http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/16/iraq-chilcot-inquiry-john-sawers
Tony Blair might have been put off Iraq war by violent aftermath, says adviser
• Government shocked by level of post-war violence
• Inquiry asks if invasion hurt Britain's reputation
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* Richard Norton-Taylor
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 December 2009 20.11 GMT
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Sir John Sawers gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry
Sir John Sawers gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. Photograph: AP
The Blair government might not have invaded Iraq had it envisaged the scale of violence it might provoke, Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6 and former adviser to the prime minister, said today.
Very few observers predicted the violence produced by a combination of jihadists, former Ba'athist officials who had melted away immediately after the invasion, and Shia extremists supported by Iraq, he told the Chilcot inquiry.
"Frankly, had we known the scale of the violence, it might well have led to second thoughts about the entire project," said Sawers. "It was not thought through."
Sawers, who was an adviser to Tony Blair and spent three months as Britain's special envoy in Baghdad in 2003, said the only person he could think of who got it right was Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who warned the conflict would create "100 new Bin Ladens".
An inquiry panel member and former top diplomat, Sir Roderic Lyne, asked today's witnesses whether the war was worth the "very high cost" and whether Britain's reputation had suffered.
Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Blair's foreign policy adviser between 2003 to 2007 and now UK ambassador in Washington, replied: "That is a very difficult decision and a very difficult debate. I can't answer it even now. It depends who you are talking to and whether publicly or privately."
He said he was sure that the reputation of British military forces had been enhanced. "But of course there are areas of the Muslim world where what we did was extremely controversial."
Sawers replied that there was "not a clear-cut answer" to the question of the war's effect on the UK's reputation. He said Iraq was now a better place and the Iraqi people were "enormously grateful" for the efforts of the British and Americans to liberate them from Saddam Hussein.
Earlier, Sheinwald said Britain had expressed concern about the impact of US military tactics in the Iraqi town of Falluja in February and April 2004. Britain was concerned about the prospect of "US marines going in with all guns blazing", said Sheinwald.
There was concern that the US would exacerbate Sunni and Shia insurgencies in both the centre and south of Iraq. The issue was "one of the key things" on the agenda of Blair's agenda at a meeting with George Bush in the US in April that year, Sheinwald told the Chilcot inquiry. It was known, and reported, at the time, that defence chiefs urged Blair to warn Bush of the consequences of US attacks on Falluja, including the use of white phosphorus.
According to previously leaked documents about the April 2004 White House meeting between the two leaders, Bush was so angry about attacks on US soldiers that he allegedly suggested that the offices of the Arabic satellite TV station al-Jazeera should be bombed.
A leaked Foreign Office memo entitled Iraq: The Medium Term, dated 19 May 2004, referred to "heavy-handed" US tactics. General Sir Mike Jackson, then head of the army, said: "We must be able to fight with the Americans, but that does not mean we must fight as the Americans."
Sawers told the inquiry that spring 2004 was a low point for those in Britain responsible for policy on Iraq. "It was then that we realised the scale of the task that was ahead of us and the need to really put our heads down and be in it for the longer term," he said.
Referring to the abuse of Iraqi detainees by US soldiers, he added: "The Abu Ghraib issues just added another nasty twist to the difficulties that we faced." As for Britain's role in occupying southern Iraq, Sawers told the inquiry: "We had no plan for handling Basra when we went in".
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Climate Change Questions
Climate Change Questions
December 16, 2009
Andrew Glikson of the Australian National University at Canberra talks with Lord Monckton.
1. Are human activities contributing to climate change? How do we know the atmosphere build up of greenhouse gases is due to human activity?
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Glikson: Since the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century, combustion of fossil fuel resulted in the emission of more than 320 billion tons of carbon in the form of CO2. This is more than half the pre-industrial carbon content of the atmosphere of 590 billion tons. About 200 billion tons stayed in the atmosphere, raising CO2 concentration from 280 parts per million (ppm) to the current level of 388 ppm.
M of B: So CO2 occupies one part in ten thousand more of the atmosphere than it did 250 years ago. If we do not reduce our emissions, it will occupy one part in 2000 more in another 100 years. The warming effect of each additional molecule of CO2 is less than that of its predecessor. The CO2 that is already in the atmosphere is causing very nearly all of the warming that CO2 can cause. Even if – per impossibile – the IPCC’s wildly-exaggerated central estimate of the warming effect of CO2 were correct, we are only adding 2 ppmv/year to CO2 concentration, so that shutting down the entire global economy for a year would forestall just 4.7 ln (390/388) = 0.024 C of warming. At today’s emissions rate, we’d need to go on doing that for 41 years to forestall just 1 C of warming.
Glikson: When the effects of the gas methane (CH4) are included in the total greenhouse effect, the total rise of greenhouse gases is equivalent to 460 ppm CO2.
M of B: Methane occupies just two-thirds of a part per million of the atmosphere, and its radiative effect is 23 times that of CO2, so its entire existing concentration has a warming effect equivalent to that of just 14 ppmv of CO2, of which not more than 4 ppmv is attributable to humankind – so, in effect, we have added 108 + 4 = 112 ppmv CO2 to the pre-existing 278 ppmv, making around 400 ppmv CO2 equivalent, not 460 ppmv.
Glikson: Consistent with the basic laws of physics and chemistry, experimental evidence and direct observations in nature, greenhouse gases, including water vapour [H2O], carbon dioxide [CO2], methane [CH4], nitrous oxide [N2O], and ozone [O3] possess heat-trapping and heat-emitting capacity.
M of B: The effect of all greenhouse gases except water vapour and carbon dioxide is so small that it may be left out of account without significant error.
Glikson: This characteristic arises from the translation of heat into kinetic energy (internal vibration of gas molecules) and, conversely, of kinetic energy to heat. The concentration of greenhouse molecules in the atmosphere thus acts as a ‘warm blanket’ without which the mean temperature of the Earth surface would have been about 30oC lower than the present mean level of about 14oC.
In fact, one must also allow for the reduction in the Earth’s albedo (its propensity to reflect sunlight harmlessly straight back to space) from 0.30 to 0.16 in the absence of clouds. Therefore the Earth’s surface today is not 30 C° warmer but just 20 C° warmer than it was when there was no atmosphere.
2. How reliable are predictions of future climate?
Glikson: Rapid climate change is happening in the present time, as manifested by polar ice melt, sea level rise, prolonged droughts in Australia, China, Argentina and the US, extreme weather events and acidification of the oceans.
M of B: The climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years, ever since the planet first came into existence. The question is whether the changes in today’s climate are beyond its natural variability. The answer, in each of the instances of “rapid climate change” mentioned by Dr. Glikson, is No.
Polar ice melt: Ice has been accumulating in Greenland (at a rate of 2 inches a year, averaged across the entire ice sheet) for 11 years (Johannessen et al., 2005). Antarctic has cooled throughout the period of the satellite record, though a single paper (Stieg et al., 2009) has unsuccessfully tried to argue otherwise, by inventing data that were not actually measured. In fact, the extent of sea ice around Antarctica has grown steadily throughout the satellite record, and reached a 30-year maximum in October 2007, just three weeks after the Arctic sea-ice extent had reached a 30-year minimum. Overall, there has been virtually no trend in global sea-ice extent in 30 years.
Sea-level rise: Ever since satellites began measuring sea-level rise by altimetry against a reference geoid in 1993, sea level has been rising at a mean rate of just 1 ft (0.3 m) per century, very similar to the 8 inches/century observed by tide-gauges in the 20th century. Indeed, even the tiny increase from 8 to 12 inches (0.2 to 0.3 m) per century is probably an artefact of the change in measuring systems rather than a consequence of “global warming”. Prof. Niklas Moerner, who has written 530 papers in the scientific literature, many of them on sea-level rise, says he expects sea level to rise by just 4 inches (10 cm) this century. In the past four years, sea level has not risen at all.
Droughts in Australia, China, Argentina, and the US: The pattern of droughts has shown no overall increase worldwide. Droughts have always occurred in human history, wiping out civilizations from South America and Africa to India and China. They are not new. Australia has a desert climate and has long been affected by droughts. In the US, the worst drought in recent times was in the 1920s and 1930s in the Great Plains, which John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath powerfully describes.
Extreme-weather events: The UN’s climate panel explicitly gives warnings against attributing extreme-weather events of any kind to anthropogenic “global warming”. For instance, the number of hurricanes making landfall in the US has not risen in 150 years. And it is settled science that a warmer planet would also be a calmer planet, weather-wise, because it is the absolute difference between extremes of temperature that causes storms, and warmer weather reduces this difference, consequently diminishing the power of storms. I am grateful to Professor Richard Lindzen for explaining this.
Acidification of the oceans: This is the fall-back position of those who are desperate to maintain that CO2 is bad for us, now that it is clear that “global warming” at the extreme rate predicted by the UN’s climate panel is not occurring and is not going to occur. Professor Ian Plimer of the University of Adelaide says that because the oceans rub up against trillions of square miles of rock they will always be – as they have always been – alkaline. In the Cambrian era, 550 million years ago, the alkalinity of the oceans was much as it is today, even though CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was 2o times today’s level. It was in that era that the calcite corals originated: they could not have done so if the oceans had been acid. Likewise, the delicate aragonite corals evolved in the Jurassic era, 175 million years ago, when CO2 concentration was again close to 20 times today’s. Calcium ranks only seventh among the substances in the ocean that could in theory acidify it: however, it is present in such small quantities that it cannot make a difference. Indeed, even if all of the CO2 we emit this century were to end up immediately in the oceans (in which case it would not cause any “global warming” at all), the CO2 already in the oceans, where there is 70 times as much of it as there is in the atmosphere, would increase by little more than 1%. The idea that so small an increase in concentration could possibly cause any measurable acidification is simply nonsense.
Glikson: The world’s major climate science research organizations (Hadley Met Office, NASA/GISS, Colorado NSIDC, Tyndall Climate Centre, Potsdam Climate Impact Institute, CSIRO, BOM) and university-based climate scientists have projected the current trends since the 1980s, including pioneering authorities such as Professor James Hansen and his group (NASA), Professor Wally Broecker (Columbia University), Professor Joachim Schellnhuber and Professor Stephan Rahmstorf (Potsdam), Dr Barrie Pittock, Dr Graeme Pearman and Dr Ian Enting (former CSIRO climate scientists).
M of B: Many of these organizations are deeply implicated in the Climategate scandal. The emails between them have demonstrated a systematic, self-serving, ruthless readiness to invent, fabricate, distort, alter, suppress, hide, conceal or even destroy scientific data for the sake of reaching the answer they want. That is not how science is done. James Hansen is not a professor, and his forecast in 1988 of how fast global temperatures would rise is “pioneering” only in the sense that it has proven to be a ludicrous and fanciful exaggeration, a technique that other scientists have copied with profitable alacrity. Many of the other scientists named by Dr. Glikson have a reputation for bending science to suit their political stance: and the sheer nastiness of most of them can be gauged from reading the Climategate emails.
In any event, science is not done by consensus, nor by reputation. The “consensus” argument, known as the argumentum ad populum or head-count fallacy, is one of the dozen ancient and by now well-worn logical fallacies first codified by Aristotle. The “reputation” fallacy is the argumentum ad verecundiam. Neither of these fallacious arguments is acceptable. All of the scientists mentioned by Dr. Glikson are funded by taxpayers, as is Dr. Glikson himself. All of them, therefore, have a direct, financial vested interest in promoting and maintaining the “global warming” scare, which has panicked scientifically-illiterate politicians into throwing billions of wasted dollars at the scientists to make their scare go away. It is not necessary to allege that each of those named has fallen prey to the temptation to enrich himself at our expense by banging the drum for “global warming: it is necessary only to establish that motives of this kind exist and that, therefore, mere numbers or mere reputation are not enough to establish a scientific case. Aristotle was right.
Glikson: The atmospheric energy rise exerted by the well-mixed greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 and methane, is consistent with the basic laws of physics and chemistry and with calculations and observations in nature and the laboratory.
M of B: Unfortunately for Dr. Glikson, the direct warming effect of CO2 is only one-third of the warming predicted by the UN. Even this direct effect is problematic, in that it is simply not possible to simulate the entire 20-mile vertical atmospheric column in the laboratory. At low altitudes, for instance, the principal absorption band of CO2 is already almost saturated, allowing very little opportunity for further warming. At higher altitudes, the atmosphere is not dense enough. Methane, as we have already shown, is simply irrelevant, and would remain so even if we were to quintuple its atmospheric concentration.
However, the UN multiplies the direct warming effect of CO2 by 3 to allow for what are known as “temperature feedbacks” – changes in global temperature that occur purely because temperature has already changed. Not one of these feedbacks can be directly measured, and the UN is unable to assign any “level of scientific understanding” to them, because our understanding of them is negligible. Notwithstanding our very low understanding of temperature feedbacks, the UN has somehow decided – on no credible evidence at all – that it should be allowed to triple the direct warming effect of CO2 to take account of them. Yet it is clear from numerous studies that the UN has prodigiously exaggerated the biggest two positive feedbacks – that from water vapor and that from cloud albedo. Most climate-sensitivity studies – those which quantify the amount of warming to be expected from a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration – now find that the UN has exaggerated CO2’s warming effect between threefold and sixfold.
Glikson: Measurements of solar radiation and cosmic rays rule out these factors as drivers of climate change since the mid-20th century.
M of B: Once again, Dr. Glikson is not abreast of the latest research. Though the relatively small changes in solar irradiance between the maxima and minima of the solar activity cycle are in themselves too small to make much difference, it has long been observed that weather on Earth changes markedly in parallel with these cycles. Professor Henrik Svensmark has performed detailed experiments and calculations, in collaboration with scientists from all around the world, so as to demonstrate that it is changes in the magnetic activity of the Sun that alter the quantity of cosmic rays entering our atmosphere and serving as nuclei for the formation of cloud droplets. His theory is extremely unpopular with scientists making their fortunes from the “global warming” scare, because on both very long and very short timescales he has been able to demonstrate the correlation between solar activity, cosmic-ray deflection and variations in cloud nucleation. The Sun cannot safely be dismissed as the main driver of today’s changes in the Earth’s climate. Scafetta and West (2008), for instance, attribute two-thirds of the “global warming” of the past half century to the Sun.
3. Are temperatures rising?
Glikson: While decade-long climate trends manifest global warming, superposition by the El Nino – La-Nina (ENSO) cycle and the 11 years-long sunspot cycle results in a zigzag upward trend of global temperatures. As the globe warms and the energy levels of the atmosphere increase, short term climate variability is increasing.
M of B: Here are the facts. It was around 7 C warmer than the present throughout most of the past 600 million years, warmer by up to 6 C during each of the last half dozen interglacial warm periods over the past 850,000 years (there was no ice on Greenland that far back), warmer during 7500 of the last 11,400 years, warmer during the Holocene climate maximum 7500 years ago, warmer during the Minoan warm period, warmer during the Roman warm period, and warmer during the Medieval warm period.
The present “global warming” began 300 years ago, at the end of the long period of comparative solar inactivity called the Little Ice Age. Then, in parallel with the recovery of solar activity, temperatures worldwide began to climb. Solar activity peaked during the Grand Maximum of the last 70 years of the 20th century. For the past few years, however, solar activity has been in decline. Therefore, there has been no statistically-significant increase in global temperatures in a decade and a half.
Glikson: Mean global temperature has risen since the 18th century by about 0.8oC, plus about 0.5oC masked by the cooling effect of emitted sulphur aerosols. Following steep mean global warming by about 0.45oC from 1975 to 1997, a major El-Nino peak in 1998 drove mean global temperature upward by another 0.2oC. Following this peak temperature continued to rise by about 0.3oC from 1999 toward a peak in 2007, followed by a strong La-Nina phase which brought temperatures down by about 0.4oC. Currently temperatures are rising, heralding a new El-Nino phase (figure 1).
M of B: Akasofu (2008) finds that temperatures have risen by around 0.5 C/century during each of the past three centuries, in parallel with the warming over that period. During 280 of those 300 years, our own contribution to the warming must have been infinitesimal and not detectable by measurement. During the 20 years 1975-1995, we might in theory have caused some warming – except that the rate of warming during those years was no greater than the rate of warming from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, two periods during which our influence on temperature was negligible. So there is no, repeat no, anthropogenic effect on temperatures that is yet measurable.
Since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001, there has been a global cooling trend that is rapid and statistically-significant. Dr. Glikson has only been able to pretend that there was a rising trend over that period by taking as his endpoint the temperature peak caused by the prominent el Nino southern oscillation – a natural event – that occurred in 2007.
4. Why should a few degrees’ warming be a concern?
Glikson: As distinct from changes in the weather, which can vary sharply by tens of degrees over short periods, a medium to long term upward trend of mean global temperatures by several degrees Celsius results in progressive shift in climate zones from the tropics toward the poles. This ensues in drying of the mid-latitudes, such as southeast and southwest Australia, sea level rise (from about 1.1 mm/year early in the 20th century to about 3.7 mm/year at present), ocean acidification (pH reduced by about -0.1 points) and intensification of extreme weather events, including floods and fires.
M of B: In fact, the Clausius-Clapeyron relation – one of the few proven results in the slippery subject of climatology – mandates that, as the space occupied by the atmosphere warms, the atmosphere is capable of carrying near-exponentially more water vapor. This, in turn, should increase cloud cover and rainfall generally, though the spatial distribution will not necessarily be the same as it is today. As for ocean acidification, there has been no attempt at worldwide measurement of the acid-base balance (measured on a logarithmic scale of pH values): the figure mentioned by Dr. Glikson is merely a computer model’s projection. Nor is there any evidence for “intensification” of extreme-weather events – there has simply not been enough warming, particularly over the past 15 years, to cause any such thing.
