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Sir Alan Rudge
Sir Alan Rudge FRS, an electrical engineer, is Chairman of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, Chairman of the ERA Foundation, former Chairman of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council,and a former member of the government Scientific Advisory Committee.
Back to top Back to Academic Advisory Council Print this page
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Political Campaigns & Advocacy
Public Affairs & Community Outreach
Building Coalitions & Nonprofits
The Armenian Domain
The Stark Group is a full-service political consulting and public relations firm that offers hands-on strategies, builds coalitions and grassroots movements from the ground up to deliver your next winning campaign. We set the bar high for ourselves and take pride in the passion, drive, and attention to detail that we place in our tailored and integrated approaches.
Simply put - we make it happen.
Elen Asatryan
Elen@TheStarkGroup.net
Elen Asatryan is the founder and lead consultant of The Stark Group. She has over 18 years of experience in leading successful campaigns, initiatives, and grassroots movements for local, state, federal offices and policies.
Prior to founding The Stark Group, for over 11 years, Elen served as the Executive Director of the nation’s largest and most influential Armenian political grassroots organization, the Armenian National Committee of America; first at its Glendale chapter for over 6 years then the Western-Region offices, where she was responsible for strategy, policy development and implementation, crisis management, communications, programs, fundraising, and day-to-day operations of the regional headquarters along with its local ANCA chapters in the 19 Western U.S. States.
Elen’s activism dates back to her middle school days when she took to her Board of Education to address discrimination issues at her school. At the early age of 15, Elen volunteered at her first campaign and by the age 19 served as campaign manager for a local race. She holds a strong track record of establishing innovative strategies, activating supporters and turning out record-breaking number of voters in some of the most competitive and heated local, state, and federal elections.
She has also served and continues to serve on various Committees and Boards of local and regional organizations including her most recent appointment to the City of Glendale Parks, Recreation and Community Services Commission. Elen is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied Political Science with concentrations in American Politics and International Relations.
Public service, leaving a positive footprint for future generations, and helping create a more just and equitable world is her driving force.
Public Affairs & Outreach
“A great combination of skills and talents.”
I am very familiar with the campaign work and expertise of Stark Group principals. They are outstanding field operatives and micro target campaign strategists in addition to being hard working and dedicated. A great combination of skil...
I am very familiar with the campaign work and expertise of Stark Group principals. They are outstanding field operatives and micro target campaign strategists in addition to being hard working and dedicated. A great combination of skills and talents.
Hon. Anthony Portantino
CA State Senator
“Ability to bring diverse people, organizations and interests to the table”
Elen’s ability to bring diverse people, organizations and interests to the table to work towards a common goal is one of her strongest assets and an important tool for any campaign and initiative to hav...
Elen’s ability to bring diverse people, organizations and interests to the table to work towards a common goal is one of her strongest assets and an important tool for any campaign and initiative to have in order to succeed. I’ve known Elen for over a decade and am so confident in her abilities and leadership, that as a council member and former Mayor, I appointed her to a city commission.
Hon. Paula Devine
Glendale Mayor & Councilmember
“Tenacity and determination”
Elen Asatryan combines the experience from dozens of political campaigns with the tenacity and determination that successful campaigns are conditioned upon. I was fortunate to have her and her team manage every aspect of my campaign in 2013. She has been m...
Elen Asatryan combines the experience from dozens of political campaigns with the tenacity and determination that successful campaigns are conditioned upon. I was fortunate to have her and her team manage every aspect of my campaign in 2013. She has been my rock every step of the way and to date, I continue to seek her guidance and support.
Hon. Zareh Sinanyan, Esq.
“Politically astute, level-headed in chaotic situations, and multi-skilled.”
As Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America – Western Region, Elen Asatryan proved her talent over and over again. She is highly knowledgeable about the complex world of politic...
As Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America – Western Region, Elen Asatryan proved her talent over and over again. She is highly knowledgeable about the complex world of political campaigns, and is an effective crisis manager and multi-tasker able to effectively and creatively handle fast-paced and rapidly changing situations as they arise. I had the pleasure of working closely with her on a daily basis for over four years and found her to be politically astute, level-headed in chaotic situations, and multi-skilled in every area ranging from big picture strategizing to the most minute tactical details including messaging, graphics, writing, and serving as a media spokesperson. I would highly recommend her services and am confident that she will continue to produce results for all her clients.
Nora Hovsepian, Esq.
ANCA-Western Region Chair
“Instrumental in developing a solid legislative strategy”
Elen and The Stark Group have been instrumental in developing a solid legislative strategy for DishDivvy, and more importantly, providing the resources and knowledge to execute our advocacy goals. Elen is extremely dedic...
Elen and The Stark Group have been instrumental in developing a solid legislative strategy for DishDivvy, and more importantly, providing the resources and knowledge to execute our advocacy goals. Elen is extremely dedicated and passionate about her work, and her clients’ vision. Her expertise in the politicalsphere, coupled with her valuable network, have been a tremendous asset for our legislative projects.
DishDivvy
Interested in learning about how we make the stark difference in your next endeavor or interested in joining our team?
The Stark Group
Copyright © 2019 The Stark Group.
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You are here : About Dexter Township
Very early in the recorded history of Dexter Township are found reports of several Indian villages. The first white settlers came from mainly New York. The first settlement was made in 1825, on the northeast fractional one-fourth of section 36, by two brothers and their families. Samuel W. Dexter purchased the east half of section 12 where the Dover Mills were later located.
The first town meeting of the original Dexter Township was held in the home of Judge Dexter, May 28, 1827.
Due to errors in surveying the township, the northern portions of sections contained less than three-quarters of the prescribed quota of land. The western area of the sections fell short by as much as fifty to sixty-five acres per section.
The early settler began farming as soon as he purchased his land. Wheat was the leading crop for some time, and nearly every farm produced some corn, barley, oats and clover.
Apples were grown in all parts of the township. The farms in the North Lake area succeeded in producing the best and greatest varieties of fruit of any part of the township.
Up to 1832 the entire western half of Washtenaw County, plus parts of Jackson and Livingston Counties, were governed by the original Township of Dexter. It was comprised of land that would later become Dexter, Scio, Webster, Lima, Freedom, Bridgewater, Manchester, Sharon, Sylvan, and Lyndon Townships.
A new Township Hall was erected at 6880 Dexter-Pinckney Road in 1970. The frame building used as a Town Hall for many years, located across from the first Catholic cemetery on Quigley Road at the corner of Dexter-Townhall Road, was then moved to a site on Territorial Road and converted into a residence.
Churches:
The North Lake Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in 1836.
A Catholic Church was begun about 1840 and was located on the corner of Dexter Town Hall Road and Quigley Road in section 21 where the old Catholic cemetery can still be seen today. The members were very active until the church burned in 1854. It was then decided to rebuild within the Village of Dexter.
There were six whole school districts located in the township. The old Smith School, once located on a sandy rise of ground on the William Smith farm, was later rebuilt across the road on what is now Territorial Road. One school was located on the old Gallagher farm at the intersection of Territorial Road and Huron River Drive. There were three schools located on the old Plank Road (now Island Lake Road). For some time a school was located on Pinckney Road north of Territorial Road.
Located on what is now Pinckney Road near the intersection of Territorial Road, is the Hudson Mills Cemetery which some of the early settlers of the township are buried. Other cemeteries in the township are located near Four Mile Lake on Lima Center Road and on Riker Road near the North Lake Church.
For more information regarding the Hudson Mill Cemeteryplease contact the Dexter Area Historical Museum at:
3443 Inverness Street, Dexter, MI 48130
Hudson Mills:
The settlement of Hudson Mills once had a hotel, and it is noted that in September 1869 a township meeting was held in the hotel. Dances were also held in the hotel. Not only were the mills located there but also a small grocery store. The hamlet of Hudson Mills thrived as long as the mills were operating, the flouring mills, sawmill, pulp mill and also a plaster mill and cider mill.
Dover Mills:
The original Thomas Birkett farm--section 1 through 12--included some 425 acres. Here Dover Mills was located and here he built his beautiful, large home. In later years, Birkett Newkirk encourage his grandfather, Thomas Birkett, to donate some of his land near Peach Mountain to the Y.M.C.A. Much later Peach Mountain was given to the State of Michigan with the understanding that the University Of Michigan would use this land for its observatory.
Lakes:
There are many lakes in Dexter Township. The principal lakes are: Silver, Half Moon, North Lake, West Lake, part of Four Mile lake, Portage and Base Lakes. Half Moon Lake was named because of the contours of its shore line. Base Lake received its name because the base line of the government survey ran through it. Four Mile Lake was so named because it is four miles, on a direct line, west of Dexter. Portage Lake was named because it was the place where the Indians coming up the Huron River portaged their canoes to some other body of water. Section 12 at the south end of Portage Lake was once the site of a city called "Saratoga of Michigan" after the famous resort in New York.
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ABOUT TELLINA LEE
Little Aussie Firecracker
Tellina Lee is an international creative artist and content creator that was born and raised in Newcastle, Australia. Born with dance and music in her blood, she started tap dancing at 3, followed by every other style soon there after. As well as dance, Tellina is an accomplished actress, singer, V/O artist, choreographer, artistic director and producer.
Tellina has won many scholarships and championships, as well as receiving awards for the top 5% in Australia for Performing Arts.
She has performed in an abundance of professional musicals, in both USA and Australia, such as Grease, High School Musical, West Side Story, Music Man, Annie Get your Gun, Piano Man, and the list goes on. With some of her many highlights including; Opening for Busta Rhymes in Las Vegas, performing at the Superbowl, Sydney 2000 Olympics Opening Ceremony, writing top 5 song for Bejing Olympics and choreographing dance groups for international fashion shows, studios and artists. She also travels internationally to teach workshops, choreograph routines, and judge international competitions.
Tellina is the creator and choreographer of "Tap That" and is excited to use her passions and visions to bring tap to another medium incorporating film, videos and the live stage. Breaking glass ceilings with her sisterhood.
"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world." –Harriet Tubman
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Home News and Gossip Vidya Balan Plays the Biopic on The Human Computer Shakuntala Devi
Vidya Balan Plays the Biopic on The Human Computer Shakuntala Devi
Sehjan
We all know how picky Vidya Balan gets in terms of picking films. We have missed him for the whole of 2018. She had clearly been missing out on all the actions. Her last film was Tumhari Sullu which had critical and commercial success. She even received a lot of awards for it. But finally, she seems to be all geared up for the next film that she had announced. We already know she would appear in the film Mission Mangal that is going to be released on Independence Day, 2019. Well, that’s not all; she got the bigger and the better news. She had announced her next film over the social media which will be a biopic on the life of India’s greatest lady mathematician Shakuntala Devi.
Shakuntala Devi – The Human Computer
Shakuntala Devi was born in 1939 in Bangalore where she grew an interest for numbers at just an age of 3. At the age of 5, she turned out to be complex mental arithmetic. She is generally known as the ‘Human Computer’ for her extraordinary talent in solving complex arithmetic. Shakuntala Devi has a certain charm which is hard to miss. When she was working with her father in the circus, she displayed her talent for the first time. After that, there was no stopping to her. She went on to travel the world to showcase her arithmetic skills. She also has interests in astronomy, cooking, and politics. She even wrote a book on homosexuality in 1977 and the reason was her being engaged to someone from the community.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BxMGHlPn96A/
Vidya Balan on The Biopic
Vidya Balan who seems proud and excited to play her biopic announced it on both Twitter and Instagram. She even shared her thoughts by saying “I am extremely excited to play the human computer, Shakuntala Devi, on the big screen. She was truly someone who embraced her individuality, had a strong feminist voice and braved many a naysayer to reach the pinnacle of success”. Abundantia Entertainment is the producer of the film. Vidya Balan feels lucky to play the role of a small town girl who got the whole world under her feet with her genius. The film is helmed by Anu Menon and it is going to be released in the summer of 2020. Currently, the actress seems busy in focusing on her web series on Indira Gandhi and the web series is bankrolled by none other than Vidya Balan. This web series must be too important for her and that is why she had let go of many film projects.
Akshay Kumar Donates 1 Crore To Rebuild The Lives of Odisha
Bollywood upcoming movie
Shakuntala Devi
http://www.thebollywoodticket.com/
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Race through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon Ride in Universal Studios Florida
Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon. Image credit: Universal Orlando Resort.
3-D ride
Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon is located in the New York area in Universal Studios Florida (USF).
Fallon Ride Grand Opening Celebration
Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon officially opened on April 6, 2017. To celebrate the grand opening of the ride, Jimmy Fallon was on-site at Universal Orlando Resort to film episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon from April 3 to April 6.
The facade for Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon. Image credit: Universal Orlando Resort.
Race through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon Ride Description
Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon, also known as the Fallon Ride, is a 3-D ride based on a popular segment on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The ride that takes guests on a race through the streets and skies of New York City with The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon.
The adventure begins with a trip to Studio 6B Club (where The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is filmed). In this space, guests can watch show clips and see a live performance by the Ragtime Gals barbershop quartet.
Studio 6B features unique interactive experiences as well, such as a meet and greet with Hashtag the Panda (The Tonight Show mascot) and a retro-style game called "Jimmy Drive" (to prep you for the actual ride). Guests also have the opportunity to sit at an Interactive Desk where they can send Fallon-style thank-you notes to family and friends.
In the Studio 6B Lobby, guests get a short "briefing" about the ride and then take their seats in a flying theater that holds 72 audience members. This is where the race part of the ride begins. Audience members race Jimmy through New York City and then to the moon and back. The ride includes glimpses of New York landmarks like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.
Guests of this ride can also experience museum-style exhibits to learn more about the 60+ year history of The Tonight Show. Exhibits include various props and set pieces from the show, such as cue cards, camera equipment, and clothes worn by both past and current hosts.
Virtual Line Experience
Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon has a Virtual Line system. This means that you do not have to physically queue up like you do for other rides in the theme park. Instead, you get in a Virtual Line by reserving a ride time through the free Universal Orlando app or by visiting one of the nearby ride kiosks. When you reserve the ride, you will be told what time you should show up at the ride entrance.
The Tonight Shop
Fallon fans can shop for Tonight Show merchandise in The Tonight Shop, a themed store near the ride exit.
The Roots, the official house band for The Tonight Show, performs the musical score for this attraction.
Ride History
Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon replaced Twister…Ride It Out, a simulation ride that opened in May of 1998 and closed in November of 2015. Twister…Ride It Out replaced Ghostbusters Spooktacular, a Ghostbusters themed stage show that opened with the park in 1990 and closed in November of 1996.
The Making of Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon
You can go behind the scenes and learn more about the making of this ride in this official video from Universal Orlando Resort.
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Location: South Porton
As part of the D&D campaign I'm running, I've typed up a description of South Porton. The players have now left South Porton and are unlikely to return there in the near future; with that in mind I've decided to put the description of South Porton up on the blog. To be honest the majority of these things are either already-discovered by the players or things they could find out by asking a passer-by.
South Porton
South Porton stands a mere 50 miles from the beginning of the Lyria/Koru mountain range and a similar distance to the Mildwood. Nestled on a peninsula of the country, it is the main port town and centre of the fishing trade. Within a hundred miles of the city are several smaller towns and villages, including Ridge, Oakedge, Cliffbreeze, Limn and Morton’s Farm. Several farmers, traders and woodsfolk live in these areas.
South Porton’s exports mainly centre on fish, though the Science and Industry College have a large centre of learning there. The clockwork steamship prototyping industry provides jobs for hundreds of people who are not bothered by the heat and hardship, and people with no other prospects can make a hard living as porters, dockworkers or performing other civic duties.
South Porton manufactures most of its metal, but imports a lot of wood from nearby Westerwatch, and fresh food, fruit and stone from Easton.
Originally a tiny fishing town, South Porton became a thriving centre of trade through simple accretion. The easy access to the plentiful seas of Lyria meant that more and more entrepreneurs were able to come and set up shop; the influx of money drew more people to the area, and eventually the shanty towns became permanent structures, spreading into the surrounding countryside. As a result, South Porton has no city walls; the borders of the town have never been stable enough for long enough to warrant building them, and the area is peaceful. Unfortunately it has also become a home to a syndicated gang, the Porton Pirates, who all-but run the city from its underbelly. They extort local businesses and are responsible for several crimes of note in the area, though the South Porton Constabulary cannot find the evidence to make any charges stick.
Population: Approximately 8,000; the figure fluctuates constantly due to students at the College and to ships currently in harbour. The residents of South Porton are mainly human, though the city is in reality a melting-pot of races thanks to the thriving shipping industry.
Government: Governor Marcus Haybridge is nominally in charge of the city, ruling with the support of a council made up of leading figures in the city. In reality most of those leading figures have paid for their role on the council through bribery to the Porton Pirates.
Defense: Due to its defensible location and the peaceful times, South Porton’s defensive capabilities are limited to a Constabulary of about 300. That said, if any external force were to threaten the Porton Pirates’ position of power they would find significant numbers of the populace picking up arms to defend their interests. The Pirates do not back down.
Food and drink: South Porton has many inns and taverns. Nearer the docklands are the Scubber’s Rat, Jakes’, Ritter’s Demise and The Cutter, all of which are Pirates territory. Further into the city more salubrious drinking-houses can be found such as the Silver Unicorn, Candelabra and The World’s End. The latter is a coffee-house with two floors where most of the city’s businessmen can be found. Trade is often negotiated here; a strict two-tier system is in operation, with the upstairs balcony being restricted to clientele of the deepest wallet. The World’s End is a place to visit for those new in town looking for honest work, though it may well be only security on a wagon train. Newcomers looking for coin who are not fussy should try The Cutter. The cheapest beds in town can be found upstairs at Ritter’s Demise (fleas included in the price) while the softest beds and choice of companions can be obtained at the Silver Unicorn.
Supplies: Most innkeepers have found it useful to stock a small supply of adventuring gear. The College has a shop that caters mostly to engineers. For specifics, adventurers should try Rickon’s Arms, Sanders General Goods or Armourer Street Armour.
Religion: Lyria, like all of Ehrian, is monotheistic. Although outside gods are respected, all residents are either atheists or worship the One Tree. There is a small temple dedicated to the One Tree, complete with its own small offshoot, but there are no regular services or collections.
The Docks: The thriving fishing district of the city is home to many warehouses, brothels, doss-houses, taverns and the occasional honest business. The Porton Pirates operate out of a series of caves hewn into the rock nearby, accessed from several safe warehouses. Adventurers looking to talk to the Pirates should, carefully, make their intentions known in Jakes’ tavern.
At the Docks:
Knockdown Lighthouse: The lighthouse once shone to guide ships safely around the headland. Operated by the Orin family, it was tended night and day so that all traffic could pass safely. No-one liked to disturb the Orins; they tended towards xenophobia and were untrusting of outsiders, keeping their children away from other locals children. Some said that they were incestuous, others that they courted devils through human sacrifices, drawing ships on to the rocks rather than warding them away. Whatever the case, one night several months ago the light burned blood-red for half an hour before going out. When members of the Constabulary finally investigated, the place was empty; meals were half-finished, books and clothing discarded as though people had been engaged in their lives before being whisked away. The lighthouse was closed up and none dared use it. Chancy thieves who have gone there have either reported that it was empty and unused or have never returned.
Jakes’: Boarded-over windows, candles dimly lighting the interior and planks stained by beer, boots and blood. Jakes, the landlord, has a glass eye that never looks in the right place and a large axe under the counter that he calls the Ender. Plenty of trouble starts there, but he ends it. Most of the clientele is bearded sailors, cutthroats, mercenaries and down-and-outs, but the downstairs room is reserved for the Porton Pirates. They hold the occasional public meeting there, and adventurers looking for illegal work should enquire within.
The Dockmaster’s Office: All information about the comings and goings of ships at the harbour can be found here. The Dockmaster, Kinnen McAllister is known throughout the city as a corrupt man who will happily hide any amount of smuggling for the right amount; conversely, he’ll also shop in smugglers for more money. If the city could ever afford it, the Constabulary could lock up every smuggler in one go.
In the main city:
The residential quarter: Most people live here. The houses are terraced at the poorest end, detached towards the Council House. Most streets are straight thanks to the talents of a Town Architect from the city’s infancy.
Armourer Street: All of the weaponry and armoury shops operate from here, and none are better or cheaper than Armourer Street Armourers. Simple in name and in stock, they have a price and quality bar that cannot be beaten. Rickon’s Arms can also be found here; Albert Rickon lives in one of the two small rooms there, the other being a four-sided room literally covered in weapons of every sort. Stumbling in here would cause loss of a finger at the very least.
Council House: A large building, white marble with columns, built in a time of plenty. The interior is richly carpeted and smells of varnish thanks to the plethora of antique furniture in every room. Incorporating the Temple of the One Tree, the Council operates from here. A small bureaucracy keeps the affairs of the city tied up and ensures that the Porton Pirates are able to run things to their satisfaction. Ironically, if the Council ever did manage to wrest control of the city’s working from the Pirates it would run in a significantly worse fashion.
The Oracular Sanctuary of Sholtar: A large tower rising from the northernmost reaches of the town, made of granite blocks covered in moss and lichen. The tower is in a small walled garden next to the city’s graveyard; several trees have grown in the garden over the years but they have all died, leaving decaying skeletons behind. The tower is empty.
Science and Industry College: The College is melee of workshops and foundries, small shops and occasional explosions. The college has been looking for security guards recently working protection for shipments of steam harvesters which are due to leave for Fennica and the surrounding towns. All of their supply runs are under threat from the Growth Movement. This is a very thinly-spread resistance to the rise of steam and clockwork who are based in Fennica, and who want to return to a simpler form of life free from the trappings of metal. ‘From soil we came and to soil we will return’ is their motto, and they operate under the control of the mysterious LeMagra, a masked man.
The World's End: A coffee bar and restaurant with two floors. The lower floor is a high-class dining establishment, nothing more. The upstairs is where most of the city's high-finance deals are made. Visitors are not encouraged; one must either be invited by a member, or must have enough money to buy a theoretical membership, were such a thing to exist. Upstairs, large leather armchairs are roughly arranged around tables, cigar fumes fug the air and the waiters are tipped based on how discrete they can be rather than their actual service.
PoisonrootSteve Cook August 27, 2012 DnD, The Root of All Evil, location, poisonroot, south porton, writingComment
South-Western Lyria - Map
generalSteve Cook August 27, 2012 DnD, The Root of All Evil, map, place, poisonroot, south porton
Poisonroot - Chapter 4
PoisonrootSteve Cook August 24, 2012 chapter, farm, farmer, forest, poisonroot, triffids, trip, victor, writing
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Indy 500: Film & 4 Women
The first Indy 500 race was in 1911, but due to races being canceled during WWI and WWII, this weekend's race will be the 94th.
As the biggest motor race of the year, the Indy 500 has been not only a part of sports history but pop culture as well.
There has actually been a surprisingly high number of car racing films (and successful one's at that) including Cars, Days of Thunder, Fast and Furious, and Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby.
None of those successful stories deal directly with the race held memorial day week at Indianapolis Speedway.
But that doesn't mean there hasn't been films, just not necessarily popular films that have withstood time.
Films about the Indianapolis 500: Racing Hearts (1922), Speedway (1929), The Crowd Roars (1932), Speed (1936), The Big Wheel (1949), To Please a Lady (1950), and Winning (1969). [Image of Paul Newman from Winning, pictured above]
Surprisingly the Indy race was featured more in the first 50 years of the race, then in the most recent 50 years.
One of the interesting evolutions of racing has been the addition of women to the race. Unlike most sports, as women have entered the sport, they compete alongside men, not in separate races.
This year's Indy 500 stands apart in that of the 33 qualifiers for the race, 4 of them are women, the most ever. These women (Sarah Fisher, Danica Patrick, Ana Beatriz, and Simona Silveresti) owe there opportunity to Janet Guthrie (pictured left) who was the first woman to race in the Indy 500 in 1976.
It will be interesting to see how the movie Secretariat performs this year, as a story about Penny Chenery a woman in the world of horse racing. If that film is successful, I have a feeling studios could be wise to snatch up an woman race car film, such as the story of Janet Guthrie.
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Home / Bizarre / U.K. Government UFO Research: The Real Picture
U.K. Government UFO Research: The Real Picture
11:12:00 PM Bizarre Edit
As you may have seen, last week I wrote three articles here at Mysterious Universe on the involvement in the UFO subject of the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). It’s the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA). You can find the three articles at these links: one, two and three. It’s worth noting, though, that there are more than a few agencies of government in the United Kingdom that have been involved in the investigation of (a) UFOs and (b) those involved in the subject, whether researchers or eyewitnesses.
Nick Pope is someone who is well known to many people in Ufology. Between 1991 and 1994 he handled UFO reports for a body within the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense (MoD). When Pope’s first book was published (Open Skies, Closes Minds – in 1996) his publicist billed him as “the Real Fox Mulder.” Well, no, he wasn’t. Pope – when he was working in a branch of the MoD called Secretariat (Air Staff) 2a – told me that: “There is no specific ‘UFO budget,’ except the staff costs, i.e. around 20 % of my salary, together with a tiny percentage of some other salaries, reflecting my line management’s supervisory role.”
The Freedom of Information Act has shown that when Pope received letters or calls from people who may have seen UFOs, it was the job of Secretariat (Air Staff) 2a to forward the reports onto the Defense Intelligence Staff (DIS) and it was the DIS that did the work to determine if the witnesses had seen satellites, aircraft, etc. Their evaluation would then be shared with Secretariat (Air Staff) 2a, who would reply to the caller/letter-writer who wanted answers regarding what they had seen. Notably, too, there was no budget for Pope to travel around the country to investigate cases. It was all done from within the MoD Main Building. So, we have an office that investigated UFOs in the MoD, but which had a budget of only 20 percent of Pope’s salary, plus a “tiny percentage” of funding from “some other salaries.” On top of that, the work was actually done by the far more secret DIS, and Pope never had the ability or the funding to hit the road to investigate even a single case in that 1991-1994 period.
As my earlier articles showed, this is very much at odds with what GCHQ was doing in regards to UFOs. They were intercepting military messages concerning UFOs, investigating cases, keeping Robin Cole under surveillance, and working with the U.K. Police’s Special Branch. On the matter of Special Branch, they opened files on George King and his Aetherius Society in the late 1950s, specifically because of the society’s stance on atomic weapons. Now-declassified files on the Aetherius Society show that Special Branch sat in on lectures given by the society and hung around in the crowds when George King and his followers were expressing their views on atomic weapons at various locations in London. Here, then, is an example of how Special Branch personnel were given funding to investigate UFO-connected issues, and to hang out at Aetherius Society meetings and prepare reports. There is also a Special Branch file on Matthew Williams, the first man in the U.K. to be arrested, charged and fined for making a Crop Circle (the actual charge was criminal damage).
Moving on, there is the matter of what used to be the U.K.’s Provost and Security Services, an arm of the British Royal Air Force that got involved in matters relative to national security and counter-intelligence. When we once again turn our attentions to the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act, we find that in the 1960s, the P&SS were very active in visiting UFO witnesses to UFO activity. The 1960s equivalent of the office that Nick Pope worked in played no role in any of those visits. In February 1962, the P&SS was involved in the investigation of a “UFO/vehicle interference” case in Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire, England. It was in the early hours of February 16 when Ronald Wildman encountered a Flying Saucer-type craft that affected the lights and engine of his vehicle. A P&SS team was soon on the scene – and a file was quickly created.
P&SS personnel were also quickly on the scene when Anne Leamon saw a strange light (strange in the sense that it seemed to hover, reverse and move in ways that a regular aircraft could not) over the hills near her Taunton, Somerset, England home. Anne contacted the Air Ministry and was amazed when a Sergeant J.S. Scott of the P&SS turned up on the doorstep one night – and returned on several, subsequent nights. He suggested to Anne that she not discuss the encounter outside of her family. The P&SS were also involved when, in November 1966, a woman named Diane Foulkes encountered a low-flying UFO at Great Ness, England. The object had adverse effects on the engine and the lights of her vehicle. And, she felt “very ill” and traumatized. Once again, the P&SS opened a detailed file.
What all of this tells us is that various agencies, offices and bodies in the U.K. have had deep involvement in the UFO subject: GCHQ, Special Branch, the P&SS, and the Defense Intelligence Staff. All of them seemed to have had significant funding – and the ability to travel around the country – to carry out research into notable cases. Ironically, the publicly visible office that Nick Pope worked in had no budget to allow for travel, no budget to interview witnesses, and no budget to keep a watch on controversial figures in Ufology.
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An Algonquian people known as the Nacotchtank inhabited the area around the Anacostia River in present-day Washington when the first Europeans arrived in the 17th century; however, Native American people had largely relocated from the area by the early 18th century. Georgetown was chartered by the Province of Maryland on the north bank of the Potomac River in 1751. The town would be included within the new federal territory established nearly 40 years later. The City of Alexandria, Virginia, founded in 1749, was also originally included within the District. James Madison explained the need for a federal district on January 23, 1788 in the Federalist No. 43, arguing that the national capital needed to be distinct from the states, in order to provide for its own maintenance and safety. An attack on the Congress at Philadelphia by a mob of angry soldiers, known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, had emphasized the need for the government to see to its own security. Therefore, the authority to establish a federal capital was provided in Article One, Section Eight, of the United States Constitution, which permits a "District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States".
The Constitution, however, does not specify a location for the new capital. In what later became known as the Compromise of 1790, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson came to an agreement that the federal government would assume war debt carried by the states, on the condition that the new national capital would be located in the South. View of the United States Capitol before the Burning of Washington (circa 1800)On July 16, 1790, the Residence Act provided for a new permanent capital to be located on the Potomac River, the exact area to be selected by President Washington. As permitted by the U.S. Constitution, the initial shape of the federal district was a square, measuring 10 miles (16 km) on each side, totaling 100 square miles (260 km2). During 1791–92, Andrew Ellicott and several assistants, including Benjamin Banneker, surveyed the border of the District with both Maryland and Virginia, placing boundary stones at every mile point; many of the stones are still standing. A new "federal city" was then constructed on the north bank of the Potomac, to the east of the established settlement at Georgetown. On September 9, 1791, the federal city was named in honor of George Washington and the district was named the Territory of Columbia, Columbia being a poetic name for the United States in use at that time. Congress held its first session in Washington on November 17, 1800. The Organic Act of 1801 officially organized the District of Columbia and placed the entire federal territory, including the cities of Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria under the exclusive control of Congress. Further, the unincorporated territory within the District was organized into two counties: the County of Washington on the north bank of the Potomac, and the County of Alexandria on the south bank.
Following this Act, citizens located in the District were no longer considered residents of Maryland or Virginia, thus ending their representation in Congress. Ford's Theatre in the 19th century, site of the 1865 assassination of President LincolnOn August 24–25, 1814, in a raid known as the Burning of Washington, British forces invaded the capital during the War of 1812, in retaliation for the sacking and burning of York (modern-day Toronto). The Capitol, Treasury, and White House were burned and gutted during the attack. Most government buildings were quickly repaired, but the Capitol, which was at the time largely under construction, would not be completed until 1868. During the 1830s, the District's southern county of Alexandria went into economic decline, due in part to heavy competition with the port of Georgetown, which was further inland and on the C&O Canal. At the time, Alexandria was a major market in the American slave trade, but rumors circulated that abolitionists were attempting to end slavery in the nation's capital. Partly to avoid an end to the lucrative slave trade, a referendum to ask for the retrocession of Alexandria passed in 1846. On July 9 of that year, Congress agreed to return all the District's territory south of the Potomac River back to the Commonwealth of Virginia. Four years later, the Compromise of 1850 outlawed the slave trade in the District, though not slavery itself. Washington remained a small city until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.
The significant expansion of the federal government as a result of the war led to notable growth in the city's population, as did a large influx of freed slaves. By 1870, the District's population had grown to nearly 132,000. Despite the city's growth, Washington still had dirt roads and lacked basic sanitation; the situation was so bad that some members of Congress proposed moving the capital elsewhere. Crowds surrounding the Reflecting Pool, during the 1963 March on WashingtonWith the Organic Act of 1871, Congress created a new government for the entire federal territory. This Act effectively combined the City of Washington, Georgetown, and Washington County into a single municipality officially named the District of Columbia. Even though the City of Washington legally ceased to exist after 1871, the name continued in use and the whole city became commonly known as Washington, D.C. In the same Organic Act, Congress also appointed a Board of Public Works charged with modernizing the city. In 1873, President Grant appointed the board's most influential member, Alexander Shepherd, to the new post of governor. That year, Shepherd spent $20 million on public works ($357 million in 2007), which modernized Washington but also bankrupted the city.
In 1874, Congress abolished Shepherd's office in favor of direct rule. Additional projects to renovate the city would not be executed until the McMillan Plan in 1901. The District's population remained relatively stable until the Great Depression in the 1930s when President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation expanded the bureaucracy in Washington. World War II further increased government activity, adding to the number of federal employees in the capital; by 1950, the District's population reached a peak of 802,178 residents. The Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1961 and grants the District three votes in the Electoral College. After the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, riots broke out in the District, primarily in the U Street, 14th Street, 7th Street, and H Street corridors. The riots raged for three days until over 13,000 federal and national guard troops managed to quell the violence. Many stores and other buildings were burned; most remained in ruins and were not rebuilt until the late 1990s. In 1973, Congress enacted the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, providing for an elected mayor and city council for the District. In 1975, Walter Washington became the first elected and first black mayor of the District. However, during successive administrations, the city was criticized for mismanagement and waste. In 1995, Congress created the District of Columbia Financial Control Board to oversee all municipal spending and rehabilitate the city government. The District regained control over its finances in September 2001 and the oversight board's operations were suspended. On September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and deliberately crashed the plane into The Pentagon in nearby Arlington, Virginia, while United Airlines Flight 93 was destined for Washington, D.C., but crashed in Pennsylvania.
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Sigiriya (Ravana's Palace) - Incredible Ancient Technology Found in Sri Lanka? - Best of Utube!!! Youtube Filme, Youtube Music, Dokus, kompletter Film oder ganzer Film. Hier finden Sie die besten Videos auf utube!!!!
Sigiriya (Ravana's Palace) - Incredible Ancient Technology Found in Sri Lanka? von Phenomenal Travel Videos 9 months ago
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Hey guys, today we are going to look at a marvelous place in Sri Lanka, this place is known as Sigiriya. There is nothing like this anywhere in the world, which is why it is known as the 8th wonder of the world. This is actually a giant monolithic rock, about 660 feet tall, and you can see that it has a flat top, like somebody cut it with a giant knife. There are incredible ruins at the top which are extremely mysterious, so let us go straight to the top and see what's up there.
As you can see there are a lot of strange brick structures here and there and it is not only confusing for visitors, but even archeologists are not able to make complete sense of what these structures were used for. They confirm that everything you see is at least 1500 years old. But the mystery is not what these structures are, it is how these structures were built. How did ancient builders manage to move all these bricks to the top of the rock? It is reported that at least 3 million bricks are found here, but it would be impossible to make these bricks on top of the rock, there is not enough clay available here. They would have to have transported these bricks from the ground.
Now, the really bizarre part is that there are no ancient stairs from the ground level which go to the top of the rock. Look, all these metal steps were built in the last century. Without these new stairs, it will be very hard to climb this rock. This whole rock is now set up with different types of stairs, this is the spiral stairs at a different level. The ancient builders built very limited stairs, but these stairs definitely did not reach the top. This is exactly why no one, not even the locals knew about Sigiriya until 200 years ago, because there were no stairs to the top. And this is why an Englishman by the name of Jonathan Forbes "Discovered" the ruins of Sigiriya in 1831.
So how did early human beings get to the top of Sigiriya? Let us assume that it is possible to hike up hill through these very steep, wooded areas. But to bring 3 million bricks from the ground level, you will definitely need proper stairs. Without this, it would be impossible to transport them to the top.
Even if we claim that the bricks were made on top of the rock itself by some miraculous means, The construction work here would have needed hundreds of workers. How did they get their food? Look around, there are no fruit bearing trees or crops growing here, to feed anyone. And what about tools? How did they carry their massive primitive tools? Where did they rest and sleep? But it gets more baffling. Look carefully, there are not only bricks here, but look at these blocks. This is marble.
The milky white marble stones are not native to this area at all. These blocks are actually very heavy, every stone which makes up a step weighs about 50 pounds. And we can find thousands of these marble blocks here. Experts agree that Marble is not naturally found anywhere nearby, so how were they transported up to a height of 660 feet, especially without stairs to climb ?
But it is not the bricks or the marble that really baffles me. It is the granite. Look at this large water tank. If you ignore the bricks and marble blocks around it, you understand that this is the largest monolithic tank in the world. It has not been built by adding stone blocks, it has been created by removing granite, by scooping out tons and tons of granite from Solid Rock. And exactly how many tons of rocks have been removed? This entire tank is 90 feet long and 68 feet wide and is about 7 feet deep. This means that at least 3,500 tons of granite have been removed. So you can take a minute to really sit back and think if mainstream archeologists are right. If human beings were using primitive tools like chisels, hammers and pick axes on granite, which is one of the hardest rocks in the world, removing 3,500 tons would have taken years. And how did these workers feed themselves during all these years, if they don't even have stairs to go to the ground level? There is something fundamentally wrong with mainstream history books which talk about ancient people cutting rocks with chisels and hammers. But this is not just a theory, we have actual evidence in front of our eyes. Look here, we don't see individual chisel marks, we see long, snake like, winding tool marks which are continuous. This is not how primitive chiseling and wedge marks look.
#Search4Truth #Sigiriya #AncientAliens
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Writing Lives
Collaborative Research Project on Working-Class Autobiography
Introducing Our Autobiographers
Biographical Entries
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Archive of Working-Class Writing
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Researching Writing Lives
Arthur P Jacobs: Home and family
Sarah Callaghan November 10, 2015 Arther Jacobs, Home & Family
The first chapter of Arthur memoir is called, ‘Small Beginnings’, which I think is a perfect representation of Arthur’s early home and family life, being simple and happy.
Arthur’s memoir is filled with happy memories of his childhood, and presents this in an interesting way through personal pictures, giving readers an insight into his upbringing. The first picture he presents to us is in the living room of his family’s flat in Hampstead Heath. This immediately tells the reader of his family’s wealth, being an affluent part of London. Hampstead Heath was a bustling place to live in war time, containing a safe haven of parks and ponds for children to run free. They are also explained as having the, ‘best domestic architects of the day’. He explains his mother, looking at him with a ‘happy expression’, while his father sits back at the table, with a more ‘confused’ look on his face at his sons antics. This was typical of family life in the 1900’s, and symbolises the nurturing role of a mother, compared to a more layed back and masculine role of the father.
Hampstead Heath neighbourhood, 1902
Arthur’s father seems to be the authoritative presence in the household, with Arthur remembering vividly when he was told off for playing with a brick in his back garden, and continuing to call it ‘dadda’, which was followed by his father saying if he continued he would, ‘throw it in the fire’. However his father does have a softer side, with Arthur remembering when he got to pick out his favourite toy, a ‘red steam roller’ from the toy shop, and father telling him to, ‘bring it to the nice lady, being the shop keeper. These two snapshots represent the typical make role in a household. Arthur’s father is obviously authoritative, and also controls the money in the household, shown as he is able to buy Arthur his toys.
Meanwhile, Arthur remembers his mother mostly in the kitchen. Although these days, readers would look upon this is typically sexist, this was in fact typical in a wartime household. Even though their food was rationed, Arthur still remembers ‘revelling’ while eating her home-made ‘lentil soup’ and ‘strawberry jam’. Despite the activities of the Suffragettes in the 1900’s, women still had very few rights, with many having a ‘very stereotypical role in British society’. This can be seen with Arthur always relating cooking back to his mother. The most popular sector of work for women was a domestic servant, and even then there were only 1,740,800 employed in the whole population, showing how many women were merly stay at home wives like Arthur’s mother.
Arthur, without I think even realising, brilliantly presents gender roles in 1900’s British society. However despite this he and his family seem to have a very happy home life. This was obviously partially because of the family’s wealth, leaving them comfortable in their day to day errands, but gender roles in this period of history were so normal one would not bat an eyelid. I think it will be interesting to carry on reading Arthur’s memoir to see what sector of work he goes into, and how being a man will aid him in achieving his education and dreams
Bibliography;
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-role-of-british-women-in-the-twentieth-century/women-in-1900/. Last accessed 1/10/2015.
/. (2015). History of Hampstead Heath . Available: http://www.hampsteadheath.net/history.html. Last accessed 10/10/2015.
arthur family home Home & Family jacobs working-class
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2017-2018 Westchester Cup – Rules Summary
Rules Summary
Girls and Boys – U11 to U19 - Rules Summary
Four-team Group Play on Saturdays in fall 2017 and spring 2018. All teams guaranteed 3 games.
Playoffs: 2 or 3 games in spring 2018 in each age/gender group to select the Champion.
Preliminary Cup dates: 2017: 9/23, 10/21, 11/18; 2018: 3/17, 4/14, 4/28, 5/12, 5/19, 6/2, 6/9.
Cup winners will qualify for the US Club Regional tournament with free entry fee into the regionals.
Open to any team from a WYSL club or a team based in Westchester, Rockland, Bronx, Manhattan, or western Fairfield CT (Norwalk and west), and teams as approved by the WYSL. Clubs may form Cup teams with players from more than one US Club travel team in their club.
U14 and younger teams register by July 15, 2017 (u15 and high school teams by Jan. 15, 2018) with a preliminary US Club Cup roster with a minimum of 9 players (u11 and u12) or 11 players (u13+) and a maximum of 26. The oldest player on a team determines the age group. All players and coaches must have US Club passes for that club. The WYSL will make US Club passes for a fee. A player may only be on one Cup roster. The player roster freezes on the Friday before the first game of the competition A coach may coach more than one team from a single club with a pass from that club. A coach may have passes and teams from more than one club.
Fees: u11,12, (9v9 2x30 min): $275; u13/14 - 2x35 min, u15/16 – 2x40 min, u17/18 – 2x45 min: $300.
Games will be scheduled by the home team in consultation with the away team and played on the published Cup Saturdays starting between 9 and 5:30. Teams must be available to play on Cup Saturdays. On request, the Cup may allow a game to be played on another day agreed to by both teams on or before the next Saturday. Once scheduled a game does not move for other than exceptional reasons and only with the approval of the Cup.
All matches will have a 3-referee crew paid on the field by the teams except for the finals which will be paid by the Cup. Matches will start on time.
The group stage is a 3 game, round-robin competition within four-team groups in a division. In the fall, u14 and younger teams play two group games with the remainder of the group games and all playoff games played in the spring. U15 and high school teams play all games in spring. In the group stage, a game can be a tie.
Group Points are awarded: win 3, tie 1, loss 0. There is a tie break procedure. Group winners plus 2nd place teams advance to the playoffs. The playoff stage is a knock-out competition, with overtime, and PKs.
All participants (players, coaches, spectators, officials) are expected to behave in a sporting manner and to show respect for the game. Poor behavior will be disciplined by the Cup.
All teams, coaches, and referees must follow Concussion Management and concussion guidelines as defined and recommended by both US Club Soccer and US Soccer including “Return to Play”. Heading is prohibited in the fall for u12 and younger players and for u11 and younger in the spring. Uniforms with logos require approval by the Cup administration.
See the complete Westchester Youth Soccer League Cup Rules for details.
© Westchester Youth Soccer League. All rights reserved.
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Posts Tagged ‘Tyler Perry’
200 men, alcohol, anal sex, bitter, childhood, children, church, continue, cycle, distrust, drugs, forgive, forgiveness, groomed, Growth, hope, hurt, lifetime, macho, male, molestation, one in six, Oprah, Oprah Winfrey Show, penetration, priest, Relationships, release, secrecy, sexual abuse, shame, side efffects, sodemy, speak out, statistics, time, trust, twins, Tyler Perry, years
Oprah’s 200 Men
In Take 2: Film/TV Reviews on 8 November 2011 at 12:02 am
Okay…..I know I am months, upon months late….but it took some time and some courage for me to finally get the nerve to actually watch this.
As a female who was molested by her own father, I can only imagine what it could feel like for a male to feel like he had to keep the secret of being abused, in any fashion. In my blogs The House My Father Built and a Molestation Survivor Speaks….you can catch a glimpse of my struggle. And even after speaking to my biological father in NOvember for the first time in 15 years….he told me that I made it all up in my mind and that I was brainwashed by family members. WHO DOES THAT?!!!!!!!! He couldn’t face the fact that he was a perverted bastard who once molested his own sister and then continued with me…..he had to attempt to make me feel stupid and as if it was my fault. I refuse to own that, but it is very hard for me shake this part of my past; I don’t even know if I am supposed to.
So I recorded this on my DVR months ago and something is now telling me to watch it….on this EASTER Sunday( I know this is not when you will read this…but it is when I wrote it). Something is about to be resurrected….hopefully the real me. I feel safe enough to watch this. It is time for me to face this beast….and what better way than to watch this episode of Oprah and possibly help some other people.
Now, I didn’t watch the Tyler Perry Episode… I guess I should find a copy of it….but I will deal with what I have thus far.
Take 2 in 5, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, #Heal Read the rest of this entry »
Anika Noni Rose, critique, Film, For Colored Girls, For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, Janet Jackson, Kerry Washington, Khalil Kain, Kimberly Elise, Loretta Divine, Michael Ealy, movie, Ntozake Shange, Phylicia Rashad, review, Thandi Newton, Tyler Perry, Whoopi Goldberg
Colored Girl vs For Colored Girls:A Review-Part 2
In Take 2: Film/TV Reviews on 9 November 2010 at 12:43 pm
WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN TYLER PERRY’S MOVIE FOR COLORED GIRLS!!!!
Please ready Review Part 1 FIRST before reading this. Click HERE. Thanks!
This morning I woke up to pitch black darkness surrounding me in my bedroom as my conscience pulled me out of a nightmare, a nightmare where I envisioned my college friend who had been out drinking with all of us and I allowed one of our guy friends to drive her home. I mean, this was the south, stuff like that doesnt happen in the south, right? He was a friend of all of ours and had been for years so I didnt feel like there was anything to worry about. But fear struck my core when she told me that he fell asleep in her bed next to her, undressed. Friend or no friend, fear can shake a girl that way. She was intoxicated and had nothing to go on but his word that nothing happened. But she would never be the same after that, and the thought of him being in the house while she was passed out shook me to my core and stalked me in my sleep years later. This was one of the realities that I took home with me after watching For Colored Girls. There were so many eye-opening moments, but that one hit home the best like, like…….. like an abusive boyfriend with fists of steel coming with the strength of hurricane Katrina. For Colored Girls had done something to me that was unexpected; it made me rethink what it meant to be a Colored Girl TODAY and not remain the colored girl of 1997 when I first picked up the book and rose to success without accepting or issuing any apologies. What kind of Colored girl was I today? And what kind of audience needed For Colored Girls: the movie?
Walking into Potomac Yards’ Regal Theater at 4pm ,directly after work, was like me rushing to see Deep Throat; no one was supposed to like it but it was the IT thing to do of the day. The crowd of women rocking one dominate color or another was a secret sign to those of us who had knowingly been Colored Girls for years, that we were here to stake claim to something that had been ours for decades, some longer than others, but ours just the same. I found myself sitting dead center in the upper rows next to a mature woman rocking a powder blue beret and matching sweater who was as poised as she wanted to be. And as I looked around the room I saw colors that weren’t apart of our Colored Girl sisterhood and I just assumed that they were the Neos begging to find out what our sisterhood was all about, but I didn’t have the courage to tell them that this may be a hazing of sorts rather than the traditional induction expected by Nationals. Besides, I would have sounded crazy to a woman who just wanted to come and see a movie, like my co-worker who didn’t even know it was a book or a play before she saw my book placed on my desk earlier that day. The 15 minutes of previews was not enough time for me to fill these women in, and so I sat back quietly with my Icee and held my judgment close as the lights went dim.
As a person who has her Masters Degree in Theatre Arts, me watching a movie is like doing the job of the Continuous ( the person who gets paid to make sure that every time they do a retake the glass is filled to the same level and a purse is on the same shoulder…..notices all errors so the shot looks continuous) instead I am doing it for free. And even though there is no stage, I am still sitting against the fourth wall begging the movie to suspend my moment of disbelief, to pull me in. Immediately, as the movie began, the violinist sitting upon the piano, leg crossed, toes pointed inches away from the pianist’s face drew my disbelief’s attention clear into the room. Who does that in real life? I immediately was aware again that this was a movie and some of the creative effects were going to be there, rather than make this as real as possible, or at least that was my initial fear. Anika Noni Rose, supposedly assigned Lady in Yellow, but performing Lady in Brown’s poem, opens up with a beautiful dance that draws us all in, but this collage of voices that jack-up the opening make it hard to understand if the women are saying the same thing or different things, and all of it gets lost in the surround sound as jumbled mess before the last line if cursively scribbled across the screen. I think that it was a unneccesary dramatic effect, or improperly executed effect. Allowing each woman to speak was clean and would have been enough. But that wouldn’t be the last thing I had wrong with this movie.
The introduction of characters was another area that jolted my senses. In the play, they were just colored girls retelling stories, some theirs and some of the people they knew, but you were never quiet sure. Half the time it felt like they were telling your story but changed the name to protect the not so innocent. SO as soon as Kerry Washington gives Kimberly Elise the name of Crystal, she no longer becomes a color to me. She becomes the woman in the poem with a face, with a figure, and a name. It takes away some of my emotion because I now have someone to judge, someone to stare at and say…honey, you don’t have to live in this situation, rather than wonder who tried to help her. And as much as I tried, Kerry’s interaction with Michael Ealy the first time was so unbelievable. Maybe there are guys who hit female strangers, but I would think that he would have taken the stereotypical stance that all abusive men took; subtly. He would have held in all that rage until after she left so that nothing would seem out of the ordinary. Because if he indeed hit her, she would have called the cops for hitting a city employee and not just left some damn voicemail. Then BAM! Phylicia began a portion of the Beau Willie poem, so was she Lady in Red? It felt like a great place to put it, but then it dawned on me….. THE POEMS WERE INCOMPLETE AND OUT OF ORDER!!!! This was no longer For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Was Enuf, this was like Passion of the Christ versus Jesus Christ, Super Star! Okay, Okay…. I get it now. He may have used the foundation of my Bible, but he remixed the order of the scripture…..it was okay. My own Bishop doesn’t read the Bible in the same order every Sunday, but I get the same message. I could relax….almost.
In comes Loretta Divine, OBVIOUSLY the Lady in Green, but why in the HELL was she doing the Lady in Red’s “water it your damn self” poem? Confused. So, people weren’t keeping their own poems either? Okay, so this went from Passion of the Christ, to Jesus Christ Super Star to Mel Gibson yelling anti-Semitic phrases on a freeway. I couldn’t understand. Each Colored Girl had her own traits, why were they being mixed around? And for the life of me…..who in the hell casted Tessa Thompson? While doing the Lady in Yellow’s graduation poem in a purple leotard ( Thought I wouldn’t notice,huh?) she destroyed everything I am still paying student loans off of for was based on. She rambled through that piece just to hear herself speak. There were no revelations, no pauses, no tone fluctuations to suggest a change in who she was, and it was too damn sing-songy. I could hear Shakespeare clawing at the dirt in an attempt to get to her trailer to recite “Bitch, speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines“. And I don’t know that many girls who would tell how they lost their virginity to a class full of females. I just think that her execution could have been better. Just like I wondered why was Whoopi in the film? The ONE poem that she received was mumbled in with that of Thandie Newton’s and very inaudible. It was as if some theatrical effect went wrong and had a wardrobe malfunction in the middle of Super Bowl and no one was willing to apologize for it. That poem deserved its own light as well, they both did. They both were of equal importance. I spent half the time trying to hear Whoopi’s poem and drown out Thandi’s, who was supposed to be the Lady in Orange…signified by her double-sided taped orange robe. I felt as if I lost something there that I can’t get back. And the close up of Whoopi saying, “He said I was ugly” sucked all seriousness out of the theater as we all laughed at an aged Ceily and imagining Sug pointing her long, bony finger in her face, because this scene “Shol was ugly”. But maybe, and this could be a stretch, maybe Whoopi became the symbolic precense of all of us who know the play,have strayed from it and the minute your faults have been thrown in your face you run back to the old play and claim to hold it sacred. I say this from the rounds of critique’s I’ve seen on the internet. Are we the mothers of this movement dressed in all white wearing dirty draws full of our bullshit that we want no one else to see? So many women, self included, claim that the purpose of the play means so many things to them, but most importantly that they can change and rise above those things….only to refuse change the moment they heard this movie was coming out. Are we the theatrical cult mothers baptizing the new generation with honey and ash to convert them back to colored ballerinas in jazz shoes the moment that we see them engaging in the activities that For Colored Girls once saved us from all those years ago? Are we the ones wishing them well but leaving the theater abruptly because this new adaptation is ” the devil’s music“? Just a thought.
With the whole Beau Willie poem, and Crystal…. I think that Kimberly Elise did a good job. I still couldn’t take my mind away from the Lynn Whitfied & Oprah scene in Brewster Place where Oprah tells her to breathe after the loss of her baby. I can’t remember if I cried during that scene. I teared up more with her scrubbing the blood off of the sidewalk. That graphic brought home that I was judging and made me think of someone very close to me and her two children and the men she has chosen to love. It brought fear in my heart, since I knew that no one but my personal Crystal could choose to help herself once she decided to take responsibility for her part in such an abusive situation. I couldn’t save her. And that stung.
The men…..outside of me visualizing Maino (Khalil Kain, who has gained some weight) raping Anika….the other guys really just floated to the back of my memory. That rape scene was the most graphic I think I’ve seen Tyler get since Medea Goes to Jail with the guy on top of Keisha Knight Pulliam. The clock was dramatic, but I caught myself laughing at the fact that at least he was a 2 minute brother. I had to detach for my own mental safety. If anything I wanted to blame the guy and not Anika for letting a guy into her house on the second date. Those damn guys!!!! They were there….but they weren’t there. It was never about them. I still question their having been there in the first place. Loretta Divine’s speech to the door was powerful because no man was there. I think that the men could have very well been abstractly there. I think that would have been more powerful than me hurting my eyes trying to squint to see a private part or two of the hot ass guy butt naked behind some beads in Thandi’s house. But…it is what it is.
I finally figured out why Janet was dressed in Red….she was supposedly the Lady in Red, all be it imposing that she delivered the Lady in Blue’s speech. Sorry Kerry…she stole your poem. Also, the big reveal of her marital situation…. I WISH I WOULD sit on a bed all calm delivering some kind of poem to the back of my Down Low husband’s head after receiving the news that I received. THAT SHIT WAS SO UNPLAUSIBLE!!!! ARE YOU SERIOUS!!! She should have reached back into her acting bag from Why Did I Get Married, Too and imagined that he was coming in her house trying to take her stuff again. THIS is where she should have lost her damn mind!!! And then she went to a damn party!!!! Oh, somebody was smoking crack when this part of the script came to be. Sorry, Janet baby…I don’t blame you because you were allowed to do it….but it didn’t fly with me. You behaving like Cruella Deville was a nice surprise, but not much else. Okay, I take that back, your change around and revelation was nice as well. But the message that was sent with her being all calm was such the wrong message to send to colored girls. We didn’t see her break down over her health, but we saw her break down over her assistant’s children? We didn’t see her break her composure over the discovery of his lies, over the uncertainty of what was ahead? There should have been something a little more believable here…..but it was that “ONE YEAR LATER” jump that we were suppose to guess what happened. Tyler should stick to a 48hr window period of believability because things get left out.
I personally think that with 9 women being housed in a 7 woman script there were some things that were going to get left out. I think that Kerry’s character could have been combined with that of Whoopi’s and Phylicia’s. She could have still been the social worker who was a hypocrite and preying on everyone else’s business. And she could have still been Nyla (Tessa) and Thandi’s (Thandi) ….am I the only one who noticed that Thandi kept her own name in the movie, or was it Tangi?……mother. I think that Loretta should have been Lady in Red and Janet Lady in Green…for the most part. But with the mixture of parts, its hard to tell who should have been what. I just think that the backdrop for these women were not quiet right for this play. Maybe it should have been a Girlfriend’s kind of setting where Joan comes in and tells about the people she works with, or a few of Maya’s “Oh Hell Nawls”, and Lynn’s inability to see the world as it is to make us all wonder just where in the hell did Toni go. It would have made us, or at least me, believe half of the movie. I would have been able to believe that there were people out there who stuff like this happened to with it being told over cocktails in an upscale bar. Hell….they could have even turned it into a play about poets living out their lives on stage in poems, and that would have helped with the cadence of some of the poetical lines that most people would never say in regular conversation or description. But this is all…..should’ve, could’ve, would’ves.
After getting over the whole Women of Brewster’s Place vibe, I did walk away with two or three bells of personal wisdom; Anika Noni Rose & Phylicia Rashad. Anika Noni Rose should definitely get an award, a certificate, or a cover for her scene in the hospital. I cried. I sat there and internalized every thing she said because the scene was done beautifully. Having been assaulted by a member of my own family, I understood and I agreed. It made me take notice of the numerous times I dated a guy and he kept trying to have sex with me when the answer “No” never wavered. It made me wonder if we weren’t surrounded by other people, or if I hadnt driven myself home…what would have happened. Or I think back to the times of having my hands pinned down after I try to push him off of me and his refusing to stop. Do you press charges when someone refuses to stop, no matter how far you initially intended to go? Are you not allowed to change your mind when you no longer feel comfortable? After he is already in your house? I already dont let many people, male or female, into my house…but who am I really allowing into my space. And just because I gave him a kiss, was seen in public with him, or hugged him….does that send him a signal that more could be in store? I was frightened. It was a good frightening, it was a frightening of awareness. That was an awareness that I never took home with the play. Just like, I heard Phylicia speaking to Thandi…..I have some things that I need to “pluck out at the root”. And I was Thandi sitting on the table facing her baby sister trying to explain to her that I didn’t hate her and never had. No one had ever taught me how to love myself so I didn’t know how to love her. It was as if it was me saying ” being a colored girl is a metaphysical dilemma that I aint got quite good at yet” into the eyes of a sister who wasnt willing to see me try. I was Thandi accepting her reason for needing $300 and going to pay it to find out that it was all a lie. I’m not perfect, and I can’t go back, but I will not stand around and take the blame for the actions of a person I don’t know any more. I just dont know how to get my life to play out as beautifully as their scene. But I’ll keep praying. It was these amazing women who spoke to me the most. But I was still Thandi’s character, running from being touched through continuous touching. I was Tessa’s character, having been pregnant and having had an abortion at the age of 20. I was Phylicia, being in everyone’s business wanting to help solve their problems and my help not being welcomed. I was Janet, being a powerhouse and people not respecting that,and sometimes abusing that power. I was Kerry, wondering would I ever be able to have a child with a man who I loved and who loved me back after a guy who had seemingly destroyed my world. I was Kimberly, staying in situations that would never benefit me but never having the strength to leave. I was Whoopi, tugging between hypocrisy and the hypocrite. And I was Loretta, not knowing that I could love myself more than any man could make me believe that he could. I walked out of that theater feeling like I was still a Colored Girl. This movie didn’t confirm it, I knew it all along, and I was okay with letting another generation find their way back to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This movie wasnt taking anything from me…it was to remind me what I had, and I had it….but I expressed it through pre-judgment and an unwillingness to accept change. Indirectly, through all of its mistakes, this film, too, was a Colored Girl that needed to find its way…and it doesn’t need to apologize for its mistakes. It just needs to exist and touch those who can be touched by it. But just for dramatic effects it should scream to the mountain of complainers on critic sites and twitter, “Shut up bitch, I said I was sorry” just to prove a point that it wasnt trying to live up to their high ass expectations in the first place. Nothing can ever be an original, but the original. And this was no Ntozake Shange, but it was a Tyler Perry. Like it or not….it exists. And I took something away from it.
And as I pulled into my house and plugged in my dead cell phone, it began to buzz like a pack of bees at a honeycomb. I check my text messages…and low and behold there is a text from the guy I cut it off with last week. His text read:
MRH: Afternoon! I know I haven’t talk with you n a couple of days, but I was down south. I would like to see you tonight an hold an talkk to you if not I got ya
I swear my life matches up better than most. His improper grammar taunted me and my intellectual capacity to understand how he just refused to put a “d” on the end of “an” when needed. I stared at the implied “Bitch, you’re stupid” tattooed to the tail end of his reason for not calling, as if the South has yet to discover phones. Here I was trying to figure out if I as the Lady in Green or the Lady in Red, and then I thought “What the hell” I became greedy and became both. You see, “ever since I realized there was someone called a colored girl, an evil woman, a bitch or a nag….. I’ve been trying not to be that” but moments like this just push my buttons and test my commitments to myself. But I was a Colored Girl….and I was better than anything he could ever do to me. And so I replied:
I just got back in the house and about to head back out. I really don’t see us EVER hanging out again. Just from the lack of respect you showed me BEFORE you went down south. But I wish you the best & early congrats on graduation. May God cover you in his favor. Goodbye!
There it was….. mission accomplished and Colored Girl approved. I could hear the women high-fiving me in my spirit. I think that I have come full circle. “I had found God in myself and I loved her fiercly!” Whether it was the film or my history with the play….I was a Colored Girl Who Once Considered Suicide When My Purpose Became Too Much…..and I am sitting here rethinking that choice….because my Purpose IS Enough! *bundles up in my purple and green sheets and comforter & hits Save.”
