There are 6 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Sink the Dubai Ports Deal!
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
2. A Rough Guide to the European Round Table of Industrialists / Big Brothers
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
3. Multinational Experiment 4 in Terror-Lab Afghanistan
From: "Ozzy bin Oswald" <hisholiness@rome.com>
4. The Great Game
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
5. Grave Mysteries (Part Two)
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
6. Chemical Poisoning: Brave New World of Zero Risk
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 10:59:35 -0500
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
Subject: Sink the Dubai Ports Deal!
Sink the Dubai Ports Deal!
by R. Cort Kirkwood
March 20, 2006
(Posted February 28, 2006) Our ports are gateways to America, and it does not make sense to put them under the control of a foreign power -- particularly an Islamic regime tied to al-Qaeda. [Click here for an online letter to Congress to block the Dubai ports deal.]
Like most Americans, President Bush knew nothing, if you believe his tubdrummers, about the infamous plan to cede control of six major American seaports to the United Arab Emirates. Technically, a company called Dubai Ports World (DPW) will run the ports, but given that DPW is state owned, it�s a distinction without a difference. If the deal goes through, an Islamic regime will control shipping on the eastern seaboard of the United States.
Bush isn�t the only one who pleaded ignorance of the deal. Michael Chertoff, the ballyhooed minister of Homeland Security, also claimed hirelings kept him in the dark. What the president knew and when he knew it will remain a mystery, but whatever he knew, he knows enough now to threaten vetoing a suggested congressional measure to investigate the deal. This veto threat comes from a supposed conservative who naively thinks �Islam is peace� and who has never uncapped the veto pen during his five years in office. Not once has Bush seen a spending bill cross his desk that could be cut by a mere penny. But suddenly he sees a bill that merits the veto.
The Bush administration would put a despotic Islamic regime, whose potentates and bankers boast significant ties to al-Qaeda terrorists, in charge of American shipping. If that seems impossible, clearly it isn�t. The deal is yet another plot, approved in secret, which would undermine American national security and sovereignty for the benefit of the transnational political and commercial plutocrats who manage government and business across the globe.
The Ports Deal
For Bush, the scandal began when the British company that manages at least six major American ports, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation, was sold to Dubai Ports World for $6.8 billion. Dubai is one of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which owns DPW, which in turn will manage shipping in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Miami.
Among the operations DPW will manage, the New York Times reported, are �the cruise-ship terminal on the West Side of Manhattan�; the New York City Passenger Ship Terminal; and �one of the biggest cargo terminals in New York Harbor,� the Port Newark Container Terminal. It is �the third-largest cargo terminal on the Port Authority�s property.� Before selling it, the British company owned 50 percent of the container terminal, the Times reported; a Danish company owned the other half, which means UAE, through DPW, now controls half of that operation.
Prior to the latest acquisition, DPW purchased port facilities in the Dominican Republic and Europe from CSX, an acquisition that conferred control of 29 ports across the planet. The latest purchase also gives DPW control of two other ports that haven�t made much news: ports in Beaumont and Corpus Christi, Texas. Those ports, observed former Reagan official Frank Gaffney, who runs the neo-conservative Center for Security Policy, move heavy armor and helicopters for the U.S. Army. Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas) is rightly concerned about the UAE�s controlling American military shipments: �They would have access to every manifest regarding shipping, all cargo going out, what�s on it, where it�s going and all incoming shipping coming back to the port.�
Unsurprisingly, the government secretly sanctioned the deal. �The Dubai purchase was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States,� the Times reported, �which does not usually disclose information about its deliberations.� And just to ice the deal for the high and mighty elites, �in mid-January, President Bush nominated a senior executive of Dubai Ports World, David Sanborn, to run the Department of Transportation�s Maritime Administration. Mr. Sanborn had been running the company�s operations in Europe and Latin America.�
One marvels that Bush appointed an executive of DPW to a marquee position in his administration, yet knew nothing of the deal that the executive�s employer was consummating to establish financial control of major American ports. Also, Bush�s Treasury Secretary, John W. Snow, was formerly the chief executive officer of CSX, which sold its container handling division to DPW in 2004.
But GOP connections to DPW aren�t the only reason the ports deal is suspect. Clan Bush is tightly plugged in to the UAE through several outlets, not least of which is the Carlyle Group, the planetary investment company long known for its relationship to both presidents Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker. Both presidents have worked for the group, and it recently hauled in a cash infusion of $100 million from the state-owned Dubai Investment Corporation.
And if that isn�t enough, presidential brother Neil Bush, the Gulf News reported, has earned plenty of frequent flyer miles jetting to Dubai. On October 14, 2001, just after the attacks of 9/11, Bush landed in Dubai to meet with several high UAE officials, not least of whom was Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, whose importance will be clarified in due course. In January 2002, Neil Bush resurfaced in Dubai to broker the products of his educational software company, Ignite!.
Again, despite these personal and political links to the UAE, Bush knew nothing of the ports deal.
Aside from all this, the Times reported, the deal never received the 45-day review required by U.S. law �when the acquiring company is controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government.� Bush officials, apparently, did not believe the company�s owner, a foreign government, warranted that review. The Committee on Foreign Investment was created specifically to review such transactions, but in any event, the Times reported, American officials conducted �a comprehensive evaluation of the management structure at Dubai Ports World, its operations abroad, and its security plans.�
In his defense, Bush stated that �the people responsible in our government have reviewed this transaction� � a Clintonian circumlocution even the Republican toadies on Capitol Hill did not accept. Thus, they sallied forth to support legislation, which Bush promised to veto, to postpone the sale.
The United Arab Emirates
Average Americans are tugging their chin whiskers, wondering whether Bush and his crew are rowing around with one oar. Politicians right and left are incensed, as are the families of those killed in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. And with good reason. Despite what supporters of this deal say about the UAE�s present commitment to the war on terrorism, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda used the UAE, a small country on the Persian Gulf bordering Saudi Arabia and Oman, as a logistical and financial base of operations for the attacks. Even worse, after the UAE�s alleged conversion to our side, it did not cut ties with terrorists.
A few facts: the U.S. State Department says it is unsafe for Americans to travel there, and if they do so, �should exercise a high level of security awareness.... Americans should maintain a low profile, vary routes and times for all required travel, and treat mail and packages from unfamiliar sources with caution.�
Aside from that, the UAE, particularly its capital city, Dubai, was a stomping ground for al-Qaeda terrorists prior to 9/11. The UAE, unlike practically every other nation on Earth, recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
As well, reported the national commission that studied the attacks on 9/11, �at the beginning of February, Bin Ladin was reportedly located in the vicinity of the Sheikh Ali camp, a desert hunting camp [in Afghanistan] being used by visitors from a Gulf state. Public sources have stated that these visitors were from the United Arab Emirates.�
The CIA planned to strike bin Laden at the camp, but decided not to do so, the 9/11 commission reported, because �policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with Bin Ladin or close by.� In a report published two months after 9/11, the Los Angeles Times divulged who visited the camp in the late 1990s: �Among the reported visitors were high-ranking UAE and Saudi government ministers. According to U.S. and former Afghan civil air officials, the hunters included Prince Turki al Faisal, son of the late Saudi King Faisal. He headed that nation�s intelligence service until late August, maintaining close ties with Bin Laden and the Taliban. Another visitor, officials said, was Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, the Dubai crown prince and Emirates defense minister.� Sheik Maktum is the man who feted Neil Bush, the president�s brother, just about a month after the 9/11 attacks.
Some of those visiting hunters, the Los Angeles Times reported, �heaped donations on their Taliban hosts, officials said � and on Al Qaeda leaders who occasionally joined them.� Nevertheless, the strike against bin Laden was off. One top agent in the field at the time, the 9/11 commission reported, �believes today that this was a lost opportunity to kill Bin Ladin before 9/11.�
In short, because a top official of the UAE was with bin Laden, American officials could not assassinate him. Even worse, it appears UAE officials tipped off bin Laden to the CIA�s surveillance, the report concluded.
�On March 7, 1999, [counterterrorism official Richard] Clarke called a UAE official to express his concerns about possible associations between Emirati officials and Bin Ladin. Clarke later wrote in a memorandum of this conversation that the call had been approved at an interagency meeting and cleared with the CIA. When the former Bin Ladin unit chief found out about Clarke�s call, he questioned CIA officials, who denied having given such a clearance. Imagery confirmed that less than a week after Clarke�s phone call the camp was hurriedly dismantled, and the site was deserted. CIA officers � thought the dismantling of the camp erased a possible site for targeting Bin Ladin.�
The 9/11 commission concluded that UAE might have been a hindrance, not a help, to American counterterrorism efforts. �The United Arab Emirates was becoming both a valued counterterrorism ally of the United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem,� the report said. �From 1999 through early 2001, the United States, and President Clinton personally, pressed the UAE, one of the Taliban�s only travel and financial outlets to the outside world, to break off its ties and enforce sanctions, especially those relating to flights to and from Afghanistan. These efforts achieved little before 9/11.�
The failure to kill bin Laden at the camp in Afghanistan left him free, ultimately, to mastermind and inflict the carnage in New York and at the Pentagon on 9/11. In these acts, too, the UAE helped bin Laden, officially or no, as more than one media outlet has noted in reports on the brouhaha over the ports deal. �Two of the hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks came from the United Arab Emirates and laundered some of their money through its banking system,� the New York Times duly noted. �It was also the main transshipment point for Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear engineer who ran the world�s largest nuclear proliferation ring from warehouses near the port, met Iranian officials there, and shipped centrifuge equipment, which can be used to enrich uranium, from there to Libya.�
As the Associated Press observed two years ago, in a dispatch documenting the UAE�s continuing link to al-Qaeda, 11 of the 19 hijackers came to the United States through Dubai. At least half of the $250,000 the hijackers used to stage their attacks came through wire transfers from banks in Dubai, also the conduits for money used in the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Three years after the attacks, AP reported, the UAE was still the �logistical hub� for bin Laden�s operatives. The UAE, a terrorism expert told the AP, �plays a key role for al-Qaeda as a through-point and a money transfer location.� And an expert on Islamic militants said the UAE wasn�t disposed to �trumpet� its help in the war against terror because its president �cultivates an image as a champion of Arab causes.�
If the devil is in the details, then regardless of the UAE�s role as a �valuable partner� in the war on terror, Bush�s approval of the sale of our ports to the UAE represents a deal with the devil where American security and sovereignty are concerned. And if those aren�t concerns enough for Bush and his understrappers, then perhaps the UAE�s dismal record on human slavery and child welfare needs considering. The UAE is a major destination for women sex slaves, the Bush State Department reported in June 2005, as well as imported child slaves, stolen or purchased from other countries, who serve as camel jockeys. A law passed in April 2005 supposedly outlawed the practice, which features oil-rich sheiks gambling on the races, while the children, who run the risk of being trampled to death, train in the burning dessert, live in hovels, and beg for water.
