Thursday, November 10, 2011
Cheney role wiretap surfaces
Thursday, January 5, 2006
United States Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, admitted to a key role in the domestic spying program. In a ringing defense of the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush, Cheney said he had "personally presided" over most briefings of selected Capitol Hill lawmakers about the program, which was begun in response to the 9/11 attacks and after Congress passed a September 2001 resolution authorizing the use of force to combat terrorism.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has been monitoring certain domestic telephone calls and emails, under the condition that the other end of the message is to or from a foreign location, the White House has admitted. In addition, the New York Times has reported that the agency has been conducting a widespread data-mining operation of such messages, hoping to identify patterns that might tip off the U.S. government to terrorist operations. Bush quickly backed up the decision by Michael Hayden, then NSA chief and now deputy national intelligence director, repeatedly authorizing the NSA to conduct warrantless searches, according to published reports.
Cheney vigorously defended the program, arguing that it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks, though a Washington Post report of his speech notes flaws in his reasoning. Cheney avoided mention of words such as "warrantless" and gave no explanation of why the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which normally issues national security warrants, needed to be bypassed. He asserted however that "the civil liberties of the American people are unimpeded" by the "wartime measure."
Cheney may face pressure by some in Congress, such as Republican Senator Arlen Specter, who has pledged to investigate the eavesdropping program, to testify on Capitol Hill, though Cheney is known to be a major proponent of executive privilege and may well resist. The vice president, anticipating a "spirited debate" on the necessity of the program, said the leak of "highly classified" data to the NYTimes had been a "clear detriment to our national security."
The Justice Department launched a probe last week to seek the source of leaked information about the secretive program. No report has emerged that the Justice Department is making a formal inquiry into possible illegalities that might have occurred on the part of the NSA or White House. Many in Congress are interested in this point, as some see this surveillance of U.S. citizens as a violation of their Fourth Amendment right guarding against unreasonable searches.
The Justice Department head and former White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, has defended the NSA program as legal and constitutional.
[edit] Sources
- FDCH e-Media. "Vice President Cheney Speaks on Iraq and the War on Terrorism" — The Washington Post, January 4, 2006
- Jim VandeHei and Dan Eggen. "Cheney Cites Justifications For Domestic Eavesdropping" — The Washington Post, January 5, 2006
- Evan Thomas and Daniel Klaidman. "Full Speed Ahead" — Newsweek, January 9, 2006 issue
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Biotech or bioterror: a global dilemma
- A 'Ted Kaczynski' who turns bio-terrorist
- Mischievous teenagers who 'hack' superbugs
- Availability of biotech knowledge amid boom
- Possibility 'suicide coughers' could kill millions
BBC thumbnail of Kenneth Alibek
Roger Brent's faculty page
https://depts.washington.edu/mcb/users/rbrent
Michael V. Callahan, DARPA scientist
http://cmedownload.com/faculty/michael-v-callahan-md-dtmh-msph
Basement gene tweakers -- Wired article
Professors embroiled in bioterror fears
Bioterrorism: a clear and present danger -- article by federal scientists
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v7/n12/full/nm1201-1271.html
Bioterrorism: a clear and present danger -- article by federal scientists
Helpful government bioterror info links
Globalization and biosecurity (National Academies)
Biotech and terror (National Academies)
Human genome project's private sector alliance
President's Council on Bioethics
Genome chip technology
Chilling E coli scenarios in fatal outbreaks
http://conantcensorshipissue.blogspot.com/2011/07/chilling-e_05.html
Arizona warned health care workers on E. coli terrorism
http://conantcensorshipissue.blogspot.com/2011/07/arizona-warned-health-workers-of.html
Draft 5
By Paul Conant
Copyright 2006 by Znewz1
JULY 2006--This article is drawn in part from a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack, which is part of the Homeland Security Committee. The Federation of American Scientists provided a transcript in July 2006. Other sources are National Academies reports. Permission is granted for reproduction of this article.
Could a lone crazed gene scientist or a cell of fanatical "suicide coughers" unleash a global pandemic that kills tens of millions of people?
Such a day is at hand, if it is not already here, say top U.S. biological weapons experts. And U.S. defenses against such attacks are far from adequate, they say.
The specter of Ted Kaczynski, the mathematician now imprisoned in the serial Unabomber murders, is much on the minds of those with an interest in America's biodefenses. Tools and knowledge now available, some of it via the Internet, are just waiting to fall into the hands of such a person, experts fear.
The revolution in biotechnology means that biologists can swap genes in and out of an organism to increase its virulence or resistance to antibiotics. Moreover, they can assemble an entire pathogen -- disease-causing microbe -- from scratch.
Unlike nuclear weapon construction, which is effectively contained by control of fissile materials, bioweapon construction is not nearly so difficult a challenge for terrorists, according to experts testifying before the House Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack.
The Centers of Disease Control have identified 60 pathogens that federal scientists consider dangerous and in need of controls and devlopment of countermeasures, such as vaccines, according to a panel member, James R. Langevin, D-R.I.
Langevin pointed out that supplies, such as DNA and growth media, that might be of use to bioterrorists can be obtained by mail-order.
Government, university and pharmaceutical research programs are involved in a wild scramble to develop biotech in the fight against disease, the engineering of superior crops and livestock and for varied and sundry other industrial purposes. For example, the federal Human Genome Project works hard to pass along a torrent of knowledge stemming from its work to the private sector.
Imposing controls on U.S. biotech research, however, makes little sense in the face of the industry's boom outside America, say experts who are pushing for more international safeguards -- arguing that the biological weapons treaty is inadequate. They note that China -- still straddled by authoritarian communism despite the fond hopes of the U.S. policy of "engagement" -- is a hub of biotech research, much of it intertwined with U.S. business.
Germ war expertise for sale
Nevertheless, regardless of the outcome of claims concerning Iraq biowar capabilities, other Middle Eastern states, perhaps employing ex-Soviet germ war scientists, also have the capability of posing major threats, according to experts. Iran is a central concern.
The Soviet Union ran a vast and dangerous germ warfare research program, known as Biopreparat, and once headed by Kenneth Alibek, who is a now a U.S. biowar consultant. Alibek testified in the July 2005 hearing that in the 1980s his experts were exploiting new discoveries in genetic engineering to create AIDS-type pathogens that were intended to subvert victim immune systems.
Alibek said lawmakers should focus on the fact that a new pathogen, perhaps resistant to antibiotics, can be formed by simple genetic engineering. "This knowledge exists; this knowledge is, let me say, widely published; and there is no significant problem to developing genetically engineered pathogens."
However, once a pathogen is engineered, terrorists still face the problem of brewing up large enough batches, though that problem is not as difficult as it once was, because the boom in genetic technology has resulted in the downsizing of key equipment.
Alibek said that the knowledge and capability is already in place for state-supported groups to produce biowar weapons but he was cautious about the thought that "low-level terrorist groups" might already be capable of such technology.
However, others voiced concerns about the possibility of "garage hackers" producing new biological pathogens rather than computer viruses. Interest in gene-splicing and DNA information is growing among amateurs, according to a July 2006 report in Wired magazine (see link above). Wired also cites the case of two professors caught up in bioterror fears over one's amateur interest.
Gene-splicing knowledge abounds
Increasing numbers of people have access to such information, according to witness Roger Brent, director of the Molecular Sciences Institute and a Pentagon consultant. Research into recombinant DNA is more than 30 years old, and the genetic technology revolution is proceeding exponentially, analagous to the accelerating pace of computer efficiency, he said.
As a consequence, Brent said, great potential benefits for humanity are clouded by the fact that there are tens of thousands of people who have the knowledge to engineer drug-resistant anthrax, or who could remake the savage SARS virus, or who might augment existing organisms to make them more deadly. Though the 2001 anthrax attacks showed the hand of an experienced scientist, biowar knowledge is no longer the province of a few shadowy specialists, witnesses said.
Brent aired the scenario of a group of militants who inflict themselves with a highly contagious disease, such as reformulated SARS, who cough on people with the consequence of millions of deaths.
The threat from cult terrorists, who might not be concerned with preserving a particular population, is illustrated by the cult Aum Shinrikyo, which killed 20 people in a Japanese subway using the deadly toxicant Ricin in 1995. The group turned to Ricin after experiments with microbial warfare succeeded only against cult members, it has been reported. But another cult might prove more successful.
James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix encodement of DNA, has said that the perils of genetic engineering were foreseen in the 1970s, but money pressures eventually broke the moratorium on such research. Watson eventually broke ranks and joined those who favored experimentation.
Other experts have warned that the recombinant DNA genie is already having unknown, but far-reaching consequences in the global ecology, as genetically modified plants and animals escape into the wild and, following classical environmental pressures, mutate and diversify. Some experts say there is no way to know whether such a mutant will eventually lead to a major extinction event that could include the human race (though this fear also applied prior to genetic engineering).
Brent said there is no easy solution to the biodefense problem, but warned that programs to stockpile vaccines are likely to be ineffective in that germ war specialists would simply design a pathogen that circumvents the vaccine. Specifically, anthrax can be modified to sidestep the current vaccine, he said.
The anthrax threat is still with us
Genocidal weapons are not the only concern. In 2001, Alibek noted, a relatively small amount of weaponized anthrax -- 5 to 7 grams -- sent through the mails resulted in months of uncertainty and large sums of money spent to defuse public anxiety and counter the contamination.