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Choreopoem, critique, For Colored Girls, Growth, High School, Janet Jackson, Movie Review, Ntozake Shange, Sentimental, Tyler Perry
Colored Girl vs For Colored Girls:A Review, Part 1
5 Nov 10, Noon EST
For Colored Girls and I go back like hot combs on stoves, with everyone in the kitchen disguised as the family’s beauty parlor. Before I knew that “being black” meant that I was the Lady in Brown , by default, eternally. Before when pink use to be my favorite color, got sick of it and traded up to Purple because I discovered that I was a child of the royal Most High. Before when everyone called me Lady or Auntie Purple, while my house quietly went from Barney’s condo to Eve’s atonement for defiance just because I felt that way. Before I realized that red and blue make Purple and I may very well just be all three or the fact that those two make a whole me. You see, I am a Colored Girl. I’ve always been a colored girl. Long before I graced a stage senior year in High School to perform Lady in Blue’s signature “Sorry” piece…..I was just another Colored Girl who refused to be JUST another Colored Girl. I was the Lady in Red attaching notes to potted plants after realizing that I couldnt truly use sex as a toy like the boys but did so anyway still longing to be touched by him, by…..somebody with a pulse. Or I was the Lady in Yellow who was the ONLY virgin amongst my friends at graduation who had to pretend like I was working with something…all the while not knowing what that something was. And definately before green became my second favorite color because I liked the way it looked next to purple, the contrast was to insure that nobody ” could almost walk off with all of my stuff“; I’d had that happened one time too many and wasnt letting it happen again. Just like I dont know if I want to let this movie happen. Well, I didnt at first, but now I dont know. Lets just say, to say that I am afraid to watch this film, yet ecstatic at its existence….is a bit like me saying that I am kinda pregnant, its true but doesnt make much sense in the scheme of things.
Ntozake Shange is staring at me from the back cover of the book that I have had since 1998 when I purchased it from Borders. My co-workers, this morning, all mentioned how well-kept and new the book looks. I told them all that I have to take care of my books just in case I wanted to return the book to the store. But I didn’t have the strength to tell them, both African-American women, that I didn’t want to taint the image of the beautiful woman on the cover who I wished I had the courage to look like. I want to be able to rock my headwraps to work in my office without problems, or being deemed unprofessional. I want to be a Colored Girl at all times and not only when it is deemed appropriate. And with all that said…..I still can’t bring myself to bend back the cover while reading….or tell them that the real reason was because…….I don’t want to force the Colored Girl on the cover to bend over backwards for me.
The backdrop behind her tearful face, the woman on the cover, seems to be that of a bathroom tile. How ironic that ever since I can remember the bathroom has been my safe haven. I feel safe in there and private in there, and sometimes still til this day I go and sit and cry in there. “Dark phrases of womanhood of never having been a girl”….It is almost a temple that people are just expected to leave you alone. The bathroom was the one place where I was left undisturbed, un-molested, un-attacked, and able to be at peace with myself. And as I ponder about who could this image have been modeled after, this amazing woman…..I wonder why God chose for the tile to be such a presence. And I, for the life of me…cant fight the feeling that I have…this urge to want to shout that I look like the woman on the old cover….I dont look like Janet. Taking nothing away from her beauty… but honey, Janet doesnt even look like Janet. So how can I cling to this rapid pace of change that has been forced upon me? DO I have to? How can I go back and erase the years drawn around this image, this source of inspiration that helped me through my adoloescent years?
This work of art spoke to me when my high school theatre teacher introduced the book to me so that I may memorize some pieces for a monologue. I was entering into the Walter Trumbauer Festival in 1998. I did the festival every year and my senior year in high school would be no different. But wow, how was a young 17-year-old girl supposed to choose from so many wonderful monologues? For weeks I memorized poem, after poem, after poem because I had rationalized that they were all me and I could capitalize by entering the Monologue, Poetry Interpretation, and Silent Partner competition. But who would have known that I would have broken up with my high school sweetheart just weeks before the competition? It must have been an act of GOD! Because the last thing that he said to me before walking away was “sorry”.
You guessed it! I became the Lady in Blue. I memorized and worked on this piece and saw his face for days on end until I sometimes forgot that other people were in the class when I rehearsed. This was written just for me. It became my therapy, my way of speaking without having to tell my own business….I got to hide behind the performance in plain sight. It was beautiful. I won 3 FIRST place trophies that year, and they still are out in my house today some 12 years later. I also got the opportunity to perform the “Sorry” piece in front of the entire school in an assembly to showcase those of us who won at the festival. I found my ex in the crowd sitting next to his sloppy ass new girlfriend ( I NEVER liked that trick) and I performed it directly to him. It was my apology for thinking that he was someone worth my time. I was finally sorry; sorry for having wasted my time. (And for those who have read my Advice from the Other Woman blog here on this site….you know that I wasnt done…yet). It was so dramatic. He sat directly under one of the overhead lights in the theatre and I could point him out in the crowd. My performance would be the talk of the school for weeks because everyone knew that I was talking about his ass! But this year when I finally got tired of his sorries…. I walked away for good, forever…because “I couldnt stand being sorry and colored at the same time”. I had come full circle. I had finally received what I sought for this piece to deliver me from all those years ago. I had found the answer before I could ever understand the problem. It had been confirmed, this play was for ME!!!
So, who is this movie for? Is it for colored girls who have baptized this play and deemed it their Bible when Zane novels aren’t enuf? Or for colored girls who pray that he (Tyler Perry) doesn’t fuck up our Holy Grail when Why Did I Get Married Too? and Medea’s Great Big Family were enuf? I am afraid to find out. Just from the commercial, the first time I saw it I was captivated and amazed that all of these amazing women were going to be in MY play!!! Who was going to play me? Who was going to tell my story. And then I saw it, the snippet of Janet doing the intro to “Sorry”. BUT WHY WAS SHE IN A RED DRESS?! That is the Lady in Blue’s SIGNATURE piece… I can’t get past that. I can’t fathom how you could be so careless and I immediately began to get enraged. I was no longer a Colored girl but a Color-ed girl feeling as if this commercial has just thrown bleach on my favorite blue Prada dress! WHERE WAS MY BLUE!!!? I was already upset. I literally ran to my bookshelf and hugged the book and began to cry. Yes, I sound psycho…but you don’t understand…..this is my LIFE that Tyler is playing with. Who were these men in an all woman’s play? Would I feel as if too much had been done to such a sacred script? Or should I be glad that at least all of these black women were employed? No matter what, I couldn’t shake the feeling that a street graffiti artist had come along and added a few of his homeboys to Da Vinci’s Last Supper and they were depicted stealing food from Mary’s, I mean Peter’s, plate. Or was I taking it too far?
Did I not have the right to prejudge? Was I not justified in thinking that the absence of real men in the play made me internalize what was being depicted on stage, force me to visualize myself in one of those colors? Or was I wrong for not giving it a chance? Or was I upset that another sacred piece of black art was being brought mainstream, mainstream….and possibly amongst “mixed company”? I felt the same way about Good Hair. But this was Lauryn Hill killing me softly but showing up 3 hours late to do it kind of confusion.
So, today, I brought the book with me to work. After reviewing it this week from cover to cover and having purchased my tickets Monday in advance…thanks Fandango!….I think I am ready to see the movie. I dont know what to expect. But I think I am ready to have an opinion. So, Dressed in all black , brown skin with a touch of Red….my colors of choice today…..I have 4 hours left……..I’ll tell you what I think. And If I’m wrong….. I’ll apologize
~*Check out Part 2 for My Critique*~
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Archive for the 1980s Category
Great Rock Albums of 1985: Phantom, Rocker and Slick
Posted in 1980s, Music, Rock, Uncategorized with tags Americans, Classic Rock, Guitarists, hard rock, Heavy Rock, King Biscuit Flower Hour, Phantom Rocker and Slick, Stray Cats, The 1980s on January 13, 2019 by 80smetalman
The biggest question I have been asking myself since 1985 is “Why didn’t Phantom, Rocker and Slick achieve greater success than what they did? For me, this was a great straight ahead, no frills rock album from a good tight band. The band possessed all the tools to be great. Slim Jim Phantom and Lee Rocker proved they were a great rhythm section when they were in the Stray Cats and were just as formidable in this band. Additionally, Lee has a good singing voice that fits perfectly with the songs. Plus, guitarist Earl Slick shows he’s a great guitarist as he plays what I have always considered the best guitar solo of 1985, (see below). So, why not?
Apart from the album itself, I can also provide additional evidence that they sounded just as good live. I recorded their live performance on the King Biscuit Flower Hour, (who remembers that?). In fact, some of the songs they played sounded better live than what it did on vinyl. Again, I ask, “Why not?”
If people don’t remember anything else about Phantom, Rocker and Slick, the one song that they might remember is the hit, “Men Without Shame,” which got a considerable amount of airplay on local radio. I was hooked straight away the first time I heard that song, despite the fact the radio version of the single chopped a good chunk of the guitar solo out of it. Why do they do that? So, you can imagine how I reacted when I heard it in its full glory.
Some more critical people might criticise the album for sounding a bit the same. Yes, I would agree there are similarities between the tracks, “Sing For Your Supper,” “Hollywood Distractions” and “Well Kept Secret” but not enough to say they are all the same. All three are great straight ahead power rockers and all three members of the band are at the top of their game. Furthermore, Phantom and Rocker haven’t totally abandoned their time with the Stray Cats as evidenced in the 1950 ballad like tracks, “Time is On My Hands” and “No Regrets.” On the latter tracks, there is another killer guitar solo from Slick. That’s the other thing, I’ll go out on a limb and venture my belief that Earl Slick is a better guitarist than Brian Setzer was in the Lee and Jim’s former band. An additional bonus is that there is some strong song writing on the album. “Lonely Actions” is proof of this, so again, “Why not?”
Men Without Shame
My Mistake
Time is On My Hands
Lonely Actions
Well Kept Secret
Runnin’ From the Hounds
Hollywood Distractions
Phantom, Rocker and Slick
Slim Jim Phantom- drums, backing vocals
Lee Rocker- double bass, lead vocals
Earl Slick- guitar, backing vocals
The theme of this post is quite obvious by now. I am asking why didn’t Phantom, Rocker and Slick achieve greater success. Everything to do so was present in bucket loads. My only theory to it was that it was down to the categorising and polarisation of music back in 1985. There was no neat little box for trendies or metaheads to put them into and while the music on the album is well played, there is an element of fun to it and society back then wasn’t ready for it.
Next post: Brian Setzer- The Knife Feels Like Justice
To download Rock and Roll Children, go to: https://c-newfreepdf.cf/olddocs/free-download-online-rock-and-roll-children-pdf-1609763556-by-michael-d-lefevre.html
Great Rock Albums of 1985: Joe Lynn Turner- Rescue You
Posted in 1980s, Heavy Metal, Music, Rock, Uncategorized with tags Classic Rock, Deep Purple, hard rock, Heavy Rock, Joe Lynn Turner, progressive rock, Rainbow, Rescue You, Ritchie Blackmore, synth pop, The 1980s on January 9, 2019 by 80smetalman
Not long ago, I heard an English friend of mine refer to Joe Lynn Turner as ‘that American pretty boy who replaced Graham Bonnet in Rainbow.’ True, Joe Lynn Turner is American and back in 1985, many ladies found him very fanciable, my sister was ga ga over him. However, the man also possesses a very good singing voice and it was only natural that after Ritchie Blackmore dissolved Rainbow to rejoin Deep Purple that Joe would put out a solo album. The result was his debut album, “Rescue You.”
Joe Lynn Turner was a victim of the 1985 belief that synthesizers were the way forward for music back then. Many of the songs on the album seem to be over dominated by it and on some of those things, I have always thought that they should have been turned down and the guitar turned up. Then the album would have been a real rocker. Don’t get me wrong, “Rescue You” is in no way an 80s synth pop album, there are some good rocking moments and on some tracks like the title track and the opener, “Losing You” you can definitely hear a bit of the old Rainbow on it. While the guitar on the title track is present, it is often obscured by the keyboard and for that song, I can’t help thinking how much I would be head banging away to it if the keyboards weren’t so dominant.
Being a typical wishy-washy Gemini, (I don’t really believe that zodiac stuff), I think there are some tracks where the keyboards do work. The prime example here is the big single from the album, “Endlessly,” which was good enough to get to 19 in the singles charts while at the same time having metalheads shaking their heads and accusing Joe of going too commercial. The keyboard intro also works on “Feel the Fire” but as the song progresses, I again think they should have taken a back seat because this is another song that could have been great if the guitars had been turned up more.
In spite of all my ramblings of too much keyboard, there are some tracks where Joe hasn’t lost touch with his hard rock roots. While the keyboards still exist on “Get Tough,” the song does rock and he also demonstrates that he has the pipes for such songs. This is another song that takes me back to his Rainbow days. In fact, the second half of the album is definitely more rock than the first. “Eyes of Love” is a fine example of this, it has a great guitar solo, but if you want concrete proof, the best track is the closer, “The Race is On.” This is the hidden gem because it just rocks with little interference from keyboards. With all my contradictions about guitars and keyboards on “Rescue You,” the one constant throughout the entire album is Joe Lynn Turner’s voice. Pretty boy or not, he has always had a great singing voice and deserves credit for it.
You Hearts
Endlessly
Rescue You
Feel the Fire
Eyes of Love
The Race Is On
Joe Lynn Turner- vocals
Alan Greenwood- keyboards
Chuck Burgi- drums
Bobby Messano- guitar, bass, backing vocals
The problem in 1985 was that the music industry was convinced that music had to have synthesizers to be any good. This belief had an effect on “Rescue You” for Joe Lynn Turner. Despite his great singing voice and the good quality of the tracks on the album, I can’t help thinking how much better some of the tracks would have been if there was less keyboard and more guitar.
Next post: Phantom, Rocker and Slick
To buy Rock and Roll Children, go to: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rock-Roll-Children-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1609763556
Great Rock Albums of 1985: ZZ Top- Afterburner
Posted in 1980s, Heavy Metal, Heavy Metal and the 1980s, Music, Rock, Uncategorized with tags Afterburner, Americans, Blues, Classic Rock, Duran Duran, Eliminator, hard rock, Heavy Metal, Heavy Rock, Southern Rock, synth pop, Tex-Mex, The 1980s, ZZ Top on January 6, 2019 by 80smetalman
It’s back to the grindstone for the new year so in my case, it’s back to the tour of the golden decade of heavy metal. While, it wasn’t planned, I realized that it might be cool to start the new year off with a post from an album from one of the all time greats, ZZ Top.
Thinking back to 1985, when I heard the first single from the “Afterburner” album, “Sleeping Bag,” I have to admit that I wasn’t too impressed. For me, that song was too synth pop and was too quick to accuse ZZ Top of selling out and abandoning their Texas boogie blues sound and wanting to sound like Duran Duran. Many other people I knew were of the same opinion. Fortunately, like I’ve said so many times throughout the history of the blog, one song doesn’t make an album. Slowly but surely, reports came in that the rest of the album wasn’t all synth pop and that Top hadn’t completely forgotten where they had came from. What convinced me that this was the case was the second single, “Rough Boy.” Even though some of Billy Gibbons’s great guitar work was shortened for the sake of radio friendliness, I realized that the reports from others were indeed correct.
Thinking about “Rough Boy,” the full length version on the album is even better from what radio had to offer. True, the song is a bit of a ballad but if ballads had guitar solos like this one, then what’s the problem? I will also not debate that there might be some synth pop sounds on “Afterburner” but for the most part, there is plenty of what ZZ Top had been famous for before hand. “Stages,” which was also released as a single and “Woke Up With Wood” bear testimony to that. If these tracks don’t convince you then “Can’t Stop Rocking” certainly will. This is a straight forward hard rocker that comes close to being a metal tune. Dusty Hill does the vocal duties here and he sounds fantastic and that leaves Billy to work more of his guitar magic and the result is pure magic.
The second half of the album carries on where the first half left off. “Planet of Women,” (I would have loved to have gone there in 1985), gets my vote for hidden gem. It’s as hard rocking as “Can’t Stop Rocking” but what carries past the line for me is Billy Gibbons. His solos are just a little bit better on this track. Things continue in this vein for the rest of the album with “I Got the Message” but “Velcro Fly” does mark a slight return to synth pop, except Billy’s guitar solo is first rate. Then we get to the last two tracks where the links with the previous mega successful “Eliminator” album come through loud and clear. Penultimate track, “Dipping Low (In the Lap of Luxury) reminds me very much of “Give Me All Your Loving,” not a bad thing. The closer, “Delirious,” reminds me of “Bad Girls,” which was the closer from the “Eliminator” album. Maybe the band planned it that way because when the album closes, you are convinced that ZZ Top haven’t sold out and remain the band that they have always been.
Woke Up With the Wood
Can’t Stop Rockin’
Dipping Low (In the Lap of Luxury)
Billy Gibbons- guitar, lead vocals, backing vocals
Dusty Hill- bass, keyboards, backing vocals, lead vocal on tracks 5 and 10
Frank Beard- drums
In conclusion, ZZ Top did not sell out with the “Afterburner” album. In fact, though I wasn’t impressed when I first heard it, “Sleeping Bag” has been growing on me more. It just proves how great this band has always been.
Next post: Joe Lynn Turner- Rescue You
Great Rock Albums of 1985: John Cougar Mellencamp- Scarecrow
Posted in 1980s, Music, Rock, Uncategorized with tags Americans, Classic Rock, Farm Aid, hard rock, Heavy Metal, Heavy Rock, John Cougar, John Cougar Mellancamp, John Mellancamp, MTV, Scarecrow, synth pop, The 1980s on December 20, 2018 by 80smetalman
With both heavy metal and synth pop polarizing a lot of musical tastes in 1985, many people claimed that they just wanted to hear some straight forward, old time rock and roll. For a lot of these people, the “Scarecrow” album from John Cougar Mellencamp gave them just that. I can’t really disagree with that thought. While I was firmly seated in the heavy metal camp back then, I still appreciated the no frills rock the album provided. It’s probably why the album made it to number two on the album charts.
For the singles enthusiasts, “Scarecrow” netted five of them, all of which got inside the top thirty. This provides further evidence that many Americans wanted this type of straight forward rock. Because that is basically what the album is full of, eleven good no frills rock tunes. Okay, maybe the second track doesn’t qualify as such but the other ten for sure. The singles “Small Town,” “Lonely Ol’ Night” and “R.O.CK. in the USA” are still remembered and enjoyed today. All three are good steady rock tunes. Less remembered however, is my personal favourite, “Rain on the Scarecrow.” This dark song highlights the tragedy of American farmers at the time as many of them were going bankrupt and having their farms repossessed by the banks. I’m tempted to go into a political rant here but I’ll desist. What “Rain on the Scarecrow” did do for me was make me take John seriously as a song writer.
Not being one to judge an album by its singles, I can safely say that the rest of the album holds up well. Even though “Justice and Independence 85” and “Minutes to Memories” were never released as singles, they still made it onto the Hot Tracks Chart and I can see why. Furthermore, John’s more topical songwriting features in the former of the two and continues with “Face of a Nation” where he sings about the poverty and homelessness that was happening in the mid 1980s at the time. What I conclude here is that John Cougar Mellencamp’s more developed songwriting combined with straight forward rock, which a lot of Americans were craving for at the time, combined to make “Scarecrow” probably his best album at the time.
Rain on the Scarecrow
Grandma’s Theme (In the Baggage Coach Ahead)
Minutes to Memories
Lonely Ol’ Night
The Face of the Nation
Justice and Independence ’85
Between and Laugh and a Tear
Rumbleseat
You Gotta Stand for Somethin’
R.O.C.K. in the USA
John Cougar Mellencamp
John Mellencamp- guitar, lead vocals, harmonica on Small Town
Larry Crane- guitars, backing vocals
Kenny Aranoff- drums, percussion, tambourine, backing vocals
Mike Wanchic- electric guitar, backing vocals
Toby Myers- bass, backing vocals
John Cascella- keyboards
Rickie Lee Jones- vocals on “Between a Laugh and a Tear”
Sarah Flint- backing vocals on “R.O.CK. in the USA”
Laura Mellemcamp (John’s Grandmother)- lead vocal on “Grandma’s Theme”
Mimi Mapes- backing vocals on “Minutes to Midnight”
A. Jack Wilkins- saxophone on “Justice and Independence 85”
Richard Fanning- trumpet on “Justice and Independence 85”
In a 1985 that seemed to be polarizing musically, it was a relief to many that there could be straight forward rock around at the time. Not only would John Cougar Mellencamp release a top album, he would go on to arrange a benefit concert to help America’s bankrupt farmers but that’s a story for another time.
Next post: My Christmas Top Ten Revisited
Great Rock Albums of 1985: Loverboy- Lovin’ Every Minute of It
Posted in 1980s, Heavy Metal, Music, Rock, Uncategorized with tags Canada, Classic Rock, Guitarists, hard rock, Heavy Metal, Heavy Rock, Keep It Up, Loverboy, Lovin' Every Minute of It, MTV, new wave, The 1980s on December 13, 2018 by 80smetalman
Possibly one of the best musical surprises for me in 1985 came in the form of Loverboy’s album, “Lovin’ Every Minute of It.” After the more keyboard oriented previous album, “Keep It Up,” I thought that Loverboy were heading down the path of more commercialized rock. That meant that one night when I happened to have had MTV switched on and the video for the bouncy, hard rocking title track came on, I was pleasantly taken by surprise. The fact that they rocked things up a bit made me give this album a chance and I was impressed.
The first five songs of “Lovin’ Every Minute of It” are true rockers. Hell, the third song, “Friday Night” could be a heavy metal song with the way the guitar opens things and how the song progresses after. All I keep thinking was, “Well done, boys!” That track follows on nicely from its predecessors, which include the title track and “Steal the Thunder” holds its own in the hard rock stakes. Even when they go to a power ballad with “This Could Be the Night,” one doesn’t get to thinking that things will go commercial with this one. I have to confess, this is a good power ballad here. The rock party continues further with “Too Much Too Soon,” which is another song which could be taken for a heavy metal song, maybe even more than “Friday Night.” I will point out that Mike Reno does a great vocal performance on that one.
With all of the above said, “Lovin’ Every Minute of It” is an album of two halves. After “Too Much Too Soon,” keyboards enter into things. This is not a bad thing although some of the tracks do sound 1980s new wave. “Lead a Double Life” sounds like it could have been used in a mid 80s comedy film soundtrack. “Dangerous” sounds like it could have been a Night Ranger song. “Destination Heartbreak” is a ballad but not as good as the power ballad mentioned previously. What redeems them in my view is that Paul Dean’s guitar can be heard along with all the keyboards and he does rip some really good guitar solos on the songs. In fact, this album could be called Paul’s album due to the way he solos all the way through it. It is a major contributor as to way the album is so good.
Lovin’ Every Minute of It
Steal the Thunder
This Could Be the Night
Too Much Too Soon
Lead a Double Life
Destination Heartbreak
Bullet in the Chamber
Mike Reno- vocals
Paul Dean- guitar, backing vocals
Doug Johnson- keyboards
Scott Smith- bass
Mike Frenette- drums
In 1985, I stopped labeling Loverboy as a hard rock band who had sold out and gone commercial. While “Lovin’ Every Minute of It” was still a very successful commercial album, it went double platinum, it also proved that that success could be done without compromising musical integrity. So full marks to the band all around on that.
Next post: John Cougar Mellencamp- Scarecrow
Great Rock Albums of 1985: Eric Clapton- Edge of Darkness
Posted in 1980s, Music, Rock, Uncategorized with tags Behind the Sun, Blues, British, Classic Rock, Edge of Darkness, EP's, Eric Clapton, Guitarists, hard rock, Heavy Rock, television, The 1980s on December 9, 2018 by 80smetalman
Blast Wikipedia! A few months ago, when I posted about Eric Clapton’s “Behind the Sun” album, I saw that in Eric’s discography, this 1985 “Edge of Darkness” album mentioned. Thinking, that it might be some little known live album, I decided to include it in my list of great albums of 1985. It turns out that Eric wrote the musical score for the British television series of the same name. At first, I thought, “Boy, do I feel foolish” but after several listens, I think it is still worthy of an 80smetalman post.
Basically, Clapton just went into the studio and did what he did best on the guitar. He just jams away through the six song EP which is only 19 minutes long. That’s no problem for me either because it is 19 minutes of pure guitar heaven. Listening to the opening title track, I am left to conclude that the television show was some horror/mystery/suspense programme. The way the guitar just lays down that sort of vibe, backed up by a piano which makes the entire song sound rather eerie. If that was what Eric was going for, he did a great job.
The rest of the album follows along in this vein. There are no fast hard rocking tracks here, just some mood effecting instrumentals. “Escape From Northmoor” stands out a little because of the use of keyboards building up the suspense. Furthermore, Eric’s guitar intro on “Oxford Circus” makes for a good change of pace and lets everyone know that he’s still a guitar God. I have come to the further conclusion that “Edge of Darkness” is a good album to just sit back, mellow out and get engrossed in the music.
Escape From Northmoor
Oxford Circus
Northmoor
There are no musical credits listed here so I assume that Eric Clapton played all the instruments himself.
One thing I have taken for granted over the years was how many great guitarists or their bands put out albums in 1985. There was Eric Clapton of course and Jeff Beck, plus when I hit the metal portion of 1985, will go on about Yngwie Malmsteen. On top of that, there were offerings from Mark Knopfler and Angus Young. I had also got the added bonus of seeing all of these, except Jeff Beck, live in this year and while Deep Purple’s album came out in 1984, I did see them live in early 1985 so Ritchie Blackmore must be added here too. What a great year it was.
Next post: Loverboy- Lovin’ Every Minute of It
Great Rock Albums of 1985: INXS- Listen Like Thieves
Posted in 1980s, Music, Rock, Uncategorized with tags Australia, Classic Rock, hard rock, Heavy Metal, Heavy Rock, INXS, Listen Like Thieves, new wave, Shabooh Shoobah, The 1980s, The Swing on December 5, 2018 by 80smetalman
INXS were always one of those hit or miss bands for me, especially by 1985 when I was full throttle into heavy metal. I thought a lot of their 1983 album, “Shabooh Shoobah” album, however, I wasn’t that impressed with what I heard from their follow up album, “The Swing.” Then that’s how my strange mind works. As a result, I wasn’t sure whether or not I should give their 1985 effort, “Listen Like Thieves” a chance. In fact, I must confess that I didn’t actually listen to the album in 1985, it would be a few years later when I was treated to it. I realized then that this was a pretty decent album.
So-called experts claim that the three singles released from the album represented INXS’s move to being a more singles band. However, while “What You Need,” “Listen Like Thieves” and “Kiss the Dirt (Falling Down the Mountain)” all charted in the band’s native Australia, only the first one charted in the US. I’m not sure how they did anywhere else. This adds to my paradox in regards to them. Three singles from an album would have led me to brand them a top 40 band back then but the fact only one song actually reached that plateau in the US convinces me they weren’t and makes me like them more.
Now as most of you already know, I don’t judge an album by its singles and it’s the rest of the album I was most interested in. Fortunately, the rest of the album doesn’t disappoint. “Shine Like It Does” continues the fusion of new wave and hard rock and “Biting Bullets” gets my vote for hidden gem on the album. It has a catchy rhythm with a hard rock edge and the keyboards support the song and add an extra dimension to it. “This Time” has an intro that would sit well with a heavy metal song and though it’s not metal, the band makes good work of things with it. With nearly all of the songs, INXS employ a catchy melody that goes well with the guitars and new wave sound. Sure, there are keyboards but they are in no way synth pop and it makes things that much better. The only song that doesn’t really do it is the instrumental “Three Sisters” but there’s enough there on that one that I still will listen to it. It’s almost the same story with “Same Direction,” except it does have a catchy chorus and a nice little guitar hook. The rockiest song, however, is the closer, “Red Red Sun.” It seems here that INXS were determined to go all out in the end and they do it quite well here. There are no solos but some good guitar hooks on it, so it’s a great way to end the album.
Shine Like It Does
Good + Bad Times
Biting Bullets
Same Direction
One x One
Red Red Sun
Michael Hutchence- lead vocals
Kirk Pengilly- guitar, saxophone, vocals
Garry Gary Beers- bass
Andrew Farriss- keyboards, guitar
John Farriss- drums, percussion
Tim Farriss- guitar
This is a case of appreciating now what I didn’t appreciate back then. Fearful to take the plunge, I had to wait a few years to see what a good album “Listen Like Thieves” actually was. Fortunately, this is also a case of all’s well that ends well.
Next post: Eric Clapton- The Edge of Night
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Home Euro Clubs Top 3 Premier league players so far this season
Top 3 Premier league players so far this season
The Premier league season has been about the duel between defending champions Manchester City and Liverpool from the off. Tottenham also still remain in the hunt with Harry Kane continuing to lead the attacking line. So who have been the top three Premier league players so far this season? And what are there odds of them landing the Players player award?
When he signed for Liverpool for £75 million it certainly raised many eyebrows with people thinking it was a ridiculous fee to pay. However he is already proving it was money well spent, and has been catalyst behind the impressive run of Liverpool for the first half of the Premier league season. At present they sit top of the table and are odds on to go and land their first Premier league title and first top division title since 1990. This season has been the best start that the club has ever made that included them breaking the record for the least goals scored. If they can now go on and win the Premier league this season then Van Dijk could be the one to pick up the Player of the year award. He is currently around 4/5 to do so. Punters from Liverpool are also Grand National online betting, in what is one of the biggest events in the city each year.
Most expensive big-5 centre backs from a transfer value standpoint according to @CIES_Football algorithm: @Laporte heads the table despite no full international status 😮 Full lists in last Weekly Post at https://t.co/9VLKO25BSA #laporte #vandijk #davinson #umtiti #rudiger pic.twitter.com/kCtPCD3vwf
— CIES Football Obs (@CIES_Football) January 7, 2019
Silva has long been key to the rise of Manchester City in recent seasons. If they are to retain their Premier league title, then he is going to need to continue to perform to his best. At present he is around 6/1 to lift the PFA Player of the year award come the end of the season. And there is little doubt that Manchester City will need to retain the title if he is to do so. At 33 years of age he is likely coming to the end of his best years. But, there is little doubting the impact he makes on the team. This has been shown in the Champions league this season where he has scored three important goals in five appearances. This is also backed up in his Premier league record in which he has scored six goals with two assists from 17 appearances this season.
Eden Hazard has been key to the strong start that Chelsea have made this season. He was around the 7/4 mark at the early stages of the season to pick up the award. He continued his impressive form from the World Cup over the summer. Hazard is now a general 8/1 chance to go on and land the PFA award. t will need Chelsea to pick up over the latter stages of the Premier league season if he is to do so. The Belgium international has very impressive statistics so far this season from his 20 appearances. This includes 10 goals scored and 9 assists, so could he even be a possible outsider for the Golden boot?
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History of the Premier League
Liverpool Reach Sixth Heavens
Arsenal In Rebuilding Mode
Kenwyne puts on Youth football tournament in home country
Justin - June 28, 2011
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Everett, January 11 2019
Two to be arraigned in connection with Everett fire that injured two firefighters
Muddasir Bari, 63, and Nargis Bhatti, 55, both of Everett, were arraigned on Tuesday in Malden District Court in connection with allegations that they violated building codes as landlords of the multifamily dwelling located at 15 Morris St. in Everett that was the location of a three-alarm fire on July 13, 2018. In an attempt to contain the fire and rescue an occupant, two Everett firefighters were seriously injured.
“Firefighters put themselves at risk whenever they respond to a fire, and that is why there are laws in place to minimize risk to first responders and to the public. In this case, through their alleged violation of the building codes, the defendants are alleged to have created a dangerous situation that ultimately led to two firefighters sustaining serious injuries,” said Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan.
State Fire Marshal Peter J. Ostroskey said, “District Attorney Ryan’s prosecution of individuals who flouted the fire and building codes is important to protecting the public as well as first responders. Holding them accountable shows support for local firefighters and building officials who enforce the codes.”
Everett Fire Chief Anthony Carli said, “This case is a worst case scenario of what can happen when overcrowding and serious fire and building codes are ignored. I appreciate the District Attorney taking on this case and taking these matters as seriously as the City of Everett does.”
Bari and Bhatti have been charged with wanton and reckless disregard of fire or building codes that result in serious bodily injuries under the Comprehensive Fire Safety Act, which was passed as a result of the 2003 fire at The Station nightclub. They pleaded not guilty.
On July 13 shortly after 2:00 p.m., Everett firefighters responded to the multifamily Morris Street dwelling, which was engulfed in flames. When the firefighters arrived, they were met with heavy fire on the second floor of the two-and-a-half-story, three-family, wood-frame building. Investigators subsequently determined that the fire started at the electrical panel as a result of the circuit being overloaded.
This incident was jointly investigated by the Everett Fire and Police Departments, State Police assigned to the Office of the State Fire Marshal, and State Police assigned to the Office of the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office.
EverettEverett Fire Department
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15 Of The Most Awe-Inspiring Photos Of Namibia
Posted on August 11, 2016 March 5, 2019 by Derek Dias
Namibia’s stunning sand dunes, German colonial architecture and incredible wildlife areas have earned it a spot as one of the most picturesque places in Africa. Of course, we here at AFKTravel never need much reason to pack our bags, but if you have any hesitation, these 15 awe-inspiring photos of Namibia will make you want to buy a plane ticket TODAY.
Dune 45, Sossusvlei, Namibia (Shutterstock)
1) Sossuvlei Dunes
Sossusvlei is a vast desert area consisting of thousands of massive dunes. The most photographed sand dune in the world, Dune 45, reaches 80 meters (almost 250 ft) as it emerges from Sossuvlei.
Luderitz, Namibia (Shutterstock)
2) Luderitz
One of Germany’s four former African colonies, Namibia definitely has the best-preserved colonial buildings compared to the other three (Togo, Cameroon, and Tanzania), partly because Germany retained it the longest, and partly because of Namibia’s low population and slow urban growth.
3) Etosha National Park
Namibia is home to an amazing assortment of wildlife, and Etosha is one of its best parks.
Fish River Canyon, Namibia (Shutterstock)
4) Fish River Canyon
Fish River Canyon is second only to the Grand Canyon in terms of impressive geological features. Located in the extreme south of the country, the canyon is over 100 miles (160 km) in length and can reach depths of 1600 feet (550 meters).
5) San People
Also known as Bushmen, the San are one of the oldest ethnic groups on the planet. While many have modernized and now live in cities and towns, the ones that retain their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle maintain the same practices as their ancestors did thousands of years ago.
6) The Skeleton Coast
One of the most forbidding in the world, the Skeleton Coast is named for the remains of ships and sailors that have washed up here over the centuries. Rough surf, heavy fog and frequent storms marooned many a seaman on the beaches. Even if sailors survived the wreck, they had the seemingly endless desert to contend with.
Deadvlei, Namibian desert (Shutterstock)
7) Deadvlei
The Deadvlei salt pan is located near Sossuvlei in Namib-Naukfluft Park. Very few plants survive this harsh environment and the skeletons of the 800-year-old acacia trees have turned black from centuries of being scorched in the sun.
(Jeremy T. Hetzel/Flickr)
8) Twyfelfontein Rock Art
Located in northwest Namibia, the carvings and paintings of animals at Twyfelfontein date back 6,000 years. It is one of the largest repositories of ancient art in all of Africa.
(Nicolai Bangsgaard/Flickr)
9) The road less traveled
Namibia’s mostly flat landscape and excellent road system make it ideal for those who want to see the country by bike. Make sure you’re prepared though, as Namibia has the second lowest population density on Earth, meaning that if you get stuck, it could be a long time before help arrives.
A Himba woman, Namibia (FCG / Shutterstock)
10) The Himba
Known for their distinctive hair styles and accessories, the Himba are considered the last semi-nomadic people in Namibia, besides the San. If you want to learn more about them, there are tour operators who offer sustainable cultural visits.
An elephant in Mamili National Park, Namibia (Shutterstock)
11) The Caprivi Strip
The tiny strip of land at the border of Namibia, Angola, Zambia, and Botswana has an amazing diversity of wildlife.
12) Sesriem
Located near the Naukluft Mountains, Sossuvlei Dunes, and Sesriem Canyon, the entire area of Sesriem is stunning. One of the best ways to take it all in is via an early morning balloon safari.
Spitzkoppe, Namibia (Shutterstock)
13) Spitzkoppe
The granite peaks of Spitzkoppe are hundreds of millions of years old and rise like monoliths out of the desert. The highest peak is 1800 meters high (5800 feet).
Seals at Cape Cross Reserve, Namibia (Shutterstock)
14) Cape Cross
Located on the Skeleton Coast, Cape Cross is home to thousands of Cape Fur Seals, one of the largest colonies in the world.
(Damien du Toit/Wikipedia Commons)
15) Kolmanskop
Located near Luderitz, Kolmanskop is former diamond mining town that’s now a ghost town. It was completely abandoned in 1954 and the desert is slowly but surely reclaiming the area, making for haunting images like the above.
15 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Namibia’s Skeleton Coast
10 Namibian Tribes You Didn’t Know About
Photo Essay: A Journey Through Namibia’s Etosha National Park
Derek Dias
Derek Dias has lived, worked, and volunteered all over the world including Germany, Sudan, Singapore, and Denmark. Currently based in Kigali, Rwanda, he teaches English, works with street kids, exports Rwandan handicrafts, and freelance writes. He is frequently sidetracked by any type of street food, bourbon, punk music, and cats.
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Main » 2018 » December » 26 » Takeda Announces Listing of American Depositary Shares on the New York Stock Exchange
Takeda Announces Listing of American Depositary Shares on the New York Stock Exchange
ADSs Will Trade Under the Ticker Symbol “TAK”
OSAKA, Japan-Thursday 20 December 2018 [ AETOS Wire ]
(BUSINESS WIRE) -- NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN ANY JURISDICTION WHERE TO DO SO WOULD CONSTITUTE A VIOLATION OF THE RELEVANT LAWS OF SUCH JURISDICTION
Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (TSE: 4502) (“Takeda”) today announced that the listing and trading of its American Depositary Shares (“ADSs”) on the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) is expected to commence on December 24, 2018. Takeda’s ADSs currently trade over-the-counter. The ADSs will now trade under the ticker symbol “TAK” and The Bank of New York Mellon will continue to act as the depositary bank for the ADS program.
Takeda will maintain its headquarters in Japan and its primary listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (the “TSE”), as well as its current listings on local Japanese stock exchanges.
“Our dual listing on the NYSE and TSE reflects our position as a leading global biopharmaceutical company and will provide wider capital markets access with expanded trading hours for our investors worldwide,” said Costa Saroukos, Chief Financial Officer of Takeda. “We look forward to closing our acquisition of Shire in the coming weeks and driving long-term value for our shareholders as a combined company.”
With its listings in Japan and the United States, Takeda will be able to access two of the world’s largest capital markets and is the only pharmaceutical company listed on both the TSE and the NYSE. The new NYSE listing will also facilitate ownership of Takeda shares following its acquisition of Shire plc (“Shire”) (the “Acquisition”) which, subject to the Shire scheme of arrangement being sanctioned by the Jersey court, is expected to complete on January 8, 2019. Under the terms of the Acquisition, Shire shareholders will be entitled to receive $30.33 in cash and either 0.839 new Takeda shares or 1.678 Takeda ADSs for each Shire share held.
In connection with the listing on the NYSE, Takeda filed a registration statement on Form 20-F on December 6, 2018, and Amendment No. 1 thereto on December 17, 2018. Takeda’s Form 20-F is available online at www.sec.gov and will be available online at https://www.takeda.com/investors/reports shortly before the listing. Takeda shareholders have the ability to receive a hard copy of this documentation, free of charge, by contacting Takeda Investor Relations by telephone at +81-3-3278-2306 or by e-mail at takeda.ir.contact@takeda.com.
About Takeda Pharmaceutical Company
Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (TSE: 4502) is a global, research and development-driven pharmaceutical company committed to bringing better health and a brighter future to patients by translating science into life-changing medicines. Takeda focuses its R&D efforts on oncology, gastroenterology and neuroscience therapeutic areas plus vaccines. Takeda conducts R&D both internally and with partners to stay at the leading edge of innovation. Innovative products, especially in oncology and gastroenterology, as well as Takeda's presence in emerging markets, are currently fueling the growth of Takeda. Approximately 30,000 Takeda employees are committed to improving quality of life for patients, working with Takeda's partners in health care in more than 70 countries. For more information, visit https://www.takeda.com/newsroom/.
This announcement is not intended to, and does not, constitute, represent or form part of any offer, invitation or solicitation of an offer to purchase, otherwise acquire, subscribe for, sell or otherwise dispose of, any securities whether pursuant to this announcement or otherwise.
The distribution of this announcement in jurisdictions outside the United Kingdom or Japan may be restricted by law or regulation and therefore any person who comes into possession of this announcement should inform themselves about, and comply with, such restrictions. Any failure to comply with such restrictions may constitute a violation of the securities laws or regulations of any such relevant jurisdiction.
Publication on Website
In accordance with Rule 26.1 of the Code, a copy of this announcement will be made available (subject to certain restrictions relating to persons resident in restricted jurisdictions) on Takeda's website at www.takeda.com/investors/offer-for-shire by no later than 12 noon (London time) on October 29, 2018. The content of the website referred to in this announcement is not incorporated into and does not form part of this announcement.
Disclosure requirements of the Code
Under Rule 8.3(a) of the Code, any person who is interested in 1% or more of any class of relevant securities of an offeree company or of any securities exchange offeror (being any offeror other than an offeror in respect of which it has been announced that its offer is, or is likely to be, solely in cash) must make an Opening Position Disclosure following the commencement of the offer period and, if later, following the announcement in which any securities exchange offeror is first identified. An Opening Position Disclosure must contain details of the person's interests and short positions in, and rights to subscribe for, any relevant securities of each of (i) the offeree company and (ii) any securities exchange offeror(s). An Opening Position Disclosure by a person to whom Rule 8.3(a) applies must be made by no later than 3.30 pm (London time) on the 10th business day following the commencement of the offer period and, if appropriate, by no later than 3.30 pm (London time) on the 10th business day following the announcement in which any securities exchange offeror is first identified. Relevant persons who deal in the relevant securities of the offeree company or of a securities exchange offeror prior to the deadline for making an Opening Position Disclosure must instead make a Dealing Disclosure.
Under Rule 8.3(b) of the Code, any person who is, or becomes, interested in 1% or more of any class of relevant securities of the offeree company or of any securities exchange offeror must make a Dealing Disclosure if the person deals in any relevant securities of the offeree company or of any securities exchange offeror. A Dealing Disclosure must contain details of the dealing concerned and of the person's interests and short positions in, and rights to subscribe for, any relevant securities of each of (i) the offeree company and (ii) any securities exchange offeror(s), save to the extent that these details have previously been disclosed under Rule 8. A Dealing Disclosure by a person to whom Rule 8.3(b) applies must be made by no later than 3.30 pm (London time) on the business day following the date of the relevant dealing.
If two or more persons act together pursuant to an agreement or understanding, whether formal or informal, to acquire or control an interest in relevant securities of an offeree company or a securities exchange offeror, they will be deemed to be a single person for the purpose of Rule 8.3.
Opening Position Disclosures must also be made by the offeree company and by any offeror and Dealing Disclosures must also be made by the offeree company, by any offeror and by any persons acting in concert with any of them (see Rules 8.1, 8.2 and 8.4).
Details of the offeree and offeror companies in respect of whose relevant securities Opening Position Disclosures and Dealing Disclosures must be made can be found in the Disclosure Table on the Panel's website at www.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk, including details of the number of relevant securities in issue, when the offer period commenced and when any offeror was first identified. You should contact the Panel's Market Surveillance Unit on +44 (0)20 7638 0129 if you are in any doubt as to whether you are required to make an Opening Position Disclosure or a Dealing Disclosure.
Takeda (Investor Relations)
Takashi Okubo
takeda.ir.contact@takeda.com
Takeda (Media – inside Japan)
Kazumi Kobayashi
Kazumi.Kobayashi@takeda.com
Takeda (Media – outside Japan)
Tsuyoshi Tada
Tsuyoshi.Tada@takeda.com
Elissa Johnsen
Elissa.Johnsen@takeda.com
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Home » Blogs » editor's blog
ACS CINF Available Positions and Candidate Statements
**VOTING IS NOW OPEN! To vote, members click here, CINF affiliates click here**
Your membership in the Division of Chemical Information (CINF) is greatly appreciated. One of the division membership benefits is voting for CINF officers. This year we are electing:
Chair Elect for the year 2019 (Division Chair 2020)
Treasurer for the years 2019 to 2020
Councilor and Alternate Councilor for the years 2019 to 2021.
The candidates’ biographies and statements of goals are provided below. The candidate names are listed alphabetically by first name for the Councilor and Alternate Councilor positions. The person receiving the highest number of votes will be elected Councilor and the person with the second highest number of votes will be elected Alternate Councilor. Division Affiliates may vote for Chair Elect and Treasurer, but may not vote for Councilor and Alternate Councilor, per CINF bylaws. Write-in votes are permitted for any of the positions.
Ballots must be submitted by August 6, 2018
NOTE: The candidate names are listed alphabetically by first name within each position.
Biographies and Statements of Candidates
Chair Elect (Chair Elect 2019, Division Chair 2020, Past Chair 2021):
Jeremy Garritano
Treasurer (Term 2019-2020):
Stuart Chalk
Councilor and Alternate Councilor (Term 2019-2021):
Bonnie Lawlor
Rachelle Bienstock
Candidate for Chair Elect
Jeremy R. Garritano is currently Associate Director, Departmental Partnerships and Services, for Sciences and Engineering at the University of Virginia, where he is also liaison to the departments of chemistry, chemical engineering, and materials science and engineering. He has presented numerous times at ACS national meetings and has written articles on chemical information literacy and on data services in academic libraries. He is currently an Alternate Councilor for CINF.
Previously he was Life Sciences/Research Data Librarian at the White Memorial Chemistry Library at the University of Maryland. From 2004-2014, he was Chemical Information Specialist and Associate Professor of Library Science at the M.G. Mellon Library of Chemistry, Purdue University, where he was responsible for collection management, information literacy instruction, and supporting interdisciplinary research, as well as having responsibility for teaching a required one-credit chemical information course for undergraduate ACS Chemistry majors.
Jeremy earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University and a Master's in Library Science from Indiana University. Other previous positions include Science Reference/Liaison Librarian at George Mason University and Visiting Science Librarian at Earlham College.
He has been a member of the ACS and the Division of Chemical Information since 2003 and has participated in many activities within the organization. He was a member of the 2006 Strategic Planning Committee. He co-taught the CINF workshop “Incorporating Chemical Information Literacy into Your Curriculum: A Workshop for Faculty and Librarians” in 2007. He has co-organized four symposia for ACS national meetings and one symposia at a Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (BCCE). He was the Teller for the CINF Elections in 2004 and in 2008. He was a member of the CINF Education Committee from 2005-2009 and served as Chair of that Committee for 2009-2010. He served as CINF Programming Chair from 2011-2012. Finally, since 2013, he has been an Associate Member of the ACS Society Committee on Education (SOCED), where he has helped provide feedback on how the Society as a whole should approach chemical education, including programming, support, services, and policy.
Statement of Goals:
Over the last 15 years of being involved with ACS and CINF, I have watched the Division adapt to both internal and external pressures. I believe the Division is currently undergoing a major evolution as the current leadership plans to embark on a new strategic plan and evaluate the purpose of CINF in relation to ACS and our membership. I would be honored to be a part of this change, working with ACS, the CINF Executive Committee, and our membership during my term. I see the Chair as providing particular leadership and direction, but also I would want to hear from you and have our members actively participate, both in-person and virtually, in order to move forward collaboratively.
Our membership consists of many facets of the chemical information enterprise: academic, corporate, government, NGO, etc., as well as focus such as content, discovery, outreach, informatics, publishing, and entrepreneurship. Besides focusing on how the Division can provide value to individual members, I would want to explore how we can collectively solve problems that we cannot solve alone. There are examples of this work already being done: partnerships with the Division of Chemical Health and Safety, increasing interactions with the Division of Computers in Chemistry, and participating in activities of the Chemistry Research Data Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) or the Pistoia Alliance. Therefore, I would want to build on those successes, but also continue to find partnerships and solutions that benefit increasingly larger numbers of our membership.
Finally, I value the network that CINF has allowed me to develop over the years and I would want to explore what that network looks like in the future – more international connections, increasing localized subgroups, and targeting students before they enter the profession are some initial ideas we can work on together given interest, participation, and support.
Candidate for Treasurer
Stuart Chalk is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Florida. Originally trained as a analytical chemist Stuart has moved into the area of chemical informatics over the last five years and has found a home in the CINF community. In addition to 25+ years in the ACS, he is a member of the RSC and AAAS, and currently serves as a titular member of the IUPAC Committee on Publications and Chemical Data Standards (CPCDS). Stuart has served as coordinator of the Scholarship for Scientific Excellence and as the division’s webmaster of the past couple of years.
I plan to serve the Division of Chemical Information as treasurer encouraging the division to invest in itself, take advantage of opportunities to improve investment returns and support the division and executive committee in its continued pursuit to gain membership and reinvent itself in the current climate.
Candidates for Councilor and Alternate Councilor
Bonnie Lawlor retired in 2014 as the Executive Director of the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS). Prior positions include Executive Vice President for Database Publishing at ISI (now Clarivate Analytics) and Senior Vice President and General Manager, Library Division for UMI (now ProQuest). Her education includes a B.S. in chemistry from Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia, an M.S. in chemistry from St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Delta Epsilon Sigma National Honor Society. Awards include the CINF Lifetime Service Award (2015), the CINF Meritorious Service award (2006), the NFAIS Service Award (1999), and the American Society for Information Science Achievement Award (1996) from the Philadelphia chapter. She was inducted as an NFAIS Honorary Fellow in 2014 and as an ACS Fellow in 2013.
At the Divisional level, Bonnie has actively served CINF for more than 30 years in a variety of capacities: Councilor (1992-present), Archivist (2006-present), Member, Publications Committee, (2009-present); Chair, Publications Committee (1990-1994); Chair, Nominations Committee (1990); Division Chair (1989); Secretary (1984-1987); Editor of the Chemical Information Bulletin (1977-1982); Membership Committee (1985-1986); Long Range Planning (1983-1985); and Program Committee (1976-1978).
At the National ACS level, Bonnie has been elected and/or appointed to positions in which she has worked diligently to ensure that Divisional needs were met. Elected positions include: Committee on Committees (2012-2017) where she served as Secretary; Council Policy Committee (2006-2011), and the Committee on Nominations and Elections (2000-2005). Appointed positions include: Committee on Budget and Finance (2018-2020), where she currently serves on the Program Review Subcommittee (she previously served as an Associate on this Committee from 2000-2002); Chair, Committee on Divisional Activities (1997-1999), and Chair, Committee on Copyrights (1993-1998). In addition, she has served on several national ACS task forces: Presidential Task for on Electronic Communication (2001); Advisory Board for Industry Relations (1997-1999), ACS Books Advisory Board (1991-1994), Board Task Force on Technical Programming (1998), ConC Task Force on Publications/Copyrights Inter-Committee Relationship (1999), and the Program Coordination Conference Committee (1997-1998). She also served as the ACS representative to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section T from 1986 through 1995. Bonnie chaired the committee that organized the CINF 50th Anniversary celebration in 1993, in recognition of the founding of the then Chemistry Literature Group as part of the Division of Chemical Education. She also served on the Committee that organized the Chemistry in the 21st Century celebration that was held at the Spring National ACS meeting in San Francisco in March 2000.
Bonnie is active in many related information societies and library consortia. She currently serves on the Boards of three organizations: The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) where she also serves as the Chair of the IUPAC Committee on Publications and Cheminformatics Data Standards; the Chemical Structure Association Trust, also serving as their Secretary and Chair of their Grant Committee; and the Philosopher’s Index where she serves on the Compensation Committee. She served as Secretary and President of the Chemical Notation Association and on the Boards of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (1996-1998) and the Information Industry Association (1997-1998). She has organized many conferences and has written and spoken on library and information issues both nationally and internationally.
For many years it has been both a privilege and an honor to serve as a Councilor for the Division of Chemical Information (CINF). The National ACS positions that have resulted due to my length of service and performance as a CINF Councilor have given our Division both visibility and a respected voice within ACS governance. If re-elected I will continue to be that voice along with my fellow Councilors, Svetlana Korolev and Andrea Twiss-Brooks, focusing on key objectives at both the National and Divisional level. At the National level my primary objectives are to continue to actively represent specific CINF needs both through my current position on the Committee on Budget and Finance (B&F) and through other ACS governance activities in which I am involved; to raise the visibility of all Divisions by continuing to promote the importance of their role within the Society; to promote the essential role that information and the flow of scholarly communication play in the advancement of all scientific and scholarly research; and, by example, to promote the value of pursuing an alternate career in chemistry. At the Divisional level, my primary objective is to ensure that CINF is well-organized, financially stable, and a vibrant Community for the next generation of those actively involved in Chemical Information.
I believe that I have been successful in meeting my commitments to you during my years of service as a CINF Councilor. Presently, because of my position on B&F, I at least have a voice (and a presence) in ensuring that Divisions are well-respected for what they bring to the Society (especially at National Meetings) and are well-funded as a result. No Divisions; no Annual Conference! In the past, as a member of the Committee on Nominations and Elections I was effective in ensuring that experienced Division candidates were given an opportunity to be elected to national office. I continued that effort on ConC where the focus is the placement of talented ACS members on committees. On the Council Policy Committee I served as chair of the subcommittee that creates the slate of nominees who ultimately serve on the ACS Committee on Nominations and Elections. Again, I worked to ensure that Division talent was adequately represented. As DAC Chair I was effective in increasing the amount of support that ACS provides to Divisions, including increased headquarters staff devoted to Divisions and the establishment of a financial pool to provide seed money for unique Division initiatives. I sincerely hope that you will give me yet another opportunity to continue to serve you and I am most grateful for your past support.
Rachelle J. Bienstock
Dr. Rachelle J. Bienstock received her BChE in Chemical Engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in New York City and her PhD in physical chemistry from The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her thesis work involved the application of nonlinear Raman optical spectroscopic techniques to the study of flavin coenzymes. After completing her PhD, she was a Member of the Technical Staff in the Central Research Laboratory of Texas Instruments performing laser assisted photochemical etching studies of semiconductor materials and thin films. Following her tenure at Texas Instruments, Dr. Bienstock was a Welch Research Fellow at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center performing NMR and molecular dynamics studies on constrained peptides, peptidomimetics, and peptide analogues, and served as an adjunct faculty member in the chemistry and biology departments of The University of Texas at Dallas. Subsequently, she came to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) here in Research Triangle Park, where she worked on a variety of interesting molecular modeling and computational chemistry problems. She worked at the National Center for Computational Toxicology of the US EPA as a contract computational chemist assisting with curation and analytical modeling studies of the data in the DSSTOX database.
Dr. Bienstock has been a long standing active member of the ACS, and has been attending the CINF planning meetings for the past several years and is therefore familiar with CINF concerns and objectives. She recently completed her tenure as CINF Chair (2015-2016) and two stints as Program Chair (2010-2012, 2018-2019), and currently serves as a member of the ACS Committee on Chemical Abstract Services (CCAS). She has helped organize, chair, and been a presenter at numerous ACS national meeting symposia. Additionally, she edited two volumes in the ACS Symposium Book Series, Library Design, Search Methods and Applications of Fragment-based Drug Design, ACS Symposium Book Series Vol. 1076, based on a very successful series of symposia on fragment based ligand library design held at the 2009 and 2010 spring national meetings, and with J. Bajorath, and V. Shanmugasundaram, Frontiers in Molecular Design and Chemical Information Science, ACS Symposium Book Series, Volume 1222, based on the 2015 Herman Skolnik Award Symposium. She is a member of the COMP, MEDI and BIOL divisions in addition to CINF and has encouraged joint symposia and interactions between divisions.
Dr Bienstock would bring to CINF not only knowledge of its past, but also awareness of the challenges CINF faces in the years ahead with membership and fundraising, and a vision for the future. In programming she has been reaching out and interacting with other divisions, including Small Chemical Businesses, Chemical Education, Chemistry and the Law, as well as Computers in Chemistry. Dr. Bienstock also has advocated for including programming symposia, which are highlighted as theme symposia for the meeting. This has given CINF significant visibility for one of the smaller ACS divisions. ACS Publishing has a great interest in CINF due to its concerns with issues regarding scientific publishing in the future (i.e. open source, e-books, mobile devices) and, hopefully, we will be able to establish a close mutually beneficial relationship with them. She has been actively engaged with ACS Division professionals regarding the challenges which CINF faces including issues with computer support and shrinking membership. She has regularly participated in the graduate and postdoctoral socials at national meetings to increase CINF membership and visibility.
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Paul Taylor Dance Company finds its future in its past
POSTED IN Dance
Paul Taylor, a foundational figure in modern dance, built a body of work that stretched over six decades. Since founding the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954 until his death this past August, the choreographer created 147 pieces that fill his namesake’s repertoire.
Six of these dances were set to J.S. Bach — a musician whose wit and depth matches Taylor’s swings between playful and incinerating choreography. And this month, for the first time in the company’s history, all six works are collated under the banner of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Bach Festival, running through June 23. Stitched together and performed at the Manhattan School of Music, the works represent four decades of Taylor’s output and demonstrate the choreographer’s emotional and physical range.
The program is bookended by the oldest piece in the group, “Junction” (1961), and the raging “Promethean Fire” (2002), with Taylor’s masterworks “Esplanade” (1975), “Musical Offering” (1986), “Brandenburgs” (1988) and “Cascade” (1999) filling out the intervening decades.
“He has a special relationship with Bach,” veteran Taylor dancer Michelle Fleet told ALL ARTS during a tech rehearsal for the festival. “All of the pieces are very different and invoke different feelings, and you get to see that all together, which is rare. I think it’s a beautiful celebration of the music and the work.”
As a dancer who has performed in every piece represented on the Bach slate (and more), Fleet speaks intimately about Taylor’s creations, likening the grandeur of “Cascade” to seeing “kings and queens dance on stage” and the relentless motion of “Promethean Fire” to “watching a painting.”
“You can’t help but love these pieces and watch them over and over again — because you will see something new each time,” she said.
Michelle Fleet with (left to right) Lee Duveneck, Madelyn Ho, Michael Apuzzo, Parisa Khobdeh, Robert Kleinendorst and Jamie Rae Walker in “Esplanade.” Photo: Paul B. Goode.
Taylor hand-selected Fleet during an audition and her tenure with the company clocks in at 20 years — three with Taylor 2, where she landed straight out of college, and 17 with the main company. With versatile musicality, strength and a giving stage presence, Fleet embodies the technical and spiritual scope of Taylor’s oeuvre and remains a linear connection to the physical passing down of movement throughout generations.
She is also among one of six long-term dancers set to retire, with her departure scheduled for this November. The Orchestra of St. Luke’s Bach Festival marks the last performance with the company for long-term Taylor dancer Michael Trusnovec, who kicks off the deluge of forthcoming retirements from Fleet, Laura Halzack, Parisa Khobdeh, Sean Mahoney and Jamie Rae Walker.
Michael Trusnovec in “Brandenburgs.” Photo: Whitney Browne.
Though the company still faces an ongoing transition, the future of Taylor Dance stands steadfast — both in the continued legacy of the dancers (veterans and next generation alike) and in the company’s expansion of its repertoire to pieces commissioned from outside choreographers.
“Of course you’re sad that he’s gone. At the same time, he’s still here,” Fleet said. “He’s very much alive in all the pieces. And alive through the dancers that have came through the company, who still come back to coach us. He’s alive when I see the younger dancers coming in to learn the style, to understand the humanity in the work.”
In addition to bringing together the six Bach pieces for the first time, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Bach Festival also features commissions from Margie Gillis and the prolific Pam Tanowitz — both of which are (of course) set to Bach and interspersed with the Taylor originals. The inclusion of the pieces suggest a hypothesis of what future performances from Taylor Dance might resemble.
Laura Halzack and Devon Louis in Pam Tanowitz’s “all at once.” Photo: Paula Lobo.
Tanowitz in particular, whose piece “all at once” premiered during the first program of the festival, choreographs works imbued with gestural humor, playfulness and unexpected moments similar to those found in some of Taylor’s pieces.
“She has a lot of structure, and then she flips it on its head, which I feel Paul had done in a lot of his other pieces, too,” Fleet said about the overlap of Tanowitz and Taylor. “You can have all of these rules, but it’s fun when they start to break those rules and allow things to happen and go against the grain. So, it’s not so unfamiliar.”
As for if the Taylor company and audiences will continue to see the current cast of veterans after they retire, Fleet — who still plans to mentor dancers — remains steadfast in that, too.
“I’ll always be part of it,” Fleet said with a smile. “Once you’re in, you’re in.”
Top Image: Paul Taylor Dance Company in Margie Gillis's "Rewilding." Photo: Whitney Browne.
TAGSBach Orchestra of St. Luke Paul Taylor Dance Company
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The True Story Behind Seinfeld’s Festivus
By All That's Interesting
Updated July 2, 2019
Did you know the classic comedy's Festivus holiday was based on a real family tradition? Grab your aluminum pole and read on.
