Film - United 93

5/5

I was quite surprised by the low turnout on opening night and this had me wondering if perhaps this isn't the right time for films about 9/11.

Director Paul Greengrass, known for the very good Bourne Supremacy film, has made a very realistic representation of what I imagined 9/11 must have been like from the perspective of those involved with United Flight 93.

Thankfully, the film lacks the typical glossy Hollywood sheen. Having no "name"
actors helped keep the focus on the story to me. No one actor is given such a prominent role that I kept on thinking that I can't wait to see them in their next film. There's no nauseating flag waving and no hollow heroics. I felt as if I was a fly on the wall in every scene, whether it took place inside the doomed aircraft, or at an aviation or NORAD command centre.

It's fascinating to watch the story unfold as an air traffic controller picks up on some dialogue which sounds suspicious. This gets relayed around and at the same time, more planes begin to cease using their transponders and begin radio silence. The film soon becomes both an edge of your seat thriller, even though you know the outcome, but at the same time, those scenes are juxtaposed with scenes of eerie calmness aboard United Flight 93, before it gets highjacked.

I have no doubt that there have been many "lessons learned" about how to handle future crisis like 9/11, given the apparent lack of clear communication channels between the civillian aviation authorities, the FAA and the military. Mistakes are made, no one seems to know how high up the chain of command the military has to go to get permission to shoot down an airliner and both the President and Vice-President seem unreachable during an obvious national crisis. Things like this happen much more smoothly in the televison series 24, which makes you wonder how fake the that aspect of the show really is or how ill-prepared for such a crisis the Federal leadership was on 9/11.

There was nothing wasted in this film and little thrown in to try to take advantage of our already raw emotions. Truthfully, I was fighting to stay awake during the opening credits, cursing myself for going to the movies after being so tired. I was jolted awake, however, how the story, and the emotions it touched off inside of me. I was surprised to find myself on the verge of tears during the scenes in which the now hi-jacked passesengers are crouching over and making phone calls to say their goodbyes. The only moment that approaches cheesiness is when seemingly everyone aboard United 93 is praying, passengers and terrorists, alike.

Greengrass doesn't try to make any political statement with the film. He doesn't go out of his way to try and shed some light on Al-Qaeda's rational for the attack. He does show the authorities, and the military and it's highest level of leadership, the Commander-In-Chief, seemded ill-prepared to respond in a timely manner, but that in itself may make for another equally fascinating film and no, I'm not in any way refering to Fahrenheit 9/11.

It's really almost moot to ask whether or not the public is ready for 9/11 films. I suppose the answer for me was yes, otherwise I would have stayed at home. United 93 is a very well made film that almost felt like a documentary with its unresolved realistic ball of confusion and the sickening feeling of helplessness. Despite the horror of this real life story, I found the film to be quite satisfying. I won't say "enjoyable."



This film has had a stronger emotional impact on me than any other this year. I can't imagine anyone watching it and not being affected in a similar fashion. Oliver Stone is coming out with another 9/11 film this summer, World Trade Centre, about some Port Authority employees trapped in one of the burning buildings.

DVD - Metal A Headbanger's Journey

4/5



Heavy Metal - A Headbanger's Journey begins with footage from 1986 with kids gathering for a rock festival. They're partying, playing air guitar, dressed in proper attire of black t-shirts or no shirts at all, but most of all, they just look like they are out for a good time. But, someone is out to ruin their fun...

The film switches to the September 19, 1985 Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) Senate hearings. The group published their "Filthy Fifteen" list of songs, along with their interpretation of what the lyrics are about. Artists included Venom, Mercyful Fate, Def Leppard, Prince, Sheena Easton, Vanity, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, among others.

Looking precisely like he just left the stage, singer Dee Snider, addressed the Senate suits, including future VP Al Gore. It's interesting to note that in part of Snider's speech which wasn't included in the film, he explained that he was raised a Christian and follows many of the same ideals, doesn't drink, smoke or do drugs and is a married father of a three year old. In other words, he was showing that beneath his mountainous blonde mane, he's actually not unlike most adults, except that he sings in a heavy metal band.

"Since I seem to be the only person addressing this committee today who has been a direct target of accusations from the presumably responsible PMRC, I would like to use this occasion to speak on a more personal note and show just how unfair the whole concept of lyrical interpretation and judgment can be and how many times this can amount to little more than character assassination."

The hysteria surrounding the interest questionable lyrics was described as being the "moral panic of the day." Despite the farce of the hearings, the music industry adopted the PMRC sticker rating system, which actually caused sales to increase in the case of some artists - forbidden fruit.

Sam Dunn introduces himself. He's earned a Masters in Anthropology and his thesis was on the Guatemalan refugees, but he always wanted to do a study about heavy metal. He's a skinny,long-haired fan and looks indistinguishable from the masses of metal fans from 1986, most of whom also probably grew up to be...responsible, normal adults. Sam's a scholar and his approach to look at metal from an more intellectual point of view, doesn't always work. Take the interview with the band Mayhem. They basically spewed forth swears and boasts about how they are the best band in the world and said absolutely nothing of substance. Dunn included the clip but mentioned that beer and interviews sometimes doesn't mix. A more serious documentary would have cut this footage out. So, don't go looking for something to base a thesis on, but do be prepared to be entertained and mildly educated about various aspects of the metal world.

Mars Bonfire, the stage name for musician Dennis Edmonton (1943), was the person who wrote the Steppenwolf classic "Born To Be Wild" which mentions the term "heavy metal" for the first time. I didn't know he was a Canadian or what his name was. Now I know.



People weighed in with their opinions of the first heavy metal band. Some cite Blue Cheer but most mentioned Black Sabbath. This led to an interview with Black Sabbath guitarist and leader Tony Iommi. According to Wikipedia, "The tritone, as its name implies, is a musical interval that spans three whole tones or six semitones. The two most basic types of tritone are the augmented fourth and the diminished fifth." They also cited examples of where we hear the tritone, known as the Devil's interval, in songs such as Black Sabbath's "Black Sabbath", Metallica's "Enter Sandman", Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze", Sibelius's Fourth Symphony, Liszt's Dante Sonata, the music of Slayer and King crimson and believe it or not, in the Simpsons theme and the musical West Side Story. Iommi simply thought the "tritone" sounded evil and wrote lyrics to go along with the sound. Later on, Black Sabbath really took advantage of the demonic imagery in order to make a lot of money and have a schtick to really make them stand apart from other bands.



This led to a discussion of the classical influences in heavy metal, something that was obvious to me but was totally oblivious to a long-time rock fan who i mentioned the film to today. To illustrate the point,they play Bach on a harpsichord and seamlessly seague to Eddie Van Halen playing Bach-like material (if not Bach) on his electric guitar.

The other major influence in metal was also discussed, the blues. Tony Iommi actually mentioned that Sabbath were essentially a blues and jazz band at the begining, and were also influenced by the dire working class, poor neighborhoods that they grew up in.

Other themes and connections to metal, such as sexuality, how dressing like women is actually extreme masculinity, religion, church burnings in Norway, violence and gore. Tom Araya, the lead singer in Slayer, raised a Catholic, quipped that religion was the biggest brain washing tool in America and that art is a reflection of society and that they're just picking up the darker reflections. He also mentioned that "everyone knows what's wrong, the things you do not do. The people who don't understand that aren't connected with themselves spiritually." That's quite a profound statement from someone who likes to have provocative song titles simply because it will get them a lot of attention. Slayer are simply trying to stay in the spotlight just like every other band, and who can blame them?

Alice Cooper was interviewed a few times and he proved to be one of the most interesting people Dunn spoke with. Regarding Satanism, Cooper said, "If you're looking for Satanism, don't look to rock'n'roll. It's all Halloween." He went on to recount how when he meets black metal bands in Norweigian shopping malls, how they seem like the most harmless people, yet he marvels at the one up-man-ship they have between them, to be more extreme than the next band.

Dunn's trip to Norway to explore one of metal's most notorious and recent sub-genres, Norweigian Black Metal, was quite interesting and somewhat sad at the same time. He noted that Norway is 87% Lutheran but their biggest cultural export is, ironically, Satanic Black Metal and he describes it as punk meets Wagner dressed as Alice Cooper. There's no way to discuss Norway's metal scene without talking about the burning of churches by some metal musicians. The bands see Christianity as something that was forced upon Norway about 1000 years ago and it's the big bad guy. They see Satanism as something for people who are born to be kings, strong, and free. It's not for the timid or weak. By this definition, a church minister said that the Satanists will always be in small numbers since most people are not like them. As far as Alice Cooper is concerned, however, it's all so Spinal Tap to him.

Cooper was one of the most reviled performers in popular music in the seventies by those who didn't understand him. He went on to say "There's more blood in MacBeth than in my show,and that's required reading in school."



The topic of suicide rears its ugly head but Dunn doesn't get too much into the stories about bands being sued for causing kids to commit suicide, which is a pathetic accusation in the first place. It's noted by UCLA musicologist Robert Walser that the most powerful predictor of whether someone will commit suicide is the feeling of helplessness...but no one listens to metal to feel helpless.

The documentary is a terrific starting point to gaining an understanding of what makes metal fans such a brotherhood. It intelligently discusses the differences between the major categories of metal and it may surprise you by how many sub-genres he identifies. There is so much to the world of metal,so many more people who could have been interviewed that I hope more intelligent films of this ilk are made. Dunn also peppered the film with insightful analysis and commentaries from members of academia who are knowledgeable about metal, journalists, a musicologist and industry insiders,including Brian Slagel, Bob Ezrin, and Malcome Dome. Ronnie James Dio and Bruce Dickinson were very interesting to listen to as were Cannibal Corpse, Angela from Arch Enemy, Geddy Lee, Lemmy and the world's most famous groupie, Pamela Des Barres. The who's who of who didn't appear in the film is astonishing, such as Metallica, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, and so on. I'm hoping that someone makes a follow up.

It's Likely a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon...

Here's a credible analysis of why the author believes a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon. It's very convincing.



Why it is most likely that an American Airlines 757-223 hit it the Pentagon.
by Joel v.d Reijden

In my complete review of 911, I have taken up many dozens of witness accounts. When put together you get the following story: A large American Airlines jetliner came screaming over the highways with it's gears up, after having circled the Pentagon area. It balanced a little to the left an right, clipped some light poles and other stuff, barely pulled itself straight again and fired up it's engines to full throttle in the last few seconds. Some say it struck the helipad with it's left wing right before it hit the Pentagon and a few others claim it hit the ground with it's nose, only inches before the wall. Just like the two airplanes that hit the WTC; "it disappeared.". A few claim they could see the tail sticking out of the building for about one or two seconds before a very heavy explosion engulfed everything in flames. (Like the WTC) People who were close by, were blown off their feet and some even went flying. Small pieces of airplane, concrete and other rubble was blown out of the building and landed up to hundreds of yards away. The blast was so powerful it blew a few big chunks of the engines hundreds of yards through the air. An intense heat has been described, which melted the back of at least one firetruck which was standing in front of the building. ....

The witness testimonies
Keep in mind that the Pentagon has 25.000 people working there. A lot of these witnesses have high ranks in the army, navy and air force. Some of the witnesses were commercial airline pilots and many people in the neighborhood are familiar with military and commercial airplanes, since there are multiple military and commercial airfields close by. So, if all those witness testimonies form a coherent story, why then do so many people support the "theory" that an F16, missile or global hawk hit the Pentagon? The funniest thing is, that nobody even reported seeing any of those planes (or a missile). ....

I have proven the following things, which seem to make a couple of dents into the works of most of the well-known 9/11 gurus:

1. Claims that the Pentagon hole is (much) too small for a 757-223, are false.
2. Claims that witnesses have said they saw a missile, are false.
3. Claims that witnesses have said they saw a small plane and implying a significant amount did the same, are misleading.
4. Claims that witnesses have said the plane was quiet were an extreme minority and are brought to the public in a misleading way. As usual, the context has never been addressed. (In the car, windows shut, radio on. One person said it was the shock)
5. Claims that a Global Hawk or a F-16 hit the Pentagon aren't backed up by any witnesses. So why have these theories been put forward in the first place?
6. Quotes from the aftermath of the crash site are no proof something else than a 757 hit the building. As you can read in the quotes I gathered, even a few people who saw a large airliner dive into the building wondered about the relatively small amount of visible damage it did.



And from the Above Top Secret website,
# Review the facts
# Size of 757 matches the initial size of hole in the building - somewhere between 13 and 16 feet (757 is 13 feet wide/high)
# Rims found in building match those of a 757
# Small turbine engine outside is an APU
# Same engine has been clearly stated to not match a Global Hawk engine
# Blue seats from 757 laying on ground in photos
# Part of "American" fuselage logo visible in more than 1 photo
# Engine parts photographed inside match a Rolls-Royce RB211
# Structural components photographed in wreckage match Boeing paint primer schemes
# Large deisel generator in front of building hit by a large heavy object
# Large deisel engine outside is spun towards the building - could not be result of bomb blast or missile explosion
# Multiple eye witnesses say they saw an airliner
# Multiple eye witnesses say they saw an airliner hit the Pentagon
# 60+ bodies, matching the passenger list and flight crew roster identified and returned to families from Pentagon wreckage

Bush Defector To Demolish 911 Lies On May 6

I'm still a believer in the official explanation about 9/11, because to not believe it is to believe that it was an inside job. I can't wrap my mind around hundreds of people keeping something this big a secret.

This is an interesting article. You've got to wonder what his agenda is - if he really has one at all. Who's payroll is he on? He used to work for the White House, so why would he come forward to lie and discredit his own name? One thing is almost certain, the mainstream media likely won't touch this story.



From: http://rense.com/general70/demol.htm

4-18-6

The former top economist in Bush's Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds, will speak out on the 9/11 inside job at the State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin-Madison on Saturday, May 6th. The film Loose Change will be shown, and refreshments served, starting at 1 p.m, and Reynolds will speak at 3:00 p.m.

Dr. Reynolds, who holds three U.W.-Madison degrees, and who is currently Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, will present evidence that top Bush Administration officials orchestrated the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, and the murder of almost 2,500 Americans, as a pretext for initiating their pre-planned "long war" in the Middle East.

"While more Americans doubt the 9/11 story every week, evidence abounds that many have a mental block against rational examination of the evidence about 9/11" writes Dr. Reynolds in a recent article. This mental block, he thinks, amounts to willful ignorance-not just about 9/11, but about history.

"Governments throughout history have provoked or staged attacks on their own people to serve the powers behind the throne ('the money power'), glorify themselves, engage in vast government spending, reward friends, exert domestic control, stimulate the juices of war, annex neighbors and pursue vast geostrategic rearrangements (the 'global domination project)" Reynolds asserts. He notes that every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on the "Operation Northwoods" plan to murder Americans in fake "Cuban terrorist" attacks in 1962. The planned Operation Northwoods murders of ordinary Americans in fake terrorist bombings and a fake "airliner shoot-down" would have involved hundreds of military and intelligence personnel. Yet the existence of Operation Northwoods was successfully kept secret from the American people for forty years until James Bamford revealed it in his book Body of Secrets, published in January 2002.

Though government officials have historically been able to successfully conceal their fake or arranged war-trigger attacks long enough to avoid being hanged for treason, Reynolds thinks the 9/11 cover-up has already unraveled. "Skepticism about conspiracy, small or large, is somewhat beside the point in the case of 9/11 because the official Osama-and-Nineteen-Young-Arabs (ONYA) conspiracy tale is so farcical and impossible. Nearly everyone in America has easy access to the internet and hundreds of websites expose the 9/11 fraud." (Morgan Reynolds, "Conspiracy and Closed Minds on 9/11": http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911 )

Reynolds argues that the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 were destroyed in a manner that can only be explained by controlled demolition with pre-planted explosives-which should not be surprising, since no steel framed high-rises have ever collapsed in the way the three World Trade Center buildings did for any other reason. In his article "Why Did the World Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse?" Reynolds writes that among the many features of the WTC demolitions that suggest explosives, rather than jet-fuel fires, are:

1. Fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.

2. The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were small.

3. WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds.



4. WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams (pp. 68-9).

5. In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC lease-holder, recalled talking to the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 and said, ".maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.

6. FEMA, given the uninviting task of explaining the collapse of Building 7 with mention of demolition verboten admitted that the best it could come up with had "only a low probability of occurrence."

7. It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.

Professional demolition, by contrast, can explain all of these facts and more. Demolition means placing explosives throughout a building, and detonating them in sequence to weaken "the structure so it collapses or folds in upon itself". In conventional demolitions gravity does most of the work, although it probably did a minority on

9/11, so heavily were the towers honeycombed with explosives.

1. Each WTC building collapse occurred at virtually free-fall speed (approximately 10 seconds or less).

2. Each building collapsed, for the most part, into its own footprint.

3. Virtually all the concrete (an estimated 100,000 tons in each tower) on every floor was pulverized into a very fine dust, a phenomenon that requires enormous energy and could not be caused by gravity alone (".workers can't even find concrete. 'It's all dust,' [the official] said").

4. Dust exploded horizontally for a couple hundred feet, as did debris, at the beginning of each tower's collapse.

5. Collapses were total, leaving none of the massive core columns sticking up hundreds of feet into the air.

6. Salvage experts were amazed at how small the debris stacks were.

7. The steel beams and columns came down in sections under 30 feet long and had no signs of "softening"; there was little left but shorn sections of steel and a few bits of concrete.

8. Photos and videos of the collapses all show "demolition waves," meaning "confluent rows of small explosions" along floors (blast sequences).

9. According to many witnesses, explosions occurred within the buildings.

10. Each collapse had detectable seismic vibrations suggestive of underground explosions, similar to the 2.3 earthquake magnitude from a demolition like the Seattle Kingdome (p. 108).

11. Each collapse produced molten steel identical to that generated by explosives, resulting in "hot spots" that persisted for months (the two hottest spots at WTC-2 and WTC-7 were approximately 1,350o F five days after being continuously flooded with water, a temperature high enough to melt aluminum (p. 70). ("Why Did the Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse?" by Morgan Reynolds: http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911 )

The apparent demolition of the three skyscrapers, and a perhaps inadvertent statement by heavily-insured WTC landlord Larry Silverstein that WTC-7 was "pulled" (slang for "demolished") can be viewed on many 9/11 truth DVDs and web-videos, including Loose Change, 9/11 Eyewitness, 9/11 and the American Empire, (Dr. David Griffin), and 9/11 Revisited (Dr. Steven Jones). Dr. Reynolds' articles on 9/11 and other matters can be found at http://nomoregames.net .

The videos, and further information about Dr. Reynolds' May 6th speech, are available from the event's sponsor, the Madison-based Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth: http://mujca.com

Will Vista Be the Last Operating System Microsoft Produces?

Here's a thought-provoking article from Apple Matters that raises some good points. If MS continues to more and more time to release new operting systems, 7+ years and counting by the time Service Pack 1 for Vista is released, one wonders if there is an opportunity for Apple Mac OS and Linux to make inroads. Rumour has it that Google is also developing a web-based OS, which sounds baffling. I plan to write more about the concept of a web-based operating system and its implications. Someone has suggested that the next killer app will the the desktop web server. Sounds again like the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Will Vista Be the Last Operating System Microsoft Produces?

by James R. Stoup
Apr 21, 2006

I don’t think Microsoft will ship another Operating System after Vista launches. I believe that a combination of technical difficulties and changing markets will prevent it from creating a product that is relevant in the market. Consider this, if the latest shipping dates are to be believed, it will have taken Microsoft over six years to get Windows Vista out the door and to its consumers. And based on past events, it is safe to assume that Vista will require at least one service pack before it is truly ready for use. Of course, factoring in the normal Microsoft delays for producing patches, such a comprehensive service pack will probably take another year before it can be released to users. That would mean that it will have taken Microsoft 7+ years to make a usable operating system.