Anthrax, which does not easily spread from one person to the next, could still be aerosolized and sprayed into, for example, subway tunnels. The effect on the public would be so great as to perhaps warrant the permanent closure of the underground system, Alibek said.
Michael V. Callahan, an expert on biodefense and mass casualty care who in July 2006 was employed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, warns of 200 laboratories in sub-Saharan Africa, a number of them in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists, which have the capability to isolate and purify anthrax and plague pathogens. These laboratories run across these organisms in normal veterinary and medical work, he said.
Disseminaton of products -- called reagants -- for amplifying such pathogens must be monitored, he said, though such technology is easy to get. Callahan also cited a test whereby experts found that they could produce 14 million lethal doses of anthrax for a reagant cost of less than $100.
The people who ran the bioterror test obtained all their information from open sources, including the U.S. Patent Office and out-of-date microbiology books, Brent emphasized. Much DNA information has been patented by genetic technology businesses.
In what he called an "exciting" development, Callahan, who has assisted in the decommissioning of Biopreparat operations, noted that the Soviet bioweapons program had included development of recently disclosed countermeasure drugs that strengthen the immune system.
Possibilities are getting worse
However, Callahan reported that the world of bioterror has, if anything, grown grimmer since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its germ war program. "Our scientific understanding of microbial metabolism and the improved efficiency of automated small scale fermenters have increased the amount of vegetative bacteria that can be produced with minimal resources," he said. Very troubling is the growing availability of small-scale fermentation systems which reduce the need for skilled technicians and a major support structure, he said.
"Potentially, a former weapons scientist from Stepnogorsk could travel to a country in the Middle East and reconvene a weapons capability from available veterinary, agricultural and clinical microbiology resources," he said.
The witnesses did not address the issue of Iraq's purported program for weapons of mass destruction, though Callahan's testimony indicates that Saddam Hussein would have had little trouble in implementing such a program, had he wished. Hussein's biowar stocks appear to have been destroyed after the first war with the United States though President Bush has said he was convinced that Hussein was hiding such weaponry prior to the second war with the United States. However, U.S. military authorities made little effort to find the purported germ war stocks in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.
Advances in understanding of lung airflow that have benefited numerous respiratory patients are also available to designers of anthrax borne on aerosols, Callahan warned. Specially coated anthrax spores would penetrate lungs after the fashion of the new class of lung medications, he said.
He also pointed out that biowar pathogens can be engineered that evade vaccines.
Development of such superbugs, however, is not necessarily cost-effective. A military biowar unit might find that coming up with an effective contagiously spread pathogen is too time-consuming. Merely because a pathogen is initially virulent doesn't mean it is stable after many replications. It might have a tendency to peter out, to mutate into something relatively innocuous. However, a group of terrorists might be willing to try an untested organism and, against the odds, succeed at killing millions, experts say.
The Kaczynski factor
Concerned about this point, subcommittee Chairman John Linder, R-Ga., asked whether someone with a "modicum of talent in this business" might genetically alter the SARS virus and "make it more virulent, spread faster and make it more difficult to treat?"
The "short answer is yes," replied Brent, though the recombinant virus might actually be weaker than the original.
Still, resynthesized SARS spread by suicidal coughers is a real concern, said Brent.
Anthrax, though not contagious in humans, is the more serious threat, said witnesses, Callahan noting that "you don't have to store it, it lives forever, and you don't have to feed it." The pathogen is also easy to obtain because the disease afflicts animals in many places, he said.
However, Callahan put avian influenza -- bird flu -- as a top concern because of its extreme mortality in humans. If a mutated bird flu pathogen becomes contagious among humans and remains extremely deadly, it could kill some 50 million people worldwide, experts have said. Artificial alteration of the pathogen is a severe worry, Callahan testified. Still, "new inhibitor" drugs are available against bird flu, and biowar experts might face obstacles in getting past these defenses, he conceded.
Another big concern is the possibility that smallpox, once considered eradicated, might be bred from some old Soviet stash. Treatment of smallpox is difficult.
Other pathogens potentially subject to terrorist manipulation include famine-inducing microbes, such as Glanders and zoological agents, that might wreak havoc among livestock and agriculture, said Callahan. Another top concern, he said, is the engineering of microbes resistant to light, making them difficult to decontaminate.
Of keen interest to microbiologists are the thermophiles, microbes that thrive in extreme heat. Other microbes consume metals and are of interest to the military as a means of weakening enemy infrastructure.
Porous biodefenses
Though the United States has drastically improved security of biohazard stocks, said Callahan, such safeguards are "easily circumvented by the novel engineering of a new agent" and "getting a new anthrax strain out of Texas, South Dakota or Maine" can be accomplished within a few days, he said.
Not only is intentional terrorism a worry, but a new concern is adolescent hackers, who maliciously send out deadly bugs without fully realizing what they are doing.
One lawmaker worried that "already the technology exists to resynthesize small viral genomes," a technology that might easily fall into the hands of DNA hackers.
Callahan expressed alarm at the easy availability of biotech knowledge that is spreading like wildfire as biotech businesses and research surges. He said that in the first third of last year, "there are 19 papers that have been produced which provide heavy, excellent answers for the challenges facing a biological weapon scientist" working in some mountain cave lab.
Callahan said the rate of open-source publication of biotech papers was outpacing the Homeland Security Department's ability to monitor them to assess the threat of the published information. "We are just picking up the big stuff, and we are probably about a year behind. We have received several red alerts this month for publications that will show up next month."
Additionally, amateurs and potential "garage hackers" have increasing access to biotech information and new portable equipment, he said.
Brent told lawmakers that he was unconvinced that there were any good means of choking off terrorist access to germ war technology.
Though experts seem wary that DNA-tech savvy teenagers pose an imminent threat, there is the 1995 report of the Detroit Boy Scout building a nuclear reactor at home, using local pitchblende ore and components available at Home Depot. And a National Aacademies report said that high school students routinely do recombinant DNA experiments.
Problems of surveillance
Such worries have undoubtedly strengthened the hand of those who argue that the Bush administration's use of extraordinary surveillance measures is well justified. In particular, the use of network theory might help monitors to zero in on threats, though mathematicians are not unanimous on the efficacy of such programs.
The problem of "false positives" may put monitors in the position of "crying wolf" too often.
Callahan suggested that a new technology was needed, whereby detection equipment was not focused on a single pathogen, but on changes in various pathogens. Callahan is currently heading DARPA research into biowar countermeasures.
Brent urged a "greatly beefed-up World Health Organization" that could be used in efforts to monitor possible biowar activities.
Callahan said WHO's bioterror awareness had improved but Alibek cautioned that "the international community" is inadequately involved in biodefense.
Alibek said DARPA was doing sophisticated work in anthrax defense and urged passing on these countermeasures for public use but Brent said a foe would simply strike with something other than anthrax.
The experience of coping with SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, demonstrates that biodefense authorities are not in an easy position, experts said. In Asia in 2003, the SARS virus killed 10 percent of the 8,000 people who were sickened by it.
Another concern is the possible engineering of pathogens that target specific DNA subgroups, informally known as "races." Since some diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia, are specific to racial type, it is a concern that a malicious group might bio-engineer a pathogen intended to wipe out a particular race.
The witnesses did not discuss the possibility of nanotech terrorism. However, as nanotechnology and nanomedicine gain ground, the fear is likely to worsen.
Nano-computers and nano-machines -- devices that are no bigger than a few atoms -- are in the developmental stages. At some point, they may be used in medicine to enter the body to control molecular interactions. Some have foreseen the possibility of self-replicating nano-robots, which, if misused, could swarm through a victim like a microbial infection -- with devastating results.
In May 2006, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, re-emphasized that "we cannot become complacent" about bioterror threats. Fauci's agency, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, has been undertaking research into vaccines against anthrax and other bioterror threats.
In a Nature article published after the 2001 anthrax attacks -- which killed four people and forced 30,000 others to take antibiotics -- Fauci and fellow agency scientists, pointed out that, in the event of a bio-attack, the appropriate antibiotic regimen and duration of treatment can be uncertain.
The NIAID has identified three categories of potential bioterror agent:
Category A. Anthrax, botulism, plague, smallpox, tularemia ("rabbit fever") and viral hemorrhagic fevers.
Category B. Q fever (carried by livestock), trucellosis, Glanders, ricin toxin and staphylococcus enterotoxin B1.
Category C. Nipah virus, Hanta viruses, tick-borne encephalitis viruses, yellow fever, drug-resistant tuberculosis.
These categories, however, do not adequately address emerging bioterror threats, according to a panel of experts writing for the federally funded National Academies, which focus on science and technology.
Two reports, one in 2004 and another in 2006, by National Academy experts stress the need to develop a comprehensive security structure within the biotech arena, whereby scientists, journal publishers and others continually watch for potential threats from wide dissemination of information.
But, the 2006 report found that censorship is not an easy issue. Commenting on the furor over publication of the method of altering the mousepox virus that made it more vicious and immune to vaccine, the panel said the technology the authors cited -- incorporating the IL4 gene into the mousepox genome -- has been known for decades. Similarly, the panelists said, the synthesis, from scratch, of the poliovirus genome, was accomplished with well-known methods. Though such replication might pose a threat, in this case the poliovirus was considerably weaker than wild strains, probably because of synthesis methods.
Also, the very knowledge that is needed to identify how a pathogen works so that it can be combated is potentially of use to a bioweapon maker, experts say.