The Larger Problem
Whatever happens with the ports deal, Americans need to know this latest scheme to undermine American national security and sovereignty is of a piece with nearly everything else this administration has done or failed to do. Bush not only refuses to stop illegal immigration from Mexico, but also suggests a �guest-worker� entitlement that would permit the alien horde to establish a permanent presence on American soil. He also supports handing Social Security benefits to these criminal aliens. The tsunami of illegal immigrants across the southern border poses a domestic security threat not just because so many are drug dealers, rapists, and murderers, but because Islamic terrorists can sneak across the open border unnoticed amid the tide.
Aside from that, the Bush administration hasn�t stopped the unimpeded flow of government-authorized immigrants and visitors from Islamic countries. Frighteningly, columnist Joe Farah recently reported, Bush has sealed a deal with Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz to bring 10,000 Saudi �students� into the United States. It will also permit 25,000 such scholars to enter the United States legally, at the Saudi government�s expense, over the next five years.
Apparently it hasn�t occurred to the president or his spear carriers that these are exactly the kind of visas that some of the 9/11 hijackers possessed when they commandeered two jets and knocked down the World Trade Center, nearly razed the Pentagon with another, and crashed a fourth into the Pennsylvania countryside, having failed to direct their piloted projectile toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Then again, in the wake of the Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the massive consolidation of police power in the hands of the Executive Branch, maybe it has occurred to them.
Thus does the government spend less time performing constitutional and legitimate duties, such as controlling immigration and providing for national security, and more time supporting a massive, intrusive, and unconstitutional �homeland security� agency with the authority to trace the activities of everyone in the country. Granted, the government isn�t likely listening to phone calls from your grandmother, but it has arrogated unconstitutional, illegitimate powers to do just about anything in the name of a constitutional, legitimate function: national security.
In a sense, the furor over spying and wire-tapping Americans is the gun-control issue writ large: because the authorities will not, and in some cases cannot, control criminals, they impose gun-control laws on the law-abiding. In the same way, perhaps if the Bush administration were not waging an unconstitutional war in Iraq, it could spend more time and money controlling immigration here, which would obviate the unconstitutional, garrison-state security measures that harass law-abiding citizens.
The government now wants to scrutinize the private lives of all Americans: their financial transactions, their e-mail, their phone calls, and their political activities. Someday, the government may force real Americans to carry identification cards. Already, uniformed federal police search old ladies at airports and harass men who have received the nation�s highest decoration for bravery � gumshoes confiscated a Medal of Honor from the late General Joe Foss, the former governor of South Dakota, who received his decoration from Franklin Roosevelt for his heroics as a fighter pilot in the skies over Guadalcanal.
Thus has Bush promised to veto a bill that would provide some measure of national security, and a cadre of internationalists and global elites who care nothing for American sovereignty support him. For instance, blithely dismissing the obvious national security dangers in the DPW sale, the neo-conservative globalists at the Wall Street Journal pray he keeps this promise.
The Journal penned a sardonic, imperious, and disingenuous editorial that lampooned the justifiable reaction to the sale, implying that racial profiling and �politics� are behind it. A British company was running the ports until now, they reminded readers, and British citizens were responsible for the bombings in London last July. On the other hand, they said, having arrested a terrorist or two, the UAE is an ally in the war against terror. DPW will control only commercial operations, they averred, not security operations. A company in Florida that lost the bid to buy the British company filed suit to stop the sale to DPW. No wonder Miami�s mayor, they concluded, objects to the sale, disguising his obvious political and commercial motives with faux distress over national security.
The Elites and Their Plan
All of which means nothing. The glib rejoinder that a �British� company ran the ports and �British citizens� bombed the London Underground is a bird that won�t fly. Just as the owners of DPW are not British, the bombers were not British in any meaningful way. They were Arab Muslims whose only claim to �citizenship� was a piece of paper. Culturally, religiously, and ideologically they were fiercely devout Muslims, and they acquired the opportunity to carry out their despicable and deadly deeds partly from the specious dogma, held by capitalist liberals at the Journal and multicultural leftists alike, that human beings are interchangeable cogs in the global gears and that anyone can be a �citizen� of any country.
However treasured an ally in the war on terror the UAE is, the Journal cannot speak for its citizens who are Muslim. Nor can it speak for DPW employees, Muslim or no. For the purpose of running our ports, unlike a British company, a company owned by an Islamic regime, particularly one with the UAE�s record, cannot be trusted. Call that profiling or anything else, but the payroll of employees running these ports won�t comprise British gardeners, Scottish pipers, and Irish poets.
Average Americans might wonder why any foreign company, state-controlled or not, is running an American port, the way companies from Singapore, Japan, and Denmark run them now. To the enlightened philosophes at the Journal, foreign control of U.S. assets is only natural; national sovereignty is obsolete. In the �global marketplace,� goods and services and land and factories are sold like Corn Flakes to the highest bidder, creed and country of origin regardless. Americans are rightly dispossessed of their patrimony of wealth and culture, of their harbors and homes, of their very birthright of citizenship, by Mexican migrants and Meccan merchants whose only experience with America is Eminem and M&Ms.
Thus, this sale. It is another piece of the plan, which includes subverting national sovereignty via immigration and billion-dollar global transactions, to cede control of American business, government, and institutions to the corporate, political, and cultural elites who contrived and command the plan, and will augment their considerable powers at the expense of the consumers and taxpayers who unwittingly support the nefarious enterprise.
It mightn�t matter to Bush and Wall Street�s elite who runs America�s harbors, industry, and commerce. But it might just matter to the average Joe, who wants physical security for his family, a job that pays a living wage, and an economy that flourishes � not wilts. Americans must ask themselves: �Would anyone approve this mad idea for the ports but a man who has gone mad, or a man who isn�t mad at all but perfectly sane, whose loyalties lie not with his people and his country, but with a grandiose liberal abstraction that travels hidden under such disingenuous names as equality, democracy, rights, and freedom?�
Further, Americans must ask themselves: �Despite blustery claims from defenders of the Bush administration that Bush is doing what�s right, is the administration loyal to U.S. citizens and doing what�s right for them, or only to itself and to the rootless elites who empower it and thereby profit from the concentration of political and financial power among the few at the expense of the many?�
An empowering of the elites in our society would explain the threat to veto. Until the average American understands this truth and does something about it, he will toil in futility for Bush, Cheney, and the elites who are plotting America�s demise.
R. Cort Kirkwood has been writing about American politics and culture for more than 20 years.
What You Can Do
Readers are encouraged to contact their U.S. senators and representatives urging them to pass legislation blocking the Dubai Ports deal. To send your letter via e-mail click here.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_3462.shtml
[This message contained attachments]
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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 13:08:42 -0500
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
Subject: A Rough Guide to the European Round Table of Industrialists / Big Brothers
A Rough Guide to the European Round Table of Industrialists
January 30, 2006 17:54 | by Dr Noel Currid
The European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) has been in the forefront of encouraging further EU integration for over twenty years. However, many EU-critical campaigners appear unaware of the ERT. Intended to increase awareness, this article will merely sketch the ERT and its activities. Making no claims to originality, [1] the article briefly examines the ERT's origins; its structure; its world-view and working methods; and its "achievements".
The ERT's origins
In the early 1980s the erstwhile European Economic Community was unable to respond effectively to the economic "stagflation" which Western Europe had been suffering from for almost a decade. At the same time there had been little movement towards further integration within the EEC. However, Pehr Gyllenhammar, Volvo's Chief Executive Officer (CEO), started campaigning for an overall scheme "to spur growth, and build industry and infrastructure" in Western Europe. Working closely with Fiat's Umberto Agnelli, Philips' Wisse Dekker and the then EEC Industry Commissioner Etienne Davignon, Gyllenhammar drew together a group of leading European CEOs into the ERT with the objective of "relaunching Europe." Gyllenhammar declared "Europe really is doing nothing. It's time for the business leaders to enter this vacuum and seize the initiative," [2} while Dekker argued that "If we wait for our governments to do anything, we will be waiting for a long time. You can't get all tied up with politics. Industry has to take the initiative. There is no other way." [3] In April 1983 the ERT's inaugural meeting was held.
The ERT's structure
The ERT now has 50 members, representing companies from 18 European countries, including three non-EU states (Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey). [4] Its current chairman is Gerhard Cromme of Thyssenkrupp, with Alain Joly of Air Liquide and Jorman Ollila of Nokia as Vice-Chairs. Other companies represented on the ERT include DaimlerChrysler, Ericsson, Fiat, Nestle, Renault and Siemens. Membership is personal, rather than corporate, and strictly invitation only.
ERT members meet in twice yearly plenary sessions, which determine the ERT's work programme and priorities, budget and publications. Decisions are made by consensus. Much of the ERT's work is done by Working Groups established at Plenary Sessions. [5] The ERT's Secretary General is in charge of a small Brussels-based secretariat which co-ordinates projects, acts as a contact point, provides administrative support and publishes ERT reports. [6]
"This is not just another lobby organization" (Pehr Gyllenhammar)[7]
The ERT may sound like just another pressure group lobbying Brussels. However, it was formed with the express intention of furthering EU integration and shaping it to benefit those European-based transnational corporations with "a significant manufacturing and technological presence worldwide" represented on its board. The ERT believes that "industry is entitled to...an EU which functions like an integrated economic system with a single centre of overall decision making." [8]The ERT has consistently supported the removal of national vetoes and of other forms of "fragmentation" within the EU: "The problem is that in the individual countries the politicians have to gather votes". [9] By way of analogy, "The United States could do nothing if every decision had to be ratified by 52 [sic] states". [10] At the same time the ERT claims to be primarily interested in the economic consequences of further EU integration, and not be overly concerned with the political consequences: "Our job is to say that potential gains are much more important...It is not for us to make speeches about the political unity of Europe." [11]
The ERT is also distinctive from other lobbying groups, as it does not bother with detailed legislation: "We don't deal with national issues. We only talk about the overall questions." [12] It is also distinctive in its ability to gain access to major players in the EU, both at national and supra-national level. The ERT's website boasts that:
"At European level, the ERT has contacts with the European Council, the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.