Now consider how long it could take Microsoft to produce Vista’s successor. If the added complexity of this new OS increases the development time by only 25% (not an unreasonable figure) of what it took to make Vista, then it will have been in development for almost 8 years. That means if Vista comes out in 2007, it won’t be replaced until 2015. To put that into perspective, if Apple continues on with its release cycle of OS X (and factoring in increases in development time) they could, counting Leopard, release 4 to 5 new operating systems by the time Microsoft releases one.

But keeping up with Apple won’t be Microsoft’s biggest concern. What will prevent Microsoft from releasing another OS is the changing market. For Vista’s successor to have a hope of selling, the company has to assume that no fundamental shifts in technology will occur for almost a decade! That seems, overly optimistic at best. With Google threatening to release a web-based OS, and Apple potentially using virtualization to run all Windows applications, Microsoft might find that by the time it can cobble something together, it no longer has a market interested in its product.

Microsoft will find itself in this position (or one like it) all too soon, and it has no one but itself to blame. Here are the two biggest factors that are slowly killing Microsoft from within.

Code base
The amount of code that makes up Windows has simply become too large to work with. Now, you can blame this on anything you want (backwards compatibiliy would be high on my list), but ultimately the cause doesn’t matter. What matters is that building new features has become impossible, and debugging this mess has become impossible + 1. This was most clearly witnessed when Bill Gates got up onstage and informed his eager audience that the codebase for Vista had become so large and tangled that they simply had to throw it all away and start over from a point they knew was stable. Guess what? That problem isn’t going to go away by throwing another service pack at it. With each version of Windows released the amount of code grows and the strain gets greater. However, the amount of code isn’t the only problem here. The structure of the OS itself is fundamentally flawed. There are too many antiquated ideas (drive letters, the registry, etc.) and constraining bounds (NTFS) to allow for anymore growth. A drastic rewrite is the only way to solve this problem. The only real question Microsoft needs to ask is how much should we rewrite?

Management
The last few years has seen a flurry of restructuring at Microsoft. Key people have left (most noticably for Google) and even loyal employees who still believe the hype have begun to criticize management and air their grievances on personal blogs. The leadership of Microsoft has failed miserably and Vista is only the beginning in what looks to be an impressive series of embarrassments. It is time for a change. If Microsoft still hopes to be in the OS market a decade from now then those changes can’t come soon enough.

DVD - Derailed

2/5



In this thriller, the Clive Owen character meets an attractive young woman who on a train who is a financial executive. The two hit it off and decide to meet the next day for drinks and fun, by telling their spouses that they are working late. They decide to get a room in a cheap hotel...

The problem with this film is that we've seen it all before. Not too long into it, you can figure out the twist and from there, it's all down hill. This isn't a terrible film, but it just feels too familiar.

Also stars Jennifer Aniston. Clive Owen actually puts in a fine performance. It's the overall story that is the weak link.

Movie - The Sentinel

2.5/5



Two Secret Service agents who used to be best friends, are tied together with a failed assasination attempt on the President. Based on flimsy evidence, one gets accused of being in a plot to kill the President and he runs, in an attempt to unravel the plot on his own.

Kiefer Sutherland is the hothot investigator agent while Michael Douglas is the accused agent who is also having an unlikely affair with... Also stars Kim Basinger as the First Lady and Eva Longoria a rookie agent.

Story is built on weak premise, even though the book it is based on was written by a former Secret Service agent. You don't get a strong sense of the reasons to kill the Prez and there's not enough "gotcha" when they figure out who the mole is. This could have been a delicous thriller but instead it's half-baked Hollywood crap. In the closeups, Douglas looks every bit his 62 years,which seems too old for an agent. Basinger looks stunning at age 53 but she isn't given much of a role. She's also rumoured to be interested in joining 24. Longoria, 21, doesn't put in a memorable performance.

Is it meant to piggy back on the popularity of the popular show 24 , which also stars Sutherland? The Sentinel lacks the cleverness and pure adrenalin rush of the tv show. 3/5 OCH.

The best part of this film was seeing the trailer for Pathfinder.

The Worst President in History?

They've never liked George W. Bush at Rolling Stone magazine. Or, it seems, Republicans.



One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush.

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.

* * * *

How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

* * * *

THE CREDIBILITY GAP

No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.

The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age -- a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."

Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections -- but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff -- a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition -- represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.

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BUSH AT WAR

Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well -- including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor -- much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.

The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.

Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.

No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."

All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops -- accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."

When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.

* * * *

BUSH AT HOME

Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.

The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever -- with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states -- including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds -- have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.

The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions -- over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."

Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."

The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them -- much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.

Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.

* * * *

PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT

Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law -- most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.

Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers -- HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.

The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison -- investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.

History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.

By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.

Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.

The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.

* * * *

Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.

The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."

SEAN WILENTZ

Posted Apr 21, 2006 12:34 PM

The Pentagon's New Spies

From RollingStone.com.

The military has built a vast domestic-intelligence network to fight terrorism -- but it's using it to track students, grandmothers and others protesting the war.



Last October, before the public learned that president Bush had secretly ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without a court order, the Pentagon approached the Senate intelligence committee with an unprecedented request. Military officials wanted the authority to spy on U.S. citizens on American soil, without identifying themselves, in order to collect intelligence about about terrorist threats. The plan was so sweeping, according to congressional sources who reviewed it, that it would have permitted operatives from the Defense Intelligence Agency to spy on dissidents by posing as peace activists and infiltrating anti-war meetings.

Senators on both sides of the aisle refused to go along with the plan. "The Department of Defense should not be in the business of spying on law-abiding Americans -- period," said Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. In closed-door deliberations, the intelligence committee blocked the request.

In fact, however, the Pentagon has already assembled a nationwide domestic spying machine that goes far beyond the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of telephone and e-mail traffic. Operating in secret, the Defense Department is systematically gathering and analyzing intelligence on American citizens at home -- and a new Pentagon agency called Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) is helping to coordinate the military's covert efforts with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Those responsible for the military's new spy network insist that it is aimed at preventing another attack by Al Qaeda. "The premise is that there needs to be a nexus to foreign terrorism," says David Burtt, CIFA's director. "In the wake of 9/11, there was a lot of criticism about the ability to collect dots and connect dots."

So far, the military's efforts at domestic spying have caught few, if any, terrorists. But the Pentagon has tracked the activities of anti-war activists across the country who have staged peaceful demonstrations against military bases and defense contractors such as Halliburton. Traditionally restricted to action overseas, America's armed forces -- including the National Guard -- are now linked in a growing domestic spying apparatus which, thanks to technology, has far greater power than the Army units that conducted a massive operation to infiltrate, disrupt and destabilize Vietnam and civil rights protests during the 1960s and '70s. "We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America," said Wyden. "This is a huge leap without even a congressional hearing."

* * * *

Intelligence gathered by the military runs into and out of the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Here, beneath the snow-covered summit of Pike's Peak, the Defense Department has set up its first command dedicated to homeland security in a gleaming new $90 million facility. Before Northcom was established in 2002, the facility was best known as the home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the ultra-high-tech war room depicted in the movie WarGames, where sharp-eyed military personnel spent the Cold War watching for a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.

Nowadays, the place is more like a real-life version of the counterterrorism unit on 24. Judging from the bustle of activity at Northcom, anti-terrorism is good for business. The corridors are filled with dust from construction and the smell of paint, and a brand-new wing is nearly ready to open. Over the past four years, Northcom has doubled in size and now boasts a staff of 1,200 and an annual budget of $93 million.

At the center of the operation is a core group of 300 intelligence analysts and staff who inhabit Northcom and its state-of-the-art facility, called the Combined Intelligence Fusion Center. "Intelligence fusion" is a spy master's term of art that refers to melding together data from all points -- including intelligence agencies, the armed forces, law enforcement and other sources -- and analyzing all the seemingly disparate information for patterns. "The fusion and analysis that these kids do is different than anything I've seen in forty years," says Adm. Timothy Keating, the commander of Northcom.

The intelligence streaming into the center can be anything from highly polished analyses from the CIA and FBI to the military's own alerts and warnings. At the bottom are Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by many government agencies, which are often little more than rumors based on unfounded information -- a financial officer who notes an odd money transfer or a military spouse who spots a suspect individual near a base. More official are Threat and Local Observation Notices (TALONs), part of a surveillance program started by the Pentagon in 2003. More than 15,000 TALONs have been collected so far, from sources such as soldiers manning gates outside military bases, law-enforcement agencies, local businesses and the media. The SARs and TALONs -- along with intelligence from the armed forces, such as the U.S. Air Force program known as Eagle Eyes -- are eventually integrated into a single intelligence database called JPEN, for the Joint Protection Enterprise Network.

In its homeland-security role, Northcom has mobilized troops for hundreds of events since 2002, including the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, Boy Scout jamborees and the presidential inauguration. The sixty-four members of its instant command center, including an intelligence team that can be mobilized in hours, have been sent into action at special events nine times in the past two years. In addition, scores of federal agencies -- from the CIA and FBI to the Coast Guard and FEMA -- have officials based at Northcom to coordinate their work. "We're fully integrated with the Special Operations Command," says Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, Northcom's director of operations. "We have people who've done operations from a Special Ops perspective."

Inside Northcom's operations center, where wall-size screens flank rows of computer terminals linked to federal agencies, military analysts monitor everything from the president's travels to routine air traffic. A placard in the war room lists fourteen events that merit immediate attention -- "we call them 'wake me up in the middle of the night' stuff," says Col. Bob Felderman of Northcom operations. Adds another Northcom official, "We get reports if somebody's pounding on a cockpit door in flight, or there's a drunk passenger, or somebody's taped a note in an airplane restroom." But the list also includes a category for "civil disturbances of more than 1,000 persons" -- a directive broad enough to include an anti-war demonstration or anti-globalization protest.

Keating, a gray-haired commander who led the U.S. Fifth Fleet, insists that Northcom does not spy on Americans. "We are not allowed to gather intelligence on U.S. persons unless there is a clearly defined, well-understood terrorist nexus," he says.

Ever since 1878, when the Posse Comitatus Act barred the U.S. military from taking part in law enforcement, the responsibility for domestic security has traditionally resided with the police and the FBI. The Defense Department, for the most part, has been confined to protecting U.S. military bases. But shortly after September 11th, the Pentagon began muscling in on the FBI's turf. In 2002, in a move that received little public attention, the Bush administration created Counterintelligence Field Activity and charged the new agency with consolidating all Pentagon intelligence to "protect DOD and the nation against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, assassinations and terrorist activities."

The agency got another boost last year when a commission appointed by Bush urged that CIFA be empowered to collect and analyze intelligence "both inside and outside the United States." Three of the commission's consultants, it turns out, were employees of MZM -- one of CIFA's primary contractors -- and federal prosecutors are now looking into whether Pentagon personnel have committed crimes in steering CIFA contracts to MZM. Nevertheless, the president agreed last October to significantly broaden the agency's mission, giving it the authority to actually direct military intelligence operations. From a small unit designed as a clearinghouse for reports, CIFA was transformed overnight into a major arm of domestic intelligence. Both its budget and its staff, thought to be in excess of 1,000 people, are classified.

According to a Defense Department strategy paper, military spying encompasses not only "defense critical infrastructure" -- highways, bridges, communications facilities, chemical plants and nuclear reactors -- but also the "defense industrial base," which the paper describes as "a worldwide industrial complex with capabilities to perform research and development and design, produce, and maintain military weapons systems, subsystems, components or parts to meet military requirements." In other words, the Pentagon sees itself as defending the entire military-industrial complex -- a mission broad enough to include intelligence on virtually any conceivable threat.

* * * *

It didn't take long for the pentagon to begin using its new powers to collect intelligence on anti-war groups. In December, NBC News reported that CIFA had collected dozens of incident and threat reports on peace activists and other nonviolent organizations that have nothing to do with terrorism. By matching the unnamed groups in the news reports to specific activities of activists nationwide, the American Civil Liberties Union discovered that the military's spying effort had ensnared the American Friends Service Committee, United for Peace and Justice, and Veterans for Peace, as well as local anti-war groups from Florida to California.

A group at University of California Santa Cruz called Students Against the War was included in CIFA's terrorism database in April 2005, when it staged a protest against military recruiters on campus. Although the protest was peaceful, a TALON report called the demonstration a "threat," an assessment that CIFA deemed "credible." A Florida group called the Truth Project ended up in the database in November 2004, when they gathered at a Quaker meetinghouse to plan a protest against high school recruiting by the military. Five months earlier, ten peace activists in Texas merited a TALON report for donning papier-m?ch? masks and handing out peanut-butter sandwiches to highlight "war profiteering" outside the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney's former firm, the defense contractor Halliburton.

In May 2005, a California group called the Raging Grannies ran afoul of military spies when it helped organize a peaceful Mother's Day demonstration to protest the war in Iraq. Unbeknownst to them, their action was brought to the attention of a new intelligence unit at the California National Guard -- a program that went by the cumbersome title of Information Synchronization, Knowledge Management, and Intelligence Fusion. According to internal e-mails, the Guard forwarded information about the protest "to our Intell folks who continue to monitor."

Asked why the Guard was spying on the Grannies, a spokesman suggested that terrorists might try to take advantage of the activists. "Who knows who could infiltrate that type of group and try to stir something up?" Lt. Col. Stan Zezotarski told reporters. "After all, we live in an age of terrorism, so who knows?"

Joe Dunn, a California state senator, was having none of it. He launched an investigation and helped force the Guard to shut down its intelligence center. "What got us to the point of the National Guard setting up units in which, at least in California, they start down the path of domestic spying?" he asks. "Our fear is that this was part of a federally sponsored effort to set up domestic surveillance programs in a way that would circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act."

The ACLU, which is demanding more information about CIFA's activities, cites a "broad and disturbing pattern" in the military's intelligence gathering, saying the efforts are being used to target legitimate protesters. "The chilling effect of this may be the most significant," says ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner. "There is a real danger when the military is seen as being used as part of the administration's political goals."

According to Denice Denton, the chancellor at Santa Cruz, the military's covert intelligence operation is already deterring dissent. "It has intimidated people," she says. "I spoke to one of the students involved, and she feels intimidated about speaking openly because she is being watched. Students wonder, 'How was this information being collected? Were people standing behind a tree?' "

Some of the military intelligence, in fact, appears to be based on very little intelligence. "These reports are nothing more than a gossip and rumor index," says Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer who exposed some of the abuses by military spy agencies in the 1960s. "A lot of them are filed by paranoid housewives and rabid, retired colonels with nothing better to do than spy on the people around them."

With the military spying on peace groups, some activists say they are on the lookout for moles within their own ranks. Ray Del Papa, who attended the Truth Project meeting in Florida, told reporters that he believes government agents infiltrated the organization. "You could pretty much pick out who are the infiltrators," he said. "It gets you mad. It is wrong for anyone from the government to have to spy on U.S. citizens."

No one disputes that the Pentagon has a responsibility to protect its facilities and personnel. But its broad definition of "terrorism" could easily lead it back into the business of targeting legitimate protesters. In the late 1960s, more than 1,500 Army personnel tracked a wide range of dissident groups and monitored every demonstration involving more than twenty people, amassing files on more than 100,000 Americans.

The Pentagon has apologized for the latest abuses and pledged to clean up its act. Robert Rogalski, acting deputy undersecretary of defense for counterintelligence and security, says a complete review of CIFA's database is under way, adding that any data on dissidents was included by mistake. "We've laid our dirty laundry on the table, we recognize that mistakes were made, and we've done the right thing," he says. "It did cause us to realize that we have to sharpen the focus."

But it may be hard to undo the damage. By law, TALON reports that do not warrant further investigation are supposed to be purged from all databases after ninety days. Yet the information is shared with so many agencies, there is simply no way for citizens to know that their names have been cleared. "It's impossible to know how many databases there are," says Jim Harper, an information-policy specialist at the conservative Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. "And every other week, databases are being combined."

The broader threat is that military spies will gradually expand their anti-terrorist mission to include more and more ordinary citizens. "The danger is that we create an apparatus for spying -- and that becomes the essential apparatus of a police state," says Pyle, the former intelligence officer. "It goes from clipping articles to sending people out to watch protesters to taking video and sending it back to the Pentagon. If some kids knock down a power line somewhere, soon they'll be looking at every member of Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front." The military's intelligence gathering got out of hand thirty-five years ago, Pyle observes. "And my sense is," he says, "the bureaucracy forgets stuff like that."

ROBERT DREYFUSS

Posted Apr 18, 2006 8:18 PM

book - The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

2.5/5



It's a fun read but not a literary classic by any means. It's interesting to see how Brown incorporated references to art and history. The ending is a let down. I'm not sure I would read another Dan Brown book. I don't care for his writing style. In fact, I am anxious to now read something well written!

Hard to believe he's sold 40 million copies of this mediocre book! Brown's next book, The Solomon Key, is supposedly about the Freemasons.



I will see the movie, however.

Apocalypse soon?

Ask most Canadians and they wouldn't say we are in an energy crisis, unless the crisis refers to the price we pay for fuel at the pump. If there's trouble looming, you've got to wonder why the mainstream media won't discuss the issue. Note, according to the CIA World Factbook website, Canada produces 2.4 million bbl/day, as opposed to the 1.4 million cited by Frances Russell. This means that Canada is a net exporter of oil, not a net importer.


Apocalypse soon?
Canada is facing an environmental and energy crisis

by FRANCES RUSSELL
Winnipeg Free Press, Wed Apr 12 2006

WHEN it comes to political scandals, this is the genuine article. It combines unethical and irresponsible behaviour with lack of transparency and accountability at the top. It's both federal and provincial in scope. It's the biggest yet.

Canada faces an environmental and energy crisis within the next decade. Not only are the politicians refusing to debate it. They are pretending it doesn't exist. Worst of all, they have no plan, no idea, how to deal with it.

Here are just some of its components:

* Canada has less than 10 years of proven conventional oil reserves left, Statistics Canada reports. In 2004, our oil production averaged 1.4 million barrels per day (bpd). We exported 1.6 million bpd to the U.S., requiring us to import some 963,000 bpd to meet our domestic demand of 1.75 million bpd.

* Canada has only 8.7 years of domestic natural gas supply remaining, also according to StatsCan. We produce 17 billion cubic feet per day (bcf) and export 9.7 bcf to the U.S., leaving us with less than half, 7.3 bcf. Even the ever-optimistic and industry-serving National Energy Board now admits Canada's natural gas situation is "unsettling."

* Canada's Prairies face an "impending water crisis with far-reaching" implications, says a new study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Dr. David Schindler, the study's lead author and Canada's most renowned environmental scientist, states the deadly combination of global warming, population pressure and the rapacious demands of Alberta's oil industry is draining all western rivers dry. Summer flows are down by 35 to 40 per cent on the Peace, Slave and Athabasca rivers. The South Saskatchewan's flow has dropped a frightening 80 per cent since 1910. Several lakes have simply dried up. And the glacier that feeds the Bow River is melting so quickly that there may be no water left in it in 50 years.
Not only has not a single alarm bell gone off in Edmonton and Ottawa, federal and provincial politicians have ramped up the looming environmental and economic disaster.