The 2006 National Academies report identifies technologies that seek to:
* Acquire new biological or molecular diversity.
* Generate new but predetermined and specific biological or molecular entities via directed design.
* Understand and manipulate biological systems in a more comprehensive and effective manner.
* Enhance production, delivery and packaging of biologically active materials.
Of particular concern are transfer of antibiotic resistance to microbes, modification of a microbe's antigenic properties, modification of a microbe's stability in an environment, and transfer of pathogenic properties to a microbe.
The 2004 National Academies report outlined seven types of experiment that should be watched:
* How to render a vaccine ineffective. A vaccine-resistant smallpox strain could prove devastating.
* How to make pathogens resistant to antibiotic and antiviral drugs.
* How to increase the transmissibility of pathogens, whether within or between species.
* How to alter the range of the pathogen -- that is, making it a danger to more lifeforms.
* How to evade diagnostic testing for a disease, through use of microencapsulation or alteration of gene sequences to change the DNA fingerprint.
* How to enable the weaponization of of a biological agent or toxin. Example: synthesis of the smallpox virus.
A version of this page was first posted on my blog Lifting the veil
I have transferred that page to this url, updated as of Aug. 11, 2010.
Slightly revised Aug. 26, 2010
If you spot an error or have other comment, please
write me at Krypto78@gmail.com.
Press and public remain confused over pivotal events of Cold War
By PAUL CONANT
It may be that the history books are out of sync about Joe MCarthy. So what? That was more than 50 years ago. Who cares?
Interestingly, McCarthy remains a highly charged issue, and he remains relevant. After all, if McCarthy really was thwarted in an attempt to knock out communist subversion in government, wouldn't that imply that the problem may have continued, with ramifications even today?
The fact is that the received wisdom concentrates on "what was wrong with McCarthy" and denies the reality of Soviet subversion and agitprop in America, which continued well after McCarthy's death. (McCarthy is believed to have died from alcoholism, though it is curious that the murders of two erstwhile McCarthy allies, the Kennedy brothers, benefited, among others, the communists.)
How the media handles the McCarthy issue has a lot to do with public perception of how well things are going in America, of course.
M. Stanford Evans in his book Blacklisted by History: the untold story of Senator Joe McCarthy (Random House 2007), cites several instances of what he saw as media bias in coverage of release of Senate executive session transcripts of the McCarthy committee. He says that in his many press releases, Donald Ritchie a Senate historian, "stacked the deck against McCarthy, up to and including glosses that were demonstrably in error." Evans said he discussed the matter of Annie Lee Moss, portrayed as an innocent victim of a McCarthy mixup, with Ritchie but that Ritchie did not correct the record to show that Democrats had staged a trick in order to make McCarthy look bad.
At some point, however, Ritchie included a line on one of his web pages noting that some, such as "M. Staunton (sic) Evans," dissented from his estimate of the Moss case.
http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2003aug/mccarthy.html
Ritchie explained his position in an email to me:
"When I prepared the 160 closed hearings of the McCarthy investigation for publication in 2003, the 500 witnesses did not include two names that have been most associated with the McCarthy hearings, Irving Peress and Annie Lee Moss. In the introduction to volume 5, covering the hearing in 1954, I explained who they were and why they did not appear in the transcripts. A recurring question was how Senator McCarthy winnowed the 500 witnesses in executive session down to the 300 he called to testify in public. Unlike the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which heard from Moss behind closed doors, but not in public, Senator McCarthy called her before the TV cameras. He might not have chosen the public route if he had interrogated her in executive session, but she had been ill at the time. The senator left the hearing midway through her testimony and never followed through with his threat to charge her with perjury if she denied membership in the Communist party. The Army, which had suspended Moss before the hearings, then gave her another job. So, unlike Mr. Evans, I think the case remains ambiguous. I was later asked to write a biographical entry about Moss for the African American National Biography Project, which I’ve included below [appended at bottom of this post]."
Evans wrote that the Moss case was not a matter of mistaken identity, as executive session material bears out and as his own reporting showed at the time of the hearing. Rather, Democratic senators played the case before the TV cameras to make it appear that Moss was a barely literate black woman, who couldn't possibly have been the Army code and cipher clerk with a communist background cited by McCarthy.
In a published summary of the Moss case, Ritchie counters Evans and others thus: "Rather than accept her word, some have speculated that she must have been shrewder and more political than she let on, wearing a mask of innocence to deceive her interrogators. The few reporters who interviewed Moss at her home described a deeply religious woman devoted to her family, church, and community."
Even so, Ritchie doesn't make plain the full extent of the televised deception detailed by Evans, though he does mention Edward R. Murrows' See It Now telecast of the Moss hearing, which was intended to discredit McCarthy and did not explain the Democratic maneuver.
The Army argued that, as a typist for encrypted messages, Moss had no access to classified data. However, such a claim implies that she was in no position to glean sensitive information from fellow employees, vacant desks or scraps carelessly tossed into waste baskets. Whether she did so is unproved. But McCarthy wasn't buying the Army's blow-off, though it appears that it is possible he overstated her role in encryption and decryption. (Ritchie's summary of the Moss case is appended at the bottom of this post; in fairness, I should also append excerpts of Evans' analysis, but I haven't time to enter it.)
Evans also wrote that when Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Wall Street Journal columnist, lashed Ann Coulter for her defense of Joe McCarthy, Evans tried to obtain a clarification. "A letter to the editor correcting this mangled treatment and setting forth some facts about the matter received no acknowledgment, and was never printed." He added that as far as he knew no correction appeared.
Rabinowitz responded to my email query asking about his attempt to gain a correction,thus:
"What efforts are those? Those of his [McCarthy's] advocates seething over the injuries allegedly done Mr. McCarthy's memory are so numerous they tend to elude one's attention."
On the other hand, Evans has long been a substantial voice in conservative journalism, having when younger been editor of the Indianapolis News, which is now associated with the Indianapolis Star, and columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. More recently, he has contributed to National Review and written a number of conservative-oriented books.1 Blacklisted received plaudits from Coulter, whose defense of McCarthy he praised, and the late Robert D. Novak, the conservative columnist ostracized by the journalistic community for doing his job in reporting Valerie Plame's CIA role. (Novak said he had been mentored by Willard Edwards, the conservative reporter who in the 1950s did much to blow the whistle on communist intrigue, but Novak's autobiography, The Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years Reporting in Washington, Random House 2007, says, as I recall, nothing or virtually nothing about using his column to expose true communist subversion -- as opposed to normal liberal activism.)
At any rate, we must acknowledge that despite Evans' credentials, his letter could easily have been overlooked.
Evans also tried getting a correction from the Washington Post's Ken Ringle who wrote a story on release of McCarthy transcripts. Evans said Ringle told him he was satisfied with the interpretation he used in his story. Ringle responded to my query by email:
"I have no idea who Stanton Evans is. I am long retired from the Post, but I very vaguely recall some sort of accusatory phone call years ago from someone concerning a very small and very routine day story about something the National Archives released about McCarthy. Sorry that I can't help you further, but to the best of my memory that was the only story I ever wrote touching on McCarthy, and it was very small beer in a journalistic career of more than 40 years. If that makes me part of the media conspiracy, so be it."
As a former reporter, I can appreciate Ringle's viewpoint.
But I have my own tale to tell. In 1986, I telephoned Eric Pace, a New York Times obituary writer, and asked him why his obituary of Philip C. Jessup contained no reference to Jessup's clash with McCarthy, which resulted in the rejection of Jessup's nomination as U.S. delegate to the United Nations. Pace, who had access to the extensive Times "morgue" of Jessup clippings, had nothing much to say, other than a verbal shrug of the shoulders. He closed the conversation by saying, "Good luck getting it [my article] published." And it wasn't.
I suspect that Rabinowitz went after Coulter because Rabinowitz was worried that Coulter's defense of McCarthy was helping to discredit the war on terror, which was under heavy attack from liberals. I was and am also very much against aspects of that struggle, realizing that 9/11 was without a doubt an inside job that could only be gotten away with via a throttled press. Interestingly, both George Bush and Dick Cheney played the "McCarthy card" (or the Coulter card) by claiming that those who opposed new curbs on liberty were aiding and abbetting al Qaeda.
In her Treason: liberal treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Random House, 2003), Coulter reexamines the 60-year history of the Cold War — including McCarthy's career, the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss affair, and Ronald Reagan's challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" and argues that liberals were wrong in their Cold War political analyses and policy decisions, and that McCarthy was correct about Soviet agents working for the U.S. government. She also argued that the correct identification of Annie Lee Moss, among others, as communists was misreported by that liberal media. (I haven't read her book and am relying on a Wikipedia summary here.)
Coulter's tunnel vision means that she gives liberals no credit for resistance to the communists. A case in point: John F. Kennedy's civil rights act crafted in 1963. That legislation, passed after his death, did a great deal to deprive the communists of a wedge issue. He did not accept the segregationist line that because communists pushed for black equality, therefore desegregation was wrong. In addition, his brother, Robert, as attorney general was highly successful in suppressing the Communist Party by requiring all its officers to register as agents of a foreign power (a rule later overturned by the court of Earl Warren, who headed the Warren commission whitewash).