"Every six months the ERT strives to meet the government that has the EU presidency to discuss priorities.
"At national level, each member communicates ERT's views to its own national government and parliament, business colleagues and industrial federations, other opinion-formers and the press." [13]
In short, the ERT's aim is to set the agenda at the highest levels of the EU, most notably the European Commission The evidence of two decades suggests that it has been extremely successful.
The Irresistible Rise of the ERT?
By 1993 "Other lobby groups, when questioned about the influence of the ERT, respond[ed] that the ERT is no longer a lobby group, but has become part of the EU apparatus." [14] There seems a fair amount of evidence over the past two decades to support this assertion.
The Single Market: For Jacques Delors, the ERT was "one of the main driving forces behind the Single Market." [15] In late 1984 the European Commission put forward a package of proposals to remove trade barriers within the EEC, eliciting little enthusiasm from either member governments or business. However, in January 1985 Wisse Dekker published Europe 1990: An Agenda for Action, which proposed eliminating trade barriers, harmonising regulations and abolishing fiscal frontiers within the EEC by 1990. Europe 1990 was part of an ERT document Changing Scales, which was sent to EEC heads of state. Three days after Dekker presented his Europe 1990 initiative, the newly appointed Jacques Delors delivered a speech to the European Parliament closely matching Dekker's proposal. A few months later, Industry Commissioner Lord Cockfield published his White Paper, the basis of the Single European Act, which postponed the ERT's 1990 deadline for internal market completion until 1992. However, the ERT had achieved its main aim.
Trans-European Networks (TENs): From its beginning the ERT regarded the development of "A single interacting system or meganetwork with a single output - mobility" as a top priority. [16] Claiming that existing infrastructures formed a barrier to unrestricted flows of goods in the single market, the ERT argued alongside the Commission for the adoption of TENs, the largest infrastructure plan in history. TENs includes the Channel Tunnel, numerous airport expansions and 12,000 kilometres of new motorways. Through an intensive lobbying campaign, which specifically targeted national transport ministers, the ERT helped put TENs squarely on the EU's agenda, culminating in the inclusion of TENs in the Maastricht Treaty. In 1991 the ERT published Missing Networks, which advocated the introduction of "user charges�to distribute the funds for improving effective transport" i.e. toll roads and road pricing. [17]
The Maastricht Treaty: the ERT was very active during the 1990-1 Intergovernmental Negotiations for the Maastricht Treaty, meeting regularly with Commissioners and national policy makers. As early as 1985 the ERT had argued that the internal market could only be completed by introducing a single currency. The timetable for EMU implementation in the ERT's 1991 Reshaping Europe report is very similar to that contained in the Maastricht Treaty. In 1995, the ERT "wrote a formal letter to all heads of government saying 'When you meet at the Madrid Summit, will you please decide once and for all that monetary union will start on the day agreed at Maastricht and with the criteria agreed at Maastricht.' We wrote to them, we asked them to do that. And they did it. They put out an announcement in Madrid and said exactly that: 'We will do it.' " [18]
The ERT post-Maastricht: In 1993 the European Commission put forward Delors' White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness and Employment. At its media launch, Delors thanked the ERT for its support in its preparation; a week earlier he had taken part in the ERT's press launch of its similar report Beating the Crisis. Furthermore, Beating the Crisis suggested the creation of a EU-wide body based upon President Clinton's Competitiveness Council. In February 1995 the EU set up a Competitiveness Advisory Group. Under Jacques Santer relations between the ERT and European Commission continued to be warm, since "By and large, our priorities are the same." [19] The ERT was largely happy with the outcome of the 1997 Amsterdam summit, after heavy lobbying, especially by the strengthening of the Commission President's powers, which would "minimise that lack of coherence within the Commission which makes life so hard for industry." [20] At the same time, the ERT was strongly supportive of the EU's expansion into Eastern Europe: "it is as if we had discovered a new South-east Asia on our doorstep." [21]
The ERT in the new Millennium: Prospects & Problems
On June 23rd 2003, the ERT held a 20th Anniversary Reception at the Palais d'Egmont in Brussels, with Romano Prodi as guest of honour. In a speech there, ERT Chairman Gerhard Cromme declared that the ERT "is proud of having being at the forefront of advocating these reforms [single market, EMU and EU enlargement] and of what the Union has achieved. Nevertheless, much remains still to be done..." [22]
In the new Millennium the ERT has continued to press for further integration, and has called for more powers to the European Commission. In 2002 the ERT told members of the convention on the EU's future that a stronger Commission was "vital", since it was "the genuinely Europe-focused institution and the one most capable of articulating the common European interest above national and regional interests." The ERT also opposed any erosion of the Commission's powers in economic affairs through their transfer to EU member states or to a system of shared responsibility. [23] For ERT's Wim Philippa "the Commission must fully retain its current executive powers". [24] With the proposed EU Constitution ensuring that the Commission would keep the sole right to proposed new laws (Article I:26) and firmly establishing the primacy of EU laws over those of national governments, (Article I:7) [25] the ERT's wishes on the the EU's political front appear to have been granted.
However, as Gerhard Cromme has recently commented, [26] the push for EU political integration in recent years has not been matched by sufficient changes in the economic sphere for the ERT. The ERT welcomed the call at the March 2000 Lisbon European Council to make the EU the "most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010: [27] not surprisingly, as it had been heavily involved in the meeting's preparation. In 2000, ERT member Daniel Janssen declared that implementing the Lisbon proposals would cause a "double revolution" in Europe: "reducing the power of the state and of the public sector and deregulation" and "transferring many of the nation-states' powers to a more modern and internationally minded structure at European level" i.e. the European Commission. [28]
In reality, even by 2002 "The vision of Lisbon is slipping as fast at it was decided and the commitment is no longer there."[29] Before the March 2005 EU Summit, where the "Lisbon agenda" was discussed, the ERT wrote to the European Council, calling upon the EU to back the European Commission's call for a "New start for the Lisbon strategy". [30] Furthermore, the ERT was unhappy about the "Lisbon agenda" being downplayed to increase the chances of the EU Constitution being approved in referendums. [31]
The ERT described the French and Dutch votes against the EU Constitution in the early Summer of 2005 as a "wake-up call." However, the ERT did not regard these votes as a signal that the process of EU integration should slow down:
"The results demand an immediate, constructive and determined response from the heads of government of Europe. It is time for positive leadership to engage public support, restore economic dynamism to the single European market and allow Europe to act with confidence and conviction on the world stage." [32]
That is, the ERT saw the crisis over the EU Constitution as another opportunity to push the EU further towards the goals it has been advocating since 1983.
By way of a conclusion
Hopefully, this brief tour of the ERT's activities over the years shows that is an extremely important player in moves pushing us towards a de facto United States of Europe. The ERT has been able to achieve many of its aims in alliance with the European Commission, an undemocratic, bureaucratic and unaccountable body par excellence. The ERT is no friend of the rights of Europe's peoples to democracy and self-determination. For the ERT, the bigger the EU's "democratic deficit", with the Commission plugging much of the gap, the better.
Dr. Currid is Chairman of Kilburn Democracy Movement (drnoelcurrid@btinternet.com)
1 The article draws a great deal upon Belen Balanya et al (2003) Europe Inc : Regional & Global Restructuring & the Rise of Corporate Power (London: Pluto Press). Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this article can be found in Chapter 3 of Europe Inc: "Writing the Script: The European Round Table of Industrialists," pp.19-36.
2 George Monbiot (2000) Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (London Macmillan), pp.320-1.
3 Newsweek 28 March 1983, quoted in "European Round Table (ERT): agenda setting for the EU" Corporate Watch magazine Issue 12 (Autumn 2000).
4 A full list is available at the ERT website There are seven representatives of British companies: Paul Adams, British American Tobacco; Martin Broughton, British Airways: Tom McKillop, Astrazeneca; John Rose, Rolls-Royce: Peter Sutherland, BP; Ben Verwaayen, BT; & Paul Walsh, Diageo.
5 There are eight at the moment: Accounting Standards: Competition Policy; Competitiveness; Employment/Industrial Relations & Social Policy; Enlargement & Neighbourhood Policy; Environment; Foreign Economic Relations: & Taxation. http://www.ert.be/pd/pdb/endb00.htm
6 http://www.ert.be/pc/enc03.htm
7 Newsweek 18 April 1983, quoted in Corporate Watch, op cit.
8 Keith Richardson, former ERT Secretary-General, quoted in Balanya et al, op cit, p.20.
9 Caroline Walcot, former ERT Assistant Secretary-General, quoted in Balanya et al, op cit, p.20.
10 Keith Richardson, quoted in Balanya et al, op cit, p.62. The reference to 52 US states was in the original. Would you trust the advice of someone who got such basic political facts right?
11 Keith Richardson, quoted in Balanya et al, op cit, p.31.
12 Keith Richardson, quoted in Balanya et al, op cit, p.20.
13 http://www.ert.be/pc/enc03.htm
14 Ann Doherty & Olivier Hoedeman (1994) "Misshaping Europe- The European Round Table of Industrialists" The Ecologist, Vol.24, No.4 (July/August).
15 Balanya et al, op cit, p.22
16 Balanya et al, op cit, p.22
17 Doherty and Hoedeman, op cit.
18 As the ERT's 1991 document Reshaping Europe put it more succinctly: "Japan has one currency. The US has one currency. How can the Community live with twelve?" ibid.
19 Balanya et al, p.25.
20 Keith Richardson, quoted in Balanya et al, op cit, p.62.
21 Keith Richardson quoted in Balanya et al, op cit, p.29.
22 http://www.ert.be/pd/pdb/endb600.htm
23 Paul Betts (2002) "Business chiefs seek stronger Commission" Financial Times 26 June, p.8
24 Interview with Wim Philippa EuroActiv.com, 18 May 2003.
25 Information c/o Democracy Movement.
26 Hugh Williamson (2005) "Companies hope to loosen their chains" Financial Times, 14 March, p.12.
27 http://www.ert.be/pg/eng00.htm
28 Balanya et al, op cit, p.xx. Janssen was speaking to a Tokyo meeting of the Trilateral Commission.
29 Morris Tabaksblat, Reed Elsevier chairman, quoted in Betts, op cit, p.8.
30 <http://www.ert.be/pdf/ERT Message to Spring Council 2005- Letter to PM Juncker.pdf>
31 Williamson, op cit, p.12.
32 http://www.ert.be/ERT press release -EU Constitutional Treaty.pdf
See also
http://www.spectrezine.org/europe/corporateeurope.html
http://www.spectrezine.org/europe/Denny3.htm
http://www.spectrezine.org/europe/currid.htm
~~~
Big Brothers
February 14, 2006 11:21 | by Alfred Mendes
It is not only developing countries which are seeing their vital national assets sold off to multinationals, as Alfred Mendes shows.
