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COVER STORIES

SCHAPELLE CORBY NEVER PROVEN GUILTY

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MAIN FEATURES

Volume 8 Number 5 September-October 2008

A SYNOPSIS OF THE ISRAEL/ PALESTINE CONFLICT

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OTHER FEATURES HEAVENLY BODIES

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND THE HOLY GRAIL

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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE LEUCHTER REPORT...PART 1

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ASPARTAME INTERACTS WITH ALL DRUGS, VACCINES AND TOXINS

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TOMGRAM: BOMBS AWAY OVER IRAQ

USS LIBERTY INCIDENT

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DEPARTMENTS Your Letters

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GILAD ATZMON - ANATOMY OF AN UNRESOLVED CONFLICT

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News

Mind Body Spirit

Candid Camera

Back Issues

Order Form

Classifieds

Subscription Form

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QUOTE “Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man, living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send *you* to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever til the end of time...but he loves you.”

- George Carlin

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VOL.8 #5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008

Diabetes is also heart disease

Rigorous control of blood sugar won’t save diabetics the heart ravages which come with the disease, new studies show.

Instead diabetics need to treat themselves as we heart patients do, with statins, blood pressure control, diet, exercise and a baby aspirin before bedtime. Their current regimen for controlling blood sugar may be as good as it gets.

The results of the studies shocked some researchers, and there was some disagreement over the Australian study, which showed the strict regimen cut back on eye and kidney damage.

The Australia study was done by the ADVANCE Collaborative Group, and covered far more people in far more countries than the American study, which was called ACCORD. Critics noted that the Australian study was backed by Servier Labs, a French company which provided one of the drugs studied. Defenders quickly noted Servier had no influence on how the study was done or its results.

But in sicker patients those with strict sugar controls actually had higher death rates, from heart attack and stroke, than those without. This was seized by some Americans as evidence that strict control is counter-productive.

As with the earlier ENHANCE study on cholesterol, which led many to question the link between a cholesterol number and heart disease, the real lesson here

may be that diabetes, like heart disease, is complicated.

It’s also likely that doctors will decide not to change their advice to diabetics in light of this study, as they haven’t changed their recommendations to heart patients based on ENHANCE. All of which leads me to question what I’ll tell friends like the neighbor above, who are diabetics. Rather than depress him with the failure of ADVANCE and ACCORD I think I’ll just say we have more in common than before — under the skin.

Source: www.rense.com 08.06.08

Officials: US talks to Iran to legitimize attack

Recent talks the United States held with Iran are aimed at creating legitimacy for a potential attack against Iranian nuclear facilities, defense officials speculated on Sunday as Defense Minister Ehud Barak headed to Washington for talks with senior administration officials.

Barak will travel to Washington and New York and will hold talks with his counterpart Robert Gates, Vice President Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

Officials said it was likely that President George W. Bush would join the meeting between Barak and Hadley. On Wednesday, Barak will fly to New York for a brief meeting with United Nations Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon.

Barak’s departure to the US came as IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi

news Ashkenazi returned to Israel on Sunday from a week-long visit to the US as Mullen’s guest. Ashkenazi held talks with Cheney, Hadley and other senior officials with a focus on the Iranian nuclear program.

“There is a lot of strategic thinking concerning Iran going on right now but no one has yet to make a decision what to do,” said a top IDF officer, involved in the dialogue between Israel and the US. “We are still far away from the point where military officers are poring over maps together planning an operation.”

In recent weeks, Mullen has said publicly that he is opposed to military action against Iran which would open a “third front” for the US military which is currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Barak’s talks in the US come a little over a week after the Bush administration sent its number three diplomat to Geneva to participate in European Union talks with Iran over its nuclear program.

The move led to reports that the US was changing its isolation tactic vis-à-vis Iran but Israeli defense officials speculated Sunday that the move was really a ploy to buy international support in the event that Bush decides to attack Iran in his last months in office.

“This way they will be able to say they tried everything,” one official speculated. “This increases America’s chances of gaining more public support domestically as well as the support of European nations which are today opposed to military action.”

Diplomatic officials have speculated that the Iran-US talks were also connected to the presidential elections.

According to the IDF officer, the frequent meetings between Israel and the US in recent weeks - Mullen was in Israel in June - is a sign of the strong ties between the two countries as well as the mutual interest both take in different regional issues such as Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas and Syria.

Source: Yaakov Katz , The Jerusalem Post 27.07.08

No need for the A-word

In “Don’t Call it Apartheid” (Haaretz English edition, July 17), Tova Herzl takes issue with the use of the word “apartheid” to describe the situation in Israel. In particular, she implies that the recent South African human rights delegation to Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank - of which I was a member - indeed came to such a conclusion. As a group, we did no such

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news thing.

Instead, we sought to move beyond mere labels and focus on the manner and extent to which Israel is separating Palestinians and Israelis within the West Bank, the impact of the tools of separation on Palestinians in particular and the broader impact of the occupation on all. And in so doing, it was often impossible to avoid making comparisons with apartheid South Africa.

Whether motivated by legitimate security considerations, fear, mistrust or sheer prejudice, the occupation’s physical manifestations - including distinct identity cards, number plates and roads, as well as checkpoints, electronic fences and concrete walls - result in a degree of separation far in excess of what was achieved in South Africa. This separation speaks for itself, whether or not one categorizes it as apartheid.

As a human rights lawyer who believes in the rule of law, I was particularly troubled by the existence of two separate - and highly unequal - systems of law operating in the West Bank. To be fair, all conduct of the military commander is subject to review by the High Court of Justice. Yet jurisdiction in all other matters is personal, with Israeli settlers having access to a modern, rightsbased legal system and Palestinians being subject to the authority of military courts.

Under apartheid, the legal system was used as a central tool in enforcing an unequal system based solely on race. In the occupied West Bank, separate legal systems are integral to the differential treatment of persons based solely on nationality. It is one thing to apply Israeli law to all citizens and residents of Israel within its internationally recognized borders; it is quite another to apply that law to Israeli citizens who choose to settle unlawfully in occupied territory.

Our deliberate focus on the occupation meant that we did not consider any particular “solution” to the conflict. As a group, we expressed no opinion on whether a future peace agreement should be based on a two-state solution, in accordance with international law; a single binational state; or some other hybrid or federal form. Instead, we agreed on the need for and the right of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in a democratic and secular state that enshrines civil, political and socio-economic rights for all who live within its boundaries.

At no point did we seek to “delegitimize”

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Israel. Nor did we try to reduce the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a single concept, recognizing that no one needs to make use of the A-word to draw attention to the horror of the occupation. In particular, we recognized that the apartheid analogy provides Israel’s unquestioning supporters with a convenient diversion.

Instead of engaging the substantive issues, such as the legality of the settlements and the route and effect of the separation barrier, Herzl regretfully homes in on the red herring.

Jonathan Berger is head of policy and research at the AIDS Law Project in South Africa. He writes widely on issues of health, human rights, social justice litigation strategy and the use and limits of law in social struggle.

Source: Jonathan Berger, 27.07.08

Egypt seizes Israeli radioactive cargo

Egypt has refused to allow entry to an Israeli truck carrying 3.5 ton of ceramics after high radiation levels were detected in the shipment. Egyptian officials seized the goods at the Al-Oja border crossing after radiation detection equipment showed a high presence of radioactive material in the cargo, a security official told AFP. A special team from the Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority (EAEA) was expected to inspect the shipment immediately, he added. It is not the first time that an Israeli truck is denied entry to Egypt. In June, Egypt sent back to Israel a delivery of 32 tons of tiles because it was emitting high levels of radiation.

Source: SG/MMN, 28.07.08

Paul: US would back Israeli strike on Iran

Former US presidential candidate Ron Paul says should there be an Israeli strike on Iran over its nuclear work, it would not be unilateral. The Texas congressman told Press TV that there is no ‘such thing as independent Israel doing anything’, dismissing speculation that the world may witness unilateral Israeli bombardments of Iranian nuclear sites.

“No matter what they do, it is our money, it is our weapons, and they are not going

Above: US Congressman Ron Paul to do it without us approving it,” said the 72-year-old Republican.

While the UN nuclear watchdog admits that there is no link between the use of nuclear material and the ‘alleged studies’ of weaponization attributed to Iran, the West continues to allege that Tehran is pursuing a military nuclear program.

Under US pressure, the UN Security Council has intervened in the nuclear case and has imposed three rounds of sanctions against Iran. Upper Israeli echelons, who seek Washington’s green light for attacking Iranian nuclear sites, have publicly threatened Tehran with the military action should the country continue uranium enrichment.

Tel Aviv, believed to possess the sole nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, reportedly staged a large-scale air maneuver in early June in preparation for a unilateral strike against Iran. Top US officials and military commanders, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, have spoken against such military action.

In a recent article, Gates said ‘another war in the Middle East is the last thing’ the United States needs right now. He warned that a war with Iran would be ‘disastrous on a number of levels’. When asked last week about the prospect of an Israeli or US attack, Admiral Mullen said that he worries about ‘the possible unintended consequences of a strike’ on Iran.

“If they (Israelis) get in trouble, we are going to bail them out,” continued congressman Paul, who is a staunch advocate of a diplomatic approach toward Iran over its nuclear program. As the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) acknowledges the rights of all signatory states in uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes, Iran has cited diplomacy as the only means acceptable in settling the dispute surrounding its nuclear program.

Source: MD/AA, 27.07.08

‘World Wide Telescope’ tussle

Microsoft has side-swiped Google with an apparently early version of a ‘World

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Wide Telescope.’ While Google Earth or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth are limited to data on Earth, this new project expands into space with the help of space images taken by the Hubble telescope.

So far, the World Wide Telescope includes little more than a few images, but more coverage of the universe and the addition of rich data sets will translate into a valuable resource tool.

Meanwhile, Google has struck a partnership with scientists building a huge sky-scanning telescope, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), on a mountaintop in Chile, with hopes of helping the public with a People’s Telescope to provide access to real-time digital footage of asteroids, supernovae and distant galaxies.

Officials say the telescope will open “a movie-like window” on nearby asteroids and far-off exploding stars, and help explore the mysterious dark energy believed to fuel the universe’s expansion.

Source: Daily Galaxy

CRS Report: 94% of Senate Bil s Passed in Secret

855 bills have passed the Senate with no debate, no amendments, no votes.

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senators Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) released a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) finding that 94 percent of bills the Senate has passed in the 110th Congress have been without a vote, debate or a single amendment. The 855 bills that have been secretly passed spend more than $9 billion, though a final total is not available because many of the bills were rushed through before a cost analysis could be performed.

Senator DeMint: “It would surprise many Americans to learn that the ‘World’s Greatest Deliberative Body’ passes the overwhelming majority of legislation without any debate at all. Democrats think they are entitled to pass bills without debate or votes, and they’ve tried to ram them through right before recess to pressure us to give up. But, Senators shouldn’t fear debate on these important bills. It’s in the best traditions of our republic to demand the Senate actually do its job and have a public debate on bills that expand government and increase the burden on taxpayers. Senator Reid can complain all he wants, but Republicans represent millions of Americans whose voices are being silenced by Democrat strong-arm tactics.”

Dr. Coburn: “The U.S. Senate has a nine percent approval rating because the

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American people believe that much of our work is done in secret with no debate, no transparency and no accountability. This report shows that the reality is worse than the public’s fears. Instead of encouraging open debate, I’m disappointed that Majority Leader Reid often chooses secrecy or demagoguery. For instance, he has depicted my effort to reduce the number of bills that pass the Senate in secret by ten percent as ‘unprecedented obstruction.’

What is unprecedented and ahistorical, however, is the Majority Leader’s view that Senators should have a king-like right to pass massive spending bills in secret with no debate, no amendments and no recorded vote.”

The CRS report states, “[T]he vast majority of measures passed or agreed to by the Senate so far in the 110th Congress have not received formal parliamentary debate on the floor of the Senate.” This practice, known as “hotlining,” has traditionally been reserved for noncontroversial bills with little to no cost to the taxpayer, like the naming of post offices. However, the practice has been abused to sneak through large bills that cost the taxpayers billions of dollars and have significant policy implications.

On March 3, 2008, U.S. Senator Richard Durbin stated on the Senate Floor: “My good friend, the late Congressman from Oklahoma, Mike Synar, used to say: If you don’t want to fight fires, don’t be a firefighter. If you don’t want to stop crime, don’t be a policeman, and if you don’t want to vote on tough issues, don’t run for Congress.”

“I agree with him. I don’t like facing tough votes, but it is a part of the job. You ought to at least have enough confidence in your beliefs to cast that vote and go home and explain it.”

Highlights from the Congressional Research Service Memorandum – “The Clearance Process in the Senate and Measures Approved in the 110th Congress through June 30, 2008”: “Nearly every day the Senate is in session, the majority and minority leaders consult to identify bills and resolutions that have been “cleared” by the Senators in both parties. A measure is considered cleared if no Senator has informed party leadership … that he or she is opposed to passage of the measure without debate.”

news - 381 were passed by UC without debate - 88 were passed by UC with some debate - 9 were passed by UC without debate after debate on a Senate companion bill • 35% of the bills passed by UC were agreed to in the week before a recess • 52% of the bills passed by UC were agreed to during the two weeks before a recess Source: SCHotline Press Releases, 24.07.08

Obama, Mostly the AntiBush, in Berlin

For most of his big Berlin speech, Barack Obama was the anti-Bush.

His critique of the current President was only thinly veiled. “I know my country has not perfected itself,” he said. “We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.”

And he asked: “Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law?”

On global warming, he said, “We must come together to save this planet.” He added: “Let us resolve that all nations including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your own, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere.”

Even on free trade, he put some distance between himself and Bush, as well as McCain. He endorsed “open markets” but argued: “We must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet.” So he called for trade that was “free and fair for all.”

He also, from the very beginning, showed that he viewed himself not only as an American but as “a fellow citizen of the world.” He talked about “global citizenship” and “common humanity.”

In perhaps the most moving passage of his speech, he asked: “Will we extend our

• Only 56 bills (6%) were passed by vote (53 by roll call vote, 3 by voice vote) • 855 bills (94%) were passed by Unanimous Consent (no debate, no vote) - 388 were passed by UC on the same day they were introduced

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land from rightful proprietors at gunpoint and then, by pursuing a genocidal assault against the Palestinian people’s very existence. Needless to say, this ongoing onslaught has certain hair-raising commonalities with the Nazi onslaught against European Jewry during the Second World War.

news hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity, by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time? Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words ‘never again’ in Darfur?’ ”

Peres is not stupid, he knows the power of words and the magic of sound-bites.

However, he often doesn’t say what he means, nor does he mean what he says, all for the purpose of eluding a world that dreads confronting Zionist lies.

Peres’s conception of “Palestinian state” is incompatible with the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, as well as being incompatible with international law and human rights.

And he spoke out, in very un-Bush ways, for “a world without nuclear weapons.”

Yet for all the differences he drew with Bush, there were some rhetorical and substantive similarities.

“We are called upon again,” Obama said, stealing a phrase that Bush likes to use in his most messianic moments. Like Bush, Obama talked repeatedly about “our shared destiny,” as if it’s preordained.

Even as he mentioned bringing the Iraq War to a close, he foreshadowed an openended one in Afghanistan. “We have too much at stake to turn back now,” he said.

And he said, “No one welcomes war,” a phrase that every warmonger invokes.

He talked about “a new dawn” in the Middle East, but he left no indication in his speech or in his visit to Israel and Palestine that he’s prepared to do what’s necessary to bring it about: especially in pressuring Israel to come to a just settlement with the Palestinians.

And while he said “we must reject the Cold War mindset of the past,” he harped on the Cold War over and over again, a coda that could only have discomfited Moscow even as Obama’s revisionism glossed over the dangerous part that America played in that era.

At the end, trying to wrap himself in the mantle of JFK while giving a subtle dig to McCain, Obama talked about the role of the “new generation—our generation” to “make our mark on history.”

Just how different that mark would be was hard to tell from Obama’s speech.

Source: Story by Matthew Rothschild, 24.07.08

Khalid Amayreh - Shimon Peres: the lying old man

Does Shimon Peres carry the genes of a pathological liar? The question may sound facetious to many, but Peres’s apparent inability to distinguish between truth and

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Above: Shimon Peres falsehood makes the question quite valid.

At 84, Peres continues to dish out a daily staple of lies, including obscene lies.

This week, the “hero” of the Qana-1 massacre, told foreign correspondents based in Israel that “Hamas was standing in the way of Palestinian statehood.” Well, this is, of course, a blatant lie, to say the least, because every honest person under the sun, Jew or gentile, knows well that the main obstacle impeding the realization of peace in the Middle East has been the intensive colonization of Palestinian land and unending expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied territories that belong to another people.

So how can we possibly buy the argument that Hamas is responsible for the building on the West Bank of hundreds of Jewish settlements, inhabited by hundreds of thousands of fascist-minded “settlers” who view non-Jews as animals in the shape of humans who should be enslaved by the “master race” as water carriers and wood hewers?

To be sure, Hamas is not an organization of angels. However, blaming the Islamic movement for the liquidation of the two-state solution is noting short of a pornographic lie. Indeed, from its very inception, Hamas entrusted “peace negotiations” to the PLO, and said on numerous occasions that it would live with a Palestinian state covering the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Moreover, the movement, many of whose leaders have been brutally murdered by Israel, repeatedly voiced a willingness to reach a ceasefire with the Israeli occupation army on condition of parity and reciprocity.

Hence, it was Israel - not Hamas - that rejected peace, first by stealing Palestinian

“Mr. Peace,” as he is occasionally deceptively dubbed, would like the Palestinians to “settle for” a deformed, truncated and territorially discontinuous entity on “parts” of the West Bank, without East Jerusalem and certainly without the repatriation of millions of Palestinian refugees who were uprooted from their homes and towns and villages around this time sixty years ago, in a drama of deportation and exile that continues to this date.

Hamas, like 99% of Palestinians, does reject such a scandalous sell-out of inalienable Palestinian rights. Indeed, even Mahmoud Abbas, the Chairman of the American puppet regime in Ramallah, whom Israel views as “moderate” and an “acceptable peace partner” openly rejects such a humiliating surrender to Zionism.

A classical example of the consummate Zionist leader, Peres may think that deceiving the world and frustrating the hapless Palestinian Authority regime into capitulating to the Zionist reality will be good for the Jews and for peace.

He is absolutely wrong. Palestinians may be in a state of weakness at the present as opposed to Israel, a powerful state that draws much of its military, economic and technological superiority from its tight domination of American politics and policies. However, this anomalous situation can’t be perpetuated forever. Nazi Germany (Israel is undoubtedly an updated version of the Third Reich despite all the fanfare and hasbara to the contrary) didn’t last forever. Nor did diabolical Stalinism, which had much in common with Zionism in certain respects. A fact that is well known to historians.

Coercing the Palestinians to surrender to Zionism, either through brute force as Israel has been doing, or economic inducements as Peres is trying to do,

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or both, would only keep the embers of injustice smoldering thinly beneath the surface. So, what Peres and his ilk view as “Jewish ingenuity” will eventually be proven an expression of visionless arrogance and poor statesmanship.

In addition to uttering his usual quotable but mendacious sound-bites about the Palestinians and their enduring plight, Peres is spending time these days trying to convince the world that Iran is Nazi Germany number-2 and its President Ahmadinejad is Adolph Hitler.

Well, how could any person with an iota of honesty and rectitude compare Nazi Germany, which destroyed Europe and caused the death of tens of millions of people, with Iran, a third world country whose only “crime” is its refusal to be subservient to the American-Zionist hegemony?

Besides, it is amply clear that Peres, who played a key role in introducing nuclear weapons to the Middle East via the French connection several decades ago, is utterly unqualified to lecture the world about an alleged Iranian nuclear threat.

To be sure, Israel, which possesses a huge arsenal of hundreds of nuclear bombs and warheads that are trained toward Teheran, Cairo, Damascus and Beirut (and perhaps Berlin as well), has no right to incite the west against the Islamic Republic. In the final analysis, Iran has an inalienable right to develop nuclear technology and even nuclear weapons to deter the mad dogs of Zionism, both in Tel Aviv and in Washington, D.C. Nuclear weapons, like all weapons of mass destruction, are ugly and evil. However, America and Israel are first and foremost to blame for transforming our world into a jungle where one must be a fox, or a tiger or a venomous cunning snake in order to survive.

Israel claims that it has never threatened to decimate any country or any people and that its nuclear stockpile is for “peaceful purposes.” But Israel has been decimating the Palestinian people for sixty years and some of its leaders who have a Hitlerian mentality are already threatening to inflict a holocaust on their victims.

For sure, had the Palestinians been strong, Israel would not have destroyed their towns, demolished their homes, bulldozed their farms before expelling them to the four corners of the globe.

In conclusion, Peres and other Zionist leaders can’t be trusted to tell the truth since Zionism and truth are inherently incompatible. During his stint as Prime

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Minister in 1996, flowing the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Peres oversaw the Qana-1 massacre in Southern Lebanon when the Israeli Wehrmacht knowingly and deliberately murdered more than a hundred Lebanese civilians, including numerous children who had sought refuge at the UN peace-keeping forces’ headquarters at the village of Qana.

For those who have forgotten or don’t know, neither Peres nor Israel has had the moral courage to say “sorry.” Obviously they both lack the moral caliber to do so.

And their crimes are too colossal and too numerous to be atoned for.

Source: http://peacepalestine.wordpress.com 07.05.08

Google Earth finds an Aussie meteor crater

Want to discover an impact crater, and even get it named after you? All you’ve got to do is spend a few hundred hours poring over images in Google Earth or Google Maps. That’s exactly what Geologist Arthur Hickman did, turning up a previously unknown impact crater when he was searching for iron ore in the mountains of West Australia.

While he was browsing through images on Google Earth, Hickman’s geology training helped him recognize the circular shape and raised rim of an impact crater.

Colleagues at the Australian National University confirmed that it’s a wellpreserved meteor crater between 10,000 and 100,000 years old, and until now totally unknown.

news James Green, head of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, sent a private communication to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory the week before ordering US$16 million in cuts to the Mars program, including US$4 million in rover operations this year. If those cuts had been implemented, they would have required that at least one of the rovers be put in a state of hibernation.

The letter said the cuts were necessary to offset cost overruns in the Mars Science Laboratory mission, scheduled to launch in 2009. The MSL is a much bigger rover than either of the currents ones, Spirit or Opportunity, and packed with sophisticated instruments to be used to determine the habitability of the planet.

I guess the question is when should a highly successful mission like the MER project end? Up till now, most Mars surface missions are good until they break down. In the case of Spirit and Opportunity, neither is showing many signs of breaking.

Source: NASA

Victory Declaration in Iraq Ill-Timed

This isn’t the first time a crater has been discovered using Google Earth. One was found in the Saharan Desert two years ago.

That crater is 31 kilometres across – much bigger than Meteor Crater in Arizona!

The newly named “Hickman Crater” measures 270 metres across, and is about 35 kilometres north of Newman, Australia.

The region was mapped by the Geological Survey of Western Australia about 20 years ago, but incredibly the crater went unnoticed until now.

Since large meteorites hit the Earth every few thousand years, and when you consider that the landscape is millions of years old, there are probably many more regions hiding meteorite impacts.

Source: Universe Today

Rovers safe on Mars

NASA rescinded a directive on 25 March that would have forced millions of dollars in cuts from the popular Mars rover program, saying the budget reductions had not been cleared with NASA Administrator Michael Griffin.

Hold the triumphalism about the surge in Iraq.

Even as Barack Obama backpedaled on his early criticism of the surge, even as the Associated Press declared flat out that “the United States is now winning the war,” even as Ambassador Crocker said the insurgency is now no longer even a threat to Iraq’s government, reality intruded in Iraq on Monday.

And it did so in the ugly form of four suicide bombers. Three women in Baghdad, and another suicide bomber in Kirkuk, managed to kill more than 50 people and wounded about 250. These disgusting acts, probably committed by Al Qaeda in Iraq or some related group, suggest that the worst may not yet be over.

It’s possible that many of the gains over the last year could quickly unravel, as Shiites,

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news who were the victims of these attacks, might retaliate against Sunnis—even members of the Sunni Awakening. And those Sunnis, who are also now armed by the United States, could retaliate in kind.

Of course, it’s also possible that the central government will hold, and that the gains over the past year will not be lost.

But these gains have been much more tenuous than we’ve been let on to believe.

And despite what John McCain has tried to say, they are not all the result of the surge. In fact, they have as much to do with Moqtada al-Sadr telling his followers to keep their powder dry than anything else.

How long that remains the case is anybody’s guess.

Source: Story by Matthew Rothschild 28.07.08

Palestinian Children Do Not Have the Right to a Fair Trial Under the Israeli Military Court System

In the 40th year of Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories, Tuesday 17 April 2007 marked Palestinian Prisoner’s Day. Currently there are approximately 380 Palestinian children in Israeli custody, many of whom are awaiting trial or sentence, and others who are serving lengthy periods of imprisonment for such minor offences as stone throwing.

Article 40 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which the State of Israel is a signatory and State Party, gives children the right to a fair trial, the right to liberty while awaiting trial, the right to be heard, the right to privacy, the right to be informed, to have access to a lawyer and support from family and to be treated with dignity during the trial process.

Israel arrests, detains, interrogates, prosecutes and sentences Palestinian children pursuant to a set of Military Orders issued by commanding officers of the Israeli occupying forces, a system which has existed since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. Palestinian children who are arrested by Israeli military personnel are deemed by Israel to be offenders against the “security” of the Israeli State and are subsequently prosecuted under the Israeli military system in Military Courts; a system which also prosecutes Palestinian adults.

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The Military Court system and procedure, on the surface, can be compared to that of a jurisdiction of criminal prosecution however the specific rules and Military Orders which operate within the Court are conducive to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and cancel out any opportunity or right a Palestinian may have to a fair trial.

Israeli Military Order 132 defines a Palestinian child as a person under the age of 16 and those children over the age of 16 are sentenced as adults and imprisoned with adults. Palestinian children are subjected to the same arrest, interrogation, trial and imprisonment procedures as adults, by the Israeli State.

Palestinian children, when under the arrest of Israeli soldiers, are not advised of their rights, are not given immediate access to a lawyer or contact with a parent, guardian, other adult relative or an independent support person. Palestinian children are deprived the right to a family visit while held in a detention centre for interrogation, which can last several weeks but even after the conclusion of interrogation, a Palestinian child may remain in a detention centre for an indefinite period where family visits are not allowed. Palestinian children can be deprived a visit from a lawyer while under interrogation for security reasons and under Israeli military law, this can last up to 90 days. In some circumstances, a Palestinian child may only meet his lawyer for the first time at the first court appearance in the Military Court.

Most Palestinian children are detained from the moment of their arrest until the end of legal proceedings. They are usually arrested in their homes in the middle of the night by numerous armed Israeli soldiers and are rarely granted bail by the Military Court.

Palestinian children are interrogated in detention centers and in many circumstances are assaulted, beaten and tortured during the interrogation process.

Torture methods include psychological threats of harm to or imprisonment of family members.

The Military Court is neither adversarial nor inquisitorial. Military Court judges are Israeli legal practitioners either employed by or members of the Israeli army, and are not independently appointed as judicial officers through the executive authority of the Israeli government. Military Court prosecutors are also Israeli army personnel.

The Military Court (both the judiciary and the prosecution) relies heavily on the confession of a Palestinian child. In this regard, there are no rules of evidence in the Military Court. A confession is obtained by coercion during the interrogation process. A confession is the main piece of information or “evidence” used against a Palestinian child in the Military Court. A confession is in effect, the prosecutor’s case and can also be used to implicate other Palestinian child prisoners both in Court proceedings and in interrogation.

The confession, regardless of how it has been obtained, forms the bases of the indictment against the child. It is what the child has to respond to in entering a guilty or not guilty plea before the Military Court.

There are no civilian, forensic or military personnel witness statements, whether oral or written, presented to the Military Court or a Palestinian child’s Defense lawyer before this plea is entered. In effect, this shifts the burden of proof on the Defense making it extremely difficult to challenge a confession.

All Palestinian children brought before

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the Israeli military court are sentenced to a term of imprisonment. Israel uses imprisonment as a measure of first resort for Palestinian children; there are very few cases of children who receive alternative sentences.

During their imprisonment, Palestinian children are exposed to varying forms of punishment for minor offences including being placed in solitary confinement, deprivation from family visits, financial penalties withdrawn from their prison accounts, and ongoing restrictions to going outdoors. Palestinian child prisoners also do not have the same rights as Israeli child prisoners, for example they do not have the right to make telephone calls.

Defence for Children International Palestine views the military system imposed on Palestinian society by Israel as a discriminatory system that violates core principals of human rights. Military Orders and Military Order enforcement officials are tools used by the executive authority of the Israeli government in its occupation of the Palestinian territories, to oppress and suppress Palestinian children, and to overall undermine their right to life, survival and development.

Source: http://peacepalestine.wordpress.com 18.04.08

Musings on “Martial Law”

How bad can it get? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with for a while here, given the Bush administration’s utter disdain for the rule of law.

And I’m wrestling even more with it now, having just read an article by investigative reporter Tim Shorrock over at salon.com.

In it, he talks about something called “the Main Core,” a top-secret database that the government uses for domestic surveillance.

I’d never heard of the thing before.

But Shorrock says it “contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies.”

One former intelligence officer told him that it was “designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe,

a suspension of the Constitution, or the imposition of martial law.” There it is again, that haunting, hovering phrase, “martial law.”

I’ve been told by members of InfraGard, an FBI-private sector group consisting of 26,000 businesspeople, that they’ve been told to plan for “martial law.” And Bush’s National Security Directive 51 seems to pave the way for that, as well.

Let’s remember that General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq, and Wayne Downing, who was Condoleezza’s counterintelligence czar at the National Security Council, both warned about “martial law.”

Is it too much to ask for Congress to hold a hearing on whatever plans there may be afoot for martial law? The time for that inquiry is now, before it’s too late.

Source: Story by Matthew Rothschild 23.07.08

Army’s torture of prisoners ‘had official blessing’

Defence chiefs and ministers face fresh pressure over the treatment of civilians at the hands of British forces in Iraq today, as a new report revives fears that “torture” techniques have been used 30 years after they were banned.

A scathing report from the Joint Human Rights Committee (JHRC) warns that the use of “coercive interrogation techniques” may have been officially sanctioned, despite assurances that troops knew they were outlawed.

The former armed forces minister Adam Ingram and Lieutenant-General Robin Brims, former Commander Field Army, told an earlier committee inquiry that British forces knew they could not use five “conditioning” techniques – wall standing, hooding, subjection to noise, and deprivation of sleep, food and drink – during interrogation.

But the committee has now ruled that their evidence conflicts with the findings of a subsequent court-martial hearing, and an internal Ministry of Defence review into the death of an Iraqi hotel worker, Baha Mousa, at the hands of British soldiers in September 2003.

The JHRC report also found that the use of hooding and stress positioning by 1 Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in 2003 was based on legal advice received from brigade headquarters. It claims that, at least until the Baha Mousa case came to light, the prohibition on the use of conditioning techniques “was not as clearly articulated to troops in Iraq as it might, and

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news indeed should, have been”.

The committee’s chairman, Andrew Dismore, said: “We have yet to receive an explanation from the Ministry of Defence for the discrepancies in evidence given ... by Mr Ingram in 2004 and LieutenantGeneral Brims in 2006 on the use of these illegal ... techniques.”

Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, who has represented Iraqis who claim abuse at the hands of British troops, said: “We are meant to believe that it is just ... a few bad apples, but the evidence from courts martial and other cases shows that nothing could be further from the truth. These methods are about breaking people down.

They were meant to have been banned, but somehow they came back and they became written and verbal policy.”

Source: By Brian Brady, Whitehall Editor 27.07.08

Russia proposes security revamp

BERLIN - Russia will present to NATO’s top diplomats today a radical set of proposals aimed at putting the Kremlin at the center of a new security architecture for Europe that would sideline the alliance and other international organizations that Russia believes are outdated and do not reflect its interests.

The proposals, the text of which was obtained by the International Herald Tribune, will be presented in Brussels

by Dmitri Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to the US-led military alliance. They are designed to create a legally binding security pact that could even include China and India, and which would also include nonaggression treaties.

The idea behind the proposals, security specialists say, would be to weaken the NATO military alliance and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which were established during the Cold War. “Russia may want to create a new organization that would get rid of the Organization of Security and Cooperation and NATO. At least that seems to be the ideal,” said Lieutenant Colonel Marcel de Haas, a Russia security analyst at Clingendael, the Netherlands Institute of International Relations.

The focus of any new security forum would shift away from the trans-Atlantic relationship - the cornerstone of European security for nearly 60 years - to a broader

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news Europe that would look eastward to Russia, the Central Asian countries, China, and India. Such a shift would weaken America’s influence, diplomatic specialists say.

The Russian plans would incite a debate about how to deal with a more assertive and wealthier Russia, where the leadership under President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is beginning to formulate its foreign policy strategy.

“Moscow believes that the current security architecture in Europe is a remnant of the Cold War bloc ideology,” said Andrew Monaghan, a Russia analyst at NATO’s defense college in Rome. “Russia sees itself as the largest state straddling Europe and Asia which has the strength and capacity to adopt a global purview,” he added. “This includes protecting and projecting its national interests and actively proposing solutions to international problems.”

Rogozin, an outspoken diplomat who was sent to NATO by Putin earlier this year, will first propose a new European Security Treaty, which will be a legally binding document and which would be based on the UN Charter.

Second, Russia intends to convene an international forum that would include the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, NATO, the EU, the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States and the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, which involves Central Asian countries.

Rogozin said the strains have become so great, that “Europe is breaking apart, certain states and entire countries are being isolated and new threats are not being properly addressed by the world community and in this light our common security is suffering.”

Source: International Herald Tribune, Story by Judy Dempsey 28.07.08

Bad Economic News for Women

More than cultural assumptions, women face some very concrete problems as they struggle to raise children and support their families.

Before the front-page story in The New York Times, “Women Are Now Equal As Victims of Poor Economy”.

Women’s E-news reported that mothers

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are losing ground at work. Under the headline “US Employers Push Mothers Out of the Workforce” Sharon Johnson writes, “From the 1950s through the 1990s the percentage of U.S. women in the paid work force steadily increased.

But that trend has begun to reverse and today 3.3 million fewer women are working than would be if the trend had continued.”

Contrary to conventional analysis, women are not “opting out” because they want to stay at home, Johnson reports.

Instead, women’s policy groups say that the problem is a workplace that is hostile to mothers. “The real explanation, they contend, is a workplace that fails women on some basic interlocking fronts: inflexible scheduling requirements, job discrimination, lack of child care, lack of parental leave, lack of sick leave.”

The Center for WorkLife Law in San Francisco found that in 13,000 cases, “mothers were 79 percent less likely to be hired and 100 percent less likely to be promoted because they are held to a higher standard than non-mothers in their companies,” Johnson reports.

The New York Times today adds more to the story. For the first time since the 1970s, median income for women has fallen over a period of several years-from $15.04 and hour in 2004 to $14.84 in 2007. After decades of steady progress, the Times reports, women across all economic and social strata are working less and earning less, and their families are making do with lower incomes as a result. While women’s workforce participation kept growing even through previous recessions, the Times headline refers to the fact that today women, like men, are seeing their overall numbers at work decline as a result of low wages and the perception that staying on the job under current economic conditions is not

worth it. In manufacturing, in particular, women, like men, are losing jobs. Nor are they making an easy transition to other sectors.

The upshot is that, as mothers lose ground at work, families are suffering.

The New York Times took a lot of flak a few years ago for an October 2003 Sunday magazine cover story on the “opt-out revolution,” by Lisa Belkin- that portrayed latte-sipping, high-income suburban moms as choosing family over work. It turned out that the numbers did not support the “trend” asserted by that story.

In this week’s news piece, the Times notes that a lot of the variation in women’s workforce participation in recent years comes from women at the other end of the economic spectrum-welfare recipients who were pushed into jobs by welfare reform legislation: “Now, as the economy weakens and employers shrink their payrolls, many of these women struggle to find work.”

It is often unclear why middle-income women drop out of work, the Times reports, since “men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, [but] that is often the assumption when women pull out.”

More than cultural assumptions, women face some very concrete problems as they struggle to raise children and support their families. For example, childcare for infants and toddlers can easily cost as much as $15,000 a year. Add to that the extreme difficulty of finding the kind of environment where you can actually feel good about leaving your baby all day, and then mix in shrinking wages and benefits, long commutes, inflexible employers, and a workplace that is not set up to deal with the inevitable crises of sick children

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and other family hassles.

