

It should be obvious that we are in a terrible situation: billions of people, thousands of ‘fact-based’ belief systems and almost none of them naturally supporting of adaptive process-based systems. Yet, we all must become method-based and not ‘fact’ based; we must all become scientists, adopting process-based belief systems just as we have, over time, all become literate. There was, for a long time, a prejudice against being literate with letters and numbers, just as today being scientifically literate is considered geeky. As long as we continue arguing over beliefs as ‘facts,’ there is no hope for resolution: there are endless years of squabbling over facts. If people have mutual respect for the process, divergence in fact only supplies material for adaptation, not reason to compete for truth as an absolute.

And there is little time, perhaps a generation. I can only guess at the thinking of the economic and political elites, whether they support an enslaved world or an enlightened one, though I have serious doubts that the necessary changes in education and media are high on their agendas. But as helpful as it would be to have the elites fully engaged in the next salutary steps toward a ecologically sustaining future, they are not required if enough of the rest of us are willing to do the necessary work and to take them on when required.

Ralph Nader has recently made the argument, in a work of fiction, that the economic elite can save us – and it is certainly true if they were to seriously devote themselves and their resources to the problems detailed by sound scientific research, that many seemingly intractable problems could be solved, but it is more likely that they will obstruct the changes that are needed since most of the solutions contain the lessening of their power, their wealth and their entitlement. The more amorphous masses will have to lead the way. In this direction lies more suffering, closer brushes with oblivion and other dangers, but it may be the only way.

Becoming evermore depressingly clear is, based on a vast evidence base that the world’s leaders have seemingly chosen not to believe in, that maintaining our present human habits will so damage ecological and biophysical systems that many present ecological structures will collapse with drastic consequences for human social and economic order. A process-based belief system would examine the data, evaluate it on its merits and develop actions corresponding to the greatest weight of the evidence. Focusing on whether the ‘facts’ benefit one political party or another is the sort of madness that comes from belief in propositions over process.

We need to believe in the process of the scientific method,¹ but first we need to be well versed in its functioning. We, a significant part of humanity, must make this process the basis for our actions. The old ways of believing in Men and Gods and their proclamations must give way to adaptive systems of change based on the processes of discovery that have led us so well in our material quests. This is no more than adaptation explicitly within the consciousness domain: we have no more time or space to do it in the old ways; they have brought us far, both in understanding and knowledge… and to the brink of destruction.

Just as reading and writing were once new, suspicious, seen as largely unimportant and seemingly for only a few, yet fueled the greatest changes in human societies; so today the broad epistemological and social designs of science must be poised to be both tool and primary system of belief for any successful future.

1. This has to be an unapologetic sustaining of a method for selecting the most veridical options to be the ‘facts’ with which we inform our actions. A common current model for discord, that of looking for equality in all positions, is silly, fundamentally unscientific and flagrantly non-adaptive.

Lost all too often in the climate debate is an appreciation of the delicate balance between the physical and chemical state of the atmosphere-ocean-land system and the evolving biosphere, which controls the emergence, survival and demise of species, including humans.

By contrast to Venus, with its thick blanket of CO2 and sulphur dioxide greenhouse atmosphere, exerting extreme pressure (90 bars) at the surface, or Mars with its thin (0.01 bar) CO2 atmosphere, the presence in the Earth’s atmosphere of trace concentrations of greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, nitric oxides, ozone) modulates surface temperatures in the range of -89 and +57.7 degrees Celsius, allowing the presence of liquid water and thereby of life.

Forming a thin breathable veneer only slightly more than one thousand the diameter of Earth, and evolving both gradually as well as through major perturbations with time, the Earth’s atmosphere acts as the lungs of the biosphere, allowing an exchange of carbon gases and oxygen with plants and animals, which in turn affect the atmosphere, for example through release of methane and photosynthetic oxygen.

An excess of carbon dioxide in the lungs triggers a need to breath. When the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere rises above a critical threshold, the climate moves to a different state. Any significant increase in the level of carbon gases triggers powerful feedbacks. These include ice melt/warm water interaction, decline of ice reflection (albedo) effect and increase in infrared absorption by exposed water. Further release of CO2 from the oceans and from drying and burning vegetation shifts global climate zones toward the poles, warms the oceans and induces ocean acidification.

The essential physics of the infrared absorption/emission resonance of greenhouse molecules has long been established by observations in nature and laboratory studies, as portrayed in the relations between atmospheric CO2 and mean global temperature projections in Figure 1.

The living biosphere, allowing survival of large mammals and of humans on the continents, has developed when CO2 levels fell below about 500 ppm some 34 million years ago (late Eocene). At that stage, and again about 15 million years ago (mid-Miocene), development of the Antarctic ice sheet led to a fundamental change in the global climate regime.

About 2.8 million years ago (mid-Pliocene) the Greenland ice sheet and the Arctic Sea ice began to form, with further decline in global temperatures expressed through glacial-interglacial cycles regulated by orbital forcing (Milankovic cycles), with atmospheric CO2 levels oscillating between 180 and 280 ppm CO2.⁴ These conditions allowed the emergence of humans in Africa and later all over the world.⁵

Humans already existed 3 million years-ago, however these were small clans which, in response to changing climates migrated to more hospitable parts of Africa and subsequently Asia.⁵ About 124 thousand years ago, during the Emian interglacial, temperatures rose by about 1 degree C and sea levels by 6-8 meters.

The development of agriculture and thereby human civilization had to wait until climate stabilized about 8000 years ago, when large scale irrigation along the great river valleys (the Nile, Euphrates, Hindus and Yellow River) became possible.

Since the industrial revolution humans dug, pumped and burnt more than 320 billion tons of carbon which accumulated as the result of biological activity during 400 million years. 320 billion tons of carbon is more than 50% the carbon concentration of the original atmosphere (540 billion tons). As a consequence the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by about 40%, from 280 to 388 ppm.

The world is now witnessing a dangerous shift in the state of the atmosphere-ocean system, an extremely rapid change from the interglacial condition of the Holocene, which began about 11,700 years-ago, to conditions analogous to those of the mid-Pliocene when mean global temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees C higher, and sea levels about 25+/-12 meters higher, than the early 20th century.

In terms of the combined effects of CO2, methane and nitric oxide, the rise of greenhouse gases has reached about 460 ppm CO2-equivalent (CO2-e) (Figure 1), only slightly below the 500 ppm level which correlates with the maximum stability of the Antarctic ice sheet.

Figure 1. A plot of global mean temperature (increase above pre-industrial time in degrees C) vs atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration (in CO2-eqivalent, a value which includes the effect of methane). The assumed climate is 3+/-1.5 degrees C per doubling of CO2-e. The field I, II, III, etc. correspond to the IPCC’s various emission scenarios. IPCC Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, figure 5.1

The current rate at which CO2 is rising, 2 ppm per year, is unprecedented in the recent history of the Earth, with the exception of the onset of greenhouse atmospheric conditions following major volcanic episodes and asteroid and comet impacts, which led to the large mass extinctions in the history of the Earth (end-Ordovician, end-Devonian, end-Permian and Permian-Triassic boundary, end-Triassic, end-Jurassic, end-Cretaceous) (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and oxygen concentrations correlated with ice ages (blue histograms, extending according to geographic latitude). Note the sharp decline in atmospheric CO2 during ice ages. After Royer et al. 2004 and Berner et al. 2007.

Further rise of CO2-e above 500 ppm and mean global temperatures above 4 degrees C can only lead toward greenhouse Earth conditions such as existed during the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic (Figure 2).

At 4 degrees C advanced to total melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets leads to sea levels tens of meters higher than at present.

Since the 18th century mean global temperature has risen by about 0.8 degrees C. Another 0.5 degrees C is masked by industrial-emitted aerosols (SO2), and further rise ensues from current melting of the ice sheets and sea ice, with loss of reflection (albedo) of ice and gain in infrared absorption by open water, leading to feedback effects.

The polar regions, actinv as the “thermostats” of the Earth, are the source of the cold air current vortices and the cold ocean currents, such as the Humboldt and California current, which keep the Earth’s overall temperature balance, much as the blood stream regulates the body’s temperature and the supply of oxygen.

Unfortunately climate change is not an abstract notion, with consequences manifest around the globe in terms of (1) Polar ice melt; (2) Sea level rise; (3) Migration of climate zones toward the poles; (4) Desertification of temperate climate zones; (5) Intensification of hurricanes and floods, related to increase in the level of atmospheric energy; (6) acidification of the oceans; (7) Destruction of coral reefs [2-4].

Which is why the European Union and in recent international conferences defined a rise by 2.0 degrees C as the maximum permissible level. A dominant scientific view has emerged that atmospheric CO2 levels, currently at 388 ppm, need to be urgently reduced to below 350 ppm [5]. This is because, a rise of CO2 concentration above 350 ppm triggers feedback effects, which include:

1. Carbon cycle feedback due to warming, which dries and burns vegetation, with loss of CO2. With further warming, the onset of methane release from polar bogs and sediments is of major concern.

2. Ice/melt water interaction feedbacks: melt water melts more ice, ice loss results in albedo loss, exposed water absorb infrared heat.

Because CO2 is cumulative, with atmospheric residence time on the scale of centuries to millennia, it may not be possible to stabilize or control the climate through small incremental reduction in emission and avoid irreversible tipping points.⁸

Humans can not argue with the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere. Time is running out. What is needed are global emergency measures, including:

1. Urgent deep cuts in carbon emissions by as much as 80%.
2. Parallel Fast track transformation to non-polluting energy utilities – solar, solar-thermal, wind, tide, geothermal, hot rocks.
3. Global reforestation and re-vegetation campaigns, including application of biochar.

Business as usual, with its focus on the annual balance sheet, can hardly continue under conditions of environmental collapse. Governments, focused on the next elections, need to focus on the survival of the next generation.

Good planets are hard to come by.

1. IPCC 2007 AR4
2. Copenhagen Synthesis Report
3. Oxford 28-30 October, 2009 meeting
4. Hansen et al. 2008. “Target CO2: Where Should humanity aim?“; Glikson, A.Y., 2008. “Milestones in the evolution of the atmosphere with reference to climate change.” Aust. J. Earth Sci. 55:2.
5. deMenocal, P.B. “African climate change and faunal evolution during the Pliocene-Pleistocene.” Earth and Plant. Sci. Lett, Frontiers, 6976, 1-22, 2004.
6. Royer et al., 2004. “CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate.” GSA Today, 14: 3, doi: 10.1130/1052-5173
7. Berner et al., 2007. “Oxygen and evolution.” Science, 316, 557 – 558.
8. Lenton et al., 2008. “Tipping points in the Earth climate system.”

It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren’t tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks.

No, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a “total information” surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call “actionable intelligence.”

Build the Perfect Panopticon, Win Fabulous Prizes!

In this context, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a remarkable document October 4 by the INDECT Consortium, the Intelligence Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment.

Hardly a catchy acronym, but simply put INDECT is working to put a human face on the billions of emails, text messages, tweets and blog posts that transit cyberspace every day; perhaps your face.

According to Wikileaks, INDECT’s “Work package 4″ is designed “to comb web blogs, chat sites, news reports, and social-networking sites in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships.” Ponder that phrase again: “automatic dossiers.”

This isn’t the first time that European academics have applied their “knowledge skill sets” to keep the public “safe”–from a meaningful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble, that is.

Last year The Guardian reported that Bath University researchers’ Cityware project covertly tracked “tens of thousands of Britons” through the installation of Bluetooth scanners that capture “radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, and using the data to follow unwitting targets without their permission.”

One privacy advocate, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, told The Guardian: “This technology could well become the CCTV of the mobile industry. It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control.”

Which of course, is precisely the point.

As researchers scramble for a windfall of cash from governments eager to fund these dubious projects, European police and security agencies aren’t far behind their FBI and NSA colleagues in the spy game.

The online privacy advocates, Quintessenz, published a series of leaked documents in 2008 that described the network monitoring and data mining suites designed by Nokia Siemens, Ericsson and Verint.

The Nokia Siemens Intelligence Platform dubbed “intelligence in a box,” integrate tasks generally done by separate security teams and pools the data from sources such as telephone or mobile calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions, insurance records and the like. Call it data mining on steroids.

Ironically enough however, Siemens, the giant German electronics firm was caught up in a global bribery scandal that cost the company some $1.6 billion in fines. Last year, The New York Times described “a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants,” and a culture of “entrenched corruption … at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions.”

According to the Times, “at Siemens, bribery was just a line item.” Which just goes to show, powering the secret state means never having to say you’re sorry!

Social Network Spying, a Growth Industry Fueled by Capitalist Grifters

The trend by security agencies and their corporate partners to spy on their citizens has accelerated greatly in the West since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This multi-billion industry in general, has been a boon for the largest American and European defense corporations. Among the top ten companies listed by Washington Technology in their annual ranking of the “Top 100″ prime government contractors, all ten–from Lockheed Martin to Booz Allen Hamilton–earned a combined total of $68 billion in 2008 from defense and related homeland security work for the secret state.

And like Siemens, all ten corporations figure prominently on the Project on Government Oversight’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD), which tracks “contract fraud, environmental, ethics, and labor violations.” Talk about a rigged game!

Designing everything from nuclear missile components to eavesdropping equipment for various government agencies in the United States and abroad, including some of the most repressive regimes on the planet, these firms have moved into manufacturing the hardware and related computer software for social networking surveillance in a big way.

Wired revealed in April that the FBI is routinely monitoring cell phone calls and internet activity during criminal and counterterrorism investigations. The publication posted a series of internal documents that described the Wi-Fi and computer hacking capabilities of the Bureau’s Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU).

New Scientist reported back in 2006 that the National Security Agency “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.”

And just this week in an exclusive report published by the British high-tech publication, The Register, it was revealed that “the government has outsourced parts of its biggest ever mass surveillance project to the disaster-prone IT services giant formerly known as EDS.”

That work is being conducted under the auspices of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British state’s equivalent of America’s National Security Agency.

Investigative journalist Chris Williams disclosed that the American computer giant HP, which purchased EDS for some $13.9 billion last year, is “designing and installing the massive computing resources that will be needed to analyse details of who contacts whom, when where and how.”

Work at GCHQ in Cheltenham is being carried out under “a secret project called Mastering the Internet.” In May, a Home Office document surfaced that “ostensibly sought views on whether ISPs should be forced to gather terabytes of data from their networks on the government’s behalf.”

The Register reported earlier this year that telecommunications behemoth Detica and U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin were providing GCHQ with data mining software “which searches bulk data, such as communications records, for patterns … to identify suspects.” (For further details see: Antifascist Calling, “Spying in the UK: GCHQ Awards Lockheed Martin £200m Contract, Promises to ‘Master the Internet’,” May 7, 2009)

It seems however, that INDECT researchers like their GCHQ/NSA kissin’ cousins in Britain and the United States, are burrowing ever-deeper into the nuts-and-bolts of electronic social networking and may be on the verge of an Orwellian surveillance “breakthrough.”

As New Scientist sagely predicted, the secret state most certainly plans to “harness advances in internet technology–specifically the forthcoming ’semantic web’ championed by the web standards organisation W3C–to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.”

Profiling Internet Dissent

Pretty alarming, but the devil as they say is in the details and INDECT’s release of their “Work package 4″ file makes for a very interesting read. And with a title, “XML Data Corpus: Report on methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat,” rest assured one must plow through much in the way of geeky gibberish and tech-speak to get to the heartless heart of the matter.

INDECT itself is a rather interesting amalgamation of spooks, cops and academics.

According to their web site, INDECT partners include: the University of Science and Technology, AGH, Poland; Gdansk University of Technology; InnoTech DATA GmbH & Co., Germany; IP Grenoble (Ensimag), France; MSWiA, the General Headquarters of Police, attached to the Ministry of the Interior, Poland; Moviquity, Spain; Products and Systems of Information Technology, PSI, Germany; the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI, United Kingdom (hardly slouches when it comes to stitching-up Republicans and other leftist agitators!); Poznan University of Technology; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria; University of Wuppertal, Germany; University of York, Great Britain; Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia; X-Art Pro Division G.m.b.H, Austria; and finally, the Fachhochschule Technikum, also in Austria.

I don’t know about you, but I find it rather ironic that the European Union, ostensible guardians of democracy and human rights, have turned for assistance in their surveillance projects to police and spy outfits from the former Soviet bloc, who after all know a thing or two when it comes to monitoring their citizens.

Right up front, York University’s Suresh Manadhar, Ionnis Klapaftis and Shailesh Pandey, the principle authors of the INDECT report, make their intentions clear.

Since “security” as the authors argue, “is becoming a weak point of energy and communications infrastructures, commercial stores, conference centers, airports and sites with high person traffic in general,” they aver that “access control and rapid response to potential dangers are properties that every security system for such environments should have.”

Does INDECT propose building a just and prosperous global society, thus lessening the potential that terrorist killers or other miscreants will exploit a “target rich environment” that may prove deadly for innocent workers who, after all, were the principle victims of the 2004 and 2007 terrorist outrages in Madrid and London? Hardly.

As with their colleagues across the pond, INDECT is hunting for the ever-elusive technological quick-fix, a high-tech magic bullet. One, I might add, that will deliver neither safety nor security but rather, will constrict the democratic space where social justice movements flourish while furthering the reach of unaccountable security agencies.

The document “describes the first deliverable of the work package which gives an overview about the main methodology and description of the XML data corpus schema and describes the methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat, etc.”

The first order of business “is the study and critical review of the annotation schemes employed so far for the development and evaluation of methods for entity resolution, co-reference resolution and entity attributes identification.”

In other words, how do present technologic capabilities provide police, security agencies and capitalist grifters with the ability to identify who might be speaking to whom and for what purpose. INDECT proposes to introduce “a new annotation scheme that builds upon the strengths of the current-state-of-the-art,” one that “should be extensible and modifiable to the requirements of the project.”

Asserting that “an XML data corpus [can be] extracted from forums and social networks related to specific threats (e.g. hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.),” the authors claim they will provide “different entity types according to the requirements of the project. The grouping of all references to an entity together. The relationships between different entities” and finally, “the events in which entities participate.”

Why stop there? Why not list the ubiquitous “other” areas of concern to INDECT’s secret state partners? While “hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.,” may be the ostensible purpose of their “entity attributes identification” project, surely INDECT is well aware that such schemes are just as easily applicable to local citizen groups, socialist and anarchist organizations, or to the innumerable environmental, human rights or consumer campaigners who challenge the dominant free market paradigm of their corporate sponsors.

The authors however, couldn’t be bothered by the sinister applications that may be spawned by their research; indeed, they seem quite proud of it.

“The main achievements of this work” they aver, “allows the identification of several types of entities, groups the same references into one class, while at the same time allows the identification of relationships and events.”

Indeed, the “inclusion of a multi-layered ontology ensures the consistency of the annotation” and will facilitate in the (near) future, “the use of inference mechanisms such as transitivity to allow the development of search engines that go beyond simple keyword search.”

Quite an accomplishment! An enterprising security service or capitalist marketing specialist need only sift through veritable mountains of data available from commercial databases, or mobile calls, tweets, blog posts and internet searches to instantaneously identity “key agitators,” to borrow the FBI’s very 20th century description of political dissidents; individuals who could be detained or “neutralized” should sterner methods be required.

Indeed, a surveillance scheme such as the one INDECT is building could greatly facilitate–and simplify–the already formidable U.S. “Main Core” database that “reportedly collects and stores–without warrants or court orders–the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security,” as investigative journalists Tim Shorrock and Christopher Ketchum revealed in two disturbing reports last year.

The scale of “datasets/annotation schemes” exploited by INDECT is truly breathtaking and include: “Automatic Content Extraction” gleaned from “a variety of sources, such as news, broadcast conversations” that identify “relations between entities, and the events in which these participate.”

We next discover what is euphemistically called the “Knowledge Base Population (KBP),” an annotation scheme that “focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE), Location (LOC), Facility (FAC), Geographical/Social/Political (GPE), Vehicle (VEH) and Weapon (WEA).”

How is this accomplished? Why through an exploitation of open source materials of course!

INDECT researchers readily aver that “a snapshot of Wikipedia infoboxes is used as the original knowledge source. The document collection consists of newswire articles on the order of 1 million. The reference knowledge base includes hundreds of thousands of entities based on articles from an October 2008 dump of English Wikipedia. The annotation scheme in KBP focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE).”

For what purpose? Mum’s the word as far as INDECT is concerned.

Nothing escapes this panoptic eye. Even popular culture and leisure activities fall under the glare of security agencies and their academic partners in the latest iteration of this truly monstrous privacy-killing scheme. Using the movie rental firm Netflix as a model, INDECT cites the firm’s “100 million ratings from 480 thousand randomly-chosen, anonymous Netflix customers” as “well-suited” to the INDECT surveillance model.

In conclusion, EU surveillance architects propose a “new annotation & knowledge representation scheme” that “is extensible,” one that “allows the addition of new entities, relations, and events, while at the same time avoids duplication and ensures integrity.”

Deploying an ontological methodology that exploits currently available data from open source, driftnet surveillance of news, broadcasts, blog entries and search results, and linkages obtained through a perusal of mobile phone records, credit card purchases, medical records, travel itineraries, etc., INDECT claims that in the near future their research will allow “a search engine to go beyond simple keyword queries by exploiting the semantic information and relations within the ontology.”

And once the scheme is perfected, “the use of expressive logics … becomes an enabler for detecting entity relations on the web.” Or transform it into an “always-on” spy you carry in your pocket or whenever you switch on your computer.

This is how our minders propose to keep us “safe.”

CIA Gets In on the Fun

Not to be outdone, the CIA has entered the lucrative market of social networking surveillance in a big way.

In an exclusive published by Wired, we learn that the CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, “want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates–even check out your book reviews on Amazon.”

Investigative journalist Noah Shachtman reveals that In-Q-Tel “is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using “open source intelligence”–information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.” Wired reported:

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. (Noah Shachtman, Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm that Monitors Blogs, Tweets,” Wired, October 19, 2009)

Although In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe told Wired that it wants Visible to monitor foreign social media and give American spooks an “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” Shachtman points out that “such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters.”

According to Wired, the firm already keeps tabs on 2.0 web sites “for Dell, AT&T and Verizon.” And as an added attraction, “Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns” against meat processing giant Hormel.

Shachtman reports that “Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field.” And why wouldn’t they, considering that the heimat security and even spookier black world of the U.S. “intelligence community,” is a veritable cash-cow for enterprising corporations eager to do the state’s bidding.

In 2008 Wired reports, Visible “teamed-up” with the Washington, DC-based consulting firm “Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others.”

According to a blurb on the firm’s web site they are in hot-pursuit of “social media engagement specialists” with Defense Department experience and “a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian.” Wired reports that Concepts & Strategies “is also looking for an ‘information system security engineer’ who already has a ‘Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph’ security clearance.”

In such an environment, nothing escapes the secret state’s lens. Shachtman reveals that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites.”

In 2007, the Center’s director, Doug Naquin, “told an audience of intelligence professionals” that “‘we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs’.”

But as Steven Aftergood, who maintains the Secrecy News web site for the Federation of American Scientists told Wired, “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source’.”

But as we have seen across the decades, from COINTELPRO to Operation CHAOS, and from Pentagon media manipulation during the run-up to the Iraq war through driftnet warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ electronic communications, the secret state is a law unto itself, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that thrives on duplicity, fear and cold, hard cash.

Three Israel-related events this year have stayed in the headlines, reflecting the importance of Israel in Canadian political and cultural life.

First, Canadian Ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was recently honoured at Canada Park — built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law — as one of hundreds of donors who helped establish the park on the ruins of three Palestinian villages. Just north of Jerusalem, it was founded in the early 1970s following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 war. It is hugely popular for walks and picnics with the Israeli public, who are by and large unaware that they are in Palestinian territory that is officially a closed military zone. Former Israeli parliamentarian Uri Avnery has described the park’s creation as an act of complicity in “ethnic cleansing” and Canada’s involvement as “cover to a war crime”. About 5,000 Palestinians were expelled from the area during the war. A plaque bearing Allen’s name is attached to a stone wall constructed from the rubble of Palestinian homes razed by the Israeli army. The Jewish National Fund, treated as a charity for tax purposes, establishes and manages such parks on behalf of Jewish people worldwide. Canada Park is believed to be the only example, outside East Jerusalem, of the JNF becoming directly involved in managing land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Then there is the wildly popular exhibition, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World,” at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a joint project with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), funded by the Toronto Tanenbaum family dynasty who coincidentally were instrumental in the creation of Canada Park. This exhibition provided a fitting gala premier for the museum’s ultra-modern wing designed by Israeli-American Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind, whose parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, also designed the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck, Germany, and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. The Dead Sea Scrolls, regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and including what is purported to be the oldest known version of the Old Testament (150BC-70CE), were found by a Bedouin shepherd in caves near Qumran, near the Dead Sea, and later by the Palestine Archaeological Museum (also known as the Rockefeller Museum) in a joint expedition with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the Ecole Biblique Française between 1947-1956. The Scrolls were displayed at the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem until 1967, when they were seized and relocated to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. Since 1967, additional (illegal) excavations and findings by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) took place in Qumran and the surrounding area, and artefacts continue to be (illegally) appropriated by Israel, under the auspices of the IAA.

Under international law and in accordance with Canada’s and Israel’s obligations as signatories to the 1954 UNESCO protocol for the “Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict”, Israel is not entitled to these artefacts. The repatriation of the Scrolls and millions of other artefacts to Palestine remains a key issue for those seeking peace and justice in the Middle East. In 2005, Canada signed other UNESCO conventions and protocols specifically aimed at preventing the removal and the exhibition of illegally removed artefacts from occupied territories, and adopted domestic Canadian legislation — the Cultural Property Export and Import Act — which makes it a criminal offense to import cultural property in violation of the conventions. The ROM, for its own part, is a member of the Canadian Museums Association whose Ethics Guidelines states that “museums must guard against any direct or indirect participation in the illicit traffic in cultural and natural objects that are: stolen, illegally imported or exported from another state, including those that are occupied or war-stricken.” The 1954 Convention clearly requires Canada to “take into custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory” and “return, at the close of hostilities, to the competent authorities of the territory previously occupied, cultural property which is in its territory.”

Israel not only continues to illegally excavate in occupied Palestinian territory but dismisses international law altogether (despite its UNESCO pledges), using archeology and discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls to reinforce the Zionist national narrative and the colonial project upon which the state was founded. Supposedly a science removed from political, religious, or ideological bias, archeology under the IAA is the very antithesis of this, being rooted in Biblical mythology. Artefacts like the Scrolls are, according to Amos Elon, “almost titles of real estate, like deeds of possession to a contested country”. Like British, French, and German imperialist functionaries before them, Israeli archeologists sift through the many layers of historical evidence in search of what will prove their belief that they are indeed God’s Chosen People, ignoring or rather destroying the intervening layers and interpreting finds to suit their needs. The thousands of years of non-Jewish Arab civilisation don’t matter. Historian Keith Whitelam says in The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, the modern state of Israel has “cast its shadow of influence backwards to claim previous periods as its ‘prehistory’.” The IAA is just as much a steamroller, flattening indigenous Palestine, as the Israeli Defence Forces, in their policy of archeological apartheid. Committee Against Israeli Apapartheid (CAIA) activist Ali Mustafa writes that Israeli archeology is explicitly categorised by the IAA as either Jewish/Israeli or Arab/Muslim in a process whereby ancient artefacts that supposedly belong to the Biblical era are actively sought after, while supposedly encouraging Palestinians to do the same concerning later Islamic periods. Following the Oslo peace process, Israel claimed it was prepared to assign jurisdiction of all “Arab” and “Muslim” archeological sites in the West Bank over to the PA; however, the offer was flatly refused, and the PA instead demanded control over all sites, as well as an immediate return of artefacts seized since 1967. The logic is simple: conflate all Palestinian history as Islamic (openly disregarding Christian and secular influences), and apply these reductive and simplistic binary terms to all artefacts ignoring the region’s shared past and overlapping cultural heritage. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the Scrolls should be seized by ROM and the Canadian government under their international obligations and held or handed over to UNESCO until their ownership is determined, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation concluded in June that “the museum feels the scrolls are legally held and both the federal and provincial government have expressed their support of the exhibition.”

The third event is the Toronto International Film Festival’s “City to city Spotlight on Tel Aviv”, in cooperation with the Israeli Embassy and the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation. Along with the ROM exhibition, this PR scheme was to be the centre- piece of Israeli Consul Gissin’s special Canadian “Brand Israel” campaign, dreamed up in 2008 on his arrival in Toronto, using the same mass marketing techniques of “The Israel Project”, launched in 2002 in the US, to present a more “benign” vision of Israel to the Canadian public. The Israel Project uses “grassroots” encounter groups to hone their propaganda efforts. Canadian partners in the Project’s Canadian spin-off included Sidney Greenberg of Astral Mediaand David Asper of Canwest Global Communications, arguably the most powerful media magnates in Canada, who are funding a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel.