And all with virtually no public debate.

Exploitation of Alberta's Athabasca tar sands, chiefly to serve the U.S. market, is now Canada's Job One.

But every barrel of tar sands oil requires 1,000 to 2,000 cubic feet of natural gas and from three to six barrels of water. By comparison, an average Canadian home burns 9,000 cf of natural gas per month in winter. In full production, Fort McMurray's tar sands plants will demand an additional 175 million litres of water per day above the 138 billion litres a year already allocated.

As for climate change, every barrel of tar sands oil produced releases 125 kilograms of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

What happens when -- and it is when, not if -- Canada, a cold country, reaches a domestic supply crunch sometime in the next decade? Thanks to the proportional sharing clause contained in the North American Free Trade Agreement, we can't turn off the tap on either oil or gas. We can't even turn it down. We will have to go short ourselves.

And there's more, much more, all exposed in a major new report by the University of Alberta's Parkland Institute, the Polaris Institute of Ottawa and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, entitled Fuelling Fortress America: A Report on the Athabasca Tar Sands and U.S. Demands for Canada's Energy.

Most Canadians probably know bits and pieces of this biggest-ever Canadian political outrage. But it's not until they are all pulled together that its staggering impact emerges.
The planned $7 billion Mackenzie Valley pipeline, projected to deliver 1.9 billion cubic feet of natural gas through 1,400 kilometres of some of the most fragile ecosystems on Earth, terminates at a tiny station called Bootis, adjacent to Fort McMurray. The pipeline isn't for natural gas consumers; it's for the tar sands.

Alberta has set its royalty rate on tar sands production at a ridiculous one per cent. Ralph Klein's government collected more revenue from gambling than from the tar sands in 2004-05. Reacting to Imperial Oil's threats to withdraw from the pipeline last fall, Ottawa came through with concessions totalling $2.8 billion. And this at the same time Imperial's parent, ExxonMobil Corp., reported a $10 billion quarterly profit, largest in U.S. history.

There has never been any public discussion about our loss of energy sovereignty, about Canada's energy security, about Canada's environmental and economic future. Why? Because Canada, alone among oil-producing nations, has not had any energy policy, federal or provincial, for over 20 years. Since Brian Mulroney's government threw Canada's storehouse of non-renewable, strategic resources onto the unfettered free market, federal and provincial governments have prostrated themselves before the oil companies and the deep integrationists in the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

The media mainly keep mum.

This scandal is epic. Year after year, it worsens. Year after year, there is no debate, nor even questions.

FrancesRussell@mts.net

Norway seeks to reduce dependence on Microsoft through open-source programs

Canadian Press

Friday, April 07, 2006

OSLO (AP) - The Norwegian government said Friday it will increase its use of freely shared, open-source software to reduce its dependency on large computer companies like Microsoft Corp.

"It should no longer be necessary to use software from the major international computer companies to gain access to electronic information in the public sector," the government said in a statement. "Now that dependency will be broken."

Measures to increase use of open-source programs include a specialist panel to set standards for public information.

The project will also set standards to allow various operating systems to communicate with one another, the Ministry of Government Administration and Reform said.

Several countries, including Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea, have been moving toward open-source alternatives.

Proponents say open source results in quicker development of software because vast numbers of people can study, update and adapt programs without having to pay licensing fees.

The Linux operating system and the Mozilla web browsers, led by Firefox, are examples of free open-source technology that users can copy, modify and redistribute.

Microsoft's Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer browser are proprietary, meaning the blueprints behind them are closely guarded, though Explorer is distributed without charge.
© The Canadian Press 2006

Could the US win a war with Iran?

From Blogo Maximo, a great Canadian blog by Steve Struthers, from London, Ontario. Please visit it.

Monday, March 20, 2006

The answer depends on what approach the US would take to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program - an aerial bombardment, a ground war, or both.

Many analysts believe the US will use the same weapons it used in the initial salvo of the 2003 attack on Iraq: sub-launched Tomahawk missiles, and F117 stealth fighters dropping GBU-28 'bunker-buster' bombs.

Armed with conventional explosives alone, the GBU-28 cannot easily destroy bunkers located very deep underground. That lack is prompting the US to consider adding on 'mini-nukes', ranging from 0.3 to 300 kilotons (kT). To put things into perspective, consider that one kiloton of nuclear weapons energy equals roughly 1,000 tons of TNT. By comparison, the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki yielded 12 and 20 kilotons.

The US is portraying these tiny weapons as 'safe for civilians', in an attempt to make a nuclear attack on Iran somehow acceptable. The bombs will use kinetic energy to penetrate the bunkers, then detonate well below ground level. The resulting blast, heat and radiation are contained by the earth, thereby reducing civilian casualties.

Would these be enough, given the likely depth of the Iranian bunkers? To assess their possible effectiveness, one must first understand where they fit in the nuclear weapons hierarchy. Weapons yielding less than 2 kilotons, or Sub-Atomic Demolition Munitions, are used by military engineer units to deny bridges and roads to advancing enemy forces. SADMs have a limited effective radius and lack the power needed to destroy or damage deeply buried bunkers.

Bombs this small will detonate at ground level or just a few metres below and will kill or injure civilians by blast, heat, and immediate radiation. Prevailing winds will also carry the resulting fallout to non-target areas, causing still more deaths and acute radiation illness. While the deaths and casualties that would result would still be lower than would be the case if larger bombs are used, the 'mini nukes' are anything but 'safe for civilians'.

Larger bombs of 100kT or more would probably be enough to take out some of the deeper facilities. The Iranians have likely anticipated this risk by building their most important facilities much deeper underground. To really do the job, a bomb of around two megatons, yielding the equivalent of 2 million tons of TNT, is needed.

A two-megaton bomb will generate a crater 500 metres wide and 140 metres deep, enough to reach all but the very deepest bunkers. Unfortunately, a bomb that large is capable of destroying a major metropolitan centre and killing not just thousands of civilians, but potentially millions.

Given the obvious deficiencies of the mini-nukes, is the US telling the truth about the size of the bombs it plans to use? In the wake of a nuclear attack on Iran, actual bomb yield will be hotly debated by both sides. Post-attack rubble, fires and fallout will make getting at the truth even more difficult. For a while, at least. Since most of the targets are in or near urban areas, civilian casualties will be magnified as bombs miss their targets and buildings closest to the targets are imploded by seismic effects of the blasts.

The US has identified nearly 450 potential targets. Most of them could be neutralized, if bombs of sufficient size are used and high civilian casualties are considered an acceptable trade-off.

Then again, if victory is defined by bringing Iran's nuclear ambitions to a screeching halt, then yes, the US could easily win. In so doing it may lose the public relations battle it sought to win with its 'safe-for-civilians' nuclear bombs.

Winning a ground war seems somewhat less likely. Reliable information about the current strength of the Iranian Army is scant. It is believed that most of its ground forces inventory is obsolete or near obsolescent, with nearly 2,000 medium and main battle tanks, and several thousand wheeled fighting vehicles, artillery and anti-tank systems. All of which would pose a problem for US forces. As would the almost 800,000 regular and reserve ground troops Iran has, many of whom are battle-hardened from combat in the 1979-81 war with Iraq. A significant portion of Iran's terrain is rugged and mountainous, thereby posing additional hurdles to overcome.

Consider the 130,000 US troops now in Iraq. Recruiting efforts at home are not going well, forcing the US Army to desperately cling to every one of those troops any way it can. If they were diverted from Iraq to fight in Iran, there would be too few of them to do the job.

Military history shows that an attacker needs a three-to-one advantage over an enemy in order to win a battle. In practical terms, this means that the US Army would need a force some 2.4 million strong to gain that numerical advantage.

Conceivably, the US could win with a smaller force, bolstered by allied troops, air power, and superior weapons. In such a scenario, bigger questions remain. Could the US, with its national budget already being strained by the Iraq war, go on the total war footing required? Would Americans be willing to accept the WWII-style rationing and other privations imposed by such a war, which is likely to be protracted?

Moreover, since Iran lacks the capacity to physically attack the continental United States, what conditions would have to exist before America would enter into a ground war against Iran?

In my next article, I'll look at the myriad risks that a war with Iran would entail.

GBU 28 "Bunker Buster" bombs may attack Iran's nuclear facilities

GBU-28 Bunker Buster

"Bunker Buster" bombs are 19' long, and a heavy enough to penetrate 100' of earth or 20 ' of rock or concrete, with time-delayed fuses to detonate the explosives seconds later, after entering the actual target. These bombs may very likely be used to target Iran's nuclear installations by Israel and/or, the US.



From GlobalSecurity.org
Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28)

The GBU-28 laser guided bomb was developed, built, tested, and used in combat in a 17 day period. The deepest Iraqi bunkers were secure from the best penetrating bomb, the GBU-24A/B, with the I-2000 warhead. Coalition leaders required the capability to destroy these vital command and control facilities. Texas Instruments and Lockheed combined their efforts to build the 18 ft long bomb. TI adapted the seeker from the GBU-24 and Lockheed built the bomb body from discarded eight inch howitzer barrels. The Air Force initially contracted for 30 bombs but the cease fire started after only two were employed. Two more of the bombs were used in testing before the bombs were dropped in combat and the Air Force expended two or three more in additional tests after the war. The Air Force ordered an additional 100 GBU-28s with the BLU-113 (8 inch gun barrel) bomb body and stocks remained low due to the limited number of targets and the only fighter capable of employing it initially was the F-111F.

The Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28) bomb is designed to penetrate hardened targets before exploding, capable of penetrating 100 feet of earth or 20 feet of concrete. The GBU-28 was initially developed in 1991 for penetrating hardened Iraqi command centers located deep underground. This "bunker buster" was required for special targets during the Desert Storm conflict and was designed, fabricated and loaded in record time. The GBU-28 is a laser-guided conventional munition that uses a modified Army artillery tube as the bomb body. They are fitted with GBU-27 LGB kits, 14.5 inches in diameter and almost 19 feet long. The operator illuminates a target with a laser designator and then the munition guides to a spot of laser energy reflected from the target.



Some considerable confusion exists in the literature concerning the weight of this bomb. Although nominally a 5,000 pound bomb, it appears that the actual weight is somewhat less than this, and that the 5,000 figure is arrived at by rounding up [the 250, 500, 1000 and 2000 pound figures for the Mk80 family are also such approximations. Statements that it is a 4,000 pound bomb reflect a similar rounding, but rounding down and rounding rather further from the exact number. Reports that the bombs weigh 4,637 pounds, and contain 630 pounds of high explosives, are too precise to be in error. Reports that the bomb weighs 4,700 pounds are in close agreement with this more precise number. A report that the bomb incorporates a 4,400-pound penetrating warhead may reflect the weight of the filled bomb body, minus guidance head and tail kit.

The GBU 28 "Bunker Buster" was put together in record time to support targeting of the Iraqi hardened command bunker by adapting existing materiel. The GBU-28 was not even in the early stages of research when Kuwait was invaded. The USAF asked industry for ideas in the week after combat operations started. The bomb was fabricated starting on 01 February 1991, using surplus 8-inch artillery tubes. The official go-ahead for the project was issued on 14 February 1991, and explosives for the initial units were hand-loaded by laboratory personnel into a bomb body that was partially buried upright in the ground outside the laboratory in New York.



This new system was needed to deal with deeply buried command and control bunkers that were beyond the reach of existing systems. The need was great, the time was short, and the only solution was to innovate a solution in an unprecedented short period of time. A team of government and industry people came together sharing the common objective of solving a difficult technical challenge in a breakneck race against time.

Personal interests were set aside as were traditional approaches, with long hours being the norm. The team worked to trade time against everything (cost, risk, performance). Reuse of existing subsystems offered the only answer. However, the pieces would have to be integrated in a very innovative way to achieve the desired results. The GBU-28 Bunker Buster that was conceived, developed, tested, and deployed in approximately 28 days. This was less time than had ever been dreamed possible.

The first two units were delivered to the USAF on 16 and 17 February 1991, and the first flight to test the guidance software and fin configuration was conducted on 20 February 1991. These tests were successful and the program proceeded, with a contract let on 22 February. A sled test on 26 February 1991proved that the bomb could penetrate over 20 feet of concrete, while an earlier flight test had demonstrated the bomb's ability to penetrate more than 100 feet of earth.



Watch the flash animation to see it in action.

USA Today also has an animation that's worth watching.

From CLW.org

Limitations

While laser-guided bombs have dramatically increased the accuracy and efficiency of aerial bombing, they are not the miracle weapon that many believe them to be. A laser beam quickly loses its integrity when its is shown through fog, rain, clouds or dust. If the beam is scattered by these obstructions, then it is not powerful enough to be seen by the bomb's guidance unit, and the bomb cannot be guided. The cloudy weather over Kosovo in 1999 proved a significant hindrance to the use of laser-guided bombs. Despite impressive Gulf War video of bombs falling down ventilation shafts, there were very few targets hit accurately enough the first time; an average of four laser-guided bombs were required to destroy most targets.


An F-117 Nighthawk engages its target and drops a bunker buster during a testing mission at Hill Air Force Base, Utah.

The U.S. military uses a calculation known as circular error probability (CEP) to determine bomb accuracy. A circular error probability number is the radius of the circle in which a bomb will land at least half of the time. The circular error probability of a typical Vietnam-era dumb bomb was 150 feet; half the time it was dropped, the bomb hit within a 300 foot-wide circle. The circular error probability of the GBU-28/B, one of the most accurate laser-guided bombs, is about 25 feet (other American smart bombs have a circular error probability of between 10 and 40 feet). This means that half of the time, the GBU-28/B falls somewhere within a 50-foot wide circle around its target.


An F-15E Strike Eagle pilot and a weapons system officer inspect a GBU-28 laser-guided bomb.

While the GBU-28/B's circular error probability is technically impressive, the bomb may still hit unintended targets, especially when the U.S. is bombing an urban area like Mogadishu or Kabul. In addition, even the most advanced technology can be defeated by incorrect targeting and pilot error--the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and Red Cross warehouses in Kabul are two recent examples.

Due to its unusual length, the GBU-28/B cannot be carried by most of the U.S. aircraft that are otherwise suited to fly bunker-busting missions. Of the three active American heavy bombers, only the B-2A "Spirit" (or stealth bomber) is able to drop a variant of the bunker buster, called the GBU-37/B. America's other stealth aircraft--the F-117A "Night Hawk" light bomber and F-22A "Raptor" fighter--are unable to carry the GBU-28/B because of the planes' relatively short bomb bays.


Air-to-air view of GBU-28 hard target bomb on an F-15E Eagle

The only U.S. plane currently cleared to drop the GBU-28/B is the F-15E "Strike Eagle," a long-range fighter bomber. While the F-15E's sophisticated radar aids it during the low-level attacks common to bunker-busting missions, the heavily-defended environments in which bunkers are often found pose a severe threat to this non-stealthy jet.

Seymour Hersh: Bush Planning Massive Bombing Campaign Against Iran, Including Nukes

From http://thinkprogress.org/2006/04/08/bombing-iran/

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports a major scoop in the current edition of the New Yorker. AFP has an overview:

The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.

…The former intelligence officials depicts planning as “enormous,” “hectic” and “operational,” Hersh writes.

…In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.

Hersh’s account is consistent with other recent reports. This week, the former deputy director at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Wayne White, told Forward Magazine:

In recent months I have grown increasingly concerned that the administration has been giving thought to a heavy dose of air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sector without giving enough weight to the possible ramifications of such action.

Joseph Cirincione, a respected non-proliferation expert who decribed himself as “the last remaining person in Washington who believed President George W. Bush when he said that he was committed to a diplomatic solution,” wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine last week that senior administration officials had already made up their mind about to attack Iran:

[C]olleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran…What I previously dismissed as posturing, I now believe may be a coordinated campaign to prepare for a military strike on Iran.

Read the whole story by Hersh.


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1.

And so the insanity continues. Obviously, this will push any bad news from Iraq off the front page for quite a while. And the Bush rah-rah crowd will think is great to have a president that does the right thing and doesn’t listen to polls.

Meanwhile, Congress drops its pants, bends over, and spreads its cheeks. And just keeps their mind on the next earmark.

Comment by Alan — April 8, 2006 @ 12:23 pm
2.

Now this is a grand idea. Since we’re stuck in mud in Iraq, we can get some traction in the so-called War On Terror by attacking a country 3 times the size that also has an actual army.

I would say that Congress won’t allow it, but 1) they will (or already have I guess) and 2) they don’t have anything to say about it anyway.

Comment by Massachusetts Liberal — April 8, 2006 @ 12:23 pm
3.

Would Bush be this obtuse to wage war against Iran without thinking of the repercussions that would occur? Either that or the neoconservatves realize that they can manipulate Bush so he will do their bidding. Either scenario is quite frightening in its implications.

Comment by Erroll — April 8, 2006 @ 12:26 pm
4.

We must understand what Bush sees himself as here on the Earth. Just he sees himself as is the question of the century, and perhaps the most important question this country needs to find an answer to.

He has no morals.

He has no guilt.

He has no love.

He has absolute power.

He believes he is God’s instrument for God’s mission.

He knows he is always right, therefore he is always right.

Where is he taking this coutnry?

To its total destruction and ruin.

Comment by EasyRider — April 8, 2006 @ 12:30 pm
5.

My only comment regarding what the Bushcovites might/will do in Iran…”once an idiot, always an idot!” Mr. & Mrs Bush Sr. ain’t ya proud of what you produced and foisted on the world?

Comment by John the Elder — April 8, 2006 @ 12:31 pm
6.

Noone has a say about anyhing in this Country any longer. This damn group of Neo Cons had planned on invadeing Iraq and Iran along with Syria and Lebanon before bush stole The Oval Office.

bush will not vacate that Oval Office either . When I read the book ; Behind The War On Terror I saw the damnplan that bush and thugs had laid out to Dominate the Oil/Natural Gas supplies.This group of warmongers don’t give a rats azz about Demoracy its about Control Of The World and the Sooner that The World Gets on This page and Stops these Murders the sooner we can get America Back.

Congress is always buffalo when it comes to bush’s Manadated Wars.

Hersh and others knows more of what is actually happening than anyone in either house plus if those in either house actually cared about the world and wars upon wars .

bush & Co set off a nuke buster bomb in Nevada ,wasn’t that a heads up ?

Comment by Thot's — April 8, 2006 @ 12:34 pm
7.

By the way, when Bush attacks Iran and Iran sends out the terrorists that it supports we will have a real terrorist war on scale that is horriable to imagine.

What will Bush do in response? Why Bush will declare a National Emergency. He will declare the country needs his leadership and point himself President for life. The U.S. Constitution is to be put on the shelf until the emergency is over.

That is where Bush is going.

He will end the U.S. as a Free nation.

Take it to the Bank.

Comment by EasyRider — April 8, 2006 @ 12:37 pm
8.

I’m starting to believe that Bush truly will go down in history — he may yet lead us into a world war before his term is over.

Comment by DS — April 8, 2006 @ 12:38 pm
9.

Easy Rider - I am afraid you are correct.
We will regret this madman as our president more than we could have ever imagined six years ago.