Glikson: Human agriculture could only develop in river valleys from about 7000 years ago when the climate stabilized and a balance was achieved between mountain glaciers and the monsoons, allowing near-constant river flow and thereby irrigation. A rise in mean global temperature results in melting of mountain glaciers, such as in the Himalaya, disrupting the great rivers of south and southeast Asia and the cultivation on which the lives of hundreds of millions of people depends. Modern civilization depends on extensive cultivation of marginal semi-arid lands and of low river valleys and delta, which are vulnerable to temperature rise and sea level rise, respectively.
M of B: In fact, it is not Himalayan glacial meltwater that billions depend upon for their water supply: it is Eurasian snow-melt, which, according to the Rutgers University Snow & Ice Lab, shows no trend throughout the past 40 years. I have also consulted Professor M.I. Bhat of the Indian Geological Survey, who confirms that the pattern of glacial melt in the Himalayas is much as it always was: generally nothing unusual in the 150-200 years for which the Indian Government and its predecessor the British Raj maintained records. As usual, however, there has been local geological deformation in some places, leading to rapid recession of a few glaciers. Overall, though, Dr. Bhat finds that the health of the 9575 glaciers that debouch from the Himalayas into India are doing fine.
Glikson: There is a delicate balance between the physical and chemical state of the atmosphere-ocean-land system and natural habitats. This controls the emergence, survival and demise of species, including humans.
M of B: In fact, it is striking how many homoeostatic mechanisms seem to exist in the climate, maintaining it at a level capable of sustaining life from the Equator to the Poles. Many billions of years ago, for instance, one-third of the atmosphere of the Earth was CO2: yet no “runaway greenhouse effect” occurred. As noted above, in the Cambrian and Jurassic eras there was up to 20 times today’s CO2 concentration, and no harm done. CO2 is a harmless trace gas: these quite substantial alterations in its concentration have been insufficient to disturb the balance of nature.
5. How reliable is the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) and the information it provides?
Glikson: The IPCC assessment reports prepared by the IPCC are based on scientific contributions by many hundreds of the world’s most experienced and reputable scientists, employed by research institutions and universities. These contributions are based on both original research and on extensive reviews published in thousands of peer-reviewed papers in the scientific literature. The peer review system, where experts scrutinize scientific data and evidence, ensures accuracy of scientific data and consistency of interpretations of the data with the basic laws of physics and chemistry. This contrasts with unreferenced claims proliferating nowadays on the internet.
M of B: And here we go again with the argumenta ad populum and ad verecundiam – the head-count and reputation fallacies. Though peer review is the best system we have for evaluating the reliability of a scientific claim, in the present age editors and reviewers at scientific journals have the same financial vested interest in promoting the “global warming” scare as the scientists who write the papers they review and publish, and in suppressing or even ridiculing the views of their opponents. You will notice that many of the assertions I have made here, along with many of the documents at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org, are in fact referenced – i.e., we say which papers in the scientific literature we are relying upon. Now that the scientific journals are almost as bad as the mainstream media at allowing serious but counter-consensual science to be fairly presented, the internet is in some respects a natural outlet for scientists exasperated at the unfairness of their mistreatment by the established outlets for scientific publication. One has only to read the Climategate emails to realize that many of the scientists cited with approval by Dr. Glikson are part of the small, nasty, determined conspiracy that has – as the emails bear witness, bullied, menaced, threatened and interfered with journal editors and reviewers, and even tampered with the process of the UN’s climate panel itself.
The comprehensive IPCC reports constitute the most advanced, multiply verified, compilations of climate science available. If any criticism can be aimed at the IPCC reviews, it is that in some respects they underestimated the magnitude and pace of ice melt and sea level rise observed since 2005, which are at the upper end or exceed the more serious IPCC projections.
In 1990, the First Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, was published. That report produced wildly-exaggerated projections of future temperature increase, based on the inaccurate and artfully-manipulated graphs of James Hansen, whom we mentioned earlier. How do we know the projections were exaggerated? Because almost two decades have passed since then, and the rate of temperature increase that we have actually measured is very considerably below the rate projected in that first report. It may be that this embarrassing failure of prediction is the main reason why the UN’s first and second quinquennial assessment reports are not available online.
In 1995, the scientists’ final draft of the Second Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel stated plainly, on five separate occasions, that no human effect on global temperatures was discernible, and that it could not be predicted when any such effect might become discernible. The UN’s bureaucracy found this conclusion unacceptable, because – among other things – it would have put them all out of work, for the climate panel would have been closed down. So the bureaucrats invited a single scientist – one of those active as a Climategate emailer – to rewrite the draft. All five of the passages I have mentioned were deleted; hundreds of consequential amendments were made; and the new draft contained a statement that a human influence on the climate was now discernible. This was the complete opposite of what the scientists had said. Yet this version – written by one man – was the version that was published, and his conclusion, directly contrary to that of the scientists who had signed off the previous final version of the 1995 report, has been the official line ever since. So, whenever anyone tells you the IPCC’s chief conclusion – that humans are affecting the climate appreciably – is the view of a “consensus”, remember that the “consensus” consisted originally of just one man.
In the 2001 Third Assessment Report, the headline graph – reproduced six times, large, and in full color, the only graph to be so favored – purported artificially to abolish the medieval warm period, on the basis of what was subsequently exposed in the peer-reviewed literature as a series of statistical abuses and downright frauds. Once again, the UN’s report did not represent the “consensus”. For, in the past 25 years, more than 770 scientists from more than 450 institutions in more than 40 countries have contributed to papers providing evidence by a variety of methods that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present. That is the consensus, but the UN’s report decided – on the basis of bogus evidence – to override it, while still claiming to represent “consensus”.
In the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, the headline graph – reproduced three times, large, and in full color, the only graph to be so favored – purported artificially to demonstrate that the rate at which the world has been warming has been accelerating over the past 150 years, with the fastest rate being observed over the past 25 years. This graph, too, is bogus, since it relies upon a known and serious statistical abuse called the “endpoint fallacy”: the artful choice of startpoints or endpoints for a multiplicity of linear-regression trends on the same stochastic dataset, which allows the dishonest scientist to demonstrate any desired change in the direction in which the data appear to be tending, or in the rate of change. The truth is that the warming rate of the 23 years 1975-1998, even though it culminated at the peak of a Great El Nino, an oceanic release of massive amounts of heat-energy to the atmosphere that occurs less than once a century, was no greater than the warming rate observed from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, so that there is known to be no anthropogenic signal at all in the global temperature data. That is the truth, but the UN decided to use a cheap statistical fraud to pretend otherwise.
The 2009 update on climate science by the UN Environment Program, one of the two co-founders of the UN’s climate panel, made a clumsy and dishonest attempt to revive the long-dead graph purporting to abolish the medieval warm period. To do so, however, the UN lifted the graph from the pages of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that any idiot can edit but only a cretin would credit. Wikipedia is the most unreliable data source in the world, particularly on “global warming”, where its “editors” allow only one point of view – far more extreme even than the UN’s climate panel – to prevail. It is most certainly not a scientific or peer-reviewed source: yet that is the source to which the UN turned to get its science from. Within days, thanks to the Internet (for no science journal or mainstream news medium would lift a finger), the UN was humiliated into being forced to alter the published document online, removing the bogus graph.
For these and many, many other reasons, the documents of the UN’s climate panel are not acceptable as the basis for any scientific conclusion whatsoever, except the conclusion that the entire process is prone to dishonesty. You will notice, of course, that all of the dishonesties I have outlined in successive UN reports have pointed in one direction and in one direction only – towards creating a climatic problem where there is none, and then exaggerating it beyond all reason.
Dr. Glikson says that the IPCC’s reports, including the most recent full report in 2007, underestimated the future rate of ice-melt and of sea-level rise. Let us consider each in turn.
Ice-melt: In the summer of 2007 some 27% of the sea ice that normally covers the Arctic Ocean at the annual sea-ice minimum in mid-September was not there. No one had predicted this sudden loss of ice. However, three weeks later, in early October 2007, the Antarctic sea-ice reached an equally-unpredicted maximum. Therefore, whatever caused the very temporary loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it was not “global warming”, or the Antarctic sea ice (which has actually been growing steadily for 30 years) would not have reached a 30-year maximum just after the moment when the Arctic sea ice reached a 30-year minimum. Indeed, a paper by NASA scientists the following year said that unusually warm winds and currents from the tropics had caused the sudden ice-melt: it had very little to do with “global warming”.
And what has happened since 2007? By 2008, half of the missing ice had returned at the summer minimum, and by 2009 very nearly all of it was back.
This year the British Antarctic Survey produced a paper saying that so much grounded ice had melted in West Antarctica over the previous four or five years that sea-level rise was inevitable. At the Copenhagen climate conference, which was taking place as we wrote this document, Al Gore (after Wikipedia, the second-most-untrustworthy source of information about the climate) was publishing a report about the loss of ice in the Arctic and worldwide, with the enthusiastic backing of some of Europe’s silliest ministers and some of the United States’ most dishonest scientists.
What, then, is the truth? It is this. Though the British Antarctic Survey found that there had been a massive loss of Antarctic ground ice in the past four years, and though a Danish scientist at Al Gore’s ludicrous presentation said that there had been gigatons of accelerating ice-melt in Greenland (the only source of land-based ice in the Arctic) over the past two or three years, sea level worldwide has not risen for four years.
My question – if I had been allowed to ask it – would have been this. If all that ice had really and truly melted, where did the water go? Is this a stupid question? No. The UN’s claim is that if significant amounts of land-based or grounded ice in Greenland and Antarctica were to melt then sea level would have to rise. But it has not risen.
Could the water have evaporated into the atmosphere, causing an increase in what is called column absolute humidity? Well, this quantity – effectively, the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere – is notoriously difficult to measure, because, although the UN’s computer models treat water vapour as though it were a well-mixed greenhouse gas, occurring at the same concentration throughout the atmosphere, water vapour does not behave in this way at all. Getting a reliable measure of column absolute humidity, averaged worldwide, is still beyond our capacity – and, indeed, this is one of the numerous reasons why the output of the computer models on which the UN’s case for alarm entirely relies is – well – unreliable.
However, we can establish by theoretical means, more or less exactly, how much and in what direction the absolute column humidity has changed. And, as it happens, we do not have to do a careful calculation, because there is a well-established relationship between atmospheric temperature and absolute column humidity. By the Clausius-Clapeyron relation – one of the very few proven results in climatological physics – as the space occupied by the atmosphere warms, it can carry near-exponentially more water vapour. However, during the four years since 2005, when poor rich Gore made his now-discredited sci-fi comedy horror movie about the climate, global temperatures have fallen very rapidly. You will not have seen this fact reported in most of the mainstream news media, but it is nonetheless true.
Therefore, today there is very likely to be less water vapour in the atmosphere than there was four years ago. So the supposedly-melted ice cannot have evaporated into the atmosphere.
Of course, the vast bulk of the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets have been accumulating ice – contrary to reports that say otherwise – for many years. For instance, Johannessen et al. (2005) record that during each of the 11 years 1993-2003 the mean thickness of the entire Greenland ice sheet grew by 0.05m (2 inches) per year. Could the supposedly melted ice have ended up back on the top of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
The scientists at the Al Gore meeting in Copenhagen said No. They said that Greenland and even Antarctica were losing ice mass. So we are still left with the mystery of where all that ice went.
There remains one more possibility. The rapid atmospheric cooling of the past four years may perhaps have caused thermosteric contraction of the oceans, a process by which as water cools it occupies less volume, and vice versa. This thermosteric contraction may have compensated for the extra ice-melt, so that as soon as warming resumes the sea level will begin to rise rapidly.
Don’t hold your breath. The 3300 ARGO bathythermograph buoys deployed throughout the world’s oceans do show a little net cooling during the six years of their operation, but the cooling is not enough to cause much in the way of thermosteric contraction. And, of course, everyone at the Copenhagen conference has been doing his or her best not to mention the rapid cooling of the atmosphere and the cooling of the oceans over recent years.
There is nowhere else for all those billions of tons of ice to go. Provisionally, I conclude that the loss of ice from Greenland and the Antarctic that the scientists are pretending to have observed is fictional. The ice is where it has long been, and yet another scare is shown to be false. Therefore, there is no basis whatsoever for Dr. Glikson’s assertion either that ice loss has accelerated beyond what was predicted or that sea level is rising faster than predicted. It is not rising at all.
6. Does an increase in carbon dioxide make any difference?
Glikson: Carbon dioxide levels are already at 388 ppm and, combined with the effects of methane, are equivalent to 460 ppm CO2. This level is dangerously close to the upper stability limit of about 500 ppm of the Antarctic ice sheet, signifying a shift in the state of the atmosphere from glacial-interglacial conditions to greenhouse conditions, with serious consequences evidenced by current trends in the climate system. An increase in ice melt rates of the west Antarctica ice sheet and to a somewhat lesser extent the east Antarctica ice sheet is reported by the British Antarctic Survey and the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, International Council for Science.
M of B: As we have already demonstrated, methane is a bit-part player because there is so very little of it in the atmosphere. Make it 388 ppmv for CO2 and 12 ppmv for methane: total 400 ppmv. At today’s rates of emission, around 2 ppmv CO2/year, that gives us half a century before we reach Dr. Glikson’s ceiling of 500 ppmv, which is in any event entirely arbitrary. For very nearly all of the past 600 million years, CO2 concentration has been well over 1000 ppmv – twice Dr. Glikson’s “danger level”.
We have already dealt with the British Antarctic Survey’s implausible finding as to the imagined – and probably imaginary – loss of ice from the West Antarctic ice sheet. There is certainly no basis in science for the proposition that after 15 years without statistically-significant “global warming” the planet is now approaching a dangerous “tipping-point”, as Dr. Glikson is here implying. In fact, it was proven by Edward Lorenz in 1963 that we can never predict the onset, timing, duration, extent, or magnitude of any phase-transition or bifurcation in the evolution of the mathematically-chaotic climate object.
We conclude that Dr. Glikson’s note is inaccurate, misleading, and relentless prejudiced in one direction only – inventing a problem where there is none, and then magnifying it. That is not science: it is politics.
December 16, 2009
Andrew Glikson of the Australian National University at Canberra talks with Lord Monckton.
1. Are human activities contributing to climate change? How do we know the atmosphere build up of greenhouse gases is due to human activity?
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Glikson: Since the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century, combustion of fossil fuel resulted in the emission of more than 320 billion tons of carbon in the form of CO2. This is more than half the pre-industrial carbon content of the atmosphere of 590 billion tons. About 200 billion tons stayed in the atmosphere, raising CO2 concentration from 280 parts per million (ppm) to the current level of 388 ppm.
M of B: So CO2 occupies one part in ten thousand more of the atmosphere than it did 250 years ago. If we do not reduce our emissions, it will occupy one part in 2000 more in another 100 years. The warming effect of each additional molecule of CO2 is less than that of its predecessor. The CO2 that is already in the atmosphere is causing very nearly all of the warming that CO2 can cause. Even if – per impossibile – the IPCC’s wildly-exaggerated central estimate of the warming effect of CO2 were correct, we are only adding 2 ppmv/year to CO2 concentration, so that shutting down the entire global economy for a year would forestall just 4.7 ln (390/388) = 0.024 C of warming. At today’s emissions rate, we’d need to go on doing that for 41 years to forestall just 1 C of warming.
Glikson: When the effects of the gas methane (CH4) are included in the total greenhouse effect, the total rise of greenhouse gases is equivalent to 460 ppm CO2.
M of B: Methane occupies just two-thirds of a part per million of the atmosphere, and its radiative effect is 23 times that of CO2, so its entire existing concentration has a warming effect equivalent to that of just 14 ppmv of CO2, of which not more than 4 ppmv is attributable to humankind – so, in effect, we have added 108 + 4 = 112 ppmv CO2 to the pre-existing 278 ppmv, making around 400 ppmv CO2 equivalent, not 460 ppmv.
Glikson: Consistent with the basic laws of physics and chemistry, experimental evidence and direct observations in nature, greenhouse gases, including water vapour [H2O], carbon dioxide [CO2], methane [CH4], nitrous oxide [N2O], and ozone [O3] possess heat-trapping and heat-emitting capacity.
M of B: The effect of all greenhouse gases except water vapour and carbon dioxide is so small that it may be left out of account without significant error.
Glikson: This characteristic arises from the translation of heat into kinetic energy (internal vibration of gas molecules) and, conversely, of kinetic energy to heat. The concentration of greenhouse molecules in the atmosphere thus acts as a ‘warm blanket’ without which the mean temperature of the Earth surface would have been about 30oC lower than the present mean level of about 14oC.
In fact, one must also allow for the reduction in the Earth’s albedo (its propensity to reflect sunlight harmlessly straight back to space) from 0.30 to 0.16 in the absence of clouds. Therefore the Earth’s surface today is not 30 C° warmer but just 20 C° warmer than it was when there was no atmosphere.
2. How reliable are predictions of future climate?
Glikson: Rapid climate change is happening in the present time, as manifested by polar ice melt, sea level rise, prolonged droughts in Australia, China, Argentina and the US, extreme weather events and acidification of the oceans.
M of B: The climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years, ever since the planet first came into existence. The question is whether the changes in today’s climate are beyond its natural variability. The answer, in each of the instances of “rapid climate change” mentioned by Dr. Glikson, is No.
Polar ice melt: Ice has been accumulating in Greenland (at a rate of 2 inches a year, averaged across the entire ice sheet) for 11 years (Johannessen et al., 2005). Antarctic has cooled throughout the period of the satellite record, though a single paper (Stieg et al., 2009) has unsuccessfully tried to argue otherwise, by inventing data that were not actually measured. In fact, the extent of sea ice around Antarctica has grown steadily throughout the satellite record, and reached a 30-year maximum in October 2007, just three weeks after the Arctic sea-ice extent had reached a 30-year minimum. Overall, there has been virtually no trend in global sea-ice extent in 30 years.
