Edgar Cayce on the powers of the Lapis Lazuli Stone

The Lapis Lazuli stone has quite a prestegious history. The preist-kings of China presented this stone as an offering to the Lord of the Universe in ceremonies at the Temple of Heaven. The Targums indicate that lapis lazuli was used for the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The ancient kings of Ur and Sumer included the stone in their tombs. Even Tutankhamen's mummy wrap contained some of this stone.

The Egyptians used to carve an eye out of the Lapis Lazuli and ornament it with gold. A chapter of the Book of the Dead was then transcribed onto the stone with an account of the passage of the soul of the deceased through the realm of death. The eye was a sacred amulet which was used in the worship of the god Ra. When Ra received the amulet, it was believed that he placed the eye upon his head.

The Lapis Lazuli is a powerful stone with a diverse range of effects on the body. The effects of the stone vary based upon the person who is wearing the stone and how the stone is worn. For individuals who are in accord with the vibrations of this stone, it can make them more sensative to the higer mental and spiritual vibrations.

I find that this stone helps me to store spiritual energy when worn around the neck. I can feel the emanation of stored spiritual energies when the energy is flowing properly through my body. I have had experiences, at times of great attunement, during which I would feel the glow of stored spiritual energy from the stone.

This spiritual energy opens up the higher centers of awareness and allows for a better flow of this vital energy through the chakras.

Quote:

As to stones, - have near to self, wear preferably upon the body, about the neck, the lapis lazuli; this preferably encased in crystal. It will be not merely as an ornament but as strength from the emanation which will be gained by the body always from same. For the stone is itself an emanation of vibrations of the elements that give vitality, virility, strength, and that of assurance in self. 1981-1 So whether from vibration of numbers, of metals, of stones, these are merely to become necessary influences to make thee in attune, one with the Creative Forces ... so, use them to attune self... 707-2

Lazurite and azurite derive their names from the arabic term lazaward, a term meaning blue. It is an opaque stone which is composed of several minerals. Generally, the stone contains small grains of pyrite. The stone is commonly found in Afghanistan, Iran, Italy, Turkestan, Chile and California.

The ARE of New York wrote the following article on the Lapis Lazuli stone:
http://www.mindspring.com/~areofnyc/areofnyc/opendoor/03july/gottlieb.htm

Edgar Cayce on the Power of Color, Stones and Crystals is an excellent study of the use of these objects in the readings:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...e&s=books&st=*

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Brewster Jennings & Associates

from Jim Sinclair

Here is the real guts of the CIA leak which has not really been considered. By outing Valerie Plame, the destruction of this cover company occurred, a method of intelligence gathering was destroyed and the actual lives of both US and non-US citizens were put in danger because they were employees of the CIA. This outrageous risking of human life by those who revealed it is a travesty, a horror and is totally a criminal act that may never fully surface and that itself is a crime.

Confidence is a fragile state of consciousness and slice by slice it is being tested. This is NOT a Plame affair - it is high treason punishable by death and nothing less.

Brewster Jennings & Associates was a company set up by the United States CIA as a front for its operations. One of its former employees was CIA-analyst Valerie Plame who later had her cover blown by Robert Novak in an interview on CNN in which he stated "Wilson's wife, the CIA employee, gave $1,000 to Gore and she listed herself as an employee of Brewster-Jennings & Associates. There is no such firm, I'm convinced.", though it later turned out that BJ&A did exist for all intents and purposes, listed on the Dun & Bradstreet database of company names.

The group was intended to infiltrate ties between groups involved in smuggling nuclear weapons and the materiel to create them, to countries such as Israel and Pakistan.

The company was apparently named after the late Brewster Jennings, who served as president of a predecessor company to Exxon Mobil Corporation.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

http://www.answers.com/topic/brewster-jennings-associates

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THE BUSH-CHENEY DRUG EMPIRE

There is certainly plenty of evidence to back up the claims connecting Bush to drug running. This interview with 7-term Idaho congressman George V. Hansen is an eye opening look at this.

by Michael C. Ruppert | FromTheWilderness -- Lead story in October 24, 2000 Issue

FTW October 24, 2000 - The success of Bush Vice Presidential running mate Richard Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five year $3.8 billion "pig-out" on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is only a partial indicator of what may happen if the Bush ticket wins in two weeks. A closer look at available research, including an August 2, 2000 report by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) at www.public-i.org, suggests that drug money has played a role in the successes achieved by Halliburton under Cheney's tenure as CEO from 1995 to 2000. This is especially true for Halliburton's most famous subsidiary, heavy construction and oil giant, Brown and Root. A deeper look into history reveals that Brown and Root's past as well as the past of Dick Cheney himself, connect to the international drug trade on more than one occasion and in more than one way.

This June the lead Washington, D.C. attorney for a major Russian oil company connected in law enforcement reports to heroin smuggling and also a beneficiary of US backed loans to pay for Brown and Root contracts in Russia, held a $2.2 million fund raiser to fill the already bulging coffers of presidential candidate George W. Bush. This is not the first time that Brown and Root has been connected to drugs and the fact is that this "poster child" of American industry may also be a key player in Wall Street's efforts to maintain domination of the half trillion dollar a year global drug trade and its profits. And Dick Cheney, who has also come closer to drugs than most suspect, and who is also Halliburton's largest individual shareholder ($45.5 million), has a vested interest in seeing to it that Brown and Root's successes continue.

Of all American companies dealing directly with the U.S. military and providing cover for CIA operations few firms can match the global presence of this giant construction powerhouse which employs 20,000 people in more than 100 countries. Through its sister companies or joint ventures, Brown and Root can build offshore oil rigs, drill wells, construct and operate everything from harbors to pipelines to highways to nuclear reactors. It can train and arm security forces and it can now also feed, supply and house armies. One key beacon of Brown and Root's overwhelming appeal to agencies like the CIA is that, from its own corporate web page, it proudly announces that it has received the contract to dismantle aging Russian nuclear tipped ICBMs in their silos.

Furthermore, the relationships between key institutions, players and the Bushes themselves suggest that under a George "W" administration the Bush family and its allies may well be able, using Brown and Root as the operational interface, to control the drug trade all the way from Medellin to Moscow.

Originally formed as a heavy construction company to build dams, Brown and Root grew its operations via shrewd political contributions to Senate candidate Lyndon Johnson in 1948. Expanding into the building of oil platforms, military bases, ports, nuclear facilities, harbors and tunnels, Brown and Root virtually underwrote LBJ's political career. It prospered as a result, making billions on U.S. Government contracts during the Vietnam War. The "Austin Chronicle" in an August 28 Op-ed piece entitled "The Candidate From Brown and Root" labels Republican Cheney as the political dispenser of Brown and Root's largesse. According to political campaign records, during Cheney's five year tenure at Halliburton the company's political contributions more than doubled to $1.2 million. Not surprisingly, most of that money went to Republican candidates.

Independent news service "newsmakingnews.com," also describes how in 1998, with Cheney as Chairman, Halliburton spent $8.1 billion to purchase oil industry equipment and drilling supplier Dresser Industries. This made Halliburton a corporation that will have a presence in almost any future oil drilling operation anywhere in the world. And it also brought back into the family fold the company that had once sent a plane - also in 1948 - to fetch the new Yale Graduate George H.W. Bush, to begin his career in the Texas oil business. Bush the elder's father, Prescott, served as a Managing Director for the firm that once owned Dresser, Brown Bothers Harriman.