“Brand Israel” is intended to take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. In The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, Frank Luntz explains: “Americans want a team to cheer for. Let the public know GOOD things about Israel … The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ’security’, and ‘peace’”. Fleshing out how to rebrand Israeli atrocities, Gissin made it clear that his mission was to “make Israel relevant” to Canadians and use Toronto as a test market for the Israel brand during his term. The lessons learned from Toronto would inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said. Official Brand Israel logos and advertising can be found across Toronto in bus shelters, on billboards, on radio and TV. Gissin said the ad blitz would be “an attack on all the senses.” The idea was to see “how to introduce a brand into Toronto” with emphasis on “grassroots” exposure, to promote Tel Aviv as a city of peace, untouched by the wars Israel has waged since 1948, despite the fact that many Palestinian communities were destroyed and Jaffa annexed to make way for the emergence of modern-day Tel Aviv.

But all is not well in the Land of Nod. The Canadian government regularly opines it is assiduously monitoring anti-Semitism despite the absence of anti-Jewish sentiment and despite the pro- Jewish nature of the media in this most laid-back, multicultural of nations. But Canadian “grassroots” are not limited to pro-Israeli marketing groups. Despite mainstream media subservience to Canada’s vigorous and large pro-Israeli lobby, some people have had enough. Zionist propaganda efforts in this “so friendly” country have increasingly met with resistance, and all the Israeli consuls in the world cannot undo the damage that Israeli war crimes have done and continue to do, as the siege in Gaza and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements continue.

There are now strong citizen groups fighting Canada’s official support of every Israeli government whim. There are many Jewish anti-Zionist groups, such as Jews for a Just Peace, Jewish Voices for Peace, Not in Our Name, Women in Solidarity with Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAZ). Nonspecific Jewish groups include Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Palestine House, Canada Palestine Association, and the above-mentioned CAIA, which has grown rapidly with centres in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Anti-Zionist activists have been holding vigils regularly at the Toronto Israeli Consulate for eight years now. They are organising the sixth Anti-Apartheid Week to be held soon on more than 25 university campuses across the country, and demonstrations and fundraising events on behalf of Palestinians are held regularly. IJAZ has launched a campaign “Divest from Israel: Support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel”, which includes stickering Israeli products in stores, requesting stores to de-shelve Israeli products, targetting businesses, organisations or government officials that support Israel, “organise a public tachlit service, a ritual that symbolises the casting away of our misdeeds, to spiritually divest from Zionist narratives and mythology and to atone for the ways that we have fallen short in countering them.”

Allen’s support for Canada Park, implicitly condoning Israel’s ruthless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, has landed him in hot water. He had to deny any personal contribution to Canada Park, an External Affairs spokesperson insisting that he had not made a personal donation and that his name had been included as a benefactor when his parents gave their contribution. Uri Davis, an Israeli scholar and human rights activist who has co-authored a book on the JNF calls Canada Park “a crime against humanity that has been financed by and implicates not only the Canadian government but every taxpayer in Canada.” Canada Park is particularly sensitive for Israel because it lies outside the country’s internationally-recognised borders. The Palestinian inhabitants’ expulsion, Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Remembering), said, was a premeditated act of ethnic cleansing of villagers who put up no resistance.”We have photographs of the Israeli army carrying out the expulsions,” he tells tourists, holding up a series of laminated cards. According to Zochrot, 86 Palestinian villages lie buried underneath JNF parks. Zochrot activists regularly select a destroyed village, taking Palestinian refugees with them as they place a handmade sign detailing the village’s name in Arabic and Hebrew. Within days, the signs are removed. Bronstein said he believes signs erected by official bodies may have a greater impact in opening Israeli minds. “In a recent newspaper interview, a senior JNF official admitted that it would be hard to stop our campaign,” he said. “Slowly we believe Israelis can be made to appreciate that their state exists at the expense of another people. Only then are Israelis likely to be ready to think about making peace.”

With Zochrot’s efforts in mind, Uri Davis joined in an application to the Canadian tax authorities to overturn the JNF’s charitable status and said attempts to rename Canada Park “Ayalon Park” over the past decade suggested that the Canadian authorities were already concerned about the prospect of the country’s involvement in the park coming under scrutiny. In April, before the ROM exhibition opened, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and executives at the ROM were sent letters of protest from senior officials of the Palestinian Authority, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas, declaring that the scrolls were in fact illegally seized by Israel following its occupation and annexation of the West Bank in 1967 and calling for their repatriation. The ROM exhibition inspired a campaign of protest led by the CJPME trying to get ROM officials to adjust the display of the artifacts to reflect the fact that the Scrolls were confiscated from East Jerusalem during Israel’s 1967 invasion and occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, to use “West Bank (Israeli-occupied)” and East and West Jerusalem with 1948 Armistice borders on maps. CJPME’s Thomas Woodley said, “We would like there to be a balanced narrative. The ROM is presenting the scrolls entirely from the Israeli perspective. There’s no discussion about what happened between their discovery and their exhibition today.”

ROM met with CJPME members and initially agreed to make changes and even distribute an additional leaflet to be inserted into the museum’s brochure. Friday pickets were held throughout the summer to inform the public about the theft of the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, a visit by Al-Ahram Weekly to the exhibition revealed that no such changes were made, and the history of their discovery in Jordan and seizure in 1967 was finessed. ROM’s PR spokesperson Marilynn Friedman declined to answer questions about why ROM reneged on promises to accommodate CJPME’s concerns.Woodley said ROM director Thorsell was receptive, and assumes that the IAA vetoed any changes that would detract from the Zionist narrative. Tens of thousands of innocent schoolchildren are being respectfully shepherded through subterranean, darkened halls, and left with the impression that the ancient “Israelis” inhabited the kingdom of “Judea”, that their “descendants” heroically prevented the “pillaging of the Scrolls by Bedouin” and are the rightful owners. The mythical kingdoms of 10th-3rd century BC Palestine — for which there is no conclusive evidence — are carefully delineated and explained in commentaries as if they are actual history. A dazzling success story for the most part for Gissin’s “Brand Israel”.

The dust-up, however, continues to provide a platform for activists to educate Canadians and empowers demonstrators at the nearby Israeli consulate. It has provided a 6-month platform for re-rebranding Israel as the centre of 21st-century apartheid. And no amount of slick PR can undo the fact that merely by continuing to exist, despite all odds, Palestinians endure as testimony to the injustice of “The Israel Project” in all its manifestations. Palestinians only have survival itself as proof of the crimes committed against them, choosing to maintain traditional dress, religious faith (both Christian and Islamic), and the historical memory of the Nakba as their most meaningful and durable expressions of resistance. Though former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir notoriously declared that “there is no such thing as Palestinians,” Palestinian academic Edward Said more accurately explained that, “In the case of a political identity that’s being threatened, culture is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration.” The battle being waged over the Scrolls is not so much about any particular ethnic, religious, or even cultural-based claim, but more importantly a means of opposing Zionist colonial discourse.

Finally, TIFF’s cozying up to the Israeli propaganda machine blew up into a global scandal, as a spontaneous movement of protest among a few filmmakers turned into an international incident, bringing 1,500 signatures from prominent Israeli public figures and the likes of Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Guy Maddin, Walter Bernstein, and Harry Belafonte to the now historic “Toronto Declaration”. Leading Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, the catalyst for the declaration, refused to screen his latest film Covered in protest. Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla withdrew his feature film debut Heliopolis, as did Ahmed Maher (The Traveller). The protesters were denounced in the mainstream media, called “opportunists, hypocrites, fascists, censors, storm- troopers, apartheid-supporters, intolerant totalitarians, a mob of homophobic anti-Semitic terrorist regime supporters” acting “effectively [as] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s local fifth column” by Canadian film producer Robert Lantos. Yet the protest overshadowed the festival itself and was a godsend for educating the wider public, which could not help but hear about the unprecedented protest, despite mainstream media indifference or hostility. Greyson condemned the opportunism of TIFF for its complicity with the Israeli consulate’s “Brand Israel” campaign. “I’m reminded of last year, when the opening night party for Passchendaele featured real soldiers posing on a Canadian Armed Forces tank. Many of us were disturbed by this uncritical collaboration with the Canadian army, currently fighting in Afghanistan. So I have to ask: who is politicising TIFF? Why hasn’t TIFF explicitly explained and repudiated the perceived Brand Israel connection, beyond vague disavowals? What’s the extent of Israeli sponsorship, beyond airfare, receptions, and the Mayor’s presence? Why an exclusive programme of Israeli state-sponsored features, when shorts could have provided critical alternative voices?”

Opponents of Greyson wrote to York University, demanding that he be investigated, fired, even deported. In a delightful irony, the popular 2nd Toronto Palestinian Film Festival opened just a few weeks after TIFF closed. “It feels like the days of the first anti-apartheid struggle back in the 1970s,” enthused one activist. BDS is already a buzzword among politically-aware Canadians. Of course, there was much momentum back then from the successful anti-Vietnam War movement, the Zionist control of mainstream was less stifling, and there was much stronger political awareness in those Cold War years. But the anti-apartheid movement eventually brought everyone on board, even the notorious Margaret Thatcher, who seeing the writing on the wall, joined in. This anti-apartheid struggle phase two is picking up steam, even among Israel’s best friends. In presenting the Toronto Declaration, Greyson explained that he had just returned from South Africa, where he visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, dedicated to the memory of the 1976 Soweto massacre, where over 500 school children and anti-apartheid activists were killed by security forces. Among other things, the museum documents how this event became a turning point for the world, “a line in the sand, a moment when we ostriches finally woke up and expressed our outrage against South Africa’s apartheid regime. During my visit to the museum, the 2008 words of former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni echoed in my head: ‘Israel practices a brutal form of apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.’” Greyson was overwhelmed by the outpouring of protest at TIFF and predicted that “Gaza represents a similar turning point to Soweto, a similar line in the sand. A moment when it’s imperative to speak out against the outrages of the Occupation.”

And with ever-more devilish torture tools being dreamed up by the likes of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP), it’s a safe bet that migration from the military to civilian law enforcement agencies will continue at its current break-neck pace.

In this context, San Diego’s East County Magazine and progressive Liberty One Radio reported, ironically enough on September 11, that the San Diego Sheriff’s Department stationed a Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) during recent town hall forums.

Manufactured by American Technology Corporation (ATC), the firm’s LRAD 500-x is a dual-purpose device: a powerful hailer and a non-lethal weapon capable of producing ear-shattering sounds highly-damaging to their human targets.

ATC’s technology has been deployed in Iraq as an “anti-insurgent weapon” and off the coast of Somalia to fight off desperate “pirates,” that is, former Somali fishermen whose livelihood has been destroyed by over-fishing by foreign factory fleets and toxic dumping, including nuclear waste, by Western polluters.

No matter, time to break out the sonic blasters!

Developed for the U.S. Navy in the wake of the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, cruise ship Captain Michael Groves “successfully repelled pirates off the Somali coast using non-lethal weapons including an LRAD. Groves has since filed suit against Carnival Cruise Line, claiming he suffered permanent hearing loss as a result,” East County Magazine reports.

The BBC noted in 2005 that the “shrill sound of an LRAD at its loudest sounds something like a domestic smoke alarm, ATC says, but at 150 decibels, it is the aural equivalent to standing 30m away from a roaring jet engine and can cause major hearing damage if misused.”

According to ATC’s web site, “LRAD resolves uncertain situations and potentially saves lives on both sides of the device by combining powerful voice commands and deterrent tones with focused acoustic output to clearly transmit highly intelligible instructions and warnings well beyond 500 meters.”

While the defense establishment and their civilian counterparts dismiss concerns that acoustic weapons pose a danger to their targets, the Bradford Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project noted in 2006:

Juergen Altmann, who is conducting an independent scientific assessment of acoustic weapons, has warned that there is risk of hearing damage to people exposed to the beam at ranges of up to 100m. … An added difficulty with ensuring no permanent damage is that some people are more susceptible to noise-induced hearing loss than others and hearing damage can occur at levels below the threshold for ear pain. A report from the US Army’s 361st Psychological Operations Company gives an idea of the powerful effects of the LRAD: ‘During distance tests at 100 meters, the sound was painful to listeners, even with hands held over the ears and ear plugs in’.” (Neil Davison, Nick Lewer, Bradford Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project, Research Report No. 8, March 2006, pp. 33-34)

Far from being employed as a means to “reduce casualties,” its actual use lends itself to the opposite effect. In Iraq, for example the U.S. Army’s 361st Psychological Operations Company noted that “The LRAD has proven useful for clearing streets and rooftops during cordon and search, for disseminating command information, and for drawing out enemy snipers who are subsequently destroyed by our own snipers.”

In a civilian setting, one can easily envisage groups of “rioters” being sonically blasted prior to street clearing operations by heavily-armed SWAT teams. Kevin Keenan, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union told East County Magazine:

“It’s very concerning. It is fine for the Sheriff’s Department to have new less-than-lethal weapons, but for their interactions with individuals these still-dangerous weapons need to be used only as substitutes for firearms. They can’t be used as just another tool on the tool belt. As we’ve seen with tasers and pepper spray, these types of weapons are being used to subdue people even though they pose the risk of serious physical harm.”

He added, “Even more concerning is having these weapons for public order policing. I can imagine no situation, or am not aware of any situation that’s ever happened in San Diego County or is likely to happen that would justify using these weapons for public order policing to control a crowd. The main effect of having those weapons at public events is to chill people and chill free speech and free association.” (Miriam Raftery, “Sonic Weapons Used in Iraq Positioned at Congressional Town Hall Meetings in San Diego County,” East County Magazine, September 11, 2009)

I would add however, the purpose of these weapons is precisely to “chill free speech and free association,” thus ensuring compliance to the whims of our capitalist masters.

Research into more “effective” low-cost acoustic NLWs are gathering steam. Wired reported September 1 that a “Tennessee lab primarily responsible for building components for nuclear weapons is branching off into the nonlethal weapons business.”

Called the Banshee II, the weapon emits a piercing 144-decibel sound that is designed to be more than just annoying. “It also has a frequency-switching system that pumps your ear drums, so it sounds like there’s a drum beating there,” the inventor tells Knoxnews.com. “You physically feel it in your ear drum.” (Sharon Weinberger, “Nuke Lab Builds ‘Beating Drum’ Sonic Blaster, Wired, September 1, 2009)

While such devices never caught on with the military its inventor, so-called nuke “gadget guru” Fariborz Bzorgi who works at the Y-12 nuclear plant in Tennessee “hopes the Banshee II could have broader applications for law enforcement.”

No doubt they will. As Neil Davison, the author of the recently published “Non-Lethal” Weapons points out, military and police moves towards “effects-based” NLWs are consistent with requirements “for weapons with greater range, more precise delivery, and rheostatic effects from ‘non-lethal’ to ‘lethal’.”

Davison cites the LRAD and other acoustic devices as “the only new technologies that have emerged” in the last several years and pointedly notes that “all these weapons have emerged from the private sector.”

That they have should hardly come as a surprise.

After all as Homeland Security Weekly reported in 2007, “homeland security spending is a massive and highly lucrative new market.” With an expected growth rate between “eight and ten percent annually over the next five years” the publication claims that “the addressable U.S. market over the next five years will be in the range of approximately $140 billion, a 21 percent increase over our five-year estimate made in 2004.”

As the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed, heimat grifting and massive waste go hand in hand:

• Cities and agencies bought things with grant money that would not make California a safer place. One county tried to use anti-terrorism funds for a lawnmower but it was blocked at the last minute. Another county succeeded in buying a big-screen television.

• Dozens of cities and agencies failed to keep adequate records on how they spent the money. In some cases, the poor record keeping resulted in thousands of dollars worth of overpayments to local agencies. In other cases, agencies were unable to find where they stored their own equipment.

• Communities repeatedly bought large and small-ticket items without seeking competitive bids. Federal procurement rules designed to protect the taxpayer weren’t used on millions of dollars in new communications systems, night-vision goggles and bomb-disposal robots. (G.W. Schulz, “Homeland Security Marked by Waste, Lack of Oversight,” Center for Investigative Reporting, September 11, 2009)

While schools go unfunded, infrastructure collapses and affordable health care for all is an unattainable pipe dream, police and intelligence agencies are having a field day–at our expense. Call it part of the “counterterrorism stimulus” package that our corporate security masters are hell-bent on shoving down our throats.

However you slice it, there’s a lot of boodle to be had by enterprising defense and security grifters. Alongside current multibillion dollar outlays for “biodefense” and counterterrorism initiatives by a multitude of state and federal agencies, the development of ever more dubious “non-lethal” weapons, implements for compliance and control during the capitalist meltdown, will enjoy a steady growth curve long into the future.

Later that year, Frist and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) covertly inserted language into the 2006 Defense Appropriations bill (H.R. 2863) that granted legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers, even in cases of willful misconduct. It was signed into law by President Bush.

According to Public Citizen and The New York Times, Frist and Hastert benefited financially from their actions; the pair, as well as 41 other congressmen and senators owned as much as $16 million in pharmaceutical stock. revealed that “the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is purported to be the key author of the language additions. This trade association represents virtually all major vaccine manufacturers.”

The Senate Majority Leader’s alarmist jeremiad at Davos was seconded by Dr. Tara O’Toole who added, “This [bioterrorism] is one of the most pressing problems we have on the planet today.”

Really? Not grinding poverty, global warming or the lack of access by hundreds of millions of impoverished workers and farmers to clean water, an adequate diet, health care or relief from epidemic levels of preventable diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis or diarrhea, but “bioterrorism” as narrowly defined by securocrats and their academic accomplices.

But Dr. Victor W. Sidel, a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and an outspoken critic of the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex challenged O’Toole’s hysterical paradigm.

Sidel made the point that there is a fundamental conflict between the state’s national security goals and health care providers’ professional responsibilities to patients. He wrote in 2003 that “military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies and personnel have long histories of secrecy and deception that are contrary to the fundamental health principles of transparency and truthfulness. They may therefore be unsuitable partners for public health agencies that need to justify receiving the public’s trust.”

In this context, the choice of O’Toole as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Undersecretary of Science and Technology is troubling to say the least. As former CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, critics charge that O’Toole’s appointment will be nothing short of a disaster.

No ordinary policy wonk with an impressive résumé and years as a government insider, O’Toole is a key player advocating for the expansion of dual-use biological weapons programs rebranded as biodefense.

Subverting the Biological Weapons Convention

The resuscitation of American bioweapons programs are facilitated by their secretive and highly-classified nature. Under cover of academic freedom or intellectual property rights, the U.S. Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex has largely been outsourced by the state to private companies and contractors at top American corporations and universities.

Efforts to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) by the inclusion of verification language into the treaty and regular inspection of suspect facilities by international experts have been shot-down since 2001 by the Bush and now, the Obama administrations. Why?

Primarily because the United States view onsite measures as a threat to the commercial proprietary information of multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as to America’s reputedly “defensive” biological programs; initiatives that continue to work with nature’s most dangerous and deadly pathogens.

In fact, the problem of the dual-use nature of such research is a conundrum facing critics who challenge the break-neck expansion of concealed weapons programs. Simply put, military activities can be disguised as commercial research to develop medical countermeasures without anyone, least of all the American people, being any the wiser.

Highly-trained microbiologists deployed across a spectrum of low-key companies, trained for academic, public health, or commercial employment are part of the dual-use problem. Who’s to say whether scientists who genetically-manipulate pathogens or create Frankenstein-like chimera disease organisms (say, synthesized Marburg or Ebola virus as has already been done with poliovirus in a U.S. lab) are engaged in treaty-busting weapons research or the development of life-saving measures.

And what about the accidental, or more sinisterly, the deliberate release of some horrific new plague by a scientist who’s “gone rogue”? As researcher Edward Hammond pointed out:

British researchers pled guilty in 2001 to charges that they improperly handled a genetically engineered hybrid of the viruses causing hepatitis C and dengue fever. British authorities characterized the virus as “more lethal than HIV”. ‘Dengatitis’ was deliberately created by researchers who wanted to use fewer laboratory animals in a search for a vaccine for Hepatitis C. Under unsafe laboratory conditions, the researchers created and nearly accidentally released a new hybrid human disease whose effects, fortunately, remain unknown; but which may have displayed different symptoms than its parents and thus been difficult to diagnose, and have required a new, unknown treatment regime. (Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, The Sunshine Project, Background Paper No. 12, November 2003)

A new report by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation has charged that despite restrictions under the BWC prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling and use of weaponized disease agents such as anthrax, smallpox or plague, as well as equipment and delivery systems intended for offensive use, the rapid growth of “biodefense and research programs over the last decade” has placed “new pressure” on efforts to curb the development of banned weapons listed in the treaty.

In an interview with Global Security Newswire Gerald Epstein, a senior fellow with the hawkish Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) told the publication, “When one is doing bioresearch and biodefense, one has to be careful to not overstep the treaty itself.”

He cited the U.S biodefense effort Project Bacchus–an investigation by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to determine whether it was possible to build a bioweapons production facility using readily available equipment–as an instance where questions were raised if the treaty had been violated.

The type of biodefense activity that is most likely to raise questions regarding treaty compliance is “threat assessment,” the process of determining what type of biological attacks are most likely to occur, he told Global Security Newswire. A dangerous biological agent could inadvertently be developed during such research, Epstein said. (Martin Matishak, “Biodefense Research Could Violate Weapons Convention, Report Warns,” Global Security Newswire, August 20, 2009)

But Pentagon bioweaponeers did more than build “a bioweapons productions facility using readily available equipment.” They built banned weapons. According to Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, the Pentagon and CIA made and tested a model of a Soviet anthrax bomb and created an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax.

After consulting with scientists who strongly suggested that the CIA anthrax bomb project would violate the BWC, “CIA lawyers decided the project was within the allowed realm of defensive research,” Guillemin revealed. Project Clear Vision, a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under contract to the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The Agency “decided the same” for the small, fully functional bioweapons facility built under the rubric of Project Bacchus.

The third initiative, Project Jefferson, led to the development of an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax based on a Soviet model. After the outgoing Clinton administration hesitated to give the CIA the go-ahead for the project, the Bush regime’s National Security Council gave the Pentagon permission. “They believed” Guillemin wrote, “the Pentagon had the right to investigate genetically altered pathogens in the name of biodefense, ‘to save American lives’.”

Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon authorized the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), one of the most secretive and heavily-outsourced Defense Department branches, to re-create the deadly anthrax strain.

What the scope of these programs are today is currently unknown. We do know however, that based on available evidence the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department and the oxymoronic Intelligence Community, using the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a cover, continue to investigate the feasibility of transforming nature’s most deadly pathogens into weapons.

In close coordination, the United States government and their outsourced corporate partners are spending billions of dollars on research and simulation exercises, dubbed “disaster drills” by a compliant media, to facilitate this grisly trade.

Secrecy and Deceit

That the official bioterror narrative is a preposterous fiction and swindle as even the FBI was forced to admit during its much-maligned Amerithrax investigation, is hardly worth a second glance by corporate media beholden to the pharmaceutical industry for advertising revenue; call it business as usual here in the heimat.

As we now know, the finely-milled anthrax powder which killed five people and shut down representative government didn’t come from the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al Qaeda, but rather from deep within America’s own Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex, to wit, from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick in Maryland. But such troublesome and inconvenient truths are barely worth a mention by “respectable” media, e.g. the corporate stenographers who sold two imperialist military adventures to the American people.

Indeed, a credible case can be made that without the anthrax attacks, the fear levels gripping the country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist events–and the subsequent clamp-down that followed, from the USA Patriot Act to the indefinite detention and torture of “terrorism” suspects, and from warrantless wiretapping to the demonization of dissent–may very well have been impossible.

It is difficult not to conclude that from the beginning of the affair, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax terrorist(s) to draw a straight line between 9/11 and the anthrax mailings. From there, it was but a short step to stitching-up a case for “regime change” in Iraq. The media’s role in this criminal enterprise was indispensable for what Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has called“the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade.” As Greenwald points out,

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax–tests conducted at Ft. Detrick–revealed that the anthrax sent to [former Senator Tom] Daschle contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since–as ABC variously claimed–bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.” (Glenn Greenwald, “Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News,” Salon, August 1, 2008)

Despite ABC News’ claims that their information came from “four well-placed and separate sources,” they were fed information that was patently false; as Greenwald avers, “No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.”

And as we will shortly explore below, the dubious “Dark Winter” and “Atlantic Storm” bioterror exercises designed by Dr. Tara O’Toole freely drew from the neocon’s sinister playbook, right down to the weaponized smallpox supplied to al Qaeda by Saddam.

Whether or not one buys the current permutation of the “lone nut” theory, this one alleges that Dr. Bruce Ivins, a vaccine specialist employed by USAMRIID, was the anthrax mailer; the fact is, when all is said and done the attacks, to use a much over-hyped phrase, were an inside job.

And like other “lone nuts” who have entered the parapolitical frame at their own peril, Ivins isn’t around to refute the charges.

The Alliance for Biosecurity: Insiders with a Mission and (Very) Deep Pockets

Before being pegged by the Obama administration to head DHS’s Science and Technology division where she will oversee the department’s billion dollar budget, with some 45 percent of it going towards chemical and bioweapons defense, O’Toole, as previously mentioned, was the CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, a satrapy which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to improving the country’s resilience to major biological threats.”

How “independent”? You make the call!

According to their web site The Alliance for Biosecurity is “a collaboration among the Center for Biosecurity and 13 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies whose mission is to work in the public interest to improve prevention and treatment of severe infectious diseases–particularly those diseases that present global security challenges.”

Alliance partners include the usual suspects: Bavarian Nordic; Center for Biosecurity of UPMC; Cangene Corporation; DOR BioPharma, Inc.; DynPort Vaccine Company LLC, a CSC company; Elusys Therapeutics, Inc.; Emergent BioSolutions; Hematech, Inc., a subsidiary of Kyowa Kirin; Human Genome Sciences, Inc.; NanoViricides, Inc.; Pfizer Inc.; PharmAthene; Siga Technologies, Inc.; Unither Virology LLC, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics Corporation. Rounding out this rogues gallery are associate members, the spooky Battelle Medical Research and Evaluation Facility and the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute.

Among the chief activities of the Alliance is lobbying Congress for increased funding for the development of new drugs deemed “countermeasures” under the Project BioShield Act of 2004, previously described by Antifascist Calling as a particularly grotesque piece of Bushist legislative flotsam.

The Alliance avers that “the United States faces unprecedented risks to national security … by the clear and growing danger of bioterrorism or a destabilizing infectious disease pandemic,” and that “our nation’s vulnerability to biothreats is so severe” due to the fact that “most of the vaccines and medicines that will be needed to protect our citizens do not now exist.” Therefore, countermeasures needed to mitigate nebulous biothreats never spelled out once in the group’s literature “will likely require several years and several hundred million dollars each to successfully develop and produce.” (emphasis added)

An Alliance report, The State of Biosecurity in 2008 and Proposals for a Public/Private Pathway Forward, charts a course for “improving and accelerating” efforts to “develop medical countermeasures (MCMs) for the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).”

Under the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, Congress authorized $5.6 billion over ten years “to purchase MCMs for the SNS.” Funds were allocated for the procurement of the anthrax vaccine as well as for “therapeutic antibodies for inhalational anthrax, a botulism heptavalent antitoxin, a smallpox vaccine, and several products for radiological and nuclear threats, obligating a total of about $1.9 billion of the $5.6 billion BioShield fund.”

In 2006 as I noted previously, Congress created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). BARDA was authorized to spend some $1.07 billion over three years for MCMs, “only $201 million has been provided by Congress through FY 2008″ noted the Alliance, “approximately one-fifth of the authorized level.”

According to an “independent economic analysis” carried out by (who else!) the Alliance’s academic partner, the Center for Biosecurity, “it would require $3.4 billion in FY 2009 to support one year of advanced development.”

“Similarly” according to the organization, “the original appropriation of $5.6 billion for Project BioShield is equally insufficient to ensure that once MCMs are developed there will be funds available to procure them and maintain the stockpile.” Indeed, “this level of funding would need to be sustained for many years.” You can bet however, that Alliance lobbyists are busy as proverbial bees in pressuring Congress to fork over the dough!

The report state’s that Alliance goals necessarily entail instilling “a sense of urgency … with Congress” by hyping the “bioterror threat.” But there’s much more here than a simple cynical exercise at preparing the “public diplomacy” ground through academic and industry “message force multipliers” that will enable Congress to shower Big Pharma with a veritable tsunami of cash. A “risk-tolerant culture” should be promoted within BARDA, one that “understands the realities, risks, timelines, and costs of drug development.”

The “risks” to whom and for what purpose are not enumerated, but one can be certain that a “risk-tolerant culture” crafted by industry insiders will come at the expense of the health and safety of the American people, one that pushes potential legal liability should things head south onto the taxpaying public.