Be that as it may, it was Coulter's defense of McCarthy that touched off Rabinowitz's famous column, where she wrote:
"Whether Sen. McCarthy actually believed some of the more fantastic charges he made -- charges that brought him instant fame -- remains a question. In 1951 he declared that Secretaries of State George Marshall and Dean Acheson had conspired to deliver China to the Soviets; and, not least, that they and other American leaders had taken part in a conspiracy against the United States, 'a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.' "
Were Marshall and Acheson Soviet agents? The record isn't quite as clear-cut as Rabinowitz seems to think. However, I don't suggest that she's necessarily playing a dual role. Plenty of people are in denial about the possibility of a vast communist conspiracy. It's too scary to think about. It raises the possibility that maybe Kremlin intrigue was involved in the 9/11 attacks, just as it seems to have been involved in the Pearl Harbor attack (in which communist sympathizers in the State Department evidently provoked Japan).
Some weird things were certainly going on in the 1940s. Edward Teller in his Memoirs: a twentieth-century journey in science and politics (with Judith L. Shoolery; Perseus 2001) cites a recollection of Lewis Strauss, a Navy officer during World War II and noted backer of the H-bomb afterward: Navy codebreakers intercepted a message from Tokyo to Prince Koniye, who was in Moscow trying to negotiate terms of surrender. The Russians however weren't interested in Japan's offer and ignored Koniye. The intercept never reached President Truman who was in Potsdam, talking with Churchill and Stalin after the victory in Europe.
Had Truman learned of this, Teller seems to suggest, perhaps the United States needn't have used the A-bomb to such horrific effect. But Truman wasn't told.
I haven't seen Teller's source material. Yet, I can only wonder how such an important intercept failed to reach Truman in Potsdam. Marshall, as head of the armed forces at the time, should have seen it and made sure it reached Truman, and not simply hoped someone in the White House alerted Truman. If Marshall didn't see it, why not?
At any rate, the Russians certainly would have favored keeping the Americans busy in the Pacific while they consolidated their European conquests.
Teller of course goes to great lengths to justify his testimony at J. Robert Oppenheimer's security hearings. Teller said he had planned to back Oppenheimer, despite his communist connections, but had a change of heart when he learned that Oppenheimer had confessed to committing perjury with respect to attempted communist espionage while he headed the A-bomb project.
Teller wrote that he was inclined to dismiss as relevant the facts that "Oppenheimer's former fiancee, Jean Tatlock; his wife, Kitty; and his brother and sister-in-law, Frank and Jackie Oppenheimer, had all been active members of the Communist Party" and the facts that a "large group of organizations to which Oppenheimer had belonged were characterized as subversive" and facts that "he had also been associated with several Communist Party officials, had attended various Communist Party functions, and had contributed $150 every month to the Communist Party, making the last such payment in April 1942."
A major issue was Oppenheimer's intensive lobbying as a postwar atomic policy planner to thwart development of the H-bomb. Teller said he was shocked when Oppenheimer, once an H-bomb was successfully tested, proposed using such a device on North Korean troops, a proposal that seemed to belie Oppenheimer's purported moral opposition. I suggest that, assuming Teller's recollection is correct, Oppenheimer, realizing he'd been bested in the struggle over the H-bomb, tried to cover his hard-left tracks with this anticommunist statement.
Teller relates that an agitated Strauss, then Atomic Energy Commission head, came to him and told him President Eisenhower had ordered him to suspend Oppenheimer's security clearance and hold a loyalty hearing. But Strauss was upset because he feared being identified as a McCarthyite.
What Teller may not have known was that Ike told Strauss to hop on the Oppenheimer case at least in part because the president had learned that McCarthy was on the scent of Oppenheimer.
The point of this discussion of Oppenheimer is to demonstrate that McCarthy's cases were often very strong in substance, though sometimes erring in trivial detail (something that happens to investigative reporters also). On the other hand, the fact that the Oppenheimer matter was sent to Eisenhower by a McCarthy critic demonstrates that McCarthy had a point about high-level influence by people with doubtful agendas. But because Ike was doing something about the Oppenheimer security question, Republican McCarthy was honor-bound not to conduct a duplicative probe ordered by Republican Ike.
Back to Coulter and Rabinowitz. Both these conservative writers, though on opposed sides of the McCarthy controversy, were agreed on the need to assail the "Jersey girls" for raising a rumpus about the 9/11 commission's credibility.
Coulter went so far as to dub them the "witches of East Brunswick" (a New Jersey suburb within the New York City metropolitan region). Rabinowitz wasn't much nicer, suggesting it was time for America (and the press) to start ignoring them.
The four Jersey women, Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza, being 9/11 widows, had been getting fairly strong media coverage and thus had become more than an annoyance to the 9/11 coverup control clique. Who better to go after these women than two women columnists? Neither Coulter nor Rabinowitz would necessarily have realized that they were unwitting dupes of the Kremlin, which, like Israel, has a major interest in maintaining the official 9/11 fictions so as to encourage America's confrontation with radical Islam.
***********************************
Appendix: Ritchie's explanation of the Moss case:
Moss, Annie Lee (9 August 1905-15 January 1996), a Pentagon employee who became a celebrated witness during Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigation of Communism in the government, was born in Chester, South Carolina. One of six children of Katie and Clemon Crawford, tenant farmers, she began picking cotton at the age of five. While in her teens she moved with her parents to Salisbury, North Carolina, where she attended but did not graduate from high school. At twenty-one she married Ernest Moss, a worker at a tobacco factory in Durham, N.C. They had one son.
Moss moved to Washington, D.C. in 1941, where her husband took a construction job and she ironed at a laundry. In 1943 she became a dessert cook for the Welfare and Recreation Association, which assigned her to the Pentagon cafeteria. As a condition of employment, she joined the Washington Cafeteria Workers union, a local chapter of the United Federal Workers of America, later ejected from the CIO for having Communist leadership. In 1943 Anna Lee Moss; cafeteria (subsequently listed as Annie Moss and Annie Lee Moss) appeared in the membership rolls of the Communist party in Washington, assigned card number 37269.
Seeking wartime housing, the Moss family lived for two weeks in a boardinghouse run by a woman later identified as a member of the Communist party. After moving into their own home, copies of the Communist party's newspaper, The Daily Worker, began arriving. When someone came to collect, Moss [said she] refused to pay, insisting that she had not subscribed. In October 1945 her name was dropped from the Communist party's rolls. Seeking a less-stressful, better-paying job, Moss became a clerk at the General Accounting Office in December. When security agents at the GAO asked in 1948 if she had a Communist Party membership card, she handed them her purse, containing only a membership card for the YWCA. Moss was cleared by the GAO's loyalty board [why were they interested?], but a postwar reduction-in-force terminated her job in 1949 [when a number of security risks were forced off the payroll]. She obtained a clerical position with the Army Signal Corps in 1950. The FBI provided the Army with information about her name having appeared on Communist membership lists, but the Army's loyalty board deemed it insufficient grounds for removal. At the Pentagon she operated a telegraph-typewriter that transmitted coded messages.
Moss came to public attention when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by McCarthy, looked into alleged Communist infiltration of the Signal Corps. In 1953 and 1954 McCarthy held hearings in which he made sensational charges about subversion and espionage, and called hundreds of witnesses to testify. In November 1953 the subcommittee staff learned that Army investigators had suspicions about Moss but lacked enough evidence to suspend her. The following February, when McCarthy came under fire for his rough treatment of Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker, he announced plans to expose a civilian employee at the Pentagon who was decoding top secret messages despite being listed by the FBI as a Communist party member. He claimed the case would prove that the Army was placingn known Communists in sensitive positions.
On February 23, 1954, Mary Stalcup Markward, a white woman from Virginia who had joined the Communist party as an undercover informant for the FBI, publicly revealed the name of Annie Lee Moss in testimony before McCarthy's subcommittee. Although Markward had been active in the Northeast Washington branch of the party that listed Moss as a card-carrying, dues-paying member, she could neither place Moss at any meetings nor identify her by sight. She knew only that Moss's address and employment records matched the information in the party's records. McCarthy insisted that the evidence showed Moss to be a Communist. If she denied it under oath, she would be subject to prosecution for perjury. "I am not interested in this woman as a person at all," he explained. "I am interested in knowing who in the military kept her on and promoted her from a waitress to a decoding clerk" (Army Signal Corps Hearings, p. 333). Army officials responded that Moss transmitted only unintelligible coded messages, but nevertheless transferred her to a supply room. She was then suspended but eventually reinstated and assigned to a nonsensitive position outside the Pentagon.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities questioned Moss in closed session in 1954. Finding no proof of disloyalty, it chose not to call her to testify in public. Illness prevented Moss from attending a preliminary executive session before McCarthy's Senate subcommittee. She finally testified under oath at a public hearing on March 11, 1954. She denied having been a member of the Communist Party, having paid dues or attended meetings. A small, frail widow, Moss appeared confused by the questioning. “Did you ever hear of Karl Marx?, a senator asked. "Who is that?" Moss answered, drawing laughter from the crowded hearing room (Army Signal Corps Hearings, p. 458).
Senator McCarthy left the hearing in the middle of her testimony. Moss's appearance represented a public relations disaster for his investigation, since the media portrayed her as a victim of circumstance. On March 16, 1954, Edward R. Murrow devoted his See it Now television show to her story. The program consisted mostly of video from the hearing, with little commentary, making it all the more convincing. The Moss case, followed shortly by the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, contributed to the erosion of McCarthy's credibility and to his censure by the Senate in December 1954.