It is clear that everywhere there is oil there is Brown and Root. But increasingly, everywhere there is war or insurrection there is Brown and Root also. From Bosnia and Kosovo, to Chechnya, to Rwanda, to Burma, to Pakistan, to Laos, to Vietnam, to Indonesia, to Iran to Libya to Mexico to Colombia, Brown and Root's traditional operations have expanded from heavy construction to include the provision of logistical support for the U.S. military. Now, instead of U.S. Army quartermasters, the world is likely to see Brown and Root warehouses storing and managing everything from uniforms to rations to vehicles.

Dramatic expansion of Brown and Root's operations in Colombia also suggest Bush preparations for a war inspired feeding frenzy as a part of "Plan Colombia." This is consistent with moves by former Bush Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady to open a joint Colombian-American investment partnership called Corfinsura for the financing of major construction projects with the Colombian Antioquia Syndicate, headquartered in Medellin. (See FTW June, 00). And expectations of a ground war in Colombia may explain why, in a 2000 SEC filing, Brown and Root reported that in addition to owning more than 800,000 square feet of warehouse space in Colombia, they also lease another 122,000 square feet. According to the filing of the Brown and Root Energy Services Group, the only other places where the company maintains warehouse space are in Mexico (525,000 sq. feet), and the U.S. (38,000) square feet.

According to the web site of Colombia's Foreign Investment Promotion Agency Brown and Root had no presence in the country until 1997. What does Brown and Root, which, according to the AP has made more than $2 billion supporting and supplying U.S. troops, know about Colombia that the U.S. public does not? Why the need for almost a million square feet of warehouse space that can be transferred from one Brown and Root operation (energy) to another (military support) with the stroke of a pen?

DRUGS

As described by the Associated Press, during "Iran-Contra" Congressman Dick Cheney of the House Intelligence Committee was a rabid supporter of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of the fact that North had lied to Cheney in a private 1986 White House briefing. Oliver North's own diaries and subsequent investigations by the CIA Inspector General have irrevocably tied him directly to cocaine smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank accounts for one firm moving four tons of cocaine a month. This, however, did not stop Cheney from actively supporting North's 1994 unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia just a year before he took over the reins at Brown and Root's parent company, Dallas based Halliburton Inc. in 1995.

As the Bush Secretary of Defense during Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-91), Cheney also directed special operations involving Kurdish rebels in northern Iran. The Kurds' primary source of income for more than fifty years has been heroin smuggling from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Having had some personal experience with Brown and Root I noted carefully when the Los Angeles Times observed that on March 22, 1991 that a group of gunmen burst into the Ankara, Turkey offices of the joint venture, Vinnell, Brown and Root and assassinated retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant John Gandy.

In March of 1991, tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees, long-time assets of the CIA, were being massacred by Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War. Saddam, seeking to destroy any hopes of a successful Kurdish revolt, found it easy to kill thousands of the unwanted Kurds who had fled to the Turkish border seeking sanctuary. There, Turkish security forces, trained in part by the Vinnell, Brown and Root partnership, turned thousands of Kurds back into certain death. Today, the Vinnell Corporation (a TRW Company) is, along with the firms MPRI and DynCorp (FTW June, 00) one of the three pre-eminent private mercenary corporations in the world. It is also the dominant entity for the training of security forces throughout the Middle East. Not surprisingly the Turkish border regions in question were the primary transhipment points for heroin, grown in Afghanistan and Pakistan and destined for the markets of Europe.

A confidential source with intelligence experience in the region subsequently told me that the Kurds "got some payback against the folks that used to help them move their drugs." He openly acknowledged that Brown and Root and Vinnell both routinely provided NOC or non-official cover for CIA officers. But I already knew that.

From 1994 to 1999, during US military intervention in the Balkans where, according to "The Christian Science Monitor" and "Jane's Intelligence Review," the Kosovo Liberation Army controls 70 per cent of the heroin entering Western Europe, Cheney's Brown and Root made billions of dollars supplying U.S. troops from vast facilities in the region. Brown and Root support operations continue in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia to this day.

Dick Cheney's footprints have come closer to drugs than one might suspect. The August Center for Public Integrity report brought them even closer. It would be factually correct to say that there is a direct linkage of Brown and Root facilities - often in remote and hazardous regions - between every drug producing region and every drug consuming region in the world. These coincidences, in and of themselves, do not prove complicity in the trade. Other facts, however, lead inescapably in that direction.

A DIRECT DRUG LINK

The CPI report entitled "Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal Trough" written by veteran journalists Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller describes how, under five years of Cheney's leadership, Halliburton, largely through subsidiary Brown and Root, enjoyed $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer insured loans. The loans had been granted by the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). According to Ralph McGehee's "CIA Base ©" both institutions are heavily infiltrated by the CIA and routinely provide NOC to its officers.

One of those loans to Russian financial/banking conglomerate The Alfa Group of Companies contained $292 million to pay for Brown and Root's contract to refurbish a Siberian oil field owned by the Russian Tyumen Oil Company. The Alfa Group completed its 51% acquisition of Tyumen Oil in what was allegedly a rigged bidding process in 1998. An official Russian government report claimed that the Alfa Group's top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven "allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe."

These same executives, Fridman and Aven, who reportedly smuggled the heroin in connection with Russia's Solntsevo mob family were the same ones who applied for the EXIM loans that Halliburton's lobbying later safely secured. As a result Brown and Root's work in Alfa Tyumen oil fields could continue - and expand.

After describing how organized criminal interests in the Alfa Group had allegedly stolen the oil field by fraud, the CPI story, using official reports from the FSB (the Russian equivalent of the FBI), oil companies such as BP-Amoco, former CIA and KGB officers and press accounts then established a solid link to Alfa Tyumen and the transportation of heroin.

In 1995 sacks of heroin disguised as sugar were stolen from a rail container leased by Alfa Echo and sold in the Siberian town of Khabarovsk. A problem arose when many residents of the town became "intoxicated" or "poisoned." The CPI story also stated, "The FSB report said that within days of the incident, Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) agents conducted raids of Alfa Eko buildings and found 'drugs and other compromising documentation.'

"Both reports claim that Alfa Bank has laundered drug funds from Russian and Colombian drug cartels.

"The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa official met with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the now imprisoned financial mastermind of Colombia's notorious Cali cartel, 'to conclude an agreement about the transfer of money into the Alfa Bank from offshore zones such as the Bahamas, Gibraltar and others. The plan was to insert it back into the Russian economy through the purchase of stock in Russian companies.

"É He [the former KGB agent] reported that there was evidence 'regarding [Alfa Bank's] involvement with the money laundering ofÉ Latin American drug cartels."

It then becomes harder for Cheney and Halliburton to assert mere coincidence in all of this as CPI reported that Tyumen's lead Washington attorney James C, Langdon, Jr. at the firm of Aikin Gump "helped coordinate a $2.2 million fund raiser for Bush this June. He then agreed to help recruit 100 lawyers and lobbyists in the capital to raise $25,000 each for W's campaign."

The heroin mentioned in the CPI story, originated in Laos where longtime Bush allies and covert warriors Richard Armitage and retired CIA ADDO (Associate Deputy Director of Operations) Ted Shackley have been repeatedly linked to the drug trade. It then made its way across Southeast Asia to Vietnam, probably the port of Haiphong. Then the heroin sailed to Russia's Pacific port of Valdivostok from whence it subsequently bounced across Siberia by rail and thence by truck or rail to Europe, passing through the hands of Russian Mafia leaders in Chechnya and Azerbaijan. Chechnya and Azerbaijan are hotbeds of both armed conflict and oil exploration and Brown and Root has operations all along this route.