Sea-level rise: Ever since satellites began measuring sea-level rise by altimetry against a reference geoid in 1993, sea level has been rising at a mean rate of just 1 ft (0.3 m) per century, very similar to the 8 inches/century observed by tide-gauges in the 20th century. Indeed, even the tiny increase from 8 to 12 inches (0.2 to 0.3 m) per century is probably an artefact of the change in measuring systems rather than a consequence of “global warming”. Prof. Niklas Moerner, who has written 530 papers in the scientific literature, many of them on sea-level rise, says he expects sea level to rise by just 4 inches (10 cm) this century. In the past four years, sea level has not risen at all.
Droughts in Australia, China, Argentina, and the US: The pattern of droughts has shown no overall increase worldwide. Droughts have always occurred in human history, wiping out civilizations from South America and Africa to India and China. They are not new. Australia has a desert climate and has long been affected by droughts. In the US, the worst drought in recent times was in the 1920s and 1930s in the Great Plains, which John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath powerfully describes.
Extreme-weather events: The UN’s climate panel explicitly gives warnings against attributing extreme-weather events of any kind to anthropogenic “global warming”. For instance, the number of hurricanes making landfall in the US has not risen in 150 years. And it is settled science that a warmer planet would also be a calmer planet, weather-wise, because it is the absolute difference between extremes of temperature that causes storms, and warmer weather reduces this difference, consequently diminishing the power of storms. I am grateful to Professor Richard Lindzen for explaining this.
Acidification of the oceans: This is the fall-back position of those who are desperate to maintain that CO2 is bad for us, now that it is clear that “global warming” at the extreme rate predicted by the UN’s climate panel is not occurring and is not going to occur. Professor Ian Plimer of the University of Adelaide says that because the oceans rub up against trillions of square miles of rock they will always be – as they have always been – alkaline. In the Cambrian era, 550 million years ago, the alkalinity of the oceans was much as it is today, even though CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was 2o times today’s level. It was in that era that the calcite corals originated: they could not have done so if the oceans had been acid. Likewise, the delicate aragonite corals evolved in the Jurassic era, 175 million years ago, when CO2 concentration was again close to 20 times today’s. Calcium ranks only seventh among the substances in the ocean that could in theory acidify it: however, it is present in such small quantities that it cannot make a difference. Indeed, even if all of the CO2 we emit this century were to end up immediately in the oceans (in which case it would not cause any “global warming” at all), the CO2 already in the oceans, where there is 70 times as much of it as there is in the atmosphere, would increase by little more than 1%. The idea that so small an increase in concentration could possibly cause any measurable acidification is simply nonsense.
Glikson: The world’s major climate science research organizations (Hadley Met Office, NASA/GISS, Colorado NSIDC, Tyndall Climate Centre, Potsdam Climate Impact Institute, CSIRO, BOM) and university-based climate scientists have projected the current trends since the 1980s, including pioneering authorities such as Professor James Hansen and his group (NASA), Professor Wally Broecker (Columbia University), Professor Joachim Schellnhuber and Professor Stephan Rahmstorf (Potsdam), Dr Barrie Pittock, Dr Graeme Pearman and Dr Ian Enting (former CSIRO climate scientists).
M of B: Many of these organizations are deeply implicated in the Climategate scandal. The emails between them have demonstrated a systematic, self-serving, ruthless readiness to invent, fabricate, distort, alter, suppress, hide, conceal or even destroy scientific data for the sake of reaching the answer they want. That is not how science is done. James Hansen is not a professor, and his forecast in 1988 of how fast global temperatures would rise is “pioneering” only in the sense that it has proven to be a ludicrous and fanciful exaggeration, a technique that other scientists have copied with profitable alacrity. Many of the other scientists named by Dr. Glikson have a reputation for bending science to suit their political stance: and the sheer nastiness of most of them can be gauged from reading the Climategate emails.
In any event, science is not done by consensus, nor by reputation. The “consensus” argument, known as the argumentum ad populum or head-count fallacy, is one of the dozen ancient and by now well-worn logical fallacies first codified by Aristotle. The “reputation” fallacy is the argumentum ad verecundiam. Neither of these fallacious arguments is acceptable. All of the scientists mentioned by Dr. Glikson are funded by taxpayers, as is Dr. Glikson himself. All of them, therefore, have a direct, financial vested interest in promoting and maintaining the “global warming” scare, which has panicked scientifically-illiterate politicians into throwing billions of wasted dollars at the scientists to make their scare go away. It is not necessary to allege that each of those named has fallen prey to the temptation to enrich himself at our expense by banging the drum for “global warming: it is necessary only to establish that motives of this kind exist and that, therefore, mere numbers or mere reputation are not enough to establish a scientific case. Aristotle was right.
Glikson: The atmospheric energy rise exerted by the well-mixed greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 and methane, is consistent with the basic laws of physics and chemistry and with calculations and observations in nature and the laboratory.
M of B: Unfortunately for Dr. Glikson, the direct warming effect of CO2 is only one-third of the warming predicted by the UN. Even this direct effect is problematic, in that it is simply not possible to simulate the entire 20-mile vertical atmospheric column in the laboratory. At low altitudes, for instance, the principal absorption band of CO2 is already almost saturated, allowing very little opportunity for further warming. At higher altitudes, the atmosphere is not dense enough. Methane, as we have already shown, is simply irrelevant, and would remain so even if we were to quintuple its atmospheric concentration.
However, the UN multiplies the direct warming effect of CO2 by 3 to allow for what are known as “temperature feedbacks” – changes in global temperature that occur purely because temperature has already changed. Not one of these feedbacks can be directly measured, and the UN is unable to assign any “level of scientific understanding” to them, because our understanding of them is negligible. Notwithstanding our very low understanding of temperature feedbacks, the UN has somehow decided – on no credible evidence at all – that it should be allowed to triple the direct warming effect of CO2 to take account of them. Yet it is clear from numerous studies that the UN has prodigiously exaggerated the biggest two positive feedbacks – that from water vapor and that from cloud albedo. Most climate-sensitivity studies – those which quantify the amount of warming to be expected from a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration – now find that the UN has exaggerated CO2’s warming effect between threefold and sixfold.
Glikson: Measurements of solar radiation and cosmic rays rule out these factors as drivers of climate change since the mid-20th century.
M of B: Once again, Dr. Glikson is not abreast of the latest research. Though the relatively small changes in solar irradiance between the maxima and minima of the solar activity cycle are in themselves too small to make much difference, it has long been observed that weather on Earth changes markedly in parallel with these cycles. Professor Henrik Svensmark has performed detailed experiments and calculations, in collaboration with scientists from all around the world, so as to demonstrate that it is changes in the magnetic activity of the Sun that alter the quantity of cosmic rays entering our atmosphere and serving as nuclei for the formation of cloud droplets. His theory is extremely unpopular with scientists making their fortunes from the “global warming” scare, because on both very long and very short timescales he has been able to demonstrate the correlation between solar activity, cosmic-ray deflection and variations in cloud nucleation. The Sun cannot safely be dismissed as the main driver of today’s changes in the Earth’s climate. Scafetta and West (2008), for instance, attribute two-thirds of the “global warming” of the past half century to the Sun.
3. Are temperatures rising?
Glikson: While decade-long climate trends manifest global warming, superposition by the El Nino – La-Nina (ENSO) cycle and the 11 years-long sunspot cycle results in a zigzag upward trend of global temperatures. As the globe warms and the energy levels of the atmosphere increase, short term climate variability is increasing.
M of B: Here are the facts. It was around 7 C warmer than the present throughout most of the past 600 million years, warmer by up to 6 C during each of the last half dozen interglacial warm periods over the past 850,000 years (there was no ice on Greenland that far back), warmer during 7500 of the last 11,400 years, warmer during the Holocene climate maximum 7500 years ago, warmer during the Minoan warm period, warmer during the Roman warm period, and warmer during the Medieval warm period.
The present “global warming” began 300 years ago, at the end of the long period of comparative solar inactivity called the Little Ice Age. Then, in parallel with the recovery of solar activity, temperatures worldwide began to climb. Solar activity peaked during the Grand Maximum of the last 70 years of the 20th century. For the past few years, however, solar activity has been in decline. Therefore, there has been no statistically-significant increase in global temperatures in a decade and a half.
Glikson: Mean global temperature has risen since the 18th century by about 0.8oC, plus about 0.5oC masked by the cooling effect of emitted sulphur aerosols. Following steep mean global warming by about 0.45oC from 1975 to 1997, a major El-Nino peak in 1998 drove mean global temperature upward by another 0.2oC. Following this peak temperature continued to rise by about 0.3oC from 1999 toward a peak in 2007, followed by a strong La-Nina phase which brought temperatures down by about 0.4oC. Currently temperatures are rising, heralding a new El-Nino phase (figure 1).
M of B: Akasofu (2008) finds that temperatures have risen by around 0.5 C/century during each of the past three centuries, in parallel with the warming over that period. During 280 of those 300 years, our own contribution to the warming must have been infinitesimal and not detectable by measurement. During the 20 years 1975-1995, we might in theory have caused some warming – except that the rate of warming during those years was no greater than the rate of warming from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, two periods during which our influence on temperature was negligible. So there is no, repeat no, anthropogenic effect on temperatures that is yet measurable.
Since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001, there has been a global cooling trend that is rapid and statistically-significant. Dr. Glikson has only been able to pretend that there was a rising trend over that period by taking as his endpoint the temperature peak caused by the prominent el Nino southern oscillation – a natural event – that occurred in 2007.
4. Why should a few degrees’ warming be a concern?
Glikson: As distinct from changes in the weather, which can vary sharply by tens of degrees over short periods, a medium to long term upward trend of mean global temperatures by several degrees Celsius results in progressive shift in climate zones from the tropics toward the poles. This ensues in drying of the mid-latitudes, such as southeast and southwest Australia, sea level rise (from about 1.1 mm/year early in the 20th century to about 3.7 mm/year at present), ocean acidification (pH reduced by about -0.1 points) and intensification of extreme weather events, including floods and fires.
M of B: In fact, the Clausius-Clapeyron relation – one of the few proven results in the slippery subject of climatology – mandates that, as the space occupied by the atmosphere warms, the atmosphere is capable of carrying near-exponentially more water vapor. This, in turn, should increase cloud cover and rainfall generally, though the spatial distribution will not necessarily be the same as it is today. As for ocean acidification, there has been no attempt at worldwide measurement of the acid-base balance (measured on a logarithmic scale of pH values): the figure mentioned by Dr. Glikson is merely a computer model’s projection. Nor is there any evidence for “intensification” of extreme-weather events – there has simply not been enough warming, particularly over the past 15 years, to cause any such thing.
Glikson: Human agriculture could only develop in river valleys from about 7000 years ago when the climate stabilized and a balance was achieved between mountain glaciers and the monsoons, allowing near-constant river flow and thereby irrigation. A rise in mean global temperature results in melting of mountain glaciers, such as in the Himalaya, disrupting the great rivers of south and southeast Asia and the cultivation on which the lives of hundreds of millions of people depends. Modern civilization depends on extensive cultivation of marginal semi-arid lands and of low river valleys and delta, which are vulnerable to temperature rise and sea level rise, respectively.
M of B: In fact, it is not Himalayan glacial meltwater that billions depend upon for their water supply: it is Eurasian snow-melt, which, according to the Rutgers University Snow & Ice Lab, shows no trend throughout the past 40 years. I have also consulted Professor M.I. Bhat of the Indian Geological Survey, who confirms that the pattern of glacial melt in the Himalayas is much as it always was: generally nothing unusual in the 150-200 years for which the Indian Government and its predecessor the British Raj maintained records. As usual, however, there has been local geological deformation in some places, leading to rapid recession of a few glaciers. Overall, though, Dr. Bhat finds that the health of the 9575 glaciers that debouch from the Himalayas into India are doing fine.
Glikson: There is a delicate balance between the physical and chemical state of the atmosphere-ocean-land system and natural habitats. This controls the emergence, survival and demise of species, including humans.
M of B: In fact, it is striking how many homoeostatic mechanisms seem to exist in the climate, maintaining it at a level capable of sustaining life from the Equator to the Poles. Many billions of years ago, for instance, one-third of the atmosphere of the Earth was CO2: yet no “runaway greenhouse effect” occurred. As noted above, in the Cambrian and Jurassic eras there was up to 20 times today’s CO2 concentration, and no harm done. CO2 is a harmless trace gas: these quite substantial alterations in its concentration have been insufficient to disturb the balance of nature.
5. How reliable is the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) and the information it provides?
Glikson: The IPCC assessment reports prepared by the IPCC are based on scientific contributions by many hundreds of the world’s most experienced and reputable scientists, employed by research institutions and universities. These contributions are based on both original research and on extensive reviews published in thousands of peer-reviewed papers in the scientific literature. The peer review system, where experts scrutinize scientific data and evidence, ensures accuracy of scientific data and consistency of interpretations of the data with the basic laws of physics and chemistry. This contrasts with unreferenced claims proliferating nowadays on the internet.
M of B: And here we go again with the argumenta ad populum and ad verecundiam – the head-count and reputation fallacies. Though peer review is the best system we have for evaluating the reliability of a scientific claim, in the present age editors and reviewers at scientific journals have the same financial vested interest in promoting the “global warming” scare as the scientists who write the papers they review and publish, and in suppressing or even ridiculing the views of their opponents. You will notice that many of the assertions I have made here, along with many of the documents at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org, are in fact referenced – i.e., we say which papers in the scientific literature we are relying upon. Now that the scientific journals are almost as bad as the mainstream media at allowing serious but counter-consensual science to be fairly presented, the internet is in some respects a natural outlet for scientists exasperated at the unfairness of their mistreatment by the established outlets for scientific publication. One has only to read the Climategate emails to realize that many of the scientists cited with approval by Dr. Glikson are part of the small, nasty, determined conspiracy that has – as the emails bear witness, bullied, menaced, threatened and interfered with journal editors and reviewers, and even tampered with the process of the UN’s climate panel itself.
The comprehensive IPCC reports constitute the most advanced, multiply verified, compilations of climate science available. If any criticism can be aimed at the IPCC reviews, it is that in some respects they underestimated the magnitude and pace of ice melt and sea level rise observed since 2005, which are at the upper end or exceed the more serious IPCC projections.
In 1990, the First Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, was published. That report produced wildly-exaggerated projections of future temperature increase, based on the inaccurate and artfully-manipulated graphs of James Hansen, whom we mentioned earlier. How do we know the projections were exaggerated? Because almost two decades have passed since then, and the rate of temperature increase that we have actually measured is very considerably below the rate projected in that first report. It may be that this embarrassing failure of prediction is the main reason why the UN’s first and second quinquennial assessment reports are not available online.
In 1995, the scientists’ final draft of the Second Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel stated plainly, on five separate occasions, that no human effect on global temperatures was discernible, and that it could not be predicted when any such effect might become discernible. The UN’s bureaucracy found this conclusion unacceptable, because – among other things – it would have put them all out of work, for the climate panel would have been closed down. So the bureaucrats invited a single scientist – one of those active as a Climategate emailer – to rewrite the draft. All five of the passages I have mentioned were deleted; hundreds of consequential amendments were made; and the new draft contained a statement that a human influence on the climate was now discernible. This was the complete opposite of what the scientists had said. Yet this version – written by one man – was the version that was published, and his conclusion, directly contrary to that of the scientists who had signed off the previous final version of the 1995 report, has been the official line ever since. So, whenever anyone tells you the IPCC’s chief conclusion – that humans are affecting the climate appreciably – is the view of a “consensus”, remember that the “consensus” consisted originally of just one man.
In the 2001 Third Assessment Report, the headline graph – reproduced six times, large, and in full color, the only graph to be so favored – purported artificially to abolish the medieval warm period, on the basis of what was subsequently exposed in the peer-reviewed literature as a series of statistical abuses and downright frauds. Once again, the UN’s report did not represent the “consensus”. For, in the past 25 years, more than 770 scientists from more than 450 institutions in more than 40 countries have contributed to papers providing evidence by a variety of methods that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present. That is the consensus, but the UN’s report decided – on the basis of bogus evidence – to override it, while still claiming to represent “consensus”.
In the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, the headline graph – reproduced three times, large, and in full color, the only graph to be so favored – purported artificially to demonstrate that the rate at which the world has been warming has been accelerating over the past 150 years, with the fastest rate being observed over the past 25 years. This graph, too, is bogus, since it relies upon a known and serious statistical abuse called the “endpoint fallacy”: the artful choice of startpoints or endpoints for a multiplicity of linear-regression trends on the same stochastic dataset, which allows the dishonest scientist to demonstrate any desired change in the direction in which the data appear to be tending, or in the rate of change. The truth is that the warming rate of the 23 years 1975-1998, even though it culminated at the peak of a Great El Nino, an oceanic release of massive amounts of heat-energy to the atmosphere that occurs less than once a century, was no greater than the warming rate observed from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, so that there is known to be no anthropogenic signal at all in the global temperature data. That is the truth, but the UN decided to use a cheap statistical fraud to pretend otherwise.
The 2009 update on climate science by the UN Environment Program, one of the two co-founders of the UN’s climate panel, made a clumsy and dishonest attempt to revive the long-dead graph purporting to abolish the medieval warm period. To do so, however, the UN lifted the graph from the pages of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that any idiot can edit but only a cretin would credit. Wikipedia is the most unreliable data source in the world, particularly on “global warming”, where its “editors” allow only one point of view – far more extreme even than the UN’s climate panel – to prevail. It is most certainly not a scientific or peer-reviewed source: yet that is the source to which the UN turned to get its science from. Within days, thanks to the Internet (for no science journal or mainstream news medium would lift a finger), the UN was humiliated into being forced to alter the published document online, removing the bogus graph.