The problem with the “opt-out” story line, as E.J. Graff pointed out in her excellent critique of Belkin’s piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, is that women’s response to all this pressure is presented as a rather pleasant, personal choice to kick back and let dad bring home the paycheck while spending more time at the gym.

The reality, as today’s news story and Johnson’s report for Women E-News shows, is that most families badly need women’s earnings to stay afloat. The answer is not to muse about how a few affluent women manage their careers and cultural expectations, but how we, as a society, make life workable for families under extreme economic, social, and emotional stress. Men, women, and children alike badly need a more modern approach to these problems. As the current recession hits home, it’s high time we did something about it.

Source: Story by Ruth Conniff, 22.07.08

What if a child is born on the Moon?

As humanity becomes a space-faring civilisation, we’re going to come up with tricky situations that challenge current laws and concepts of nationality. For example, what’s your country if you’re born on the Moon? Or if two astronauts get into a fight while in orbit, whose laws are followed?

If you break a piece of an international module, where do you send the cheque?

During a recent conference in Vienna, Austria, scholars and space scientists met to propose unusual circumstances that might happen in space exploration.

Law in space is currently covered by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. It follows the tradition of maritime law – countries or states have legal jurisdiction within their own spacecraft but what happens when a spacecraft has been built by several nations, such as the Columbus laboratory module, which was sent to the International Space Station last December?

The partner nations working to build the International Space Station have already rejected a proposal that the entire station falls under US law.

There are issues of criminal law as well.

What if one astronaut from one country punches another while in an international module, or pulls out a weapon? There are also patent law problems, where should an invention be patented? And

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there are civil law concerns like what happens if an astronaut damages a part of the station?

The meeting looked far into the future too, when bases are established on the Moon and Mars. Since the 1967 treaty defines the Moon for the good of all humanity, it can never be considered a territory of any country back on Earth. So what nationality would a child have being born there? Would he or she be called a ‘Lunatic’? OK, just kidding.

Source: Universe Today

Space rocks go under the hammer

Some of the world’s most famous meteorites have gone under the hammer at Bonhams New York auction house in what is said to be the first sale of its kind.

The pieces were drawn from collections across the world and many examples are richly coloured and intricately patterned, some even bearing gemstones.

A piece of America’s famous ‘Willamette Meteorite,’ discovered in Oregon in 1902 and priced at US$1.1million, did not sell but an iron meteorite from Siberia fetched US$123,000 and a US mailbox hit by a meteorite in 1984 sold for US$83,000.

“The results were stronger than anticipated with a near-perfect result,” Bonhams meteorite specialist Claudia Florian said after the sale.

Some of the 54 lots of meteorites for sale fell to Earth thousands of years ago.

Only one is documented as having made a fatal impact. The fatality, in the case of the Valera Meteorite which landed in a field in Venezuela in 1972, was a cow.

“It’s very rare to have a meteorite actually impact a living being ... so now that particular meteorite is considered to be collectible,” Ms Florian said before the sale. However, it was sold for US$1,300.

An altogether more humble offering were four tiny stones – the smallest of them weighing just a gram – from a shower which hit Holbrook, Arizona, in 1912.

That lot sold for US$325.

Source: BBC News

Flying Saucers - Where It All Began

The modern phenomena of UFOs and “flying saucers” began in Washington state on June 24, 1947.

American businessman Kenneth Arnold spotted nine mysterious, high-speed

news objects “flying like a saucer would” along the crest of the Cascade Range. His report made international headlines and triggered hundreds of similar accounts of “flying saucers” locally and across the nation. The rash of sightings peaked on July 8, 1947, when the U.S. Army reported that flying saucer wreckage had been found near Roswell, New Mexico.

This was retracted the following day, and despite relentless debunking and the absence of concrete evidence, reports of flying saucers and other unidentified flying objects (UFOs) persist to the present day.

While flying in his private airplane near Mt. Rainier en route from Chehalis, Washington, to his home in Boise, Idaho, Kenneth Arnold (1915-1984) was startled by a bright light shortly before 3 p.m., on June 24, 1947. He looked north and saw nine gleaming objects racing southward along the crest of the Cascades. They were roughly circular in form -- except for one crescent-like object -- about 50 feet across, and appeared metallic. He watched them for approximately two minutes until they disappeared over Oregon.

During a refuelling stop in Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold described his experience to East Oregonian editor Nolan Skiff. He said the vehicles flew in an undulating formation “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water” and weaved in and out of the mountain peaks at speeds approaching 1,400 m.p.h. Skiff’s report of Arnold’s encounter with “nine bright saucer-like objects” was picked up by the Associated Press and the “mystery discs” made national headlines on June 26.

Local newspapers and authorities were immediately inundated with other reports of “flying discs” (the term “flying saucers” came later). Several residents of Bremerton, Washington, reported seeing a number of discs during the previous week. The most spectacular reports came on July 4, 1947. In Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, scores of citizens and police officers claimed to see dozens of discs overhead.

As many as 50 residents of Boise also reported spotting a large formation, and Emil J. Smith, pilot of a United Air Lines DC-3, said his plane was buzzed by several flying disks while en route from Boise to Pendleton that evening.

Source: Story by David Reneke http://www.westender.com.au/news/101

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MIND BODY SPIRIT IS YOUR FAMILY’S HEALTH A LIVING TIME BOMB? This section is dedicated to bringing to the Australian public an understanding that ‘wellness’ is a state that can be arrived at, only when YOU take responsibility for your own health. Most Australians, it would seem, believe that government agencies such as the TGA and FDA etc, and the medical industry, have our good health as their major goal - whereas, this is probably not the case! In addition adout showing the condition of foods and personal care products we buy every day in our supermarkets, we will be tackling subjects such as fluoride, aspartame, food additives, asthma, ADD and ADHD, leukaemia, asperger’s syndrome and autism etc.

BIOTECH: THE BASICS PART THREE

by Rachel Massey (Environmental Research Foundation)

As we saw in REHN #716, genetically engineered crops now planted in the U.S. and worldwide are mostly designed to tolerate herbicides or to kill insects or other pests. A small percentage is designed for other purposes such as resisting infection by certain viruses. Here we will look at some of the threats genetically engineered crops pose to ecosystems.

Pesticidal crops may be toxic to nontarget organisms - organisms they were not designed to kill. For example, BT corn designed to kill the European corn borer can also be toxic to other closely related insects, including butterflies and moths.

Monarch butterfly larvae feed on milkweed, which often grows in or near corn fields. In a laboratory, scientists found that monarch larvae feeding on milkweed dusted with BT corn pollen grew more slowly and died at a higher rate than larvae that were not exposed to the toxic pollen.[1] Another study found these effects were likely to occur outside the laboratory as well. Researchers placed potted milkweed plants in fields of BT corn and measured the number of BT pollen grains that were deposited on the milkweed leaves. Monarch larvae exposed to BT corn pollen at these levels had high death rates compared with larvae exposed to non-engineered corn pollen or placed on milkweed leaves with no pollen.[2] The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now expresses concern about the effects of BT corn pollen on monarchs and other butterfly species, including the endangered Karner Blue butterfly.[3] EPA has asked companies to submit data on these effects, but this “data call-in” occurred four years AFTER EPA allowed BT corn to be used on U.S. farms.[2,pg.13] BT corn may also harm the green lacewing, a beneficial insect that eats agricultural

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pests. The lacewing may be affected by the toxin in the digestive systems of insects that have eaten BT corn but have not been killed by it.[4] This example shows how non-target effects may interfere with a chain of predator-prey relationships, disrupting the natural balance that keeps pest populations under control.

BT crops may also affect non-target organisms by changing soil chemistry. A 1999 article in Nature reported that the roots of BT corn plants released BT toxin into soil. The researchers found that 90 to 95% of susceptible insect larvae exposed to the substance released from the roots died after 5 days.[5] The use of BT crops can also promote the development of BT-resistant pest populations. As we saw in REHN #716, organic farmers use BT sprays occasionally as a natural insecticide to combat severe pest outbreaks. BT crops, in contrast, generally expose insects to BT toxins day after day, whether or not there is a major infestation.

These conditions increase the likelihood that BT-resistant insects will evolve. The widespread appearance of BT-resistant insect pests would mean the loss of one of the most valuable tools available to organic farmers for dealing with serious pest outbreaks.[6,pg.139] Herbicide-tolerant crops are designed to make it easier for farmers to use certain herbicides. A 1999 study of soybean farming in the U.S. midwest found that farmers planting Roundup Ready soybeans used 2 to 5 times as many pounds of herbicide per acre as farmers using conventional systems, and ten times as much herbicide as farmers using Integrated Weed Management systems, which are intended to reduce the need for chemical herbicides.[7,pg.2] Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, can sometimes persist in soil over long periods of time[8] and may affect the growth of beneficial soil bacteria, among other environmental effects.[9]

A recent, unpublished study conducted at the University of Missouri suggests that applications of Roundup to Roundup Ready crops may be associated with elevated levels of soil fungi that sometimes cause plant diseases.[10] More hazards may lie ahead as new products of genetic engineering come to market. According to the New York Times, Scott Company is collaborating with Monsanto to develop Roundup Ready grass for lawns.[11] Studies suggest that Roundup exposures can be harmful to human health.

For example, exposure to glyphosate herbicides may be associated with increased occurrence of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of white blood cells.[12] (See REHN #660.)

And a study published last August in Environmental Health Perspectives found that in a laboratory, Roundup exposure interfered with sex hormone production in cells of testicular tumours taken from mice.[13] If the introduction of Roundup Ready grass leads to increased use of Roundup on lawns, children’s exposure to the herbicide could rise.

In some cases, genetically engineered crops might become problem weeds, disrupting existing ecosystems. A recent study published in Nature found that some genetically engineered crops are unlikely to become problem weeds.

Researchers planted genetically engineered crops that were available in 1990 and monitored their growth for ten years. Many of the plants simply died out, and those that did survive showed no signs of spreading.[14] But some crop plants, such as canola, survive well on their own without human intervention.

In Canada, genetically engineered canola plants designed to resist various herbicides

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MIND BODY SPIRIT appear to have exchanged genetic material so that some canola plants now can survive exposure to two or three herbicides.

These plants with multiple herbicide resistance can be difficult for farmers to control.[6,pgs.122-123] Genetically engineered virus-resistant crops are supposed to reduce problems from viral infections, but in some cases they could make those problems worse.

Virus-resistant crops are created by adding virus genes to the plant’s existing genetic material. If a genetically engineered crop resistant to one virus is infected by another virus, the genetic material from the two viruses may sometimes interact to produce new virus types, which could be more harmful or could infect a wider range of plants than the original.[15,pgs.59-68] All the hazards discussed above are compounded by the problem of genetic pollution. Many crop plants disperse genetic material through pollen, which may be carried by the wind or by pollinators such as bees.

This means genetically engineered plants may “share” their genetic material with other, non-engineered plants.

For example, pollen from genetically engineered corn can blow into a neighbouring field and pollinate conventional corn.

Because of genetic pollution, some organic farmers whose fields border genetically engineered crops may no longer be able to certify their crops as organic.[6,pg.127] In animals, sexual reproduction between different species is usually impossible. In a few cases, reproduction between closely related species can occur but the offspring are generally sterile. For example, a horse and a donkey can mate to produce a mule, but mules cannot reproduce.

In contrast, many plants are able to reproduce sexually with related species, and the offspring of these combinations are often fertile. When crop plants grow near wild plants to which they are related, they may reproduce with these plants. This means that genetic material inserted into a crop plant can find its way into wild plant populations.

A recent article in Science reviews the literature on “ecological risks and benefits” of genetically engineered crops and confirms what advocates of precaution have been saying for years: we lack basic information on how genetically engineered crops may affect ecosystems.[16]

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Here are a few examples of what scientists do not know about ecological effects of genetically engineered crops: No published studies have looked at whether novel genes introduced into crops have become established in populations of wild relatives.[16, pg. 2088] We know that BT toxin can be released from the roots of BT corn plants, but no published studies have looked at the ecological consequences of adding BT toxin to soil in this way. [16, pg. 2089] As we have seen, BT toxin in the digestive systems of plant-eating insects may affect the predator insects that eat them. Right now it is impossible to model how an ecosystem might change due to these effects on predators, the authors say.[16, pg. 2089] Scientists are currently unable to estimate the likelihood that planting genetically engineered virusresistant crops will lead to the development of new types of plant viruses. [16, pg. 2089] A precautionary approach would require that we investigate these questions before, rather than after, permitting large-scale commercial cultivation of genetically engineered crops.

Part 3 References [1] John E. Losey and others, “Transgenic Pollen Harms Monarch Larvae.” NATURE Vol. 399, No. 6733 (May 20, 1999), pg.

214.

[2] Laura C. Hansen and John J. Obrycki, “Field Deposition of BT Transgenic Corn Pollen: Lethal Effects on the Monarch Butterfly,” OECOLOGIA Vol. 125, No. 2 (2000), pgs. 241-248.

[3] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Biopesticide Fact Sheet: BACILLUS THURINGIENSIS Cry1Ab Delta-Endotoxin and the Genetic Material Necessary for Its Production (Plasmid Vector pCIB4431) in Corn [Event 176],” April 2000. EPA Publication No. 730-F-00-003.

Available at http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/ biopesticides/factsheets/fs006458t.htm.

[4] A. Hilbeck and others, “Effects of Transgenic BACILLUS THURINGIENSIS corn-fed prey on Mortality and Development Ti m e o f I m m a t u r e C H Y S O P E R L A CARNEA (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae).”

ENVIRONMENTAL ENTOMOLOGY Vol. 27, No. 2 (April 1998), pgs. 480-487.

[5] Deepak Saxena and others, “Insecticidal Toxin in Root Exudates from BT Corn,” NATURE Vol. 402, No. 6761 (December

2, 1999), pg. 480.

[6] Royal Society of Canada, ELEMENTS OF PRECAUTION: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE REGULATION OF FOOD BIOTECHNOLOGY IN CANADA (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, January 2001).

ISBN 0-920064-71-X. Available from the Royal Society at (Ottawa, Canada) phone: (613) 991-6990 or at http://www.rsc.ca/ foodbiotechnology/GMreportEN.pdf.

[7] Charles Benbrook, “Evidence of the Magnitude and Consequences of the Roundup Ready Soybean Yield Drag from University-Based Varietal Trials in 1998,” AgBioTech InfoNet Technical Paper #1, July 13, 1999. Available at http://www. biotech-info.net/RR_yield_drag_98.pdf.

[8] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Pesticide and Environmental Fate One Line Summary: Glyphosate,” May 6, 1993.

[9] See T. B. Moorman and others, “Production of Hydrobenzoic Acids by BRADYRHIZOBIUM JAPONICUM strains after treatment with glyphosate.” JOURNAL O F A G R I C U LT U R A L A N D F O O D CHEMISTRY Vol. 40 (1992), pgs. 289293. For a review of other relevant studies, see Caroline Cox, “Herbicide Factsheet: Glyphosate (Roundup)” JOURNAL OF PESTICIDE REFORM Vol. 18, No. 3 (Fall 1998), updated October 2000, available at http://www.pesticide.org/gly.pdf [10] R.J. Kremer and others, “Herbicide Impact on FUSARIUM spp. and Soybean Cyst Nematode in Glyphosate-Tolerant Soybean.” American Society of Agronomy study abstract, available at http://www. biotech-info.net/fungi_buildup_abstract. html. Also see University of Missouri press release, “MU Researchers Find Fungi Buildup in Glyphosate-Treated Soybean Fields” (December 21, 2000), available at http://www.biotech-info.net/fungi_buildup. html.

[11] David Barboza, “Suburban Genetics: Scientists Searching for a Perfect Lawn,” NEW YORK TIMES July 9, 2000, pg. A1.

[12] Lennart Hardell and Mikael Eriksson, “A Case-Control Study of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and Exposure to Pesticides,” CANCER Vol. 85, No. 6 (March 15, 1999), pgs. 1353-1360.

[13] Lance P. Walsh and others, “Roundup Inhibits Steroidogenesis by Disrupting Steroidogenic Acute Regulatory (StAR) Protein Expression,” ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES Vol.108, No. 8

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MIND BODY SPIRIT (August 2000), pgs. 769-776.

[14] M. Crawley and others, “Transgenic Crops in Natural Habitats.” NATURE Vol. 409, No. 6821 (February 8, 2001), pgs.

682-683.

[15] Jane Rissler and Margaret Mellon, THE ECOLOGICAL RISKS OF ENGINEERED CROPS (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

[16] L. L. Wolfenbarger and P.R. Phifer, “The Ecological Risks and Benefits of Genetically Engineered Plants.” SCIENCE Vol. 290 No. 5499 (December 15, 2000) pgs. 2088-2093.

Fish Oil Improves DHA Status Of Malnourished Infants

Fish oil supplementation in malnourished infants improves their DHA status.

Researchers from the Netherlands found that fish oil is apparently well-absorbed and increased red blood cell (RBC) DHA levels by over 47%. This was achieved by giving a 500 mg supplement of fish oil daily, each containing 112 mg of DHA, for a period of 9 weeks.

The researchers noted that these increased DHA levels did not significantly affect the concentration of RBC omega-6 fatty acids, which was a concern since there is a competitive relationship between omega3 and omega-6 fatty acids. The study was performed on malnourished, predominantly breastfed, Pakistani children, aged 8-30 months.

Arch Dis Child 2000; 82: 366-369 COMMENT: Although these children were being breast fed, their mothers were malnourished, and therefore so were the children. This study illustrates the importance of proper nutrition, especially essential fatty acids, in breastfeeding women.

MEAT: Biblical Nutrition: The Bible Supports Foods from Both Plant & Animal Kingdoms...PART 3

by James Ong Singapore (originally published in www.chetday.com)

This letter is written in rebuttal to Reverend Malkmus position that is promoted in Hallelujah Acres.

I recently read Parts 6, 7, and 8 of your continuing series on Biblical nutrition, and it amazes me that you stubbornly hold

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fast to your doctrine by misinterpreting the Bible.

I wish to submit my third and final rebuttal of your teaching on Biblical nutrition, highlighting further scriptural evidence, rather than rehashing the same arguments over and over again: In your Health Tips, you quote 1 Timothy 4:3 to explain that in the KJV, “meat” does not always refer to animal flesh. But you deliberately left out vs. 4-5 which states, in the same KJV that you use, “For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.”

Notice what the Scripture says. Every creature of God is good, i.e. cows, sheep, goats, deer, chicken, quail, fishes with scales and fins, etc, and nothing is to be refused as food, if it is approved by the Word of God. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 are detailed instructions God gave to Moses to teach the Israelites on how to choose between what may be eaten and what may not be eaten.

You teach that during OT times, animals were slaughtered primarily for the purpose of religious sacrifices which were a foreshadow of the ultimate and final sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the sins of man.

You are only stating the partial truth.

Firstly, the flesh of the animals that were sacrificed were to serve as food for the priests and those who offered the sacrifices. In fact, priests were offered the choicest parts of the animals as food.

Priests must have eaten more meat than the common folk. Yet, they are supposed to be the healthiest people in the nation for if they had any physical defect or uncleanness, they were disqualified from serving before God. You can read all about these in Leviticus and Numbers.

Why do you keep certain truths from your readers? You are not teaching the whole counsel of God. I quote from Deuteronomy 12:5-12 that sums up God’s position on the consumption of meat, both as part of religious ceremonies and as a part of normal meals: “But you shall seek the place where the Lord your God chooses, out of all your tribes, to put His name for His dwelling place; and there you shall go.

“There you shall take your burnt offerings,

your sacrifices, your tithes, the heave offerings of your hand, your vowed offerings, your free-will offerings, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks.

“And there you shall eat before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice in all to which you have put your hand, you and your households, in which the Lord your God has blessed you.

“You shall not at all do as we are doing here today-every man doing whatever is right in his own eyes-for as yet you have not come to the rest and the inheritance which the Lord your God is giving you.

“But when you cross over the Jordan and dwell in the land which the Lord your God is giving you to inherit, and He gives you rest from all your enemies round about, so that you dwell in safety, “then there will be the place where the Lord your God chooses to make His name abide. There you shall bring all that I command you: your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tithes, the heave offerings of your hand, and all your choice offerings which you vow to the Lord.

“And you shall rejoice before the Lord your God, you and your sons and your daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levite who is within your gates, since he has no portion nor inheritance with you.

“Take heed to yourself that you do not offer your burnt offerings in every place that you see; “but in the place which the Lord chooses, in one of your tribes, there you shall offer your burnt offerings, and there you shall do all that I command you.

“However, you may slaughter and eat meat within all your gates, whatever your heart desires, according to the blessing of the Lord your God which He has given you; the unclean and the clean may eat of it, of the gazelle and the deer alike.

“Only you shall not eat the blood; you shall pour it on the earth like water. “You may not eat within your gates the tithe of your grain or your new wine or your oil, of the firstborn of your herd or your flock, of any of your offerings which you vow, of your free-will offerings, or of the heave offering of your hand.

“But you must eat them before the Lord your God in the place which the Lord your God chooses, you and your son and your

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MIND BODY SPIRIT daughter, your male servant and your female servant, and the Levite who is within your gates; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God in all to which you put your hands.

“Take heed to yourself that you do not forsake the Levite as long as you live in your land.”

Notice that as far as the sacrifices and tithes are concerned, the Israelites are required to eat the flesh of the animals in the presence of the LORD at the place appointed by Him. It is a command. As for other occasions, God freely allows man to eat meat whenever and whatever their heart desires.

You also teach that in NT times, there is no longer any need for animal sacrifices, hence we should not be eating meat. This same Jesus, who offered Himself as the once-for-all sacrifice for sins, ate fish after His resurrection and invited His disciples to join Him in His breakfast of broiled fish and bread! Furthermore, the apostle Paul in Romans 14 deals at length with the issue of eating meats offered to idols.

In his treatise, he does not condemn or discourage the eating of meat at all. Rather he states categorically in v. 14 that, “I know and am convinced in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but to him who thinks anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean.”

From this passage, we can gather that Paul himself ate meat, being stronger in faith but he taught that abstinence from meat is sometimes better for the sake of the conscience of the weaker brother. This is so as not to cause the brother to stumble, since he is weaker in faith and feels that he should not eat meat that has been offered to idols. Paul deals with this issue again 1 Corinthians 8.

Nowhere in the NT does the Bible prohibit the eating of animal flesh/food.

You should also refer to my earlier letters (Biblical Nutrition Part 1, Biblical Nutrition Part 2) the OT that state that during the Millennium, animal sacrifices will be reinstated in the Jerusalem Temple, fishing will continue and meat will still be eaten.

You seem to advocate feeding raw meat to cats and dogs to keep them healthy.

Yet, many breeders have successfully bred beautiful, healthy cats and dogs on commercial pet food and, occasionally, freshly cooked food, for years. For your information, I used to keep German

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Shepherds.

My family has never fed them with raw meat. Our dogs reproduced without problems and never had tumours or other health problems described by you. Feeding raw meat is potentially dangerous as the animals will develop a taste for blood and raw flesh and have been known to attack humans as a result.

The word “raw” does not even appear in Genesis 1:29 or Daniel 1:12. So how can you be so sure that the Bible was referring unequivocally to raw fruits and vegetables in both instances?

Did you know that God fed the Israelites with manna every morning and quail every evening during their wilderness wanderings? You can read it in Exodus 16. If meat is so toxic, why would God do such a thing?

Even without quail, the Israelites had plenty of dairy products and eggs to consume because they left Egypt with plenty of livestock (Exodus 12:38). The Israelites were also instructed to cook the manna.

With this diet, Moses lived to a ripe old age of 120, still in excellent health on the day he died. Vegetables and fruits were hard to come by in the wilderness, more so if you have to move from place to place.

God even gave instructions to the Israelites regarding their gathering of birds’ eggs (Deuteronomy 22:6).

Did you know that God sent a raven to feed Elijah with bread and meat in the morning and in the evening for a period of time during the drought until the brook Cherith dried up? You can read the account in 1 Kings 17:1-7. This same Elijah was fed with bread cake baked on hot stones, which strengthened him for a forty day/night journey to Horeb, the mountain of God. Proponents of vegetarianism/veganism often cite the example of Daniel. However, they may not be aware that Daniel did not maintain a strict vegetarian diet for the rest of his life.

The evidence is in Daniel 10:2-3, which records an event that took place many years after his training as a youth in King Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, “In those days, I Daniel, had been mourning for three entire weeks. I did not eat any tasty food, nor did meat or wine enter my mouth, nor did I use any ointment at all until the entire three weeks were completed.”

You see, the best way to interpret Daniel Ch. 1 is that the young men were presented

with the king’s delicacies which must have included unclean flesh of animals that were forbidden for the Jews to eat, meats that were not prepared in the manner that the Torah prescribed (e.g. draining out the blood, removing the cover fat) and meats that were offered to Babylonian idols.

Their godly wisdom taught them that consuming such food would defile their body, mind and spirit.

God honoured their commitment and blessed their bodies and minds. The diet of vegetables (we don’t know for sure if it was all cooked, all raw or partly cooked, partly raw) was certainly more nutritious than the king’s delicacies.

In the Middle East, seeds, grain, beans and lentils are a very common part of the people’s diet. It would not be unreasonable to assume that part of the vegetables (“pulses” in the KJV) the youths ate included seeds, grains, beans and lentils.

After Daniel completed his training and began to serve in the king’s court, he could choose the clean meats and have them prepared in the Torah-prescribed way.

So there was no need for him to continue with his vegetarian diet, as confirmed by Daniel 10:2-3.

It is still possible to buy meats from freerange animals that are slaughtered in the kosher/halal way today. As I’ve said before, we need to go back to the good old ways of mixed, organic farming and protection of our environment, rather than condemn animal foods wholesale.

Other than the threat of contaminated sea and river water, fish is an excellent source of animal protein and essential fatty acids, and qualifies as “free-range” meat. In many rural villages in Asia, cows, goats, chicken and ducks are still raised in the traditional way and slaughtered and eaten on special occasions.

John the Baptist, whom Jesus described as the greatest prophet under the Old Covenant, ate honey and locusts as his primary diet.

Reverend, you seem to like to use the example of animals feeding in the wild as illustration of how man should eat. Please bear in mind that man was not created in the image of the wild beasts, but in the image of God, Amen.

So our best model is not the wild animals, but the perfect God-Man Himself, our

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MIND BODY SPIRIT Lord Jesus Christ, who ate animal and cooked foods freely and did not ever once condemn the eating of such foods.

And by the way, He also drank wine, the fermented grape juice variety, for if He had only drunk unfermented grape juice, He would not have been accused of being a glutton and a drunkard by the Pharisees and teachers of the law who are learned men and would not have made the accusation without first checking the basic facts (Luke 7:33-35). I will not belabour this point.

stemmed from over-consumption of meat, pasteurised dairy products, foods deepfried with refined, commercial vegetable oils, salt and other preservatives, refined sugar and refined flour. Lack of fibre, nutrients, rest, exercise and other lifestyle factors (such as stress) probably played a part as well.

Pork and sausages are very dangerous to our health. So is deep-fried food fried with cheap vegetable oils. To blame it all on animal products is too extremist a position.

You may wish to refer to two excellent articles on this topic. (Click here for the first article on alcohol in the Bible and click here for the second article) The scriptural position on alcohol (wine or strong drink) is clearly to drink only in moderation and not to become addicted to or drunk with it. The best Scripture on this is found in Deuteronomy 14:26: “You may spend the money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen, or sheep, or wine, or strong drink, or whatever your heart desires; and there you shall eat in the presence of the LORD your God and rejoice, you and your household.”

As I’ve said in my earlier letters, a wellbalanced diet that comprises both raw and cooked vegetables, fresh fruits, wholemeal grain products, nuts, seeds, beans, coldpressed oils and a modest consumption of free-range eggs, meat, poultry and fish, prepared and cooked in the proper way is the Biblically-correct way to eat and ensures optimum health, if all the other lifestyle factors are also in place.

It should be understood that Genesis 1:29 was a commandment given to Adam and Eve before the Fall, when the world was perfect. It was essentially a fruitarian/seed diet (based on the botanical definition of a fruit).

Best regards,

After the Fall, God cursed the ground and also modified the diet to include the green plants of the field, which was previously meant for the animals, as well as bread made from grains (Genesis 3:18) probably because of the presence of sickness and the subsequent lower yield of fruits and seeds from a ground that was cursed.

All that changed after the Flood, with the earth’s environment being vastly different and harsher still, the genetic make-up of man being slightly modified so that he could not live much beyond 120, God permitted men to eat animal flesh as well (Genesis 9:3): “Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give to you, as I gave the green plant.”

These instructions were given by an allwise, all-knowing and benevolent God who always has man’s best interests in His heart.

From analysing the diet you had preHallelujah Diet days, it can be deduced that your health problems probably

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It is my hope and prayer that you will come to a fuller understanding of the truth and have the courage to admit that you had made a mistake.

James P. T. Ong, Singapore

Alternatives to Using Pesticides

Although most of us like to avoid the use of toxic pesticides, you don’t need to put up with ants swarming your counters.

Boric acid or borax will kill ants and even cockroaches.

Since most ants like sweets, you can mix a little bit of honey or other type of sugar with boric acid and make a paste. Cut out some 2-inch by 2-inch cardboard squares and smear the paste on. Put these in the ant trail, where they will gobble it up and take the residues back to the nest.

A home-made garden spray that will discourage most pests consists of a mashed garlic paste combined with some cayenne or horseradish. Add a small amount to a gallon jug and let it sit for a day or two, shaking it now and then. Spray a small amount onto a few leaves first to make sure it doesn’t burn them.

Most nurseries these days have Neem Oil, which is harmless to humans but sprayed on garden plants discourages all types of fungi, moulds and even ants.

If you would like more details on these

types of natural solutions to pests, try the book Dead Snails Leave No Trails by Nancarrow and Taylor, or visit the website http://www.betterbasics.com.

COMMENT: Avoiding pesticides are an important part of staying healthy. They are particularly toxic to pregnant women. If you are interested in reviewing one of the better texts on this subjects Dr. Theo Colburn Reclaiming Our Stolen Future is one of the better books on the topic. It is one of Dr. John Lee’s favourite books.

Drug Industry Lies About New Drug Research and Development

The pharmaceutical industry spends about one-fifth of what it says it spends on the research and development (R&D) of new drugs, destroying the chief argument it uses against making prescription drugs affordable to middle and low-income seniors, a Public Citizen investigation has found.

A Public Citizen report reveals how major U.S. drug companies and their Washington lobby group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), have carried out a misleading campaign to scare policy makers and the public.

PhRMA’s central claim is that the industry needs extraordinary profits to fund “risky” and innovative research and development to discover new drugs. In fact, taxpayers are footing a significant portion of the R&D bill, which is much lower than the companies claim.

This R&D scare card is built on myths and falsehoods that are maintained by the drug industry to block Medicare drug coverage and measures that would rein in skyrocketing drug costs.

Public Citizen based the study on an extensive review of government and industry data and a report obtained through the Freedom of Information Act from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Among the report’s key findings: The actual after-tax cash outlay - what drug companies really spend on R&D for each new drug (including failures) - is approximately $110 million (in year 2000 dollars.) This is in marked contrast with the $500 million figure PhRMA frequently touts.

The NIH document shows how crucial taxpayer-funded research is to the development of topselling drugs. According to the NIH, U.S. taxpayer-funded scientists

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MIND BODY SPIRIT conducted at least 55 percent of the research projects that led to the discovery and development of the five top-selling drugs in 1995.

Public Citizen found that, at most, about 22 percent of the new drugs brought to market in the past two decades were innovative drugs that represented important therapeutic advances. Most new drugs were “me-too” or copycat drugs that have little or no therapeutic gain over existing drugs, undercutting the industry’s claim that R&D expenses are used to discover new treatments for serious and lifethreatening illnesses.

A second report issued today by Public Citizen, The Other Drug War: Big Pharma’s 625 Washington Lobbyists, examines how the U.S. drug industry spent an unprecedented $262 million on political influence in the 1999-2000 election cycle.

That includes $177 million on lobbying, $65 million on issue ads and $20 million on campaign contributions. The report shows that: The drug industry hired 625 different lobbyists last year - or more than one lobbyist for every member of Congress - to coax, cajole and coerce lawmakers.

The one-year bill for this team of lobbyists was $92.3 million, a $7.2 million increase over what the industry spent for lobbyists in 1999. Drug companies took advantage of the revolving door between Congress, the executive branch and the industry itself.

Of the 625 lobbyists employed in 2000, more than half were either former members of Congress (21) or worked in Congress or other federal agencies (295).

The industry’s $20 million in campaign contributions and millions more in issue ads attacking candidates opposed by the industry aided its army of lobbyists in gaining access to congressional representatives.

The drug industry is stealing from us twice: First it claims that it needs huge profits to develop new drugs, even while drug companies get hefty taxpayer subsidies.

Second, the companies gouge taxpayers while spending millions from their profits to buy access to lawmakers and defeat proconsumer prescription drug legislation.

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, added, “Not surprisingly, pharmaceutical companies have been deceiving Congress and the

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American public for years.

Worried that a benefit would lead to discounted prices in the lucrative senior citizen market, the industry spent a record $262 million on political influence in the 1999-2000 election cycle.

The report, The Other Drug War: Big Pharma’s 625 Washington Lobbyists, documents how the U.S. drug industry spent $177 million on lobbying, $65 million on issue ads and $20 million on campaign contributions - more than any other industry in 1999-2000.

“The drug industry is one of the more hypocritical industries around,” said Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. “It claims to be working for consumers when in fact it uses profits from sales to buy access to lawmakers and defeat pro-consumer prescription drug legislation.” Among the report’s highlights: Public Citizen’s Congress Watch July 23, 2001

MILK AND THE CANCER CONNECTION

by Hans R. Larsen, MSc ChE On January 23, 1998 researchers at the Harvard Medical School released a major study providing conclusive evidence that IGF-1 is a potent risk factor for prostate cancer. Should you be concerned? Yes, you certainly should, particularly if you drink milk produced in the United States.

IGF-1 or insulin-like growth factor 1 is an important hormone which is produced in the liver and body tissues. It is a polypeptide and consists of 70 amino acids linked together. All mammals produce IGF-1 molecules very similar in structure and human and bovine IGF-1 are completely identical. IGF-1 acquired its name because it has insulin-like activity in fat (adipose) tissue and has a structure which is very similar to that of proinsulin.

The body’s production of IGF-1 is regulated by the human growth hormone and peaks at puberty.

IGF-1 production declines with age and is only about half the adult value at the age of 70 years. IGF-1 is a very powerful hormone which has profound effects even though its concentration in the blood serum is only about 200 ng/mL or 0.2 millionth of a gram per millilitre (1-4).

IGF-1 and Cancer IGF-1 is known to stimulate the growth of both normal and cancerous cells (2,5). In 1990 researchers

at Stanford University reported that IGF-1 promotes the growth of prostate cells (2).

This was followed by the discovery that IGF-1 accelerates the growth of breast cancer cells (6-8).

In 1995 researchers at the National Institutes of Health reported that IGF-1 plays a central role in the progression of many childhood cancers and in the growth of tumours in breast cancer, small cell lung cancer, melanoma, and cancers of the pancreas and prostate(9).

In September 1997 an international team of researchers reported the first epidemiological evidence that high IGF1 concentrations are closely linked to an increased risk of prostate cancer (10).

Other researchers provided evidence of IGF-1’s link to breast and colon cancers (10,11). The January 1998 report by the Harvard researchers confirmed the link between IGF-1 levels in the blood and the risk of prostate cancer.

The effects of IGF-1 concentrations on prostate cancer risk were found to be astoundingly large - much higher than for any other known risk factor.

Men having an IGF-1 level between approximately 300 and 500 ng/mL were found to have more than four times the risk of developing prostate cancer than did men with a level between 100 and 185 ng/mL. The detrimental effect of high IGF-1 levels was particularly pronounced in men over 60 years of age. In this age group men with the highest levels of IGF1 were eight times more likely to develop prostate cancer than men with low levels.

The elevated IGF-1 levels were found to be present several years before an actual diagnosis of prostate cancer was made(12).

The evidence of a strong link between cancer risk and a high level of IGF-1 is now indisputable.

The question is why do some people have high levels while others do not? Is it all genetically ordained or could it be that diet or some other outside factor influences IGF-1 levels? Dr. Samuel Epstein of the University of Illinois is one scientist who strongly believes so.

His 1996 article in the International Journal of Health Sciences clearly warned of the danger of high levels of IGF-1 contained in milk from cows injected with synthetic bovine growth hormone (rBGH). He postulated that IGF-1 in rBGH-milk could be a potential

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MIND BODY SPIRIT risk factor for breast and gastrointestinal cancers (13).