Comment by Marie — April 8, 2006 @ 12:41 pm
10.

Bush is dense enough to believe he can get away with being the bully of the world. Why would this option appeal to the half-wit?

1. It re-enforces his image as “The War President.”
2. It shows that he’s willing to attack anyone and the neo-cons believe the use of force will cause enemies to agree to cooperate with USA demands.
3. It allows the military to use its new toys on an evil enemy.
4. It increases attacks on Americans worldwide, thus proving that the “War on Terrorism” is going to be a “long war” and that the president must exercise his authority on all issues relating to terrorism including domestic spying.
5. It causes an increased demand for more military spending, thus helping Bush supporting corporations to take in more money.
6. It distracts Americans from Iraq, immigration, budget problems, domestic spying, leaks out of the WH, lack of adequate health care coverage, repub corruption, voting machine corruption, and on and on. . . . .
7. He gets to dress up and pretend to be a soldier and tell us that he had destroyed our evil enemy so we can sleep soundly tonight.

Comment by Southwest Bob — April 8, 2006 @ 12:41 pm
11.

Shouldn’t there be freedom and democracy in Iran by now? I don’t understand. Did something go wrong with that plan? As I understood it, we bring “freedom” to Iraq and the rest of the Mideast falls into line. What could go wrong?

Comment by And You Thought REAGAN Was Stupid — April 8, 2006 @ 12:42 pm
12.

#8 DS
Bush is on record as saying he wwants to be a “war president” because those are the only ones that are remembered.
So we have a lunatic in the White House, supported by a power mad cabal.

Comment by Marie — April 8, 2006 @ 12:43 pm
13.

For some reason the image of Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb to the ground while cheering “Yahoo” and waving his cowboy hat comes to mind.

Folks, the Apocalypse is nigh.

Nothing like making our own reality.

I wonder if Ralph Nader still thinks there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between Bush and Gore?

-GSD

Comment by GSD — April 8, 2006 @ 12:44 pm
14.

2) they don’t have anything to say about it anyway.

Massachusetts Liberal

I don’t think they do

Could it happen while congress is on vacation?

Coming to a draft board near you…

http://www.sss.gov/

Comment by WiscoDuk — April 8, 2006 @ 12:46 pm
15.

America began with a King George and will end with a King George.

-GSD

Comment by GSD — April 8, 2006 @ 12:46 pm
16.

The 51 million who voted for this idiot will be like the 12 million who bought the record “Saturday Night Fever” you know they are out there in huge numbers–but only few will ever admit they did it.

Comment by Above the Clouds — April 8, 2006 @ 12:48 pm
17.

This madness is for real. The consequences of this are immense: total war for years to come, the total loss of US military strength, incalculable human suffering, a draft, skyrocketing deficits, skyrocketing oil prices, a total destruction of our way of life. This may seem like an exaggeration; it is not. Iraq was a piece of cake compared to what will happen if this comes to pass.

There is a tiny window for Congressional supervision before this happens. If we all let it happen, what will we tell our children?

Comment by Camilo — April 8, 2006 @ 12:49 pm
18.

My only prayer is that we will hang George Bush for his war crimes before the rest of the world has to destroy us to accomplish that.

Comment by KnightErrant — April 8, 2006 @ 12:50 pm
19.

well folks the party’s over. Do you think our Republic can get to it’s collective senses and throw these madmen and women (condi rice) out of office? Take it to the streets folks. And let’s give all those damn worthless fools in Congress their pink slips this year. Power to the people folks, we gotta do it. This is our country and we need to take it back. Easy rider is right, that is the plan of the neocons and PNAC. But hey, Let’s stop it!! Come on now we are the true patriotic Americans and it’s up to us, to save our country and our constitution.

Comment by Freebird — April 8, 2006 @ 12:51 pm
20.

“(…)without giving enough weight to the possible ramifications of such action.”

Where have I seen this one before?

Comment by Gregor Samsa — April 8, 2006 @ 12:51 pm
21.

Don’t tell anyone: they have a doomsday machine.

Comment by Godfry Daniel — April 8, 2006 @ 12:54 pm
22.

Planning to use nukes. Jesus, Moses, and Carl Sagan. There’s really nothing to say about that, is there?

I haven’t read anything sadder or scarier in quite a while.

Comment by Interrobang — April 8, 2006 @ 12:54 pm
23.

Color me surprised. The public, the media, and eventually the Iranians will bear the brunt of blame for this, for our collective failure to act to stop the carnage.

But we know there are only a handful, relatively, of criminals in our government who are to blame. The largest culpable group is probably the media.

I can’t wait for the day when they will all get their due. I do not advocate violence or death to anyone; rather, total solitary isolation for life…I mean totaly devoid of any human contact ever again.

Above all, I hope they live long under such conditions.

Comment by Ken Daves — April 8, 2006 @ 12:55 pm
24.

use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs

This has got to be a joke. Seriously, you have to be joking. All through out the cold war, the world managed, just barely managed, to avoid nuclear warfare. A WWIII situation which could eliminate the human race. All throughout the cold war, and here, it ends. If ever it is asked who was the most evil man in the history of all humanity, we will have our answer.

Come to sunny South Africa, the crime may be an issue but our mines are deep.

Comment by Bruce Gorton — April 8, 2006 @ 12:56 pm
25.

Folks, the Apocalypse is nigh.

So much for the good news on his low approval ratings and the unraveling of his regime. They won’t matter in his grand scheme of things.

I wonder if Ralph Nader still thinks there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between Bush and Gore?

Comment by GSD — April 8, 2006 @ 12:44 pm

I didn’t know he said that. Guess he’s probably eating those words now.

This is appalling. We have no checks in place to stop this madman any longer. And We the People, as a whole, have only ourselves to blame.

How hard do you think those people who voted for Bush in 2004 will be kicking themselves when this starts?

Comment by unbelievable — April 8, 2006 @ 12:56 pm
26.

Anyone notice the full page ad in the NY Times this week placed by the American Jewish Congress depicting the supposed range of Iran’s missles. Of course, viewing the map with its coincentric circles made clear that the bulleye target was Iran.

Comment by bushworstpresidentever — April 8, 2006 @ 12:58 pm
27.

Take it to the streets folks. And let’s give all those damn worthless fools in Congress their pink slips this year. Power to the people folks, we gotta do it. This is our country and we need to take it back.

Comment by Freebird — April 8, 2006 @ 12:51 pm

I’m wondering if it will be too late by then. A lot can happen in a month, much less 7 of them…

Comment by unbelievable — April 8, 2006 @ 12:59 pm
28.

bush & Co set off a nuke buster bomb in Nevada ,wasn’t that a heads up ?

Comment by Thot’s — April 8, 2006 @ 12:34 pm

Thot’s,

That hasn’t happened yet. The 700 ton conventional weapon is set to be blown up on June 2. 700 Toms is big enough that it doesn’t have to be a nuke.

Here is why they want bigger conventional weapons:

Because they want to be able to kill everybody and destroy everything and then go in a take the oil without having to wait for the fall out to clear.

Comment by Spudge_Boy — April 8, 2006 @ 1:00 pm
29.

Georgie Porgy pudding and pie,
Sent the bombers up in the sky.
Don’t be talking about no Iraq,
This one will be mighty craic.
The king in the Whitehouse would not lie.

“craic” pronounced crack, Irish for a good time.

Comment by oscar wilde — April 8, 2006 @ 1:00 pm
30.

Now THAT, folks, is terrorism.

Comment by Loonie — April 8, 2006 @ 1:02 pm
31.

This is excellent news. Everybody look busy, Jesus is coming.

Comment by quicksand — April 8, 2006 @ 1:05 pm
32.

Haven’t seen anywhere else with the story yet, and this is a big one if true. Lets hope it isn’t.

Comment by Bruce Gorton — April 8, 2006 @ 1:06 pm
33.

Haven’t seen anywhere else with the story yet, and this is a big one if true. Lets hope it isn’t.

Comment by Bruce Gorton — April 8, 2006 @ 1:06 pm
34.

Bush has been planning to attack Iran for months now! He has to do it before summer > it is his plan to undermine the Democrats in the November elections! Having an all out war with hundreds of our troops killed each month will be used as cover to conceal massive vote fraud for the Republicans! Heck Dubya might even declare Martial Law and cancel the elections?!

Comment by Jay Randal — April 8, 2006 @ 1:13 pm
35.

Look, folks. Is anybody surprised? Bush’s ratings are almost in the twenties range. nuking Iran would inject fear and confusion into the american public. they’ve got nothing to lose. nuking iran is probably the only way that they could divert attention from Fitzgerald’s investigation.

Comment by Brando — April 8, 2006 @ 1:17 pm
36.

Remember how all of the Bush Administration cabinet officers sat in the hallowed US House Chamber during the first State of the Union speech before March 19, 2003? Chins high in the air, proud expression on their faces, they were so, oh so, happy to be there at that time.

Two words come to mind: Evil Empire.

This planning of these wars have been going on since Reagan took office. Had Ronald Reagan not had a conscience, and you may disagree, it would have all taken place sooner than later.

‘Trust, but verify’- Ronald Reagan

You cannot trust any of these neoconning former liberals, not now, not anytime.

They’re just plain old evil, pure and simple.

Comment by Ron — April 8, 2006 @ 1:18 pm
37.

Looks like George W Bush is truly the anti-Christ. This must be why the fundamentalists are so in love with him. They believe that W will bring on the Rapture. Won’t they be disappointed when they die like all the rest of us. What is there is no heaven or hell? All though living through the Bush regime is close be living in hell.

Comment by cats are flyfishn — April 8, 2006 @ 1:22 pm
38.

Can someone comment (intelligently, and as factually as possible, please) on what authorization Bush has or needs to proceed with this kind of action? It seems that the war authorization that took us into Iraq has been used to justify a lot of questionable actions — but certainly attacking a different soverign nation requires authorization from Congress, yes?

I’m not of the mind that Congress will deny him that power (yet), but if there is, at least, that step required than at least there’s time to try and make clear to our representatives that this is not what we want. And if we do have that opportunity, we’re going to have to use it — and use it big.

I couldn’t have imagined I could wake up and read something more upset ting today than I have the last three months.

Comment by SiriusA — April 8, 2006 @ 1:22 pm
39.

In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.

Can anybody say Joe Lieberman?

Comment by Spudge_Boy — April 8, 2006 @ 1:22 pm
40.

Holy shit. This really is the end of days, isn’t it? He’s not even trying to sell this war to us like with Iraq.

Maureen Dowd, in The Divine Right of Bushes today, draws a fascinating parallel between Scooter Libby and the 1700 year-old Judas manuscript recently found. It’s worth a read and it gives an interesting glimpse into the unreasoning behind some George Bush’s more hair-raising decisions.

Comment by jurassicpork — April 8, 2006 @ 1:23 pm
41.

HAARP and earthquakes.

google it, and see what you find.

of course if you go to the military’s website on HAARP you will not find any indication that they have the capability to make earthquakes occur; they CAN!!

and what happened in Iran last week?

Comment by military space — April 8, 2006 @ 1:24 pm
42.

36

The neo-cons were never actually liberals. They were like Jane Fonda, political fashionists. When it was fashionable, they smoked weed and protested against war, not out of any real belief, but because it was fashionable.

And they sold the “Dirty Hippy” moniker not because they disliked hippies, but because it was fashionable.

Now, evil is in fashion.

That said, we only recently got word that the US Pentagon is planning a information war, and if this story is not true, it could hurt a lot of liberal blogs when Bush stands up and says “No I didn’t” and procedes to prove it. This story needs a fact check, because while it sounds horrifying if it is true, it sounds entirely too, well, sensational.

Comment by Bruce Gorton — April 8, 2006 @ 1:27 pm
43.

There is no problem with our Iraq or Middle East policy which the deaths of several hundred million Arab and Persian muslims can’t cure.

Comment by rapier — April 8, 2006 @ 1:28 pm
44.

These idiots think they are doing what’s necessary to save their version of the american lifestyle. They believe that they must stop Iran or they will gain control the region and hold us hostage with the oil from the mideast, and possibly cut into the sacred corporate profits.

They think they have to act now before they lose Congress and can’t act as an unchecked unitary executive. Can’t have a Dem House or Senate preventing them from doing what in their minds is imperative to saving the world. And, as an added bonus, the US public will blindly rally around them and possibly retain the repug majority in Congress.

The attack will come before the November elections, because the neocons fear thay won’t be able to do it if they wait any longer.

Comment by pete h — April 8, 2006 @ 1:29 pm
45.

Post 38 > Bush believes that since he is now King of the United States, he no longer has to ask the Congress for war! They will be told to rubber stamp whatever he wants! He might even attack Iran without warning and then tell the Congress?! They are all sheep now anyways! Heck even Rep. Cynthia McKinney has been cowed now and she was the biggest anti-war person left in the Congress! We now live under a dictatorship and war on Iran is very soon!

Comment by Jay Randal — April 8, 2006 @ 1:31 pm
46.

25 - unbelievable,
You can’t kick anyone when you’re dead. Make sure that the tank is full and you have enough fuel for the generator for at least 48 hours. Stock up on canned goods with late expiration dates. Plan on six months worth. Be sure that you have a can opener. You will also need water to drink and cook with., plan on a couple quarts per day for each person in your household. Copy all of your photos from your computer to a few memory sticks and store them in one of those lead shielded 35 MM film cases. And if the bomb hits within 5 miles up wind of your location, just kiss your ass goodbye – there isn’t enough duct tape in the world to save you.
Oh, yes, and buy a few AK47s and enough ammo to take out at least 6000 people (In self-defense).

Comment by WaltTheMan — April 8, 2006 @ 1:32 pm
47.

Bush is adding to his war crimes resume. From his perspective, he’s got nothing to lose. The blowback on our troops in Iraq will be stunning. Does anyone really think that attacking Iran will suddenly change the attitudes of the people in the ME towards us? Bush will be assuring the IsSlamic extremism becomes dominant. The moderates in the region will be totally marginalized. Watch as the oil pipelines go down in Saudi Arabia. This administration is totally insane.

I truely believe that this action is premeditated to once again change the mid-term election dynamics here. These people cannot lose their grip on power…they are in way too deep and there’s no going back now. I hope the American people are smarter about this then they were in 2002.

Comment by Innocent Bystander — April 8, 2006 @ 1:33 pm
48.

Doesn’t starting WWIII and ending life as we know it,
have to be approved by the Rubber-Stamp Congress?

Comment by Keith H. — April 8, 2006 @ 1:35 pm
49.

nukes are so 1950. come on guys, US military has moved on to different ways of attacking the enemy. And they have already attacked Iran. They attacked ‘em last week. They attacked ‘em three years ago, killing tens of thousands! with earthquakes!

it’s all done through the Van Allen Belts, an electromagnetic force field in the ionosphere. When Bush and co. were talking about Saddam’s WMDs and that Saddam was moving them around and that they didn’t know where they were, it was all a charade. It doesn’t matter how deep below the ground the “enemy” tries to conduct its nuclear/WMD operations, the US military knows exactly where they are.

They can x-ray the earth; they can create sea squalls, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, they can intercept any radio frequencies or even interfere with communications of the “enemy.” with this technology.

they have been researching it since the first rocket was sent to outer space. they have been studying the physics of the ionosphere.

We will never know just what they can do. But physiciss and other scientists out there can tell us.

http://www.earthpulse.com/src/product.asp?productid=5

Comment by military space — April 8, 2006 @ 1:39 pm
50.

#39

Absolutely, there are already links on Daily Koz and Buzzflash that indicates that Joementum may have been at those meetings. Just like Zell Miller, he is a pathetic sellout.

If Harry Taylor can stand up to the most stupidest man in the entire universe, why not the Democrats. We should write to them every week. Snail mail or e-mail, we have to let them know where we stand and ask them, no, DEMAND that they speak out for US and against Dumbya.

Comment by JIMBO — April 8, 2006 @ 1:39 pm
51.

The Rubber Stamp Congress has to approve the budget to pay for WWIII and last I heard they left Washington for a 2 week vacation.

It might be time to brush up on my Spanish. Mexico is starting to look appealing.

Comment by cats are flyfishn — April 8, 2006 @ 1:45 pm
52.

The most frightening part of this story is that it fits nicely into what has become a pattern for this President and his administration. We can only hope that despite the fit, this situation will be the exception, rather than the rule.

Sadly, Iran may well be a much larger problem than we could have ever imagined to find in Iraq. Now that we have squandered our ‘good will’ capital with the International community, we may well be between a rock and a hard place. Such are the consequences of the unfettered stacking of numerous miscalculations.

http://www.thoughttheater.com

Comment by Daniel DiRito — April 8, 2006 @ 1:48 pm
53.

This is one of those nights, where I am glad to be a South African. We don’t have oil (We have SASOL which can make petrol out of coal, but no actual oil) and we are nice and far away from anyone important.

As an added bonus, the city I live in sits right on top of the deepest mines in the world. Currently I am learning to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Comment by Bruce Gorton — April 8, 2006 @ 1:48 pm
54.

Sadly… I think we all saw this coming when BushCo invaded Iraq in the first place. Iran would be next. A culture of fear is all this evil government gives to the American people. Sheep to the slaughter. Animal Farm? 1984?

BushCo = LIARS

Comment by Mack MacKenzie — April 8, 2006 @ 1:49 pm
55.

Unbelievable- In reference to #25, kicking themselves isn’t good enough when it came to what 61 million people committed was the stupidest presidential election ever in 2004. They need to bang their heads against the walls and…kick themselves.

If Dumbya ever commits an act of nuking Iran, and we have to travel out of the country, we should wear T-shirts every day that indicate that we do not support Dumbya. Maybe political asylum would be best for us if the worst come to worst.

Comment by JIMBO — April 8, 2006 @ 1:49 pm
56.

Cynthia McKinney has been cowed now and she was the biggest anti-war person left in the Congress!

Apparently you didn’t see Bill Maher last night. Cynthia is not cowed.

Comment by Spudge_Boy — April 8, 2006 @ 1:49 pm
57.

Not only Hersh, others also expect war on Iran soon: http://dearkitty.modblog.com/ core.mod?show=blogview&blog_id=816848

Comment by dearkitty — April 8, 2006 @ 1:50 pm
58.

Down the Straits of Hormuz,
Oil tankers they do cruise.
Should one get a rocket and sink,
Then problems me do think.
Dub, are you still on the booze?

Comment by oscar wilde — April 8, 2006 @ 1:50 pm
59.

If this isn’t just a ploy to draw attention away from Iraq, I am seriously scared. Not so much that it might happen - public will might prevail this time - but that the people who lead our country are this moronic. This is crazy on so many levels. Is religious fundamentalism starting to drive some kind of apocalyptic push? You know, God put me in the presidency to bring on the Last Times? Wow. The idiocy of this is frankly unbelievable.

Comment by Wally — April 8, 2006 @ 1:52 pm
60.

#16,

Hey, don’t knock SNF…..

Okay, anyone remember The Dead Zone?

Comment by Taylor — April 8, 2006 @ 1:52 pm
61.

Within hours of the bombs droping on Iran every American soldier in Iraq would be in expreme danger. I know Bush is clueless…but would he be willing to accept the consequences?

Comment by Edward Deevy — April 8, 2006 @ 1:56 pm
62.

The Dead Zone book, movie or TV series?