For these and many, many other reasons, the documents of the UN’s climate panel are not acceptable as the basis for any scientific conclusion whatsoever, except the conclusion that the entire process is prone to dishonesty. You will notice, of course, that all of the dishonesties I have outlined in successive UN reports have pointed in one direction and in one direction only – towards creating a climatic problem where there is none, and then exaggerating it beyond all reason.
Dr. Glikson says that the IPCC’s reports, including the most recent full report in 2007, underestimated the future rate of ice-melt and of sea-level rise. Let us consider each in turn.
Ice-melt: In the summer of 2007 some 27% of the sea ice that normally covers the Arctic Ocean at the annual sea-ice minimum in mid-September was not there. No one had predicted this sudden loss of ice. However, three weeks later, in early October 2007, the Antarctic sea-ice reached an equally-unpredicted maximum. Therefore, whatever caused the very temporary loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it was not “global warming”, or the Antarctic sea ice (which has actually been growing steadily for 30 years) would not have reached a 30-year maximum just after the moment when the Arctic sea ice reached a 30-year minimum. Indeed, a paper by NASA scientists the following year said that unusually warm winds and currents from the tropics had caused the sudden ice-melt: it had very little to do with “global warming”.
And what has happened since 2007? By 2008, half of the missing ice had returned at the summer minimum, and by 2009 very nearly all of it was back.
This year the British Antarctic Survey produced a paper saying that so much grounded ice had melted in West Antarctica over the previous four or five years that sea-level rise was inevitable. At the Copenhagen climate conference, which was taking place as we wrote this document, Al Gore (after Wikipedia, the second-most-untrustworthy source of information about the climate) was publishing a report about the loss of ice in the Arctic and worldwide, with the enthusiastic backing of some of Europe’s silliest ministers and some of the United States’ most dishonest scientists.
What, then, is the truth? It is this. Though the British Antarctic Survey found that there had been a massive loss of Antarctic ground ice in the past four years, and though a Danish scientist at Al Gore’s ludicrous presentation said that there had been gigatons of accelerating ice-melt in Greenland (the only source of land-based ice in the Arctic) over the past two or three years, sea level worldwide has not risen for four years.
My question – if I had been allowed to ask it – would have been this. If all that ice had really and truly melted, where did the water go? Is this a stupid question? No. The UN’s claim is that if significant amounts of land-based or grounded ice in Greenland and Antarctica were to melt then sea level would have to rise. But it has not risen.
Could the water have evaporated into the atmosphere, causing an increase in what is called column absolute humidity? Well, this quantity – effectively, the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere – is notoriously difficult to measure, because, although the UN’s computer models treat water vapour as though it were a well-mixed greenhouse gas, occurring at the same concentration throughout the atmosphere, water vapour does not behave in this way at all. Getting a reliable measure of column absolute humidity, averaged worldwide, is still beyond our capacity – and, indeed, this is one of the numerous reasons why the output of the computer models on which the UN’s case for alarm entirely relies is – well – unreliable.
However, we can establish by theoretical means, more or less exactly, how much and in what direction the absolute column humidity has changed. And, as it happens, we do not have to do a careful calculation, because there is a well-established relationship between atmospheric temperature and absolute column humidity. By the Clausius-Clapeyron relation – one of the very few proven results in climatological physics – as the space occupied by the atmosphere warms, it can carry near-exponentially more water vapour. However, during the four years since 2005, when poor rich Gore made his now-discredited sci-fi comedy horror movie about the climate, global temperatures have fallen very rapidly. You will not have seen this fact reported in most of the mainstream news media, but it is nonetheless true.
Therefore, today there is very likely to be less water vapour in the atmosphere than there was four years ago. So the supposedly-melted ice cannot have evaporated into the atmosphere.
Of course, the vast bulk of the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets have been accumulating ice – contrary to reports that say otherwise – for many years. For instance, Johannessen et al. (2005) record that during each of the 11 years 1993-2003 the mean thickness of the entire Greenland ice sheet grew by 0.05m (2 inches) per year. Could the supposedly melted ice have ended up back on the top of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
The scientists at the Al Gore meeting in Copenhagen said No. They said that Greenland and even Antarctica were losing ice mass. So we are still left with the mystery of where all that ice went.
There remains one more possibility. The rapid atmospheric cooling of the past four years may perhaps have caused thermosteric contraction of the oceans, a process by which as water cools it occupies less volume, and vice versa. This thermosteric contraction may have compensated for the extra ice-melt, so that as soon as warming resumes the sea level will begin to rise rapidly.
Don’t hold your breath. The 3300 ARGO bathythermograph buoys deployed throughout the world’s oceans do show a little net cooling during the six years of their operation, but the cooling is not enough to cause much in the way of thermosteric contraction. And, of course, everyone at the Copenhagen conference has been doing his or her best not to mention the rapid cooling of the atmosphere and the cooling of the oceans over recent years.
There is nowhere else for all those billions of tons of ice to go. Provisionally, I conclude that the loss of ice from Greenland and the Antarctic that the scientists are pretending to have observed is fictional. The ice is where it has long been, and yet another scare is shown to be false. Therefore, there is no basis whatsoever for Dr. Glikson’s assertion either that ice loss has accelerated beyond what was predicted or that sea level is rising faster than predicted. It is not rising at all.
6. Does an increase in carbon dioxide make any difference?
Glikson: Carbon dioxide levels are already at 388 ppm and, combined with the effects of methane, are equivalent to 460 ppm CO2. This level is dangerously close to the upper stability limit of about 500 ppm of the Antarctic ice sheet, signifying a shift in the state of the atmosphere from glacial-interglacial conditions to greenhouse conditions, with serious consequences evidenced by current trends in the climate system. An increase in ice melt rates of the west Antarctica ice sheet and to a somewhat lesser extent the east Antarctica ice sheet is reported by the British Antarctic Survey and the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, International Council for Science.
M of B: As we have already demonstrated, methane is a bit-part player because there is so very little of it in the atmosphere. Make it 388 ppmv for CO2 and 12 ppmv for methane: total 400 ppmv. At today’s rates of emission, around 2 ppmv CO2/year, that gives us half a century before we reach Dr. Glikson’s ceiling of 500 ppmv, which is in any event entirely arbitrary. For very nearly all of the past 600 million years, CO2 concentration has been well over 1000 ppmv – twice Dr. Glikson’s “danger level”.
We have already dealt with the British Antarctic Survey’s implausible finding as to the imagined – and probably imaginary – loss of ice from the West Antarctic ice sheet. There is certainly no basis in science for the proposition that after 15 years without statistically-significant “global warming” the planet is now approaching a dangerous “tipping-point”, as Dr. Glikson is here implying. In fact, it was proven by Edward Lorenz in 1963 that we can never predict the onset, timing, duration, extent, or magnitude of any phase-transition or bifurcation in the evolution of the mathematically-chaotic climate object.
We conclude that Dr. Glikson’s note is inaccurate, misleading, and relentless prejudiced in one direction only – inventing a problem where there is none, and then magnifying it. That is not science: it is politics.
Tactical Implications of the Headley Case
from STRATFOR
Tactical Implications of the Headley Case
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December 16, 2009 | 2132 GMT
Global Security and Intelligence Report
By Scott Stewart
A week after he was arrested in Chicago on Oct. 3, David Coleman Headley was charged in a federal criminal complaint with conspiring to commit terrorist attacks outside the United States and providing material support to terrorist organizations. The charges alleged that Headley was involved in a plot to attack a newspaper in Denmark that had published a collection of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Mohammed in September 2005.
Since Headley’s arrest, there have been almost daily disclosures of new information regarding his activities and those of his co-conspirators. These new details have emerged during court proceedings and from leaks by U.S., Indian and Pakistani government officials. On Dec. 7, new federal charges were filed against Headley alleging that he had conducted extensive surveillance against targets in Mumbai that were attacked during the November 2008 armed assault in that city, which resulted in the deaths of some 170 people. Headley reportedly became an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after being arrested and charged with smuggling heroin into the United States from Pakistan in 1997. Following the 9/11 attacks, he allegedly worked for the FBI as a terrorism informant. Now, following his arrest on Oct. 3, he is reportedly again cooperating with the U.S. government.
From the information that has emerged so far, it appears that Headley, who was born Daood Gilani in 1960 in Washington, D.C., to a Pakistani father and American mother, worked as a surveillance operative and operational planner for the Pakistan-based militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Harkat-ul-Jihad e-Islami (HUJI). In 2006, Headley legally changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley, anglicizing his first name and taking his mother’s maiden surname. He apparently did this to disguise his Pakistani heritage and Muslim faith while traveling to places such as India and Denmark.
Details of this case will continue to emerge as the court proceedings against Headley and his co-conspirators progress, but the information released to date reveals a great deal about Headley and about LeT and HUJI.
What We’ve Learned About Headley
First, it is evident that Headley was not merely a low-level cannon fodder-type operative. Most of the men who attend jihadist training camps are taught basic infantry and guerrilla-warfare skills such as hand-to-hand combat and how to fire an AK-47 and throw a hand grenade. A handful of the best and brightest of these students are then selected to attend additional training in advanced combat skills that often include terrorist tradecraft, which is the set of skills required to conduct a terrorist attack. Terrorist tradecraft includes things like surveillance, bombmaking and covert communications and is quite distinct from basic infantry skills.
In his Dec. 7 indictment, we learned that Headley reportedly attended LeT training camps in Pakistan in February and August of 2002 and in April, August and December of 2003. This indicates that Headley progressed far beyond basic militant training, and it is likely that he was taught during his later training sessions the tradecraft required to conduct preoperational surveillance for terrorist attacks and to participate in the operational planning for such attacks.
One element of terrorist tradecraft that was evident in the indictment and the Oct. 11 criminal complaint is Headley’s careful use of language and of multiple methods of communications, including the use of cell phones and using long-distance calling cards, e-mail communication (using a variety of accounts) and face-to-face briefings. For the most sensitive communications and planning activities, Headley traveled to Pakistan to meet in person with LeT and HUJI leaders, a very secure way to communicate. He also had numerous phone and e-mail conversations in which he discussed the status of his work or planned reconnaissance trips. During such conversations, Headley would use terms to disguise the true objective of his work. For example, when referring to attack plans, Headley and his alleged co-conspirators reportedly called them “investment plans” or “business plans,” and when discussing the plot against Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that published the Mohammed cartoons, Headley and his co-conspirators referred to it as the “Mickey Mouse Project,” the “MMP” or “the Northern Project.”
Headley also used a common militant communication method of creating messages and then saving them in the drafts folder of a Web-mail service rather than sending the message. The person creating such a message can then provide a colleague with the user name and password for the Web-mail account, which enables the second person to log on and read the communication in the draft folder without an e-mail having been sent. This procedure is referred to as an “electronic dead drop.”
In addition to facilitating communication, these dead drops can be used to save notes that a terrorist operative does not want to physically carry on his person for fear of being caught with them. In September, we noted that Najibullah Zazi used this method to send his bombmaking notes from a training camp in Pakistan to himself rather than risk physically carrying the notes into the United States, where they could have been found during a search of his belongings.
According to the Oct. 11 criminal complaint, before leaving Pakistan for the United States in December 2008, Headley used this process to save a list of taskings he had received for his surveillance work in Denmark. The list, which was entitled “Mickey Mouse,” included the following entries (presented here as contained in the complaint, verbatim and unedited):
* Route Design (train bus air)
* Cross (cover authenticator)
* Trade? Immigration?
* Ad (Lost Luggage) (Business) (Entry)?
* King’s Square (French Embassy)
* YMCA
* Car Trip + Train Option (Nufoozur Rehman) (Weekend?)
* Residence for clients
* Complete Area Coverage (P.S. e.t.c.)
* Countersurveillance (magic eye)
* NDC option; Lunch + coffee spots
* Security (armed?)
* Foreman residence
* Zoom; Entry and exit method in the house
* Feasible plan
* On return, procurement of machinery
* Uniform
* Mixed fruit Dish
* Cell phone and camera
* Border Crossing
* City Guide Map
* Alternate Investment
* Got Papers? (Clients)
* Make Visiting Cards
We’ve included all the items listed in the complaint to demonstrate the depth of the surveillance work he was tasked with by his contacts in Pakistan. These responsibilities included determining the best way to get the attack team (“clients”) into the country, finding them a place to stay, procuring weapons (“machinery”) and conducting thorough surveillance of the newspaper and its surroundings. This would have included security in the area, countersurveillance activity and closed-circuit television cameras in place. Headley may also have been tasked with locating the residence of the newspaper’s editor.
According to the Oct. 11 federal complaint, Headley traveled from Chicago to Copenhagen in January 2009 to conduct surveillance of the Jyllands-Posten offices in Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark, and to photograph and videotape the surrounding areas. He then traveled to Pakistan, where he met with his co-conspirators to brief them on his surveillance operations and to construct a plan for the attack. Following his return to Chicago, Headley traveled back to Copenhagen in August 2009 to conduct additional surveillance (presumably to address issues that arose during the operational planning session in Pakistan). During this second trip, Headley made some 13 additional videos and took many photos of the potential targets and the areas around them.
In the Dec. 7 indictment, the U.S. government alleges that in order to conduct surveillance for the Mumbai attacks, Headley made five extended trips to Mumbai: one in September 2006, two in February and September of 2007 and two in April and July of 2008. During each of these trips Headley reportedly took pictures and made videos of various targets, including those attacked in November 2008. He also reportedly traveled to Pakistan after each of these trips to brief his co-conspirators there and to provide them with his maps, sketches, photos and videos. In March 2008, Headley and his co-conspirators reportedly discussed potential landing sites for a team of attackers who would arrive by sea in Mumbai, and he was instructed to take boat trips in and around the Mumbai harbor and make videotapes of the area, which he allegedly did during his visit to India in April 2008.
During much of his surveillance activity, Headley identified himself as an employee of the immigration services company First World, but there is no evidence that Headley ever worked for that company. There is also no information in the documents released so far that would explain how Headley paid for his extensive international travel, much less earned money to cover his day-to-day expenses.
Finally, there is the issue of Headley’s alleged work as a DEA and FBI informant (which could help explain at least some of the financial mysteries discussed above). Given the demonstrated — and considerable — nexus between heroin trafficking and terrorism funding for the jihadist groups operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan, such a crossover of an informant from narcotics to terrorism is no surprise — especially following the incredible push by the U.S. government to recruit human intelligence sources with links to the jihadist world following the 9/11 attacks.
If Headley were reporting to the FBI, it could also explain the very specific warnings that the U.S. government gave to the government of India about plans to attack hotels in Mumbai in September 2008. Following the warning, the government of India initially increased security measures at these sites, but the measures were dropped before the attacks were launched in November 2008.
At present, it is very difficult to ascertain if Headley was a double agent who was really reporting to LeT and HUJI the entire time he was ostensibly working for the U.S. government or if he was merely a rogue informant who was playing both ends against the middle for his own personal benefit. Such rogue sources have been seen in jihadist cases before. If Headley was either a double agent or a rogue source, there may be some significant blowback for the U.S. government as further revelations are made about the case.
What We’ve Learned About LeT and HUJI
First of all, this case demonstrates that LeT and HUJI have each developed a sophisticated central-planning apparatus. This is something they needed to do as they drifted out from under the wings of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, though undoubtedly they learned a lot about planning from their long association with the ISI. Second, the Headley case shows that as of October 2009 (almost a year after the Mumbai attacks), LeT and HUJI still enjoyed a great deal of operational freedom in Pakistan. They were able to travel, raise funds, communicate, train and plan operations with seemingly little interference. This is a stark contrast to al Qaeda, which is hunted, on the run and experiencing a great deal of difficulty moving operatives, communicating, raising funds and conducting operations. The links between Headley and his associates to current and former Pakistani military officers and government officials are likely what is affording LeT and HUJI their operational freedom.
As far as targeting, we have seen LeT and HUJI shift away from strictly Indian targets and toward more of a transnational al Qaeda-like target set. Not only did they attack Western interests and a Jewish target in Mumbai, but they were also planning to conduct an attack against a newspaper in Denmark that had absolutely no relation to the cause of Kashmiri independence from India. That said, despite having a highly trained surveillance operative and operational planner living inside the United States, these groups did not appear to task him to use his terrorist tradecraft to conduct target surveillance or plan and conduct attacks inside the United States.
According to court documents, HUJI leader Ilyas Kashmiri appears to have been the force driving the Denmark attack plans, and Headley seems to have been frustrated when his LeT contacts did not want to proceed with the Denmark attack after Kashmiri was reportedly killed in an American unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) strike in Pakistan. LeT wanted Headley to help them plan another attack in India instead. The report of Kashmiri’s death was ultimately proved false, but the UAV attack apparently caused Kashmiri to go to ground and for Headley and his LeT contacts to lose communication with Kashmiri for a period of time. It is known that Kashmiri is closely affiliated with al Qaeda, and the plans for the Denmark attack are an indication that HUJI has become more closely aligned with the transnational jihadist targeting philosophy as a result of Kashmiri’s contacts with bin Laden and company. It appears that LeT, on the other hand, has retained more of a focus on India. So, while the two organizations continue to cooperate, they do have some differences in targeting philosophy, and it would seem that HUJI is creeping further into the al Qaeda orbit than LeT.
The information released to date in this case also underscores the importance of interpersonal relationships in the jihadist milieu and how these relationships, which are based on family, friendship and trust, often lead to an overlap in which people interact with different groups, and groups such as LeT and HUJI share resources and work together. The jihadist world can be a very murky place and operatives can work with different “companies,” to use Headley’s term.
Protective Intelligence Implications
This case also has some significant protective intelligence implications, and it underscores much of what we have been saying about surveillance and countersurveillance for several years now.