Moss retreated into anonymity, living quietly with her son and grandchildren until her death in Washington at age ninety. In 1958 the defendant in another investigation sought to disqualify Mary Markward's testimony on the grounds that she had lied about Moss, but the Subversive Activities Control Board concluded that Markward had not been discredited as a witness since an Annie Lee Moss did appear on Communist party rolls. The Board conducted no further investigation of Moss, however, leaving her political past unresolved. Like McCarthy, commentators across the ideological spectrum have shown less interest in Moss as a person than as a symbol. Rather than accept her word, some have speculated that she must have been shrewder and more political than she let on, wearing a mask of innocence to deceive her interrogators. The few reporters who interviewed Moss at her home described a deeply religious woman devoted to her family, church, and community. If she was a symbol, it was of a bewildering era when citizens were presumed guilty until they proved themselves innocent.
1. On Aug. 26, 2010, I made more precise my description of Evans' credentials and deleted a reference to the Heritage Foundation because his association with that outfit cannot be substantiated beyond guest lecturer.
A copy of a March 18, 2002, email to the Reporters Committee:
Hello Ms. Dalglish [Lucy Dalglish, committee executive director],
Though no longer employed by a media organization, I remain a journalist in the sense that I write occasional web essays on free press issues.
Bush's extremism on secrecy is highlighted by his peculiar view of the constitution whereby he employs a de facto line item veto to void a CIA control law. That essay is at:
Bush fiat
http://angelfire.com/az3/nfold/bushfiat.html
By the way, I have found that both my geocities and angelfire web sites seem to get hit with an undue number of bugs. My angelfire site's page counters go up and down erratically, usually in unison. Complaints to Lycos some weeks back have produced no corrections, though in the past I would get an email from their support team saying that a particular bug was fixed.
This kind of annoyance seems to be part of the turf when writing about clandestine agencies. See my Geocities report:
MI6fray [taken down by Geocities].
Also, other special interest groups have the power to cause problems. See:
Pardon [also killed by Geocieties]
(By the way, on the last essay concerning Marc Rich and friends, no response has been received from the Washington Post ombudsman.)
Thanks for your attention.
Paul Conant
AntiPolygraph reports similar problem
On March 25, 2002, Cryptome.org listed Conant's letter.
On the same day, George W. Maschke of Antipolygraph.org sent Conant this email:
Dear Mr. Conant:
I recently found your website via a link at Cryptome.org and I thought I'd share a thought with regard to your hit counter problem. I, too, help run a website that is causing chagrin to officials in a number of three-letter agencies. We have had problems with our hit counters, too, but I have every reason to believe that the problem is with our server rather than any nefarious conduct on the government's part.
On occasion, the file in our server that keeps track of the number of hits becomes corrupted. Another thing that can happen, depending on one's browser, is that one ends up seeing a cached version of one's web page, which falsely creates the appearance that the hit count has gone down. I have personally experienced this on occasion.
I'm skeptical that anyone in the U.S. government is going to the trouble of toying with the hit counter on your site.
Best regards,
George W. Maschke
AntiPolygraph.org
On the same day, Conant replies:
Dear Mr. Maschke:
Thank you very much for taking the time for a thoughtful reply. By taking trouble to write, you help affirm the First Amendment right of unhindered communication, which we all have a duty to strive to uphold, in particular during a 'war on terror.'
I realize the hit counter issue is pretty foggy. However, it's just one of many hassles, computer-linked or not, that I run into as a journalist writing on 'controlled' subjects.
My feeling is that, if no response is forthcoming from Lycos even though previously its support team responded, then that silence is grounds for suspicion. But obviously clandestine forces are rarely so dumb as to leave themselves without a cover story.
Of course, I could cover this hassle like a regular news story, but it seems sufficient simply to draw attention to the fact that hassles come with the turf when discomfiting three-letter agencies.
Best regards,
Paul Conant
Remarks concerning this page on the original Angelfire site:
April 24, 2002 -- A random check of the counters sometime in the morning showed that, they were not going up and down in unison. However, the bug returned a few hours later.
On April 28, 2002, I see that various pages checked record an identical number of hits (364), including a page which is at a separate Angelfire address and which is not listed in the index.
On May 2, 2002, I note that a check from a public access terminal of someone else's Angelfire hit counter along with a check of my sites does not show an equal number of hits with those pages of mine that show equal numbers. That is, the bug seems to affect all my Angelfire web sites, but not someone else's Angelfire web site.
On July 5, 2002, I found an ambiguous posting on Angelfire's 'help' site which seemed to indicate Angelsfire's hit counter system was disabled. However, I never received an email alert to such a problem. Also, Angelfire says that a banner reading 'refuse' appears across the bottom of the page when the hit counter isn't functioning. I've never seen this banner. About two or three weeks ago, all the counters on my pages went to 0 and began to gradually rise. So now portal sites for several of my web pages have higher counts than do my pages.
On July 9, 2002, I added a Beseen Hit counter to this page, with a startup number of 300. I don't expect the rinky-dink to stop, only perhaps to change form.
Later on July 9, I attempted to install Beseen's guest book service, but the promised code is very slow in arriving.
On July 10, still no code, even after several tries, though it is supposed to arrive within minutes of signup. However, I did receive an email entitled 'Message from President Bush' from Jack Oliver of the Republican National Committee.
The unwanted filters are highly political, it seems.
On Aug. 1, I find that Beseen has shut down its free services and will discontinue the free hit counters by Aug. 19. [changed to Aug. 26]. Boy, the feds have all the luck!!!
On. Aug. 20, I tried to sign up for Microsoft's bcentral hit counter service. The registration process was blocked and I could not complete it, despite several attempts.
On Aug. 28, I installed www.digits.com's hit counter, using a low startup value of 250.
Nov. 10, 2011: The hit counter never got over 980.
Psyops against the press
Conant to Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
Bush deploys 'line item veto' to aid CIA
National Missile Defense: Serious technical problems
UN correspondent Ted Morello
Morello targets freedom of the press
Ex-head of Joint Chiefs targets the official TWA 800 theory
The CIA, under Director Bill Casey, tried to blow me off when I sought documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. But eventually, the agency sent me a packet of 900 pages -- even though, unknown to me, quite a few more documents had already been released. The CIA package came damaged, with a tear in it. I realized that this gave the agency an 'out' in the event anything was missing, but I decided to accept it anyway.
The spooks knew I wasn't looking for little green men. They knew I was looking for spooks.
The mass of data compiled from government sources and elsewhere -- I looked at disreputable stuff with caution -- permitted me to write a report that strongly suggested that federal operatives had had a longstanding Cold War policy of promoting and using the flying saucer craze for psychological warfare against -- the American public. My guess is that the justification was that if the KGB plays head games against Americans, then the CIA must protect America, even if it meant counter-head games against Americans.
It appeared that my report didn't land anywhere, though I have discovered that other of my work was published without me learning of that fact until years later. Though the report seemingly wasn't published, it fell into the hands of experienced journalists and hence I suspect it may have enjoyed an underground existence. I hope so, because I no longer have a copy. (If you have one, please send it to me by email or surface mail; my address is at the first Conant page link above.)
During the research phase, I called up a colleague, Ted Morello, a longtime UN correspondent, who had covered some flying saucer nonsense early in his career. He told me he had years previously written a memoir on the entire episode and promised to bring me a copy at a newspaper office where we both worked off and on as copy readers.
But, in my presence, when Morello searched his rucksack for the memoir, he couldn't find it, though he was absolutely convinced he had brought it with him. Later, calling from home, he said he had found the report after all and would mail me a copy.
The envelope containing the report had a return address sticker on it. The name was printed as 'Ted Morrello.'
Though I had felt sure his name had one 'r' in it, I couldn't imagine anyone would be so petty as to falsify anything of that sort. Upshot: An error was introduced into my report, which served a purpose of tending to discredit me as being a sloppy journalist.
Sometime later I happened to see his name in his handwriting in the copy desk per-diem log. One 'r.'
I rushed home and went to my files to retrieve the envelope. His report was still there, but the envelope could not be found.
Proof, of course, is missing. And this all occurred many moons back. In fact, this episode occurred just before the Irancontra affair blew up. Yet, during that scandal and in the years since I have noticed nothing but trivial changes in anti-reporter tactics by the Department of Dirty Tricks. Control of information and sandbagging is what this bunch does for a living. You can't expect them to act in any other way. From their perspective, they're being professional, no matter what the consequences to democracy.
I remember calling up a spokesman at the Reagan White House and complaining about the excessive spook activity around me. His reaction was: If there's a national security concern, these boys shouldn't be on your case. It's the FBI's responsibility. Though he sounded appalled, he didn't react as if I was a crank. As I say, this phone call predated the Irancontra explosion by only a few weeks.
It is many incidents of the sort described that make me suspicious about hit counter problems (see Conant letter above). After all, number of hits on an essay on a 'controlled subject' is political information that could sway decisions of lawmakers and others concerning various three-letter agencies.
Ted Morello's 2007 obituaryhttp://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\07\21\story_21-7-2007_pg7_38
By Paul Conant
Conant is an internet journalist and science buff, not an epidemiologist.
First published ca. 2003
A global population cataclysm should occur no later than 2028 if the Third World pandemic is left unchecked, according to my simple but I think not simplistic calculation. An activist scientist, Andrew M. Sessler, agrees with me on the scope of the problem, though he is wary of the precise numbers (as am I, actually).