Comment by Spudge_Boy — April 8, 2006 @ 1:57 pm
63.

Post 53 the US has so many nukes to explode that someone like Rumsfeld might say to drop a few on South Africa just for the heck of it?! I would hate to have to live in a mineshaft for years > makes me think of the movie “Time Machine” where the people who hid underground to escape nuclear war turned into cannibal Warlocks who ate the docile people who survived on the surface! Nuclear war would most likely kill off 99% of the world’s population and just a few confused and hungry people remaining! Some in Australia and maybe a few in places like South Africa, but the United States would be completely wiped out with just a few crazed idiots like Cheney living in deep underground bunkers > yes Dick would eat people to survive!

Comment by Jay Randal — April 8, 2006 @ 1:58 pm
64.

May I add, I threw a fit, sent out emails to all my representatives when and before congress allowed this nut case to go to war with Iraq. The wording in these papers they passed gave him power, as I remember, to march all over the world and do as he chooses. This is a night mare and I am not suprised that this is the end result. That’s why I went into a rage then and have remained there since. Untill we take this son of a barbara out we are screwed. Heard about the bomb in Nevada a couple of months ago, but there is much more, to much to list. It would not suprise me if this basterd does this while our do nothing representatives are on vacation. So much for feeling a little safer for a couple of weeks. The greedy evil basterds all, will distroy all they can to bring on their armagedon for all the middle east and at our distruction as well. They are the terrorists….Blessings..P.S. going to work in the garden while I still can….Buy buletts, food and water. The buletts are to keep the food and water,,,,were going to need them….

Comment by Sharon Cox — April 8, 2006 @ 2:04 pm
65.

There will be cheering and “support the troops” calls if and when becuase America likes nothing better than killin.’ But there will be less of it than usuall.

These madmen must be stopped by any means necessary. It is up to all of us to do what we can to SHUT THIS COUNTRY DOWN and demand nothing less than the arrest of these thugs — all of them.

Comment by Jaded Prole — April 8, 2006 @ 2:04 pm
66.

It might be time to brush up on my Spanish. Mexico is starting to look appealing.

Comment by cats are flyfishn — April 8, 2006 @ 1:45 pm

You may be right. Down here in the Southwest many of us have that covered already. Glad to be bilingual at times like this.

Comment by Freebird — April 8, 2006 @ 2:04 pm
67.

Post 56 > Spudge: McKinney is my Representative in Congress and I like her, but when Pelosi forced her to apologize for defending herself against a bad cop guard at the Capital, she has been compromised to a certain degree! In fact I think she was set up on the incident or the GOP just took advantage of it to humiliate her?! I did not see Bill Maher last nite, but nice to hear that she still tries to fight back!

Comment by Jay Randal — April 8, 2006 @ 2:06 pm
68.

The blowback from this will be gigantic. The US using a nuclear weapon,regardless of size, on another nation, to stop them from getting the same weapon! That makes total sense in Bushworld! The neo-cons are truly insane. I wonder if the Iranians will be grateful for being nuked or if they would respond like those “ingrate Iraqis” after we liberated them?

Comment by T2005 — April 8, 2006 @ 2:13 pm
69.

Walt, thanks for the tips, but frankly, sometimes I wonder if I’d want to survive such an event. The aftermath might just not be worth it.

This is very disconcerting. I think he will pull out the nukes if Congress lets him pull it off. And from the new forum above this one, it sounds like they are not only willing, but foaming at the mouth.

And we wondered why they made sure Timothy McVeigh was made an example of. Just a warning not to stand up to the government.

I don’t think anyone will come to liberate us. The egocentric jerks in this country have made sure of that.

But I want it to be said that I voted for Kerry in 2004.

Comment by unbelievable — April 8, 2006 @ 2:21 pm
70.

That’s a pretty scary article.

What the hell is a “bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon”??

Comment by S.D. — April 8, 2006 @ 2:23 pm
71.

If there were to be a nuclear attack on the United States, as a response from Iran, it would be on places that didn’t even vote for Bush. All the neo-cons can go hide in their barns while New York and LA will be burning. Irony abound in this administration

Comment by freeme — April 8, 2006 @ 2:24 pm
72.

This cannot happen. We need to be in the streets over this one.

Comment by tb — April 8, 2006 @ 2:32 pm
73.

I guess I never really wanted to live beyond the age of 56 anyway. We ticked off most of the world when we invaded Iraq, I can’t believe the other countries of the world would stand back and let us do this. Syria, Egypt, and the rest of the middle east aren’t going to sit by and watch, since it’s likely they may be next. The retaliation is going to be hell from all sides.
If Congress gave him authorization for war on whoever, can’t they also take it back or put stipulations on it?
Maybe we could get Congress to stop him, because of job security. You can’t be a senator or representative, if there isn’t anyone left to represent.

Comment by Nancy L. — April 8, 2006 @ 2:46 pm
74.

Maybe we could get Congress to stop him, because of job security. You can’t be a senator or representative, if there isn’t anyone left to represent.

Comment by Nancy L. — April 8, 2006 @ 2:46 pm

I emailed my elected neocons to let them know that I opposed military action against Iran at this time. Not that they care what I think so far, but November is getting closer…

Comment by unbelievable — April 8, 2006 @ 2:56 pm
75.

The UK posted a story like this on the 2nd.

Comment by jurassicpork — April 8, 2006 @ 2:57 pm
76.

I want to propose something a little more radical: perhaps this is a bluff.

If you accept the NEO-con view of geopolitics in the Middle East, the US has no power because everyone thinks the US is a bunch of pussies who can’t accept a single dead soldier. But if it’s own citizens — you and I, folks — are freaking out this much, have this little faith that our leaders are rational, are SO convinced that Bush might just do something this fucking insane… maybe the Iranians will believe it as well?

Look, if this was a movie than only a handful of people would know this was a bluff. They wouldn’t even let the Chiefs of Staff know. Rumsfield might not even know. It needs to be that convincing.

I don’t know. I don’t want to believe things are so insane that such a scenario could exist, but … but it’s another way to look at it. That said, protesting in the streets serves our interest and the administrations — it’s a no lose response.

Comment by SiriusA — April 8, 2006 @ 2:57 pm

Iran: Israel's air-strike options

by Lt. Col. Rick Francona



Let's assume that Iran has exhausted the world’s patience over its “peaceful nuclear energy” research program - a program most analysts believe is a cover for a nuclear weapons program. Israel has indicated in clear terms that it will not permit Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. What are Israel's options to derail the program?

Most analysts agree that Israel does not have the capability to strike all of the sites associated with the program - estimates range between 12 and more than 20 locations. With limited power projection capabilities, Israeli intelligence analysts will determine the critical portions of the program - the key elements that if destroyed will slow down the effort. In 1981, the Israeli air force successfully crippled the Iraqi nuclear program with a daring daylight air raid on the key element of that program – the French-built Osirak reactor at At-Tuwaythah, just south of Baghdad. The single most critical element In the Iranian program is thought to be the centrifuge facility at Natanz (also known as the Esfahan enrichment facility).

The Natanz facility is a challenging target. The heart of the facility is the centrifuge area, located in an underground, hardened structure. The Iranians are fully aware of Israeli capabilities and no doubt have studied what the Israelis did to the Iraqi program a quarter century ago. They are also aware of the demonstrated capability of the American-made precision-guided penetrating munitions ("bunker busters") in the Israeli inventory. The Iranian program has been dispersed all over the country; the facilities have been built with American and Israeli capabilities in mind and are protected by modern Russian air defense systems.

Aside from the difficult nature of the target itself is its geographic location in relation to Israel. The straight-line distance between Israel and Natanz is almost 1000 miles. (At-Tuwaythah was only 600 miles). Since the countries do not share a common border, Israeli aircraft or missiles must fly through foreign - and hostile - airspace to get to the target.

The least risky method of striking Natanz is with Israel's medium range ballistic missiles, the Jericho II or III. Details on the exact capabilities of these systems are unknown, but it is believed that the Israeli missiles can reach Natanz. However, to travel that far, the missiles will have a limited warhead weight, probably less than 1000 pounds. It is doubtful that these warheads will be able to penetrate far enough underground to achieve the desired level of destruction. That points to an attack by the Israeli air force's American-made fighter-bomber aircraft as the most likely option. The Israelis have 25 F-15I Ra'am (Thunder) and about 30 F-16I Sufa (Storm) jets.

How will the aircraft fly from their bases in Israel to a target located 200 miles inside Iran? There are two realistic ways to get there – either through Saudi Arabia or Iraq, possibly even using Jordanian airspace as well. Either route is a one-way trip of about 1200 miles. Even though Turkey and Israel have had a defense agreement since 1996, using Turkish airspace is not likely politically and would require the attacking aircraft to fly over 1000 miles inside Iranian airspace. It is also doubtful that the Israelis would jeopardize operational security by consulting with the Turks.

The Saudi Arabia option. The strike aircraft depart southern Israel, enter Saudi airspace from the Gulf of ‘Aqabah or Jordan, fly 800 miles of Saudi airspace to the Persian Gulf and then 300 miles into Iran. Although the Israelis traversed Saudi airspace when they attacked the Iraqi facility in 1981, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have since significantly upgraded their air defense capabilities and share information with each other.

Since the Israeli air force does not operate stealth aircraft, there is a reasonable expectation that at some point the aircraft will be detected over Saudi Arabia, either by ground based radar or the AWACS airborne radar platforms. Whether Saudi defenses could - or would - be able to stop the Israelis is uncertain. Perhaps the Saudis would turn a blind eye and claim ignorance - after all, a nuclear-armed Iran is a potential threat to the Kingdom as well.

The Iraq option. The strike aircraft depart southern Israel, cross 300 to 400 miles of Saudi airspace or a combination of Jordanian and Saudi airspace, and enter Iraqi airspace as soon as possible, continue across 500 miles of Iraq to the Persian Gulf and then on to the target. Entering Iran from Iraqi airspace would create too much of political firestorm. As it is, the use of Iraqi airspace will require the cooperation of the United States. Although Iraq is a sovereign nation, its skies are controlled by the American military. That said, allowing Israeli aircraft to ingress from Iraq is likely out of the question.

Either of these options carries the risk that once the actual attack on the facility is made, the viability of the return route is in jeopardy – all forces in the area will be on alert. The planners may opt to go to the target one way and back home via another.

The limiting factor in Israeli planning is the great distance to the target. Can Israel’s fighter-bombers conduct this mission without refueling? Combat radius - the distance an aircraft can fly and return without refueling - is difficult to calculate, and depends on weapons payload, external fuel tanks, mission profile, etc. It is even more difficult when dealing with Israeli aircraft because they will not release performance data on their assets.

The best "guestimate" of the combat radius of the F-15I and F-16I, outfitted with conformal fuel tanks, two external wing tanks and a decent weapons load, is almost 1000 miles. Either of the two possible flight routes is about 200 miles further than that. To make up for the shortfall, the aircraft could be fitted with an additional external fuel tank, but this will require a reduction in the weapons load. Given the accuracy of the weapons in the Israeli inventory, that might not be problematic. However, if the aircraft are detected and intercepted, the pilots will have to jettison the tanks in order to engage their attackers. Dropping the tanks will prevent the aircraft from reaching their target.

Air refueling. This raises the question of air refueling? This is a limitation for the Israelis. While Israel has a large air force, its focus has been on the Arab countries that surround it. In recent years, it has sought the capability to project power against a target over 1000 miles away. To do this, Israel has acquired five B707 tanker aircraft. However, the tankers would have to refuel the fighters in hostile airspace. The B707 is a large unarmed aircraft and would be very vulnerable to air defenses.

Looking at the two scenarios, air refueling over Saudi Arabia would be very risky. It would have to be done at low altitude to evade detection and will probably be at night. Using Iraqi airspace will be somewhat less difficult as altitude will not be an issue.

Of course, the tankers would have to get to Iraqi airspace and back. The use of Turkish airspace for the tanker aircraft to enter Iraq is probably not an option for the same reasons that it is not an option for the fighters – political sensitivities on the part of the Turks and operational security considerations on the part of the Israelis. Another possibility is American cooperation – allow the Israelis to stage their tankers from an American air base in Iraq. These tankers could fly to Iraq though international airspace around the Arabian Peninsula and over the Persian Gulf. It would be too far for them to return to Israel without landing to refuel, otherwise the Israelis could refuel the fighters over the Gulf.

American participation? There are other possibilities, from allowing Israeli fighters to land and refuel at U.S.-controlled bases in Iraq, to having U.S. Air Force tankers refuel the Israeli aircraft over Iraq. A diplomatic nightmare, maybe, but certainly a military possibility.

Theoretically, the Israelis could do this, but at great risk of failure. If they decide to attack Natanz, they will have to inflict sufficient damage the first time - they probably will not be able to mount follow-on strikes at other facilities.

When all the analyses are done, there is only one military capable of the sustained widespread air operations required to eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons research program - the United States. Again, a diplomatic nightmare, but certainly a military possibility.

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Israel to Destroy Iran's Nuclear Power Plants

News/Comment; Posted on: 2004-02-19 18:58:58

US designs special jet to do the job

by Jeff Hook

JERUSALEM - The first two of a new fleet of the most advanced F-16 fighter jets landed Thursday at an airbase in southern Israel. The warplanes, the first of 102 to be paid for by U.S. taxpayers [at a cost of $45 million each], represent the Israel lobby's single most successful act of subversion in the history of the "Jewish State" - an incredible $4.5 billion dollar blood-suck. The U.S. created the F-16I specifically for the needs of the Israeli military. That is, to destroy Irans nuclear power generating plants.



Although loaded with technical advances, the key modification consists of a pair of large external fuel tanks (see image) above the central fuselage, greatly extending the range of the jet. One senior air force officer hinted, "it can reach the capitals of all the countries in the region."


F16I

The head of the Mossad intelligence agency recently identified Iran's nuclear power program as the top threat to Israel. "For all practical purposes this comes to defend against the threat from Iran," said Zeev Bonen, a military expert from Bar Ilan University.

Faced with a similar "threat," Israeli warplanes destroyed Iraq's only nuclear power generating plant in 1981, killing numerous civilian maintenance workers in the process. That operation required complicated midair refueling, endangering the lives of precious Jews. Because of its extended range, the new F-16 would not have that problem.

To prepare the public, Israeli military commanders have disclosed that a "pre-emptive strike" against Iran is in the works. "This is a step up in building the deterrent capabilities of the Israeli armed forces," Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told reporters, just before pasting Jewish squadron decals onto the American jets - decals for the same squadron that bombed the Iraqi power plant in 1981.

The funding for the jets comes from American military aid to Israel. The manufacturer will be paid directly from the annual US military "grants" given to Israel, which this year alone stands at about $2.2 billion. In other words, the jets won't cost the Jews a penny. Despite this, every media outlet reporting on the event refers to it as a "deal" or a "sale" or a "purchase" - an outright lie.


Israel receives first long-range jets in its largest ever military deal



A. Conformal Fuel Tanks
B. 600-gallon wing tanks
C. Landing gear
D. Radar
E. Targeting System
F. Navigation and Reconnaissance Pods
G. Cockpit
H. Dorsal Avionics Compartment
I. Engines

The F-16s are the backbone of the IAF, but these new "I" models will considerably boost the IAF's long-arm reach, enabling it to fly a round trip of 1,040 miles (1,640 kilometres).This extended flight range enables the IAF to attack targets well within Iran and Libya without having to refuel. The additional removable fuel tanks (CFT's) which it has for that purpose, do not affect the maneuverability.

THE IRAN PLANS by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

THE IRAN PLANS
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?
Issue of 2006-04-17
Posted 2006-04-10

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.



American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. “So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?”

When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”



One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of “coercion” aimed at Iran. “You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond,” the officer said. “You have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added, “People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran.” (In response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military planning but added, “As the President has indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department also said that Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic channels” but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were “inaccuracies” in this account but would not specify them.)

“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said. The danger, he said, was that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.” A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: “Hezbollah comes into play,” the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. “And here comes Al Qaeda.”



In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”

The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”



Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.

Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:

I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.



One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year. (Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none of its current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.

There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for “continuity of government”—for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the U.S. knows about it remains classified. “The ‘tell’ ”—the giveaway—“was the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised,” the former senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that “only nukes” could destroy the bunker. He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. “We see a similarity of design,” specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.

A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to “go in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure—it’s feasible.” The former defense official said, “The Iranians don’t have friends, and we can tell them that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back their infrastructure. The United States should act like we’re ready to go.” He added, “We don’t have to knock down all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous—put bad stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep.”

But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence official, “say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know what’s underneath—to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And there’s a lot that we don’t know.” The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”

The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.

The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. “The Iranians have distributed their nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue where some of the key stuff is. It could even be out of the country,” he said. He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: “What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?”

With or without the nuclear option, the list of targets may inevitably expand. One recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, who is also an expert on war planning, told me that he would have vigorously argued against an air attack on Iran, because “Iran is a much tougher target” than Iraq. But, he added, “If you’re going to do any bombing to stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across the board. Maybe hit some training camps, and clear up a lot of other problems.”

The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe it’s the way to operate”—that the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives.

If the order were to be given for an attack, the American combat troops now operating in Iran would be in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops “are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,” the consultant said. One goal is to get “eyes on the ground”—quoting a line from “Othello,” he said, “Give me the ocular proof.” The broader aim, the consultant said, is to “encourage ethnic tensions” and undermine the regime.

The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A. operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported to key members of Congress.

“ ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon’s position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. “The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran,” he said. “We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want.”

The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted terrorists.

Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.”

Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as “a white coup,” with ominous implications for the West. “Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out,” he said. “We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution.” He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was “To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like.”

Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. “Ahmadinejad is not in control,” one European diplomat told me. “Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval.”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that “allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous.” He added, “The whole internal debate is on which way to go”—in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American action. “God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen.”

While almost no one disputes Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there is intense debate over how soon it could get the bomb, and what to do about that. Robert Gallucci, a former government expert on nonproliferation who is now the dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, “Based on what I know, Iran could be eight to ten years away” from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, “If they had a covert nuclear program and we could prove it, and we could not stop it by negotiation, diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions, I’d be in favor of taking it out. But if you do it”—bomb Iran—“without being able to show there’s a secret program, you’re in trouble.”

Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the Knesset last December that “Iran is one to two years away, at the latest, from having enriched uranium. From that point, the completion of their nuclear weapon is simply a technical matter.” In a conversation with me, a senior Israeli intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s duplicity: “There are two parallel nuclear programs” inside Iran—the program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate operation, run by the military and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials have repeatedly made this argument, but Israel has not produced public evidence to support it. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term, told me, “I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program—I believe it, but I don’t know it.”

In recent months, the Pakistani government has given the U.S. new access to A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan, who is now living under house arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting up a black market in nuclear materials; he made at least one clandestine visit to Tehran in the late nineteen-eighties. In the most recent interrogations, Khan has provided information on Iran’s weapons design and its time line for building a bomb. “The picture is of ‘unquestionable danger,’ ” the former senior intelligence official said. (The Pentagon adviser also confirmed that Khan has been “singing like a canary.”) The concern, the former senior official said, is that “Khan has credibility problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the neoconservatives what they want to hear”—or what might be useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who is under pressure to assist Washington in the war on terror.

