23
Feb
2005

Celebrations as 02 plan is ditched

JUBILANT West Kirby residents are celebrating victory over telecom giants 02 after plans for construction of a mobile phone mast in the town were thrown out.

Wirral planning committee refused permission for a 15m high telecommunications mast and ancillary equipment to be built in Orrysdale Road, West Kirby.

West Kirby Cllr Jeff Green said the proposed mast would be five metres higher that existing street lights and, with 1.5m high cabinets added to the mast, it would create clutter and be a visual eye-sore.

Anti-mast campaigner Kate Evans said: "I have real concerns about the health implications caused by the use of these masts. It's a pity the Government will not allow the council to refuse applications of health grounds.

"Unfortunately because of the current system there is a presumption in favour of development which over-ride local, environmental and safety concerns. On this occasion common sense prevailed."

The 02 company has the right to appeal against the planning committee decision.

Protestors in Meols have another mast fight on their hands after 02 submitted a third application to sight a tower near to Kingsmead School in Bertram Drive.

Two previous applications have been thrown out by Wirral council planners.


From Mast Network

Protest plan over 30m phone mast

Feb 23 2005

By Cathy Reeves


RESIDENTS are planning to stage a demonstration this Friday in protest at a 30m telephone mast.

Planning permission has been granted by Wealden District Council for the pole and ancillary equipment to be put up in the grounds of Mid Sussex Timber yard in Station Road, Forest Row.

Villager Paula Simonis said: "We really don't want it. My first worries are the health risks and the fact that we knew nothing about this. "Villagers feel very aggrieved that it's gone through the way it has. "People feel they haven't had the right to talk about it."

The demonstration is expected to attract a good number of protesters with placards.

Simon Waters, partner at Mid Sussex Timber, insisted no contract had yet been signed with the telephone company and that he would be looking for reassurances about safety before signing any deal.

He said: "I will be making it quite clear to them that if they want the support of the local people then they need to convince the village and ourselves that what they plan to erect would not be detrimental to anyone's health in any way.

"If there's going to be justified huge opposition obviously we wouldn't go ahead.

Mike Davies, community affairs manager for Hutchison 3G UK Ltd, said: "The site itself gained full planning consent with the local authority at the end of 2004. It went through the full planning process."

Mr Davies said there were no objections placed at the time.

He continued: "I think the reality is we will not be changing the location because it was given full consent by authority."

The protest is due to take place at the site on Friday at 3.30pm.


From Mast Network

MPS CALL FOR MAST RETHINK

http://tinyurl.com/65ssx

From Mast Network

MAST FEARS

Residents up in arms over mobile phone company's proposals

A PROPOSED phone mast upgrade has sparked health fears for elderly and disabled people who live nearby.

Residents of High Craigends and Craigends Court, Kilsyth, including local community councillor Hugh Dempsey, are up in arms after T-Mobile (UK) Limited announced it was planning to upgrade its mast just next to the Celtic Supporters Club.

Mr Dempsey raised the matter at this week's Kilsyth Community Council meeting: "I'm very concerned for the people who live right next to this, most of whom are elderly and have health considerations, and I'm concerned about whether they are going to have any say in the matter," he told the meeting. Members agreed to oppose the move.

Chairman Margot Macmillan said: "There's been a lot of research done but no-one has come out with an absolute answer. The effects are unknown. I'm concerned about this - I think almost everyone is concerned."

Local residents have also told the Chronicle of their worries. Catriona Kilmurray, whose disabled son lives near to the mast, said: "Some of the houses are just two or three metres from the mast – you can practically reach out and touch it. Also, some of this housing is amenity housing – which means it is specially designated for elderly people or those with health needs, so many of these people are already vulnerable which makes the whole thing even more worrying."

The local campaign against the upgrade of the 12.5 metre high mast, has come in the same week that a world renowned professor is visiting Scotland to highlight the issue.

Professor Olle Johansson is calling on the Scottish Executive to suspend the construction of all masts and launch an immediate investigation into the long-term health effects.

Professor Johansson, who is to brief MSPs this week, has said: "In areas where phone masts are commonplace, evidence of health defects, skin conditions, allergies, and caner clusters is extremely worrying."

T-Mobile say the proposed upgrade to the mast is needed to provide 'third generation communications' to the residential area of Kilsyth. A letter from the company to local residents explained: "Third generation has been identified as the future of communications and is being heralded as a major technological breakthrough. This promises a range of high-quality mobile multimedia services with a reliable integration of voice, data and video images. Effectively you will be able to send and receive e-mails, view digital video clips and use a powerful personal organiser and a convenient electronic wallet."

In a statement on residents' health concerns T-Mobile told The Chronicle: "Based on over 40 years research T-Mobile is confident that its base stations, operating within strict international guidelines (recognised by the World Health Organisation) do not present a health risk to any member of the public." "T-Mobile recognises that one of the biggest challenges facing operators in developing a modern telecommuications infrastructure is minimising the impact it has one the environment. At T-Mobile we work hard to try to reduce the visual impact of our base stations and this is why we are upgrading an existing site rather than building a completely new installation."


From Mast Network

Rummy TV

http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/column.php?id=760

When Democracy Failed - 2005

The Warnings of History

This weekend - February 27th - is the 72nd anniversary, but the corporate media most likely won't cover it. The generation that experienced this history firsthand is now largely dead, and only a few of us dare hear their ghosts.

It started when the government, in the midst of an economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist. Some, like Sefton Delmer - a London Daily Express reporter on the scene - say they certainly did not, while others, like William Shirer, suggest they did.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.

He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.

His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.

Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.

Playing on this new implicitly racial nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.

His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.

Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.

He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.

His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at out disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public's recollection as his central security office began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so successful that the names of some of the people "denounced" were soon being broadcast on radio stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians and news reporters who dared speak out - a favorite target of his regime and the media he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by corporate allies.

To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.

He also reached out to the churches, declaring that the nation had clear Christian roots, that any nation that didn't openly support religion was morally bankrupt, and that his administration would openly and proudly provide both moral and financial support to initiatives based on faith to provide social services.

In this, he was reaching back to his own embrace of Christianity, which he noted in an April 12, 1922 speech:

"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers ... was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

"In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders...

"As a Christian ... I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice..."

When he later survived an assassination attempt, he said, "Now I am completely content. The fact that I left the Burgerbraukeller earlier than usual is a corroboration of Providence's intention to let me reach my goal."

Many government functions started with prayer. Every school day started with prayer and every child heard the wonders of Christianity and - especially - the Ten Commandments in school. The leader even ended many of his speeches with a prayer, as he did in a February 20, 1938 speech before Parliament:

"In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgment and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger."

But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him (later known as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, questions of his possibly illegitimate rise to power, his corruption of religious leaders, and the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians about the people being held in detention without due process or access to attorneys or family.

With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media - he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity.

He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe - at first - denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.

It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying with European nations, but, after he personally met with the leader of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the military action began, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the nervous British people that giving in to this leader's new first-strike doctrine would bring "peace for our time." Thus Hitler annexed Austria in a lightning move, riding a wave of popular support as leaders so often do in times of war. The Austrian government was unseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany, and German corporations began to take over Austrian resources.