Another scientist, James B. Watson of 'double helix' fame, argues in his 2003 book, 'DNA: the secret of life,' that current methods are unlikely to stave off a global AIDS catastrophe, despite effective controls in developed countries. Watson, who heads a genetics research operation, argues that much-feared recombinant DNA technology (genetic engineering) may be the best hope for a fast, efficient counterattack on the HIV virus.
The classic Bernoulli epidemic equation well captures the spread of HIV among the sexually active part of the population, which I roughly estimate at about 1/3.
Here's what I did:
I used a plausible estimate for 1980 of 1 million people infected with HIV worldwide. I then used an estimate of 37 million infected worldwide in 2001. I neglected to figure in the 20 million who have died of AIDS between 1980 and 2001. Such a complication would not tend to lower the rate in the equation.
Another minor flaw in the equation is that we assume a constant population, when in fact it grew from 4.45 billion to 6.08 billion between 1980 and 2001. However, by using two different population figures in the two sample ratios, we implicitly account for population growth. And since the disease is spreading so rapidly in the Third World, where most of the earth's inhabitants live, the population constant is, practically speaking, irrelevant. However, various averaged population constants (in order to account for different rates) give nearly the same curves, with maximum population catastrophe about 2030 or sooner.
Calculation method i The standard equation used was
y(t) = 1/[(1/a - 1)exp(-rt)]
Setting a --for 1980-- at 106/[4.45(109)] = 4450
and y(21) --the proportion for 2001-- at 37(106)/[6.08(109)] = 37/6800
we get r = .1574
This gives the following global infection percentages:
2002: 0.7 %
2003: 0.8 %
2004: 0.97%
2005: 1.14%
*****
2010: 2.46%
2015: 5.26%
2020: 10.87%
2025: 19.17%
*****
2028: 33%
Calculation method ii
I did another calculation based on UN HIV figures for South Africa in 1997 and 2002. The UN percentages are based on adult population, which is defined as persons aged 15 to 49. The UN figures for 1997 and 2002 are 12.6% in 1997 and 20.1% in 2002.
Estimating the adult population again at a third of total population, I plugged in the numbers to obtain a constant of proportionality r = -.09869. (Here I used a slightly different world HIV estimate of 40 million for the initial value.)
The following is a projection of HIV among the earth's total population based on the South Africa figures:
2005: 1%
2010: 1.6%
2015: 2.6%
2020: 4.2%
2025: 6.7%
2030: 11%
2035: 16.2%
2040: 24%
2043: 33%
This HIV scenario is perhaps conservative since overall adult population may well exceed 1/3 of total earth population. (Sorry for not taking the time to dredge these figures up, but such refinements aren't likely to change the picture much.)
The UN reports that when 4% of adults (as defined) have HIV, 35% of adult deaths are tied to AIDS, for an overall adult mortality rate of 75%. When 8% of adults are infected, a person aged 25 to 34 faces a 4/5 probability of imminent death.
That is, we may expect that population catastrophe begins at 1.33% of total population and reaches a crisis point at 2.6% of total population.
However, the UN back-projected its HIV estimate for South Africa to 4.5% of adults in 1994. The Bernoulli equation then gives r at 1.19704 for 1994 to 1997 and r at 0.19386 for 1994 to 2002. Those values would mean 33% of the world population infected by 2003 or by 2020.
The UN of course doesn't use anything so crude as this old-fashioned single variable equation, but rather uses the software program Epimodel, about which I know nothing. Yet we may infer that Epimodel predicts a sharp bulge in infections at around 5% of adults (or 1.67% of the overall population), with the rate tapering off somewhat later. Yet, the 5% mark seems to harbinger a brief but devastating surge in infections. This inference is in accord with a CIA analysis discussed below.
The industrial nations, through use of anti-retroviral drugs, condom availability, routine HIV screening, and aggressive public education will likely keep their AIDS rates low for some years to come. Yet an HIV rate for the rest of the world fast approaching 2.6% of total population points to widespread death through AIDS and famine (not enough healthy workers) and global economic chaos. HIV 'safe zones' face being overwhelmed by refugees from AIDS-blighted regions.
I doubt this forecast is unduly pessimistic. The HIV epidemic began, perhaps in the 1970s, with only a few infected persons in subsaharan Africa, where it spread, essentially unchecked. Depopulation and social breakdown of Botswana and Zimbabwe is near at hand with the same grim fate for other African nations closing fast.
At present, the HIV epidemic is taking off in south Asia and the Pacific. The Caribbean is ripe for a major outbreak.
A 2003 UN report (see also this site) shows that Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia are showing AIDS rates that point to a catastrophic pandemic of the type that has left 11 million African children orphaned.
Interestingly, the UN, faced with the most recent AIDS figures, downwardly revised its global population estimate for 2050 from 11 billion to 9.3 billion. This estimate appears unduly optimistic, perhaps assuming a worldwide campaign to counter the disease.
If the Group of 8 industrial nations lacks the political will to begin emergency intervention on a global scale, the world as we know it will cease to exist within a few decades.
In a September 2002 email, Andrew Sessler, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote, 'Probably [your analysis] is roughly correct, but an overestimate due to self-limiting effects (like running out of healthy people in particular areas, etc.).
'Nevertheless, unless something is done (rich nations giving more than the U.S. is now giving, development of low-cost drugs, development of a vaccine, etc.), the general dimension of the problem is going to be as you say.'
Sessler suggested I search the literature for more accurate projections, which I will only do if I can do so efficiently. At any rate, the purpose of my back-of-the-envelope calculation was to get a picture of the general dimensions of the problem and not to get the most fine-tuned analysis possible.
Aggressive countermeasures, in particular education and condom availability, have worked wonders. Thailand turned its surging rate around, even without much availability of retroviral drugs, and the African nation of Senegal, not noted for sexual abstinence, has long kept its AIDS rate down using such measures.
However, entrenched ideologies may result in terrible consequences. An egregious example is China, where the communist line is one of denial that communist solutions to social problems are ineffective. The communists say, for example, that alcoholism has been pretty much eradicated. Hence, little in the way of treatment or prevention is available for those afflicted with that disorder.
Yet, alcoholism and the closely related phenomenon of drug use, including intravenous drug use, are known risk factors for HIV.
China's official attitude is to play down the significance of the HIV problem, perhaps not wishing to give any propaganda advantage to critics of communism. However, in June 2002, the UN sharply warned China that its do-nothing policy on AIDS would bring disastrous consequences to the people.
China's latest estimate that 1 million Chinese are infected still falls far short of estimates made by foreign observers.
But even accepting the official estimate but using calculation methodii, if HIV is left unchecked, an adult Chinese aged 25 to 34 will have a 4/5 probability of dying in 2033.
Calculation method iii
I was also able to find a figure of 25.5 million infected globally in 1996. Calculating the world population at 5.745 billion for that year, I plugged the numbers into the Bernoulli equation and obtained a much lower rate of infection globally.
These figures give this picture:
2005: 0.78%
2010: 1.07%
2015: 1.47%
2020: 2%
2025: 2.7%
2030: 3.7%
****
2060: 20.5%
However, I suspect that this estimate is much too conservative. That is, the five-year rate for 1996 to 2001 reflects the fact that the HIV epidemic was brought under control in industrial nations since AIDS was detected in 1981. However, the impact of the rate reversal in the industrial nations will be rapidly eclipsed as the disease spreads through the developing nations.
In June 2002, the CIA's National Intelligence Council predicted that the AIDS pandemic will rapidly worsen in the years ahead. Ethiopa's 5% infection ratio was cited as an indicator of a sudden surge in infections.
In news accounts, the NIC did not disclose its estimates of numbers of people anticipated to be infected in future years nor did it reveal what mathematical and epidemiological method was used to arrive at its assessment.
The fact that the estimate is being treated as classified intelligence data suggests that the NIC prediction is closer to the higher of my estimates.
Fox News: trumpet of Israel's hard right
By PAUL CONANT
Copyright 2003 by Paul Conant.
This article may be reproduced in part or in its entirety without charge.
APRIL 21, 2003--Australian-born media magnate
K. Rupert Murdoch holds a U.S. passport. But the policy of the top-rated Fox News Channel and the rest of his News Corp. is the
unabashed promotion of the militarist agenda--including the long-planned war against Iraq--of hard-right Israelis.
The political orientation of Fox, which terms its coverage unbiased, reflects the policy of the so-called neocons, or neoconservatives, who argue that American (or British or Australian) national interests are very close to the national interests of Israel, as interpreted by the Israeli hard right. The projection of U.S. power is seen by neocons as a way of encouraging democracy in the Islamic world, which assists U.S. interests and those interests, they assert, dovetail with Israel's interests. A number of neocons, once referred to by conservative Patrick Buchanan as Israel's 'amen chorus,' hold high-level positions in the Bush administration.
For example, I. Lewis Libby, the longtime lawyer for pardoned Israeli businessman Marc Rich and long an advocate of war against Iraq,
is Vice President Dick Cheney's national security aide.
Roger Alper, writing in Israel's 'broadly liberal' Haaretz, comments on the simple-mindedness of Fox's Iraq war coverage:
'America's Fox News network has been demonstrating since the start of the war in Iraq an amazing lesson in media hypocrisy. The anchors, reporters and commentators unceasingly emphasize that the war's goal is to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The frequency, consistence and passion with which they use this lame excuse, and the fact that nearly no other reasons are mentioned, shows that this is the network's editorial policy.'
Alper notes, 'The American flag lies in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, while the logo accompanying the programming is Operation Iraqi Freedom, the official name given by the Pentagon.' He comments, 'Fox News looks like the propagandistic campaign of systematic disinformation by the Bush administration.'