While millions around the world prepare for Christmas this Friday, thousands of loyal Seinfeld fans begin to gather around their unadorned aluminum poles to air their grievances for Festivus. But just what is this secular “holiday” celebrated two days before Christmas?
While the holiday became famous on one of the greatest television series of all time, it was in fact created in 1966 by author Daniel O’Keefe as a unique celebration during the holidays. His son, Dan O’Keefe, became a writer for Seinfeld and eventually shared his family’s bizarre holiday tradition with his writing team for the episode “The Strike,” with the help of his brother.
“It is a fake holiday my dad made up in the ’60s to celebrate the anniversary of his first date with my mother, and it was something that we celebrated as a family in a very peculiar way through the ‘70s, and then I never spoke of it again,” O’Keefe told Yahoo News. “I had actually forgotten about it because I had blotted it out of my mind.”
O’Keefe was reluctant to write about the tradition, desperately hoping to avoid shaming his family legacy and writing career. But the rest of his writing team found the ritual hysterical, and with some fine-tuning and a dash of classic Seinfeld humor, Festivus was born.
Some parts of the holiday were added by the writers, such as the legendary aluminum pole. “That came out of Festivus being anti-commercial, and what’s the least like a tree? A warm living thing, and just an antiseptic metal pole,” said Alec Berg, one of the three writers credited on the episode.
Other traditions, however, were real, with the airing of grievances being an accurate portrayal of the O’Keefe’s family tradition, right down to the tape recorder. So if you want an authentic Festivus experience, do as Frank Costanza says: “Gather your family around and tell them all the ways they have disappointed you over the past year.” ‘Tis the season of Festivus!
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A practical example: how alcohol screening and brief intervention can work in a real-life New Zealand primary-care environment
Susan Paton1,
John McMenamin2 and
Kristen Maynard1
© Paton et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012
Advanced Form
Heavy Episodic Drinking
New Zealand has a high level of acute alcohol-related harm compared with other countries. In the most recent alcohol use survey, 61.6% of New Zealand drinkers aged 16-64 years reported heavy episodic drinking at least once in a 12-month period, and 12.6% reported weekly heavy episodic drinking. There is substantial multinational evidence, and growing New Zealand evidence, showing that alcohol screening and brief intervention (SBI) in primary-care and emergency-department (ED) settings is an efficacious and cost-effective approach to reducing alcohol-related harm among people with heavy episodic drinking. Despite this, SBI is significantly underutilized in New Zealand. This implementation description demonstrates how SBI has been integrated successfully into general practice in the Whanganui region of New Zealand. In 2010, the Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand (ALAC) provided support to the Whanganui Regional Primary Health Organization (WRPHO) to implement an alcohol SBI approach that involved asking all patients ≥15 years about their alcohol consumption, offering brief advice to those identified as risky drinkers, and, where appropriate, referring patients to specialist services. This approach used a reminder system on the front page of electronic patient notes and an advanced form in the patient management system. In just under a year, 43% of all patients ≥15 years enrolled in the WRPHO had been asked about their alcohol consumption, with 36 percent of these patients receiving a brief intervention or specialist referral. The WRPHO project highlights how SBI can work in a New Zealand primary-care setting and its potential efficacy for reducing alcohol harm.
Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand
Whanganui Regional Primary Health Organization, Whanganui, New Zealand
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Tag Archives: Don’t Renege on Our Love
Richard & Linda Thompson – Shoot Out the Lights – Classic Music Review
By altrockchick on September 5, 2018 | 13 Comments
Love me or hate me, but the one thing that is beyond dispute is that my perspectives on music have never been influenced by commercial considerations, a desire for fame or the opinions of Establishment critics.
From a financial perspective, altrockchick.com is one of the worst-performing enterprises in history: after six years, 400 reviews and 1.5 million words, I have earned zero revenue while piling up thousands of dollars/euros in expenses. I write anonymously because the last thing in the world I want to experience is the personality distortion and general weirdness that usually comes with fame. I do read the opinions of Establishment critics, but most of the time I find myself offended by their sheer laziness, astonishing pomposity and the façade of objectivity they attempt to project. I’m sorry, but if you’re getting paid to write reviews for a magazine, newspaper or website, your objectivity is automatically compromised by the need to earn a paycheck, and the fact that the enterprise that employs you also sells advertising to the music industry compromises you even further. Commercialization of criticism demands short, punchy reviews that attempt to distill the essence of an artist’s work in as few words as possible so consumers can make buying decisions. It does not encourage understanding.
What’s sad is that many music listeners parrot the words and thoughts of Establishment critics instead of thinking for themselves. This dynamic helps create a common consensus around a particular work, and as I’ve learned in my reviews of Abbey Road, Arthur, Dark Side of the Moon and others, people who have accepted the common consensus—in large part because it validates the feeling of being “right” and lets them feel like they “belong” to a cohesive thought community—react to “No, I think that album really sucks” by aggressively attacking the heretic who dares to think differently. This is not healthy. The only valid purpose of criticism is to share one’s interpretations to help readers or listeners clarify what they feel and think about a given piece of work. In our fucked-up world, common consensus criticism has become the “official party line,” and woe unto those who deviate from the dogma.
I bring this up because the Establishment interpretation of Shoot Out the Lights has forged a common consensus that is total, unmitigated bullshit. Since they all come to the same conclusion, I’ll just cite two examples I found particularly offensive, and respond to each in turn.
Mark Deming, AllMusic: Shoot Out the Lights has “often been cited as Richard Thompson’s greatest work, and it’s difficult for anyone who has heard his body of work to argue the point.”
Altrockchick: According to Mr. Deming, Richard Thompson should have walked out of the studio after the final mixing session of Shoot Out the Lights and blown his brains out instead of hanging around for twenty-six years producing substandard work. Note that Mr. Deming dares you to disagree with the common consensus, which is pretty much all he has to support his ridiculous conclusion. I have listened to Richard Thompson’s entire body of work and I guarantee you he would not have earned status as my favorite songwriter had he abandoned his career after Shoot Out the Lights—shit, he wouldn’t have made the Top 20. His solo career features dozens of songs and several albums that are far superior to his work here. What is true is that Shoot Out the Lights was his breakout album—the moment in time when he developed a clear sense of artistic direction and emerging confidence.
Robert Christgau, Village Voice: “News of the wife’s solitary return to England brings this relationship-in-crisis album home–including the husband’s ‘bearded lady’ warning in ‘The Wall of Death,’ ostensibly a synthesis of his thanatotic urge and lowlife tic. If poor Richard’s merely ‘A Man in Need,’ I’m an ayatollah, but I have to give him credit–these are powerfully double-edged metaphors for the marriage struggle, and ‘Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?’ is as damning an answer song as Linda could wish.”
Altrockchick: Christgau has always been an arrogant prick, a man far more interested in self-promotion and the delivery of highfalutin’ wit than helping his readers better appreciate the music. His read here is superficial at best, focused more on the juicy titillation factor in the Thompson breakup than the content of the music itself, interpreting every song through the lens of a collapsing relationship. The truth is that even an extremely loose interpretation of the lyrics on the album will tell you that a grand total of two of eight songs deal with relationship problems, and that neither “Wall of Death,” nor “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” have anything to do with the Thompson situation. His “thoughts” on this album (minus the usual pompous references) barely rise to the standards of a gossip columnist.
There is also another problem in labeling Shoot Out the Lights Richard Thompson’s greatest work, namely the mediocre vocals of one Linda Thompson. Struggling with her diaphragmatic breathing due to pregnancy, she manages to hit the notes most of the time, but her phrasing is inconsistent, sometimes disconnected from the lyrics she’s singing. Her primary means of expressing emotion is to raise her volume, but since she also gets louder when straining to reach notes at the upper end of her range, it’s hard to tell when she’s going for feeling or struggling with the scale. Truth is, she wasn’t much of a singer to begin with, especially when compared to her contemporaries. With Linda Thompson, you don’t get the stunning clarity of Anne Briggs, the remarkable presence of Sandy Denny, the breathtaking range and dynamic command of Maddy Prior, or the brilliant interpretive skills of June Tabor. Replace Linda with any of those singers and you’d certainly have a better album, though to label it Richard Thompson’s greatest work would still be a rather significant stretch. Shoot Out the Lights is like the key that unlocked the door, a celebration of self-discovery where Richard Thompson resolved the internal struggle between the spiritual and secular, reconnected with his guitar and began to live up to his immense potential as a songwriter.
The first thing you notice on “Don’t Renege on Our Love” is Richard Thompson’s new-found confidence in his vocals. If you listen to the Richard & Linda albums preceding Shoot Out the Lights, Richard sings almost apologetically, like he’s concerned that taking command will expose a fatal flaw. Here he sticks self-deprecation where the sun don’t shine and delivers a forceful but attenuated vocal that captures a range of psychic states, from frustrated lover to broken-hearted beggar to outraged victim of betrayal. The notion of betrayal will become a major theme in his work to come; at this point, his sense of right-and-wrong is as rigid as rigid gets (“Do I take you for a lover or just a deceiver?”), failing to recognize that the whole thing could be a simple misunderstanding. The theme of betrayal also carries with it a deeply held belief that for love to be real it must be pure in word and deed, including love in its carnal form. It’s a belief I hold myself, but when distrust begins to creep into a relationship, it’s easy for the still-active libido to rise up and offer itself as the solution to the relationship problem—if we can just fuck, everything will be all right. The problem is that when the poison starts to spread in concert with the sexual urge, it amplifies the original suspicion, negating the healing power of physical love:
There’s a rope that binds us and I don’t want to break it
If love is a healing why should we forsake it
Well hunger is hunger and need is need
Am I just another mouth to feed
That creeping, dark feeling is perfectly captured in the progressively dissonant chord changes that accompany the fade—a punctuation mark that clearly communicates both the underlying fear and the unlikelihood that the relationship can be salvaged. I love the sprightly, sharp guitar fills throughout the song—just enough and not too much from a man who has the guitar chops to dominate any song he chooses to dominate. I’d also love to pin some kind of medal on Dave Mattacks for sustaining the skip-and-roll pattern throughout the song without having his arms lock up in protest.
“Walking on a Wire” may present us with the woman’s side of the same story; then again, maybe not. It’s easy to make that assumption because of the juxtaposition, but to take that a step further and connect the two songs to the Thompson breakup would be an overreach. Richard wrote both songs, and there’s nothing about “Walking on a Wire” that makes it gender-specific. The one thing we can say with certainty is that “Walking on a Wire” is an emotional powerhouse sung from the perspective of a human being experiencing the slow death of a relationship and unable to do anything to stop it. Here Linda overcomes the challenges of a compromised voice, oscillating between the release of repressed frustration and the utter exhaustion that comes with an attempt to a rescue a relationship that is probably long gone.
Too many steps to take
Too many spells to break
Too many nights awake
And no one else
This grindstone’s wearing me
Your claws are tearing me
Don’t use me endlessly
It’s too long, too long to myself
Richard’s low-end harmony on the chorus helps strengthen the sense of despair that permeates the piece, and he delivers another superb guitar solo that reinforces the tender melody.
After two relatively heavy pieces, the bouncy “Man in Need” comes as something of a relief, and no, Mr. Christgau, this is not Richard Thompson singing about Richard Thompson but Richard Thompson playing the part of a peripatetic man of the sea whose urge to wander and fear of commitment leaves him in quite a pickle when it comes to securing the basics of food, shelter and clothing. His conundrum is “Hey, I’m only doing what comes natural to me” and is completely oblivious to the fact that most people would consider a man who abandoned his dependents and has proven himself little more than a sponge to be an undesirable companion. Richard Thompson delivers the vocal with carefree abandon, tongue firmly planted in cheek, supported by a cascading set of call-and-response vocals from Linda on the chorus. The guitar solo is an absolute delight, a set of nimble thrusts centered around the melody, a solo that makes you wonder about the sanity of the Mullah who had encouraged Richard Thompson to give up playing electric guitar to facilitate his quest for higher spiritual consciousness. That idiotic advice led to a three-year hiatus after Pour Down Like Silver, but he really wouldn’t regain the sparkle in his chops until Shoot Out the Lights—and thank fucking god he did.
Linda returns to the mike for “Just the Motion,” a gentle, reflective piece that reminds us that any change to the routine is more difficult than we’d like to believe. For the most part, she does a decent job, particularly in the quieter opening verse. Unfortunately, when she arrives at the ending, she goes classic crescendo when the song demands the opposite. This is most noticeable on the second repetition of the line, “You can’t hear the storm, it’s as peaceful as can be.” The text after the comma should be delivered like this:
it’s as
as can be
Instead, we get:
Every time I hear her ramp up the volume on PEACEFUL–a word that by definition should alert the singer to back the fuck off—I clench my teeth so hard I feel an overwhelming urge to run to the dentist to make sure I didn’t break a molar. It comes across as “Goddamn it, can’t I get any PEACE AND QUIET around here?” Since the only other cover of the song is David Byrne’s typically beat-happy approach, I’ll just have to sit back and hope that June Tabor decides to finally put together a Richard Thompson tribute album and give us the definitive version. What saves this track is the sheer excellence of the song and the perfectly lovely combination of electric guitar and dulcimer. “Just the Motion” is a gem that deserves better treatment.
Side Two opens with the rough power chords that form the intro to the title song, a clear signal that Richard Thompson has thrown all caution to the wind when it comes to electric guitar. He approaches the vocal with an equal sense of command, relating the tale of a paranoid, gun-toting, anti-social shut-in with stark brevity. The slow, relentless beat accentuated by those power chords seem to reflect a sense of cold determination on the part of our shut-in, making his chosen isolation seem all the more dangerous:
Keep the blind down on the window
Ah, keep the pain on the inside
Just watching the dark. Just watching the dark.
Ah he might laugh but you won’t see him
As he thunders through the night
Shoot out the lights. Shoot out the lights.
After an extended electric guitar solo with loads of dissonance and unexpected shifts over the fretboard, the closing verse expands the sense of danger. Up to this point, the guy seemed to be a crackpot more likely to do harm to himself or inflict mayhem on a few stray neons in the vicinity; now the man is on the move and we start to wonder if the lights in question are the lights of human life:
In the darkness the shadows move
In the darkness the game is real
Real as a gun. Real as a gun.
As he watches the lights of the city
And he moves through the night
A second ripping solo accentuates the high end of the fretboard in an extended scream, followed by attacks both high and low. The experience of “Shoot Out the Lights” is remarkably compelling, a disturbing but credible depiction of the anger that courses through those who feel they have been left behind—by choice or by social selection.
“Back Street Slide” is a character sketch portraying women who have little else to do but spread slanderous gossip about anyone who flies through their finely-attuned radar screens. “Gatemouth woman leaning on the fence/She’s got no teeth, she’s got no sense/You don’t need much intelligence” is a pithy description, but in the end the lyrical narrative doesn’t go much further. The strength of the song can be found in the bouncy beat and party-like feel of the arrangement, melding the joyous rhythm with loosely-fitting background vocals from Linda. I like the listening experience, but the song shows that Richard Thompson still had room to grow as a lyricist—and grow he would, Mark Deming be damned.
The only co-written song on “Shoot Out the Lights” is “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” where Linda Thompson shares the honors. Christgau’s assertion that this is some kind of answer song in the context of the breakup is certainly a creative interpretation, but there’s no evidence to support that flight of fancy. Any rational person who ACTUALLY READS THE LYRICS would conclude that the song deals with the status of women in society. And though Linda Thompson’s receives co-writing credit, Richard Thompson wrote the lyrics, and in a 2008 interview with the blogger behind I Shot a Man in Reno, Richard shared his approach to the song:
How do you approach the subject of death in your writing? Do you consciously come at it from a specific angle?
You don’t sit down to moralise or write about your philosophy every time you write a song. You just write a story. It’s fiction and it’s fun to make something up, it’s an enjoyable process. Then you look at it afterwards and you think, ‘Oh that’s obviously about me or about someone I know, and that reflects what I believe.’ With a song like “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” I sat down to write a story. It could be about Sandy [Denny] or a couple of other people that I know…. I don’t think it is about any person in particular. It’s a bit like detective fiction, it has some of the same goriness and detail. In good detective fiction there’s always a corpse, otherwise you feel unsatisifed. The song doesn’t really give any answers, it just asks the moral questions.
The “moral question” has to do with society’s tendency to doubt a woman’s credibility. Since it’s pretty obvious that the woman in the song did not off herself (given the fingerprints on her throat) some may wonder why the premise of the song is posed as a mystery, but every woman alive knows the answer to that question: the broad is always to blame, never to be believed, and if she was raped and strangled, she must have been asking for it. The fact that we need to ask the question is the moral of the story.
In this case, the woman was definitely trying to become a player, inviting only “the chosen” to her parties, double-crossing old friends without a second thought. In addition to committing the cardinal sin of encroaching on traditional male territory, she makes the same mistake many women have made in attempting to achieve equality: believing that if you want to play with the guys, you have to act like a guy. We do not know what specifically led to her death, but she did fail to take into account the warning signs that she was pushing too hard: “The truth came ’round and she refused it.” Her “fatal flaw” was her ambition—or more accurately, that she dared to even have ambitions. Wherever you land in the interpretation, “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” is a superbly-written work, a song that leaves plenty of room for the listener to engage in both debate and self-reflection on the status of women in our societies.
Some of Richard Thompson’s stories are dramatic narratives sung from the perspective of the adolescent male, with “Read About Love” earning status as my personal favorite. “Wall of Death” is one such song, and any interpretation that says otherwise is absolute nonsense (Hello, Robert Christgau). This is a light-hearted song about how the natural desire of a young person to experience the essence of life tends to lead the youth to court risk and tempt fate—in this case, to experience the most dangerous carnival ride available, The Wall of Death.
This seemed to be a guy thing, a necessary rite of passage into culturally-induced manhood, so I asked my Dad about it. He told me that in high school, he and his friends liked to drive down Highway 1 around Devil’s Slide, a twisty, curvy dangerous coastal road that sometimes falls into the ocean in torrential rains. They’d take the curves at double the speed limit, then rate the risk factor on a 1-10 scale. “A ’10’ was death. We had a ‘9’ once, with two wheels over the edge of the cliff. I’ll never forget that one.” “Why the fuck did you do such a fucking stupid thing?” I asked politely and respectfully. “I can’t explain it—it was dumb but we just had to do it. It’s a version of the Rebel Without a Cause thing—floor it, head for the cliff and jump out just in time.” “Uh, Dad, Buzz didn’t make it.” “Yeah, but Jim did,” he replied with a tenuous sense of triumph.
Our teenage hero embraces that urge, dismissing the more conventional outlets of excitement as poor substitutes for the ultimate thrill:
On the Wall Of Death all the world is far from me
On the Wall Of Death it’s the nearest to being free
Well you’re going nowhere
When you ride on the carousel
And maybe you’re strong
But what’s the good of ringing a bell
The switchback will make you crazy.
Beware of the bearded lady
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
When he later describes the experience as “the nearest thing to being alive,” he reinforces the belief that the daily routine is a form of existential death while capturing the feature of the human personality that leads us to feel more alive and alert when faced with danger, especially when one’s life is on the line. It’s the same tendency we see in the stories of people who lived through WWII (on the Allied side, of course), who describe those years as the most exciting of their lives. It seems crazy, but when you look at it from the opposite perspective, it’s a damning commentary about how our well-organized societies fail to provide much in the way of meaningful challenges.
The music is hardly funereal, featuring stereo arpeggiated guitar patterns and Linda’s best high harmonies on the album. Richard Thompson really identifies with the character, imbuing his vocal with the tone of a guy who has found his niche in life and is intensely proud of it. And goddamn, I love that guitar solo—especially that delightful high-speed arpeggiated transition back to the vocals. It sounds magical, reflecting the magical experience of an adolescent boy experiencing the thrill of his life.
“Wall of Death” is a strong finish to an album that is hardly the one-dimensional exploration of a breakup that Establishment critics would have you believe. Shoot Out the Lights explores a wide range of the human experience, as do most of Richard Thompson’s subsequent works. Like the boy in “Wall of Death,” Richard Thompson has found his niche; unlike that young lad obsessed with a single experience, Richard Thompson would find himself at home anywhere his creative mind would take him—an aesthetically-oriented wanderer, a “Man in Need” with clear intent to apply his ample musical talent to the challenge of understanding the many facets of human experience.
Shoot Out the Lights is simply the true beginning of one of the most productive and enjoyable journeys ever recorded.
Posted in: 1980's, Classic Music Reviews, Richard Thompson | Tagged: altrockchick, Dave Mattacks, Don't Renege on Our Love, female blogger, female music blogger, Just the Motion, Linda Thompson, music review, Richard Thompson, Shoot Out the Lights, Walking on a Wire, Wall of Death
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The First Amendment
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The First Amendment is one of the most cited amendments of the United States Constitution. The concepts of freedom of religion, speech, press, and peaceable assembly are at the core of our democracy.
Consider starting a discussion by asking the group their intitial reactions to or thoughts about the First Amendment. What seem to be the differences in their opinions toward the amendment? Are most supportive, cynical, or somewhere in between? Take note to see if anyone realizes that the very fact that they are able to sit and discuss whether or not the First Amendment is important (and to indirectly criticize the government) is a right granted to them by the First Amendment itself.
The focus of this guide will be freedom of speech, and also freedom of the press, which is very closely related. Freedom of religion differs enough in subject to merit a guide of its own. The fact that the First Amendment can be separated into different guides is another sign of its importance to civic education.
Why definitions? Words are extremely powerful, and dictionaries are always very precise about what vocabulary they use in their definitions. Freedom of speech is a concept containing two important words: “freedom” (or free) and “speech.” Have the group look closely at the definitions of the two words separately, and then compare and contrast them to the available definition of freedom of speech, as well as to the amendment itself. In these definitions, speech is defined as expressing oneself through speaking only. However, in this guide, it will become clear that freedom of speech extends to unspoken actions or non actions as well (in fact, the provided definition for it carefully uses ‘express’ instead of ‘speak’). Ask the group what they think about this. Also, discuss how you might define “freedom of speech” and why, paying close attention to what words the group wishes to include or exclude. (Definitions taken from Merriam-Webster Online )
For Freedom
n. the quality or state of being free: as a: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action b: liberation from slavery or restraint from the power of another (independence) c: the quality or state of being exempt or released usually from something onerous (freedom from care) d: ease, facility (spoke the language with freedom) e: the quality of being frank, open, or outspoken (answered with freedom) f: improper familiarity g: boldness of conception or execution h: unrestricted use (gave him the freedom of their home)
n. a: a political right b: freedom, franchise, privilege, mean the power or condition of acting without compulsion. Freedom has a broad range of application from total absence of restraint to merely a sense of not being unduly hampered or frustrated (freedom of the press)
For Speech
n. a: the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words b: exchange of spoken words (conversation)
n. a: something that is spoken b: a usually public discourse
n. The power of expressing or communicating thought by speaking
For Freedom of Speech
n. the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint
Quotations can help to point out values that are important to American society. The following collection of quotes indicate that freedom of speech has long been a part of our country’s dialogue on government. Many other quotes could be found by encouraging group members to explore quotation sites on the Internet and to discuss the quotes that most attract their interest.
“In a free state there should be freedom of speech and thought.” – Tiberius (Roman Emperor)
“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” – George Washington
“Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.” – Colin Powell
“The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.” – Justice Anthony Kennedy
“If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave.” – John Adams (on freedom)
“The principle of free thought is not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
How does one decide what an American value might be? The soundest approach is by using core historical documents. Materials ingrained into American culture include the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution, as well as famous speeches, United States Supreme Court cases, and other sources documenting events or ideas from American history.
In the case of freedom of speech, several key documents are opinions of the United States Supreme Court in cases that tested and verified the freedoms granted in the First Amendment. These will be the core documents for this guide.
Before moving on to the historical sources and study questions listed here, consider starting a group discussion by asking how the group might identify an American “value”. Have the group make a list of what it considers to be “American values” and why. See if the values that group members come up with are similar to those used in these study guides.
Schenck v. United States (March 3, 1919)
Link to opinion at Legal Information Institute – Supreme Court Collection
Link to summary in lay terms at Wikipedia
During World War I, Congress passed an Espionage Act, which restricted behavior that was considered contrary to the war effort. Schenck was convicted under the espionage act for distributing anti-war pamphlets to new draftees into the military, discouraging them from being forced to fight in the war. The Supreme Court ruled against Schenck’s appeal, and also set a precedent for the extent to which the government must protect free speech.
Two quotes from the opinion of this case established analytical boundaries: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” and “The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.” Discuss with the group its understanding of, and reaction to the standard of review reflected in these quotes.
The court ruled that Schenck’s activity could be found to be a clear and present danger, because certain things that might be allowed in peacetime, might not be allowed when the nation is at war, particularly those that present a direct threat to the nation’s security. What does the group think or feel about this opinion? How often have they heard the phrase: “clear and present danger?” What do they personally think that this phrase means? What personal experiences have they had that informs their views?
Also note that in future cases the definition if this phrase has been changed. Consider having the group explore the Internet to see how this legal standard has changed since Schenck v. the United States and why.
This case was argued under the First Amendment freedom of speech clause. However, Schenck was handing out pamphlets. This is a form of writing, rather than oral speech. What does the group think or feel about how the freedom of speech clause acts as an umbrella over many different forms of expression, rather than just speech alone? This is a good time to refer back to the group’s definition for freedom of speech—do pamphlets fit within it? Why or why not?
Gitlow v. New York (June 8, 1925)
Link to summary in lay-terms at Wikipedia
Gitlow v. New York is another landmark Supreme Court case that deals with the First Amendment freedom of speech clause. Gitlow was found guilty of inciting anarchy under a New York state law when distributing pamphlets discussing a working-class revolution. He argued that the law itself was unconstitutional, under the Fourteenth Amendment “due process” clause, which guarantees, among other things, “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
This case established that, through the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights extends to the States. Gitlow’s original conviction was upheld, but almost as an aside, the Supreme Court stated in the opinion: “For present purposes, we may and do assume that freedom of speech and of the press which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress are among the fundamental personal rights and “liberties” protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States.” This set a precedent, that eventually would extend nearly the entire Bill of Rights to the States. Focus the group on the opening words of the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law,” which does not directly express anything regarding the states. Theoretically, states could have restricted many of the rights listed in the first amendment – establish state churches, monitor the press, etc. Does the group agree that these are fundamental human rights that must be protected by the 14th Amendment? Why or why not?
We enjoy a great deal of freedom which might be limited if the First Amendment did not extend to state governments. How might things have been different if another decision had been made?
Tinker v. Des Moines (February 24, 1969) and Texas v. Johnson (June 24, 1989)
Links to opinions at Legal Information Institute – Supreme Court Collection: Tinker Texas
Links to summaries in lay-terms at Wikipedia: Tinker Texas
These are two very different Supreme Court cases. Tinker v. Des Moines deals with the right of a school district to prevent students from expressing freedom of speech while in school. Texas v. Johnson deals with a man’s right to burn the American flag in protest. Both, however, address an important concept related to the First Amendment – symbolic speech. In Tinker v. Des Moines, students wore armbands, and in Texas v. Johnson, the man was burning a flag; both were found to be protected under the First Amendment freedom of speech clause.
Tinker v. Des Moines addressed issues raised when students wore black armbands in silent protest to the war in Vietnam. They were suspended from school for not removing the bands, and eventually the case made its way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found that the suspension was a violation of the First Amendment. The Court notes that the students were peaceful and not disrupting the education process. The following section of the Court’s opinion reflects its reasoning: “In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school, as well as out of school, are “persons” under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views.” The opinion is also careful to point out that First Amendment rights for teachers and students are “subject to application in light of the special characteristics of the school environment.” As the above quotes shows, in allowing student rights, the Court recognized student responsibilities or obligations to the State. Consider asking the group what it believes the rights and obligations are or should be? Why? How would the opinion apply if a student were to shout uncontrollably or disrupt the learning environment? What about strongly stating an unpopular opinion? What else may be in or out of bounds? What values are reflected in the group’s responses?
In Texas v. Johnson, a protester burned a flag during the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas. He was arrested under a Texas law which prohibited flag desecration. However, the Supreme Court ruled that this law violated First Amendment rights. More specifically, the Court pointed out that: “The Government may not prohibit the verbal or nonverbal expression of an idea merely because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable, even where our flag is involved.” This point is the heart of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech would lose a great deal of its impact if it only applied to things that mainstream society found suitable. Have the group discuss this concept. What range of views are present in the group, and what underlying data, assumptions, values, or reasoning support these views?
Flag burning is still a subject of debate in the United States, since the flag carries with it a great deal of symbolic meaning. Think of other cases where some kind of “offensive or disagreeable” speech must be allowed under the First Amendment. How does allowing this form of expression benefit our country?
Ask the group to think back to the 2004 election season. Both candidates frequently said things about American policy or their opponents that were offensive or disagreeable not only to their opponent, but large segments of the population. And yet, without the ability to say these things, would an election lose some of its meaning? Why or why not? What would the public lose if there were greater restrictions on what candidates or their supporters could say or do?
Both Tinker v. Des Moines and Texas v. Johnson involve symbolic speech. That is, wearing an armband or burning a flag do not involve spoken or written words. Does the group consider actions such as these “speech?” Why or why not? What about creative art, or music that challenges the government? These forms of symbolic “speech” can spawn considerable discussion. How do the various interpretations offered within the group reflect the words of the Constitution, or the reasoning in the opinions?
Near v. Minnesota (June 1, 1931)
This case focuses on freedom of the press. It deals with Jay M. Near, who started a newspaper in Minneapolis that was found by the trial court to be “malicious, scandalous, and defamatory.” Under a Minnesota law, the state not only had the right to prosecute him for libel, or writing that is false and damaging to a person or institution’s reputation, but also had the right to restrain or cease future publication, or censor, future publications of the newspaper. The United States Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional due to the right to restrain future publications. The group members can explore the meaning behind this decision.
The opinion states: “The question is whether a statute authorizing such proceedings in restraint of publication is consistent with the conception of liberty of the press as historically conceived and guaranteed?”
The Court answered this question with a quote from a famous English lawyer from the 18th century, Sir William Blackstone: “The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state; but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public; to forbid this is to destroy the freedom of the press; but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.”
The opinion expands on this concept by quoting one of the founding fathers, Madison: “The security of the freedom of the press requires that it should be exempt not only from previous restraint by the Executive, as in England, but from legislative restraint also.”
The opinion concludes that: “For these reasons we hold the statute to be an infringement of the liberty of the press guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. We should add that this decision rests upon the operation and effect of the statute, without regard to the truth of the charges contained in the particular periodical. The fact that public officers named in this case, and those associated with the charges of official dereliction, may be deemed to be impeccable cannot affect the conclusion that the statute imposes an unconstitutional restraint upon publication.”
To put this in other words, the question of the case was not whether the libel in the publication of Near was justified or not, whether Near could be prosecuted or not. Instead, the question was whether or not he could be restrained by the government from making future publications.
Begin by having the group discuss the right that the Court is protecting. How does the group understand the phrase “freedom of the press?” What is the role of the press in a democracy? How would the public be affected if the press were not free?
In the opinion of the Supreme Court, prior restraint or censoring is very detrimental to the freedom of the press. Have the group brainstorm ideas why prior restraint could be so dangerous – especially when lack of restraint can enable the publication of libelous material. Does the group see the distinction between holding the press accountable by prosecution for libelous or harmful material and censoring the press prior to publication? What is it and why? How would letting the government censor the press affect accountability of government officials? How would it affect the rights of the public in a democracy?
Revisit the prior discussion on the First Amendment and its relationship to State laws or actions. How would the press be affected if the First Amendment restrained federal action, but not that of the State?
Free speech continues to be a focal point of our national dialogue. Nearly every day issues related to freedom of speech are reported, debated, and discussed in the media and the government.
As a group, go through a stack of newspapers or magazines, or browse the Internet, and have group members point out articles that reflect concerns they have about freedom of speech. Discuss these in the context of the ideas and concepts already pointed out from the definitions and historical sources. Ask group members how their own views were shaped by their own experiences with personal expression and the government. Ask them to consider if the article or report is promoting a particular point of view. What is being reported and what is not? Why? What additional information would the group like to have?
Commercial Speech
Link at FindLaw.com
The Supreme Court has differentiated between commercial and political speech and protected “political speech” even when it is offered by a commercial entitiy. With regard to political speech, “The First Amendment affords the broadest protection to such political expression in order to assure [the] unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people.” Brownsburg Area Patrons Affecting Change v. Baldwin, 137 F.3d 503, 505-06 (7th Cir. 1998) (quoting Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 13 (1976)); see also, e.g., New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964). Simply put, even commercial entities have a right to engage in political speech.
For example, public utilities have a right to express and control their own political speech, even regarding regulated matters. As the Supreme Court held in Consolidated Edison Co. v. Public Service Comm’n of N.Y., 447 U.S. 530, 534 n.1 (1980), a utility’s “position as a regulated monopoly does not decrease the informative value of its opinions on critical public matters.”
In Consolidated Edison, the Court invalidated a rule prohibiting a utility company from addressing controversial political issues in its billing envelopes. Id. At 544. The Court recognized that utilities, as much as any other entities, possess First Amendment rights, and concluded that “limit[ing] the means by which [the utility] may participate in the public debate … strikes at the heart of the freedom to speak.” Id. At 535
The United States Supreme Court further addresses free speech rights of public utilities in Pacific Gas and Electric Co. v. Public Utilities Comm’n, 475 U.S. 1 (1986). The Court held that a regulatory order forcing a utility to disseminate, and thus effectively compelling it to respond to opinions in other groups with which it disagreed, violated the utility’s First Amendment rights . Id. At 20-21. In reaching that conclusion, the Court reiterated that the utility’s own speech, as expressed in a newsletter distributed in its monthly billing envelope, undoubtedly “receives the full protection of the First Amendment.” Id. At 8.
Purely commercial speech is in contrast, is afforded less protection than other forms of speech. Such speech may be regulated where it is more likely to deceive the public than to inform it. Friedman v. Rogers 440 U.S. 1 (1979).
To summarize, even though its purely commercial speech may be regulated and restricted, the right of a commercial entity to have and to express a political opinion is fully protected by the First Amendment.
For an example of “purely commercial speech,” have group members think of commercials, and then examples of “false advertising,” which is regulated by the government.
Ask the group to consider how commercial speech is different from political speech. How is the public affected differently by the two different kinds of speech?
What is the government interest in regulating commercial speech? What are the dangers in regulating political speech, but not commercial speech? In regulating commercial speech, but not political speech? Have the group brainstorm many different aspects of this question.
Anti-SLAPP Laws in Missouri
Link to article at Missouri Bar
SLAPP is an acronym for “strategic lawsuit against public participation”. What does this have to do with free speech and the First Amendment? Mr. Kling’s article, cited here summarizes the purpose of SLAPP lawsuits: “[A SLAPP] lawsuit is filed solely for delay and distraction, and to punish activists by imposing litigation costs on them for exercising their right to speak and to petition government. The primary purpose of a SLAPP lawsuit is not to resolve the allegation in the petition, but to punish or retaliate against citizens who have spoken out against the plaintiffs in the political arena and to intimidate those who would otherwise speak in the future.”
Kling describes one type of SLAPP lawsuit, a lawsuit brought against a community group protesting real estate development, and exercising its right to petition and publish its views.
Instead of attempting to try and directly silence this speech, which clearly would be unconstitutional, plaintiffs in SLAPP lawsuits instead discourage such speech by engaging the speakers in intimidating lawsuits and burdening them with expensive legal fees.
The Missouri anti-SLAPP law applies to “any action seeking money damages against a person for conduct or speech undertaken or made in connection with a public hearing or meeting.”
SLAPPs and anti-SLAPP laws bring up an interesting aspect to freedom of speech. In these cases, no one is directly preventing these petitioners from speaking. In fact, these cases happen after the fact; canvassing, speaking, and protesting have already occurred. However, such suits can be viewed as punishing people for speaking, and discourage future groups from doing so. Discuss with the group a parallel between restraint of speech in this instance and the concern raised by the Court in Near v. Minnesota when it addressed a prior restraint of freedom of the press.
Clearly in the minds of Missouri legislators, in order for freedom of speech to function, it cannot be obstructed by intimidating and costly SLAPP lawsuits. What do the group members think? What does the group believe should be the government’s role in preserving or protecting freedom of speech? Why?
Judith Miller Case
The Judith Miller case deals with the rights of the press to protect their anonymous sources in a court of law. After refusing to reveal some of her sources in a grand jury case dealing with leaks that revealed the identity of a CIA agent, Judith Miller was arrested. If the group members would like more information, typing “Judith Miller” in a search engine will bring up a great deal of related information. A good place to start is an article at NPR.org: “Lessons in the Judith Miller Case.”
This article raises several important questions, and the full implications of the case have yet to be seen. As a group, consider discussing the following:
Do group members think that anonymous sources are important for journalists? Why or why not? What are the benefits and drawbacks of anonymous sources? How is this related to the rights guaranteed by First Amendment?
Discuss with group members their thoughts on whether there should be laws that protect journalist-source confidentiality, much like a doctor-patient relationship. The article points out that in many states such laws exist, but there are no federal laws.
Carl Bernstein (who along with Bob Woodward famously helped investigate the Watergate scandal) stated in a recent article in Vanity Fair that: “… there is no way our reporting on Watergate could have been done without the use of anonymous sources. In fact, in our first 100 stories, there is not a single named source who revealed anything of substance about the undercover activities of the Nixon White House.” If anonymous sources are truly that important for journalists to get valued information, are they essential for a free press?
Below are links to websites and resources that deal with freedom of speech.
Legal Information Institute, Cornell University – The Supreme Court Collection
First Amendment Schools
Center for Civic Education
First Amendment Center (Vanderbilt University)
The First Amendment Project – (An advocacy group. The website includes a blog, which contains personal opinions. But this also provides the opportunity for group members to discern opinions from facts, and to agree or disagree.)
The Freedom Forum
For a recent resource on civic education, see the following PDF: A Crisis in Civic Education.
Comments Off on Free Speech . . . IS an American Value®
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Top 10 left handed metal drummers
Hadlee Fleming June 16
Ok, I will admit, I didn't plan on doing this list but someone commented the idea on my left handed guitarist list so I thought why not? but I never got around to it until now so I hope you enjoy it.
When it comes to left handed musicians in rock and metal, drummers are the least obvious since you can't immediately tell that a drummer plays left handed, unlike with a guitarist or bassist. They're also the most overlooked since those that are left handed are rarely ever talked about. So here, I thought I would list out 10 of them and give them some love.
As always, if there's any that I missed, comment them down because there's plenty of other great left handed drummers out there.
Alright, let's do it:
10. Sebastian Thomson
Current Baroness drummer Sebastian Thomson joined the band some time after the band released their Yellow & Green double album. He first appeared on the band's 2015 album Purple, which is an amazing album. Everything about that album was great including Thomson's drumming, as he shows that his drum skills definitely suit the band. Thomson has also killed it once again on the new Baroness album Gold & Grey which dropped a couple of days ago so check it out if you haven't already to hear Thomson in action.
9. Oli Beaudoin
Oli Beaudoin is currently the drummer for the Canadian melodic death metal band Kataklysm. He's been the band's drummer since 2013 and has played on the band's last 3 albums. As shown on these 3 albums, Beaudoin managed to click in with the band just fine and has mastered the art of northern hyperblast. So, although he's been in the band for less than a decade, he's done quite a bit for Kataklysm so hopefully, he'll still be able to play in the band for a wee while because the dude's got quite a bit of skill.
8. Shawn Drover
Shawn Drover became the drummer for Megadeth back in 2004 and played in the band for a decade before leaving alongside guitarist Chris Broderick and forming Act of Defiance with him. With Megadeth, he first appeared on the album United Abominations and the last album that he did with the band was the 2013 album Super Collider. Now, his drumming with Megadeth was great, even on Super Collider, which is considered one of the band's worst albums. Although he was good with Megadeth, I think he's even better with Act of Defiance, so if you like his work with Megadeth, definitely check out Act of Defiance.
7. Ginger Fish
Shock rock drummer Ginger Fish played drums for Marilyn Manson from 1995 up until 2011, when he left to play drums for Rob Zombie. He first played on Manson's legendary sophomore album Antichrist Superstar, which is regarded as his best album. He then played on the next bunch of Manson releases, with his last one being The High End of Low. After that, he left and joined Rob Zombie's band, which he's still in today. He's played drums on Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor and The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser so he's definitely a big name when it comes to shock rock drumming.
6. Neil Sanderson
Alongside bassist Brad Walst, drummer Neil Sanderson is one of the only original members of the popular hard rock/alt metal band Three Days Grace, and has played on every album that the band has made. He leads with his left hand even though he uses a right hand setup. Although the drums aren't really that much of a focus on any Three Days Grace material, Sanderson certainly delivers and he manages to do it well, as him and Walst prove that they're a solid rhythm section and they play this particular style of music well. Just because a player is overlooked, doesn't mean they're not good and Sanderson is a good example of that.
5. Nicke Andersson
Left handed multi instrumentalist Nicke Andersson has played multiple instruments in multiple bands but when it comes to drums, he played on the first 4 entombed albums and then he left before rejoining after the band reformed in 2016. He is also the current drummer for the German hard rock band Lucifer. As some of you may know, Entombed have been credited for pioneering death n roll with their 3rd album Wolverine Blues, an album which features Andersson's drumming. He also did vocals on the band's 2nd album Clandestine alongside his awesome drumming. Not to mention, he does a great job on Left Hand Path and DCLXVI as well and he also did good on the new Lucifer album.
4. Fenriz
Norweigan black metal legend Gylve Fenris Nagell, better known by his pseudonym Fenriz, makes up one half of the duo Darkthrone, considered one of the country's greatest black metal bands. Although he plays guitar right handed, he plays drums left handed. Now, he plays both instruments for Darkthrone but he's best known for playing drums for the band, and he usually kills it. He's proven himself to be one of the best multi instrumentalists in Norweigan black metal, although the band has been exploring other styles since 2006 but Fenriz still does his job fantastically.
3. Mike Bordin
Mike Bordin is best known as the longtime drummer for the alt metal band Faith No More but he is also one of the many people who have played for Ozzy Osbourne. He's appeared on every Faith No More release and played drums on 3 Ozzy albums, Down to Earth, Under Cover and Black Rain. He uses a right hand setup but he has his primary ride cymbal on his left. Although not the most famous Ozzy drummer, he still played some good drums on the 3 albums he contributed to, however, his best works are with Faith No More, especially on the band's best works such as The Real Thing and Angel Dust. Definitely check out Faith No More if you dig alt metal and you'll be able to hear Bordin's great skill for yourself.
2. Tom Hunting
Exodus drummer Tom Hunting has been in and out of the band but has played on most of the band's releases. As many of you will know, Exodus are one of the most legendary thrash bands ever and have dropped numerous classic albums, most notably Bonded by Blood. The only Exodus albums that don't feature Hunting's drumming skills are Impact is Imminent and Force of Habit. Every other Exodus album showcases Hunting's awesome drumming, the dude definitely packs speed and skill. He was originally the band's lead vocalist but then he switched to drums so, thank God for that.
1. Ian Paice
Probably the most famous left handed drummer ever, Ian Paice is the man who sits behind the kit for the legendary Deep Purple. He's been the band's drummer ever since the band was first formed back in 1968 and has played on every Deep Purple album. He's been considered one of the greatest drummers in metal and there's good reason for that. Even though he isn't the most technically skilled drummer there ever was, he still had plenty of skill, and his style was a great fit for Deep Purple's brand of bluesy hard rock that borders on metal. Even today, the 70 year old is still going strong with Deep Purple.
Well, that's the list, I hope you enjoyed it, let me know what you thought about it and I'll see you next time.
Maggot6(sic)6worm7426
Why wasn’t Nils ”dominator” fjällström from dark funeral on the list?!?!?!?!
Read one more reply
Reply to: Hadlee Fleming
Oh sorry. I got slightly offended since he is one of my favorite drummers and we are both from sweden
Hadlee Fleming Author
Reply to: Maggotworm7426
Ok, fair enough
And dark funeral is my favorite blackmetal band
kasra1407
What about chris adler
Reply to: kasra1407
He doesn't count because he plays drums right handed
Andy Crow
Nicke Andersson! The president of Rock!
SWAMPTURTLEPYRAMID
I did not know any of that. Mike Bordin kicks ass.
Reply to: SWAMPTURTLEPYRAMID
Hell yeah he does
Sid666
Great list. Although you should add Gene Hoglan to the list. Coming from a drummer. :hearts:
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Top 10 left handed metal bassists
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Amy on Andy Barker P.I.
Amy has a guest spot on Andy Richter’s new NBC mid-season replacement show, Andy Barker P.I. NBC decided to air five of the six episodes taped so far, and unfortunately, Amy’s was the one that got the boot. However, you can watch the entire episode for free on NBC’s website (it’s “The Lady Varnishes”) and it’s available for purchase on iTunes for $1.99. She guest stars alongside Ed Asner (and plays a character as old as Ed Asner…).
March 11, 2007 Katie
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The best coverage for Grayslake, IL (60030)
Resting about forty miles north of downtown Chicago is a village with a population of around 20,957 residents called Grayslake, Illinois. The town is a metropolitan area that is about fourteen miles just west of Lake Michigan and around fifteen miles south of the border of Wisconsin.
One of Grayslake’s most prominent highlights are the education options available such as Grayslake Central High, University Center of Lake County, and the Grayslake North High School. Other business’ include a Fairground, light industry, office space, and residential area spanning 640 acres in the south end. While researching to determine the Best Cellular Service in Grayslake, IL 60030 we found such events as the Taste of Grayslake, Grayslake Day, and the Grayslake Arts Festival are three fun-filled family activities held each summer.
The early history of the village is that Mr. William Gray settled in the area around Grays Lake (hence the name) in 1840. Soon, other farmers made their way to the area. The Wisconsin railroad established a line that ran to Chicago, passing one side of Gray’s Lake. Once establishing a station in the area in 1886, the village received its name then incorporated in 1895.
The largest lake, Grays Lake, located in the center of the town is the namesake and main attraction to the area. Grayslake provides swimming, fishing, and boating in the summer and skating, ice fishing, and hockey in the winter months. Rollins Savannah is a 1,200-acre forest preserve with a bird observation deck, walkways, and trails through the wetlands.
What is the Best Cellular Service in Grayslake, IL 60030
Before we reveal our findings for the Best Cellular Service in Grayslake, IL 60030, we want you to know that Best Cellular is a Quad-carrier, meaning, we use all four major carriers across the U.S. We don’t have a need to show partiality to one carrier. We are proud to say in Grayslake, IL 60030, the “Big Red” and the “Yellow Network” both serve equally. With Best Cellular, if you already have a phone you prefer to keep, no problem. We prefer you to keep your phone unless you need to update or replace your existing device. If you have a phone number you want to keep, that is fine with us as well.
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Douglas W. Powell was born on October 1, 1943 in Pelham, NC to the late James Powell and Odell Powell.
He proudly served 26 years as a Hospital Corpsman in the U. S. Navy, where he achieved the rank of Master Chief Petty Officer, the highest rank for an enlisted man. He served time with the U. S. Marines, on several ships, in base medical clinics and he retired from the Naval Hospital in Beaufort, SC where he was the Command Master Chief.
After leaving the service and moving to Ormond Beach, Douglas continued to work in several fields. When he finally gave up working, he was a regular and valued volunteer at the Jewish Federation's Jerry Doliner Food Bank. He enjoyed playing softball and played on local recreational teams including the Beach Boys Senior traveling team.
Battling cancer for the past 3 years, Douglas passed on Sunday, July 7, 2019.
Douglas is predeceased by his two daughters, Sonja Powell and Roxanne Jaquish, and three brothers, Jimmy Powell, Billy Powell, and Donnie Powell. He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Rosemary (Stiteler) Powell, his son Douglas W. Powell, Jr., two grandsons Clay "Eddie" Sapp (Becca) and Sean Sapp, and a great-grandson Brodie Sapp. He is also survived by three sisters, Faye Presgrave and husband Max of Tennessee, Lillie Owens, and Anne Vermillion and husband Jim all of Virginia.
Friends will be received from 6-8 PM on Tuesday, July 16, 2019, at the Bauer Bly Funeral Home, Inc., 125 East Main Street, Dayton, PA.
Additional visitation will be from 10 AM until time of services at 11 AM on Wednesday, July 17, 2019, at the funeral home with the Rev. Jason McQueen officiating.
Interment will be in the Smicksburg Lutheran Cemetery, West Mahoning Township, PA, where military honors will be presented by the American Legion Honor Guard.
In lieu of flowers, please consider making donations to St. Jude's Children's Hospital, 105 St. Jude Place, Memphis, TN, 38105.
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FSU’s QB Battle and ACC Wrap Up
November 4, 2015 Justin Bramm
Florida State’s 45-21 victory over Syracuse means a lot more than simply defeating an ACC opponent, the victory brings up questions at the most important position on offense, the quarterback.
With season long starter Everett Golson sitting out the game due to a concussion, backup Sean Maguire got the start and proceeded to pass for 348 yards, 3 touchdowns with no interceptions.
Maguire simply made the offense look the best it has all season. Most noticeably was his ability to throw down the field, which Golson has shown he isn’t consistently able to do. The plays that were being called for Maguire proved that there is more trust in his arm than Golson’s. The Seminoles haven’t been utilizing wide receiver Travis Rudolph’s speed downfield because Golson can’t be trusted to chuck it down the field. In comes Maguire, and two bombs to Rudolph later early in the game and he has two catches for 120 yards and two touchdowns.
Travis Rudolph had his best game of the season with Maguire under center.
Being able to stretch the field is something that the Seminole offense has been lacking all season, with this, opposing defenses have been loading the box in order to contain running back Dalvin Cook, and Golson hasn’t given any team a reason not to because he hasn’t shown that he is capable of making the defenses pay.
All of this adds up to one big question for the Seminoles leading into the biggest game of their season against newly #1 Clemson; who should be the starting quarterback?
Normally a good game by the backup quarterback in replacement of the starter isn’t enough to supplant the starter, but this isn’t an ordinary situation. The first reason is that even though Golson transferred in during the offseason and subsequently won the starting job over Maguire, Golson hasn’t performed to the level that was expected and the level coaches were hoping. Secondly is that Maguire has proved that he can lead the team to victories, he is only 2-0, but one of them was against Clemson and their top five defense last season.
Who will start is a complete unknown at this point. Coach Jimbo Fisher has said everything from saying he’s going to wait and see throughout the week, to saying that he’s not eliminating the possibility of a two quarterback system. Regardless of who starts, the success of the Seminoles season will be determined by the outcome of their next game against Clemson. A win will help people forget about their loss to Georgia Tech, while also putting them in the driver’s seat of the Atlantic division of the ACC.
If you asked me, I think the nod will be given to Maguire. It is a tough decision, but Golson just hasn’t looked like he has been in control of the ‘Noles offense at any point of the season. At times he looks scared and opts to scramble, or he throws a short pass, the offense under Golson was more of a dink and dunk offense, compared to what Maguire showed us on Saturday. Maguire’s arm brought life to the offense, and he did so without Dalvin Cook.
The Seminoles face Clemson at 3:30 on Saturday.
Here’s what else happened in the ACC this weekend:
MIAMI’S KICKOFF RETURN VS DUKE
One of the biggest plays of the season happened last weekend when Miami miraculously returned a kickoff for a touchdown against Duke to win the game as time expired. Miami, in a last ditch effort to win the game lateralled the ball eight times and managed to get by the Duke coverage team to score the game-winning touchdown, but not really. One of the Miami runners who attempted to lateral the ball was clearly down upon watching the replay, and multiple block in the back calls were missed that should have been called. The ACC has thus suspended a couple of the ACC officials from the game, admitting that the referees erred on the play. So the play that won Miami the game, shouldn’t have been a touchdown, but it was. Why the ACC can’t overturn the play and give Duke the victory is beyond me, but as it stands Miami won the game, and now has an outside shot of winning the Coastal division. It really is a shame because Duke had a lot more on the line in this game than Miami did. With the loss, Duke now is a game back from UNC in the Coastal division of the ACC.
UNC LEADS THE COASTAL DIVISION
Because of the botched kickoff return, UNC is now sitting atop the Coastal division. With Pittsburgh and Duke both losing, #21 North Carolina is now quietly 7-1 and in position to face either Clemson or Florida State in the ACC championship. The divisional race is still far from over as UNC and Duke face each other this weekend, with Duke and Pitt facing each other in two weeks. Nonetheless it seems like this UNC team is being slept on. They have the 21st ranked offense in points per game in the NCAA, and the 15th best defense in terms of points allowed. People will point to their strength of schedule, but the win over #23 Pittsburgh helped put them on the map, and how they perform in their game against Duke this weekend will go a long ways to determining how good this team really is.
FRANK BEAMER RETIRES
Frank Beamer, the long-time coach of the Virginia Tech Hokies has decided to step down as head coach after the end of the 2015 season. This wasn’t a move that was completely unexpected, but it will mark the end of an era at Virginia Tech. Beamer began coaching for Virginia Tech in 1987, leading them to 22 straight bowl games. His teams have slipped a bit over the past few seasons, which along with his age, surely played a big part in his decision to step down. Beamer will be remembered as one of the most respected coaches in college football by coaches, and by his players who all credit Beamer to being one of the biggest influences in their careers. Beamer took Virginia Tech from an independent team in 1987, to the Big East in 1991, to where they are now in the ACC in 2004. Beamer led the Hokies to four ACC Championships, three Big East Championships, and six BCS bowl game appearances. Who will be the coach in 2016 is unclear, however Beamer has stated in the past that he hopes someone on his current staff will be named his successor.
accacc footballBCSCampus Pressbox ArchivesClemsonDalvin CookEverett GolsonFlorida StateFrank BeamerJimbo FisherPittsburghSean MaguireVirginia Tech
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Despite Failures, Sound Transit Benefits from Short Voter Memories
Public Policy | 0
Washington state’s Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority – better known as Sound Transit – is anything but sound in fiscal terms. Formed in Seattle’s go-go public-construction fever-years by the King, Pierce and Snohomish county councils in 1996, it made unfulfilled promises.
Operating commuter and light rail express bus services, it continually wants to expand. But it’s at the expense of short voter memories.
Why was Sound Transit possible?
Let’s revisit the giddy year of 1995 in Seattle. Seattle’s pro teams played in the Kingdome.
In football, the Seahawks, eager to return to winning seasons in the National Football League, hired Dennis Erickson as coach. Coach Erickson had a stellar college background. In six years, he led the Miami Hurricane to a 63-9 record and two national championships.
In his first eight games in Seattle, the Seahawks went 6-2. The rabid Seahawk fans had reason to hope.
In major league baseball, the Mariners finished the season at 79-66, and then tied the California Angels for first place in the American League West. In an emotional one-game tie-breaker, the Mariners clobbered the Angels, 9-1.
Despite losing the first two games in the next playoff series with the New York Yankees, the Mariners won the series on Edgar Martinez’ double driving home Ken Griffey, Jr. for the winning run in the 11th inning of the deciding game.
Seattle fans got baseball fever, even though the team lost to the Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship Series. Pitcher Randy Johnson was later named winner of the prestigious Cy Young Award.
The Seattle Supersonics finished their National Basketball Association season with a whopping 57-25 record. But they lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Community spirit was sky-high – largely from the success of Seattle’s pro teams.
The Mariners, Seahawks and their fans began to lobby for new stadiums. The Washington State Legislature soon went into special session and came up with a public funding package. The plan was to build what was to become Safeco Field near the Kingdome.
Later, CenturyLink Field was built for football.
The multi-purpose Kingdome was operated by King County, which was demolished in 2000 to make way for the football stadium. But as with the typical inefficiency in any government project, the bond issues to build and repair the Kingdome weren’t scheduled to be paid off until 2016.
1996 Sound Move Plan
To capitalize during this period of euphoria, the public sector’s Sound Transit announced its strategy for a ballot measure, Sound Move plan, it’s “Ten-Year Regional Transit System Plan.” For riders, the promised the system would provide 107,000 trips per weekday by 2010.
But it every year it missed the mark. In 2013, Sound Transit missed its ridership goal by 70 percent.
“Sound Transit officials recently said their agency’s June 2013 ridership figures averaged 32,000 weekday boardings,” blogged Bob Pishue, director of the Washington Policy Center (WPC) for Transportation. “They were quick to tout this as a 14% increase over June 2012, but conveniently ignored the fact their ridership is far below what they promised voters when the program began.”
WPC (www.washingtonpolicy.org) provides a terrific service and is self-described as an “independent, non-partisan think tank promoting sound public policy based on free-market solutions.” Often, it does a better of reporting and analyzing important events and trends in Washington than the news media.
“Sound Transit head Joni Earl proudly highlights June 11 as a banner day, with 38,000 boardings, however on that day a Mariner game and a World Cup qualifier soccer match were both being played in SODO, so it wasn’t a typical day,” Mr. Pishue added.
“Understandably, Sound Transit officials are putting the best face possible on their low ridership numbers, but a more accurate picture comes from looking at what they promised the public in the first place,” he observed.
“Clearly facing failure by 2006, Sound Transit said they would serve only 35,821 trips per weekday, a 66% cut,” he added. “In 2009, Sound Transit backed away further on their ridership promise, down to 29,467 per weekday, a 72% cut from their original commitment.”
Taxpayers were originally promised a great plan and paid billions for it.
Worse, public funds continue to bail out Sound Transit. It’s past time for voters to get their money’s worth.
From the Coach’s Corner, here are more informative WPC analyses:
Washington Taxpayers Lose Economic Freedoms under Ruling Class, Inslee – Washington state’s ruling class was at it again in March 2013. After less than four months in office, Gov. Jay Inslee has already violated a major campaign promise he made on taxes to get elected in 2012.
Why Health-Insurance Rates Increasing and Policyholders Losing Coverage in WA – Two promises of ObamaCare are proving to be false in Washington state, says leading think tank. Hundreds of thousands of Washington state residents – individual policyholders and small group insurance members – are learning two promises of ObamaCare are false.
“The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.”
PreviousHiring? Laying Off? Retaining Workers? 3 Often Asked Questions
Next7 Steps to Become Great at Thinking on Your Feet
Job Creation: Obama Refused to Listen to Intel’s CEO
Obama’s Broken Promise for Transparent Government – Study
Top Economist: Obama Bank Tax Is a Con
1.36 Million Jobs Would be Created by Tariffs on China – Study
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Honda shows 3 concepts; 1 likely to be built
Kathy Jackson | Automotive News
Honda's FCX fuel cell concept, above, is similar to the production model that will go on sale in 2008.
LOS ANGELES -- Honda showed three concept vehicles at the Los Angeles Auto Show.
One definitely will go to market. The other two have possibilities if consumers are enthusiastic.
The FCX fuel cell concept is close to the production model that will go on sale in Japan and the United States in 2008, says fuel cell marketing manager Stephen Ellis.
The vehicle will replace the current FCX. It will be the first time Honda will aggressively market a fuel cell vehicle to the public.
At the heart of the new vehicle is the new fuel stack, Ellis says. It is under the center console and flows vertically, allowing for more efficient water drainage and better performance. The new placement also makes for more interior room than the current stack, which is underneath the floor and flows horizontally.
It has four doors, compared with two for the current car. It has a range of about 270 miles, about 30 percent more than the current vehicle. The interior fabric is a first for Honda: a biofabric partially made from corn.
Of Honda's 20 FCXs on the road, only one is leased to a consumer. Ellis says the company plans to lease "substantially more" of the new FCX models to private owners.
Honda also showed the two-seat sport Remix concept and the Honda Step Bus concept. Both are geared to the youth market.
The Remix was designed to fit a moderately priced small-car platform with front-wheel drive, a four-cylinder engine and a six-speed manual transmission.
The Step Bus is a five-seat minibus with cues from the old VW hippie bus. It is spacious and has sliding front doors. The interior is high-tech, with features on the instrument panel encased in transparent rubberlike materials.
"We will see what kind of reaction we get at the show," says Honda Division product manager John Watts, "and we could build these cars."
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Market Integrity Insights
Views on improving the integrity of global capital markets
Standards, Ethics and Regulations (SER)
Systemic Risk
Asset Manager Code
FASB
EU Roadmap for Long-Term Financing: What Does It Mean for Investors?
By Mirzha de Manuel Aramendía
Posted In: Corporate Governance, MiFID
EU-Roadmap.png
The European Commission recently unveiled its roadmap to improve the long-term financing of the European economy, which many see as a sort of “legacy agenda” for the next legislature, after elections take place in May. The roadmap contains a total of 31 actions, some ongoing but most to be proposed or carried out in 2014. Of these actions, only five make reference to legislation, with the rest alluding to reports, studies, consultations, and recommendations.
Actions are planned in six major fields:
Prudential standards for banks and insurers
A single market for personal pension funds and saving accounts
Equity and corporate bond markets, securitisation, covered bonds, and private
Access to finance by small and medium enterprises (SMEs)
Corporate governance and engagement
The Commission also proposes measures to improve the legal and tax environment.
Actions to Develop Capital Markets
As highlighted by Steven Maijoor, chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), at a recent event supported by CFA Institute, “As our banking systems are going through an important phase of transformation, markets and policymakers increasingly look to securities markets for fresh impulses”.