The Milk Connection Bovine growth hormone was first synthesised in the early 1980s using genetic engineering techniques (recombinant DNA biotechnology). Small scale industrysponsored trials showed that it was effective in increasing milk yields by an average of 14 per cent if injected into cows every two weeks.

In 1985 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States approved the sale of milk from cows treated with rBGH (also known as BST) in large scale veterinary trials and in 1993 approved commercial sale of milk from rBGHinjected cows(13-16). At the same time the FDA prohibited the special labelling of the milk so as to make it impossible for the consumer to decide whether or not to purchase it(13).

Concerns about the safety of milk from BST-treated cows were raised as early as 1988 by scientists in both England and the United States (14,15,17-22). One of the main concerns is the high levels of IGF-1 found in milk from treated cows; estimates vary from twice as high to 10 times higher than in normal cow’s milk (13,14,23). There is also concern that the IGF-1 found in treated milk is much more potent than that found in regular milk because it seems to be bound less firmly to its accompanying proteins (13).

The concerns were vigorously attacked by consultants paid by Monsanto, the major manufacturer of rBGH. In an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in August 1990 the consultants claimed that BST-milk was entirely safe for human consumption (16,24).

They pointed out that BST-milk contains no more IGF-1 than does human breast milk - a somewhat curious argument as very few grown-ups continue to drink mother’s milk throughout their adult life. They also claimed that IGF-1 would be completely broken down by digestive enzymes and therefore would have no biological activity in humans (16).

Other researchers disagree with this claim and have warned that IGF-1 may not be totally digested and that some of it could indeed make its way into the colon and cross the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. This is of special concern in the case of very young infants and people who lack digestive enzymes or suffer from

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protein-related allergies (13,14,20,22,25).

Researchers at the FDA reported in 1990 that IGF-1 is not destroyed by pasteurisation and that pasteurisation actually increases its concentration in BST-milk. They also confirmed that undigested protein could indeed cross the intestinal wall in humans and cited tests which showed that oral ingestion of IGF-1 produced a significant increase in the growth of a group of male rats -a finding dismissed earlier by the Monsanto scientists (25).

The most important aspect of these experiments is that they show that IGF-1 can indeed enter the blood stream from the intestines - at least in rats.

Unfortunately, essentially all the scientific data used by the FDA in the approval process was provided by the manufacturers of rBGH and much of it has since been questioned by independent scientists. The effect of IGF-1 in rBGH-milk on human health has never actually been tested and in March 1991 researchers at the National Institutes of Health admitted that it was not known whether IGF-1 in milk from treated cows could have a local effect on the oesophagus, stomach or intestines (26,27).

Whether IGF-1 in milk is digested and broken down into its constituent amino acids or whether it enters the intestine intact is a crucial factor. No human studies have been done on this, but recent research has shown that a very similar hormone, Epidermal Growth Factor, is protected against digestion when ingested in the presence of casein, a main component of milk (13,23,28).

Thus there is a distinct possibility that IGF-1 in milk could also avoid digestion and make its way into the intestine where it could promote colon cancer (13,22).

It is also conceivable that it could cross the intestinal wall in sufficient amounts to increase the blood level of IGF-1 significantly and thereby increase the risk of breast and prostate cancers (13,14).

The Bottom Line Despite assurances from the FDA and industry-paid consultants there are now just too many serious questions surrounding the use of milk from cows treated with synthetic growth hormone to allow its continued sale. Bovine growth hormone is banned in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The European Union has maintained its moratorium on the use of rBGH and milk products from BST-treated

cows are not sold in countries within the Union. Canada has also so far resisted pressure from the United States and the biotechnology lobby to approve the use of rBGH commercially.

In light of the serious concerns about the safety of human consumption of milk from BST-treated cows consumers must maintain their vigilance to ensure that European and Canadian governments continue to resist the pressure to approve rBGH and that the FDA in the United States moves immediately to ban rBGH-milk or at least allow its labelling so that consumers can protect themselves against the very real cancer risks posed by IGF-1.

From People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) (http://www.peta. com)

References 1. Wilson, Jean D. and Foster, Daniel W., eds. Williams Textbook of Endocrinology, 8th edition, London, W.B. Saunders Company, 1992, pp. 1096-1106 2. Cohen, Pinchas, et al. Insulin-like growth factors (IGFs), IGF receptors, and IGF-binding proteins in primary cultures of prostate epithelial cells. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, Vol. 73, No. 2, 1991, pp. 401-07 3. Rudman, Daniel, et al. Effects of human growth hormone in men over 60 years old.

New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 323, July 5, 1990, pp. 1-6 4. LeRoith, Derek, moderator. Insulin-like growth factors in health and disease.

Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 116, May 15, 1992, pp. 854-62 5. Rosenfeld, R.G., et al. Insulin-like growth factor binding proteins in neoplasia (meeting abstract). Hormones and Growth Factors in Development and Neoplasia, Fogarty International Conference, June 26-28, 1995, Bethesda, MD, 1995, p. 24 6. Lippman, Marc E. The development of biological therapies for breast cancer.

Science, Vol. 259, January 29, 1993, pp.

631-32 7. Papa, Vincenzo, et al. Insulin-like growth factor-I receptors are overexpressed and predict a low risk in human breast cancer.

Cancer Research, Vol. 53, 1993, pp.

3736-40 8. Stoll, B.A. Breast cancer: further metabolic-endocrine risk markers? British Journal of Cancer, Vol. 76, No. 12, 1997, pp. 1652-54

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MIND BODY SPIRIT 9. LeRoith, Derek, et al. The role of the insulin-like growth factor-I receptor in cancer. Annals New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 766, September 7, 1995, pp. 402-08 10. Mantzoros, C.S., et al. Insulin-like growth factor 1 in relation to prostate cancer and benign prostatic hyperplasia.

British Journal of Cancer, Vol. 76, No. 9, 1997, pp. 1115-18 11. Cascinu, S., et al. Inhibition of tumor cell kinetics and serum insulin growth factor I levels by octreotide in colorectal cancer patients. Gastroenterology, Vol. 113, September 1997, pp. 767-72 12. Chan, June M., et al. Plasma insulinlike growth factor I and prostate cancer risk: a prospective study. Science, Vol. 279, January 23, 1998, pp. 563-66 13. Epstein, Samuel S. Unlabeled milk from cows treated with biosynthetic growth hormones: a case of regulatory abdication.

International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1996, pp. 173-85 14. Epstein, Samuel S. Potential public health hazards of biosynthetic milk hormones. International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1990, pp. 73-84 15. Epstein, Samuel S. Questions and answers on synthetic bovine growth hormones. International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1990, pp. 57382 1 6 . D a u g h a d a y, W i l l i a m H . a n d Barbano, David M. Bovine somatotropin supplementation of dairy cows - Is the milk safe? Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 264, August 22/29, 1990, pp. 1003-05 17. Brunner, Eric. Safety of bovine somatotropin. The Lancet, September 10, 1988, p. 629 (letter to the editor) 18. Kronfeld, D.S., et al. Bovine somatotropin. Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 265, March 20, 1991, pp. 1389-91 (letters to the editor) 19. Rubin, Andrew L. and Goodman, Mark.

Milk safety. Science, Vol. 264, May 13, 1993, pp. 889-90 (letters to the editor) 20. Challacombe, D.N., et al. Safety of milk from cows treated with bovine somatotrophin. The Lancet, Vol. 344, September 17, 1994, pp. 815-17 (letters to the editor)

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\21. Coghlan, Andy. Milk hormone data bottled up for years. New Scientist, October 22, 1994, p. 4 22. Coghlan, Andy. Arguing till the cows come home. New Scientist, October 29, 1994, pp. 14-15 23. Mepham, T.B., et al. Safety of milk from cows treated with bovine somatotrophin.

The Lancet, Vol. 344, July 16, 1994, pp.

197-98 (letter to the editor) 24. Grossman, Charles J. Genetic engineering and the use of bovine somatotropin. Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 264, August 22/29, 1990, p. 1028 (editorial) 25. Juskevich, Judith C. and Guyer, C. Greg. Bovine growth hormone: human food safety evaluation. Science, Vol. 249, August 24, 1990, pp. 875-84 26. Mepham, T.B. Bovine somatotrophin and public health. British Medical Journal, Vol. 302, March 2, 1991, pp. 483-84 27. NIH technology assessment conference statement on bovine somatotropin. Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 265, March 20, 1991, pp. 1423-25 28. Playford, R.J., et al. Effect of luminal growth factor preservation on intestinal growth. The Lancet, Vol. 341, April 3, 1993, pp. 843-48

COMMENT: Some outstanding science documenting the reasons why you want to avoid drinking milk. Some may argue that the IGF-1 levels are not increased in organic milk and this is likely true. However, the IGF-1 is still there, as it is in all animal milks (and human as well of course). This is one of the reasons why it is a completely inappropriate food for anyone but a young child. But there are numerous other reasons to avoid drinking milk besides the IGF-1 levels (see articles below). In addition to the possible cancer risk, a justpublished study shows that IGF-1 may play a role in the early stages of diabetic nephropathy (Horm Res 2000;53:53-67)

Drug-Company Influence on Medical Education in the USA

It begins on the first day of medical school and lasts through to retirement, and it is the only reliable “cradle to grave” benefit that doctors can truly count on any more.

Even in this era of medical-ledger watching world wide, there is little evidence to expect it will ever end. In fact, it may even

be growing.

It starts slowly and insidiously, like an addiction, and can end up influencing the very nature of medical decision-making and practice. It first appears harmless enough: a textbook here, a penlight there, and progresses to stethoscopes and black bags, until eventually come nights “on the town” at academic conventions and allexpenses paid “educational symposia” in lovely locales.

Attempts to influence the judgment of doctors by commercial interests serving the medicalindustrial complex are nothing if not thorough. Unfortunately, they seem to work. Studies have shown that prescribing patterns are influenced by advertising and other marketing activities. If this were not the case, why would industry spend hundreds of millions of dollars on promotion?

Advertising sustains industry, and no industry, not even the medical one, can avoid its reach. So it is not the fact of marketing that is in question here. It is the form in which it comes. Surely, no one would mistake a pen with a corporate logo as anything but promotion. Nor would anyone suggest that a stuffed animal with a brand-named drug stitched to its fur is of great medical value. But when the line between medical education and advertising or marketing is blurred, there is a problem.

A recent study completed by the US watchdog Public Citizen (http://www. citizen.org) documents the relation between medical education activities, the pharmaceutical industry, and medical education services suppliers (MESS), which are private businesses that provide medical education.

The study stems from survey data published in the December, 1999, issue of Medical Marketing & Media, an industry periodical. MM & M surveyed 123 MESS about their 1998 and 1999 operations.

80 returned questionnaires. In summary, the data suggest that supplying medical education can, in this form, be a very lucrative exercise, whose most consistent client is the pharmaceutical industry. What is of most concern here is the fact that so much continuing medical education comes through the filter of industry. To ensure the integrity, and the appearance of integrity, of the process of learning in medicine, physicians should do more to pay for CME themselves, just as many other professionals have to do.

Lancet September 2, 2000; 356: 781

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SCHAPELLE CORBY NEVER PROVEN GUILTY

by Roy Reeves Copyright (c) R. Reeves 2008

The subject of Schapelle Corby’s arrest in October 2004, and conviction and imprisonment in Bali in May 2005, continues to make the news even now, in mid 2008. A movie length documentary about this very subject, entitled “Schapelle Corby - The Hidden Truth” or “Ganja Queen”, was screened on Channel 9 in Australia in late June, and on HBO in the US in early July. Her book, entitled “My Story”, which has been available in Australia and New Zealand since 2006, has just been released in the UK and US, entitled “No More Tomorrows”. The Schapelle Corby story is far from over.

As an active supporter of Schapelle Corby and the whole Corby family, I have studied her case in some depth. I am, of course, an ardent believer in her innocence of the crime for which she was arrested, tried and convicted. My personal opinion, and that of many other supporters, is that the marijuana was planted in Schapelle Corby’s boogie-board bag by the Balinese Police themselves, however, in this article I have elected to stick to the known facts rather than indulge in conspiracy theory.

What I have discovered, during the course of my investigations, is the fact that Schapelle Corby was never adequately proven guilty under Indonesian Law, and as such should not have been convicted. The guilty verdict handed down by the Judges was, in the end, based on the unsupported testimony of two Customs Officers and two Anti-Drug Squad Officers.

Their testimony was at odds with the testimony given by Schapelle Corby herself, and the CCTV footage from the camera above the Customs Counter at Ngurah Rai Airport, which could and would, I believe, have supported Schapelle’s testimony, and refuted the lying testimony of the four men, was never allowed into the courtroom.

Article 8 of the Indonesian Code of Criminal Procedure, Article 18 of the Indonesian Human Rights Law, and Article 14 (2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, all state the following, in so many words: Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to the law.

The onus was therefore on the Prosecution to prove guilt, rather than on the Defence to prove innocence, in Schapelle Corby’s case. However, they didn’t do this. Their case was weak and lacked evidence.

Apart from the marijuana itself, the only other evidence they presented was the

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testimony of four men, and this testimony was unsupported by CCTV footage, which it could, and should have been, considering how important it was to the outcome of the trial.

Since Schapelle’s boogie-board bag was unlocked from the time it left the Corby’s home to the time it arrived on the Customs counter at Ngurah Rai Airport, anyone could have inserted the plastic bag of marijuana into it during that time.

For Schapelle to be guilty of importing a prohibited drug, the Prosecution would have to prove that she had put the drugs into the boogie-board bag herself or, at the

very least, prove that she knew the drugs were in there prior to opening the bag.

She certainly could not have been found guilty of drug smuggling, since to smuggle means to convey secretly. Having the drugs in a clear plastic bag, inside an unlocked boogie-board bag with your name on, and then willingly opening that bag for inspection thus exposing the drugs, cannot be construed as conveying secretly!

For Schapelle to be guilty of drug trafficking, the Prosecution would have to prove that she had some connection with a drug distribution network in Bali. Since she was there to help celebrate her sister’s 30th

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birthday and have a holiday on the beach, to suggest that she intended spending her entire fortnight trying to sell the drugs off piecemeal in a foreign country, is nothing short of absurd.

Any one, or all, of the following points could have been investigated by the Balinese Police, to assist the Prosecution in building their case against Schapelle, and if they had been doing their job properly one would have expected them to do so: • A check for fingerprints on both the outer and inner plastic bags in which the marijuana was packed. If her fingerprints appeared on either bag - Guilty.

• Weighing the entire luggage that had been checked in under Schapelle Corby’s name at Brisbane Airport. Put the bag of marijuana on the scales at the same time, then compare this weight with the checked-in weight. If the two weights were the same then the marijuana was in her bag at check-in Guilty.

• Forensically test the marijuana to determine its country of origin and THC content. Proving that the marijuana came from Australia, while not exactly proving that Schapelle was guilty, would certainly have advanced their case considerably. If, on the other hand, Schapelle’s DNA had been matched against the DNA of any hair or skin fragments found amongst the drugs - Guilty.

• Accessing the CCTV footage from the camera above the Customs counter at Ngurah Rai Airport. The Customs Officer there, Gusti Winata, testified that Schapelle displayed signs of nervousness, was hesitant about opening her boogie-board bag, and pushed his hand away when he tried to open it. If true, this footage would have corroborated his story and would have proved that Schapelle had prior knowledge of the drugs in her bag - Guilty.

This last point was as vital to the Prosecution’s case as it was to the case for the Defence, as we will see later.

The presence of the marijuana in Schapelle Corby’s boogieboard bag was not, on its own, grounds for a conviction. Under Indonesian Law, the Prosecution is required to produce some form of secondary evidence, with which to back up the primary evidence.

were all denied. Not only were they denied by the Balinese Police, who refused to give the AFP a sample of the marijuana for testing, they were also denied by the Judge. This was a total obstruction of justice, as it severely limited Schapelle’s chances of mounting an effective defence.

An investigation by the Police into how Schapelle planned to rid herself of the drugs could also have provided secondary evidence.

Had a link between her and any one or more drug distribution networks in Bali been established - Guilty.

To the detriment of the Prosecution’s case however, no investigation of this nature was ever carried out. Schapelle’s luggage and its contents were ultimately destined to go to her sister’s home, yet Mercedes and her husband were never questioned.

An investigation by the AFP into how Schapelle might have grown or acquired 4.2kg of marijuana would have been quite in order.

Working with their Balinese counterparts, to eliminate any further transnational drug importations of this type into Indonesia from Australia, would have been in the interests of both countries. Had a link between Schapelle and any known drug dealers in Australia been established - Guilty.

Although they were never informed that their affairs and finances were being looked into, the Corby’s are fairly certain that they were.

Clearly, however, there was nothing irregular about either, since no further investigation was ever carried out. Not one family member has ever been questioned by the AFP in relation to this crime.

Had Schapelle been a drug user, particularly a marijuana user, and had she been caught using or possessing drugs of any kind following her arrest, this fact could also have been used as secondary evidence - Guilty.

BELOW: Photo of Schapelle in her cell. © Rosleigh Rose

Had the results from any one of the first three points above favoured the Prosecution’s case, it would have provided them with secondary evidence. As such, it is reasonable to assume that they would have wanted these points investigated, and that the Police would have done so.

The fact that not one of these points was ever investigated seemingly defies all logic, unless we look at the alternate hypothesis. These points, if properly investigated, could just as easily have proven Schapelle’s innocence, and they would have done.

Were the Police just playing it safe, to protect the Prosecution’s case at all cost, or did they know in advance which way the results would go? If the latter is true, then how did they know?

The only people who actually asked for these points to be investigated, pleaded for it in fact, were Schapelle and her Defence Lawyers. Schapelle even signed a consent form allowing the AFP to forensically test the marijuana, in order to ensure an impartial and fair result.

Since the AFP’s brief in a case like this is to assist the Prosecution and not the Defence, asking for this forensic testing, fingerprinting of bags and weighing of luggage, would have been utter stupidity if Schapelle had, in fact, been guilty. The results would only have further incriminated her.

As it was, her requests in this regard, and those of her Lawyers,

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Once again, to the detriment of the Prosecution’s case, Schapelle was not a drug user and her urine tests proved this.

Nor was she, or has she ever been, caught in possession of drugs.

need to,” but in the end he never found the need. If the footage had favoured the Prosecution’s case, would he have found the need then?

Let’s not underestimate the importance of this point. The testimony of these four men was the Prosecution’s only secondary evidence. They had nothing else.

Even now, when it would be so easy for her to descend into the darkness, and numb her pain with the wide variety of illicit drugs that are readily available in Kerobokan Prison, she chooses not to, even when so many of her fellow inmates have.

If these men were lying, and it’s reasonable to assume that they were, then the evidence was inadmissible and the case against Schapelle Corby was over.

So, with no fingerprints, no weight comparison, no forensic test results, and no investigation into how Schapelle had acquired the drugs or how she intended to get rid of them, when she tested negative to drug use the Prosecution found themselves with no secondary evidence.

The Police did attempt to help them out, trying twice to trick Schapelle into signing a confession, both times written in Indonesian which she could not speak or read. They also tried to plant drugs on her in the Polda visitor’s room. However, these measures all failed.

In the end, the testimonies of the two Customs Officers and two Anti-Drug Squad Officers, who were present in the airport at the time, formed the basis of the Prosecution’s secondary evidence. For the crimes of importing a prohibited drug and drug smuggling, Schapelle Corby was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in a third world prison. She was convicted on the strength of their testimonies, and their testimonies alone.

Gusti Winata was the Customs Officer at the counter when Schapelle’s boogieboard bag arrived there.

Winata testified that he asked her to open the boogie-board bag but she refused, saying there was nothing in there. She was nervous, and when he tried to open it himself, she pushed his hand aside and said, “No.” He proceeded to open it a bit, at which time she yelled, “No!” When the Judge asked if Schapelle agreed, she said, “No, he’s lying.”

The Judge would have had no choice but to acquit Schapelle of all charges and set her free.

ABOVE: This photo of Schapelle’s face was attached to a card sent to her father in July 2007. © Rosleigh Rose

According to Komang, when asked about the bag of marijuana, Schapelle said, “This is mine, I own it.”

In response to this Schapelle said, “I never at any stage stated that the marijuana belonged to me. Never, ever, have I stated that.”

Komang’s statement was clearly a lie, since no one in their right mind would admit to owning the drugs, whether it was true or not.

These testimonies were later backed up by the testimonies of two Anti-Drug Squad Officers, both of whom were in the airport at the time the boogie-board bag was placed on the counter.

Despite being a considerable distance away from the counter in what was, at the time, a crowded airport, both claimed to have seen Schapelle push Winata’s hand away when he tried to open the boogie-board bag. Both also claimed to have heard Schapelle say that the drugs belonged to her, even though neither of them could speak English!

It was Schapelle’s word against theirs.

Schapelle, on the other hand, testified that when James was asked if the boogieboard bag was his, she said, “No, no, it’s mine. Here you go...” and placed it up on the counter. She noticed that the zips had been tampered with but thought nothing of it and, without being asked to do so, willingly unzipped the bag for inspection.

She was immediately struck by the smell and sight of the marijuana, and in a panic she zipped the bag up again.

The second Customs Officer to testify, Komang Gelgel, gave the following testimony.

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People can easily lie, but cameras cannot.

Had the CCTV footage from the camera above the Customs counter been made available in court as requested, it would have instantly corroborated one version of events or the other. Since it was Schapelle and her Lawyer Erwin who requested it, it’s logical to assume that it would have favoured her testimony.

Initially, the Judge agreed to look into it, this later became, “We’ll get it if we

According to the Law of Indonesia, there would have been no grounds for a conviction.

Not only should access to that camera footage have been allowed, the Judge himself should have insisted on it. The testimony of these men was both crucial and damning, and Schapelle had every right to request this footage for the purpose of refuting it outright. When the Judge failed to comply with the request he was, essentially, siding with the Prosecution.

His failure to allow the footage into court, considering the importance of it to the case, was totally inexcusable.

In the end, Schapelle Corby was never proven Guilty, she was merely judged to be ‘Guilty’, and by a Judge prepared to take the word of liars over that of an Innocent woman.

For him and the other two Judges to find Schapelle ‘Guilty’, without attempting to confirm, or prove to the World, that the evidence upon which they would base their verdict was true and correct, especially when this evidence was in dispute, was an outrageous travesty of justice.

Schapelle’s first appeal could have been based on this one point alone.

Even now, it should be sufficient grounds for her conviction to be overturned.

To this day, not one piece of evidence has ever been produced, by the Balinese Police or Australian Federal Police, which links Schapelle Corby with the plastic bag of marijuana found in her boogie-board bag on the 8th October 2004.

The Innocent Should Not Be Punished!

VOL.8 #5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008

Arthur Conan Doyle and the Holy Grail

by Sol Copyright (c) Sol 2008

The Musgrave Ritual

The Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle is most familiar to us today as the creator of the detective Sherlock Holmes, but a lesser known fact about him is that he was also a Scottish Rite Freemason. He was unarguably a highly intelligent and well-read man, who later in his life turned to mysticism and was head of a Spiritualist movement which lobbied to change England’s old law aginst witchcraft. Taken together this gives us a person who would, either Knowingly or Subconsciously, incorporate some very interesting symbolism into his stories, infusing the Detective Mystery genre with other Mysteries.”

According to a simplified version of Jung’s immortal theory of the Collective Subconsious, all of humanity’s dreams and desires are added to an endless stream of thought which is common to us all. Some sensitive people, notably adepts of the various creative arts, can somehow “connect” to that stream and get ideas and symbols out of it, which they shape into their creations. (What others refer to as “creativity” or “imagination”.)

A secret as big and ancient as the “Holy Grail”, which countless seekers of strove to find over the centuries or even millenia, would certainly leave a mark on that timeless record. The brilliant trickster Doyle is actually likely to have known much of the Grail lore, as part of his reasearch on the history of the Scottish Rite. But whether he did it purposely or not, this lore found its way into his own tales.

There is a particular Sherlock Holmes adventure which can provide some very revealing information about the history of the Grail in modern times. It is called “The Musgrave Ritual”, and it is widely available online, for example here: http:// www.4literature.net/Arthur_Conan_Doyle/ Musgrave_Ritual .

This short story is by no means an example of Doyle’s finer writing, or of Holmes’ more brilliant deductions and better known cases.

And it’s plot is far less captivating than

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some of Doyle’s faster-paced adventures.

But it would seem that this was merely a clever tactic adopted by Doyle in order to conceal the real importance of his account, because most readers would usually look no further. Let’s take a good look at what he is telling us here.

Holmes basically sets out to find a missing butler and maid at the mansion of an old aristocratic friend, but ends up finding something entirely different in addition - a buried treasure of King Charles I Stuart (which name is still spelled “Stewart” according to the Scottish King Lists.).

The nature of the treasure is revealed only at the very end of the story, but this is obviously the part which should pique the curiosity of any Grail researcher.

Because according to research put forward by such works as “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, or “Bloodline of the Holy Grail” by Laurence Gardner, Charles I Stewart is named as the hereditary head of a “secret brotherhood” which was in charge of safeguarding nothing less than the Holy Grail itself. This “Grail” was supposedly hidden somewhere in Scotland, most likely at the Roslyn Chapel, by the remnants of the Knights Templar who fled France during the destruction of their Order by King Philip IV of France in 1307 CE. The main clue which Holmes has to work with in the story, is an old family ritual of his friend Reginald Musgrave. Nobody in the family knows the meaning of this ritual, but respecting the wishes of their ancestors they had dutifully passed it through many generations of Musgraves, each traditionally teaching it to his male offspring.

Holmes’ friend caught his butler one day in the family’s private library surreptitiously studying the old document, shortly before the butler went missing. Holmes understands right away that the ritual in fact deals with the location of some kind of a buried treasure.

Here is the wording of the Musgrave family

ritual. It’s presented in the form of a questionand-answer dialogue, familiar as an entry ritual into all secret societies, including Freemasonry and College Fraternities.

‘Whose was it?’

‘His who is gone.’

‘Who shall have it?’

‘He who will come.’

‘Where was the sun?’

‘Over the oak.’

‘Where was the shadow?’

‘Under the elm.’

‘How was it stepped?’

‘North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.’

‘What shall we give for it?’

‘All that is ours.’

‘Why should we give it?’

‘For the sake of the trust.’

Holmes measures the amount of steps from the ritual on the ground, after performing an intelligent bit of triangulation to determine where a shadow of a rooted-out elm would have fallen when the shadow of the stillstanding oak tree on the estate would’ve been at the elm trunk, and proceeds to find both the missing butler and the crypt where the treasure was concealed.

It was hidden on the Musgrave estate by friends of the deposed and executed King Charles the First, who were fleeing the Parliamentary forces of Oliver Cromwell.

The exact date is not given, but Musgrave notes that his ancestor was a “prominent Cavalier and right-hand man of Charles the Second in his wanderings”. These “wanderings” are known to have taken place after the battle of Worcester in 1651, when the Royalists were defeated in their attempt to help the young son of Charles I gain back the usurped throne, two years after his father was beheaded.

Holmes guesses that Musgrave and other Stuart supporters hid some historically important relics to keep them from being plundered, so that they could be passed onto Charles II when he was restored to power. The hiding place was described in the family ritual. The opening lines, “Whose

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was it”/”His who is gone” refers to Charles I. The second question and answer “Who shall have it”/”He who will come” refers to the foreseen future coronation of Charles II. But the original Musgrave who concealed the trove and wrote the ritual, had evidently died in the war before he had time to reveal its secret to his own son. Thus his descendants had no idea of the ritual’s true significance, until it was discovered

by Reginald Musgrave’s butler and then

by Holmes.

The “treasure” itself, which was hidden in that manner and eventually did not find its way to the son of Charles the First but instead remained rusting under Reginald Musgrave’s house for over two hundred years, was, in Holmes’ own words, “nothing less than the ancient Crown of the Kings of England”.

As mentioned, we are told this fact only at the very end of the story. The nature of the treasure when revealed, turns out to be merely incidental to the larger romantic adventure between the butler and the maid, and in fact it’s quite a disappointment to reach that part, as means very little to any of the heroes in the tale or to the reader.

Yet it would seem that the very unimportance of this treasure in the story plot is used

by Doyle to disguise the fact that we’re talkng about a vital link in the British Royal Succession, the very Old Crown of England itself. A very important artifact in itself, it is also extremely symbolic - not only of the Power its wearer wields, but also of the sacred Grail guardianship with which the Stewarts were entrusted.

The lost cache belonged to Charles I and it did not reach his son because of the Revolution. But Charles II did in fact eventually assume the British Throne nine years later in 1660, soon after Cromwell’s death - so he did actually inherit “the crown”, the Monarchy itself. So which “treasure” of his father did he not get?

This can only mean that Doyle was referring to another kind of succession which was broken here - that of the Stewart Grail Keepers, which was interrupted with the beheading of Charles I so that his sacred charge did not make its preordained way to his eldest son and rightful heir.

The Grail, according to the legends, was deemed much more important to its guardians than rulership of the land.

Charles II must’ve had a new crown made to replace the “lost” one, and this signifies that some sort of a major change took place in the British Monarchy at that time as well, as from that time on the monarchs wore a “different crown” than before. But the symbolic significance of the Old Crown as the Old Grail cannot be denied.

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This is borne out in the last question of the Ritual - “Why do we do it/For the sake of the trust”, which words should be written in capital letters as The Trust, thus obviously referencing the object of this ancient Stewartship. Doyle is saying that due to the social and political upheavals brought by the Commonwealth Revolution (as well as the changing religious climate in Scotland), Charles II no longer had the same control of the Grail as his father did, it was not fully passed onto him.

Our notion is borne out in several other features of the story, perhaps most pertinently its very opening words “an anomaly which often struck me”. Using a first line which drops a hint to the Intrepid Searcher is an established trick in occult literature. The “anomaly” should make the reader aware that something very unusual will be told. It also refers to the mentioned disappointment at the useless nature of the found treasure - because despite its apparent irrelevance today, this treasure is in actuality a vital symbol for something most important.

The wording of the ritual itself also strongly supports the Broken Grail Succession theory, in Doyle’s choice to use particularly the oak and the elm tree as the starting markers from from which to determine the location of the hidden trove. Both trees have traditionally been deeply assosciated with Grail lore.

The Oak was an ancient symbol of the House of Stewart, and earlier was the symbol of the House of king David from the Bible. The Mediterranean Oak (a slightly different variety from the European one) was the largest shade-giving tree in old Palestine and was justly considered the King of the Trees there. Thus the Oak became a symbol for the Holy Bloodline itself, which bloodline was shown by the above writers and others to have gone from King David to Jesus, and then through the Merovingians in France to the Stewart kings.

“Sun over the Oak” would then be Doyle’s way of telling us that despite the unsuccessfully passed heritage of Charles II, the ancient guardianship of the Grail somehow continued. But like the English Crown in the story, it was hidden away, with the hiding place and its meaning forgotten by subsequent generations. Yet the Old Oak still stands to guide one’s way, as it guided Holmes to make his find.

An interesting aspect of “The Musgrave Ritual”, is that by the time Holmes arrived on the scene the elm was already cut down on the Musgrave estate, and Holmes (as did the missing butler before him) had only the place where it stood and its known old height to work with. This did not prevent either of them from performing a geometrical calculation and locating the spot which the shadow of the elm would’ve pointed to at a

certain time of day.

The cut-down elm here undoubtedly refers to the famous event in the history of the Knights Templar, known as “the Cutting of the Gisors Elm” ( see for example http:// www.crystalinks.com/prieuredesion.html) This momentous instance ties into the Grail Legend in many more ways than can be readily enumerated in a short article, but basically it signified an ideological split within the Templar Order and the Merovingian Bloodline, and also the split between France and Plantagenet England, (which led to such things as the hundredyear war.)

The Cutting of the Elm took place near the Castle of Gisors in France in the year 1188 CE. That same year the Rosicrucian Order was founded by none other that Jean de Gisors, also founder of the Priory of Sion, the organization said to be in charge of guarding the Grail Bloodline. (See the excellent article by Steven Mizrach at http:// www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/rennes-sion.html) The word for “elm” in French is “orme”, which is related to Ormus, the 1st Century Gnostic who’s considered the “spiritual father” of the Rosicrucians and is also found in some histories of the origins of Modern Freemasonry. Other interesting thoughts about this can be found at the above links.

It is very likely therefore, in light of what we’ve found in this story so far, that “Shadow under the Elm” was Doyle’s way of saying that the traces of that old Templar Split still weigh heavy, like a shadow, over the guardianship of the Grail. But this doesn’t prevent Holmes from solving the puzzle - because after all, the sun is still “over the oak”. This is akin to the Biblical expression “the hand is still upraised”, meaning that despite the split, the boken succession, the lost treasure, and all the other problems acquired over the years, the old Grail Legacy still stands to be discovered, if one merely looks in the right place.

What one has to do then, presumably, is find the right starting place from which to apply Doyle’s triangulation and step measurements, to find the actual location of the Grail in his day, which he may’ve even known due to his many assosciations, or had simply guessed. He gives a hint as to the general geographical location in the very last words of the story, which are also very significant, just like the opening ones.

As he’s talking about the missing maid (who, significanlty, is the only feature of the story which he failed to physically locate and could only put a logical theory about), Holmes says that “she carried herself and the memory of her crime to some land beyond the seas”. This is undoubtedly a reference to the United States, where many sources claim that the Grail itself was

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carried to. The idea of the Grail in America was well-known in Doyle’s time and was later yet more popularized by people like the mystic Manly Hall.

The “missing woman” would then obviously symbolize the Lost Sacred Feminine, which according to many writers constitutes the nature of the Grail. Like the “treasure” itself, which was buried and lost in the story, this is another very poignant symbol for that broken succession.

The meaning of the second-to-last question of the ritual is not entirely clear at this time - “What shall we give for it/All that is ours”.

This evidently refers to some sort of selfsacrifice, because “all” would presumably include one’s life as well. Obviously implying the personal sacrifice of people like the Musgrave ancestor in the story, who did give his life in support of his charge, this phrase must also refer to something which Doyle thought was still very pertinent to the Grail in his day and probably in the future.

An additional hint in this story as to the possible modern location of the Grail could be the fictitious location where Doyle places the Musgrave manor - in a town of “Hurlstone” in western Sussex. The name is suggestive of “a stone’s throw”, which is a familiar relative measure of distance when describing major landmarks. And though the figures in the Ritual could be interpereted in different ways - for example, “ten and by ten” could refer to multiplication, and not taking ten steps with each foot as Holmes had surmised - Conan Doyle is basically telling us how the measurement should be done, once we find the starting point.

It should be noted that in the film version of this story made in 1986, available today on DVD as “The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 5 - The Musgrave Ritual & The Man with the Twisted Lip” the steps in the ritual are given differently: “West 8 by 8, South 7 by 7, West 6 by 6, South 5 by 5 plus 2 by 2 and then under.”

One has to wonder why the film writer Jeremy Paul, who won an Edgar Award for this script, changed the original wording. He may have thought that his new figures carry an additional numerological significance, or perhaps it was meant to hide the numbers given by Doyle for some reason. But perhaps the new sequence simply looked better on film, or happened to be the best fit for the set location. But another interesting coincidence about that DVD is that the hero of the second story on it “The Man with the Twisted Lip” is called “St. Clair” - which name is intimately assosciated with the Holy Grail, the Templars, and Freemasonry.

Lastly, “the Musgrave Ritual” is considered an unusual Holmes adventure, because it does not involve Dr. Watson in any way the incident took place when Holmes “was in college” long before he met Watson,

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and he tells the whole thing to the good doctor in their study, showing him some of the recovered coins from the find. This uncommon feature (although present in a few other Holmes tales) is another pointer at the importance of this otherwise unnoticed story.

The Valley of Fear

To conclude our account, lets take a short look at a much better known Holmes and Watson escapade, which is described in the novel “The Valley of Fear”, written by Doyle in 1914, long after the Musgrave Ritual came out in 1893.

This work is also considered an unusual Holmes story, because the entire second half of the novel does not involve Holmes or Watson at all. The scene there is set in an imaginary “Vermissa Valley, Pennsylvania”, and describes the earlier American history of the client whose case Holmes was working on in the first half. The complete absence of our usual heroes from the lengthy description makes this novel also stand out on its own among Holmes’ more familiar investigations.