“I think Khan’s leading us on,” the former intelligence official said. “I don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the smoking gun.’ But lights are beginning to blink. He’s feeding us information on the time line, and targeting information is coming in from our own sources— sensors and the covert teams. The C.I.A., which was so burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office saying, ‘It’s all new stuff.’ People in the Administration are saying, ‘We’ve got enough.’ ”

The Administration’s case against Iran is compromised by its history of promoting false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In a recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web site, entitled “Fool Me Twice,” Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war.” He noted several parallels:

The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism.

Cirincione called some of the Administration’s claims about Iran “questionable” or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked, “What do we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all this?” The answer, he said, “is in the intelligence community and the I.A.E.A.” (In August, the Washington Post reported that the most recent comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Iran was a decade away from being a nuclear power.)

Last year, the Bush Administration briefed I.A.E.A. officials on what it said was new and alarming information about Iran’s weapons program which had been retrieved from an Iranian’s laptop. The new data included more than a thousand pages of technical drawings of weapons systems. The Washington Post reported that there were also designs for a small facility that could be used in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks about the laptop became the focal point of stories in the Times and elsewhere. The stories were generally careful to note that the materials could have been fabricated, but also quoted senior American officials as saying that they appeared to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read, “RELYING ON COMPUTER, U.S. SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS.”

I was told in interviews with American and European intelligence officials, however, that the laptop was more suspect and less revelatory than it had been depicted. The Iranian who owned the laptop had initially been recruited by German and American intelligence operatives, working together. The Americans eventually lost interest in him. The Germans kept on, but the Iranian was seized by the Iranian counter-intelligence force. It is not known where he is today. Some family members managed to leave Iran with his laptop and handed it over at a U.S. embassy, apparently in Europe. It was a classic “walk-in.”

A European intelligence official said, “There was some hesitation on our side” about what the materials really proved, “and we are still not convinced.” The drawings were not meticulous, as newspaper accounts suggested, “but had the character of sketches,” the European official said. “It was not a slam-dunk smoking gun.”

The threat of American military action has created dismay at the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency’s officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear weapon, but “nobody has presented an inch of evidence of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” the high-ranking diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. “But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride,” the diplomat said. “The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy.”

In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: “We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. ”

Joseph’s heavy-handedness was unnecessary, the diplomat said, since the I.A.E.A. already had been inclined to take a hard stand against Iran. “All of the inspectors are angry at being misled by the Iranians, and some think the Iranian leadership are nutcases—one hundred per cent totally certified nuts,” the diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding concern is that the Iranian leaders “want confrontation, just like the neocons on the other side”—in Washington. “At the end of the day, it will work only if the United States agrees to talk to the Iranians.”

The central question—whether Iran will be able to proceed with its plans to enrich uranium—is now before the United Nations, with the Russians and the Chinese reluctant to impose sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, “there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It’s a dead end.”

Another diplomat in Vienna asked me, “Why would the West take the risk of going to war against that kind of target without giving it to the I.A.E.A. to verify? We’re low-cost, and we can create a program that will force Iran to put its cards on the table.” A Western Ambassador in Vienna expressed similar distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A. He said, “If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an inspection system—if you don’t trust them—you can only bomb.”

There is little sympathy for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush Administration or among its European allies. “We’re quite frustrated with the director-general,” the European diplomat told me. “His basic approach has been to describe this as a dispute between two sides with equal weight. It’s not. We’re the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea of letting Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is ludicrous. It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious proliferation risk.”

The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing perception that President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their real goal is regime change. “Everyone is on the same page about the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change,” a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, “The Europeans have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose between going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington on something they don’t want. Their policy is to keep the Americans engaged in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable.”

“The Brits think this is a very bad idea,” Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, told me, “but they’re really worried we’re going to do it.” The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged that the British Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington but that, “short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very difficult to line up the Europeans on Iran.” He said that the British “are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the Iranians, with no compromise.”

The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran, given its record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but “to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability is not at the point where they could successfully run centrifuges” to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. “The regime acts in its best interests,” he said. Iran’s leaders “take a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American bluff,” believing that “the tougher they are the more likely the West will fold.” But, he said, “From what we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the moment they back off.”

The diplomat went on, “You never reward bad behavior, and this is not the time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the regime to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed”—in sanctions—“is sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on the U.N. route.” He added, “If the diplomatic process doesn’t work, there is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military option, but the impact could be catastrophic.”

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was George Bush’s most dependable ally in the year leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he and his party have been racked by a series of financial scandals, and his popularity is at a low point. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last year that military action against Iran was “inconceivable.” Blair has been more circumspect, saying publicly that one should never take options off the table.

Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing campaign. “The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically,” the European intelligence official told me. “He will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it, but the results will be worse.” An American attack, he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the U.S. “Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it,” he said. “If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.”

Another European official told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. “It’s always the same guys,” he said, with a resigned shrug. “There is a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short.”

A key ally with an important voice in the debate is Israel, whose leadership has warned for years that it viewed any attempt by Iran to begin enriching uranium as a point of no return. I was told by several officials that the White House’s interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country, which would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In a speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s hostility toward Israel as a “serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace.” He added, “I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”

Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: “What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally—that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?”

Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. “It’s impossible to block passage,” he said. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict.

Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. “They would be at risk,” he said, “and this could begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy world.”

Iran could also initiate a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, with the help of Hezbollah. On April 2nd, the Washington Post reported that the planning to counter such attacks “is consuming a lot of time” at U.S. intelligence agencies. “The best terror network in the world has remained neutral in the terror war for the past several years,” the Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. “This will mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us.” (When I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he said that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, “Israel and the new Lebanese government will finish them off.”)

The adviser went on, “If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle.” The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq would be at greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the region, “the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck.”

“If you attack,” the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, “Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians.”

The diplomat went on, “There are people in Washington who would be unhappy if we found a solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful thinking.” He added, “The window of opportunity is now.”

Stephen Ames win The Players Championship, the "5th" major

We began to hear about this transplanted Trinidadian golfer a few years ago, after he moved to Calgary and became a Canadian citizen, but he mostly flew below the radar. Mike Weir was the dominant Canadian golfer and his celebrity was cemented by winning the Masters in 2003.

Ames almost seemed to be best known for his attitude than his golfing skill with the media reporting that he was aloof, and arrogant rather than congenial like most pro goflers. In February at the Accenture Match Play Championship, Ames took a shot at Tiger Woods.

From the Golf Channel.
"Ames was on the practice range Monday afternoon when he was asked if he would take a carefree attitude into his match against the No. 1 player in the world because not many expected him to win. Ames shook his head.

"Anything can happen," Ames said, breaking into a big smile. "Especially where he's hitting the ball."

Ruthless to the end until his name was in the record books Wednesday, Woods won the first nine holes -- seven of them with birdies -- and closed out Stephen Ames as early as mathematically possible, 9 and 8."

It was the most lopsided loss in the eight-year history of the World Match Play Championship at La Costa.



Even if Ames had a point with his comment, it was bound to get him in trouble with the media. It was only going to make Ames look bad and should have been saved for a private moment, if at all. Here's what commenter on the Score Golf website had to say:

"I agree, and even the Tiger comment was taken way out of context. I heard the interview, it was said in a joking type of way, and he went on to say how great a player Tiger is. My only problem with Stephen Ames is that he retracted his Tiger comments a few years ago, he is a 100% rights Tiger Woods is a total Brat and yet tour players are afraid to say it."


Stephen Ames and Tiger Woods at the Accenture Match Play Championship

Ames demolished the most competitive field in golf two weeks ago at The Players Championship, which featured 48 of the top 50 players in the world. He won won $1.44-million (U.S.), a five-year exemption on the PGA Tour and an unexpected invite to the Masters, which is now down to its final two days. He won by shooting 5-under 67 to win The Players Championship by six shots.

``This is big,'' Ames said. ``This is characterized as the fifth major. I beat the top players in the world.''

"Except for the 10th hole, I played a flawless round," Ames said. "It felt like a walk in the park."

With a six-shot lead playing the final hole, Ames lived up to his name.

He took dead aim.

``Oh, you just had to go at it, didn't you?'' Robert Ames, his brother and caddie, teased him.



According to Fox Sports, "Ames finished at 14-under 274, six shots clear of two-time U.S. Open champion Retief Goosen, who closed with a 69. The scoring average was 75.378, the second-toughest Sunday in Sawgrass history. Despite playing in the final group, Ames was eight shots better and had the best score of the day."

You often hear about golfers being "in the zone," when they are totally focused and are playing mistake free golf. Stephen Ames was clearly in the zone for the final round of the TPC tournament and it was spectacular sport to watch, especially when the best players in the world couldn't catch him.

Educators Make the Move to Desktop Linux in Classrooms

Linspire's Education Program Helps Schools Achieve One-to-One Computer Initiatives

SAN DIEGO, October 13, 2005 - In a nationwide effort to help provide students with affordable computers, Linspire, Inc. today launched a new, low-cost licensing program for schools who wish to install a Linux desktop operating system as an alternative to the more expensive Microsoft Windows operating system. Through the program, educators will be able to sign up for single copies or per-unit volume license packs of Linspire at special educator rates. Educators who are interested in the program and would like to receive a free evaluation copy of Linspire should visit www.linspire.com/education.

"Desktop Linux is less expensive for schools to buy and less expensive for IT administrators to upgrade," said Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire, Inc. "It's easy to install and easy for teachers and staff members to learn, and it's safe from the plague of viruses and spyware. Desktop Linux is the next-generation operating system that students today will grow up using."

Linspire provides a complete, stable operating system for students, teachers and administrators alike. It includes all the applications critical to students and educators - including a full file-compatible office suite, Internet browser, email client, graphics and photo editing programs, and Web filtering programs - in an easy-to-use, familiar environment. Using Linspire's unique CNR (Click and Run) software download tool, administrators will be able to quickly and easily manage applications across an entire school, load applications on multiple workstations with one mouse click, and remotely designate which computers in the network get which applications.

"We tested a number of Linux distributions and chose Linspire to run our laptop computers as it had the best support for laptop hardware and the installation process was fast and simple," said Steve Kossakoski, Assistant Superintendent for Technology and Research at the Great Bay eLearning Charter School in Exeter, New Hampshire. "Linspire's GUI is easy to use and there has been little or no training required for teachers or students."

The Linspire Education Program was developed as a direct response to the successful deployment of desktop Linux machines in one-to-one student computer initiatives such as the Indiana Access Program. This program aims to provide each high school student in the state with an individual desktop Linux computer for instructional use in each classroom they visit during the day - a potential 300,000-unit deployment over the next several years.

Educators and IT administrators in Indiana chose the Linspire operating system as part of the Indiana Access Program have found students make the transition to Linux easily: "We put our students in a room with Linspire, just to see how they would adapt after using Microsoft Windows," said Scott Back, Technology Coordinator for Shelby Eastern Schools, outside Indianapolis, Indiana. "Guess what? They figured it out right away without any training or special help. They were using Linspire."

"I've toured the schools and seen for myself that it doesn't really make a difference to students what operating system they're using as long as it can perform how they need it to," Carmony added. "Students should learn computer skills - not be trained on applications that only run on one specific operating system. The reality is that we have no idea what kind of computers these kids will use when they get out of school - why not branch them out now?"

More information on the Linspire Education Program is available at www.linspire.com/education. System builders or vendors who are interested in partnering with Linspire to help provide complete Linspire machines to schools should send an email to edu@linspire.com or visit www.linspire.com/education for more information.

About Linspire, Inc.

Linspire, Inc. (www.linspire.com) was founded in 2001 to bring choice into the operating system market. The company's flagship product, the Linspire operating system, is an affordable, easy-to-use Linux-based operating system for home, school, and business users. Linspire pioneered CNR ("click and run") Technology, which allows Linspire users to download and install thousands of software programs with just one mouse click. The more than 2,000 software titles available in the CNR Warehouse (www.linspire.com/cnrservice) include full office and productivity suites, games, multimedia players, photo management software, accounting tools, and more.

For more information, please contact:

Heather MacKenzie
Linspire, Inc.
858-587-6700, ext. 263
858-587-8095 Fax
pr@linspire.com

Microsoft launches Linux site

Now, what could they be up to?



Microsoft launches Linux site
By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb | 7 April 2006 09:48 AEST | General News

Microsoft Thursday launched a website that touts its open-source development efforts, and Windows' interoperability with Unix and Linux.
Port 25 - the site's named after the server port used to listen for SMTP email traffic - is an attempt to promote conversations about Microsoft, open source, and how the twain might meet.
Sponsored by the developer's Open Source Software Lab, which is headed by long-time Linux guy Bill Hilf - formerly of IBM but now Microsoft's general manager of platform technology strategy - the site will offer blogs and other content on the OSSL's efforts.
"This will be the place we not only blog, but also where we put analysis from our OSS labs and also where we discuss and show other parts of Microsoft that we think are just plain cool," wrote Hilf on a welcome blog. "I think what you'll see here over time is how a bunch of open source guys inside Microsoft think."
Opening-day content consisted of blogs by several Labs' researchers, and an article about the OSSL, which houses more than 300 servers running 15+ versions of Unix and 50 Linux distributions.
Hilf is also in charge of the controversial "Get the Facts" anti-Linux PR campaign, and Microsoft's Shared Source, an initiative that gives developers access to some of its source code.
"Overall, I am impressed with the concept (caveat: assuming Microsoft sticks with it)," wrote JupiterResearch analyst Joe Wilcox on his Microsoft Monitor blog. "If Get the Facts is a stick, Port 25 is the carrot."

Bill Introduced in Minnesota to Require Use of "Open Data Formats"

The inevitable is happening more and more...

Wednesday, April 05 2006 @ 06:46 AM EDT
Views: 1,315
OpenDocument

I received an email yesterday pointing me to a bill, introduced on March 27, that would require all Executive branch agencies in the state of Minnesota to "use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this." The text of the bill is focused specifically on "open data formats," and would amend the existing statute that establishes the authority of the Office of Enterprise Technology (OET), and the duties of the states Chief Information Officer. While the amendment does not refer to open source software, the definition of "open standards" that it contains would be conducive to open source implementations of open standards. The text of the affected sections of Minnesota Statutes Chapter 16E, showing the amendments proposed, can be found here.

The fact that such a bill has been introduced is significant in a number of respects. First, the debate over open formats will now be ongoing in two U.S. states rather than one. Second, if the bill is successful, the Minnesota CIO will be required to enforce a law requiring the use of open formats, rather than be forced to justify his or her authority to do so. Third, the size of the market share that can be won (or lost) depending upon a vendor's compliance with open standards will increase. And finally, if two states successfully adopt and implement open data format policies, other states will be more inclined to follow.


The amendment, and the statutory framework in which it exists, provides an interesting contrast to the open standards policy adopted by the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) in many respects. For example, it appears from the existing text of the statute that the Minnesota OET already has clear authority to mandate the use of open data formats, reading in part as follows:

When state agencies have need for the same or similar public data, the chief information officer, in coordination with the affected agencies, shall manage the most efficient and cost-effective method of producing and storing data for or sharing data between those agencies. The development of this information architecture must include the establishment of standards and guidelines to be followed by state agencies. The office shall ensure compliance with the architecture.

Second, the proposed amendment contains an extremely detailed (and rather eclectic) definition of "open standards," including not only the traditional concepts of availability to all on reasonable and nondiscriminatory ("RAND") terms, but a good deal more besides. For example, it requires that all permitted standards must permit royalty free implementation, and also includes a number of requirements that are far more detailed than would normally be found in the description of an open standard, but which might be agreed upon as necessary by the members of a working group developing a standard. The following is one example taken from the proposed definition of an "open standard" found in the amendment: "[An open standard] is documented, so that anyone can write software that can read and interpret the complete semantics of any data file stored in the data format." (I've included the full text of the proposed definition at the end of this blog entry.)

In addition to the very restrictive definition of open standards and open data formats, the amendment is also intolerant of making exceptions, providing:

For a particular project involving the access, storage, or transfer of data, a restricted data format may be chosen when satisfaction of essential project requirements precludes the use of an open data format. Neither the current storage format of previously collected data, nor current utilization of specific software products, is a sufficient reason, in absence of other specific overriding functional requirements, to use a restricted format;

Moreover, the amendment would require periodic review of all "existing data stored in a restricted format, to which the state of Minnesota does not own the rights, every four years to determine if the format has become open and, if not, whether an appropriate open standard exists;" The amendment, if enacted, would therefore impose a very tight collar on what types of software could be purchased and used.

On its face, the amendment is vendor neutral. It does, however, include one provision that may have been directed at Microsoft, which has at times been criticized for adding proprietary extensions to otherwise standards-compliant product features. That provision is found in the definition of an "open standard," and requires that if a standard, "allows extensions, ensures that all extensions of the data format are themselves documented and have the other characteristics of an open data format;"

There are a number of other interesting points that I note in reading the amendment at the Minnesota site, one being that the state legislation portal is set up to provide data on a bill's sponsors and current status - something that is sadly lacking in Massachusetts. There also appear to be a number of differences between the responsibilities and authority of the CIO in Minnesota, as compared to Massachusetts, that Peter Quinn might have appreciated. I may look more deeply into those differences and return to them in a future entry.

Curiously, I have been able to find out almost nothing on the Web about the amendment, indicating that thus far it has received little public notice. The news item submission (written by the submitter) that pointed me to the bill, however, reads in part as follows:

A consortium of Minnesota businesses and citizens has moved to put forward legislation that promises to assist the State in overcoming the negative effects of time, innovation and the market. Referred to as the Open Data Formats Bill, House File 3971 defines the means by which Minnesota could take control over how it stores information so as to not be bound, technically or legally, to anything other than its own technical objectives.

The Bill is an attempt to counter the fact that searches on the State website display information that is primarily stored in formats owned by vendors... that could go out of business, get acquired, or turn into the next Enron. It is also a response to what some refer to as the 'eight track tape effect' where information is stored in a way that is both popular and looks permanent, but then is quickly replaced by newer technologies. In some instances the information has been lost forever.

The Bill is not biased towards any one technology and advances a policy where at all times and in all instances the State has the ability and legal right to review, fix or improve the information it uses to conduct business. The Bill is not expected to increase State spending on technology. It is, nonetheless, expected to receive stiff opposition despite improving competition for State contracts, enhancing the ability of Minnesotans to access State services and data, and improving communication between State systems.

I will keep an eye on this new bill and report further as additional information becomes available. For now, however, it is significant to note that the debate over open data formats has now begun in a second state. It will be interesting to watch how the forces align, and the discussion becomes focused as the process moves forward.

The full text of the two new statute sections appears below.

For further blog entries on ODF, click here.

Language to be added to Minnesota Statutes 2005 Supplement, section 16E.03, subdivision 1:

(f) "Open standards" means specifications for the encoding and transfer of computer data that:

(1) is free for all to implement and use in perpetuity, with no royalty or fee;

(2) has no restrictions on the use of data stored in the format;

(3) has no restrictions on the creation of software that stores, transmits, receives, or accesses data codified in such way;

(4) has a specification available for all to read, in a human-readable format, written in commonly accepted technical language;

(5) is documented, so that anyone can write software that can read and interpret the complete semantics of any data file stored in the data format;

(6) if it allows extensions, ensures that all extensions of the data format are themselves documented and have the other characteristics of an open data format;

(7) allows any file written in that format to be identified as adhering or not adhering to the format;

(8) if it includes any use of encryption, provides that the encryption algorithm is usable on a royalty-free, nondiscriminatory manner in perpetuity, and is documented so that anyone in possession of the appropriate encryption key or keys is able to write 2.20 software to unencrypt the data.