It is becoming increasingly clear that foreign nations, such as Germany, France and, particularly America, are gaining control of crucial public sectors of the British economy. However, in an article of this length, only three intriguing examples will be considered:
In 2001, the Defence Evaluation & Research Agency (DERA) of the British Ministry Of Defence (MOD) was split into two: the Defence Scientific & Technical Laboratory (DSTL); and the QinetiQ Group plc, formed as a result of the Ministry of Defence's decision, in 1998, to privatise a crucial section of its research department. (This mirrored exactly what the American equivalent of DERA - the Defense Advanced Rearch Projects Agency [DARPA] had previously done). QinetiQ's owners were the notoriously prestigious American private equity firm, the Carlyle Group.(1)
Carlyle had bought a 33.8% stake from the MOD for �42.2 million. In 2005, it now holds a 31% stake worth about �340 million - having, in the year to 31st March 2005, made operating profits of �69 million from a turnover of �872 million. And, as recently reported by the BBC, the Defence Secretary, John Reid, stated "the government is to sell its majority stake in defence firm QinetiQ and float the business on the stock exchange". This sale is expected to raise �1.1 billion in February 2006. This has not pleased Prospect, the union representing the workers at QinetiQ, but it has pleased others - such as Dame Pauline Neville-Jones who, as reported in the Independent on Sunday (IOS) of15th January 2006, stands to 'make around �400,000' from the sale as a result of her acquiring a 0.04% stake in QinetiQ, and subsequently serving as non-executive Chairman of the company until she retired last summer. From 1991 to 1994 she was Head of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the Cabinet Office and Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, as well as serving as Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee from 1993 t0 1994; from 1998 to 2004, she served on the board of BBC governors; and she recently became policy adviser to David Cameron. For his part, the Chairman of QinetiQ, Sir John Chisholm, stands to gain �24 million from the sale.
It is important to note that the nature of QinetiQ's research bears all the hall-marks of 'Big Brother' The following is not a comprehensive list:
(a) The introduction of identity cards to British citizens;
(b) The development of Zephyr 3 solar-powered space satellites; and
(c) introducing the US system Praetorian (which is currently operating at airports in the US) to the UK. This is a system which "automatically tracks and stitches 3D images with CCTV video, maps, and other real-time information, and alerts operators to intruders, unusual behaviour, left objects or anything it is told to spot" (2). 'Big Brother' indeed!
To assist in gaining a proper perspective of the foregoing, it should be added that Carlyle is both a pivotal defense contractor to the Pentagon, and owner of the CIA-front company -Vinnell Corp. (of Saudi Arabian notoriety). (3)
Another example of America's intrusion on to the British scene is worthy of note at this point. As revealed by the IOS (once more) of 8th January 2006, the London Transport Commissioner, one Bob Kiley - an American - after five years service, would be stepping down at the end of this month. However, the Managing Director of the London underground, one Tim O'Toole - an American - who had been favoured to become Kiley's successor, had apparently decided not to run for the job. As a result of this, the transport finance chief, Jay Walder - another American! - would now be one of two candidates for the job. On the face of it, an extraordinary situation - made even more intriguing when it is recalled that Bob Kiley had served in the CIA from 1963 to 1970, first as Manager of Intelligence Operations, and then as Executive Assistant to the notorious Richard Helms. (4)
To quote from the same IOS report: "Controversially, Mr Kiley will remain on TFL's payroll for three years after he steps down - earning �736,000 in consultancy fees. He will also be able to remain in the �2.I million house in Belgravia that was bought for him by TfL and where he lives rent free". This is certainly controversial!
At this point, enter Germany and France on to the British scene - in the form of E.ON and Electricit� de France (EDF) respectively.
As a result of the British government's privatisation of its electricity industry in 1998, E.ON subsequently took over control of Powergen, the UK's leading energy company. E.ON is a German company which, in its own words, is "the world's largest investor-owned energy services provider". Indeed, as if to back this claim, it also acquired the American LG&E Energy Corp (now known as E.ON US) in 2000. (5) Moreover, as reported in the IOS of 15th January '06 (once again!), E.ON, made three bids last year to take over Scottish Power - all rejected - but, inasmuch as Scottish Power has since replaced its CEO with one Philip Bowman, it now makes it more likely that E.ON's next expected bid will succeed. An intriguing little addendum: Bowman "has admitted he knows little about the utility sector". Just the man for the job!
London Electricity was taken over by the French EDF Group in 1998, out of which grew EDF Energy in 2003. It covers London, East of England and the South East, thus making it "the 5th largest electricity generator in the UK". Intriguingly, (to quote their own words): "As a subsidiary of EDF Group, EDF Energy is not listed on the London Stock Exchange and so we are not obliged by law to comply with Stock Exchange rules". This EDF Group is one of the key players in electricity generation world-wide, but perhaps its most intriguing company is the EDF International North America (EDF INA), which is a member of the American company NuStart Energy Development LLC., which was formed in 2004 for both "obtaining a Construction and Operating License (COL) for a new nuclear plant in the USA - and completing the design engineering for selected radar technologies". (6) This is hardly surprising, given that France is dedicated to the use of nuclear energy. And, as EDF is now operating in the UK, are we not thus justified in suspecting that there is a causal relationship between that fact and the strong 'feelers' recently put out by the British government for resuming the use of nuclear power plants in this country?
The foregoing illustrates that Britain is no longer in 'hands-on' control of much of her economy - like so many other nations - including the so-called 'developed nations'. This is understandable, in view of the fact that we are living in an increasingly globalised system of capitalism - the source of which is "big brother' America - who now considers himself the 'policeman-of-the-world'. For which we have to pay an unacceptable price - namely, the loss of democracy.
Implicit within the term 'democracy' is that the elected representatives of a fulfill their responsibilities to their electorates using a 'hands-on' method of control - such as nationalisation. This is impossible within a capitalist system with its comcomitant 'privatisation', and, as proof of this, one needs only a brief look at that epitome of so-called 'democracy', America, whose 'elections' are either bought or manipulated (using the computerised DRE system), and whose Administration is an un-elected, appointed group so closely connected to the corporate establishment that it is therefore imbued with conflicts-of-interests - better known as corruption.
William Engdahl, in his article "Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax?", noted that the US Senate had, in October '05, passed an $8 billion emergency funding bill to address the growing Avian Flu panic - in the course of which debate the Health & Human Services secretary, Mike Leavitt had told the press "If it isn't the current H5N1 virus that leads to an influenza pandemic, at some point in our nation's future, another virus will". It transpires that a drug which might possibly help in dealing with the flu, named Tamiflu, had been patented in 1996 by a Californian firm, Gilead Sciences Inc. - who had subsequently given its marketing rights to the Swiss pharmaceutical firm, Roche. It further transpires that Donald Rumsfeld had sat on the board of Gilead from 1988, and subsequently served as chairman from 1997 to 2001 - when he was appointed Defense Secretary. He is reported to be one of the largest stockholders in the company today. The article adds: "President Bush has ordered the US government to buy $2 billion worth of Gilead Science's Tamiflu".(7)
One fact is undeniable today: every July the 4th the US flag has been flying in the many US military and Intelligence bases throughout nations in Europe (including Britain), and the Mid, Near, and Far East - none of it to the benefit of those host nations - Iraq and Afghanistan in particular! Moreover, this but mirrors the fact that Britain, under the banner of its Union Jack, had, in its day of Empire, colonised and enslaved, both literally and figuratively, a number of countries (one of which happened to be the birthplace of this author). On the face of it, it would therefore seem somewhat puzzling that George Brown, in his recent speech to the Fabian Society calling for the establishment of a day celebrating Britain's national identity by waving the Union Jack in a manner similar to the American July the 4th celebration, is, at the very least, untimely - inopportune. But it is merely another example of the subordinate role Britain plays vis-�-vis her ally, America - that 'special relationship'. Of one thing we may be sure: those famous Fabians, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, must be agonising in their graves!
Alfred Mendes writes frequently for Spectrezine.
(1) http://www.spectrezine.org/europe/QinetiQ.htm
(2) http://news.bbc.co.uk
(3) http://www.spectrezine.org/global/carlyle.htm
(4) http://www.spectrezine.org/war/Mendes9.htm.
(5) http://www.eon.com/
(6) http://www.edfenergy.com/
(7) global research
http://www.spectrezine.org/global/Mendes2.htm
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Message: 3
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 11:27:36 +0800
From: "Ozzy bin Oswald" <hisholiness@rome.com>
Subject: Multinational Experiment 4 in Terror-Lab Afghanistan
Multinational experiment will yield real change, officials say
More than 800 people working together from around the globe will examine
asymmetric threats, stability operations and reconstruction during
Multinational Experiment 4 beginning in late February.
By Army Sgt. Sara Wood
American Forces Press Service
(WASHINGTON - Feb. 13, 2006) -� The latest in a series of multinational
experiments will use hypothetical events to help U.S. government and
coalition agencies coordinate planning and will translate to real-world
change, two U.S. officials working with the program said here today.
Multinational Experiment 4, which runs Feb. 27 to March 17, will involve
800 people from eight countries and NATO, and will use the context of
Afghanistan to practice civil-military coalition processes, said Army Lt.
Gen. John R. Wood, deputy commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command.
"The idea here is to practice together and prepare ourselves for joint
interagency and multinational environments of the future," Wood said.
"This is so critical to success of our future coalition military
mission."
In this experiment, Joint Forces Command will partner with the State
Department's Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization to use all
elements of national power and will integrate the U.S. government
solution with other nations' government solutions, Wood said.
Barbara Stephenson, planning director for reconstruction and
stabilization at the State Department, said that this experiment will be
essential in creating structures for coalition partners to collaborate
before operations begin, reducing the amount of time spent fixing
conflicts on the ground.
"The multinational experiment is catalyzing real-world change," she said.
"It's helping us develop concepts for how we plan before we get there,
organize once we're on the ground, and then integrate our national and
international efforts so we can help nations transition from conflict to
peace."
Multinational Experiment 4 will use more than 268 hypothetical events
focused on asymmetric threats, stability operations and reconstruction,
Wood said. The events focus on complexity and on challenging the planning
processes, he said. The experiment begins with hypothetical forces in
place that are representative of partner nations and not any current
force structure, he explained.