Holmes’ client client, the hero of the second part of the novel, used to be a Pinkerton agent in the US, where he was an instrument of the Law and brought to justice what we would call today “a protection racket”. It was run by the Vermissa Valley chapter of “The Ancient Order of Freemen”, supposedly a national organization with a chapter in every major US city. In Vermissa Valley they were called “the Scrowers”, and assumed a very sinister role of a violent organized crime ring, who charged “protection-dues” from legitimate businesses, enforcing this policy with mayhem and murder. Doyle takes pains to point out that this is only one renegade lodge of the large organization, the rest of which is law-abiding and philantropic.

It has been pointed out by many researchers that this description is Doyle’s “thinly veiled” cricisim of Freemasonry, not so thinly veiled at all of course. But most likely it carries an additional important message as well.

First, the fact that the action is set in America strengthens our earlier supposition that Doyle believed the “Holy Grail” to have been taken to that land accross the sea - because Freemasons were named by some researchers of his day as the modern Guardians of the Grail. (On the other hand, Doyle may’ve only meant to disassociate the criminal group from home in England, and place them in distant violent America instead.)

Doyle probably wishes to show us here how certain factions of Freemasonry had perverted the Original Precepts for Personal Gain, while trying to fool others that they were only doing it for everyone’s “protection”. This idea goes back further than modern Freemasonry to factions of

the Templars, who may’ve started doing the same thing before, which gave birth to such legends as Templar “the Key of Solomon” being a book on raising demons.

Doyle is also making an important statement about how members of a “select brotherhood” are forced to do things which may oppose their own personal morality.

They dare not go against their bretheren in the organization, either out of loyalty or for fear of reprisals. This is an open statement about how the “bad Masons” keep their members in line. The criminal behavior of the “bretheren” could be a reference to some known murders from 19th Century America, which are seen today as having been committed and later covered up by Freemasons - such as the death of Captain William Morgan in 1826.

The moral dilemmas posed by an adherence to the Rules of Brotherhood rather than one’s conscience, is a theme that has been endlessly expounded in subsequent books and films. Doyle was possibly the first to popularize it for a much wider audience - though of course the idea of a band of criminals controlling a frontier town, which we’ve seen in so many Western movies, goes back to the legends of the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin of Locksley.

Lastly, researchers have concluded that Doyle’s “Order of Freemen” is based on a sordid episode of an actual organization named “The Molly Maguires”, who had also ended up being a violent ring who subjugated a peaceful working valley to their vices. This group split off from the “Ancient Order of Hibernians”, an Irish Catholic society which was set up in the 16th Century to oppose Henry the Eighth’s persecution of Catholicism. (See extensive article at http://mill-valley.freemasonry. biz/marin_hibernians_orangemen_royal_ black_knights.htm .)

This is an important bit of fact, because “persecution of Catholicism” is considered to be one of the causes of the political upheavals in England and Scotland during the 17th Century, which had led to the execution of Charles I and the physical removal of the Grail from the Stewart charge. Doyle is likely to have been satirizing conflicting factions of Freemasonry seeking to regain control of the Grail.

It would seem then, that Doyle is definitely trying to tell us something with all this symbolism. Whether he was actually privvy to information regarding the Grail, or had made a good educated guess about it, which is far more likely, or had merely pulled the whole thing out of the Collective Subconscious - but there is no doubt that in addition to everything else he was famous for, he should also get credit for giving subsequent generations of intrepid searchers a good trail to follow.

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ASPARTAME INTERACTS WITH ALL DRUGS, VACCINES AND TOXINS

by Dr. Betty Martini Copyright (c) Dr. B. Martini 2008

Who knows more about the toxicity of aspartame than the FDA. Their toxicologists, Doctors Adrian Gross and Jacqueline Verrett strenuously objected to aspartame approval for 16 years. It wasn’t just that aspartame is not safe and in original studies triggered brain tumors, seizures and all sorts of other tumors, it was that the manufacturer filtered out what they didn’t want FDA to see. (January 10, l977 in a 33 page letter, FDA Chief Counsel Richard Merrill recommended to U.S. Attorney Sam Skinner that a grand jury investigate Searle for “apparent violations of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, 21 U.S.C.331(e), Act 18 USC 1001, for “their willful and knowing failure to make reports to the Food and Drug Administration required by the Act 21, U.S.C. 355 (i) and for concealing material facts and making false statements in reports of animal studies conducted to establish the safety of (aspartame),” The FDA called special attention to studies investigating the effect of NutraSweet on monkeys and hamsters.)

Both U.S. Prosecutors hired on with the defense team and the statute of limitations expired. Still the FDA kept saying loudly no - no - no!

FDA’s Jerome Bressler wrote the brilliant FDA audit, the Bressler Report on http:// www.dorway.com <http://www.dorway. com/> in regard to Searle’s testing.

In speaking with Bressler he told me personally the studies were so bad the worst 20% was removed by FDA when retyped. He also told this to Doctors H. J. Roberts and Dr. Russell Blaylock. Dr. Roberts asked his congressman to get the rest of the report from the FDA who promptly refused.

In the incredible aspartame documentary, Sweet Misery, A Poisoned World, from the very mouth of Attorney James Turner who assisted the famed Dr. John Olney in trying to prevent approval came mind

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boggling facts! Don Rumsfeld, currently Secretary of Defense, was CEO of Searle and said he would call in his markers and get aspartame approved. To Rumsfeld the fact the FDA said “no” meant only he would have to use politics instead of science to get this neurotoxin approved, knowing full well it would poison the public, causing in humans the injuries seen in lab animals, brain tumors and seizures. He was on Reagan’s transition team and the day after Reagan took office Arthur Hull Hayes was appointed to approve this toxin, since no former FDA Commissioner had been willing to do so.

ASPARTAME WAS APPROVED BY PRESIDENTIAL ORDER: President Reagan knew it would take 30 days to get Hayes to FDA so he wrote an executive order making the outgoing FDA Commissioner powerless to oppose aspartame. From the congressional record, Senate, page S5497, May 7, l985: “Two FDA officials have told Common Cause Magazine that Hayes was determined to push aspartame forward, in part as a signal that the Reagan administration was ushering in a new regulatory era. One official privy to some of the deliberations made at Hayes’ level says the “people at the top” were not receptive to important concerns raised about the quality and validity of some of the key tests submitted in support of aspartame.”

“There were real questions” about the reliability and interpretation of the data “that were glossed over” at the commissioner’s level, this official says, adding that Hayes and his close associates wanted FDA scientists to concentrate on providing rationales for overturning the l980 Public Board of Inquiry instead of focusing on the fact that there were unresolved issues about a number of key

tests.”

John Hoey, M.D. in reviewing Marcia Angell’s book, “The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It” (10/7/2004) says: “By Angell’s account, the current slide toward the commercialization and corruption of clinical research coincided with the election of President Ronald Reagan in l980 and the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, a new set of laws that permitted and encouraged universities and small businesses to patent discoveries from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Research paid for by the public to serve the public instantly became a private and salable, good, one that is producing drug sales of more than $200 billion a year.”

Further, Dr. Hoey in discussing research commercialization said: “The broader effects are felt in the commercialization of universities, medical faculties, and our profession. In 2000, in a letter written in response to Angell’s Journal editorial, Is Academic Medicine for Sale?” a reader supplied the answer: No. The current owner is very happy with it. The increasing intrusion of industry into medical education and the almost complete domination of continuing medical education (especially regarding drugs) by the marketing departments of large pharmaceutical companies are a scandal.”

When Arthur Hull Hayes got to the FDA a Board of Inquiry was set up with the finest scientists FDA had. They declared: “...the Board concludes that approval of aspartame for use in foods should be withheld at least until the question concerning its possible oncogenic potential has been resolved by further experiments.

The Board has not been presented with proof of a reasonable certainty that aspartame is safe for use as a food

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additive under its intended conditions of use.”

“ORDER: The foregoing constitutes the Board’s findings of fact and conclusions of law. Therefore, it is ORDERED that: (1) Approval of the food additive petition for aspartame (FAP 3A2885) be and it is hereby withdrawn. (2) The stay of the effectiveness of the regulation for aspartame, 21 CFR 172.804, is hereby vacated and the regulation revoked.”

This PBOI report on 9/3/80 was signed by Walle J. H. Nauta, M.D., Ph.D., Chairman, Peter W. Lampert, M.D., and Vernon R. Young, Ph.D., Member.

Dr. Hayes wouldn’t take “no” because he was there to get aspartame approved.

As the Congressional Record continues, Senate, S5497, May 7, l985: “Hayes decisions to approve aspartame for use in dry foods such as cereals in l981 and soft drinks in l983 does not square with the role of the FDA is supposed to play. The FDA is the government agency that reviews and approves all tests submitted by companies before allowing food additives on the market. The law requires a manufacturer - in this case Searle - to prove to the satisfaction of the FDA that there is a “reasonable certainty” that a food additive is safe. The government does not have to prove that it is harmful - an important distinction. If tests are inconclusive, an additive is not suppose to be approved by the FDA.” When Hayes finished his job to get a neurotoxic drug on the market he hired on with the public relations firm, Burston Marsteller, who represented NutraSweet, for $1000.00 per day as a consultant.

Hayes refused to talk to the press since.

He had no excuse for approving a toxic drug whose petition was revoked by FDA scientists. Hayes had full knowledge that its a carcinogen in violation of the Delaney Amendment which forbid adding carcinogens to food and drugs.

WHEN FDA WAS PUSHED OFF ITS PEDESTAL: Imagine an intact FDA which tried to do its job of protecting the public, having to proclaim that a horrendous neurotoxic drug is safe. What could FDA say when asked if aspartame was safe?

Could they say “we approved it but its poison”? Probably the only thing they could say was “Ask us no questions and we will tell you no lies.” Even today when journalists ask the FDA to comment on aspartame they say: “No comment. See our web site.” The web site is just lying industry propaganda. Beginning with Reagan and Hayes the pharmaceutical cartel had the power to get approved the worst drugs. FDA seemed to care not. Their bulletin, the FDA Consumer continued to

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tout the safety of aspartame and letters to victims whose lives were destroyed said aspartame was the most tested additive in history. Even letters to congressmen lied and lied.

Dr. John Olney knew what aspartame would do to the brains of our children and discussed it in his report to the Board of Inquiry. In l999 Parents Magazine asked “What’s Happening to our Children”, announcing that families all over America were experiencing so much depression it was estimated that 1 out of 4 had contemplated suicide.

The 50% phenylalanine in aspartame lowers the seizure threshold and depletes serotonin,and can trigger bipolar or manic depression, mood swings, paranoia, hallucination and suicidal tendencies.

So our children are medicated instead of educated. Seventy per cent of consumers use aspartame and 40% of the children.

Dr. Olney’s prophecy is fulfilled.

To get a copy of the congressional record, Board of Inquiry Report and Dr. Olney’s Report to the Board of Inquiry on CD you can contact Bob Flint at bobflint@ greatfallspro.com. The web site would be http://www.greatfallspro.com Three congressional hearings were held

by Senator Howard Metzenbaum who wrote a bill to have independent studies done on the problems from aspartame, effect on the fetus, behavioral problems in children, seizures and drug interactions.

The producers saw to it that the bill never got out of committee. The last of the heroes of FDA toxicologists Adrian Gross and Jacqueline Verrett testified to no avail. Dr. Adrian Gross said without a shadow of a doubt aspartame causes brain tumors and brain cancer, and violates the Delaney Amendment. His last words were: “And if the FDA violates its own laws who is left to protect the public?”

We are now taking case histories on brain tumors and seizures starting in New York and New Jersey. Dr. Verrett said: “All studies were built on a foundation of sand and should be thrown out.” Today’s FDA is the handmaiden of the pharmaceutical/ chemical cartel. The revolving door is so busy they need a bridge for the traffic. I told all this to Acting Commissioner Dr. Michael Friedman. He defended Monsanto on 60 Minutes when Dr. Olney made world news about the aspartame brain tumor association. Then Friedman hired as Vice President of Searle for big bucks - crime pays well.

In l986 the Community Nutrition Institute in Washington, D.C. petitioned FDA to ban aspartame because so many were having seizures and going blind from the free methyl alcohol in the drug. Aspartame

is sold as an additive but it’s a neurotoxic drug. FDA law requires an additive be inert or non-reactive. The medical text on aspartame disease lists countless diseases and symptoms and drug interactions by the toxin.

A S PA R TA M E D I S E A S E R A G E S , INTERACTS WITH ALL DRUGS, VACCINES AND TOXINS. When aspartame was news, Dr. H. J. Roberts in a press conference foretold that in 5 or 10 years we would have a global plague. And it was Dr. Roberts who declared Aspartame Disease to be a global plague and published the medical text in 2001, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic, www.sunsentpress.com or 1 800 827 7991. His chapter on drug interaction goes into Coumadin, Dilantin, antidepressants and other psychotropic agents, Inderal, Aldomet, hormones and insulin. He says aspartame interacts with all cardiac medication and even discusses drug reactions after the cessation of aspartame.

In his general considerations he discusses that aspartame may either reduce or potentiate drug action by various mechanisms. He lists a few of the possibilities.

Alteration of the blood proteins to which drugs attach.

Alteration of drug receptors on cell membranes.

Changes in the sites at which impulses are transmitted along nerves and to muscle.

Metabolic abnormalities in the elderly that are known to enhance their vulnerability to drug reactions (Weber l986). This problem increases in the case of persons taking multiple drugs (“polypharmacy”) prescribed by several physicians.

Interference with drug action by amino acids and protein. An example is the erratic therapeutic effects when patients with parkinsonism who were controlled on levodopa began to use aspartame products. The antagonism of levodopa by dietary protein presumably reflects impaired transport from serum across the blood brain barrier by neutral amino acids (Pincus l986).

Dr. Roberts also discusses Lidocaine (Xylocaine) which he says is an important drug used for local anesthesia and the treatment of ventricular arrhythmias in intensive care units. Alterations of its pharmacology by aspartame require study.

He says: “Kim et al (l987) reported that the intraperitoneal administration of aspartame significantly reduced the 50% convulsion

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dose of lidocaine. They indicated that PKU patients and asymptomatic PKU heterozygotes may be more sensitive to the toxic effects of this and related local anesthetics.”

Today Dr. Roberts explained: “An interaction should be suspect with virtually every drug if the patient is using aspartame.”

This goes along with conversations with Dr. James Bowen who says because aspartame damages the mitocondria of the cell it will interact with all drugs and as a chemical hypersensitization agent will interact with vaccines, unsafe sweeteners like Splenda or sucralose (chlorinated hydrocarbon) and toxins.

Dr. Bowen wrote about the biochemical interactions between aspartame and other poisons including many pharmaceuticals illustrated in Dr. Roberts medical text and said Dr. Mercola’s web site has them as well. Further he wrote: “Because aspartame in the processes of digestion and metabolism, forms about ten other known severe poisonings, and intermediate metabolites, it’s potential for drug related interactions is immeasurable. To top that off, the aspartame molecule is so heinously poisonous in different ways that it never passed a single FDA standard toxicity test!

So Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of aspartame manufacturer Searle employed political power to get it approved, after the FDA for 16 years refused to allow it on the market because of aspartame toxicity. Then Reagan took direct executive measures to paralyze FDA from further action against aspartame.

Our FDA has never been the same since.

Deadly chemicals now being blessed

by FDA are marketed as wholesome pharmaceuticals, are just the tip of the iceberg, and result of Rumsfeld’s damage to FDA. If any concern whatsoever for human welfare still existed, aspartame

would be immediately pulled from the market! The reasonable FDA lawful standard is that a chemical must pass all toxicity tests at one hundred times the “maximum human dose,” in order to pass as a food additive. What the original tests showed is that at a dose of three cans of pop per day, scaled to the weight of the animal, aspartame releases DKP, a recognized virulent brain carcinogen. No other chemical causes the brain cancer rate to jump as much.”

Dr. Bowen continues, “Aspartame is a known destroyer of DNA. The mitocondrial DNA (MtDNA) is especially damaged, yielding the present epidemic of disease aspartame consuming mothers pass on to all future generations. Aspartame also directly damages the mitochondria, thus having a “double whammy” effect on mitochondrial function! The summation of these many known severe toxicities and its immune, genetic, mitochondrial, and metabolic damages, make clear that aspartame will not only cause many diseases, which the FDA and CDC have already noted but it has pathways of approach to interact adversely with every conceivable pharmaceutical. My forth coming book: “Sweet Mystery in The Present Darkness: Whatever Happened to We Scientists Who First Spoke Out Against Aspartame?” will delve into all of this in greater detail and more specificity.”

The Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste wrote in the spring of l996 the article: “The Rising Rates of Health Problems - Is There A Toxic Connection?” by Stephen Lester. It might as well have been written about aspartame because the diseases it lists are all ones that have been written about as triggered by aspartame, from birth defects to chemical sensitives.

Under the title Cancer Lester says: “When has gone wrong with our way of thinking when it is considered “normal”

that 1 in 3 people get cancer? IT IS NOT NORMAL. Cancer is not a natural disease and even if it were, it wouldn’t be “normal” for cancer to claim the lives of 25% of the population.” Again, one can only think of aspartame when in original studies it triggered brain, mammary, uterine, ovarian, testicular, thyroid and pancreatic tumors and violated the Delaney Amendment. The Pharmaceutical and Chemical cartel know aspartame violates the law, so one would ask is that why the Delaney Amendment was repealed? When a law for the safety of the public gets in their way of marking poison they simply do away with the law.

In June it will be 3 years since I petitioned the FDA to ban aspartame because I have the FDA records and they lie to the public. The law states they have 180 days to answer. Their letter to me states they have more important things to do.

So the FDA continues to recall drugs that interact and leave the poison aspartame on the market. Aspartame triggers an irregular heart rhythm and interacts with all cardiac Rx. It damages the cardiac conduction system and causes sudden death. With people dropping dead so fast that defibrillators are now sold over the counter, they took the opportunity to pull ephedra (Chinese MaHaung )off the market when an athlete died who was using Diet coke. Dr. John Olney reviewed the FDA records on ephedra and found it to be safe. One attorney said, “it wasn’t Chinese Mahaung at all, but the drug that caused some problems.” So what does the FDA do, leave the drug on the market causing the problems and snatches a safe supplement in their continuing loyalty to the pharmaceutical cartel.

MSG has an additive and synergistic effect with aspartame. Is that why the glutamate industry used aspartame as their placebo, so they could show that one excitotoxin does not react more than the placebo when, in fact, the aspartic

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acid in aspartame is also an excitotoxin.

They started doing this before aspartame was approved, so it was well known in the industry that aspartame would react. The records found in the FDA files by Jack Samuels (http://www.truthinlabeling.org) who filed suit against the FDA on labeling of MSG, showed the FDA had known all along and the industry had been doing this for 25 years against the law. While the FDA had to admit it was wrong they did nothing, again giving their loyalty the glutamate industry.

One can only remember the words of Dr. James Bowen to the FDA over 18 years ago: “Aspartame is mass poisoning of the American public and over 70+ countries of the world”. What does it take to save the people from this poison when government lies?

Dr. John Hoey, writing about the book The Truth About the Drug Companies says according to Angell, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the pharmaceutical industry’s U.S. trade association has “the largest lobby in Washington,” which in 2002 employed 675 lobbyists (including 26 former members of Congress) at a cost of more than $91 million. The result has been above-average growth in corporate profits during both Republican and Democratic administrations. The most recent and perplexing lobbying effort caused Congress explicitly to prohibit Medicare from using its huge purchasing power to get lower prices for drugs, thus opening up a dollar pipeline, in the form of higher drug prices, directly from taxpayers to corporate coffers.

These changes, along with the cave-in by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in l997 that permitted direct-to-consumer advertising to bypass mention in their ads of all but the most serious side effects, have further augmented profits. The overall effect has been a corruption not only of science but also of the dissemination of Science.” No wonder new books keep being published like Dr. Carolyn Dean’s “Death of Medicine”.

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USS Liberty incident

Source: Wikipedia

The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a U.S. Navy intelligence ship, USS Liberty, in international waters about 12.5 nautical miles (23 km) from the coast of the Sinai Peninsula, north of El Arish, by Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967.

It occurred during the Six-Day War, a conflict between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The Israeli attack killed 34 U.S. servicemen and wounded at least 173. The attack was the second deadliest against a U.S. Naval vessel since the end of World War II, surpassed only by the Iraqi Exocet missile attack on the USS Stark on May 17, 1987, and marked the single greatest loss of life by the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Both the Israeli and American governments conducted multiple inquiries into the incident, and issued reports concluding that the attack was a tragic mistake, caused by confusion about the identity of the USS Liberty. These conclusions have been challenged from several fronts, most notably by an organization of Liberty survivors, as well as by some key former high-ranking officials who were in office at the time in the United States government,

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including the Secretary of State, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the NSA, and the senior legal counsel to the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry into the incident. The matter is officially closed for purposes of Israeli-American relations, but remains controversial in the public debate.

Israelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s official position is that the attack was an accident. Officials say they were assured by the United States that no U.S. ships were in the area, and that its air and naval forces mistakenly identified Liberty as the Egyptian vessel El Quseir. Proponents say such mistakes were inevitable in the tense atmosphere of the Six-Day War, and that no concrete motive existed for Israel to initiate a surprise attack against a country that was quickly becoming its most powerful and important ally.

O t h e r s claim that the attack was premeditated and deliberate. They note that the Liberty was more than twice as large as the El Quseir, and was clearly designated with Latin rather than Arabic letters and numbers. Proponents include the surviving Liberty crewmen, [1] and some former U.S. government officials, including then-CIA director Richard Helms

and then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk as well as Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer, former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The United States and Israel exchanged diplomatic notes after several inquiries.

Israel also eventually paid nearly $13 million in humanitarian reparations to the United States and in compensation to the families of the victims.[1]

The attack on the Liberty

USS Liberty was originally the 7,725-ton (light) civilian cargo ship Simmons Victory (a Victory Ship, the follow-on series to the famous Liberty Ships). She was acquired by the United States Navy, converted to an Auxiliary Technical Research Ship (AGTR), and began her first deployment in 1965, to waters off the west coast of Africa. She carried out several more operations during the next two years. During the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab nations, she was sent to collect electronic intelligence in the eastern Mediterranean.

On June 4, 1967, the day before the start of the Six-Day War, Israel asked if the United States had any ships in the

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region[citation needed]. The United States responded that it did not — which was in fact the case[citation needed], since the Liberty was just entering the Mediterranean Sea at this time. In addition, five messages had been sent by the U.S. Navy to the Liberty, warning it to come no closer than 100 nautical miles (185 km) to the Sinai coast (Oren, p. 263). These messages were not received until the following day (ibid).

On June 5, at the start of the war, General Yitzhak Rabin (then IDF Chief of Staff) informed Commander Ernest Carl Castle, the American Naval Attache in Tel Aviv, that Israel would defend its coast with every means at its disposal, including sinking unidentified ships; thus the Americans should either reveal which ships it had in the area, or remove them. Nevertheless, the United States did not give Israel any information about the Liberty.[2] At that time the Liberty was already in the eastern Mediterranean. As war broke out Captain William L. McGonagle of the Liberty immediately asked Vice Admiral William I. Martin at the U.S. 6th Fleet headquarters to send a destroyer to accompany the Liberty and serve as its armed escort and as an auxiliary communications center.

The following day, June 6, Admiral Martin replied: “Liberty is a clearly marked United States ship in international waters, not

a participant in the conflict and not a reasonable subject for attack by any nation.

Request denied.” He promised, however, that in the unlikely event of an inadvertent attack, jet fighters from the Sixth Fleet could be overhead in ten minutes.

During the morning of the attack, early June 8, the ship was overflown by several Israeli Air Force (IAF) aircraft. Their exact number and type is disputed; at least one was a Nord Noratlas “flying boxcar” (claimed by the survivors and confirmed

by Israel); a photograph shows a C-47 Dakota[citation needed] and other reports speak about Mirage III jet fighters. At least some of those flybys were from a close range. In fact, at 6:00 a.m. Sinai (GMT +2) time that morning, Israel confirmed that a Nord Noratlas identified the ship as the USS Liberty, and an additional craft made a separate identification at 9:00AM (Oren, 263-4). Many Liberty crewmen gave testimony that one of the aircraft flew so close to Liberty that its propellers rattled the deck plating of the ship, and the pilots waved to the crew of Liberty, and the crewmen waved back. One explanation why subsequent pilots did not identify the Liberty despite close proximity is that the pilot’s attention was diverted to locating Egyptian submarines (Oren, 264).

At this time, the ship was readying to turn south towards the coast of the Sinai

Peninsula from its previous eastern direction. It would then turn east and patrol at 5 knots (9 km/h) in international waters, 13 nautical miles (23 km) off the Sinai Peninsula near El-Arish, just outside Egypt’s territorial waters. At about 2 p.m. the Liberty was attacked by several IAF aircraft, possibly two or three Mirage IIIs, carrying cannon and rockets, followed by Dassault Mysteres carrying napalm. After a series of passes an Israeli pilot, who wondered why the Liberty had not returned fire, made a close pass and noted that the ship had Western (not Arabic) lettering.

Rabin immediately feared that the ship was Soviet, ordered the planes and a three torpedo boat squadron, which had been ordered into the area, to withhold fire pending positive identification of the ship, and sent in two helicopters to search for survivors. However, although the order was recorded in the ship’s log, the commander of the torpedo boat squadron claimed never to have received it.[3] About twenty minutes after the aircraft attack, the ship was approached by three torpedo boats bearing Israeli flags and identification signs. Initially, McGonagle, who perceived that the torpedo boats “were approaching the ship in a torpedo launch attitude,”[2] ordered a machine gun to engage the boats. After recognizing the Israeli standard and seeing apparent Morse code signalling attempts by one of the boats

BELOW: Liberty turns to evade Israeli torpedo boats.

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(but being unable to see what was being sent, due to the smoke of the fire started by the earlier aircraft attack), McGonagle gave the order to cease fire. This order was apparently misunderstood in the confusion, and two heavy machine guns opened fire; one of these was accidentally fired due to exploding ammunition (Oren, 267). Subsequently, the Israeli boats responded with fire and launched at least two torpedoes at Liberty (five according to the 1982 IDF History Department report).

One hit Liberty on the starboard side forward of the superstructure, creating a large hole in what had been a former cargo hold converted to the ships research spaces, causing the majority of the casualties in the incident. The torpedo boats approached Liberty and strafed crewmen (including damage control parties and sailors preparing life rafts for launch) on deck. (See disputed details below.)

When the ship was confirmed to have been American, the torpedo boats returned to offer help; it was refused by the American ship. About three hours after the attack, Israel informed the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv about the incident and provided a helicopter to fly a U.S. naval attaché to the ship.

Though Liberty was severely damaged, with a 50-foot (15 m) hole and a twisted keel, her crew kept her afloat, and she was able to leave the area under her own power. She was escorted to Malta by units of the U.S. 6th Fleet and was there given interim repairs. After these were completed in July 1967, Liberty returned to the United States. She was decommissioned in June 1968 and struck from the Naval Vessel Register. Liberty was transferred to United States Maritime Administration (MARAD) in December 1970 and sold for scrap in 1973.

U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry did not satisfy some parties.[3]. The majority of those subsequent U.S. reports were issues such as communications failures rather than culpability. [4]. The Naval Court of Inquiry conclusions continue to be disputed (see below). The US Senate Historian can “find no evidence that the Congress ever held hearings or launched an investigation into the June 8, 1967 incident with the USS Liberty.” [5] On December 17, 1987, the issue was officially closed by the exchange of diplomatic notes between the U.S. and Israel. Israel also eventually paid nearly $13 million in humanitarian reparations to the United States and in compensation to the families of the victims.

Israeli investigations

Three subsequent Israeli inquiries concluded the attack was conducted because Liberty was confused with an Egyptian vessel and because of failures of communications between Israel and the U.S. The three Israeli commissions were: • Preliminary Inquiry by Colonel Ram Ron (“Ram Ron Report” - June 1967) • Inquiry by Examining Judge Y. Yerushalmi (“Yerushalmi Report” -July 1967). online at this link http://www. usslibertyinquiry.com/evidence/israel/ yerushalmi.pdf%7CAvailable • “The Liberty Incident” - IDF History Department Report (1982)

Investigations of the attack

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American investigations

Ten official American investigations[citation needed] are claimed regarding the Liberty incident, including: • The CIA Report of 1967 • The Clark Clifford Report of 1967 • The Joint Chief of Staff’s Report, on U.S. communications failures.

• The NSA Report of 1981 including recordings of intercepted Israeli military radio transmissions and translated transcripts of postattack helicopter pilots.

• The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Testimony of 1967 • The U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry as released under FOIA (see below) Critics assert that five U.S. congressional investigations[citation needed] and four other U.S. investigations[citation needed] were not investigations into the attack at all, but rather reports using evidence only from the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry, or investigations unrelated to the culpability of the attack but rather discussing issues such as communications. In their view, the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry is the only investigation on the incident to date. They claim it was hastily conducted, in only 10 days, even though the court’s president, Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, said that it would take 6 months to properly conduct.[6] Additionally, the court’s legal counsel, Captain Ward Boston, JAGC, U.S. Navy, prepared and signed an affadavit (pdf) in which he claimed that Admiral Kidd had told him that the government ordered Kidd to falsely report that the attack was a mistake, and that he and Kidd both believed the attack was deliberate. He wrote, in part,

McGonagle received the Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. medal, for his actions.

However, his is the only Medal of Honor not to be awarded by the U.S. President in a formal event. It was awarded at the Washington Navy Yard by the Secretary of the Navy.[4][5]

Several official US and Israeli investigations maintained the initially published conclusion that the event was a tragic mistake through misidentification. The scope of the Israeli investigations[citation needed] was to decide whether or not anyone in the Israeli Defense Forces should be tried on crimes (no criminal wrongdoing was found), accepting as a premise that the attack was a mistake. The scope and performance of U.S. congressional investigations and four other U.S. investigations subsequent to the

the returning aircraft informing Israeli headquarters of markings on the front of the hull (markings that would not be found on an Egyptian ship). As the general root of these problems, Israel blamed the combination of alarm and fatigue experienced by the Israeli forces at that point of the war.

ABOVE: Torpedo damage to Liberty’s research compartment (Starboard side).

The Israeli government said three crucial errors were made: the refreshing of the status board (nullifying the ship’s classification as American), the erroneous identification of the ship as an Egyptian vessel, and the lack of notification from

“The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack, which killed 34 American sailors and injured 172 others, was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.

Each evening, after hearing testimony all day, we often spoke our private thoughts concerning what we had seen and heard.

I recall Admiral Kidd repeatedly referring to the Israeli forces responsible for the attack as ‘murderous bastards.’ It was our shared belief, based on the documentary evidence and testimony we received first hand, that the Israeli attack was planned and deliberate, and could not possibly have been an accident.”

However, there is no record of Kidd publicly expressing such opinions in his lifetime.

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[6] Critics of Boston believe that he is not telling the truth in regard to Kidd’s views and any pressure from the government.[7]).

In particular, A. Jay Cristol, who also served as an officer of the Judge Advocate General in the U.S. military, suggests that Boston was responsible in part for the original conclusions of the Court of Inquiry, and that by later declaring that they were false he has admitted to “lying under oath.”

Critics also note that Boston’s claims about pressure on Kidd was hearsay, and that Kidd was not alive to confirm or deny them, and they note that Boston did not maintain prior to his affadavit and comments related to it that Kidd spoke of such instructions to him or to others. Supporters of the intentional-attack theory believe that Boston’s statement invalidates the conclusions of the Court, and that Boston would not have made such an accusation if he did not know it to be true.

• •

deck stations and doing damage control topside.

Liberty opened fire first on the gunboats. This, though, was after the aerial attacks.

No adequate benefit has been put forward that the Israelis would derive from the attack on an American ship, especially considering the high cost of the predictable complications that must inevitably follow such an attack on a powerful ally, and the fact that Israel immediately notified the American embassy after the attack.

The 1981 book Weapons by Russell Warren Howe asserts that Liberty was accompanied by the Polaris submarine USS Andrew Jackson, which filmed the entire episode through its periscope but was unable to provide assistance.

According to Howe: “Two hundred feet below the ship, on a parallel course, was its ‘shadow’- the Polaris strategic submarine Andrew Jackson, whose job was to take out all the Israeli long-range missile sites in the Negev if Tel Aviv decided to attack Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad. This was in order that Moscow would not have to perform this task itself and thus trigger World War Three.”

Ongoing controversy

This incident stands as the only peacetime attack on a U.S. naval vessel not investigated by Congress. The survivors want a full Congressional hearing[cita tion needed]; they hold that a proper investigation has never taken place and that all previous reports are incomplete, mention the incident in passing, and either that they are intended to exonerate Israel or that they do not even question the culpability of the attack (instead, they hold, it focuses on other topics, such as American communication problems).

Israel denied all accusations that the attack was deliberate using the following arguments: • The incident took place during the Six Day War when Israel was engaged in battles with three Arab countries, creating an environment where mistakes and confusion were prevalent. For example, at 11:45, a few hours before the attack, there was a large explosion on the shores of El-Arish followed by black smoke, probably caused by the destruction of an ammunition dump by retreating Egyptian forces. The Israeli army thought the area was being bombarded, and that an unidentified ship offshore was responsible. (According to U.S. sources, Liberty was 14 nautical miles (26 km) from those shores at the time of the attack.)

• The attacking aircraft used napalm rockets and machine guns, and m a c h i n e g u n s a r e i n e ff e c t i v e armament for doing real damage to a steel-hulled ship—other than starting fires in combustibles. Machine guns, though, are often used to keep a ship’s company under cover, thus keeping the company from manning weather

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a cease-fire to which Israel’s government had agreed.[8] They are backed in this position by some representatives of the U.S. intelligence community. Critics claim many of the books and documentaries include incorrect assumptions and use fuzzy reasoning. For example, critics note that a document declassified in 1997 indicated that the U.S. Ambassador at the time had reported on the day of the Liberty attack that he “would not be surprised” by an Israeli attack on Syria, and that the IDF Intelligence chief had told a White House aide then in Israel that “there still remained the Syria problem and perhaps it would be necessary to give Syria a blow,”[7] which, the critics argue, indicate that Israel was not trying to conceal the planned invasion of Syria from the U.S.

ABOVE: Aircraft pelted the superstructure with machine-gun and rocket fire.

Virtually all of the survivors of Liberty, some U.S. government officials and some U.S. military officers have asserted that the attack was premeditated. Jim Ennes, a junior officer (and off-going Officer of the Deck) on Liberty’s bridge at the time of the attack, has published a book titled Assault on the Liberty. Like virtually all accounts of the “Liberty” incident, it has come under heavy criticism by those disagreeing with its point of view.

Ennes and Joe Meadors, another survivor of the attack, run a web site that was built “with support and encouragement from the USS Liberty Veterans Association.”

Meadors states that the classification of the attack as deliberate is the official policy of the association, to which all known survivors belong. Other survivors run several additional websites.

Several books and the BBC documentary USS Liberty: Dead in the Water tried to prove Liberty was attacked on purpose.

They claim that the ship was attacked to prevent the U.S. from knowing about the forthcoming attack in the Golan Heights, which apparently would violate

James Bamford, a former ABC News producer, in his book Body of Secrets, proposes a different possible motive for a deliberate attack: “to cover up a massacre of 1,000 Egyptian prisoners of war” that was supposedly taking place at the same time in the nearby town of El-Arish. In 1995, mass graves of 90 Egyptian soldiers were discovered outside of El-Arish, and IDF veterans have admitted that unarmed civilians and prisoners of war were murdered in the 1967 War.[9][10] In any event, the possibility of a ship at sea discovering such a crime on land, at or beyond the limit of its visual range, is questionable (according to U.S. accounts, the ship was 14 nautical miles (26 km) from shore at the time of the attack, and did not get much closer to it previously).

In 2003, journalist Peter Hounam wrote Operation Cyanide: How the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III, which proposes a completely different theory regarding the incident. In an attempt to explain why there was no support by U.S. forces as backup, Hounam claims that Israel and U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had secretly agreed on day four of the Six Day War that Liberty would be sunk with complete loss of life. The attack would be blamed on Egypt, allowing the U.S. in turn to attack Egypt, thus helping out Israel.

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However, according to Hounam’s theory, because the Liberty did not sink after two hours, the plan was quickly reversed, Israel apologized for the case of mistaken identity, and a cover-up put into place.

Likewise the BBC documentary (2002) claims that the Liberty incident provoked the launch of nuclear-armed planes targeted against Cairo from a US aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. It is claimed in the theory that they were recalled only just in time, when it was clear the Liberty had not sunk with all hands, and that Israel was responsible [11].

the Israeli Air Force tapes are published in Appendix 2 of Judge Cristol’s book The Liberty Incident.