(g) "Restricted format" means any data format that is accessed, stored, or transferred 2.22 and is not open standards compliant.

Language to be added to Minnesota Statutes 2005 Supplement, section 16E.04, subdivision 2:

(g) The office shall assist state agencies to avoid the purchase or creation of data processing devices or systems that do not comply with open standards for the accessing, storing, or transferring of data. The office shall:

(1) ensure any new data standards which the state of Minnesota defines and to which it owns all rights are open standards compliant;

(2) use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this. For a particular project involving the access, storage, or transfer of data, a restricted data format may be chosen when satisfaction of essential project requirements precludes the use of an open data format. Neither the current storage format of previously collected data, nor current utilization of specific software products, is a sufficient reason, in absence of other specific overriding functional requirements, to use a restricted format;

(3) reexamine existing data stored in a restricted format, to which the state of Minnesota does not own the rights, every four years to determine if the format has become open and, if not, whether an appropriate open standard exists;

(4) make readily accessible, from a central location on the Internet, documentation on open data formats used by the state of Minnesota. When data in open format is made available through the state's Web site, a link shall be provided to the corresponding data format documentation.

Globe and Mail - JESUS LIVES

Here's a bizzare story.

JESUS LIVES
A reclusive ex-cop in Siberia now has so big a following that it may become Russia's first new official religion despite its bizarre beliefs. For example, he says he's Christ returned

GRAEME SMITH

From Saturday's Globe and Mail



Before dawn, the forests of Siberia have an uncanny quiet, as sounds fall into the dark trees and echoes sink into the sea of snow. Then a bell disturbs the stillness, followed by another and another, until they become a chorus. Horses snort, leather tack creaks and boots squeak on snow. Shapes that seem to be from a different century emerge from the grey dimness. On a logging road near the remote Russian village of Petropavlovka, about 4,000 kilometres east of Moscow, what looks like a medieval procession jingles though the woods. A bearded man holding a candle leads the way, followed by men in hooded robes and women in long skirts. Standard-bearers carry flags, a girl juggles balls and horses pull rough wooden sledges. Welcome to fairyland. Here in the foothills of the Western Sayan mountains, where the snows are so deep that you can literally drown in the vast whiteness, one of the world's largest and most isolated religious colonies is performing an annual ritual. They're celebrating the birthday of their Messiah, a former traffic cop named Sergei Torop. Among his 5,000 followers in these Siberian forests, and perhaps as many as 50,000 other faithful around the world, Mr. Torop is known as Vissarion, a reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

Mr. Torop's birthdays are always an occasion for joy, as his followers celebrate Christmas and New Year's on the same day. However, the fact that he is turning 45 signals the beginning of Year 46 of the Blossoming Epoch, which has special significance for yet another reason. It will mark the 15th year since he started wearing flowing robes and preaching a New Age version of the gospel. Under Russian law, that is a watershed.

The ex-cop from southern Siberia has achieved what other small-time cult figures, demagogues and sectarian leaders have only dreamed about: He has built the largest religious sect in Russia.

Following his commands, Vissarionites have carved a new settlement, Sun City, from the slopes of a remote mountain. They constructed a three-storey chalet for their master on the mountain's peak, where he lives with a select group of followers and, because he enjoys painting, has a studio stocked with expensive art supplies.

From this aerie, he has a splendid view of the hills and valleys where his acolytes have hacked out clearings for their own meagre farms and cabins. When he wants to guide his flock, he picks up his radiophone or roars down the mountain on his U.S.-made snowmobile to deliver his teachings in person. When he speaks, his followers hear the word of God.

The government in Krasnoyarsk, the regional capital, used to bother Mr. Torop with questions about whether he was stealing his followers' money, whether his rule over the sect was totalitarian, whether his people were getting enough nutrition from their vegan diet of homegrown foods and whether they were keeping their children ignorant about the outside world.

These concerns have eased as Mr. Torop has earned the cautious support of the local government. His followers pay taxes and they're a rare source of population growth among the dying villages in this region.

Still, Mr. Torop isn't satisfied. His group is regularly labelled as a sect, or a dangerous cult, and he wants to remove this stigma. His church has registered as a federal religious organization, and in the coming months his followers plan to apply for recognition as a "traditional" religion in Russia.

That is possible only after a religion has been active for 15 years, which puts the Vissarionites in a unique position. When former president Boris Yeltsin signed the law on religion in 1997, it was seen as an attempt to suppress the bizarre array of religious movements that sprang up after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Vissarionites will be the first to test that law.

Vladimir Vedernikov, who serves as Mr. Torop's manager of external relations, has been meeting weekly with government officials, and believes that the bid will succeed. "Maybe this year or next year, depending on the formalities . . .," he says. "We won't be a sect any more; we will be a religion."

At least one government official agrees with him, and predicts that the Vissarionites will follow the same path to acceptance taken by the Mormons in the 19th century. But they are bitterly opposed by both the Russian Orthodox Church and by some disgruntled former members, who accuse Mr. Torop of leading a cult that robs people of their money and their health.

But as the morning light grows stronger and the procession continues its march toward Mr. Torop's birthday celebration, it's hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer strangeness of the notion that an international religion could spring from this odd little society in the Siberian forest.

A brochure advertises the settlement as "the fairy world where everything is real," and it does resemble something from a children's book or a bizarre dream. Padding across the snow in thick felt boots, the followers talk about what it's like to live in their fairy tale. They describe it as a land of forgetting: their personal history, the outside world, their own suffering and, sometimes, their own rules.

The first Vissarionite to escape his personal history was, of course, Vissarion himself.

Mr. Torop was born the son on a construction worker on Jan. 14, 1961, in a suburb of Krasnodar, a city near the Black Sea. As his website (http://www.vissarion-eng.org) says, his life until he was 30 differed little from that of most Russians. He joined the Red Army at 18, spending his two years of mandatory service in an engineering unit that sent him to construction sites in Mongolia.

Afterward, he returned to Minusinsk, a city of 72,000 in southern Siberia, where his family was living at the time. He worked three years at a metalworking shop before starting a career in the police.

At the same time that his new job put him on the government payroll, the Soviet Union was showing signs of weakness. In 1985, the Communist Party got its third leader in less than three years: Mikhail Gorbachev, who soon tried to crack down on alcoholism by restricting the production and sale of vodka. Huge lineups formed at liquor stores across the country, and mobs sometimes attacked the police protecting them.

Now a tall and serene figure in his cream-coloured robe, Mr. Torop seems acutely aware that his followers take his words as scripture and, perhaps as a result, he doesn't say much. But during an interview at his mountaintop chalet, his demeanour changes as he recalls the chaos of the final Soviet years.

"I felt the times changing," he says. "It was difficult for me because there was a great distance between my inner world and the world I saw evolving around me . . . Things were developing badly, as new rules led people to worry more and have more aggression.

"New laws like prohibition, for example. That was one of the first signs. Bad things happened. When a shop was opening, you had to see it. It was craziness." (Now, the first of his 61 commandments to the Vissarionites is to react calmly in the face of aggression.)

In 1989, he left the police to immerse himself in his painting, carefully rendering bowls of fruit and bunches of flowers. By that point, he was married with children, and claims to have supported his family for 10 months exclusively by finding coins and bills on the street.

Scavenging wasn't great work, however, and in April, 1991, he came up with a better idea when the director of a tiny UFO research centre in Minusinsk claimed to recognize in him a divine nature, and suggested he rename himself Vissarion, or "He who gives life."

His new incarnation proved popular, partly because he wasn't the only one shaken by the changes in his country. Hundreds of new religious movements rushed into the spiritual vacuum as the fall of the Soviet empire brought an abrupt end to 70 years of official atheism. Almost overnight, the new regime gave Russians permission to believe whatever they wanted, and drove them to pray for mercy from a system that resembled the cruellest aspects of capitalism. Russia plunged into a chaotic, money-grabbing contest, in which the winners usually employed gangs of men armed with Kalashnikovs.

As an alternative, Mr. Torop offered a doctrine of non-aggression, the joys of rural living and the same vision of communal labour without pay that would be familiar to anyone nostalgic for Soviet times.

His teachings attracted a wide range of people -- including foreigners from Germany, China, Italy, Bulgaria, Cuba and Sweden, whom he met on his missionary visits abroad -- but the biggest group came from the ranks of Russian artists, performers, scientists, doctors, teachers and other members of the intelligentsia who lost status with the Communist collapse.

Marina Nikitina, 46, was trained as a director of "mass cultural activities," but discovered that state pageantry had abruptly fallen out of fashion. Now, she's a writer for the Vissarionite newsletter.

Anatoly Pshenay, 53, was a high-ranking railway general in Belarus before fleeing the corruption and backbiting. When he joined the colony in Siberia, he lived in an old shipping container.

Oleg Nadimsky, 45, left his job as a Moscow lawyer to be a potter.

The first major test of Mr. Torop's ability to recruit occurred in Moscow in the winter of 1991. At the time, Sergei Chevalkov, now 54, was a colonel in the Russian strategic rocket forces, teaching at a Moscow academy and doing nuclear research. Mr. Chevalkov says he was drawn by curiosity to an early-morning meeting on Red Square, in front of Saint Basil's Cathedral.

Mr. Torop had just arrived after a three-day train journey from Siberia, and "we saw this young guy in a fur coat like a villager," Mr. Chevalkov recalls. "He took off his cap, and said: 'I have something important to tell you. Our Heavenly Father sent met here today.'

"I had a reaction like, 'What can this guy teach us -- yoga?' "

Mr. Chevalkov chuckles at his first impression; he's now a senior priest among the Vissarionites, joining not because he was fleeing the Soviet collapse but because, he says, the people who control Russia's nuclear forces aren't completely sane. "Mankind stands at a very dangerous precipice."

For those who want to leave their past behind and forget the outside world, Sun City offers plenty of isolation. For the faithful from far-flung regions, the trek to mark Mr. Torop's birthday required a five-hour flight from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk, followed by an overnight train ride south to the town of Kuragino and then a trip by car or minibus across the winding, rutted roads through the old logging towns now almost entirely taken over by Vissarionites.

Even after that, reaching Sun City requires a two-day walk from the nearest village, and the roads are eventually replaced with narrow paths through the deep taiga.

The destination is a city in name only, a small collection of cabins with no plumbing and no gas. Mr. Torop says he selected the mountainside location because it radiates mystical energy. But real electricity is in short supply: Only some well-appointed cottages have solar power, providing weak current for a few hours each day. Buildings, furniture and even some tools are fashioned by hand.

The marchers stop at intervals along the way, singing songs, dancing, or slurping from steaming bowls of borsht. During one break, Mr. Pshenay, the former railway official, explains the community's plans to protect its isolation.

Like many of the Vissarionites, he sold most of his assets when he moved to Siberia and donated the money to a 150-member "family" within the larger community. They share everything: finances, food and possessions.

Mr. Pshenay gave more than most: He used to drive the newest model of Ford Scorpio and keep a fleet of other vehicles. "We couldn't drive Mercedes, because [Belarusian President Alexander] Lukashenko didn't want us to be too flashy," he says. His sacrifices appear to have earned him a measure of respect, and he now serves as chairman of the childcare board.

Education is an important portfolio, because it's one of the few remaining sore points with the government. Local authorities want all children in the district to study the usual curriculum and take standard tests, while the Vissarionites want to teach their own views in segregated classrooms.

Mr. Pshenay lost a battle in this ongoing war last fall, when many children were forced to attend state schools. Of the 800 children in the district village, only 60 now study the Vissarionites' heavily modified curriculum. But the community is fighting back, with plans to open new schools, and lobbying to replace the staff at the local state-funded school.

If Mr. Pshenay is successful, his system will produce more graduates such as Alena Nabiolena, 17, who blushes when asked questions about world history. Does the word Buchenwald mean anything to her? "No." Auschwitz? "Nope." The Holocaust? "No." Genocide? "No." How about Stalin?

"Stalin, Stalin, Stalin," she says, with a quizzical look. "He was a ruler, right? I'm not sure what he did."

But the Vissarionites have other kinds of knowledge they want to give their children. Many say they believe in extrasensory perception, reincarnation and the impending Apocalypse. They think cancer is caused by excessive aggression, and toothaches are the result of mulling over difficult spiritual problems. Foods such as meat or fish will pollute the body, they say, as will such combinations as potatoes and peas, or sugar and bread.

One visitor, who described himself as a student of Mr. Torop, says he studies by summoning a hologram of his master from the energy field surrounding Earth and then listening as it speaks. The UFO expert who first inspired Mr. Torop remains one of his advisers.

The third of the 61 rules for life contains what could be a telling statement: "An untruth which brings good is wisdom." Or, as Mr. Pshenay says: "We create our own fairy tale here."

Like the oldest fairy tales, life here can be grim, although the suffering isn't obvious at first glance.

Russian media report that Vissarionites are starving to death on their vegan diets and refusing conventional medical treatment, but regional government officials say this isn't true. Some followers suffered health problems while adjusting to life in the forest, but they have modified what they eat and now take people to hospital in emergencies. Mr. Torop also discourages smoking and drinking, which makes his villages visibly more healthy than many rural towns.

The faithful, very aware of their media image, make every effort to show outsiders that they're happy, even escorting visitors to see children playing table hockey and video games. But in quiet moments, over meals or warming themselves around woodstoves, others say they're exhausted by the daily regimen of hard farm work.

Other kinds of discomfort are more subtle. Ms. Nikitina, the newsletter writer, divorced her husband four years ago and now despairs of ever finding a new partner in a community that is at least 60-per-cent female. Love with a non-believer would be unthinkable, so "I try to stay happy, try to drive away the sadness. But it's hard; I have a woman's dreams."

In fact, women have many challenges in the colony. Mr. Torop teaches that they should serve their husbands and bear many children, and that men can have two wives, if the women agree. His own wife, he admits, isn't keen on this idea -- uncomfortable now that another woman wants to join their family.

Down the mountain from Sun City, Marina Aptusheva, 32, ruefully recalls being her husband's second wife. After three years, the first wife left, and Ms. Aptusheva says she would never try it again. "The egotism of a woman screams and shouts in that situation."

The hardship can go beyond the Vissarionites themselves.

For example, Olga Yenifarova, 40, runs an interior-decor store in Moscow, and spent seven years and about $10,000 (U.S.) trying to extract her mother, brother and sister from the colony. She says her family had already lost at least $20,000 when they sold their apartment in Latvia and went to Siberia in 1997. Alarmed at the health problems and depression she says they have suffered, Ms. Yenifarova regularly sent care packages containing boots, warm clothes and money.

Eventually, she persuaded them to quit after flying them out for a vacation. But by the time they moved to Moscow, they had changed. Her once-bubbly sister rarely spoke, and her mother suffered from a lung infection, and still seemed devoted to Mr. Torop.

"It didn't destroy their lives, but almost. . .," Ms. Yenifarova says. "Vissarion eats very well, travels the world, roars around on his snowmobile, while everybody else labours in the fields to keep him comfortable. That's not a religion."

Bishop Antony Cheremisov, who oversees the Krasnoyarsk region for the Orthodox Church, says disaffected Vissarionites sometimes show up asking for food and a ticket home. He says people are often trapped inside the Vissarionite colony because they have given up their money and property, and he argues that making the group a traditional religion could set a bad precedent. "This is a test of the law."

And yet, for Mr. Torop's birthday celebration, hundreds of his followers climb a small mountain that rises a kilometre above Sun City. They sprinkle dried flowers on a heart-shaped rock, draw symbols in the snow, light candles, sing songs, listen to speeches by their leader and his priests, and watch as he blesses loaves of bread.

They seem enthralled by these rituals. But as the temperature drops in the afternoon, with a nearby weather station reporting minus 50 Celsius, the effects of spending two days in the cold become apparent. A woman collapses, slumping unconscious onto one of the steps carved into the snow around a wooden temple. Soon, she is carried away.

In this land of forgetting, even Mr. Torop's rules can be forgotten. Despite his teachings about alcohol, villagers merrily maintain stashes of vodka, and many also have switched from being vegans to being vegetarians, which means they can eat eggs and dairy products. And if the 500 snow steps and the pathway from Sun City to Mr. Torop's hilltop home are supposedly shovelled by hand, why is there a snow blower nearby?

As well, his followers are trying to generate their own culture -- a homegrown roster of literature, music and even children's cartoons that will free their minds from the negative influences from the outside world. This has succeeded to some extent -- many Vissarionites say they now read nothing but their own literature (of course, book-burnings have thinned what else is on their shelves). Yet children still spend long afternoons watching Hollywood movies on TV, and the adults' video collections include soft-porn titles such as Mickey Rourke's Wild Orchid.

Ultimately, this trend toward moderation will make the Vissarionites an ordinary religious community, says Mark Denisov, the official in Krasnoyarsk responsible for relations with them.

"Many people could not survive the events of the 1990s," he explains. "Some people became drug addicts and alcoholics. Others turned to non-traditional religions, looking for salvation from the terror of life. By the force of historical events, we ended up with 5,000 people here in unfamiliar circumstances in the woods."

They made mistakes at first, Mr. Denisov says. They didn't co-operate with the local police, and they weren't open to the media. Children were given no schooling. Devout followers refused medical treatment and died.

But most problems have been solved, he says. "Years have passed. The community has matured."

A demonstration of that maturity -- and a sign of the outside world's growing acceptance of this strange sect -- comes after the birthday celebration has ended.

Ruslan Kagirov, a 28-year-old computer programmer, makes the gruelling journey from the mountain home to his village, walking for several hours down the steep slope, across a vast frozen swamp and through forests to meet Mr. Torop's fleet of old Soviet military trucks.

The engines are frozen, so the faithful must wait until water can be heated over open fires and bring them back to life. But finally Mr. Kagirov reaches Kuragino, where he can catch the train.

But three local youths, obviously drunk, notice the bespectacled, clean-cut young man, and one of them, wearing a black eye and a sneer, sits down across from him.

"I'm trying to decide whether to punch you," he says.

"That would be bad for me, because it would hurt," Mr. Kagirov replies, implacably. "But it would also be bad for you because I'd report you to the police."

"If you're frightening me with the police, I should hit you in the face," he's told.

"I'm not frightening you. I'm just telling you what will happen."

The drunk starts to repeat himself, saying, "I should hit you in the face" several times before adding some crude insults. Mr. Kagirov has a black belt in karate, but remains unnaturally calm.

Finally, his antagonist man asks: "Are you from Sun City?"

"Yes, I've come from Sun City, and I live by its laws."

This could be all the lout needs to make good on his threat, but instead, he just says: "Don't move to Kuragino. There's nothing here."

As a train pulls in and the sound of squealing brakes echoes through the station, Mr. Kagirov thanks the man for his advice. Then he politely says goodbye.

Graeme Smith is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in Moscow.

MacLean's Magazine - Did Jesus really die on the cross?

From MacLean's Magazine. I'm a believer that Jesus existed, and I do find it strange that someone like Tom Harpur, a well-known religious commentator, would say that he never lived at all.

April 3, 2006.

Did Jesus really die on the cross?