While Headley is a U.S. citizen and changed his name in order to camouflage his heritage and religious affiliation, he conducted an inordinate amount of surveillance activity by himself. Conducting a surveillance operation with only one person is among the most difficult — and risky — activities that any surveillance operative can be tasked to perform. Any time a person conducts surveillance he or she is vulnerable to detection. That vulnerability is mitigated somewhat if the surveillance is conducted by a team of individuals and the team members can take turns exposing themselves to potential countersurveillance. Doing a solo surveillance operation means that the surveillance operative is forced to show his face time and again to anyone watching.
Furthermore, activities such as taking photographs and making video recordings are far riskier than simply observing a target. Having one single surveillance operative visit two offices of the same newspaper and then take dozens of photos and make 13 video recordings of the offices — in a one-week span, no less — is terrible surveillance tradecraft. Had someone been conducting countersurveillance on one of the targets Headley was studying — or, better yet, countersurveillance of more than one of these potential targets — the countersurveillance assets almost certainly would have noticed his abnormal behavior. American tourists may frequently take photos and shoot videos while visiting foreign capitals, but they do not take the time to capture extensive still and video images of newspaper offices.
Even people who have conducted thousands upon thousands of hours of surveillance would have a hard time creating cover for action and status that would justify that much surveillance activity — especially when the surveillant is a foreigner and working alone. The only rational explanation for why Headley was not noticed while conducting his surveillance is that nobody was looking.
The use of an American citizen to conduct surveillance once again illustrates the importance of focusing on the “how” of terrorist attacks and not just the “who.” And when considering the actor, the focus must be placed on his or her behavior, not just nationality or religious creed.
Tactical Implications of the Headley Case
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December 16, 2009 | 2132 GMT
Global Security and Intelligence Report
By Scott Stewart
A week after he was arrested in Chicago on Oct. 3, David Coleman Headley was charged in a federal criminal complaint with conspiring to commit terrorist attacks outside the United States and providing material support to terrorist organizations. The charges alleged that Headley was involved in a plot to attack a newspaper in Denmark that had published a collection of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Mohammed in September 2005.
Since Headley’s arrest, there have been almost daily disclosures of new information regarding his activities and those of his co-conspirators. These new details have emerged during court proceedings and from leaks by U.S., Indian and Pakistani government officials. On Dec. 7, new federal charges were filed against Headley alleging that he had conducted extensive surveillance against targets in Mumbai that were attacked during the November 2008 armed assault in that city, which resulted in the deaths of some 170 people. Headley reportedly became an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after being arrested and charged with smuggling heroin into the United States from Pakistan in 1997. Following the 9/11 attacks, he allegedly worked for the FBI as a terrorism informant. Now, following his arrest on Oct. 3, he is reportedly again cooperating with the U.S. government.
From the information that has emerged so far, it appears that Headley, who was born Daood Gilani in 1960 in Washington, D.C., to a Pakistani father and American mother, worked as a surveillance operative and operational planner for the Pakistan-based militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Harkat-ul-Jihad e-Islami (HUJI). In 2006, Headley legally changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley, anglicizing his first name and taking his mother’s maiden surname. He apparently did this to disguise his Pakistani heritage and Muslim faith while traveling to places such as India and Denmark.
Details of this case will continue to emerge as the court proceedings against Headley and his co-conspirators progress, but the information released to date reveals a great deal about Headley and about LeT and HUJI.
What We’ve Learned About Headley
First, it is evident that Headley was not merely a low-level cannon fodder-type operative. Most of the men who attend jihadist training camps are taught basic infantry and guerrilla-warfare skills such as hand-to-hand combat and how to fire an AK-47 and throw a hand grenade. A handful of the best and brightest of these students are then selected to attend additional training in advanced combat skills that often include terrorist tradecraft, which is the set of skills required to conduct a terrorist attack. Terrorist tradecraft includes things like surveillance, bombmaking and covert communications and is quite distinct from basic infantry skills.
In his Dec. 7 indictment, we learned that Headley reportedly attended LeT training camps in Pakistan in February and August of 2002 and in April, August and December of 2003. This indicates that Headley progressed far beyond basic militant training, and it is likely that he was taught during his later training sessions the tradecraft required to conduct preoperational surveillance for terrorist attacks and to participate in the operational planning for such attacks.
One element of terrorist tradecraft that was evident in the indictment and the Oct. 11 criminal complaint is Headley’s careful use of language and of multiple methods of communications, including the use of cell phones and using long-distance calling cards, e-mail communication (using a variety of accounts) and face-to-face briefings. For the most sensitive communications and planning activities, Headley traveled to Pakistan to meet in person with LeT and HUJI leaders, a very secure way to communicate. He also had numerous phone and e-mail conversations in which he discussed the status of his work or planned reconnaissance trips. During such conversations, Headley would use terms to disguise the true objective of his work. For example, when referring to attack plans, Headley and his alleged co-conspirators reportedly called them “investment plans” or “business plans,” and when discussing the plot against Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that published the Mohammed cartoons, Headley and his co-conspirators referred to it as the “Mickey Mouse Project,” the “MMP” or “the Northern Project.”
Headley also used a common militant communication method of creating messages and then saving them in the drafts folder of a Web-mail service rather than sending the message. The person creating such a message can then provide a colleague with the user name and password for the Web-mail account, which enables the second person to log on and read the communication in the draft folder without an e-mail having been sent. This procedure is referred to as an “electronic dead drop.”
In addition to facilitating communication, these dead drops can be used to save notes that a terrorist operative does not want to physically carry on his person for fear of being caught with them. In September, we noted that Najibullah Zazi used this method to send his bombmaking notes from a training camp in Pakistan to himself rather than risk physically carrying the notes into the United States, where they could have been found during a search of his belongings.
According to the Oct. 11 criminal complaint, before leaving Pakistan for the United States in December 2008, Headley used this process to save a list of taskings he had received for his surveillance work in Denmark. The list, which was entitled “Mickey Mouse,” included the following entries (presented here as contained in the complaint, verbatim and unedited):
* Route Design (train bus air)
* Cross (cover authenticator)
* Trade? Immigration?
* Ad (Lost Luggage) (Business) (Entry)?
* King’s Square (French Embassy)
* YMCA
* Car Trip + Train Option (Nufoozur Rehman) (Weekend?)
* Residence for clients
* Complete Area Coverage (P.S. e.t.c.)
* Countersurveillance (magic eye)
* NDC option; Lunch + coffee spots
* Security (armed?)
* Foreman residence
* Zoom; Entry and exit method in the house
* Feasible plan
* On return, procurement of machinery
* Uniform
* Mixed fruit Dish
* Cell phone and camera
* Border Crossing
* City Guide Map
* Alternate Investment
* Got Papers? (Clients)
* Make Visiting Cards
We’ve included all the items listed in the complaint to demonstrate the depth of the surveillance work he was tasked with by his contacts in Pakistan. These responsibilities included determining the best way to get the attack team (“clients”) into the country, finding them a place to stay, procuring weapons (“machinery”) and conducting thorough surveillance of the newspaper and its surroundings. This would have included security in the area, countersurveillance activity and closed-circuit television cameras in place. Headley may also have been tasked with locating the residence of the newspaper’s editor.
According to the Oct. 11 federal complaint, Headley traveled from Chicago to Copenhagen in January 2009 to conduct surveillance of the Jyllands-Posten offices in Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark, and to photograph and videotape the surrounding areas. He then traveled to Pakistan, where he met with his co-conspirators to brief them on his surveillance operations and to construct a plan for the attack. Following his return to Chicago, Headley traveled back to Copenhagen in August 2009 to conduct additional surveillance (presumably to address issues that arose during the operational planning session in Pakistan). During this second trip, Headley made some 13 additional videos and took many photos of the potential targets and the areas around them.
In the Dec. 7 indictment, the U.S. government alleges that in order to conduct surveillance for the Mumbai attacks, Headley made five extended trips to Mumbai: one in September 2006, two in February and September of 2007 and two in April and July of 2008. During each of these trips Headley reportedly took pictures and made videos of various targets, including those attacked in November 2008. He also reportedly traveled to Pakistan after each of these trips to brief his co-conspirators there and to provide them with his maps, sketches, photos and videos. In March 2008, Headley and his co-conspirators reportedly discussed potential landing sites for a team of attackers who would arrive by sea in Mumbai, and he was instructed to take boat trips in and around the Mumbai harbor and make videotapes of the area, which he allegedly did during his visit to India in April 2008.
During much of his surveillance activity, Headley identified himself as an employee of the immigration services company First World, but there is no evidence that Headley ever worked for that company. There is also no information in the documents released so far that would explain how Headley paid for his extensive international travel, much less earned money to cover his day-to-day expenses.
Finally, there is the issue of Headley’s alleged work as a DEA and FBI informant (which could help explain at least some of the financial mysteries discussed above). Given the demonstrated — and considerable — nexus between heroin trafficking and terrorism funding for the jihadist groups operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan, such a crossover of an informant from narcotics to terrorism is no surprise — especially following the incredible push by the U.S. government to recruit human intelligence sources with links to the jihadist world following the 9/11 attacks.
If Headley were reporting to the FBI, it could also explain the very specific warnings that the U.S. government gave to the government of India about plans to attack hotels in Mumbai in September 2008. Following the warning, the government of India initially increased security measures at these sites, but the measures were dropped before the attacks were launched in November 2008.
At present, it is very difficult to ascertain if Headley was a double agent who was really reporting to LeT and HUJI the entire time he was ostensibly working for the U.S. government or if he was merely a rogue informant who was playing both ends against the middle for his own personal benefit. Such rogue sources have been seen in jihadist cases before. If Headley was either a double agent or a rogue source, there may be some significant blowback for the U.S. government as further revelations are made about the case.
What We’ve Learned About LeT and HUJI
First of all, this case demonstrates that LeT and HUJI have each developed a sophisticated central-planning apparatus. This is something they needed to do as they drifted out from under the wings of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, though undoubtedly they learned a lot about planning from their long association with the ISI. Second, the Headley case shows that as of October 2009 (almost a year after the Mumbai attacks), LeT and HUJI still enjoyed a great deal of operational freedom in Pakistan. They were able to travel, raise funds, communicate, train and plan operations with seemingly little interference. This is a stark contrast to al Qaeda, which is hunted, on the run and experiencing a great deal of difficulty moving operatives, communicating, raising funds and conducting operations. The links between Headley and his associates to current and former Pakistani military officers and government officials are likely what is affording LeT and HUJI their operational freedom.
As far as targeting, we have seen LeT and HUJI shift away from strictly Indian targets and toward more of a transnational al Qaeda-like target set. Not only did they attack Western interests and a Jewish target in Mumbai, but they were also planning to conduct an attack against a newspaper in Denmark that had absolutely no relation to the cause of Kashmiri independence from India. That said, despite having a highly trained surveillance operative and operational planner living inside the United States, these groups did not appear to task him to use his terrorist tradecraft to conduct target surveillance or plan and conduct attacks inside the United States.
According to court documents, HUJI leader Ilyas Kashmiri appears to have been the force driving the Denmark attack plans, and Headley seems to have been frustrated when his LeT contacts did not want to proceed with the Denmark attack after Kashmiri was reportedly killed in an American unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) strike in Pakistan. LeT wanted Headley to help them plan another attack in India instead. The report of Kashmiri’s death was ultimately proved false, but the UAV attack apparently caused Kashmiri to go to ground and for Headley and his LeT contacts to lose communication with Kashmiri for a period of time. It is known that Kashmiri is closely affiliated with al Qaeda, and the plans for the Denmark attack are an indication that HUJI has become more closely aligned with the transnational jihadist targeting philosophy as a result of Kashmiri’s contacts with bin Laden and company. It appears that LeT, on the other hand, has retained more of a focus on India. So, while the two organizations continue to cooperate, they do have some differences in targeting philosophy, and it would seem that HUJI is creeping further into the al Qaeda orbit than LeT.
The information released to date in this case also underscores the importance of interpersonal relationships in the jihadist milieu and how these relationships, which are based on family, friendship and trust, often lead to an overlap in which people interact with different groups, and groups such as LeT and HUJI share resources and work together. The jihadist world can be a very murky place and operatives can work with different “companies,” to use Headley’s term.
Protective Intelligence Implications
This case also has some significant protective intelligence implications, and it underscores much of what we have been saying about surveillance and countersurveillance for several years now.
While Headley is a U.S. citizen and changed his name in order to camouflage his heritage and religious affiliation, he conducted an inordinate amount of surveillance activity by himself. Conducting a surveillance operation with only one person is among the most difficult — and risky — activities that any surveillance operative can be tasked to perform. Any time a person conducts surveillance he or she is vulnerable to detection. That vulnerability is mitigated somewhat if the surveillance is conducted by a team of individuals and the team members can take turns exposing themselves to potential countersurveillance. Doing a solo surveillance operation means that the surveillance operative is forced to show his face time and again to anyone watching.
Furthermore, activities such as taking photographs and making video recordings are far riskier than simply observing a target. Having one single surveillance operative visit two offices of the same newspaper and then take dozens of photos and make 13 video recordings of the offices — in a one-week span, no less — is terrible surveillance tradecraft. Had someone been conducting countersurveillance on one of the targets Headley was studying — or, better yet, countersurveillance of more than one of these potential targets — the countersurveillance assets almost certainly would have noticed his abnormal behavior. American tourists may frequently take photos and shoot videos while visiting foreign capitals, but they do not take the time to capture extensive still and video images of newspaper offices.
Even people who have conducted thousands upon thousands of hours of surveillance would have a hard time creating cover for action and status that would justify that much surveillance activity — especially when the surveillant is a foreigner and working alone. The only rational explanation for why Headley was not noticed while conducting his surveillance is that nobody was looking.
The use of an American citizen to conduct surveillance once again illustrates the importance of focusing on the “how” of terrorist attacks and not just the “who.” And when considering the actor, the focus must be placed on his or her behavior, not just nationality or religious creed.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
2009 in Review: The Year of Obama
from STRATFOR
2009 in Review: The Year of Obama
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December 14, 2009 | 1939 GMT
Graphic for Geopolitical Intelligence Report
By George Friedman
President Barack Obama’s speech in Oslo marking his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize was eloquent, as most of his speeches are.
It was also enigmatic — both for its justification of war and for his speaking on behalf of the international community while making clear that as commander in chief, his overarching principle is to protect and defend the United States.
In the end, it was difficult to discern precisely what he meant to say. An eloquent and enigmatic speech is not a bad strategy by a president, but it raises this question: At the end of his first year, what precisely is this president’s strategy abroad? Ironically, it is useful to consider Obama in the light of the last president who dominated and defined his time: Ronald Reagan, a man as persuasive, polarizing and enigmatic as the current president.
These two men share much, including charisma and a desire to revive American power abroad. But Obama is about to diverge from this parallel. Whereas Reagan chose to reassert American power to bring U.S. allies back into line, Obama seems to be choosing to rejuvenate American alliances to revive national power. And this choice constitutes the largest foreign policy risk to his presidency in the months and years ahead.
A Year of Presidential Dominance
Obama dominated 2009 as no freshman-year president has since Reagan. As with Reagan, the domination came not only from character and charisma but also from deep public disappointment with his predecessor.
Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter, who was seen as having led the country into the double miasma of a major economic crisis and a global crisis of confidence in the United States. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1981 raised the question of the limits of American power and the extent to which U.S. allies could count on American power. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan drove home the diminished state of American power, as the United States seemed incapable of responding.
George W. Bush very much paralleled Jimmy Carter, as different as their respective ideologies seemed. Like Carter, Bush’s presidency also culminated in a grave economic crisis, while his foreign policy had created deep distrust worldwide about the limits and effectiveness of U.S. power.
It is ironic in the extreme that both Reagan and Obama ran on platforms emphasizing the need to do something about Afghanistan and castigating the prior president for alleged fecklessness with dealing with it. At some point, someone should write a history of the last American generation and its Afghan obsession. This has become a symbol of our times, and not for obvious reasons.
Reagan vs. Obama
The similarities and profound differences between Reagan and Obama are a good starting place for understanding the last year. Reagan took office in a powerful country that seemed to have lost its confidence, and he saw his mission as restoring both American self-confidence in its global mission and its appetite for pursuing it.
To Reagan, the American-led anti-Soviet alliance was in jeopardy not only because of the Carter presidency but also because of Gerald Ford (whom Reagan had challenged for the nomination in 1976) and ultimately because of Richard Nixon. They saw the United States as a declining power and sought to manage that decline. Reagan intended to preside over the reassertion of U.S. power and global leadership.
The Obama presidency is partially a reaction to Bush’s response to 9/11. Obama argued that the war in Iraq was not essential and that it diverted American forces from more important theaters, particularly Afghanistan. Like Reagan, Obama feared the fate of the American alliance system, though for very different reasons.
Whereas Reagan feared that unwarranted American caution was undermining the confidence of the alliance, Obama’s view has been that excessive and misplaced American aggressiveness was undermining its alliance, and weakening the war effort as a result.
Both Reagan and Obama set about changing the self-perception of the United States, and with it the perception of the United States in the world. Neither was uncontroversial in doing this. Indeed, critics vilified both for what they did, frequently in extraordinarily vituperative ways.
Surging Then Sagging Popularity
The controversy of each president has been rooted in a shared fact: Neither won the presidency overwhelmingly. Reagan took 50.7 percent of the vote, but Carter lost by a large margin because of third party candidates. Obama won with 52.9 percent. Put another way, 47.1 percent of the public voted against Obama and 49.3 percent voted against Reagan.
Both surged in popularity after the election and both bled off popularity as the rhetoric wore thin, economic problems continued and actions in foreign affairs didn’t match promises. Reagan fought a brutal battle for tax cuts to stimulate the economy and was attacked by Democrats for greatly increasing the deficit. Obama fought a brutal battle for more spending and was attacked by the Republicans for greatly increasing the deficit.