The technology used in the experiment will allow organizers to increase
or decrease pressure in certain areas and evaluate the outcome, Wood
said. The evaluation portion of the experiment is very important, as it
gives the coalition a chance to explore alternative planning processes
and tools, he said.
Three simulation systems are being used for Multinational Experiment 4,
Wood said - U.S., German and French. Each has different capabilities, and
coordinating the systems was important in creating a common operating
picture, he said.
"By being able to take these three nations' models and put them together,
we can really model the complexity," he said. "We can actually see the
action and its reaction."
Multinational Experiment 4 will use two parallel headquarters, Wood said.
One will be staffed by NATO at a single location in Turkey, and the other
will be spread around nine or 10 sites on a distributed network, he said.
Both headquarters will review operations and compare their findings at
the end, he explained.
Earlier and better collaboration between U.S. government agencies and
international partners, which the multinational experiment seeks to
create, will improve U.S. national security and international security,
Stephenson said. It will allow agencies to better align strategic goals
and to create a common understanding of objectives before operations even
begin, she said.
The multinational experiment is bringing people together to solve
real-world problems and could bring about transformation in the way
conflicts are dealt with, Stephenson said.
"Success in this will result in far less loss in human life, far less
resources to get to that point, and far less time until we have built
sufficient local capacity for us to move into a supporting role rather
than the lead role," she said.
The multinational experiment series was started in 2001, before the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Wood said. The goal of the series is to
improve the level of partner-nation involvement in developing new ideas
for coalition operations.
The findings of Multinational Experiment 4 will be presented to an
audience of NATO and other-nation participants May 19, and will be used
to develop the next level of the experiment, he said.
http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2006/no021306.htm
What will follow after MNE-4?
MNE-5 will be the next in the series of multinational experiments. It
will build on MNE-4 following a thorough assessment of the experiment�s
results. Senior leaders from the MNE-4 participating countries will
discuss an appropriate theme, scenario, a range of topics for
experimentation, and the possibility of expanding the number of
participating nations. http://www.jfcom.mil/about/experiments/mne4.htm
Related Post:
Violation of International Law In Afghanistan, War Vet Tells Troops
US Military Transformation to Global NATO Response Force
[IMAGE]
"We cannot transform our military using old weapons and old plans. Nor
can we do it with an old mindset that frustrates the creativity and
entrepreneurship that a 21st Century military will need."
- G.W. Bush, May 25, 2001, during commencement exercises at the Naval
Academy
"As we transform our military, we can discard Cold War relics and reduce
our own nuclear forces to reflect today's needs."
- G.W. Bush, February 27, 2001
"Coming on the heels of our victory in Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi
Freedom is proof positive of the success of our efforts to transform our
military to meet the challenges of the 21st century."
- Vice President Dick Cheney, May 1, 2003, remarks to the Heritage
Foundation
"We must ensure that the United States military has the training, the
equipment, and the facilities they require to remain the greatest
fighting force the world has ever known, both in times of war and
peace...And we must use these valuable assets to maintain our status as
the world�s lone superpower, as we transform our military to face the
challenges of the future."
- Senator John Cornyn (R. Tex.), May 1, 2003, Senate floor statement
"The longer we wait to transform our military for the new world of
high-tech, unconventional, asymmetrical warfare, the more it will cost us
down the road, in both dollars and dangers."
- Senator Joe Lieberman, March 7, 2002
"What's required in the long term � as we spend whatever is necessary on
quick fixes, like airport security � is to transform our military's Cold
War strategy."
- Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan (USN, ret.), September 20, 2001, former
commander of the US second fleet
"We also share a sense of urgency for the need to transform our military
forces to meet the challenges of the 21st Century."
- Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), February 21, 2001, in a letter to G.W.
Bush
"As we move into the 21st Century and face the unique security context of
the post-Cold War era, our challenge is to continually transform our
military force so that it can effectively respond to an ever-evolving
variety of threats."
- Senator Tom Daschle (D. S.Dakota)
"We will transform our military into a more agile, more versatile, more
jointly integrated force that will take full advantage of technological
gains."
- Former Vice President Al Gore, Sept. 12, 2000
"U.S. Joint Forces Command will transfer its geographic area of
responsibility to the Northern and European commands. Joint Forces
Command will then change from being a combatant command with geographic
and functional responsibilities to a functional combatant command to
carry out, as the secretary said, the critical missions of
transformation, joint experimentation, and joint training."
- Gen. Richard Myers, chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Wednesday, April
17, 2002, United States Department of Defense News Briefing
Office of Force Transformation
Remarks by NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson
Ladies and Gentlemen,
We are here to say goodbye to General Joseph Ralston, to recognize his
excellent service to our Alliance, and to welcome General James Jones as
the new Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
General Ralston, Joe,
....Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, you have
demonstrated real leadership in helping NATO and Allied militaries
transform to meet the needs of the modern security environment. By
playing critical roles in defining a ground-breaking military concept for
the defense against terrorism, to focusing SHAPE on the threats from
weapons of mass destruction or cyber attack, your tenure has helped
retool the Alliance.
The same applies to reform of the Alliance�s command structure. Thanks in
no small part to your strong commitment, and your wise counsel, we have
done more in six months than the previous reform process did in six
years.
As we have adapted our structures, you have also helped lead a major
effort to transform our military capabilities. You have really stuck your
neck out on this issue, and I want to thank you for this personal
engagement. Without it, we would not have achieved such a worthwhile
capabilities package at Prague.
You have demonstrated similar strong leadership in preparing NATO for
another round of enlargement and in helping to turn the concept of a
Euro-Atlantic community into reality. Your determination to bring the
Partners as close as possible to the Alliance, at SHAPE and in the field,
has helped them make ever-stronger contributions to our common security.
Finally, let me mention Russia, because you have worked particularly hard
to bring this key country closer to the Alliance. By engaging personally,
you sent a strong signal of our commitment to working with Russia. You
can take great credit for the way in which we have been able to deepen
and broaden our cooperation with Russia over the past year.
The Alliance has transformed dramatically and continues to do so. When
you took up your post three years ago, who could have thought that SHAPE
would host the force generation conference for the International Security
Assistance Force in Kabul and that the Alliance would assume a role in
supporting military operations in Afghanistan? Yet that is what we have
been preparing for, benefiting from your experience during the last few
months when you were in charge. And now that the Alliance should confront
threats to our security from wherever they may come, who knows what else
the future holds? http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2003/s030117a.htm
Unified Command Plan (UCP)
http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/unifiedcommand/
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE)
NATO Response Force (NRF) The NRF is designed to be a robust, high
readiness, fully trained and certified force that is prepared to tackle
the full spectrum of missions, including force.
bullet The force will have an initial operational capability by 15
October 2003. When final operating capability is reached by the fall of
2006, its troop size will be set at 21,000
NATO chiefs in secret WMD exercise
The Australian
NATO defense chiefs took part in an unusual secret exercise in Colorado
yesterday to test the alliance's military responses in a fictional
fast-moving crisis involving terrorists and weapons of mass destruction
NATO Conducts Rapid-Reaction War Game
Washington Post
NATO has decided to mount a new "NATO Response Force," composed of about
20,000 personnel, that can respond instantly to "asymmetric" threats --
in which the enemy is not a national army but a small, loosely organized
guerrilla or terrorist force.
The transformation of Donald Rumsfeld
Asia Times
The man who is arguably the father of the notion of military
transformation, United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
appears to be undergoing his own sort of personal metamorphosis in
response to the changing realities of global events involving the United
States. In fact, he is undergoing this transformation unabashedly, even
with gusto.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheNeuschwabenlandTimes
--
___________________________________________________
Play 100s of games for FREE! http://games.mail.com/
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Message: 4
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 08:14:01 -0500
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
Subject: The Great Game
The Great Game
By Steve Kramer
The Great Game is a term which first described the great rivalry between Russia and Britain (and later, America) for supremacy in Central Asia. From early in the 19th century, when Britain controlled the Indian subcontinent (which comprises India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh - more populous than China), Tsarist Russia vied with Britain for the 2,000 miles of territory which separated the two powers. Up for grabs were an abundance of natural resources belonging to relatively weak Muslim regimes, like Iran, Afghanistan, and the other "-stans" (which eventually become part of the Soviet Union). By the latter part of the 19th century, the target for Britain and Russia shifted westward to the Middle Eastern oil fields, as oil become vital to the West.
In the period following World War I the protagonists had changed, but the Great Game remained. Tsarist Russia had given way to the USSR, while Britain struggled to hold onto its influence in the Middle East, which it shared with France. After World War II, Britain (and France) resigned themselves to minor roles in the Middle East, while America stepped up to battle the Soviets during the Cold War period. The Arabs achieved national states for themselves, although these were mostly motley creations cobbled together by the British and French. Israel, perceived as a Western colonial outpost by the Arabs, emerged as a power in the region. It is surprising to us today, but in the early 1950s both America and Britain were concerned about the possibility that Israel might join the Soviet orbit. This was because of the large number of Russians who became Zionist pioneers and created Israel's quasi-Socialist government.
Today, a version of the Great Game is still being played out across both Central Asia and the Middle East, with the same prize: oil fields and pipeline routes. While the Soviet Union disintegrated years ago, the Russians have not forgotten their old dream of being a world power, despite the fact that just a few years ago Russia was floundering.
Russia has been included in the BRIC formulation, which hypothesizes that Brazil, Russia, India, and China will emerge as the 21st century's Great Powers, eclipsing the US, Europe, and Japan. But is Russia's economic potential equal to the other BRIC countries? Demographic and economic analysis leads to a definite "no".
Comparing Russia to the others, it is striking that Russia has by far the oldest population, with an average age of 38 years, with only about 30 years remaining until the end of the average Russian life (67 years). This compares with an average age of 28 for the others, with another 42 years of life remaining (until age 70 on average). Nor does the future bode well for the Russians: its population growth rate is minus four/tenths of one % (-.4%), while the three other countries average plus 1%. In plain language, the Russian population is aging rapidly while its numbers are dropping dramatically, unlike the rest of BRIC.
Economically, Russia is booming right now, due to the fact that it is the world's largest energy supplier: #1 in natural gas and #2 in oil. But fossil fuels and other commodities generally have proven to be a poor basis for strong, prolonged economic growth. The oil-rich Arab countries are a good example of that, with a dismal economic future in store when the oil wells run dry. In contrast, China, India, and Brazil all have vibrant economies based on multiple income sources, with no fear that new technologies might induce an economic meltdown.