In a new book, Michael Baigent, the dean of alternative-Jesus historians, known best for suing Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, calls the Crucifixion an elaborate hoax

BRIAN BETHUNE

The Greatest Story Ever Told hardly begins to describe it. Jesus Christ is the most important figure in Western history; given the West's impact on the rest of the world, possibly in all human history. His story, as detailed in the four Gospels -- which depict his transformation from Jesus of Nazareth into Jesus Christ -- is sunk deep in the cultural DNA of the West. Traditionalist Christians embrace it as the literal truth, while millions of others view it as a mixture of fact and metaphor, but even atheists and followers of other faiths know it. For almost 2,000 years, the New Testament has inspired enormous works of love, from martyrdom to the abolition of slavery; it has also set armies marching and lit the fires of the Inquisition. Its impact has been so powerful and so attractive that those its guardians have persecuted or excluded -- heretics, gay people and, often, women, still want in. For that reason there has always been a hunger for other versions of Christ's story.

During the last 200 years, scholars in a steadily more secular West have tried to get behind the Jesus of faith -- the divine incarnation who walked on water and raised the dead -- to find the Jesus of history, a Jewish preacher with a radical new call to love our neighbours. Often derisively known, especially in the U.S., as the Jesus Wars, the historical quest has proved astonishingly fruitful for context, yielding historians a clearer understanding of Jesus's essential Jewishness and the social and political upheavals of first-century Israel.

Much of that has come from the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, which record the organization, beliefs and spiritual yearnings of a community of ascetic Jews. And the 1945 Nag Hammadi find in Egypt of a trove of Gnostic Christian texts, rejected by orthodox believers 1,600 years before, has shed new light on the tangled history of early Christianity. Even traditionalist Christians, who have had to face challenges based on those documents, have been cheered by some archaeological finds, particularly the 1968 unearthing of the skeletal remains of a crucified man, complete with an iron nail driven through his heel bone. It's been an effective rebuttal to Gospel opponents who claim the Romans never nailed (as opposed to tied) a victim to his cross.

But still nothing on Jesus the man, no mundane document of the sort historians yearn for, a tax receipt, say, made out to Jesus of Nazareth for purchase of a plot of land. Outside the ruthlessly pruned and selective books of the New Testament -- John's Gospel ends with a tantalizing "there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written" -- there is little else for historians to mine. Even the extra-canonical books such as those turned up at Nag Hammadi, the so-called apocrypha that were not allowed into the New Testament when it was finally hammered out in the fourth and fifth centuries, are still within the faith tradition, concerned with the divine Christ, not the human Jesus. There is sufficient third-party evidence -- brief references by Roman observers -- to convince the most secular historian that Jesus lived, preached, outraged the authorities and was crucified, but that's all.

It's clearly not enough for a vast contemporary audience. And so the door is wide open for fiction writers like Dan Brown, whose Da Vinci Code hasn't dominated bestseller lists for three years on its thriller element alone. Brown's backstory of a misogynist Church, cruelly suppressing all knowledge of Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene and, with it, any trace of the honour primitive Christianity offered "the sacred feminine" principle, has resonated with millions of women (and men). And now Michael Baigent, the dean of alternative-Jesus historians, has called the Crucifixion an elaborate hoax -- cutting out not only the heart of traditional Christianity, but the very essence of secular historians' pitifully brief list of sure things.

Jesus was sentenced to the cross by Pontius Pilate all right, argues Baigent in The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History (HarperCollins), but that's where his version diverges, to put it mildly, from that of the Gospels. Pilate didn't want him dead (Baigent's Jesus is a prominent Jew friendly to Rome), but didn't dare face down a mob of anti-Roman Jews demanding his execution. So Pilate had Jesus hung on the cross, but he also had him taken down alive and smuggled to safety in Egypt.



Baigent, 58, is currently in the news for suing Brown for plagiarism in a London court, but that's not his first appearance in headlines. Twenty-four years ago, with co-authors Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Baigent published Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a convoluted story claiming that Jesus married and fathered a bloodline that still has living descendants. (They haven't been too prominent recently, but once they were kings of France.) That bloodline, and not the cup Christ used at the Last Supper, is the real Holy Grail. This incendiary truth, Baigent wrote, guarded for hundreds of years by a secret society, is anathema to organized Christianity, particularly the papacy, which has always been devoted to suppressing evidence -- often violently -- about the real Jesus.



Holy Blood caused a sensation at the time, and has sold steadily ever since. In 2002, when the then-obscure Brown picked up on many of those ideas and ran with them (and how: 40 million copies sold), the novelist paid homage to his pioneering predecessors by naming a major character after two of them. Sir Leigh Teabing (an anagram of Baigent) also walks with a limp, just like Henry Lincoln, but Brown testified in court that the physical disability was just an embarrassing coincidence. In any event, far from being mollified by Brown's homage, Leigh and Baigent called their solicitors.

It was the last thing he wanted to do, said Baigent in an interview with Maclean's: "It's a terrible thing for a writer to sue another writer, and it's made me angry I was driven to it." But authors own nothing except their intellectual property, he continued. "You want to use it, you acknowledge your source -- and not by some cute anagram; you want to use a lot of it, you pay for it, just like a filmmaker who wants to make a movie of your book." Still, Baigent acknowledges that Holy Blood was scarcely the first source to mention some of its ideas. Even Martin Luther mused about such matters during the 16th-century Protestant Reformation; in modern times, so did Charles Davis, an English ex-priest and professor at Montreal's Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in 1971. Nor does Brown use all of Holy Blood's concepts. Most notably, as a self-described Christian, he shied away from any suggestion the Crucifixion never occurred. But more to the point, no matter how much Baigent's work may have aided Brown's, Baigent is quick to agree the novel has already done The Jesus Papers a lot of good. "The Code opened all these questions about Christ and Christianity to a vast public, and opened publishers' eyes to the fact religious discussion is no niche market -- a lot of people are very interested." It's clear that the world is ripe for radical re-evaluations of Jesus. Scholars may be appalled at Brown and Baigent both, but the public is certainly with the former -- and quite possibly ready for the latter.

With testimony finished and his publicity tour yet to begin, Baigent is simply waiting now, for the judge's decision and for what he expects to be a furious counterattack on his new book. Others have written works dismissing Christ's existence entirely, including John Allegro's notorious 1970 volume The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which said Jesus was the mythical front for a magic mushroom cult. More seriously, two years ago, Tom Harpur's The Pagan Christ, which shares many key themes with The Jesus Papers, declared that orthodox Christianity was based on a foolishly literalized version of a mythic cycle that had been around for millennia before Jesus -- who never lived at all -- was supposedly born. And Harpur was greeted with a polite hearing. But that's the problem, Baigent agrees; somehow complete dismissal is a more respectable position than, well, something that sounds like a carnival trick.

But Baigent can't follow Harpur down that road: "The no-Christ position is impossible to maintain, if only because of Tacitus -- a highly placed Roman historian with good access to contemporary documents -- saying that Pontius Pilate crucified him." Nor is there anything particularly new with the notion that, while Jesus was crucified, he did not die on the cross. In fact, it's almost 2,000 years old.



Scholars postulate that Jesus's violent death left behind a small band of followers faced with working out the meaning of the most shattering moment in their lives. From earliest Christian times, there were suggestions that the inconceivable had not really happened, that Jesus had somehow escaped his cup of suffering. Sometimes he did so spiritually (some Christian Gnostics taught that the divine Christ fled the human husk, Jesus, before death); sometimes literally, either by someone taking his place on the actual cross (usually Simon the Cyrene, whom the Gospels portray as helping Christ carry his cross), or by what's commonly known as the "swoon theory." Jesus fell into a comatose state, natural or drug-induced, and was mistakenly judged dead by his executioners.

No mainstream scholar accepts the cross survival tales as anything more than dogmatic spin, pious hope or simple folklore, like the old legend that Jesus visited Britain as a teenager with his great-uncle Joseph of Arimathea, a sojourn immortalized in William Blake's hymn "Jerusalem": And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green? (Or perhaps to explain the original "empty tomb" ending of Mark's Gospel -- the conclusion that mentions the Risen Lord was added centuries later. For Baigent, a revived and already spirited-away Jesus explains that circumstance better than rising from the dead.)



For secular historians, the Crucifixion is the incontrovertible truth about Jesus -- some virtually deduce his life from the fact of his death. (Pilate is also the sole figure from Jesus's trial to become part of the Nicene Creed, the most widely accepted capsule statement of Christian faith: "For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.") For religious historians and Christians in general -- at least since the bounds of orthodoxy were set in the early centuries -- the equation has always been stark: no crucifixion means no resurrection, no once and final sacrifice for the sins of humanity, no salvation, no faith.

Gnostic Christians, who are credited with a secret, individual and dogma-free enlightenment -- and, perhaps crucially, a belief in equality for women -- have had good press in modern times. They lost the battle with those Christians who were coalescing around a centralized, required belief system and nascent Church hierarchy. Baigent's affection for them runs deep. "The Gnostics didn't stress faith, but individual experience, and I agree it's better to know than to believe. Even the canonical Gospels make it clear Christ had a kind of initiatory system: parables for those first coming to hear him preach and secret teachings about the Kingdom of God for the disciples. So I think the Gnostics were more in tune with that than the more dogma- and faith-bound Christians. I did my master's in religious studies on the Renaissance concept that if you get the symbolism right, it will resonate in the human mind and cause physical and spiritual effects, give understanding by experience. I believe that too. I'd rather meditate in an old temple than read about its history."

Given his conviction that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith were utterly separate beings, his high regard for the Gnostics (the prime source for escaping-the-cross stories), and his belief in Tacitus's evidence, Baigent was practically bound to start combing the New Testament for hints of a fake crucifixion. And that raises the single largest problem in modern versions of an alternative Jesus, the same one that causes mainline historians to throw up their hands. Once you come to accept that the Gospels were heavily edited, how do you judge which parts to trust?

Too often, as virtually everyone in New Testament studies says of opposing viewpoints, the sections judged trustworthy are no more than those the writer likes. Fifteen years ago the American Catholic expert John Dominic Crossan counted no fewer than seven distinct varieties of Jesus, ranging from political revolutionary to charismatic seer, in recent books by academics -- evidence, as he thought it, that too many in the field write "theology and call it history." (He didn't seem to notice that, from a more secular-minded position, he was just as guilty.) Like any historian, Baigent aims for plausibility -- for what makes sense in his own time, while not doing violence to the plain testimony of whatever evidence he can muster. He also applies what scholars call "the criterion of embarrassment." "The New Testament is basically theology masquerading as history," he avers, "so anything in it that runs counter to later orthodox belief has a better-than-average chance of being true. Or that simply sticks out, off-message -- I always appreciate anomalous material. Some of it is bound to be fantasy, but some is factual."

So Baigent accepts most of what has rapidly become standard alternative-Jesus belief. Mary Magdalene was "probably" his wife, certainly his closest confidante -- the Gnostic gospels say she had "secret" knowledge from Jesus. In 1982's Holy Blood, Baigent, like most other males in his field at the time, was rather indifferent to orthodox Christianity's often vicious misogyny. But the success of The Da Vinci Code's exploration of the Church-suppressed "sacred feminine" has become one of the most prominent and attractive features in the alternative-Jesus school. In The Jesus Papers Baigent wields the feminine cause as one of his main clubs for bashing the Vatican.

And it is the Vatican he hammers. Again, like most others who see a Church-led conspiracy to hide the truth, Baigent hasn't a word to say about Greek Orthodoxy or even fundamentalist Protestantism. "The Vatican is spin central," he insists. "It's the heir to that Roman centralizing group that screwed this religion down 1,600 years ago, that kicked out the feminine element that Jesus fostered, and then turned him into God."

Less commonly, Baigent also believes that Christ was nurtured by the Zealot faction -- militant, occasionally murderous Jews opposed to Roman rule and committed to restoring a king/high priest over Israel who was both a descendant of David (through Jesus's father Joseph) and Aaron, the first high priest. (Luke's Gospel says Mary was of his line.) The most hated symbol of Roman control was its taxes; when, as described in Matthew 22:17, pro-Roman Jews demanded of Jesus: "Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar or not?" they were asking a loaded question, one that would bring his fundamental alignment into the open. The Zealots, in Baigent's reading, were furious after he gave a Solomonic response -- "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" -- that essentially meant "Yes."

Why Christ answered that way is the main argument of The Jesus Papers, one that may be lost in the Crucifixion furor. Like Harpur before him, Baigent sees a Jesus who had become infused with Egyptian mythic belief, a man who had become a seer and moral teacher, no longer interested in the realpolitik future the Zealots had raised him to. Naturally they denounced him to the Roman authorities. "My starting point was realizing Pilate's dilemma," Baigent says, meaning Pilate's need to avoid executing a prominent Jew who was friendly to Rome, balanced by the risk of public unrest in a notoriously unruly province. So Pilate cut a deal with the Zealots -- they could have their sacrificial victim or their martyr (he can't make up his mind which), but only for show: Jesus had to come down alive, and depart Israel forever (to Egypt, Baigent believes). One of his key points of evidence is that the Greek language distinguishes between the words for "living body" and "corpse," unlike Latin and English, where "body" can do for either. And when Joseph of Arimathea comes to Pilate, in the Gospel of Mark, to ask for Jesus's "body," the word he uses is soma, "the living body."

It's not much to support a claim as audacious as Baigent's. He has arguable cause for some of his big-picture conclusions -- there's plenty of evidence, for one, that Jesus, and the early Church after him, accorded women a higher status than the surrounding pagan or Jewish cultures. Given that, and the role of later Christianity in Western misogyny, Mary Magdalene may well have played a larger role in Christ's life than the male authors of the New Testament wanted to acknowledge. And it's equally true that the streams of Christian thought that eventually hardened into orthodoxy were not the sum of early responses to Jesus of Nazareth.

But, to apply his own tests of plausibility and embarrassment: is it more likely that Mark carelessly gave away the secret of the Crucifixion, or that he innocently mixed up two words he may have thought of as synonyms? Is it more likely that Mary's supposed Aaronic descent -- the main thread leading to the Zealot thesis -- was left in Luke, because it was too well-known to be removed, or because it was a minor detail? Baigent is aware how slender his reeds are. And, in fact, they are not his sole or even main support. Those, curiously enough, are matters of faith.

Baigent actually begins The Jesus Papers -- the title of which does not become meaningful until the end of the book -- with a story. Years ago a respected Anglican cleric told Baigent that a long-dead, famous churchman named Canon Alfred Lilley (1860 -1948) had told him that he, Lilley, had seen indisputable evidence about 1892 that Christ was still alive in 45 CE, long after the Crucifixion. Baigent is sure he will never see this proof, but he firmly believes in it. The story is, in effect, a version of Catholicism's apostolic succession -- a true knowledge, passed from one pair of trusted hands to another and to another, over the course of more than a century.

And Baigent ends with another tale, this one drawn from his 25 years of familiarity with the underground trade in Middle Eastern antiquities. "The things I've seen and heard about," he sighs, "will hopefully see the light of day sometime. I do have to tell readers about them, but I can't base a book on unexamined evidence." At the heart of his conclusions about Jesus are Aramaic papyri bearing a letter to the Jewish high court, the Sanhedrin, which Baigent has seen, and actually held in his hands. (Unfortunately he can't read Aramaic.) The author believes the letter was written by Jesus himself after his supposed death; in it Jesus denies that he had ever called himself the literal, physical son of God.

Even for those who deny his divinity, and yearn for a new version of his story, the truth about Jesus is a story of faith.

Pentagon: Iran Missile Advances Possible

Iran recently tested some new weapons as a show of force, and have made incredible claims that may be exaggerations, according to the Pentagon. This isn't a huge surprise as they are trying to suggest that bombings by the US and Israel will come at a heavy price.



Pentagon: Iran Missile Advances Possible
By Al Pessin
Washington
03 April 2006

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The U.S. Defense Department says it is possible Iran has made improvements in its missile forces, but a spokesman has also warned that Iran has exaggerated its capabilities in the past.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman responded Monday to Iranian claims that in recent days it has tested improved airborne and undersea missiles. He said Iran has conducted many tests during the past year of both ballistic and anti-ship missiles, and it would not be surprising if it has made some progress during that time.

"We know that the Iranians are always trying to improve their weapons systems by both foreign and indigenous measures," he said. "It's possible that they are increasing their capability and making strides in radar absorbing materials and targeting. However, the Iranians have been known also to boast and exaggerate their statements about greater technical and tactical capabilities."


Photo released April 3, 2006 shows test firing of Fajr-3 missile fired by Iran in Persian Gulf on April 1, 2006

Whitman says ballistic missiles have long been an important part of Iran's military strategy, and that the country has the largest inventory of such missiles in the Middle East.

Iran has announced three weapons advances during war games it began conducting on Friday. The latest announcement involved a torpedo fired on Monday that Iranian state television says is capable of destroying enemy ships and submarines "at any depth and any speed."



Earlier, Iran said it had successfully test fired an airborne missile that can avoid enemy radar and deliver warheads to several targets simultaneously. It also announced the test firing of a new high-speed underwater missile.

'World's fastest' torpedo


The Pentagon spokesman said Iran's war games and his comments on them have nothing to do with the effort by the United States and several other world powers to convince Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program. The Security Council has demanded that Iran stop enriching uranium, an important step in producing fuel that could be used in a nuclear bomb.

Open source firms need to smarten up to sell to governments

Open source firms need to smarten up to sell to governments
Aussie developers told to shed the beach-bum look.

Rodney Gedda. Computerworld Australia
31 March 2006

Open source needs to scuttle the T-shirt and sandal-wearing 'hacker' image and adopt a business-like, influential approach to win more business from government customers, according to an Australaian government official.

Patrick Callioni, who is manager of the finance and administration division of the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), told the attendees at Linuxworld 2006 conference in Sydney this week that getting open source implemented in government "isn't easy."

"Doing business with government is not easy - be it proprietary software, open-source software, chairs, desks, anything," Callioni said. "It's particularly not easy with the Australian government as there are about 190 agencies, ranging from one person to 120,000 desktops."

Making the procurement process more complicated is the fact that the people purchasing the business are not necessarily the same people who assess and make decisions about the technology, he said. Callioni recommends that open-source suppliers "explore the twilight of business and government."

"To deal with government you have to be more business-like," he said. "If you're going to need something for 10 years you don't want to deal with a company that's here today and gone tomorrow. We're interested in value for money and long-term support, so if you're not offering that don't complain about me not buying your product."

Despite the stern criticism, Callioni encouraged more adoption of open source products within government, saying "our doors are open."

"But it takes two to tango [so] don't sell me salt and pepper shakers," he said, adding it's possible to be in government and remain a human being. "We want the innovative potential of open source and it's not just about saving money -- sometimes it can cost you more but you get more value."

AGIMO is already using open source with its MySource Matrix CMS, and has championed greater adoption by other agencies by publishing an open-source procurement guide for federal government agencies last year .

"Think about new ways of doing business and be more business-like," he said. "Remember, we are the customers, so if you want to sell you need to put in more effort."

Callioni lamented the pressure put on government to expedite open source adoption. "We're constantly being told we could do more, but that's not our job [and] you need to convince us of the benefits," he said.

In addition to suppliers not doing enough, Callioni cited public spending accountability, existing lock-in, legacy infrastructure, an inherent tendency towards conservatism, and legal considerations as all hurdles to open source adoption at the government's end.

"Anything the open-source community can do to make legal issues easier and predigested will help them do business with government," he said.