As a result, Reagan suffered a sharp setback in the 1982 midterm elections as Republicans lost seats in the House of Representatives. Reality overwhelmed rhetoric, and Reagan’s rhetorical skills even began to be used against him. But over time, as the economy recovered, Reagan began to gain ground in foreign policy. There were many failures to be sure, but Reagan succeeded by aligning his policies with geopolitical reality.
The United States was enormously powerful, regardless of psychic wounds and poorly deployed resources. The Soviet Union was much weaker than it appeared to those who feared to challenge it. Reagan did not try to change this reality; instead, he crafted policies that flowed from this reality. For all his mistakes, this made him both a two-term president and one more fondly regarded today than he was in his time.
Repudiation vs. Continuity
This is where the difference between Reagan and Obama begins to emerge, and the two men as historical figures begin to diverge.
Reagan repudiated his predecessor’s foreign policy and understood that by flexing American power, the allies would regain confidence and fall back into line. By contrast, Obama has taken a different turn — and is traveling a much more difficult road. He has retained a high degree of continuity with his predecessor’s policies while seeking to resurrect American power first through popularity in order to get allies to cooperate. This is a complicated proposition at best.
With Iraq, Obama continues the Bush policy of phased withdrawal subject to modification. In Afghanistan, the president has carried out his campaign pledge to increase forces, continuing the war that began in 2001, again with a timetable and again subject to change.
With Iran, Obama continues the Bush policy of using sanctions while not taking any other options, like war, off the table. With Russia, Obama has maintained the position the Bush administration took toward NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia, as well as resisting Russian attempts to dominate the former Soviet Union. With China, Obama’s position is essentially the Bush position of encouraging closer ties, not emphasizing human rights and focusing on tactical economic issues.
This continuity is combined with a so-far successful attempt to create an altogether different sensibility about the United States overseas. Obama has portrayed the Bush administration as being heedless of international opinion, whereas he intends to align the United States with international opinion. This has resonated substantially overseas, with foreign publics and governments being far more enthusiastic about Obama than they were about Bush.
As a result, the president has been particularly proud of the number of nations that are part of the Afghan war coalition, which he puts at 43. The Iraq war saw only 33 countries send troops, substantially less than Afghanistan but still not indicative of isolation. But in both cases this use of popularity as power is illusory. In many cases the numbers of troops sent are merely token gestures of goodwill.
Nevertheless, there is no question that Obama has managed to generate far more excitement and enthusiasm about his presidency overseas than Bush did. This is the marked achievement so far and it is not a trivial one. His goal is to create an international coalition based less on policy than on a perception of the United States as more embedded in the international community.
The question is: Will this gambit succeed? And if the answer is yes, the next question is: What does he plan to do next? Reagan intended to change the U.S. perception of itself to free him to conduct a more aggressive and risk-taking foreign policy. His view of the world was that the American perception of itself was irrational and limiting and that by lifting the limitations, American power would surge.
Obama’s strategy thus far is to change the perception of the United States in foreign countries while at the same time conducting a foreign policy imposed on him by geopolitical reality, much as it imposed itself on Bush. Obama’s problem is that the perception he has deliberately generated and the actions that he has taken are at odds. What will the allies offer him, for instance, if he has simply resurrected American popularity — but not changed U.S. policy?
Indeed, significant policy changes so far have not succeeded. Openings to Iran and Cuba have not been reciprocated. The opening to the Islamic world has not revolutionized U.S. relations in the region. The Russians are deeply suspicious of Obama, as is Eastern Europe. The Chinese find it hard to see a difference. The major impact has been in Europe, in particular Europe west of Poland. But even here there is a difference between popular enthusiasm and the unease of governments, particularly in Germany.
The Obama Paradox
And so it is in Europe that Obama’s strategy will face its defining moment.
In Europe, two goals are at odds. For the Europeans, a definitive, new era is one in which the United States will stop making demands on Europe to support foreign adventures and, ideally, stop engaging in foreign adventures except with European approval.
Obama expects that the Europeans, when approached, will be far more willing to join the United States in foreign adventures because their perception of the United States is more positive.
This is the deep paradox of Obama’s foreign policy, which he expressed in Oslo as he accepted the peace prize and went on to make the case for just war and for sanctions against regimes like Iran. In the coming months, three questions will manifest themselves. The first is: Will the Europeans shift from greater control over U.S. actions and less risk to less control and more risk? The second is: What will the president give them in exchange? How much control will pass to them in a consultative foreign policy? The third: How much active support for the Untied States are the Europeans able and willing to bring to bear?
After all, the reality is that the American president who just accepted the Nobel Peace Prize is engaged in multiple wars and a confrontation with Iran. Europe’s good wishes have some value, but not the same as material engagement. Indeed, it is not clear why foreign states would embrace Bush’s foreign policy conducted by Obama, simply in exchange for consultation. The Europeans will want more.
Aligning Foreign Policy and Geopolitics
Reagan’s foreign policy was elegant and aligned with geopolitics. It sought to create a domestic surge in self-confidence in order to support larger defense budgets and a more aggressive policy toward the Soviet Union. Reagan’s read of the situation was that the United States was stronger than had been thought and the Soviets were weaker. He had many problems along the way: economic setbacks, scandal, etc., and his popularity shifted. But his thrust was clear.
What is inelegant, though, in Obama’s foreign policy is the relation between continuing many of Bush’s old policies while improving America’s image overseas. Continuity is understandable: Geopolitics deals the cards and the choices are few. The utility of the popularity is important; it can only help. What is unclear as he enters his second year is the relationship between the two.
Most presidents do not fully define their strategy in the first year. But those who do not in the second year tend to run into serious political trouble. Obama has time, but not much. He must show the hand he is playing, or invent one, fast.
2009 in Review: The Year of Obama
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December 14, 2009 | 1939 GMT
Graphic for Geopolitical Intelligence Report
By George Friedman
President Barack Obama’s speech in Oslo marking his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize was eloquent, as most of his speeches are.
It was also enigmatic — both for its justification of war and for his speaking on behalf of the international community while making clear that as commander in chief, his overarching principle is to protect and defend the United States.
In the end, it was difficult to discern precisely what he meant to say. An eloquent and enigmatic speech is not a bad strategy by a president, but it raises this question: At the end of his first year, what precisely is this president’s strategy abroad? Ironically, it is useful to consider Obama in the light of the last president who dominated and defined his time: Ronald Reagan, a man as persuasive, polarizing and enigmatic as the current president.
These two men share much, including charisma and a desire to revive American power abroad. But Obama is about to diverge from this parallel. Whereas Reagan chose to reassert American power to bring U.S. allies back into line, Obama seems to be choosing to rejuvenate American alliances to revive national power. And this choice constitutes the largest foreign policy risk to his presidency in the months and years ahead.
A Year of Presidential Dominance
Obama dominated 2009 as no freshman-year president has since Reagan. As with Reagan, the domination came not only from character and charisma but also from deep public disappointment with his predecessor.
Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter, who was seen as having led the country into the double miasma of a major economic crisis and a global crisis of confidence in the United States. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1981 raised the question of the limits of American power and the extent to which U.S. allies could count on American power. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan drove home the diminished state of American power, as the United States seemed incapable of responding.
George W. Bush very much paralleled Jimmy Carter, as different as their respective ideologies seemed. Like Carter, Bush’s presidency also culminated in a grave economic crisis, while his foreign policy had created deep distrust worldwide about the limits and effectiveness of U.S. power.
It is ironic in the extreme that both Reagan and Obama ran on platforms emphasizing the need to do something about Afghanistan and castigating the prior president for alleged fecklessness with dealing with it. At some point, someone should write a history of the last American generation and its Afghan obsession. This has become a symbol of our times, and not for obvious reasons.
Reagan vs. Obama
The similarities and profound differences between Reagan and Obama are a good starting place for understanding the last year. Reagan took office in a powerful country that seemed to have lost its confidence, and he saw his mission as restoring both American self-confidence in its global mission and its appetite for pursuing it.
To Reagan, the American-led anti-Soviet alliance was in jeopardy not only because of the Carter presidency but also because of Gerald Ford (whom Reagan had challenged for the nomination in 1976) and ultimately because of Richard Nixon. They saw the United States as a declining power and sought to manage that decline. Reagan intended to preside over the reassertion of U.S. power and global leadership.
The Obama presidency is partially a reaction to Bush’s response to 9/11. Obama argued that the war in Iraq was not essential and that it diverted American forces from more important theaters, particularly Afghanistan. Like Reagan, Obama feared the fate of the American alliance system, though for very different reasons.
Whereas Reagan feared that unwarranted American caution was undermining the confidence of the alliance, Obama’s view has been that excessive and misplaced American aggressiveness was undermining its alliance, and weakening the war effort as a result.
Both Reagan and Obama set about changing the self-perception of the United States, and with it the perception of the United States in the world. Neither was uncontroversial in doing this. Indeed, critics vilified both for what they did, frequently in extraordinarily vituperative ways.
Surging Then Sagging Popularity
The controversy of each president has been rooted in a shared fact: Neither won the presidency overwhelmingly. Reagan took 50.7 percent of the vote, but Carter lost by a large margin because of third party candidates. Obama won with 52.9 percent. Put another way, 47.1 percent of the public voted against Obama and 49.3 percent voted against Reagan.
Both surged in popularity after the election and both bled off popularity as the rhetoric wore thin, economic problems continued and actions in foreign affairs didn’t match promises. Reagan fought a brutal battle for tax cuts to stimulate the economy and was attacked by Democrats for greatly increasing the deficit. Obama fought a brutal battle for more spending and was attacked by the Republicans for greatly increasing the deficit.
As a result, Reagan suffered a sharp setback in the 1982 midterm elections as Republicans lost seats in the House of Representatives. Reality overwhelmed rhetoric, and Reagan’s rhetorical skills even began to be used against him. But over time, as the economy recovered, Reagan began to gain ground in foreign policy. There were many failures to be sure, but Reagan succeeded by aligning his policies with geopolitical reality.
The United States was enormously powerful, regardless of psychic wounds and poorly deployed resources. The Soviet Union was much weaker than it appeared to those who feared to challenge it. Reagan did not try to change this reality; instead, he crafted policies that flowed from this reality. For all his mistakes, this made him both a two-term president and one more fondly regarded today than he was in his time.
Repudiation vs. Continuity
This is where the difference between Reagan and Obama begins to emerge, and the two men as historical figures begin to diverge.
Reagan repudiated his predecessor’s foreign policy and understood that by flexing American power, the allies would regain confidence and fall back into line. By contrast, Obama has taken a different turn — and is traveling a much more difficult road. He has retained a high degree of continuity with his predecessor’s policies while seeking to resurrect American power first through popularity in order to get allies to cooperate. This is a complicated proposition at best.
With Iraq, Obama continues the Bush policy of phased withdrawal subject to modification. In Afghanistan, the president has carried out his campaign pledge to increase forces, continuing the war that began in 2001, again with a timetable and again subject to change.
With Iran, Obama continues the Bush policy of using sanctions while not taking any other options, like war, off the table. With Russia, Obama has maintained the position the Bush administration took toward NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia, as well as resisting Russian attempts to dominate the former Soviet Union. With China, Obama’s position is essentially the Bush position of encouraging closer ties, not emphasizing human rights and focusing on tactical economic issues.
This continuity is combined with a so-far successful attempt to create an altogether different sensibility about the United States overseas. Obama has portrayed the Bush administration as being heedless of international opinion, whereas he intends to align the United States with international opinion. This has resonated substantially overseas, with foreign publics and governments being far more enthusiastic about Obama than they were about Bush.
As a result, the president has been particularly proud of the number of nations that are part of the Afghan war coalition, which he puts at 43. The Iraq war saw only 33 countries send troops, substantially less than Afghanistan but still not indicative of isolation. But in both cases this use of popularity as power is illusory. In many cases the numbers of troops sent are merely token gestures of goodwill.
Nevertheless, there is no question that Obama has managed to generate far more excitement and enthusiasm about his presidency overseas than Bush did. This is the marked achievement so far and it is not a trivial one. His goal is to create an international coalition based less on policy than on a perception of the United States as more embedded in the international community.
The question is: Will this gambit succeed? And if the answer is yes, the next question is: What does he plan to do next? Reagan intended to change the U.S. perception of itself to free him to conduct a more aggressive and risk-taking foreign policy. His view of the world was that the American perception of itself was irrational and limiting and that by lifting the limitations, American power would surge.
Obama’s strategy thus far is to change the perception of the United States in foreign countries while at the same time conducting a foreign policy imposed on him by geopolitical reality, much as it imposed itself on Bush. Obama’s problem is that the perception he has deliberately generated and the actions that he has taken are at odds. What will the allies offer him, for instance, if he has simply resurrected American popularity — but not changed U.S. policy?
Indeed, significant policy changes so far have not succeeded. Openings to Iran and Cuba have not been reciprocated. The opening to the Islamic world has not revolutionized U.S. relations in the region. The Russians are deeply suspicious of Obama, as is Eastern Europe. The Chinese find it hard to see a difference. The major impact has been in Europe, in particular Europe west of Poland. But even here there is a difference between popular enthusiasm and the unease of governments, particularly in Germany.
The Obama Paradox
And so it is in Europe that Obama’s strategy will face its defining moment.
In Europe, two goals are at odds. For the Europeans, a definitive, new era is one in which the United States will stop making demands on Europe to support foreign adventures and, ideally, stop engaging in foreign adventures except with European approval.
Obama expects that the Europeans, when approached, will be far more willing to join the United States in foreign adventures because their perception of the United States is more positive.
This is the deep paradox of Obama’s foreign policy, which he expressed in Oslo as he accepted the peace prize and went on to make the case for just war and for sanctions against regimes like Iran. In the coming months, three questions will manifest themselves. The first is: Will the Europeans shift from greater control over U.S. actions and less risk to less control and more risk? The second is: What will the president give them in exchange? How much control will pass to them in a consultative foreign policy? The third: How much active support for the Untied States are the Europeans able and willing to bring to bear?
After all, the reality is that the American president who just accepted the Nobel Peace Prize is engaged in multiple wars and a confrontation with Iran. Europe’s good wishes have some value, but not the same as material engagement. Indeed, it is not clear why foreign states would embrace Bush’s foreign policy conducted by Obama, simply in exchange for consultation. The Europeans will want more.
Aligning Foreign Policy and Geopolitics
Reagan’s foreign policy was elegant and aligned with geopolitics. It sought to create a domestic surge in self-confidence in order to support larger defense budgets and a more aggressive policy toward the Soviet Union. Reagan’s read of the situation was that the United States was stronger than had been thought and the Soviets were weaker. He had many problems along the way: economic setbacks, scandal, etc., and his popularity shifted. But his thrust was clear.
What is inelegant, though, in Obama’s foreign policy is the relation between continuing many of Bush’s old policies while improving America’s image overseas. Continuity is understandable: Geopolitics deals the cards and the choices are few. The utility of the popularity is important; it can only help. What is unclear as he enters his second year is the relationship between the two.
Most presidents do not fully define their strategy in the first year. But those who do not in the second year tend to run into serious political trouble. Obama has time, but not much. He must show the hand he is playing, or invent one, fast.
Monday, December 14, 2009
EXAMINER: Two researchers attribute Norway light to HAARP, anti-ET space-based weapon of mass destruction
Two researchers attribute Norway light to HAARP, anti-ET space-based weapon of mass destruction
December 12, 7:34 PM Seattle Exopolitics Examiner Alfred Lambremont Webre
AP: Nov. 9, 09 spiral light at Tromso, Norway
Following a cross-volley of interpretations of the Dec. 9, 2009 blue-green light vortex over Norway on the eve of Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech (Russian missile; ETs destroying Russian missile), two researchers have independently posited that HAARP, a space-based weapon of mass destruction one of whose antenna fields is close to the site of the Norwegian spiral light.
According to one of the researchers, David Wilcock (see below), one of his confidential sources stated the Norway spiral light was part of Project Blue Beam.
One of the alleged purposes of Project Blue Beam is the use of advanced electromagnetic imaging such as that produced by HAARP and exhibited in the Norway spiral light as a psychological mass conditioning device in aid of the implementation of a global corporate new world order.
If this analysis is accurate, the Norwegian light may have been a HAARP-induced effect attempting to anchor an extraterrestrial-like or “transcendent” aura around U.S. President Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo the following day, Nov. 10.
EISCAT: HAARP antenna site near Tromso, Norway
HAARP and the Norwegian spiral light
According to Mr. Wilcock, the Dec. 9, 09 Norway spiral light is similar to other spiral lights in Russia in 2006, and in China (first seen in April 2009) that may be attributed to the HAARP technology.
Mr. Wilcock states that the plasma effects exhibited by the Norway light were too dense to have been produced by a failed Russian missile. He reiterates that HAARP is most probably the cause of the spiral lights.
Researcher Richard Hoagland notes that “just over the hill from Tromso [where the spiral light appeared], lies a high-tech Norwegian ‘HAARP antenna farm’ -- the EISCAT Ramfjordmoen facility -- specifically designed to broadcast powerful beams of microwave energy high into space ... thereby also creating blatant HD/torsion side-effects in the Earth's highly-electrified upper "plasma" atmosphere (ionosphere)? The facility is officially supported by Norway, Sweden, Finland, Japan ... China ... the United Kingdom ... and Germany.”
Although Mr. Hoagland in his analysis implies that the Norway light may have been a warning to President Barack Obama by the controllers of HAARP, the more likely scenario is that Mr. Obama now works in collaboration with the controllers of HAARP to use HAARP in the service of the implementation of a corporate new world order worldwide.