The stealth nature of Alliance recommendations are clearly spelled out when they aver that “stakeholders” should “focus more on the potential biothreats and the corresponding countermeasures, rather than the price tag” and that BARDA, ostensibly a public agency, should be packed with insiders “who have drug development and manufacturing experience.” This will lead to the development of “a culture that is focused on partnering with industry and academia.”

But the bottom line as always, is the corporatist bottom line for Alliance shareholders! How else can one interpret their statement that emerging “biothreats” are all the more dire today now that “interest of the public and private capital markets in biodefense has declined over the last 2-3 years.” What better way then, to beef-up those sagging capital markets than to install an industry-friendly individual at DHS with a documented track record of overplaying the “bioterror threat.”

Dark Winter

O’Toole was the principal designer of two “tabletop” bioterror preparedness drills, the 2001 Dark Winter exercise and the 2005 Atlantic Storm run-through; both were criticized by scientific experts as fabrications of an alleged threat of a smallpox attack mounted by al Qaeda.

Reviewing Milton Leitenberg’s 2005 report, Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat, published the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, protein chemist Dr. Eric Smith wrote the following:

Of note is Leitenberg’s dissection of the process of assessment as practiced through bioterrorism threat scenarios conducted by the US government and private think tanks. Exercises like Dark Winter, which modeled an “aerosolized” smallpox attack, Top Off 2 and 3, both on pneumonic plague strikes, and Atlantic Storm, an exercise that purported to show an al Qaida group manufacturing a dry powder smallpox weapon, were rigged. In the cases of Dark Winter and the Top Offs, transmission rates of disease were sexed up beyond historical averages so that “a disastrous outcome was assured” no matter any steps taken to contain outbreaks. Eight pages are reserved to pointedly condemn the Atlantic Storm exercise on a host of sins which can generally be described as a bundle of frank lies and misinformation coupled with a claimed terrorist facility for making smallpox into a weapon that even state run biological warfare operations did not possess. And once again, juiced transmission rates of disease were employed to grease theoretical calamity. The reader comes to recognize the deus ex machina–a concoction or intervention added to dictate an outcome, in these cases very bad ones–as a regular feature of the exercises. However, the results of the same assessments–the alleged lessons learned–have never been reported with much, if any, skepticism in the media. (Eric Smith, “A Vaccine for the Hype: Milton Leitenberg’s new ‘Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat,” Global Security, National Security Notes, March 31, 2006)

In criticizing “the fancy that such attacks are easy and one of the most catastrophic threats faced by the American people,” Smith denounces the alarmist scenarios of Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm’s designers–people like Dr. Tara O’Toole and the coterie of industry insiders and other well-paid “experts”–as guilty of perpetrating a massive “fraud … and a substantial one” on the American people.

While one of Atlantic Storm’s architects proclaimed “this is not science fiction” and that “the age of Bioterror is now…” Leitenberg and Smith denounce O’Toole’s spurious claims as “not the least bit plausible.”

Leitenberg wrote that “well before October-November 2001, the spectre of ‘bioterrorism’ benefitted from an extremely successful sales campaign.” Indeed, hyped-up scenarios such as Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm that place “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of shadowy, intelligence-linked terror outfits like al Qaeda provided “inflated predictions that … were certainly not realistic. Much worse, in addition to being wrong, inflated predictions were counterproductive. They induced interest in BW in the wrong audiences.”

But the implausible nature of the scenarios deployed in national exercises hardly prohibited the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex from concocting scarecrow-like straw men designed to sow terror amongst the American people while extracting regular infusions of cash from Congress.

Among the eight exercises analyzed by Leitenberg between 1998-2005, he found that each and every one were fraudulently designed and the threat of bioterrorism had been framed as a rationalization for “political action, the expenditure of public funds for bioterrorism prevention and response programs,” that could “not occur without it.” This is “not benign,” Leitenberg concludes.

A second consequence of sexed-up “bioterror” drills have even more ominous implications for the immediate future. Because of national security state perceptions that mitigation of catastrophic bioterrorism is of supreme importance for national survival–perceptions reinforced by academic, corporate and militarist peddlers of crisis–”the US biodefense research program appears to be drifting into violation” of the Biological Weapons Convention. This is a menacing development and has happened, I would argue precisely because the evaluation process which justifies research into biological weapons threat capabilities and scenarios, are repackaged to conceal the offensive thrust of this research as wholly defensive in nature, which it certainly is not.

How else would one explain ongoing research funded by the National Institutes of Health to study botulism toxin, “with the added qualification” Smith points out, that because the protein toxin is “unstable, therefore there will be collaboration with other researchers to stabilize it.” The NIH grant “means preparing a much more effective botulinum toxin than had been available before.”

Smith goes on to cite “another problematical breakout” offered by two scientists to study the “aerobiological” characteristics of the lethal Marburg and Ebola viruses. How this is “defensive” in nature, in keeping with research restrictions under the Biological Weapons Convention, is another instance of a backdoor move to kick-start illicit bioweapons development.

According to Smith, the study “looks to define how the organisms can be aerosolized, an instance of research into examining vulnerability in the complete absence of a verified threat.” But I would argue that showering taxpayers dollars into such dark and troubling research tributaries deploy hyped-up threats as cover for the development of illegal weapons.

When her nomination was announced in May, Rutgers University and homeland security critic Richard Ebright told Wired,

“This is a disastrous nomination. O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration. O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position.”

“She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security,” he adds. “She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” (Noah Shachtman, “DHS’ New Geek Chief is a Bioterror ‘Disaster,’ Critics Charge,” Wired, May 6, 2009)

And Dr. Smith told Wired that exercises designed by O’Toole and her colleagues show her to be “the top academic/salesperson for the coming of apocalyptic bioterrorism which has never quite arrived.”

As noted above, “[She's] most prominent for always lobbying for more money for biodefense, conducting tabletop exercises on bioterrorism for easily overawed public officials, exercises tweaked to be horrifying,” Smith told Wired.

But Smith goes even further and denounces O’Toole as an industry shill who “has never obviously appeared to examine what current terrorist capabilities have been… in favor of extrapolating how easy it would be to launch bioterror attacks if one had potentially unlimited resources and scientific know-how.” It’s a “superb appointment if you’re in the biodefense industry and interested in further opportunity and growth.”

“Alternatively” Smith avers, O’Toole’s appointment is “a disaster if threat assessment and prevention” has “some basis in reality.”

Not that any of this matters in Washington. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee led by “independent Democrat” and arch neocon Sen. Joseph Lieberman, voted to send her nomination to the full Senate July 29.

Never mind that the deadly weaponized pathogen employed in the attacks didn’t originate in some desolate Afghan cave or secret underground bunker controlled by Saddam.

And never mind that the principal cheerleaders for expanding state-funded programs are Pentagon bioweaponeers, private corporations and a shadowy nexus of biosecurity apparatchiks who stand to make a bundle under current and future federal initiatives.

Leading the charge for increased funding is the Alliance for Biosecurity, a collaborative venture between the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Big Pharma.

Health care for all derailed? Mission accomplished!

Meanwhile, despite alarm amongst civil liberties groups, public health researchers and other “reality-based” evil-doers who haven’t slaked their thirst with “birther” kool-aid, the Obama administration “is quietly dusting off an effort to impose new federal quarantine regulations” to “contain” the H1N1 flu virus, Politico revealed.

“While any discussion of quarantine may stoke public fears of barbed wire camps filled with infected Americans or closures of international borders” Politico reports, “public health experts said that sort of approach to H1N1 flu would not be effective.”

While White House officials aren’t talking, Wendy Mariner, a professor of law and public health at Boston University told the publication, “it’s not really going to help.”

And if the H1N1 pandemic behaves in a manner similar to the 1957 outbreak of H2N2 influenza then “closing schools, stopping large gatherings and other such measures are unlikely to do much,” a team of public health experts told Reuters.

“Efforts to mitigate it were futile,” Brooke Courtney, a researcher with the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center told the wire service. “In 1957 it was decided pretty early on that efforts to quarantine or isolate people would not be effective,” Courtney said.

Why? Because by the time the H2N2 strain was diagnosed it was already “too widespread” for a quarantine of affected individuals to serve a useful purpose.

Despite warnings from public health researchers, the Obama administration is moving full-speed ahead. And with a September target date for new federal regulations, CDC spokeswoman Christine Pearson told Politico, “It’s important to public health to move forward with the regulations. We need to update our quarantine regulations, and this final rule is an important step.”

Not everyone is convinced, however.

“It doesn’t surprise me that when swine flu or any other epidemic is featured prominently in the news, we see a return to quarantine and other public health regulations,” said Christopher Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union, which sharply criticized the Bush-era proposal as too heavy-handed. “The enemy here isn’t the American people or sick people. It’s an illness. … Police officers with guns cannot make people obey a quarantine. In order for this to work, it has to be collaborative. They have to trust the government.” (Josh Gerstein, “Obama Team Mulls New Quarantine Regs,” Politico, August 5, 2009)

While Calabrese is certainly correct in a technical sense that “the enemy here isn’t the American people or sick people,” from the standpoint of a predatory national security state that views all disorder–including illness–as a dire threat to the heimat, what better means to keep the rabble in line than a state-imposed quarantine enforced by “police officers with guns”?

As Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky wrote in July, “it is in the interest of the political power brokers and the dominant financial actors to divert public attention from an understanding of the global crisis.”

Despite clear signs that the economic crisis continues to deepen on a planetary scale and that state efforts to mitigate the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression have failed, as World Socialist Web Site analyst Barry Grey points out, the Federal Reserve Board’s “upbeat assessment” fails to take into account that “new data on unemployment, home foreclosures, home prices and retail sales painted a picture of growing economic distress for tens of millions of Americans.”

But “growing economic distress” for the majority of Americans have translated into rising corporate profits “on the basis of a deep and protracted decline in the wages, working conditions and wealth of the working class.”

Under such dire conditions, combustible social fuel could lead to an unprecedented political explosion. Therefore, as Chossudovsky observes “an atmosphere of fear and intimidation which serves to weaken and disarm organized dissent” must be manufactured, one whose “objective is to undermine all forms of opposition and social resistance.”

How will these goals be accomplished by the capitalist state? Chossudovsky avers: “In this framework, the occurrence of ‘natural disasters,’ ‘pandemics,’ ‘environmental catastrophes’ also plays a useful political role. It distorts the real causes of the crisis. It justifies a global public health emergency on humanitarian grounds.”

And as with other “extraordinary circumstances” such as those which followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the declaration of a global war against terrorism, a militarized and repressive state will step in to fill the breech, this time as public health “savior.”

In this context, Boston University’s Wendy Mariner’s statement that “proposals to limit liberty” through quarantine regulations by the federal government “represent a dangerous precedent to constitutional theory” must be viewed through the lens of capital’s deepening economic, political and social crisis.

Despite the fact that “there’s almost no evidence it will matter” in terms of mitigating an H1N1 pandemic outbreak, as Mariner averred “it wouldn’t surprise me if they try to sneak this past in August, when people are away.”

And with a bipartisan consensus in Washington to fork over billions of dollars to enterprising drug manufacturers, it’s a sure bet that “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans will do what they do best: toe the corporatist line.

Project BioShield

While objections to new federal quarantine regulations may be widespread, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), particularly that agency’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) is pulling out all the stops.

Similar to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a satrapy for arms manufacturers and other death merchants, HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority freely doles out billions of dollars in taxpayer boodle to Big Pharma.

According to a blurb on their web site BARDA, a distinct entity within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at HHS “provides an integrated, systematic approach to the development and purchase of the necessary vaccines, drugs, therapies, and diagnostic tools for public health medical emergencies.”

Well and good as far as it goes (which isn’t very far), BARDA does more, much more. Under the Bush regime, Congress passed the Project BioShield Act of 2004, a particularly grotesque piece of Bushist legislative flotsam “as part of a broader strategy to defend America against the threat of weapons of mass destruction.”

You can bet however, they don’t mean WMDs like the weaponized anthrax that came from Pentagon stockpiles and was used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. While “only” five people may have died, panic gripped the country as the capitol was shut-down and the national security state sunk its claws ever-deeper into civil institutions.

Never mind that a far-greater threat to the health and safety of the American people comes from the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex than from the H1N1 strain of the influenza virus. Or that this nexus of academic, corporate and militarist grifters operate with little in the way of effective oversight as a growing spate of accidents and unauthorized experiments at BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities readily attest. (For a round-up of incidents through 2007, see The Sunshine Project’s essential web archive.)

Despite poor safety records and lax controls by federal authorities, America’s bioweaponeers are devising ever-more devilish weapons in the form of genetically-modified pathogens such as antibiotic-resistant smallpox or a reassembled strain of the 1918 influenza virus that killed upwards of 40 million people. (For details see: Edward Hammond, Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, The Sunshine Project, Background Paper No. 12, November 2003)

Indeed as written, the BioShield legislation provides HHS and the National Institutes of Health “contracting flexibility, infrastructure improvements, and expediting the scientific peer review process, and streamlining the Food and Drug Administration approval process of countermeasures.”

In other words, Project BioShield is little more than a generous public handout to unaccountable private corporations. Hence the law’s emphasis on “contracting flexibility,” the old public funding/private profit dodge that empowers FDA to “streamline” (cut-corners) the scientific peer review process in order to “expedite” (fast-track) “countermeasures” (new drugs) with little concern for public health and safety whilst immunizing corporate partners from liability.

In practice, this means that “in place of the peer review and advisory council review procedures” HHS will employ such “expedited peer review procedures (including consultation with appropriate scientific experts) as the Secretary, in consultation with the Director of NIH, deems appropriate to obtain assessment of scientific and technical merit and likely contribution to the field of qualified countermeasure research.”

In plain English, these political appointees beholden to the whims of Executive Branch and congressional grifters in thrall to multinational drug corporations will empower “scientific experts” (e.g. scientists in the employ of Big Pharma) to rule on the efficacy of “countermeasures” for which said corporations reap a handsome profit. And should things go wrong and people begin dying from inadequately tested vaccines, well then, Congress has a neat solution: foot the American people with the bill!

This is spelled out quite clearly: “(2) FEDERAL TORT CLAIMS ACT COVERAGE.–(A) IN GENERAL.–A person carrying out a contract under paragraph (1), and an officer, employee, or governing board member of such person, shall, subject to a determination by the Secretary, be deemed to be an employee of the Department of Health and Human Services for purposes of claims under sections 1346(b) and 2672 of title 28, United States Code, for money damages for personal injury, including death, resulting from performance of functions under such contract.”

Therefore, when Congress immunizes corporate entities from civil and criminal penalties by making them federal employees, you know the grift, and the fix, is literally in.

But wait, there’s more!

The Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response “works in close collaboration with key partners, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. HHS, through ASPR/BARDA, executes acquisition programs, utilizing the Special Reserve Fund commensurate with these priorities. HHS also works to promote open communication of U.S. Government needs to industry, an essential partner in Project BioShield. The availability of a substantial, long-term funding source was designed to provide the incentive for industry to respond to U.S. Government requirements and develop critical medical countermeasures for the American public.”

And I thought saving lives would be incentive enough. What was I thinking!

This is accomplished through the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE). Like ASPR/BARDA, the PHEMCE includes “key interagency partners” the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Agriculture.

As Antifascist Calling pointed out in previous articles notably “Bringing the (Bio) War Home,” under cover of protecting the nation’s food supply, USDA facilities such as the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) in partnership with the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) carries out dangerous dual-use research that endangers the health and safety of the public.

In the intervening years since Project BioShield legislation was enacted, things have gone from bad to worse. Since after all, the “business of government is business,” giant multinational drug consortiums have been the law’s biggest winners. And if the National Biodefense Science Board (NBSB) has its way, HHS’s corporate partners stand to reap an even-greater windfall.

The intelligence and security web site Cryptome posted an August 11 notice buried deep inside the Federal Register.

The NBSB is seeking public comment on the group’s new working document, “Inventory of Issues Constraining or Enabling Industry Involvement in Medical Countermeasure Efforts.” Cutting through the bureaucratic jargon, NBSB’s “Market & Sustainability Work Group” seeks to hand over even more cash to their “industry partners.”

Apparently the FDA’s already “streamlined” review process and “contracting flexibility” under Project BioShield isn’t enough for the corporate freebooters reaping billions in hand outs.

NBSB proposes to further “incentivize” industry by “increased federal funding for advanced development, in the form of cost-reimbursement contracts and rewarding private-capital investments with milestone payments at procurement.” This would give the drug industry the following “advantage:” “Risk of distraction of large industry partners from commercial mission or dilution of effort [potential conflict with fiduciary responsibility to shareholders of publicly traded companies].”

Under NBSB’s proposal, the drug industry stands to grab “reimbursement of development costs + 15%, with return-on-working-capital at 22%, and cost-of-money-for-capital at 15%.”

If said corporate patriots swing into action during a national emergency, then “compensation if commercial product(s) during emergencies (e.g., lost sales, market share, delayed licensing” are fully paid by the federal government.

Nice work if you can get it!

While it is vital that government, particularly our civilian institutions, plan for contingencies that may arise as the result of a pandemic outbreak of disease or a terrorist attack, the secrecy and opaque procedures surrounding entities such PHEMCE only fuel suspicion.

Indeed, PHEMCE’s Enterprise Executive Committee, chaired by BARDA and charged with implementing “tactical activities,” particularly when such policies are not clearly spelled-out, bolster arguments by Boston University’s Wendy Mariner that “proposals to limit liberty represent a dangerous precedent to constitutional theory, particularly when there’s almost no evidence it will matter.”

But perhaps the revival of Bush-era quarantine proposals and the NBSB’s free gifts to corporations already plush with veritable mountains of cash “matter” in a different sense, one which those of us armed with socialist “conspiracy theories” fail to grasp.

Pentagon Power-Grab: Militarizing the Heimat

As we have witnessed on more than one occasion in recent American history, the nature of a national security state is precisely to usurp civilian power and transfer it to opaque, unaccountable militarist bureaucracies such as the Pentagon.

The Hill reported August 10 that “a bipartisan pair of governors is opposing a new Defense Department proposal to handle natural and terrorism-related disasters, contending that a murky chain of command could lead to more problems than solutions.”

Vermont Governor Jim Douglas (R), the chairman of the National Governors Association and Vice Chairman, West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin (D) wrote a letter opposing the Pentagon power-grab.

Under current law, governors and not the Department of Defense, exercise control over National Guard units in their own states as well as DoD personnel or any other Guard units from other states deployed under their jurisdiction.

Their objections arose over a Pentagon proposal for a “legislative fix” that would give the Secretary of Defense authority “to assist in response to domestic disasters and, consequently, control over units stationed in an affected state,” The Hill revealed.

“We are concerned that the legislative proposal you discuss in your letter would invite confusion on critical command and control issues, complicate interagency planning, establish stove-piped response efforts, and interfere with governors’ constitutional responsibilities to ensure the safety and security of their citizens,” Douglas and Manchin wrote to Paul Stockton, assistant secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and America’s Security Affairs. (Reid Wilson, “Governors Oppose DoD Emergency Powers,” The Hill, August 10, 2009)

After objections by governors were raised to a similar proposal in the House version of the fiscal 2009 Defense authorization legislation, it was removed from the final version of the bill. It now seems however, that the Pentagon is back seeking to expand their writ over civilian institutions.

That this latest proposal arrives simultaneously with a mandate for new Executive Branch authority to quarantine sick people, should raise public alarm levels. The Bush regime’s proposal would have handed the state authority to order a “provisional quarantine” of three business days, up to six calendar days, for individuals suspected of being infected with H1N1 “or other illnesses listed in a presidential executive order.”

Under regulations proposed, but never implemented by the previous administration, airlines and cruise lines would have been required to store personal data on passengers “including email addresses, traveling companions and return flight information.” Indeed, the information “would be subject to review by federal officials in a health emergency, though it would be voluntary for passengers to provide the data,” according to Politico.

This series of disturbing reports follow close on the heels of analysis by Michel Chossudovsky, that a decision has been reached by U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a “significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall.”

Chossudovsky avers that “the decision points towards the militarization of civilian institutions, including law enforcement and public health.” This assertion is validated by the Politico report. Objecting to the DoD’s desire to usurp civilian authority over National Guard forces, the letter by prominent governors underscores the danger to civil liberties by an out-of-control Pentagon bureaucracy hell-bent on “assisting” civil institutions.

Citing the military’s consideration of “a plan to give transportation and laboratory help to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the event of a major outbreak,” Chossudovsky writes:

Much of the groundwork for the intervention of the military has already been established. There are indications that these “regional teams” have already been established under USNORTHCOM, which has been involved in preparedness training and planning in the case of a flu pandemic.

Within the broader framework of “Disaster Relief,” Northern Command has, in the course of the last two years, defined a mandate in the eventuality of a public health emergency or a flu pandemic. The emphasis is on the militarization of public health whereby NORTHCOM would oversee the activities of civilian institutions involved in health related services. (Michel Chossudovsky, “H1N1 Pandemic: Pentagon Planning Deployment of Troops in Support of Nationwide Vaccination,” Global Research, July 31, 2009)

They wouldn’t do that, would they?

Since his inauguration in January, President Barack Obama’s administration has continued the repressive policies of the Bush regime. From warrantless wiretapping to corporate give-aways, and from presidential signing statements and the indefinite detention of “terrorism” suspects to the escalation of imperialist adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, like Bush, the Obama administration represents the continuity of policies across a narrow bipartisan political spectrum, designed to bolster the national security state.

Moves to implement quarantine regulations and Pentagon plans to assume control during a national public health emergency are clear signs that democratic decision-making processes in the United States are growing weaker by the day.

There seems to be a great effort on the part of those who think they have a mission to not only describe but also shape our culture to dampen any signs of disagreement between the scientific and the religious perspectives that have often appeared, to this untrained eye, to suggest some antagonism in the very public battles between them. Thus, many reporters, social commentator’s, religionists and even scientists have held forth on the necessity to promote harmony between these “nonoverlapping magisteria,” to borrow the late Stephen Jay Gould’s phrasing. (See “The trouble with NOMA” for my view of Gould’s description.)

Thus, accommodation between the religious and the scientific is presented as something to be desired, if not at all costs, certainly in the overwhelming majority of cases. And those obstreperous individuals, of whom Richard Dawkins—unfairly, in my view—appears to have become the prototype, who dare to suggest the accommodation may mask a sellout of basic scientific values are just being rude. According to the mavens of accommodation, those who cannot say anything nice about religion should just shut up about it. Now they are not quite gutsy enough to come out and declare such a requirement openly, but it is implicit in their constant insistence that those who won’t “play nice” with religion are damaging our public discourse and doing a disservice to the many believers who are not fundamentalists and who do, for the most part, believe in science.

All of this noise obscures, in the public mind at least, an obvious and, for the religious, uncomfortable fact—the “elephant in the room” that everyone seems to be ignoring. Science and religions are not just different ways of looking at things, they are in fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality. They are, in a word, incompatible.

This does not mean that a scientist may not believe in a god or practice a religion and still be a good scientist. Human beings function at high levels in all walks of life and practically every one of them believes in contradictory and, at times, mutually exclusive ideas. For example, we are very good at compartmentalizing our minds so that our fantasies can coexist with our perceptions and understanding of the real world. As long as we don’t force the issue, the two may cohabit quite peacefully, neither one intruding on the other. People do this sort of thing all the time. However, saying that two ideas may coexist in the same mind, or the same culture, should not be taken as evidence those ideas are compatible with one another. That a scientist may believe in a god says nothing about whether or not his or her religious beliefs are compatible with science.

Science is based upon observation, experimentation and demonstration. In order to be acceptable, scientific evidence must be susceptible to independent verification. When evidence cannot be verified, when experiments cannot be repeated, any conclusions drawn from them are either held in abeyance, pending further study, or disregarded. Science is about asking questions and challenging the answers. As a consequence, science is always unfinished, always contingent upon what we know today and what we may learn tomorrow. Above all else, science is a reason-based process. It is inherently rational. Science is a method of learning about the universe and everything in it through the application of human cognition.

Those who advocate accommodation between science and religions are fond of declaring that science answers the “how” questions and religions answer the “why” questions. They are not, however, very clear about exactly what that means. Sometimes how and why are inextricably intertwined so that it is not possible to understand one without the other. For example, one cannot understand how the human genome works without understanding why it is put together the way it is. It is not possible to understand the “why” of nuclear fission without understanding the “how” of atomic theory.

Of course, religionists will complain what they mean is that religions supply the answers to the “really big” questions of human existence. “Why am I here?” “What is the meaning of existence?” Those kinds of questions. There are, of course, perfectly good answers to those questions supplied by science. The first answer is that I am here because my parents engaged in sexual activity and I was the result. The second is that existence appears to supply its own meaning. Existence is an end in itself and requires nothing more than that to make it meaningful.

“No. No. That is not what we mean either,” the religionists will declare. They claim to be talking about ultimate meanings and that sort of thing. What religions answer are those ultimate questions that cannot be addressed by science. In other words, religions claim to be able to answer questions for which there are no satisfactory answers except by appeal to the irrational and the indefinable. But what sort of answers are supplied thereby?

Here is the rub. It is all well and good to ask “Why is there something rather than nothing?” as many people have. However, there is no way to get to a verifiable answer. Since we cannot see beyond the event, the “Big Bang,” which led to the development of this universe, we cannot know what conditions were before it came into existence. Maybe something always has existed. Maybe the universe is a unique event, a cosmic hiccup that will never be repeated. Maybe universes are as common as galaxies or solar systems. Maybe the universe we occupy was created as a bauble for the children of a species of cosmic overlords, something to keep the kiddies occupied whilst they were in their cribs. Maybe it is the accidental byproduct of extreme flatulence by the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Maybe the answer is simply “Why not?”

Obviously, some of those answers might deserve more consideration than others and one, or maybe two of them are intended only in jest. However, there is no method known to us to prove any of them false. But what sort of answer is “God?” It really is no answer at all. Positing a god as an answer to unanswerable questions tells us absolutely nothing about anything. It is simply a pietistic way of begging those questions.

So what exactly is it about religions that science must accommodate?

This is an important question, one to which I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer. As a method of finding out about what exists, science brings a lot to the table. Religions offer nothing that is helpful in that endeavor. Instead they offer verbal slight of hand, phrases like “the ground of all being” or “a god outside of space and time” or new age gobbledygook that sounds like “the ineffable essence at the core of an inexplicable reality.” That kind of thing. Such language may be appropriate for the ethereal meanderings of theologians who rarely offer anything useful in the real world, but they are scarcely helpful in finding out about what is going on in the universe we all occupy and why it appears to operate the way it does.

It is no virtue that the only territory religion can claim for its own is that which is outside the ken of rational inquiry. In that terrain anything is possible, and nothing can be verified. It is the realm of mystic visions, spiritual entities and things that go bump in the night. The gods who populate such regions may be the creators and destroyers of worlds or the ethereal panaceas and placebos who have fed the fantasies of all manner of delusional people. And while it may be impossible to demonstrate that such fanciful notions are false, there is not the slightest bit of verifiable evidence to suggest they are true. Attempting to shoehorn such notions into scientific theories does a disservice to the work of the scientific enterprise as a whole. It also goes a long way toward destroying the credibility of the scientists who make the attempt.

Consider the “fine-tuning” argument so beloved by theists. There is a set of physical properties that need to have the values they have in order for human beings, or any complex life forms, to have evolved. Thus, it is claimed, a divine agent must have set things up so that the universe we occupy would have those values. Ergo, “God”—or whatever you want to call the agent in question—must exist, or we could not be here. Now whether it is expressed as a probability or only a possibility, this argument has no place in science. (For more treatments of this subject and a variety of arguments on both sides of the issue, I refer you here.)

The late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and other works, once compared this notion to a mud puddle declaring that the hole it occupied must have been created for it because otherwise it could not have fit so well. (Here’s a youtube audio of Adams making the point.) Any universe occupied by complex life must be organized to accommodate that life. There’s no reason to suppose a divine agent had anything to do with it. It’s a bit like declaring that human legs are proof there must be a god because no matter how tall you are, they are exactly the right length for your feet to reach the ground.

We expect to hear this sort of pap coming from religionists. However, it is surprising to hear it put forth by any scientist, whether they have a background in astrophysics or not. Certainly, the constants exist. That’s not the point. The point is that their existence is evidence of nothing except that certain conditions may be necessary for life to evolve. Positing “God” as the source of those constants violates the most basic rules of science. It is not even a good hypothesis because there is absolutely no way to test it. Making declarations about what is necessary for a universe like ours to exist is an exercise in futility anyway. Ours is the only universe we know anything about. You simply cannot form valid conclusions about the conditions necessary for a phenomenon to exist when you have only one example of that phenomenon.

There are no concepts put forth by religions to which science must accommodate itself. However, science puts forth many ideas to which religions must accommodate their own beliefs if they wish to retain any semblance of intellectual respectability. Here in the United States, many religious people deplore evolution, dismiss modern cosmology and declare their preference for ignorance and superstition. Now, people have the right to believe such things. They have no right, however, to require anyone else to respect such nonsense. Religions that preach the world was created by a deity 6,000 years ago (or in any similar time frame) ought not be allowed to influence the way biology is taught in modern science classrooms in public schools because the theory of evolution offends their religious sensibilities. A person’s right to be an ignoramus does not translate into a right to impose ignorance on others.