From the early 1950s up to shortly before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel’s primary military ally was France. The United States, with a few exceptions, consistently refused requests for sales of offensive weapons to Israel until 1968. The height of FrenchIsraeli cooperation was in the 1956 Suez war, when France, Israel and the United Kingdom participated in a combined ground, sea and air offensive against Egypt, despite stringent opposition (and even threats) by the United States and the Soviet Union.

As of 2005, the National Security Agency (NSA) has yet to declassify “boxes and boxes” of Liberty documents. Numerous requests under both declassification directives and the Freedom of Information Act are pending in various agencies including the NSA, Central Intelligence Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency.

Israeli officials and Jewish organizations worldwide have asserted that materials claiming the Liberty incident was deliberate are often used as a pretext for anti-Semitic declarations and acts[citation needed].

They claim these reviews often do not give Israel the benefit of the doubt, using the incident as an excuse for Israel bashing, especially in comparison to the treatment of other incidents involving foreign attacks on U.S. vessels. Meadors and Ennes have denied an anti-Semitic pretext in their work, and have repeatedly expressed sharp disapproval at the use of the Liberty incident in anti-Semitic contexts, and have pointed out that some of the ship’s company was Jewish.

On July 2, 2003, as a result of Florida Judge Jay Cristol’s (retired Naval carrier pilot) lawsuit using the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Agency made two significant admissions: there had been no radio intercepts made by USS Liberty, and there had been no radio intercepts made by the U.S. submarine Amberjack.

The National Security Agency released copies of the recordings it made from an EC-121 aircraft in the vicinity of the attacks from 2:30 p.m. to 3:27 p.m. Sinai time, and the resultant translations and summaries.

The tapes show that the helicopters were first dispatched to rescue Egyptians, and then demonstrate the confusion as to the identification of the target ship. Cristol adds: “The tapes confirm that the helicopter pilot observed the flag at 3:12 p.m.” which would coincide with the audio tapes the Israel Air Force released to Judge Cristol of the radio transmissions before, during and after the attack. The English translations of

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On October 10, 2003, The Jerusalem Post ran an interview with Yiftah Spector, one of the pilots who participated in the attack [12], and thought to be the lead pilot of the first wave of planes. Spector stated in the interview that the ship was assumed to be Egyptian at the time of the attack; the transcripts of the Israeli communications about the Liberty are also in the interview.

•

On June 8, 2005 the USS Liberty Veterans Associations filed a “Report of War Crimes Committed Against the U.S. Military, June 8, 1967” with the Department of Defense.

Department of Defense Directive 2311.01E requires the Department of Defense to conduct a thorough investigation of the allegations contained in this report.

Details in dispute

The events surrounding the attack, even very simple elements such as its duration, are the subject of fierce controversy.

Among the disputed facts: • Vi s i bility of ensign: The most vehemently debated point is the visibility of the large American flags that the ship was flying; Americans claimed the flags were clearly visible in the wind. The Israeli pilots claimed they were either unable to notice it altogether (possibly due to there being no wind, or because Liberty was steaming with the wind at the same speed that the wind was blowing), or considered it an Egyptian diversion aimed to mislead them. One point is beyond dispute: USS Liberty bore an eight-foot-high “5” and a four-foothigh “GTR” along either bow, clearly indicating her hull (or “pendant”) number (AGTR-5), and had 18-inchhigh letters spelling the vessel’s name across the stern. These marking were not cursive Arabic script but in English.

• Israeli aircraft markings: Some American survivors of the attack assert that the Israeli aircraft were unmarked. Israel never responded to this claim.

• Jamming: An additional point on which Israel did not comment is the use of radio jamming. In the absence of reliable records, it is only

•

•

•

left to speculate whether jamming (of Navy tactical and international maritime distress frequencies) did take place, or whether the deficiency in communications originated in the attack itself (i.e., loss of power and damage of antennas). Both Liberty and USS Saratoga radio operators reported hearing the distinctive buzzing sound usually indicative of radio frequency jamming. According to a book by Russell Warren Howe (see below), Captain McGonagle testified that the jamming of his transmissions had been on American, not Egyptian, frequencies, suggesting that the Israelis were aware of the nationality of the ship. The U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry concluded that Liberty experienced jamming (finding 47).

Probability of identification: Americans claim the thirteen closer flybys of the previous two days should have been sufficient for identification. Israel acknowledged the ship had been identified as American and neutral the previous day; however, it claims that at 11 a.m., the ship moved out of the status board. An hour later, when explosions were heard in El-Arish, Israel claims to have reacquired the ship without being aware that it was the same one that was flown over the day before.

Effort for identification: The American crew claims the attacking aircraft did not make identification runs over Liberty, but rather began to strafe immediately. One Israeli report claims several passes were made.

Speed of the vessel: According to Israeli accounts, they made (admittedly erroneous) measurements that indicated the ship was steaming at 30 knots (56 km/h). Supposedly, Israeli naval doctrine at the time required that a ship traveling at that speed must be presumed to be a warship. The speed of Liberty was later recalculated to be 28 knots (52 km/h), although maximum sustained speed of Liberty was only 17.5 knots (32 km/h), 21 knots (39 km/h) being attainable by overriding the engine governors.

According to Body of Secrets, by James Bamford, and Liberty crewmen (including the Officer-of-the-Deck), the ship was steaming at 5 knots (9 km/h) at the time of the attack.

Visual communications: Joe Meadors, the signalman on bridge, states that “Immediately prior to the torpedo attack, he was on the Signal Bridge repeatedly sending ‘USS Liberty U.S. Navy Ship’ by flashing light to the torpedo boats.” The Israeli boats claim to have read only the signal “AA”, which was exactly the signal dispatched by the Egyptian destroyer Ibrahim Al-Awal when it was engaged

VOL.8 #5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008

•

•

by the Israeli Navy eleven years earlier.

Meadors claims he never sent “AA” (which would require him to identify himself as well); this disagreement may be settled by considering the fact that Liberty was unable to read signals sent from the boats.

Call for ID: Israel claims to have called the ship on radio several times without receiving an answer, while the American crew members deny ever receiving a call for identification.

The crew’s failure to receive any call for identification may be related to the possible Israeli jamming of radio frequencies. (Refer to Jamming above.)

Israeli ships’ actions after the torpedo hit: The American crew claims that after Liberty had been torpedoed, Israeli boats circled the ship firing machine guns at descended (unmanned) life rafts and sailors on board the ship.

Israelis claim they recognized the ship as American immediately after it was hit and ceased fire. The former point of view was expressed by many of the crew members, while the latter one is reinforced by the lack of mention of the action by the ship’s captain. The former point of view has also been corroborated by Captain Ward Boston, senior counsel to the U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry.http://www.ifamericansknew. org/history/boston.html

•

•

Israeli offers of help: Reports differ regarding whether the Israeli boats offered help. The crew claims the torpedo boats simply withdrew, while the captain and the Israeli crew report that help was offered.

U.S. rescue attempts: At least two rescue attempts were launched from U.S. aircraft carriers nearby but were recalled, according to David Lewis, officer of the deck (OOD) during the attack. Lewis wrote and made an audio recording about a meeting 6th Fleet Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis requested in his cabins: “He told me that since I was the senior Liberty survivor on board he wanted to tell me in confidence what had actually transpired. He told me that upon receipt of our SOS, aircraft were launched to come to our assistance and then Washington was notified.

He said that the Secretary of Defense (Robert McNamara) had ordered that the aircraft be returned to the carrier which was done. RADM Geis then said that he speculated that Washington may have suspected that the aircraft carried nuclear weapons so he put together another flight of conventional aircraft that had no capability of carrying nuclear weapons. These he launched to assist us and again notified Washington of his actions.

Again McNamara ordered the aircraft

recalled. He requested confirmation of the order being unable to believe that Washington would let us sink.

This time President Johnson ordered the recall with the comment that he did not care if every man drowned and the ship sank, but that he would not embarrass his allies. This is, to the best of my ability, what I recall transpiring 30 years ago.”

Names of casualties

The following Liberty personnel were killed in the incident: • Cryptologic Technician 3rd Class William B. Allenbaugh, USN • Lieutenant Commander Philip M. Armstrong Jr., USN • Seaman Gary R. Blanchard, USN • Cryptologic Technician 2nd Class Allen M. Blue, NSA • Quartermaster 3rd Class Francis Brown, USN • Cryptologic Technician 2nd Ronnie J. Campbell, USN • Cryptologic Technician 2nd Class Jerry L. Converse, USN • Cryptologic Technician 2nd Class Robert B. Eisenberg, USN • Cryptologic Technician 2nd Class Jerry L. Goss, USN • Cryptologic Technician 1st Class Curtis L. Graves, USN • Cryptologic Technician Lawrence P. Hayden, USN

BELOW: Commander W.L. McGonagle in his damaged cabin after the attack.

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•

Cryptologic Technician 1st Class BELOW: There are conflicting accounts as to Warren Hersey, USN whether the Liberty was flying its flag during parts of • Cryptologic Technician 3rd Class the attack Alan Higgins, USN • Seaman Carl L. Hoar, USN • Cryptologic Technician 2nd Class Richard W. Keene, USN • Cryptologic Technician James L. Lenau, USN • Chief Cryptologic Technician Raymond E. Linn, USN • Cryptologic Technician 1st Class James M. Lupton, USN • Cryptologic Technician 3rd Class Duane R. Marggraf, USN • Cryptologic Technician David W. Marlborough, USN • Cryptologic Technician 2nd Class Anthony P. Mendle, USN • Cryptologic Technician Carl C. Nygren, USN • Lieutenant James C. Pierce, USN • Sergeant Jack Raper, U.S.M.C. • Corporal Edward Rehmayer II, U.S.M.C. • I n t e r i o r C o m m u n i c a t i o n s Electrician David N. Skolak, USN • Cryptologic Technician 1st Class John C. Smith Jr, USN Washington, had warned Under • Chief Cryptologic Technician Melvin D. Smith, USN Secretary of State Eugene V. Rostow • Postal Clerk 2nd Class John C. that if war breaks out, we would have • Spicher, USN no telephone number to call, no code • Gunner’s Mate 3rd Class Alexander for plane recognition, and no way to N. Thompson, USN get in touch with the U.S. Sixth Fleet.’”

• Cryptologic Technician 3rd Class Oren, Michael B. The USS Liberty: • Thomas R. Thornton, USN Case Closed, Azure, Spring 5760 / • Cryptologic Technician 3rd Class 2000, No. 9.

Phillipe C. Tiedtke, USN 3. “While Egyptian naval ships were • Lieutenant Stephen S. Toth, USN known to disguise their identities • Cryptologic Technician 1st Class with Western markings, they usually • Frederick J. Walton, USN displayed Arabic letters and numbers only. The fact that the ship had Western markings led Rabin to fear that it was Soviet, and he immediately 1. “The surviving Liberty crewmen . . . called off the jets. Two IAF Hornet believed the attack was deliberate.” helicopters were sent to look for *Mission Memorial: Remembering • survivors - Spector had reported the USS Liberty from the Veterans seeing men overboard - while the of Foreign Wars Magazine, June/July torpedo boat squadron was ordered 2005.

• to hold its fire pending further attempts 2. “The failure of the Israeli navy’s at identification. Though that order attacks on Egyptian and Syrian ports was recorded in the torpedo boat’s early in the war did little to assuage log, Oren claimed he never received Israel’s fears. Consequently, the it.” Oren, Michael B. The USS Liberty: IDF Chief of Staff, Gen. Yitzhak • Case Closed, Azure, Spring 5760 / Rabin, informed the U.S. Naval 2000, No. 9.

Attaché in Tel Aviv, Cmdr. Ernest 4. Even as USS Liberty’s Heroic Captain Carl Castle, that Israel would defend • Receives New Honor, Coverup of its coast with every means at its Israeli Attack on His Ship Continues, disposal. Unidentified vessels would Washington Report on Middle East be sunk, Rabin advised; the United Affairs, March 1998 Issue, Pages 26, States should either acknowledge 88 its ships in the area or remove them.

5. Navy Medal of Honor: Vietnam War Nonetheless, the Americans provided • (era) 1964-1975, citation for Captain Israel with no information on the William L. McGonagle, U.S. Navy, Liberty. The United States had also accessed May 15, 2006 rejected Israel’s request for a formal 6 “However, according to his own naval liaison. On May 31, Avraham Harman, Israel’s ambassador to account, Boston’s evidence of a

References

cover-up derives not from his own part in the investigation but solely on alleged conversations with Admiral Kidd, who purportedly told him he was forced to find that the attack was unintentional.

Kidd died in 1999 and there is no way to verify Boston’s allegations.

However, Cristol argues that the ‘documentary record’ strongly indicated that Kidd ‘supported the validity of the findings of the Court of Inquiry to his dying day.’” The USS Liberty Attack, Anti-Defamation League, June 9, 2004.

7. LBJ, National Security File, Box 104/107, Middle East Crisis: Jerusalem to the Secretary of State, June 8, 1967; Barbour to Department, June 8, 1967; Joint Embassy Memorandum, June 8, 1967.

Books

• A History of Israel by Ahron Bregman contains extracts from the tapes.

(ISBN 0-333-67631-9) • Cristol, A. Jay (2002). The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S. Navy Spy Ship. Dulles, Virginia: Brassey’s. ISBN 1-57488414-X. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East,

by Michael B. Oren, Oxford University Press (ISBN 0-19-515174-7) Assault on the Liberty: The True Story of the Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship, by James M. Ennes, Jr. (ISBN 0-9723116-0-2) Currently in its 9th printing.

The Puzzle Palace, by James Bamford, Penguin Books, 1982, has a detailed description of the Israeli attack on the SIGINT ship USS Liberty, and the events leading up to it, on pages 279-293.

Body of Secrets, by James Bamford, Doubleday, 2001 (ISBN 0-09-9427745) Peter Hounam, Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III, Vision Paperbacks. 2003, ISBN 1-90413219-7, Anthony Pearson, Conspiracy of Silence: The Attack on the USS Liberty, 1979 ISBN 0-7043-2164-5 John Borne, The USS Liberty, Dissenting History vs. Official History

External links

U.S. government sites

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Attack on a Sigint Collector, the U.S.S. Liberty, by William D. Gerhard and Henry W. Millington, U.S. Cryptologic History series, National Security Agency, 1981, partially declassified 1999, 2003.

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• •

Additional information released by the National Security Agency on July 2003, including audio recordings (mostly in Hebrew) of conversations between two Israeli helicopter pilots and their control tower following the attack, transcripts of the recordings (in English), and follow-up reports.

Naval Historical Center, featuring photographs of the ship and crew, and the aftermath of the attack.

National Security Agency’s Memorial Wall, including list of names enscribed on the wall.

Other sources •

USS Liberty attack tapes released by David Ensor, CNN.

Sources claiming attack was a mistake •

• • • • •

• • • • •

The Liberty Incident, by Naval Aviator and JAG A. Jay Cristol. Includes original documents, as well as rebuttals to various theories and articles that hold that the attack was deliberate.

Pages devoted to USS Liberty Incident maintained by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, including a collection of contemporaneous diplomatic documents and telegrams.

The USS Liberty: Case Closed Azure article by Michael Oren Michael Oren’s “Six Days of War.” Ballatine Books, 2003, p. 263-271 Memos show Liberty attack was an error Haaretz article by Nathan Guttman Return of the USS Liberty Critique of Bamford’s “Body of Secrets” from Honest Reporting Bamford Bashes Israel: Conspiracy Theorist Claims Attack on USS Liberty Intentional from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America Viewers’ Guide to the History Channel’s Cover Up: Attack on the USS Liberty from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America The USS Liberty Attack from the Anti-Defamation League Response to the History Channel Program on the USS Liberty prepared for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs by A. Jay Cristol Declassified Documents Show Israel’s 1967 Attack On USS Liberty Was Accidental from the Israel National News USS Liberty: Israel Did Not Intend to Bomb the Ship by A. Jay Cristol

Sources claiming attack was deliberate 1: Survivors of the attack •

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• • •

The website of the Veterans of USS Liberty, run by survivors Jim Ennes and Joe Meadors. This site includes a wide variety of documents, photographs, and responses to authors who argue that the attack was a mistake.

The USS Liberty Inquiry website, run by USS Liberty survivors Jim Ennes, Joe Meadors and John Hrankowski and maintained by researcher Andrew Nacin. This contains hundreds of documents and evidence on the attack, as well as a public forum..

USS Liberty, by John Gidusko, Communications Officer aboard the USS Liberty Assault on Liberty Still Covered Up After 26 Years by Jim Ennes at WashingtonReport Loss of Liberty Film, featuring multiple survivors which claim to be convinced they were set-up

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2: Other sources • • • • • • • • •

A Juridicial Examination of the Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty by Lieutenant Commander Walter L. Jacobsen, JAGC, USN USS LIBERTY: Public History vs. Dissenting History, by John Borne Possible strategic and political backgrounds by Eric Margolis, foreign correspondent for the Toronto Sun. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Israel Deliberately Attacked US Ship, Lebanon Daily Star, January 21 2004.

Naval Institute Proceedings: Friendless Fire? by David Walsh San Diego Union-Tribune: Lifting the “fog of war” by David Walsh BBC Documentary Dead In The Water documentary Terror Storm (minutes 13 through 18) by Alex Jones U.S. Navy and Marine Casualties in Wars, Conflicts, Terrorist Acts, and other Hostile Acts

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HARD EVIDENCE

37

Heavenly Bodies

by Philip Gardiner Copyright (c) P. Gardiner 2008

The Bible says that ‘Christ is all and in all’. Did the early Christians and Gnostics understand man’s relationship with the hidden forces of the larger universe?

The questions of whether early man understood and utilised the effects of cyclic patterns, electromagnetic forces and the closeness of his nature with plants and animals may be answered in the signs of the reverence he paid to these elements; his worship and ritualistic behaviour surrounding some of these basic and fundamental parts of the ‘supernature’.

Cyclic patterns and rhythms dominate our lives, from the day to night patterns to the seasonal changes and their effects upon us. If we look at a few of the cycles, which have become important to man we can see how we are affected by them.

Day/night cycles are different in other parts of the world. Some have longer nights and shorter days, for example, and their nature has adapted accordingly. Seasonal Affective Disorder is purely the result of long nights and weeks. On the equator, where the sun is stronger and is out for longer periods, SAD does not exist and is indeed refuted.

In certain parts of the world we have four seasons. Elsewhere, the seasons are different. Tropical regions have two seasons: wet and dry. Monsoon areas have three: cold, hot and rainy. In Polar Regions, the temperature change from summer to winter is abrupt.

Man, animal and plant life have adapted remarkably well to the different seasons they experience. We have seen previously how the pineal gland actually measures the seasons and length of day. This is how we adapt to the various seasons around the globe. Many species, including some types of bird, can accurately predict the weather to help them plan migratory patterns. The Orange Ladybird insect in the UK has never been wrong in its long-term winter predictions.

The moon plays an important part in all the religions of the world. Lunar cycles and human experience are intrinsically linked. The tidal flow of the world’s oceans corresponds to the waxing and waning of

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the moon, as does the menstrual cycle, which has had a profound effect upon our early and later religious beliefs.

Menstruation occurs only during the fertile years and had symbolic meaning amongst early cultures. The menstrual blood of women is considered with awe and fear and may have much to do with the use of Red Ochre by ancient man. This blood is also derided and called unclean (even today, the women of Judaism go through a purification bath seven days after the end of the menstruation), a poisoning of woman for her sins by the great gods, although this appeared to be a much later addition as a result of the subtle battle of the religious sexes.

Menstruating women were often kept away from the other members of their tribe or village. This may be why the witches’ Sabbat took place specifically on the day when the moon took rest, and was associated with evil. Ishtar, one of the Moon-Goddess’s titles, was said to be menstruating on this day. The menstruating woman is also seen as a symbol of fertility, and in some African cultures she is led around the home of one who wishes to become pregnant and asked to touch everything. The onset of menstruation marks the move from child to woman and was celebrated with Earth Goddess or Mother Goddess rituals and, much later, possibly within the taking of blood in the Eucharist.

The Sabbat (Heart-rest of the moon), the moon’s day of rest, the seventh day, was later taken over by the Hebrews who turned it into their day of rest and laid waste to the maternal, lunar religions, and inaugurated their paternal ‘sun god’. Christians took this further, moving the day of rest to the Mithraic Sun-day; the original moon day being Monday. 1 The sidereal lunar month is 27.32 days and the synodic lunar month is 29.53 days.

Both have different paths and different meanings dependent upon your culture. In the sidereal lunar year there are thirteen months per year. This is a matriarchal structure and is more than 3,000 years old.

Originally, there were thirteen signs of the zodiac in this period, the thirteenth being Ophiucus – the serpent.

The instillation of a twelve-month period seems to have been an attempt by the patriarchal cultures to gain dominance, and thus we now have twelve months per year. It must be noted that twelve is a symbolically relevant number and should be watched for. The elimination of the thirteen month period has come down to us today with the persecution of the witches coven, which has thirteen members, the number thirteen being considered unlucky, but more importantly the fact that Jesus had twelve disciples, therefore making up thirteen in total, the hidden number of Mother Earth.

The moon is tied up in many of our early cultures. The names of its associated deity vary due to locality, language and ethnic differences, but are all essentially of the same goddess. Aphrodite, Astarte, Badb, Brigit, Ch’ang O, Demeter, Hecate, Inanna, Isis, Ishtar, Maja Jotma, Tsuki-Yomi. Some of these names have been carried on, kept alive behind the scenes by the secret cults whilst they were subtly battling or even creating the front lines of the new or growing male-oriented popular gods such as Mithras and Yahweh.

The terms ‘lunatic’ (‘moon-struck’) and ‘mental’ are both taken from the moon, under the impression that such effects are brought on by the lunar periods, usually the full moon. It is not surprising that the moon was denounced as the ‘mad’ moon when we consider the patriarchal and matriarchal battles, which were being fought across the continents. The idea was put forward that the electrical energy of the body became drained at this time of the month, and caused the person to lose his or her faculties. Two hundred years ago, Lunacy was covered by English law.

Kleptomania, arson and dangerous driving have been shown scientifically to increase at times of the full moon, so there may be some scientific reason for this matriarchal lost battle.

The Jewish Passover is celebrated on the lunar calendar; the Christian Easter (Eoster was the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring) is calculated from the full moon after the vernal equinox. The full moon at the autumn equinox is celebrated as the harvest moon. The Jews had many moon festivals, such as New Moon and Full Moon

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(see Num. 28,11:14). The eclipse of the moon is considered by many cultures to be the union of the Sun God and Moon Goddess. This belief harks back to a time when the known world shared a common Priesthood (see Secrets of the Serpent book).

500,000 births were measured in New York in 1948/57. The results showed that more births occurred during a waning moon and the maximum after a full moon. In the North Sea coast of Germany, most births occur at high tides as the moon passes overhead.

More children are born in the Northern Hemisphere in May and June than in November and December, and vice versa in the Southern Hemisphere. Size of offspring has also been mapped and shows a noticeable pattern dependent upon time of year. In the 1960’s, Eugen Jonas understood the lunar aspect of ovulation and successfully increased the effectiveness of contraception to ninetyeight per cent. When he was presented with the birth charts of 250 newborn children he successfully identified the sex of eighty-seven per cent of the babies from planetary information alone.

Frank Brown of North-Western University, Illinois, found that oysters in his laboratory, a thousand miles from their Connecticut shore, opened at the same time as their home shores’ high tide, which in turn is related to the moon’s orbital pattern. Brown also proved that potatoes, rats and fiddler crabs are all governed by lunar periods.

Within laboratories, the metabolisms of various creatures fluctuated in response to lunar patterns and geomagnetic factors.

Now, years later, research is proving that all known sea creatures, when taken from their natural homes, still obey the same lunar cycles. At the time, many scientists thought Brown to be dealing with the paranormal sciences and ignored his research.

The Sun - the Shining One, great light of the world - is venerated all over the globe as the light of life, the giver of heat and the most important cyclic symbol of all time. Our ancestors knew that it meant life or death. It was essential for the sun to return every day, for its strength to be renewed again each Easter. We say the sun is wise, and therefore in mystery plays around the world, light equates to wisdom. The strength of the sun gave rise to its being considered the most powerful of the deities. In the early developed civilisations the sun is always there. In Egyptian culture he is Ra, Re or AmunRe. The scarab beetle is often used to portray the sun in some aspects, a symbol of self-regeneration and the early ideas of reincarnation. The sun is generally male and outwits the lunar female goddess as

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well as mating with her.

We sacrifice, dance (almost always, significantly, in circles), travel hundreds of miles and sing to the great light. We even give it human names such as Apollo, and include him in dramas. This, of course, hides a deeper and more symbolic understanding that the initiated, the ancient serpent worshipping Priesthood of the sun knew how to decipher. The cyclic pattern and life-giving nature of the sun is key to the secrets of the ancient serpent cults.

The movements of the sun have inspired tales of where the sun god goes and why he comes back, of battles fought and death overcome. This last idea of overcoming death gives us the first hints at how man has used the sun god fables and mysteries to hide the secret ideas of how we ourselves could be reincarnated.

Thousands of years of begging the sun to return each day and be reborn each spring led ancient man to develop his own re-birth rituals and ideas of how to accomplish it.

We copy the external and make it internal, in the same way we manifest the internal externally.

Everyday we rise with the sun. Our bodies release hormones, which waken, revive and regenerate us. In summer, our endocrine glands release more hormones that bring a sense of well-being. By late afternoon we feel more relaxed as the sun’s strength wanes. The secret police of many countries often choose this time of day to arrest people, as they are more easily subdued. If we today understand how to utilise the power of the sun with the regenerative effects of holidays and by the dealings of the secret police, what did our ancient and less complicated ancestor do?

Sunspot activity affects our biorhythms directly in ways we do not totally understand.

Evidence shows that it can be an irritant to our bodily functions and mental attitude.

The Foundation for the Study of Cycles has produced some interesting results with their long-term research, including some of the following. There is a 3.86 year cycle in lemming suicides and North American lumber pine growth; an 11.1 year cycle of sun spot activity and serious upsurge in war and unrest (the next large one being 2011). The Black Death and the Great Plague coincided with this solar turbulence. There is also an increase in traffic accidents every 11.1 years, a rise and fall in hemlines, and an increase of volcanic and earthquake activity.

The stars, the myriad shining ones, also have an effect on us. Michel Gauquelin, a French psychologist, placed the hypothesis that we are affected by the position of the planets at our time of birth firmly on the

doorstep of science. He showed that the position of the stars had some indication as to what line of work one may enter later in life. This was not related to the practice of astrology or the horoscopes in the daily newspapers, but a serious, scientific data analysis. The psychologist, Hans Eysenck said, ‘How ever much it may go against the grain, I think we must admit that there is something here that requires explanation’.

His results, however, showed tendencies within the higher professionals and the same response was not achieved with unskilled workers.

The study of the stars goes back thousands of years. Some say 4,000 BC Sumeria was the first to do so. Others put this even earlier and say that ancient man was studying the stars 32,000 years ago. 2 Their evidence is an engraved antler from Abri Blanchard, France, with a strange pattern of notches or calendrical phases of the moon.

With all the evidence on patterns, rhythms and electromagnetism that affect our bodies, it is no wonder that modern science has taken another look at the ancient art of astrology, which has been neglected due to the widespread misuse of generic horoscopes.

Natal astrology deals with planetary positions at the time of our birth.

Astrometerorology concerns the prediction of major earthquakes, climatic changes and volcanic eruptions. There is much evidence to suggest that certain animals, which can predict such occurrences, are born at a specific time of year that corresponds to certain astrological predictions.

Cosmobiology is the study of the balance between cyclic behaviour, biological patterns, radiation and gravitational effects upon us.

Ancient peoples must have understood the precise mappings of these newly named sciences when they too predicted such things by the stars. It may be that ancient man was using both his ‘hidden powers’, and the tools of the earth around him. It may also be that the ideas and symbolism of Alchemy were just a few more steps along this path.

The Indian sage, Parasar, circa. 3000 BC, used Natal Astrology in his work. Megalithic structures have many astrological and Earth alignments. The Pyramids map the stars, obeying the Hermetic lore of ‘as above so below’. Ziggurats, temples, floor paintings, carvings and forty-mile long lines etched into the ground all convey the ancient and global belief in astrological predictions.

The very earliest almanacs contained weather forecasts based upon astrological

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predictions. In the countries of Arabia, the position of the stars was consistent with the weather. The ancient priesthood would have appeared to be in the know all the time, and therefore would appear holy and godlike; it was little wonder that they became incorporated into the symbolic format and titles of the stars.

The term ‘zodiac’ has a meaning pertaining to animals, possibly ‘animal map’ or ‘circle of animals’. This is seen more precisely in the ancient Chinese chart where every star sign has an animal name. The zodiac is belt of the gods, which lies nine degrees either side of the ecliptic plane, and contains the orbits of the moon and the major planets.

The sun originally traversed these minor gods on a regular path and the various signs of the zodiac were blessed with his arrival. That the word ‘zodiac’ pertains to animals explains why it contains animal symbols, such as the ram and fish. These ancient anthropomorphic beliefs were included into the sky, in the same way that pagan gods were taken on as saints by the Christian church. Later on, the saints received their own stars and were painted with them in ecclesiastical fervour. In some of the world’s zodiacs, such as the Chinese version, there is a tree at the centre.

The Babylonians, and especially people in the Middle East, studied the stars mathematically and attempted, even as long as 5,000 years ago, to scientifically log the reactions and effects of the stars.

They produced a calendar and perfect measures of time, essential for a people without clocks. Carl Jung suggested that the zodiac was an archetypal component of the psyche of mankind and he linked it with the theory of the collective unconscious.

The patterns and rhythms of the stars, with their gravitational and radiation activity have enormous effects upon our universe.

But could they also affect us individually and collectively? The cosmic radiation hitting and passing through our planet is millions of years old. It comes in cycles, as does the solar wind. The cycles increase and decrease, but nevertheless there is a pattern. Our species has been on this planet, and life has been part of the vast universe long enough for there to be some marked and observable effect.

There are a vast number of other cycles in which we are involved, such as urinary cycles, sexual cycles, stock market crashes, epidemics and a host of other minor cycles. A study of history will show how generations experience the same mistakes, and successes, all in a cyclic pattern.

The Buddhist Wheel of Life reflects the understanding the ancients had of this cyclic life of ours. It depicts, amongst

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others, creatures of passion, stupidity and hatred, and shows how we endlessly repeat the same things. The Wheel culminates in the twelve links in the chain of causation on the search for truth.

We should be on the look out for common threads; links between civilisations and time. The web that man has spread across the many thousands of years is complex and cluttered. Historians would have us believe that various human achievements sprang up spontaneously and simultaneously across the continents.

Mathematically, this is in error. There are too many coincidences, too many simultaneous eruptions of human culture and achievement, from the buildings that share a common purpose as solar and astral temples to the emergence of the ancient cross as a symbol (something directly linked to the sun – see The Cross of Thoth DVD from Crichton Miller or the book, The Golden Thread of Time).

In 1957, Tom Lethbridge wrote a book called ‘Gogmagog’. He claimed that Druidism and Brahmanism were linked and shared a common origin. Lethbridge believed that their ancient religion was somehow related to and existed for the Earth Goddess, also associated with the Moon Goddess and often cross-linked. This is true in that She was one of the deities worshipped by the ancient priesthood, to whom the Brahmins and Druids were related. The Earth/Moon Goddess, or Mother, had many names, Gaia or Ge, Isis, Astarte and eventually culminating in the Virgin Mary (Mother of God), and leading to the cult of the Black Virgin, which itself seems to be related more to Mary Magdalene than the Mother of God. Lethbridge was so upset by the reaction to his hypothesis that he ‘retired’ to Devon and took up dowsing, itself uniquely linked to the ancient serpent worshipping culture.

Unfortunately, the effect of this was to fuel his adversaries’ opinions of him, even though he discovered some remarkable facts, which to this day are highly regarded by dowsers. He showed that different substances or items produce different swing rates of the pendulum. The pendulum is well known for being the most accurate dowsing implement and in Lethbridge’s case this proved to be true. He found that the age of items gave a different rate, as did the surrounding emotions. A pebble thrown violently reacted differently from one thrown in a less aggressive manner.

Work carried out by other dowsers has shown that while the rates differ between dowsers, the principle remains the same.

This difference may be due to the rate at which the dowser absorbs the emitted energy, but it is hard to understand why the rates are uniformly different. If there had been a pattern of irregular rates this

would be sufficient evidence to ignore the practice; as it is, we have evidence enough to require further investigation.

Although some of the conclusions drawn by Lethbridge are open to debate, we are left wondering whether there is any evidence for humans being able to pick up energy. As we have seen, electromagnetism is in all things and we are open to its power, as are animals. The theory is that we transfer this energy to the implements used. This may explain why some dowsers have different rates, but still keep the same proportions as Lethbridge’s work. In the Vietnam War and World War 1, dowsers were used to help the Army find unexploded shells and locate mines. Modern oil companies use the skills of the dowsers to locate oil.

There is much evidence to show that ancient man practised dowsing, or radiesthesia, in one form or another. In the Tassili-n-Ajjer caves in the Sahara of South-Eastern Algeria, there are ancient pictoglyphs, approximately 8,000 years old, which show what appears to be dowsing.

Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing, and the Greek Daedalus, both closely associated, are credited with its invention.

The Chinese, the masters of Feng Shui, have also been credited with the invention of dowsing from the 3rd millennium BC. In the Bible we find that Moses (the patriarch who, according to Acts, had all the knowledge of Egypt) was adept at finding water with his rod. The writers of the Bible vehemently opposed the tradition of dowsing, mainly due to the fact that just about any lay-person can dowse, therefore could take the secret knowledge away from the priesthood and reduce their power.

Later, the Inquisition of the Catholic church found it necessary to stamp out dowsing once again, whilst many Abbots continued the practice in secret and even wrote extensively on the subject, albeit symbolically. What would be the reaction of the church if they were to find out that their own prophets, including the Saviour, practised divination? As we shall see later, they simply ignore the fact.

Among the other forms of divination to look out for is Bath-Kol: divination by means of the heavenly, divine voice. By interpreting this sound, the ancient Jewish prophets could announce the Will of God to the people. If ever there was a tool to keep the sacredness of God within the elite then this is it. This practice appears to be worldwide in all cultures but is carried out only by the initiated few. We can assume (based on our own beliefs) that this may mean a sound within our selves, but the archaeological evidence suggests actual sounds were produced using certain tools.

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Necromancy, the art of raising spirits from the dead to discover answers, is another form of divination that has strong links with the Bible. The Witch of Endor, in 1 Samuel 28, summoned the spirit of Samuel for Saul to question. Saul paid the price for this sin, but this demonstrates the existence of this ancient practice, which stretches back to beliefs in the underworld or place of the ancestors; a belief and a divination practised all over the globe.

Astrology is a form of divination relating to the stars. This too was practised globally at the same time as necromancy.

The interpretation of dreams, Oneiromancy, is a worldwide custom and one which also appears within the pages of the Bible, as well as many other holy book from just about every other religion and culture from our ancient past. Sometimes the dreamer would choose a specific location and take an hallucinogenic substance to bring on a dream, which only the priest could interpret.

In the Bible, the one with the ability to interpret the dream was the chosen one of God - the Shining One, a special person or priest. The Carl Jung of the day!

Interpretations of our unconscious world is now common, but this reveals that it was an ancient practice – and purely psychological with added religious meaning.

Scrying is the method of using a crystal or shining ball, mirror, or, more correctly and more ancient, a shining stone. Only a priest, or latterly clairvoyant, could read the message received. This art goes back to and even further than the Egyptians. Gypsies still use the crystal ball

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today. Hebrew tradition has it that Adam received wisdom from a shining stone, and Nostradamus used a bowl of water, as did Zeus.

Geomancy is the ancient from of reading messages from the earth. The word comes from the Greek word for Mother Earth, Ge or Gaia, and mancy or magos meaning knowledge. Ancient Greek, Latin and Arab writers tell us about Geomancy. This divination technique is also global and is referred to in the Bible, in some remarkable places. That such a paternal religion should be involved in a maternal belief is startling.

The timescale of the spread of Geomancy across the globe is much debated. There is, however, no doubt that it was universally used.

In Geomancy, the earth is drawn upon by hand or with sticks and a response read. Special codes or symbols are used, which are known only by the initiated. The symbols are usually lines, dots or stars. The final symbol is probably the one we should remember as this includes the symbol of the fish, although not in modern Geomancy techniques. The Arabs used random marks and read these. In other parts of the world, earth was thrown into the air and the shapes it formed as it fell on the ground it were interpreted.