The Commission´s plan to develop capital market comprises actions both in wholesale and retail markets:
Initial public offerings: The Commission will assess the implications and effects of the Prospectus Directive by the end of 2015. This will likely include the introduction of a specific framework for SME issuances, at least under €5 million in 12 months, for which no EU-wide transparency requirements exist currently. The Commission may also propose at this point specific requirements for issuer transparency for offerings through crowdfunding platforms.
Private placements: The Commission will re-examine its project, initiated in 2007, to develop private placement markets in Europe. It notes that, while these markets exist in certain EU countries, a significant number of issuers still prefer to place in the US ($20 billion in 2012). It remains cautious, however, as these markets tend to be characterised by a relative lack of transparency and high illiquidity that the Commission would like to tackle.
Specialised SME markets: The revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) creates a new category of multilateral trading facilities specialising in SME growth markets. The Commission will introduce measures to foster the use of these markets, lessening the administrative burden on SMEs while keeping them attractive to investors by providing enough transparency and protections.
Corporate bond markets: MiFID II introduces a number of measures to improve the functioning of non-equity markets in the EU, including the establishment of a consolidated tape. The Commission, however, indicates its willingness to move further to enable the creation of liquid and transparent secondary markets for the trading of corporate bonds in the EU. It proposes to conduct an exploratory assessment as a first step but has not indicated a timeline.
Securitisation: The Commission wishes clearly to revive securitisation but is cautious because it needs to find a workable arrangement to differentiate “high quality” from complex and opaque operations without creating an opportunity for regulatory arbitrage. If it does, it is willing to forego punitive capital charges for high quality tranches, as reflected in its proposal on banking structural reform and the ongoing discussions for implementing Solvency II.
Covered bonds: To develop the covered bond market in Europe, the Commission proposes to review its prudential treatment, taking into account aspects such as credit quality, eligible collateral, and transparency. In addition, it will explore potential measures to strengthen the enforceability of preferential rights within the bankruptcy regimes of member states, which it aims at coordinating more broadly to stimulate investing and entrepreneurship.
Personal pensions: The Commission recalls its recent request for advice to the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) on the creation of a single market for personal pension products, which are underdeveloped in most member states. EIOPA will deliver its final advice in the second half of 2014. In its preliminary report, EIOPA focuses on life-cycling, guided choice, simplicity, affordability, and communications with plan holders.
UCITS eligible assets: Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS funds) need to comply with strict liquidity requirements, which typically make investments in less liquid asset classes inadequate to the redemption profile offered to investors. The Commission, however, proposes to review the eligible assets under the UCITS directive to include SME stocks, but only if they fulfil certain liquidity characteristics, in line with MiFID II.
Finding the Right Balance for Investors
Investors should welcome the renewed interest of European policymakers to develop capital markets. It is a well-known fact that Europe relies on banking and that capital markets only account for about one-third of funding provided to the real economy, in stark contrast to the US. Many blame this apparent lack of diversity in funding channels for the difficulties experienced by Europe to regain growth and finance innovation.
Deeper and more transparent and liquid capital markets will expand opportunities to investors, including retail investors who will be able to access a wider variety of securities, either directly or through packaged products such as investment funds or pension plans. However, it is crucial that any initiatives have the interests of end investors at heart in order to stimulate their participation and preserve their trust over time.
Photo credit: iStockphoto.com/yuri4u80
Mirzha de Manuel Aramendía
Mirzha de Manuel Aramendía is director of capital markets policy at CFA Institute. He is responsible for developing capital markets policy in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region through education and research, developing policy papers, research projects, and regulatory consultations.
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Inside East Harris County
Somebody must have been chasing them
By Carol Christian on February 16, 2010 at 3:37 PM
Organizers of the first Strides for Schools Fun Run/Walk on Feb. 13 in Deer Park say they’re tickled with the results: 553 people registered, and the event raised $23,250.
About 550 people hit the streets of Deer Park on Feb. 13 for the first-ever Strides for Schools Fun Run/Walk. The 5K event raised $23,250.
The proceeds will go to the Deer Park Education Foundation, which helps fund innovative teaching programs in Deer Park public schools.
Shell Deer Park presented the Fun Run as a gift to the community last fall during the company’s 80th anniversary celebration.
Sheri Brown, the foundation director, said the money raised will make a huge different in the foundation’s programs this year.
“I was thrilled with the overwhelming response we received from the community,” Brown said in a news release. “I am grateful to Shell and to all the participants and the dozens of volunteers, sponsors and spectators who helped make this event a true winner.”
These folks were among the 550 participants in the Feb. 13 Strides for Schools Fun Run in Deer Park. Does anyone know their names?
Shell Deer Park General Manager Aamir Farid said that supporting education has been among the company’s top priorities for decades.
“We wanted to create an event that would bring the entire community together to support and recognize the Deer Park school system,” Farid said. “We’re excited about this year’s strong results, but we’re already looking forward to doubling that success next year.”
Carol Christian
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But the dictionary says…
A Better Pencil
By Dennis Baron
The Supreme Court is using dictionaries to interpret the Constitution. Both conservative justices, who believe the Constitution means today exactly what the Framers meant in the 18th century, and liberal ones, who see the Constitution as a living, breathing document changing with the times, are turning to dictionaries more than ever to interpret our laws: a new report shows that the justices have looked up almost 300 words or phrases in the past decade. Earlier this month, according to the New York Times, Chief Justice Roberts consulted five dictionaries for a single case.
Even though judicial dictionary look-ups are on the rise, the Court has never commented on how or why dictionary definitions play a role in Constitutional decisions. That’s further complicated by the fact that dictionaries aren’t designed to be legal authorities, or even authorities on language, though many people, including the justices of the Supreme Court, think of them that way. What dictionaries are, instead, are records of how some speakers and writers have used words. Dictionaries don’t include all the words there are, and except for an occasional usage note, they don’t tell us what to do with the words they do record. Although we often say, “The dictionary says…,” there are many dictionaries, and they don’t always agree.
As for the justices, they aren’t just looking up technical terms like battery, lien, and prima facie, words which any lawyer should know by heart. They’re also checking ordinary words like also, if, now, and even ambiguous. One of the words Chief Justice Roberts looked up last week in a patent case was of. These are words whose meanings even the average person might consider beyond dispute.
Sometimes dictionary definitions inform landmark decisions. In Washington, DC, v. Heller (2008), the case in which the high Court decided the meaning of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, both Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens checked the dictionary definition of arms. Along with the dictionaries of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, Justice Scalia cited Timothy Cunningham’s New and Complete Law Dictionary (1771), where arms is defined as “any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another” (variations on this definition occur in English legal texts going back to the 16th century). And Justice Stevens cited both Samuel Johnson’s definition of arms as “weapons of offence, or armour of defence” (1755) and John Trusler’s “by arms, we understand those instruments of offence generally made use of in war; such as firearms, swords, &c.” (1794).
The much less publicized case of Barnhart v. Peabody Coal Co. (2003) turned in part on the meaning of a single word, shall. In this case the justices all agreed that the word shall in one particular section of the federal Coal Act functions as a command. What they disagreed about was just how much latitude the use of shall permits.
In Peabody Coal the Court’s majority decided that sometimes circumstances may excuse the delayed fulfillment by the Social Security Commissioner of what the Coal Act requires: in other words, better late than never. But in his dissent, Justice Thomas insisted that the verb shall allows no wiggle room: a command that is not fulfilled on time cannot be fulfilled at all. Thomas reiterated the legal commonplace that the words in statutes must be understood in their “ordinary and or natural meaning,” and he quoted the American Heritage Dictionary to prove that shall is a “mandatory command”:
[shall aux. v.] (1) a. Something that will take place or exist in the future…. b. Something, such as an order, promise, requirement, or obligation.
Actually, the definition that Thomas cited shows that shall is often not a mandatory command, just an indicator of the future tense. However, the other justices agreed that shall was an imperative in the Coal Act, and the American Heritage definition doesn’t support Thomas’ claim that imperative shall is absolute, so it’s not clear why Thomas bothered to quote the dictionary at all, except to make the point that dictionary definitions routinely guide legal interpretation.
Sometimes the justices can’t find the support they’re looking for in dictionaries, and when a judicial interpretation of a law clashes with the lexical evidence, the justices are quick to reject the authority of the same dictionaries that in other cases they hold up as repositories of wisdom and reason. In Heller, none of the justices thought that the Second Amendment protected a citizen’s right to own a tank or a surface-to-air missile, even though such weapons fit the definition of arms. But they did argue over the meaning of the phrase bear arms, specifically, whether the amendment protects the right to bear arms only in connection with military service. The Court’s conservative majority decided that it did not, that it also guaranteed the right to bear arms for hunting and self-defense.
Dictionaries, however, show that from the 18th century to the present, the phrase bear arms typically appears in military contexts, not ones involving individual self-defense, hunting, or sport. As the historian Garry Wills put it, “One does not bear arms against a rabbit.” But Justice Scalia rejected the dictionary evidence that did not support his understanding of the Second Amendment, writing in his majority opinion, “the fact that the phrase [bear arms] was commonly used in a particular context does not show that it is limited to that context.”
In other cases, when one dictionary doesn’t give the justices what they want, they pick another, looking sometimes to the American Heritage for proof, other times to Webster’s Third, and still other times to the Oxford English Dictionary, in order to make the meaning come out right. To find out what a word might have meant to the Framers, the justices even quote the dictionaries of Noah Webster (1828) or Samuel Johnson (1755). And of course they use Black’s Law Dictionary to elucidate technical terms.
This constant cherry-picking confirms that jurists do recognize dictionaries as fluid and context-bound, much like the words they define. The job of the lexicographer is not to give the law, or even to interpret it. Dictionaries don’t exist to create meaning. Instead, they record the meanings assigned to words and phrases by speakers and writers, by professionals and amateurs, by lawyers and judges, by upright citizens and criminal defendants. These meanings are multiple and changeable, and reliance on dictionaries should always be instructive, never absolute.
Regardless of what the Framers thought or what the Constitution says, the meaning of our laws, like the meaning of the words they’re made of, is always open to interpretation: that’s why we have courts, and many, many lawyers, and it’s why there are many dictionaries, not just one. Justice Scalia was right to go beyond the dictionary in Heller because, to paraphrase the slogan of the NRA and its gun aficionados, dictionaries don’t make meanings, people do. But sometimes, it seems, the dictionary helps.
Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.
View more about this book on the
CFH 27th June 2011
“One of the words Chief Justice Roberts looked up last week in a patent case was of. These are words whose meanings even the average person might consider beyond dispute.”
In fact, _only_ the “average person” would think that. No linguist, aware of the myriad and multifarious uses of the word “of” — nor for that matter even an “average person” who consulted a dictionary and noticed those many uses — would make such a statement, except perhaps to set up a dishonest dig at someone’s intelligence.
Dennis Baron 27th June 2011
@cfh: the law makes much of how the average person, the reasonable person, understands language, as well as what it often refers to as the plain meaning of the text. while the lexicographer must consider the many meanings of apparently simple words, the ordinary person isn’t usually asked to do this. the average person considers many words beyond dispute, but lawyers, judges, and justices of the supreme court, as well as the chief justice of the united states, still feel compelled to seek out finer shades of meaning. sometimes they are simply curious, and sometimes they do so seeking support for their point of view. but we all use language that way, don’t we?
Terminologia etc. » » Leggi e dizionari (negli Stati Uniti) 28th June 2011
[…] 28 giugno 2011 – But the dictionary says… aggiunge alcuni esempi e conclude ribadendo il ruolo di dizionari e […]
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Activist & Political · Essays · Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
We Are Not Who We Are: Human Sacrifice, Philosophical Horror, and (Maybe) the End of the World
Katherine Murray
Chris Evans as Curtis Everett in Snowpiercer
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. – Mario Savio
Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men
Whether it’s Charlton Heston’s cry that “Soylent Green is people!” or Jack Nicholson’s warning that “[we] can’t handle the truth,” our collective fear has been wending its way through the cinema. That dark secret that underpins everything else – what if we aren’t the people we think we are? What if society chews up its citizens, not by mistake, but through deliberate acts of design and intent? If this is the way we survive – if we can have justice or life, but not both – which are we willing to choose? Is the greater evil that humanity ends, or that it survives by cannibalizing itself?
This moral dilemma – the question of whether survival or justice should be our first duty – has been in the air for a while, but two films have recently turned up the volume, proposing in stark and viscerally disturbing terms that the answer is “justice” even at the cost of survival. Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012) and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, released in North America in the summer of 2014, take the radical position that we have a moral duty to destroy ourselves, when survival’s dependent on evil. These movies call on us to – in Snowpiercer’s case, quite literally – throw ourselves on the gears, even if doing it means that humanity stops.
The Cabin in the Woods (co-written by witty fan-favourite Joss Whedon) is best known for the clever, self-reflexive way it questions the horror movie genre. Five smart, sarcastic college students get attacked by a “zombie redneck torture family” during a weekend vacation, only to discover that their deaths are part of a ritual sacrifice to stop “giant, evil gods” from ending all life on the planet. All of the action in the cabin is scripted and directed by a team of government scientists working underground, and the students’ horrific deaths are played out on a series of TV monitors, attracting a voyeuristic crowd. The twist comes when the last surviving students find a way into the underground bunker and literally unleash hell on their tormentors. Even after learning that the world will be destroyed if he lives to see sunrise, the wisest of the students, Marty, refuses to die. “Maybe that’s the way it should be,” he says of the coming apocalypse, “If you’ve gotta kill all my friends to survive.”
In American culture, horror movies are a ritual that takes the place of witch trials and public stoning – the audience is free to indulge in the sins of others, through vicarious titillation, while still feeling righteous because those others are punished. The Cabin in the Woods, first and foremost, makes the observation that horror stories are carefully crafted to serve just this need. The scientists in the bunker use chemistry and other manipulation to entice the students into “transgressing” so that they can be punished, just as screenwriters create characters whose promiscuous or hedonistic behaviour is meant to justify their later deaths. Both halves of the exchange take place for the benefit of the audience – the pleasure of transgression, followed by the pleasure of watching the punishment. At one point, as the scientists try to lure a female character into taking her shirt off on camera, one of their security guards expresses disgust, and they remind him, “We’re not the only ones watching.”
What’s interesting about The Cabin in the Woods, though – beyond its clever observations of the genre – is that it takes its premise entirely seriously. The scientists overseeing this human sacrifice aren’t wrong. They aren’t acting out of superstition or misinformation – it is actually the case that they must sacrifice five people or suffer “the agonizing death of every human soul on the planet.” Indeed, this is what happens in the final thirty seconds of the film, after Marty lights up a joint in lieu of dying on the altar – the world is destroyed.
Needless to say, depicting the end of the world as the lesser of two evils is a fairly unusual choice; it’s different from what happens in many other films and television shows that try to address this dilemma. The most common resolution, when faced with a choice between evil and global destruction, is to find a way of ending the evil without any negative fallout, either because the negative fallout fails to materialize or because the long-term consequences are never discussed.
A screen capture from “The Beast Below”
In the Doctor Who episode “The Beast Below,” which aired in 2010, the Doctor and his companion travel to a future where citizens of the UK are forced to live aboard a spaceship, since the Earth has become uninhabitable. Upon reaching the age of majority, each citizen is presented with a short video explaining that life aboard the ship is only sustained through the continuous torture of a peaceful alien called a Star Whale, who has been forced to carry the ship into space. Confronted with this knowledge, citizens are given the choice between either freeing the Star Whale (in which case the ship will be destroyed and everyone on board will die), or forgetting that they ever heard about it. Everyone, including the Doctor’s companion, chooses the latter of the two options, because the knowledge is too horrific to live with, and the consequences of saving the Whale too severe. The Doctor eventually discovers the truth of what’s happened, but, when the story reaches its climax, it turns out that there’s an option no one had considered. The Doctor’s companion realizes that the Star Whale is benevolent enough to stay with the ship voluntarily, even after it’s freed, so she releases it from torture, and it carries the spaceship safely. The lesson of “The Beast Below” is that there is no cost to doing the right thing – that it was, in fact, unnecessary to do the wrong thing in the first place, because the Star Whale would have carried the ship out of kindness.
In A Few Good Men (1992), two Marines stand trial for murdering a third, and the question is whether this murder is evidence of systemic corruption within the military – whether the men we admire, “because they stand on a wall and say, ‘Nothing’s going to hurt you tonight,’” are performing horrific acts in our name – whether our freedom has come at the price of justice and honour. The practical question the film’s lawyer protagonist tries to answer is whether the Marines he’s defending were ordered by their commander to enact a “code red” – an illegal disciplinary measure – on the third, accidentally resulting in his death. The climax comes when the commander, played by Jack Nicholson, admits on the stand that he ordered the code red and that he’s not sorry, because the hard truth is that murdering that Marine saved lives. “You have the luxury of not knowing what I know,” he says. “We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. … You don’t want the truth because, deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. … I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”
The entire script of A Few Good Men drives hard at this point – that there may be a schism between acceptable moral behaviour and the things we must do to survive. Nicholson’s monologue is a powerful moment, in part, because he’s saying things we fear may be correct – that we don’t ask too many questions about what goes on out of sight; that we don’t want to know, if the truth is that we’ve been complicit in evil. After introducing this problem, though, the movie pulls back and suggests that the answer is simply to stamp out immoral behaviour, ignoring the possible fallout. At the story’s conclusion, the Marines on trial are found guilty of conduct unbecoming and learn that they should have stood up for their fellow Marine, rather than punishing him for his weakness. Nicholson’s character is arrested, and it’s implied that things won’t go too well for him. There is absolutely no discussion of whether or not he was correct in what he said, and it might even be assumed that these were the ravings of an incompetent leader who tortured the servicemen under his command. Once again, the lesson appears to be that our fears are unfounded, and that there’s no conflict between moral good and survival.
There are many other examples as well. Soylent Green (1973) ends with Charlton Heston’s attempt to warn the world that human life on an overpopulated Earth is being sustained through cannibalism, but it’s unclear what the alternative may be. In Watchmen (2009), millions of innocent people are killed to secure world peace, and the secret of why they were killed, once revealed, may trigger a nuclear war – but we never find out if that happens, because the movie ends just as the secret goes public.
In a context where we’ve usually been shielded from the consequences of choosing justice over survival, the ending of The Cabin in the Woods is unusually radical and pessimistic in its politics. It accepts that ending injustice may yield catastrophic results and embraces the end of the world as the consequence for ending human sacrifice.
Snowpiercer takes a similar, though more optimistic, stance. The story takes place in the world that greed built – a future where the Earth has been made uninhabitable, and the only survivors live aboard a massive train owned and ruled by the wealthiest man alive. The train has a rigid class system where those at the front hoard resources and those at the back are forced to live in poverty. The plot concerns a group of revolutionaries who hail from the very back car and fight their way to the front of the train, trying to seize control. Along the way, they uncover disquieting truths about how the train has survived, the worst of which is the revelation that the miracle engine that powers the train is designed to operate on the labour of terrified lower-class children, who are shoved into the small spaces between the gears and forced to work as human machinery until making a fatal mistake. Faced with this information, the protagonist, Curtis, must decide whether to – literally – throw his body on the gears to stop the engine, thereby destroying the world.
Although this doesn’t become clear until the end, the real conflict in the film is not between Curtis and the train’s evil overlord, Wilford. It’s the philosophical disagreement between Curtis, who would sacrifice the world to end injustice, and his mentor, Gilliam, who would sacrifice anything – an arm, or a leg, or 74 percent of the steerage-class population – in order to save the world.
Gilliam, who also hails from the poorest car, is a hero in Curtis’ eyes, because he cut off his own arm to feed people during a famine. Curtis is ashamed of himself because he wasn’t willing to do the same thing, and because he turned to murder and cannibalized others during the same crisis. For most of the film, he maintains that he can’t be a leader, because he wasn’t able to make the same choices that Gilliam made. Once he reaches the engine, however, he learns that Gilliam has been working with Wilford all along – that the two of them have planned the revolution expressly to thin the population and ensure the survival of the train. The deed already done, Curtis realizes that the goal he’s been fighting for is lost and considers accepting Wilford’s offer to live peacefully at the front of the train. When he discovers the truth about the children, though, Curtis jams his arm between the gears of the engine, tearing it off and (indirectly) causing catastrophic damage to the train. He dies and, from what we can see, so does almost everyone else.
In political philosophy, the conflict that Curtis and Gilliam face is expressed as the problem of “dirty hands.” It’s what Canadian politician and Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff was speaking about when he told Philosophy Bites that politicians are necessarily required to deviate from “the moral standards that we customarily observe in private life,” and that people would feel less cynicism toward public officials if they accepted that “politicians do a … dirty job, but [that] it’s an absolutely necessary job for the survival of our republics.” The idea is that political office necessarily requires those who hold it to do unsavoury things so as to ensure the security (and sometimes glory) of the nation. Officials are placed in the same position as Curtis and Gilliam, with conflicting duties toward the overall good of the train and the demands of a functioning conscience – the question is how those conflicts must be resolved.
In Politics and Morality, British philosopher Susan Mendus argues that the very nature of this conflict is that it can’t be resolved. Public officials assume responsibility for protecting the welfare of the group and would rightly be seen as remiss if they entirely ignored those duties; as human beings, though, they also have a duty to the demands of private morality. It’s true that we should not allow the human race to be destroyed; it’s true that we should not allow injustice to continue. To choose between one or the other is, as Isaiah Berlin writes, to reach the erschreckend – horrifying, dismaying – realization that there are two incompatible moralities at play. That both worldviews – the one that saves the train and the one that saves the children – make sense; that they are both a sacrifice toward the greater good; that one must choose which good to pursue, while leaving the other behind.
Marty (Fran Kranz) in The Cabin in the Woods
Curtis, in Snowpiercer, chooses the children, becoming a hero, like Gilliam, losing an arm for the opposite cause. Like Marty, from The Cabin in the Woods, who fears that society’s “filling in the cracks with concrete,” and binding into a monstrous form, Curtis decides that some worlds are too awful to live in – that there comes a point where you’ve got to make it stop, no matter what the cost may be.
Like The Cabin in the Woods, Snowpiercer doesn’t shy away from the idea that choosing justice could lead to massive destruction, death, or a new type of hardship for everyone. The film’s coda, however, offers a slightly more uplifting vision that follows from its interest in class. After the train rolls over, in a torrent of fire and snow, we learn that the child Curtis rescued has survived, and that a life outside the train cars may be possible. There are several suggestions that Wilford, because the present situation benefits him, is working to indoctrinate the population against leaving the train, even as environmental conditions are changing – that even though the train might have been the only way to survive in the past, the world has changed enough that new solutions are possible. The ending is ambiguous, but there’s a strong suggestion that we can escape the world that greed built and live outside the closed systems designed by mad billionaires. That maybe, out of destruction, new worlds are born.
There’s also a possibility that the child, and anyone else who survived the disaster, will freeze and die in ten minutes, just as Wilford predicted. The point is that there comes a stage where the evils perpetrated in the name of survival are so tainting, and so horrific to our sense of moral justice, that they must be stopped at any cost. And, by unflinchingly confronting the cost of just action on screen, The Cabin in the Woods and Snowpiercer have carried the ball forward on our ability to confront this cost in life.
— Katherine Murray
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer and regular contributor to Bitch Flicks, a feminist film and TV review website. She has an MA in English/Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick and an interest in story-telling across all forms of media.
Previous story Like You Know It All: The Power of Godard and Breillat at the 63rd Melbourne International Film Festival (July 31-August 17, 2014)
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Beatnik Chic: Chuck Workman’s The Source November 1, 1999
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You are here: Home | Resources | November 2002 | CAL celebrates moral victories
CAL celebrates moral victories
November 8 2002 by Tony W. Cartledge , BR Editor
CAL celebrates moral victories | Friday, Nov 8, 2002
Friday, Nov 8, 2002
By Tony W. Cartledge BR Editor
The Christian Action League of North Carolina (CAL) is replete with causes, victories and enthusiasm but short on funds, according to reports at its annual advisory board meeting Nov. 7 at Caraway Conference Center.
The CAL was founded in the late 1800s as the "Anti-Saloon League." In 1937 the Baptist State Convention (BSC) named a committee to meet with interdenominational leaders to form a statewide organization to oppose traffic in liquor, leading to the "Allied Church League of North Carolina for the Abolition of Beverage Control." In 1958, the organization was renamed the Christian Action League of North Carolina, and the charter was amended so the group could address "other moral and ethical issues facing the Judeo-Christian family," according to the CAL Web site.
The CAL's advisory board draws on different religious groups from the state's 100 counties, but the leadership has remained predominantly Baptist. The BSC's budget for 2002 included a contribution of $7,000 for the CAL, with an increase to $10,000 planned for 2003. The CAL relies mainly on contributions from individuals and churches for support.
Treasurer Russell Capps said the difficult economy has led to a downturn in donations, leading budget planners to propose a 2003 budget of $198,097, just $1,500 more than the budget for 2002.
The advisory board re-elected Coy Privette of Kannapolis, a former executive director of the group, as president. Gerald Primm of Greensboro was elected as vice-president. Three regional vice-presidents are Don Davis of Dunn, Lee Cockerill of Salisbury and Johnny Blevins of Elkin. Kay Alexander of Cary was named secretary, Russell Capps of Raleigh, treasurer, and Steve Daniel of Morganton, legal advisor.
"Field reports" discussed opposition to alcohol initiatives in two counties during the year. Steve LeaShomb, pastor of Midway Baptist Church in West Jefferson, said three pro-alcohol initiatives were successful in West Jefferson, but the same three were defeated in the neighboring town of Jefferson.
Kershaw Getty, pastor of Liberty Grove Baptist Church in Fleetwood, said alcohol opponents learned from the defeat in West Jefferson and turned up the intensity in Jefferson. One campaigner persisted with two elderly women until they agreed to go and vote against the initiatives just five minutes before the polls closed, he said. Two of the three initiatives were defeated by only three votes, and the other lost by nine votes.
David Blackburn, director of missions for the Ashe Baptist Association, described how alcohol opponents used the Internet and database programs to identify potential voters. Blackburn encouraged CAL advisors to call on leaders of the 80 Baptist associations for assistance when their communities face moral issues.
Tim Horldt, pastor of First Baptist Church in Valdese, said town council members there voted 3-2 in February to hold three pro-alcohol referendums, despite overwhelming opposition from citizens who attended the meeting. With assistance from CAL executive director Mark Creech, "Citizens for a Drug-Free Town" was organized and hundreds of yard signs were erected. Forty of 44 downtown businesses opposed the issue, Horldt said, including many restaurants. All three initiatives were defeated with alcohol opponents gaining 55 to 60 percent of the vote.
Capps, a member of the N.C. House of Representatives, offered a short tribute to Ann Frazier, a long time conservative activist and secretary of CAL, who died during the year. Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary has agreed to catalog and preserve her papers, he said.
Capps gave a brief report on house legislation in 2003. Having CAL as a watchdog is critical, Capps said, noting that Creech keeps legislators and citizens informed of moral issues such as House Bill 1088, which would have allowed sales of beer and wine, even in communities where citizens have voted against alcohol sales. That bill and a similar bill in the senate were defeated because of Creech's efforts, Capps said. With the house now split 60-60 along party lines, Capps expressed hope that a coalition can be formed to support issues of interest to the CAL.
Capps also noted that the state house approved a bill sponsored by Sam Ellis that encourages the U.S. Congress to require that all pornographic Web sites use a .xxx suffix in their address. Ellis' bill was inspired by Mary Conyers of Wendell, who founded "Protect Every Child" to oppose easy access to Internet pornography.
Bob Carpenter, a state senator from Macon County, expressed concern that video-poker proponents have contributed heavily to candidates who support gambling and alcohol initiatives.
Carpenter sponsored the Infant Homicide Protection Act last year, which allows women who have given birth to unwanted babies to leave their newborns in a safe place without being charged with abandonment.
In Creech's annual report, he said America is engaged in a cultural war, "battling for our spiritual and moral lives." The question before the nation, he said, "is not whether all men are created equal, but whether they are created by God at all," whether they are created under God and accountable to Him. The church has been largely uninvolved in the issues that dictate our moral climate, he said.
Creech cited a string of recent California laws to illustrate what happens "when liberals seize a state." California passed 22 pro-gay laws in the past two years, he said, including requirements that children in grades K-12 be taught to appreciate various sexual orientations, and that children with the potential of being intolerant of homosexuals should be identified for "retraining."
What has happened in California could make its way to North Carolina, Creech said: "More than ever, the Christian community within the Tar Heel state needs to mount an offensive strategy that will repel the evil influences of our society." Whatever that strategy is, the CAL will be involved, he said.
Creech reviewed a string of successful CAL efforts on a variety of fronts.
While new pro-life legislation has been stymied, tight restrictions to the state abortion fund have remained intact, he said, getting the state largely "out of the abortion business." The state has paid for only one abortion in the past seven years, he said.
Lottery proponents expected that this would be their year, Creech said, with budget pressures and a pro-lottery governor on their side. Bills that called for a "non-binding advisory referendum" on the lottery were stalled most of the year as lottery proponents sought more support, however, and the senate version of the bill was finally defeated by a vote of 69 to 50. Much of the credit is due to the CAL motivating lottery opponents to contact their legislators, Creech said.
For the first time in many years, no significant alcohol initiatives were approved on the state level, Creech said, including two efforts to allow beer and wine sales within 100 yards of a "sports club," even if local citizens have voted against alcohol sales. Again, the CAL helped to orchestrate a barrage of phone calls and e-mails in opposition to the bill.
CAL efforts contributed to a deferral of action on several other issues of concern, Creech said, and also helped to defeat alcohol referendums in five of nine places.
"Like a hurricane, the winds of righteousness have swept across our state and wreaked havoc for liberal and godless forces," he said.
Creech likened the calm eye of a hurricane to the evangelical, spiritual center of a believer's personal relationship with Christ. But Christians must also produce winds that impact the world around them, he said.
Creech said "the failure of liberal social action by mainline churches in the 1960s" is that it was "all wind and no center." Today's evangelical churches have the opposite problem, he said, failing to emphasize that one's relationship with Christ should also impact the world. "It's all a calm, warm, fuzzy center, and no wind," he said, that "passes over the land and changes nothing."
To be transformers of society, Creech said, Christians must live out both aspects of the spiritual hurricane.
Copyright (c) Biblical Recorder Inc.
11/8/2002 12:00:00 AM by Tony W. Cartledge , BR Editor | with 0 comments
SBC President Frank Page clarifies views on education
Giving plans mask division : Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005
Study of gluttony needed : Thursday, Oct. 13, 2005
Giving plans still work for N.C. Baptists : Thursday, Oct. 13, 2005
Freedom plan or giving ban? : Monday, Oct. 10, 2005
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Welcome to the Team: Mrs. Dasha Waller
Posted on Jul 30, 2018 in HomePage, News & Events
We are excited to welcome the talented Mrs. Dasha Waller to CGI’s team as Director of Investor Relations. Dasha brings more than 17 years of experience in Investor Relations and commercial real estate. Her decorated CV includes; CBRE, Davies Communications, Granite Peak Partners, Western National Group and most recently Ethika Investments. Utilizing her broad experience in real estate marketing, investment and development, Dasha is an integral part of CGI’s team and a consummate client relationship expert.
Dasha will serve as the main point of contact for investors, helping to build and maintain relationships while spearheading all global investor activity and communications. She will also work in parallel with our partners, as part of the capital-raising team, to present CGI’s acquisitions and developments as we continue to expand and welcome new investors to our partnerships. When asked what she looks forward to most in her new role, Dasha stated “I’m looking forward to meeting the many investors who truly helped to create CGI. In return, I hope to make them feel valued while providing an easier and more effective way for them to obtain information.”
She started her career in marketing at CBRE where she was part of a top producing industrial team brokering sales and leases in Southern California. She later transitioned to Western National Group where she was involved in the development of seven ground up multi-family properties comprised of more than 200 units each. With her considerable ability to manage projects and communicate effectively with both internal and external constituents, she played a lead role in implementing the vision and the timely delivery of all residential amenities and soft costs. Most recently, Dasha was Vice President of Investor Relations at Ethika Investments, which launched two private value-add funds comprised of roughly 250 million in equity from high net worth, sovereign wealth and institutional investors. There she oversaw fund and asset level reporting while helping to capital raise for multiple investment vehicles simultaneously.
Dasha earned her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is fluent in Czech. Running is one of her favorite hobbies when not spending time with her husband, her eight-month-old son and two rescue dogs.
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The Karma Kagyu Path
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This article was published in issue # 29 | Spring-Summer 2012
Dharma is a word which might stand for any sort of human activity, but it follows that what the students of Buddhism mean by dharma is the transformation of their own inner negativities into something more real. Our inner negativities are the five negative emotions,1 and what we have to do in order to transmute these negative emotions is to follow the Mahayana path. The five negative emotions derive from ignorance and so it is ignorance that we must transmute in the path to freedom.
Many years ago, in the vajra-asana2 at Bodhgaya, India, the Buddha attained full realization and it is from his realization that the tradition of enlightenment derives in our time. And from his teaching we derive the great teachings of tantras, which had an effect like fire burning down a mountainside. From the great fire of the tantras countless numbers of realized siddhas,3 who were renowned for their powers, arose in India. The teachings of these tantras were a very special part of the Mahayana, enabling one to distinguish each moment in its momentariness, and attain complete buddhahood in that moment.
Then the tradition of the dharma was brought to Tibet by the siddhas and scholars of ancient India, and by the scholars and the translators of Tibet, working together in a rigorous fashion. The transmission is maintained so that from ancient times to the present day the lineage has been passed on in an unbroken succession of realized individuals.
Among these, Milarepa4 was especially noteworthy. This great siddha first had to undergo many difficulties and then practice levels of yoga to gain the confidence of true meditation. But in the end, he attained the confidence of Mahamudra,5 and in one body and in one life attained full realization. The effects of his realization still reach us today, such that people even on merely hearing his name gain freedom; and not only do they gain freedom but they spontaneously feel inspired to follow his way and develop because of it. This is equally true in the East and the West. This is a sign that the energy of the Buddha’s enlightenment can and does still affect us today. If this were not the case, the mere hearing of someone’s name would not change a person’s mind, would not influence them as strongly as it does on many occasions. The impulse, the feeling of people to follow the way of the dharma merely on hearing or thinking of the name of Milarepa, is a sign that the energy of the Buddha still affects us today. However, even so, we still have the karma that we have built up in our past lives and so we go on experiencing happy events from good karma, and unhappy events from bad karma that we have accumulated. If your karma is weak, then merely gaining some confident understanding of the nature of the Mahayana teaching can lead to freedom and recognition of the wisdom of your own innate awareness.
In the Kagyu tradition, one needs to get and keep the view, meditation and conduct proceeding simultaneously, and it would not be correct to say that one can dispense with, for example, either view or meditation. However, it is a special quality of the Kagyu tradition to bring people to realization suddenly and spontaneously without reference to view, meditation or conduct.
All of you connected with the traditions of Milarepa have great hopes of recognizing your own true nature and attaining the fruition of the realization of Mahamudra. I pray that in the end, all of you will dispel the darkness of your ignorance, recognize the wisdom of your own awareness, and attain the final peace of the ultimate realization of Vajradara;6and I pray that in the meantime you will all be happy and will act selflessly for the benefit of others and that through constantly thinking of this each of you will be of great benefit to your fellows and be able to consider their needs most highly.
In fact, the true Kagyu tradition is not one which a pupil can approach immediately, nor is it one which a teacher can teach immediately. It is one where the approach is extremely profound and were a teacher to attempt to teach it to a person who did not have the appropriate precepts, then not only would it benefit neither of them, but it would actually be destructive. But when it is taught to a person who has a deep sense of trust and is stable in it to the depths of his heart and marrow of his bones, then it has a supreme transforming effect.
Dorje Chang
And so it is because of this that in the Kagyu tradition we begin with studying Chariot of Deliverance—The Supreme Path which will thus purify our character with the four reflections. These bring us to a stable condition of trust which all the great teachers of the Kagyu tradition in the past have verified.
More important than the actual levels of meditation are the preliminaries through which we approach them. If we do not purify our character, purify the obscurations of our body, speech and mind, then though we go on seeking our own happiness, we will continually fall into suffering, because we will always be trapped by our own ignorance. It is because of this that we purify the obscurations of our body, speech and mind. So first we practice prostrations. Then, in order to purify the negative karma we have accumulated, we do the Vajrasattva7 practice. Next, in order to create the conceptual accumulation of merit and the non-conceptual accumulation of wisdom, we practice the Mandala Offerings. Finally, because our true connection with the dharma is through our lama, and also because it is through the lama that we receive our tradition of the dharma, we practice Guru Yoga in order to receive the energy of the lineage. Thus the practice with the 400,000 recitations of the preliminaries Diamond Holder (Tib. Dorje Chang) is very important, and it is based on this that we begin to develop, stage by stage, through the levels of meditation.
In matters of view the Kagyudpa have always followed the tradition of Madyamaka8 which is also known as Yen tong in Tibetan. This view, beyond any object of examination or any possibility of examining anything, is the integral view, the view of the integral basic space of emptiness and great bliss. This integral view of emptiness is in accordance with the great Indian teacher Asanga.
In matters of meditation, we practice the Six Yogas of Naropa9and the profound understanding of Mahamudra which gives rise spontaneously to true wisdom, and by these means, attain in actuality, the four aspects of buddhahood. Tantra is divided into father tantra, mother tantra and non-dual tantra. In the non-dual tantra called Kalachakra integral great bliss is described, and this integral great bliss is the realization of the path. It is to this end that we practice the development stage of the spontaneous dakini,10 and the completion stage of the inseparability of prana11 and mind. In the development stage, we practice the attainment of the purity of body, speech and mind of the deity.
When one receives an initiation, one passes through the four stages: the vase initiation, the secret initiation, the initiation of knowledge and wisdom, and the initiation of the word; and in some initiations one passes through a fifth initiation of awareness. All of these concepts signify one basic reality: the four aspects of buddhahood. Then, based on the purity attained in the development stage, we practice the completion stage of the inseparability of prana and mind. The significance of this is the same as was explained before in regard to the integralness of view. Specifically, the integralness of the basic space of emptiness and wisdom means that those two are not capable of being separated into a duality. This is the understanding of the aspect of the totality of buddhahood called the Sambhogakaya, and is in accordance with integral great bliss as described in the non-dual tantras.
This is what the language of the Kagyu tradition sounds like, and this is what we must practice; and in order to practice it, one must begin at the beginning of the path by purifying one’s obscurations. So it is that we begin practicing Chariot of Deliverance—The Supreme Path, and then we progress stage by stage. For instance, if we were going to go up to the top of the house, we would go up the stairs. Otherwise, how would we get to the top? My prayers are that all of you will be able to attain these realizations, and that in attaining them, you will be of boundless benefit to sentient beings. When a bodhisattva12 makes a prayer of aspiration, it is never meaningless; it has a great effect on those for whom he prays. This effect comes from the great strength of his aspiration affecting others. It does not come from his trying to do anything, but rather it comes from effortlessness. No amount of effort could ever have such strength. Effortlessness is an ultimate approach. Trying to do something is a mundane approach. I will pray that you will all develop greatly in love and compassion and that the dharma will go on increasing until you all attain realization.
1 Five negative emotions: anger, pride, jealousy, desire and ignorance.
2 Vajra-asana: the posture in which the Buddha was sitting when he reached enlightenment, with his hand touching the earth.
3 Siddha: one who has attained spiritual power such as Mahamudra realization.
4 Milarepa (1052–1135): famous Tibetan yogi and poet who dwelt in caves and achieved realization in one lifetime.
5 Mahamudra: refers to the experience of the practitioner where one attains the union of emptiness and luminosity and also perceives the non-duality of the phenomenal world and emptiness.
6 Vajradara (Skt.) or Dorje Chang (Tib.): one’s own intrinsic enlightenment; personification of the Dharmakaya.
7 Vajrasattva (Skt.) or Dorje Sempa (Tib.): practice which purifies harmful deeds and removes obscurations.
8 Madyamaka: the philosophy developed by the Indian master Nagarjuna in the first half of the second century.
9 Six Yogas of Naropa: key meditation practices of the Kagyu school.
10 Dakini: a female dharma protector
11 Prana: energy or breath which moves through the channels of the body.
12 Bodhisattva: a being committed to the Mahayana path of developing wisdom and compassion in order to help all living beings to attain enlightenment.
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About H.H. the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa
The 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924–1981) was spiritual leader of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He spearheaded the transmission of Tibetan Buddhism to the West, establishing dharma centers and monasteries in various places around the world in order to protect, preserve, and spread the Buddha’s teachings. He was considered by many to be a living Buddha.
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Tect Aerospace to move to Garvey Center
The Wichita Eagle
WICHITA – Tect Aerospace has signed a new lease for 5,600 square feet at the R.H. Garvey Building at 300 W. Douglas.
The firm will take about half of the first floor.
This brings the building’s occupancy to 100 percent. The O.W. Garvey Building at 200 W. Douglas also is 100 percent leased.
“That’s a neat feeling to have,” says Larry Weber of Builders Inc., which owns the buildings. “I can’t tell you the last time that that had happened.”
Marty Gilchrist and Grant Tidemann of J.P. Weigand & Sons represented Tect in the deal.
Tect is moving from its current headquarters at 2872 N. Ridge Road.
A couple of its new neighbors at the Garvey Center will be leaving or downsizing in the next couple of weeks.
Attorney Mark Kahrs is vacating 2,500 square feet on the first floor of the O.W. Garvey Building.
Harrington Health, which has two and a half floors in the R.H. Garvey Building is giving back half a floor.
“They’re consolidating their spaces,” Weber says.
Still, he says he’s pleased with what’s happening at the Garvey buildings and in downtown in general.
“There is a lot happening in downtown right now,” Weber says.
“Downtown is alive and well.”
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Clarinda – SMM
Performers: Jonathan Kennedy, Alina Horvath, Daniel Mészöly
Song 198 (volume 2)
Correspondence about this song between Burns and Mrs Dunlop began on the 12th February 1788. Clarinda was Agnes M’Lehose, whose famous sentimental affair with Robert Burns started in 1787 – in fact in one of his letters to Mrs Dunlop, Burns wrote that “My song, Clarinda, was a real affair”. The air which appears in the Scots Musical Museum was composed by Darmstadt-born cellist J. G. C. Schetky.
Here the song is performed very much as printed in the Scots Musical Museum, with just with a fiddle and cello joining the harpsichord. But another version of this song, with an arrangement by Johann Nepomuk Hummel appeared in Thomson’s collection, and you can hear how this sounds too. It’s entitled ‘Farewell, dear mistress of my soul’ and was set to a tune by George Thomson himself later in the 1830s.
Clarinda - SMM (251)
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Friday News Finds – September 14, 2018
On September 14, 2018 By Canadian Business Law BlogIn Friday Finds, Uncategorized
Hello and welcome back to Top Five Friday Finds – the weekly series in which we share five of the corporate law news stories that dominated the papers (and our conversations) this week.
The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) has been busy this week, issuing two press releases on Thursday. First, the CSA is looking to replace their current market analysis system with a new platform to more effectively identify and analyze potential market abuse cases. The CSA has hired Kx, a division of Derivatives plc, on a multi-year contract to build and manage this new system. Along with this announcement, the CSA also published proposed regulation changes that would ban the use of certain embedded commissions. In its notice, the CSA stated that the aim of these changes is to improve transparency and eliminate conflict, addressing investor protection concerns. The Ontario Finance Minister released a statement shortly after, expressing the government’s opposition to the proposal. The proposal is open for comments until December 13, 2018.
This was also a big week for Toronto, as two major companies announced that they will be opening new offices there. Uber Technologies Inc announced on Thursday that it will be expanding its self-driving car service in Canada by investing more than $200 million to open an engineering office in Toronto. Similarly, Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it plans to open a new HQ in downtown Toronto. Microsoft will be getting cozy with CIBC, intending to occupy four floors CIBC’s new office building, CIBC Square, being built in the financial district.
Speaking of CIBC, on Wednesday, the bank announced that they will be launching a new bond targeted at cultivating women’s leadership. The bond, the first of its kind in Canada, is targeted at institutional investors. Companies must show that women account for either 30% of its executive ranks or board seats in order to qualify for the bond. This bond comes at a time when institutional investors are particularly focused on social and governance issues, and a number have made public commitments to weigh these factors in their investment decisions.
In contrast, Loblaws Cos Ltd has had a bit of a tough week after the Tax Court of Canada ruled against the major grocer last Friday. The case, started in 2015, involves one of Loblaws’ banking subsidiaries in Barbados, Glenhuron Bank Ltd. While generally Canadian-owned foreign banks are exempt from paying Canadian income tax, the court ruled that this was not the case for Glenhuron and Loblaws is now on the hook for $368 million. Loblaws CEO Sarah Davis issued a press release on Monday, stating that company disagrees with the court’s decision and plans to appeal the judgement.
Lastly, in the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been dealing with issues around trading cryptocurrencies. The SEC has issued a number of statements and carried out enforcement actions stating that a cryptocurrency initial coin offering (ICO) can constitute a security offering, and thus must meet the security registration requirements. On Tuesday, the SEC took this a step further and charged TokenLot LLC, a platform for buying and selling unregistered ICOs, with being an unregistered dealer-broker. The Commission found that platforms promoting the trading of cryptocurrencies are operating illegal unregistered security exchanges. The SEC’s position on cryptocurrencies was also backed up by a U.S. federal court this week. In the case of man charged with criminal fraud for promoting questionable cryptocurrencies, the court ruled that U.S. securities laws can apply to ICOs.
Now you’re up to speed with the major stories of the week. Come back next week for more Friday Finds!
Friday News Finds – September 7, 2018
Government of Ontario rejects CSA proposal on embedded commissions
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May 15, 2018 / 12:59 PM / a year ago
Dropbox eyes security, machine learning technologies in Israel
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - U.S. file-sharing and storage company Dropbox (DBX.O) plans to expand its development center in Tel Aviv by hiring more staff and looking out for potential partnerships and acquisition opportunities in security and machine-learning.
FILE PHOTO: The Dropbox app logo seen on a mobile phone in this illustration photo October 16, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas White/Illustration/File Photo
Israel’s education system and military service have created a pool of talented people working in cybersecurity and “that is something we deeply need to take advantage of”, Quentin Clark, who leads engineering, product and design at Dropbox, told reporters on Tuesday during a visit to Israel.
Dropbox, which went public on Nasdaq in March in the biggest tech IPO in over a year, established a presence in Israel in 2015 when it bought mobile productivity startup CloudOn.
Clark said it was now looking for potential acquisitions in the fields of security and machine learning.
He said he would be visiting universities in Israel this week to look at machine-learning technologies.
“There may be an opportunity for us to go deeper in that space as well,” he said, noting that in San Francisco there is stiff competition for talent in this field.
“There is a fairly significant pressure on that expertise in the market,” Clark said.
Dropbox’s Tel Aviv development center, which focuses on enterprise administrative capabilities, has a staff of more than 40 people and is the company’s largest overseas office after Dublin.
“We can more than double our staff here,” said Meir Morgenstern, head of the Israeli development center.
Dropbox, which had revenue of $1.1 billion in 2017, has more than 500 million registered users and 11.5 million paying subscribers.
(This version of the story refiles to add word ‘partnerships’ in first paragraph.)
Reporting by Tova Cohen; Editing by Susan Fenton
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Marco Rubio Changes His Mind About Reelection, and I’m Glad
Shane Vander Hart: Marco Rubio is an energetic voice for conservatism, incredibly articulate on the life issue, and needed voice in the Republican Party.
Rubio at Iowa Faith & Freedom 2015 Spring event.
CDC Report: Fewer High School Students Are Having Sex
Florida U.S. Senate Race,
Marco Rubio,
Marjorie Dannenfelser,
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) announced on Wednesday that he has changed his mind and will run for reelection for another term as Florida’s junior senator. After a disappointing defeat to Donald Trump in the Florida primary that led to Rubio suspending his presidential campaign he planned to enter back into the private sector. He had already announced that he was not running for reelection.
Frankly, I’m not surprised that he changed his mind, and I’m glad he did. Rubio has not been a perfect senator, but he is a young, energetic voice for conservatism. He has been incredibly articulate on the life issue. He is a needed voice in the Republican Party.
He said he is concerned that the Senate continues to be a check and a balance to the President regardless of who that may be.
In politics, admitting you’ve changed your mind is not something most people like to do. But here it goes.
I have decided to seek reelection to the United States Senate.
I understand my opponents will try to use this decision to score political
points against me. Have at it. Because I have never claimed to be perfect, or to have all the answers.
Still, the people of Florida deserve to know why I’ve changed my mind.
I have often said that the U.S. Senate can be a frustrating place. And it’s true. After witnessing the gridlock that grips Washington, I think just about every American – Democrat or Republican – would agree.
But the Senate is also a place from which you can perform great services for the people you have the honor of representing. And I am proud of the work we have done to help thousands of Floridians over the last six years.
The Senate can also be a place from which great policy advances can be made. I am proud that we have done that too.
But as we begin the next chapter in the history of our nation, there’s another role for the Senate that could end up being its most important in the years to come: The Constitutional power to act as a check and balance on the excesses of a president.
Control of the Senate may very well come down to the race in Florida. That means the future of the Supreme Court will be determined by the Florida Senate seat. It means the future of the disastrous Iran nuclear deal will be determined by the Florida Senate seat. It means the direction of our country’s fiscal and economic policies will be determined by this Senate seat. The stakes for our nation could not be higher.
There’s also something else. No matter who is elected president, there is reason for worry.
With Hillary Clinton, we would have four more years of the same failed economic policies that have left us with a stagnant economy. We would have four more years of the same failed foreign policy that has allowed radical Islam to spread, and terrorists to be released from Guantanamo. And even worse, if Clinton were president and her party took control of Congress, she would govern without Congressional oversight or limit. It would be a repeat of the early years of the current administration, when we got Obamacare, the failed stimulus and a record debt.
The prospect of a Trump presidency is also worrisome to me. It is no secret that I have significant disagreements with Donald Trump. His positions on many key issues are still unknown. And some of his statements, especially about women and minorities, I find not just offensive but unacceptable. If he is elected, we will need Senators willing to encourage him in the right direction, and if necessary, stand up to him. I’ve proven a willingness to do both.
In the days ahead, America will continue to face serious challenges – the possibility of terrorist attacks at home and abroad, a declining military, anemic economic growth and low wages, assaults on our rights and values, outdated health care, education and pension programs in desperate need of reform – that face backward or uncertain responses from either Clinton or Trump.
No matter who wins the White House, we need a strong group of principled, persuasive leaders in Congress who will not only advance limited government, free enterprise and a strong national defense, but also explain to Americans how it makes life better for them and their families. I ultimately changed my mind about this race because on that front, and in that fight, I believe I have something to offer.
In the end, this was a decision made not in Washington, but back home in West Miami over Father’s Day weekend, with my wife and our four children.
There were two paths before us. There was one path that was more personally comfortable and probably smarter politically. But after much thought and prayer, together we chose to continue with public service; to continue down the path that provides the opportunity to make a positive difference at this critical and uncertain time for our nation.
In the end, there was simply too much at stake for any other choice.
It remains to be seen how much political damage was done by the loss. Those concerned about Rubio’s political future thought exiting the presidential race before would have been a wiser choice.
A former rival in the presidential race was quick to back Rubio’s reelection bid. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he is glad to support Rubio.
“Marco is a friend and has been an ally in many battles we have fought together in the Senate. I’m glad to support him in his bid for re-election. Marco is a tremendous communicator and a powerful voice for the American Dream. At this time of great challenges, we very much need strong leaders in the Senate who will fight to restore economic growth, to defend our constitutional liberties, and to ensure a strong national security for our nation,” Cruz said in a released statement.
Susan B. Anthony List cheered Rubio’s decision, and said they were ready on the ground to help.
“For months the Susan B. Anthony List Florida team has been going door to door to speak with Florida voters – including women, Hispanics, and persuadable Democrats – about the importance of life issues in the upcoming election. We have knocked on more than 200,000 doors in the sunshine state. Sen. Rubio’s announcement today provides a shot of enthusiasm to our already robust pro-life campaign. Not only do we welcome his return to the race, we have laid the groundwork for victory on Election Day,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser.
“Rubio is one of the strongest, most articulate champions in the fight for unborn children and their mothers. Sen. Rubio provides us with the strongest chance to win and maintain this consistent pro-life voice in Washington.”
Mike Huckabee: The Sarah Palin Email Controversy
By Mike Huckabee You almost have to feel sorry for all the…
Young Leads Mowrer in New Iowa 3rd Congressional District Poll
Congressman David Young (R-IA) leads Democratic challenger Jim Mowrer by 15 points in a new Simpson College/RABA poll in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District.
The Haley Barbour and Mike Huckabee Love Fest
Jonathan Martin had a post up at POLITICO today that indicated that…
Rick Santorum Champions Traditional Values at Republican National Convention
Rick Santorum, you would think went off script a little bit tonight…
Shane Vander Hart is the founder and…
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Jeffrey Seemann
Former Co-Chair Executive Steering Committee, Professor of Ecology &
Jeff Seemann, Ph.D. is a Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. Dr. Seemann served as the co-chair of CIRCA Executive Committee from its founding through May 2017. He served as the UConn Vice President for Research from 2013-2017 where he oversaw the University’s $250 million research enterprise at the main campus in Storrs, the UConn Health campus in Farmington, the School of Law in Hartford, and the 5 regional campuses located around the state. Prior to joining the University in 2013, Dr. Seemann served as both the Vice President for Research at Texas A&M University and the Chief Research Officer for the eighteen-member Texas A&M University System. Dr. Seemann received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is an internationally recognized biologist with research interests in the biochemistry and molecular biology of photosynthesis.
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My References
MMU Library
Catalogue Search for "collection:"Main Catalogue"" Internet
Results 11 - 20 of 20
Sorted by Relevance Published Date (newest first) Published Date (oldest first) Title (A-Z) Title (Z-A) Main Author (A-Z) Main Author (Z-A)
The Assessment and Treatment of Addiction: Best Practices and New Frontiers
eBook. English.
Published St. Louis, Missouri: Elsevier, [2019]
"Get a quick, expert overview of all types of addiction - from substance addictions to behavioral addictions and more. This practical resource presents...
Functional neurosurgery and neuromodulation
By Burchiel, Kim, author
Published Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2018
Functional Neurosurgery and Neuromodulation provides comprehensive coverage of this emerging, minimally invasive area of health care. Recent advances...
HER2-Positive Breast Cancer
By Hurvitz, Sara
Published Philadelphia: Elsevier, 2018
Get a quick, expert overview of clinically-focused topics and guidelines that are relevant to testing for HER2, which contributes to approximately 25%...
Case studies in the traditional food sector: a volume in the consumer science and strategic marketing series
Published Duxford, United Kingdom: Woodhead Publishing is an imprint of Elsevier, [2019]
All formats and editions (2)
Case Studies in the Wine Industry aims to close the gap between academic researchers and industry professionals through real world scenarios and field...
The art and science of facelift surgery: a video atlas
By Niamtu, Joseph, author
Published [S.l.]: Elsevier, c2019
The sourcebook for clinical research: a practical guide for study conduct
By Martien, Natasha, author
Published London, United Kingdom: Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier, [2018]
A single trial is complex, with numerous regulations, administrative processes, medical procedures, deadlines and specific protocol instructions to follow...
Bancroft's theory and practice of histological techniques
Published [London?]: Elsevier, [2019]
"For 40 years, Bancroft's Theory and Practice of Histological Techniques has established itself as the standard reference for histotechnologists and laboratory...
Neuroradiology: spectrum and evolution of disease
Published Philadelphia: Elsevier, [2019]
"Acquire a better understanding of disease evolution and treatment response with Neuroradiology Spectrum and Evolution of Disease. The unique format includes...
Global Reconstructive Surgery
By Chang, James, 1965- author
Published Edinburgh: Elsevier, c2019
Pathology of Melanocytic Tumors
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Tag Archives: con man
Living La Belle Vie
Posted on August 19, 2018 by Shayne Davidson
At Paris on Wednesday M. Bordeaux, the examining magistrate, committed the defaulting bank clerk Gallay, the woman Merelli, and the man Lerendu for trial before the Assize Court. Gallay will be indicted for forgery and embezzlement and the woman Merelli for complicity in the two forgeries alleged to have been committed by Gallay, which enabled him to embezzle the sum of 350,000 francs. Merelli is also accused of receiving stolen property. The man Lerendu will be indicted for having received 15,000 francs, remitted by Gallay on the promise that he would assist in committing the forgeries.
— The Guardian (London, England), December 1, 1905
With her high starched collar and prim lace shawl over a plain gingham dress she looks every bit like a sweet country girl. Her apparent lack of makeup and nascent unibrow complete the wholesome picture.
He looks like a dapper professor or businessman, with his pince-nez, dark suit coat and staid plaid vest. Only his handlebar mustache hints at a wilder side to his personality.
Don’t believe your eyes because Jean Gallay, the man in the photo, was a brazen thief who stole an enormous sum of money from the bank where he worked. The woman, Valentine Merelli, was his mistress who aided him in concealing the thefts and fled with him to Brazil. Both were married to other people when they met and fell in love (at least he fell for her). The pair sailed off into the sunset aboard a luxurious yacht, guzzling champagne all the way.
Jean was a well-educated man who spoke German and English in addition to his native French. He’d worked for the Paris police prior to taking a job as a bank clerk at the Comptoir d’escompte de Paris, where he realized the record keeping system at the bank had some loopholes ripe for exploitation.
In 1904 he began to transfer small sums of money belonging to the bank’s clients to the bank’s branch offices. Next he withdrew the money using documents he’d forged. When he wasn’t caught he increased the amounts he stole.
He moved his family to the country and adopted a false persona — he became the Baron de Gravald, a wealthy, unmarried man about town. Wearing an old straw hat and tired coat to his clerk’s job during the day, he transformed himself in the evenings with a fashionable dinner coat, tailored shirt and diamond-studded platinum cuff links. A silk top hat and monocle completed the Baron’s aristocratic look.
On one evening out on the town the Baron met Valentine Merelli and fell head over heels for her.
Valentine Darbour was a convent-educated girl from the countryside. She got married young to a printer named Sohet but soon tired of her monotonous, middle-class life, so she left her husband, took some of her dowry cash and moved to Paris. She adopted the stage name “Valentine Merelli” and tried to develop a stage career but she had no talent for acting or singing. Soon her money ran out and she was forced to search for a man to support her — ideally a rich one.
Jean seemed to be the answer to Valentine’s prayers. He set her up in an apartment in the Rue Gustave Flaubert. To finance their stays in expensive hotels, meals in the best restaurants and trips to the opera he embezzled ever-larger sums of money from the bank. He knew that the thefts would be discovered eventually, so he asked a fellow employee, Lerendu, to help him cover up the losses in the books.
As the summer of 1905 unfolded, Jean knew that the day of reckoning, when the bank uncovered his fraud, was drawing near. He and his ladylove needed to get out of Paris and run as far away from Europe as it was possible to go. Knowing they would likely be caught if they went by rail they hatched a plan to travel by boat to Brazil.
With the $200,000 (over $5,500,000 in today’s dollars) that remained of the stolen loot, they traveled to Le Havre, a port city in northwestern France. There Jean chartered a British steam yacht, Catarina, for three months and hired a crew of 20 men, along with a physician and a maid, Marie Audot, for Valentine.
The couple outfitted themselves for the voyage with 28 hats, 37 evening dresses, 40 suits, 50 pairs of knickers, 40 pairs of shoes, 22 corsets and many boxes of champagne and liquors. It took 86 bags and trunks to hold it all. Valentine directed the loading of the booty onto the yacht. For three days before Catarina set sail the crew was not allowed to go on shore and an aura of mystery surrounded the plans for the voyage.
On August 3rd the couple’s luxuriously appointed dreamboat left for the coastal city of Bahia in Brazil.
Meanwhile back in Paris the bank finally looked over its books, discovered the missing funds and tied the theft to their absent employee. They notified the police and provided them with a photograph of the unassuming clerk.
The detective in charge of the case figured the couple would try to escape by boat. He tracked Jean and his mistress to Le Havre, where he showed Jean’s photo to the yacht rental companies in town. He soon discovered which yacht Jean hired, but the boat had already left port. He got the yacht’s itinerary and alerted the Bahia police to keep a watch for her at the port. To guarantee that there was no confusion he provided the police in Brazil with a photo of Jean.
When Catarina made port in Bahia, the police went aboard and arrested Jean, Valentine and Marie. They were extradited, under guard, back to France. The boat’s crew was reportedly quite unhappy because, with champagne flowing every evening and the baron handing out cigars to all and sundry, they’d never enjoyed a trip more.
Jean was convicted and served part of his seven-year sentence at Devil’s Island, an infamous French penal colony in Guiana that was, ironically, located just north of Brazil. “They are taking me away from France but the hope of returning again will sustain me,” he commented before he left. He got his wish when he was transferred to Melun Prison in France. He was released in 1912 after serving five years.
Since Jean had started embezzling money before he met Valentine, the jury gave her the benefit of the doubt and decided that she was unaware of how he’d obtained his wealth. They acquitted her of the charges but her husband divorced her.
After her trial ended she had a brief fling with the kind of fame she’d previously longed for when she was photographed for a series of postcards. When people realized that she was no great beauty and that she still couldn’t sing, her star plummeted and she faded from the limelight.
The maid, Marie, wasn’t charged with any crime. She sold her story to the press.