Religions and science need not be in conflict. When they are, it is usually religions who pick the fight. They pick it because they see their dominance over the minds of humankind slowly being eaten away. For tens of thousands of years, supernaturalism dominated the human narrative and gave us thousands of gods and hundreds of thousands of religions. Religions, like all other human cultural artifacts, have evolved to meet the changing conditions in which they have found themselves. Today, however, modern science has evolved a new narrative that makes the hoary tales told by religions seem quaint and parochial and, at times, destructive. The story science tells us about who we are and how we came to be is far grander and far more inspiring than the puny myths peddled by modern religions.

So religions may well need to accommodate themselves to modern science if they are to have any prospect for survival in the coming centuries. But science has no need and no reason to accommodate itself to the beliefs of any religion. And unless religion can bring more to the party than wishful thinking and unverifiable observations, it would be a violation of its very nature for science to try.

1. If you are interested in this subject and want to track the debate, two of the best sources of information are P.Z. Myers blog, Pharyngula, and Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution is True. Both could be characterized as anti-accommodationist, I suppose, but their reactions are informed by science, and they cite references, including those to whom they are reacting. Both blogs are well-written and informative, touching on many areas.

According to Forbes, Holdren’s environmentalism has been celebrated over the years. He has been the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Research Center and a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Holdren partook as a member of The Limits to Growth club. In his 1971 Sierra Club book, Energy: A Crisis in Power, Holdren writes “it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population.” The science supporting notions of peak oil, regardless of Holdren’s confidence, has been seriously scrutinized, giving credence to Forbes claim that Holdren holds serious dogmas.

From Forbes,

In keeping with his dogmatic (my italicization) limits-to-growth convictions, Holdren joined his frequent co-author, eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich, in a famous bet against cornucopian economist Julian Simon.

In 1980, Holdren, Ehrlich and Stanford colleague John Harte picked a basket of five commodities–chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten–that they were sure were going to rise in price as they became increasingly scarce. They drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Holdren, Ehrlich and Harte the same quantities of five metals that could be purchased for $1,000 10 years later at 1980 prices.

If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990. Simply put, the combined real prices of the metals selected by Holdren and his colleagues fell by more than 50% during the 1980s, confirming cornucopian claims that the supply of resources over time becomes more abundant, not scarcer.

Holdren also held the view that, by 2040, the US population would reach 270 million, and that that would pose a “severe” problem. Today, in 2009, the population of the U.S. is about 304 million. In a 1975 The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article, Holdren slightly tinkered with his previous conceptions of limits to energy, writing that “civilization is not running out of energy; but it is running out of cheap energy.”

In his 1977 book Ecoscience, Holdren, Paul Ehrlich (head of science under Bush), and Anne Ehrlich write on page 837 that “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society. Few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion, however.”

Holdren also proposes “a comprehensive Planetary Regime (that) could control the development, administration and distribution of all natural resources…not only in the atmosphere and the oceans, but in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes.”

He states further, the “Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits…The Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

Some syndicated columnists argue the claims made by concerned citizens are moot points, for the tome Ecoscience was written more than thirty years ago. Maybe so, until one learns that some of the suggestions are already utilized by the U.S. government, as over 250 different pharmaceutical chemicals have been found in the drinking supply of the unsuspecting U.S. population. Many of these chemicals are attributed to hyper feminization in women and demasculinization in men. In one example, Holdren states his belief that under the current U.S. Constitution, adding sterilants to the nation’s water supply was probably a good thing:

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

Eugenics, an outcome of the study of human heredity, aims to “improve” the genetic makeup of the human stock. While the idea of eugenics appears in Plato’s Republic, the modern concept became prominent during the second half of the 19th century. Two widespread philosophical beliefs formed the bedrock of eugenics: a belief in the perfectibility of the human species and a spreading faith in science as the most accurate tool of knowledge.

Social Darwinism was one 19th century predecessor to the 20th century eugenics movement. Two predominant themes of social Darwinism—“struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest”—as applied to human sociality, were premised upon the notion that the rich were more biologically fit than were the poor and, for that reason, more successful in life. More nuanced theories of evolution, naturally, render the assumption that competition is the bedrock mechanism of evolution obsolete, thereby making room for the notion that cooperation is in the driver’s seat. Could some form of competitive cooperation oil the gears of evolution? A healthy competition?

By separating the “better” and “worse” elements, according to social Darwinism, the species could continually be improved. Modern eugenics breaks from that pool of thought in noteworthy ways. The latter featured a laissez-faire approach to the philosophy, maintaining that nature would take such a course; that the worst elements of society would over time be eliminated. Such concepts, many argue, form the foundation of the Nazi program.

Modern eugenics, however, has as its basis the notion that careful planning by way of proper breeding is the best means to improving society; this is the ideology adopted by the Nazi Regime.

In the 1930’s in Germany, the rush to sequester and alleviate mental deficiencies was quickly interpreted to encompass malcontents and dissidents opposed to the Nazi regime. This vague theory gave way to the Nazi Sterilization Act, effective July 1933.²

Dr. Ernst Rudin, a leading and articulate authority in favor of the Sterilization Act, traveled in 1930 to Washington D.C. in order to present a paper called, “The Importance of Eugenics and Genetics in Mental Hygiene.” The paper was well-received in the United States, where many—especially among the moneyed elite—were cordial to German pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy.

In late June 1933, German Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick convened a blue-ribbon committee on demographic and racial policy, during which he unraveled an ambitious program to evaluate “our ethnic body politic according to its genetic value.” Frick propagandized that the decay of das Volk was not attributable to an outside enemy, but, rather, to something within the people themselves. The materialism and lamentable moral decline of the Weimar Era had to be eradicated, and Weimar programs stopped. In reality, despite the crushing of the German economy by western business, the Weimar Republic constituted a vibrant culture and enjoyed relatively successful social programs. Among the programs to be stopped were birth control that reduced the Volk by encouraging a “two-child family system,” superfluous social welfare programs that wasted money on “hopeless clients,” and “sexual freedom [that promoted] the ‘mannish woman.’”³

Frick outlined the overbearing program to eradicate the bad and “select” the beneficial. Such issues were referred to scantily in the Nazi Party program but mostly ignored by the party press. During a party rally in 1929, Hitler commented on the topic, commenting that if, of one million newborns 10,000 of the least desirable died, it would result in a net gain for the Volk.

The engineers of the Nazi sterilization program looked to the U.S. as a model. A 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, drafted by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, justified sterilization: In the wake of world war, when “the best of a generation of young men risked their lives for the nation,” Holmes reasoned, “it would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices…in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Nazi sterilization program was initiated during a time when 28 American states as well as a number of European nations employed sterilization programs.

The magnitude of, not the ideas behind, the Nazi “ethnic improvement” schemes was what made them stand out. In the United States between 1907 and 1947, about 45, 127 people were sterilized (conservatively). In Germany, internationally respected eugenicist Friedrich Lenz calculated that 1 million feeble-minded Germans (in a population of 65 million) should be sterilized, whilst Agricultural minister Walter Darre called for ten times that many. Frick adapted his radio audience to the concepts by preparing them for a rate of one in five.

Beginning their eugenics programs on children, the Nazis, on July 14, 1933, passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Children. Leaders of the movement to eliminate “mental defectives” from the German Volk were lawyer Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, whose phrase “lebensunwertes Leben”—or “life unworthy of life”—became a popular, albeit chilling phrase.²

Sterilization was the preferred means of prevention, and was administered by special “hereditary health courts.” The Nazi euthanasia program was carried out by secret decries, for Hitler refused to seek a legal ruling, well-aware of such a programs illegal nature under the Weimar Constitution.

Between 1934 and 1945, so it is estimated, more than 400,000 people were sterilized as “life unworthy of life.”

The Nazi regime employed these measures in such a convoluted way—what Robert Jay Lifton terms “bureaucratic mystification”—as to make it nearly impossible for victims, their families and even those working within the system to know the vast nature of the euthanasia program.

In the United States, the Rockefellers—who had, among other endeavors, amassed a bustling oil empire—were also interested in the eugenics movement. In 1910, the Eugenics records Office was established, with grants bestowed unto it on behalf of—but certainly not only—John D. Rockefeller.

In 2009, a number of global crises give rise to a social climate in which talks of “global governance” receive little attention or analysis. The war on terror, global warming, swine flu and peak oil—no matter how contrived these phenomenon may be—create an opportunity for the most radical and disreputed of values to appear in the mainstream.

Right Side News points out that, while Holdren can be criticized for publicizing the aforementioned views and other likes it, because he preceded it by evoking other authorities, it cannot be entirely attributed to him. Holdren, according to Right Side News, escapes guilt by stating, “The impact of laws and policies on population size and growth has, until very recently, largely been ignored by the legal profession. The first comprehensive treatment of population law was that of the late Johnson C. Montgomery, an attorney who was president of Zero Population Growth, and whose ideas are the basis of much of the following discussion.”⁴

Right Side News best investigate precedents set in this nation’s legal history. On October 15, 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO Act) became law. The RICO Act enabled law enforcement to charge persons or a group with racketeering; that is, committing multiple violations of certain varieties within a 10 year period. The purpose of the act was stated to be “the elimination of the infiltration of organized crime and racketeering into legitimate organizations operating in interstate commerce.” Holdren and his associates, an international ueberclass of about 6,000 individuals, are eligible for such proceedings. Each one of us, naturally, is aware of Nuremburg Trial precedents. The United States government is an organization operating in interstate commerce, as articulated by President Woodrow Wilson in the 1920’s when he said, “the business of America is business.”

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren was asked about past scientific overstatements, and riposted, “The motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time.”

Holdren, by the way, has pontificated that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020. Also, that sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century, far exceeding even the most concerned, who place the level at 13 inches.

While introducing Holdren, Barack Obama promised that his administration was “ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”⁵

State directed sterilization breach two deeply rooted principles. One being the secular precept, enshrined in John Locke’s Second Treatise, that “every man has a property in his own person,” and the other the prohibition against any interference in reproduction, which Pope Pius XI forcefully restated in his 1930 Casti Cannubi.³

The Business of Genocide

The H1N1 virus has killed fewer than 500 people. The World Health Organization, nevertheless, declared a global pandemic: “The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic in the 21st century,” according to Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director.⁶

It has been reported by the Washington Times, “children will be a key target population for a pandemic flu vaccine in the fall.” The students would be vaccinated in a three step program in a mass campaign paralleling that of efforts in the 1950’s against polio. Pregnant women, adults with chronic illnesses and health-workers would join children as the first in line. The federal government expects to receive approximately 100 million doses of vaccine by mid-October, assuming the current production, by only five companies, continues as planned. However vaccine for wide use, by about 120 million “especially vulnerable” people, will not be available until later in the fall.⁷

The Department of Homeland Security, moreover, issued in April a swine flu memo to some health care providers. “The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines,” the memo states. Such authority is limited to diseases listed in presidential executive orders; President Bush, however, added new forms of influenza with the potential to cause pandemics in Executive Order 13375. Anyone violating a quarantine order can be punished by a $250,000 fine and a one-year prison term, according to CBS News.⁸

The Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Plan extinguishes the distinction between a civilian and national security emergency situation, what is effectively the end of Posse Comitatus.

Not only the United States, but rather many other countries have announced mandated vaccination programs. The French government, for example, has purchased 28 million vaccines for the country of 60 million +. The Former chairman of the British Medical Association has, also, called for mandatory vaccinations.

The US Secretary of Health and Human Sercices, Kathleen Sebelius, recently signed a decree granting vaccine makers total legal immunity from all lawsuits resulting from any new “Swine Flu” vaccine. The $7 billion US Government program to rush vaccines onto the market in time for the Fall flu season is being done devoid of normal safety testing. Swine Flur, H1N1, furthermore, has yet to be rigorously scientifically isolated, characterized and photographed with an electron microscope—the scientifically acknowledged procedure.⁹

Is the United States social climate such, that forced inoculations would not inspire internal dissent?

Created in 2002 by President Bush, NorthCom, the Pentagons Northern Command—with jurisdiction over the United States—has been running preparedness drills in the event of a flu pandemic for at least the past three years. Northcom, furthermore, was recently assigned its own fighting unit six months ago. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Divison 1st Brigade Combat Team spent much of the last five years battling in Iraq.¹⁰

Head of NorthCom General Victor Renuart, testifying in March, claimed the command center would provide “assistance in support of civil authorities” during an epidemic. Adding, “when requested and approved by the Secretary of Defense or directed by the President, federal military forces will contribute federal support.”

According to the General, NorthCom had prepared for a flu outbreak from Mexico. “Because Mexico is our neighbor and disasters do not respect national boundaries, we are focused on developing and improving procedures to respond to potentially catastrophic events such as pandemic influenza outbreak, mass exposure to dangerous chemicals and materials, and natural disasters.”

NorthCom also has a “private sector cell.”

“We have great participation from industry and from other organizations around the country,” the General testified.

One private sector group that has worked with the FBI and Homeland Security on pandemics is InfraGard, a group of more than 30,000 businesspeople who enjoy special access to confidential FBI Information and may be assigned special—even lethal—duties in times of an emergency.”

InfraGard wishes to be a player in pandemic response. “Utilization of their expertise will help local communities prepare for a possible pandemic event to ensure minimal disruption and quick recover,” one InfraGard press release stated.¹¹

1. Bailey, Ronald. John Holdren, Ideological Environmentalist. Forbes Magazine, 2.03.09.
2. Marrs, Jim. The Rise of the Fourth Reich. Harpers.
3. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience.
4. Kincaid, Cliff. Is Obama’s Science Czar a Crackpot? Right Side News, 7.15.09.
5. Harsanyi, David. Science Fiction Czar. Denver Post, 7.15.09
6. WHO declares global swine flu pandemic and says virus is ‘unstoppable.’ Times online UK.
7. Brown, David and Hsu, Spencer. Students first in Line for Flu Vaccine. Washington Post, July 10, 2009.
8. Department of Homeland Security Guidelines For Possible Swine Flu Quarantines. GlobalResearch
9. Eberhart, Dave. Health Bill Would Allow Forced Vaccinations in Private Homes. Newsmax, 7.16.09.
10. Rothschild, Mathew. Will NorthCom Takeover in Swine Flu Outbreak? The Progressive, 4.29.09
11. Engdahl, William F. Now Legal Immunity for Swine Flu Vaccine Makers. Global Research, 7.22.09.

Israel’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel.

Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilised soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government’s line on the Middle East conflict.

“To all intents and purposes the internet is a theatre in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose,” said Ilan Shturman, who is responsible for the project.

The existence of an “internet warfare team” came to light when it was included in this year’s foreign ministry budget. About $150,000 has been set aside for the first stage of development, with increased funding expected next year.

The team will fall under the authority of a large department already dealing with what Israelis term hasbara, officially translated as “public explanation” but more usually meaning propaganda. That includes not only government public relations work but more secretive dealings the ministry has with a battery of private organisations and initiatives that promote Israel’s image in print, on TV and online.

In an interview this month with the Calcalist, an Israeli business newspaper, Mr Shturman, the deputy director of the ministry’s hasbara department, admitted his team would be working undercover.

“Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the hasbara department of the Israeli foreign ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis,” he said. “They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the foreign ministry developed.”

Rona Kuperboim, a columnist for Ynet, Israel’s most popular news website, denounced the initiative, saying it indicated that Israel had become a “thought-police state”.

She added that “good PR cannot make the reality in the occupied territories prettier. Children are being killed, homes are being bombed, and families are starved.”

Her column was greeted by several talkbackers asking how they could apply for a job with the foreign ministry’s team.

The project is a formalisation of public relations practices the ministry developed specifically for Israel’s assault on Gaza in December and January.

“During Operation Cast Lead we appealed to Jewish communities abroad and with their help we recruited a few thousand volunteers, who were joined by Israeli volunteers,” Mr Shturman said.

“We gave them background material and hasbara material, and we sent them to represent the Israeli point of view on news websites and in polls on the internet.”

The Israeli army also had one of the most popular sites on the video-sharing site YouTube and regularly uploaded clips, although it was criticised by human rights groups for misleading viewers about what was shown in its footage.

Mr Shturman said that during the war the ministry had concentrated its activities on European websites where audiences were more hostile to Israeli policy. High on its list of target sites for the new project would be BBC Online and Arabic websites, he added.

Elon Gilad, who heads the internet team, told Calcalist that many people had contacted the ministry offering their services during the Gaza attack. “People just asked for information, and afterwards we saw that the information was distributed all over the internet.”

He suggested that there had been widespread government cooperation, with the ministry of absorption handing over contact details for hundreds of recent immigrants to Israel, who wrote pro-Israel material for websites in their native languages.

The new team is expected to increase the ministry’s close coordination with a private advocacy group, giyus.org (Give Israel Your United Support). About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a programme called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.

Nasser Rego of Ilam, a group based in Nazareth that monitors the Israeli media, said Arab organisations in Israel were among those regularly targeted by hasbara groups for “character assassination”. He was concerned the new team would try to make such work appear more professional and convincing.

“If these people are misrepresenting who they are, we can guess they won’t worry too much about misrepresenting the groups and individuals they write about. Their aim, it’s clear, will be to discredit those who stand for human rights and justice for the Palestinians.”

When The National called the foreign ministry, Yigal Palmor, a spokesman, denied the existence of the internet team, though he admitted officials were stepping up exploitation of new media.

He declined to say which comments by Mr Shturman or Mr Gilad had been misrepresented by the Hebrew-language media, and said the ministry would not be taking any action over the reports.

Israel has developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to new media since it launched a “Brand Israel” campaign in 2005.

Market research persuaded officials that Israel should play up good news about business success, and scientific and medical breakthroughs involving Israelis.

Mr Shturman said his staff would seek to use websites to improve “Israel’s image as a developed state that contributes to the quality of the environment and to humanity”.

David Saranga, head of public relations at Israel’s consulate-general in New York, which has been leading the push for more upbeat messages about Israel, argued last week that Israel was at a disadvantage against pro-Palestinian advocacy.

“Unlike the Muslim world, which has hundreds of millions of supporters who have adopted the Palestinian narrative in order to slam Israel, the Jewish world numbers only 13 million,” he wrote in Ynet.

Israel has become particularly concerned that support is ebbing among the younger generations in Europe and the United States.

In 2007 it emerged that the foreign ministry was behind a photo-shoot published in Maxim, a popular US men’s magazine, in which female Israeli soldiers posed in swimsuits.

The Wall Street Journal reported July 13 that “A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.

Investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman writes, “The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.”

The Washington Post however, revealed July 16 that the assassination plan was sanctioned by President Bush. Unnamed “intelligence officials” told the newspaper that “a secret document known as a ‘presidential finding’ was signed by President George W. Bush that same month, granting the agency broad authority to use deadly force against bin Laden as well as other senior members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”

According to Post reporter Joby Warrick, Bush’s finding “imposed no geographical limitations on the agency’s actions” and that the CIA was “not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.” This implies that targets could be hit anywhere, including on the soil of a NATO ally or inside the United States itself.

According to the Los Angeles Times the program “was kept secret from lawmakers for nearly eight years at the direction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.”

Despite these reports and hand-wringing amongst congressional Democrats, there’s something fishy here. After all, isn’t the whole point of America’s “global war on terror” to “capture or kill” al-Qaeda suspects? What’s so secretive or controversial about that?

The descriptions of the operation that have so far emerged however, bear a striking resemblance to charges laid earlier this year when investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that the Bush administration stood-up an “executive assassination ring.”

During a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota in March the veteran journalist told the audience: “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.”

The program was allegedly shut down by Panetta on June 23, a day after leaning of the agency’s clandestine initiative. What make these revelations all the more significant is that the CIA Director only learned of the program fully four months after assuming office.

“The implications,” socialist analyst Bill Van Auken writes, “are clear. The CIA maintained the secrecy ordered by Cheney even after the latter had left office, and continued to conceal the existence and nature of the covert operation not only from Congress, but from the Obama administration itself.”

But was the program shut down? The Washington Post further revealed that the plan, allegedly “on the agency’s back burner for much of the past eight years, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of proposals to initiate what one intelligence official called a ’somewhat more operational phase’.”

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell hints that the program was in a “somewhat more operational phase” years earlier, despite repeated denials by CIA officials and congressional staffers.

Wilkerson told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show  July 14, “What I suspect has happened is what began to happen while I was still in the government, and that was we’re killing the wrong people. And we’re killing the wrong people in the wrong countries. And the countries are finding out about it, or at least there was a suspicion that the countries might find out about it, and so it was shut down. That’s my strong suspicion.”

According to Wilkerson, the teams may have been dispatched under deep cover, using Joint Special Operations Command as a cut-out, a confirmation of charges made by Seymour Hersh in March. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was queried by the State Department, “after some hemming and hawing, which was Rumsfeld’s forte, he finally admitted that he had dispatched some of these teams,” Wilkerson explained.

Powell’s former aide told Maddow, “It’s laughable that the CIA has never lied to Congress. “They lie to Congress on a routine basis.” Much the same can be said of General Powell who lied to the entire world “on a routine basis” during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

It must also be said there is precedence for the CIA’s alleged death squad activities during the Bush era. In Vietnam for example, the CIA and U.S. Special Forces jointly ran a secret assassination program that targeted Vietnamese dissidents. As author Douglas Valentine revealed in his definitive study, The Phoenix Program, Operation Phoenix “was a computer-driven program aimed at ‘neutralizing’, through assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture, the civilian infrastructure that supported the insurgency in South Vietnam.”

Those programs never died and have since morphed into above top secret “Special Access Programs” used with deadly effect in Central- and South America during the 1980s and across the Middle East today.

The latest scandal comes on the heels of revelations that the Bush administration’s massive secret surveillance programs targeting the American people went far beyond well-publicized warrantless wiretapping.

A new 38-page declassified report issued July 10 by inspectors general of the CIA, National Security Agency, Department of Justice, Department of Defense and the Office of National Intelligence, collectively called the acknowledged “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and cross-agency top secret “Other Intelligence Activities” the “President’s Surveillance Program.”

The IG’s report failed to disclose what these programs actually did, and probably still do today under the Obama administration. Shrouded beneath impenetrable layers of secrecy and deceit, these undisclosed programs lie at the dark heart of the state’s war against the American people and perhaps, other regime opponents.

The CIA’s Office of Inspector General said that “the program was an additional resource to enhance the CIA’s understanding of terrorist networks and to help identify potential threats to the U.S. homeland,” and that the “PSP was one of many tools available to them, and that the tools were often used in combination.” However, “some officers told the CIA OIG that there was insufficient legal guidance on the use of PSP-derived information.” (pp. 33-34)

But with a thin reed provided by President Bush’s executive orders, presidential findings and 2001 congressional authorization for war against al-Qaeda, why would there be “insufficient legal guidance”? If “PSP-derived information” was used to target alleged al-Qaeda operatives there wouldn’t be need for additional legal guidance. If however, the CIA “was very deeply involved in domestic activities” as Seymour Hersh averred, and used NSA information for political dirty tricks it would be a violation of the CIA’s charter, one that comes with serious consequences including jail time.

Investigative journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who broke the NSA spy story in The New York Times in 2005, reported July 11 that intelligence officials “‘had difficulty citing specific instances’ when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists.”

True enough as far as it goes, but perhaps these programs were highly efficacious in silencing those who were deemed politically suspect, even within the defense and security apparatus itself.

While major media in the United States insist that the Agency’s assassination program was meant to target al-Qaeda assets, one question inevitably raises its head: did the CIA and allied intelligence services murder political opponents? Were covert actions carried out by the CIA–at home or on the soil of America’s allies–”against people they thought to be enemies of the state,” as Hersh revealed?

More pointedly, was the British bioweapons expert Dr. David Kelly, who leaked information to the press that the British and American governments had falsified the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, murdered for exposing the fraudulent evidence for war or worse, planning an exposé on the West’s continued development of offensive biological weapons?

Dr. David Kelly was an unlikely dissident. In fact Kelly wasn’t a dissident at all, but a prominent figure in Britain’s bioweapons defense establishment.

The former head of the microbiology department at Porton Down, the UK’s secret biological and chemical warfare research facility, at the time of his 2003 death Kelly was a consummate insider, a trusted keeper of state secrets; dangerous and deadly secrets that could topple governments.

A civilian employee of Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD), Dr. Kelly was a biological weapons expert and former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. His off-the-record conversations with journalist Andrew Gilligan about the British government’s fraudulent claim that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” set off a firestorm that continues to smolder.

While David Kelly wasn’t a spy, he did enjoy unprecedented access to the world of secret intelligence. Indeed, according to author Gordon Thomas, Kelly had helped orchestrate the defection of a top Russian microbiologist Vladimir Pasechnik (who turned up dead in 2001, allegedly from a stroke) and played a part in the FBI’s investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States by trying to identify the origin of the Ames strain used in the fatal mailings.

In 2008, the multiyear, multimillion dollar “Amerithrax” investigation was closed when the Bureau claimed that Dr. Bruce Ivins was the killer. Ivins, a top anthrax expert at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick in Maryland committed suicide. According to the FBI version, the scientist killed himself just as the Bureau was about to arrest him for the crime.

Many were unconvinced that Ivins was the anthrax “lone gunman.” Indeed, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a target of the 2001 attacks, charged FBI Director Robert Mueller with staging a cover-up.

During 2008 hearings, Leahy angrily chided Mueller: “If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that [Ivins] is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people. I do not believe that at all. I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or after the fact, I believe there are others who can be charged with murder.”

Richard Spertzel, Ivins’ former boss at Ft. Detrick told investigative journalists Bob Coen and Eric Nadler, “He’s dead and they can close the case and he can’t defend himself. Nice and convenient isn’t it?”

Thomas claims that Kelly had worked with two American scientists, Benito Que and Don Wiley, who also turned up dead under highly suspicious circumstances.

It was originally claimed by authorities that Que was bludgeoned to death during an attempted carjacking in Miami. “Strangely enough,” The Toronto Globe & Mail reported in 2002, “his body showed no signs of a beating. Doctors then began to suspect a stroke.”

Wiley, according to the Canadian newspaper “was an expert on how the immune system responds to viral attacks such as the classic doomsday plagues of HIV, ebola and influenza.” After planning a trip to Graceland with his son police “found his rental car on a bridge outside Memphis, Tenn. His body was later found in the Mississippi River. Forensic experts said he may have had a dizzy spell and have fallen off the bridge.”

As it turned out, the pair were “engaged in DNA sequencing that could provide ‘a genetic marker based on genetic profiling’.” Thomas writes: “The research could play an important role in developing weaponized pathogens to hit selected groups of humans–identifying them by race. Two years ago, both men were found dead, in circumstances never fully explained.”

Coincidence, or something more sinister?

By summer 2003, it was obvious that Saddam Hussein’s regime did not possess WMDs and that the entire pretext for invading Iraq was based on a lie, concocted by the American regime, and in particular by Vice President Richard Cheney and the neoconservative mafia in control of America’s defense and security apparatus.

Tasked to the Defence Intelligence Staff, Kelly read a draft of the Joint Intelligence Committee’s (JIC) dossier on Iraq’s reputed WMDs. He was unhappy with many of the report’s conclusions, according to multiple press reports. He disputed the infamous claim that the Iraqi Army was capable of launching battlefield biological and chemical weapons within “45 minutes” of an order from Saddam. This dubious claim, one of many, was inserted into the report at the insistence of MI6 political masters acting through the JIC.

During a trip to Iraq in June 2003, Kelly inspected what were alleged by the Bush administration to be “mobile weapons laboratories,” a claim infamously made by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations in February 2003. The Observer reported that a British scientist, who turned out to be David Kelly, told the newspaper: “They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were–facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.”

One of the key pieces of evidence to emerge was the JIC’s, and Kelly’s, involvement with Operation Rockingham, a secret program for weapons inspections in Iraq.

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter told the Sunday Herald that Operation Rockingham was a “dirty tricks” unit “designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq.”

Describing the unit as “dangerous,” Ritter told investigative journalist Neil Mackay, “Rockingham was spinning reports and emphasizing reports that showed non-compliance (by Iraq with UN inspections) and quashing those which showed compliance. It was cherry-picking intelligence.”

A political firestorm ensued, which threatened the viability of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour government. Heads would have to roll; one of those heads as it turned out, would be David Kelly’s.

After an appearance before Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee on July 15, 2003, Kelly was visibly upset by his shoddy treatment by MPs. In an email to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a serial-fabricator who had stitched-up evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, Kelly said there “were many dark actors playing games.”

During the whitewash known as The Hutton Inquiry, a British ambassador David Broucher reported a conversation he had with Kelly in Geneva. The ambassador asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded? The bioweapons expert replied, “I will probably be found dead in the woods.”