This long, expensive and tortured path was hastily established, as described by FTW in previous issues, after President George Bush's personal envoy Richard Armitage, holding the rank of Ambassador, had traveled to the former Soviet Union to assist it with its "economic development" in 1989. The obstacle then to a more direct, profitable and efficient route from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Turkey into Europe was a cohesive Yugoslavian/Serbian government controlling the Balkans and continuing instability in the Golden Crescent of Pakistan/Afghanistan. Also, there was no other way, using heroin from the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos and Thailand), to deal with China and India but to go around them.

It is perhaps not by coincidence again that Cheney and Armitage share membership in the prestigious Aspen Institute, an exclusive bi-partisan research think tank, and also in the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. Just last November, in what may be a portent of things to come, Armitage, played the role of Secretary of Defense in an practical exercise at the Council on Foreign Relations where he and Cheney are also both members. Speculation that the scandal plagued Armitage, who resigned under a cloud as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, is W's first choice for Secretary of Defense next year is widespread.

The Clinton Administration took care of all that wasted travel for heroin with the 1998 destruction of Serbia and Kosovo and the installation of the KLA as a regional power. That opened a direct line from Afghanistan to Western Europe and Brown and Root was right in the middle of that too. The Clinton skill at streamlining drug operations was described in detail in the May issue of FTW in a story entitled "The Democratic Party's Presidential Drug Money Pipeline." That article has since been reprinted in three countries. The essence of the drug economic lesson was that by growing opium in Colombia and by smuggling both cocaine and heroin from Colombia to New York City through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (a virtual straight line), traditional smuggling routes could be shortened or even eliminated. This reduced both risk and cost, increased profits and eliminated competition.

FTW suspects the hand of Medellin co-founder Carlos Lehder in this process and it is interesting to note that Lehder, released from prison under Clinton in 1995, is now active in both the Bahamas and South America. Lehder was known during the eighties as "The genius of transportation." I can well imagine a Dick Cheney, having witnessed the complete restructuring of the global drug trade in the last eight years, going to George W and saying, "Look, I know how we can make it even better." One thing is for certain. As quoted in the CPI article, one Halliburton Vice President noted that if the Bush-Cheney ticket was elected, "the company's government contracts would obviously go through the roof."

THE DARK PAST

In July of 1977 this writer, then a Los Angeles Police officer struggled to make sense of a world gone haywire. In a last ditch effort to salvage a relationship with my fiancŽe, Nordica Theodora D'Orsay (Teddy), a CIA contract agent, I had traveled to find her in New Orleans. On a hastily arranged vacation, secured with the blessing of my Commanding Officer, Captain Jesse Brewer of LAPD, I had gone on my own, unofficially, to avoid the scrutiny of LAPD's Organized Crime Intelligence Division (OCID).

Starting in the late spring of 1976 Teddy had wanted me to join her operations from within the ranks of LAPD. I had refused to get involved with drugs in any way and everything she mentioned seemed to involve either heroin or cocaine along with guns that she was always moving out of the country. The Director of the CIA then was George Herbert Walker Bush.

Although officially on staff at the LAPD Academy at the time, I had been unofficially loaned to OCID since January when Teddy, announcing the start of a new operation planned in the fall of 1976 had suddenly disappeared. She left many people, including me, baffled and twisting in the breeze. The OCID detectives had been pressuring me hard for information about her and what I knew of her activities. It was information I could not give them. Hoping against hope that I would find some way to understand her involvement with CIA, LAPD, the royal family of Iran, the Mafia and drugs I set out alone into eight days of Dantean revelations that have determined the course of my life from that day to this.

Arriving in New Orleans in early July, 1977 I found her living in an apartment across the river in Gretna. Equipped with scrambler phones, night vision devices and working from sealed communiquŽs delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, Teddy was involved in something truly ugly. She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran. At the same time she was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city. The boats arrived at Marcello controlled docks, unmolested by even the New Orleans police she introduced me to, along with divers, military men, former Green Berets and CIA personnel.

The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, oil rigs in international waters, oil rigs built and serviced by Brown and Root. The guns that Teddy monitored, apparently Vietnam era surplus AK 47s and M16s, were being loaded onto ships also owned or leased by Brown and Root. And more than once during the eight days I spent in New Orleans I met and ate at restaurants with Brown and Root employees who were boarding those ships and leaving for Iran within days. Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the wrong question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off.

Disgusted and heart broken at witnessing my fiancŽe and my government smuggling drugs, I ended the relationship. Returning home to LA I made a clean breast and reported all the activity I had seen, including the connections to Brown and Root, to LAPD intelligence officers. They promptly told me that I was crazy. Forced out of LAPD under threat of death at the end of 1978, I made complaints to LAPD's Internal Affairs Division and to the LA office of the FBI under the command of FBI SAC Ted Gunderson. I and my attorney wrote to the politicians, the Department of Justice, the CIA and contacted the L.A. Times. The FBI and the LAPD said that I was crazy.

According to a 1981 two-part news story in the "Los Angeles Herald Examiner" it was revealed that The FBI had taken Teddy into custody and then released her before classifying their investigation without further action. Former New Orleans Crime Commissioner Aaron Cohen told reporter Randall Sullivan that he found my description of events perfectly plausible after his thirty years of studying Louisiana's organized crime operations.

To this day a CIA report prepared as a result of my complaint remains classified and exempt from release pursuant to Executive Order of the President in the interests of national security and because it would reveal the identities of CIA agents.

On October 26, 1981, in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, I reported on what I had seen in New Orleans to my friend and UCLA classmate Craig Fuller. Craig Fuller went on to become Chief of Staff to Vice President Bush from 1981 to 1985.

In 1982, then UCLA political science professor Paul Jabber, filled in many of the pieces in my quest to understand what I had seen in New Orleans. He was qualified to do so because he had served as a CIA and State Department consultant to the Carter administration. Paul explained that, after a 1975 treaty between the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein the Shah had cut off all overt military support for Kurdish rebels fighting Saddam from the north of Iraq. In exchange the Shah had gained access to the Shat al-Arab waterway so that he could multiply his oil exports and income. Not wanting to lose a long-term valuable asset in the Kurds, the CIA had then used Brown and Root, which operated in both countries and maintained port facilities in the Persian Gulf and near Shat al-Arab to rearm the Kurds. The whole operation had been financed with heroin. Paul was matter-of-fact about it.

In 1983 Paul Jabber left UCLA to become a Vice President of Banker's Trust and Chairman of the Middle East Department of the Council on Foreign Relations.

----------

If one is courageous enough to seek an "operating system" that theoretically explains what FTW has just described for you, one need look no further than a fabulous two-part article in "Le Monde Diplomatique" in April of this year. The brilliant stories, focusing heavily on drug capital are titled "Crime, The World's Biggest Free Enterprise." The brilliant and penetrating words of authors Christian de Brie and Jean de Maillard do a better job of explaining the actual world economic and political situation than anything that I have ever read.

De Brie writes, "By allowing capital to flow unchecked from one end of the world to the other, globalization and abandon of sovereignty have together fostered the explosive growth of an outlaw financial marketÉ

"It is a coherent system closely linked to the expansion of modern capitalism and based on an association of three partners: governments, transnational corporations and mafias. Business is business: financial crime is first and foremost a market, thriving and structured, ruled by supply and demand.