Jean and Valentine’s mugshots, along with those of the maid and Jean’s co-worker, Lerendu, were collected by the father of the modern mugshot, Alphonse Bertillon, in an album of Paris Crime Scenes compiled during the early 20th century. The album, which includes some gruesome photos of Parisian murder victims, was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2001. “Made as part of an archive rather than as art, these postmortem portraits, recorded in the deadpan style of a police report, nonetheless retain an unsettling potency,” notes the Met’s catalog.
Featured photo: “La Merelli,” mugshot taken October 9, 1905. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Posted in 1900s | Tagged Bertillon, Bertillon photo, con man, con scheme, confidence man, dual personality, embezzlement, female criminal, forgery, Grand Larceny, Metropolitan Museum of Art, paris, paris crime, Valentine Merelli | 9 Comments
Gambling with Gangsters
Large amounts of money have been found cleverly concealed about the persons of J. J. Kellogg and J. MacDonald, held here for questioning. The men were arrested Wednesday as suspicious characters.
— The Daily Times (Davenport, Iowa), October 12, 1931
Nothing says “crook” quite like cash concealed in your clothing. One man had $1400* ($23,172) in hundred dollar bills sewn in the lining of his coat sleeve. His pal had $560 ($9,269) in hidden compartments in the instep and heel of his shoe.
They were spotted hanging around the downtown streets of Washington, Iowa, on the evening of October 8, 1931. Earlier in the day they’d checked into the Colenso Hotel on the town’s main drag. The coat cash man said his name was J. J. Kellogg and James McDonald was who the shoe cash man claimed to be. After the pair booked into the hotel, they’d inquired about what time the local banks opened their doors.
Naturally the cops wanted to know who they were and what they were up to.
J. J. Kellogg, who looked like he walked out of central casting for the role of a two-bit gangster in an Edward G. Robinson film, stuck out like a sore thumb in Washington where most of the townsfolk were farmers. With the fedora, cigar, lean, hungry face and suspicious eyes — he might as well have had “gangster” tattoed on his forehead.
He was taken into custody for having false license plates on his car. The police then discovered that one of the many names he used was Riley Gaffigan. They suspected that Riley and his buddy James had been part of a gambling con pulled the previous January in Springfield, Illinois.
Hotel Abraham Lincoln
The victim of that con was Myrtle Tanner Blacklidge, the tax collector for the second wealthiest district in the United States — the northern part of Illinois, which included Chicago. Myrtle went to the Hotel Abraham Lincoln in Springfield on January 22, 1931. There she played the card game faro with three men in a hotel room. The men told Myrtle she’d won $207,000 ($3,426,258) but they claimed her win was “on paper.” They wanted Myrtle to fork over $50,000 ($827,598) cash to replace a check she’d provided to get into the game. Only then, they said, could they give her the winnings.
Though she had a well-paying job, Myrtle had expensive tastes and was desperate for cash. She’d lost both her adult son and her husband to illness within weeks of each other the previous year. She borrowed the $50,000 in $1000 bills from a friend — defeated Chicago mayoral candidate, Edward Litsinger. Of course Litsinger, like any Chicago pol worth his salt, expected something in return for the loan. Myrtle promised him $10,000 ($165,519) of her winnings.
She rejoined the card players and handed over the $50,000 cash, but she was unable to resist a little more gambling. She lost the whole $50,000 but figured she still had $157,000 ($2,598,659) coming to her. The men told her to wait in the room while they went to get the remainder of her winnings. They never reappeared. “I realized I had been duped,” she later commented.
Litsinger said Myrtle lied to him about why she needed the money, telling him it was to complete a “business deal,” not to gamble. He promised to sue her. Then it was revealed that it was actually Litsinger’s nephew, Fred Litsinger, the tax reviewer for northern Illinois, who’d handed over his uncle’s cash. Fred had done a bit of gambling himself at the time. Hoping to avoid bad publicity for his family, Edward dropped the lawsuit.
Myrtle resigned from her tax revenue job due to the scandal.
George Perry, known in Chicago as “Big George” Parker, was shot to death in his home in South Bend, Indiana, a few months later. Myrtle identified him as one of the three men who’d taken her in the faro game.
The authorities thought they’d found the remaining two men when the Iowa police arrested Riley and James. In addition to the cash hidden in their clothes and shoes the men carried a substantial number of used cashier’s checks with the details erased out. Police believed their current racket was to start poker games with local farmers, paying out their losses with the bogus checks.
Not wanting to personally confront the gangsters, Myrtle and Fred were unwilling to go to Iowa to identify the men. Myrtle looked at photos of Riley and James and said she thought they weren’t the ones. The men each paid hefty $500 ($8,275) fines for driving with illegal license plates on their car and were released. They melted into the criminal underworld and weren’t heard from again under the names they’d used in Washington, Iowa.
No one was ever arrested for the faro game con.
Myrtle’s troubles continued when the wife of a policeman sued her for $100,000 ($1,837,537) in 1934, claiming Myrtle had stolen the affections of her husband. Torrid love letters from Myrtle to “Denny, Darling” were produced in court as evidence. The jury awarded $7,500 ($140,815) to the wife, and Myrtle, unable to pay, was sent to jail. Ironically the policeman’s wife was required to pay Myrtle’s jail boarding fees — 50 cents ($9) per day!
In her last years Myrtle lived in a Chicago nursing home, where she wrote for the monthly newspaper, “The Optimist.” She died at the home in 1958, aged 79.
*Note: U.S. dollars were converted to 2018 values using an inflation calculator and are listed in parentheses.
Featured photos: mugshots (?) identified on the reverse as “James J. Kellog, alias Billie Gafney, Laferty.” Collection of the author.
Posted in 1930s | Tagged card cheat, card shark, Chicago, con man, con scheme, confidence man, crook, faro, female prisoner, gambler, gambling, Iowa, jealousy, Springfield | 11 Comments
The Trouble with Harry
Harry Vining, alias Edward Brooks, 19 years old, of 1 Harvard ct., Brookline, was arrested last evening by Inspectors Pierce and McGarr last evening on the charge of uttering forged checks. He was held on a warrant issued by the lower court, but the police have also an indictment warrant containing two similar counts. It is said he is also wanted in Brookline.
— The Boston Daily Globe, December 26, 1905
It didn’t make for happy family holidays when Harry Lewis Vining was charged with three counts of check fraud the day after Christmas in 1905. Despite his youth, Harry had managed to pull off “numerous forgeries” of checks for almost a year, until he was finally caught in mid-December. He forged the signatures of a variety of real people on the checks and each check was made out to one of his aliases. Oddly, all the checks were for the same dollar amount — $29.
Harry was the younger of two children born to a Civil War veteran from Maine, John Q. A. Vining, and his wife, Julia Merrey Vining. John Vining worked as a carpenter and moved his family from Maine to Massachusetts by 1886, the year Harry was born. John and Julia were in their late forties when their only son entered the world. Bernice Snow, Harry’s sister, was almost 20 years older than her brother and had been a widow for seven years when her brother’s legal woes began.
Harry’s mother and sister showed up in court at his sentencing and turned on the water works — big time. Their show of emotion, along with the family’s “character and respectability” and the defendant’s boyish charm, softened the judge’s resolve. “Vining, my first intention was to send you to state prison, but I do not think you fully realize what you have done,” said Judge DeCourcy. Instead he sent Harry to the Concord Reformatory with a warning: if he got arrested again he would cool his heels in a Massachusetts state prison for a very long time. This explains why, when Harry got up to his little tricks again, he was in California — about as far from Massachusetts as someone could go in the United States.
Bimini Bath House, circa 1920. William H. Hannon Library.
On November 29, 1907 Harry strolled into the Bimini Baths, just west of downtown Los Angeles. He claimed to be an officer of the law and wore a deputy sheriff’s star to prove it. He removed his clothing, put on a bathing suit and headed off for a pleasant soak in the warm waters of the natural hot springs that supplied the popular bathing resort.
Folsom Prison Inmate photographs, California State Archives.
When Harry left the baths — clean, refreshed and relaxed — he couldn’t find his clothes anywhere. That was because J. N. Gunnett, the bathhouse watchman, recognized Harry when he came in. After Harry went into the baths Gunnett collected his clothes, locked them up and called the police.
Not only was Harry’s deputy’s star fake, he’d passed a bad check at the Bimini several weeks earlier, so Gunnett was ordered to keep a sharp eye out for him.
The officers arrested him and gave him his clothes back so he could get dressed, then they took him to jail. The Los Angeles Police knew him as “William Howard” and wanted him for passing 15-20 forged checks, some of which he’d tendered as payment at local saloons.
This time when Harry showed up in court, his female relatives were not in attendance sobbing their eyes out. He received a three-year prison sentence to Folsom State Prison, northeast of Sacramento. Officials did not know Harry’s real name at this point so he was sent to prison as “William Howard.” He claimed to work as a set painter for the theater — his occupation in the prison register was “scenic artist.”
After Harry was released from Folsom, on April 19, 1910, he wisely left Los Angeles and headed north to San Francisco. In September he “kited” a bogus check there to pay for groceries and he wasn’t caught until the following February. When he pleaded guilty to that crime he falsely claimed to be the son of Edward Payson Vining, the former Freight Traffic Manager for the Union Pacific Railway Company. Vining was also from Massachusetts and he was a well-known author. Though they shared a surname, his family was no relation to Harry’s family. If Harry thought this would cause the judge to give him a lighter sentence, he was mistaken.
Harry Vining in Folsom stripes. Collection of the author.
At this point officials knew his true name and that he had a previous record. His sentence was harsh — Harry got another five years at Folsom. Four aliases were also listed in the prison register for him — William Crawford, William Howland, William Howard and William Madison. Prison officials wanted to make sure they’d know him if he were arrested again under one of his aliases. He served three years and seven months and was discharged on September 25, 1914.
After Harry was freed from Folsom he moved to Eureka, California, where he married a woman named Beulah and worked as mechanic and “car operator” according to the 1917 city directory.
The film business, which got established in California around 1919, with its glamour and “get rich quick” mentality, might have drawn Harry back to the southern end of the state, perhaps to try his hand as a scenic artist for films.
It’s likely Harry died in Los Angeles in 1933 and was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery — it sounds like a place he’d want to be buried. However absolute proof that it’s “my” Harry in that grave eludes me.
Note: I am indebted to my vintage photography collector friends, Ron and Fawn, for connecting me with three of the mugshots of Harry L. Vining that appear in this post. The photos inspired me to find out more about Harry’s life and crimes, and they’re a bit of a mystery themselves. Fawn discovered them in a Michigan antique mall, where they were displayed together in a frame. (Strange — why frame mugshots?) It appears that they were cut from an official Folsom prisoner photo album and repasted into another photo album, then later cut out of the album and framed.
Featured photos: Harry L. Vining’s mugshots from his 1911 incarceration at Folsom State Prison. Collection of the author.
Posted in 1900s, 1910s | Tagged bad checks, Boston, California, check kiting, con man, Fictitious checks, Folsom prison, forgery, Los Angeles, San Francisco | 10 Comments
Three Little Shells
Posted on January 5, 2018 by Shayne Davidson
Leon Kentish alias H. Wilson and Harry Montague alias R.F. Johnson were arrested yesterday by Chief of Police Little, Sergeant Kennedy and Officer Neagle. The men were stopping at the Causer House. They are charged with suspicion of larceny, and common gamblers. They are alleged to be shell workers, and travel under the pretense of selling an article for cleaning clothing. The fellows are the same ones who were recently arrested in Binghamton, and taken to Penn Yan, where they were wanted for skipping board bills. The police found the shells upon their persons.
— Star-Gazette, Elmira, New York, July 17, 1893
The shell game is a con as old as time. A pea or small ball is placed under one of three shells (walnut shells were popular) that were laid out, usually on the ground. The shell operator shuffles them around and asks the mark to guess which shell the pea is under. It looks like easy money, but unbeknownst to the mark, the operator, using sleight of hand, has removed the pea before the mark makes his — inevitably wrong — choice. Then the operator surreptitiously places the pea under another shell. He reveals the pea and voila, the mark loses the bet!
Often shills or cappers were used to help convince the mark to get involved in the game or to suggest under which shell the pea would be found. Sometimes the mark was allowed to win once or twice, with the stakes being ratcheted up with each play. Then the operator went in for the kill.
Oily-tongued, nimble-fingered shell workers were said to be “in their glory when they find a man who is out for a good time with a good-sized purse.” They were the bane of the nineteenth century cop’s existence.
“Step right up, gentlemen, and be convinced that the hand is quicker than the eye.” This is the way that the shell-worker opened his game while sitting astride one of the long timbers on the pier. One of the cappers came up and called the turn for $120, which was paid to him without a murmur. Then another one of the party won and induced his friend, a young fellow who looked like he might be a divinity student to try his luck. The shells were thrown and the capper whispered: “Bet him $25 and take the shell on this end.”
— The Inter Ocean, Chicago, June 12, 1894
Needless to say, the divinity student lost his stake. The shell game workers ran off when they noticed a sketch artist sitting nearby, watching them closely and “copping off their mugs” for the newspaper.
In addition to working the shell game, Harry Montague was wanted by the Newark Police for highway robbery and burglary. When he went before a New York City judge, in June 1893, he literally talked himself into jail by using language so foul that the judge held him in contempt of court. The police planned to hand him over to the New Jersey authorities once he finished serving 29 days in Brooklyn’s Raymond Street Jail.
Instead Harry managed to elude the New Jersey authorities and make his way upstate. The shells he was carrying tipped off the Elmira police to his real profession and he and his pal, Leon Kentish, were arrested. After that Harry either earned himself a long prison stretch or he changed his alias because his name disappeared completely from police notes in the news.
Featured photo: CDV mugshot of Harry Montague, alias Johnson, July 9, 1893. Collection of the author.
Posted in 1890s | Tagged Brooklyn, con man, confidence man, New York, New York City, shell game | 1 Comment
The Mind Reader
Leon Daniels, who has been traveling about the city for some weeks, and who claims to be a mind-reader, will appear before Judge Davis this morning. He is accused of stealing from the Central Hotel an overcoat belonging to the proprietor.
— The Record-Union, Sacramento, California, February 8, 1897
He most likely got off with a fine or short jail sentence for the theft of the Sacramento hotel proprietor’s coat. Not only was he a mind reader, he also a hypnotist, so perhaps he used that skill with the judge to avoid a conviction. At any rate, the newspapers made no mention of a prison sentence for Shasta Leon Daniels.
“Shasta Leo,” as he was often called, was born in 1866 in Iowa to Alvah Daniels, an itinerant cooper and carpenter, and his wife Sarah (Millard) Daniels. His parents were born in New York. After their marriage they moved their growing family westward, from Wisconsin to Iowa to Dakota Territory (now South Dakota), finally settling in the Napa County wine region of Northern California by 1890. Leon had four older sisters and a younger brother, all of whom lived conventional lives, while the quirkily named Shasta Leo followed his bliss.
Instead of working a regular job he traveled around the west, plying his unusual trade and stealing the occasional item when commerce was slow and his funds got low. “Daniels is an odd genius who travels over the country telling fortunes, hypnotizing people or almost anything that will bring in a few dimes. He is said to be quite an adept at slight-of hand,” was how one Oregon newspaper described him.
Albany Train Depot, 1895
Shasta Leo liked to drink and occasionally tippled a bit too much. On a fine April day in the year 1900, he and his friend, Charles Berry, had been drinking in Albany, Oregon, and decided to ride the rails to Eugene. Shasta Leo hopped on a lumber train car while it was moving and slipped, falling between two cars. His left leg hit one of the rails and was run over by the wheel of the train, mashing the flesh to jelly but leaving most of the bones unbroken, according to one newspaper description of the incident.
He was taken to a nearby boarding house, where his leg was amputated just below the knee. “Daniels took the matter philosophically and seemed as little disturbed as any one around,” reported the Albany Democrat the day after the accident. Hopefully his inebriated state helped with the pain, at least for a while. Initially no one was sure if he would survive. Since he had no money, the taxpayers of Linn County paid the surgeon’s bill.
Not only did he survive, he was well on the road to recovery by May. By June he was able to return to California, where he convalesced at the home of his pharmacist brother in Napa. Evidently he took to roaming again after his leg was fully healed. Shasta Leo died on January 10, 1911, in Los Angeles, far from his family in Northern California.
Featured photo: mugshot of Shasta Leon Daniels taken in 1897 in Sacramento, California. Collection of the author.
Albany Train Depot from the Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collections, Salem Public Library, Salem, Oregon.
Posted in 1890s, 1900s | Tagged alcohol, California, con man, hotel thief, larceny, Oregon | Leave a comment
Crooks’ Books
Posted on July 16, 2017 by Shayne Davidson
The engagement of an internationally known woman criminal to marry the internationally noted criminologist, whose inspiration she was in the preparation of a book on the famous women criminals of all time, was announced today.
May Vivienne Churchill, known to the police of three continents as “Chicago May” Churchill, assisted and inspired Netley Lucas, English Criminologist, in the preparation of his book, “Ladies of the Underworld.”
— The Baltimore Sun, January 4, 1928
During the early 20th century it was all the rage for reformed crooks (or those who claimed to be “ex”) to publish books about their felonious exploits. The notorious “Chicago May” was supposedly the inspiration for Netley Lucas’ 1927 book “Ladies of the Underworld: The Beautiful, the Damned and Those Who Get Away with It.” May’s own memoir, written with professional help, titled “Chicago May: Her Story by the Queen of Crooks” rolled out in 1928.
It’s not surprising that Netley and Chicago May cooked up a scheme to shock polite society while simultaneously promoting their books. As champagne corks popped in celebration of the New Year, 25-year-old Netley, and May, the queen blackmailer old enough to be his mother, announced their intention to wed. They hoped a photograph showing the two of them cozying up on a loveseat would convince readers that their wedding plans were legit. In reality it was a publicity stunt.
Netley was not, in fact, a “noted criminologist.” He was an English con man who began his life of crime at the tender age of 14 when he adopted the persona of a wounded serviceman, claiming to have fought in a World War I battle. Gaining the sympathy of London society, he was able to open credit accounts with various businesses until the deception was uncovered and he was sent to reform school. He quickly escaped and was on the make again, posing as a gentleman. Arrested for false pretenses and check fraud, back to the borstal went young Netley. There “he had associated with every form of crook and confidence trickster imaginable.” It was perfect schooling for a boy with his predilections and talents.
In 1924, at the tender age of 21, Netley, who claimed to have turned over a new leaf, found his “true calling” as a writer. His memoir, “The Autobiography of a Crook,” was published in 1925. It became a bestseller and over the next few years he wrote biographies of members of various European royal family members and well-known public figures.
Netley’s biographies were fabricated. Even his own memoir turned out to have been ghost written. The book about the exploits of lady criminals was likely also a pack of lies.
Chicago May was born Mary Anne Duignan in 1871 in Ireland. She stole her family’s life savings, in 1890, and used it to immigrate to England, then America. May worked as a prostitute in New York City. Next she moved to Chicago during the World’s Fair in 1893. She teamed up with another prostitute to rob clients — one did the robbing while the gent was “distracted” by the other. She also became adept at the “badger game,” a con in which married men were lured into sexually compromising situations, then blackmailed.
May became romantically involved with the noted criminal Eddie Guerin and they traveled to Europe. (Not one to be outshone, Eddie published his autobiography in 1928). She and Eddie planned the robbery of an American Express office in Paris, but plans went awry and they ended up in prison. The pair reunited in London (May was released, Eddie escaped) where their relationship turned ugly and May took up with another crook named Robert Considine, alias Charlie Smith. An argument between the three, involving Eddie’s threats to slash May’s face, led to Eddie being shot in the foot. May and Charlie were convicted of attempted murder and sent to English prisons in 1907.
Her criminal heyday in the past, May returned to the United States after her 1917 prison release. She landed in Detroit, where, desperate for money, she worked as a common prostitute. May hoped her memoir would help her get back on her feet financially.
Though the engagement to Netley was bogus, May did plan to get married — to her old love and fellow crook, Robert. However she was taken ill before the nuptials could occur and she died in a Philadelphia hospital on May 30, 1929. At least 15 of her 57 years on earth had been spent in a prison cell.
Netley fared even worse than May. In 1931 he was convicted of trying to sell a fake biography of Queen Alexandra and sentenced to 18 months hard labor. The notoriety brought an end to his writing career and he spiraled into alcoholism. He was found dead in 1940, aged 37, in the partly burnt out living room of a house in Surrey, England. No one mourned his passing.
They say what goes around comes around, so it seems fitting that crook books are back in style. Biographies of both Netley Lucas and Chicago May have been published in recent years.
Featured photo: news photo of Netley Lucas and Chicago May, announcing their engagement to be married on January 4, 1928. Collection of the author.
Other photos: Netley’s mugshot, Police Gazette, July 18, 1924; May’s mugshot, date and location unknown; May and Robert, The Evening Journal, Wilmington, Delaware, May 30, 1929.
Posted in 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s | Tagged blackmail, Chicago, Chicago May, con man, Con woman, confidence man, Detroit, London, Netley Lucas, prostitute | Leave a comment
Francis Schlatter & Hankie Panky
Televangelists and their “healing” product scams have a history stretching far back in time. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, driven by news of events described as miracles, thousands of people lost money to clever con men (and occasionally women) posing as “divine healers.” One phony man of the cloth, going by the name Reverend Francis Schlatter, claimed to be able to cure the sick using handkerchiefs that he’d blessed. Send him your hard-earned cash, along with a handkerchief, and he’d bless it and return to you a “divine handkerchief” capable of healing whatever ailed you.
His name was as bogus as his handkerchiefs — he was born in 1838 in Switzerland and his real name was reported to be either Jacob Kunze or James Dowie. The original Francis Schlatter was an Alsatian cobbler and immigrant to the United States who, in 1894, felt the call of God in Denver, Colorado. Francis traveled around the west for two years, drawing huge crowds and supposedly healing the sick by clasping his hands together. He took no money for his services. He vanished mysteriously in Mexico and was presumed dead in 1896, though his body was never found.
Francis Schlatter, the healer, c. 1895. Collection of the Library of Congress.
The absence of Francis’s body created an irresistible opportunity for con men and imposters began popping up immediately after he disappeared. Since it wasn’t illegal in most places in the United States to use a different name from the one you were given at birth, the copycat Francis Schlatters simply started using that name, claiming they were the “real” healer who hadn’t actually died.
Kunze/Dowie partnered with a younger man named August Schrader around 1908. Styling themselves as “King” Francis and “Prince” August, the pair traveled around America and Canada organizing churches — they weren’t picky about the denomination — and officiating at weddings and funerals. They also offered prayer for a fee and the blessed cure-all hankies, sent through the mail.
August Shrader (left) and his partner, “Francis Schlatter” (right). The Oakland Tribune, Oakland, California, February 6, 1917, page 18.
They set up shop in Oakland, California, by 1910, but were asked to leave when people complained that their morals were “not conducive to the best interests of the neighborhoods where they carried on their practice.” Next they landed in Los Angeles (city of all things fake) and established their “Baptist Church, Inc.” — described as a cult — at a property they purchased in Hollywood. Garbed in long black robes, with flowing hair, thick beards and high silk hats, they attracted attention wherever they went.
It was the handkerchief scam that finally brought the pair down. Many of the people who sent money for handkerchiefs complained that they didn’t work. No one was cured of being blind or deaf (and certainly not of being dumb). In June 1916, postal inspectors arrested the men in New York and returned them to Los Angeles for indictment. The charge: conspiracy to use the mails to defraud.
News photograph dated July 18, 1918. Collection of the author.
They signed over their Hollywood property to the lawyer who represented them at trial. August, aged 49, died of pneumonia before the trial finished and was given a pauper’s burial. “Francis” declined the offer to officiate at the funeral of his friend and business partner.
He was convicted of the mail fraud charge and sent to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington State, arriving on March 18, 1917, where he was booked into the prison as “Francis Schlatter.” It was unusual but he was allowed to wear his silk top hat in both his mugshots. (Normally the side view would be hatless.) His booking card notes that he had lost almost all his teeth and was less than five feet tall. He was released from prison on June 1, 1918.
On October 16, 1922, a man going by the name “Francis Schlatter” was discovered dead in a cheap rooming house in St. Louis, Missouri. Many newspapers reported that this was the man who’d been imprisoned at McNeil Island for mail fraud. But was it?
The Topeka Daily Capital, Topeka, Kansas, October 25, 1922, page 15.
The informant on the man’s death certificate was Luverna Schlatter, who’d been contacted because she was thought to be the ex-wife of the dead man. Luverna was divorced from a different “divine healer” going by the name Francis Schlatter. However the body of the man who died in St. Louis in 1922 was not buried in Miamisburg, Ohio, as stated on the death certificate. In a bizarre twist, the body went unburied. On May 7, 1945, it was discovered in the basement of a St. Louis funeral home.
One plausible scenario is that Luverna, who lived in Chicago, went to St. Louis and discovered that the corpse awaiting her there was not that of her ex-husband, but belonged to the man who’d been incarcerated at McNeil Island* so she left without it. The death in 1922 of the fake Francis Schlatter is as much a mystery as the death of the man he spent years impersonating.
Featured photos: Francis Schlatter, McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Collection of the National Archives at Seattle, Washington, record group 129.
*Update: I recently received a copy of an article from the Denver Times, dated October 19, 1922, from David Wetzel, author of The Vanishing Messiah. The article describes how the man who was imprisoned at McNeil Island was still alive at that date, when he visited the Los Angeles Times offices to tell the paper he was not the man who had recently died in St. Louis.
Posted in 1900s, 1910s | Tagged con man, confidence man, fake healer, Francis Schlatter, McNeil Island Penitentiary, scam, scam artist | Leave a comment
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Tag Archives: Hollywood
Henry King’s Mysterious Mugshots
Henry King in 1915
Henry King was about as squeaky clean as they come in a place as rife with scandal as Hollywood. He was married to the same woman, a silent film actress named Gypsy Abbott, until her death in 1952. He and Gypsy raised four children and lived in the same beautiful home at 645 S. Muirfield Road in Los Angeles for more than 20 years.
He came from a farming family in Christiansburg, Virginia. He dropped out of high school and worked on the railroads for a time. He stumbled into acting when he accompanied a friend to an audition and got an offer to try out for a part. It turned out he had a talent for it.
He moved on from being a theatrical actor to acting in Hollywood movies, where he got in on the ground floor, just as motion pictures were taking hold. He went on to become a film director and he worked at various studios, including 20th Century Fox. He made nearly 70 films over a career that spanned almost 40 years. He was nominated twice for an Oscar for Best Director.
He was an avid pilot who enjoyed scouting film locations in his personal plane. Though he was 55 years old when the United States got involved in World War II, he served as a deputy commander of the Civil Air Patrol.
He died, aged 96, of a heart attack in his sleep at his California home in 1982.
There is no record of any wrongdoing on the part of Henry Edmondson King, in 1939 or at any other time during his long life, according to newspapers and online biographies. He was a decent man who got along with temperamental actors and demanding studio heads alike. Unlike many Hollywood celebrities, he didn’t have a big ego. He was calm on the set and efficient at his craft. Sure, he made a lot of money, but that’s not a crime in America.
The only dishonest thing he ever did that I was able to discover was to tell the occasional fib about his height. On his 1918 World War I draft registration card he claimed to be 6’2.5” tall. On a 1922 passport application he said he was 6’6” tall. His “stand-up” photo indicates he was about 5’11” but he was older when it was taken, so who knows. Maybe he had osteoporosis.
Why did the NYPD take mugshots of Henry on April 28, 1939? And they were not just any mugshots, but a set of both the standard front and side photos along with the “stand up” photo of his full body. He looks calm and composed in the photos, with an expression on his face that gives absolutely nothing away. But he was an actor so it’s not surprising that he was able to carefully control his face.
Were the photos taken as a publicity stunt for a film about crime in New York City? If so the film was never made. In 1939 King was probably working on Little Old New York, a film about the life of engineer Robert Fulton as he worked to build the first steam-powered ship in America. The movie was released in February 1940 and, according to imdb, some of the scenes in it were filmed on location in New York City.
Does the number 41144 have some meaning? Is it a hidden code? Or is it just the number Henry was given when he was arrested, if he was arrested.
Henry, your mugshots are very intriguing. What’s the story behind them?
The reverse side of Henry King’s mug shot photos.
Featured photos: Front and side mug shot photos of Henry King, taken on April 28, 1939 by the NYPD. Collection of the author.
Posted in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s | Tagged actor, film director, Henry King, Hollywood, Los Angeles, movie director, New York City, NYPD | 26 Comments
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Tag Archives: robbery
“With Long Criminal Records”
Posted on December 9, 2018 by Shayne Davidson
Warrants charging larceny were issued yesterday by the Circuit Attorney’s office against three women arrested last week in their room in Hotel Statler for shop-lifting. Police reported finding the wallet of a victim in the room. The women, all of whom said they are from Milwaukee, Wis., are: Ruth Stehling, 34 years old; Louise R. Smith, 32, and Jean Miller, 34. In the room police found a wallet containing $14, some checks and personal papers belonging to Mrs. Katherine Rueckert, 3435 Halliday avenue. Mrs. Rueckert had reported that the wallet was snatched from her in a downtown department store.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), March 27, 1934
The Kusch family crime poster has the look of a kid’s school project, with the awkward placement of text, some of which was hand-drawn, and the amateurish attempt at a symmetrical layout. It was made by a St. Louis police officer in 1934 and photographed as a magic lantern slide, possibly for use as a lecture aid.
I suspect the point of the poster was to demonstrate how suspects might avoid being identified as repeat offenders by using aliases. The real names of the three ladies in stand-up mugshot were (left to right) Helen, Anna and Julia Kusch.
Another aim of the poster was to demonstrate that crime was a career choice that occasionally ran in families.
The mother of two of the three women in the photo was Mary Meka Kusch. Mary was a German immigrant to the United States who tutored her young daughters in how to steal ladies’ purses and forced them to become pickpockets. Mary’s husband, Michael, who was also born in Germany, was not involved in the “family business.”
In 1909 Anna Kusch was the youngest child ever arrested by the detective bureau in Buffalo, New York, after she was caught stealing shoppers’ purses in department stores. At the ripe old age of eight Anna was a suspect in many purse thefts.
Anna and her older sister, Helen, were serial pickpockets while they were still in grade school. The girls strolled the streets, stealing ladies’ purses as the opportunity arose, and hiding their loot in a baby carriage. Imagine the surprise of the beat officer who leaned over to give the “baby” a tickle on the chin!
In 1910 the Kusch sisters were taken into police custody for pickpocketing. Mama Kusch got three months probation for teaching her children to be thieves.
The following year Helen was arrested again for stealing cash from the purses of women shopping on the main drag of Buffalo. She told the police that her mother sent her out every day after school to steal money and if she didn’t do it she got a whipping. Mary was charged with receiving stolen property. Helen was sent to a detention home for juveniles.
Meanwhile the sisters’ older brothers, John and Albert Kusch, were engaged in robbing the poor box at a local Catholic church. They drank enough whiskey to put Albert and a friend in the hospital in critical condition with alcohol poisoning. Albert subsequently recovered. John went on to be convicted of burglary and sent to New York’s Elmira Reformatory at the age of 19.
As Helen and Anna blossomed into their teen years they continued to shoplift and pickpocket. Both were caught and earned themselves another stay in a Buffalo detention home.
The Kusch family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by 1920. The change of state may have been motivated by their notoriety in Buffalo because their crime careers continued in “America’s Dairyland.” When Helen was 28, in 1926, she was arrested for pickpocketing in Milwaukee. She jumped bail and forfeited her $1000 bond.
John was arrested for passing bad checks in 1931 when he was 38 years old. Over the previous 20 years he’d accumulated 16 arrests, including one for contributing to the delinquency of a minor after he’d picked up an underage girl and had sex with her. He was sentenced to five to seven years in a Wisconsin state prison on the bad check charge. John joined Albert, who was already in state prison, serving a three-year sentence for the attempted robbery of a pharmacy.
When the Kusch ladies were arrested for pickpocketing in St. Louis, Helen and Anna had 25 years of experience under their belts. They knew it would be a smart move to give the police false names to fool them into believing it was their first offense. Julia Kusch was not their sister but she may have been their sister-in-law because Albert was married for a while to a woman named Julia.
Helen was picked up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for shoplifting an item worth $1.50 in 1935. Police there claimed she’d been arrested many times in the past. She was given a six month suspended sentence and a $100 fine. Anna was also arrested and later released without charge.
The 1935 arrests of Helen and Anna were last time any Kusch family members appeared in the police news. It’s impossible to know if the poster put an end to their criminal activities, however there’s an old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” That little proverb may have run through the mind of the police officer when he got out his glue and pen to make the Kusch Family crime poster.
Featured photo: St. Louis Police Lantern Slides, collection of the Missouri History Museum.
Posted in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s | Tagged Buffalo, burglar, burglary, child abuse, child prisoner, family crime, female criminal, female prisoner, Grand Larceny, lantern slide, Milwaukee, Pickpocket, pickpockets, purse snatching, robbery, sex with minor, shoplifter, shoplifting, St. Louis | 5 Comments
Unforgettable Legs
Posted on November 11, 2018 by Shayne Davidson
Short skirts may or may not be a sign of modern depravity, but they registered as a sign of bad luck for Peggy Hudson and her husband, according to reports from Los Angeles. Peggy is now awaiting sentence on a charge of first degree robbery.
— Hayward Semi-Weekly Review (Hayward, California), May 15, 1928
Charles Anderson arrived home after a long day at his Los Angeles restaurant, The Red Onion, on the night of March 5, 1928. He pulled his car into the garage, got out of the vehicle and was unpleasantly surprised to discover a man and woman waiting in the shadows for him.
The woman thrust a gun into his ribs and told him to turn out the lights. Once they were extinguished the man ordered Charles onto the ground and tied him up with a piece of rope. Then the couple went through his pockets and robbed him of the day’s profits from the restaurant — $382 cash ($5,640 in 2018).
Before they left the man remarked to Charles, “Guess I’ll have to take your car too. You see I’m an ex-convict and I have to make a quick getaway. Don’t be afraid, though. I don’t want your car and I’ll leave it a couple blocks from here on Reno Street.” And with that puzzling comment, the pair got into his car and drove off into the night.
Charles freed himself and called the police. His car was nowhere to be found.
“I didn’t get a good look at her face, but I saw her legs, and I could pick them out any time,” he told the police. He claimed the legs he’d seen belonged to Nora Hudson, better known as Peggy. She was a woman he’d previously employed as a cashier at his restaurant. He also said he thought he recognized Peggy by her voice but he was less sure of that than he was about her legs. He didn’t know her male companion.
Changes in women’s hemlines in the 1920s meant a lot more leg showed than ever before and naturally men took notice. This careful, possibly even lecherous, observation of his female employee’s legs paid off for Charles. It took two months but the LAPD finally located 20-year-old Peggy by tracing her to her home address on Flower Street in downtown L.A. The police took Peggy and her husband, Willard Hudson, a musician, into custody and booked them on suspicion of robbery.
Was there something unusally memorable about Peggy’s legs? If so it’s not obvious in the news photo.
California State Archives
Willard’s incriminating comment about having a criminal record turned out to be true. He’d been incarcerated at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas.
A pair of slick criminals the Hudsons were not. With time to cool off they likely realized they’d been foolish to rob a man who knew Peggy. Then they compounded their mistake when Willard confessed his criminal background to their victim.
They pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery and each was sentenced to five years to life in prison. Willard served his sentence at Folsom Prison and Peggy was sent to San Quentin. She was paroled in August 1931 after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Peggy Hudson must go down in history as the only person ever captured and sent to prison after being identified by her legs.
Featured photo: Nora Hudson, alias Peggy Hudson, July 8, 1928; California State Archives; Sacramento, California; San Quentin Mug Book.
Posted in 1920s | Tagged armed robbery, California, Car theft, female criminal, female prisoner, Folsom, Folsom prison, Grand Larceny, larceny, Los Angeles, robbery, San Quentin | 3 Comments
A quarrel over a woman ended last night in the slaying of an escaped convict by one of his three pals and the wounding and capture of the other three men by the police following a pistol battle.
— The St. Louis Star and Times (St. Louis, Missouri), July 7, 1931
It started out as a congenial evening of drinking among friends on a hot summer night in St. Louis. Winfield (known as “Windy”) Seeman and his pal, Morris Rosen, met up with John Harrington and Harry Casey near the Mississippi riverfront. July in St. Louis is notoriously hot and humid. In order to try to cool off one of the men suggested they head to a speakeasy called “Mack’s Place” for some beers.
The speakeasy was in a house in the southeast part of the city, near the workhouse, in an area called “No Man’s Land,” where mounds of rocks from an old quarry were still scattered around. During the 19th century, workhouse inmates were forced to break rocks from the quarry into gravel as part of their penance for being imprisoned. Streetlights were few in No Man’s Land, so it was dark at night and vehicles traversed the landscape with difficulty. The police disliked the area and avoided it, which meant it was a good place to run an illegal beer tavern.
Harry Casey was a 40-year-old St. Louis man with an extensive criminal history. As a joke he was nicknamed “The Velvet Tongue Kid” thanks to his free use of some of the vilest curse words in the English language. He’d been sent to the workhouse for car theft in his late teens. By the age of 25 he’d been hardened by two prison terms in the Missouri State Penitentiary (MSP) — one of which came after he’d stolen some guns and attempted to kill a police officer who tried to arrest him in Illinois. He’d lived in California for a time but he’d recently returned to his hometown.
Windy Seeman (top) and Morris Rosen (bottom) in MSP mugshots. Collection of the Missouri State Archives.
Windy Seeman and Morris Rosen had become buddies at the MSP when Windy was serving a ten-year sentence for robbery. Russian-born Morris, the younger of the two, had served a year at the MSP for assault to kill and was in for the second time for burglary and grand larceny. They were both skilled tradesmen and had been put to work on the outside in a supervised prison gang that was at work on a new prison. Windy and Morris walked away from the gang the previous October and had been on the lam ever since.
John was a salesman in his thirties with no criminal record.
The men sat in front of Mack’s Place drinking and as the alcohol flowed, tongues loosened. John casually mentioned that he thought Windy’s wife, Irene, was a very attractive woman. Perhaps it was an innocent comment or he may have been testing the waters to see how married the Seemans really were. Either way, he wasn’t prepared for for the escaped con’s reaction.
Windy accused John of trying to steal his wife. John replied that it was meant as a compliment, nothing more, but Windy became even more incensed and refused to let the matter drop.
John retreated inside the speakeasy but Windy grabbed his pistol and followed him. Harry, never one to avoid a fight, followed them both inside and Morris trailed in last. Gunfire erupted and Windy fell to the floor with a bullet wound to his chest.
Morris insisted that they needed to get his friend to a doctor. The three men laid Windy in the backseat of John’s car and headed to the city hospital. Before they got far the police, who’d been called by someone at the speakeasy, arrived on the scene. They ordered the men out of the car. Instead Harry fired at the policemen, who dropped to their knees, sought cover and returned fire.
By the time the bullets stopped flying, John had been shot in the left arm and Harry had taken a bullet to his right hand and had a deep scalp wound. Morris was seriously injured — he’d been shot in the head. Windy was dead, with bullet wounds to his stomach and heart. None of the officers was injured.
The police weren’t sure whose bullet had killed Windy. However he’d been lying in the backseat of the car during the gun battle, which made it unlikely that the officers, firing from a low angle, had shot him. John told police that Harry fired the fatal shot after the argument moved inside the speakeasy. Morris, once he’d recovered, said the same thing. But velvet-tongued Harry claimed John had fired the fatal shot.
Harry with charged with Windy’s murder. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and assault to kill and was sent to prison for ten years. He died in 1944 of stomach and liver cancer and was buried in a pauper’s grave in East St. Louis, Illinois.
John, whose father, Patrick Harrington, was a St. Louis policeman, returned to life as a salesman. He was killed in July 1952 when he failed to stop at an intersection near Route 66 in St. Louis County while driving his car at a high rate of speed. John’s car struck another vehicle and he was thrown 30 feet from his wreck. He died at the scene of fractures, shock and blunt force head trauma. Passengers in the other two cars involved in the crash suffered only minor injuries.
Morris survived but his lost his eye. He was returned to the MSP to finish his sentence once he’d recovered. He was released in 1934 and he moved back to his hometown of Kansas City. Eventually he became a part owner of Toffler’s Loan Shop in Leavenworth, Kansas. The store, part pawn shop and part general store, sold rifles, shotguns and pistols, among other things.
In December 1952, while demonstrating a revolver he believed to be unloaded, Morris snapped the trigger and the gun exploded. It wounded him in the hand and wounded a bystander in the arm. He recovered from his second gunshot wound and lived another 33 years, dying in 1995 at the age of 90.
Featured photo: Morris Rosen’s mugshot, taken on November 19, 1931. The Missouri State Penitentiary Database, collection of the Missouri State Archives.
Posted in 1930s, 1940s, 1950s | Tagged alcohol, alcoholic, gun death, jealousy, Missouri State Penitentiary, murder, murderer, prison escape, robbery, speakeasy, St. Louis | 4 Comments
Old-fashioned terms for crime can be confusing. When Lillie Bates was arrested in New York City on June 17, 1909, the officers listed her crime as simply “Badger.” Did that mean she was caught mistreating a short-legged, furry, mammal that hunts at night? Probably not. More than likely it meant she was involved in a criminal enterprise called “the badger game.”
The badger game involved a woman and her male accomplice, and it was actually the accomplice who was the “badger.” The game was often a venomous combintion of crimes, including prostitution, robbery, con game and extortion.
The female in the partnership posed as a reputable woman who was down on her luck and therefore willing to have a sexual encounter with an “old married man with the appearance of honor and wealth.” She got him into her bedroom, which had a secret panel cut in one of the walls. Here’s a description of what often happened next:
She fastens the door and will permit nothing until the lamp is extinguished. The very respectable gentleman lays his clothes carelessly upon a chair, together with his watch and well-filled purse, and the hour of pleasure begins. But the woman’s accomplice is outside the partition and at a signal from her he knows that the time for him to take action has arrived. Silently he opens the secret door. Light as a cat the “badger” passes through it, with his usual dexterity begins to examine carefully all the clothes of the victim as they lie on the chair, far from the bed. The darkness of the room facilitates his work. Very soon he has got possession of all that is of any value and he creeps back through the opening. The door shuts as noiselessly as it was opened. The object of the two is attained and now it only remains to set free the plucked bird without any disturbance. As soon as the “respectable gentleman” begins to dress someone knocks at the door. The “respectable gentleman” gets alarmed. His companion does the same; she urges him to dress as quickly as possible, and go out by the back door, for it is quite certain that her husband, or father, or brother, as the case may be, has returned and wants to come in.
— The Dark Side of New York Life and Its Criminal Classes, Gustav Lening, 1873
Hopefully the victim left the house so quickly that he didn’t check to see if all his valuables were where he kept them.
Variations on the badger game were plentiful. All of them required acting talent along with a boatload of nerve. Sometimes there was no secret panel and the male accomplice simply stormed into the room, claiming to be the woman’s outraged husband, fists cocked and ready for a fight unless he was financially compensated. Sometimes the couple threatened to reveal the victim’s transgression to his family unless he paid up.
Sophie Lyons, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Pinkerton’s, Inc.
Sophie Lyons, the “queen” of nineteenth century crime, was an adept practitioner of the badger game. She was so good at it that she sometimes pulled it off without a “badger.” In 1878 she finally got caught after she lured a well-respected, elderly lawyer to her Boston hotel room with the promise of sex, got him to undress, then locked his clothes in her trunk.
She forced him to write her a check for $1000 ($24,215 in 2018), and told him he’d get his clothes back after she returned from the bank with the money. She locked the door on her way out so he couldn’t call the police.
Officials at the bank were suspicious of such a large check and called the police, who escorted Sophie back to the hotel. There they found her naked victim. She claimed she was his long-standing mistress. He refused to prosecute due to the shame it would have brought him. “She was so bewitching and fascinating that I could not help it,” he sheepishly remarked.
I found no record of a Lillie or Lillian Bates’ arrest or conviction. Was “Fred,” whose name was tattooed on her arm, the badger? Was her victim a well-known man who was too embarrassed to press charges? We’ll never know the details of how she played the badger game. Ten months after her arrest, when the 1910 census was taken in New York City, there was no one named Lillie Bates living in the city.
Featured photo: Bertillon card photos of Lillie Bates, June 17, 1909, New York Municipal Archives.
Posted in 1900s | Tagged badger game, con scheme, Con woman, extortion, female criminal, New York City, prostitute, prostitution, robbery, Sophie Lyons | 24 Comments
Posted on June 6, 2018 by Shayne Davidson
Buried treasure running into the hundreds of dollars has been found on the old Starke Hotel property, now owned by Attorney Ralph E. Swing, it became known here yesterday. For a number of days men employed on grading the property have been digging for the gold and keeping the fact a secret.
— The San Bernardino County Sun, San Bernardino, California, March 3, 1921
Starke’s Hotel, located at Third Street and Arrowhead Avenue in San Bernardino, California, was a busy place during its heyday in the late 19th century. According to a 1938 news article, the hotel was a temporary home to “visitors from all parts of the states, professional gamblers, miners and many other guests” when it was owned and operated by German immigrants August Starke and his wife Catherine. By 1910 the hotel, which had changed owners several times, was a flophouse and sometime brothel called the Sunrise Hotel.
On a rainy day in early March 1915, a 21-year-old Texan named Charles Hayward and his accused accomplice, Rosie Moyer, sat in the San Bernardino jail awaiting trial in Superior Court. They were charged with robbing $350 (worth about $8,700 in 2018), most of it in $10 gold coins, from a Chinese man named Wong Fong.
Charles was suspected of carrying out the actual robbery, then handing the bag of money off to Rosie. It was alleged that Rosie then hid the bag somewhere in the couple’s room at the Sunrise Hotel, but the police hadn’t located the cash.
Almost two years earlier Charles escaped from a chain gang while doing 30 days for petty larceny in Oakland, 450 miles to the north. More recently he’d survived a suicide attempt after he’d hacked at his wrist with the jagged edge of a cigarette tin while he was in jail on a drug charge in Los Angeles. Charles was familiar with the California criminal justice system — he’d also been jailed in San Diego, Sacramento and San Francisco.
Charles thought Rosie wasn’t the brightest coin in the cash register, so while he sat in jail he wrote her two letters telling her exactly how to “frame” her story when she testified at her trial. But Rosie never got the letters because a jail trusty handed them to the jailer instead. She got her story mixed up and ended up incriminating herself on the stand. Her attorney did what he could to try and repair the damage, but she was convicted of the robbery.
The lawyers brought an interpreter, a local Chinese-American high school boy, to translate the testimony of Wong Fong and the other Chinese witnesses who spoke no English. As it turned out he spoke a different dialect than the witnesses and the lawyers had to to send to Los Angeles for another interpreter. The letters Charles wrote to Rosie were also submitted as evidence at his trial. He too was convicted of robbing Wong Fong.
When Rosie was sentenced she cried hysterically and begged Charles to tell the court she’d had nothing to do with the crime. He steadfastly maintained his innocence. He said he couldn’t exonerate her since he wasn’t guilty of the robbery himself and had no idea who’d done it. The authorities drugged Rosie to calm her down. Both she and Charles were sentenced to five years at San Quentin. They served three and a half years before being paroled.
By early 1921 the Starke, or Sunrise Hotel, was abandoned and slated for tear down. When the construction workers found $10 gold coins in the demolition rubble, San Bernardinians speculated about the origins of the coins. Some folks thought a miner or old-salt frontiersmen, who cached his wealth at the hotel, had forgotten where he’d left his loot. The best money, however, was on the coins belonging to Wong Fong, the victim of the 1915 robbery. The money, you’ll recall, was never recovered.
Wong couldn’t say if the loot was his or not because he was long gone, killed several years earlier when he fell off his bolting horse. Ironically the owner of the property, Ralph E. Swing, was one of the prosecution attorneys in the cases against Charles and Rosie, let the workers keep the money. “Finders are keepers,” commented attorney Swing. Perhaps fearing the taxman, none of the finders was willing to admit to how much gold they’d recovered.
An archeological analysis of San Bernardino Chinatown, including the privies of Starke’s Hotel, was undertaken by Foothill Resources for Caltrans in 2001. Many household objects, such as clothing and eating utensils, were located, in addition to the signs of what you’d normally expect to find in a privy. Even items related to social drugs, like alcohol, tobacco and opium, were discovered. However there was no gold found anywhere in the vicinity, on which several of the San Bernardino Superior Court buildings now stand.
Featured photos and additional photos: Charles Hayward and Rosie Moyer, inmate photos from the California State Archives; Sacramento, California; Department of Corrections San Quentin Prison Inmate Photographs.
Posted in 1910s | Tagged African American, California, Chinese, Gold Coins, Grand Larceny, robbery, San Bernardino, San Quentin, Starke's Hotel | 8 Comments
Knock-out Drops
Posted on January 31, 2018 by Shayne Davidson
If you watched the second episode of The Alienist on TNT recently, you may have wondered about the harrowing experience of John Moore (played by Luke Evans) after knock-out drops were put in his drink.
Moore, a newspaper crime illustrator and friend of the alienist, Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, takes a trip alone to the “boy whorehouse” in lower Manhattan, where Giorgio Santorelli, the teenage victim whose brutal murder Kreizler is investigating, worked before his death. He hopes to interview Giorgio’s employers and coworkers in an effort to prove his detective skills to Kreizler. However he gets more than he bargained for when the bartender spikes his drink with a powder. The episode ends with Moore falling paralyzed on a bed, unable to move or speak, as the brothel’s young male prostitutes swarm over him.
Is there any truth to this part of the plotline in the show? Did bartenders actually spike their patrons’ drinks with paralytic drugs?
Crooked bartenders did, in fact, spike drinks with knock-out drops or powders (probably chloral hydrate) during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, usually for the purpose of robbing the victim. A case in point is a bartender named Dennis Houlihan, also known as “Happy Hooligan” and “Knock out” who was active in Fort Wayne, Indiana in August 1901.
Dennis, an Irishman with a florid complexion, was described in the news as a “grafter, dispenser of knock-out drugs and all round thing man.” He worked as a bartender at the Shamrock Saloon, a tavern owned by a man named Jack Cain. Dennis was arrested on suspicion of having “relieved the pocket” of Shamrock customer Thomas Otis of $17. However Thomas, who’d had plenty to drink, along with possibly a bit of the old knock-out powder, wasn’t able to say for certain where his money went missing, so the case against Dennis was dismissed.
Police were informed that Dennis and Jack previously ran a notorious “joint” in Cleveland, where sailors were regularly given knock-out drops and robbed of their cash. Unwilling to let Dennis off scott-free, they immediately rearrested him for “flim flamming” a man out of a twenty-dollar bill at a different bar. This time the charges stuck and “Knock out” got what was described as the stiffest sentence ever handed out in Fort Wayne — $200 and six months in the workhouse. If unable to pay the fine, which is quite likely, he became the guest of the Fort Wayne police for a whopping 495 days.
Police suspected Dennis might move his operations elsewhere, so they shared his details with police detective bureaus in other cities. The card that survived (back shown below) is from St. Paul, Minnesota.
A final story about Dennis appeared in an Indianapolis newspaper, in 1907, after he was arrested for knocking down a drunken friend, stealing the man’s watch and pawning it. Initially he denied the accusation but later he admitted his guilt. “A man will do anything when drunk,” he commented, “even to his best friend.” And as John Moore discovers in The Alienist, a sober bartender’s enemy suffers the most severe consequences of all.
Featured photos: Dennis Houlihan’s mugshots from his Bertillon card dated August 12, 1901. Collection of the author.
Posted in 1890s, 1900s | Tagged Fort Wayne, illegal drugs, Indianapolis, knock-out drugs, larceny, poison, robbery, The Alienist, thief | 1 Comment
Brothers in Arms and Chickens
Six inmates, all from the prison hospital, escaped from the Hutchinson reformatory here last night at 8:15 o’clock in one of the most daring and systematic breaks in recent years. Following the carefully laid plans the six took advantage of two prison ladders, one of which was equipped with special hooks, made a dash for a dark spot on the east wall, scaled it and disappeared before the hospital guard noticed their absence.
— The Hutchinson News (Hutchinson, Kansas), March 4, 1929
Clarence Pruitt, KSP prisoner photos, 1926
Clarence Pruitt was paroled in August 1928 from the Kansas State Penitentiary (KSP) after serving two and a half years for stealing 32 chickens from a farmer named Guy Platte. Soon after he was paroled, authorities discovered that in 1925, he’d escaped from the State Industrial Reformatory in Hutchinson. Rather than allowing him to enjoy his new freedom, they sent him back to the reformatory to serve out the rest of his 1924 sentence for grand larceny.
Clarence was one of the six men who escaped from Hutchinson into the frigid March night in 1929. He was recaptured in July. Rather than risk another escape from Hutchinson he was sent to the more secure state penitentiary — round two at the KSP for Clarence.
Lyal Berry became prisoner # 6549 at the KSP on July 19, 1919, after he pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary. He’d burgled three homes in Peabody, Kansas, was arrested and broke out of jail by cutting through the bars on the window of his cell with a stolen saw. He told prison officials he was 22 but he was actually only 17 years old and a recent graduate of the state reformatory for juveniles in Colorado. Though young, he had an impressive criminal career of robberies and jailbreaks under his belt, along with a bullet wound sustained when he was shot by a pursuing police officer after his jailbreak.
Lyal Berry (Cecil Pruitt), KSP prisoner photos, 1919
Lyal’s real name was Cecil Pruitt. He loved aliases and he had at least five of them, including the name of his older brother, Clarence. Born on August 17, 1901, he was two years younger than Clarence. The Pruitt brothers’ father, William, died in 1911, while they were still boys. Their mother, Elizabeth, moved to Denver, Colorado, after William’s death, where she got remarried. Clarence left school after 8th grade to work as a coal miner and farmer. Cecil only made it through 5th grade.
Although he had a poor prison record, Cecil was paroled from the KSP in August 1924, four days after his 23rd birthday. It didn’t take long for him to violate his parole. The Kansas authorities located him at the New Mexico State Penitentiary, in July 1925, where he was serving a five to six year sentence for burglary and armed robbery. He was returned to KSP to serve the rest of his sentence for the 1919 burglary on July 20, 1928 — round two at the KSP for Cecil.
The Pruitt brothers had a couple of months together at the KSP before Cecil was pardoned and released on December 13, 1929. Clarence got out in 1930.
Unfortunately the story doesn’t end well for the Pruitt brothers. In March 1931, a car containing more than 100 stolen chickens was found abandoned in Greeley, Colorado. The vehicle was traced to Clarence, who pleaded guilty to theft of 1,200 to 1,800 chickens in the area and was sentenced to two to three years in a state prison. Clarence’s wife blamed his brother for her husband’s legal troubles, but by then Cecil was in a Denver jail on a narcotics charge. Plus Cecil had always been more interested in stealing cash and jewelry than chickens.
Despite having served multiple prison sentences for chicken theft, other people’s chickens continued to tempt Clarence, and by 1940 he was incarcerated in the Missouri State Penitentiary. On May 8, 1950 he was arrested for stealing 100 chickens from farms in several counties outside Denver. He pleaded innocent to the charges and the outcome of his case wasn’t reported.
If he’d spent his criminal career stealing chickens, Cecil might have lived to a ripe old age. Instead his body was found in a “blood-stained, bullet-pocked” car in Kansas City on September 7, 1931, less than a month after he turned 30. He’d been beaten to death. Police suspected a fellow gangster killed him, but his murder was never solved. His sisters collected his body and buried him.
Featured photo: Front of reward card issued for Clarence Pruitt, prisoner #6216. Collection of the author.
Posted in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s | Tagged burglary, gangster, Grand Larceny, jail break, Kansa State Industrial Reformatory, Kansas State Penitentiary, murder, prison escape, robbery | 1 Comment
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Savage Family Crest, Coat of Arms and Name History
1) (West Bergholt and Copsford, co. Essex, 1611). Chequy or and gu. a lion ramp. erm. a canton az. Crest—Two lions’ gambs erased erm. supporting a pillar gobony or and gu. capital and base of the second.
2) (Baron Abinger). Motto—Suis stat viribus. Chequy or and gu. a lion ramp. erm. on a canton az. a castle triple-towered ar. Crest—A Tuscan column chequy or and gu. supported on either side by a lion’s gamb ermines erased gu. Supporters—Two angels vested ar. tunics az. wings or, in the exterior hand of each a sword in bend ppr. pommel and hilt gold.
1) (Rock Savage and Clifton, co. Chester). Motto—Ware the horn. This was discarded for the ancient bearing temp. Henry VIII. Ar. six lioncels ramp. sa. N.B.—This is the ancient coat of the Savages. Sir John Savage. Knt., having inherited Clifton through his mother, Margaret, dau. and heir of Sir Thomas Daniers, obtained, 3 Henry V., a grant of the arms of that family, viz., Ar. four fusils in pale sa. Crest—A unicorn’s head erased ar.
2) (Earl Rivers, extinct 1728; descended from John Savage, Esq., of Clifton, co. Chester, sprung from Savage, of Steinesbie, co. Derby, m. temp. Edward III., Margaret, dau. and heir of Sir Thomas Daniers, Knt., of Bradley, co. Chester, with whom he obtained the manor of Clifton; eighth in descent from him was Sir John Savage, created a bart. 1611, whose son, Sir Thomas Savage, second bart., was created Viscount Savage 1626. lie m. Elizabeth D’Arcy, dau. of Thomas, third Lord D’Arcy, of Chiche, who was created, 1626, Viscount Colchester and Earl Rivers, with special remainder to his son-in-law, Sir Thomas Savage). Motto—A te pro te. Ar. six lions ramp. three, two, and one sa. Crest—Out of a ducal coronet or, a lion's gamb erect sa. Supporters—Dexter, a falcon or, belled of the last; sinister, a unicorn ar.
3) (Brodway, co. Worcester, Visit. 1600; and Tidbury co. Gloucester, Visit. 1623). Same Arms. Crest—Out of a ducal coronet or, a lion’s gamb erect sa.
4) (co. Chester, Visit. 1600; co. Gloucester, Visit. 1620; Tidminton and Powick, co. Worcester, Visit. 1634). Same Arms. Crest—A unicorn’s head erased ar.
5) (Elmley Lovet, co. Worcester, and Highgate, co. Middlesex). Same Arms, a crescent for diff. Crest—Out of a ducal coronet or, a lion's gamb erect sa. charged with a crescent or.
6) (Bloxworth, co. Dorset). Same Arms, a fleur-de-lis gu. for diff. Crest—A lion’s gamb erect sa. in a ducal coronet or.
7) (Clavering-Savage, Elmley Castle, co. Worcester). Same Arms, on a canton az. a fleur-de-lis of the field. Cresl —A unicorn's head erased per fess ar. and gu. armed and crined or, in the mouth a fleur-de-lis az.
8) (Midsomer Norton, co. Somerset). Ar. on a pile az. six lions ramp. three, two, and one or. Crest—A unicorn’s head couped at the neck per fess wavy az. and sa. three bendlets ar. armed or, in the mouth a sprig of oak fructed ppr.
9) (Tatchbroke and Barford. co. Warwick; Robert Savage, a.d. 1574, son of Thomas Savage, of Barford, and grandson of William Savage, of Tatchbroke). (Clanfield, co. Oxford; Walter Savage, Visit. Oxon, 1574, second son of Thomas Savage, of Barford, co. Warwick, m. Anne, dau. of Michael Fox, of Chacombe, co. Northants). Ar. on a fess az. betw. three pheons sa. as many roses or.
10) (Castleton, co. Derby). Ar. a pale fusily sa. a crescent for diff. Crest—A unicorn’s head ar. erased gu.
11) (Hart Street, City of London). Ar. on a fess az. betw. two pheons sa. three roses or. Crest—Two arms embowed in armour ppr. issuing out of an Eastern crown or, supporting a pheon sa.
12) (co. Chester, 6 Henry VII.). Ar. two cotises dancettee sa. (another has the tinctures reversed).
13) (cos. Essex and Oxford). Ar. on a fess az. betw. two pheons of the second three roses or.
14) (co. Kent). Erm. on a chief az. three lions ramp. ar.
15) (London). Ar. on a fess az. betw. two pheons sa. three roses or.
16) (co. Sussex). Az. a chev. betw. three leopards’ faces ar.
17) (Portaferry, co. Down; an ancient Norman family established in Ireland under Sir John de Courcy, a.d. 1177. Andrew Savage, Esq., of Portaferry, representative of this family, on inheriting the fortune of his maternal grand-uncle, assumed the surname and arms of Nugent, by royal licence, in 1812). Motto—Fortia atque fidelis. (Knockadoo, co. Sligo; a branch of Savage, of Portaferry; descended from Hugh Savage, Esq., of the city of Dublin, third son of John Savage, Esq., of Ballyvarley, co. Devon, great-grandson of Rowland Savage, Esq., of the Little Ards, who d. at Portaferry in 1552. The Rev. Robert Savage, of Knockadoo, and Lukesland Home, co. Devon, d. 1841, leaving his sisters his co-heirs). (Ballymadun, co. Dublin; descended through the Knockadoo branch from Savage, of Portaferry; Francis Savage, Esq., of Ballymadun, was eldest son of Rev. Chbistopheb Kingsborocgh Savage, who was eldest son of Francis Savage, Esq., of Knockadoo). Motto—Fortis atque fidelis. Ar. six lions ramp. sa. langued gu. Crest—Out of a ducal coronet or, a lion's gamb erect sa.