In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said, "Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."

To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will.

Rather than the government being run by multiple parties in a pluralistic, democratic fashion, one single party sought total control. Emulating a technique also used by Stalin, but as ancient as Rome, the Party used the power of its influence on the government to take over all government functions, hand out government favors, and reward Party contributors with government positions and contracts.

In times of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself. You were either with us, or you were with the terrorists.

It was a simplistic perspective, but that was what would work, he was told by his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels: "The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

Those questioning him were labeled "anti-German" or "not good Germans," and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the army came) against the "intellectuals and liberals" who were critical of his policies.

Another technique was to "manufacture news," through the use of paid shills posing as reporters, seducing real reporters with promises of access to the leader in exchange for favorable coverage, and thinly veiled threats to those who exposed his lies. As his Propaganda Minister said, "It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."

Nonetheless, once the "small war" annexation of Austria was successfully and quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of opposition were again raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist cells wasn't enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent. A full-out war was necessary to divert public attention from the growing rumbles within the country about disappearing dissidents; violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and the epidemic of crony capitalism that was producing empires of wealth in the corporate sector but threatening the middle class's way of life.

A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.

In the months after that, he claimed that Poland had weapons of mass destruction (poison gas) and was supporting terrorists against Germany. Those who doubted that Poland represented a threat were shouted down or branded as ignorant. Elections were rigged, run by party hacks. Only loyal Party members were given passes for admission to public events with the leader, so there would never be a single newsreel of a heckler, and no doubt in the minds of the people that the leader enjoyed vast support.

And his support did grow, as Propaganda Minister Goebbels' dictum bore fruit:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Within a few months Poland, too, was invaded in a "defensive, pre-emptive" action. The nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed in the name of national security; it was the end of Germany's first experiment with democracy.

As we conclude this review of history, there are a few milestones worth remembering.

February 27, 2005, is the 72nd anniversary of Dutch terrorist Marinus van der Lubbe's successful firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag) building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution. By the time of his successful and brief action to seize Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitler was the most beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation. Hailed around the world, he was later Time magazine's "Man Of The Year."

Most Americans remember his office for the security of the homeland, known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, simply by its most famous agency's initials: the SS.

We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly violent warfare they named "lightning war" or blitzkrieg, which, while generating devastating civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable "shock and awe" among the nation's leadership according to the authors of the 1996 book "Shock And Awe" published by the National Defense University Press.

Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the German democracy had become through Hitler's close alliance with the largest German corporations and his policy of using religion and war as tools to keep power: "fas-cism (fâsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.

Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, bust up unions, and create an illusion of prosperity through government debt and continual and ever-expanding war spending.

America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.

To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.

Thom Hartmann http://www.thomhartmann.com lived and worked in Germany during the 1980s, is the Project Censored Award-winning, best-selling author of over a dozen books, and is the host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk radio program. This article, in slightly altered form, was first published in 2003 by CommonDreams.org and is now also a chapter in Thom's book What Would Jefferson Do?, published in 2004 by Random House/Harmony.


Informant: Laurel

The Secret Government

http://207.44.245.159/article3281.htm

Thousands of Germans March to Protest Bush Visit

Demonstrators pulled a float portraying a prisoner being beaten at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison through the German city of Mainz on Wednesday. The float featured a woman in military fatigues whipping a "prisoner" in an orange jumpsuit -- a replication of abuse by US troops at the Baghdad prison.

http://tinyurl.com/6wemp


From Information Clearing House

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Pictures:
http://www.attac.de/uni-bochum/Gallery/thumbnails.php?album=45

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Lufthansa May Sue Over Bush Visit Flight Disruption
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000100&sid=a5r.jATeAKnQ

informant: ranger116

America's might is draining away

Ignore the vanity of the Bushites, America's might is draining away:

America’s modesty in 1945 understated its muscle, just as Bushite vanity overstates it today. He has over-reached. His country is overstretched, losing economic momentum, losing world leadership, and losing the philosophical plot. America is running into the sand.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1065-1451138,00.html


From Information Clearing House

Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules

UK: How could attorney general support such a weak and dismal argument? :

The following is an extract from Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules.

http://207.44.245.159/article8154.htm

If Bush pushes criticism, Putin will push back

In written answers to questions submitted by The New York Times before Bush left for Europe, Ushakov said Putin would likely respond to Bush's criticism by raising "our own concerns about the situation in the United States and certain troubling aspects of Washington's policies."

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/02/22/news/diplo.html
http://snipurl.com/d06a


From Information Clearing House

Iran to Bush: Don't Meddle with Our Independence

"America does not like an independent Iran, the question is how far they can (take away Iran's independence), and ... what price they would have to pay to achieve that end," he told a news conference after a weekly cabinet meeting.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=H34TVT3ZPLNLOCRBAELCFEY?type=worldNews&storyID=7712450
http://snipurl.com/d068


From Information Clearing House

Not in our name, Mr. President

It won’t be a pretty sight when Bush’s dedicated supporters reach the breaking point. Make no mistake they will finally realize that lowering ourselves to the methods of our enemies damages the ultimate cause. As one former FBI agent is quoted in a recent magazine article, “Brutalization doesn’t work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul.”

http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/2005/as-editorials-0221-editorial-5b18q4103.htm
http://snipurl.com/d062


From Information Clearing House

U.S.-Held Prisoners Transferred Abroad Subjected to Torture

Despite repeated denials from President Bush and others in his administration that the U.S. government does not engage in torture or hand over prisoners to nations that do, a number of eyewitness accounts and press reports contradict those White House assertions.

http://207.44.245.159/article8148.htm

Secrecy reaches absurd level in detention

Attorneys for the Justice Department appeared before a federal judge in Washington this month and asked him to dismiss a lawsuit over the detention of a U.S. citizen, basing their request not merely on secret evidence but also on secret legal arguments.

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/editorial/10960904.htm
http://snipurl.com/d061


From Information Clearing House

After Iraq will the US attack Syria next?

The history and consequence of imperial interventions in Syria and Lebanon...

http://207.44.245.159/article8145.htm

Syria minister warns of Bush 'plot'

"What has happened in Lebanon is an inseparable part of the plan to restructure the Middle East. This causes real worries to the people of this region," Shaban told Aljazeera.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4EE5CB31-3106-4A23-A07D-1E8A7FE51CD2.htm
http://snipurl.com/d05y


From Information Clearing House

What the CIA's Files Can Tell Us About Iraq

Since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the American public has endured an astounding avalanche of official lies, half truths, pseudo-events and sheer balderdash that will surely enter the Guinness Book of Records.

http://207.44.245.159/article8150.htm

Preface - TIPPING POINT

http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/Global_Warming.htm

Whalley Range against the mast

Residents in Whalley Range oppposed to T Mobile's proposal to site a 3G mast (15m) high on the ground's of Whalley Range Football Club, Kings Road, Chorlton are meeting on Tuesday 1st March 2005 at the Gita Bhavan Hindu Temple at 7pm. The meeting will be held in the hall not the temple itself so that is accessible to the muslim community.