"Big business complicity and political laisser faire is the only way that large-scale organized crime can launder and recycle the fabulous proceeds of its activities. And the transnationals need the support of governments and the neutrality of regulatory authorities in order to consolidate their positions, increase their profits, withstand and crush the competition, pull off the "deal of the century" and finance their illicit operations. Politicians are directly involved and their ability to intervene depends on the backing and the funding that keep them in power. This collusion of interests is an essential part of the world economy, the oil that keeps the wheels of capitalism turning."

After confronting CIA Director John Deutch on world television on November 15, 1996 I was interviewed by the staffs of both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. I prepared written testimony for Senate Intelligence which I submitted although I was never called to testify. In every one of those interviews and in my written testimony and in every lecture since that time I have told the story of Brown and Root. I will tell it again at the USC School of International Relations on December the 8th, 2000 - regardless of who wins the election.

Michael C. Ruppert
www.copvcia.com

Sources:

- The Center for Public Integrity, "Cheney Led Halliburton to Feast at Federal Trough", Knut Royce & Nathaniel Heller,
http://www.public-i.org/story_01_080200.htm

-"Le Monde - Diplomatique", April 2000.

- The U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce

-The Aspen Institute, www.aspeninst.org

-"The Austin Chronicle", August 28, 2000

-The Associated Press, "Study: US Could Save Cost in Balkans" - 10/10/00

-The Associated Press, "Cheney, North Relationship Probed" - 8/11/00

-"The New York Times" Index

-The Council on Foreign Relations

-"The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush" - Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin

-"CIA Base" © 1992, Ralph McGehee

-CIA Inspector General Report of Investigation: Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States. Volume II: The Contra Story - Report 96-0143-IG.

-newsmakingnews.com, 27 August 2000, "The Dick Cheney Data Dump"

- Securities and Exchange Commission - "Edgar" Data base.

-Halliburton/Brown and Root - www.Halliburton.com/brs

-The Vinnell Corporation - www.Vinnell.com

-"The New York Press," 8/1/00

-"The Los Angeles Times," March 23, 1991.

-"The Los Angeles Herald Examiner:, Oct. 11 & 18, 1981

-"The Christian Science Monitor" - Oct. 20, 1994

-"Jane's Intelligence Review" - February 1, 1995.

-Written testimony of Michael C. Ruppert for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence dated 10/1/97 - http://www.fromthewilderness.com//free/ciadrugs/ssci.html

-"From The Wilderness" (4/99, 4/00, 6/00)

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Life After Aspartame

By Pat Thomas

This article first appeared in the September 2005 issue of The Ecologist, Volume 35, No.7.

Aspartame should never have reached the marketplace. But even if the authorities were to remove it from sale tomorrow, how much faith should consumers place in the other artificial sweeteners on the market?

Life After Aspartame

There is not a single artificial sweetener on the market that can claim, beyond all reasonable doubt, to be safe for humans to consume. Saccharin, cyclamate and acesulfame-K have all been show to cause cancer in animals. Even the family of relatively benign sweeteners known as polyols, such as sorbitol and mannitol, can cause gastric upset if eaten in quantity.

NutraSweet believes that its new aspartame-based sweetener, Neotame, is 'revolutionary'; but, seemingly, it is only a more stable version of aspartame. This leaves the market wide open for sucralose.

Sucralose, sold commercially as Splenda, was discovered in 1976 by researchers working for British sugar refiner Tate & Lyle. Four years later, Tate & Lyle joined forces with Johnson & Johnson to develop and commercialize sucralose under the auspices of a new company, McNeil Specialty Products (now called McNeil Nutritionals).

Sucralose has been approved by more than 60 regulatory bodies throughout the world, and is now in more than 3,000 products worldwide. In the United States, Coca-Cola has developed a new diet drink sweetened with Splenda, and other major soft drink manufacturers are expected to follow suit.

Splenda is advertised as being 'made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar' -- a claim that is currently the subject of a heated legal challenge in the United States. While it is true that sugar, or sucrose, is one of the starting materials for sucralose, its chemical structure is significantly different from that of sucrose.

In a complex chemical process, the sucrose is processed with, among other things, phosgene (a chemical-warfare agent used during WWI, now a common intermediary in the production of plastics, pesticides and dyes), and three atoms of chlorine are selectively substituted for three hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) groups naturally attached to the sugar molecule.

This process produces 1,6-dichloro-1, 6-dideoxy-beta-D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy-alpha-D-galactopyranoside (also known as trichlorogalactosucrose or sucralose), a new chemical substance that Tate & Lyle calls a 'water-soluble chlorocarbohydrate.'

Accepting Tate & Lyle's classification of sucralose as a chlorocarbohydrate at face value raises reasonable concerns about its suitability as a food additive. Chlorinated carbohydrates belong to a class of chemicals known as chlorocarbons.

This class of chemicals includes a number of notorious human and environmental poisons, including:

* Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)
* Aliphatic chlorinated carbohydrates
* Aromatic chlorinated carbohydrates such as DDT
* Organochlorine pesticides such as aldrin and dieldrin
* Aromatic chlorinated ethers such as polychlorinated dioxins (PCDD) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDF)

Most of the synthetic chlorinated compounds that we ingest, such as the pesticide residues in our food and water, bio-accumulate slowly in the body; and many cause developmental problems in the womb or are carcinogenic. How do we know that sucralose is any different?

Tate & Lyle insists that sucralose passes through the body virtually intact, and that the tight molecular bond between the chlorine atoms and the sugar molecule results in a very stable and versatile product that is not metabolized in the body for calories.

This doesn't mean, however, that sucralose is not metabolized in the body at all, and critics like HJ Roberts argue that, during storage and in the body, sucralose breaks down into, among other things, 1,6 dichlorofructose, a chlorinated compound that has not been adequately tested in humans.

Tate & Lyle maintains that sucralose and its breakdown products have been extensively tested and proven safe for human consumption. The company notes that in seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), McNeil Specialty Products submitted more than 110 studies that attested to the safety of sucralose.


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Interesting paper on Edgar Cayce

Here is a paper written by Eric A. Mein, MD and David L. McMillin, MA of the Meridian Institute:

http://www.meridianinstitute.com/ceu/ceu18ahm.html

It is well worth taking the time to read through it. I have found it to be most enlightening.

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WTC Architect: Collapse 'Unbelievable'

By Michal Meyer and Stuart Winer

JERUSALEM (September 12) - Aaron Swirsky, one of the architects of the World Trade Center, yesterday expressed disbelief on hearing of the collapse of the twin towers. Swirsky told JPostRadio the buildings had been designed with "accidents" in mind.

"The terrorism was different in those days, but there was always the possibility of an accident with a plane hitting the building. The building was designed like a pipe structurally, with the main structure in the perimeter of the building." This meant that a hole in the building would not collapse the whole structure. The fact that the buildings did collapse he described as "incredible."

Swirsky said the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center made a big hole in one building. "The intent was to topple the building, but because of the design it didn't. But now... it is unbelievable." He said the collapse may have been due to the size of the plane, bigger than the architects had ever planned for.

The floors above the crash sites would have been safe, at least at first, said Twirsky. "What is really tragic is the building was designed with each floor as a hermetic unit, as to evacuate a building like that is a nightmare. Imagine you are on the 100th floor and there is no elevator, so each floor is designed to be safe; but when it collapses then that whole theory goes up in smoke."