18) (Ardquin Castle, co. Down, and Lisanoure Castle, co. Antrim; a family coeval with that of Portaferry; Fun. Ent. Ulster’s Office, 1665; presumed by some authorities to to have branched off at a very early period from that ancient house). Motto—Fortis atque fidelis. Same Arms, an annulet az. for diff. Crest—On waves of the sea a mermaid ppr.
19) (Sir Thomas Savage, knighted 31 Oct. 1601, by Charles, Lord Mountjoy, Lord Deputy of Ireland). Ar. six lions ramp. three, two, and one, a label of three points gu.
20) (Valentine Savage, Esq., of the city of Dublin, Deputy Clerk of the Crown temp. Charles II., m. Mary, dau. of Thomas Houghton, Esq., of Ballyanne, co. Wexford; Fun. Ent. Ulster’s Office, 1670). (Reban, co. Kildare; Sir Arthur Savage, Knt., a Privy Councillor in Ireland temp. James I. and Charles I.; Fun. Ent. Ulster’s Office, 1626, of his dau. Elizabeth, wife of Sir James Carrol, Mayor of Dublin). Ar. six lions ramp. three, two, and one sa.
21) (Kilcreen, co. Kilkenny; exemplified to Clayton Bayly, Esq., of Kilcreen, on his assuming, by royal licence, 1837, the surname and arms of Savage in lieu of Bayly, in compliance with the will of his uncle, Francis Savage, Esq., of Hollymount, co. Down). Motto—Fortia atque fidelis. Ar. six lioncels ramp, three, two, and one sa. Crest—Out of waves a mermaid all ppr.
Origin, Meaning, Family History and Savage Coat of Arms and Family Crest
Savage Origin:
England, Scotland
Origins of Name:
The surname of Savage comes from a nickname which was used in early European times. This surname in particular comes from a time when nicknames were used habitually to describe someone, and it was eventually so used that it became an identifier rather than just a nickname. These nicknames were first used as a description of physical attributes or particularities of a person, such as their moral compass or their dress and attire according to their occupation. The surname of Savage is of an early medieval English origin, deriving from the Middle English and Old French words of “salvage” and “sauvage” which translate to mean “wild,” “uncontrolled” or “out of control.” This surname was recorded in the Doomsday Book of 1086, which encompassed the “Great Survey” of England.
More common variations are:
Salvage, Sauvage, Savvage, Saviage, Saviage, Savaage, Savahge, Saavage, Sa-Vage
The first recorded spelling of the surname of Savage was in the Doomsday Book for Herefordshire in the year 1086, which was said to encompass the “Great Survey” of England. One Edric Saluvage was recorded and mentioned in this book in the year 1086, under the rule of King William I, who was also commonly referred to as “William the Conqueror” and ruled from the year 1066 to the year 1087. Other mentions of this surname include various spellings of this surname, and include Robert le Sauuage, who was recorded in Surry in 1198, Ralph le Savage, who was recorded in Suffolk in 1268, and the great Co. Down family of Savage, Savage of the Ards, who were recorded in the Province of Ulster.
In Ireland, the surname of Savage was translated to Gaelic and then turn into “Mac an tSabhasaigh” which caused the English settlers there to become Hibernicized.
William le Sauvage from Kent participated in the Ulster invasion in 1177 and built a castle on the top of hill Ardkeen in the region of Down. Over the centuries, the Savages would become fully intertwined in the Irish landscape and would war with other Irish clans often.
During the Great Migration, also known as the European Migration, which began in the 1600’s, English settlers became disgruntled with their leadership and the way that their homeland was being run. Oftentimes during this time period, they set off in search of a better life, and settled on the United States of America, which at that time was referred to as the Colonies or the New World. This New World promised religious freedom, better conditions for living, and the possibility to acquire land. Among these settlers who migrated to the New World were people with the surname of Savage. The first person recorded to set foot on American soil with the surname of Savage was one Thomas Savage, who was just twenty-seven years of age when he embarked on the journey to New England, from London, on the ship named the “Planter” in the 1635 in the month of April. It is possible that people with the surname of Savage were destined to arrive in America sooner, but did not make the journey due to poor living conditions on the transport ships that were bringing them here. During this time, many people died from starvation and disease, or came to the new country with these ailments. Those with the surname of Savage who did make it to America safely lived in the states of Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California, Washington, Illinois, Virginia, Michigan, and the state of North Carolina.
Savage Today:
United States 57,700
England 18,004
Nigeria 11,004
Canada 6,596
Australia 6,100
Sierra Leone 4,681
South Africa 3,908
Northern Ireland 1,955
New Zealand 1,811
Ireland 1,299
Claudia Von Savage, who is an American Republican politician, and a Delegate to the Republican National Convention from New Jersey in the year 2004
Augustus Alexander “Gus” Savage (1925-2015) who was an American politician, and a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois from the year of 1981 to the year 1993
Henry Wilson Savage (1859-1927) who was an American theatrical manager
John Savage (born in 1949) who was born with the name John Youngs, and is an American Genie Award nominated actor best known for his roles in The Deer Hunter in the year 1978, Hair in the year 1979, and The Godfather: Part III in the year 1990
Arthur William Savage (1857-1938) who was an American businessman, inventor, and explorer, the founder of Savage Arms in 1894, and was best known for producing the Savage model 99
Adam Whitney Savage (born in 1967) who is an American industrial design and special effects designer and fabricator and a two-time Primetime Emmy Award nominee
Jess W. Savage who was an American politician, and the Mayor of Albany Oregon in the year 1949
Savage Coat of Arms Meaning
The four main devices (symbols) in the Savage blazon are the lioncel, unicorn, pheon and fleur-de-lis. The three main tinctures (colors) are sable, argent and azure .
The bright, strong blue color in Heraldry is known in English as azure, and similarly in other European languages – azul in Spanish, azurro in Italian and azur in French. The word has its roots in the Arabic word lazura, also the source of the name of the precious stone lapis lazuli 6. Despite this, those heralds who liked to associate colours with jewels chose instead to describe blue as Sapphire. According to Wade, the use of this colour symbolises “Loyalty and Truth” 7.
The art of heraldry would be significantly poorer if we were without the lion in all its forms. Most general works on Heraldry devote at least one chapter solely to this magnificent creature and its multifarious depictions 8 9 10. Some of the earliest known examples of heraldry, dating right back to the knighting of Geoffrey of Anjou in 1127, where he is shown with six such beasts upon his shield 11 .The great authority on heraldic symbology, Wade, points out the high place that the lion holds in heraldry, “as the emblem of deathless courage” 12, a sentiment echoed equally today.The Lioncel, whilst it may sound exotic, is simply a term when there several lions lion in the same shield. 13
In the mediaeval period there was no real percieved difference between real and mythical animals, after all, much of the world remained unknown and who was to say what strange and magical creatures existed in distant lands? As heraldry developed a whole menagerie of imagined creatures 14 came into being, and their various representations became more or less standardised in form and appearance. The unicorn is an intresting example that is still part of our own mythology today. The unicorn as illustrated on even the most ancient coat of arms is still instantly recognisable to us today, and shares many of the same poses that both lions and horses can be found in. 15. Wade, the 18th century heraldic writer suggested that were adopted as symbols because of “its virtue, courage and strength”. 16
Given the martial nature of the origins of Heraldry, in the identification of knights and men-at-arms it can come as no surprise that mediaeval weaponry of all types are frequently to be found in a coat of arms 17. The pheon is a specific type of arrow head with barbs and darts and hence quite distinctive in appearance. 18 Like the other symbols related to arrows, Wade suggests the symbolism is that of “readiness for military service”. 19
Elizabeth DuRoss commented on 04-Jun-2018
Thomas Savage, aged 13, sailed to Virginia in 1608 with Captain Christopher Newport. He was the first permanent white settler of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. I’m surprised that this Savage, who explored with Cap’t John Smith and was a playmate of Pochohantas was overlooked on the section regarding Savages in America.
6 A Glossary of Terms used in British Heraldry, J.H. Parker, Oxford, 1894, Entry:Azure
13 A Glossary of Terms used in British Heraldry, J.H. Parker, Oxford, 1894, Entry:lion
15 A Glossary of Terms used in British Heraldry, J.H. Parker, Oxford, 1894, Entry:Unicorn
18 A Glossary of Terms used in British Heraldry, J.H. Parker, Oxford, 1894, Entry:Pheon
19 The Symbolisms of Heraldry, W. Cecil Wade, George Redway, London, 1898 P111
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True Detective S1E8: “Form and Void”
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga | Written by Nic Pizzolatto | 54 min
Look to the stars; the oldest story ever told
By Colin Hart
Clunky, anticlimactic and somewhat disappointing in the eyes of a True D diehard, but nonetheless close to perfection. “Form and Void” was not the finale we wanted, but was the finale we deserved, or at least the one that Nic Pizzolatto felt we needed.
The buildup to the Yellow King/Carcosa has been an Apocalypse Now-ish descent into hell — the alluring combination of occult symbolism and minimalist music has made this modern-day cult of Kurtz into a Southern Gothic Heart of Darkness. But the fact that the deranged killer — a supernaturalish savant by the name of Errol Childress — is a backwoods cretin who fucks (“makes flowers on”) his half-sister is somewhat of a half-assed sign of disrespect.
Art is ultimately in the hands of the creator, but it is better understood through the eye of the beholder. The first third of “Form and Void” introduces us to Mr. Childress, but I feel that providing “depth” to the “character” is both unnecessary and fruitless on Nic Pizzolatto’s part. We’re already at the end of the line — better to have him remain unknown than try to provide him with meaning.
He rapes and murders young kids — nothing more, nothing less. Errol Childress (and I call him that because it’s his name in the credits, though he is most often referred to—and remembered as—“our guy” or “the killer”) ultimately represents the evil that men do, but a supernatural Killer BOB or salient Buffalo Bill or seductive Norman Bates he is not.
He’s not even the Yellow King, or at least I don’t think he is.
“Form and Void” is oxymoronic — both a climax and anticlimax, stunning and heavy-handed, prestige and pulp. It is great but it is severely flawed, mostly in its lack of resolution. But the lack of resolution concerns itself with plot, when in actuality the true conclusion is reached by way of character development.
Rust can smell the psychosphere or sentient meat or whatever the fuck he wants to call it — the odor of death and dismay and pagan VHS snuff films. But to finally see the so-called psychosphere, be engulfed and live inside it, that is what True Detective has been building up to this entire time.
When we finally enter Carcosa, the episode — and even Errol Childress as a villain — turns it up a notch. His voice carries through the catacombs, and the supernatural quality that has been hinted at seemingly becomes a reality.
The showdown in the Carcosa crypt between Rust, Marty and “the bad guy” is the most tension-filled True Detective scene since the conclusion of “Who Goes There.” It is also one of the most memorable of TV 2014. The kicker — Rust looking up to the sky to see the cosmos spiraling toward him. Auditory hallucination or spectral unravelling of the great divide, whatever its meaning may or may not be, the imagery is stunning.
Childress nearly kills Rust and Marty, but is soon subdued by a well-timed bullet to the brain. A deus ex machina in the forms of Detectives Papania and Gilbough arrives to take our heroes to the hospital.
The anticlimax in the hospital contains the episode’s meat, which is not what fans of the show’s occult symbolism want to hear, though it is exactly as Pizzolatto intended. Rust, in a coma, takes on a Jesus Christ pose, and the Biblical symbolism becomes the dominant factor.
Similar to “Who Goes There,” this final act of “Form and Void” seems like part of a different show, almost to the point of being unrecognizable. Yet I got the same vibes from “Made in America” and “Person to Person,” so Pizzolatto must be doing something right.
The music begins to alter the mood, with minor chords and atonal counterpoint courtesy of T Bone Burnett making it hard to discern what exactly the show is trying to convey. The tracking shots of past locales — the Childress house, the abandoned church, the Dora Lange tree — shows a frozen-in-time “time is a flat circle” universe in which everything has remained unchanged.
And that is what True Detective’s greatest message is: not everything can be changed, or even fixed. The Tuttle family gets off scot free, while thousands of other rapists and abusers and murderers continue their crimes unchecked. The world is a terrible place, and the battle between good and evil will forever wage on.
Rust awakes from his coma a changed man, and suddenly pessimism turns to optimism for the first time in the True Detective universe. As the last two episodes proved, some things can be mended: the humanity of the soul.
Rust’s final speech outside the hospital is True Detective’s finest scene, and one of the greatest monologues in TV history. It makes all the clutter that came before worthwhile.
It’s a perfect conclusion to a tremendous artistic achievement, and you have to wonder who deserves the most credit for the overall greatness of True Detective season one: writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto, director Cary Joji Fukunaga or actor Matthew McConaughey.
It was ultimately (just) a Biblical story of black and white. Rust looks up at the stars: “Once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.” Iconic final lines that stand right up there with “Sorry, we’re closed” and “What year is this?”
And so, True Detective season one had no deeper meaning than good versus evil and the power of friendship (circular time and conservative masculinity notwithstanding). But that’s all it ever set out to be, despite its cynical philosophizing and occult political conspiracies.
It may not have broken new ground from an artistic standpoint, but it sure did a good job of making us believe it did.
Total entertainment forever.
July 24, 2018 colinsreviewCary Joji Fukunaga, featured, Form and Void, Matthew McConaughey, Nic Pizzolatto, Rust Cohle, season finale, True Detective, True Detective season one, TV
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Tag Archives: WEED
R.I.P. HOWARD MARKS – “MR NICE” ( 13 AUGUST 1945- 10 APRIL 2016 ) ….LONG FEATURED HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION, LITTLEDEAN JAIL
Posted on March 5, 2015 by CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION
R.I.P MR NICE
ABOVE : Howard Marks in his prime …
WHETHER ONE LOVE’S HIM OR LOATHES HIM … HOWARD MARKS , DESCRIBED AS BRITAIN’S BEST LOVED , RETIRED INTERNATIONAL DOPE DEALER , SADLY LOSES HIS BATTLE WITH CANCER, AND PASSED AWAY AGED 70 ON 10 APRIL 2016 , WITH HIS FAMILY AROUND HIM .
FROM OUR PERSPECTIVE HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL …AS A LONG STANDING FRIEND WE WISH HOWARD’S FAMILY ALL THE VERY BEST DURING THESE DIFFICULT TIMES
ABOVE IS A BRIEF VIDEO NEWS RELEASE OF THE SAD DEATH OF HOWARD MARKS
ABOVE AND BELOW : A BRIEF LOOK AT SOME OF THE HOWARD MARKS COLLAGES ON DISPLAY HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL …
BELOW IS A PREVIOUS NEWS ARTICLE ANNOUNCING THE SAD NEWS THAT HOWARD WAS BATTLING INOPERABLE BOWL CANCER ………..
Drug smuggler-turned-celebrity author Howard Marks, 69, reveals he has inoperable bowel cancer
Diagnosis was in autumn last year but he has now ‘come to terms with it’
Mr Marks, who spent seven years in a US prison, has no regrets
His bestselling memoir Mr Nice was turned into a film starring Rhys Ifans
Now, his aim is to continue his battle for the legalisation of marijuana
Celebrity friends are holding a concert in his honour to raise funds for treatment and to set up a charitable foundation
PUBLISHED: 13:37, 25 January 2015 | UPDATED: 16:49, 25 January 2015
Former drug smuggler Howard Marks – once known as Mr Nice – has revealed he has inoperable bowel cancer.
The 69-year-old, who spent seven years in a US prison, was diagnosed in autumn last year but said he has now ‘come to terms with it’.
And after selling more than a million copies of his memoir, published in 1996, and being captured on screen by actor Rhys Ifans, Mr Marks says he has no regrets.
A recent photograph of Howard Marks , February 2015 , at the time he revealed that he had been diagnosed with inoperable bowel cancer
Above is a picture of Howard Marks at his most recent event , staged at the Forum , London on 27 February 2015.
HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL WE TOUCH UPON A GREAT MANY TABOO AND TRUE CRIME SUBJECT MATTERS THAT NO OTHER VISITOR ATTRACTION DARE COVER . (IT’S HISTORY FOR GOODNESS SAKE!!!!…ISN’T IT ?)
A VERY BRIEF PICTORIAL MONTAGE INSIGHT INTO THE EXPLOITS AND INTERNATIONAL HEADLINE NEWS SURROUNDING ONE OF THE UK’S MOST INFAMOUS AND NOTORIOUS DRUGS SMUGGLERS …… NOW FAMED AUTHOR HERE ON DISPLAY AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL
ANDY JONES OF THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL SEEN HERE WITH HOWARD MARKS AT A PRIVATE BASH IN LONDON BACK IN JANUARY 2011
AN INTRIGUING INTERACTIVE VIDEO INSIGHT INTO THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HOWARD MARKS …NR NICE
Dennis Howard Marks (born 13 August 1945) is a Welsh author and drug smuggler who achieved notoriety as an international cannabis smuggler through high-profile court cases, supposed connections with groups such as the CIA, the IRA, MI6, and the Mafia, and his eventual conviction at the hands of the American Drug Enforcement Administration. At the height of his drug career, he was said to have controlled 10% of the world’s hashish trade.[1]
He currently lives in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.[citation needed
[edit]Early life
Marks was born in Kenfig Hill, near Bridgend, Wales, and attended the Garw Grammar School in Pontycymer (he is a fluent Welsh speaker[2]). This was followed by Balliol College, Oxford, between 1964 and 1967, where he studied natural science with nuclear physics. Among his friends at Balliol was the epidemiologist Julian Peto, and the journalist Lynn Barber. After this he studied Physics (Grad. Inst P.) at the University of London (1967 to 1968). Then, he went back to Balliol, Oxford (1968 to 1969) to study History and Philosophy of Science (Dip. H.Ph. Sc.) and then he went on to theUniversity of Sussex (1969 to 1970) to study Philosophy of Science.
He spent seven years imprisoned in the Federal Correctional Complex, Terre Haute, Indiana. During his smuggling career, he claims not to have used violence and to have refused to deal with hard drugs. Both he and his now ex-wife Judy Marks were extradited from Mallorca, Spain to Florida. They have three children together: Amber, Francesca and Patrick. He also has an older daughter, Myfanwy, from a 5-year relationship with Rosie Lewis.
[edit]Life after release
Following his release from prison, Marks published a best-selling autobiography, Mr Nice (Secker and Warburg, 1996), which has been translated into many languages. In addition to Mr Nice, he compiled an anthology called The Howard Marks Book of Dope Stories (Vintage, 2001) and more recently a follow-on from his autobiography; Señor Nice: Straight Life From Wales to South America.Señor Nice differs from his previous book as drugs are not central to the story and, while autobiographical, the book is more Marks’ own exploration of his ancestor, the pirate Sir Henry Morgan.[3]
Marks is a campaigner for the legalisation of cannabis and tours the world with a one-man show. He also appeared in the documentary Stoned in Suburbia which aired on Sky1 in the UK. In October 2010, Howard hosted a documentary on Current TV titled ‘Howard Marks On Drugs’, which investigated drugs laws in the UK.
Judy Marks has also written her autobiography of their life together entitled “Mr Nice and Mrs Marks” published by Ebury Press, 2006.
Marks recorded the song ‘Grow More Weed’ with the UK dub punk band P.A.I.N.
Within the world of music, Marks co-recorded a song ‘Three men in a boat’ with his long time friend Lee Harris. The record was later remixed by River Styx (Musician, rap poet) and released on the album ‘Angel Headed Hip Hop’ on Genepool/Universal Ltd.
Marks stood for election to UK Parliament in 1997, on the single issue of the legalization of cannabis. He contested four seats at once: Norwich South (against future Home Secretary Charles Clarke),Norwich North, Neath and Southampton Test. The average vote was over 1%. This led to the formation of the Legalise Cannabis Alliance (LCA) by Alun Buffry in 1999.
From 1999 to 2000 he was the honorary rector of Glasgow Caledonian University.
On 28 October 2010 he appeared as a guest on the BBC music quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Marks is the voice-over for the television series Dirty Sanchez.
[edit]Films
Marks had a role as a customs officer in the planned film Ecstasy, based on the bestselling book by Irvine Welsh and also made a cameo appearance in the 1999 film Human Traffic (in the “spliff politics” scene).
In 2010, he played a fictional role in the infamous gangster movie Killer Bitch directed by Liam Galvin.[4] He is also the subject of a biopic starring Rhys Ifans as Marks entitled Mr Nice, named after hisautobiography of the same name. Chloë Sevigny plays the role of his wife Judy. The film was released in October 2010.
Posted in CRIME THROUGH TIME | Tagged 1%, 1960'S, 1970'S, 1980'S, 25 CROMWELL STREET, ALABAMA 3, Amber Marks, ANDY JONES, ARREST, BANGED UP, BANKSY, BERNIE DAVIES, BERNIE DAVIS, BEST WORLD CRIME MUSEUM, BIGGEST CRIME MUSEUM IN EUROPE, BIKER GANGS, BLACK MUSEUM, BOWEL CANCER, Bridgend, BRUCE REYNOLDS, CAMDEN, CANNABIS, CANNABIS DEALER, CANNABIS GROWER, CELEBRITY DRUGS SMUGGLER, CHARLES BRONSON, CHARLES SALVADOR, COCAINE, COLLECTION, CRACK COCAINE, CRIME, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, CRIME COLLECTION, CRIME COLLECTIONS, CRIME MEMORABILIA, CRIME MUSEUM, CRIME MUSUEM, CRIME SCENE, CRIME THROUGH TIME, CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION, CRIME THROUGH TIME MUSEUM, CRIME THROUGH TIME MUSUEM, CRIMINAL, CRIMINALS, DAMIEN HIRST, DISMALAND, dope dealer, DRUG BARONS, DRUG DEALER, DRUG GANGS, DRUG LORDS, drug smuggler, DRUG TRAFFICKER, DRUG WARS, DRUGS, DRUGS BARON, DRUGS CARTEL, DRUGS KING, DUNCAN CAMPBELL, ENGLANDS BEST TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, EUROPE'S LARGEST TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, EUROPES BEST THE TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, EUROPES BEST TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, FACE OF A FUGITIVE, FILE, FILM LOCATION, FILM SET, FOREST OF DEAN, FOREST OF DEAN NEWS CENTRE, FOREST OF DEAN TOURISM, FRANCESCA MARKS, FREDDIE FOREMAN, FUGITIVE, GANGLAND, GANGSTER, get involved, GLOUCESTER NEWS CENTRE, GLOUCESTER TOURISM, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE MUSEUMS, GLOUCESTERSHIRE TOURISM, GRASS, HAPPY MONDAYS, HELLS ANGELS, HEMD, HEROIN, HEROINE, HOWARD MARKS, HOWARD MARKS DEAD, HOWARD MARKS DEATH, HOWARD MARKS DIES, HOWARD MARKS OBITUARY, IM A CELEBRITY GET ME OUT OF HERE, IMAGES, IMPRISONED, INFAMOUS, INFAMY, INTERVIEW, IRA, JENNIE BELLESTAR, JOINT, JUDY MARKS, KARL MARX, kentish town, kieth Allen, LARRY LOVE, LEEDS, LEGALISE CANNABIS, LITTLEDEAN, LITTLEDEAN GAOL, LITTLEDEAN HOUSE HOTEL, LITTLEDEAN JAIL, littledean jail facebook, LITTLEDEAN VILLAGE, LITTLEDEAN VILLAGE STOCKS, london crime scene, MAFIA, MAIMERABILIA, MARIJUANA, martin blunt, MC, MEMORABILIA, MEXICO, MEXICO DRUG WARS, MI6, MIKE BIGGS, MOST WANTED, MR MARKS, MR NICE, MULE, MURDERABILIA, MUSEUM, MYFANWY MARKS, NICK REYNOLDS, NOTORIOUS, OIL, ON LOCATION, OUTLAWS, OUTLAWS MC, OXFORD, OXFORD UNIVERSITY, PATRICK MARKS, PETER STRINGFELLOW, POLICE, PRISON, PRISON CELL, PRISON MUSEUM, RHYS IFANS, RHYS IVANS, ROB SPRAGG, ROCK AND ROLL, RON AND REG KRAY, RONNIE BIGGS, SAS, SAS LITTLEDEAN, SAS WHO DARES WINS, SCANDAL, SENOR NICE, SEX, SHAUN RYDER, SHUAN RYDER, SKUNK, SKY NEWS, SLEAZE, SMUGGLE, SPECIAL AIR SERVICE, SPECIAL AIR SERVICES, SPECIAL FORCES, SPECIAL FORCESS, SPECIAL OPERATIONS, SPLIFF, star wars, STARWARS, STRINGFELLOWS, SUPER FURRYANIMALS, TAFFY, THE BEST TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, THE CITIZEN, THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION, THE FORCE AWAKENS, THE FORESTER NEWSPAPER, the forum, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, THE GUV, THE KRAYS, THE ORIGINAL TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, THE TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, THE UK'S TRUE CRIME EXHIBITION, TOUR, TRACEY EMIN, TRUE CRIME, TRUE CRIME COLLECTION, TRUE CRIME COLLECTIONS, TRUE CRIME COLLECTIONS by CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION, TRUE CRIME EXHIBITION, TRUE CRIME GANGLAND ], TRUE CRIME MEMORABILIA, TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, TRUNCHEON, UK'S BEST TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, UK'S LARGEST TRUE CRIME MUSEUM, UNDERWORLD, US PRISON, USA PRISON, VALLEY COMMANDOS, wale, WALES, WANTED, WEED, WELSH, WELSH ASSEMBLY, WELSH DRUG SMUGGLER, www.crimethroughtime.com, WYE VALLEY TOURISM | Leave a reply
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Cemetery escape in New Orleans
March 21, 2018 in exploring the USA | Tags: cemetery, Creole Queen, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, Louisiana, Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans, NOLA, paddlewheel, tombs | 13 comments
Statue of a weeping angel in the Chapman Hyman Tomb. Standing before the statue, I could feel the grief in my own body.
I am one of the lucky few who got out again, after being shut up in a cemetery for the night.
But let me start at the beginning. I’m in New Orleans for a quick trip with a friend. The trip was my idea. He loves the city and I’ve never seen it, so I wanted to be introduced through the eyes of someone who loves it, you know? Anyway, we arrived at night and on our first day out we both wanted to see cemeteries.
We went to Metairie Cemetery first. Built on the site of an old racetrack, some of the curved shape of the track can still be seen today. The cemetery is simply gorgeous, with white shining marble everywhere, manicured lawns and mature trees. Patrick wanted to see the weeping angel first, so we drove to it and parked the car. You can see my photo of her above. The expressiveness of the statue is heartbreaking, and the inscription “Sister” at the base brought tears to my eyes.
Then we walked. And walked. The place is enormous! We didn’t really intend to walk around for two hours, but that is what happened.
The city was founded in 1718 and people have been dying there ever since. As you know, half of the city of New Orleans is below sea level and protected with dikes and flood walls and massive water pump systems. It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize that you don’t want to bury your dead in the ground. So tombs are built on top of the ground. As we walked between them, the ground was often marshy beneath our feet and there were standing pools of water in low spots, reminding us that it is no myth: the city of New Orleans is level with the water table.
One of the tree-lined avenues at Metairie Cemetery.
At this cemetery, tombs are not crowded.
Many of the tombs are elaborate.
The pyramid caught our eye.
Spofford tomb
detail from the pyramid
A tree shades a tomb
Parts of the cemetery were more congested, but still lovely.
This panoramic view shows the arrangement of tombs along the avenues. Click for a larger version so you can see the detail.
I was not able to show clearly this picturesque narrow row of tombs because I was trying to crop out a bunch of bright orange construction cones.
Another row in the apparently more modern section.
One of the many “Woodmen of the World” grave markers.
Interesting aside: we noticed many Woodmen of the World markers on graves, with marble markers in the shape of logs. There were at least six styles of log markers that we noticed, and I became curious. Founded in 1890, Woodmen of the World is a fraternal benefit society. From 1890 to 1900, WOW’s life insurance policies had a proviso that provided for the grave markers, free of charge for members. From 1900 to the mid- 1920’s, members purchased a $100 rider to cover the cost of the monument. Since then there have been no discounts for grave markers.
As I was leaving, I turned back to look one last time, and saw this amazing sky casting an eerie light on the darkened scene below. I regret that my simple phone camera couldn’t duplicate how beautiful it truly was.
Next we went into the Garden District to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. This one is famous because author Anne Rice used to live near it and based the tombs of the Mayfair Witches and the vampire Lestat on the tombs she found here. And consistent with that history, this cemetery was more what I anticipated in a New Orleans cemetery: not crumbling apart, but certainly a very old and storied place in the center of busy neighborhood streets.
As we approached the front gate, there was a crowd encircling a tour guide, and other people milling about in every direction. We slipped as quickly as we could through the tourists and between a row of tombs to begin our cemetery explorations in peace. We actively avoided all people while we were in there…which was likely the reason we did not hear the warning to get out.
An avenue in Layfayette Cemetery No. 1
This is what I had in mind when I pictured a New Orleans cemetery.
The Layfayette Cemetery No 1 is much smaller than the Metarie cemetery and the tombs are less elaborate.
After an hour in this much smaller cemetery, Patrick and I had become separated and I found myself near the front gate. I could hear the chatter of people on the sidewalk outside the cemetery. I heard a man’s voice say, “Does that lady know she’s locked in?” I glanced up. “Hey, do you know you’re locked in?” he said to me. I responded with a half smile. He reached over and grabbed the bars of the gate and shook them – presumably to show me that he knew what he was talking about. “I am not even kidding,” he said. Uh-oh.
I began walking up and down the paths until I found Patrick. “Hey, there may be a problem.” “Oh yeah? With what?” When I told him, he remembered that the cemetery was supposed to close at 3pm. It was a few minutes past.
We went back to the gate and laughed with the people on the outside, and eyed the cast iron gate for footholds. I handed my phone through and one of them got a picture of me. Then suddenly, two tour guides showed up.
The person with the key had locked the gates and left, but these two were still sitting in their parked car nearby and no one had noticed them till they came to the rescue. “We have someone trapped in here once a week,” one of the women told us. “Step here, then your left foot goes here…”
And Viola! We climbed right out.
Me, trapped in a cemetery.
This image is from mikestravelguide.com where he wrote about free things to do in New Orleans.
After that we went to the waterfront and walked along the river. I didn’t get any more decent photos, so I don’t have much more to show you. We took a lovely dinner cruise on a paddlewheeler Creole Queen down the Mississippi River and back again. It was warm and lovely and I was on a ship in the country’s longest river. Our view of the city in the sunset from the water was a pretty nice final scene for the day.
New Orleans from the Mississippi River.
Kings and Queens and tombs
January 17, 2010 in Egypt | Tags: 40th birthday, Hatshepsut, heiroglyphics, Nefertari, tombs, Tutankhamon, Valley of Kings, Valley of Queens | Leave a comment
Luxor Temple
The city of Luxor was the ancient city of Thebes, if you want to place our modern trip into context. This morning we got an early start to head out to the Valley of the Kings after breakfast, and spotted Luxor Temple in daylight.
Looking past the entrance into the Valley of Kings
The Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor is a remote, desolate place with no vegetation. On the bus on the way over, Hossam told us a creation legend from ancient Egypt which holds that in the beginning the world was all water except for an island in the shape of a pyramid, and upon that island was the source of all life. As we walked from the parking lot up the hill toward the tombs, Tara pointed up to the peak. Rising above the area is the Qurn (“horn”), a mountain that many regard as a natural pyramid shape, presiding over the entire cemetery. Hossam confirmed that this peak was commonly believed by the ancients to be the island pyramid.
Tomb of Rameses IX on left and Tutankhamon center
(thanks to www.thebanmappingproject.com for the images of the tombs) The Valley of the Kings was awesome, though we went quickly through it. I could have spent 4 hours slowly walking through the fantastic tunnels. Sadly, we were required to leave our cameras on the buses.
Omnipresent security guarding the gates
We began with Rameses IX (KV 6 – the identifier used by archaeologists). We formed a single-file line and entered a narrow tunnel that was only wide enough to allow exiting tourists to pass on their way out. Floor-to-ceiling plexiglass protected the walls from us, which was appropriate, because I wanted so desperately to touch the work of ancient artists only inches from my face.
Stars on the ceilings
Hossam had already told me that if I liked seeing the colours as I claimed, then I would like the Valley of the Kings. It’s tremendous – the colours inside the tombs. Stunning. They are so bright, detailed, intricate…it’s awe-inspiring. After three thousand years, we can see the different shades of similar colors. For example: white, cream, light yellow, dark yellow, and orange, all layered in one place, showing the folds or decorations in fabric, for example. Then there are the reds, the black, green, turquoise, and the startlingly brilliant cobalt blue. Especially on the ceilings…covered in a darker shade of cobalt, and sprayed with gold stars to represent the night sky. It’s so beautiful.
Inside tomb of TaWsret & Nakhet
Unfortunately, the insides of the tombs smelled awful because of all the smelly tourists crowding through. It truly was crowded and hot inside them all. The temperature was in the 80s outside, perhaps 90 degrees. We were dying: especially the women, who had to be covered up. I was pleased to find that everyone in our group stayed covered up: bus 1 and bus 2. Other tourists who wore backless tank tops with miniskirts embarrassed me. Today was a good day to find out who would break the social mores. One woman removed her outer shirt and had a sleeveless shirt on, but otherwise remained covered. Some women rolled their pant legs up to their calves. I thought we remained a respectable group. Often, often, we women talked of how unbearable it would be to have to wear the full burqua in such dreadful heat – especially when they are nearly always heat-absorbing black.
Tomb entrances in the mountains, as spotted from the bus
After Ramses IX, we visited the tomb of Ta Wsret and Nakhat (KV 14), followed by Seti II (KV 15). Each one was extraordinary, but KV14 was the best tomb of the whole trip, in my opinion. (Forgive me if I’m getting the owners of the tombs mixed up. Also, I found that Hossam spelled the names for me differently than I’ve seen them spelled on the Internet.) The story with KV14 is that it was originally built for Queen TaWsret (or Tausert), but before she died, her son with Seti II died. So it became Nakhat’s tomb (or Setnahkt).
God Horus in Hatshepsut's temple
At the places closer to the entrance, hieroglyphics show TaWsret honoring the gods, and as one goes deeper, her image has been covered and repainted with Nakhat, even though they are scenes that are appropriate for queens, not kings/princes. In the deepest sections, there is only Nakhat. We walked through tunnels that opened up into a large room with inner columns, then another tunnel, then another room with columns. There is an unexpected magical atmosphere created when a dark, musty cave is illuminated to reveal columns, anterooms, paths, ramps, tunnels, doorways, and altars underground and illustrated on every square inch.
The order of construction is that first the walls of the tomb were built, and then the kings and queens (while still alive) had artists paint onto papyrus classic scenes and new scenes depicting the gods, the king doing his great deeds, and historical and stories from religious texts such as the “Book of Gates,” which explains how to get through all the steps one must go through to successfully arrive at the gates of the afterlife. At the last gate, one’s heart is weighed on a scale. A light heart gets you into the afterlife with the gods and your ancestors. A heavy heart will be eaten by the monster standing nearby. The papyrus would then go to artists who painted a draft in red onto the stone. A senior artist would review and correct the paintings in black. Then carvers would create sunken relief (deeply carved images) and raised relief (higher quality, more difficult illustration of raised images where the negative areas are ground away) into the limestone cave walls of which the structure was built. When that was done, artists would then come and paint them. The figures on the walls with non-human heads are gods (including pharaohs/kings who are believed to be gods). Commonly seen gods are Horus with the falcon head, Osirus with a red sun disk, Anubis with the head of a jackal, and Hathor with a cow head, cow ears, or cow horns.
The most recently discovered tomb, and the only tomb found intact by scientists, is that of King Tut-Ankh-Amon. Hossam offered to get us into the king’s tomb if we wanted to, but it was extra money and he talked us all out of it by saying that it’s not much different than the other tombs, and all the treasure is at the Museum of Antiquities anyway. We let him sway us, and we didn’t buy extra tickets to see a fourth tomb.
Surreal view of Pharoah Hatshepsut's temple
We were able to take our cameras to Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s temple, who ruled from about 1475 to 1455 BC. This was a high point for Tara, who studied Queen Hatshepsut in school last year. One of the few female pharaohs, Hatshepsut was a powerful one. Tired of hearing that women can’t be kings, she ordered herself to be called King Hatshepsut, and images of her sported the long beard of a king. She may have even worn a beard in real life, since kings always shaved their chins clean and wore a fake beard strapped on anyway.
Queen with the double crown and beard
Her temple was remarkable. It is set into a cliff face, three stories high, and looks out across a low slope into the valley (wadi, in Arabic). From the parking lot, the huge temple dominated our view during our walk up to it. There remain the stumps of two frankincense trees at the entrance, which Pharaoh Hatshepsut brought back from her travels in Africa. Her temple is in poor shape mainly because her nephew/stepson Thutmosis III was her successor. He hated her and went to great lengths to destroy her works all over the Nile valley. Where he couldn’t break an image, Thutmosis III had any references to Hatshepsut chiseled off the walls.
Inside Hatshepsut's temple
Next we went to the Valley of the Queens. It’s a similar group of tombs beneath mountain peaks, in a valley south of the Valley of the Kings, and still on the west bank of the Nile. Egyptians typically had their tombs on the west bank because of the setting sun, and their main living areas were on the East bank because that is where the sun rises.
All I can remember about the Valley of the Queens is Nefertari’s tomb. Again, cameras were not allowed. (thanks to Swarthmore for the images) It was a heartbreak not to capture on my own camera the images Nefertari left for us.
Inside Nefertari's tomb
I was stunned to wordless- ness (yes, I know, hard to believe!), but I’ll try to put something down for you. Here we saw the most pristinely preserved hieroglyphics yet. The colours were incredible; the detail awe- inspiring. I could not believe the quality of preservation of the painting! It looked as though the artists were in there last month. In five minutes I identified a dozen different birds in hieroglyphics, each with amazing detail of colour variation and individual feathers painted. Women had straight, wavy, curly, and kinky hair, with earrings and painted fingernails. I could count the scales on the fish. It was truly humbling. The ceilings we saw in every tomb and temple had a blue background with stylized gold stars painted in a pattern. I’ll recognize that design forever.
Goddess Hathor (left) and Nefertari
The level of detail itself is impressive, but I think the most amazing thing for me is the sharpness of the detail after so much time. It’s hard to believe that the crisp edges of tiny carved scarab legs and feelers are clearly evident, and that the individual feathers of the dozens of types of birds are illuminated to such precise degree that I’m sure the species of the birds could be identified and compared to modern birds to determine whether any evolutionary changes had occurred since 1500 BC. But it’s not only birds. I wish I could explain better – trillions of images walls, columns, statues, tablets and sarcophagi inside. The sarcophagi and statues inside were often granite, so the detail was not as good – though still inspiring.
Grinding an alabaster vase, buried in the ground
Finished vases
It was noon and we were so hungry, but before lunch we went to an alabaster factory. It was interesting to me that vases and bowls are actually carved from stone by patiently grinding a hollow into them, and then grinding and polishing till smooth. We saw a demonstration in which the alabaster was buried to the lip in the dirt on the floor of the workshop. Differently-shaped carving tools (think router bits) were inserted into the hollow, and with a long handle attached, a man twisted around and around, continuing to carve and shape the inside of the bowl.
The alabaster showroom
The Colossi of Memnon
After alabaster, we saw the Colossi of Memnon. Amenhotep III erected these two 1000-ton statues. Due to an earthquake in 27 BC, the crumbling statues would sometimes make a tone with the movement of air through them. This is how they were granted the nickname of Memnon, the grandson of Eos, goddess of dawn. To be granted a song meant that you had earned the goddesses’ favor. A good deed went wrong when Roman emperor Septimius Severus repaired the statues in 199 AD. The song has never been heard again.
Rameses II statue in Karnak Temple
Our lovely crew had lunch waiting for us on the MS Neptune. In better spirits, we went for an afternoon tour at Karnak Temple on the north end of Luxor. For over 1000 years, and obviously through the reign of many pharaohs, this temple was continuously built upon and enlarged. It encompasses three main temples and additional small temples, both inside and outside the main structure. Covering almost 250 acres of land, this is the largest temple complex in the world. We were granted a generous amount of time to wander and explore this gigantic place, while avoiding men in gallabiyas eager to show us a new path to follow, for baksheesh. At Karnak, Hatshepsut had twin obelisks erected, at the time the tallest in the world. One still stands, as the tallest surviving ancient obelisk on Earth; the other has broken in two and toppled, perhaps by Thutmosis III?
The best, best part of Karnak is the Hypostyle Hall, a gigantic (I’m running out of adjectives that mean “big.”) hall filled with columns, for columns’ sake. They are all in the design of papyrus reeds and flowers, with many representing the closed bud of a flower, and the central, monolithic columns topped with open papyrus blossoms. A total of 134 columns fill the hall, and the 12 in the center are certainly the largest columns I could ever imagine. These are the sequoia sempervirens of columns, 70 feet high and big enough around that 100 men can stand together on the top of one of them. Not that this has actually happened, but Hossam said it was possible.
Columns in the style of open papyrus blossoms
We walked counterclockwise circles seven times around a gargantuan granite scarab on a pedestal. Apparently that brings on pregnancy, marriage, or just good luck. I hope we get to choose which one. At Karnak we saw an example of hieroglyphics carved excessively deep into the stone. Hossam explained that with a history of the new king coming in and having the last king’s name and good deeds scratched off the stone, some of them got wise and had their stuff carved so deeply that it would discourage vandals.
At the base of the Hipostyle Hall. See the person?
detail from above
Before we left, we snapped photos of the sphinxes in the setting sun. This is also where my WordPress profile photo was taken.
Rams head sphinx
Next we stopped at a perfume factory. Since scented oil was an extremely valuable commodity in Ancient Egypt, I consider this a relevant stop. But I’m not a big fan of scents. We had a demonstration of glass-blowing, while an artist created a delicate vessel in which to hold oils and a glass stopper with which to dab on oils.
Me posing with the sphinxes at Karnak Temple
Tara and I were all shopped out, and were grateful for the free toilet and hassle free browsing time. I stopped at the doorway to purchase some of the cheapie papyrus bookmarks being sold by hoards of children, and whipped out my dollar quickly to make the trade for a fistful of bookmarks before I was surrounded. Too slow, because another child showed up quickly enough to make a claim on the dollar. I backed away from the pushing fight that broke out after I put the dollar into the hands of the first child I saw, and watched their plight in helpless pain.
Avenue of Rams Head Sphinxes
Glassblower at the perfume shop
Flirtatious young Egyptian who was very interested in my daughter
towel monkey
Each time we return to our cabins, the cabin boys have done something amazing with our towels. they use all the clean towels, plus other things in the room, to sculpt something for us. We had a lotus flower flanked by two swans, a crocodile eating the remote control, and a monkey hanging from the ceiling with a strip of toilet paper for a tail. It’s a riot. The guys stand at the end of the hall and wait to see our reactions when we open the door. I wish I could hand them each a $100 bill for the fabulous service and fun they have provided us.
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asian economies
Germany and Switzerland FTA
Main Business Systems found in Asia
Kaisha business system uses an authoritative approach while CFB is a family owned business in Taiwan and Hong Kong. However, the two above models are smaller than Japanese Kaisha and Korean Chaebol, but they do not run capital and energy intensive enterprises. In contrast, both Kaisha and Chaebol coordinate activities in a number of industries. Another significant difference is that Japanese, Korean and Chinese Kaisha model have a high level of managerial autonomy and independence from shareholders unlike Chaebol and CFB (Whitley, 1992). Additionally, as a result of mutual interests between the members of business groups and Keiretsu, which is the market for corporate control, managerial autonomy is weak in Japan since financial institutions are independent of large firms in Anglo-Saxon societies. For example, senior management in the business system does not face pressure from shareholders and makes decisions independently. In contrast, both CFB and Chaebol come under pressure in the process of decision-making (Thompson, 1998).
Secondly, authority influences the three business systems in different ways. For example, promotion of senior managers depends on experience and skills. The Japanese Kaisha focuses on specialization, while the Korean Chaebol on diversity in portfolios. Additionally, CFB demonstrates a clear distinction between specialized management activities. They contract managerial expertise from large enterprises and organization structure owned by the family. As a result, firms concentrate on one field of practice or production, but the entire family business may ventures in different economic activities through shareholdings, partnerships, and alliances. Therefore, family can acquire a range of investments but cannot integrate through formal hierarchies (Whitley, 1992).
Another significant difference is how the business systems adapt to change or develop. Unlike the Korean Chaebol, the Japanese Kaisha focuses the general patterns of change and growth on increasing the market share. For example, the Korean Chaebol change of approach is discontinuous in terms of activities and resources. Their growth occurs through vertical integration and diversification into different portfolios. Unlike the Kaisha and CFB, growth in Chaebol business models happens through acquisition of firms. CFB achieves growth not only through an increase in volume, but also from opportunities of diversification if partners and prospects are available. Therefore, strategic change is rapid but discontinues (Whitley, 1992).
Specialization of managerial competence and capability in Japanese Kaisha encourages separation of ventures as soon as the business grows and can sustain its operations. Additionally, fast growing subsidiaries develop own funding arrangements and enterprise unions since they have a small number of shareholders. In contrast, Korean Chaebol integrates new activities through the managerial hierarchy to maintain central control. For example, CFB diversifies through partnerships with associates or through separate firms run by the family. Integration is therefore through a combination of financial control, ownership and personal loyalties. For example, the degree of integration and control of activities and subsidiaries from the main economic activity of a business differs greatly in Chaebol, considerably in CFB and least in the Kaisha business models (Whitley, 1992).
Variations in the above also reflect approaches in risk taking and management of business uncertainties. For example, the Japanese Kaisha avoids risk associated with diversification by developing employee competence. However, the business system is vulnerable to significant changes in product and input market. The Japanese Kaisha manages such risks by limiting a firm's commitment to human and material resources through subcontracting, separation of expertise staff from manual laborers, and developing partnerships with creditors, customers, and suppliers. The approach enables firms to cope with market changes since such condition can be planned jointly for mutual interest. Additionally, the model fosters employee training and staff mobility with an aim to adapt to market needs (Thompson, 1998).
In contrast, the Korean Chaebol manages risk through vertical integration and diversification into different portfolios. As a result, they allow risky ventures. However, the Korean Chaebol business model manages risk through partnership with state agencies (Thompson, 1998). Additionally, private firms contribute little capital to most capital projects such as heavy industries. The degree to which the three business models manage market risk varies significantly. For example, the Japanese firms manage risks by focusing on one portfolio with suppliers and partners on the long-term basis. As a result, they form a network of mutual commitments, which influence strategic choices for change. On the other hand, CFB focuses on flexibility and limited commitments to supplier, traders and consumers (Whitley, 1992).
Lastly, although CFB is independent to subcontractors, employees and other associates, the relationships are more personal and restricted than in Kaisha business models, which hinder radical changes. As a result, CFBs prefer to set up new firms for a new venture in different fields rather than risks exhibited in existing partnerships. Secondly, the Chaebol has lasting ties with other entities, especially state agencies and political figures (Thompson, 1998).
"Asian Miracle"
Over the past three to four decades, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong among other Asian states transformed from technologically backward and poor countries to modern and affluent economies. Most of the countries have experienced more than 4 folds of increase in per capita income. Additionally, each of the economies has a large number of firms producing technologically complex products that compete against products from the West. The growth in the performance has significantly outpaced all other economies with comparable output and income in the 1960. Asian businesses have maintained cultural values that have added significantly to the economies. Therefore, Asian nations have emerged as economic giants because of effective alignment of economic policies to cultural values.
The term "Asian Miracle" is a result of growth of tangible inputs such as capital labor and technical progress that led to increase in total factor of productivity. In contrast, the economic growth of developed countries in the west such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdome, and the U.S. is a result of technical progress (Berger & Borer, 2002). Schuman argues that there is no single culture that caused the "Asian Miracle" because the nations have different philosophies and political systems. He advances the thesis that government intervention played the key role in the growth of the economies. For example, the countries experienced economic boom under the supervision of autocratic regimes that controlled the private sector (as cited in Mahbubani, 2013).
During the emergence of the "Asian Miracle", most of the political leaders came from the nobility, but still poor class. I agree with Schuman's argument that the leaders ignored Western economy theory and used their own discretion and traditional values to run the economy. As a result, they made choices in line with traditional values, which suit the need of the society. Secondly, corporate cultures derived from society gave businesses a common ethic and strategic direction. With the government involvement in the economy and social values instilled in the markets, there was adequate capacity for the economy to expand in one direction. Otherwise, the government could not have developed feasible policies and implemented them efficiently.
Additionally, the government tailors the economy to meet social need of civilians and other economic players. Moreover, all the early boomers had inadequate natural resources, and to acquire them, they had to import. As a result, they specialized in different production lines, which they exported to gain financial capability to import. They targeted the U.S., which had an elaborate market. Secondly, since the United States focused on attaining new allies, it accepted the goods to create a buffer against the communists. It also provided logistical and military support to the countries, allowing Asian nations to focus on the economy (Parmar & Cox, 2010). Mahbubani and Kurlantzick partly agree with the above sentiments. For example, Mahbubani (2013) believes that expatriate support given to Asian students in the west has led to the "Asian Miracle". Students who graduate from the U.S. universities return home and use the knowledge to steer growth. Additionally, they agree with the idea that cultural values significantly influence the growth of the economies.
In conclusion, business systems in Asia differ significantly in terms of size, economic activities, competitiveness, managerial experience and autonomy of senior manager from shareholders. The differences also result from business strategies such as coping with change, growth patterns, and management of subsidiaries and philosophies in dealing with risks. Asian businesses have maintained cultural values that have led to significant growth of the economies. For example, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong among other Asian nations transformed from technologically backward and poor countries to modern and affluent economies.
Advancements In Technology Helps The Economic Progress In Taiwan
Can China Catch a Cool Breeze?
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Perrotin, KAWS
PIRAMIDE BUILDING, 1F, 6-6-9 ROPPONGI
MINATO-KU, 106-0032 VIEW MAP
50 CONNAUGHT ROAD CENTRAL,
HONG KONG VIEW MAP
EXHIBITION EXHIBITION, MARCH 22 – MAY 12 2018
Perrotin is proud to announce simultaneous exhibitions in its Tokyo and Hong Kong galleries by the multifaceted American artist KAWS. Both shows represent a homecoming of sorts for KAWS, who fortified his creative career in Tokyo in the early-2000s and was the first artist to exhibit in the gallery’s Hong Kong space in 2012.
Considered one of the most relevant artists of his generation, KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of influential work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, large-scale sculptures, street art, and graphic and product design. Over the last two decades KAWS has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times. He often draws inspiration and appropriates from pop culture animations to form a unique artistic vocabulary for his works across various mediums.
Now admired for his larger-than-life sculptures and hardedge paintings that emphasize line and color, KAWS’ cast of hybrid cartoon and human characters are perhaps the strongest examples of his exploration of humanity. His refined graphic language revitalizes figuration with big, bold gestures and keen, playful intricacy. As seen in his collaborations with global brands, KAWS’ imagery possesses a sophisticated humor and reveals a thoughtful interplay with consumer products. Highly sought-after by collectors inside and outside of the art world, KAWS’ artworks, with their broad appeal, establish him as a uniquely prominent artist in today’s culture.
KAWS (b. 1974, Jersey City, New Jersey; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) has exhibited internationally in major museums. His recent solo exhibitions include KAWS: WHERE THE END STARTS, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2016) which traveled to the Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2017); KAWS, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Longside Gallery, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2016). His work has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri (2017); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2014); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas (2013); Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2013); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia (2011).
プレスリリース 閱讀中文新聞稿
https://www.perrotin.com
William Leavitt, galerie frank elbaz, Paris
Almine Rech gallery, Claire Tabouret.
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THE ROUSING OF THE SCOTTISH WORKING CLASS 1774-2008 by James D. Young. With an appendix on Marxism and the Scottish National Question — eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)
Posted on July 6, 2017 at 2:08 pm. Written by Christie
In introducing this reissue of The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class (1979) to a new generation of readers in Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales and North America, especially in Canada, I require to say it was the first of the twelve books I have had published since 1979. It was widely reviewed, mostly denounced in Scotland, upset Unionist historians, questioned by a few prominent members of the Scottish National Party, and made a big and sympathetic impact on what was still a strong Scottish labour movement. It was not a book for ambitious scholars interested in promotion at the cost of the truth to identify with or praise; and, when first published David Daiches, the Scottish literary authority praised, and then bowed to pressure in later years by ignoring it. It was published by Croom Helm, London, Fontana Books, London, and McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, Canada; and it was later published by two American publishers. It was in 1994 that Professor Willy Maley wrote an article ‘Cultural Devolution? Representing Scotland in the 1970s’ for the book The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure? (1994), where he responded to the silly attack on The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class by Christopher A. Whatley. Maley wrote with penetrating, analytical skill.
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Continue reading “THE ROUSING OF THE SCOTTISH WORKING CLASS 1774-2008 by James D. Young. With an appendix on Marxism and the Scottish National Question — eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)” »
RADICAL GLASGOW A skeletal sketch of Glasgow’s radical tradition by John Couzin (see eBookshelf)
Posted on May 28, 2016 at 8:28 pm. Written by Christie
RADICAL GLASGOW. A Skeletal Sketch of Glasgow’s Radical Tradition by John Couzin
Also available from the eBookshelf and Kobo ; Check out other Christiebooks titles HERE
A summary of some of the events and people that have helped to shape the Glasgow of today, a glimpse at a history that is sometimes difficult to find. My hope is that anyone who reads these few pages will be prompted to dig a little bit deeper and discover a rich heritage of which we can be very proud and perhaps try to contribute to that struggle and carry the heritage forward. The information contained in these pages has been gleaned from countless conversations, stories told, articles, pamphlets and books read over more years than I care to remember. My thanks goes to those friends, acquaintances and total strangers who over the years passed on some of these stories. — John Couzin
SOCIALISM & PARLIAMENT by Guy Aldred. eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)
Posted on November 10, 2015 at 10:43 am. Written by Christie
SOCIALISM & PARLIAMENT by Guy Aldred.
In this 1923 work, Glasgow-based anarchist Guy A. Aldred argues for libertarian, extra-parliamentary socialism instead of Labourist or statist socialism. “The advent of a Labour opposition in the House of Commons, the near possibility of that opposition becoming His Majesty’s Government, have revived interest in the question of parliamentary action. Bitter plaints at the historic failure of Parliamentary methods are tempered with a faint hope that something may be achieved by parliamentarism. It is forgotten that reform activity means constant trotting round the fool’s parade, continuous movement in a vicious circle. Something must be done for expectant mothers, for homeless couples wishing to housekeep, for rent-resisters, something to reform here or there, regardless of the fact that capitalism is a hydra-headed monster, that the reforms needed are as innumerable as the abuses begotten of the capitalist system, and such abuses increase with every modification of capitalist administration, the better to perpetuate the system. Under these circumstances it is necessary to restate the arguments against parliamentary activity, to explain and to prove that parliament was never intended to emancipate the working class from the evils of capitalism, that it never can and never will achieve this result.”
GENERAL FRANCO MADE ME A ‘TERRORIST’ The Christie File: Part 2, 1964-1967 eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)
Posted on March 28, 2014 at 9:30 am. Written by Christie
GENERAL FRANCO MADE ME A TERRORIST. The Christie File: part 2, 1964-1967 (The interesting years abroad of a West of Scotland ‘Baby-boomer’) Stuart Christie ISBN 1 873976 19 4
‘This volume picks up where the last one ended, namely his leaving Britain to take part in an anarchist plan to assassinate Franco. Christie, however, was arrested by Franco’s secret police long before he completed his mission to give the explosives he smuggled into Spain to those who were planning the assassination. Christie recounts his experiences being arrested and his time in various Spanish prisons with assurance, humanity and wit. He is not afraid to talk about the failures and cock-ups, the bickering and the surreal along with the bravery and dedication. As such, it is a real treat to read, giving the human side which history books never really manage to do. His account of the characters he met and the life of political prisoners in Franco’s regime is engrossing. Flag Blackened
MY GRANNY MADE ME AN ANARCHIST: The Christie File: Part 1, 1946-1964 eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)
Posted on January 11, 2014 at 12:01 am. Written by Christie
My Granny Made me an Anarchist: The Christie File: Part 1, 1946-1964. First published by ChristieBooks in 2002 in a limited edition of 100 copies, this fully revised, updated, unabridged eBook
“This fascinating personal account offers a remarkable picture of the late-20th century, seen through sensitive eyes and interpreted by a compassionate, searching soul.” Noam Chomsky
“Stuart Christie’s granny might well disagree, given the chance, but her qualities of honesty and self-respect in a hard life were part of his development from flash Glaswegian teenager — the haircut at 15 is terrific — to the 18-year old who sets off to Spain at the end of the book as part of a plan to assassinate the Spanish dictator Franco. In the meanwhile we get a vivid picture of 1950s and early 1960s Glasgow, its cinemas, coffee bars and dance halls as well as the politics of the city, a politics informed by a whole tradition of Scottish radicalism. Not just Glasgow, because Stuart was all over Scotland living with different parts of his family, and in these chapters of the book there is a lyrical tone to the writing amplified by a sense of history of each different place. When we reach the 1960s we get a flavour of that explosion of working class creativity and talent that marked the time, as well as the real fear of nuclear war and the bold tactics used against nuclear weapons bases. It is through this period of cultural shake-up that Stuart clambers through the obstructive wreckage of labour and Bolshevik politics, and finds a still extant politics of libertarian communism that better fitted the mood of those times. Now, in 2002,it is Stuart who finds himself quoted in an Earth First pamphlet as the new generation of activists for Global Justice by-pass the dead hand of Trotskyist parties and renew the libertarian tradition.” John Barker
Continue reading “MY GRANNY MADE ME AN ANARCHIST: The Christie File: Part 1, 1946-1964 eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)” »
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Consumer Protection in the Banking Industry
The decision rendered by the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of Bank of Montreal v Marcotte, 2014 SCC 55 (“Marcotte”), on September 19, 2014, has significant implications with respect to consumer protection requirements in the banking industry. The Marcotte decision highlights the important role that compliance with both provincial and federal consumer protection legislation has within the banking industry. The Marcotte decision may have also led to the federal government’s recent proposed amendments to the Bank Act, SC 1991, c 46 (the “Bank Act”), which were included in the Economic Action Plan 2015 (Budget 2015).
In Marcotte, the Supreme Court of Canada considered the applicability of certain disclosure requirements and civil remedies that are provided for under the Quebec Consumer Protection Act, RSQ, c P-40 1 (the “Act”), with regards to bank-issued credit cards. In 2003, the plaintiff’s class action suit against multiple banks and the Fédération des caisse Desjardins du Québec (the “Banks”) was launched. The plaintiffs alleged that the fees being charged for the conversion of Canadian currency into foreign currency were in violation of the disclosure requirements under the Act and sought for the class to be reimbursed for the balance of the conversion charges that had been incurred.
The Defence
The Banks argued that the plaintiff’s action should be dismissed, claiming that the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity applied and rendered the Act inapplicable. The doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity stipulates that there is a core to each federal subject matter that cannot be reached by provincial laws. Interjurisdictional immunity, when applicable, operates to prevent laws that are enacted by one level of government from impairing the core of the jurisdiction reserved for the other level of government. In Marcotte, the Banks argued that the applicability of the relevant provisions of the Act would impair the core of the federal government banking power. The Quebec Superior Court and Court of Appeal dismissed this argument, holding that credit card contracts are not at the core of banking activities, and, therefore, the Act did not interfere with the federal banking regime.
Additionally, the Banks argued that the relevant sections of the Act were inoperative due to the doctrine of federal paramountcy. The doctrine of federal paramountcy establishes that where there is a conflict between valid provincial and federal laws, the federal law will prevail and the provincial law will be deemed inoperative to the extent that it conflicts with the federal law. This argument was also dismissed by both the Quebec Superior Court and Court of Appeal.
The Supreme Court of Canada Decision
The decision was appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the defendants’ appeal against the plaintiffs in a unanimous decision. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Court of Appeal’s findings on all issues and held that the doctrines of interjurisdictional immunity and federal paramountcy did not apply. The Supreme Court of Canada held that the imposition of disclosure requirements and civil remedies through provincial legislation does not go to the core of the federal bank power. In addition, it rejected the proposition that the provisions of the Act at issue significantly impaired the federal bank power. While the provisions of the Act imposed certain disclosure requirements and provided for civil remedies, they were not found to impair activities that were essential to banking in such a way that would require Parliament to specifically legislate to override the provincial legislation.
The Supreme Court of Canada did note that paramountcy may be operative in instances where the civil remedy provided by the provincial statute nullified the contract, instead of simply reducing how much the parties paid, as was the case in Marcotte. However, the Court refused to rule on this issue. Similarly, with respect to the interjurisdictional immunity issue, the Court did not rule on what the core of the federal jurisdiction over banking was, nor did it provide any general guidance on this issue.