Russia may or may not be a bona fide BRIC member in the future, but it's working diligently right now to regain its lost superpower status. Vladimir Putin, with his background as a secret policeman and leader in the KGB (the feared Soviet foreign intelligence and domestic security agency), has been treading very heavily lately in power politics. His latest maneuver is pitting Iran against America and Israel. While nearly every country shuns the Islamist regime running Iran, Putin has been adept at doing business with the mullahs and cozying up to them. For example, his offer to produce the enriched uranium necessary for Iran's nuclear "energy" production enables the mullahs to play-act at being reasonable while they continue to develop weapons of mass destruction. In addition, Putin wants to sell high quality air defense weapons to Iran, which can just as easily serve an offensive purpose. (Putin is playing a similar game with Hamas, lending them credibility by inviting them to visit Russia, while the West is unified in applying pressure on them.)
It doesn't take too much imagination to see Putin's schemes as the latest maneuver in the Great Game. Iran is one of the world's largest oil exporters, and the biggest terror exporter, bar none. America and its proxy in the Middle East, Israel, stand in Russia's way of exerting a major influence in the region. If Iran were to become embroiled in an outright war with America and Israel, Russia would be the great beneficiary. At the least, America and Israel would become the target of even more Muslim outrage and terror attacks, while Russia would be a bystander. As a tasty side dish, Iran's oil production would no doubt be devastated in the mayhem, while Arab oil shipments would be curtailed due to the inevitable disruption of the Indian Ocean. If Putin can pull it off, not only will Russia be the winner of this inning of the Great Game, but Russia will become the number one oil producer to boot.
http://www.infoisrael.net/cgi-local/text.pl?source=4/b/viii/260220062
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Message: 5
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 08:57:19 -0500
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
Subject: Grave Mysteries (Part Two)
Friday, March 03, 2006
Grave Mysteries (Part Two)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/JeffWells/subalbum1/dna-kundalini-sized.jpg
For the Holy One dreams of a letter, dreams of a letter's death.
O bless the continuous stutter of the Word being made into flesh. - Leonard Cohen
I apologize for having been a bad blogger this week. It's been a tough few days time-management wise, but that's just the least interesting half of it. I'd hoped to get this post together for Wednesday, but the thoughts are still percolating. so please bear with me as I consider some of this stuff on the fly.
First, we left this discussion considering the Gamatria of "New English Qaballa," with particular attention to Allen Greenfield's application of the occult cryptography to UFO contacts. Greenfield argues that the cipher in Crowley's Book of the Law is but the latest discovered in a sequence of alchemical and Masonic codes used by trans-human entities to disseminate encrypted hidden meaning to high adepts. He writes in Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts that as a code is cracked, the rules of contact change. For instance, once Crowley's cipher was cracked in the mid-70s, "contact without communication" began to predominate: "after 1973, the 'personal aliens with funny names' were nearly universally replaced" by impersonal "greys."
Leaving aside the cipher for a moment, Greenfield adds that, as John Keel and others have noted, "contactee control names show up in many cases and are often identical with ancient deity names":
As a prime example, Ashtar most likely derives from Astaroth, a "great duke in the infernal regions," according to the ancient magical text The Lemegton. The mysterious Grimorium Verum (the "True Instruction") in that text informs us that Astaroth "has set up residence in America." Contactee George Van Tassel claimed to contact "Ashtar, commandant of station Schare" in 1952.
The most famous channeller of the Nine, Uri Geller, claimed contact with an off-world artificial intelligence that called itself "Spectra" (much like Philip K Dick's "Valis"). Spectra has a cipher value of 106, which corresponds to "Astaroth" and "Dark Powers."
Spectra left Geller mechanical-sounding messages on tape recorders, claiming to be a computer from the future. When physicist Jack Sarfatti first heard Geller tell this story in a 1973 meeting at Stanford Research Institute, he spoke up about his own message from a mechanical voice, received as a child over the telephone, saying "I am a conscious computer on board a spacecraft from [memory failure]. We have identified you as one of four hundred young bright receptive minds we wish to [memory failure]. You must give us your decision now. If you say yes, you will begin to link up with the others in 20 years." And 20 years later there's Sarfatti, at SRI, hearing an eerily similar account from Geller. (Curiously, Sarfatti remembered only one call, but his mother three weeks' worth. Fellow physicist Jean-Paul Sirag writes that Mrs Sarfatti was "struck by the similarity of the Spectra voice, described in [Andreas Puharich's] Uri, and the voice she heard on the phone, when she ended the series of calls by grabbing the phone out of Jack's hand and yelling into the phone, 'You leave my boy alone!'"
Sirag himself had an interesting encounter with Geller. In a friend's Manhattan loft in June of 1973, while he was "in the psychedelic state induced by LSD," Sirag asked Geller if he could make contact with Spectra. Geller told him to look in his eyes and tell him what he saw:
I was very surprised to see not only his eyes, but his entire head take on what I took to be an eagle shape complete with feathers going down to his shoulders. I jumped back a step and said, "Uri, you look just like an eagle." He was very excited about this, but wouldn't reveal anything further about his ET presence. When Puharich's book Uri, with its extensive and detailed Horus hawk stories, came out later in 1974, I understood why Uri had been so excited.
A few months after Sirag's vision of Spectra, he heard an incredible story from a friend named Ray Stanford that his car was twice teleported while driving to the airport to pick up Geller. And a few weeks after that, Sirag sees the December cover of Analog science fiction magazine on the newsstand: a picture of a man standing before a pyramid wearing a white uniform, a nametag that read "Stanford" and a helmet decorated as a hawk. The title of the story was "The Horus Errand." Oddest of all, the man's face was that of Ray Stanford. Robert Anton Wilson notes in Cosmic Triggers vol. I that "a letter to the artist who drew the cover, Kelly Freas, drew a reply saying that Freas had never met Stanford and was not consciously aware, at the time, that he was using Stanford's face in the illustration." Stanford added that, 30-mile teleporation aside, "a hawk had appeared quite dramatically during another meeting" with Geller.
Well - once again - so what? Sirag was "in the psychedelic state induced by LSD" when he saw Geller take on Spectra's aspect of a bird of prey. (Hawk or eagle? The argument has been made, writes Wilson, that the bird on the Great Seal of the United States is not an eagle, but rather the Horus hawk.) An interesting correspondence, some may say, but it was an altered state, and there was a lot of that going around in the early 70s.
For more correspondence, let's return for a moment to ciphers. An interactive and multi-systemic Gematria can be found on this page. Words and numbers can be entered here to get an sense of their cryptic value according to the code of the English Qabala (though not necessarily the exact correspondences in The Book of Law). This isn't a particularly serious tool, in part because it's so easy to use, so it should probably carry the disclaimer "for entertainment purposes only." And yet "George Bush" = 137, which corresponds with "White House," "False Christs," "wealth magic" and "espionage." (And just because I could, I typed "Rigorous Intuition," generating a numerical value of 263. I was surprised to find its correspondences were overwhelmingly terms of communication, such as "a certified message," "and the truth came out," and "make the connection.")
We can take or leave this search for correspondences, and Western science has decided , in large part, to leave it. Radical connectivity just hasn't made sense to the rational mind. Though perhaps the better we understand our condition, it makes the best sense.
One thing we are, and that we share with all life, is code. Single-celled creatures that lived billions of years ago were written with the same four-letter nucleic alphabet as we are. Nothing on Earth has endured like DNA. Nothing on Earth can even account for it. Its co-discoverer Francis Crick contended that it must be of extraterrestrial origin, much as shamans claimed life descended from a cosmic serpent.
Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge is a fascinating account of an anthropologist trying to make sense of his own ayahuasca vision of giant, twinned snakes, why such visions are so common, and why creation myths around the world share the same imagery. ("Ayahuasca," by the way, has a value of 58, which corresponds with "awakens," "cosmos," "drunk" and "kabbalah.")
The first time Narby saw the paintings of shaman Pablo Amaringo he was impressed by their correspondence to his own ayahuasca-induced visions. Amaringo claims to paint only what he has seen and experienced in the shaman ritual. Images include writhing vines and twisted snakes, zigzag staircases and UFOs.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/JeffWells/subalbum1/ayahuasca-painting-sized.jpg
Increasingly, Narby was struck by the visual cues of DNA. He showed Amaringo's work to a friend with a good understanding of molecular biology, said "Look - there's collagen. And there, the axon's embryonic network with its neurites. Those are triple helixes. And that's DNA from afar, looking like a telephone cord. This looks like chromosomes at a specific phase...."
In 1980 scientists determined that all cells emit photons at a rate of up to 100 units per second, and that DNA is the source of the photon emissions. The wavelength at which DNA emits photons "corresponds exactly to the narrow band of visible light." DNA emits a regular, coherent source of light: researchers compare it to an "ultra-weak laser." When Narby asked a scientific journalist friend what that implied, his friend explained "a coherent source of light, like a laser, gives the sensation of bright colors, a luminescence, and an impression of holographic depth."
DNA has a crystaline aspect with hexagonal, quartz-like base pairs. Most of its length is aperiodic, as the sequences of base pairs is irregular. However, writes Narby, "this is not the case for the repeat sequences that make up a full third of the genome, such as ACACACACACACACAC." Junk DNA, it's been called.
In these sequences, DNA becomes a regular arrangement of atoms, a periodic crystal - which could, by analogy with quartz, pick up as many photons as it emits. The variation in the length of the repeat sequences (some of which contain up to 300 bases) would help pick up different frequencies and could thereby constitute a possible and new function for a part of "junk" DNA.
Narby wonders whether DNA, stimulated by such drugs as DMT - the principal hallucinogen of ayahuasca and created naturally in the human brain - activates "not only its emission of photons (which inundate our consciousness in the form of hallucinations), but also its capacity to pick up the photons emitted by the global network of DNA-based life? This would mean the biosphere itself, which can be considered 'as a more or less fully interlinked unit,' is the source of the images."
If this is true, then one consequence should be that all correspondences are meaningful. As I wrote above, Radical connectivity just hasn't made sense to the rational mind. Though perhaps the better we understand our condition, it makes the best sense.
While researching the literature on Amazonian shamanism Narby came upon anthropologist Michael Harner's account of his 1961 ayahuasca experience. "Giant reptillian creatures" resting in the lowest depths of his brain began projecting scenes for him, while telling him the information was reserved for the dead:
First they showed me the planet Earth as it was eons ago, before there was any life on it. I saw an ocean, barren land, and a bright blue sky. Then black spots dropped from the sky by the hundreds and landed in front of me on the barren landscape. I could see the "specks" were actually large, shiny, black creatures with stubby pterodactyl-like wings and huge whale-like bodies.... They explained to me in a kind of thought language that they were fleeing from something out in space. They had come to the planet Earth to escape their enemy. The creatures then showed me how they had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence. Before me, the magnificence of plant and animal creation and speciation - hundreds of millions of years of activity - took place on a scale and with a vividness impossible to describe. I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside all forms of life, including man.