The buildings had no sprinklers, because each floor could be sealed off from the others in case of a fire. "There are shutters that would shut off the vertical openings (between floors) so that the fire couldn't travel from one floor to the other. That was the theory. When the danger had subsided they could evacuate."

After the planes crashed into the buildings, Swirsky said people in the floors above would have been trapped. They would have been unable to escape. The buildings were not designed to allow for a quick exit in case of emergency. Afterward, those trapped would have fallen with the buildings when they collapsed.

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Quote of the day

"Reductionist biologists have said that life itself is a kind of iridescence on matter. Other people say that mind, conscious mind, is a kind of iridescence on biology. These are all, sort of, ways to dismiss what we experience as most fascinating and most beautiful.

Plato linked the idea of the good, the true and the beautiful, but its hard to tell what is good and its hard to tell what is true, but its not hard to tell what is beautiful. So if you follow beauty, I think you can be pretty clear that you're not going to fall too far from the path of righteousness.

Thats sort of what the psychadellic path is. Its the demand that things be more beautiful, more strange and more astonishing than they've ever been before."

~Terrence McKenna

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Why was 'God's banker' killed?

Was financier laundering money for Mafia, Vatican? After 25 years, trial of five seeks the answers
2005 10 11

By Bill Taylor | thestar.com

AP File Photo - The son of Roberto Calvi, above, is also a banker, in Montreal. Carlo Calvi believes it suited an elite for his dad’s secrets to die with him.

Even the Pope couldn't help "God's banker."

Roberto Calvi, an Italian financier with ties both to the Vatican — hence his nickname — and the Mafia, in 1982 begged John Paul II to step in and save his bank from collapse, The Times of London reports. But money was the least of Calvi's problems.

Two weeks later, on June 19, he was found hanging by an orange rope tied in a lover's knot from scaffolding under one of the nine arches of Blackfriars Bridge in central London. The 300-metre, 18th century stone structure spans the River Thames.

It was one of the showier crimes of the 20th century, originally ruled a suicide but revealed two years ago to be homicide, with all the ingredients of a good whodunit — organized crime, financial scandal, money laundering for the Mafia and the Vatican, and chicanery in the most confidential corridors of religious power and the equally secret affairs of freemasonry.

It also never has been explained how someone could suspend a corpse in such a prominent place without being noticed.

Almost a quarter of a century later, that little mystery might be solved as the trial began in Rome for the five accused killers of Calvi, 62. They are: Pippo "the Cashier" Calo, a Sicilian Mafia chieftain; businessmen Flavio Carboni and Ernesto Diotallevi; Manuela Kleinszig, Carboni's ex-girlfriend; and Silvano Vittor, Calvi's bodyguard.

After brief opening statements yesterday in a courtroom inside a top-security jail, the trial was adjourned to Nov. 23 at the request of a defence lawyer needing time to prepare.

The prosecution will argue the accused lured Calvi to London to kill him after he held onto millions of dollars he was laundering for the Mafia and also stole from financier Licio Gelli, head of the illegal Masonic lodge, P2. Calvi was a member along with top politicians, businessmen and military officers.

The banker had been appealing a four-year jail sentence for illegally exporting currency. The day before his body was found, he was fired in absentia as head of debt-ridden Banco Ambrosiano, at the time Italy's largest private banking group. Its collapse triggered one of Italy's biggest banking scandals.

The defence, sticking to the original finding of suicide, is expected to embarrass the Roman Catholic church by calling former Vatican officials to testify.

Among those anxious to see justice finally done are Calvi's widow Carla and son Carlo, a Montreal banker. They believe he was the victim of a well-disguised Cosa Nostra hit to cover up the Vatican Bank's involvement with the Mafia.

Family members could not be reached yesterday but Carlo Calvi, 51, has told the British Broadcasting Corp. his father was "a dynamic businessman but not a good judge of people. I believe the killers were sending a message by killing him in public in the heart of the city. There was definitely something theatrical about it all, and the message was clearly worth the risk."

A new book on the case, Poteri Forti (Powerful Forces) by Ferruccio Pinotti, includes a letter to the Pope which Pinotti says the Calvi family gave him: "I have thought a lot, Holiness, and have concluded that you are my last hope," it says.

Calvi reportedly reminded John Paul that he had funded political and religious groups supported by the Vatican in both eastern and western Europe and had set up banks in Latin America to help combat the spread of communism. He warned the Pope that if Banco Ambrosiano went under it would "provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage."

His bank was owed huge sums of money by Panamanian companies involved with the Vatican Bank. The Vatican later paid out a quarter of a billion dollars to Ambrosiano creditors, denying legal responsibility but admitting "moral involvement."

Calvi also had warnings for the pontiff himself — that Vatican fiscal shenanigans were being kept from him and that Calvi's enemies within the church hierarchy were also conspiring against John Paul. Calvi claimed he had been dumped by the Vatican, "the authority for which I have always shown the utmost respect and obedience."

There were two British inquests into his death. The first said suicide; the second, a year later, returned an open verdict. But the findings of forensic scientists who exhumed his body led Italian judges to reopen the case. Scotland Yard detectives in London also got involved.

Calvi's pockets were stuffed with bricks, apparently to weigh down his body, and cash. He was carrying a forged passport. Forensic scientists said the absence of dirt on his hands and brick dust under his fingernails showed he had not touched the bricks or climbed the scaffolding. They concluded his throat injuries indicated strangulation, not hanging.

Under Italian law, defendants are not required to attend their trials. Carboni, one of the last people known to have seen Calvi alive, was the only one in court yesterday. Calo has been in jail since the 1980s for unrelated crimes. The prosecution alleges that he ordered Calvi's death. He watched the hearing by a TV hook-up from another prison.

Carboni said he was "indifferent" to how Calvi died, adding, "there is no proof of any kind ... if reasons to commit suicide exist, Calvi had them all."

Carlo Calvi, who moved to Montreal five years after his father's death, has said he has "no personal grudge against the killers. I am not someone who has that goal of having someone punished for the crime. I am someone who wants people to learn something from the judicial process."

He dismisses popular theories that Blackfriars Bridge and the way the body was hung were Masonic symbols. (P2 lodge members are said to wear black robes and call each other `friar.' Bricks are a mason's material. Initiates reportedly are told betraying its secrets brings death by hanging and tides to wash the corpse.) "But I do believe ... the way he was killed was symbolic."

Carlo Calvi has claimed parallels between the murder and the 1981 assassination attempt against the Pope of 1981. There was a power struggle within the Vatican, in which his father was caught up. "It wasn't obvious that the Pope was going to be in the winning position ..."

He told the Toronto Star in 1998: "My father had many enemies within the Vatican."

With files from Star wire services

Article from: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Conte...

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Question on Masonic links left Dunblane inquiry chief stunned

MICHAEL HOWIE

original source

LORD Cullen, who presided over the Dunblane inquiry, was "taken aback" when he was asked to declare whether he was a Freemason, newly released papers have revealed.

Documents relating to the school massacre, released after a 100-year secrecy rule was lifted, show how police investigated claims of a Masonic conspiracy.

But they appear to give little support to lingering suspicions of a cover-up involving police, politicians and other senior public figures.

Among the 3,000 letters and reports uncovered is correspondence between a member of public and Lord Cullen's office regarding suggestions that the gunman, Thomas Hamilton, and senior police, who were aware of concerns over summer camps and clubs he ran, were Masons.