Two days after giving testimony before Parliament he was.

“A Wet Operation, a Wet Disposal”

In The Strange Death of David Kelly, Liberal-Democratic MP Norman Baker builds a strong case that the scientist was murdered. Despite Lord Hutton’s dubious findings that Kelly killed himself, several troubling facts intruded to upend the British government’s apple cart. To summarize:

The lack of fingerprints found on the knife allegedly used by the scientist to slit his wrists; the lack of blood found at the scene, despite a verdict that he had sliced open an artery; unexplained contusions on Kelly’s scalp; the position of the body discovered by searchers differed markedly from that alleged by detectives; bottled water, knife and wristwatch said to be found by detectives were not observed by the searchers who actually discovered the body; eight computers removed from Kelly’s home and office by MI6 agents; missing dental records; the level of painkillers found in Kelly’s stomach was “less than a third” of what is considered a fatal overdose by medical experts. On and on it goes…

One source told Baker that Dr. Kelly’s death was “a wet operation, a wet disposal,” a term used in intelligence circles to denote an assassination.

Six years after Kelly’s murder, a group of British doctors have announced that “they were mounting a legal challenge to overturn the finding of suicide,” The Mail on Sunday reports.

A 12-page opinion concludes: “The bleeding from Dr Kelly’s ulnar artery is highly unlikely to have been so voluminous and rapid that it was the cause of death. We advise the instructing solicitors to obtain the autopsy reports so that the concerns of a group of properly interested medical specialists can be answered.”

One motive which may have led to Kelly’s murder was that the scientist was writing a book “exposing highly damaging government secrets before his mysterious death,” The Sunday Express reported July 5.

According to published reports, Kelly intended to reveal that he had warned Prime Minister Tony Blair “there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the British and American invasion.” Despite warnings that the book would breach Britain’s draconian Officials Secrets Act, Kelly sought advice on how he might bring his findings into a publishable form.

These reports also suggest that Kelly threatened to “lift the lid” on a larger scandal, “his own secret dealings in germ warfare with the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

Investigative journalists Bob Coen and Eric Nadler in their book Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail and a companion 90-minute documentary, Anthrax War, provide startling evidence that Kelly’s death is linked to a secret world of germ warfare research.

Indeed, according to Coen and Nadler, David Kelly’s secret dealings included a connection with Dr. Wouter Basson, the cardiologist who was the former head of the South African apartheid regime’s clandestine biological and chemical warfare program, Project Coast.

During Basson’s 1999 trial and subsequent acquittal, evidence presented by some 150 witnesses, including operatives linked to South African snatch-and-kill squads, tied Basson to chemical and biological research used in extrajudicial executions by the apartheid regime. It was further alleged that Project Coast had conducted active research into the fabrication of “ethnic weapons” that would specifically target South Africa’s black population.

In Anthrax War, Basson states that his findings were shared with foreign scientists, including those affiliated with weapons research in Britain and the United States. According to a 2001 piece in The New Yorker,

Basson had already put the fear into American intelligence during his T.R.C. [Truth and Reconciliation Committee] appearance, where he handed over fourteen pages of notes from a visit to the United States in 1981. American Air Force officers had been eager to develop joint “medical projects” with South Africa, he wrote. … Basson says that in 1995 his life was threatened on the street by a C.I.A. agent. The American Embassy in Pretoria admits privately that the United States government is “terribly concerned” that Basson may start talking about his sources of information and technology. The Embassy hopes that an impression of “unwitting coöperation” is all that emerges in the way of an American connection. (William Finnegan, “The Poison Keeper,” The New Yorker, January 15, 2001)

Coen and Nadler uncovered evidence that Kelly had discovered a “Porton Down-South Africa connection” linked to a global bioweapons black market. The investigative journalists told the Express, “We have proved there is a black ­market in anthrax. David Kelly was of particular interest to us because he was a world expert on anthrax and he was involved in some degree with assisting the secret germ warfare programme in apartheid South Africa.”

Andrew Mackinlay, a British MP blamed for humiliating Kelly “to the point of suicide” started “asking questions in the House of Lords” after the scientist’s death “about Kelly’s relationship with these bad actors in Pretoria, even making inquiries about South African links to Pasechnik’s Regma firm.”

Founded in 2000 by the deceased scientist, Regma Bio Technologies was headquartered on the Porton Down campus and had signed a contract with the U.S. Navy for anti-anthrax research.

What Mackinlay discovered about the entire operation was highly disturbing to say the least. His inquiry sparked “the convening of an extraordinary ‘handling strategy meeting’ involving thirteen officials from different government agencies. But any and all information about UK-South African germ work was withheld from the MP.”

Mackinlay told Coen and Nadler, “This is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the British government.”

The question is, did David Kelly threaten to reveal these “closely guarded secrets” in the book he was preparing, and was this a motive for certain “dark actors” to eliminate a person now considered “an enemy of the state”?

These programs are not Cold War relics. Biological weapons research continues today and remain one of America’s most deadly secrets. As the 2001 anthrax attacks which employed a weaponized version of the bacteria to sow terror, and subsequent FBI cover-up illustrate, such programs remain fully operational.

The evidence suggests that Dr. David Kelly, as Norman Baker avers “may have signed his own death warrant” by threatening to reveal this secret underworld menacing all humanity with unimaginable horrors.

That an out-of-control agency like the CIA has the means, motives and opportunity to silence critics and that “no geographical limitations” were placed “on the agency’s actions,” should give pause to a society that considers itself a democracy.

Media revelations so far have suggested that the CIA and Special Operations Forces were assembling teams to “put bullets in [the al Qaeda leaders'] heads” as The Wall Street Journal reported.

But perhaps the Obama administration’s trepidation in exploring this and other Bush-era programs through congressional hearings or the mechanism of a special prosecutor has much to do with fear of opening a proverbial can of worms.

One never knows where such an investigation might lead.

“Half of British children aged 5 to 9 own a mobile phone. Some Experts are Unhappy,” headlines a June 23, 2009 article in the UK’s daily “The Times.” It reports that “Lawrie Challies, an emeritus professor of physics who has led the Government’s mobile-phone safety research, says that parents should not give children phones before secondary school.”¹ University of Melbourne pediatrics professor Michael Carr-Gregg, a leading Australian psychologist, “is worried about the power of mobile phones to distract and overexcite” and “says that no children should be allowed a mobile phone until the age of 12.” The French Government bans sales of mobile phones to children under 6.
The long-term consequences of young children already taking their gaze away from living people and constantly-changing nature to look down into and be captured by static machines concerns me. Who benefits and what is lost? What is appropriate technology use? What induces obsessive/compulsive/addictive behavior?

Though I sometimes use a cell phone, with moderation, I am concerned about the unconscious and excessive use of them, like while driving or talking so loud in a restaurant that one disturbs the peaceful meals of others. The issue is how we use technology, rather than abuse it. Some people seem always on call, slaves to their cell phones, willing to drop a live person in favor of talking into that tiny machine. The disadvantages of cell phones, including texting, warrant attention, including unintended consequences and collateral damage.

At issue is when and where and what the consequences might be at certain ages and in certain situations. What might be appropriate cell phone and texting etiquette for young people at different ages? My goal is to encourage people to engage in critical thinking about consequences before placing pulsating plastic to hand then ear, rather than using more primitive and holistic communication methods, like face-to-face.

Cell phones can be good for emergencies, convenient, functional, practical, and have some advantages, as demonstrated by the global communication from the recent twittering from Iran. They can enable even a young person to speak to a distant relative or a parent who is out of town. However, walking around in the streets texting while looking down is sometimes dangerous and at least rude.

As with Petaluma, CA, artist Sally Krah, I am concerned about “the health risks of cell phones.” She uses hers “carefully and infrequently,” so that “it doesn’t rule my life. It’s a blessing if used in moderation.”

The immediacy of cell phones and their push-button control can increase impatience with slower things, like the development of deep human relationships, lasting love, growing plants, and caring for animals. Cybertime creates unnatural time pressures, heightening stress and anxiety. The tools and technologies that we use are not neutral; they help shape who we become.

The addiction to technological progress has heightened in recent years, especially with respect to telecommunications and cybernetics. This growth further exhausts fossil fuels. The development, manufacture and maintenance of high technology tools and weapons depend upon ample cheap energy from fossil fuels. As oil supplies decline and the pace of life quickens even more rapidly, the demand for more coal extraction will increase, which will heighten pollution and speed-up global climate chaos.

“Every single machine in the nation runs on lubrication,” notes David Frindley, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This includes electrical and wireless tools that require crude oil byproducts. He was quoted in a recent article about Transition Towns in the weekly “North Bay Bohemian,” where he purchased a small farm in Sonoma County. Frindley is a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, based in small town Sebastopol, Northern California.

CAUGHT IN THE CELL PHONE SNARE

Alas, I have also been caught in the cell phone snare. While speaking to my Sonoma State University students one day, mine went off, much to their delight, giggles, and snickers, as well as my embarrassment.

We may have a social epidemic on our hands. Studies reveal that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the fourth quarter of 2008. One person reported that his 13-year-old exchanged 14,528 texts in one month.
The number of text messages rose to about 75 billion earlier this year and is going up. Downsides include declines in spelling, word choice and writing complexit and an inability to focus. Text-bullying and sending naked photos have become problematic, resulting in at least one documented suicide.

I invited a SSU freshman class off-campus for a film and dinner. The first thing that some of these teens did at the restaurant was to put their cell phones on the dinner table. Some of their little gadgets promptly vibrated, buzzed, and made a variety of demanding sounds.

My dinner guests were soon miles away texting, having what sounded like one-way conversations intruding into our dinner, and playing phone games, ignoring the rest of us at the table in front of them. What happened to old-fashioned connective meal-time conversations? When the primary relationship becomes with a talking machine, rather than with a multi-dimensional person with whom to have spontaneous, life-deepening and life-changing dialogue, something is lost.

As they multi-tasked on so-called “smartphones,” I felt annoyed and alone—a slow dinosaur at a table with fast-moving butterflies with short attention spans flickering away into cyberspace, their consciousnesses split. They are masters at quick scans of screens, rather than reading entire books. I must admit that I am old-fashioned and prefer home-made music and food to the factory-made stuff. I prefer live story-telling and the oral tradition of recited poetry to television. I resist being drawn into the need-it-yesterday world.

But I didn’t say anything to my students, though I did later circulate an article on the downsides of texting to initiate discussion. The students were defensive, but it was a good experience in critical thinking, which is what I teach and seek to practice here.
One of the students in that class, Sally-Anne Petit, helped me understand the use of cell phones from the perspective of her generation as follows: “Changes in our world have made us feel uncomfortable. Or even in danger of being without a mobile technological device. We use these devices to hide us from scary things in this world. It provides shelter, or even a friend. This is important because part of growing up is defending yourself and learning how to act in awkward, or uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous situations.”

“Its not about the technology so much as it is how the technology is used,” added one of my Teaching Assistants, social worker Victoria Fleming, M.S.W. “It calls for a new etiquette. It is harder for us as we get older to find relevance in young technology and this creates a rift between generations. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is accelerated by the pace of emerging technology.”

I later walked on SSU’s beautiful redwood-lined campus. Many students had their faces buried in that consumptive machine, missing the redwoods and other humans passing by, as well as the birds above calling to them. I’ve even seen two people walking along talking to each other—on their cells phones. Those with bluetooths in their ears reminded me of the part-machine, part-human race called Borgs in Star Trek.

Some SSU students understand the downsides of texting and related phenomenon. “Digital Communication: The Death of Verbal Communication in our Society” was recently published by the campus newspaper. Brian Evans contends that “we as a society have been spoiled by the luxuries of Internet, cellular communication, iPhones, Blackberries, etc.” He laments that they have “diminished the personalization of communicating” and “texting has limited our laughter to Lol.”

The sound-bite, minimalist approach that texting and twittering employ can contract the soul and imagination, rather than expand them; they narrow the range of emotions that can be expressed. The frequency with which some fiddle with their phones, eyes down, makes it more difficult to make eye contact with them.

“TECHNO-ADDICTION”

“Techo-addiction” is how some psychologists describe this phenomenon, which includes other recent developments, such as Facebook, My Space, You Tube, and Twitter. An indication that addiction is an appropriate description is when you see someone walk across a busy street, not in the crosswalk, texting, instead of looking, thus risking their life. Texting and twittering also seem to shorten the attention span and heighten one’s vulnerability to distraction, rather than focus and concentration.

New technologies can promise a lot, and then entangle users in a growing web of products, often quite expensive. Cell phones expand the consumer culture of instant messaging and instant gratification, thus reducing the time for embodied human relations and dialogue that leads beyond data and information to depth and textured wisdom.

It is illegal to hold cell phones to one’s ear while driving in California, though I notice many violators, who thus threaten the rest of us with more accidents. Plane, train, and ship accidents have been documented to have happened while or just after pilots’ attentions were diverted while texting.

In contrast to the three-year-old with cell phone, I recently visited friends with a five-month-old bundled onto her mother’s chest, eyes locked, occasionally smiling at the rest of us, returning to absorb her mother’s warm intimacy. It comforted me. I have also been delighted to hang out with a neighbor’s seventeen-month-old, so full of vitality, splashing in water, beginning to form words. He inspires me. I worry about what is in store for these children in this high-tech, sped-up digital world.

I watch with delight as youngsters interact with chickens on my small farm, look up with awe into the giant redwoods, feel their powerful dance partner the wind, and see the birds above. My seventeen-month-old friend eagerly stuffs his mouth with berries, whose purple color ring his wide smile.

At a library, I recently also saw a small girl, probably under three, fixated on a computer screen. She skillfully moved the “mouse” around and watched the machine respond promptly. Screens radiate light, which looking at directly can be harmful, especially to young eyes and brains. Sonoma State University psychology graduate student Julie Perkins is writing her thesis partly on “the gaze” and reports that she “is concerned with the use of machines and the deleterious effect of gazing on a screen in the digital world.” This trend of children absorbed by machines rather than living beings or even picture books concerns me.

On the other hand, I’ve heard of toddlers who throw cell phones into toilets. Good for them! This could be a direct way of communicating “Pay attention to me!” Such spontaneous play is a healthy alternative to the beginning of consumerism. Technophiles seek to protect their expensive hand-held devices, whereas I am more concerned to protect children from pre-mature technology and the addiction to a cell phone culture that is not age appropriate. One toddler’s mother explained that cell phones can have a candy-like appeal, which can lead to a child wanting to consume too much, unless appropriate limits are discerned and established.

THE FLICKERING MIND

The Flickering Mind titles a book by award-winning journalist Todd Oppenheimer, sub-titled The False Promises of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved. Though published in, what some now consider long ago, 2003, its nearly 500 pages document the downsides of computers in education long before texting became so popular and disruptive. His chapters include “Hidden Troubles,” “Bulldozing the Imagination,” and “The Human Touch.”

“Time poverty is now a recognized psychological and social stressor,” according to psychotherapist Linda Buzzell, co-editor of the new Sierra Club Book’s Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind. She adds, “We struggle with diminishing success to adapt to the strange mechanical and disembodied world we have created,” including “endless 24/7 online communications… constantly rushing to keep up as we inevitably fall further behind.” In that machine-driven process “we find ourselves destroying not only our own health, but our habitat and the habitat of the people, plants and animals with whom we share the planet.”

My college students tend to be sweet and open-hearted. They also have more trouble reading entire books and sustaining attention than they did even a few years ago; they appear more distant and distracted. Their emails have gotten briefer and are not always in standard English; they employ abbreviations that I do not understand. They seem to have less patience for ambiguity and paradox, preferring a machine-like yes and no and making overstatements like “always” and “never.”

I do not allow cell phones to be on during class. The tapping while texting can be as annoying as cross-talking and insulting to whoever is speaking. However, I still sometimes hear them vibrate and know that some students are so addicted that they are adept at concealing these tools—which can become almost like armor or weapons–under their clothes and desks the way earlier generations of youth would carefully conceal cigarette smoking.

It took a long time to make cigarette smoking illegal in certain public places, though the dangers had been clearly documented for decades. I hope that it does not take as long to make cell phones illegal in some places, especially moving vehicles, as well as elsewhere. Cell phones can be powerful forces in expanding the consumer culture and reducing embodied human relations and deep communication with others that involves texture, emotion, and nuances.

The critique of soulless machines implicit in this article echoes a tradition reaching back more than a century that includes British novelist D.H. Lawrence, German-speaking poet Rilke, German-American psychologist Erich Fromm, American gardeners Scott and Helen Nearing, and French sociologist Jacques Ellul. Contemporary American advocates of this tradition include psychotherapist Chellis Glendinning (When Technology Wounds), public relations expert Jerry Mander (In the Absence of the Sacred), and farmer Wendell Berry (In the Presence of Fear).

The three-year-old witnessed by the pediatrician was being conditioned for an adult life of consumption with an early onset cell phone addiction. Instead of speeding up to follow the commands of goal-oriented machines such as cell phones, we humans could benefit from slowing down to nature’s meandering pace, especially here in the gorgeous Redwood Empire.

1. ”Mobile phones for children: a boon or a peril?” Times Online – UK

The impetus for developing this new generation of airliners is the need to improve fuel economy so as to maintain the profitability of the passenger air transport industry. Between 1986 and 2001, the world price of crude oil remained steady at near $22 a barrel. From 2002 to 2008, the world price of crude oil rose steadily from $25 to $95 a barrel (the prices quoted are rough averages, and in 2007 dollars). Modern airliners that are lighter and stronger than their older-generation all-metal size equivalents can carry more payload with less fuel consumption, and this translates to economic sustainability.

The quest for a more efficient airliner began with the first example of the type, Igor Sikorsky’s S-22 of 1913, the Ilya Muromets, a four engine biplane with an enclosed cabin for 16 passengers. Russia’s military needs in WW1 swallowed up the commercial potential of the S-22, and the production was shifted to bombers. The post-war rebirth of commercial aviation began with the Farman twin engine biplane transport of 1919, the F-60 Goliath, seating 14 passengers. Since then the quest for “better, faster and cheaper” passenger aviation has never stopped.

In 1972, Airbus introduced its A300, the first twin turbofan widebody air transport. The Boeing Commercial Airplanes company introduced its first widebody twin turbofan airliner, the 767, in 1981. Airbus chooses to be an airplane manufacturer that leads the industry in the application of engineered materials (composites) and computer-controlled aviation. Boeing is an airplane manufacturer that seeks to maintain its reputation for robust, reliable and increasingly efficient designs, which it gained early in its history with airplanes like the revolutionary 247 of 1933, the first truly modern airliner (all-aluminum monoplane of semi-monocoque construction with cantilever wings, wing flaps, retracting landing gear, trim tabs, autopilot, and deicing boots for the wings and tailplane).

Airbus and Boeing are today’s main competitors for new airplane orders worldwide. As noted earlier, it is the cost of fuel that drives the economics of commercial air transport, and in turn the replacement of older aircraft with newer models. The competing demands of safety, reliability, strength, carrying capacity, volumetric efficiency, speed and fuel economy drive airplane designers toward a convergence of characteristics, so that today both Airbus and Boeing airliners look, sound and feel largely the same to most passengers.

Each iteration of a manufacturer’s model type will have a higher proportion of weight-saving composite material, and a more extensive array of electronic and computer systems. How and where composites and computers are used by Airbus and Boeing may be quite different between their competing models of comparable type, but inevitably both manufacturers increase their use of both composites and computers, to remain competitive. The Airbus A330 and A340 series of airplanes, introduced in 1992 and 1993, and their classmate the Boeing 777, introduced in 1995, will be replaced by the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, set for introduction in 2010, and the Airbus A350, set for introduction in 2013. Both the 787 Dreamliner and the A350 are nearly all-composite airplanes. The 787 Dreamliner is 80% composite by volume, and by weight it is: 50% composite, 20% aluminum, 15% titanium, 10% steel and 5% other. By weight, the A350 is: 53% composite, 19% aluminum and aluminum-lithium, 14% titanium, 6% steel and 8% other.

The challenge facing the civil aviation industries today is to answer the questions raised by the mysterious loss of Air France Flight 447, and to convince the public that any problems that may be uncovered about the use of composites and computers in AF447 will be fully understood and solved before building and flying all-composite airliners with even more complicated computerized control systems.

So, it is no wonder that Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney defended electronic flight control technology and the Airbus A330, in an interview prior to the Paris Air Show: “The causes of the [AF447] accident are unknown, and I don’t think there is any link with a serious fault with the aircraft…the A330 is a reliable and proven aircraft.”¹

The AF447 crisis in civil aviation may be similar to that of the two de Havilland Comet crashes of 1954. The Comet, introduced in 1949, was the world’s first passenger jet transport. During both January and April of 1954, de Havilland Comet airplanes broke apart at altitude while flying in clear weather over water. After the second crash, the fleet was grounded, many pieces were recovered from the seabed to assemble partial reconstructions, and many tests were conducted on another intact airframe. The cause of spontaneous disintegration was eventually found to be metal fatigue in the aluminum alloy used for the skin, by the cumulative effect of many cycles of cabin pressurization and de-pressurization.

The changes in design, materials and manufacturing techniques needed to solve the problems of the de Havilland Comets of 1949-1954 were used to produce an improved Comet, which returned de Havilland to passenger aviation in 1958. However, those same lessons had already been divined by Boeing to produce the 707, their first commercial jet transport, which was also introduced in 1958 and immediately went on to dominate passenger air transport through the 1960s.

If the air transport industries fail to fully resolve the AF447 mystery, then a portion of the public will assign an apprehensive image to the coming generation of composite computer-controlled air transports, a psychology we could think of as “‘54 Comet dread,” as opposed to “’60s 7-0-7 optimism.”

AF447 In The Clouds

In the early pre-dawn hours (~2:15 UTC) of 1 June 2009, Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris fell out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean near the equator about midway between Brazil and Senegal, with the loss of all 228 people aboard. The aircraft was one of the most modern, a dual engine Airbus A330-200.

(UTC is Coordinated Universal Time, which replaced Greenwich Mean Time in 1964 and is defined for the time zone straddling much of 0 degrees longitude. There are 24 time zones each generally of 15 degrees longitude, but there are numerous deviations of time zone boundaries.)²

The accident occurred after the airplane had flown over 90% of its planned northeast-directed transect of 227 km through the width at mid length of a mesoscale convection system (MCS), a cluster of storms 800 km long east to west, and 160 km wide north to south.³

The last radio message from the crew of AF447 was a routine notification at 1:33 UTC that the flight at 35,000 feet (10,671 m) along oceanic high altitude route UN873 had reached waypoint INTOL, near the outer boundary of airspace monitored by radar from Brazil. The pilots of AF447 expected to reach waypoint TASIL, near the edge of airspace radar-monitored from Senegal, in 50 minutes (by 2:23 UTC), a distance of 663 km between waypoints. A mid Atlantic gap of at least 500 km exists between the limits of Brazilian and Senegalese air traffic radar surveillance.⁴

Between about 1:46 UTC to 1:56 UTC, AF447 flew through the western fringe of the top of a storm that reached to between 35,000 feet (10.67 km) and 40,000 feet (12.2 km). It seems AF447 had shifted somewhat to the left, or westward, from its planned flightpath in order to avoid the brunt of this storm, and in anticipation of weaving between storm cells ahead. Thunderstorms in the tropics are usually very localized, of short duration, and produce abundant rainfall. They can develop so quickly that a Paris-bound flight 4 hours out from Rio de Janeiro might encounter an active storm cell over a patch of ocean that had been cloudless prior to takeoff. This is why airplane weather radar had been developed, to alert pilots of weather threats ahead, and to guide their weaving between active storm cells when they became unavoidably embedded in weather systems with numerous storms. After crossing about 42 km of clear airspace, AF447 entered the main MCS thunderstorm cluster, at about 1:59 UTC.

A sequence of satellite images of the MCS cluster show the large 800 km by 160 km (roughly) cloud mass with its variegated edge, drifting, evolving and fragmenting during that day. These images show the merged shape seen from above of the laterally spreading “anvil” tops of the many individual storm cells in the cluster. The updrafts in these cells had sufficient energy to push moisture up to between 40,000 feet (12.2 km) to 56,000 feet (17.1 km). Moisture that rises into the base of MCS clouds, perhaps near 3281 feet (1 km) at 20 C (68 F), can be chilled by strong updrafts to arrive at -40 C (-40 F) at the 10.67 km cruising altitude of AF447, and continue rising and chilling to as low a temperature as -80 C (-112 F) at 17 km elevation. This storm cluster was typical, not unusual, for the location and time of year.

AF447 proceeded northeast through the MCS cluster, guided by its weather (moisture, rain, hale) radar along a corridor of mild radar reflectivity (and of anticipated least relative ’storminess’), about equidistant between a strong cell to the west and the strongest cell of the moment, which was about 30 km east. About 8 minutes after entering the MCS system (2:07 UTC), AF447 began penetrating what was probably the most energetic part of the storm cluster along its flightpath.

At 2:10 UTC, the first of a series of automated signals was sent by AF447’s onboard computerized maintenance system, via satellite, to Air France computers in Paris logging maintenance information. The series of automated messages had a combined time span of 1 minute and occurred until 2:14 UTC; 5 failure reports and 19 warnings were transmitted. The earliest automated messages reported on the failure of the Pitot Tube sensors, which measure the airspeed of the airliner and provide an estimate of altitude based on the static pressure of the atmosphere. Subsequent messages in the initial burst indicated that the auto-pilot (automatic ’steering’) and auto-thrust (automatic ‘gas pedal’) systems had been disengaged, the collision avoidance system (to detect other nearby airliners) had a fault, that the flight control computers (three for redundancy) had shifted to an “alternate” mode where they made fewer automatic adjustments to the airplane’s control surfaces, and placed fewer limits on the range of manual inputs by the pilots that would be implemented as motions of the control surfaces (ailerons, rudder and the many types of flaps).⁵

From 2:11 UTC to 2:14 UTC, messages indicated the failure of the gyroscopes (air data inertial reference system, ADIRU, used to provide the artificial horizon orienting the sense of ‘up,’ ‘down,’ and ‘level,’ essential during nighttime) and resulting faults in the instrument panel displays (screens and electronic images instead of mechanical dial gauges); there was disagreement between systems that interpreted air data (such as for airspeed and angle of attack of the wings into the airflow); that a fault had occurred in the flight control computer system (that transmits commands to the hydraulic actuators that physically move control surfaces); that a fault had occurred in the computer system that captures and processes pressure and electrical outputs from air and motion sensors that supply data; and finally, a “cabin vertical speed warning” indicating a rapid loss of cabin air pressure, due to either a rapid descent or a breaching of the cabin shell.

AF447 may have entered its period of most severe jolting, buffeting and external cooling near 2:07 UTC, when it began crossing the core of the MCS cluster between its most active cells. Some as yet unknown excessive structural strain — perhaps exacerbated by material embrittlement or loss of plasticity and cohesion due to excessive cooling, such as by micro-strains induced by the expansion of trapped moisture freezing inside composite materials — may have been delivered by turbulence and initiated the subsequent fragmentation of the aircraft.

Pressure sensor icing sustained during at least the three minutes prior to 2:10 UTC seems to have initiated the cascade of air data (speed, pressure, altitude and attitude) processing and instrumentation failures, and contributed to the growing uncertainty of the decision-making electronic processing for the navigation and flight control systems.

Pilots rank their priorities during flight, especially in emergencies, as: “aviate, navigate, communicate.” The pilots of AF447 would be working first to keep their airplane at a proper speed: fast enough to stay aloft at the given elevation and weight of the airplane, and not too fast to damage the structure because of excessive pressure differences produced by airflows near the speed of sound, and by excessive structural stresses induced by the alternating jolts of updrafts and downdrafts in turbulent air spaces. Given that the aircraft remains aloft and is not being rattled to pieces, the next priority is to point it in a safe direction, for example away from active thunderstorm cells, and along the best route to a safe landing. The third priority is to communicate the status of the flight to air traffic controllers, a useful task as long as it is not a distraction from essential aviating.

Troubleshooting a torrent of error messages from a computerized flight control system to then compose a radio report for air traffic controllers is not a sensible allocation of attention during an emergency to control an airliner in a storm. We can understand why the crew of AF447 might not send any radio messages during their 3 minutes (and possibly as much as 11 minutes) of weaving between the storm cells and riding the waves of turbulence, before the first automated alarm of trouble was transmitted at 2:10 UTC. At this point, AF447 had crossed 154 km of the MCS cluster, the last 42 km of which were probably the roughest. During the next 4 minutes, when the automated messages were sent, the flight probably travelled 56 km. At 2:14 UTC, AF447 was about 2 to 3 minutes (28 km to 42 km, at 14 km/minute) from exiting the northern edge of the MCS cloud system, and it sent its last transmission.