Harner adds as a footnote: "In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, 1961, I knew nothing of DNA." And 20 years before Crick's theory of directed panspermia Harner was seeing them drop from space.
Perhaps the cipher the NSA most wants cracked is the human genome.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/JeffWells/subalbum1/theincorporationseyes.jpg
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2006/03/grave-mysteries-part-two.html
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Message: 6
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 12:20:19 -0500
From: "norgesen" <norgeson@hotmail.com>
Subject: Chemical Poisoning: Brave New World of Zero Risk
Chemical Poisoning: Brave New World of Zero Risk
http://www.zero-risk.org/images/boriscover_2.jpg
Brave New World of Zero Risk - Covert strategy in British Science Policy is Martin Walker's latest expos� of scientific corruption. The book takes the chemical and pharmaceutical multinationals to task for bending science in the name of industrial progress and for riding roughshod over the human tragedies of people suffering injury from toxic chemicals.
An incisive investigative writer, Martin Walker is widely known for his monumental Dirty Medicine, which documents the collusion of modern medicine with a greed-driven pharmaceutical industry. In 2004 Walker took up the fight for the chemically injured with another book, Skewed. He examines the scandalous re-definition as a psychiatric problem of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and a related cluster of illnesses. Walker tells of the chemical industry's collaboration with psychiatric and medical "experts" who would have us believe that physical symptoms of chemical poisoning are pure imagination and that the sufferers need a dose of psychiatric drugs and perhaps some motivational therapy.
Brave New World of Zero Risk, available free for download here, continues where Skewed left off. But more than that - Zero Risk shows how pharma, food and chemical giants deal with those who might depress their already threatened profits even further by exposing weak points. Vaccine researcher Dr Andrew Wakefield fell from grace after finding a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Dr Arpad Pusztai paid with his carreer for insisting that the rats he fed GM potatos in what may well have been the only properly conducted GMO feeding experiment, suffered organ damage as a result.
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Zero Risk contains extensive documentation on how front groups such as the innocent-sounding Social Issues Research Center, known for its strong support of hormone replacement therapy, are slanting the debate the way industry wishes.
"The pharmaceutical corporations can no longer be seen as a part of some social superstructure", says Walker, concluding a chapter on science and its apparently senseless direction. "Their need for a research base, for trial subjects, for organisations to agree licensing and other regulatory matters, together with their need for markets and consumers of their products, means that, like a metastasised cancer, their growth now extends into all areas of society, which has become a massive human laboratory. "
The question becomes: What kind of medicine are we going to have - corporate or scientific?
The quackbusters, pharma's shock troops who attack doctors that do not toe the line, are discussed with a fair bit of history and pointers to their parent organization, the so-called skeptics. 'De-bunking' activities are generally directed towards health practitioners that use cutting edge protocols such as mercury-free dentistry, nutritional immune enhancement and detoxification for chemical injury.
Genetically modified foods are pronounced safe and promoted by industry groups. The decision process that led governments to the unquestioning acceptance of genetic modification as an element of science policy, according to Walker, was arrived at behind closed doors. He describes how the policy was put into effect in the UK with these words:
"In clearing the runway for bioscience, New Labour was also clearing it of its citizens. There is no room for ordinary citizens' input into the new world of science, so they have dropped them utterly from the equation, and 'steak' holders (the better fed citizens), are now the powerful vested interests..."
Evidently, people are no longer needed, except as 'consumers'. Pressure groups supplant public input with a vague concept of 'listening to the stake holders'.
Covering up the harm done by industry seems to be a common practice. After citing two instances, the Spanish "contaminated oil" scandal of 1982 that killed hundreds and a 1988 Camelford (UK) water poisoning incident, where 20 tons of toxic chemicals ended up in the town's drinking water, Walker highlights the rationale behind the crazy idea that people suffering from chemical or other environmental pollution are making it all up:
"When you deny the existence of illness presented by patients, you also have to deny the mental health of those patients. So much more so is this the case with environmental illness, where the psychiatrist can first attack the very mind frame of both patient and alternative therapist. In a rational world, the subject who is affected by invisible rays from mobile phones or computer screens can be made to appear mentally unbalanced. If you can see the cause, then it is the job of crisis management, psychiatry, psychology or PR, either to convince everyone that it is not there, or disguise it as something else."
"As the stakes get higher and the crack in the floodgates widens, more subtle plans have to be drafted. These are plans that start at the beginning by defining as mentally ill, those who believe that modern technological ['wonders'] can produce chronic health damage. Mental illness is undoubtedly the best fallback position for those responsible for creating environmental illness. And so it is that psychiatrists become part of the front line troops in denfence of the state and its corporate partners."
Science is being used to cover up, rather than reveal, the effects industrial 'progress' has on our health. Contrary views are rigorously suppressed. Walker says that scientists themselves have to look at how industry uses them to help suppress the evidence of harm.
"At the centre of this almost surgical censorship, which has developed like a cancer in society, are working scientists. On questions of science, it is imperative that scientists themselves wise up to the way in which they and their work are being manipulated."
Caught your interest yet? You can download the PDF of Martin Walker's book. Don't forget to leave a small donation. Walker provides his work for free, but he does need to eat as well...
If, instead, you want to get an even closer look at the subject matter, here is a recent essay by Martin titled "Realpolitik and ME", which you find below.
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8 November 2005
Realpolitik and ME
By
Martin J. Walker
We live in a period where everything is spin, where the truth is rarely told about public policy and where many public arguments are disingenuous. However, during the contemporary period, everything is confusion. Only when we look back are we able to see clearly how social reality was constructed.
This situation makes it very difficult for campaigners, or those trying to voice a dissenting view to Government or its agencies. While thirty years ago, it might have been possible to engage in a peripheral dialogue with government, today, government and its many agencies is a secretive, shadowy organisation which often invites campaigners to wrestle with phantoms. In contemporary society, there is, in short, no point at which the clear demands of the people might be put to government and a considered answer returned.
One of the principal reasons for this is that over the last fifty years, the government has begun increasingly to act on behalf of hidden constituents. Instead of gauging and responding to the needs of the people, they have increasingly, in the field of health, begun to act on behalf of corporations, foisting their demands onto the public in the form of policy. In some areas, this corporatisation of government is easy to see and describe, in others, it lies deeply hidden and anyone who attempts to unravel it is quickly accused of advocating �conspiracy theories�.
The campaign to de-construct the neurological illness ME, to ridicule its sufferers and, in the process, to redefine a growing body of �mentally ill� subjects, began in the mid eighties. The principal character in the British campaign has been Professor Simon Wessely. Over time, however, the �psychiatric lobby� has gathered new adherents and a large, increasingly organised body of combatants.
The psychiatric lobby is now marked by its financial power � over 11 million being funnelled into the network of clinical centres and funding provided by the Medical Research Council (MRC) to carry out the PACE and FINE trials; its roots in major medical research institutions like the MRC and increasingly its links to corporate lobby groups funded especially by the pharmaceutical companies.
The patient, or �sufferer� group which has been forged simply by its opposition to the psychiatric lobby, has inevitably consisted of disparate groups and individuals. Inevitably, because unlike the psychiatric lobby, this grouping has no common ideological purpose nor does it have a hegemonous leadership. Mainly, as well, this group is composed of people who are ill or their carers, circumstances which leave little room for organised campaigning. The only two defining criteria of this group are, first, they seek effective treatments for ME and second, they have pressed the research community to carry out physical research in order to find the organic causes of ME.
While the psychiatric lobby is well organised, powerful and educated to a unified purpose, sufferers, patients and their families lack political, organisational cohesion. The inability of this �community� to form a united political campaign has meant that they have faced a consistent series of defeats, and while the �psychiatric� lobby has become stronger, the campaign of sufferers, patients and their families have lost ground, broken off on the edges and become divided within itself.
Objectives
What is inevitably confusing about the psychiatric lobby, what makes them difficult to stand firmly against, is their apparent lack of a reasoned and ultimate objective. It is, of course, useful to define ultimate objectives in order to organise opposition strategies. While an effective campaign can be waged on a day to day basis, it is an understanding of the final objective of the psychiatric lobby which should in principle define the political movement against them. Without any understanding of the lobby�s objective, we are left to weigh up each new assault, each new gambit, on the apparent sincerity of its proposer.
Before going on to look at the present strategies being employed by the psychiatric lobby, I would like to try and define their long-term objectives.
With New Labour, the biotech industry and the pharmaceutical companies have planned a far-reaching programme of �drug� research. They are committed to being world leaders by the year 2015 in the production of biotech and genetically engineered �person altering� substances. These substances will not be medicines in the sense that we recognise them presently and the purpose of many of them will not be to treat illness. In fact, it might be the case that we have come to the end of the period of human pharmaceutical drug use, at least on the scale we have witnessed it over the last fifty years.
These new patented substances will be used primarily to change people. Apart from a number of physical changes, there are many mental outlooks which might be affected: a person might be made happier, more serious, more creative, to have, for example, a better memory, or to be more empathetic, more attractive to the opposite sex.
Presently, the pharmaceutical industry, which has recently begun to join with the biotech industry, considers that it suffers over-regulation. Limitation on animal experiments and strictures on human drug trials are increasingly considered an obstacle to profit. The big problems, however, lie in the future: Will these corporations be able to convince governments - in the face of anti-vivisection protests � that the rules for animal testing can be stretched to include mood-altering compounds which are not specifically �treatments�? Even if this problem is resolved, in second stage testing, corporations are going to need considerable access to human volunteers, particularly those with certain psychological portraits.
I can see no other reason why the North American State has embarked upon a mental health audit of the whole population, nor why British psychiatrists should want to push half a million adults and children through a network of clinical centres which evaluate their psychological status.
The Ongoing Battle
With this possible long-term objective in mind, we can return to reviewing the psychiatric lobby�s present strategies. The battle between the psychiatric lobby and the vulnerable patients and sufferers campaign has always been a massively uneven battle. Fairly recently, however, it has taken a major turn in favour of the psychiatric lobby.