We would welcome any information on how to stop prior notification going through as manchester city council planning department told us today, they are nothing to do with the process and can't stop anything from going through. They have advised us to speak with the football club - however the football club recently refused to accept a petition with 400 plus names on.

Any advice greatly received - please email: stopthemast@hotmail.co.uk

Nicky Lidbetter
Senior Manager
National Phobics Society
Zion Community Resource Centre
339 Stretford Road
Hulme
Manchester
M15 4ZY
Tel: 0870 7700 456
Fax: 0161 227 9862
Email: nationalphobic@btconnect.com
Website: http://www.phobics-society.org.uk


From Mast Network

Mobile mast generates health fears

Feb 23 2005

By Anthony Harvison, Crewe Chronicle

THE possibility of a phone mast being erected near a built-up area of Coppenhall is alarming residents worried it could be a health hazard.

Mobile phone company Vodafone is in the early stages of seeking planning permission for a mast in Parkers Road to provide third generation services to users in the area.

But the news has shocked nearby residents, fearful over the effects electromagnetic radiation emitted by the masts might have on their health. It follows fears voiced in the Chronicle last week by people living near four masts at Hough and Chorlton.

Geoff Wilson, of Elmstead Close, is leading a campaign to stop the mast getting planning permission. He feels it is in a totally unsuitable location. He said: 'It is a ludicrous position to place a mast. There are dozens of farmers' fields six or seven hundred yards down the road which would be a better site than this. 'It's really slap-bang in the middle of a residential area, with hundreds of houses, an old people's home literally 50 yards away and two schools in the vicinity, Mablins Lane and Leighton.

'As a parent of a three-year-old son this is a major concern. I know we have got to move on and we all want better phone reception but my main worry is health. These radio signals do not go round the long way. They go straight through the houses.'

Mr Wilson has been receiving support from national pressure group Mast Sanity and is in the process of contacting Eddisbury MP Stephen O'Brien. He has also gained the assistance of Independent councillor for Leighton, Byron Evans, who expressed sympathy for the residents' plight: 'People are not totally convinced of the safety of these masts in the long-term. We will look into this to see if the positioning is appropriate or not.'

A spokesman for Vodafone said the proposed mast has to be near the housing estate to be effective, adding: 'We do understand that some people will have concerns but we have got to balance that with the need to provide a mobile phone service to many millions of customers. 'We comply with stringent international guidelines issued by the World Health Organisation which has said that despite enormous amounts of research, there is no substantiated evidence of any adverse health effects.'


From Mast Network

Meeting called as mast plan rings alarm bells

http://tinyurl.com/69far


From Mast Network

Mobile phone's wrong number

http://www.thisisdroitwichspa.co.uk/worcestershire/droitwich/news/DROIT_NEWS_LATEST7.html#


From Mast Network

HEALTH RISK FEARS OVER O2 MAST PLAN

http://newsnow.co.uk/cgi/NGoto/86296012?


From Mast Network

Group Looks at North America to Become One Country

http://tinyurl.com/4l5zj

We need to repair the vote now

After the last two presidential elections, it's incredibly important to repair our election system. We need to guarantee paper printouts for electronic voting machines, cut long lines, and prohibit partisan election officials.

There's lots of legislation in Congress to do just that, and we need to demand our representatives pass it immediately.

I just signed a petition to Congress. Can you join me by signing this petition?

http://www.moveonpac.org/repairthevote/

This is urgent because states are preparing to spend over a billion dollars on new electronic voting machines. Unless Congress requires paper printouts now, we'll be stuck with expensive machines that can't do a simple recount.

I hope you'll sign this petition to Congress:

http://www.moveonpac.org/repairthevote/

Bob Reuschlein


From ufpj-news

The Wealth Transfer Scheme

WorkingForChange

posted 02/22/05

Geov Parrish reports on the Bush administration budget, which uses their self-manufactured deficit as an excuse for a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich.

http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=7354350&url_num=13&url=http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=18583

Plans to restrict cellphone tower sitting

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/10882_print.shtml


Informant: Robert Riedlinger

Total verbandelt?

"Friends of the Earth" werfen der Europäischen Behörde für Lebensmittelsicherheit Parteinahme für die Interessen der Gentech-Industrie vor...

http://www.telepolis.de/tp/r4/artikel/19/19518/1.html

A Thousand Words

You can read scientific reports about climate change and global warming till your eyes blur, but sometimes, good old-fashioned photos still tell the story best.

Check out this BBC photo essay documenting climate change:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/sci_nat_how_the_world_is_changing/html/1.stm

Source: http://www.tompaine.com/index.php#passiton

A Hidden Budget Blow

by Earl Hadley, TomPaine.com Exclusive

There are hidden education cuts in Bush's budget that the GOP leadership doesn't want you to see.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/a_hidden_budget_blow.php

LEAFLET HAD TWO ERRORS IN IT

11:00 - 23 February 2005

May I correct two errors in the Conservative leaflet distributed to Bath residents? In Lyncombe ward, the Liberal Democrat councillors have reacted most vigorously to local residents' concerns about the phone mast that mmO2 wished to erect at the Bear Flat.

First the council turned down the application and now the local councillors are helping the telecom company look for another site away from houses and schools.

We Bear Flat residents should feel pleased that our councillors have worked so hard for us on this matter. Of course this site should never have been recommended in the first place; the people to blame for this are the planning department officers who disregarded Government guidelines and the wishes of local people.

The second mistake in the leaflet is that it states there is no evidence of any ill effects from phone masts. There have been several scientific studies that have shown ill effects. The Government-funded Stewart report concludes that it is not possible to say that exposure to RF radiation is totally without adverse health effects and goes on to recommend that a precautionary approach should be adopted.

I hope that any further leaflets put out by the Conservative party will have these errors corrected.

TESSA NEWMAN

Elm Place, Bath

http://tinyurl.com/5k2v9

From Mast Network

Council and residents urge MPs to call for change in law

A CAMPAIGN has been launched for a law change so that planning authorities can consider the health risks of mobile phone masts.

Studies have linked radiation from mobile phones and the masts to conditions such as ear and brain tumours.

Under the current law planning committees can reject applications for masts on their visual appearance but not on the possible health dangers.

Now Poole council and residents have called on MP for Mid Dorset and North Poole Annette Brooke and Poole MP Robert Syms, to lobby the government for a change in the law.

Poole councillor Charles Meachin said: "It's appalling. The planning officers want to take health issues into consideration, but can't.

"Local people can't take into account if these masts are going to affect our children."

Residents are behind the plan after several recent failures to stop mobile masts going up:

Parents were furious when O2 was given permission to install a mast in Herbert Avenue near St Joseph's School in Poole.

A government inspector overturned East Dorset planners' rejection of a 21-metre mast in Cannon Hill Plantation - just half-a-mile from Colehill First School.

Just before Christmas residents in Branksome lost their fight to stop a mobile mast being built in The Avenue.

People protested against a mast put up in Butts Pond.

At the moment residents and dog walkers in Parkstone are fighting to stop a Vodafone mast being put up at a beauty spot, Stromboli Hill, in Clifton Road.