In one letter, the member of public, whose name has been concealed, wrote to Lord Cullen's office after a date for a preliminary inquiry hearing was set.

The letter, dated 11 April 1996 - less than a month after Hamilton killed 16 pupils and a teacher at Dunblane Primary School - said: "It is in the public interest that Lord Cullen be asked if he is a Freemason, given the widely held view by the public that Thomas Hamilton's Masonic affiliation was probably the reason that the Ombudsman overturned an earlier decision by Central Regional Council in 1983 to prevent Hamilton from running youth clubs, and that his Masonic affiliation probably facilitated his application for a gun licence."

The letter-writer said anyone involved in the inquiry who turned out to be a Freemason should be forced to resign - and that included Lord Cullen.

The letter went on: "It is far too important to allow the Masonic implication to be whitewashed by furtive operations in the Freemasons, intent only in 'diverting a discourse' - a Masonic ruse - from the involvement of Freemasons and Freemasonry."

A handwritten note, apparently written by court staff after consulting with Lord Cullen, is marked "verbal response" and dated 18 April. It says "taken aback by the letter" and "not a Freemason, never has been".

Hamilton wrote scores of letters to police, council officials, MPs and even the Queen, claiming he had been the victim of a grand conspiracy to prevent him running boys' clubs.

In a statement given to Central Scotland Police in June 1996, an unnamed Grand Lodge of Scotland leader said he was aware of press speculation that Hamilton was a Mason, but said he did not think this was true as it "would have come to light immediately after the Dunblane incident".

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New evidence suggests US & Russia are embroiled in an illegal race to harness the power of hurricanes & earthquakes

by The Daily Express

October 8, 2005

The Daily Express (U.K.) - 2005-07-16

original source

THE huge mushroom cloud soared skywards, the captain was gripped by fear, believing his plane was about to be engulfed by the fall-out from a nuclear explosion. After declaring mayday and ordering his crew to don oxygen masks, the experienced pilot had the presence of mind to record that the cloud measured an estimated 200 miles in diameter and was tipped by an eerie light, like nothing he had seen before. Eventually, it soared harmlessly into the atmosphere, leaving the passenger jet to continue safely on its journey from Anchorage, in Alaska, to Tokyo.

But far below, a fleet of fishing boats trawling the sea between Japan and the Soviet Union was drenched by a violent but short-lived downpour before the weather suddenly cleared. Nuclear tests and volcanic activity were later ruled out but scientists concluded that this was not a natural phenomenon. More than two decades later suspicion still exists that the stunned airline crew and fishermen in 1973 were witnessing a sinister Cold War experiment, in which water from the Sea of Japan was blown into the air to create clouds and rain.

British government papers, just released by the National Archives, show that throughout the Seventies there was deep mistrust between the two superpowers over environmental warfare. The documents reveal that both the US, which led the field, and the Soviet Union had secret military programmes with the goal of controlling the world's climate. "By the year 2025 the United States will own the weather, " one scientist is said to have boasted.

Since then, a United Nations treaty has been signed which bans environmental warfare, such as causing earthquakes, melting the polar ice caps and altering climate. But some experts believe that clandestine work to create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction continues.

These claims are dismissed by sceptics as wild conspiracy theories and the stuff of James Bond movies but there is growing evidence that the boundaries between science fiction and fact are becoming increasingly blurred. The Americans now admit that they invested L12million over five years during the Vietnam war on "cloud seeding" - deliberately creating heavy rainfall to wash away enemy crops and destroy supply routes on the Ho Chi Minh trail, in an operation codenamed Project Popeye.

It is claimed that rainfall was increased by a third in targeted areas, making the weather-manipulation weapon a success. At the time, government officials said the region was prone to heavy rain.

However this sort of rain-making experiment was nothing new. In Britain, it has been alleged that before the devastating Lynmouth floods in Devon in 1952, the RAF had been conducting secret rain-making tests. Aircraft showered clouds with silver iodide, on which water droplets formed, became heavy and eventually fell to the ground as rain. In the next 12 hours nine inches of rain fell - 250 times the normal amount for August - and 35 people were killed.

Former North Devon MP Tony Speller, then a 22-year-old soldier who helped in the relief effort, sought answers from the MoD.

"I have no doubt they were seeding in the area because there were RAF log books to prove it, " he says now. "Of course the MoD denied any knowledge but that is not to say it did not happen."

Speller, now 76, adds: "I doubt we will ever know the truth."

Early work on climate control was crude and unpredictable but it is claimed that both the Americans and Russians continued to experiment behind closed doors even after the UN ban in the mid-Eighties, and both now possess sophisticated systems which are capable of controlling the weather - with potentially devastating results.

In the US, the technology was developed under the high-frequency active auroral research programme ( HAARP) - originally part of Ronald Reagan's controversial Star Wars defence system. Based in Gokoma, Alaska, the weapon operates by beaming powerful radio waves into the upper atmosphere to alter weather patterns. Some experts claim the system is already up and running, while others say it won't be ready for another 20 years.

Michel Chossudovsky, professor of economics at the University of Ottawa in Canada, who has studied official military documents about HAARP, is in no doubt that the weapon is ready.

"There are very clear statements by the US Air Force to the effect that weather modification technology is available. HAARP will be fully operational by next year and could be used in actual military situations, " he says.

(See http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20040927&articleId=319)

"To claim this system has any nonmilitary purposes is twisting the truth.

I don't think there are any peaceful applications - it is a weapon of mass destruction, capable of major climatic disturbance. Part of the beauty is that the enemy might never know that a weapon had been used. I believe the UN agreement is certainly being violated."

He claims that at least one British firm has been involved in its development.

"It is time people began focusing on these weapons instead of concentrating solely on global warming, " Chossudovsky adds. "Both are a serious threat."

The Russians are thought to have their own "weather steering" system, called Woodpecker, involving the transmission of low-frequency waves which are capable of disrupting the atmosphere and altering the path of the jet stream. It is claimed that a prolonged drought in California in the Eighties was caused by the blocking of warm, moist air for many weeks.

According to Damian Wilson, a physicist with the Met Office, controlling climate is a reality but not a precise science. "Clearing fog by dropping dry ice into clouds is a proven technique which has been around for decades, " he says.

"Large amounts of research have been invested in seeding clouds to generate rain and it is done in countries where there are water shortages. The problem is that it is unpredictable and you need clouds to start with. The technology does not exist to make rain fall from clear blue skies so it cannot be used in the desert to end droughts and famines."

WILSON believes it is possible to alter the course of a hurricane, which could have enormous life-saving potential. The current mayhem in the Caribbean and America's Eastern seaboard also shows what a destructive weapon a well-targeted storm could prove.

The Americans used cloud seeding to try to control a hurricane in 1947 but the tactic backfired when it picked up strength and hit Savannah, Georgia.

It is known that the US carried out further hurricane-manipulation experiments between 1962 and 1983, under the codename Project Stormfury, after it was calculated that a single hurricane contained as much energy as all the world's power stations combined. More recent projects have involved pouring tens of thousands of gallons of vegetable oil on to the sea.

"Hurricanes gather their strength from the warm sea surface, " says Wilson. "By spreading a large film of oil on the sea it would reduce the intensity by cooling the surface. In theory it is possible to change the path of the hurricane this way. It would not surprise me if military research into controlling the weather goes on. As we suffer more summer droughts in the south-east of England I would also expect to see pressure for cloud seeding to be introduced in this country."