KNEE-JERK SUPPORT OF ISRAEL
Fox News policy is echoed by the rest of Murdoch's popular media, such as the New York Post and London Sun tabloids. His upper-scale publications, such as the Times of London, are permitted some flexibility, but are unlikely to do much to rock the boat of the Israeli hard right.
Murdoch's association with militant zionism dates at least to the 1960s and his link-up with Jacob Rothschild, the London financier, whose vast assets have gone to support the zionist cause for decades. Rothschild is currently sharing the helm of BSkyB, the British television company, with Murdoch's son, James.
Eric Alterman, writing in the left-leaning Nation, cites Murdoch's Post and influential Weekly Standard magazine, along with top Murdoch writers, 'who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.'
In July 2002, Jason Maoz, editor of the Jewish Press listed John Podhoretz, senior Murdoch editor and writer, among 'Media Friends Top Ten.' Others listed included columnists George F. Will, Cal Thomas and Charles Krauthammer, along with New York Times writers William Safire and A.M. Rosenthal.
Similarly, Americans for a Safe Israel applauded Podhoretz's appointment as the New York Post's editorial page editor, and the American Zionist Information Network lists Podhoretz, a Post writer, under 'reliable columnists.' Other 'reliable columnists' are Will, Safire and Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News, a Post rival, and of U.S. News and World Report magazine. The zionists list the New York Post under 'reliable U.S. media.'
On Sept. 4, 2001, Sam Kiley quit his job as the Africa correspondent for the Murdoch-owned Times of London, charging that Times editors had repeatedly introduced a pro-Israeli bias into his copy on the Palestinian issue. Kiley attributed the bias to Murdoch's well-known political friendship with Ariel Sharon, current prime minister of Israel. Times editor Peter Stothard denied Kiley's charges.
A summary of Kiley's charges appears in Britain's Guardian but the story on his resignation that Kiley wrote for his current employer, the Evening Standard, was not found in a search of that paper's online archives.
MURDOCH'S POLITICAL FRIENDS
Among groups that have honored Murdoch are the Anti-Defamation League, which gave him its Torch of Liberty award in 1977, soon after he bought the Post from Dorothy Schiff and unleashed his British tabloid style on New Yorkers; the United Jewish Appeal, which reportedly honored him at the behest of his political friend Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likudite Israeli politician; and the American-Israeli Friendship League, headed by Zuckerman, which honored him in June 2001. Murdoch's political friend Sharon was the featured speaker at the affair, according to Seth Lipsky, a Wall Street Journal columnist, who left important details to the imagination of the reader.
The political philosophy of Murdoch, who is rather private about his ethnic heritage, is well captured by a talk he gave to the American Jewish Congress in April 1982 in support of Britain's Falklands war decision. According to a biographer, William Shawcross, Murdoch told the audience that the Falklands war had parallels in the Mideast. The issue, he said, was democracy versus dictatorship. Hence, the case for supporting Britain was the same as the case for supporting Israel.
In an April 7, 2003, New York Times story, Murdoch tells reporter David D. Kirkpatrick that his main responsibility is to shareholders. So, if a paper is not performing, it might be necessary for Murdoch to look at its political tone. 'If you have an editor who wants to be a great hero and go against the public will and lose all the readers, the shareholders are going to blame the chief executive.'
The chief executive's media empire was saved from bankruptcy in 1991 by Citigroup, which enforced some harsh cuts, including the forced sale or closing of the bulk of Murdoch's U.S. newspaper and magazine holdings. He had never been able to get his British-Australian style print journalism to turn a profit in the United States. But, the resilient impresario held onto Fox screen and broadcast assets, and engineered a financial comeback.
ENGAGING CHINESE COMMUNISM
In the process, Murdoch regained control of the New York Post, after having been forced to sell it during a cross-ownership dispute. The Post has never turned a profit for News Corp., but gives Murdoch a coveted New York newspaper presence and also gives the hard-right Israeli lobby an important voice in national politics.
Yet, his critics charge, Murdoch is not always the unflinching conservative. They argue that the Chinese communists have found that Murdoch's conservatism is flexible when his financial interests are at stake. Jonathan Mirsky, another ex-correspondent for the Times of London, asserted that Murdoch and his executive son James were 'in bed with the reds,' having bent over backward to mollify China's communist leaders. A 1998 Time magazine report on the controversy over the decision of HarperCollins UK to forgo publishing the memoirs of Hong Kong's last British governor, Chris Patten, says that Murdoch never wanted to publish the book and had disagreed with Patten, an anticommunist, on views expressed. Critics asserted that the Murdochs were appeasing communists in hopes of garnering a share of the vast Chinese market for News Corp.'s television interests.
In a similar vein, a Wall Street Journal editorial features editor monitored the New York Post's coverage of China's seizure of a U.S. reconnaisance plane, and found it wanting. Tunku Varadarajan, writing in the Free Republic of April 9, 2001, noted that the coverage in the normally boisterous tabloid was excessively tame and appeared to be in line with Murdoch's business interests in China.
(The 72-year-old Murdoch's China connections are highlighted by his marriage to Wendy Deng, 32, whom he met at his Hong Kong television firm. The couple resides in Los Angeles, home of Murdoch's 20th Century Fox film studios, with their children. It is Murdoch's third marriage.)
The influence of the Israeli hard right at Fox News is well illustrated by Fox's Special Report with Brit Hume, which regularly uses Podhoretz, William Kristol and Fred Barnes as political commentators. Kristol is the editor of Murdoch's Weekly Standard magazine, which preaches the neocon line of an aggressive policy of promoting Israeli 'democracy' and limiting Islamic authoritarianism. Podhoretz and Kristol, using Murdoch's money, founded the magazine in 1995 and regularly write for it, as do Barnes, Hume and former Rothschild banker Irwin M. Stelzer.
A Weekly Standard editorial of Nov. 16, 1998, entitled 'How to attack Iraq,' urged using an enclave in southern Iraq as a springboard for Iraqi opposition forces.
NO 9/11 EVIDENCE NECESSARY
The signature of Kristol, head of the Project for a New American Century think tank, is featured prominently in a letter of Sept. 20, 2001 to Bush, calling on the United States to wage war against Saddam 'even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack' of Sept. 11.
The writers asserted, 'Israel has been and remains America's staunchest ally against international terrorism, especially in the Middle East. The United States should fully support its fellow democracy in its fight against terrorism. We should insist that the Palestinian Authority put a stop to terrorism emanating from territories under its control and imprison those planning terrorist attacks against Israel. Until the Palestinian Authority moves against terrorism, the United States should provide it no further assistance.'
Signers include conservative Christian ideologues Gary Bauer and Jeffrey Bell (Murdoch owns Zondervan, a publisher of Christian study bibles). Other signers are President Reagan's UN envoy Jeane Kirkpatrick, identified by journalist Jeet Heer as a onetime member of the Social Democrats, a Trotskyist-linked fringe party; Richard N. Perle, the controversial Pentagon adviser; Frank Gaffney, head of the Council for Security Policy, a militant Israeli activist group; Krauthammer, the columnist; and Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter, who helped shaped the neocon movement as editors of the American Jewish Committee's Commentary magazine. John Podhoretz is Decter's son.
On June 14, 2002, Murdoch writer Podhoretz participated in a discussion titled 'Hebrew nationalists: why the U.S. supports Israel' at the Hoover Institution, where he and Norman Podhoretz hold key posts, and is quoted: 'The best thing, the way that peace will be assured in the Middle East is a regime change in Iraq and a defeat of al Qaeda.'
RUMSFELD'S 1998 WAR CRY
A letter of Jan. 26, 1998, likewise urged President Clinton to invade Iraq, citing inspection problems, uncertainty over weapons of mass destruction, and reputed difficulties of a policy of containment. The letter charged that Clinton was 'crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the Security Council.'
Signers included Donald H. Rumsfeld, the current defense secretary; Paul D. Wolfowitz, now number two man at the Pentagon; Perle, who resigned under a cloud as head of the Defense Policy Board; former CIA Director R. James Woolsey who serves on the Defense Policy Board; John R. Bolton, a State Department official; Kristol; and Elliott Abrams, a convicted Irancontra conspirator who is now a key National Security Council aide with zealous pro-Sharon views. Abrams, identified by Heer as a onetime member of the Trotskyist-tied Social Democrats, served with Perle on the staff of the late conservative Sen. Henry M. Jackson.
An April 11, 2002, memo from Kristol to White House officials rebukes unnamed senior aides for seeming to 'launch a campaign against Ariel Sharon's national unity government.'
In May 2002, Kristol told the Washington Post's Dana Milbank that National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice had 'moved over to our side' and away from the proteges of Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser and top aide to Bush's father who had opposed the Iraq attack. 'Our side' included such Murdoch-tied neocons as Libby and Eric S. Edelman, a Cheney aide named ambassador to Turkey.
Murdoch's top neocons:
* John Podhoretz. Fox News Channel contributor. Twice-weekly columnist for the New York Post. Weekly columnist for National Review Online (which is conservative but not specifically neoconservative). Contributing editor to the Weekly Standard. Consulting editor at ReganBooks, an imprint of the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins. Podhoretz left his editorial post at the Weekly Standard in 1997 to take over as editorial page director of the Post. Later he became the paper's arts and features editor, before becoming a full-time columnist.