The Stewart report, a recent government-sponsored scientific inquiry, warned that the health risks of masts were still unknown and that care should be taken where about were they are put up.

Poole MP Robert Syms said: "The government issued circulars to say this report should be ignored.

"There may be no evidence but if we have a choice they should not be put near schools."

Mrs Brooke has already written to the Office of the deputy Prime Minister and said all mobile masts should be discussed at council. Those masts that are under 15 metres high can now be given permission by officers alone, without any discussion by planning committee members.

From Mast Network

Tower Watch

http://www.cellular-news.com/tower_watch/

Firefighters in battle to get rid of phone masts

Feb 18 2005

By Jessica Shaughnessy, Daily Post Staff


FIREFIGHTERS are campaigning for mobile phone masts at six stations in Merseyside to be removed because of health concerns.

Firefighters at Buckley Hill in Sefton claim senior officers ignored their fears and ordered them to train on a bell tower where a mast stands.

Now the FBU is lodging a formal complaint with Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service and is calling for the Buckley Hill mast, as well as masts at stations in Bromborough, Newton-Le-Willows, Wallasey, Kirkby, and Croxteth to be removed.

FBU branch secretary Les Skarratts said: "The firefighters were ordered to train on the bell tower, despite expressing concern.

"This is against the law. Under the Health and Safety Act, employers have to provide written assurance that something is safe if employees are concerned.

"The authority has not been able to do that.

"Firefighters at all six stations are unhappy their health is being put at risk. We want the masts to be taken down or assurance that they are safe."

Mr Skarratts said firefighters in Buckley Hill share concerns with local residents about a possible cancer cluster in the area.

Residents have called for the Department of Health to carry out an epidemiology survey in the area because they suspect there has been an unusually high rate of cancer and epilepsy diagnosis since the mast was built seven years ago.

Campaigner Eileen O'Connor, of Formby, is supporting Buckley Hill residents and the firefighters in their bid. She is chairwoman of national pressure group SCRAM and a trustee of the Radiation Research Group.

She said: "People should not go within three feet of these masts when they are operating, and should certainly not climb up them.

"Firefighters across America and Canada have successfully campaigned for a ban on siting masts on their stations."

The Daily Post understands that proprietors are paid up to £30,000 to have masts on their land.

Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service confirmed it is in talks with the union about the issue.

But the service said it cannot take the ones already built down because of contractual obligations to mobile phone companies.

A spokesman said: "We were originally approached by the mobile phone companies a number of years ago and payment was offered.

"There are six masts on our property that are under contract.

"If any credible evidence proves they are harmful to health, we will terminate contracts with the mast providers."

Last year the authority decided not to have any more masts on its property.

The authority said: "Upon expiry of their current arrangements, the Authority will require them (the mobile companies) to remove their equipment, or agree terms acceptable to the Authority for the continued installation of their equipment."

jessicashaughnessy@dailypost.co.uk

http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_objectid=15204117&method=full&siteid=50061&headline=firefighters-in-battle-to-get-rid-of-phone-masts-name_page.html


Informant: sylvie

Protestors vow to block phone mast

By Kerry McQueeney

Businesses in a tower block in Croydon are vowing to physically stop a mobile phone company from putting a mast on top of the building next door amid fears it could damage their health.

The owner of Albany House and the businesses which rent office space there plan to physically block the path of a crane which the mobile phone company want to use to access the land and put up the transmitter.

Mobile phone company Hutchison 3G submitted plans last August to place a 6.5 metre transmitter, disguised as a flag pole, on top of 88-90 South End next door to Albany House.

Croydon Council says 160 letters were sent to addresses closest to the site and less than five objections were received. As a result the mast was approved at the end of August.

Anita Bishop, who owns Albany House, objected to the application. She said: "The company putting up the mast want access to my land to move a crane. There's no way I'm going to let them through. If this is the only way I can stop them from putting this mast up, so be it."

David Gregory, owner of Brickworks Marketing Communications, says he will cancel his tenancy and take his business elsewhere if the mast goes up.

He said: "I am not convinced these things are harmless. I won't put myself at risk and I won't put my staff at risk. I believe that transmitters are detrimental to your health, that your immune system is considerably weakened by them."

A spokesman for Hutchison 3G said: "We understand the concerns raised. However, there is an increasing demand for this kind of technology not least from businesses".

12:19pm today

http://www.croydonguardian.co.uk/news/features/display.var.572748.0.protestors_vow_to_block_phone_mast.php


From NewsNow

Phone Masts News

http://newsnow.co.uk/newsfeed/?search=mast&x=0&y=0

Petition to the WHO

In the name of the people, who suffer under Electrical Sensitivity, we beg for

- official acceptance of the problem

- a clear definition of the Electrical Sensitivity

and preventively

- the support concerning the construction of radio free protection zones

- a ban of the continuous emission of cordless phones after the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) standard and other electronic devices

signature / name, address:



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This will be forwarded to the WHO in Genf, if you send it to:

Verein für Elektrosensible e.V.
Düsseldorfer Str. 22

D-80804 München



Workshop of
Electrical Hypersensitivity
in Prag, 26.-28. Oktober 2004

Summary from Dr. Birgit Stöcker


The biological effects of electric and magnetic fields as well as electro-magnetic waves (emf), have been estimated completely erroneously during the last decades. However, because of the increasing expansion of technology in every area of life and especially since the escalation of mobile phone radiation, the evaluation of the influence of electro-technology on life has changed, and there came movement into the valuation.

Science is now discussing the following:

1. Electro-sensibility as an intensified perception of emf, which is seen as a sensory disturbance by neuropathic patients (e.g., in conditions after meningitis, borrelioses or multiple sclerosis); in cases of brain stem syndromes, brain tumours, as well as skull fractures.

Diagnosis: neurologic tests
Therapy: damp of conduction systems

2. Electro-sensitivity, which is mainly a stress syndrome marked by raised sympathetic activity, increased action potentials, secretion of stress factors (like free radicals, adrenaline, noradrenaline, histamine, cholesterine, etc.). Corresponding to the individual tolerance of these stress factors, people suffer from unspecific symptoms, such as insomnia, headache, chronic fatigue, vertigo, and even epilepsy; or, they complain of vacillating blood pressure, difficulty in breathing, cardiac arrhythmia and myocardial arrest. As these problems, as a rule, disappear after disconnecting the electromagnetic source, we talk about a neurological warning-signal, which should not be underrated.

Diagnosis: in vivo- or in vitro-provocation with testing the stress factors; new: genetic expression test

Therapy: stress reduction with
- sport
- breathing exercises
- medicine
- supplements

3. Electro-allergy as a different reaction of the organism against emf. We find allergies more and more in young people, who use an immense amount of electronic appliances.

Diagnosis: allergy tests
Therapy: antiallergics

4. Electro-injuries playing a strong role in the diseases of modern civilization. This includes changes in the nervous and hormonal systems, heart and blood pressure effects, negative influences on immunity, metabolic disorders and long-term cancer, as well as genetic reactions. Radiation disease is normally irreversible. It appears not only in hypersensitive people, but can also attack everyone in society, without their feeling any sensibility. Correlating cause and effect (medical coherence) is, at the most, hard to percieve, as environmental or civilization’s diseases are regularly a synergism of multifarious loads.