Potential Implications
One of the more relevant issues for banks that arises out of the decision in Marcotte is the application of provincial regulation to the banking industry. While the decision in Marcotte was limited in scope, it has certainly opened up the possibility that provincial legislation could regulate matters that have traditionally been seen as falling solely under the federal power to regulate banking. From the perspective of banks, this decision has had the effect of adding the requirement for further due diligence, because, in addition to federal law, banks must now also ensure that they are in compliance with provincial legislation.
More recently, the federal government has addressed the issue of consumer protection in the banking industry with several proposed amendments that were included in the Economic Action Plan 2015 (Budget 2015), tabled in the House of Commons on April 21, 2015. The Economic Action Plan 2015 proposes to amend the Bank Act, in order to strengthen and modernize Canada’s financial consumer protection framework and to provide an exclusive set of rules to govern consumer protection for banks. The proposed amendments are intended to result in a financial consumer framework that provides:
broadened general requirements for clear and simple disclosure of information, and expanded use of summary information boxes for banking products and services;
improved access to basic banking services by allowing a broader range of personal identification to open an account;
expanded prohibitions on certain business practices, including high pressure sales situations, and cooling-off periods for a greater range of products;
expanded corporate governance requirements so that boards of directors’ duties relate to all consumer protection measures;
improved transparency and accountability, for example through enhanced public reporting on complaints and on measures taken to address the challenges faced by vulnerable Canadians; and
a requirement that advertising be clear and accurate.
It will be important for banks to monitor the progress of these proposed amendments to the Bank Act in the coming months and, in the meantime, to ensure that the proper due diligence is being conducted and that they are in compliance with both federal and provincial consumer protection legislation.
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Provincial Health and Safety Legislation is Inapplicable to Federal Undertakings
In Commission des normes, de l’équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail c Commission des lésions professionnelles, 2016 QCCS 2424, the Quebec Superior Court held that provincial occupational health and safety legislation does not apply to general contractors working on federal undertakings.
Cox & Palmer publications are intended to provide information of a general nature only and not legal advice. The information presented is current to the date of publication and may be subject to change following the publication date.
Copyright 2019 Сox & Palmer, All Rights Reserved.
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A flag for Sri Lanka's secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. (AP/Markus Schreiber)
Tamil journalist bound, shot, during Sri Lankan civil war
New York, June 20, 2011--Video footage of a Tamil journalist apparently executed in the final stages of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war underscores the need for an urgent international inquiry, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
The U.K.'s Channel 4 has screened amateur footage of the body of Tamil news presenter Shoba, indicating that she was shot and killed during the government's final military surge in the northeast. Shoba, who went by one name, also reported under the name Isaipriya or Isaippiriya for the media division of the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), according to Channel 4 and the pro-LTTE TamilNet news website. "Her role was as a journalist rather than a direct fighter," Channel 4 reported.
The footage, shown June 14 in the documentary "Sri Lanka's Killing Fields," shows Shoba's body, half-naked with her hands bound, among the corpses of Tamil Tiger rebels apparently captured, and executed by Sri Lankan government forces. The manner of Shoba's death is not shown, although several point-blank executions of bound prisoners were filmed in the same location. Channel 4 reporter Jon Snow said in the documentary that Shoba's body was found among some that "appear to have been raped or sexually assaulted, and then murdered."
Channel 4 first released extracts of the footage, which it dates to May 18 or 19, 2009, in December 2010. TamilNet reported relatives had identified her as the woman shown. The Sri Lankan government denounced the videos as fake, according to the documentary. "The footage has since been authenticated by the United Nations, though the Sri Lankan government refuses to accept that," Channel 4 says in the film.
"Channel 4 has provided solid evidence that Shoba was murdered and that a war crime may have been committed," said Bob Dietz, CPJ Asia program coordinator. "Moreover, Shoba was reportedly working as a journalist. It is essential that an international inquiry make use of this and any other evidence to investigate and prosecute those responsible."
The Sri Lankan Ministry of Defense website lists Shoba as Lieutenant Colonel Issei Piriya, a Tamil Tigers communications leader killed during battle by its 53 Division troops on May 18, one day before the government announced victory.
British war crimes lawyer Julian Knowles told Channel 4 that the tied hands, absence of weapons, and the arrangement of Shoba's body and others found with her undermine that claim. "It's difficult to think of a mechanism how they could have died other than a cold-blooded execution," he said.
Both TamilNet and Channel 4 say that Shoba, 27, was a working journalist. TamilNet posted an excerpt of Shoba's reporting for O'liveechchu, the Tigers' videomagazine. "Shoba remained unarmed and did not take part in combat," the website said, citing its unnamed local correspondent who has since left Sri Lanka. "She never carried a gun and her physical condition did not permit her to go to the battlefield. She always had either a camera, a pen, or a notepad," Channel 4 reported, citing Shoba's colleague. Shoba suffered from a heart condition, according to Channel 4 and TamilNet.
The Sri Lankan government prevented journalists from accessing the conflict zones, according to CPJ research. Some of the footage in "Killing Fields" was obtained by eye-witnesses, usually Tamils in the conflict zones, using mobile phones and small cameras, according to Channel 4. Others were recorded by soldiers as "grotesque war trophies." The documentary put the video of Shoba in this category.
Short URL: https://cpj.org/x/444a
Sri Lankan politicians try to intimidate journalists over New York Times report
July 3, 2018 2:20 PM ET
Washington, D.C., July 3, 2018--The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on opposition politicians in Sri Lanka to stop trying to intimidate local journalists by publicly leveling accusations against them. At a press conference yesterday evening, associates of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa accused two journalists for The New York...
Sri Lankan military intelligence officers suspected in journalist's murder
February 23, 2017 4:04 PM ET
New York, February 23, 2017--Sri Lankan authorities should fully investigate the 2009 murder of an editor and bring his killers to justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Five military intelligence officers were arrested this week in connection with the murder of Lasantha Wickramatunga, the editor-in-chief of the...
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Kuwaiti blogger sentenced for insulting ruler on Twitter
January 9, 2013 5:33 PM ET
New York, January 9, 2013--A Kuwaiti court sentenced an online journalist to prison on Monday for insulting the ruling family on social media, according to news reports. Ayyad al-Harbi was ordered to begin serving the two-year jail sentence immediately, news reports said.
Police arrested al-Harbi on November 13 in connection with a series of posts he made to his personal Twitter account, starting in October, in which he criticized the government and called on authorities to stop oppressing Kuwaiti citizens, according to news reports. He was released the next day on bail, the reports said. A court convicted him on Monday on the insult charge, which is punishable by up to five years in prison, according to Article 25 of the penal code.
Al-Harbi's lawyer, Mohammed al-Humidi, said the journalist would be appealing, according to news reports.
Al-Harbi wrote opinion pieces for Sabr, a Kuwait-based independent website that publishes news and commentary. He wrote extensively about local issues including corruption and freedom of speech in the run-up to the December parliament election. He has also written articles that have called on the Shia minority to revolt against corruption and criticized the government in connection with their attitudes on freedom of speech and women's rights.
Since October, protesters have demonstrated against the legal process behind the December parliamentary elections and the lack of reform promised by the government. Police have arrested and used stun grenades to disperse several protesters, news reports said.
"CPJ is alarmed by the prison sentence handed to Kuwaiti journalist Ayyad al-Harbi," said Middle East and North Africa Coordinator Sherif Mansour. "We urge the Kuwaiti appellate court to reverse this conviction and uphold the nation's commitment to freedom of expression."
Al-Harbi wrote a post on Twitter on January 6, accusing the government of corruption. The same day, he posted a prediction on Twitter, in which he said he would be indicted in the coming days for insulting the Alsabah ruling family, the same fate met by Kuwaiti opposition activist Rashed al-Anzi, who had been convicted on the same charge the day before.
For more data and analysis on Kuwait, visit CPJ's Kuwait page here.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This alert has been corrected to reflect that al-Harbi was convicted under Article 25 of the penal code--not Article 54 of the constitution, as previously stated.
Ayyad al-Harbi
Short URL: https://cpj.org/x/5199
Kuwaiti authorities sentence local journalist in absentia to five years hard labor
January 12, 2018 3:39 PM ET
New York, January 12, 2018--Kuwaiti authorities should allow independent journalist Abdullah al-Saleh to return to Kuwait without fear of imprisonment or reprisal for his work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. A Kuwaiti national security court on December 25, 2017, found al-Saleh, a YouTube reporter and former columnist...
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Connecting the World 16 December 2015
Internet Society CEO Speech at the UN General Assembly WSIS+10 Review
By Kathryn BrownFormer President / CEO
Today, December 16, 2015, Internet Society President and CEO Kathy Brown delievered the following remarks before the UN General Assembly as part of the 10-year Review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+10)
Mr. Chairman, Honorable Ministers, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Internet Society, an organization of 80,000 members, 145 organizations and 112 volunteer Chapters in 92 countries, congratulations on the successful conclusion of the WSIS +10 review.
The Internet Society evolved from a belief of our founder Vint Cerf that ‘a society would emerge from the idea that is the Internet’. Today we see that not only has an Information Society emerged, but also that the Internet has woven itself into the very fabric of our whole society and is now a critical part of how we connect, communicate, create and collaborate.
We are encouraged by the positive outcome of the WSIS 10 review resulting from years of cooperation and shared dialogue. The final outcome document is an endorsement of the agreement we all made 10 years ago to allow the Internet to grow and flourish through bottom-up, distributed collaborative processes. We enthusiastically support the unequivocal re-commitment to the multistakeholder model first adopted in Tunis; the renewal of the IGF mandate and the central focus on creating a digital enabling environment for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Moreover, the Internet Society has continually called for a sharper focus on development and Human Rights in order to build a people-centered Information Society. WSIS has delivered by putting the building blocks in place to continue to champion these two crucial imperatives.
And importantly, the co-facilitators have shined a light on the value of the collaborative, multistakeholder model by striving to be as open, transparent and inclusive as the UN process would allow. By their actions they acknowledged that there is only one way to build the Internet future – and that is by working together.
So, I want to say thank you to those who have made this agreement possible. Thank you to the Secretary-General; to the president of the General Assembly; and to our two excellent facilitators. But most of all thank you to all those stakeholders who contributed with passion, ideas and advocacy to this positive outcome.
Of course, we all know that the outcome document reflects a series of compromises – and we have a concern; and it is not an insignificant one.
In our view, the outcome statement falls short in failing to fully recognize the transnational nature of the Internet as a borderless “network of networks” comprised of millions of individual networks that connect around the globe. It seeks to apply national solutions to global problems, particularly those related to safety and security. This shortfall is compounded by an unfortunate misbelief by some that cooperation ONLY among governments is sufficient to solve issues that require the expertise and commitment of all of us.
Indeed, our able and perceptive co-facilitator from the UAE asked the opening panel yesterday how we could improve UN processes that have historically been multilateral, to better address the governance issues of the Internet. Those issues are multistakeholder, transnational and distributed by nature.
We agree that further progress must be made to fully embrace a changing digital world that knows no borders and no single “decider”.
As more people – and things – come online, many challenges, known and unknown, lie ahead. Government-centric processes are only one of the many ways that solutions can be crafted AND implemented. Solving 21st Century problems will require the collaboration of all stakeholders through 21st century mechanisms.
We at the Internet Society stand ready to join with all of you – and with all stakeholders around the world – to reach a common vision of an open, global, trusted Internet for everyone, everywhere. Again, thank you for your dedication to a better world.
More information about the WSIS+10 event can be found at
http://www.internetsociety.org/wsis
Connecting the World, Improving Technical Security, Internet Governance, World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), WSIS10
The Week in Internet News: Placing Money on AI
In India, Days Left to Comment on Rules That Could Impact Your Privacy
This Data Privacy Day Take Steps to Protect Your Data
My Privacy Online: Championing Trust in the Era of IoT
Moving Forward to an Internet That’s Interplanetary in Scope and Function
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Cultural exchange in the literatures and languages of medieval Iberia
Posted on October 30, 2013 by David Wacks
This entry is based on a public lecture I gave at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute in NY on 29 October 2013 [link to video]. My thanks to Hilary Ballon, Deputy Vice Chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi, Prof. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite of NYU Department of History, and Prof. S.J. Pearce of NYU Department of Spanish and Portuguese for the invitation and for their hospitality in NY.
This lecture is dedicated to the memories of two recently deceased teachers and colleagues, Prof. Samuel Armistead and Prof. María Rosa Menocal, both of whom paved the way. Que en Gan ‘Eden estén, may they rest in peace.
Tonight I am going to talk about the role of literature in cultural exchange in one interesting —but not unique— cultural moment in a part of the world that was at once of the cultural capitals of the Islamic world and a very important religious center of Western Christianity. Most of us think of the Iberian Peninsula as the point of embarkation of Columbus and Cortés, or as the site of a bloody civil war in the 20th century. Tonight I would like to take you back before all of this, to a time when Europe had yet to set its sights on the New World, before modern nation states and national languages and national cultures.
Celtic Invasions
Like much of the world, the lands that are now Spain and Portugal were always a crossroads of different ethnic and linguistic groups. The people who are now known as the Basques migrated there during the mists of prehistory. Celts navigated their way across the Bay of Biscay and established colonies on Spain’s northern coast thousands of years ago, mixing with local Iberian tribes. Phoenicians established trading posts in southern cities such as Cadiz and Málaga well over two thousand years ago. The Romans pacified the Peninsula during the third to second centuries BCE, giving it the name Hispania, and its Romance languages, several of which are still spoken today. Visigoths came over the Pyrenees after the disintegration of Roman political power and installed themselves in Toledo, where they ruled over Hispania for over two centuries. In the eighth century CE, Muslim forces crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa and in short order pacified the entire Peninsula. From 711, there would be Muslim kings parts of the Peninsula until Boabdil, King of Granada, lays his arms at the feet of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel the Catholic in 1492. From a European perspective, this period of Muslim political dominance is what most distinguishes the history and culture of the Iberian Peninsula.
Muslim conquest of al-Andalus
The Muslims who conquered and settled the Iberian Peninsula — overwhelmingly North African Berbers with a sprinkling of Eastern Arab élites— created a society that has no peer in Western Europe in terms of its multiconfessionality, its coexistence of the three major Abrahamic traditions.
Al-Andalus was a unique case in Western European history. Nowhere else in Western Europe was Islam the state religion and Arabic the state language for significant periods of time. Consequently, there is nowhere else in Western Europe, until very recently, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians, lived and worked together under a political system that espoused —but did not always adhere to— a doctrine of religious tolerance. I am referring to the Islamic doctrine of dhimma, the concept that the non-Islamic Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Judaism, were considered fellow Ahl al-kitab, ‘People of the Book,’ and as such are granted religious freedom and protections from persecution. This is a unique fact in the history of Western Europe. The only other case is that of Islamic Sicily, which was a far shorter time period and which left a very interesting, but ultimately shallower historical footprint.
Great Mosque of Cordova
I want to be very clear that I am not talking about a Golden Age of Tolerance here. Laws are one thing and people are another. We do not always respect doctrine. There was sectarian violence in al-Andalus, and the protections granted to Christian and Jewish religious minorities were a far cry from what we would expect in a modern democracy. They were not considered the equals of their Muslim counterparts. They paid a poll tax and were barred from occupying certain positions in government. However, they enjoyed the right to practice their religions, to organize and govern their own affairs autonomously, provided they did not offend Islam or Muslims in doing so.
This legacy of tolerance, while no utopia, was a significant historical fact and that made the examples I am about to discuss possible, at a time when religious minorities elsewhere in Western Europe fared considerably worse on the whole. What’s more, the material culture of al-Andalus far surpassed that of the rest of Christian Europe.
detail of tile from the Alhambra palace, Granada
The Andalusi capital, Cordoba, in the tenth century boasted lit streets, public baths, and vast libraries when Germany and France were in the depths of what we like to call the Dark Ages. European visitors to the Caliph’s court in Cordova were flabbergasted by the luxury and cultural refinement they encountered there. To be sure, this was not the daily reality of all Andalusis, but when we talk about al-Andalus we should think of fifteenth-century Florence in terms of wealth and cultural refinement. To this day “al-Andalus” in the Arab world means ‘wealth, opulence, and artistic refinement and is used heavily in branding things like shopping malls and hotels.
al-Andalus Mall, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Today as I’ve said I’d like to show you how this period of cultural wealth and relative tolerance found expression in literature, in a series of five examples that span as many centuries, some from a context of Muslim government and some from Christian kingdoms.
The city of Cordova in the tenth century was home to the court of the Umayyad Caliphs and the most populous, most technologically advanced, and wealthiest city in Western Europe. It was also a city where Classical Arabic was the official language of government and of state religion, of the literary establishment and of high culture. But it was not the only language spoken or written by Andalusis. Christians, Muslims and Jews spoke colloquial Andalusi Arabic and a dialect of Latin we’ll call Andalusi Romance. Jews prayed and wrote in Hebrew in addition to Classical Arabic. So the linguistic reality in al-Andalus at this time is one of widespread bilingualism both in spoken and in written language.
Andalusi poet singing, from Bayad wa-Riyad, 13th century, one of three surviving illustrated manuscripts from al-Andalus
Our first example is drawn the poetry of the court, and represents a striking innovation in the kind of songs that Andalusi poets recited and sang. We should remember that poetry, and “fancy” poetry of the type one might hear at court served a very different purpose in the tenth century than it does for us in the US in the twenty first. Poetry was political propaganda, it was a means to celebrate or revile public figures, it was a way to celebrate a victory or commemorate an important event. Poets created political and social capital in the images and catchy but authoritative phrases they coined. People repeated and recited the most memorable lines in daily discussion and in public and private gatherings. More than just a rarefied art form that one studied in school or that a select group of elite read quietly to themselves, poetry was more like a high-profile medium that traveled from mouth to mouth rather than from smartphone to smartphone.
Until the tenth century, when a poet performed a composition at court he recited it in a singsong voice, in metered monorrhyme lines; that is, every line in the poem ended in the same syllable. There may have been some musical accompaniment but poems were not sung to a melody, they were declaimed, recited.
statue of Muqaddam al-Cabri in Cordova
According to tradition, in the middle of the tenth century, a blind poet named Muqaddam from the town of Cabra near Cordova, made a simple yet radical innovation in Classical Arabic poetry: he wrote poems that were meant to be sung, even danced to. In place of the traditionally metered monorrhyming verses, his songs, written in the same Classical Arabic as the Qur’an itself, were sung to popular tunes, had the variable rhyme scheme and stanza/refrain structure that is still so well known to us from today’s popular music. This was nothing short of revolutionary, a shocking innovation in Arabic poetic tradition.
Even more shocking was the fact that this Muqaddam included bits of these popular tunes in his compositions, tunes sung in not in the exalted language of the Qur’an but rather in the colloquial language of the street, the fields, and the marketplace. The listener would hear the orchestra’s introduction, and soon beneath the classical instrumentation and arrangements would hear the oddly familiar tune of a popular love song, over which the poet would sing in the language of the Qur’an, in formal metaphors and images drawn from classical tradition. And then, at the poem’s end, almost as an afterthought, the last lines became that popular tune itself. The effect was something like hearing a Shakespeare sonnet sung to the tune of a Shakira tune, and then hearing a verse from the Shakira tune at the end, at which point you realize that the sonnet has not just the same tune, but the same theme, and rhymes with the popular song.
I’d like to play you an example of this kind of poem or song by Ibn Zuhr, who was born in Seville in the eleventh century. His song ma li-l-muwallah is a festive bachanal set to popular music. This recording is a modern reconstruction by the Altramar Medieval Music Ensemble from their album titled Iberian Garden.
Muqaddam’s style of poetry became known as the muwashshah, or girdle poem because the individual stanzas were linked together by the refrain as if in a chain or woven belt. Singers in the Arab world still sing muwashshahat in Classical Arabic, most notably the iconic Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. The classical Andalusi musical style still has large audiences in the cities of North Africa, many of which have their own Andalusi orchestras such as this one pictured in Tangiers, Morocco.
Nonetheless, the Andalusi muwashshah was an innovation built on cultural exchange, on crossing boundaries. By brining colloquial Arabic and Andalusi Romance language and popular melodies into the arts of the court, the poets of al-Andalus transformed both the popular lyrics they used as the basis for their learned compositions as well as the idea of what it meant to perform poetry at court.
Jewish Andalusi poets carried this exchange a step further by adapting the new poetry into Hebrew. This, too represented a bold innovation in Hebrew poetic tradition on more than one count. First, it opened up Hebrew poetry to a vast range of ideas, imagery, thematic material, and technique that were previously the province of Arabic. They wrote Hebrew poetry using the language of the Hebrew Bible describing the themes and images of the Classical Arabic poetic tradition. The beloveds described in terms of gazelles or fawns, the lush descriptions of gardens, the metaphors drawn from desert life of the pre-Islamic Arabic poets all of this they recast in biblical Hebrew, sometimes in entire phrases lifted directly from the prophets, the psalms, the narratives of genesis and kings, and especially the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon.
Rabbi Hayyim Louk and the New Jerusalem Orchestra
These were also set to Andalusi classical arrangements, and to this day there are artists such as Rabbi Haim Louk who continue to interpret the Andalusi Sephardic tradition. Here is a short clip from his recent arrangement of a piyyut or devotional poem by the eleventh century poet Solomon ibn Gabirol. Rabbi Louk has set the poem to the tune of a very popular qasidamade popular by the Moroccan singer Abdesedek Chekara, who lived in the twentieth century.
Soon after the time of the poets Moses ibn Ezra and Ibn Zuhr, the balance of power on the Iberian Peninsula began to tilt in the direction of the Christian states in the north.
The Iberian Peninsula before 1031
Asturian Christians from north of Cantabrian mountains began to push Muslim armies back onto the plains in the ninth century, during the days of the Umayyad Caliphate, and by the middle of the tenth century they had conquered large sections of the central plains, where they established their capital in León. Some fifty years later the Caliphate disintegrated, leaving in its wake a collection of petty Muslim kingdoms that competed with each other and with the Christian states to the north for dominance. The Christian kings of Leon and Castile pressed their advantage and by 1076 they had conquered Toledo, the former capital of the Visigothic kingdom. However, it would be another century and a half before the tide turned decisively in favor of the Christians. Historians view battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212 the key date after which (at least retroactively) the writing was on the wall for al-Andalus.
Alfonso X portrayed in a manuscript of his Cantigas de Santa Maria
Not coincidentally it was around this same time that Christians in Western Europe began to compose serious literary works in the various Romance languages they spoke, carving out space once occupied by their classical language, Latin. This was happening in neighboring countries as well, where increased commerce and the proliferation of universities spurred literary innovations that eventually gave Western Europe its Chaucers and Dantes. In Spain, however, Christian authors worked in the shadow of the considerable intellectual legacy of al-Andalus long after the balance of power on the Peninsula had turned in their favor. What this meant is that literary prestige in Christian Iberia was determined not only by imitation of Latin and French models but by the appropriation and translation of the massive corpus of Arabic-language learning that was produced in al-Andalus by the Christian kings’ Muslim predecessors.
The most famous example of this process was the court of Alfonso X, known as ‘The Learned’, who ruled Castile and León during the second half of the thirteenth century. His father was Ferdinand the Third, the Saint Ferdinand who gave his name to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. You can still see his legacy in the city seal of LA.
If you look closely, beside the Mexican eagle and serpent and under the California bear, you can see a Castle and a Lion, the arms of the Kingdom of Castile and León. However, he was even more famous for having conquered the two most important cities in the south of the Peninsula, Cordova and Seville, in the middle of the thirteenth century.
After Ferdinand completed his considerable military conquests, all that was left of the great al-Andalus was the small Kingdom of Granada in the south, which was reduced to the status of client state to Castile and Leon, and remained a harassed tributary state until its eventual defeat in 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs Isabel the Catholic and Fernando of Aragon.
Such was the political landscape when Ferdinand’s son Alfonso X took the throne in 1252. Unlike his father, Alfonso was not a successful military leader and did not continue to expand his father’s territory. However, Alfonso’s contributions in the areas of science and letters equaled the accomplishments of his father in the military and political arena. Alfonso was the architect of a massive literary project that accomplished two important goals. The first was to establish and exalt Castilian as a literary language, displacing Latin as the most prestigious, most important language of learning at court. He commissioned an impressive corpus of works on law, science, official history, and philosophy, and statecraft that, in the space of a single generation, established Castilian as a prestigious literary language when Italian and French were just getting off the ground as such.
One of the ways Alfonso accomplished this was through translations of Arabic works directly into Castilian. Alfonso employed a team of scholars who translated scores of crucial works of science, philosophy, and wisdom literature into Castilian from Arabic. Just as his father Ferdinand claimed the great cities of al-Andalus for Christian Iberia, Alfonso’s aim was to lay claim to the intellectual tradition of al-Andalus, to reproduce in Castilian the curriculum that produced the great scholars of al-Andalus.
This was only a part of the Castilian vogue for all things Andalusi. The victorious Christian court consumed Andalusi textiles, music, architecture, and material culture with an enthusiasm rivaled only by its hunger for Andalusi learning. This transfer of Andalusi intellectual culture to the Castilian court was a forerunner of the European Renaissance, a flowering of Greek science and learning delivered by the conduit of Andalusi civilization.
As a result, Alfonso’s court was arguably the most sophisticated, most technologically advanced court in Western Christendom, which, in his estimation, made him worthy of the title of Holy Roman Emperor. He never achieved this honor, but what he did do was make available in the vernacular language of the court, a massive library of high-tech and cutting edge works of mathematics, astronomy, natural sciences, philosophy, and most important for our discussion this evening, literature.
Castilian translation of Calila e Dimna
In 1251 Alfonso commissioned a translation of the classic Arabic work of gnomic narrative, Kalila wa-Dimna or ‘Kalila and Dimna.’ The book is a collection of exemplary tales, similar in structure to the 1001 Nights, told to a Lion king by two courtiers, jackals, one named Kalila and the other Dimna. This way of telling stories, these stories within stories, came to Arabic from Indian tradition and dates back to at least the first century CE. As we will see, through the Alfonso’s translations this tradition reached Europe and provided one of the inspirations for the modern novel. In Kalila wa-Dimna, The jackals told stories that provided political advice to the lion, and was a form of manual for political survival in narrative form, akin to the ‘Mirror of Princes’ genre cultivated in Western Europe in Latin. In many of the exemplary tales contained in the book, the main characters are discussing a political problem faced by the Lion king, and Kalila or Dimna offer advice in the form of a story that illustrates the way to control the situation.
This model of telling stories introduced to the nascent vernacular literature by Alfonso the tenth, became a vogue in Europe and were widely and successfully imitated. Giovanni Boccaccio borrowed the idea for his Decameron, a collection of tales told to each other not by advisors and kings but to a group of Florentine courtiers fleeing an outbreak of plague in the countryside. Geoffrey Chaucer followed suit in his Canterbury Tales, his collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims traveling from London to Canterbury. Both of these examples leave the courtly setting and political context behind but in both cases the stories are a bulwark against some danger, not the intrigue and political hijinx of the royal court but the lurking danger of plague, or the perils of the medieval English highways.
This tradition of appropriating Andalusi learning and material culture became the prestige model for courtly culture in Castile. For centuries, Castilian nobles were avid consumers of Andalusi textiles, architecture, ceramics, food, and music. This phenomenon was difficult to characterize. Were these Castilians simply cynically aping and appropriating the culture of the civilization they had essentially defeated and with whom they were sporadically at war for as long as they could remember? Or was Andalusi culture part of Castilian culture? Politically it was clear that Castile was a Christian kingdom, but it was one that counted many thousands of Andalusi Muslims, Jews and Christians in its population. Some cities remained essentially Andalusi in their cultural life for centuries after being conquered by Christian armies. In Toledo, for example, Arabic was used as one of the classical languages of the Mozarabic Christian community, the descendents of the Christian community of Andalusi Toledo. Though that city was, as we have mentioned, conquered by Castile in 1070 CE, Mozarabic scribes continue to file land deeds and other documents written in Arabic for over three centuries. In the Crown of Aragon, the city of Valencia, conquered by Aragon in the early thirteenth century, continued to be a center of Andalusi culture and a vibrant Arabic-speaking community for over two hundred years. Politics and religion aside, it was sometimes difficult to say where al-Andalus ended and Castile began.
Nowhere is this confusion more evident that in the work of Alfonso’s nephew, the powerful nobleman Don Juan Manuel, author of the collection of tales known as El Conde Lucanor, the tales of Count Lucanor. Juan Manuel was, after the king, the most powerful man in Castile. He was governor of the border state of Murcia, and had extensive diplomatic experience dealing with the kingdom of Granada. Like his uncle Alfonso, though perhaps not quite so prodigiously, he wrote a series of works of noble interest, ranging from his treatise on politics El Libro de los Estados, the ‘Book of the Estates’ to works on hunting and chivalry, to his most famous book, the Conde Lucanor. The structure of this collection of tales tells us the story of the continuing assimilation of Andalusi learning in the court of Castile and what intellectual and cultural fruits this process bore. Like Alfonso’s Kalila wa-Dimna, Conde Lucanor begins with a story about a ruler in need of advice. In Juan Manuel’s book this ruler is a member of the high nobility, but not a king, like Juan Manuel himself. His advisor Patronio responds to specific questions about real-life political predicaments posed to him by the Count. Don Juan Manuel takes the structure of Kalila wa-Dimna as a starting point, but transforms the animal fables and out-of-time-and-place anecdotes of the Arabic work into relatively realistic stories set in places like Cordova and Toledo. He gives his characters Castilian or Andalusi names and sometimes includes tales about historical figures from the region. He weaves together material drawn from folklore, from official histories, historical anecdotes, Latin manuals of materials for sermons written by Dominican friars, and tales from local oral tradition. Many of the stories in Conde Lucanor are also found elsewhere in other Latin or Arabic versions. In one famous case, he includes the tale of a wise magician and a foolish Churchman that is found in only one other source: a Hebrew book written in Castile in during the time of Alfonso X.
This tale and its transformations from Castilian folktale to the Hebrew literary work of Ibn Sahula to the Conde Lucanor of Juan Manuel provides us with another example of how literary materials and traditions move between religious and linguistic groups in medieval Iberia. A further example of Castilan literary innovation that was made possible by the translation work carried out by Alfonso’s teams is found in a curious book by the title of El libro del cavallero Zifar, ‘the Book of the Knight Zifar.’
Miniature of Zifar and Grima from Libro del Caballero Zifar (15th c. manuscript) (Bibliothèque Nationale Espagnol 36)
This book tells the story of a knight errant who in some ways might have been drawn from books about Arthur and Lancelot, but in other ways is a sort of frame character himself who serves as justification for the exposition of a large corpus of proverbial sayings and maxims drawn from Alfonso’s translations and other Eastern sources of wisdom literature. Like the Conde Lucanor, the Book of the Knight Zifar is the result of the second generation of the appropriation of Andalusi learning, the incorporation of Andalusi wisdom literature into the Arthurian Chivalric Romance. As such it is more than the story of a knight’s adventures; it is the story of the Castilian Christian appropriation of Andalusi learning and what that means for the culture of the court, projected onto the familiar literary figure of the knight errant.
Zifar is an exceptional knight who bears a most inconvenient curse that causes his horse to die every ten days. He is separated from his wife and children, is shipwrecked, falls in love with various women, and finally becomes king and is reunited with his family. The saga continues with the adventures of his second son Roboán, who embarks on a career of knight errantry whose narration is studded with proverbs, sayings, and philosophical musings, all with a very Christian moralizing yet Mediterranean cosmopolitan viewpoint. The chivalric qualities of the Zifar and Roboán are always described in terms of Christian values, and even graphic depictions of bloody combat are framed in terms of the theology of just war.
Some have argued that the book was itself translated from Arabic as part of the massive translation project of Alfonso the tenth. Many of the characters have names that may well be derived from Arabic words. Zifar himself may be loosely derived from the Arabic verb Safara, ‘to travel,’ which yields ‘safari’ in English. His wife Grima, maybe a corruption of the Arabic Karima, ‘noble, precious.’ Many of the place names are suggestive of place names drawn from medieval Arabic works of geography. The land that Zifar’s son eventually comes to rule, Tigrida, is located between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, in what we know call Iraq.
What is interesting about the “Eastern” features of the Book of the Knight Zifar is that they are largely window dressing. The conceit of translation from Arabic is an allegory for the transmission of learning from al-Andalus to Castile, a confirmation of the prestige of the Andalusi intellectual legacy, but not an actual exploitation of it. Here the exchange of learning from al-Andalus to Castile is framed not in terms of a manual of political dominance but in a fantasy of Christian morality and knightly excellence, with a sprinkling of statecraft similar to that found in Kalila wa-Dimna and Conde Lucanor. It is an allegory of the development of Castilian courtly culture in the wake of the Christian conquest of al-Andalus.
Thus we see that in the thirteenth century as in the twenty-first, novels and politically flavored fiction have as much to do with current events as they do with art and storytelling. In the cases of Don Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor and the anonymous Libro del cavllero Zifar, the authors tell their versions of the story of the the new, Christian-ruled al-Andalus. The winners tell story of what the intellectual culture of the Castilian court becomes, after enjoying the intellectual spoils of war, the Andalusi legacy of learning and science.
My last two examples this evening come to us from the minority cultures of Christian Iberia, and demonstrate a different type of literary cultural exchange. They are not about how the triumphant majority exploits and incorporates the learning of the vanquished, but rather how a minority culture makes use of the literary languages and building blocks of the dominant culture. I wish to demonstrate how the Muslim and Jewish subjects of these Christian monarchs made sense of the world in which they found themselves living, one in which they were not guaranteed the same institutional protections afforded to religious minorities in al-Andalus. While some Christian Iberian monarchs practiced certain forms of religious tolerance at certain times, there was no Catholic doctrine of tolerance to serve as a guide for political action. Consequently the fortunes of Castile’s Muslim and Jewish populations were dependent upon the whims of the monarch and upon the mood of the church, the nobility, and of the mob.
After the Christian conquest of al-Andalus, the fortunes of the Muslim populations of areas like Valencia and Murcia took a sharp turn for the worse. Rather than live under Christian rule as a religious minority, the ruling elites fled to Granada or North Africa, and the great majority of Muslims living under Christian rule were either tenant farmers or artisans. While most communities enjoyed the right to continue practicing Islam into the sixteenth century, there was a severe brain drain that cut the legs out from underneath institutional Islamic life in Christian Iberia, and began a long process of cultural deprivation that would become extreme in the years following the conquest of Granada.
The Capitulation of Granada, by Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz: Boabdil confronts Ferdinand and Isabella. 1882
1492, as you all know, was an important year for a number of reasons. We all know about the first voyage of Columbus, but it was also the year of the defeat of Granada, when the triumphant Catholic Monarchs Isabella the Catholic of Castile and Leon and Ferdinand of Aragon took possession of the Alhambra, thus ending the existence of Islamic political power in Western Europe. This military defeat by no means signaled the end of Islamic life in Christian Iberia. In fact, according to the Capitulaciones de Granada, the surrender treaty offered to Granada’s Muslim population by Ferdinand and Isabella, Granadan Muslims enjoyed very explicit protection of their religious freedoms, including the right to practice Islam, to organize the affairs of the Muslim community according to shari’a law, to educate their children in madrassat, and to enjoy representation at court, all in perpetuity:
Their highnesses and their successors will allow [all the people of Granada] great or small, to live in their own religion, and not permit that their mosques be taken from them, nor their minarets nor their muezzins. . . nor will they disturb the uses and customs which they observe. (Constable 345)
However, a decade after the fall of Granada the pious and severe Isabel had a change of heart, and reneged on the terms set out in the Capitulations. Under the influence of her confessor, the ambitious and zealous priest Fray Franciso Jiménez de Cisneros, the Catholic Monarchs prohibited the practice of Islam in 1502, and required all Muslims to convert to Christianity or quit the kingdom. These hastily converted and poorly catechized Muslims became known derogatorily as ‘Moriscos,’ little Muslim-ish new Christians, neither properly Muslim nor properly Christian.
This disastrous moment did not in any way, however, mark the end of Islam in Spain. Rather, it marked the beginning of a new phase of clandestine or crypto-Islam, a transformation of traditional Islamic life to the new straitened circumstances. The brain drain that resulted from the near total exile of Islamic elites from the peninsula meant that it became very difficult to receive formal instruction in Islamic religion, law, and even in the classical Arabic language. Although some crypto-Muslims in places such as Granada and Valencia continued to speak colloquial Andalusi Arabic, the new prohibitions eventually ensured that almost none had any real proficiency in Classical Arabic, and even fewer were able to compose original texts in the language. Once Philip the Second prohibited the Arabic language itself in 1567, it became extremely dangerous to have any book written in Arabic in one’s possession. This applied equally to works of poetry, law, history, or fiction as it did to the Qur’an and its commentaries. By the middle of the sixteenth century, just as the struggles between Catholics and Protestants were reaching a fever pitch on the European continent, Islam went underground in Spain.
The end of publicly organized Islamic life during the period did not mean the end of Islamic cultural practice or even of Islamic literature in Spain, however. Spanish Muslims continued to smuggle books from Granada and North Africa into Christian realms, but given the near total death of Classical Arabic studies, the distribution and consumption of Islamic texts underwent a curious transformation. Moriscos began to adapt classical texts on Islamic topics into Spanish, the only language that most Spanish Muslims were able to understand. And yet, though the Moriscos could not read Classical Arabic, they clung tenaciously to the Arabic alphabet, the letters in which the Qur’an was written, and wrote their Spanish-language religious treatises in the Arabic letters of the Qur’an.
Manuscript of Aljamiado Poema de Yuçuf, 14th century
So was born Aljamiado literature, written in Spanish using Arabic letters. It was called Aljamiado from the Arabic word `ajamiyya, the language of the `ajami, or non-Arabs. This was a term that had been applied throughout Islamic history to the vernacular languages of non-Arab Muslims, such as Farsi or Tamazigh (Berber). Like many writing systems, the Arabic alphabet had been adapted to write several languages of Muslim communities such as Farsi, Urdu, and even Uigur. Aljamiado literature was the only example of Muslims using the Arabic Alphabet to write in a Romance language.
Authors composed a wide variety of Aljamiado texts. The lion’s share are religious treatises, including basic primers and compendia of Islamic religious practice and thought. There are narrative poems and prose legends celebrating key figures from the Qur’an, devotional poetry, Qur’anic exegesis. But there is also an imaginative literature that includes exemplary tales, translations of the accounts of the epic battles of Islamic expansion, and even an Islamicized version of a popular romance novel, the Amores de Paris y Viana, the Romance of Paris and Viana. I’d like share with you briefly one remarkable example of this literature to illustrate the extent to which Islamic, Hispanic, and European traditions merge and interplay in the literature of late Spanish Islam.
Mohammad de Vera, Tratado de la creencia, de las prácticas y de la moral de los musulmanes, 17th century. (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Espagnol 397)
The text in question is called La Doncella Carcayona, ‘The Damsel Carcassone’ and it is an Islamicized, Iberian version of a folktale that is told across Europe. There are versions recorded in French, Italian, Russian, and several other languages. It is the tale of the Maiden of the Severed Hands. The tale is a perfectly classic European folktale that contains many familiar motifs and characters known to us from the Grimm Brothers’ collection and other sources: the incestuous King, the magical talking helper animals, the gallant young prince who comes to the aid of the damsel in distress. There is even a wicked mother-in-law, here standing in for the wicked stepmother made famous by Cinderella. And yet, this at the same time a perfectly Islamic folk tale. The author has pressed the tale of the maiden of the severed hands into service as a primer for Islam. The entire point of the story is to demonstrate the powers of Islamic faith and daily prayer.
This version was written in Tunis by a Morisco who had arrived there after the expulsion from Spain in 1613. Our anonymous author wrote this text in Roman characters, a testimony to the extent to which many Moriscos had been almost completely Hispanized and were full participants in the vernacular culture shared by Christians and Muslims.
This damsel Arcayona followed the religion and idolatry of her father, and had a beautifully fashioned silver idol that she worshipped. And, one day, while this damsel was praying to her idol, she sneezed. When she invoked the name of her idol an angel appeared, in shape of a beatiful dove, on top of the head of the idol. The dove spoke to her in clear and measured speech:
¡Ya damsel! You must not continue to do that, but rather say alandulilah arabin allamin
And, just as the angel said this, the idol fell to the ground.
What in a secular European folk tale would be attributed to magic is here attributed to the power of God. The enchanted dove is in fact an angel who (elsewhere in the story) teaches Carcayona the shahada, the Muslim credo or affirmation of faith, demonstrating the power of faith to carry one through difficult times; a fitting lesson for a religious minority that suffered terrible persecution in Spain and an uncertain future in North Africa.
This remarkable literary hybrid demonstrates very clearly that coexistence and cultural sharing is not always an expression of a positive experience or of a tolerant and peaceful society, but that adversity also breeds innovation across traditions. Hopefully these examples can teach us lessons about how different traditions can coexist fruitfully.
The Expulsion of the Jews (Solomon Hart, England, 1806-1881)
The same year in which Granada fell to the Catholic monarchs was also the year in which they decided to expel the Jews from their kingdoms. Like the decision to put and end (or at least try to put an end) to Islam, this catastrophic event gave rise to some significant cultural formations that, like the phenomenon of Aljamiado literature, demonstrate great adaptability and resilience.
I am speaking here of the culture and language of the Sepharadim, the exiled Spanish Jews, who, once settled in their new homes in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, or elsewhere, continued to speak Spanish, sing the ballads they had learned growing up in Spain, and wrote in Judeo-Spanish to the present day. The Sephardic Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire became, somewhat ironically, a vibrant center of Spanish culture in the heart of Spain’s rival superpower in the Mediterranean, a sort of anti-Spain within Ottoman Constantinople or Smyrna.
Since before the days of al-Andalus, Spain’s Jews had always spoken the vernacular languages of the majority. Hebrew for them was a classical language that was used for prayer, religious study, legal records, correspondence, and was occasionally pressed into service with other Jews as an international lingua franca much the way that Latin was sometimes used among literate Christians. However, there were no toddlers speaking Hebrew in Spain, and Spanish Jews, like their Christian and many of their Muslim counterparts, grew up speaking Spanish or Portuguese or Catalan, singing the same traditional songs, and telling the same stories as their Christian neighbors. Within their community, certain linguistic habits began to develop: key concepts or words from religious practice or formal Hebrew discourse made their way into everyday speech, such that the Hebrew ben adam, literally ‘person’ was (and still is) used to mean “anyone” alongside the Spanish fulano, itself, it is worth pointing out, a loan from Arabic. Likewise certain Hebrew words acquired Spanish grammatical features and were so incorporated into Judeo-Spanish, such as the word amazalado, or ‘lucky’, which is patterned after the Spanish afortunado, ‘fortunate,’ but based on the Hebrew word mazal, ‘good fortune, luck,’ which one often hears among contemporary Jews: mazal tov, or literally ‘good fortune,’ but meaning ‘may you continue to enjoy good fortune.’ This type of finely grained exchange is another example of how closely intertwined the various traditions of the Peninsula had come to be by the late fifteenth century, despite —or perhaps due to— the political and sectarian tensions that characterized the fifteenth century in the region.
As in the case of Aljamiado, Judeo-Spanish was and continues to be a distinctively Jewish form of Spanish. Judeo-Spanish or Ladino is a base of medieval Spanish that over time acquired many loan words from Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Italian and French, but that retains even today a recognizably fifteenth-century grammar and vocabulary that is novel but intelligible to speakers of modern Spanish. In fact, it is a language that was spoken in this city, in fact in this neighborhood for many years. While the existence of a Yiddish press in New York is a well-known fact, there was also between the wars a very active and productive Ladino press.
One of the newspapers, La vara, a humor and political commentary weekly, published in Ladino had its offices right here on Rivington St., a neighborhood perhaps better known for its Yiddish legacy, but where you may currently hear plenty of Spanish spoken. The paper, in addition to running pieces of local and international interest to the Ladino-speaking community in New York, also advertised the services of local merchants and professionals, such as the “Dentista Español” Eli Hanania, who practiced, according to this advertisement, at 21 East 118th St. uptown.
El Dentista Español
This community flourished between the wars, and in the nineteen sixties still boasted members who knew by heart scores of ballads that their great great great grandparents had learned in Spain, and had carried with them for centuries in Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire. While Ladino has almost entirely ceased to be spoken as a natural language — you would be hard pressed to find a baby learning it from her mother today, there are a number of writers and musicians who continue to compose in Ladino and use it as a language of artistic and journalistic expression. Among them is the New York based singer Sarah Aroeste, a fragment of whose 2012 recording of “Scalerica de Oro,” a traditional Ladino song, you are about to hear.
This song, I believe, brings us full circle, from medieval Spain back to current day New York. I hope that through these examples you have some sense of the richness and variety of cultural exchange evident in the literatures and languages of medieval Iberia. I’ve prepared a handout for those of you interested in doing some further reading and of course I am very much looking forward to your questions now. Thank you.
Suggestions for further reading
For an overview of medieval Iberian literature, politics and culture in an accessible format, see the work of the late María Rosa Menocal: The Ornament of the World (Boston: Little Brown, 2002). You may also enjoy her coffee table book that includes a series of essays, photos and literary excerpts: Dodds, Jerrilynn Denise, María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale’s The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Also of interest is a recent volume of poetic texts from late medieval and Early Modern Iberia with accompanying English translations edited by Vincent Barletta, Mark Bajus, and Cici Malik: Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of Iberian lyric Poetry, 1400-1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Also quite interesting is Olivia Remy Constable’s anthology, Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), which includes a broad selection of historical and literary documents from the period drawn from all the languages of the peninsula and translated into English. For a more encyclopedic and academic overview of the literatures and cultures of al-Andalus, see The Literatures of al-Andalus (Cambridge History of Arabic Literature), edited by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond Scheindlin, and Michael Sells (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 2000).
On the Arabic poetry of al-Andalus, the bilingual Arabic-English anthology of James Monroe is essential: Monroe, James T. Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Monroe’s landmark anthology has been recently reprinted by Gorigas Press and is easily available. For an overview of the history of al-Andalus see Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) and Nicola Clark’s The Muslim conquest of Iberia: medieval Arabic narratives (London: Routledge, 2012).
Raymond Scheindlin has edited two volumes of bilingual Hebrew/English selections of the major Andalusi Hebrew poets, with explanatory notes for each poem. See Wine, Women, and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986) and The Gazelle (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991). More recently Peter Cole has published a large anthology of Hispano-Hebrew poetry with excellent translations of a wide variety of Hebrew poets from Spain, also with excellent notes and bibliography: The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). His volume of bilingual Hebrew/English selections of poetic texts from the Kabbalah tradition also contains a number of selections by Iberian authors: The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
Chris Lowney includes a chapter on Alfonso X’s translation activity in his A Vanished World: Medieval Spain’s Golden Age of Enlightenment (New York: Free Press, 2005), as well as chapters on related cross-cultural issues such as Andalusi science, conversion, theology, and the Christian conquest of al-Andalus.
On the history of the Moriscos, see Matthew Carr’s very well-written and impeccably researched Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (New York: The New Press, 2009). For a more academic approach to the literature and culture of the Moriscos, see Vincent Barletta’s Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). The classic volume on Morisco history is Henry Charles Lea’s The Moriscos of Spain: Their Conversion and Expulsion (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co., 1901) which has passed into the public domain and is available online free of charge from the Hathi Trust Digital Library (www.hathitrust.org). It has also been reprinted by Greenwood Press (New York, 1968).
For a popular history of the Sephardic Jews, see Jane Gerber’s The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: The Free Press, 1992). For a history more focused on linguistics and literature see Paloma Díaz Mas, Sephardim: The Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Rabbi Marc Angel has published an excellent synthesis of Sephardic intellectual history: Voices in Exile: a Study in Sephardic Intellectual History (Hoboken: KTAV, 1991).
There is relatively little Ladino literature translated into English. Matilda Koen-Sarano has published two volumes of Sephardic folktales translated into English: King Solomon and the Golden Fish: Tales from the Sephardic Tradition (Detroit: Wayne State University Pres, 2004) and Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003). See also the more recent A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi, edited by Aron Rodrigue and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and translated by Isaac Jerusalmi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), and An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty, edited and translated by Renée Levine Melammed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
On the Sephardic community in the United States see also his La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982), and the more recent work by Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York: New York University Press, 2009), which contains ample documentation of the Ladino press in New York City.
This entry was posted in Medieval Iberian Culture and tagged al-Andalus, Alfonso X, Aljamiado, Calila e Dimna, Conde Lucanor, Ibn Zuhr, Ladino Press, Libro del Caballero Zifar, Moriscos, Moshe ibn Ezra, Muqaddam al-Cabri, muwashshah, Scalerica de Oro, Sepharadim, Sephardic by David Wacks. Bookmark the permalink.
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‘Blade Runner’ Sequel Adds ‘Captain Phillips’ Co-Star Barkhad Abdi
More Stories By Erik
PBS Fall Slate: Dates For Ken Burns’ ‘Country Music’, New Contemporary History Series, ‘Poldark’ Finale & More
‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’ Sets Broadway Closing Date
Captain Phillips Oscar nominee Barkhad Abdi has joined Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright in the untitled sequel to Blade Runner. As has been the case with most casting announcements for the film, there are no details on his role. The cast also includes Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Carla Juri and Dave Bautista.
Denis Villeneuve is directing the Alcon Entertainment pic, whose story picks up several decades after the conclusion of Ridley Scott’s 1982 original. Production is set to begin next month. Warner Bros will open the film October 6, 2017. Sony has overseas rights.
Abdi made his acting debut as a Somali pirate in Paul Greengrass’ 2013 film Captain Phillips. Along with the Oscar nomination, he earned Supporting Actor noms for the role from the Golden Globes and SAG and won a BAFTA Award. Abdi appeared alongside Helen Mirren and Aaron Paul in thriller Eye in the Sky, which Bleecker Street opened in March.
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Letter from Lewis St. George Stubbs to his sister, Emmie, re: his law career, his vegan diet, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1905, pg. 1 (x) ›
Copies of correspondence between Emmie Kursteiner and E.T. Wood, Grand Turks Treasurer, re: mortgage payments, Cockburn Harbour, Turks Islands, 1948, pg. 1 (x) ›
"The Gazette - Turks and Caicos Islands," Vol. 90, No. 17, re: government notification, 1941, pg. 1 (x) ›
Lewis St. George Stubbs fonds
Lewis St. George Stubbs was born on June 14, 1878 in the Turks & Caicos Islands, British West Indies. He left Cambridge University, where he was studying to become a medical missionary, to fight in the Boer War 1900-1901. He immigrated to Winnipeg in 1902 and was called to the Manitoba Bar Association in 1906. In 1908 he and his wife moved to Birtle, Manitoba where he practiced law for fourteen years. In 1921 he ran unsuccessfully for the Liberal Party against T.A. Crerar the leader of the Progressive Party in the federal riding of Marquette. In April 1922 he became the first judicial appointment of the newly appointed Mackenzie King and moved back to Winnipeg. Stubbs was removed from the bench by order-in-council June 1, 1933 following an inquiry into his judicial conduct. A month later he won the nomination to become the C.C.F. party’s first candidate in a bye-election in the riding of Mackenzie in Saskatchewan. He lost the election and returned to the practice of law in Winnipeg. In 1936 Stubbs ran as an independent candidate in the provincial election and swept the polls with the greatest electoral majority ever recorded in the Manitoba Legislature. He won re-election in 1941 and 1945. Stubbs was active in many left leaning/united front political organizations. The digitized material from the Lewis St. George Stubbs fonds consists of correspondence between Stubbs and his family in the Turks and Caicos Islands, detailing his immigration to England and to Canada.
"The Gazette - Turks and Caicos Islands," Vol. 90, No. 17, re: government notification, 1941, pg. 1
Newspapers (1) + -
Turks and Caicos Islands (1) + -
Turks Islands (1) + -
Grand Turk (1) + -
Legislative Board of the Turks and Caicos Islands - Creator (1) + -
Roberts, I.A. - Contributor (1) + -
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767.405(9)(b) (b) The parties agree in writing to consider the property division, maintenance or child support issue.
767.405(10) (10) Powers and duties of mediator. A mediator assigned under sub. (6) (a) shall be guided by the best interest of the child and may do any of the following, at his or her discretion:
767.405(10)(a) (a) Include the counsel of any party or any appointed guardian ad litem in the mediation.
767.405(10)(b) (b) Interview any child of the parties, with or without a party present.
767.405(10)(c) (c) Require a party to provide written disclosure of facts relating to any legal custody or physical placement issue addressed in mediation, including any financial issue permitted to be considered.
767.405(10)(d) (d) Suspend mediation when necessary to enable a party to obtain an appropriate court order or appropriate therapy.
767.405(10)(e) (e) Terminate mediation if a party does not cooperate or if mediation is not appropriate or if any of the following facts exist:
767.405(10)(e)1. 1. There is evidence that a party engaged in abuse, as defined in s. 813.122 (1) (a), of the child, as defined in s. 813.122 (1) (b).
767.405(10)(e)2. 2. There is evidence of interspousal battery as described under s. 940.19 or 940.20 (1m) or domestic abuse as defined in s. 813.12 (1) (am).
767.405(10)(e)3. 3. Either party has a significant problem with alcohol or drug abuse.
767.405(10)(e)4. 4. Other evidence which indicates one of the parties' health or safety will be endangered if mediation is not terminated.
767.405(12) (12) Mediation agreement.
767.405(12)(a) (a) Any agreement that resolves issues of legal custody or periods of physical placement between the parties and that is reached as a result of mediation under this section shall be prepared in writing, reviewed by the attorney, if any, for each party and by any appointed guardian ad litem, and submitted to the court to be included in the court order as a stipulation. Any reviewing attorney or guardian ad litem shall certify on the mediation agreement that he or she reviewed it, and the guardian ad litem, if any, shall comment on the agreement based on the best interest of the child. The mediator shall certify that the written mediation agreement accurately reflects the agreement made between the parties. The court may approve or reject the agreement, based on the best interest of the child. The court shall state in writing its reasons for rejecting an agreement.
767.405(12)(b) (b) If after mediation under this section the parties do not reach agreement on legal custody or periods of physical placement, the parties or the mediator shall so notify the court. Except as provided in s. 767.407 (1) (am), the court shall promptly appoint a guardian ad litem under s. 767.407. Regardless of whether the court appoints a guardian ad litem, the court shall, if appropriate, refer the matter for a legal custody or physical placement study under sub. (14). If the parties come to agreement on legal custody or physical placement after the matter has been referred for a study, the study shall be terminated. The parties may return to mediation at any time before any trial of or final hearing on legal custody or periods of physical placement. If the parties return to mediation, the county shall collect any applicable fee under s. 814.615.
767.405(13) (13) Powers of court. Except as provided in sub. (8), referring parties to mediation under this section does not affect the power of the court to make any necessary order relating to the parties during the course of the mediation.
767.405(14) (14) Legal custody and physical placement study.
767.405(14)(a)(a) A county or 2 or more contiguous counties shall provide legal custody and physical placement study services. The county or counties may elect to provide these services by any of the means set forth in sub. (3) with respect to mediation. Regardless of whether a county so elects, whenever legal custody or physical placement of a minor child is contested and mediation under this section is not used or does not result in agreement between the parties, or at any other time the court considers it appropriate, the court may order a person or entity designated by the county to investigate the following matters relating to the parties:
767.405(14)(a)1. 1. The conditions of the child's home.
767.405(14)(a)2. 2. Each party's performance of parental duties and responsibilities relating to the child.
767.405(14)(a)2m. 2m. Whether either party has engaged in interspousal battery, as described in s. 940.19 or 940.20 (1m), or domestic abuse, as defined in s. 813.12 (1) (am).
767.405(14)(a)3. 3. Any other matter relevant to the best interest of the child.
767.405(14)(b) (b)
767.405(14)(b)1.1. The person or entity investigating the parties under par. (a) shall complete the investigation, prepare a report of the results, and, at least 10 days before the report is introduced into evidence under subd. 2., submit the report to the court and to both parties. The court may review the report, but may not rely upon it as evidence before it is properly introduced under subd. 2.
767.405(14)(b)2. 2. The report under subd. 1. shall be offered in accordance with the rules of evidence and shall be a part of the record in the action if it is so offered and admitted into evidence.
767.405(14)(c) (c) No person who provided mediation to the parties under this section may investigate the parties under this subsection unless each party personally so consents by written stipulation after mediation has ended and after receiving notice from the person who provided mediation that consent waives the inadmissibility of communications in mediation under s. 904.085.
767.405 History History: 1987 a. 355; 1989 a. 56; 1991 a. 269; Sup. Ct. Order No. 93-03, 179 Wis. 2d xv; 1995 a. 275, 343; 1999 a. 9; 2001 a. 61, 109; 2003 a. 130; 2005 a. 443 ss. 8, 56, 57, 181; Stats. 2005 s. 767.405; 2007 a. 187; 2009 a. 187; 2013 a. 334.
767.405 Note NOTE: 1987 Wis. Act 355 and 2005 Wis. Act 443 contain explanatory notes.
767.405 Note Judicial Council Note, 1993. Subsections (5) (a) and (14) (c) are amended because the rule of inadmissibility under s. 904.085 is not a privilege; it is waivable only if the parties stipulate that the mediator may conduct the custody investigation.
767.405 Annotation The director is an agent of the circuit court judges, and the director's statutory authority and responsibilities are to be carried out under the supervision of the circuit court judges. A collective bargaining agreement cannot trump such statutory, judicial branch authority because doing so would violate separation of powers principles. A collective bargaining agreement may not abrogate a statutory function of the judicial branch. Any such provisions in a collective bargaining agreement are invalid and unenforceable. Racine County v. International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, 2008 WI 70, 310 Wis. 2d 508, 751 N.W.2d 312, 06-0964.
767.407 767.407 Guardian ad litem for minor children.
767.407(1)(1) Appointment.
767.407(1)(a)(a) The court shall appoint a guardian ad litem for a minor child in any action affecting the family if any of the following conditions exists:
767.407(1)(a)1. 1. The court has reason for special concern as to the welfare of a minor child.
767.407(1)(a)2. 2. Except as provided in par. (am), the legal custody or physical placement of the child is contested.
767.407(1)(am) (am) The court is not required to appoint a guardian ad litem under par. (a) 2. if all of the following apply:
767.407(1)(am)1. 1. Legal custody or physical placement is contested in an action to modify legal custody or physical placement under s. 767.451 or 767.481.
767.407(1)(am)2. 2. The modification sought would not substantially alter the amount of time that a parent may spend with his or her child.
767.407(1)(am)3. 3. The court determines any of the following:
767.407(1)(am)3.a. a. That the appointment of a guardian ad litem will not assist the court in the determination regarding legal custody or physical placement because the facts or circumstances of the case make the likely determination clear.
767.407(1)(am)3.b. b. That a party seeks the appointment of a guardian ad litem solely for a tactical purpose, or for the sole purpose of delay, and not for a purpose that is in the best interest of the child.
767.407(1)(b) (b) The court may appoint a guardian ad litem for a minor child in any action affecting the family if the child's legal custody or physical placement is stipulated to be with any person or agency other than a parent of the child or, if at the time of the action, the child is in the legal custody of, or physically placed with, any person or agency other than the child's parent by prior order or by stipulation in this or any other action.
767.407(1)(c) (c) The attorney responsible for support enforcement under s. 59.53 (6) (a) may request that the court appoint a guardian ad litem to bring an action or motion on behalf of a minor who is a nonmarital child whose paternity has not been acknowledged under s. 767.805 (1) or a substantially similar law of another state or adjudicated for the purpose of determining the paternity of the child, and the court shall appoint a guardian ad litem, if any of the following applies:
767.407(1)(c)1. 1. Aid is provided under s. 48.57 (3m) or (3n), 48.645, 49.19, or 49.45 on behalf of the child, or benefits are provided to the child's custodial parent under ss. 49.141 to 49.161, but the state and its delegate under s. 49.22 (7) are barred by a statute of limitations from commencing an action under s. 767.80 on behalf of the child.
767.407(1)(c)2. 2. An application for legal services has been filed with the child support program under s. 49.22 on behalf of the child, but the state and its delegate under s. 49.22 (7) are barred by a statute of limitations from commencing an action under s. 767.80 on behalf of the child.
767.407(1)(d) (d) A guardian ad litem appointed under par. (c) shall bring an action or motion for the determination of the child's paternity if the guardian ad litem determines that the determination of the child's paternity is in the child's best interest.
767.407(1)(e) (e) Nothing in this subsection prohibits the court from making a temporary order under s. 767.225 that concerns the child before a guardian ad litem is appointed or before the guardian ad litem has made a recommendation to the court, if the court determines that the temporary order is in the best interest of the child.
767.407(2) (2) Time for appointment. The court shall appoint a guardian ad litem under sub. (1) (a) 1. or (b) whenever the court deems it appropriate. The court shall appoint a guardian ad litem under sub. (1) (a) 2. at the time specified in s. 767.405 (12) (b), unless upon motion by a party or its own motion the court determines that earlier appointment is necessary.
767.407(3) (3) Qualifications. The guardian ad litem shall be an attorney admitted to practice in this state. No person who is an interested party in a proceeding, appears as counsel in a proceeding on behalf of any party or is a relative or representative of an interested party may be appointed guardian ad litem in that proceeding.