In China, the most complex form of Geomancy was Feng Shui (literally, ‘wind and water’), the interpretation of the Earth energies and the use of this reading to discover where best to place tombs or temples. The Chinese use a similar technique on humans in acupuncture,

a very popular and reportedly effective alternative medicine.

The Chinese called the powers of the Earth, ‘Yin’ (female, negative) and ‘Yang’ (male, positive). As we know, everything, including energy, matter, and magnetism, has a positive and a negative, so once again, our ancestors were there before us. Modern day dowsing has shown that sites such as Stonehenge, Glastonbury, Newgrange, the pyramids of Egypt and the ziggurats of South America are all situated on these so-called ancient energy lines. This is yet another example of the global aspect of these ancient beliefs, which spread through cultures without altering the ethnicity of the population, but fitting in with it.

There are subtle hints, missed by orthodox history, which are beginning to reveal the patterns of an antiquated hierarchy of special priests. Once we are alerted to their existence, it becomes obvious that they were there all along.

There are many belief systems in the world, but they all come from one basic and undeniable core, invented and evolved separately by the original serpent solar worshippers.

For more see Secrets of the Serpent: In Search of the Sacred Past book and DVD available from Earthlink Publishing.

Notes

1. Woman’s Mysteries. Esther Harding.

Rider. 1971 2. Human Antiquity. Feder and Park.

Mayfield Publishing. 1993

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A Synopsis of the Israel/Palestine Conflict

by ‘If Americans Knew’ Copyright (c) If Americans Knew 2008

The following is a very short synopsis of the history of this conflict. We recommend that you also read the much more detailed account, “The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict”, which will appear in the November-December issue of Hard Evidence.

For thousands of years there was no such conflict. In the 19th century the land of Palestine was inhabited by a multicultural population of Palestinian Arabs – approximately 86 percent Muslim, 10 percent Christian, and 4 percent Jewish. For centuries these groups had lived in harmony.

Zionism

In the late 1800s a group in Europe decided to colonize this land. Known as “Zionists,” this group consisted of an extremist minority of the Jewish population. They wanted to create a Jewish homeland, and considered locations in Africa and the Americas, before settling on Palestine.

At first, this immigration created no problems. However, as more and more Zionists immigrated to Palestine – many with the express wish of taking over the land for an exclusively Jewish state – the indigenous population became increasingly alarmed. Eventually, there was fighting, with escalating waves of violence. Hitler’s rise to power and Nazi atrocities, combined with Zionist activities to derail the boycott against Germany and to interfere with refugee efforts, led to increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, and conflict grew.

UN Partition Plan

Finally, in 1947 the United Nations decided to intervene.

However, rather than adhering to the democratic principle espoused decades earlier by Woodrow Wilson of “selfdetermination of peoples,” in which the people themselves create their own state and system of government, the UN chose to revert to the medieval strategy whereby an outside power divides up other people’s land.

Under considerable Zionist pressure, the UN recommended giving away 55 percent of Palestine to a Jewish state – despite the fact that this group represented only about 30 percent of the total population, and owned under 7 percent of the land.

1947-1949 War

While it is widely and correctly reported that the resulting war

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eventually included five Arab armies, less well known is the fact that throughout this war Zionist forces outnumbered all Arab and Palestinian combatants combined – often by a factor of two to three. Also contrary to popular belief, Arab armies did not invade Israel – virtually all battles were fought on land that was to have been the Palestinian state. Finally, it is significant to note that the Arab armies entered the conflict only after Zionist forces had committed six massacres, including the grisly massacre of men, women, and children at Deir Yassin.

(Future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, head of one of the Jewish terrorist groups, called this a “splendid act of

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conquest,” and stated: “As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.” Zionist/Israeli forces committed 33 massacres altogether.)

By the end of the war Israel had conquered 78 percent of mandatory Palestine; threequarters of a million Palestinians had been made refugees; over 500 towns and villages had been destroyed; and a new map was drawn up, in which every city, river and hillock received a new, Hebrew name, as all vestiges of the Palestinian culture were to be erased.

For many decades Israel denied the existence of this population, Golda Meir

once saying: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian.”

1967 War In 1967, Israel conquered still more land.

Following the Six Day War, in which Israeli forces launched a highly successful surprise attack on Egypt, Israel occupied the additional 22 percent of Palestine that had eluded it in 1948 – the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since, according to international law it is inadmissible to acquire territory by war, these are occupied territories and do not belong to Israel. It also occupied parts of Egypt (since returned) and Syria (which remain under occupation).

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Also during the Six-Day War, Israel attacked a US Navy ship, the USS Liberty, killing and injuring over 200 American servicemen. President Lyndon Johnson recalled rescue flights, saying that he did not want to “embarrass an ally.” (In 2004 a high-level commission chaired by Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, found this attack to be “an act of war against the United States,” a fact few news media have reported.)

Current Conflict

There are two primary issues at the core of this continuing conflict. First, there is the inevitably destabilizing effect of trying to maintain an ethnically preferential

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state, particularly when it is largely of foreign origin. As we have seen, the original population of what is now Israel was 96 percent Muslim and Christian.

Yet, Muslim and Christian refugees are not being allowed to return to their homes in the current “Jewish state.” (And those within Israel are subjected to systematic discrimination.)

when Israel continued to confiscate land in these areas and to move its citizens onto it, the Palestinian population rebelled. (The Barak offer, widely reputed to be generous, was anything but.) This uprising, called the “Intifada” (Arabic for “shaking off”) began at the end of September 2000.

Second, Israel’s continued military occupation and confiscation of privately owned land in the West Bank, and control over Gaza, are being resisted by many of the Palestinian inhabitants. It is these occupied territories that, according to the Oslo peace accords of 1993, were going to become a Palestinian state. However,

Largely due to one-sided special-interest lobbying, U.S. taxpayers give Israel an average of $7 million per day, and since its creation have given more US. funds to Israel than to any other nation. As Americans learn about how Israel is using their tax dollars, they are increasingly calling for an end to this expenditure.

U.S. Involvement

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The Truth about the Leuchter Report Part 1

by Malcolm Nicholson Copyright (c) M. Nicholson 2008

Introduction

Two recent issues of Hard Evidence have featured the Leuchter Report which is supposed to have proved there were no homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. In 1988 Fred Leuchter had been hired by the Holocaust revisionist Ernst Zundel to prepare a report for his defence against the charge of publishing false news in Canada.

Leuchter travelled to Poland, looked at the sites, took samples and produced a report which concluded that there could not have been homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek.

At first glance, the Leuchter Report, especially its forensic findings, may sound convincing, but the truth is it is flawed and incompetent. It does not prove there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz and many of its arguments have been abandoned by other Holocaust revisionists.

Leuchter’s lack of expertise

When I first heard about the Leuchter Report, I got the impression that Leuchter built and sold gas chambers to American prisons. This is not true. There were six American states with gas chambers in 1988, Arizona, California, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina and Missouri.

None of these has a gas chamber which was supplied by Leuchter. The closest he appears to have come to selling a gas chamber to a prison is in Missouri, but they changed the law so prisoners could only be killed by lethal injection (1).

Although Fred Leuchter claimed to be an engineer, he has no academic qualifications in engineering. He has a Bachelor of Arts in history from Boston University. This makes Leuchter one of the few Holocaust revisionists to have any academic qualifications in history. Boston

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University offered three engineering degrees when he was there, so it is not as though he did not have the opportunity to study engineering (2). Leuchter has practical experience in designing and building execution technology, but that does not make him an engineer, any more than someone, who can do their own tax return, is an accountant.

During the Zundel trial, Judge Ron Thomas did not allow the Leuchter Report to be admitted as evidence because Leuchter did not have the expertise to support his opinions (3). This decision was justified.

Leuchter was incompetent.

The nature of Leuchter’s arguments

The arguments in the Leuchter Report can be divided into two categories, engineering and forensic. During the Zundel trial, Leuchter said he based 90% of his conclusions against the existence of the gas chambers, on engineering and design considerations, and only 10% on the forensic evidence (4) . This is strange because Leuchter’s forensic findings of very low cyanide residue in the gas chamber sites might appear convincing, but his engineering and design criticisms are clearly wrong.

In the 1998 documentary Mr Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter Jr. Leuchter described what he thought he was going to see when he went to Auschwitz; “I expected to see facilities that could have been used as gas chambers. I expected to see areas that were explosion-proof.

I expected to see areas that were leakproof. There had to be holes in walls or areas where they had exhaust fans, pipes.

There had to be something to remove the gas after it had been put into the room.

There has to be some kind of device to

heat the chalk (?) pellets and sublimate the gas to get it into the air. These things didn’t exist.” (5) It sounds like Leuchter did not realize the Birkenau gas chambers had been destroyed in 1944-45 and he expected to find intact gas chambers in 1988. He almost appears to be saying that because there are not intact, functioning gas chambers in Birkenau today, there could not have been any gas chambers during World War II. He does not take into account the possibility that equipment was removed when the buildings were demolished.

Likewise, in his report Leuchter wrote about the gas chambers in Crematoria IV and V, “According to reports, Zyklon B gas pellets were allegedly thrown in through wall ports which are non-existant.” (6) They are now “non-existant” because the walls were torn down. That does not mean they were not there in the 1940s.

Leuchter made another strange claim when he wrote, “Kremas I, II, II, IV, and V are described historically and on inspection were verified to have been converted mortuaries or morgues connected and housed in the same facility as crematories.”

(7)

Crematorium I in Auschwitz I is a reconstruction and the four crematoria in Birkenau or Auschwitz II are ruins. There is no way Leuchter could have looked at these piles of rubble and determined that they used to be morgues.

The danger of explosion

Leuchter claimed that hydrogen cyanide gas, which was used in the gas chambers, would cause an explosion in the nearby crematoria ovens (8). Although hydrogen cyanide is flammable, the concentration of hydrogen cyanide used for gassing was

VOL.8 #5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008

too low to cause an explosion. Jean Claude Pressac wrote in Truth Prevails, “HCN’s flammability limits in the air are from 5.6% (minimum) to 40% (maximum) in volume (6% - 41% according to Du Pont).

This signifies that upon contact with a flame there is an explosion if the concentration of hydrocyanic acid in air comprises between 67.2 g/m³ and 480g/m³. Below 67.2 g/m³ there is no risk, nor is there any at greater than 480 g/m³, because there is not enough remaining oxygen for burning to begin. The SS used doses of 5g/m³ in delousing and 12-20 g/m³ in killing, well under the 67.2 g/m³ threshold. The gas chambers were not about to explode.” (9) Some Holocaust revisionists agree there would have been no danger of an explosion.

Friedrich Berg has written, “Another false argument Faurisson has repeatedly used is that cyanide gas is explosive and therefore, could never have been used near crematory ovens. Fred Leuchter was apparently persuaded to fall in line and use the same argument. The fact is that cyanide in air is only explosive in concentrations higher than 5.6% - in other words, the concentration of HCN in air must be at least 56 times greater than the 0.1% one is likely to use in a homicidal gas chamber – before it can even become explosive!” (10) Berg also quoted from the Military Fumigation Manual, published in 1943, which said that hydrogen cyanide gas could be present with an open flame and not cause an explosion, “When outdoor conditions cause the indoor temperature to fall below 65 degrees F., it is desirable to heat the building for two or three hours before the Discoids are applied and during the fumigation so the insects will be warmed and therefore more susceptible to the gas.

Furnace rooms should not be sealed but the door should be locked and barred to prevent entry….The furnace (if coal) should be stoked so that heat will be satisfactorily maintained for the short period of exposure required, if possible. If not possible, the furnace tender should wear a gas mask when tending the fire.” (11) Likewise, another revisionist Germar Rudolf has written, “With correct application quantities and concentrations, the technical literature indicates that there is practically no danger of explosion.” (12)

Heating

In the Leuchter Report, Leuchter claimed there were design and safety problems with the Auschwitz gas chambers which

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were so serious that they could not have functioned as gas chambers. He claimed there were no doors on the gas chambers, no ventilation system, no means of heating the gas and that after it had expelled, it would kill “the entire camp”. (13) These claims are simply not true. They are either contradicted by the documentary evidence or the supposed problems are not as bad as Leuchter claimed and he knew it.

In 1991 Leuchter was interviewed by Stephen Trombley for his book The Execution Protocol, about the execution business in the United States. He told Trombley that American gas chambers were not safe. However, in spite of their safety flaws, they still worked and killed the prisoner without killing anyone else (14) . While he had claimed in the Leuchter Report that after the gas had been ventilated, it would kill those outside, Leuchter told Trombley that in American gas chambers, “The gas that’s expelled into the air is harmless because it dissipates rapidly.” (15) Likewise, although Leuchter claimed that the Auschwitz gas chambers would not work because there was no heating, he told Trombley that American gas chambers were not heated (16). They still worked.

Because hydrogen cyanide boils at 25 degrees Celsius, Leuchter claimed that Zyklon B would not have worked and Jews would not have been gassed if the temperature in the gas chamber had been below 25 degrees Celsius (17). He does not appear to know the difference between evaporation and boiling. Water evaporates and turns into steam below its boiling point of 100 degrees Celsius. Just as water evaporates well below its boiling point, Zyklon B releases hydrogen cyanide gas its boiling point of 25 degrees.

During the war, the German Society for Pest Control experimented with delousing at cold temperatures. A 1943 article, “Once More: The Efficiency of Prussic Acid at Low Temperatures”, by R. Irmscher reported that at even –18 to –19 degrees Celsius 32.5% of the hydrogen cyanide had been released after one hour and at 15 degrees Celsius 77% had been released after one hour (18). The Zyklon B took longer to release gas at lower temperatures but it still produced enough hydrogen cyanide to kill people. Revisionists, who say the temperature had to be 25 degrees to kill people with Zykon B, are simply ignorant.

Furthermore, Leuchter’s claim that the Auschwitz gas chambers were not heated is not true. In 1989, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers by Jean Claude Pressac was published.

Pressac reproduced wartime construction

documents, such as letters, telegrams, invoices, plans and worksheets, which contained references to gas-tight doors, undressing rooms, the ventilation system and heating.

A March 6, 1943 letter from SSSturmbannfuhrer Rudolf Jahrling to Topf, the crematorium manufacturers, show they were planning to heat the cellars in Crematoria II and III which have been identified as gas chambers, “Subject: KL Auschwitz Krematorien II and III In accordance with your suggestion, the service agrees that cellar I should be preheated with the air coming from the room of the 3 forced draught installations.

The supply and installation of the ductwork and blowers necessary to this end are to be effected as soon as possible. As you point out in your above mentioned letter, execution should commence this week. We should ask you to send in triplicate detailed quote and supply for installation.

At the same time, we should ask you to send an additional quote for the modification of the air-extraction installation in the undressing room.” (19) Jean Claude Pressac wrote, “Why would anyone want to heat rooms that by definition ought to remain cool? This idea would be absurd if there had not been a change of function changing these rooms from morgues to gas chambers, where the temperature had to remain high enough for the product to vaporize rapidly.” (20) If the Auschwitz gas chambers were heated, but the American gas chambers were not, this presumably means the Auschwitz gas chambers were better designed than the American ones.

Ernst Zundel paid Leuchter $35,000 (US) for his report and testimony. Leuchter often acted as a professional witness ($500 a day plus expenses in the 1980s) who would testify in death penalty cases that the execution equipment could malfunction.

He would often testify against prisons which did not buy his execution hardware (21) . Leuchter must have known from experience that the design and safety flaws described in the Leuchter Report would not stop a gas chamber from working. The laws of chemistry are the same in Poland and North America. He appears to have been telling his revisionist employees what they wanted to hear. If the prosecution, rather than the defence in the Zundel case, had approached Leuchter and paid him, he would have presumably produced a report proving the existence of the gas chambers.

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Gas-tight doors for the gas chambers

Leuchter further claimed the cellars of Crematoria II and III were only morgues and they had no doors, “….there was no ventilation, no heating system, no circulation system, no sealant inside or out and, further, no doors on the morgues in Krema II. The area has been examined by the author and no evidence of doors or door frames has been found.”

(22)

However, in a letter, dated March 31, 1943, to the German Armaments Works, Karl Bischoff wrote, “In the letter mentioned above informs you that you must make three gas-tight doors according to the order of January 1, 1943 for BW 30b and 30c, following the size and construction of those already delivered.

At this occasion we remind you of another order of March 6, 1943 for the delivery of a gas door 100 x 192 cm for morgue 1 of crematorium 3, Bw 30a, which must be equipped exactly in the form and size of the basement door of crematorium 2, located opposite, to be made with a spy-hole of double 8mm glass with a rubber seal and metal fitting. This order must be considered as very urgent.” (23) BW 30b and 30c were Crematoria IV and V respectively. Eyewitnesses, such as Henryk Tauber (24), said there was a peephole in the gas chamber doors so the SS could tell when the Jews were dead. This 1943 letter confirms there was a peephole in the door. These eyewitnesses must have been in the crematorium to know there was a peephole, so this document makes their accounts of what happened on the other side of the peephole more credible.

An inventory, dated June 24, 1943, for Crematorium III lists a gas-tight door and 14 shower heads for Leichenkeller I (25).

Pressac said there were no water pipes connected to the shower heads, so they were dummies (26). Witnesses reported that there were fake shower heads in the gas chambers to deceive the Jews into thinking they were only going to have a shower.

According to witnesses, in Crematoria IV and V, the SS threw the Zyklon B pellets into the gas chambers through hole in the outside walls. On February 12, 1943, the Auschwitz Central Construction Office ordered 12 gas-tight doors or shutters for these holes in Crematoria IV and V, “Production of 12 gas-tight doors approximately 30 x 40 cm exactly like those already made in the inmates’ woodworking shop, with bolt and catch.” (27)

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HARD EVIDENCE

These 30 x 40 cm windows can be seen on the plans for Crematorium IV. They are on the outside walls of the rooms described as gas chambers by witnesses (28). Not all the windows in Crematoria IV and V had gas-tight shutters, only the windows to the gas chambers, suggesting that gas was intended to be used in these rooms. Some of these shutters have survived and are kept in Crematorium I (29).

Bischoff’s letter of March 31, 1943, which was quoted earlier, mentioned three gastight doors which had been ordered for Crematoria IV and V (30).

A work sheet for Crematorium V for April 16 and 17, 1943, includes, “fit window bars, drainage (work) and fit gas doors.”

(31)

An order, dated April 9, 1943, includes “24 anchor bolts for gas-tight doors” in Crematoria IV and V (32).

In 1991 Leuchter and Zundel published the Fourth Leuchter Report which was intended to be a reply to Pressac’s book. Leuchter did not say anything like, “Well, it looks like I was wrong about the doors. That’s a point in favour of the gas chambers.” He did not acknowledge he had been wrong in any way. He simply made up new explanations to explain away the new evidence even though he was contradicting what he had written in the original Leuchter Report. He now wrote,

(gassicher) door, so the gas-tight doors, which he had earlier said were not even there, could not have been doors to gas chambers (34).

However, according to the documentary Mr Death The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. , Leuchter cannot speak German, so he would not know what the German words really mean, especially in a technical sense, and he has no business criticising anyone’s translation of them.

(35)

A methane gas chamber?

Pressac reproduced another documentary reference to a gas chamber in a contractor’s daily report sheet for March 2 1943 for work in Crematorium IV. It says “filling in of the floor of the gas chamber (Gasskammer) with backfill, tamping it and laying a concrete slab over it.” (36) In The Fourth Leuchter Report, Leuchter wrote, “It however, may be a joke. This foreman and his crew had been working here for a number of days and perhaps he or someone in his crew was flatulent during that period. I’m sure these people were no different from most construction workers and he may have put this in the daily report as a joke.” (37)

“First, it must be remembered that the doors in question were to be utilized in morgues (Leichenkeller) and as one might expect, the morgues are want for some kind of minimal seal on the openings.

Second, Leichenkeller #1 was to contain the decomposing older bodies, which might be even more of a problem.” (33)

In other words, someone is supposed to have farted in that room, so they wrote “gas chamber” on the worksheet. Revisionists must think this is a very unfortunate coincidence. Out of all the places in Nazioccupied Europe for someone to make such a joke, they did it in a building that would later be said to be a gas chamber for killing Jews and their joke would be misconstrued as evidence for those gas chambers.

Leuchter did not explain how he supposedly knew that Leichenkeller 1 contained older corpses or why they would store decomposing bodies in a morgue when there fifteen crematorium ovens upstairs.

It is hard to take revisionists seriously. They say there is no documentary evidence for the gas chambers, and then, they come up with explanations like this for a document mentioning a gas chamber in Crematorium IV in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

First, there were no doors. Then, there were doors, but they were doors to morgues, not gas chambers. Leuchter does not explain why, if it is so obvious morgues would have doors, he said there were none in the first place. The original Leuchter Report had gone down the Orwellian memory hole and been conveniently forgotten.

Ventilation for the gas chamber

Leuchter did not concede that gas-tight doors suggested there were gas chambers.

He criticised Pressac’s translation of German terms and argued that a gastight (gasdicht) door was not a gas-proof

Leuchter claimed the gas chambers had no ventilation. Again, this is not true.

An inspection report by Kurt Prufer, dated December 29, 1942, says about Crematorium II, “Delivery of the ventilation and air extraction systems for the corpse cellar has been delayed by the blockage of wagons, so that it will not be possible to install them for another 10 days.” (38) On February 11, 1943, Karl Bischoff sent

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a telegram to Topf, complaining about the delays of materials for Crematorium II, “Thus, you write on 21st January 1943 that all the materials for the ventilation and air extraction installations would be sent on 22nd January 1943. When the wagon arrived, these components were missing, so that your fitter Messing was unable to continue. On the telephone, Mr Prufer told us that all the material had been sent.

Now a consignment note arrives with a consignment date of 6th February 1943. After examination of this and a conversation with your fitter, it appears that a No.450 blower with a 3.5 HP motor is still missing, and it is precisely this blower destined for the C-cellar I for which our need d the most urgent. Also, a 7.5 HP motor for the No. 550 air extraction blower for C-cellar 2.

We therefore telegraphed you once more ‘dispatch immediately blower 450 and a 3.5 HP motor for C-cellar and a 7.5 HP motor for air extraction blower No. 550 for C-cellar II, not appearing on the dispatch note of 6.2.1943, otherwise the installation cannot be brought into service. Reply by telegraph.’” (39) Bischoff wrote that the crematorium could not be brought into service without the ventilation and air extraction system for the underground rooms. If these were ordinary crematoria, as revisionists maintain, they could have still burned bodies in the ovens upstairs without ventilation in the cellars. It is hard to imagine how the lack of ventilation in the cellars could have prevented the crematorium upstairs from operating. It does make sense if there were gas chambers in the crematoria. The gas chambers could not have operated without a ventilation system to extract the gas afterwards.

The ventilation system is also mentioned in five construction worksheets from March to April 1943 (40).

In the original Leuchter Report, Leuchter claimed that there was no ventilation system in the gas chambers of Crematoria II and III, so the gas chambers could only have been used once a week (41) and there would have been time for the cyanide to react with the iron in the bricks and form Iron Blue (42). Because there were no Iron Blue stains, Leuchter argued that they could not have been gas chambers.

The fact, that there was a ventilation system, undermines Leuchter’s forensic argument.

Under cross-examination during the Zundel trial, Leuchter was shown documents referring to the ventilation system, however he still denied there was any ventilation

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and said, “Most of the facility at Crematorium II is standing. Although the roof is caved in, most of the facility and all of the building material is there. There are no holes, there is no provision for duct work, ventilators, fans, et cetera.

Crematorium III is not all there, but I can speak from experience and from inspection and investigation at Crematorium II, there were no ventilation fans on the premises at all.” (43) “I know for a fact there was no ventilation system in the Leichenkeller of any type, and there was no provision in the construction of the building for that.” (44) The ventilation duct at the bottom of the wall of the gas chamber in Crematorium III is still visible (45). Leuchter must have been standing a few feet from it when he took his forensic samples from Crematorium III (46) . Although he claims to have inspected the site and could not find any trace of the ventilation system, it looks like Leuchter could not recognize a ventilation duct when he was standing next to one.

He argued that it would take at least 20 hours to ventilate the gas chambers, based on the instructions for delousing ordinary buildings, not gas chambers with mechanical ventilation systems. Then, without any explanation, he increased this figure by over 700% and claimed it would take a week to ventilate the gas chambers, so they could only have been used once a week (47).

Leuchter further claimed that only 1693 people could have been gassed in all the gas chambers in a week, so it would have taken 68 years to gas six million people (48) . As we have seen, Leuchter was wrong about the ventilation and the time it would have taken to ventilate the gas chambers.

Furthermore, “only” one million Jews were killed in Auschwitz, not six million which is the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis.

HCN Gas Detectors in the Crematoria

On February 26, 1943, SS Untersturmer Pollock sent a telegram to Topf, “Send immediately 10 gas detectors as discussed. Send your invoice later.” (49) In The Fourth Leuchter Report, Leuchter said they were for measuring the carbon monoxide air mixture in the ovens and they “have nothing to do with testing for hydrogen cyanide gas and do not imply the existence of gas chambers.” (50) He did not explain how he knew this.

In 1994 it become clear that Leuchter was wrong when Pressac published Topf’s reply, dated March 2, 1943, which said the gas detectors were for detecting Prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide), “Re: Crematorium (II). We acknowledge receipt of your telegram stating: “Immediate shipment of 10 gas detectors as agreed.

Estimate to be furnished later.” Concerning this matter, we can tell you that for two weeks now we have been making inquiries of five different firms about the apparatus you want indicating the traces of prussic acid [Anziegegerate fur Blausaure-Reste].

We have received negative responses from 3 firms and we are still awaiting answers from the other 2. When we receive further information on this subject, we will let you know immediately so that we can put you in touch with the firm making the apparatus.

Heil Hitler!” (51) There were devices for detecting hydrogen cyanide gas in Crematorium II where eyewitnesses said there was one of the gas chambers which used hydrogen cyanide gas. There were no other crematoria with hydrogen cyanide gas detectors in ordinary concentration camps like Buchenwald or Bergen Belsen, only the crematoria at Birkenau which contained gas chambers which used hydrogen cyanide gas. If Holocaust revisionists were at all objective and genuinely interested in historical truth, they would admit this is a very implausible coincidence and this document would generate at least a little bit of suspicion that maybe there were gas chambers after all.

New revisionist explanations for the gas chambers

Before 1989 revisionists had argued that the Auschwitz gas chambers were really only doorless morgues. Leuchter appears to have taken most of his arguments about the supposed design flaws of the gas chambers from the French revisionist Robert Faurisson who helped with Zundel’s defence and wrote the foreword to the Leuchter Report. Even another revisionist Friedrich Berg could see this when he wrote that Leuchter got his argument that hydrogen cyanide was flammable and explosive from Faurisson (52).

John C. Zimmerman describes the Leuchter Report as “in reality, nothing but a rehash of arguments previously expressed by Faurisson” (53) and “(in reality Faurisson’s) report” (54). It looks like Faurisson, who was working with Zundel’s defence, gave his arguments to Leuchter who wrote them up as an expert report which was supposedly based on his expert opinions.

Faurisson and other revisionists then claimed the Leuchter Report was a triumph

HARD EVIDENCE

49

for revisionists and proved the gas chambers did not exist.

Jean Claude Pressac’s Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, with its documents mentioning gas-tight doors, ventilation systems and undressing rooms in the crematoria cellars, disproved the claims of Leuchter and other revisionists that the gas chambers were only morgues.

However, revisionists did not concede that they were wrong and perhaps there really were gas chambers after all.

They abandoned the Leuchter Report’s engineering and design arguments and came up with new explanations, which took into account the newly published evidence, for what the gas chambers supposedly really were.

Samuel Crowell has published several articles arguing that the gas chambers were, in fact, anti-gas air-raid shelters, intended to keep poison gas out rather than in (55). The gas chamber in Auschwitz I was converted into an air raid shelter in 1944. That is not disputed, however we should not confuse the four crematoria in Birkenau with the crematorium in Auschwitz I. The air raid shelter in Crematorium I was across the street from the SS hospital and was meant for its staff and patients. The four Birkenau crematoria were located on the other side of the camp from the SS barracks and were an impractical place for air raid shelters. By the time the SS men had run several hundreds metres across the camp, bombs presumably exploding around them, the air raid would have been over. Crematoria II and III in Birkenau had underground rooms, so they would provided some protection during an air raid, but Crematoria IV and V were above-ground and would have offered no more protection from an air raid than any other brick building.

If there had been air raid shelters in the four Birkenau crematoria, one would expect there would have been some mention of them in the documents which Crowell cites discussing air raid precautions in Auschwitz. There is none. Likewise, none of the crematoria construction documents say there was an air raid shelter in any of the Birkenau crematoria.

The biggest critic of Crowell’s hypothesis is his fellow revisionist Carlo Mattogno.

He found that, “Absolutely no anti air-raid protective measures were undertaken in Auschwitz-Birkenau before the end of 1943.” (56) Therefore, the four Birkenau crematoria, which were completed between March and June 1943, could not have been intended to be air raid shelters and the gas-tight doors, undressing

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rooms and gassing cellar mentioned in the construction documents must have had another purpose. Mattogno has argued that there were really delousing or disinfestation chambers in the Birkenau crematoria.

An apparently relevant document, which Mattogno quoted, was an order, dated 13 April 1943, requesting, “2 Topf disinfestations heaters for Crematory II in the prisoner of war camp Auschwitz.”

(57)

This does not necessarily prove there was going to a disinfestation or delousing chamber in Crematorium II. A disinfestation heater was used to heat the air so the Zyklon B would release the gas faster, which means the SS were intending to use Zyklon B in the crematorium. If they were looking for a way of heating a gas chamber, which used Zyklon B, they would presumably use a heater for a Zyklon B delousing chamber.

During the 2000 libel trial, David Irving argued that the crematoria cellars were both air raid shelters and delousing chambers for fumigating the corpses of typhus victims (58). So, according to Irving, the cellars were gas chambers where the Nazis used Zyklon B on Jews, but they were delousing gas chambers and the Jews were already dead. The documentary evidence for the Auschwitz gas chambers must be pretty conclusive if this is the best attempt Irving can come up with to explain it away.

When Irving was asked, “What is the evidence that they used the room for gassing corpses?”, he simply replied, “That is what it was built for.” (59) Apart from the lack of any evidence to support this explanation, the obvious flaw is why would they bother to delouse corpses which were about to be cremated? Fire is a safer and more efficient way of killing lice on a corpse than messing around with poison gas.

Why would they not just cremate the corpse? Instead of simply taking a typhus infested corpse into the oven room and burning it, Irving would have us believe that they took it downstairs, deloused it for about 24 hours, then took it back upstairs and cremated it.

David Irving said he came to believe hydrogen cyanide could not have been used to kill people in the Auschwitz gas chambers because of the low levels of cyanide residue found by Fred Leuchter, compared with the nearby delousing chamber. Then in 2000, he said hydrogen cyanide had been used in the cellars, but to delouse corpses. If Leuchter’s forensic

findings are supposed to have proved the cellars could not have been hydrogen cyanide gas chambers, surely they also proved they could not have been hydrogen cyanide delousing chambers.

If the cellars were delousing chambers, which used Zyklon B, why did they not have more cyanide residue like the “other” delousing chamber? When Irving was asked, “If that were so, why did Mr Leuchter not find similar concentrations of hydrogen cyanide residue in those room as he did in the delousing facility?”, he replied, “Frankly, I do not know the answer to that.” (60) In his foreword to the Leuchter Report, Irving wrote, “Forensic chemistry is, I repeat, an exact science.” (61) However, it appears Irving only believes the “exact science” when it suits him. When he needed a new explanation for the new evidence, the “exact science” was ignored. Like historical evidence, revisionists will only accept scientific evidence when it supports their case and ignore it when it disproves it.

Notes (1)

(2) (3) (4)

(5) (6)

(7) (8) (9) (10)

(11) (12)

(13) (14)

(15) (16) (17) (18)

(19)

Shelly Shapiro, Truth Prevails, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1990 p 18-21 Ibid., p 14 Ibid., p 75-81 Robert Lenski, The Holocaust on Trial, Reporter Press, Alabama, 1990, p 369 Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter Jr., Niche Pictures, 1999 Fred Leuchter, The Leuchter Report, Focal Point Publications, 1989., p 17 Ibid., p 13 Ibid., p 13, 16, 17 Truth Prevails, op cit., p 45 Friedrich Berg, “Gas Chambers for Robert Faurisson: Answers to a Challenge”, http://codoh.com/gcgv/ gaschamb.html Ibid.

Germar Rudolf, The Rudolf Report, Theses and Dissertations Press, Illinois, 2003, p 157 The Leuchter Report, op cit., p 13, 16, 17 Stephen Trombley, The Execution Protocol, Random House, 1993, p 97 Ibid.

Ibid.

The Holocaust on Trial, op cit., p 389 R. Irmscher, “Once More: “The Efficiency of Prussic Acid at Low Temperatures”, http://www.holocaust-history.org/ works/irmsher-1942/htm/intro000. htm Jean Claude Pressac, Auschwitz:

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(20) (21) (22) (23)

(24) (25)

(26) (27) (28) (29) (30) (31)

(32) (33)

(34) (35)

Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989, p 221 Ibid., p 432 The Execution Protocol, op cit., p 51 The Leuchter Report, op cit., p 1617 Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, Indiana University Press, 2002, p 314 Ibid, p 191 Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, op cit., p 432 Ibid., p 227, 231 The Case for Auschwitz, op cit., p 338-9 Ibid., p 200, 336-7 Ibid., p 336-8 Ibid., p 314 Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, op cit., p 454 Ibid., p 454 Fred Leuchter, Robert Faurisson, Germar Rudolf, The Leuchter Reports – Critical Editions, Theses and Dissertations Press, Chicago, 2005, p 215 Ibid., p 215 Mr Death The Rise and Fall of Fred

Leuchter, Jr., Niche Pictures, 1998 (36) Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, op cit., p 446 (37) The Leuchter Reports – Critical Edition, op cit., p 220 (38) Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, op cit., 212 (39) Ibid., p 360 (40) Ibid., p 373 (41) Leuchter Report, op cit., p 16-17 (42) Robert Lenski, The Holocaust on Trial, Reporter Press, Alabama, 1990, p 368 (43) Ibid., p 369 (44) Ibid., p 393 (45) The Case for Auschwitz, op cit., p 367 (46) Leuchter Report, op cit., p 29 (47) Ibid., p 16-17 (48) Fred Leuchter, “Inside the Auschwitz ‘Gas Chambers’”, http://www.ihr. org/leaflets/inside.shtml (49) Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, op cit., p 367 (50) The Leuchter Reports – Critical Edition, op cit., p 216 (51) Yi s r a e l G u t m a n a n d M i c h a e l Berenbaum (editors), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994, p 210 (52) Friedrich Berg, “Gas Chambers for Robert Faurisson: Answers to a

(53)

(54) (55)

(56)

(57) (58) (59) (60) (61)

Challenge”, http://codoh.com/gcgv/ gaschamb.html John C. Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial, University of America Press, Lanham, 2000, p 181 Ibid., p 183 Samuel Crowell, “Technique and Operation of German Anti-Gas Shelters in World War II”, http://www. codoh.com/incon/inconpressac.html “Bomb Shelters in Birkenau: A Reappraisal”, http://www.codoh. com/incon/inconbsinbirk.html “Comments on Mattogno’s Critique of The Bomb Shelter Thesis”, http:// codoh.com/incon/inconscrmtgno. html Carlo Mattogno, “Morgue Cellars of Birkenau: Gas Shelters or Disinfesting Chambers?”, http://www.vho.org/GB/ c/CM/leichen.html Ibid.

Irving v. Penguin, Ltd. and Lipstadt, (January 24, 2000) Day 8, p 85-88 Ibid., p 86 Ibid., p 102 Leuchter Report, op cit., p 6

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This Issue’s Contributor: Tom Bradley Northern Territory

NT power to rest on UFO-sighting chook farmer

Source: AAP. Story by Lindsay Murdoch, Darwin Photo by Glenn Campbell

A FORMER chicken farmer could hold the balance of power in the Northern Territory Parliament this week.

“People should be afraid,” said Gerry Wood, who ran as an independent. Why? “I’m afraid.”

Vote counting reopens today after closing on Saturday night, with Labor looking certain to win 12 seats, the Country Liberal Party eight, Mr Wood one and four undecided.

Three of those are expected to fall to the CLP, meaning that the seat of Fannie Bay, where Labor holds a 57-vote lead, may be the decider.

Mr Wood criticised Labor’s push for a Japanese gas plant in Darwin Harbour — and its negative election campaign.