Here we can observe a circulus vitiosus dynamic at work:

Electricity
geopathic heavy
zones metals
synergism
fungi, viruses, chemical
bacteria, parasites substances
allergenes

Diagnosis: in vivo- or in vitro-provocation with testing specific parameters, like blood pressure, hormones or glukose tolerance before and after emf-loading; also genetic test (DNA damages)

Therapy: corresponding care of symptoms


Kontakt:

Dr. Birgit Stöcker
Verein für Elektrosensible e.V.
- Mitglied im Paritätischen Wohlfahrtsverband -
Düsseldorfer Str. 22

D-80804 München

Tel. Hotline: 0900 11 00 791

e-mail: stoecker.b@web.de


Letter to the WHO in response to its Precautionary Framework
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/473990/

The emissions damage health
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/538751/

Elektrosensibilität ein Stress-Syndrom: Petition an die WHO

Im Namen der Menschen, die unter Elektrosensitivität leiden, bitte ich um


- offizielle Anerkennung des Problems


- eine klare Definition der Elektrosensitivität


sowie präventiv um:


- die Unterstützung der Einrichtung von funkfreien Schutzzonen und


- ein Verbot der Daueremission von DECT-Telefonen u.a. elektronischen Geräten



Unterschrift / Name, Adresse:


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Dies wird an die WHO in Genf weitergeleitet, wenn Sie es einschicken an den:

Verein für Elektrosensible e.V.
Düsseldorfer Str. 22

D-80804 München




Bericht über den Workshop:

Electrical Hypersensitivity, ein internationales elektromagnetisches Feld-Projekt der WHO vom 25. und 26. Oktober 2004 in Prag

von Birgit Stöcker

Ende Oktober 2004 fand in Prag eine internationale Tagung zum Thema „Elektrosensibilität“ statt. Bereits erzielte experimentelle und theoretische Ergebnisse wurden kritisch besprochen und neue Resultate präsentiert. Auch nicht-wissenschaftliche, aber qualifizierte Meinungen konnten vorgetragen werden. So versuchten vor allem Vertreter von Betroffenen-Verbänden, die Fülle der diskutierten Symptome und biologischen Effekte zu einem logischen Krankheitsbild zusammenzufassen.

Anwesend waren Vertreter aus den verschiedensten Staaten der Erde, was zeigte, dass es sich bei der Elektrosensitivität um ein Weltproblem handelt. Es diskutierten ca. 75 Forscher aus universitären Instituten, ca. 25 Ingenieure der Mobilfunk-Industrie sowie etwa 35 Beamte aus Strahlenschutzbehörden und Ministerien. Leider waren nur 4 Ärzte zugegen, womit bestätigt war, dass dieses Thema medizinisch noch nicht erfaßt worden ist. Aus den Betroffenen-Organisationen waren lediglich 9 Personen gekommen; sie waren auch nicht geladen worden, bzw. hatten sie Schwierigkeiten der Anreise in eine hoch technologisierte Stadt.

Das Programm organisierte die Weltgesundheitsorganisation in der Schweiz (Dr. Repacholi, Dr. Saunders, Dr. van Deventer) in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Nationalen Institut für Arbeit in Schweden (Prof. Hansson-Mild). Die lokale Organisation lag bei dem Nationalen Referenz Laboratorium für nicht-ionisierende Strahlung Tschechiens (Prof. Pekarek, u.a.)

Herr Repacholi, WHO, machte in seinem Eingangsreferat eine gute Zusammenfassung des heutigen offiziellen Wissensstandes zur Elektro-Hypersensitivität (EHS), die auch von den Betroffenen mitgetragen werden konnte, so dass der Eindruck entstand, das EHS-Syndrom sei erkannt, gut beschrieben als auch von oben anerkannt. Er betonte, dass der Workshop dazu gedacht sei, Wissenslücken aufzuzeigen und weitere notwendige Wege (insbesonders kausaler) Forschung festzulegen. Zusätzlich sollte überblickt werden, wie EHS-Individuen geholfen werden kann.

Allerdings brachten die vielen Referate einzeln-thematisch und kausal denkender Forscher im Laufe der zwei Tage mehr Verwirrung als Klärung der Thematik. So schien Dr. Patrick Levallois, Québec, Canada, irritiert über unterschiedliche Symptomschilderungen in den verschiedenen Staaten; zum Beispiel stehen in Schweden immer schon Hauterscheinungen im Vordergrund; in Mitteleuropa werden häufiger neurologische Symptome geschildert und in USA spricht man von Elektroallergien. Als Ursache der EHS sehen einige Studien eine „Amalgam-Intoleranz“, andere „Allergien“ und weitere „ungewöhnliche Sensitivitäten gegenüber alltäglichen Chemikalien“. Daraus zog Levallois das Fazit, dass die Elektro-Hypersensitivität ein nicht gut charakterisiertes gesundheitliches Problem darstelle und weiterer Forschungsbedarf bestehe.

Prof. Kjell Hansson-Mild, Umea, Schweden, wunderte sich über die unterschiedlichsten Meßwerte verschiedener Frequenzen sowohl in Privathäusern als auch bei Arbeitsplätzen, die nach der Selbsteinschätzung Elektrosensitiver alle zu Erkrankungen führen können, selbst wenn sie wenig von der Norm abweichen.

Dr. Jan Bures, Prag, Tschechien, berichtete über Magnetfeldstimulationen menschlicher Gehirne, die mit Ausnahme einiger wenigen gravierenden Folgen, bei mehreren Zehntausend Probanden keine biologischen Effekte erzeugten. Zwar haben Langzeitversuche bei Tieren solche gezeigt; eine EMF-Hypersensitivität beim Menschen hält Bures trotzdem, aufgrund dessen biologischer Natur, nicht für plausibel.

Prof. Eugene Lyskov, Umea, Schweden, sieht vor allem einen psychosomatisierenden Effekt aufgrund veränderter Stresssituation und der daraus resultierenden Hyperaktivität des vegetativen Nervensystems. Dr. Christopher Mueller, Zürich, Schweiz, verneint eine reine psychosomatische Reaktion sowie eine Placebo-Effekt und bestätigt die Elektrosensitivität durch sein NEMESIS-Projekt. Ganz anders Dr. Eduard David, Witten-Herdecke, Deutschland, der zum wiederholten Male seine viele Jahre zurückliegende Studie vortrug. Dabei war keine reguläre psychologische Abnormität, insbesondere in Bezug auf hypochondrische Tendenz, festzustellen, obwohl einige Hypersensitive ein „schizoides Verhalten“ zeigten. Er erkläre dies mit einer gewissen Erwartungshaltung während der Provokationsversuche. Darüber hinaus war keine Differenz zwischen der sensitiven bzw. der gesunden Gruppe festzustellen. (Dazu sei angemerkt, dass Herr David selbst immer wieder darauf hinweist, dass sein Lehrstuhl für Elektropathologie durch die Elektroindustrie finanziert werde.)