EISCAT: Norway torsion map
HAARP as a space-based weapon of mass destruction
HAARP is an exotic weapons system that is part of the weaponization of space, using "scalar wave interferometry" - a technology first discovered by scientist Nicola Tesla in the early 1900's. Two or more longitudinal, ultra-low frequency waves are “aimed” at an intersecting point, at which time they interact in a very unique way, “tapping” into the limitless plenum of energy surrounding the planet, and weaponizing this scalar energy.
HAARP has 3 major weapons-system components:
• Space-based component: HAARP weaponizes the Earth's Ionosphere.
• Air-based component: HAARP uses chemtrails as a frequency reflector from its ground and space base, and as a binary weapons system against the human population.
• Ground-based component: HAARP ground stations energize HAARP (Alaska; Greenland; Norway; Australia)
HAARP has numerous reported applications as a weapons system:
• SDI (Strategic Defence Initiative) Radiofrequency weapon
• Environmental warfare - Weather & earthquake warfare
• Space Warfare System
• Missile Defense System
• Scalar energy warfare against land and population targets, including cities, industrial sites, buildings, populations and individuals
• ELF weapon with electromagnetic harassment and mood manipulation of target populations and individuals.
• Biological & binary weapons against populations (with chemtrails component)
• Psyops electromagnetic imagery integrated with Project Blue Beam
HAARP is a space-based weapon of mass destruction. The death toll of two recent probable Environmental Warfare attacks by HAARP is on the scale of Hiroshima. The estimated death toll of the May 3, 2008 Weather Warfare Myanmar Cyclone is 78,000 dead + 56,000 missing as of May 29, 2008. The death toll of the May 12, 2008 Tectonic Warfare China Earthquake is 68,000 as of May 29, 2008, and expected to rise to 80,000. Official Japanese figures at the time put the Hiroshima death toll at 118661 civilians. But later estimates suggest the final toll was about 140,000.
December 12, 7:34 PM Seattle Exopolitics Examiner Alfred Lambremont Webre
AP: Nov. 9, 09 spiral light at Tromso, Norway
Following a cross-volley of interpretations of the Dec. 9, 2009 blue-green light vortex over Norway on the eve of Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech (Russian missile; ETs destroying Russian missile), two researchers have independently posited that HAARP, a space-based weapon of mass destruction one of whose antenna fields is close to the site of the Norwegian spiral light.
According to one of the researchers, David Wilcock (see below), one of his confidential sources stated the Norway spiral light was part of Project Blue Beam.
One of the alleged purposes of Project Blue Beam is the use of advanced electromagnetic imaging such as that produced by HAARP and exhibited in the Norway spiral light as a psychological mass conditioning device in aid of the implementation of a global corporate new world order.
If this analysis is accurate, the Norwegian light may have been a HAARP-induced effect attempting to anchor an extraterrestrial-like or “transcendent” aura around U.S. President Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo the following day, Nov. 10.
EISCAT: HAARP antenna site near Tromso, Norway
HAARP and the Norwegian spiral light
According to Mr. Wilcock, the Dec. 9, 09 Norway spiral light is similar to other spiral lights in Russia in 2006, and in China (first seen in April 2009) that may be attributed to the HAARP technology.
Mr. Wilcock states that the plasma effects exhibited by the Norway light were too dense to have been produced by a failed Russian missile. He reiterates that HAARP is most probably the cause of the spiral lights.
Researcher Richard Hoagland notes that “just over the hill from Tromso [where the spiral light appeared], lies a high-tech Norwegian ‘HAARP antenna farm’ -- the EISCAT Ramfjordmoen facility -- specifically designed to broadcast powerful beams of microwave energy high into space ... thereby also creating blatant HD/torsion side-effects in the Earth's highly-electrified upper "plasma" atmosphere (ionosphere)? The facility is officially supported by Norway, Sweden, Finland, Japan ... China ... the United Kingdom ... and Germany.”
Although Mr. Hoagland in his analysis implies that the Norway light may have been a warning to President Barack Obama by the controllers of HAARP, the more likely scenario is that Mr. Obama now works in collaboration with the controllers of HAARP to use HAARP in the service of the implementation of a corporate new world order worldwide.
EISCAT: Norway torsion map
HAARP as a space-based weapon of mass destruction
HAARP is an exotic weapons system that is part of the weaponization of space, using "scalar wave interferometry" - a technology first discovered by scientist Nicola Tesla in the early 1900's. Two or more longitudinal, ultra-low frequency waves are “aimed” at an intersecting point, at which time they interact in a very unique way, “tapping” into the limitless plenum of energy surrounding the planet, and weaponizing this scalar energy.
HAARP has 3 major weapons-system components:
• Space-based component: HAARP weaponizes the Earth's Ionosphere.
• Air-based component: HAARP uses chemtrails as a frequency reflector from its ground and space base, and as a binary weapons system against the human population.
• Ground-based component: HAARP ground stations energize HAARP (Alaska; Greenland; Norway; Australia)
HAARP has numerous reported applications as a weapons system:
• SDI (Strategic Defence Initiative) Radiofrequency weapon
• Environmental warfare - Weather & earthquake warfare
• Space Warfare System
• Missile Defense System
• Scalar energy warfare against land and population targets, including cities, industrial sites, buildings, populations and individuals
• ELF weapon with electromagnetic harassment and mood manipulation of target populations and individuals.
• Biological & binary weapons against populations (with chemtrails component)
• Psyops electromagnetic imagery integrated with Project Blue Beam
HAARP is a space-based weapon of mass destruction. The death toll of two recent probable Environmental Warfare attacks by HAARP is on the scale of Hiroshima. The estimated death toll of the May 3, 2008 Weather Warfare Myanmar Cyclone is 78,000 dead + 56,000 missing as of May 29, 2008. The death toll of the May 12, 2008 Tectonic Warfare China Earthquake is 68,000 as of May 29, 2008, and expected to rise to 80,000. Official Japanese figures at the time put the Hiroshima death toll at 118661 civilians. But later estimates suggest the final toll was about 140,000.
Experts Gather at Dealy Plaza to Discuss the Latest Theories on JFK Assassination
Experts Gather at Dealy Plaza to Discuss the Latest Theories on JFK Assassination
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By Mark Anderson
The Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) and the JFK Lancer Group both held conferences Nov. 21-22, on the 46th anniversary of the killing of John F. Kennedy. COPA President John Judge said a “coup” took out Kennedy because he resisted construction of a global empire enforced by America.
Weekend highlights in Dallas included a special award presented to perhaps the only surviving surgeon who operated on both JFK and his accused “lone nut” shooter Lee Harvey Oswald at Parkland Hospital; and a strong rebuttal against noted “Manson” prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book Reclaiming History, which worships the long-disputed Warren Commission report. Standing on the world-famous grassy knoll, Judge’s strong oratory on JFK’s resistance to American imperialism admonished the 300 people at a special memorial to wake up.
“They continue to bury history at a rate we can barely reverse,” Judge told the audience at Dealey Plaza along Elm Street—the scene of the JFK shooting on that date in 1963 in the shadow of the former Texas School Book Depository. Judge spoke before and after a moment of silence. The weather was just like it was on that dire day long ago. The shadows on the grass looked the same. While other speakers such as UK researcher Ian Griggs lamented that the JFK incident still has not been completely and definitively solved—as key witnesses pass away due to the relentless passage of time—Judge said that, once and for all, Americans need to get past mourning JFK and win back their eroding freedom for JFK’s sake.
“We are allowed to know nothing and believe everything,” he stated, saying that people who do not truly know cannot act.
Judge said the Nov. 22, 1963, event “was not a lone gunman in a window; it was a military coup d’ etat. . . . They reversed the course of the Kennedys to have détente with the Soviet Union, to end the Cold War, to stop the arms race, to quit nuclear testing, to pull out of Vietnam . . . to get rid of the oil tax depletion allowance . . . to scatter the CIA to the four winds—these are the reasons that Kennedy was killed—not by a lone nut. But by a well-organized conspiracy and cover-up that went right to the top of the power systems of this country.”
Also, Russ Vandeveerdonk, who portrayed the president in Oliver Stone’s 1991 JFK movie, appeared on the knoll as a celebrity of sorts, recalling the unsettling feeling of riding down Elm Street slowly in the presidential limo, just as JFK did. An awkward incendiary device was tried as a shoulder-mounted means of imitating a fatal gunshot, he recalled for AFP.
WATCH THE INTERVIEW WITH JFK ACTOR
VANDEVEERDONK BY CLICKING HERE
Judge added: “You can call us conspiracy theorists if you call everyone else coincidence theorists,” speaking of how some people mock COPA’s quest to look into various assassinations, including Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.
“John F. Kennedy was someone who stood up to this system and where it was going in those critical years,” Judge added.
He said JFK would not waste U.S. resources in Vietnam and respected other nations’ sovereignty, refusing to topple foreign leaders.
Judge claimed that in Suitland, Md., near his home, is a National Archives location with a vast records center, containing “the military-history records of the United States, from World War II until now. These records are for the most part classified. They are stored in underground buildings at that site in Suitland . . . each of those buildings is an acre in size; there are 27 of those buildings in Suitland—27 acres of papers and classified documents of your military history. Do you think you own America? If you don’t own your own history, you are a conquered people. . . . Because that’s what conquerors do—they take the history away from the people.”
Notably, there are various National Archives locations including in College Park, Md., where JFK’s suit jacket, tie and shirt he wore on that fateful day are stored, as AFP confirmed. All presidential libraries are part of the National Archives system, including JFK’s library in Boston.
Jim DiEugenio, author of Destiny Betrayed and editor of Probe, attended both conferences at the Lawrence and Adolphus hotels to rebut Vincent Bugliosi’s 2,000-page tome that DiEugenio says is as much a nasty diatribe against anyone who disbelieves the Warren Commission as it is a flimsy “investigation” into what happened to JFK. Concerned that someone with Bugliosi’s reputation will have the final say on JFK, DiEugenio said that on any other subject, Bugliosi is well-versed and pleasant to speak with, but when it comes to JFK, “it’s like flying into the Bermuda Triangle,” where nothing makes sense anymore.
He warned that this huge book’s many flaws need to be exposed since Bugliosi is reportedly working with actor Tom Hanks to produce a major “docu-drama” in time for the 50th anniversary in 2013, which could be highly influential in re-selling the lone-gunman yarn to younger generations.
Known for posting a highly detailed rebuttal online of Bugliosi’s book, DiEugenio told AFP that Bugliosi had helpers in writing it, which partly explains why this book, in his view, is far worse than any of the famed attorney’s other books, including Helter Skelter about the Manson crimes and The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder about the Iraq war.
No one in the two groups that met in Dallas believes the Warren Commission, regardless of other differences of opinion they may have. For instance, another noted researcher, Robert Groden, appeared at the COPA conference and later sold his literature on the grassy knoll next to the famous picket fence from which extra shooters are said to have fired at JFK. Groden, a major figure during the House Select Committee on Assassinations probe, believes the Zapruder Film is genuine.
But respected researchers Jack White and Jim Fetzer, who were not in Dallas for these events, contend the film was doctored to misconstrue the events of Nov. 22, 1963. The common denominator of the two research groups is that no one thinks Oswald acted alone, if he took part at all.
AFP’s Michael Collins Piper wrote in his highly regarded book Final Judgment that the Israeli Mossad had a strong hand in JFK’s demise. Unfortunately that angle was not explored by conference speakers. A bookseller at Hotel Lawrence during COPA’s event, sells books on every conceivable angle of this subject, including Piper’s.
An honored Lancer guest, Dr. Robert McClelland, addressed that group at the Adolphus Hotel, saying he thinks the fatal shot came from behind the picket fence. In his view, Oswald did play a minor role, shooting JFK once through the back and that a fragment of that bullet went through Kennedy’s neck and exited out the front—but did not hit Texas Gov. John Connally.
However, another Parkland physician who tried to save JFK, Dr. Malcolm Perry, had spoken with Bethesda coroners and later told McClelland that he felt the small bullet hole at the base of the front of Kennedy’s neck was an entry wound, not an exit wound.
The Mary Ferrell Pioneer Award—“In appreciation for your dedication to the true history of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy”—was presented by the Lancer group to McClelland.
“Lancer was President Kennedy’s Secret Service code name,” Debra Conway, who heads the Lancer group, told the Dealey Plaza crowd the morning after McClelland’s speech. “We thought that would be a wonderful and unique way of saying we don’t want secrets anymore. ... So JFK Lancer became our standard and our name, and we are open-document activists.”
Griggs looks forward to the day “when we won’t be here on the 22nd of November. We will have solved this thing and it will have gone away. This is the 46th anniversary—
46 years—and we still don’t know. When is it going to end?”
MARK ANDERSON is the corresponding editor for American Free Press.
rss202
By Mark Anderson
The Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) and the JFK Lancer Group both held conferences Nov. 21-22, on the 46th anniversary of the killing of John F. Kennedy. COPA President John Judge said a “coup” took out Kennedy because he resisted construction of a global empire enforced by America.
Weekend highlights in Dallas included a special award presented to perhaps the only surviving surgeon who operated on both JFK and his accused “lone nut” shooter Lee Harvey Oswald at Parkland Hospital; and a strong rebuttal against noted “Manson” prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book Reclaiming History, which worships the long-disputed Warren Commission report. Standing on the world-famous grassy knoll, Judge’s strong oratory on JFK’s resistance to American imperialism admonished the 300 people at a special memorial to wake up.
“They continue to bury history at a rate we can barely reverse,” Judge told the audience at Dealey Plaza along Elm Street—the scene of the JFK shooting on that date in 1963 in the shadow of the former Texas School Book Depository. Judge spoke before and after a moment of silence. The weather was just like it was on that dire day long ago. The shadows on the grass looked the same. While other speakers such as UK researcher Ian Griggs lamented that the JFK incident still has not been completely and definitively solved—as key witnesses pass away due to the relentless passage of time—Judge said that, once and for all, Americans need to get past mourning JFK and win back their eroding freedom for JFK’s sake.
“We are allowed to know nothing and believe everything,” he stated, saying that people who do not truly know cannot act.
Judge said the Nov. 22, 1963, event “was not a lone gunman in a window; it was a military coup d’ etat. . . . They reversed the course of the Kennedys to have détente with the Soviet Union, to end the Cold War, to stop the arms race, to quit nuclear testing, to pull out of Vietnam . . . to get rid of the oil tax depletion allowance . . . to scatter the CIA to the four winds—these are the reasons that Kennedy was killed—not by a lone nut. But by a well-organized conspiracy and cover-up that went right to the top of the power systems of this country.”
Also, Russ Vandeveerdonk, who portrayed the president in Oliver Stone’s 1991 JFK movie, appeared on the knoll as a celebrity of sorts, recalling the unsettling feeling of riding down Elm Street slowly in the presidential limo, just as JFK did. An awkward incendiary device was tried as a shoulder-mounted means of imitating a fatal gunshot, he recalled for AFP.
WATCH THE INTERVIEW WITH JFK ACTOR
VANDEVEERDONK BY CLICKING HERE
Judge added: “You can call us conspiracy theorists if you call everyone else coincidence theorists,” speaking of how some people mock COPA’s quest to look into various assassinations, including Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.
“John F. Kennedy was someone who stood up to this system and where it was going in those critical years,” Judge added.
He said JFK would not waste U.S. resources in Vietnam and respected other nations’ sovereignty, refusing to topple foreign leaders.
Judge claimed that in Suitland, Md., near his home, is a National Archives location with a vast records center, containing “the military-history records of the United States, from World War II until now. These records are for the most part classified. They are stored in underground buildings at that site in Suitland . . . each of those buildings is an acre in size; there are 27 of those buildings in Suitland—27 acres of papers and classified documents of your military history. Do you think you own America? If you don’t own your own history, you are a conquered people. . . . Because that’s what conquerors do—they take the history away from the people.”
Notably, there are various National Archives locations including in College Park, Md., where JFK’s suit jacket, tie and shirt he wore on that fateful day are stored, as AFP confirmed. All presidential libraries are part of the National Archives system, including JFK’s library in Boston.
Jim DiEugenio, author of Destiny Betrayed and editor of Probe, attended both conferences at the Lawrence and Adolphus hotels to rebut Vincent Bugliosi’s 2,000-page tome that DiEugenio says is as much a nasty diatribe against anyone who disbelieves the Warren Commission as it is a flimsy “investigation” into what happened to JFK. Concerned that someone with Bugliosi’s reputation will have the final say on JFK, DiEugenio said that on any other subject, Bugliosi is well-versed and pleasant to speak with, but when it comes to JFK, “it’s like flying into the Bermuda Triangle,” where nothing makes sense anymore.
He warned that this huge book’s many flaws need to be exposed since Bugliosi is reportedly working with actor Tom Hanks to produce a major “docu-drama” in time for the 50th anniversary in 2013, which could be highly influential in re-selling the lone-gunman yarn to younger generations.
Known for posting a highly detailed rebuttal online of Bugliosi’s book, DiEugenio told AFP that Bugliosi had helpers in writing it, which partly explains why this book, in his view, is far worse than any of the famed attorney’s other books, including Helter Skelter about the Manson crimes and The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder about the Iraq war.
No one in the two groups that met in Dallas believes the Warren Commission, regardless of other differences of opinion they may have. For instance, another noted researcher, Robert Groden, appeared at the COPA conference and later sold his literature on the grassy knoll next to the famous picket fence from which extra shooters are said to have fired at JFK. Groden, a major figure during the House Select Committee on Assassinations probe, believes the Zapruder Film is genuine.
But respected researchers Jack White and Jim Fetzer, who were not in Dallas for these events, contend the film was doctored to misconstrue the events of Nov. 22, 1963. The common denominator of the two research groups is that no one thinks Oswald acted alone, if he took part at all.
AFP’s Michael Collins Piper wrote in his highly regarded book Final Judgment that the Israeli Mossad had a strong hand in JFK’s demise. Unfortunately that angle was not explored by conference speakers. A bookseller at Hotel Lawrence during COPA’s event, sells books on every conceivable angle of this subject, including Piper’s.