AF447 Into The Sea

The search for AF447 began at 2:23 UTC. Brazilian air traffic controllers called their Senegalese counterparts when they failed to receive the expected confirmation that AF447 had announced itself to Senegal by radio, as required upon entry to a new airspace. The Brazilian Air Force dispatched search planes, a Spanish maritime patrol plane searched southwest from the Cape Verde Islands, and the search effort quickly expanded in the following days to include Brazilian naval vessels, cargo ships within the search area, French military planes and ships, and satellites.⁶

Fernando de Noronha is an archipelago of 21 islands 354 km (220 miles) northeast from the eastern tip of Brazil. AF447 flew past (~1:18 UTC) and to the west of Fernando de Noronha on route to waypoint INTOL at 565 km (351 miles) from the coast. At about 2:44 UTC, the pilots of a TAM Airlines flight from Europe to Brazil reported observing “orange dots” on the surface of the ocean — burning wreckage? — when they were approximately 1300 km (808 miles) from Fernando de Noronha. This would put them about 515 km (320 miles) northeast of the last known position of AF447, 30 minutes after its last transmission.

If AF447 broke apart at 2:14 UTC, some wreckage might fall as far as 130 km from this location (an estimate based on the debris scatter from China Airlines Flight 611, a Boeing 747 that broke apart at 35,000 feet in 2002). Powered flight by AF447 beyond 2:14 UTC was unlikely since there were no subsequent automated messages (presumably, all power generation, controlled motion and thrust had ceased). If the “orange dots” were burning AF447 wreckage, then the TAM pilots had the ability to see glows no less than 380 km ahead of them. So, the “orange dots” sighting is probably unrelated.

The Brazilian Air Force spotted floating debris 650 km (404 miles) northeast of Fernando de Noronha on 2 June, the next day a Brazilian Navy patrol boat arrived in the area. On 6 June, bodies and debris from AF447 were recovered. On 8 June, the vertical stabilizer and rudder of the Airbus A330-200 was found and recovered.⁷

By 26 June, when the search for human remains ended, 51 bodies and 600 pieces of debris had been recovered from two debris fields about 80 km (50 miles) apart on the surface of the ocean. The finds were concentrated along a 150 km track almost due north from the last known position of AF447; debris (but apparently not bodies) was scattered as far as 50 km east and west of this track. The tendency of flat pieces of debris to glide haphazardly as uncontrolled airfoils would scatter them much further from the last heading of the airplane than more compact objects, which developed no aerodynamic lift.⁸

Autopsies revealed the victims to have fractured limbs and hips, no seawater in their lungs, no signs of burning or charring, and some had little or no clothing. The presumptions are that AF447 broke up at altitude without a fuel explosion causing a cabin fire, that the victims were ejected from the wreckage at high altitude, which sucked out their breath and quickly made them unconscious, that the high speed air blast tore off their clothing, and that their bodies were not fragmented on hitting the sea because they fell more slowly individually than if they had been attached to a much heavier mass like a wrecked fuselage.

An explosion and fire in the lower fuselage (below the floor of the passenger cabin, in the center fuel tank or the cargo holds) cannot be ruled out because the passengers would be shielded from such a blast and fire, and the airplane still disintegrate in flight. Recovery of a sufficient number of parts from the lower fuselage will resolve the question of fire (no evidence yet). The recovery of parts has so far been restricted to those that float, so a great deal of plastic and composite material, and not so much metal.⁹

The official investigators are anxious to find the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder (the “black boxes” which are actually orange), which lie somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. To help locate them, each is equipped with a sonic emitter (”pinger”) with a range of 2 km. The sea floor is between 2.5 km and 4 km deep below the suspected crash site, and is quite mountainous since it is close to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (the boundary from which tectonic plates originate and spread eastward and westward). The recorder cases can withstand pressure down to a depth of 6 km, and the pingers are designed to operate for at least 30 days, after which their signals fade.

Questions And Speculations

The sequence of known events for AF447 has been laid out in the sections above. The distances and UTC times quoted are either from news accounts or my simple calculations, which do not account for factors such as the curvature of the Earth and headwinds, which pilots, navigators and meteorologists use to arrive at precise numbers. Unless Airbus can make a more detailed analysis of AF447’s automated messages, and until more parts of the airplane are recovered and analyzed, especially the voice and data recorders, we are left without more facts. So, now we ask 5 questions and speculate.

Question 1. AF447 flew into a line of thunderstorms and was destroyed. Is this a case of pilot error?

The ranking for safety of nine modes of transportation on the basis of deaths per billion journeys (the basis of insurance rates) is: bus (4.3), rail (20), van (20), car (40), foot (40), water (90), air (117), bicycle (170), motorcycle (1640).¹⁰

The primary causes for the complete loss of commercial jet aircraft in accidents during 1996 through 2005 were found to be the: flight crew (55%), airplane (17%), weather (13%), miscellaneous other (7%), air traffic control (5%), maintenance (3%).¹¹

Airline travelers demand rapid transit across vast distances with the punctuality of well-run train services. They also crave comfort, meal services and entertainment during their trips. Personal safety and incident-free travel are usually taken for granted, but highly prized when thought about. And, passengers want it all cheap. Everything about passenger airplane design and airline operations is focused on producing this type of experience for the flying public. An accident like that of AF447 is simply an unpleasant reminder that nature may not always be as conveniently benign as we had assumed and planned for in the design of our passenger airplanes and the operations of our air travel industry. Our margins may be too thin because we are in too much of a hurry, and too cheap.

Passenger airplanes are designed to withstand forces comparable to about 2 to 2.5 times their maximum loaded weight (2 to 2.5 times their total mass times the constant of gravitational acceleration, g = 9.81 meters per second-squared). We could design passenger airplanes that are essentially unbreakable, like the F-35 fighter now under development, which can be stressed to 8 or 9 g, and uses composite materials for its wing and nacelle skins. However, ‘unbreakable’ passenger airplanes would be much smaller and slower than the 200-500 seat turbofan-propelled transports we are used to. They would be more like the Lockheed P-3 Orion that has been used as a “hurricane hunter,” flying through violent storms to gather meteorological data. The P-3 Orion (1962-1990) is a maritime patrol plane developed from the Lockheed Electra passenger airplane (1957-1961), which could carry about 120 people. The four engine turboprop P-3 Orion has an operational limit of 3 g, but the plane was shown to survive a 7 g stall recovery in 2008; see the photo of the wing.¹²

Compare the photo of the overstressed P-3 Orion wing to photos of a recovered spoiler (wing flap) from the AF447 airplane.¹³

We could restrict air travel to times and routes of guaranteed clear weather, but then direct flights between Brazil and Europe would be impossible because planes would be barred from crossing the approximately 700 km wide Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a permanent band of thunderstorms that circles the globe near the equator. Flights are often grounded or diverted to alternate destinations when dangerous weather develops, but neither the flying public nor the airline operators are eager to expand this practice to the point of avoiding any possibility of contact with rain, snow, ice, lightning, turbulent air and birds.

So, on the basis of accepted practice, the Captain of AF447, Marc Dubois, did not make an error to set off on his fateful flight. It remains to be determined if he and his two assisting pilots made the right decisions in maneuvering the airplane through the atmospheric conditions they encountered, and in responding to the technical problems that erupted.

There are three possibilities of root causes here: human error, systemic error, or natural catastrophe. If the pilots made mistakes, then the information on the voice cockpit recorder and the flight data recorder will probably reveal them (if the recorders can be found). If the piloting was flawless, then the accident could be a systemic failure, a result of inadequacies in: airplane performance, design, maintenance, certification (the performance and safety standards we choose to adhere to, through government regulation), and the operational practices of the air travel industry.

The third possibility, that an unusual and rogue natural force overwhelmed AF447 and could not have been anticipated, lets humanity off the hook. The current best guess for an AF447 natural catastrophe is wind shear, a large and abrupt change in wind velocity experienced in crossing an invisible plane through the atmosphere. But this excuse is weak. Wind shear produced by the updrafts and downdrafts in thunderstorms is now monitored by onboard Pulse-Doppler weather radar. Clear air turbulence (CAT) is a form of cloudless wind shear that is difficult to avoid because it cannot be detected visually nor with radar (a laser range-finding and reflectivity-measuring system called Doppler LIDAR is needed). CAT is created near the four high-altitude jet streams that ring the earth, in the wind shadows of mountain peaks, and as the wake turbulence of large airplanes. AF447 was far from all of these.

The Captain of AF447 was 58 and had 21 years of piloting for Air France. He had undoubtedly flown Airbus planes between Rio de Janeiro and Paris many times. On the 31st of May, he probably saw nothing unusual in the weather predicted along his route (see Figure 4 in Reference 3, and the associated maps of higher elevation winds). He expected the usual thunderstorms near the equator and would be sure to monitor his weather radar during flight, to adjust his course as needed to evade active storm cells that might develop along his intended track.

The northern hemisphere’s trade winds move southwest, and the southern hemisphere’s trade winds move northwest; they converge in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The converged masses of heavily laden moist air then rise to great height (17 km) before diverging into a northward flow north of the equator, and southward flow south of the equator. These high-altitude flows toward higher latitudes sink to low elevation at 30 degrees north and south latitude, and then skim along the surface of the Earth westward and toward the equator, as the trade winds. These toroidal patterns of atmospheric circulation are called Hadley Cells. The ocean regions of the ITCZ were called “the doldrums” by early European mariners because of the typical absence of surface winds. The tropical heat and vertical trend of atmospheric circulation within the ITCZ continuously spawns thunderstorms, and these can group into squall lines or clusters now called mesoscale convection systems (MCS). The updrafts in these storms can reach 17 km, well past the usual 10-11 km cruising altitude of airliners. Pilots experienced at transoceanic flight, like those of AF447, would understand the nature of the air spaces they intended to cross, and plan accordingly.

At least 12 other airplanes passed through the area of AF447’s disappearance during the period from 3 hours before, to perhaps 1 hour after 2:15 UTC. It is likely most were Airbus airplanes since the carriers were Air France (four, besides AF447), Air TAM (three), Air Iberia (two), Lufthansa (two) and British Airways (one). One Air France plane left São Paulo bound for Paris on 31 May 2009 at 22:10 UTC after AF447 left Rio de Janeiro at 22:03 UTC that same day, so they must have been as close to each other on the same route as allowed by regulations for safe separation. Several of the other planes passed AF447’s last known position within 30 minutes of the disappearance. None reported anything unusual (one passenger on a flight 40 minutes behind AF447 recalled a half hour of turbulence near the equator).

The effects causing AF447 to fall from flight were extremely localized and short-lived.

Question 2. Pitot Tubes measure airspeed, but on AF447 they failed due to icing. Did a loss of speed data cause the flight control computers to issue bad commands, which led to a loss of control in bad weather?

A Pitot probe is a small tube facing into the airflow from the nose of an airplane; it’s purpose is to sense ram pressure, which is interpreted for speed. Obviously, the speed sensor fails if the tube becomes plugged. It has to be maintained and cleared of insect nests, insects impacted during flight through swarms, and dirt; it has to drain off rainwater without distorting the pressure reading; and it has to be equipped with a heater to melt impacted ice.

A number of Airbus planes have had problems with Pitot probes that failed due to icing, and the entire A330 and A340 series have been undergoing retrofits. The AF447 Airbus A330-200 did not yet have the improved Pitot tubes, but since its loss Air France has speeded the retrofitting of its Airbus fleet, and all carriers are now quite focused to complete this task. There have been many recent articles in the news and in pilot forums like airliners.net, about the Pitot tube problems on Airbus planes.

The Airbus A330 uses three Pitot tubes, and its air data computers select the reading from any two that agree. None agreed on AF447 (at 2:10 UTC) so the flight control system informed the pilots that speed data was unreliable — absent — and it shifted flight control from the fully automatic mode to an alternate mode, which is comparable to the amount of computerized flight control on a Boeing 777.

Airbus pilots have a back-up procedure for estimating speed on the basis of other instruments (angle of attack and engine power) in case their airspeed indicators fail. This procedure is simplified to about three simple control settings (for thrust), for low, medium and high altitude; and which are to be committed to memory for use in emergencies.¹⁴

The computerized flight control system does not blindly use inconsistent data to compute bad commands to control surface actuators. Instead, it flags the discrepancy and turns control over to the pilots, and the pilots have their back-up procedure for flight with unreliable speed data. The loss of speed data alone is not sufficient to cause the loss of flight control.

Question 3. Did a loss of speed data cause the AF447 pilots to overspeed the airplane to the point of structural damage, because they believed they were preventing a stall?

An airplane must move fast enough to generate the aerodynamic lift force that holds its weight aloft. The stall speed is the minimum for flight. Stall speed increases with altitude because the atmosphere becomes thinner. The stall speed for the AF447 Airbus A330-200 at 35,000 feet was 759 kph (472 mph).

Airliners are designed to fly at high subsonic speeds because supersonic travel requires much higher fuel consumption. They have swept wings that remain behind the curved pressure wave the airliner’s nose plows before it, and which becomes a shock wave when the airplane moves at or above the speed of sound.

Consider a straight-wing airplane moving at sonic to low supersonic speed. The outer parts of the wings will extend ahead of the curved bow wave, and produce additional shock waves. Because neither flight speed nor incoming air density and temperature are perfectly uniform, shock waves will oscillate about some mean position relative to the airplane, causing fluctuations in the distribution of pressure force on the aircraft surface. Also, shock waves that cross the surfaces of wings will cause the flow to separate, destroying the lift. Shock waves create drag, and more shock waves create more drag. Maintaining high speed against high drag requires large engines with high fuel consumption. Supersonic airplanes are equipped with very powerful engines to accelerate them quickly from the subsonic to supersonic regime.

The maximum speed for a subsonic airliner is set by the criterion of ensuring no localized sonic flows nor shocks. For example, flow scooting around the joint of a wing and the fuselage, or some bulge on the skin, might be locally faster than the average aircraft speed. That average must be kept below the point where the fastest localized flows are sonic. Besides ensuring a smooth attached flow over the skin of the airplane, the absence of shock waves ensures there are no abrupt changes in pressure from point to point along the airframe. Such jagged and fluctuating distributions of aerodynamic force would produce large stresses and torques on airframes, and require they be much more robust. Robust equals heavier equals smaller equals less payload equals more fuel consumption equals unprofitable civil air transport like the now-retired Concorde. The upper speed limit for AF447, at 35,000 feet in clear weather, was 913 kph (567 mph).

The speed of sound depends entirely on the temperature of the air, and as this cools with elevation (below the stratosphere where most civil aviation occurs), the speed of Mach 1 decreases with height. Since stall speed increases with height, an altitude is reached beyond which a given airplane cannot fly. This is called the “coffin corner.” A pilot cruising near this altitude has only a narrow window of safe speed. This pilot must be alert to stay ahead of a stall while not speeding too quickly and subjecting the airplane to large fluctuating forces pounding and ultimately breaking it. AF447’s speed window at 10.67 km altitude was 759-913 kph (472-567 mph, Mach 0.72-0.86).

AF447’s nominal cruising speed of 871 kph (Mach 0.82) was relative to headwinds of about 28 kph, so its speed relative to the earth (ground speed) was 843 kph (524 mph).

If AF447 had only lost its speed data the pilots would used their back-up speed scale (BUSS), described earlier, and the flight would have continued. There had to be additional problems to rob the pilots of the readings on which the BUSS relied, or to distract them from aviating. Additional problems could be natural: the ‘act of god’ catastrophic updraft or turbulence that went undetected by all and disappeared with AF447; the problems could be multiple and simultaneous aircraft systems failures; and the additional problem could be the pilots’ own mistake in becoming absorbed in trying to interpret the cascade of error messages and to reboot their computer systems, and so lose sight of their drifting airspeed until it was too late.

The mystery at this point is that nature does not seem to have been unusually unkind at that time and place, it is hard to believe the airplane would have multiple systems failures and suffer a catastrophic disintegration without some overwhelming external force being applied, and it is hard to believe the flight crew was anything other than highly competent, experienced, prepared and alert.

Question 4. Can lightning more easily penetrate the composite panels of the Airbus A330-200, and this effect initiate the problems of AF447: by causing an electrical fault disrupting computer systems, or sparking a fire or fuel explosion?

The first 20 years of aviation were dominated by composite airplanes, which were made of resin-painted canvas-covered wood frames, a construction method used earlier for canvas-covered canoes. Metal airplanes were built to meet the demands of higher speeds, larger load capacity and greater reliability. Aside from its aerodynamic and mechanical functions of producing lift, reducing drag, and containing cabin pressure, the surface of a metal airplane has the electromagnetic function of acting as a Faraday Cage, shielding the interior (passengers and crew, cargo, fuel system, electronics and control systems) from any external electromagnetic threats, such as lightning.

Electromagnet waves and arcs (like lightning) will easily penetrate composite panels unless they contain layers of metal foil or metallic fibers, which are connected to grounding points so as to short-circuit and bleed away incident electric currents. Composite panels designed for airplane skins must incorporate such metallic lamina to shield the aircraft from lightning, and to ensure that no external electromagnetic emissions can penetrate to sensitive electronic systems within the airplane and interfere with their operation (electrical noise shielding). Engineers are aware of these requirements and have standards (and regulations) to guide their design efforts.

The electronics and computer systems in airliners today are so complex and sensitive that the electromagnetic shielding has to be a critical part of the design of the airframe. Ideally, a new design is tested against real electromagnetic waves and electric arcs, and not just “virtually” with computer simulations, to verify the Faraday Cage performance of the structure. Since the average airliner experiences about one lightning strike a year, reality eventually weeds out the bad designs.

The fact of the automatic messages from AF447 shows that electrical power was available until at least 2:14 UTC that day, there were no indications of interruptions or surges.

Also, there was no indication that lightning occurred near AF447’s last known position during the time of its disappearance (based on NASA surveillance). Storms in equatorial oceanic regions exhibit an unusual lack of lightning, a fact motivating current meteorological research. See (3) for sources on this topic.

So, it seems lightning is a very unlikely contributing factor to the disappearance of AF447.

Question 5. Do composites degrade more easily and quickly than aluminum and steel, and are composite airplanes more fragile that all-metal airplanes?

The contemporary use of composite materials for aircraft structures is very new, and there is less than twenty years experience with them in the field. From the very studies that were used to devise these engineered materials, scientists learned about their weaknesses as well. Composites are fibrous or mesh layers (lamina) bonded together by a resin or cement matrix. Shock and cyclic stresses can lead to failure of the material by separation of layers — delamination.

Cyclic stresses can be from pressurization and de-pressurization, or cycles of temperature extremes that cause stresses by thermal expansion and contraction, or severe vibration and repetitive torquing. A composite panel may develop an interior separation that remains unnoticed for some time before the complete failure of the panel. The integrity of composite airliner panels must to be checked periodically, by visual inspection and acoustic probing (which might be tapping to hear a ‘funny’ sound).

In 2002, airplane mechanics working for the Federal Express delivery service discovered that the hydraulic fluid used in the actuators of an Airbus plane had dissolved some of the composite material of the rudder, causing a separation from control rods, and difficulties during flight. In 2005, a rudder removed for inspection revealed extensive delamination between its outer layer and its inner core; traces of hydraulic fluid were found between these layers in the area of separation.

These and other incidents of composite material-related rudder malfunctions on Airbus planes cast doubt on the ascription of pilot error as the cause of the American Airlines Flight 587 accident of 12 November 2001. An Airbus A300-600 just airborne and climbing crossed into the wake turbulence of a nearby Boeing 747; the first officer made aggressive rudder motions to keep the Airbus plane upright, and the rudder snapped off followed by the vertical fin, leading to a horrific crash into a residential neighborhood of Queens, New York City. What if the strength of the rudder and its joints to its actuators and axle had been seriously degraded earlier?

William John Cox has reviewed many incidents and accidents with Airbus planes in which the composite-material vertical stabilizer and rudder was a key factor. The strength of his doubts about composite rudders is reflected by the title of his article, “Should the Airbus Be Grounded?”¹⁵

The overall technical question that has to be answered about composite materials used in aviation is: what causes them to degrade during their service life, and how long is that service life? We can break down the overall question to types of sources of both sporadic and cyclic stress: aerodynamic (pressure), mechanical (vibration, torque, impact, shock), thermal (heated expansion and cooled contraction), chemical (surface reactions with gases and liquids found in aviation, the effect on bulk integrity by the absorption of moisture, gases, volatile organic compounds), electrical (corona and arc discharge effects on surface integrity) and radiative (ultraviolet light embrittlement).

There is no technical reason why composite-material aviation structures should be less safe than their metal counterparts. But, it may be that an equivalent degree of safety would require that composite panels, shells and structures be replaced more often than metal pieces, because the composites may degrade more quickly under the combined actions of the pressurization and deep cooling cycles of flight, the corrosive and embrittling effects of ozone and ultraviolet light, the dissolving and delaminating effects of hydraulic fluids and volatile organic compounds (fuel and solvent vapors), and the fracturing by impact with hail and other hard airborne grit.

The loss of AF447 underscores the need to answer these questions.

An Imagined Final Sequence

Assume AF447 flies into a patch of especially dense and especially cold fog whose supercooled droplets freeze on contact to rime ice, which clings tenaciously; 12 other flights miss as intense a fog freeze. Supercooled fog droplets are small and have low reflectivity to radar, pilots have to tilt their radar antennas down and turn up the gain to see the rain and hail at lower elevations ahead to infer a high concentration of ice crystals and supercooled fog above, assuming there is little horizontal wind shear so the high ice and fog have not moved laterally from their formative updraft and rainout downdraft. But, this can happen as the cloud’s anvil, so perhaps fog freeze is unavoidable if the flight is weaving between storm cells. Rime ice sticks on contact, accumulating into a solid mass with many air pockets. Twenty four steps of an imaginative sequence follow.

1. Gradual icing reduces the inlet areas of all 3 Pitot probes, uniformly. The angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor is a weathervane attached to a horizontal shaft at the side of the aircraft near its nose. The AOA measures the angle between the airflow and the longitudinal axis of the airplane. Assume the AOA vane also ices, swiveling gradually to higher angle. Both effects cause a gradual speed-up on auto-thrust (the airplane version of cruise control).

2. Pitot icing blockage becomes severe and non-uniform; a 50 kph discrepancy between probes is recorded.

3. The Pitot system fails at 2:10 UTC, auto-pilot and auto-thrust go to the “alternate” mode, which is comparable to the combination of automatic and manual control used on the Boeing 777. The rudder is no longer limited to only 5 degrees of deflection because the flight control programming presumes the pilots would need the freedom of greater motion to perform recovery maneuvers. The shift to alternate mode is not a failure of the automated system, but the response programmed for the situation.

4. The speed window (”coffin corner”) at 35,000 feet is 757-913 kph (Mach 0.72-0.86). The pilots had set auto-thrust to maintain a speed near 881 kph (Mach 0.83). They are fooled into thinking their present speed is about 834-850 kph because of the last presumably good speed readings they observed prior to the warnings of 2:10 UTC. They assume the current power settings are for this speed, when actually the speed has crept up to 913-929 kph without notice.

5. Arriving at excessive speed causes 1.3 g shaking, which is self-induced but they interpret as atmospheric turbulence. If they were really cruising at 881 kph (Mach 0.83) and had encountered turbulence, then they should have reduced their speed to 819 kph (Mach 0.77). Assuming this is their situation, they try reducing speed by using the ‘no airspeed data’ flying procedure. They throttle back a bit, guessing at a 16-32 kph reduction based on the combination of the AOA sensor (which is iced and showing too high an angle) and the power setting. They assume the power setting accounts for a higher headwind than is the case (because it seems high), and they want to be assured of avoiding a stall, so they actually only reduce power to slow down by 16 kph to 897-913 kph (a good thing, too!), imagining they are now flying at 819-834 kph.

6. The AOA system fails at 2:11 UTC. Either the vane stalk is frozen into position, or the 1.3+ g shaking from excessive speed has caused too many erratic and wide swings of the vane, and it has faced broadside into the flow and become heavily balled up in ice. So, speed guessing is now nearing impossible. They are at about 897-913 kph when they should be 819 kph, assuming turbulence; and there may actually be some real turbulence as well. The majority of the “turbulence” they are experiencing is really the buffeting effect of excessive speed caused by the erratic shock and pressure jumps along the fuselage, wings, tailplanes, vertical stabilizer and rudder during transonic cruise. At 2:12 UTC, air data discrepancies are flagged; perhaps icing and transonic flow (shock wave effects) prevent other measurements such as of total air temperature.

7. Swept-wing transports have a tendency to swing back and forth in a lateral rolling motion called a Dutch Roll. A combined yaw and roll make the nose point left and the right wing dip (or go into the opposite combination), which is countered by the ailerons to level the wings, and the rudder to steer back on track. But, the lag in response swings the plane past straight and level into a nose pointing right and the left wing down attitude. The Dutch Roll is an oscillation between control inputs and lateral swings. Part of the automatic flight control system is a yaw damper, a slight shifting of the rudder back and forth as needed to keep the airplane straight and level.

At 2:13 UTC, AF447 was flying at excessive speed, the surrounding atmosphere may have exacerbated flight instability by being turbulent, and the flight control system no longer limited rudder deflection to 5 degrees. Yaw damping became ineffective. Because of the 1.3+ g shaking and the shock-induced flow disruptions of transonic cruise, the responses to the deflections of the ailerons and rudder became erratic, and an amplifying Dutch Roll oscillation sets in.

8. A big tail swing right is countered by a rightward rudder deflection of greater then 5 degrees, and the combined moment (torque) to the right and the air resistance against the vertical fin (to the left) puts a greater then 2.5 g load on the vertical stabilizer, and snaps the entire fin-plus-rudder assembly off to the left.

9. The loss of the vertical stabilizer releases resistance to the rightward moment, and an instant angular acceleration of 3.5 to 5 g, or more, swings the tail rightward.

10. The rear pressure bulkhead in the fuselage has a pressure force directed rearward, from the pressurized cabin and cargo hold toward the unpressurized tailcone. During a rightward tail swing, this force points to the back and rightward. At the same time, the rightward moment acting on the tailcone puts a lateral force on it, which is to the left and increasingly back during the rightward swing. With the tail wagged right, the rear bulkhead is tilted forward on right side, backward on left side, and the resultant force on it is more or less straight back. This causes a rotation of the bulkhead so as to open its seam on the right side of the fuselage, breaching the pressure seal and allowing the cabin to de-pressurizes rapidly.

11. An automatic signal sent at 2:14 UTC announces cabin de-pressurization.

12. The unimpeded rightward tail swing sweeps the right wing square into the airstream while the airplane is near its maximum speed, about 881-913 kph (Mach 0.83-0.86). This swings the right wing leading edge forward at a higher relative speed than Mach 1, so it moves forward of the leading shock.

13. The shock extends along the middle chord of right wing, now angled more squarely into the flow, and causes flow separation behind it, with a complete loss of lift; shock stall.

14. The plane’s nose is yawed left in a rightward tail swing, the right side losses lift force while left keeps it, and the result is a sudden strong moment causing a rotation (perhaps 5 g) about the plane’s longitudinal axis: left side/wing up, right side/wing down.

15. The excessive right twist of the fuselage causes engine pylons to fail. Engine number 1 (left side) breaks off — cutting electrical power — rotating in an upward swing right, smashing into the bottom of the left wing near the wing root and trailing edge, and then smashing into and through the left side of the fuselage just past the left wing root.

16. Engine number 2 (right side) swings up and right to twist bottom-up through the right wing leading edge, outboard of the engine location, and the outer wing then snaps off by rotating about the rip, with a tip upward motion. Air blast through its underside blows off upper surface spoilers like the one recovered by the Brazilian Navy.

17. The tailplanes probably snap off at the same time as the engines.

18. The reduction in mass on the right side, relative to the left, gives a boost (less inertia and drag) to the rightward roll underway.

19. The rear section of fuselage twists off from its remaining right side connection with a leftward swing, and the tailcone section separates from it, tearing off from the right to left side of its pressure bulkhead seam.

20. The interior of the fuselage originally behind the wings experiences an air blast through its forward open section toward the tail end; many panels and weakly attached objects are blown out.

21. The still intact assembly of forward fuselage plus right wing stub plus left wing continues to roll completely over while also yawing back and forth, for several cycles. The wing experiences lift forces that make the entire body spin, like a maple seed pod, whose single airfoil causes it to gyrate during a swinging descent.

22. The angular force at the left wingtip and at the cockpit end of the fuselage are greatest, so the fuselage snaps apart aft of the cockpit and also ahead of the left wing root, while an outboard length of left wing also snaps off.

23. The sections of the airplane that fall are: the vertical stabilizer with its rudder (recovered by the Brazilian Navy), the tailcone (with or without tailplanes), the rear cabin section (probably further ruptured during descent by air blast), the engines, the right wing outboard of the number 2 engine location; then after a bit of ‘maple seed’ auto-rotating helicopter flight as a unit: the cockpit section of the forward fuselage, another length of the forward fuselage, an outer length of left wing and the wing root section of the fuselage with the remaining wing stubs.