Zurück zu den in Schweden seit langem untersuchten Hauterscheinungen; so ist Prof. Olle Johansson, Stockholm, klar, dass die Anzahl der Mastzellen in der Epidermis bei EHS-Personen erhöht ist. Dies könnte die klinischen Symptome von Stechen, Schmerzen, Anschwellen und Rötung erklären. Ein neuer Aspekt, der näher diskutiert werden sollte.

Prof. Lawrie Challis, Nottingham, UK, berichtete von geplanten Studien zu RF, GSM, UMTS und TETRA. Anscheinend läuft in England unter dem Titel „Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme“ eine ähnlich groß angelegte Forschung wie in Deutschland, deren Ergebnisse erst in einigen Jahren zu erwarten sind. Auch Prof. Norbert Leitgeb, Graz, Österreich, stellte laufende sowie geplante EHS-Forschung vor. Obwohl die EMF-Datenbasis seit 1993 bereits 85 wissenschaftliche Studien zur EHS beinhaltet, steht, laut Leitgeb, der kausale Link zur EMF-Belastung immer noch aus.

Allerdings gehen nicht alle Forscher den rein kausalen Weg. Prof. Anders Ahlbom, Stockholm, Schweden, sieht EMF als Teil einer langen Kette, die zu Symptomen bzw. einer Kombination von Symptomen führt. Prof. Berndt Stenberg, Umea, Schweden, schilderte neben der Hautproblematik ein generelles Syndrom und sprach deshalb von „Umwelterkrankung“. Dr. Herman Staudenmayer, Denver, USA, bindet das EHS-Problem in eine „Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance“ (IEI) ein (wobei das Wort idiopathisch die Intoleranz gegenüber Umweltfaktoren falsch erfaßt, da Umweltreize nun mal existieren und sich entsprechend ursächlich verhalten).

Frau Dr. Lena Hillert, Stockholm, Schweden, die sich seit vielen Jahren epidemiologisch mit der Thematik auseinandersetzt, bestätigt das Leiden hypersensitiver Menschen, doch vermißt sie den biologischen Marker. Sie empfiehlt deshalb „kognitive Verhaltens-Therapie“ den Patienten anzubieten. Dies verspricht natürlich keine Heilung.

Mehr Hoffnung liegt deshalb auf politischen Programmen, wie dem „Internationalen EMF-Projekt“ http://www.who.int/emf , durch welches die WHO ein weltweites Forschungsprogramm koordiniert. Dr. T.E. van Deventer, Genf, Schweiz, schilderte den Projektrahmen, der die Mitgliedstaaten dazu anregt, Vorsorge in die öffentliche Gesundheitspolitik mit aufzunehmen. Entsprechend hat das National Radiological Protection Board, United Kingdom, eine öffentliche Gesundheitserfassung von EHS beschlossen (Vorstellung durch Dr. Jill Meara).

Quelle:
http://www.elektrosmognews.de/news/20041128_workshop_prag.html
(Auszug)


Elektrosensibilität - ein Stress-Syndrom
http://www.buergerwelle.de/pdf/elektrosensibilitaet_ein_stress_syndrom.htm

Mad cap idea

by Lawrence Kudlow

Washington Times

02/22/05

A defining characteristics of George W. Bush's presidency has been that he says what he means and means what he says. Our CEO-like MBA president has always communicated his vision clearly and simply. Once he sets a policy, he moves rapidly to carry it out with all the political force he can muster. You could even argue that Bush has been the clearest and most reliable presidential policymaker since Ronald Reagan. ... That's why his latest gambit on Social Security payroll taxes is so hard to fathom. Bush clearly said after last November's election that his visionary Social Security reform plan ... would not countenance payroll-tax increases. Just this week he undercut that position when he said an increase in the payroll-tax cap -- now $90,000 -- would be 'on the table' in forthcoming negotiations with Congress...[editor's note: And this is still defined as "says what he means and means what he says?" - SAT]

http://tinyurl.com/6uhzs


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Pentagon lying its way out of an unwinnable war - again

by Col. David Hackworth

Nashua [NH] Telegraph

02/22/05

As with Vietnam, the Iraqi tar pit was oh-so-easy to sink into, but appears to be just as tough to exit. This should be no big surprise! Most slugfests -- from bar brawls to military misadventures like Vietnam and Iraq -- take some clever moves to step away from once the swinging starts. This is why most combat vets pick their fights carefully. They look at their scars, remember the madness and are always mindful of the fallout. That's not the case in Washington, where the White House and the Pentagon are run by civilians who have never sweated it out on a battlefield. ... Now the increasingly flummoxed Bush team is stealing the page on Vietnamization from Nixon's Exit Primer, coupled with the same deceitful tactics he used to get us out of the almost decade-long Vietnam quagmire:
telling lies...

http://tinyurl.com/3wxo8


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Standing their ground

by Ruth Coniff

The Progressive

03/05

As the Bush Administration pushes forward with its aggressive plans to tear up the Constitution and launch its liberty jihad, Senator Barbara Boxer has stepped forward as the voice of Democratic opposition.

In her celebrated clash with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the confirmation hearings, Boxer quoted Martin Luther King Jr., in what ought to be the Democrats' new motto: 'Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.' The life began draining out of the Democratic Party the day it decided to take a pass on opposing the most aggressively rightwing Administration in history.

Fortunately, Boxer and a handful of colleagues decided to reverse the trend by publicly repudiating Bush in what was expected to be a noncontentious confirmation process...

http://www.progressive.org/march05/conn0305.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Imperial entropy

by Kirkpatrick Sale

CounterPunch

02/22/05

It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and left, and people were actually able to talk openly about an American empire, it is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue. And indeed it is now possible to contemplate, and openly speculate about, its collapse...

http://www.counterpunch.org/sale02222005.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

They've only just begun

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar.Com

02/23/05

[Robert] Novak, being a conservative, has the charmingly old-fashioned idea that you need real evidence -- and not just emotional hysterics and blind incitement -- before condemning a nation and openly threatening them with regime change. But that kind of thinking is a relic of America's republican past, when free men and women judged the actions of their government with a critically discerning eye. The imperial era has a different way of looking at these things: truth emanates not from reality, but from power -- which is the only reality. The Empire is so powerful that it creates its own reality, and this crazed belief permeates Imperial America, especially among the elites...

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4933


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Syria out doesn't mean US in

by Ilana Mercer

AntiWar.Com

02/23/05

Most real people had a 9/11 moment. Ann Coulter's call to arms was particularly memorable. For exhorting, 'We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,' she was even banished from National Review. This was indeed a puzzling purge, considering neoconservatives promptly adopted her recommendations, invaded Muslim countries, and killed their leaders. The neocons have adopted all of Coulter's recommendations, save the peaceful one...

http://www.antiwar.com/mercer/?articleid=4931


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Revealed: the rush to war

The Guardian [UK]

02/23/05

The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq that military action could be ruled illegal. The government was so concerned that it might be prosecuted it set up a team of lawyers to prepare for legal action in an international court. And a parliamentary answer issued days before the war in the name of Lord Goldsmith -- but presented by ministers as his official opinion before the crucial Commons vote -- was drawn up in Downing Street, not in the attorney general's chambers. The full picture of how the government manipulated the legal justification for war, and political pressure placed on its most senior law officer, is revealed in the Guardian today. It appears that Lord Goldsmith never wrote an unequivocal formal legal opinion that the invasion was lawful, as demanded by Lord Boyce, chief of defence staff at the
time...