The report of the Chief Medical Officer in 2003, ultimately only strengthened the hand of the psychiatric lobby, awarding them even greater funding to carry their case forward. However, because in some general respects this Report gave powerless succour to patients and patients groups who had been arguing that the origins of ME were organic, the report angered the psychiatric lobby. Weeks before the end of deliberations, in an infantile gesture, the psychiatric participants resigned en masse.
Since the end of the CMO�s Report, the psychiatric lobby strategy might be said to have four prongs.
The PRIME Project and PACE
The PRIME Project appears to be giving the kind of time and attention to ME sufferers which many of them have always wanted. However, despite its protestations that it is evaluating the kinds of treatments best used with ME, the project is nothing more than a softening-up project, working to shovel sufferers into the PACE trials and its network of clinical centres.
The PRIME Project is firmly rooted in the camp of the psychiatric lobby and has no intentions of either raising the funds for or designing any programmes of organic research into the causes of ME. The complete exposure of this strategy is written up on the One Click site in The One Click Story � The Underbelly of ME/CFS Politics Revealed.
Assault on the Political Opposition
The third strand of the strategy has involved an all-out assault upon the One Click campaign, the only patient advocacy group opposed to the psychiatric lobby which has a political perspective. This assault has been varied in its implementation, including, character assassination, threatening letters, police intervention, arrests, the interference with telephone and computer services and, in the case of [One Click founder] Jane Bryant, the confiscation of her computer. It has been singular, though, in its objective, to shut down the principal opposition to the psychiatric lobby. This strand of the strategy is also written up on the One Click site.
The �Independent� Inquiry
The fourth strand of the strategy, which has emerged over the last six months, has exhibited itself in Dr Ian Gibson MP�s �Independent Inquiry�, which was set up to examine other than psychiatric causes of ME.
The emergence of the �Independent � Inquiry manifests one of the greatest differences between the two lobbies involved in this ongoing battle being fought over ME sufferers. The philosophy of those who are asking for serious scientific biological research into the causes of ME, can be reported simply and without embellishment. For twenty years now, they have wanted no more than any other patient group in Britain: to raise the issue of, and the funding for scientific research into the cause and treatment of their condition.
With respect to those who maintain that ME is first and foremost a psychiatric condition, their philosophy, its campaign and their strategies have been anything but straightforward. Baroque in its intrigue, infinite in its dissembling, practised like a card sharp in deceit, it has resembled nothing less than a psychological operation constructed by the CIA or some other secret policing instrument. The campaign has buried itself inside medical research like an engorged maggot; at every turn, new money comes to hand, more mercenary researchers rush to its aid. With each turn of the ratchet in its offensive, new sponsors from the corporate world emerge, new velvet gloves hiding iron fists, new words of reconciliation which conceal venom and forked tongues.
Because the patient community is unable to adopt a cohesive political line, they get duped every time the psychiatric lobby hides its stick behind a large carrot. In the case of the phantom �Independent� Inquiry, Dr Ian Gibson New Labour MP for Norwich North, approached Kevin Short and Professor Malcolm Hooper. After a discussion Gibson went to the nearest phone box and having changed into his familiar red and blue suit, flew out exclaiming; �It�s about time something was done, I will set up an Independent Inquiry�. Within days of Gibson�s offer, Short was energetically digging another hole for ME groups to bury themselves in.
Neither Kevin Short nor Professor Hooper, or for that matter a number of others who quickly tendered evidence to what has turned out to be an entirely bogus offer, seem to have given Gibson�s offer a moment�s political reflection. It was as if the words �Independent Inquiry� mesmerised the listeners and they immediately suspended their political judgement. �I�m an MP�, said Gibson, �trust me�.
Had either Professor Hooper or Kevin Short reflected for a moment on Gibson and his offer, they would have found cause to be concerned. Before he became an MP, in 1997, Gibson was Dean of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA). East Anglia was the base, until the mid nineties, of Fisons, the agricultural chemical company. Funding from the company helped shape research at the UEA, more so when Fisons was bought up by Rhone-Poulenc in 1996. In 1999, Rhone-Poulenc joined with Hoeschst Marion Roussel to form Aventis. UEA has had a funding input from all these companies and, in 2003, it was in the top twelve Universities receiving funds from the BBSRC, the bio-tech quango which dispenses massive funding � some of it from the coffers of the Sainsbury family. Gibson himself has declared funding received from Rhone-Poulenc for taking part in scientific meetings.
Up until last year, Gibson was the Chair of the All Party Science and Technology Committee (APSTC), the watchdog committee which oversees science policy in the Commons for the Science Ministry which is situated within the Department of Trade and Industry (Dti). The APSTC is funded in part by Astra Zeneca, the Dti and bioscience companies.
Together with Dr Des Turner, Tony Wright and Dr Richard Taylor � also a member of the Associate Parliamentary Group on Health, set up by the pharmaceutical lobby group Networking for Industry � Gibson is a member of the All Party Group on Cancer, which is heavily funded by all the leading Big Pharma names, including Novartis, Pfizer Lilly and Merk. He is also a member of the All Party Group on Pesticides and Organophosphates, which, until they became more focussed on bio-engineering, were staple product of Fisons and Rhone-Poulenc.
Gibson is a leading member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, now called simply the BA, which in the early nineties played a considerable role in promoting the �quackbusting� Campaign Against Health Fraud. Gibson sits on the editorial committee of the BA�s magazine, Science and Public Affairs, the magazine is again a public arbiter of government science policy and Gibson shares his editorial role with personnel from the Royal Society of Spin, The Financial Times, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) � the science policy-making centre of government, and the Wellcome Trust.
Involvement in the higher echelons of corporate science and government has brought Gibson into contact with the new generation of science lobby groups. Sense About Science � funded by the ABPI and various chemical and pharmaceutical interests; The Institute of Ideas � funded by Pfizer and the Science Media Centre, also funded by the ABPI and a variety of powerful corporations. These lobby groups work in partnership with New Labour, POST and the Dti.
Although they profess a focus on science, these groups, are actually involved in corporate PR and spin. They are linked in North America to right-wing libertarian groups heavily involved in �quackbusting�, campaigning rabidly against alternative medicine, environmentalists and patient advocacy groups. In Britain, they have been involved, in partnership with the Royal Society and the Royal Institution, in pushing corporate interests in Genetically Modified crops and pharmaceuticals. In 2004, Science in Society, the magazine of the Institute of Science in Society, one of the most independent and radical science campaigning groups, informed its readers of the collusion between Professor Derek Burke a leading member of Sense About Science, and Dr Ian Gibson, in defending GM crops on the grounds that they were perfectly safe for human health.
This interest in corporate science is, of course, quite natural for a man who has been an academic scientist prior to entering the Commons. For ME sufferers, however, Gibson�s involvement with the various groups above must sound alarm bells. As I explained in Brave New World of Zero Risk, the lobby groups which are presently spinning news on behalf of corporate interests and New Labour are the joined up version of the quackbuster group HealthWatch (in fact, members and ex - members of HealthWatch actually write unattributed copy for members of these lobby groups).
One of the prominent founding members of HealthWatch was Simon - now Professor - Wessely. Wessely is now a senior member of the Science Advisory Panel for the Science and Media Centre, a member of the US American Council on Science and Health advisory panel, a leading member of the R,RSA, an obscure group inside the Health Protection Agency, set up to spin all public health threats, and he is still deeply involved in the corporate manipulation of ME information. Yet another prominent member of this new generation of Lobby organisations is Michael Fitzpatrick, an East London GP who has written in purple prose about false beliefs held by people who claim that they have the physical symptoms of ME.
The fact that the �Independent Inquiry� into the skewing of government policy on ME towards the psychiatric lobby, which Gibson promised, turns out to be neither an �Inquiry� nor �Independent�, is par for the course. Before even the composition or the personnel of the Inquiry had been announced, the Independent Inquiry suddenly metamorphosed into a �Scientific Group on ME� situated in the offices of Tony Wright MP, the last Chair of the Parliamentary group on ME.
So, after twenty years of getting by on a wing and a prayer, without the slightest evidence to support their bizarre belief that ME is a psychiatric condition, the psychiatric lobby has wised up. How much better it would be for the psychiatric lobby to colonise the area of physical scientific research into ME. Of course, there is a vast difference between gathering information about scientific research into ME � little of which has been done for obvious reasons � and supporting this same research.
We have a good example of how the corporate science lobby groups deal with scientific research in the position that Dr Fitzpatrick and others have taken on Dr Andrew Wakefield�s research. There is only one genuinely scientific resolution to an argument within scientific research, that is, to independently replicate research and compare results. Instead of doing this, the �science lobby�, supported by government and pharmaceutical companies, used research reviews like the recent Cochrane Review, which compared studies focussed either on MMR or Autism, to discredit Wakefield.
Inevitably, there has been precious little physical scientific investigation into ME, in Britain. The reason for this is obvious; all the money and the power is held by the psychiatric lobby the posturing of which, over ME suits the government and the corporations. Once again, with the declaration of an �Independent� Inquiry, the ME community has been thrown into confusion by a honeymoon offer from their detractors. The singular lack of political analysis amongst some of the most prominent figures in the ME community, has yet again led these long-suffering individuals down another blind alley.
The conflict between the psychiatric lobby and those who believe that ME has a physical aetiology is now intractably dominated by vested interests. The PRIME Project, the �Independent� Inquiry and the network of clinics set up by the NHS, under the guidance of Professor Pinching, all constitute major advances by the psychiatric lobby. Unfortunately, after twenty years of denigration, many ME sufferers and their carers are still avoiding crucial political questions and failing to work autonomously towards what should be their two main objectives.
The first, a political objective has to be the organisation of a far reaching independent and judicial investigation into the psychiatric lobby and, the second, more practical objective, the establishment of an �independent� national research fund, which will be used to establish and conduct research entirely into the physical causes of ME by medical researchers unaligned to either corporate or psychiatric interests.
There comes a time in all political struggles when accepting the hand of friendship from a suspected or traditional enemy, or even entering into a dialogue with them is simply to commit Hara Kiri, in public without the honour. Until the ME �community� has built a solid and cohesive movement opposed to the psychiatric and corporate lobbies, until they begin to close in on either of the two objectives above, it would appear wise for them to adopt the �precautionary principle� and maintain a moratorium on listening to or consorting with anyone who comes bearing gifts or �Independent� Inquiries.
Martin J. Walker
8 November 2005
Martin Walker's book: Brave New World of Zero Risk Martin Walker provides the book for free. Your contribution is welcome - it will help him continue his excellent investigative work.
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2005/12/22/chemical_poisoning_brave_new_world_of_zero_risk.htm
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