It is not just the weather that has attracted the attention of the military.

Scientists have also researched ways of triggering earthquakes. By setting off small quakes, pressure could be released and a disaster averted. But military scientists believe it is also possible to direct powerful energy beams into vulnerable fault zones, causing the Earth's plates to shift, creating a massive earthquake. Along fault lines beneath the oceans, the same technology could be used to launch devastating tsunamis.

Part of the problem in banning experiments involves agreeing a definition of what environmental warfare is. It has been argued that the famous Dambusters mission during the Second World War, when bouncing bombs were used to flood the German industrial heartland, were a form of environmental warfare.

Half a century later, the threat is still being taken sufficiently seriously.

Former US defence secretary William Cohen warns: "Terrorists are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes and volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts."

Owen Greene, director of research at Bradford University's department of Peace Studies, believes efforts are continuing in secret to develop weapons that harness nature.

"There is so much money within the Pentagon that it would surprise me if they were not looking into it, " he says. "I suspect it is going on in both the US and Russia. You can't stop people researching the weather. As for earthquakes, you don't even need to spend money on active military programmes because there is so much other work going on which could easily be adapted. Some of the ideas are quite credible."

Another defence source says: "The risk is that by fooling around with nature, we may unleash irreversible damage and change our entire planet's atmosphere."

Despite these stark warnings, such is the immense power of nature, it seems inevitable that Man will continue to play God.

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Gamma-Ray Burst Mystery Unraveled

By Robert Zimmerman | Also by this reporter
Wired News
02:00 AM Oct. 04, 2005 PT

Astronomers have long theorized that merging neutron stars produce massive explosions capable of wiping out nearby solar systems for thousands of light-years around. But no data was available to prove it one way or the other because the evidence -- incredibly short bursts of gamma rays -- was too ephemeral for systematic observation.

Now a flurry of research is coming to a head that offers the first detailed view of the origin of so-called short gamma-ray bursts, revealing a picture that is consistent with the merging neutron star theory. That means the universe could be far more hazardous than previously thought, given the number of known and probable neutron star pairs in relative proximity to Earth.

On Wednesday, NASA is expected to announce new findings related to short gamma-ray bursts, followed Thursday with the publication of four papers on the phenomenon in the science journal Nature. Though the papers have not yet been made public, they come amid a growing consensus among scientists about the origin of these most fleeting astronomical events.

Gamma-ray bursts have been one of astronomy's most challenging mysteries since their discovery in the early 1970s. Their ephemeral and sudden appearance -- about once per day for less than two minutes and often shorter than a second -- made it impossible to determine their distance, location or strength, and thus their cause.

What makes all gamma-ray bursts so intriguing, however, is what they represent. As astrophysicist Tsvi Piran stated at a Hubble Space Telescope symposium in 1999, "Every gamma-ray burst apparently signals the birth of a black hole."

Since the 1980s, the two most popular theories of the origin of gamma-ray bursts postulated stupendous explosions at gigantic distances, either from a supernova caused by the sudden collapse of a massive star's core, or the merger of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole. The high-speed orbit of these dense binaries causes ripples of energy to radiate out from the system. The energy loss in turn causes the objects to slowly but inevitably spiral inward, eventually crashing together in a cataclysmic explosion.

Steve Thorsett of Princeton University has calculated the consequences if such a merger were to take place within 3,500 light-years of Earth, with its energy aimed at the solar system. The blast would bathe Earth in the equivalent of 300,000 megatons of TNT, 30 times the world's nuclear weaponry, with the gamma-ray and X-ray radiation stripping Earth of its ozone layer.

While scientists cannot yet predict with any precision which nearby stars will go supernova, the merger of neutron star binaries is as predictable as any solar eclipse. Three such binary systems have been discovered, and one, PSR B1534+12, presently sits about 3,500 light-years away and will coalesce in a billion years.

Scientists in the 1990s concluded that gamma-ray bursts lasting longer than 10 seconds appeared linked to unusual supernovas occurring many billions of light-years away.

For bursts shorter than 10 seconds, however, the mystery still remained. By the time telescopes could point to these brief events, their afterglows had disappeared, making it impossible to determine anything about them.

To solve this mystery, the Swift Gamma Ray Burst Mission was launched on Oct. 7, 2004. Comprising three different telescopes -- a gamma-ray detector, an X-ray telescope and an ultraviolet/optical telescope -- Swift was programmed to respond almost instantly whenever its gamma-ray detector sensed a gamma-ray burst in the sky.

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Bush considers military role in flu fight

from the mercury news

JENNIFER LOVEN

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - President Bush, increasingly concerned about a possible avian flu pandemic, revealed Tuesday that any part of the country where the virus breaks out could likely be quarantined and that he is considering using the military to enforce it.

"The best way to deal with a pandemic is to isolate it and keep it isolated in the region in which it begins," he said during a wide-ranging Rose Garden news conference.

The president was asked if his recent talk of giving the military the lead in responding to large natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and other catastrophes was in part the result of his concerns that state and local personnel aren't up to the task of a flu outbreak.

"Yes," he replied.

After the bungled initial federal response to Katrina, Bush suggested putting the Pentagon in charge of search-and-rescue efforts in times of a major terrorist attack or similarly catastrophic natural disaster. He has argued that the armed forces have the ability to quickly mobilize the equipment, manpower and communications capabilities needed in times of crisis.

But such a shift could require a change in law, and some in Congress and the states worry it would increase the power of the federal government at the expense of local control.

Bush made clear that the potential for an outbreak of avian flu is much on his mind, and has had him talking with "as many (world) leaders as I could find," consulting a book he read over the summer on the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 40 million and meeting with staff and experts.

"I have thought through the scenarios of what an avian flu outbreak could mean," he said.

He acknowledged that a quarantine - an idea sure to alarm many in the public - is no small thing for the government to undertake and that enforcing it would be tricky.

"It's one thing to shut down airplanes," Bush said. "It's another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu."

He urged Congress to give him the ability to use the military, if needed.

"I think the president ought to have all ... assets on the table to be able to deal with something this significant," he said.

As a standby precaution, Bush in April signed an executive order that added pandemic influenza to the government's list of communicable diseases for which a quarantine is authorized. It gives the government legal authority to detain or isolate a passenger arriving in the United States to prevent an infection from spreading.

At the time the order was signed, a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the Public Health Service would probably recommend home quarantines when possible, but said they would be voluntary. It's unclear whether the federal takeover of state and local quarantine powers that Bush discussed Tuesday would be limited just to travel or involve broader home quarantines as well.

Bush also said he has been urging world leaders to improve reporting on outbreaks of the virus, and exploring how to speed the production of a spray, now in limited supply, that "can maybe help arrest the spread of the disease."

"One of the issues is how do we encourage the manufacturing capacity of the country, and maybe the world, to be prepared to deal with the outbreak of a pandemic?" he said.

Yet it is the pill Tamiflu, which makes symptoms less severe and shortens the duration of the illness, that is in short supply - not its harder-to-use inhaled competitor Relenza.

Experts agree there will certainly be another flu pandemic - a new human flu strain that goes global. However, it is unknown when or how bad that global epidemic will be - or whether the H5N1 bird flu strain now circulating in Asian poultry will be its origin.

Just in case, experts are tracking the avian flu, which has swept through poultry populations in large swaths of Asia since 2003, jumped to humans and killed at least 65 people.