24. The four sections of the cabin (the tailcone is a fifth fuselage section) guessed here might experience further air blast rupture and content ejection as they descend; and the large structural remnants hitting the water would then suffer collision fragmentation.

What’s Next?

Perhaps some day we will know the real sequence of events and apply its lessons to improve our aircraft, or modify our air transport habits.

To move beyond imagination we need more facts. If the voice and flight data recorders are ever recovered (lost under the ocean over a month at this point), then investigators will learn much more. The public may learn more soon because the French Investigation and Analysis Bureau (BEA) is set to issue an initial technical report on the 2nd of July.

1. Boeing Backs Airbus on AF447.
2. Map of Time Zones.
3. Tim Vasquez, “Air France Flight 447, A Detailed Meteorological Analysis.”
4. Map, From INTOL To TASIL.
5. Air France Flight 447, Wikipedia.
6. Simon Hradecky, “Crash: Air France A332 over Atlantic on Jun 1st 2009, aircraft impacted ocean,” The Aviation Herald.
7. AF447 Airbus A330-200 Vertical Stabilizer And Rudder, Wikipedia.
8. BEA’s AF447 “Sea Search Operations,” (link “sea search operations” produces PDF file with maps).
9. Brazilian Air Force, Information On AF447, see “fotos.”
10. Air Safety, Wikipedia.
11. Aviation accidents and incidents, Wikipedia.
12. P-3 Orion At 7 g.
13. AF A332 Crash (F-GZCP) Part 16, ‘Recovered Spoiler‘:

    Reply 204, Pihero,
    Reply 205, KingFriday013,
    Reply 242, Guillermo.

14. Joelle Barthe, procedure for Airbus flight without airspeed data.
15. William John Cox, “Should the Airbus Be Grounded?“

According to the memorandum, CYBERCOM “will reach initial operating capability (IOC) not later than October 2009 and full operating capability (FOC) not later than October 2010.”

Gates has recommended that this new Pentagon domain be led by Lt. General Keith Alexander, the current Director of the ultra-spooky National Security Agency (NSA). Under the proposal, Alexander would receive a fourth star and the new agency would be based at Ft. Meade, Maryland, NSA’s headquarters.

Gates’ memorandum specifies that CYBERCOM “must be capable of synchronizing warfighting effects across the global security environment as well as providing support to civil authorities and international partners.”

Ostensibly launched to protect military networks against malicious cyberattacks, the command’s offensive nature is underlined by its role as STRATCOM’s operational cyber wing. In addition to a defensive brief to “harden” the “dot-mil” domain, the Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism’s adversaries.

One of ten Unified Combatant Commands, STRATCOM is the successor organization to Strategic Air Command (SAC). Charged with space operations (military satellites), information warfare, missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as global strike and strategic deterrence (America’s first-strike nuclear arsenal), it should be apparent that designating CYBERCOM a STRATCOM branch all but guarantees an aggressive posture.

As Antifascist Calling reported in May, the Pentagon’s geek squad, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently building a National Cyber Range (NCR), a test bed for developing, testing and fielding cyber weapons.

In conjunction with “private-sector partners,” the agency averred in a January 2009 press release that NCR promises to deliver “‘leap ahead’ concepts and capabilities.”

The Armed Forces Press Service reported June 24, that Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told journalists that CYBERCOM is “not some sort of new and necessarily different authorities that have been granted.” Obfuscating the offensive role envisaged for the command, Morrell told reporters: “This is about trying to figure out how we, within this department, within the United States military, can better coordinate the day-to-day defense, protection and operation of the department’s computer networks.”

Others within the defense bureaucracy are far more enthusiastic, and forthright, when it comes to recommending that cyber armaments be fielded as offensive weapons of war. Indeed, Armed Forces Journal featured a lengthy analysis advocating precisely that.

The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, “Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace,” Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)

We have heard these Orwellian arguments before; one can take it for granted that when militarists pontificate on the need for a “deterrent,” the bombers are preparing for take off.

As with other Pentagon schemes, the technological quick fix may prove as deadly as the alleged threat, particularly where botnets are concerned.

A botnet is a collection of widely dispersed computers controlled from one or more central nodes. Often built by cyber criminals to implant malicious programs or code, steal passwords and other encrypted data from targeted systems, botnets are the bane of the Internet.

In these endeavors, sophisticated hackers are aided and abetted by the miserable security code or lax practices of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) more concerned with facilitating commerce–and the bottom line–than in providing adequate protection against criminals.

Indeed in March, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the Federal Trade Commission “to shut down Google’s so-called cloud computing services, including Gmail and Google Docs, if the web giant can’t ensure the safety of user data stored by these online apps,” The Register reported.

EPIC’s petition in part, was sparked “by a Google snafu that saw the company inadvertently share certain Google Docs files with users unauthorized to view them. Google estimates that the breach hit about 0.05 per cent of the documents stored by the service,” according to The Register.

Infected computers are referred to as “zombies” that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by “master” machines. Unwary users are often “spoofed” by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into “cooperating” with the installation of malicious code.

While criminals employ botnets to generate spam or commit fraudulent transactions, draining a savings account or running-up credit card debt through multiple purchases for example, botnets also have the capacity to launch devastating distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against inadequately defended computers or indeed, entire networks.

As many commentators have warned, the best defense is to write better security programs and exercise a modicum of common sense when using the Internet. The Pentagon however, has something else in mind.

Col. Williamson proposes to transform the Air Force’s high-speed intrusion-detection systems into an offensive botnet by enabling “the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find.” In other words, creating thousands of zombie machines.

“After that,” Col. Williamson avers, “the Air Force could add botnet code to all its desktop computers attached to the Nonsecret Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). Once the system reaches a level of maturity, it can add other .mil computers, then .gov machines.”

Underscoring the risks posed by out-of-control military hackers to hold America’s, or any other nations’ communications infrastructure hostage to a militarized state, Williamson suggests that in order to “generate the right amount of power for offense, all the available computers must be under the control of a single commander, even if he provides the capability for multiple theaters. While it cannot be segmented like an orange for individual theater commanders, it can certainly be placed under their tactical control.” (emphasis added)

In other words, should an “individual theatre commander” desire to suddenly darken a city or wreck havoc on a nation’s electrical infrastructure at the behest of his political masters then by all means, go right ahead! A proposal such as this, should it ever be implemented, would in essence, be a first-strike weapon.

Other plans for “defending” Pentagon computer networks are even more extreme.

STRATCOM commander Gen. Kevin Chilton has even suggested that “the White House retains the option to respond with physical force–potentially even using nuclear weapons–if a foreign entity conducts a disabling cyber attack against U.S. computer networks,” according to a disturbing report published by Global Security Newswire. During a Defense Writers Group breakfast in May, Chilton told journalists:

“I think you don’t take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America. Why would we constrain ourselves on how we respond?” …

Should the breaches evolve into more serious computer attacks against the United States, Chilton said he could not rule out the possibility of a military salvo against a nation like China, even though Beijing has nuclear arms. He rejected the idea that such a conflict would necessarily risk going nuclear.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Chilton said.

At the same time, the general insisted that all strike options, including nuclear, would remain available to the commander in chief in defending the nation from cyber strikes.

“I think that’s been our policy on any attack on the United States of America,” Chilton said. “And I don’t see any reason to treat cyber any differently. I mean, why would we tie the president’s hands? I can’t. It’s up to the president to decide.” (Elaine M. Grossman, “U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyber Attack,” Global Security Newswire, May 12, 2009) blockquote>
While Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The New York Times that CYBERCOM’s launch “is not about the militarization of cyber,” how else can it be characterized?

Indeed, Whitman went on to say that CYBERCOM “is focused only on military networks to better consolidate and streamline Department of Defense capabilities into a single command.”

How then, should one interpret moves by the Pentagon to “consolidate and streamline” DoD “capabilities” under the purview of STRATCOM? Obviously, an entity defined as a “Unified Combatant Command” as clearly stated by General Chilton’s avowal to “leave all options on the table,” would combine cyber “defense” with STRATCOM’s global strike mission.

Antifascist Calling revealed last year, citing a U.S. Air Force planning document, that preparations are already underway to transform cyberspace into an offensive military domain. Indeed, Air Force theorists averred:

Cyberspace favors offensive operations. These operations will deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, or deceive an adversary. Cyberspace offensive operations ensure friendly freedom of action in cyberspace while denying that same freedom to our adversaries. We will enhance our capabilities to conduct electronic systems attack, electromagnetic systems interdiction and attack, network attack, and infrastructure attack operations. Targets include the adversary’s terrestrial, airborne, and space networks, electronic attack and network attack systems, and the adversary itself. As an adversary becomes more dependent on cyberspace, cyberspace offensive operations have the potential to produce greater effects. (Air Force Cyber Command, “Strategic Vision,” no date, emphasis added)

Echoing Air Force strategy, SecDef Gates memo clearly states, since “cyberspace and its associated technologies … are vital to our nation’s security,” the United States will “secure freedom of action in cyberspace” by standing-up a unified command “that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations.”

Simply put, the Pentagon intends to build an infrastructure fully-capable of committing high-tech war crimes.

Under NSA’s Operational Control

Meanwhile in the heimat, CYBERCOM will effectively be under the day-to-day control of the National Security Agency. This is hardly good news when it comes to civil liberties.

Leaving aside considerations of bureaucratic trench warfare with the Department of Homeland Security, charged with defending the state’s .gov and .com domains, the unprecedented power of CYBERCOM to conduct offensive military and surveillance operations within the United States itself is underlined by the preeminent role NSA will assume.

Authorized by the criminal Bush regime to carry out massive electronic surveillance of Americans’ private communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, various driftnet spying operations continue under Obama’s purported “change” administration. As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, the only “change” that’s come to the White House has been the color of the drapes hanging in the Oval Office.

The New York Times June 17, that the “National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged.” According to the Times, “The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.”

I take issue with the Times’ characterization that such a breach of constitutional norms merely represent “logistical difficulties.” As with a Times’ report in April which alleged that NSA’s driftnet spying under Obama was simply a problem of “overcollection,” far from being mere technical issues, first and foremost, these violations represent political decisions made at the highest levels of the national security state itself.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation. (James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress,” The New York Times, June 17, 2009)

Last year, congressional Democrats, including Senator now President, Obama, handed the NSA virtually unchecked power to spy on the private communications of Americans. In addition to granting retroactive immunity to telecom grifters who profited from their conspiracy to illegally spy on citizens for the state, the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FIA) gave NSA the legal cover to intercept Americans’ communications “so long as it was done only as the incidental byproduct of investigating individuals ‘reasonably believed’ to be overseas,” as the Times delicately put it.

CYBERCOM’s brief, and its deployment inside NSA with full access to the agency’s powerful computing assets, and with a mission to conduct global Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) at the behest of their STRATCOM masters, mean that despite bromides about “privacy concerns,” the Pentagon will most assuredly be interested in developing an attack matrix that can just as easily be turned inward. After all as General Chilton asserts, “it’s up to the president to decide.”

“One thing that is pretty clear,” Wired reports, “NSA will be leading this emerging command.” Indeed, NSA “may also come to dominate the wider government cyber defense effort, as well.” As The Wall Street Journal revealed, the Defense Department’s 2010 budget “envisions training and graduating more than 200 cyber-security officers annually.” In contradistinction to DoD, “the Department of Homeland Security has 100 employees dedicated to civilian cyber security, with plans to reach 260 next year,” the Journal reports.

In other words, right from the get-go NSA will be assuming operational control of CYBERCOM. This is driven home by the fact that the Pentagon is already receiving the vast majority of appropriations for state cybersecurity initiatives and have thousands of cyberwarriors across all branches of the military, including outsourced private contractors who labor for DoD, ready, willing and able to staff the new command.

As Antifascist Calling revealed in April, with billions of dollars already spent on a score of top secret cyber initiatives, including those hidden within Pentagon Special Access or black programs, the issue of oversight is already a moot point.

Defense analyst William M. Arkin in his essential book, Code Names, described some three dozen cyberwar programs and/or exercises, currently being pursued by the Pentagon. Since the book’s 2005 publication, many others undoubtedly have come on-line.

While NSA Director Alexander has explicitly stated that he does “not want [NSA] to run cybersecurity for the United States government,” CYBERCOM’s stand-up, and Alexander’s near certain appointment as commander, all but guarantees that the agency will be a ubiquitous and silent gatekeeper answerable to no one.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/cyber-command-launched-us-strategic-command-to-oversee-offensive-military-operations/feed/ 2 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/look-up-in-the-sky-its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-raytheon-spy-blimp/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/look-up-in-the-sky-its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-raytheon-spy-blimp/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:33:56 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8777 As the American republic’s long death-spiral continues apace, newer and ever more insidious technologies usher us towards an age of high-tech barbarism.

“At first glance” Newsweek reveals, “there was nothing special about the blimp floating high above the cars and crowd at this year’s Indy 500 on Memorial Day weekend.”

“Nothing special” that is, until you took a closer look. What you then discovered was another quintessentially American innovation, all the more chilling for its bland ubiquity. A silent, hovering sentinel linking commerce and repression; a perfect trope for our ersatz democracy. “Like most airships” Newsweek continued, “it acted as an advertising vehicle.”

But the real promo should have been for the blimp’s creator, Raytheon, the security company best known for its weapons systems. Hidden inside the 55-foot-long white balloon was a powerful surveillance camera adapted from the technology Raytheon provides the U.S. military.

Essentially an unmanned drone, the blimp transmitted detailed images to the race’s security officers and to Indiana police. “The airship is great because it doesn’t have that Big Brother feel, or create feelings of invasiveness,” says Lee Silvestre, vice president of mission innovation in Raytheon’s Integrated Defense division. “But it’s still a really powerful security tool.” (Kurt Soller, “Are You Being Watched? The blimp flying above your head may be watching your every move,” Newsweek, June 11, 2009)

“It doesn’t have that Big Brother feel” and yet here, as elsewhere, the “feelings of invasiveness” are implicit, unseen, invisible, the securitized DNA giving form and structure to the Empire’s “new normal.”

Imported from America’s aggressive wars of conquest in Iraq and Afghanistan and now deployed in the heimat, sprawling intelligence and security bureaucracies have teamed-up with corporate scofflaws to fill a market niche, inflating the bottom-line at the expense of a cherished freedom: the right to be left alone.

But as Antifascist Calling has noted many times, “what happens in Vegas” certainly doesn’t stay there, a point driven home by Raytheon.

“Anticipating requirements for innovative and affordable ways to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR),” according to a company press release, “Raytheon is using aerostats–modern blimps or balloons–carrying high-tech sensors to detect threats on the ground and in the air at distances that enable appropriate countermeasures.”

Known as RAID (Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment) the system is kitted-out with “electro-optic infrared, radar, flash and acoustic detectors.” According to the firm, some 300 have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same military version, as Newsweek reported and Raytheon confirmed, “demonstrated to officials concerned with security and spectator safety its value by providing situational awareness in what is billed as one of the largest sporting events of the year.”

Indeed Charles Burns, the director of Corporate Security for the Indy Racing League said in the company’s press release: “Conducting this demo with Raytheon gives us the opportunity to evaluate new and innovative technology that keeps our venues safe and optimizes the racing experience for our fans.”

Along with a suite of sensors and high resolution video cameras, RAID’s digitized mapping tools are similar to those developed for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). In tandem with a preprogrammed mapping grid of the target location, the system can scan a wide area and relay video clips to a centralized command center.

Captured data known as GEOINT, or geospatial intelligence, is “tailored for customer-specific solutions” according to NGA. That agency along with its “sister” organization, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the super-secret agency that develops and flies America’s fleet of spy satellites are also among the most heavily-outsourced departments in the so-called Intelligence Community.

As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock points out in his essential book, Spies For Hire, giant defense firms such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman “with assistance from Republican lawmakers from the House Intelligence Committee,” helped launch a lobby shop for the industry in 2004, the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF).

Self-described as a “not-for-profit educational foundation,” USGIF “is the only organization dedicated to promoting the geospatial intelligence tradecraft and building a stronger community of interest across industry, academia, government, professional organizations and individual stakeholders.” Since its formation, USGIF has expanded to some 154 companies and state agencies and has an annual budget that exceeds $1 million.

“Strategic partners” include the usual suspects, corporate heavy-hitters such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Science Applications International Corporation, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, IBM, Google, AT&T, Microsoft, The MITRE Corporation, and L3 Communications. Additionally, niche companies such as Analytical Graphics, Inc., DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Intergraph, PCI Geomatics, TechniGraphics, Inc., flesh-out USGIF’s roster.

In this context, the public roll-out of RAID is all the more pressing for securocrats and the companies they serve since Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano “plans to kill a program begun by the Bush administration that would use U.S. spy satellites for domestic security and law enforcement,” the Associated Press reported June 22.

That program, the National Applications Office (NAO) was first announced by the Bush regime in 2007 and was mired in controversy from the get-go. As Antifascist Calling reported last year, NAO would coordinate how domestic law enforcement and “disaster relief” agencies such as FEMA utilize GEOINT and imagery intelligence (IMINT) generated by U.S. spy satellites. But as with other heimat security schemes there was little in the way of oversight and zero concern for the rights of the American people.

The intrusiveness of the program was so severe that even Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the author of the despicable “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″ (H.R. 1955) vowed to pull the plug. Chairwoman of the Homeland Security Committee’s Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment subcommittee, Harman introduced legislation earlier this month that would have shut down NAO immediately while prohibiting the agency from spending money on NAO or similar programs.

When the bill was introduced, Harman told Federal Computer Week: “Imagine, for a moment, what it would be like if one of these satellites were directed on your neighborhood or home, a school or place of worship–and without an adequate legal framework or operating procedures in place for regulating their use. I daresay the reaction might be that Big Brother has finally arrived and the black helicopters can’t be far behind. Yet this is precisely what the Department of Homeland Security has done in standing up the benign-sounding National Applications Office, or NAO.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, Napolitano reached a decision to cut NAO off at the knees “after consulting with state and local law enforcement officials and learning that they had far more pressing priorities than using satellites to collect information and eavesdrop on people.”

Perhaps those “pressing priorities” could be better served by a low-key approach, say the deployment of a system such as RAID? After all, what’s so threatening about a blimp?

It comes as no surprise then, that the next target for Raytheon marketeers are precisely local police departments and sports facilities “that want to keep an eye on crowds that might easily morph into an unruly mob,” as Newsweek delicately put it.

Nathan Kennedy, Raytheon’s project manager for the spy blimp told the publication, “large municipalities could find many uses for this [technology] once we figure out how to get it in their hands.”

While the company refuses to divulge what this intrusive system might actually cost cash-strapped localities drastically cutting social services for their citizens as America morphs into a failed state, municipalities “without a Pentagon-size police budget” could look at the airship’s “potential to display ads [that] may assist with financing.”

Raytheon claims that local authorities fearful of succumbing to what I’d call a dreaded “surveillance airship gap,” could install “a built-in LED screen to attract sponsors, generate revenue and defer operating costs.”

How convenient!

However, Raytheon’s slimmed-down surveillance airship is a spin-off from a larger Pentagon project.

Among other high-tech, privacy-killing tools currently under development is the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Integrated Sensor Is Structure (ISIS) program. As conceived by the agency, ISIS will be a high-altitude autonomous airship built for the U.S. Air Force that can operate at 70,000 feet and stay aloft for a decade.

Washington Technology reported April 29, that Lockheed Martin won a $400 million deal to design the system. “Under the contract” the publication revealed, “Lockheed Martin will provide systems integration services, and Raytheon Co. will furnish a high-energy, low-power density radar, Lockheed Martin officials said.”

Operating six miles above the earth’s surface, well out of range of surface-to-air missiles, the airship will be some 450 feet long, powered by hydrogen fuel cells and packed with electronic surveillance gear and radar currently being field-tested by Raytheon.

Projects such as ISIS reflect a shift in Pentagon planning and spending priorities. Under Bush regime holdover, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the military plans to leverage America’s technological advantage to improve intelligence and surveillance capabilities at the expense of over-inflated big ticket items such as the F-22 Raptor or new Navy destroyers.

Gates and others in the Pentagon believe a shift towards “robust ISR platforms” will better facilitate the Pentagon’s new paradigm: waging multiple, counterinsurgency wars of conquest to secure natural resources and strategic advantage vis-à-vis imperialism’s geopolitical rivals.

But military might and technological preeminence, however formidable, represented by the Pentagon’s quixotic quest for total “situational awareness” promised by platforms such as ISIS and RAID, will no more ameliorate the Empire’s extreme political weakness than putting a band-aid over a gangrenous lesion changes the outcome for a dying patient.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/look-up-in-the-sky-its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-raytheon-spy-blimp/feed/ 2 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/cia-and-pentagon-deploy-rfid-death-chips-coming-soon-to-a-product-near-you/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/cia-and-pentagon-deploy-rfid-death-chips-coming-soon-to-a-product-near-you/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:04:29 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8623 What Pentagon theorists describe as a “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA) leverages information technology to facilitate (so they allege) command decision-making processes and mission effectiveness, i.e. the waging of aggressive wars of conquest.

It is assumed that U.S. technological preeminence, referred to euphemistically by Airforce Magazine as “compressing the kill chain,” will assure American military hegemony well into the 21st century. Indeed a 2001 study, Understanding Information Age Warfare, brought together analysts from a host of Pentagon agencies as well as defense contractors Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton and the MITRE Corporation and consultants from ThoughtLink, Toffler Associates and the RAND Corporation who proposed to do just.

As a result of this and other Pentagon-sponsored research, military operations from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond aim for “defined effects” through “kinetic” and “non-kinetic” means: leadership decapitation through preemptive strikes combined with psychological operations designed to pacify (terrorize) insurgent populations. This deadly combination of high- and low tech tactics is the dark heart of the Pentagon’s Unconventional Warfare doctrine.

In this respect, “network-centric warfare” advocates believe U.S. forces can now dominate entire societies through ubiquitous surveillance, an always-on “situational awareness” maintained by cutting edge sensor arrays as well as by devastating aerial attacks by armed drones, warplanes and Special Forces robosoldiers.

Meanwhile on the home front, urbanized RMA in the form of ubiquitous CCTV systems deployed on city streets, driftnet electronic surveillance of private communications and radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in commodities are all aspects of a control system within securitized societies such as ours.

As Antifascist Calling has written on more than one occasion, contemporary U.S. military operations are conceived as a branch of capitalist management theory, one that shares more than a passing resemblance to the organization of corporate entities such as Wal-Mart.

Similar to RMA, commodity flows are mediated by an ubiquitous surveillance of products–and consumers–electronically. Indeed, Pentagon theorists conceive of “postmodern” warfare as just another manageable network enterprise.

The RFID (Counter) Revolution

Radio-frequency identification tags are small computer chips connected to miniature antennae that can be fixed to or implanted within physical objects, including human beings. The chip itself contains an Electronic Product Code that can be read each time a reader emits a radio signal.

The chips are subdivided into two distinct categories, passive or active. A passive tag doesn’t contain a battery and its read range is variable, from less than an inch to twenty or thirty feet. An active tag on the other hand, is self-powered and has a much longer range. The data from an active tag can be sent directly to a computer system involved in inventory control–or weapons targeting.

It is hardly surprising then, that the Pentagon and the CIA have spent “hundreds of millions of dollars researching, developing, and purchasing a slew of ‘Tagging tracking and locating’ (TTL) gear,” Wired reports.

Long regarded as an urban myth, the military’s deployment of juiced-up RFID technology along the AfPak border in the form of “tiny homing beacons to guide their drone strikes in Pakistan,” has apparently moved out of the laboratory. “Most of these technologies are highly classified” Wired reveals,

But there’s enough information in the open literature to get a sense of what the government is pursuing: laser-based reflectors, super-strength RFID tags, and homing beacons so tiny, they can be woven into fabric or into paper.

Some of the gadgets are already commercially available; if you’re carrying around a phone or some other mobile gadget, you can be tracked–either through the GPS chip embedded in the gizmo, or by triangulating the cell signal. Defense contractor EWA Government Systems, Inc. makes a radio frequency-based “Bigfoot Remote Tagging System” that’s the size of a couple of AA batteries. But the government has been working to make these terrorist tracking tags even smaller. (David Hambling and Noah Shachtman, “Inside the Military’s Secret Terror-Tagging Tech,” Wired, June 3, 2009)

Electronic Warfare Associates, Inc. (EWA) is a little-known Herndon, Virginia-based niche company comprised of nine separate operating entities “each with varying areas of expertise,” according to the firm’s website. Small by industry standards, EWA has annual revenue of some $20 million, Business First reports. According to Washington Technology, the firm provides “information technology, threat analysis, and test and evaluation applications” for the Department of Defense.

The majority of the company’s products are designed for signals intelligence and surveillance operations, including the interception of wireless communications. According to EWA, its Bigfoot Remote Tagging System is “ideal” for “high-value target” missions and intelligence operations.

EWA however, isn’t the only player in this deadly game. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s geek-squad, has been developing “small, environmentally robust, retro reflector-based tags that can be read by both handheld and airborne sensors at significant ranges,” according to a presentation produced by the agency’s Strategic Technology Office (STO).

Known as “DOTS,” Dynamic Optical Tags, DARPA claims that the system is comprised of a series of “small active retroreflecting optical tags for 2-way data exchange.” The tags are small, 25×25x25 mm with a range of some 10 km and a two month shelf-life; far greater than even the most sophisticated RFID tags commercially available today. Sold as a system possessing a “low probability of detection,” the devices can be covertly planted around alleged terrorist safehouses–or the home of a political rival or innocent citizen–which can then be targeted at will by Predator or Reaper drones.

The Guardian revealed May 31 that over the last 18 months more than 50 CIA drone attacks have been launched against “high-value targets.” The Pentagon claims to have killed nine of al-Qaeda’s top twenty officials in north and south Waziristan. “That success” The Guardian avers, “is reportedly in part thanks to the mysterious electronic devices, dubbed ‘chips’ or ‘pathrai’ (the Pashto word for a metal device), which have become a source of fear, intrigue and fascination.”

According to multiple reports by Western and South Asian journalists, CIA paramilitary officers or Special Operations commandos pay tribesmen to plant the devices adjacent to farmhouses sheltering alleged terrorists. “Hours or days later” The Guardian narrates, “a drone, guided by the signal from the chip, destroys the building with a salvo of missiles. ‘There are body parts everywhere,’ said Wazir, who witnessed the aftermath of a strike.”

It is a high-tech assassination operation for one of the world’s most remote areas.

The pilotless aircraft, Predators or more sophisticated Reapers, take off from a base in Baluchistan province.

But they are guided by a joystick-wielding operator half a world away, at a US air force base 35 miles north of Las Vegas. (Declan Walsh, “Mysterious ‘chip’ is CIA’s latest weapon against al-Qaida targets hiding in Pakistan’s tribal belt,” The Guardian, May 31, 2009)

But while American operators may get their kicks unloading a salvo of deadly missiles on unsuspecting villagers thousands of miles away, what happens when CIA “cut-outs” get it wrong?

According to investigative journalist Amir Mir, writing in the Lahore-based newspaper The News, “of the sixty cross-border Predator strikes…between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US Predator strikes thus comes to not more than six percent.”

So much for “precision bombing.” But as CIA Director Leon Panetta recently told Congress, continued drone attacks are “the only game in town.”

A “game” likely to reap tens of millions of dollars for enterprising corporate grifters. According to Wired, Sandia National Laboratories are developing “Radar Responsive” tags that are “a long-range version of the ubiquitous stick-on RFID tags used to mark items in shops.”

A Sandia “Fact Sheet” informs us that “Radar-tag applications include battlefield situational awareness, unattended ground sensors data relay, vehicle tracking, search and recovery, precision targeting, special operations, and drug interdiction.” Slap a tag on the car or embed one of the devilish devices in the jacket of a political dissident and bingo! instant “situational awareness” for Pentagon targeting specialists.

As Sandia securocrats aver, Radar Responsive tags can light up and locate themselves from twelve miles away thus providing “precise geolocation of the responding tag independent of GPS.” But “what happens in Vegas” certainly won’t stay there as inevitably, these technologies silently migrate into the heimat.

Homeland Security: Feeding the RFID Beast

One (among many) firms marketing a spin-off of Sandia’s Radar Responsive tags is the Washington, D.C.-based Gentag. With offices in The Netherlands, Brazil and (where else!) Sichuan, China, the world capital of state-managed surveillance technologies used to crush political dissent, Gentag’s are a civilian variant first developed for the Pentagon.

According to Gentag, “the civilian version (which still needs to be commercialized) is a lower power technology suitable for commercial civilian applications, including use in cell phones and wide area tracking.” Conveniently, “Mobile reader infrastructure can be set up anywhere (including aircraft) or can be fixed and overlaid with existing infrastructure (e.g. cell phone towers).”

One member of the “Gentag Team” is Dr. Rita Colwell, the firm’s Chief Science Advisor. Headquartered at the University of Maryland, College Park and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, according to a blurb on Gentag’s website “Colwell will lead development of detection technologies that can be combined with cell phones for Homeland Security applications.”