“People don’t want politicians in their faces,” Gerry Wood told The Age after Labor’s shock result in Saturday’s election.

“You don’t need an ugly face on posters to win … you just need a nice little friendly chicken,” he said, referring to the logo he used in running for Nelson, a semi-rural electorate south of Darwin.

Mr Wood, who entered Parliament in 2001, last month reported seeing a UFO over Howard Springs, his home town.

Readers are invited to send in photos of unusual or funny events that they or their friends have witnessed to ‘Funny Photos!’ Hard Evidence Magazine, PO Box 738, Jimboomba, QLD 4280, Australia. If you want your photos returned, please include a self-addressed & stamped envelope with your submission.

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VOL.8 #5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008

Tomgram: Bombs Away Over Iraq

by Tom Engelhardt Copyright (c) T. Engelhardt 2008

A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. (“Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.”) Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way: “The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.

“In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad.”

And here’s paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times: “The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation.

To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.’s.”

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew up “an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq.”

Note that both pieces started with bombing news -- in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these last days -- those 100,000 pounds of explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad -- simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the New York Times, it was buried inside a single sentence.

Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned

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to the subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the Bush administration’s invasion of 2003 and probably represents a genuine shifting of American military strategy in that country. Despite a few humdrum wire service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has bothered to cover the story adequately either.

For those who know something about the history of air power, which, since World War II, has been lodged at the heart of the American Way of War, that 100,000 figure might have rung a small bell.

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (a prelude to World War II), the planes of the German Condor Legion attacked the ancient Basque town of Guernica. They came in waves, first carpet bombing, then dropping thermite incendiaries. It was a market day and there may have been as many as 7,00010,000 people, including refugees, in the town which was largely destroyed in the ensuing fire storm. More than 1,600 people may have died there (though some estimates are lower). The Germans reputedly dropped about 50 tons or 100,000 pounds of explosives on the town. In the seven decades between those two 100,000 figures lies a sad history of our age.

Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 10 miles south of the Iraqi capital that was the target of the latest 100,000pound barrage has recently been largely off-limits to American troops and their Iraqi allies. The American military now refers generically to all Sunni insurgents who resist them as “al Qaeda,” so in situations like this it’s hard to tell exactly who has held this territory.

At Guernica, as in Arab Jabour 71 years later, no reporters were present when the explosives rained down. In the Spanish situation, however, four reporters in the nearby city of Bilbao, including George Steer of the Times of London, promptly rushed to the scene of destruction. Steer’s first piece for the Times (also printed in the New York Times) was headlined

“The Tragedy of Guernica” and called the assault “unparalleled in military history.”

(Obviously, no such claims could be made for Arab Jabour today.) Steer made clear in his report that this had been an attack on a civilian population, essentially a terror bombing.

The self-evident barbarism of the event - the first massively publicized bombing of a civilian population -- caused international horror. It was news across the planet. From it came perhaps the most famous painting of the last century, Picasso’s Guernica, as well as innumerable novels, plays, poems, and other works of art.

As Ian Patterson writes in his book, Guernica and Total War: “Many attacks since then, including the ones we have grown used to seeing in Iraq and the Middle East in recent years, have been on such a scale that Guernica’s fate seems almost insignificant by comparison.

But it’s almost impossible to overestimate the outrage it caused in 1937… Accounts of the bombing were widely printed in the American press, and provoked a great deal of anger and indignation in most quarters…”

Those last two tag-on paragraphs in the Parker and Rasheed Los Angeles Times piece tell us much about the intervening 71 years, which included the German bombing of Rotterdam and the blitz of London as well as other English cities; the Japanese bombings of Shanghai and other Chinese cities; the Allied firebombing of German and Japanese cities; the U.S. atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Cold War era of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in which two superpowers threatened to use the ultimate in airborne explosives to incinerate the planet; the massive, years-long U.S. bombing campaigns against North Korea and later North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; the American air power “victories” of Gulf War I and Afghanistan (2001); and the Bush administration’s shock-and-awe, air-and-cruise-missile assault on Baghdad in March 2003, which, though meant to “decapitate” the regime of

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ABOVE: Red dotted areas depict US B-52 bombings of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

Saddam Hussein, killed not a single Iraqi governmental or Baath Party figure, only Iraqi civilians. In those seven decades, the death toll and damage caused by war - on the ground and from the air - has increasingly been delivered to civilian populations, while the United States has come to rely on its Air Force to impose its will in war.

One hundred thousand pounds of explosives delivered from the air is now, historically speaking, a relatively modest figure. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a single air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf, did that sort of damage in less than a day and it was a figure that, as again last week, the military was proud to publicize without fear of international outrage or the possibility that “barbarism” might come to mind: “From Tuesday afternoon through early Wednesday the air wing flew 69 dedicated strike missions in Basra and in and around Baghdad, involving 27 F/A-18 Hornets and 12 Tomcats. They dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of ordnance, said Lt. Brook DeWalt, Kitty Hawk public affairs officer.”

As far as we know, there were no reporters, Iraqi or Western, in Arab Jabour when the bombs fell and, Iraq being Iraq, no

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American reporters rushed there -- in person or by satellite phone -- to check out the damage. In Iraq and Afghanistan, when it comes to the mainstream media, bombing is generally only significant if it’s of the roadside or suicide variety; if, that is, the “bombs” can be produced at approximately “the cost of a pizza” (as IEDs sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies. From the air, even 100,000 pounds of bombs just doesn’t have the ring of something that matters.

Some of this, of course, comes from the Pentagon’s success in creating a dismissive, sanitizing language in which to frame war from the air. “Collateral damage” stands in for the civilian dead -even though in much of modern war, the collateral damage could be considered the dead soldiers, not the ever rising percentage of civilian casualties. And death is, of course, delivered “precisely” by “precision-guided” weaponry. All this makes air war seem sterile, even virginal.

Army Col. Terry Ferrell, for instance, described the air assaults in Arab Jabour in this disembodied way at a Baghdad news conference: “The purpose of these particular strikes was to shape the battlefield and take out known threats before our ground troops

move in. Our aim was to neutralize any advantage the enemy could claim with the use of IEDs and other weapons.”

Reports - often hard to assess for credibility - have nonetheless seeped out of the region indicating that there were civilian casualties, possibly significant numbers of them; that bridges and roads were “cut off” and undoubtedly damaged; that farms and farmlands were damaged or destroyed. According to Hamza Hendawi of the Associated Press, for instance, Iraqi and American troops were said to have advanced into Arab Jabour, already much damaged from years of fighting, through “smoldering citrus groves.”

But how could there not be civilian casualties and property damage? After all, the official explanation for this small-scale version of a “shock-and-awe” campaign in a tiny rural region was that American troops and allied Iraqi forces had been strangers to the area for a while, and that the air-delivered explosives were meant to damage local infrastructure - by exploding roadside bombs and destroying weapons caches or booby traps inside existing structures. As that phrase “take out known threats before our ground troops move in” made clear, this was an attempt to minimize casualties among American (and allied Iraqi) troops by

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bringing massive amounts of firepower to bear in a situation in which local information was guaranteed to be sketchy at best.

Given such a scenario, civilians will always suffer. And this, increasingly, is likely to be the American way of war in Iraq.

The ABCs of Air War in Iraq

So let’s focus, for a moment, on American air power in Iraq and gather together a little basic information you’re otherwise not likely to find in one place. In these last years, the Pentagon has invested billions of dollars in building up an air-power infrastructure in and around Iraq. As a start, it constructed one of its largest foreign bases anywhere on the planet about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad. Balad Air Base has been described by Newsweek as a “15-square-mile mini-city of thousands of trailers and vehicle depots,” whose air fields handle 27,500 takeoffs and landings every month.

Reputedly “second only to London’s Heathrow Airport in traffic worldwide,” it is said to handle congestion similar to that of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

With about 140,000 tons a year of cargo moving through it, the base is “the busiest aerial port” in the global domains of the Department of Defense.

It is also simply massive, housing about 40,000 military personnel, private contractors of various sorts, and Pentagon civilian employees. It has its own bus routes, fast-food restaurants, sidewalks, and two PXs that are the size of K-Marts. It also has its own neighborhoods including, reported the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks, “KBR-land” for civilian contractors and “CJSOTF” (Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force), “home to a special operations unit [that] is hidden by especially high walls.”

Radar traffic controllers at the base now commonly see “more than 550 aircraft operations in just one day.” To the tune of billions of dollars, Balad’s runways and other facilities have been, and continue to be, upgraded for years of further wear and tear. According to the military press, construction is to begin this month on a $30 million “state-of-the-art battlefield command and control system [at Balad] that will integrate air traffic management throughout Iraq.”

N a t i o n a l P u b l i c R a d i o ’s D e f e n s e Correspondent Guy Raz paid a visit to the base last year and termed it “a giant construction site… [T]he sounds of construction and the hum of generators seem to follow visitors everywhere. Seen from the sky at night, the base resembles Las Vegas: While the surrounding Iraqi

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villages get about 10 hours of electricity a day, the lights never go out at Balad Air Base.”

This gargantuan feat of construction is designed for the military long haul. As Josh White of the Washington Post reported recently in a relatively rare (and bland) summary piece on the use of air power in Iraq, there were five times as many U.S. air strikes in 2007 as in 2006; and 2008 has, of course, started off with a literal bang from those 100,000 pounds of explosives dropped southeast of Baghdad. That poundage assumedly includes the 40,000 pounds of explosives that got modest headlines for being delivered in a mere 10 minutes in the Arab Jabour area the previous week, but not the 16,500 pounds of explosives that White reports being used north of Baghdad in approximately the same period; nor, evidently, another 15,000 pounds of explosives dropped on Arab Jabour more recently. (And none of these numbers seem to include Marine Corps figures for Iraq, which have evidently not been released.)

Who could forget all the attention that went into the President’s surge strategy on the ground in the first half of last year?

But which media outlet even noticed, until recently, what Bob Deans of Cox News Service has termed the “air surge” that accompanied those 30,000 surging troops into the Iraqi capital and environs? In that same period, air units were increasingly concentrated in and around Iraq. By mid2007, for instance, the Associated Press was already reporting: “[S]quadrons of attack planes have been added to the in-country fleet. The air reconnaissance arm has almost doubled since last year. The powerful B1-B bomber has been recalled to action over Iraq…

Early this year, with little fanfare, the Air Force sent a squadron of A-10 ‘Warthog’ attack planes -- a dozen or more aircraft -to be based at Al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq. At the same time it added a squadron of F-16C Fighting Falcons… at Balad.”

Meanwhile, in the last year, aircraft-carrier battle groups have been stationed in greater numbers in the Persian Gulf and facilities at sites near Iraq like the huge al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar continue to be upgraded.

Even these increases do not tell the whole story of the expanding air war. Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press reported recently that “the military’s reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq.” The use of such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including Hellfiremissile armed Predators, doubled in the first ten months of 2007 -- with Predator

air hours increasing from 2,000 to 4,300 in that period. The Army alone, according to Baldor, now has 361 drones in action in Iraq. The future promises much more of the same.

American military spokespeople and administration officials have, over the years, decried Iraqi and Afghan insurgents for “hiding” behind civilian populations -- in essence, accusing them of both immorality and cowardice. When such spokespeople do admit to inflicting “collateral damage” on civilian populations, they regularly blame the guerrillas for turning civilians into “shields.” And all of this is regularly, dutifully reported in our press. On the other hand, no one in our world considers drone warfare in a similar context, though armed UAVs like the Predators and the newer, even more heavily armed Reapers are generally “flown” by pilots stationed at computer consoles in places like Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. It is from there that they release their missiles against “anti-Iraqi forces” or the Taliban, causing civilian deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

As one American pilot, who has fired Predator missiles from Nellis, put it: “I go from the gym and step inside Afghanistan, or Iraq… It takes some getting used to it. At Nellis you have to remind yourself, ‘I’m not at the Nellis Air Force Base. Whatever issues I had 30 minutes ago, like talking to my bank, aren’t important anymore.’”

To American reporters, this seems neither cowardly, nor in any way barbaric, just plain old normal. Those pilots are not said to be “hiding” in distant deserts or among the civilian gamblers of Caesar’s Palace.

Anyway, here’s the simple calculus that goes with all this: Militarily, overstretched American forces simply cannot sustain the ground part of the surge for much longer.

Most, if not all, of those 30,000 troops who surged into Iraq in the first half of 2007 will soon be coming home. But air power won’t be. Air Force personnel are already on short, rotating tours of duty in the region.

In Vietnam back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as ground troops were withdrawn, air power ramped up. This seems once again to be the pattern. There is every reason to believe that it represents the American future in Iraq.

From Barbarism to the Norm

The air war is simply not visible to most Americans who depend on the mainstream media. In part, this is because American reporters, who have covered every other sort of warfare in Iraq, simply refuse to look up.

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It should be no surprise then that news of a future possible escalation of the air war was first raised by a journalist who had never set foot in Iraq and so couldn’t look up. In a December 2005 piece entitled “Up in the Air,” New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh suggested that “a key element of [any] drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower… The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.”

After Hersh broke his story, the silence was deafening. Only one reporter, as far as I know, has even gone up in a plane - David S. Cloud of the New York Times, who flew in a B-1 from an unnamed “Middle Eastern airfield” on a mission over Afghanistan. Thomas Ricks traveled to Balad Air Base and did a superb report on it in 2006, but no reporter seems to have bothered to hang out with American pilots, nor have the results of bombing, missilefiring, or strafing been much recorded in our press. The air war is still largely relegated to passing mentions of air raids, based on Pentagon press releases or announcements, in summary pieces on the day’s news from Iraq.

Given American military history since 1941, this is all something of a mystery.

A Marine patrol rampaging through an Iraqi village can, indeed, be news; but American bombs or missiles turning part of a city into rubble or helicopter gunships riddling part of a neighborhood is, at best, tag-on, inside-the-fold material -- a paragraph or two, as in this AP report on the latest fighting in an undoubtedly wellpopulated part of the city of Mosul: “An officer, speaking on condition of

anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said three civilians were wounded and helicopters had bombarded buildings in the southeastern Sumar neighborhood, which has seen frequent attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces that have led to a series of raids.”

The predictably devastating results of helicopters “bombarding” an urban neighborhood in a major Iraqi city, if reported at all, will be treated as just the normal “collateral damage” of war as we know it. In our world, what was once the barbarism of air war, its genuine horror, has been transformed into humdrum ordinariness (if, of course, you don’t happen to be an Iraqi or an Afghan on the receiving end), the stuff of largely ignored Air Force news releases. It is as unremarkable (and as American) as apple pie, and nothing worth writing home to mom and the kids about.

Maybe then, it’s time for Seymour Hersh to take another look. Or for the online world to take up the subject. Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the U.S.) will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those “precision” bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the U.S. Air Force looses 100,000 pounds of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the “liberation” of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.

In the meantime, brace yourself. Air war is on the way.

Note on Air-War Readings

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a study in

December 2007 on the air war in Iraq, which can be read as a PDF file (http:// www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/071213_ oif-oef_airpower.pdf). Figures on the rising intensity of air power in that country can be found there - of a sort that the Washington Post only recently reported on. For some historical background on U.S. air power and the bombing of noncombatants, I suggest checking out Mark Selden’s “A Forgotten Holocaust.”

Those who, in these years, wanted to find out something substantive about the air war in Iraq had to look to independent sites on line. At Tomdispatch, I began writing on the air war in 2004. See, for instance, “Icarus (armed with Vipers) Over Iraq”; others have taken up the subject at this site since: See Dahr Jamail’s “Living Under the Bombs”; Nick Turse’s “Bombs Over Baghdad, The Pentagon’s Secret Air War in Iraq” and “Did the U.S. Lie about Cluster Bomb Use in Iraq” (both of which involved the sort of reporting, long distance, that American journalists should have been doing in Iraq); and Michael Schwartz’s “A Formula for Slaughter: The American Rules of Engagement from the Air,” among other pieces. On the air war in Afghanistan, see my “’Accidents of War,’ The Time Has Come for an Honest Discussion of Air Power.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the cofounder of the American Empire Project.

His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

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Gilad Atzmon Anatomy of an Unresolved Conflict

by Mary Copyright (c) peacepalestine 2008

In Hegelian terms, recognition is accomplished by directing oneself towards non-being, that is, towards another desire, another emptiness, another ‘I’.

It is something that can never be fully accomplished. “The man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognise his right. It is only desire of such recognition, it is only the action that flows from such desire, that creates, realizes and reveals a human, non biological I.” (Kojeve A., Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 1947, Cornell Univ. Press, 1993, p. 40).

Following this Hegelian line of thinking, we can deduce that in order to develop selfconsciousness, one must face the other.

While the biological entity will fight for its biological continuity, a human being fights for recognition.

In order to understand the practical implications of this idea, let us turn to the ‘Master-Slave Dialectic’. The Master is called the Master because he strives to prove his superiority over nature and over the slave who is forced to recognize him as a master.

At first glance, it looks as if the master has reached the peak of human existence but as we shall see, this is not the case. As has just been stated, it is recognition that humans fight for. The master is recognised by the slave as a master but the slave’s recognition has little value. The master wants to be recognised by another man, but a slave is not a man. The master wants recognition by a master, but another master cannot allow another superior human being in his world. “In short, the master never succeeds in realising his end, the end for which he risks his very life.” So the master faces a dead-end. But what about the slave? The slave is in the process of transforming himself since, unlike the master who cannot go any further, the slave has everything to aspire to. The slave is at

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the vanguard of the transformation of the social conditions in which he lives. The slave is the embodiment of history. He is the essence of progress.

A Lesson in Mastery

Let us now try to apply the Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic to the notion of Jewish ‘chosenness’ and exclusivity. While the Hegelian ‘Master’ risks his biological existence to become a master, the newborn Jewish infant risks his foreskin. The chosen infant is born into the realm of mastery and excellence without (yet) excelling at anything. The other awards the chosen baby his prestigious status without the requirement of facing any process of recognition. And in fact, the ‘chosen’ title is given to Jews by themselves (allegedly God) rather than by others.

If, for instance, we try to analyse the IsraeliPalestinian conflict through the Hegelian mechanism of recognition, we realise the impossibility of any dialogue between the two parties. While it is more than clear that the Palestinian people are fighting for recognition, which they declare at every possible opportunity, the Israelis avoid the whole recognition issue altogether. They are convinced that they are already fully recognised in the first place. They know who they are - they are born masters who happen to live on their ‘promised land’.

Israelis refuse to join the dialectic ‘meaning transformation’ game and instead divert all their intellectual, political and military efforts into demolishing any sense of Palestinian recognition. The battle for Israeli society is to suppress any Palestinian symbol or desire, whether material, spiritual or cultural.

Strangely enough, the Palestinians are managing quite well in their fight for recognition. More and more people out there are now beginning to understand

the just nature of the Palestinian cause and the level of inhumanity entangled with the entire concept of Zionism and Jewish politics in general. More and more people out there find the Palestinian people and their spokesmen very easy to empathise with. Even the Hamas who were despised by most Western political institutions are now managing to get their message across. The Israelis, on the other hand, are falling behind in such manoeuvres.

The average Western listener finds them almost impossible to sympathise with.

While a Palestinian will call you to share his pain and misery, talking straight to your heart, the Israeli spokesman will demand that you to accept his views. He will insist on selling you a ready-made fantastic historical narrative; a repetitive tale that starts somewhere around Biblical Abraham, continues with a series of Holocausts and leads eventually towards more current bloodshed. It seems as if the Israelis, the masters, always present the same faceless story. Can Abraham and the Holocaust justify Israeli inhuman behaviour in Gaza? Not really, and the reason is simple, Abraham and the Holocaust and historical narratives in general do not evoke genuine emotional feelings. And indeed, the Jewish political world is so desperate to maintain its narrative that the last Holocaust has now been transformed into a legal narrative. The message is as follows: “beware, if you doubt my narrative you will end up behind bars.” This is obviously an act of desperation.

Following Hegel, we learn that recognition is a dynamic process; it is a type of understanding that grows in you. While the Palestinians will use all their available, yet limited, resources to make you look at their faces, in their eyes, to carry you into a dynamic process of mutual recognition, the Israelis would expect you to accept their narrative blindly. They would expect you to turn a blind eye to the clear fact

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that as far as the Middle East is concerned Israel is an aggressor like no other. Israel is an occupying regional super power, a tiny State heavily engaged in exploring different nuclear, biological and chemical arsenals. It is a racially orientated apartheid state that bullies and abuses its minorities on a daily basis. Yes, the Israelis and their supportive Jewish lobbies around the world want you to ignore these facts. They insist upon being the victims, they want you to approve their inhuman policies referring to Jews endless suffering.

How is it that Jewish politics has become aggressive like no other? It is simply the fact that from a Jewish political perspective, there is ‘no other’. The so-called other for them is nothing but a vehicle rather than an equal human subject. Israeli foreign affairs and Jewish political activity should be comprehended in the light of a severe lack of a ‘recognition mechanism’. Israeli and Jewish politics, left right and centre, is grounded on locking and fixing of meaning.

They would refuse to regard history as a flux, as a dynamic process, as a journey towards ‘oneself’ or self-realisation. Israel and Israelis view themselves as if they are external to history. They do not progress toward self-realisation because they have a given, fixed identity to maintain. Once they encounter a complex situation with the surrounding world, they would then create a model that adapts the external world into their chauvinist self-loving value system. This is what Neo-conservatism is all about; this is what the fantasmic yet sickening newly emerging Judeo-Christian discourse is all about.

As sad as it may sound, people who are not trained to recognise the other are unable to let them be recognised. The Jewish tribal mindset: left, centre and right, sets Jews aside of humanity. It does not equip the followers of the tribal mindset with the mental mechanism needed to recognise the other. Why should they do it? They have done so well for many years without having to do so. Lacking a notion of an other, indeed transcends one far beyond any recognised form of true humanist thought. It takes one far beyond ethical thinking or moral awareness.

Instead of morality, every debate is reduced into a mere political struggle with some concrete material and practical achievements to aim for.

Hegel may throw some further light on the entire saga. If indeed one becomes aware of oneself via the other, then the ‘Chosen subject’ is self-aware to start with. He is born into mastery. Accordingly, Israelis are not practicing any form of dialogue with the surrounding human environment since they are born masters. In order to be fair to the Israelis, I have to admit that their lack

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According to Hegel, attaining ’self-consciousness’ is a process that necessarily involves the other. How am I to become conscious of myself in general? It is simply through desire or anger, for example. Unlike animals that overcome biological needs by destroying another organic entity, human desire is a desire for recognition.

of a recognition mechanism has nothing to do with their anti-Palestinian feelings. As a matter of fact, they cannot even recognise each other - Israel and Israelis have a long history of discrimination against its own people (Jews of non-European descent such as Sephardim Jews are discriminated against by the Jewish elite, those of Western descent). But are progressive Jews any different? Not really.

Like the Israelis and similar to any other form of tribal chauvinist ideology, they are continuously withdrawing into self-centred segregated discourse that has very little to engage or grab the interest of anyone besides themselves. Consequently, like the Israelis who surround themselves with walls, the Jewish progressive cells have already set themselves into cyber ghettos that are becoming increasingly hostile to the rest of humanity and those who supposed to be their comrades.

Historic Materialism

If one cannot establish relationships with one’s neighbour based upon recognition of the other, there must be another way of establishing a dialogue. If one cannot form a dialogue based upon empathy with the other and the rights of the other, one must pursue another mode of communication.

It seems as if the alternative ‘chosen’ dialogical method reduces any form of communication into a materialistic language. Almost any form of human activity, including love and aesthetic pleasure, can be reduced to a material value. The Chosen political activists are well practised in using this method of communication.

Recently the Israeli ultra-Zionist author A B Yehoshua has managed to upset many American Jewish Ethnic leaders at the

American Jewish Committee conference by saying: “You [Jews in the Diaspora] are changing jackets … you are changing countries like changing jackets.” Indeed, Yehoshua came under a lot of pressure following his remark, he was very quick to regret his statement. However, Yehoshua’s insight, while far from being original, is rather painfully truthful.

It is quite apparent that some politically orientated Diaspora Jews are engaged in an extremely fruitful dialogue with any possible core of hegemony. Yehoshoua’s criticism was fairly spot on. Following Yehoshua, once it is clear that a new country is becoming a leading world super power, it won’t take long before a wave of liberated assimilated Jews would try to infiltrate into its governing elite. “If China ever became the world’s foremost super power,” he warned, “American Jews would migrate there to assimilate rather than in the US.” (http://www.amin.org/eng/ uncat/2006/june/june30-1.html).

A decade ago, at the peak of the legal battle between major Jewish institutions and the Swiss Bank, Norman Finkelstein stood up and said that very little remains of the Jewish Holocaust apart from various industrial forms of financial bargaining for compensation. According to Finkelstein, it was all about profit-making. Without any criticism intended by me about financial compensation, it appears as if some people are quick to translate their pain into gold.

(It is important to mention that pain as well as being transformed into gold, can be transformed into other values such as moral or aesthetic ones). However, the possibility of transforming pain and blood into cash stands at the heart of the Israeli false dream - that the Israeli-Palestinian

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conflict, especially the refugee problem, is resolvable. Now we know where this assumption originates. The Israelis, as well as Jewish leading institutions, are fully convinced that if they were happy to come to a financial settlement with the Germans (or the Swiss for the matter), the Palestinians would be equally happy to sell their lands and dignity. How do the Israelis arrive at such a strange conviction? Because they must know better than the Palestinians what the Palestinians really want. How? Because the Israelis are brilliant, they are the Chosen People. Moreover, the chosen subject doesn’t even try to engage with the human in the other. Sixty years after the Nakba, the mass the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians, the vast majority of Israelis and world Jewry do not even start to acknowledge the Palestinian cause, let alone do they show any form of empathy.

When you talk to Israelis about the conflict, one of their most frequently used arguments is the following: “When we (the Jews) came here (to Palestine), they (the Arabs) had nothing. Now they have electricity, work, cars, health services, etc.” This is obviously a failure to recognise the other. It is typical of the chauvinist colonialist to impose one’s own value system on the other. In other words, the Israelis expect the Palestinians to share the importance they attach to the acquisition of material wealth. “Why should the other share my values?

Because I know what is good. Why do I know what is Good? Because I am the best.” This arrogant and completely materialistic approach obviously lies at the heart of the Israeli vision of peace.

The Israeli military calls it ‘the stick and the carrot’. Seemingly, when referring to Palestinians they actually have rabbits in their minds. But, as bizarre or even tragic as it may sound, the Israeli born, ultra-left Mazpen movement was not categorically different. They obviously had some revolutionary dreams of secularisation for the Arab world. They obviously knew what was good for the Arabs. Why did they know? Shall I let you guess? Because they were exclusively and chauvinistically clever. They were the Marxists of the chosen type. Hence, I wasn’t overwhelmingly surprised that as time went by, the legendary ‘revolutionary’ Mazpen and the despised neo-conservatism actually united into a single catastrophic message: “We know better what is good for you than you yourselves do.”

Both Zionists and Jewish leftists have a “New Middle East dream”. In Peres’s old fantasy the region turns into a financial paradise in which Israel would stand at the very centre. The Palestinians (as well

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as other Arab States) would supply Israeli industries (representing the West) with the low cost labour they need. In turn, they, the Arabs, would earn money and spend it buying Israeli (Western) goods.

In the Judeo progressive dream the Arabs leaves Islam behind, they become Marxist cosmopolitan progressives (East European Jews) and join the journey towards a world revolution. As much as Peres’s dream is sad, the Judeo Marxist version is almost funny.

As it seems, within the Zionist dream, Israel would establish a dual coexistence in the region where the Palestinian people would be the eternal slaves and the Israelis their masters. Within the Judeo progressive cosmopolitan dream, Red Palestine will establish a dual coexistence in the region where the Palestinian people would be the eternal slaves of a remote Euro-centric ideology. If there is a big categorical difference between the two Judeo centric ideologies, I just fail to see it.

However, according to Hegel, it is the slave that moves history forward. It is the slave that struggles towards his freedom.

It is the slave who transforms himself and it is the master who eventually vanishes.

Following Hegel, we have good reason to believe that the future of the region belongs to the Palestinians, the Iraqis and nation Islam in general. One way of explaining why Israel ignores this understanding of history relates to the conditional detachment of the exclusive ‘chosen’ state of mind.

Welcome to Cuckoo land

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian doctor who lives and works in the occupied West Bank, referred to Israel as “trying to be David and Goliath at the same time” (Dr. Barghouti was speaking at a debate at the House of Commons, 22 Nov. 2000). According to Dr. Barghouti, this is impossible. He also claimed that “Israel is probably the only State that bombs a territory it occupies.” He found this very strange and even bizarre. Is it really strange to be David and Goliath simultaneously?

Is it really strange to destroy your own property? Not if you are insane. The lack of mirroring (again, seeing oneself through the other) can lead people, as well as nations, into strange dark corners. The lack of a framework which would allow you to discern your own image through the other, the lack of a corrective mechanism, appears to be a very dangerous state of affairs.

The first generation of Israeli leaders (Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Meir, Peres,

Begin) grew up in the Diaspora, mainly in Eastern Europe. Being a Jew living in a non-Jewish environment forces one to develop a sharpened self-awareness and imposes a certain kind of mirroring.

Moreover, early Zionism is slightly more developed than other forms of Jewish tribal politics for the simple reason that Zionism is there to transform the Jews into ‘people like other people’. Such a realisation involves a certain amount of necessary mirroring. However, this was not enough to restrain Israeli aggressive acts (e.g., Deir-Yassin, Nakba, Kafer Kasem, the ‘67 war, etc.) but it was more than enough to teach them a lesson in diplomacy. Since 1996, young leaders who were born there have led Israel into the state of ‘chosenness’ (Rabin, Netanyahu, Sharon, Barak, Olmert).

Whilst in their earlier years they were imbued with an intense traditional Jewish anxiety, as they grew up this was overtaken by the legacy of the 1967 ‘miracle’, an event that turned some of the ‘chosen’ ideologies into a messianic extravaganza. This fixation with absolute power exacerbated by Jewish anxiety coupled with ignorance of the ‘other’ leads to epidemic collective schizophrenia, both of mood and action; a severe loss of contact with reality that gives way to the use of excessive force. The recent “Second Lebanon War” was an obvious example for that matter. Israel retaliates with machine guns in response to children throwing stones, with artillery and missiles against civilian targets following a sporadic uprising, and with a total war to a minor border incident. This behaviour should not be explained by using political, materialist or sociological analytical tools. Much greater understanding could be gained by situating the conflict within a philosophical framework, which allows a better understanding of the origins of paranoia and schizophrenia.

The Israeli Prime Minister, representing both ‘David and Goliath’, can talk about the vulnerability of Israel, Jewish pain and Jewish misery in one breath and about launching a massive military offensive against the whole region in the next. Such behaviour can only be explained by seeing it as a form of mental illness. The funny/sad side of it is that most Israelis do not even realise that something is going terribly wrong. Being a born master leads to the absence of a ‘recognition mechanism’. Inevitably it leads toward blindness. This lack of a recognition mechanism results in a split psyche, being both ‘David and Goliath’ at one and the same time. It seems that neither Israel nor Israelis can any longer be partners in any meaningful dialogue.

VOL.8 #5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008

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John Pilger: Documentaries That Changed The World (3 DVD SET)

John Pilger has produced an incredibly broad range of issues over his impressive 35 year career. His determination to uncover the truth and unearth the facts underlying numerous injustices and conflicts has taken him to every corner of the globe. Now, for the first time on DVD come four of John Pilger’s most important films. Films that have been internationally praised and which have had direct impact against the brutal injustices ignored by popular media. The Quiet Mutiny, Do You Remember Vietnam, Death of a Nation, Year Zero.

John Pilger: Stealing a Nation During the 1960’s the British and American Governments agreed on a deal which would save the British government from paying millions of dollars in debt and secure America a strategic military platform later used to launch air strikes against Iraq and Afghanastan. The island of Deigo Garcia, located in the middle of the Indian Ocean and under Britsh rule was chosen by the US as the site for their new base.

To complie with the American choice the British governement set about the forced relocation of Diego Garcia’s 2000 indiguous inhabitants. Now, with his RTS award winning documentray Stealing a Nation, Australian journalist and renowned filmmaker John Pilger brings to light this shocking conspiracy and reveals the plight of these victimised refugees, brutally taken from their ancestrial homes and forced to live in abject povety in nearby Maritius.

Stealing a Nation is a film that must be seen to be believed.

John Pilger’s Australia (3 DVD SET) 5 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN FILMS AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME ON DVD! Welcome to Australia, the Last Dream: Unsung Heros - Secrets - Other peoples Wars - The Secret Country

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John Pilger’s New Rulers of the World (3 DVD SET)

Over an impressive 35 year career John Pilger’s determination to uncover the truth and unearth the facts underlying numerous social and political injustices has taken him to every corner of the globe. DISC 1 The New Rulers Of The World. John Pilger explores the impact of globalisation, taking Indonesia as his prime example, a country that the World Bank described as a ‘model pupil’ until its ‘globalised’ economy collapsed in 1998. Under scrutiny are the increasingly powerful multinationals and the institutions that back them, notably the IMF and The World Bank. DISC 2 War By Other Means. In this multi-award winning film John Pilger and David Munro examine the policy of First World banks in undertaking loans with Third World countries, and expose the humanitarian/ social issues that arise when these countries are unable to meet the crippling interest charges. DISC 3 Burp! Pepsi v Coke in The Ice Cold War. This is the first film made by John Pilger with director Alan Lowery, a fellow Australian. It looks at the worldwide struggle for soft drink supremacy by the Coca Cola Company, illuminating the overwhelming power of multinational corporations over poorer countries and their struggling economies.

John Pilger’s Return Ticket (3 DVD SET) Over an impressive 35 year career John Pilger’s determination to uncover the truth and unearth the facts underlying numerous social and political injustices has taken him to every corner of the globe. Now for the first time on DVD comes three of John Pilger’s most important films. South Africa: Apartheid did not Die; Frontline-In Search of Truth in Wartime; Vietnam: The Last Battle.

John Pilger’s: No Middle Ground in the Middle East (3 DVD SET) Over an impressive 35 year career John

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Pilger’s determination to uncover the truth and unearth the facts underlying numerous social and political injustices has taken him to every corner of the globe. Now for the first time on DVD comes three of John Pilger’s most important films: Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq; Palestine is Still the Issue; Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the the War on Terror

9/11 Mysteries: Demolitions What occurred on 9/11 is now the most disputed story of hte 21st century. Following the hugely influencial film Loose Change Edition, 9/11 Mysteries: Demolitions asks the questions that mainstream media daren’t pose. It presents an argumetn which - if true - suggests that the events of 9/11 were part of a deliberate hoax designed to provide the pretext for the declaration of the War on Terror. 9/11 Mysteries: Demolitions fanciful speculation or could it be revealing a devastating reality?

Loose Change 2ND Editon Over 10 million people download the original concept that spawned Loose Change 2nd Edition an indication of the ongoing interest in this controversial subject. “Loose Change 2nd Edition” is the most provocative 9-11 documentary ever made. This film shows direct connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the United States Government from evidence derived from news footage, scientific fact, and most importantly, Americans who suffered through that tragic day. “IT IS EVERYONE’S DUTY TO VIEW THIS FILM!” Special and exclusive bonus features

Truth, Lies & Intelligence Directed by award winning Australian filmmaker Carmel Travers, Truth, Lies & Intelligence is a decisive and compelling exploration of the intelligence fraud that led the Collation of the Willing to war with Iraq. Taken from a previously undocumented Australian perspective and featuring exclusive interviews with ex-Australian intelligence analyst Andrew

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Wilkie, former senior intelligence advisor to Colin Powell: U.S. Secretary of State, Greg Thielman, former Director General of the CIA James Woolsey and bestselling author Guzin Najim, an Iraqi refugee who spent six years under house arrest during Saddam Husseins regime before fleeing to Australia. With 170,000 U.S. troops now deployed in Iraq supported by a budget of US$200 billion, Truth Lies & Intelligence sheds light on a conspiracy of nations and reveals a land and its people devastated by a conflict based on deception and fraud.

The Blood of My Brother Over 10 million people download the original concept that spawned Loose Change 2nd Edition an indication of the ongoing interest in this controversial subject. “Loose Change 2nd Edition” is the most provocative 9-11 documentary ever made. This film shows direct connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the United States Government from evidence derived from news footage, scientific fact, and most importantly, Americans who suffered through that tragic day. “IT IS EVERYONE’S DUTY TO VIEW THIS FILM!” Special and exclusive bonus features

Weapons of Mass Deception With Weapons of Mass Deception , director Danny Schechter takes a comical, cutting edge and decisive look at the Iraq war busting through so-called “objective reporting” to challenge media complicity with the U.S. government and its cooperation in presenting the Iraq War as a pro-American propaganda machine.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism This dynamic, entertaining & outrageous documentary from producer/ director Robert Greenwald provides an in-depth look at the moral and ethical corruption inside Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel.