An honored Lancer guest, Dr. Robert McClelland, addressed that group at the Adolphus Hotel, saying he thinks the fatal shot came from behind the picket fence. In his view, Oswald did play a minor role, shooting JFK once through the back and that a fragment of that bullet went through Kennedy’s neck and exited out the front—but did not hit Texas Gov. John Connally.
However, another Parkland physician who tried to save JFK, Dr. Malcolm Perry, had spoken with Bethesda coroners and later told McClelland that he felt the small bullet hole at the base of the front of Kennedy’s neck was an entry wound, not an exit wound.
The Mary Ferrell Pioneer Award—“In appreciation for your dedication to the true history of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy”—was presented by the Lancer group to McClelland.
“Lancer was President Kennedy’s Secret Service code name,” Debra Conway, who heads the Lancer group, told the Dealey Plaza crowd the morning after McClelland’s speech. “We thought that would be a wonderful and unique way of saying we don’t want secrets anymore. ... So JFK Lancer became our standard and our name, and we are open-document activists.”
Griggs looks forward to the day “when we won’t be here on the 22nd of November. We will have solved this thing and it will have gone away. This is the 46th anniversary—
46 years—and we still don’t know. When is it going to end?”
MARK ANDERSON is the corresponding editor for American Free Press.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Health e-Tips - Could You Be Immune to Swine Flu?
Urgent Swine Flu Alert
Breakthrough super-herb combo could make your body...
"Immune" to Swine Flu
Now, the "Discovery of the Year" that vaccine-makers don't want you to know about...
Dear Reader,
This is the breakthrough you asked us for. While the world waits — and panics — you are the first to know the solution.
Finally, you can face cold and flu season without fear. Even of the dreaded swine flu that is leading the news every night.
Ever since the government first sounded the alarm about the H1N1 virus — the so-called "swine flu" — HSI members like you have been asking us for safe, effective alternatives to what the mainstream has to offer. You know Big Pharma's vaccines are ineffective at best — and downright dangerous at worst.
So while everyone else is lining up at the doctor's office or their local Walgreen's to get stabbed in the arm, you'll already be armed with the best flu-fighting secrets out there.
The true killer behind swine flu revealed...
and just in time
As we have reported many times, in most ways the H1N1 virus is no different than your run-of-the-mill flu. But getting the flu is miserable — why get sick at all when you don't have to?
And even if your immune system is healthy, certain strains of flu can pose one real danger that the mainstream has seemed to ignore... the cytokine storm.
When your body is attacked by a virus, your immune system needs a way to respond. Cytokines are cell messengers that signal the system to set up a proper defense.
But when the viral load gets too high — like it can with the H1N1 virus — the cytokines actually over-respond and... well... your immune system basically goes haywire.
A biochemical cascade of cells pours into the lungs. They call this the dreaded cytokine storm.
It can cause acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and your body releases fluid into your lungs... which can cause suffocation and, eventually, death.
In fact, some experts believe cytokine storms may be the true cause behind many swine flu deaths.
And the mainstream's solutions have been sadly ineffective at squelching this storm. You just need to watch the evening news to know how true that is.
But HSI knew real solutions were out there. So we went to our international network of experts for the answer.
And what we found surprised even us. We discovered not one but...
Three revolutionary immunity boosters that send swine flu right back to the farm
But, thanks to three immune superchargers, you could stop the flu in its tracks, avoiding the storm and staying healthy year round.
The first of these is a special plant extract, called OL10. In laboratory tests, OL10 absolutely destroys viruses by the millions. Not only that, it takes on bacteria and parasites with the same killing zeal.
It gets better, OL10 contains a powerful natural substance called oleuropein, which constantly adapts to new viral attacks on the plant... changing its defense properties as the microbes change their attacks. Now that's something the mainstream's vaccines sure can't deliver!
It's your super potent first line of defense against swine flu... as well as regular flu and even the common cold.
But that's just the start of the trio that knocks out swine flu like Ted Williams swatting home run balls. The second one in this powerhouse threesome is...
The herbal gladiator that clobbers viruses
from the inside out
And it's a doozy.
It's called GSE and it's an all-natural substance that is simply overwhelming to viruses and other disease-causing microbes. They just can't survive it. In fact, one lab study showed it can kill nearly 900 kinds of bacteria and fungi.
It seems to prevent infectious cells from absorbing the nutrients they need...so the cells just fall apart. Even better, according to experts on GSE, if it's taken when you already have a flu or cold virus, it appears to speed up recovery and can help soothe painful sore throats on contact.
So that's two... and the swi ne flu doesn't stand a chance against them. But we didn't stop there... in fact it took Japanese medicine to add the final piece to the puzzle.
Ancient Asian secret is the most potent virus killer
It's called HexoseCC and it's a super-powered mushroom extract that's been used as a staple of Japanese wellness for generations. And even though it's brand-new to American medicine...it's gaining quite a reputation here as well.
It's an extract of a unique hybridization of several kinds of medical mushrooms known for their immune-enhancing abilities. On their own, each mushroom has a long medical history in Japan, where their extracts are widely prescribed by physicians.
But when combined into a single hybrid mushroom, the resulting active ingredient is so potent that dozens of scientific studies have now established HexoseCC to be one of the world's most powerful — and safe — immune sti mulators.
In fact, these studies, published in respected peer-reviewed journals, have established the health benefits and safety of HexoseCC more conclusively than nearly any other natural supplement.
What is especially remarkable about this super virus slayer is how it works to help boost immune function:
* Increases your natural NK cells ("killer" cell) activity against diseased cells as much as 300 percent
* Increases the formation of explosive granules within NK cells — and the more ammunition each NK cell carries, the more invaders it can destroy.
* Boosts Interferon levels, which stops viruses multiplying and stimulates NK cell activity.
* Increases the formation of TNF, a group of proteins that help destroy cancer cells.
What's even better: HexoseCC causes no side effects because it stimulates your body's natural defense system to seek out and selectively destroy invading bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens.
Combine these three natural extracts and your body is an impenetrable fortress — even swine flu and other viral threats don't stand a chance.
This three-headed immune boosting superhero is available now ... but you have to know exactly where to get it and how much to take. And I can't wait to give you all the details in HSI's brand-new report, "Surviving Swine Flu Season: Underground medicine's 14 real solutions for staying healthy and safe."
It tells you recommended dosages of the triple super-flu fighter... but that's not all. In fact, we've combined...
All our most effective flu fighters
— in one resource
For the past 12 years, we've made it our mission to hunt down natural cures and bring them directly to the people who need them most. Now we've made it even easier for you to find cutting-edge immune system boosters by gathering the best of the best.
And, for the first time ever, all the greatest discoveries from our worldwide network are available at your fingertips in one single reference.
You'll learn all about:
* The special enzyme that helps keep your lungs clear in the face of swine flu
* The anti-viral miracle with ten of the most potent flu fighters on the planet
* Centuries-old Chinese flu remedies finally available in the US
* The truth behind the swine flu vaccines — make sure you read this before you even think about getting a shot
* One common nutrient you can take that could stop the flu in its tracks!
* How to get the one supplement that offers super-immunity against mutating flu bugs
In Surviving Swine Flu Season, you'll discover our latest breakthroughs and the modern-day miracles that have helped HSI members and their loved ones for more than a decade. You'll get all the details — the science, the studies, the HSI-recommended source, and you'll learn the straight truth about the dangerous vaccines our own government is pushing on us.
Now, for the first time ever, the research on these astounding discoveries, along with direct contact information for every single flu remedy listed, is available in one combined reference.
And better yet...
You'll get the information you need
— or the report is free
Thanks to the diligence of our research team and our vast network I know you'll find what you're looking for. But if you aren't 100% satisfied with Surviving Swine Flu Season, then, quite simply, I don't want it to cost you a cent. Simply call and we'll issue you a prompt refund of your purchase price — no questions asked.
And, because I so firmly believe in the value of this report, I want you to keep it anyway. Pass it on to a friend or loved one who may need it. Save it for your own future reference. Even if you ask for your money back, it's yours to keep, plain and simple.
Don't wait -- flu season is here!
You don't have time to waste. Not a month, not a week, not an hour. That's why we're making this urgent report available instantly for our members.
Just click the link below to order your copy of "Surviving Swine Flu Season: Underground medicine's 14 real solutions for staying heal thy and safe" for only $19.95. Don't delay — the information in this report is simply too important to wait another minute.
To your good health — for years to come,
Jenny Thompson
Director, Health Sciences Institute
Order Now using our Secure Order Form
To start receiving your own copy of the Health e-Tips, visit:
http://www.wrightnewsletter.com/etips/freecopy.html Or forward this e-mail to a friend so they can sign-up to receive their own copy of the Health e-Tips.
Health e-Tips readers can now tap into the minds of other health-conscious readers at the new HSI health forum:
http://www.healthiertalk.com
Copyright (c)2009 by Healthier News, LLC. Health e-Tips may not be posted on commercial sites without written permission.
Before you hit reply to send us a question or request, please visit here http://www.wrightnewsletter.com/healthy/faqs.html
If you'd like to participate in the Nutrition & Healing Forum, search past e-letters and products or you're a N&H subscriber and would like to search past articles, visit http://www.wrightnewsletter.com
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Attn: Customer Service
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Frederick, MD 21705 USA
Breakthrough super-herb combo could make your body...
"Immune" to Swine Flu
Now, the "Discovery of the Year" that vaccine-makers don't want you to know about...
Dear Reader,
This is the breakthrough you asked us for. While the world waits — and panics — you are the first to know the solution.
Finally, you can face cold and flu season without fear. Even of the dreaded swine flu that is leading the news every night.
Ever since the government first sounded the alarm about the H1N1 virus — the so-called "swine flu" — HSI members like you have been asking us for safe, effective alternatives to what the mainstream has to offer. You know Big Pharma's vaccines are ineffective at best — and downright dangerous at worst.
So while everyone else is lining up at the doctor's office or their local Walgreen's to get stabbed in the arm, you'll already be armed with the best flu-fighting secrets out there.
The true killer behind swine flu revealed...
and just in time
As we have reported many times, in most ways the H1N1 virus is no different than your run-of-the-mill flu. But getting the flu is miserable — why get sick at all when you don't have to?
And even if your immune system is healthy, certain strains of flu can pose one real danger that the mainstream has seemed to ignore... the cytokine storm.
When your body is attacked by a virus, your immune system needs a way to respond. Cytokines are cell messengers that signal the system to set up a proper defense.
But when the viral load gets too high — like it can with the H1N1 virus — the cytokines actually over-respond and... well... your immune system basically goes haywire.
A biochemical cascade of cells pours into the lungs. They call this the dreaded cytokine storm.
It can cause acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and your body releases fluid into your lungs... which can cause suffocation and, eventually, death.
In fact, some experts believe cytokine storms may be the true cause behind many swine flu deaths.
And the mainstream's solutions have been sadly ineffective at squelching this storm. You just need to watch the evening news to know how true that is.
But HSI knew real solutions were out there. So we went to our international network of experts for the answer.
And what we found surprised even us. We discovered not one but...
Three revolutionary immunity boosters that send swine flu right back to the farm
But, thanks to three immune superchargers, you could stop the flu in its tracks, avoiding the storm and staying healthy year round.
The first of these is a special plant extract, called OL10. In laboratory tests, OL10 absolutely destroys viruses by the millions. Not only that, it takes on bacteria and parasites with the same killing zeal.
It gets better, OL10 contains a powerful natural substance called oleuropein, which constantly adapts to new viral attacks on the plant... changing its defense properties as the microbes change their attacks. Now that's something the mainstream's vaccines sure can't deliver!
It's your super potent first line of defense against swine flu... as well as regular flu and even the common cold.
But that's just the start of the trio that knocks out swine flu like Ted Williams swatting home run balls. The second one in this powerhouse threesome is...
The herbal gladiator that clobbers viruses
from the inside out
And it's a doozy.
It's called GSE and it's an all-natural substance that is simply overwhelming to viruses and other disease-causing microbes. They just can't survive it. In fact, one lab study showed it can kill nearly 900 kinds of bacteria and fungi.
It seems to prevent infectious cells from absorbing the nutrients they need...so the cells just fall apart. Even better, according to experts on GSE, if it's taken when you already have a flu or cold virus, it appears to speed up recovery and can help soothe painful sore throats on contact.
So that's two... and the swi ne flu doesn't stand a chance against them. But we didn't stop there... in fact it took Japanese medicine to add the final piece to the puzzle.
Ancient Asian secret is the most potent virus killer
It's called HexoseCC and it's a super-powered mushroom extract that's been used as a staple of Japanese wellness for generations. And even though it's brand-new to American medicine...it's gaining quite a reputation here as well.
It's an extract of a unique hybridization of several kinds of medical mushrooms known for their immune-enhancing abilities. On their own, each mushroom has a long medical history in Japan, where their extracts are widely prescribed by physicians.
But when combined into a single hybrid mushroom, the resulting active ingredient is so potent that dozens of scientific studies have now established HexoseCC to be one of the world's most powerful — and safe — immune sti mulators.
In fact, these studies, published in respected peer-reviewed journals, have established the health benefits and safety of HexoseCC more conclusively than nearly any other natural supplement.
What is especially remarkable about this super virus slayer is how it works to help boost immune function:
* Increases your natural NK cells ("killer" cell) activity against diseased cells as much as 300 percent
* Increases the formation of explosive granules within NK cells — and the more ammunition each NK cell carries, the more invaders it can destroy.
* Boosts Interferon levels, which stops viruses multiplying and stimulates NK cell activity.
* Increases the formation of TNF, a group of proteins that help destroy cancer cells.
What's even better: HexoseCC causes no side effects because it stimulates your body's natural defense system to seek out and selectively destroy invading bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens.
Combine these three natural extracts and your body is an impenetrable fortress — even swine flu and other viral threats don't stand a chance.
This three-headed immune boosting superhero is available now ... but you have to know exactly where to get it and how much to take. And I can't wait to give you all the details in HSI's brand-new report, "Surviving Swine Flu Season: Underground medicine's 14 real solutions for staying healthy and safe."
It tells you recommended dosages of the triple super-flu fighter... but that's not all. In fact, we've combined...
All our most effective flu fighters
— in one resource
For the past 12 years, we've made it our mission to hunt down natural cures and bring them directly to the people who need them most. Now we've made it even easier for you to find cutting-edge immune system boosters by gathering the best of the best.
And, for the first time ever, all the greatest discoveries from our worldwide network are available at your fingertips in one single reference.
You'll learn all about:
* The special enzyme that helps keep your lungs clear in the face of swine flu
* The anti-viral miracle with ten of the most potent flu fighters on the planet
* Centuries-old Chinese flu remedies finally available in the US
* The truth behind the swine flu vaccines — make sure you read this before you even think about getting a shot
* One common nutrient you can take that could stop the flu in its tracks!
* How to get the one supplement that offers super-immunity against mutating flu bugs
In Surviving Swine Flu Season, you'll discover our latest breakthroughs and the modern-day miracles that have helped HSI members and their loved ones for more than a decade. You'll get all the details — the science, the studies, the HSI-recommended source, and you'll learn the straight truth about the dangerous vaccines our own government is pushing on us.
Now, for the first time ever, the research on these astounding discoveries, along with direct contact information for every single flu remedy listed, is available in one combined reference.
And better yet...
You'll get the information you need
— or the report is free
Thanks to the diligence of our research team and our vast network I know you'll find what you're looking for. But if you aren't 100% satisfied with Surviving Swine Flu Season, then, quite simply, I don't want it to cost you a cent. Simply call and we'll issue you a prompt refund of your purchase price — no questions asked.
And, because I so firmly believe in the value of this report, I want you to keep it anyway. Pass it on to a friend or loved one who may need it. Save it for your own future reference. Even if you ask for your money back, it's yours to keep, plain and simple.
Don't wait -- flu season is here!
You don't have time to waste. Not a month, not a week, not an hour. That's why we're making this urgent report available instantly for our members.
Just click the link below to order your copy of "Surviving Swine Flu Season: Underground medicine's 14 real solutions for staying heal thy and safe" for only $19.95. Don't delay — the information in this report is simply too important to wait another minute.
To your good health — for years to come,
Jenny Thompson
Director, Health Sciences Institute
Order Now using our Secure Order Form
To start receiving your own copy of the Health e-Tips, visit:
http://www.wrightnewsletter.com/etips/freecopy.html Or forward this e-mail to a friend so they can sign-up to receive their own copy of the Health e-Tips.
Health e-Tips readers can now tap into the minds of other health-conscious readers at the new HSI health forum:
http://www.healthiertalk.com
Copyright (c)2009 by Healthier News, LLC. Health e-Tips may not be posted on commercial sites without written permission.
Before you hit reply to send us a question or request, please visit here http://www.wrightnewsletter.com/healthy/faqs.html
If you'd like to participate in the Nutrition & Healing Forum, search past e-letters and products or you're a N&H subscriber and would like to search past articles, visit http://www.wrightnewsletter.com
To learn about Nutrition & Healing, call (915)849-4605 or visit http://clicks.wrightnewsletter.com//t/AQ/tpw/vFw/D4c/AQ/At6reg/6smk.
If you want to end your e-Tips subscription or you need to change your e-mail address, please follow the instructions below. Your changes will be effective immediately. However, if you do not follow the instructions below and simply hit reply instead, we may not receive your request and cannot assure you that it will be completed.
Please note: We sent this e-mail to:
WALTERSIY@gmail.com
because you subscribed to this service.
Manage your subscription:
To end your Health e-Tips subscription...visit this address:
Unsubscribe Here
To manage your subscription by mail or for any other subscription issues,
write us at:
Order Processing Center
Attn: Customer Service
P.O. Box 925
Frederick, MD 21705 USA
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