Another firm specializing in the development and marketing of RFID surveillance technologies is Inkode. The Vienna, Virginia-based company specializes in the development of low power devices “for integration into all types of products.” According to a 2003 article in the RFID Journal, the firm has developed a method for “embedding very tiny metal fibers in paper, plastic and other materials that radio frequency waves can penetrate. The fibers reflect radio waves back to the reader, forming what Inkode calls a ‘resonant signature.’ These can be converted into a unique serial number.”

Indeed, the fibers can be embedded in “paper, airline baggage tags, book bindings, clothing and other fabrics, and plastic sheet,” Wired reported. “When illuminated with radar, the backscattered fields interact to create a unique interference pattern that enables one tagged object to be identified and differentiated from other tagged objects,” the company says.

“For nonmilitary applications, the reader is less than 1 meter from the tag. For military applications, the reader and tag could theoretically be separated by a kilometer or more.” The perfect accoutrement for a drone hovering thousands of feet above a target.

More recently, the RFID Journal reports that Queralt, a Wallingford, Connecticut-based start-up, received a Department of Homeland Security grant to design “an intelligent system that learns from data collected via RFID and sensors.”

Tellingly, the system under development builds on the firm’s “existing RFID technology, as well as an integrated behavioral learning engine that enables the system to, in effect, learn an individual’s or asset’s habits over time. The DHS grant was awarded based on the system’s ability to track and monitor individuals and assets for security purposes,” the Journal reveals.

And with a booming Homeland Security-Industrial-Complex as an adjunct to the defense industry’s monetary black hole, its no surprise that Michael Queralt, the firm’s cofounder and managing director told the publication, “The reason this development is interesting to us is it is very close to our heart in the way we are going with the business. We are developing a system that converges physical and logical, electronic security.”

The core of Queralt’s system is the behavioral engine that includes a database, a rules engine and various algorithms. Information acquired by reading a tag on an asset or an individual, as well as those of other objects or individuals with which that asset or person may come into contact, and information from sensors (such as temperature) situated in the area being monitored, are fed into the engine. The engine then logs and processes the data to create baselines, or behavioral patterns. As baselines are created, rules can be programmed into the engine; if a tag read or sensor metric comes in that contradicts the baseline and/or rules, an alert can be issued. Development of the behavioral engine is approximately 85 percent done, Queralt reports, and a prototype should be ready in a few months. (Beth Bacheldor, Queralt Developing Behavior-Monitoring RFID Software,” RFID Journal, April 23, 2009)

Creating a “behavior fingerprint,” Queralt says the technology will have a beneficial application in monitoring the elderly at home to ensure their safety. Homes are laced with humidity, temperature and motion-sensing tags that can for example, “sense when a medicine cabinet has been opened, or if a microwave oven has been operated.” In other words, the Orwellian “behavioral engine” can learn what a person is doing on a regular basis.

But given the interest–and a $100,000 DHS grant, chump change by current Washington standards to be sure–corporate and intelligence agency clients have something far different in mind than monitoring the sick and the elderly!

Indeed, the RFID Journal reports that “a company could use the system, for instance, to monitor the behavior of employees to ensure no security rules are breached.”

Want to surveil workers for any tell-tale signs of “antisocial behavior” such as union organizing? Then Queralt may have just the right tool for you! “The workers could be issued RFID-enabled ID badges that are read as they arrive at and leave work, enter and exit various departments, and log onto and off of different computer systems,” the RFID Journal informs us. “Over time, the system will establish a pattern that reflects the employee’s typical workday.”

And if a worker “enters the office much earlier than normal on a particular occasion,” or “goes into a department in which he or she does not work,” perhaps to “coerce” others into joining “communist” unions opposed let’s say, to widespread surveillance, the ubiquitous and creepy spy system “could send an alert.”

Queralt is currently designing an application programming interface to “logical security and identity-management systems” from Microsoft and Oracle that will enable corporations to “tie the RFID-enabled behavioral system to their security applications.”

The Future Is Now!

This brief survey of the national security state’s deployment of a literally murderous, and privacy-killing, surveillance technology is not a grim, dystopian American future but a quintessentially American present.

The technological fetishism of Pentagon war planners and their corporate enablers masks the deadly realities for humanity posed by the dominant world disorder that has reached the end of the line as capitalism’s long death-spiral threatens to drag us all into the abyss.

The dehumanizing rhetoric of RMA with its endless array of acronyms and “warfighting tools” that reduce waging aggressive imperialist wars of conquest to the “geek speak” of a video game, must be unmasked for what it actually represents: state killing on a massive scale.

Perhaps then, the victims of America’s “war on terror,” at home as well as abroad, will cease to be “targets” to be annihilated by automated weapons systems or ground down by panoptic surveillance networks fueled by the deranged fantasies of militarists and the corporations for whom product development is just another deadly (and very profitable) blood sport.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/cia-and-pentagon-deploy-rfid-death-chips-coming-soon-to-a-product-near-you/feed/ 17 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/now-showing-the-edl-security-show/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/now-showing-the-edl-security-show/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:01:09 +0000 Christopher Parsons http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8504 We’re paying for a high-tech Broadway show that’s themed around ’security’, but we’re actually watching the equivalent of a catastrophic performance in a low budget community theater. The price of admission? Only millions dollars and your privacy.

As of June 1, 2009, Canadians and Americans alike require an Enhanced Drivers License (EDL), a NEXUS card, a FAST card, a passport, or a Secure Certificate of Indian Status to cross a Canadian-American land border. In Canada, only Ontario, Quebec, B.C. and Manitoba have moved ahead to develop provincial EDLs; the Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island governments have all decided not to provide these high tech, low privacy, cards to the constituencies (Source). To apply for an EDL in a participating province, all you need to do is undergo an intensive and extensive 30 minute face-to-face interview at your provincial equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Your reward for being verbally probed? A license that includes a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag and a biometric photograph. The RFID tag includes a unique number, like your Social Insurance Number (SIN), that is transmitted to anyone with an RFID reader. These readers can be purchased off the shelf by regular consumers, and number your EDL emits is not encrypted and does not require an authentication code to be displayed on a reader. Effectively, RFID tag numbers are easier to capture than your webmail password.

EDLs are an incredibly expensive ’solution’ for individual Canadians to purchase, given that in Ontario alone an EDL will cost almost $30 more than a passport. Further, Manitobans have turned a cold shoulder to these cards; only a few thousand residents have adopted them out of an expected hundred thousand or so. In Ontario, my contacts have told me that the responsible ministry has yet to provide policy documents or manuals to the front line staff who are tasked with issuing these licenses. Without their scripts, how will these staff members play their parts in issuing each Canadian a little piece of the great North American security theater?

EDL programs are big ticket items that Canadian provinces are being pressured to pay for in order to satisfy the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), a unilateral American policy directive. While fiscal conservatives might argue that in this period of reduced government incomes and ballooning debts, such big ticket items should be carefully evaluated, we might ask them why government should be any more careful of spending money on EDLs than it is in otherwise ’securing’ the border? As recently reported by Dean Beeby, $8.7 million dollars have been spent since 2006 on gates, barriers, fences, sirens and signs to catch people who are trying to illegally cross the border. The catch? Gates have fallen on cars. Cameras can’t actually catch the license plates of illegal night-time border crossers. Automated video analysis systems don’t work. It would seem as though the various props of our Broadway security show should be returned to the manufacturer as defective or even dead on arrival!

If broadcasting an equivalent of a radio-accessible SIN and high financial costs to individual Canadians weren’t enough, there are additional privacy-related issues with EDLs. While the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner/Ontario is promising that future generations of EDLs will integrate ‘privacy by design’ principles, insofar as future cards won’t broadcast their unique identification numbers without first being activated, the current licenses that are being deployed in that province are absolutely devoid of any real protections (the much touted ’security sleeve’ is demonstrably faulty). While integrating privacy by design is a positive step forward, Ontario is the only province that has publicly discussed this at length. Moreover, even in Ontario there has been little comment about the worries of government creating massive databanks of facial images that are designed to be rapidly searched. As it stands, facial recognition technologies are sub-par at meeting the expectations that the public has developed from watching 24, Heroes, and other works of science fiction. In fact, massive amounts of research needs to be done to improve accuracy rates of facial recognition technologies, and a large database to conduct tests on to develop the technology is just what the scientist ordered. Thus, while the facial images that are taken of individuals will be of minimal use to government agencies at the moment, we cannot assume that ‘privacy by technological incompetence’ will be something Canadians can rely on over the long term.

Perhaps most importantly, privacy advocates’ underlying worries about these cards have not been addressed. As I have previously noted,

“In the cases of both radio tags and biometric data, there exists a serious danger of function creep. As more and more members of the Canadian and American public carry these devices, increased pressures will extend how these documents are used, exceeding their initial purpose of securing American borders” (Source).

While various RFID proponents have insisted that RFID tags cannot, in practice, be used to track user data, the web cookies that we download after visiting websites were never intended to let companies track us. Just last year however, the Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that, lo and behold, the company that will do no evil (i.e. Google) is using web cookies as an “Internet tracking technology that enables it to more precisely follow Web-surfing behavior across affiliated sites” (Source). RFID tags are meant to track cattle as they move around the world; surveillance is the reason for their very existence. Why would we ever assume that this technology would ultimately be used for some other purpose as soon as it were applied to human targets, when other evidence demonstrates that non-surveillance technologies are readily requisitioned to monitor our daily activities?

This worry about pervasive surveillance is something that Dr. Andrew Clement has discussed in various presentations through the Canadian IDentity Forum. He has noted that, despite government assurances, there is no evidence that real speed enhancements will be realized at the border. At most, Canadians can expect to pass through borders 5-10 seconds faster than they do right now. Moreover, while there are claims that EDLs are somehow ‘more secure’ than present licenses, this is just another part of the script in the Canadian/American security theater. You see, to qualify for an EDL, individuals must show foundational documents (e.g. birth certificates) to prove that they are who they claim to be; where a foundational document is successfully forged the ’security’ offered by the EDL is defeated. Moreover, the RFID tag can be copied, letting another person clone the tag’s unique number. When Ms. Daghum comes to the border with her cloned tag, she can have Ms. Ouziel’s profile brought up on the border guard’s screen. If Ms. Daghum physically appears like Ms. Ouziel, then a border guard could be fooled about the authenticity of the RFID tag based on the information called from government databases. The RFID is insecure and the biometric image currently unreliable — how, again, do these cards actually make us safer (as opposed to making us feel safer) from terror threats?

If high costs, minimal border-crossing efficiencies, unreliable biometric images, and easily duplicated RFID tag numbers aren’t enough to make you wonder about the capacity of EDLs to secure the border, I’ll leave you with two concluding points. RFID tags, and the data that they emit, contribute to what scholars such as David Lyon and Kevin Haggerty have termed ‘the surveillance society’, or a society where “[w]e are inadvertently handing over to centralized authorities an infrastructure of visibility the likes of which no society has ever seen before” (Source). Canadians regularly moan that they can’t protect their own privacy but, by refusing to adopt an EDL and using a passport instead, they will find that protecting their privacy is actually cheaper than buying into the surveillance society. Get a passport, and congratulate yourself on being a privacy advocate by taking yourself out to dinner on your EDL-related savings!

Second, as has been noted by Canadian civil liberties groups;

“[A] passport is an internationally recognized travel document that gives the holder certain rights, while a driver’s licence is not . . . If the U.S. decides to deport a Canadian while she is carrying her passport, she must be deported back to Canada.

A Canadian carrying a driver’s license could be deported to anywhere in the world” (Source).

We are all unfortunately aware of the horrors that can occur when suspected ‘terrorists’ are sent to places such as Syria. While Maher Arar’s case does demonstrate that a passport will not necessarily persuade American authorities to act in within the confines of law, an EDL will not legally persuade foreign authorities that you should be sent to Canada instead of a torture cell in Syria. Even in a world where a passport has diminished legal standing in the eyes of American authorities that diminished standing is better than the absolute lack of legal standing that EDL-holders are left with.

In summation, you’d be well advised not to take part in this most recent act of the Canadian-American security theater. You’ll pleasantly find that there’s a reduced entry fee to the security show with a passport (with money left over to buy a drink and snack!). Far more importantly, the passport might actually prevent the ushers/border guards from deporting you to a truly horrible place to ‘enjoy’ unspeakable acts of barbarity. Be your own privacy advocate, boycott the EDL, and buy yourself a passport if you want to cross a Canadian-American land border.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/now-showing-the-edl-security-show/feed/ 4 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/what-happened-to-air-france-flight-447/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/what-happened-to-air-france-flight-447/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:00:44 +0000 Manuel Garcia Jr. http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8499 Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean about 725 km (450 miles) northeast of Brazil at about 2:30 a.m. local time, Monday, June 1. The accident occurred three hours into the 11-hour flight; 228 people were aboard the twin-engine Airbus A330-200 jet. While flying at 521 mph (839 kph) at 35,000 feet (10,671 m) at 2:15 a.m., the plane encountered heavy turbulence. An automated communications system in the airplane began an exchange of data with Air France maintenance computers on the ground that totaled four minutes and indicated that multiple electrical and pressurization failures had occurred. The last contact was at 2:33 a.m. There was no distress call from the pilots. Brazilian air force planes searching the area found a five-kilometer strip of floating debris including cables and fuel slicks. Brazilian and French ships should arrive early Wednesday to begin the accident investigation and the recovery of bodies. (See early news bulletins, 1 and 2, and later bulletin 3)

Determining what actually happened will require recovering and examining the remnants of the airplane, in particular the major fragments of the airframe, the engines, and most importantly the flight recorders (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder). Without the benefit of a pilot’s radio report, investigators would only have the flight histories of the selected components and parameters that are monitored by the flight recorders. One worry is that the flight recorders are submerged at between 9,000 ft (2744 m) and 14,000 ft (4268 m) and may be difficult to find; their casings are designed to withstand the pressure of 6000 m (19,680 ft) depth for up to 30 days.

Speculation about what may have happened centers on lightning causing a massive electrical surge that caused the failure of (fused, short-circuited, overloaded) the fly-by-wire flight controls; and severe buffeting in a thunderstorm, which disrupted the flight-path.

Pilots of fly-by-wire airplanes do not normally use muscles or hydraulics to move the many flaps and the rudder; electric motors controlled by computers do this to an extent set by the pilots’ manipulation of their control levers, pedals and wheels. The lightning-blackout scenario is unlikely because lightning strikes happen regularly in commercial and military aviation, and airplanes are designed to withstand them (by keeping the electrical charges outside the plane’s interior, because of the all-metal hull and wing surfaces). Also, pilots are trained (in simulators) to compensate for loss of the fly-by-wire system by using the mechanical control system of the trim tabs to push the bigger flaps and the rudder into place. Trim tabs the smallest of the many types of movable flaps, which act like the tails of weathervanes, pushing the larger flaps or rudders they are embedded in into new angles; in normal operation the trim tabs are an assist and a fine adjustment.

The lack of a distress call from the pilots suggests two possibilities: their radios were inoperative or had lost power (which would be odd since the automated data transmission system was functioning), or a very sudden breakup of the airframe in flight. Airframes of modern commercial airliners like the Airbus A330-200 are designed to withstand the buffeting of air turbulence and the stresses of the severe turns and dives that may occur in emergencies. If the airframe broke up prior to impact with the water, what was its cause? Obvious guesses are: missile, bomb and fuel tank explosion.

There is no evidence of a missile attack, so we eliminate that guess. Sabotage by bomb is also discounted, because that guess requires too many elaborate assumptions. Actually, any speculation is entirely unjustified at this point, since recovering evidence and systematic analysis have yet to begin. However, events like this inspire fear and cause minds to race, speculating on causes and meanings.

So, we are led to the question of a fuel tank explosion, could it have happened in AF 447 as either a natural event (electrostatic discharge into fuel-air vapors above liquid fuel in an agitated tank) or an unintended electro-mechanical failure (spark from wire exposed by damaged insulation, into fuel-air vapors) as in the TWA Flight 800 disaster of 1996.

The fuel tanks of airliners are fitted into the wings and the section of the hull below the passenger deck and along the length of the wing roots. The central fuel tank between the wings is usually the single largest volume fuel container. As a plane climbs to higher elevation, the atmospheric pressure drops and so the air originally contained in a fuel tank at the airport seeks to expand; if the tank were sealed this would cause the internal pressure to increasing exceed the external pressure and put great stress on the tank walls. Similarly, as fuel is pumped out of a tank to the engines, the space evacuated must be filled with ambient air to avoid creating a vacuum that would resist subsequent pumping. So, fuel tanks are designed with vents that allow air to flow in, and fuel-air vapors to flow out as needed to equalize pressures at any altitude. The vents are in the form of pipes that run from the central fuel tank through the wing tanks and out to the wing tips where an orifice, at each wing tip, allows for the exchange of air.

Because hydrocarbon liquids and vapors are very insulating electrically, and metals are excellent conductors, there is always a build-up of electrostatic charge between fuel flows and metal containers. This is why sparks can be generated when fuels are pumped into rapid flows or sprays near metal surfaces. There have been many accidents caused by electrostatic discharges into fuel-air mixtures, which were initiated by improperly grounded or excessively turbulent pumping procedures. The petroleum industry has long known about this phenomenon, and developed many standards for the design and operation of fuel pumping and storage equipment. Also, many fuels have chemical additives that enhance their electrical conductivity, to significantly reduce their ability to hold electrostatic charges (reducing the electrostatic build-up relative to the metal piping and containers during pumping and/or sloshing).

The fuel vent pipes of airliners are one type of fuel pumping system. These must be designed to minimize the electrostatic build-up between the flowing fuel-air mixture and the pipe walls. Larger diameter vent pipes will keep flow velocities low (electrostatic build-up and the possibility of sparking increase with flow velocity). Plenum chambers and baffles along the flow path can help prevent bursts of rapid flow in reaction to some mechanical jolt to the wing structure or some sudden drop in external air pressure (which would impulsively draw out fuel-air vapors). Using additives to significantly increase the fuel’s conductivity is also extremely helpful.

Because the airplane manufacturing, airline transport and fuel industries routinely do a good job of managing the fuel and fueling risks, it is rare that we hear about fuel fires and explosions on the tarmac or in flight. However, fuel vapor explosion accidents still do happen; a Boeing 737-400 parked at the gate in 2001 had its center tank explode, killing one person.

Despite the many airliners that experience lightning strikes without harm, it may be that the destruction of AF 447 was the rare instance of lightning igniting the fuel-air vent flow, which subsequently caused a major fuel tank explosion.

Whatever the cause of the loss of AF 447, the loss of 228 lives demands that it be found, and the lesson applied to improve air transport safety.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/what-happened-to-air-france-flight-447/feed/ 26 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/can-economic-growth-stop-climate-change/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/can-economic-growth-stop-climate-change/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 16:31:50 +0000 Rajesh Makwana http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8428 Despite the scientific consensus on the urgent need to address the causes of climate change, a stubborn attachment to economic growth by policymakers threatens to disrupt any effective response to the growing environmental crisis. Interim updates in the run up to December’s major Climate Conference in Copenhagen revealed that emissions and temperatures are accelerating more rapidly than expected — leading many to ask why governments and political leaders are doing so little to reduce emissions and mitigate climate change.

This long-standing gulf between government rhetoric and action was preoccupying scientists attending the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in the Danish capital during March, and many of these specialists have since engaged in activism of a kind not seen since the period of nuclear proliferation during the 1950s and 1960s. Acknowledging the failure of governments to date, experts at the meeting urged world leaders to resist the influence of vested interests and act decisively to avert a series of devastating ecological and social consequences.

Whilst Nicholas Stern, one of the UK’s leading climate change scientists and author of the Stern report, berated the British government’s failure to pursue strong and effective policies, other outspoken and prominent scientists took to the street in protest. Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), joined more than 1,000 campaigners in Coventry (UK) as part of a Climate Change Day of Action in March. Demonstrators similarly voiced concerns over government inaction at the Put People First and Climate Camp protests during the G20 Summit in London. Dr. Hansen, like many in the climate change movement, believes that our politicians are failing the planet, and that direct action through protests is now crucial in order to combat heavy lobbying from the business sector that has prevented the necessary legislative interventions.

What these scientists-cum-activists now faced is the same barrier to progress that campaigners have expressed for decades: a stubborn adherence to economic growth and corporate welfare by policymakers. So entrenched is the attachment to continually expanding the economy that Gordon Brown, acting as ‘chancellor’ of the G20 Summit, made the resumption of global economic growth a key target for the meeting. Ministers hope that the trillion dollar stimulus that was agreed upon will go a long way to re-establishing economic ‘normality’. More recently, the same ministers pledged billions to the world’s lender of last resort — the IMF, to provide additional debt-based credit to stimulate growth around the world. The underlying rationale behind these policies is that governments must preserve economic growth at all costs, and the best way to safeguard growth is by protecting those businesses that generate the most income.

Profiting from Climate Change

The danger of continuing such a ‘growth at all costs’ approach is amplified when only financially profitable solutions to the climate crisis are pursued by governments. In most industrialized countries the largest and most influential businesses are oil corporations and car manufacturers that wield significant lobbying power over governments, and a responsibility to their shareholders before any commitment to reduce CO2 emissions. Given both the overriding commitment by corporations to profit and a dependency by the population on the consumption of oil, there is little incentive for these industries to encourage people to consume less fossil fuel. As one example, car manufactures have traditionally prioritized speed and aesthetics over efficiency, and some of the most fuel efficient cars available today are less economical in fuel use than those available over two decades ago — particularly in the US. Whilst this approach has contributed to gross domestic product (GDP) and generated huge incomes for the car industry, the average ‘miles per gallon’ usage in US cars is currently less than it was in the 1908 model T Ford.

A spiraling level of economic and financial competition between nations is also stifling effective agreement and action on emission reductions, whilst continuing to aggravate the often-tense relationship between countries in the Global North and South. Given the competitive nature of the global economy, most governments resist enacting tough legislation to curb emissions in the fear of losing their competitive financial edge. They prefer instead to use less effective market-based mechanisms that will facilitate a continued prioritization of economic growth.

Green taxes on driving cars or flying in airplanes discriminate against the poor and are only half measures compared to stricter legislation, such as outright bans on cars in cities or domestic flights. Despite being a key mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, setting an agreed ‘cap’ on emission levels and then allowing some companies to ‘trade’ their allowances to other firms for profit doesn’t reduce emissions as effectively as simply legislating for larger reductions. Whilst strict legislation would force corporations to innovate greener technology, ‘Cap and Trade’ results in incremental and insufficient adjustments to emissions with a view to creating new markets and expanding profits. Carbon offsets are an increasingly popular way of reducing emissions, and present yet another business opportunity that contributes to GDP. Palliative measures such as planting trees or purchasing offsets sold by ‘greener industries’, while at the same time pursuing business as usual, does little to mitigate the unsustainable and damaging activities that emit greenhouse gases in the first place.

An understanding of how business opportunity has trumped effective policy can be drawn from a host of other market friendly solutions to global warming. Bio-fuel expansion accelerates climate change through increased deforestation, the destruction of ecosystems, peat drainage, and an increasing use of nitrate fertilizers. Policies that encourage ‘clean coal’ production or carbon capture and storage (CCS) help governments to justify the continued building of coal plants, thereby appealing to the fossil fuel lobby and obfuscating the deeper issues. And the nuclear lobby is using climate change to revive their flagging industry despite serious concerns over hazardous wastes, a lengthy development process, and clear evidence of its marginal capacity to reduce emissions.

Ultimately, none of these options addresses our over-reliance on fossil fuels, the problems with continued industrial expansion, or the need for more sustainable modes living and working. Instead of limiting advertising, restricting the overuse of pollutants or legislating for deeper cuts in emissions in key polluting industries, governments and corporations have adopted a strategy that leaves the average citizen feeling responsible for solving the climate crisis themselves.

The tendency of governments to trust business models and not strong legislation is skillfully masked by shifting guilt and responsibility onto ‘consumers’, and much of the public debate still remains focused around recycling, changing light bulbs and re-using carrier bags. By reducing their carbon footprints and making choices that are more responsible in of lifestyle and consumption habits, people in the developed world may try to live more sustainable lives. Whilst engagement by the public is crucial and personal adjustments are necessary, consumer measures are limited in their effectiveness and generally only possible in the richest countries.

Moreover, the ideal of ‘consumer choice’ in goods and services is predicated on the continued consumption of natural resources, the pollution from which is one of the main drivers of climate change. By any assessment, it would take decades for consumer preferences to re-orient the current model of production and consumption that remains driven by the need to increase profit levels and share prices endlessly.

A more suitable strategy would be for governments to enact legislation targeting the source of emissions, for example by regulating the exploitation of natural resources by industrial producers, including the full environmental costs of production into the price of goods, and discouraging the all-pervading consumer culture that is increasingly the focus of life, even in the developing world. These and similar measures would shift the responsibility away from the end ‘consumer’ who is presently encouraged to continue over-consuming, albeit more conscientiously.

Revisiting the Limits of Growth

Endless economic growth is clearly unsustainable as GDP can only increase through the continued production and consumption of the world’s resources. This paradigm, despite its application to almost all aspects of international and domestic policies, is inherently flawed since we only have finite resources and a limited capacity to absorb emissions. As the oft-quoted UK Interdependence report by the New Economics Foundation estimated, if all countries consumed as much as the US per capita, we would require over five planets worth of resources to survive.

The relentless process of economic expansion largely relies on inputs from nature, and consequently ravages the environment whilst releasing huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. A recent report by the Sustainable Development Commission in the UK summarized the conflict between growth and the environment, stating; “In the last quarter of a century the global economy has doubled, while an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems have been degraded. Global carbon emissions have risen by 40% since 1990 (the Kyoto Protocol ‘base year’). Significant scarcity in key resources — such as oil — may be less than a decade away.”

Writing previously in the New Scientist, Tim Jackson, the report’s main author, equated emissions rates to consumption rates and calculated that, if we factor in moderate economic growth, the necessary cuts in emissions will require an 11-fold reduction in the current European average consumption rate. Yet any coherent plan, requisite technology or financing to achieve this universal decarbonization of the world’s economy is still far from being realized.

There are wider social issues that accompany an entirely growth-based approach to economic development. For example, numerous studies have demonstrated that economic growth is not an adequate measure of wellbeing or happiness. As a society, despite a phenomenal increase in material wealth, we are no happier now than we were in the 1970s. If fairly distributed, the proceeds from growth can be important, particularly in the developing world where it can significantly enhance well-being by helping to secure basic human needs. But once these needs have been met, as is largely the case in rich countries, increases in wealth cease to contribute significantly to well-being.

Even as a means of poverty reduction, economic growth is extremely inefficient and uneven in its benefits. The proceeds of growth are not distributed fairly enough to justify an adherence to the ‘trickle down’ theory, and there is no coherent global welfare system to compensate the increasing numbers of ‘losers’ in the global market system. Not only has inequality in wealthier countries increased in recent decades, but levels of inequality between countries also continue to rise. The minimal quantities of aid redistributed by donor countries to compensate those who cannot afford to pay market prices for their essential goods and services is also fast dwindling, as donor countries have fewer resources to spare in the wake of the worsening global financial crisis.

The poor in the developing world also suffer disproportionately from the ‘externalities of growth.’ As demand for more goods continues to rise, and resources are extracted and then consumed as products — often many thousands of miles away — various hazardous by-products are created along the way. These include toxic chemicals used by the extractive industries, chemical fertilizers used by agri-business, and carbon emissions from machinery and transport.

Not only can poorer countries simply not afford to address many of the environmental consequences of this process, they will often be the first to be threatened by the consequences of climate change as it affects agricultural production. Up to 85 percent of the population in some of the poorest countries depend directly on crops, livestock, fisheries or forests for their daily income or sustenance, and estimates suggest that crop yields could reduce by a third in many poorer countries by 2050 as a direct result of global warming. Sub-Saharan Africa, the smallest contributor to CO2 emissions, will be the hardest hit.

There is a growing acknowledgment amongst scientists and campaigners that the only way out of the quagmire of growth is an immediate shift in policy to favor public and environmental interests over those of big business and the profit imperative. But it is also necessary to achieve a wider appreciation of how the pursuit of economic growth accelerates global warming and mitigates prevention — a basic fact that should play a key role in climate change campaigns. Without greater public awareness of the political and ideological obstructions to action, governments are likely to continue reinventing the same competitive, growth-centric policies that are the root cause of the climate crises.

Only public engagement can finally urge governments to act more decisively on climate change, although this involvement must go beyond individual efforts to recycle waste, buy responsibly or reduce carbon footprints. The media has already well documented the role of non-violent protests in reshaping public opinion and policy, and the recent heavy-handed approach by the UK government to squash the G20 protests signals a growing concern amongst policymakers of how informed citizens can quickly damage their political reputation. It is time to step up efforts to educate, engage and mobilize world opinion on the real causes and solutions to climate change, enabling the global public to take the lead in forcing governments to act.

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