A brilliantly executed expose featuring candid interviews with former Fox News staff who discuss being forcefully coerced

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to push a ‘right-wing’ point-of-view or risk their jobs and livelihoods. OUTFOXED exposes the shocking hypocrisy behind Fox News Channel’s ‘Fair and Balanced’ slogan and examines the increasing threats to democracy when multi-national corporations take control of the public’s right to know.

War on Iraq: 3 DVD Documentary Collection Collected together for the first time come three international bestselling films that expose the deception, fraud and contempt that both the military and media maintain toward the general public. You’ve seen the War. Now see the Truth - Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, Weapons of Mass Deception & Truth Lies and Intelligence - now available on DVD in one stunning three disc set.

Protocols of Zion Despite all the evidence, millions around the world continue to belive a Jewish conspiracy caused 9/11. This belief is a modern day incarnation of the infamous “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” a century old forgery created by aids of the Russian Czar during the late 19th century which claim to be the Jews master plan for world domination. Despite being discredited numerous times over the past century the 25 Protocols have remained a major influence in the actions of Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford and contemporary leaders of Islamic extremism and the American white power movement in fueling hate, violence and ultimately genocide throughout the 20th century. As award winning filmmaker Marc Levin takes to the streets to discover why the Protocols have re-awakened his curiosity becomes a personal odyssey. He engages in free for all dialogue with Arab Americans, Black Nationalists, Christian Evangelists, White Supremacists, Kabbalist Rabbisd and Holocaust survivors. Sometimes confrontational sometimes comedic, Levins journey into the origins of hate in a modern civilisation is a provocative, important and

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compelling film.

The Kursk: A Submarine in Troubled Waters In August 2000 the pride of hte Russian navy and its 118 crew lay at the bottom of the Barents Sea. The unthinkable had happened. The Kursk, the world’s most technologically advanced nuclear submarine and pride of the Russian Fleet had sunk. After two years of investigation, this documentary unveils the contradictions, lies and secrets created by the authorities at the time, hiding the true origins of the disaster.

Super Flu: Race Against a Killer Can we survive? Are you prepared? This timely documentary explains and educates us on exactly what dangers we face during the approaching Bird Fly pandemic.

Offering a rare insight into the World Health Organizations viral ‘War Room’ and made specifically for Australian audiences with the aid of National Geographic, SUPER FLU is the definitive guide to protecting you and your family against a global plague.

Features a frightening dramatization of the probable consequences of a full scale outbreak of the Bird Flu Pandemic in Australia.

Breaking the Da Vinci Code The definitive exploration into the conspiracies that surround Dan Brown’s best selling thriller reveals what truths and which deceptions have successfully created what has become the world’s greatest urban myth “THE DA VINCI CODE”. Featuring over 60 minutes of bonus material filled with startling new revelations.

Secrets of Angels, Demons & Masons Separating fact from fiction, Secrets of Angels, Demons & Masons is the definitive guide to the secret societies which lie at the heart of Dan Brown’s

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international best-selling thrillers. Based on Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer’s best-selling book, Secrets of Angels & Demons, this intriguing documentary investigates the covert histories behind the Illuminati and the Freemasons, the two mysterious organizations central to Dan Brown’s novel Angels & Demons and the highly anticipated sequel to The Da Vinci Code entitled THE SOLOMON KEY From the intrigues of the Vatican to the conspiracies that launched the French Revolution, instigated the rise of communism and effected the founding of American, world-renowned historical and religious experts examine the age-old conflict between science and religion and uncover the truth behind Browns controversial claims. Narrated

by Tony Award-winning actor John Cullum, Secrets of Angels, Demons & Masons interweaves evocative archives with commentary by world-renowned experts, taking viewers on a suspenseful journey from baroque Rome to historic Washington D.C.

1421: The Year China Discovered the World Was America discovered by China almost a century before Columbus staked his claim? 1421 explores this possibility with new facts and expert accounts which claim that Chinese Admiral Zheng He circumnavigated the globe and

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produced maps which included the America, Australia and Antarctica. As new evidence comes to light using advanced carbon dating techniques the world’s history books are being re-written as we speak. One of the most controversial historical documentaries ever made, 1421 is a compelling and stunning film that will question everything you were ever taught.

JFK: Breaking the News With the first reports that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the world sat riveted, awaiting news bulletins that beamed into living rooms in rapid succession. The shocking events of the weekend that followed touched off the remarkable rise of television as the primary source of breaking news,and set the stage for today’s all-news channels. Narrated by award-winning journalist jane Pauley, JFK: Breaking the News draws on first-hand accounts from reporters and photographers, along with original broadcast reports, historic amateur film and unforgettable news photographs.

History Makers - 2 DVD Box “Two of the greatest adventures never told” - For the history fans - DV1’s top selling documentaries, Voyage of the Nautilus (Released June 2006) and 1421 The Year China Discovered the World (Released July 2006), gift packed together for Xmas.

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Girl in a Mirror: A Portrait of Carol Jerrems Girl in a Mirror documents the work of 1970s photographer Carol Jerrems, in a life tragically cut short. Drawing from hundreds of her photographs, the film traces the passionate and exuberant course that Jerrems took through this turbulent decade. AFI Nomination BEST DOCUMENTARY 2005

Comic Book Confidential Armed with his unique brand of comedic insight, pop-culture documentarian Ron Mann brings us the definitive look at the not-so-humble comic book. Featuring rare and hilarious archival footage from Government propaganda films, Comic Book Confidential humorously chronicles the mediums turbulent history with 22 exclusive interviews from the worlds foremost comic creators, plus a new introduction from comic savant Kevin Smith. From the simple funny pages of the 1930s to the social revolutionary underground magazines of the 60s to the critically acclaimed satire of the 80s and beyond, Comic Book Confidential is a funny and fascinating film for both the comic-curious and hard core fans alike.

Stars Frank Miller (Sin City), Stan Lee (Spider man), Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), Jack Kirby (Fantastic 4) & Will Eisner (Fritz the Cat).

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SECRET SOCIETIES AND THEIR POWER IN THE 20TH CENTURY

A Guide through the entanglements of Lodges with High Finance and Politics, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberger, CFR, UNO

by Jan van Helsing â&#x20AC;&#x153;In politics nothing ever happens accidentally! If something occurs, you can be sure that it had been planned this way!â&#x20AC;?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Do you really believe that you know what goes on upon this planet? Several authors have maintained that occurrences on our Earth are controlled and managed by just a few powerful persons.

Jan van Helsing confronts the readers with the same claim - he shows the interactions of Lodges and occultism with high finance and politics - without the customary allocation of guilt (Freemasons, Zionists, Satan). He addresses the roots of the problem - in the refreshing and unadulterated way of the young generation which dares to oppose this criminal system of control, power and manipulation. This book, the result of year-long research and endlessly poring over books - is substantiated by reports from former secret servicemen of several countries. The author not only highlights the machinations behind political events, but also the secreting away of a technology that would free humanity immediately from its planned, wretched state.

A completely new view of the world we live in! Having this book, you will be at once shaken and aroused!

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Vol. 4. No 2. ($4.00) *Vaccinations - Your Money or Your Children; *Photo Exclusive - New Zealand’s First UFO Symposium; *Hale Bopp Pictorial; *Escape from Armageddon - Breaking the Chains of Suppression; *Astrological Outlook - June/July 1997; *Q-Mechanics; *Pauline Hanson - On the Right or in the Right?; *Corruption in High Places - The Clinton Body Count!; *Dirty Deals with the National Parks & Wildlife Service; *Are these the words of Jesus? - The Thunderbolt of the Nag Hammadi!

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Vol. 4. No 4. ($4.00) *Contact 97 Ufology 50 Years On!; *Inside The Bible Code - An Interview with Prof. Eliahu Rips; *Deer Antler Velvet; *Prophecy 2000 - Are These the Final Hours?; *Pt. 2 Martin Bryant - The Not-So-Lone Assassin?; *Psychiatry & Western Philosophy; *The Protocols of Zion - Forbidden History; *What Is Water Made Of?; *Forbidden Knowledge - The Nature Of Money; *Mobile Phones - Killing Your DNA; *Who Will Guard The Guards Themselves?; *Astrological Outlook - October/ November 1997; *The Rape Of Australia.

Vol. 4. No 5. ($4.00) *Inhumane Abuse - In the Public Welfare System; *Inside The Bible Code Pt. 2 - An Interview With Michael Drosnin; * *Saint Felicity - Saviour of the Poor; *The Mystery of Burrows Cave; *The Enuma Elish; *It Couldn’t Happen Here!; *Pauline Hanson: - “I Am Not A Racist”; *The IMF Economic Bomb; *The Protocols of Zion - Another Point of View!; *The Tasmanian Conspiracy: The Second Patsy: Gun Dealer Terry Hill; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?; *Astrological Outlook - December/January 199798; *Australian International UFO Symposium 1997; *UFO Pictorial.

Vol. 4. No 6. ($4.00) *Japan’s Temple of the Deep; *A Blast from the Past; *What is the M.I.A.?; *The Faces Behind Pastoral Leases; *The Modern Australian Serf; *The Australian - Indonesian Obligation; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?; *Globalisation: The Kinder Word for the New World Order!; *Police Corruption in Australia; *The Secrets of the Genesis Code; *Mind Expanders; *Nuclear Survival; *Pope Joan: True to Life or Fictitious Legend?; *Laugh Lines; *The Mystery of the Bog Mummies; *The Psychiatric Thought Police.

Vol. 5. No 1. ($4.00) *Xenotransplantation; *The Protocols of Sion - The Masonic Link!; *The Bioplasma Enigma; *The Ghosts of Lady Elliot Island; *What to do in a Nuclear, Chemical or Biological Offensive!; *Judgement Day: The Australian Way!; *Enter The New

World Order - The Multilateral Agreement on Investment; *Buy Australian. *Native Title vs Tribal Law; *Determination of Absolute Rest; *Frequency Technology And The Defence Nuclear Agency; *Fed on Industrial Waste: Fluoride and the Atomic Bomb; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Vol. 5. No 2. ($4.00) *Pauline Hanson: The Truth Behind the Lies; *The Great Australian Swindle; *The Conspiracy to Murder Yitzshak Rabin; *Privatisation; *The World That Was; *The Demon In The Protocols; *Homeopathy; *Laugh Lines; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?; *Global Surveillance.

Vol. 5. No 3. ($4.00) *Vaccination Up-Date: Australia’s Constitution and the NWO injection program; *Indian Salt Workers - A Bitter Life!; *The ‘Lost’ Ark of the Covenant Pt. 1 of 2; *’Terra Del Zur’ The First Maps of the Great South Land; *George Soros and the Rothschild Connection; *Parallels Between The Rabin Assassination and the Oklahoma City Bombing!; *Laugh Lines; *Possibility Thinking; *Reverse Speech: The Total Exposure of Truth; *How Media Relays Government Propaganda!; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?; *Covert Eavesdropping or Bugging - The Blatant Warning Signs.

Vol. 5. No 4. ($4.00) *Y2K - The Millennium Bug & The Hysteria Industry; *Carpenter Genes: Why Darwinian Evolution Is Flatly Impossible!; *The ‘Lost’ Ark of the Covenant Pt. 2 of 2; *The Bible: Was it Computer Generated?; *Hitler’s Role in the New World Order; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?; *Proof of Anti-Personal Technologies Developed Through Illegal Experimentation on Human Targets; *Laugh Lines; *Wired For Sound - Phone Bugging; *The US Military’s Controversial HAARP...

Research Tool or Death Star?

Vol. 5. No 5. ($4.00) *The Mysterious Tribes of China’s Bayan-Kara-Ula; *Ancient Mysteries - The Case of the Headless Spaceman; *The Reason...

For The Season - An Exposé of Christmas; *Methadone Madness: Heroin & the Narcotics Mafia; *Laugh Lines; *The Other Face of Clinton: Human Rights & Individual Freedom; *Top Secret ‘Cablesplice’; *Weather Warfare: Another Look At HAARP!; *Deuteronomists: Old or New Age Cults?; *Mind Expanders; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Vol. 5. No 6. ($4.00) *Laugh Lines; *100 Ways to Live to 100; *Ethno Biological Genetic Warfare - Another Evil of Modern Technology; *Special Report: Paying for Rainfall - Taxing Earths Blood; *Mother Shipton Prophetess from the Past; *Exposing the Near Death Experience - Is Death The End?; *The ‘DEBIT TAX’ - Our Economic $aviour?; *Firewalkers; *Astro-Theology...Retelling an Ancient Story!; *Mind Expanders; *Maewyn: The Patron Saint of Ireland; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?; *The Nature Of Reality!

Vol. 6. No 1. ($4.00) *National Security 666 - The Mark of the Beast; *100 Ways To Live To 100 - Pt 2; *Mandala: ‘The Secret Place’; *Preparing For Y2K - Worse Case Scenario; *For We are Young and Free...Or Are We?; *Laugh Lines; *Australia at the Xrossroads; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?; *Corporate Hypnosis;

*Mind Expanders; *Extra-Terrestrial Nano-Technology?; *Was Northern Australia The Land of Ophir?; *Aircraft Contrails: Modifying the Weather and Causing Illness!; *Chemical Genocide...Y2K Poses Fatal Threat to City Water!; *Open Society or Open Conspiracy.

Vol. 6. No 2. ($4.00) *Breast Cancer: Millennium Bra Burning!; *Aussie TGA Corruption - An Exposé of Pharmaceutical fraud!; *Astrological Influences On The 3rd Dimension!; *WARS...Are They Occult Ritual Sacrifices?; *Lateral thinking; *Europe’s New Iron Curtain; *Laugh Lines; *Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?; *Paul Hellyer - Economic Think-Tank!; *Avoiding The Divorce War; *Mind Expanders; *Pornography - Compromising Love and the link to Crime!

Vol. 6. No 3. ($4.00) *Falling victim to the Hysterectomy Industry!; *Soft Drinks: Harmful If Swallowed; *Conflict Management; *If The Heavens Fall: Pt 1 of 2; *Laugh Lines; *Y2K: Don’t Worry - Be Informed!; *Mummies of the Silk Road; *Mind Expanders; *Arms Control: Biomonitoring, Verification & Compliance!

Control: Biomonitoring, Verification & Compliance!

Vol. 6. No 4. ($4.00) *STRESS - Life’s Great “Quality” Killer!; *1735 AD: Monstrum Humanum Rarissimum; *ALCHEMY: Remarkable & Mysterious; *Earth Cycles: If The Heavens Fall: Pt 2 of 2; *Mind Expanders; *Circumcision: Ethics, Morals & Medicine; *Olive Leaf Extract - Natural Alternative; *Your Path to Financial Freedom!; *Legal Realities: Taxation Your Pocket is Being Picked!; *Your Desire for Privacy - A Crime?, *Laugh Lines.

HARD EVIDENCE MAGAZINE BACK ISSUES

Postage ($1.50 per copy purchased - within Australia) $3.50 for first item; (New Zealand/World - Airmail) - $1.00 for each addition Vol.1 #1-6 ($5.95 each) Vol.2 #1-6 ($5.95 each) Vol.3 #1 ($5.95 each) Code: 301 Magistrate’s Letter Tries to Hide his Sordid Past; Applied Digital Solutions Introduces Verichip; What is Time?; Books on Out of Body Experiences; Almost There: A Commercially Viable Fuel Cell; Scepticism as Mystique...Pt 1/2; If You Don’t Like the Message, Kill the Messenger!; UFOs in Raid Soviet Space Centre; Australian-US Defence Facilities in Australia: First Strike?...Pt 1/3; Humanity vs the New World Order...Part 5; An Australian Anti-Zionist Jewess Tells it the Way it is!

Vol.3 #2 ($5.95 each) Code: 302 Poisoning in the Name of Progress; Do Matters Have ‘Feelings’?; Learning to Love Big Brother: George W Bush Channels George Orwell; Entering Palestine; Scepticism as Mystique...Pt 2/2; Introducing Rexbeast: Living Stone-age Giants of the Australian Bush; The Real Story of the Money Control over America...Pt 1/2; Australian-US Defence Facilities in Australia: Black Market Bombs - Dirty Bombs...Pt 2/3; Humanity vs the New World Order...Part 6.

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MAGAZINE BACK ISSUES AVAILABLE THROUGH EARTHLINK PUBLISHING Vol.3 #3 ($5.95 each) Code: 303 The Background is Oil; Alf Vaporizer; The Unseen Conflict War Plans, Backroom Deals, Leverage & Strategy; Blindness, Mad Cow Disease and Canola Oil...Pt 1/2; The Brutal Shock & Awe: The Price for Liberation; The Real Story of the Money Control over America...Pt 2/2; Australian-US Defence Facilities in Australia: The Dangers from Nuclear Weapons: Myths & Facts...

Pt 3/3; Myths & Facts About the War; The Secrets of Sumeria; 10 Things to Know About US Policy in the Middle East.

Vol.3 #4 ($5.95 each) Code: 304 Population Reduction of 3 Billion a Global Necessity?; Bad Apples in a Rotten System - The Ten Worst Corporations of 2002; Trees of Mass Destruction - Pinus radiata; Iraq; Zionism and the Establishment of the Modern Polish State; Earth, Moon & Jupiter, as Seen from Mars; SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) - A Global Scam; Of Course We Need a Coastguard!; Blindness, Mad Cow Disease and Canola Oil...Pt 2/2.

Vol.3 #5 ($5.95 each) Code: 305 The Forging of ‘Pipelineistan’; Ariel Sharon’s Amazing Statistics; Bonhoeffer - The Rest of the Story; Lost Australian Colonies of the Bronze Age God-Kings...Pt 1/3; Weapons of Total Destruction; ‘Magnetic’ People; Everyday Household Fluoride Chemical Unsafe; Looking Into the Alien Mind; Arab Contributions to Civilisation.

Vol.3 #6 ($5.95 each) Code: 306 Wizard of Oz; Sinister Forces in Our Skies - The UFO/Black Helicopter Connection; Lost Australian Colonies of the Bronze Age God-Kings....Pt 2/3; The Deadly Truth about Aspartame; The True Atlantis and the Mystery of the Underworld; Horrifying U.S. Secret-Weapons Unleased in Baghdad; The Chemtrail Crisis; Star Trek Sci-Fi or PsyWar?; Risks of Flumist Vaccine.

Vol.4 #1 ($5.95 each) Code: 401 Who Killed Off the Star Wars Scientists?; The Sons of Satan; Death by Slow Burn - How America Nukes its Own Troops; Did NASA Accidentally ‘Nuke’Jupiter?; Natural Gas Crisis; The Dangers of Lead Poisoning.

Vol.4 #2 ($5.95 each) Code: 402 Lost Australian Colonies of the Bronze Age God-Kings....Pt 3/3; The Ten Commandments - A Re-examination; Much Farther Down the Road to Hell; The Overpopulation Crisis; The Great Australian Snake Extermination....Pt 1/2; Mars Rover Picks Up the Strange Object; Ghosts of Oklahoma City.

Vol.4 #3 ($5.95 each) Code: 403 Government’s 911 Coverup Falling Apart; Ghosts of Oklahoma City - Murder in the Heartland; The Great Australian Snake Extermination....Pt 2/2; Eating Fossil Fuels; War Propaganda and the Capture of Saddam Hussein; Iraqi Resistance Stiffens Amidst Claims Saddam’s Capture was a Hoax.

Vol.4 #4 ($5.95 each) Code: 404 The Real Axis of Evil; The Abu Ghraib Prison Photos; 80% in Iraq Distrust Occupation Authority; Sodomizing Female Prisoners in Iraq Ordered by Intelligence Agencies; The Death of Nick Berg in Iraq - A Muslim Perspective; Could N. Berg’s Execution be Fake?; 14 U.S. Military Bases Under Construction in Iraq; Berg - Top 50 Oddities & Irregularities; The Shadow of Zog - Enegesis of Besson; Were Humans Created by Gods?; 911 - Time for Painful Questions...Pt 1/3.

Vol.4 #5 ($5.95 each) Code: 405 The Shadow of Her Smile; 911 - Time for

Painful Questions...Pt 2/3; Brainwashing and Its Consequences; Tan Hill Crop Circle; Tears for the Innocent; These Skies Have Been ‘Colourised’.

Vol.4 #6 ($5.95 each) Code: 406 Lost Cave Systems of the Blue Mountains; Ancient Astronauts; 911 - Time for Painful Questions...Pt 3/3; Silcone Snakes Cause Sensation in Australia and Elsewhere; FEMA - The Secret Government; Is Fluorida Really As Safe As You Are Told?...Pt 1/3; How To Distinguish A Real UFO Photograph from a Fake?; Hyperdimensional Hurricanes?

The Mystery...Pt 1/4; Iraq War Update; Pursuing Free Energy; Alien Mummy Found in Brazil?

Vol.5 #1 ($7.95 each) Code: 501 Is Fluorida Really As Safe As You Are Told?...Pt 2/3; The Complete Illegality of the Jiang Regime’s Persecution of Falun Gong; Hyperdimensional Hurricanes? The Mystery...Pt 2/4; Jurassic Park, PseudoEvents, and Prisons: The Fallout From Abu Ghraib...Pt 1/5; Mystery Animals; The Mysterious Miracle Worker; Iraq War Update; World’s First Giant Hominid Skull-Type Found in Australia!; The Crisis in Human Consciousness.

Vol.5 #2 ($7.95 each) Code: 502 Is Fluorida Really As Safe As You Are Told?...Pt 3/3; McVeigh: The Manchurian Candidate; Hyperdimensional Hurricanes?

The Mystery...Pt 3/4; Mars Anomalies; Jurassic Park, Pseudo-Events, and Prisons: The Fallout From Abu Ghraib...Pt 2/5; Target Iran; A History of U.S. Secret Human Experimentation; Iraq War Update; The Staggering Cost of Israel to Americans; Iraq - The Decastation.

Vol.5 #3 ($7.95 each) Code: 503 Jurassic Park, Pseudo-Events, and Prisons: The Fallout From Abu Ghraib...

Pt 3/5; Debunking the Out of Africa Origin of HIV and Aids; Mars Anomalies; No to Fluoridation: Hyperdimensional Hurricanes? The Mystery...Pt 4/4; What Are Those Objects in the Trails?...Pt 1/2; Iraq War Update; 10 Most Puzzling Mystery Artifacts; New Findings on our ‘Unwritten’ History.

Vol.5 #4 ($7.95 each) Code: 504 Jurassic Park, Pseudo-Events, and Prisons: The Fallout From Abu Ghraib...Pt 4/5; What’s With the Weather?; The Great Astronaut Impersonator; The Space Weapons Program; The Ultimate Blasphemy...Pt 1/3; Deep Sea Creatures; The Blitz. Who Really Started It?; What Are Those Objects in the Trails?...Pt 2/2; Ascension 2012 - Maya End Date as Biblical Apocalypse...Pt 1/2 Vol.5 #5 ($7.95 each) Code: 505 Jurassic Park, Pseudo-Events, and Prisons: The Fallout From Abu Ghraib...Pt 5/5; White Flour Contains Diabetes-Causing Contaminant Alloxan; Germ Wars...Part 1; Codex - The Sickness Industry’s Last Stand...

Pt 1/2; Avebury Manor Crop Circle; The Ultimate Blasphemy...Pt 2/3; Tenth Planet Discovered; Ascension 2012 - Maya End Date as Biblical Apocalypse...Pt 2/2 Vol.5 #6 ($7.95 each) Code: 506 Codex - The Sickness Industry’s Last Stand...

Pt 2/2; The Ultimate Blasphemy...Pt 3/3; Night of the Crusher; Projecting Nuclear Fusion Onto the Sun; The Electric Glow of the Sun; Time Travel and Modern Physics...

Pt 1/3; Crazy Weather Over The United States; The Facts Behind Fahrenheit 9/11...

Pt 1/6; Book Review - Mind Transmissions, Inc; Book Review - The United States and Iraq - A Modern History; Book Review - The New World Order; Vol.6 #1 ($7.95 each) Code: 601 Book Review - Body Snatchers In The

Desert; Time Travel and Modern Physics...

Pt 2/3; The Facts Behind Fahrenheit 9/11...

Pt 2/6; Timeline - The Journey of Falun Dafa 1992-2003; Film Review - The Future of Food; Another Formaldehyde Cocktail, Darling?; The Ridgeway Crop Circle; Politically Motivated Disease Causation...

Pt 1/2; 2005 UK Crop Circles; Multiple Chemical Sensitivities.

Vol.6 #2 ($7.95 each) Code: 602 Time Travel and Modern Physics...Pt 3/3; The Facts Behind Fahrenheit 9/11...Pt 3/6; Book Review - The Master of Speech; Politically Motivated Disease Causation...

Pt 2/2; Book Review - Radiant Healing; Starlin’s Half-Man, Half-Ape Super Soldier; Earthquake Alarm; Big, Easy Iraqi-Style Contracts Flood New Orleans.

Vol.6 #3 ($7.95 each) Code: 603 The Facts Behind Fahrenheit 9/11...Pt 4/6; Nasa’s Dirty Bomb; Eavesdropping Using Microwaves; Book Review - The Real Axis of Evil; The Plague Upon Eden; What Can We Learn from Medical Whistleblowers?; Understanding UFO Secrecy in the 21st Century; The Real Star Trek Theology; Mind Control in the 21st Century...Pt 1/8.

Vol.6 #4 ($7.95 each) Code: 604 Five Reasons to Keep Britain and the Rest of the World GM-Free; The Facts Behind Fahrenheit 9/11...Pt 5/6; Repatriation - The Dark Side of WW2...Pt 1/7; Evidence of a Mars Coverup; The Abolition of Work; Minority Rules; Why the Secrecy?; The Rest of the 911 Flight 93 Story; The Trap Door; Satellite Spies - The Shocking Truth; The Secret Code; Mind Control in the 21st Century...Pt 2/8; Beyond Abu Ghrib - Detention and Torture in Iraq...Pt 1/4.

Vol.6 #5 ($7.95 each) Code: 605 Unveiling Tibetan Buddist Propaganda and Atrocities; The Facts Behind Fahrenheit 9/11...Pt 6/6; Repatriation - The Dark Side of WW2...Pt 2/7; The Moons of Mars; Historical Background of the Real ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’; Protocols of the Minutes of the Learned Elders of Zion; The Pilgrims Way Crop Circle; The Accuracy of the Gospels; Mind Control in the 21st Century...Pt 3/8; Beyond Abu Ghrib - Detention and Torture in Iraq...Pt 2/4.

Vol.6 #6 ($7.95 each) Code: 606 Uranium Bombing in Iraq Contaminates Europe; The Coming Greenland Disaster; They Kill Us for Sport; Depleted Uranium Exposure; The Value of Psychotic Experience...Pt 1/2; Repatriation - The Dark Side of WW2...Pt 3/7; Weapons to Die For; Troy and the Trojan Horse; Poltergeist; Ancient Mysteries and Human Origins; Ancient Kabbalistic Work; Best UFO Photos for 2006; 40th Anniversary of the Mothman Sightings; The God in the Moon and the Trinity Matrix; In the Beginning There was Terror...Pt 1/2; Mind Control in the 21st Century...Pt 4/8; Beyond Abu Ghrib - Detention and Torture in Iraq...Pt 3/4.

Vol.7 #1 ($7.95 each) Code: 701 The Value of Psychotic Experience...Pt 2/2; Communism - A Jewish Creation; Unravelling the Ark, the Shroud and Mary; The Ark, the Shroud and Mary - The Truth Behind the Mystery; £3.68 trillion - The price of failing to act on Climate Change; How Long Can the World Feed Itself?; Cosmetics, Beauty Aids and the Connection to Birth Defects; Vanishing Glaciers; The Queen’s Death Star; High Risk Counties within 100 miles of Nuclear Reactors; The Case of Adam’s Alien Genes; Uranium Effect on DNA Established; Genesis for the New Space Age; Balanced Critique of Ald vs Sitchin & Von Daniken; The Use of Hypnosis in Abduction Research; Massive UFO Fleet

filmed over the UK; There was Terror...Pt 2/2; Repatriation - The Dark Side of WW2...

Pt 4/7; Mind Control in the 21st Century...

Pt 5/8; Munition exposure linked to brain cancer in Gulf War Veterans; Beyond Abu Ghrib - Detention and Torture in Iraq...Pt 4/4; Climate’s Last Chance.

Vol.7 #2 ($7.95 each) Code: 702 The Neurobiology of Mass Delusion; Inner Alchemy - Your Guide to Spiritual Transcendence; Synopsis of the Electric Universe; Out of Control - Aids and the Corruption of Medical Science; Get Plastic Out of Your Diet; An Exopolitical Perspective on the Pre-emptive War Against Iraq; UN Resolutions Against Israel; Human Medical Experimentation in Modern Times...Pt 1/3; Mind Control in the 21st Century...Pt 6/8; Repatriation - The Dark Side of WW2...Pt 5/7.

Vol.7 #3 ($7.95 each) Code: 703 The Iran-Qaeda Scandal; Operation Talisman Saber; The Case of the Missing Elephant; UFO Problems Being Repeated...Pt 1/2; War of the Worlds - Could it Happen for Real?; Secrets, Lies & Cover-ups - Environmental Plunder; An Australian Chernobyl; Ehud Olmert’s “Convergence Plan”; Mind Control in the 21st Century...Pt 7/8; What if Israel Had Never Been Created?; Repatriation - The Dark Side of WW2...Pt 6/7.

Vol.7 #4 ($7.95 each) Code: 704 Propaganda and the Politics of Perception; UFO Problems Being Repeated...Pt 2/2; Was the ‘Face’ Depicted 4,500 Years Ago?; Mind Control in the 21st Century...

Pt 8/8; Protrait of a Palestinian Town; The IEEE, Plasma Cosmology and Extreme Ball Lightning; Secrets of the Stars - Tracing the Origins of Ancient Cults and Cabals; Kids At Risk; Tranceformers - Sharmans of the 21st Century; Censoring the Truth (RIP Democracy); Revelation 2012; Repatriation - The Dark Side of WW2...Pt 7/7.

Vol.7 #5 ($7.95 each) Code: 705 Cabalists, Gnostics, and Secret Syrian Sects; US Tactics of Containing Regional Roles in Middle East; Who Benefits from the Afghan Opium Trade?; The Bolsheviks of Russia; The Pain in Your Arm...Pt 1/2; The Electric Sky - An Abridged Interview with Don Scott; The Singing Pyramid; HAARP - Vandalism in the Sky?; HAARP Likely Not Primary Ionospheric Array in Alaska; Hidden Holocaust, USA; Human Medical Experimentation in Modern Times...Pt 2/3; The Bush Administration’s New Strategy for Setting the Middle East Aflame.

Vol.7 #6 ($7.95 each) Code: 706 The Pain in Your Arm...Pt 2/2; Holy Vehm - My Journey into the Heart of a Real Secret Society; Censored! The Top 10 Big Stories the US News Media Missed in the Past Year; Strange Artifacts - The Piri Reis Map of 1513; Judaic Communists - The Documentary Record; The Electric Sky; Free Speech - At A Price; Human Medical Experimentation in Modern Times...Pt 3/3; Understanding Africom...Pt 1/3; Number (Revised)...Pt 1/3.

Vol.8 #1 ($7.95 each) Code: 801 Is Jesus Christ an Impostor?; The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s Early Soviet Regime; Two ‘Acts’ of Tyranny on the Same Day!; Gateways to the Gods; The Constantine Conspiracy; Saving Iraq - A Critique of Peter W. Galbraith; Understanding Africom...Pt 2/3; Number (Revised)...Pt 2/3.

Vol.8 #2 ($7.95 each) Code: 802 The One - The Sufi Tale of Self Empowerment; Nuremberg - The Crime That Will Not Die; The Centre Cannot Hold; The ‘Liberation of the Camps’ - Facts

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MAGAZINE BACK ISSUES AVAILABLE THROUGH EARTHLINK PUBLISHING vs. Lies; The Balkanization of Iraq; Rostau - The Great Pyramid; The Victor?; Understanding Africom...Pt 3/3; Number (Revised)...Pt 3/3.

Vol.8 #3 ($7.95 each) Code: 803 A Review of the ‘Leuchter Report’; Imperialism 101; Gnosis - The Secret of Solomon’s Temple Revealed; My Aspartame Experiment; Found - The Footprints of Adam and Eve From a World Before our Own; Understanding a Secret of the Universe; Ancient Secret Societies, UFOs, and the New World Order; Africom ‘Value Adding’ to Whom?; Interview with Michael A. Dyer from www. nwowatcher.com; The Uprising.

Vol.8 #4 ($7.95 each) Code: 804 The ‘Leuchter Report’; Atlantis, Egypt and Ireland?

The Story of Princess Scotia; The Destruction of Ethnic Germans and German Prisoners of War in Yugoslavia, 1945-1953; Ancient Order of Hibernians; Freemasons; Tapping into Nature’s Genius.

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In “Journeys to the Mythical Past”, the sequel to “The Earth Chronicles Expeditions”, the renowned researcher of antiquity Zecharia Sitchin tells his own story of an indefatigable dedication to finding the truth that almost cost him his life when uncovering secrets of the Giza pyramids and Sphinx.

Exposing hidden artifacts that contradict establishment assumptions dedicated to preserving the status quo or that baffle scientists when forced to show them, Sitchin’s firsthand accounts of his explorations take the reader into the inner workings of the Vatican, the enigma of a futuristic computer from millennia ago, and the secret handiwork of a Divine Architect at Stonehenge, at Malta, and at a site in the Americas.

Looking deep into antiquity, Sitchin offers astounding evidence that links the Nazca lines and a baffling adjoining site to the departure from Earth of the Anunnaki, the ancient gods who, he believes, vowed to return.

MEMOIRS OF A MONSTER HUNTER Nick Redfern is a full-time author and journalist specialising in a wide range of unsolved mysteries, including Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFO sightings, government conspiracies and alien abductions. For centuries, people across the world have had a fascination with monsters and strange creatures. They marvel at the tales and legends of the Bigfoot; of the Abominable Snowman; of the infamous and diabolical MothMan. But do such creatures really exist?

Can it be true that our planet is home to fantastic beasts that lurk deep within its forests and waters?

“Memoirs of a Monster Hunter” proves the answer is a resounding yes! In this follow-up to his wildly successful “Three Men Chasing Monsters”, paranormal investigator and author, Nick Redfern chronicles his surreal journey in search of all-things monstrous. His strange adventures lasted five years and saw him doggedly pursuing a menagerie of creatures, including gargoyles, giant birds and what some believe are living dinosaurs. Follow Redfern as he explores the El Yunque rainforest of Puerto Rico in search of the terrifying Chupacabras, a

razor-clawed, glowing-eyed beast that is part giant bat and part vampire; seeks out the Goat Man, a menacing creature that evokes imagery of both demons and the fabled cloven-hoofed Centaurs of ancient mythology and is said to inhabit the forests of East Texas; chases after what many people believe are real-life, fleshand-blood werewolves that surface from hidden lairs and prowl the countryside when the Moon is full.

DOES IT RAIN IN OTHER DIMENSIONS? We have neighbours in the universe.

“Does it Rain in Other Dimensions?” describes one man’s experience of communicating and working with otherdimensional and extra-terrestrial beings over a 50 year period. It shows how he worked through the fear some experiences engendered to find a new spiritual perspective. Use the symbols in this book, that were given to the author by Light Beings, to aid your own consciousness-awakening process and be ready for the coming Shift.

GHOSTS ON 87TH LANE After moving her young family into their first house - a small suburban home in the Midwest - a series of strange and chilling events take place: unexplained noises, objects disappearing, lights going out by themselves, phantom footsteps.

And then M. L. Woelm’s neighbour confirms the horrifying truth - her house is haunted.

Beginning in 1968 and spanning three decades, this moving memoir chronicles the hair-raising episodes that nearly drove an ordinary housewife and mother to the breaking point. With friends who thought she was crazy and a skeptical, unsupportive husband who worked nights, the author was left all alone in her terror. How did she cope with disembodied sobs, eerie feelings of being watched, mysterious scratches appearing on her throat, and a phantom child’s voice crying Mommy! in her ear?

Discover how frazzled nerves and constant stress wreak havoc on the author’s health and marriage, until she finally finds validation and understanding from ghost expert Echo Bodine, friends, her grown children, and finally . . . her husband.