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1423304,00.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



UK: New evidence shows No 10 'push to war' :

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, was at the centre of a deepening row today over his advice on the legality of the Iraq war.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/16847366?source=Evening%20Standard
http://tinyurl.com/4f7er


From Information Clearing House

NYC kids send anti-war letters to soldier

Fox News

02/22/05

The New York City Department of Education, red-faced over Brooklyn sixth-graders who slammed a GI with demoralizing anti-Iraq-war letters as part of a school assignment, will send the 20-year-old private a letter of apology Tuesday. Deputy Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina, who has a nephew serving in Iraq, plans to personally contact Pfc. Rob Jacobs and his family, said department spokeswoman Michele McManus Higgins. 'She knows how difficult it is to have a loved one in a war zone,' Higgins said. Jacobs is stationed 10 miles from the North Korean border and who has been told he may be headed to Iraq in the near future. The GI got the ranting missives last month from pint-sized pen pals at JHS 51 in Park Slope. Filled with political diatribes, the letters predict GIs will die by the tens of thousands, accuse soldiers of killing Iraqi civilians and bash President Bush...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,148364,00.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Stun guns will soon be available for ordinary citizens

News Target [Taiwan]

02/21/05

The Taser guns currently used by the military and police will soon be in the hands of ordinary citizens. Taser International has announced plans to offer a $1000 version of its electric weapon to the general market. The guns are somewhat controversial, though, with some saying that they can cause cardiac arrest. The company states that there is no link between cardiac arrest and its products...

http://www.newstarget.com/004825.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Search Google


Google



Climate Change

Excellent glossary and links for the subject of climate change:

http://www.greenfacts.org/studies/climate_change/toolboxes/glossary.htm#anthropogenic

And I too wonder about the validity of the climate change scenario regarding CO2 and Ozone. It seems the UV ray situation plays a larger role than the overall presented picture of climate change would have us know, which concentrates mainly on CO2. I know CO2 is important, but considering the biosphere, I wonder if its secondary to its endangering effects compared to the Ozone depletion and the consequent admittance of UV ray absorption. The DNA of plankton and other life forms seems particularly susceptible to disruption due to UV exposure.

Whenever you see something hyped to such a great degree, you simply have to wonder, what is missing? What is actually behind the scenes that they're not telling you about?

Laurel

MEDIA COMPLICITY IN WAR CRIMES

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

February 23, 2005

MEDIA ALERT: MEDIA COMPLICITY IN WAR CRIMES

“Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.” (Jean Rostand)

Nuremberg - Article Six

On February 13, The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), an international peoples’ initiative, declared much of the Western media guilty of deception and incitement to violence in its reporting on Iraq. The tribunal, meeting in Rome, made its pronouncement after taking testimony from independent journalists, media professors, activists, and a member of the European Parliament.

The panel of WTI judges noted that the United States and British governments had deliberately impeded the work of journalists and knowingly spread lies and disinformation. But the panel also accused the Western corporate media of filtering and suppressing the truth. The tribunal described how journalists had violated article six of the Nuremberg Tribunal which states:

"Leaders, organisers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes (crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity) are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such a plan." (‘Media Held Guilty of Deception,’ Inter Press Service, February 14, 2005)

The media’s complicity in war crimes continues unabated, of course. Thus, in covering the results from Iraq‘s January 30 election, Peter Marshall announced grandly on the BBC’s Newsnight television programme:

“So, democracy has come to Iraq.” (BBC2, Newsnight, February 14, 2005)

Instantly revealing the usual bias in mainstream reporting, Marshall added:

“Things could be worse... the rule by mullahs, a Shia theocracy, looks less likely now with the Shia list’s failure to reach 50 per cent of the vote.”

He meant things could be worse for Western interests, of course - the real concern. John Pilger has noted how in the media, “one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity. This leads journalists to make a distinction between people who matter and people who don't matter.” (The Progressive Interview, by David Barsamian, November 2002, http://www.progressive.org/nov02/intv1102.html)

Put crudely, the impoverished people of Iraq do not matter to the top 5% of the British population who own 45% of the nation‘s wealth and who run the country.

Elite journalists are very much members of this 5% club. And so they take for granted that ‘democracy’ for Iraqis means the freedom to make ‘reasonable’ choices as defined by the people who matter. To do otherwise is not to express democratic freedom of choice, it is to invite bombing and invasion.

The disregard for the people of Iraq - as clearly evidenced by long-standing Western support for Saddam Hussein, and by the genocidal sanctions imposed from 1990 to 2003 - makes the sudden determination to bring them ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ very hard to swallow.

Guys With Turbans

How do we know democracy has come? Newsnight’s Jon Leyne explained. He noted that the victorious Shia United Iraqi Alliance needed to choose a new Iraqi prime minister. There were two main candidates, "both religious Shiites, but also both acceptable to the Americans".

Acceptable, in other words, to a superpower army occupying the country and launching major military offensives against centres of population. Now that's democracy!

Leyne continued: "We call them a religious Shiite alliance... but they're very sensitive to what the Americans would feel if guys with turbans took over this country."

“Guys with turbans” sounds like a polite version of “towel heads”. But Leyne had a point - everyone knows that Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush I, was stating obvious truth when he said in April 2003:

"What's going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you do? We're surely not going to let them take over." (Quoted, Walter Gibbs, ‘Scowcroft Urges Wide Role For the UN in Postwar Iraq,’ The New York Times, April 9, 2003)

Everyone knows it, but still every journalist under the sun describes the Iraqi election as “democratic” and “successful” - superb examples of what 20th century American foreign affairs advisor Reinhold Niebuhr called “necessary illusions“ and “emotionally potent over-simplifications“.

Leyne added that bringing the Sunnis into the political process might not stop the suicide bombers, but it could split the insurgency and drain popular support.