Podhoretz has worked at Time magazine, the Washington Times, Insight magazine and U.S. News and World Report. He was a speechwriter for President Reagan and a special assistant to 'drug czar William Bennett.'
* William Kristol. Like John Podhoretz, Kristol is the son of an editor of a magazine that helped launch the neocons, sometimes identified as Judeo-cons. Kristol's father, Irving, for years edited The Public Interest, according to several writers, as an outgrowth of his Trotskyism, a form of communism in deadly struggle with Stalinism. (Alliances of Trotskyists and conservative anti-communists date to before the McCarthy years. Jeet Heer of Canada's National Post writes of Trotskyist influence in the White House.) He is chairman of the Project for a New American Century, which identifies hard-right Israeli goals as close to U.S. goals.
Kristol's pull is demonstrated by the $100,000 he received as a member of Enron's Advisory Board before Enron exploded, says Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish.
Before founding the Weekly Standard, Kristol led the Project for the Republican Future 'where he helped shape the strategy that produced the 1994 congressional victory.' Previously, he served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during the first Bush administration and to Reagan's education secretary, William Bennett.
* Irwin M. Stelzer. Known as Murdoch's deal-maker and political go-between, Stelzer is reported to have easy access to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom Murdoch applauded for defying Labor Party and public sentiment and pressing forward on the Iraq war initiative.
Stelzer, according to published reports, headed Enron's advisory board while serving as managing director of the investment banking firm Rothschild Inc., a post he no longer holds.
(The neocons owe a great deal to the political acumen of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, a Texan who was once among the biggest holders of Enron stock among White House aides, according to BBC News. Rove's influence put top GOP strategist Ralph Reed, formerly executive director of the Christian Coalition, on Enron's payroll, the BBC reported.)
Stelzer, whose main interest is business regulation, is a columnist for the Sunday Times, published in London, and the Courier Mail, an Australian paper, both Murdoch-owned. He is also a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and is a member of the publications committee of The Public Interest.
Stelzer, a former economics professor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Prior to joining Hudson in 1998, he was at the American Enterprise Institute, home of a number of neocons, some of whom are now Bush administration officials.
* Fred Barnes. Joined Fox News in 1996 as a political commentator and contributor after a 10-year stint as senior editor and White House correspondent for the 'liberal' New Republic, where he served under owner-editor Martin Peretz, who took it over from Michael Straight, the anti-McCarthy writer who in 1979 was exposed as having been a soviet spy. Since 1974 Peretz has used the magazine to promote Israel's cause and was one of the signers of the Sept. 20, 2001, letter urging Bush to topple Saddam.
From 1988 to 1998 Barnes was a regular panelist on the McLaughlin Group public affairs program. Aside from his work for Murdoch, he is a news correspondent for PBS.
* Brit Hume. Since 1996, Hume has been the managing editor and chief Washington correspondent for Fox News. His political program, 'Special Report with Brit Hume,' regularly hosts Murdoch neocons and tends to favor the GOP. As managing editor, Hume is responsible for Fox's highly skewed pro-neocon news spin. Hume also writes for the Weekly Standard.
FOX SPY STORY STIFLED
However, Hume, who began his career as a newspaperman and went on to spend 23 years with ABC News, on occasion has permitted his reporters to defy the pro-Israeli tone.
In December 2001, Fox's Carl Cameron reported that federal authorities were investigating what appeared to be a ring of Israeli spies who evidently had foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, though Cameron cautioned that the Israelis were not known to be implicated in the attacks. A number of the suspected agents, he said, were active in the Israeli military, while others worked for an Israeli communications company, Amdocs Ltd., that handled virtually all directory assistance and billing data for U.S. phone users. U.S. security officials were concerned that Israeli intelligence was using this data, Cameron reported.
*Cryptome's copy of the Cameron transcripts [scroll down].
*Christopher Ketcham's detailed Salon article on 'the Israeli art student mystery' pulls together various threads of this bizarre story, including the discovery that some of the 'art students' resided for a while in Hollywood, Fla., near the residence of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.
*A copy of a March 27, 2001, 'Drug Enforcement Administration report' [scroll down] on the art students is found at Cryptome.org.
*The ABC News program, 20/20, reported that five young Israelis arrested after filming the trade center disaster were strongly suspected of being Israeli intelligence agents. There were official denials that the Israelis had foreknowledge of the event.
*Activist reporter John Sugg's stories on the 'art students' are found here and here. *The Jewish Forward's Marc Perelman reported on the 'art student' mystery and on the Israelis arrested on Sept. 11, 2001.
The Forward, a Jewish periodical, reported that Jewish groups were planning to contact Fox executives privately over the reports, which were seen as fueling anti-semitism. Fox hastily pulled the Cameron transcripts off its web site and other media outfits pulled discussions of the report from their web sites.
Murdoch in the 1980s employed Patrick Buchanan as a Post columnist. But, after a stint as a Reagan press aide, Buchanan moved to CNN, where he has been highly critical of the neocon Israeli lobby.
A neocon letter-signer and ex-AEI vice president is Bolton, now Bush's undersecretary of state for arms control and security affairs. Bolton's special assistant is David Wurmser, who helped write a 1996 manifesto for Israel's hard right Likud Party that included a call to topple Saddam and weaken anti-Israel power in Syria and Iran. Wurmser was assisted in that policy paper by Douglas J. Feith, now deputy secretary of defense for policy, and Perle, who--despite suspicions of ethics problems--remains a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, though he resigned the chairmanship. Perle is a top manager at Hollinger International, a media conglomerate run by Conrad Black, who like Murdoch congratulated Blair for defying opinion and holding to a war objective. Black owns the Jerusalem Post, London's Daily Telegraph and Chicago's Sun-Times, which Black obtained after Murdoch's unsuccessful tenure.
Wurmser, while director of Middle East Affairs at AEI in October 2001, wrote an article for the Weekly Standard called 'The Saudi Connection,' which linked Saudi Arabia to terrorism.
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a major neocon think tank, lists Feith among those who have served on its board of advisers. Others listed are Cheney, Bolton, Perle and Woolsey.
The related neocon group, the Center for Security Policy, lists Woolsey and Sen. John Kyl* as co-chairs of its national security advisory council, which includes Perle as an adviser. Kyl is an Arizona Republican who backed Netanyahu's 1996 campaign.
Others affiliated with the center are Rep. Christopher Cox of California, Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona, Sen. Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. All are Republicans.
Murdoch has a well-known ease of access to various high-level politicians, such as Sharon and Blair, and, with the opening of a 40-million-pound printing plant in Ireland, Irish Premier Bertie Ahern, who hosted a Bush-Blair meeting on the future of Iraq, is also duly cautious of Murdoch's power. Murdoch's Sunday Times and racy Sun publish Irish editions. Yet, published reports suggest that Murdoch has had trouble maintaining the Sun's circulation at a profitable level.
However, Murdoch's main media aim is to extend his global TV reach. News Corp. owns Britain's BSkyB televsion, America's Fox stations, Asia's Star TV, which boasts 120 million weekly viewers. He has recently put in a successful bid for the DirecTV satellite operation.
Murdoch runs a tangled skein of offshore accounting schemes in order to keep corporate taxes low and in order to take advantage of accounting methods that might be frowned upon in New York or London, it has been reported.
An Israeli subsidiary, News Datacom Research Ltd., in 1998 was assessed 15 million shekels after being investigated for tax fraud.
Murdoch testified on behalf of fellow media owners S.I. Newhouse Jr. and Donald E. Newhouse at their federal tax trial. The government sued the brothers for $1.3 billion after they offered to pay $247 million in taxes from the estate of their father Samuel I., who died in 1979. In 1990, the Newhouses agreed to pay an additional $46 million following a favorable ruling by the tax judge. Though the court viewed Murdoch's testimony on his appraisal of Newhouse holdings as irrelevant, the political effect of the publishers' alliance was incalculable.
*A previous version of this report contained an error in which Kyl was associated with a data mining discussion. Conant apologizes for that error.
'The Strategist and the Philosopher' (Truthout translation of Le Monde article on neocons)
'The Most Biased Name in News' by Seth Ackerman (Extra!)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs targets Weekly Standard
Tom Hayden on the neocons (ZNet)
'The Rise of the Judeo-Cons' by Kenneth R. Weinstein (Azure: Ideas for the Jewish nation)
'The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War' by Michael Lind (New Statesman)
'Origins of Regime Change in Iraq' by Joseph Cirincione (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
'This War is Brought to You by...' by Pepe Escobar (Asia Times Online)
'The Men from JINSA and CSP' by Jason Vest (The Nation)
Neocons urge Bush to treat Arafat as a terrorist
'Doing the Right-Wing Shuffle' by Eric Alterman (Salon)
'Carving Up the New Iraq' by Neil Mackay (Sunday Herald, Scotland)
Marc Rich's media protectors (Paul Conant)
The power of the Israel lobby (San Francisco Chronicle)
Conant to Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
Background on Richard N. Perle (PR Watch); many useful links
'U.S. Iraq policy for dummies' by Bernard Weiner (The Crisis Papers)
Cryptome's copy of a March 27, 2001, report on 'Israeli art students'
'The China syndrome' by Paul Krugman (N.Y. Times column on Murdochian practices)
'Selective intelligence' by Seymour M. Hersh (New Yorker)
The Christian zionist lobby , a report by Donald E. Wagner (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, North Park University)
The Rothschild-Murdoch connection, Margareta Pagano, eFinancialNews
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