Most human cases have been linked to a contact with sick birds, but the World Health Organization has warned the virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans - changing it from a bird virus to a human pandemic flu strain.

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Noam Chomsky - Controlled asset of the New World Order

Commentary
By Daniel L. Abrahamson
originally from rense.com
DLAmedia@yahoo.com
9-27-5

"Since 9-11, he has steadfastly refused to discuss the evidence of government complicity and prior knowledge. Furthermore, he claims that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg Committee, and Trilateral Commission are "nothing organizations." When critiquing poverty, he never mentions the Federal Reserve and their role in manipulating the cycle of debt. Similarly, he claims the CIA was never a rogue organization and is an innocent scapegoat; that JFK was killed by the lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; that the obvious vote fraud in 2004 did not occur..."


Noam Chomsky is often hailed as America's premier dissident intellectual, a fearless purveyor of truth fighting against media propaganda, murderous U.S. foreign policy, and the crimes of profit-hungry transnational corporations.

He enjoys a slavish cult-like following from millions leftist students, journalists, and activists worldwide who fawn over his dense books as if they were scripture. To them, Chomsky is the supreme deity, a priestly master whose logic cannot be questioned.

However, as one begins to examine the interviews and writings of Chomsky, a different picture emerges. His books, so vociferously lauded in leftist circles, appear to be calculated disinformation designed to distract and confuse honest activists. Since the 1960's, Chomsky has acted as the premier Left gatekeeper, using his elevated status to cover up the major crimes of the global elite.

His formula over the years has stayed consistent: blame "America" and "corporations" while failing to examine the hidden Globalist overclass which pulls the strings, using the U.S. as an engine of creation and destruction. Then after pinning all the worlds ills on American imperialism, Chomsky offers the solution of world government under the United Nations.

In his book "The Conspirator's Hierarchy," Dr. John Coleman named Chomsky as a deep cover CIA agent working to undermine social protest groups. Certainly Dr. Coleman's claims appear validated by an honest review of Chomsky's role as a Left gatekeeper.

Since 9-11, he has steadfastly refused to discuss the evidence of government complicity and prior knowledge. Furthermore, he claims that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg Committee, and Trilateral Commission are "nothing organizations." When critiquing poverty, he never mentions the Federal Reserve and their role in manipulating the cycle of debt.

Similarly, he claims the CIA was never a rogue organization and is an innocent scapegoat; that JFK was killed by the lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; that the obvious vote fraud in 2004 did not occur; and that peak oil is real and good for humanity.

What he does advocate is population control, gun control, support for U.N.E.S.C.O., and the end of national sovereignty in favor of a one-world government under the UN. In other words, the major goals of the New World Order.

Chomsky's role in propaganda paradigm is much like that of Karl Marx: to present a false liberation ideology which actually supports the desired solutions of the elite. Marx pointed out the inequalities and brutality of capitalism and then advocated a one world bank, army, and government with the abolition of private property and religion; in other words, the major goals known of the New World Order.

Tens of millions of activists worldwide still remain trapped by this scam, failing to recognize the inherent autocratic and elitist structures of Marxism-Leninism or the newer incarnation under Chomsky.

The Globalist elites and their army of social scientists at the Tavistock Institute understand that people are going to question the inequities of the current economic system. For example, why is wealth distributed so unequally between classes and countries? Why are those living in third world nations allowed to die from preventable diseases and starvation? Why does the U.S. government sponsor and direct such murderous foreign policy? Why was America attacked on 9-11?

In other words, why is the world embroiled in such violence? Who is behind all this suffering? And most importantly, what solutions would relieve the poverty and destruction plaguing the worldwide population?

Enter Chomsky, the controlled opposition, to play the role of re-direct agent. He discusses a mere fraction of the real elite manipulation and then quickly pushes his followers into dead-end solutions and alienating rhetoric. Chomsky's hero status is further amplified by Left gatekeeper publications like Z Magazine, DemocracyNow!, The Progressive, and The Nation.

Is it a coincidence that all of those magazines receive major funding from Globalist front-groups like the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Carnegie Endowment, and MacArthur Foundation? Chomsky may be the head gatekeeper, but he works alongside a network of fellow Globalist assets like Amy Goodman who do their best to appear radical while avoiding all the hardcore issues and deliberately leading the Left into oblivion.

The following analysis will show that Chomsky, a deep cover agent for the New World Order, a master of black propaganda whose true motives become clear with a sober and honest examination.

(more...)

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Former Bush team member is voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the WTC

By John Daly
UPI International Correspondent

Washington, DC, Jun. 13 (UPI) -- Insider notes from United Press International for June 8

A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, "If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling." Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings."

Two years after President George W. Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished" in Iraq, some thoughtful officers are beginning to question who the insurgents actually are. In a recent interview the head of the US 42nd Infantry Division which covers key trouble spots, including Baquba and Samarra Major General Joseph Taluto said he could understand why some ordinary Iraqis would take up arms against U.S. forces because "they're offended by our presence." Taluto added, "If a good, honest person feels having all these Humvees driving on the road, having us moving people out of the way, having us patrol the streets, having car bombs going off, you can understand how they could (want to fight us). There is a sense of a good resistance, or an accepted resistance. They say 'okay, if you shoot a coalition soldier, that's okay, it's not a bad thing but you shouldn't kill other Iraqis.'" Taluto insisted however that the other foreign forces would not be driven out of Iraq by violence, observing, "If the goal is to have the coalition leave, attacking them isn't the way," he said. "The way to make it happen is to enter the political process cooperate and the coalition will be less aggressive and less visible and eventually it'll go away." Taluto's comments are sure to raise hackles at the Pentagon, which insist that all insurgents are either Baathists or al-Qaida. Taluto observed that "99.9 per cent" of those captured fighting the U.S. were Iraqis.

Ah well, there's always Argentina. The German government is reportedly blocking the deportation of Nazi war crimes suspects from the U.S. back to Germany to be tried and punished. The German interior ministry has refused to accept the suspects even though the United States already has stripped them of their citizenship because of their World War II history and has asked Germany to accept them; German officials worry the suspects might join neo-Nazi groups. Deputy director of the Office of Special Investigations at the Department of Justice Jonathan Drimmer said, "By and large we're talking about concentration camp guards, we're talking about collaborators, people who were involved in indigenous police forces, that kind of thing." German interior ministry officials said that Washington had not given Berlin enough proof that the suspects were war criminals, despite repeated requests from Germany. Deportation in U.S. court cases requires not criminal, but just civil, proceedings, with a burden of proof of "clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence." German Interior ministry officials noted that if Germany accepted the deportees, they would be supported by the German social system and possibly would involve themselves in the extreme right or anti-Semitic political activities.

The first conflict that the newly independent United States engaged in began in 1801 with the Barbary States; now descendents of those corsairs have participated in naval exercises with their former enemies. On June 7 Algerian and U.S. Coast Guard warships conducted a joint naval exercise, improving interoperability and developing cooperation in securing the western Mediterranean. The vessels conducted maritime patrol missions, testing their joint capabilities to monitor and board suspicious vehicles and interdict illegal migration. U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Robert Wyner said Washington regards Algeria as a strategic partner in the war against terrorism and that Algeria would play a major role in U.S. efforts to bolster the stability of North Africa and counter the threat of al-Qaida. Interestingly enough, former counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke closed Boston harbor on 9-11 because of concerns that al-Qaida terrorists were stowaways aboard liquefied natural gas tankers from Algeria bound for Boston's Everett LNG facility.

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