Nowhere in Newsnight’s review of the election results was there mention of whether the political process might help lessen the far worse violence committed against Iraqis by the US-UK “coalition“. Last year, a report in The Lancet found that eighty-four per cent of an excess 100,000 Iraqi deaths since the invasion had been caused by the actions of "coalition" forces, with 95 per cent of those deaths due to air strikes and artillery.
http://www.jhsph.edu/Press_Room/Press_Releases/PR_2004/Burnham_Iraq.html

Newsnight also failed to mention the prospects for alleviating the “coalition‘s” criminal mismanagement of its already illegal occupation. A 2004 post-war nutritional assessment carried out by UNICEF in Baghdad found that acute child malnutrition or wasting had nearly doubled from four per cent in 2003, to almost eight per cent. UNICEF also report that the under-5 infant mortality for 2003 was 110,000 in occupied Iraq, 292,000 in occupied Afghanistan, as compared to 1,000 in the invading and occupying country Australia (countries that have populations of 25, 24 and 20 million, respectively). (Cited, Gideon Polya, ‘Non-reportage of US-linked infant mass mortality,’ December 23, 2004,
http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/newswire/2004/12/816196.shtml)

As if reporting this catastrophe from some far-distant galaxy, the New York Times describes Iraq as “a country with high unemployment, mediocre public services and some of the highest crime rates in the world”. (Adriana Lins de Albuquerque, Micahel O'Hanlon and Amy Unikwiicz, ‘The State of Iraq: An Update,’ The New York Times, February 21, 2005)

What Future Historians Will Say

In the autumn of 1999 US Vice President Dick Cheney - then CEO of Halliburton - said:

"Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand... So where is this oil going to come from?... The Middle East with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies." (Quoted, Ray McGovern, ‘We Need the Oil, Right? So What's the Problem?’ Truthout, http://uruknet.info/?s1=2&p=9699&s2=16)

Reviewing these comments, Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, notes that it will be entirely obvious to future historians that oil was a key factor in the decision to invade Iraq:

“They will point to growing US dependence on foreign oil, the competition with China, India, and others for a world oil supply with terminal illness, and the fact that (as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has put it) Iraq ‘swims on a sea of oil.’ It will all seem so obvious as to provoke little more than a yawn.” (Ibid)

But for now a very different version prevails as the ‘common sense’ view. To select at random, the Daily Telegraph notes:

“The success of the election does not absolve Britain and the United States from their duty as guardians of democracy. That role has historically been the destiny of the English-speaking peoples.” (Leader, ‘The people of Iraq speak,’ The Daily Telegraph, February 14, 2005)

At a stroke Britain and the United States are transformed from illegal invaders on utterly false pretexts, the killers of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, into “guardians of democracy”.

Alas, one group of people rejects the Telegraph’s view: the Iraqis themselves. A recent US-run poll of Baghdadis showed that one per cent agreed that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy to Iraq. Five per cent thought the goal was to help Iraqis. The majority assumed the US wants to control Iraq's resources and to use its new bases there to control the region. Demonstrating insight far beyond the capacity of most Western journalists, Baghdadis felt that the US did want ‘democracy‘, but not one that would allow Iraqis to run their lives "without US pressure and influence." (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, ‘Imperial Presidency,’ Canadian Dimension, January/February 2005, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20041217.htm)

All of this will indeed one day be obvious. But not now, for we live in a time when the conforming influence of concentrated political and economic power has devastated the media’s capacity for honest and rational thought.

As long as journalists continue to submit to this oppression of the human spirit, they will continue to be complicit in the gravest imaginable crimes against humanity.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to Peter Marshall
Email: peter.marshall@bbc.co.uk

Jon Leyne:
Email: jon.leyne@bbc.co.uk

Newsnight editor, Peter Barron
Email: peter.barron@bbc.co.uk

Please also send all emails to us at Media Lens:
Email: editor@medialens.org

Visit the Media Lens website: http://www.medialens.org

CHINA VOWS TO KEEP ITS ENVIRONMENT CLEAN DESPITE GROWING PAINS

http://tinyurl.com/5x6ox


Informant: NHNE

UN: A THIRD OF WORLD'S AMPHIBIAN SPECIES THREATENED WITH EXTINCTION

AFP

February 21, 2005

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1540&ncid=1540&e=6&u=/afp/20050221/sc_afp/environmentunkenya_050221172602


Informant: NHNE

Bombing Iran: Never Say Never

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=76387;show_parent=1

The Republicans are the national ID party

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=76365;show_parent=1

A secret document exposed

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=76363;show_parent=1

Year Five - All the Great Lies

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=76353;show_parent=1

WHICH MEDIA LIARS SERVE YOUR NEWSPEAK?

http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=76349;show_parent=1

Press stirs up anti-Iranian sentiment

http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/2319/


Informant: jensenmk

From ufpj-news

Army Having Difficulty Meeting Goals In Recruiting

Fewer Enlistees Are in Pipeline; Many Being Rushed Into Service

by Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A01

The active-duty Army is in danger of failing to meet its recruiting goals, and is beginning to suffer from manpower strains like those that have dropped the National Guard and Reserves below full strength, according to Army figures and interviews with senior officers .

For the first time since 2001, the Army began the fiscal year in October with only 18.4 percent of the year's target of 80,000 active-duty recruits already in the pipeline. That amounts to less than half of last year's figure and falls well below the Army's goal of 25 percent. ... Read the rest of this article on Washington Post site: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40469-2005Feb20.html or http://tinyurl.com/6gwrz

© Virginia Metze

The strange story of White House reporter 'Jeff Gannon'

In case you just can't get enough of the Jeff Gannon story, here's another take:

The strange story of White House reporter 'Jeff Gannon'

Donald P. Russo

From The Morning Call -- February 19, 2005

Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central's ''The Daily Show,'' returned recently to the Lehigh Valley for two appearances at Easton's State Theatre. During his stand-up routine, Stewart said, ''Bush's presidency is like 'The Truman Show,' it's a world of his own creation.'' (He was referring to the 1998 Jim Carrey movie.) Based upon recent events, it appears that George W. Bush creates not only his own reality, but also, his own news media.

There was a time, not long ago, when the media would have taken a president to task for launching a pre-emptive war under false pretenses. Media pundits of yesteryear may have actually questioned the notion of a president leading a nation into a protracted war based upon spurious assumptions about the provenance of a prior terrorist attack, or manufactured hysteria over weapons of mass destruction that failed to materialize. ... Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/46hgo

© Virginia Metze

Time for Bush to define 'independent press'

by Dante Chinni
from the February 22, 2005 edition
Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - The cafes and restaurants here were atwitter again last weekend. Finally, after years of talking about things like terrorism and deficits and Social Security reform, the capital's chatterers had a story they could discuss without reading a briefing paper.

Thank you, Jeff Gannon or James Guckert or whatever your name really is. It seems like old times again inside the Beltway. ... Read the rest at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0222/p11s01-codc.htm

© Virginia Metze

The Emperor's Latest Tour

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/samples2.html

Rummy Dropped from the Loop?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt48.html

America the Frightful

http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050208.shtml


Informant: Lew Rockwell

The Anti-Revisionist Establishment

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory63.html

THE ERA OF BIG GOVERNMENT IS BACK

http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin217.htm

Bush disappoints Europe with climate change ideas

http://tinyurl.com/7xa8a


Informant: NHNE

Interview with Brian Stein, Per Segerbach, and Olle Johansson

(excerpt)

I've uploaded the file BBC Radio report - 2005FEB16 - EHS.mp3:

http://tinyurl.com/6qhqo or
http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/news/20050218_outlook.mp3

It contains the portion of the BBC World Service's Outlook broadcast for Wednesday, Feb 16, 2005, in which Brian Stein, Per Segerbach, and Prof. Olle Johansson are interviewed about ES. Mr. Stein and Mr. Segerbach have ES, and Prof. Johansson has been a reseacher into ES for many years.

The MP3 interview is an extract from last Wednesday's BBC Outlook. I don't know for how long the BBC will offer a web accessible archive of this interview, but until tomorrow you can hear the interview here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/ram/outlook_wed.ram


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