767.407(4) (4) Responsibilities. The guardian ad litem shall be an advocate for the best interests of a minor child as to paternity, legal custody, physical placement, and support. The guardian ad litem shall function independently, in the same manner as an attorney for a party to the action, and shall consider, but shall not be bound by, the wishes of the minor child or the positions of others as to the best interests of the minor child. The guardian ad litem shall consider the factors under s. 767.41 (5) (am), subject to s. 767.41 (5) (bm), and custody studies under s. 767.405 (14). The guardian ad litem shall investigate whether there is evidence that either parent has engaged in interspousal battery, as described in s. 940.19 or 940.20 (1m), or domestic abuse, as defined in s. 813.12 (1) (am), and shall report to the court on the results of the investigation. The guardian ad litem shall review and comment to the court on any mediation agreement and stipulation made under s. 767.405 (12) and on any parenting plan filed under s. 767.41 (1m). Unless the child otherwise requests, the guardian ad litem shall communicate to the court the wishes of the child as to the child's legal custody or physical placement under s. 767.41 (5) (am) 2. The guardian ad litem has none of the rights or duties of a general guardian.
767.407(4m) (4m) Status hearing.
767.407(4m)(a) (a) Subject to par. (b), at any time after 120 days after a guardian ad litem is appointed under this section, a party may request that the court schedule a status hearing related to the actions taken and work performed by the guardian ad litem in the matter.
767.407(4m)(b) (b) A party may, not sooner than 120 days after a status hearing under this subsection is held, request that the court schedule another status hearing on the actions taken and work performed by the guardian ad litem in the matter.
767.407(5) (5) Termination and extension of appointment. The appointment of a guardian ad litem under sub. (1) terminates upon the entry of the court's final order or upon the termination of any appeal in which the guardian ad litem participates. The guardian ad litem may appeal, may participate in an appeal or may do neither. If an appeal is taken by any party and the guardian ad litem chooses not to participate in that appeal, he or she shall file with the appellate court a statement of reasons for not participating. Irrespective of the guardian ad litem's decision not to participate in an appeal, the appellate court may order the guardian ad litem to participate in the appeal. At any time, the guardian ad litem, any party or the person for whom the appointment is made may request in writing that the court extend or terminate the appointment or reappointment. The court may extend that appointment, or reappoint a guardian ad litem appointed under this section, after the final order or after the termination of the appeal, but the court shall specifically state the scope of the responsibilities of the guardian ad litem during the period of that extension or reappointment.
767.407(6) (6) Compensation. The guardian ad litem shall be compensated at a rate that the court determines is reasonable. The court shall order either or both parties to pay all or any part of the compensation of the guardian ad litem. In addition, upon motion by the guardian ad litem, the court shall order either or both parties to pay the fee for an expert witness used by the guardian ad litem, if the guardian ad litem shows that the use of the expert is necessary to assist the guardian ad litem in performing his or her functions or duties under this chapter. If both parties are indigent, the court may direct that the county of venue pay the compensation and fees. If the court orders a county to pay the compensation of the guardian ad litem, the amount ordered may not exceed the compensation paid to private attorneys under s. 977.08 (4m) (b). The court may order a separate judgment for the amount of the reimbursement in favor of the county and against the party or parties responsible for the reimbursement. The court may enforce its orders under this subsection by means of its contempt power.
767.407 History History: Sup. Ct. Order, 50Wis. 2d vii (1971); 1977 c. 105, 299; 1979 c. 32 ss. 50, 92 (4); 1979 c. 196; 1979 c. 352 s. 39; Stats. 1979 s. 767.045; 1987 a. 355; Sup. Ct. Order, 151 Wis. 2d xxv (1989); 1993 a. 16, 481; 1995 a. 27, 201, 289, 404; 1997 a. 105, 191; 1999 a. 9; 2001 a. 61; 2003 a. 130; 2005 a. 443 s. 25; Stats. 2005 s. 767.407; 2007 a. 20.
767.407 Note Judicial Council Note, 1990: This section clarifies and expands s. 767.045, as it was amended by 1987 Wisconsin Act 355. It also incorporates the substance of s. 809.85 into it. Sub. (1) (a) specifies the situations in which the court is required to appoint a guardian ad litem. Sub. (1) (a) 1. reflects the desirability of broad discretion for the court to appoint a guardian ad litem. Of special note is sub. (1) (b). While the court has always had the discretion to appoint a guardian ad litem in such situations, the committee concluded that it is desirable to specifically identify these situations as requiring special attention.
767.407 Note Sub. (2) is the present law which takes into account the need for mediation.
767.407 Note Sub. (4) defines the role of the guardian ad litem. It clarifies that the responsibility is as an advocate for the best interests of the child. It emphasizes the need for the guardian ad litem to function independently, while giving broad consideration to the views of others, including the children, social workers and the like. It also specifies that the guardian ad litem shall function in the same manner as the lawyer for a party. Among other things, this means that the guardian ad litem communicates with the court and other lawyers in the same manner as a lawyer for a party, presents information on relevant issues through the presentation of evidence or in other appropriate ways and generally functions as the lawyer for a party. In this case the “party" is the best interests of the children. Sub. (4) also enumerates specific duties to emphasize their particular importance.
767.407 Note The discretion for the guardian ad litem to communicate the wishes of the child in sub. (4) was added in 1987 Wisconsin Act 355, as was much of sub. (6). These are unchanged.
767.407 Note Sub. (5) specifies that the appointment terminates at the final order or the conclusion of the appeal unless the court otherwise directs. The court may reappoint or continue the appointment of the guardian ad litem after this but is required to state the scope of the responsibilities for such period. [Re Order effective Jan. 1, 1990]
767.407 Annotation If both spouses have ability to pay, each should be required to contribute to the payment of the guardian ad litem's fee, with the percentage to be paid by each to be determined in the court's discretion. Tesch v. Tesch, 63 Wis. 2d 320, 217 N.W.2d 647 (1974).
767.407 Annotation When the guardian ad litem's report was timely disclosed to both parties, the trial court did not err in failing to introduce the report during a custody hearing. Allen v. Allen, 78 Wis. 2d 263, 254 N.W.2d 244 (1977).
767.407 Annotation An increase of visitation rights from 24 days to 75 days per year had sufficient impact upon the welfare of the children to require the appointment of a guardian ad litem. Bahr v. Galonski, 80 Wis. 2d 72, 257 N.W.2d 869 (1977).
767.407 Annotation The appointment of a guardian ad litem pursuant to sub. (1) and s. 891.39 (1) (a) is mandated when paternity is questioned and also when there are special concerns. Special concerns arise when a child's welfare is directly at issue, as is the case when an existing family is disrupted. Johnson v. Johnson, 157 Wis. 2d 490, 460 N.W.2d 166 (Ct. App. 1990).
767.407 Annotation A guardian ad litem may not be called as a witness in a custody proceeding. The G.A.L. is to communicate with the court as a lawyer for a party and to present information by presenting evidence. Hollister v. Hollister, 173 Wis. 2d 413, 496 N.W.2d 642 (Ct. App. 1992).
767.407 Annotation A guardian ad litem could act in a separate action involving the child outside of the court of original appointment even though another guardian ad litem had been appointed by the court when the separate action was brought. Interest of Brandon S.S. 179 Wis. 2d 114, 507 N.W.2d 94 (1993).
767.407 Annotation The court's power to appropriate compensation for court-appointed counsel is necessary for the effective operation of the judicial system. In ordering compensation for court-ordered attorneys, a court should abide by the s. 977.08 (4m) rate when it can retain qualified, effective counsel at that rate, but should order compensation at the rate under SCR 81.01 or 81.02 or a higher rate when necessary to secure effective counsel. Friedrich v. Dane County Circuit Ct. 192 Wis. 2d 1, 531 N.W.2d 32 (1995).
767.407 Annotation The denial of a child's request to intervene in a divorce action was correct. The guardian ad litem fulfills the requirement that a child is entitled to representation. Joshua K. v. Nancy K. 201 Wis. 2d 655, 549 N.W.2d 494 (Ct. App. 1996), 94-3420.
767.407 Annotation Quasi-judicial immunity extends to a guardian ad litem's negligent performance in a divorce proceeding. Paige K. B. v. Molepske, 219 Wis. 2d 418, 580 N.W.2d 289 (1998), 96-2620.
767.407 Annotation Under sub. (6), if only one of the parties is indigent, the court may not order the county or the indigent party to pay guardian ad litem fees. The court's only option is to order the non-indigent party to pay. Olmsted v. Circuit Court for Dane County, 2000 WI App 261, 240 Wis. 2d 197, 622 N.W.2d 29, 00-0620.
767.407 Annotation The quasi-judicial immunity of a guardian ad litem described in Paige K.B. applies only to liability for the negligent performance of his or her duties, not as a shield against court-imposed sanctions for failure to obey a court order. Reed v. Luebke, 2003 WI App 207, 267 Wis. 2d 596, 671 N.W.2d 304, 02-2211.
767.407 Annotation The guardian ad litem is an advocate for the child's best interest, not a fact-finder or a consultant for the court. A trial court may decide, in individual cases, to weigh the guardian's recommendation more heavily than the other statutory factors, but the court cannot rewrite the statute to create a fixed hierarchy of factors. Goberville v. Goberville, 2005 WI App 58, 280 Wis. 2d 405, 694 N.W.2d 405, 04-2440.
767.407 Annotation A circuit court may not, when the issue is contested, determine the primary placement of a child without appointing a guardian ad litem for the child. Because the interests affected by the absence of a guardian ad litem are the child's and not the parties', neither parent is empowered to waive a child's right to have its best interests represented and advocated for in a placement proceeding, and the court will decline to address the issue on the basis of either waiver or the doctrine of invited error. State v. Freymiller, 2007 WI App 6, 298 Wis. 2d 333, 727 N.W.2d 334, 05-2460.
767.407 Annotation The “why" behind appointing guardians ad litem for children in divorce proceedings. Podell, 57 MLR 103.
767.41 767.41 Custody and physical placement.
767.41(1)(1) General provisions.
767.41(1)(a)(a) Subject to ch. 822, the question of a child's custody may be determined as an incident of any action affecting the family or in an independent action for custody. The effect of any determination of a child's custody is not binding personally against any parent or guardian unless the parent or guardian has been made personally subject to the jurisdiction of the court in the action as provided under ch. 801 or has been notified under s. 822.08, as provided in s. 822.06. Nothing in this chapter may be construed to foreclose a person other than a parent who has physical custody of a child from proceeding under ch. 822.
767.41(1)(b) (b) In rendering a judgment of annulment, divorce, legal separation, or paternity, or in rendering a judgment in an action under s. 767.001 (1) (e), 767.501, or 767.805 (3), the court shall make such provisions as it deems just and reasonable concerning the legal custody and physical placement of any minor child of the parties, as provided in this section.
767.41(1m) (1m) Parenting plan. Unless the court orders otherwise, in an action for annulment, divorce, or legal separation, an action to determine paternity, or an action under s. 767.001 (1) (e), 767.501, or 767.805 (3), in which legal custody or physical placement is contested, a party seeking sole or joint legal custody or periods of physical placement shall file a parenting plan with the court if the court waives the requirement to attend mediation under s. 767.405 (8) (b) or if the parties attend mediation and the mediator notifies the court under s. 767.405 (12) (b) that the parties have not reached an agreement. Unless the court orders otherwise, the parenting plan shall be filed within 60 days after the court waives the mediation requirement or the mediator notifies the court that no agreement has been reached. Except for cause shown, a party required to file a parenting plan under this subsection who does not timely file a parenting plan waives the right to object to the other party's parenting plan. A parenting plan shall provide information about the following questions:
767.41(1m)(a) (a) What legal custody or physical placement the parent is seeking.
767.41(1m)(b) (b) Where the parent lives currently and where the parent intends to live during the next 2 years. If there is evidence that the other parent engaged in interspousal battery, as described under s. 940.19 or 940.20 (1m), or domestic abuse, as defined in s. 813.12 (1) (am), with respect to the parent providing the parenting plan, the parent providing the parenting plan is not required to disclose the specific address but only a general description of where he or she currently lives and intends to live during the next 2 years.
767.41(1m)(c) (c) Where the parent works and the hours of employment. If there is evidence that the other parent engaged in interspousal battery, as described under s. 940.19 or 940.20 (1m), or domestic abuse, as defined in s. 813.12 (1) (am), with respect to the parent providing the parenting plan, the parent providing the parenting plan is not required to disclose the specific address but only a general description of where he or she works.
767.41(1m)(d) (d) Who will provide any necessary child care when the parent cannot and who will pay for the child care.
767.41(1m)(e) (e) Where the child will go to school.
767.41(1m)(f) (f) What doctor or health care facility will provide medical care for the child.
767.41(1m)(g) (g) How the child's medical expenses will be paid.
767.41(1m)(h) (h) What the child's religious commitment will be, if any.
767.41(1m)(i) (i) Who will make decisions about the child's education, medical care, choice of child care providers and extracurricular activities.
767.41(1m)(j) (j) How the holidays will be divided.
/statutes/statutes/767 true statutes /statutes/statutes/767/V/407 Chs. 765-770, The Family statutes/767.407 statutes/767.407 section true
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New Pat Liddy Walking Tour: From Green to Black & Gold
Pat Liddy's new tour From Green to Black & Gold is Free for all DoDublin Hop on Hop off and Day Tour Customers.
DoDublin have added even more value to our tickets by including a 2nd Walking tour Free with each Hop on Hop off tour ticket purchased.
The new tour starts from just beside our Hop on Hop off bus stop on St. Stephen's Green.
The DoDublin Bus Stop, Opposite The Little Museum of Dublin, in St. Stephen's Green - Where the free Walking tour begins.
It will be available from May until the end of September 2019 and will depart every Friday and Saturday at 11.30am. The tour is 90 minutes in duration. The normal cost of this tour is €12.
Tour Summary
This new tour is unique because it brings you to parts of the city that are rarely seen by visitors, but which were once the heart of Dublin city in "the rare old times" You'll be shown ancient sites, historic churches, including Whitefriar Street Church, (which contains the remains of the famous St Valentine) and many hidden gems as you travel from St. Stephen's Green, passing St. Patrick's Cathedral, once home to Jonathan Swift (author of Gullivers Travels),
then through the LIberties Quarter, an area steeped with history and home to some of Dublin's top whiskey distilleries. Towards the end of the tour you'll arrive at Guinness Storehouse
and nearby Pearse Lyons Whiskey Distillery, where you'll have the option to purchase tickets for either at a discounted rate.
Pearse Lyons Distillery on James's Street
You are here: Home > New Pat Liddy Walking Tour: From Green to Black & Gold
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02 October 2012 5:52 PM
It's not hard to work out why our politicians are changing their minds about the benefit system
The cherished certainties upheld by our political masters and intellectual betters sometimes seem so firmly set that they can never be altered. And then, suddenly, the wind changes.
If you google back a couple of years, you will turn up headlines in which Tory hero Boris Johnson was vowing never to tolerate ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’.
The cause of this strong language was the Coalition’s benefit policy, introduced by Iain Duncan Smith, which introduced the first caps on the level of means-tested benefits people were entitled to claim. Housing Benefit was going to be limited to £400 a week for a family, and Boris thought this would mean the eviction of thousands.
The Mayor’s deep feelings were undoubtedly to do with the looming 2012 London election and his perception that less well-off voters are in love with the welfare benefits system.
So now, not quite two years later, we have Mr Duncan Smith’s Labour shadow Liam Byrne on the radio, talking about Coalition plans for a national benefit cap.
How apocalyptic do you think Mr Byrne was?
‘It would make much more sense to have a different cap in different parts of the country,’ he said.
Not much social cleansing there.
How about medical testing of people making claims for Disability Living Allowance, a £12.6 billion a year benefit paid to those who claim an impairment or health condition, and which, in the past, was awarded to half of all those who claimed it without any medical check at all?
The tests need fast reform, Mr Byrne said, because they are too bureaucratic. ‘The principle of the test is absolutely right.’
Our politicians seem, over a period of a few months, to have fallen out of love with the benefits system. Mr Byrne’s view was that ‘the truth is that social security today doesn't enjoy widespread support’.
He added: ‘For many people in work, they don't actually feel they get much out for the pressures that they have to contend with in everyday life.’
The BBC’s Today Programme prefaced its Byrne interview with a few words from an apparently randomly-selected young working class man about the benefits system, in which he deplored large numbers of people who fail to work because they say they are depressed or have bad backs.
The surprise is not that you can find an ordinary person who takes this line, but that the BBC broadcast it so prominently. The shock was as if you were listening to searing allegations of long ago child abuse on Newsnight, and suddenly you heard the name Jimmy Savile rather than the Roman Catholic Church.
It is not hard to work out why our politicians are changing their minds about the benefit system. Their polling is telling them to.
They look at things like the British Social Attitudes survey, an annual snapshot with no reputation for right-wing savagery, which reported last month that nearly two thirds think benefits are too high. This ‘suggests a fundamental long-term change in attitudes towards welfare and benefit recipients,’ researchers said.
This week Demos, a think tank closely linked to Tony Blair in the days when Blair was ratting on his promises to reform the welfare system, came up with the number of people who would like to see benefit claimants issued with a spending card rather than cash, so as to limit the things that they can buy.
Two thirds wanted a bar on welfare money being used for gambling; half wanted a block on claimant spending on tobacco and alcohol; just under half wanted to stop benefit money going on branded goods like trainers; more than a third wanted to ban spending on holidays.
Politicians should not have needed British Social Attitudes or Demos to tell them this. They should have looked at the government poverty figures which have showed numbers of working people on poverty line incomes rising since 2004, long before the recession.
They should have realised that working families who face tough competition for jobs and decent wages do not like paying high taxes to keep their shiftless neighbours untroubled by the need to earn.
What they actually did was to urge more mothers to go out to work. Then they wondered why it wasn’t making them popular.
We now seem to have an end to the dominating consensus, unbroken since the 1960s, which says that welfare is a right rather than a safety net and that no-one is out of work through their own fault.
If the major political parties can at last summon the courage to reform the benefits system, the rewards for the rest of us could be great.
Gordon Brown’s tax credits, designed to persuade single mothers to work at least part time, cost nearly £25 billion a year and serve both to depress the incomes of everyone else and to discourage couples from living together. It is time tax credits were questioned.
Mr Duncan Smith is already onto the Disability Living Allowance mentioned above. The price to the nation of that one and tax credits together would pay for David Cameron’s high speed railway line to Birmingham, in a year.
Beyond disability payouts, Housing Benefit costs us around £15 billion. Income Support for those who say they cannot work, around £8 billion. Council Tax Benefit for claimants of these, another £3 billion.
We are getting close to the cost of building the Boris Island airport by now.
And if the sacred cow of the benefits system turns out to be more of a dead duck, what about other untouchable pillars of the state that are supposed to be so widely loved that they are beyond serious reform?
Perhaps one day politicians might start to consider how popular with their voters the NHS really is.
October 2, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (10)
Has your tax money been spent in Equador, building a theme park to mark the equator...in the wrong place?
News from Ecuador, where visitors flocking to a theme park exploiting one of the country’s best-known features may, it turns out, be in for a disappointment.
The government-owned Middle of the World park has stalls selling tat, bands playing Andean pipe music who are as good as you will find in any Essex shopping mall, and food stands where you can buy a lunch of roast guinea pig.
The heart of the attraction is a monument in the shape of a globe, which marks 0 degrees latitude, and a viewing platform with a yellow trail to represent the very line of the equator. Tourists love to stand with one foot in the northern hemisphere and one foot in the southern. Great picture for holidaymakers to send to friends and family, me standing right on the equator.
Only they’re not.
Let the Ecuadorian Ministry of Tourism explain: ‘Unfortunately, in the 1990s scientists discovered that the monument is actually about 1,000 feet south of the true equator.’
The story of how the equator theme park came to be built a few hundred yards away from the equator is a bit murky, but it seems the place was first picked out as a tourist site in the 1930s, when the local builders did not have the advantage of satellite technology.
The current 100 foot-high marker was put up in the late 1970s, and it may have been that the architects decided not to be too picky about the exact location. Some say the real equator runs through a nearby ravine which made it hard to build on the right line.
And there’s another joke about the tourist industry in Ecuador, a country in which things are often not quite what they seem.
You have been paying for it.
The British Government and British taxpayers, we have been assured, do not give aid money to Ecuador. Dear me no. Not any more, anyway not for a few years now.
Yes, but that’s bilateral aid, paid directly to recipients in Ecuador. What about multilateral aid, the kind which goes through international agencies on its way to the deserving poor? That’s our money too.
The total amount of British taxpayers’ money paid to Ecuador in aid through middlemen in 2010, the last year for which figures are available, was £2.3 million. Not the biggest slice of the budget David Cameron is proudly devoting to international aid – a figure set to reach £13 billion next year – but it would pay the wages of a soldier or two.
The bulk of it went through the Global Fund, an American-based health agency which spent £1,347,000 of British money on projects to combat Aids, tuberculosis and malaria.
However a further £490,000 from the British aid budget went into Ecuador in 2010 through the European Union, which is financing a series of programmes including a number intended to generate ‘sustainable economic opportunities’.
During the 1980s and 90s, the sustainable economic opportunities subsidised by Brussels with our money included many in tourism. It is as hard to find exactly where the money went as it is to work out why someone put the Ecuador government’s equator theme park some distance from the equator.
What about the rest of your money?
Roughly £250,000 of it was spent in Ecuador in 2010 by various UN agencies, by an environmental organisation called the Global Environment Facility, and by the Regional Development Bank.
Another sum of around £200,000 from Britain was spent by the UN refugee agency UNHCR on its programme in Ecuador. Among purposes to which this money has been put is improving refugee registration, providing refugees with identity documents, and ‘the processing of asylum claims and documentation’.
So, your money may or may not have been spent developing a theme park with no reason to exist. It has, however, certainly been used to assist the Ecuador government and President Rafael Correa in their mission of providing asylum to Wikileaks fugitive Julian Assange.
Mr Assange, who is wanted by Swedish police to answer questions about allegations of rape and sexual assault, took refuge in the Ecuador embassy in Knightsbridge over three months ago. The Supreme Court has ordered his extradition to Stockholm.
He is inside the embassy with a camp bed and a treadmill for exercise. Police are outside with the dual purpose of controlling demonstrators and nabbing Mr Assange should he try to make a run for it.
Estimates of the legal and policing costs of the circus run somewhere north of £1 million. The scene shifted this week to the UN headquarters in New York, where Ecuador Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told Foreign Secretary William Hague that by refusing to allow Mr Assange to leave the embassy, Britain is infringing his human rights.
Ecuador, a country where those who criticise the President are liable to find themselves out of a job, facing fines in the millions of dollars, sentenced to jail, or all three, has become the protector of Mr Assange and a champion of freedom of speech.
And we are paying the bills for this nonsense at both ends.
You shouldn’t laugh at the Assange circus any more than you should laugh at the Middle of the World not being at the middle of the world. The joke’s on you.
September 28, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (2)
So Mr Mitchell, let's talk about what makes someone a 'pleb'
Andrew Mitchell has done us all a favour by raising the important question, what is a pleb?
The class system is terribly complicated these days and many of us are unsure exactly where we stand, until put in our place by someone like Mr Mitchell.
We all know that the old working class collapsed after the 1980s, and that the biggest chunk of it adopted the values and ethics of the middle ground. A smaller bit gave up and became the benefit dependent class, about five million strong.
My favourite definition of that vast middle ground is people who have a job, a mortgage and a car.
Thanks to the Coalition Chief Whip, we can begin to break these masses down further. Let’s consider two new groups, whom we can identify on the one side as plebs, and on the other, those that people like Mr Mitchell might call people like us.
The Oxford English Dictionary says that a pleb is a member of the ordinary people or working classes, or, in the derogatory sense, an unsophisticated or uncultured person.
The dictionary also says that in Westminster School slang it means the son of a tradesman, but that’s a matter for Nick Clegg rather than Rugby-educated Mr Mitchell.
Once upon a time a policeman would certainly have been working class. But police sergeants in London these days are likely to be earning the best part of £50,000 a year, and more when you include overtime. That puts them well into the higher tax bracket, and probably into Mr Clegg’s top 10 per cent, ripe to be hammered with new taxes.
So the best guess is that Mr Mitchell, after his frustrating day in an upmarket curry house, meant to call the Downing Street police officers unsophisticated or uncultured.
What makes you unsophisticated or uncultured? Watching the X Factor? Watching a TV history of the world presented by Andrew Marr? Watching the football on Sky, instead of just pretending to the voters that you do?
Is it flying with Ryanair rather than on a scheduled airline, turning left at the plane door? Is it going to Florida for your holidays rather than New England? Is it having a flat or a semi-detached house, and only one of them?
It is certainly what school you went to. Many who failed to go to an independent school may speak in a manner Mr Mitchell finds unsympathetic, and a high percentage will not know what plebeian means.
It is also going into hospital somewhere that has crowded wards packed with sick and lonely old people, where the nurses are too busy to notice the patients, and where young men can dial 999 to beg the police for a glass of water, and then still die of thirst. The people like us go to hospitals where everybody has a private room and chooses their meals from a menu.
The people like us go to the country at weekends. Plebs go on weekend breaks to Barcelona or hen trips to Prague.
The people like us also, let’s face it, often have breeding. Mr Mitchell’s father is a retired wine merchant and head of the historic El Vino company who was a junior minister in the 1980s. Trade perhaps, but very far from pleb.
Part of not being a pleb is having plenty of money. Mr Mitchell worked for Lazards and in a number of other well-rewarded jobs in the City. His investments in a tax efficient property scheme attracted some critical attention. But despite the current reputation of the banking industry, he can still look down on plebs.
It doesn’t matter how you acquired your money. There are people who, in Mr Mitchell’s view, are to be respected because they help ‘run this ****ing government’, whose parliamentary expenses claims looked less than high-minded. Including Mr Mitchell himself, who did not shrink from claiming 13 pence for Tippex and 45 pence for a stick of glue.
Being a pleb is not a matter of party allegiance. The Labour leadership long ago purged the plebs, leaving only a token figure to pretend to the rest of them that they still mattered.
John Prescott was the last of the Labour plebs, defined by his pride in having a Jaguar or two and his anxiety to protect his wife’s hairdo. He was a figure out of a British film or play from around 1937, the forelock-touching working class character there to give us all a laugh before we move on with the serious people.
Perhaps that definition of the middle ground – a job, a mortgage, a car – is what makes somebody a pleb now. The expansion of the middle classes never happened, in the eyes of our betters. Rather, as far the people like us were concerned, the real change was that everybody else turned into plebs.
Mr Mitchell doesn’t need a job, I doubt he has much in the way of mortgages, and you will recall that the Gategate affair kicked off about his bike.
There remains one difficulty, which is how a pleb behaves. The policemen in Downing Street were, as most policemen still are, scrupulously polite. Mr Mitchell’s behaviour, according to the police report now published, is reminiscent of no-one more than John Terry.
The former England football captain, in his charmless and disastrous on-field rant at Anton Ferdinand, used only one printable word. That was the word ‘black’, the one that got him into trouble. Mr Mitchell has far too much in the way of brains to have said anything racially incendiary. But from his foul-mouthed attack on the police, one of the few pertinent words that could be published was ‘plebs’.
Terry has plenty of money, which he made himself from giving honest entertainment to the public, and he’s not a pleb. Technically, he’s a chav.
But Andrew Mitchell, Rugby, the Royal Tank Regiment, Cambridge, Lazards, Secretary of State for International Development, Chief Whip, has no class.
Charles needs to learn to be less heavy-handed, and not just when it comes to protecting his daughter-in-law's reputation
I fully understand the anger of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at those pictures. I can see why William wants to suppress them and protect his wife. I can see why his father feels an urgent need to help.
But I think the Prince of Wales is getting this one badly wrong.
I am taking it as read that Charles is pulling the strings as his law firm, Harbottle and Lewis, uses French privacy law and a regiment of European lawyers to harass Closer magazine.
The lawyers are also chasing the photographer who took the long-range snaps of Kate on the balcony in Provence.
Charles is, after all, the one with the money to pay the bills, and he is the one who is in Britain to give the instructions while William and Kate have been carrying out a very traditional Royal tour on the other side of the world.
It’s a mistake. First of all, it isn’t going to work. The French magazine has taken its profit already. The pictures are on newsstands in Italy and it seems that 60 are about to be published in a Danish celebrity magazine. Others may follow.
I am no expert in online communication or social media. But it took me roughly 15 seconds to turn the pictures up on the internet. Like the mobile phone images of Prince Harry BARE ASS NAKED, to use the words of the website that published them, anyone who wants to see them can.
Harbottle and Lewis can brief lawyers in any court they like anywhere in the world, but it won’t make the slightest bit of difference. The European gossip magazines and the tat websites are all building up their libraries of the naked young royals, much like children once collected cigarette cards.
I’ve got a Harry and a Kate. Swop you for a William and a Pippa.
But the Duchess pictures aren’t respectable. No British newspaper or magazine will touch them. The Irish newspaper that did is much chastened by the wrath of its owner. American publications, with the greatest legal protection for freedom of speech anywhere on the planet, have so far been slow to buy.
Charles doesn’t need lawyers to protect the Duchess from seeing the pictures in the mainstream British media.
Last month Charles’ lawyers became very heavy-handed over the Harry images, which you will remember stemmed from the Prince’s invitation to a number of young women to join him in his Las Vegas hotel suite, together with their smartphones.
Despite these circumstances, the lawyers firmly warned the press about how private they were. ‘The only possible reason for publication of the photographs is one of prurience and nothing more,’ they solemnly advised.
This too did nothing to keep the pictures out of the public eye. When two British newspapers actually did publish them, nothing happened.
Two newspapers, you ask? Yes. One was the Sun, the other the Church Times, which printed the Sun’s Harry front page to illustrate a newspaper review.
It is true that the Church Times likes its occasional joke, but I think Harbottle and Lewis will have a hard time making their prurience charge stick there.
That brings us to problem two, which is that the effort to suppress the Kate pictures doesn’t look good.
Police raids of magazine offices to try to track down offending photographers are illiberal, however you look at it. The disgraceful snapper, whoever they may turn out to be, broke no law except the ones about privacy.
Kate’s balcony performance was visible from a public road, for those with suitable optical gear. Nobody trespassed or caused damage. Nobody harassed or chased her to get the pictures.
So we are left with the legal notion of privacy. And privacy is politically controversial.
Privacy is a matter for continuing rows between Parliament and the courts, for arguments among MPs and between judges, and, this autumn, for the report of a major judicial inquiry with wide and serious implications for the way national life is conducted in a number of areas.
It is a field which the heir to the throne might think it wise to stay as far away from as possible.
Charles has never been slow to involve himself in political controversy. He has repeatedly pressed on the public his views on architecture, the environment, literacy. Sometimes this has been unwelcome to people with an interest in the matters in question.
A High Court judge has now sent the Prince of Wales a clear warning about this. Seven government departments are, unless Charles makes a successful appeal, about to publish the ‘black spider’ letters which he has dashed off to Cabinet ministers down the years.
The judge, Mr Justice Walker, said that Charles’ opinionated letters were not written as part of any of his constitutional roles or duties and are not protected by any constitutional safeguard. They are merely lobbying, in the same way as letters from any individual or business.
There is an obvious model Charles could learn from in this. In her 60 years on the throne, the Queen has had the constitutional right to be consulted on what her ministers are doing, to encourage and to warn them.
Over that time, there has never been a breath of a hint that she has been overbearing or has misused her influence. You can bet that if she had done you would have heard about it long ago.
Charles, as he gets nearer to taking the throne himself, needs to learn similar discretion. He could start by using softer, more subtle, and probably more effective methods to protect his daughter-in-law from embarrassment.
And the Duchess, freshly back from the South Pacific, will just have to wash those snaps right out of her hair.
The unstoppable march of China? Stable nations with booming economies don't get into fights over small groups of islands (we should know)
Economists talk an awful lot of rubbish, and they probably talk more rubbish about the Far East than any other part of the world.
In the late 1980s, every day brought new dire warnings from highly-trained and deeply knowledgable experts on how Japan was going to take over the world. Japanese expansion was unstoppable and the West was doomed.
You could not argue with these people. You could point out that Japanese prosperity from the 1950s onwards was based on exports to the West, and so if western economies collapsed it was unlikely that Japan would continue to boom, but they wouldn’t listen.
You could tell them about the 'Yellow Peril', a scare as popular among our Edwardian predecessors as climate change is with people who should know better today.
This had it that the Chinese, Japanese, or whichever Asian group happened to be in mind at the time, were going to breed like rabbits and take over the world. Kaiser Wilhelm ll is said to have coined the phrase, before he engaged Europe’s attention in its own little internal arguments.
The Yellow Peril turned out to be, like global warming, hot air. But it lived on as the as the deep-rooted and unsavoury foundation of the views of apparently sane economic pundits.
In the recession of the early 1990s Japan’s outrageously high property prices turned out to be one ginormous bubble and its economy has been struggling to recover ever since. Mired. Pretty much stagnant. Famous companies running into trouble. Nobody says any more that Japan is taking over the world.
What happened was that after Japan had grown by undercutting Western industry with cheaper and better goods, Asian rivals learned to do the same to Japan.
Enter China.
We have had a number of years of hearing the same sort of wise predictions about China as we had two decades ago about Japan. Chinese wealth and power is taking over the world, we are assured. It is unstoppable. There are so many of them, and they work so hard for such low pay. Their vast army and their aircraft carriers, warplanes and space satellites will reduce the rest of us to submission.
It has never been hard to detect a trace of the old Yellow Peril racism behind all this. It has however, been harder to argue with people who seemed to assume that Chinese economic expansion would go on at increasing speed for ever.
Arguing may get easier from now on, because all the signs are that China has just hit the wall.
As with Japan before her, China shows all the signs of suffering because of recession in the West. Factories closing, unemployment in the cities, and so on. The pressure is now taking effect in a worrying mixture of internal political upheaval and belligerence abroad.
British people will be familiar with the kind of national anger that can be stoked up in unstable countries over the ownership of small islands. This is now happening in China over the obscure Diaoyu group.
As is inevitably the case of all good disputes over uninhabited islands, there is supposed to be oil under the surrounding seas.
And the country currently in charge in the islands – the Senkaku islands if you are Japanese - is Japan, and China has never forgiven Japan for the bloodletting and terror of the occupation that ended in 1945.
This is a historic wound that is still open. There has never been a major attempt to settle differences, no effort to form an alliance or understanding, no moving symbolic moment such as Francois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl achieved for France and Germany by holding hands at the Verdun battlefield in 1984.
In Britain people whose grandfathers and grandmothers would never buy German cars in the 1950s are proud to drive Minis built in a German-owned factory. In China Japanese companies, including Honda, Nissan, Mazda and Canon, are busy shutting down their factories in fear of demonstrations and attacks.
Just to make sure nobody is missing the message, China has in the best Argentinian style despatched a fleet of fishing boats to the islands, with the aim of winding up the Japanese coastguard.
We appear to have a classic case of an international row developed to divert attention from political trouble at home. The fall of Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai and the subsequent show trials of his wife, for murdering British fixer Neil Heywood, and his police chief who tried to flee, remind us that China continues to be governed by a dictatorial Communist Party elite whose methods would be familiar to Stalin and Mao.
The disappearance and reappearance of Xi Jinping, shortly before his expected coronation as president, is another highly unusual sign that, beneath the opaque surface, something rough is going on.
Where does this leave China’s march to worldwide economic domination? Stuck up a blind alley, looking for the way out, is the answer. Western investors have been given a nasty shock. If Honda have to shut down plants in China, what confidence does that give everybody else?
What if there is a dispute with America next? You can write off a current argument over Chinese subsidies for car part factories as Obama electioneering. But there is a second row, over a US decision to send missile defence radars to Japan, which has an altogether more sinister echo of the Cold War.
China is still trying to curry favour and win friends in the West, as you will have noticed if that paid-for China Daily supplement fell out of the middle of your newspaper this morning, bearing exciting news about a debate over private hospitals.
But the signs from Beijing are pointing the other way. What China needs is not advertising, but stable government, a reliable legal system, and good relations with its neighbours. It is increasingly obvious that the lack of any could hurt its economy even harder than the recession.
If all they've got to worry about is a handshake, then football reform has been an unsung success
Many of us have been looking for a token to show that the Olympic interlude is over and we are all back to normal. We now have the definitive sign that the brief reign of sportsmanship and fellowship is finished, thanks to our Premier League footballers.
Officials at Queens Park Rangers and Chelsea, we have been told, are in negotiations over the difficulties presented by this weekend's fixture. Appeals have been made to fans for good behaviour, and the Metropolitan Police are involved.
At the heart of the dispute are the figures of John Terry and Anton Ferdinand, who continue to fight the battle they started in a QPR-Chelsea match last October, after which Ferdinand accused Terry of racist abuse.
There is a pre-match set piece in which both teams shake hands, in the name of respect. Ferdinand , it seems, means to avoid shaking Terry’s hand. He may also decline to greet Chelsea left back Ashley Cole, on the grounds that Cole stood up for his team-mate at Terry’s spectacular trial in July.
I took a certain amount of criticism last October for suggesting that making a complaint about racial abuse on the pitch would do no good for Anton Ferdinand, nor for Patrice Evra, who made a similar complaint after a match between Liverpool and Manchester United, nor for anybody else.
Nearly a year on, I note that three of the clubs in the argument have changed managers in unhappy circumstances that cannot be divorced from the race controversy. England lost their manager. John Terry has been cleared in a criminal trial that showcased the depths of foul abuse to which footballers routinely subject each other on the pitch. He still faces an FA charge.
Police and prosecutors have made fools of themselves and of laws that were not designed to settle personal disputes between footballers.
If there is any evidence that the cause of defeating racism has been served in the smallest measure by any of this, I would like to see it. Perhaps Garth Crooks can provide some.
Yet still it goes on, although now it has all been relegated to the inside back pages. We are at the point where Anton Ferdinand is apparently refusing to shake the hand of a fellow black footballer, because he showed loyalty to a colleague.
Perhaps it would be easier if players were to wear distinctive badges when they line up for the pre-match ritual. They could be white for racist, pink for homophobe, green for climate denier, red for Glenn Hoddle attitudes to disability, yellow for a drunk, blue for a dangerous driver, brown for a choc ice.
They would act as a handshake guide, and give the Sky commentators something to say in the boring bit before a match begins. Will Carlos Kickaball shake with the opponent who got coked up and insulted a bridesmaid at his cousin’s wedding? We’ll be back after the break.
Let’s imagine, shall we, Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis, Bradley Wiggins or Katherine Grainger refusing a handshake to an opponent during a medal ceremony, on the grounds that they were subjected to severe personal abuse during a race. No, me neither.
But I think we should take a cue from the Olympics, from the closing ceremony, and look on the bright side.
The ridiculous QPR-Chelsea posing comes in a week when we have been horribly reminded of what football was like not much more than 20 years ago.
For me, it was the pictures of Hillsborough that brought it all flooding back. They have more in common with the 1920s than the modern age. The 1989 pictures of Sheffield are not so different from those of the overcrowding at the 1923 cup final, when vast numbers flooded onto the Wembley pitch and were by legend kept in check by one policeman on a white horse.
We too easily forget the horrors of football in the 1970s and 80s. The Ibrox disaster of 1971, 66 dead; Bradford, 1985, 56 dead in a fire; Heysel, two weeks later, when Liverpool fans stampeded in Brussels and 39 Belgians and Italians died.
These disasters could have happened any weekend, at any match. Grounds and their approaches were dangerous. Violence and mass thuggery were an everyday matter, and crowds were controlled accordingly. Young news reporters of my generation were routinely assigned to football matches not because large-scale disorder was possible, but because it was expected.
While we take in the lying and industrial-scale evidence rigging by the South Yorkshire Police and look for the criminal charges that must surely follow, we should not forget the achievement of Lord Justice Taylor, who wrote the original report on Hillsborough.
Taylor did not produce a whitewash. His findings, unwelcome to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and many others, squarely blamed police incompetence for the Hillsborough deaths and firmly rejected the notion that Liverpool fans were to blame. Taylor savaged the football authorities, for their ancient rickety unsafe stadiums, their crude terraces and cages, and the general contempt with which they exploited their customers.
The judge, who died in 1997, condemned abusive, obscene and racist chanting.
His report, delivered swiftly after Hillsborough, led rapidly to all-seater stadiums in the top divisions. It was instrumental in the gentrification and renewal that has in turn made billions for those who run football.
We no longer get the open, blatant viciousness, racial and otherwise, that once disfigured the grounds.
This weekend, the biggest worry in advance of a set of Premier League fixtures is who is going to shake whose hand when the teams run out at Queens Park Rangers. And that, by any measure you like, is a success.
How the Law Commission is turning divorce into easySplit, and making a mockery of the principle of marriage
Getting divorced is a painful and difficult thing. You probably hadn’t worked that out for yourself, so a quango stuffed with eminent lawyers and judges has taken it upon itself to tell you so.
Since divorce is awful and miserable, the quango in question, grandly called the Law Commission, thinks we ought to do something about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get rid of all that ‘acrimony and wasted costs’?
This is a favourite song of the great and good of the legal profession, the state-funded charities and the counselling groups, the liberal academics and the think tanks which get reported by the BBC. The tune hasn’t changed in 50 years.
And whenever a government has listened and done something about it, the result has been a disaster.
It was the Law Commission – set up by Harold Wilson in the 1960s – which drew up the 1969 Divorce Reform Act. This was widely regarded as a long-delayed and absolutely necessary piece of legislation. It got rid of all that uncaring need to prove fault, with resulting embarrassing court cases, when a couple divorce.
The new law brought in two and five-year waiting periods for divorce by separation, and the quickie, which can take only six months, when someone accepts their behaviour was at fault.
So in one well-designed swoop, our finest legal planners freed unhappy married couples from their bonds, took the pain out of divorce, cut excessive legal costs, rationalised the process of separation, and empowered future generations of women.
Well, they would have done, if only people had behaved the way they were supposed to.
What we got was more lawyers, more costs, and, above all more divorce. In 1968 there were just under 46,000 divorces. That more than doubled by 1972, trebled by 1979, and peaked in 1993 at over 165,000.
Given the very well documented damage caused by divorce to adults and children, I would not be confident in saying the 1969 Act did very much to free people from misery and pain.
Instead the 1969 Act gave us broken families in the millions, complete with child custody struggles and endless battles over who gets the house.
It paved the way for millions more to cohabit rather than marry – what is the point of marriage when divorce is so common? As a result we have ever-growing numbers of single parent families left behind when those cohabitations end, which happens, by the way, rather more than three times faster than even modern marriages break up.
Perhaps it might have been better if the law had encouraged all those people trapped in unhappy marriages to stick with it, rather than get divorced, which didn’t seem to make them any happier after all.
The Law Commission, consistent if nothing else, has continued to try to put things right, always in the name of getting rid of that acrimony and those costs. It should change its name to easySplit.
It designed John Major’s 1996 Family Law Act, which took the remaining idea of fault, so Victorian and barbarian, out of divorce. It also tried to force couples to go through the newly-fashionable process of mediation, in the name of getting rid of that acrimony and those costs.
Guess how well it worked? After a few test runs, which showed that divorcing couples were still stubbornly acrimonious, Tony Blair killed it off in 2001.
One thing you can say for the Law Commission, it doesn’t go away. It has called for a cohabitation law to do for cohabiting couples all that enlightened divorce law has done for the married.
Now it wants sweeping new legislation to tidy up the question of who gets the money when a married couple breaks up, because, according to Commissioner Professor Elizabeth Cooke, ‘most people agree the current law is inadequate’.
So look forward to formal legislation on prenups, keeping hold of your premarital money, and rules on how much each partner can expect to get after they divorce.
The one thing you can guarantee there will not be is the much-touted arithmetical formula to decide who gets what. This is because even if it works in Canada it won’t work here, and because the judges will never wear it.
All this touches on a larger question. As put by Professor Cooke, the Commission is ‘looking at the boundaries of the sharing principle’ and considering ‘how far the law should be incentivising independence’.
Funny how we have been told for years by all the best-trained people that money and the law cannot possibly encourage people to marry or stay married. But now all of a sudden it can ‘incentivise independence’.
What this scheme means is a further radical reform of marriage itself. Marriage is no longer considered a useful platform for bringing up children. If you break the marriage contract the law takes no notice. Now the anachronistic idea that a marriage is for life and the husband and wife share everything is to go.
Will there be much left?
This scheme will land on David Cameron’s desk some time next year. We already know this is a Prime Minister who regards marriage chiefly as a useful vehicle for gathering votes.
Tax support for married couples? Yes, but only in the election campaign.
Roll on a party conference and there’s not much to say, the Prime Minister asks his aides for some popular, cost-free ideas. Alcohol-free zones in pubs? No, unworkable. Compulsory cross-country running for all school pupils? No, too Eton. Same-sex marriage? Brilliant, let’s say we are doing it because we are Conservative, that’ll put the Nasty Party to bed.
If Mr Cameron has a scrap of sense left, he will thank the Law Commission generously for its expensively-prepared proposals, before dropping them into the round file.
The day after the victory parade for Team GB which included Derek Derenalagi who was declared dead in Afghanistan after losing both his legs in an IED incident, we have another opportunity to marvel at human achievement.
The sixth anniversary of L/Bdr Ben Parkinson's accident is a time for looking at real human success: real determination and will power. From being told he would not walk or talk again, Ben walked on his C Legs to carry the Olympic torch and is relentless in his work to get better, from physiotherapy and speech therapy to sky diving and adventure sports with his beloved Pilgrim Bandits charity.
It's all a far cry from a pampered, distorted view of the world which some people hold, where criminals are admired and worshipped and seemingly permitted to break the law. And what's more, some of these criminals are funding the very people who are responsible for the attacks on our servicemen and women.
The Hawley Arms in Camden, the hang out of the late Amy Winehouse, is where evidence of this topsy turvey world presents itself for all to see. Alongside parking attendants who turn a blind eye at ticketing illegally parked cars as long as they're friends with the bouncer, music festival casualties rub cheek by jowl with middle class girls who have ditched their smart clothing and opted for car boot sale chic in order to catch the eye of edgy musicians.
Shuffling around like some failed extra from Last of the Summer Wine was one such musician, former bandmate of Pete Doherty and fellow heroin addict who goes by the name of Wolfman. One presumes that come a full moon he doesn't run out into the wilderness. These girls who will have friends, fathers, brothers - boyfriends even - in the Armed Forces and so inevitably will be or have already served in Afghanistan are declaring themselves "starstruck" by an ex-lag heroin addict who does a jolly good impression of a soap dodger.
Heroin addiction helps fund the Taliban. It helps fund people who kill and maim our troops: people like Ben Parkinson and Derek Derenalagi.
There are roughly three levels of Taliban fighter, all linked in some way to the trade in opium. The top level are the fanatics; the organisers, those utterly absorbed in the cause of militant Islam. The second are supporters, mid ranking men who could one day be persuaded to follow a different path. Who may see the benefits of a country not at war. The third are the ten dollars a day fighters. They need the money for their families and are paid far more by the Taliban to pick up an AK-47 than they are farming wheat. The weapons get hidden in hay bales and amongst farming tools when the Western patrols come round but need for money and a fear of the Taliban drives them from being on side with British troops, informing on the whereabouts of IEDs and opposition fighters, costing time and lives.
So where is the glamour in supporting these people? Why do people allow themselves to forget the deadly links when faced with a lyrical lag who has no intention of giving up an illegal habit and only thinking about his own need and not the consequences of his actions? He may be able to afford it and cast off concerns of the crime associated with drug use but many addicts can't. Certainly the self confessed methadone addict who approached me outside Camden station, wearing no shoes and declaring she was 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo', begging for cash and to be taken seriously, cannot say the same.
Role models come in all shapes and sizes but when they are supporting terrorism, surely it's time to stop glamourising everyone with a record deal and money in the bank?
A memo for the new Transport Secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, by the ministry’s permanent secretary, Sir Ged Busslaine...
I am lucky enough to have acquired a copy of a memo prepared for the new Transport Secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, by the ministry’s permanent secretary, Sir Ged Busslaine.
In some network error, it popped up on my computer while I was trying to book baggage onto easyJet.
I share it with readers because it sheds some light on the development of Government policy concerning airport capacity in the South East.
‘Patrick,
‘I would like to welcome you to the Department, where you will find many of your new colleagues greatly supportive. It is refreshing to have a minister whose chief priority in recent years has been loyalty to his leader, whoever that may have been, and who arrives untainted by any apparent opinion or convictions.
‘Given our current need to calm popular misconceptions over airports around London, it is with special warmth that I greet a new Secretary of State whose constituency is in Derbyshire and who enjoys a majority on a scale that provides immunity from any temporary misunderstanding that may grip the electorate.
‘Because of my confidence in your ability to come to an unbiased and responsible view of the matter, I will set out frankly for your earliest consideration our internal departmental analysis of advantages and disadvantages of the two main alternatives for future London airport development.
Heathrow:
‘Some London MPs, are strongly opposed to further development. This is for the basest of electoral reasons, and their protests should be ignored in the national interest.
‘Heathrow has the benefit of being there, and it costs nothing extra to keep it there.
‘It is within convenient reach of Westminster for ministers, civil servants, visiting foreign statesmen and dignitaries, and for such MPs as we may choose to favour with places on fact-finding visits to warm and distant countries.
‘Road links are good for those who travel in motorcades escorted by the Metropolitan Police. Alternatively, experiments conducted during the Olympics with what were vulgarly termed Zil lanes have demonstrated that we can at any time revive special road arrangements for those on vital national business without provoking widespread disorder.
‘Rail connections are good for those who use them. There is a tube line with a journey time from central London roughly the same as that of a flight to Paris, and a railway branch line that for some reason connects with Paddington, which leaves a further half hour journey to the City. This is entirely adequate for those who feel they need to fly for common commercial reasons.
‘There is an excellent environmental case. We can show that carbon emissions from aircraft arriving and departing at Heathrow are very much the same as they would be were they to arrive or depart from anywhere else.
‘Heathrow aircraft noise is much exaggerated by troublemakers. Those who live under the flight paths are used to it and would probably lose sleep if it was taken away. Look at Windsor Castle. Has the Queen complained lately?
‘In order to maintain emissions at the low level necessary to meet the Government’s green targets, we discourage extra air traffic as far as possible. In furtherance of this objective, we should delay the construction of any third runway at Heathrow. With any luck, it will be a decade before we have to take any decision.
‘We can then use the £10 billion cost of the runway to pay for more wind farms in the Thames Estuary.
Boris Island:
‘Is in the wrong place. Does the Cabinet Secretary wish to drive through the East End every time he needs to catch a plane?
‘It would be very expensive. To raise the necessary £100 billion, we would first need to cancel the HS2 rail line to Birmingham. This would go down very badly with our European partners, in whose interest it is being built. We would lose a vital link between Birmingham, Brussels and Paris, and we would lose influence in the EU.
‘It would be environmentally disastrous. The loss of Thames Estuary wind farms would be damaging to the Government’s green targets.
‘We would have to build new housing on the land freed by the closure of Heathrow and its surrounding miles of car parks and chain hotels. This would undermine our longstanding commitment to using the need for housing development as a reason for getting rid of the green belt.
‘We would interfere with bird life. In particular, the inevitable night flying that would follow the establishment of flight paths over the sea would disturb large numbers of gull families. Research conducted for us by the Alfred Hitchcock Environment Institute suggests this may provoke violent retaliation by some species.
‘Construction would result in the possible extinction of the Lesser Pockmarked Lugworm. We would face powerful opposition from the animal rights lobby.
‘The development of Boris Island would be greatly to the convenience of millions of people in the south east and, indeed, in other regions. For this reason it would be deeply environmentally damaging. It is important to maintain our long-standing policy of not encouraging the lower orders to move about unnecessarily.
‘A decision quietly to shelve Boris Island would have the political advantage of smoking out the Mayor of London’s campaign against the Prime Minister and bringing it into the open, where it can more easily be dealt with.
‘By the way, we have some tickets for the end of season at Glyndebourne if you’d like to pop down with us some evening. We’ll have to leave the office early. The traffic’s terrible.
Yours, Ged’
September 6, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)
When it comes to our rights, the real Supreme Court is in Strasbourg
IT was the Brokeback Mountain incident that did it for me.
Even if you have been following the long-running Christians vs The Rest legal series, you may be puzzled over how the Hollywood film about two gay cowboys gets involved. Don’t worry, the dispute went right through the British court system all the way up to the grandeur of the Appeal Court and the wisdom of Lord Justice Laws without anybody noticing it much.
It all came out, though, in front of the more-or-less distinguished judges of the European Court of Human Rights.
What happened was this. Gary McFarlane, a counsellor with Relate, went on a course on psycho-sexual therapy with the aim of furthering his career. During the course, he made a mistake. There was a screening of Brokeback Mountain and he didn’t go.
Mr McFarlane says he was tired. His colleagues, however, were suspicious. They knew Mr McFarlane was a Christian. They began to think he might be one of those homophobes.
The upshot was a series of interviews with bosses – I don’t know if they were done under hot white lights but that would have been in keeping with the general atmosphere – during which Mr McFarlane was questioned about his attitudes. They ended up with him getting the sack because of his uncertainty about whether he would, if asked, give sex advice to gay couples.
There is a lesson for us all here. Personally, I’m getting the DVD out today, and I’m making sure the CCTV cameras catch me doing it, and I’m keeping the receipt.
I wonder however, how many supporters of the gay lobby, those with a deep horror of the McCarthyite purges of Hollywood in the 1950s, or a dim recognition that Stalin’s enforcement of CPSU discipline in the 1930s might have been somehow morally flawed, are worried about the way Mr McFarlane was treated.
The British courts, I think, got it wrong. Here is Lord Justice Laws fulminating against the repressive evils of religious dictatorship while throwing Mr McFarlane’s case out in the Appeal Court in 2010.
'The precepts of any one religion - any belief system - cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens, and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.'
Autocratic? Poor Gary McFarlane? And he is, by the way, because these days he finds it difficult to get another job, what with the homophobia.
Far from treating anyone as less than a citizen, Mr McFarlane never actually refused his counselling services to anybody. He had worked with gay couples, without complaint.
There is a genuine political battle going on here, and the courts are in the middle of it. Parliament has voted repeatedly for legislation that outlaws discrimination against same-sex couples, and judges properly take note of that. But not everybody agrees, and that leaves minority individuals with moral misgivings about gay rights, what was Lord Justice Laws’ phrase? Out in the cold.
Yet we are supposed to respect minority beliefs, and our constitution still reserves a special place for the Church of England. Lord Justice Laws observed that 'the liturgy and practice of the established Church are to some extent prescribed by law.'
Well, I ain’t no lawyer, but that’s wrong. There’s no some extent about it. They are. Full stop.
If a milk-and-water organisation like Relate is going to sack a previously valued employee because of doubts over his ideological position on gay rights, what happens when you come to a hard case like Islington council?
The judges of the European Court of Human Rights, as mentioned above, are now deliberating that question alongside the matter of Mr McFarlane and Brokeback Mountain, and that is a real failure for British justice.
We have been hearing from lawyers for a decade about the benefits of the Human Rights Act, which wrote European human rights rules into British law. Under its terms, British judges would conduct a balancing act, weighing one set of rights against another in each case, and deciding where the interests of justice weighed heaviest.
They have come nowhere near to doing so in the case of Mr McFarlane and three other Christian cases thrown into Strasbourg this week: sacked Islington registrar Lilian Ladele, and Nadia Eweida and Shirley Chaplin, the women who wanted to wear crosses with their work uniforms.
The Human Rights Act has given judges enormous new powers to make the law, which they have not hesitated to use, and yet in these key cases their rulings have fallen short of settling a British political and constitutional argument of the first importance.
So once again we go to the European judges, who assume their role as Britain’s real supreme court. That building opposite the Palace of Westminster fitted out with expensive judges and even more expensive carpets designed by Peter Blake? That’s not a Supreme Court. It’s just for show. It’s a costly annex to the Court of Appeal with no genuine purpose. It can’t decide a thing. The final word is spoken in Strasbourg.
Of course, the European human rights court shouldn’t be in Strasbourg at all. There are some decent restaurants, but the wine is a bit downmarket for the delicate palates of all those lawyers. Best to shift the court a bit southwards to a real trencherman’s city where there is plenty of fine burgundy. Next time, throw the Christians to Lyons.
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Ex-Starbucks CEO Blasts Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Un-American’ Ideas
Liberals are infuriated that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is mulling entering the 2020 presidential contest as a third-party and have redirected a good chunk of the hate mob from President Trump to bully and threaten a man who in only a matter of days, has exposed their radicalism.
Schultz’s new book came out on Monday and he has been making the media rounds in support of it but is also using the spotlight to express his dismay with the Democrats and their transformation into a socialist rat pack led by the buck-toothed former bartender and media superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
AOC has in less than a month put her stamp on a party that was already careening toward communism with her “Green New Deal” and calls for a 70 percent tax rate on productive people and it could be that Schultz is the perfect foil.
Via Fox News, “Howard Schultz, ex-Starbucks CEO, calls Ocasio-Cortez’s ideas ‘misinformed,’ ‘un-American'”:
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who is seriously considering running a run for president as an Independent, called the billionaire-bashing ideas of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., “misinformed” and “un-American” at the first stop of his book tour Monday night in New York City.
When asked about how her advisers have said American billionaires are evidence of policy failures and a failure of the system, he replied: “It’s so un-American to think that way.”
He continued about taking advantage of the opportunities in life presented to him: “I am self-made. I came from the projects and took advantage of the promise of the country. I am living proof of the American Dream.”
Just last week, Ocasio-Cortez told a crowd in New York City that “a world that allows for billionaires” is immoral, although she did point out that not all billionaires themselves are immoral, noting the philanthropy of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
Ocasio-Cortez, Pocahontas and Comrade Bernie have been the vanguard of the class warriors who have taken advantage of the lack of leadership to set a new course for the Dems but now the class war may have been joined by a man who doesn’t have to worry about the dirty money of the billionaires Soros and Steyer who are underwriting the left’s communist revolution.
This is gonna be one helluva show.
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ADA Coalition Member Profile: Sally Walsh
After DRM Brings Suit, DHHS Agrees to Accommodation Process for Sec. 19 Recipients Affected by 40 Hour Cap
Deaf Man Prevails in Movie Theater Case as Department of Justice Issues Rules
Cross-Program Collaboration at DRM
May is Better Speech & Hearing Month!
Do You Have Combined Hearing & Vision Loss? iCanConnect Can Help!
DRM Blog Archive
Governor’s Budget Repeals Legal Interpreting Fund
by Riley Albair
Access to justice is vitally important. Without it, individuals are unable to have their voices heard, exercise their rights, challenge discrimination, or hold decision-makers accountable.
For Mainers who are deaf[1], access to justice includes the elimination of communication barriers when attempting to obtain legal services and representation.
Attorneys have a responsibility to provide deaf clients with accommodations that they may need to communicate. For nearly 30 years, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has required public accommodations, including attorneys engaged in private practice, to provide equal access to their services.[2] This includes providing sign language interpreters, real-time captioning, or other auxiliary aids and services necessary to ensure effective communication with clients who are deaf.
Maine, unlike most states, opted for several years to provide funding for free interpreters for private attorneys. The Legal Interpreter Fund was available to private lawyers and advocates who could use the fund to pay for qualified sign language interpreters or real-time captioning services to meet with deaf clients.[3] This funding was unique. Hospitals, doctor’s offices, and other professionals, in contrast, have long been expected to meet their equal access obligations on their own.
Recently, the Legal Interpreter Fund was repealed in the Governor’s budget. After learning of the repeal of the fund, the Division for the Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Late Deafened, together with DRM, announced the change to the public. The announcement acknowledged the misunderstandings regarding equal access obligations that the Legal Interpreting Fund may have created:
“Access to justice is vitally important of course, but by establishing and maintaining this fund, we may have inadvertently sent a message to some Maine lawyers that interpreters are readily available to them at no cost. The message we want to send is that effective communication is vital for all of us when we engage a lawyer, a doctor or any other professional and that Deaf people are entitled to services that create effective communication.”
Regardless of this change, equal access remains an obligation for private attorneys. Attorneys are required, under state and federal law, to provide qualified interpreters or real-time captioning when needed to represent clients who are deaf.
DRM Deaf Services provides advocacy and representation to deaf Maine residents to ensure access to effective communication, including in legal settings. We will continue to advocate for those who have trouble accessing interpreter services, and we will continue to train our communities on civil rights and equal access. Together with our partners, the Division for the Deaf, Hard of Hearing and late Deafened, the Commission for the Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Late Deafened, and the Maine Deaf Rights Group, we will continue to work ensure equality and communication access for all.
[1] The term “deaf” is to be interpreted to include individuals who may identify as Deaf, deaf, hard of hearing, late-deafened, and deaf-blind.
[2] Title III of the ADA, 42 U.S.C. §§ 12181-89, provides people with disabilities the right to equal access to public accommodations. Both Title III of the ADA, and the regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Justice pursuant to Title III, 28 C.F.R. Part 36, specifically include the offices of lawyers in the definition of public accommodations. 42 U.S.C. § 12181; 28 C.F.R. § 36.104.
[3]For more information, see Division for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing webpage on Legal Interpreting. https://www.maine.gov/rehab/dod/legal_interp_info.shtml
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Mohamed Dekkak & Classic Cars
/ Blog /
/ Mohamed Dekkak & Classic Cars
by in Who is Who
Car Model: Cord 812 Classic
Year Make: 1936
Details: A luxury automobile and a collectible classic; 1st American front-wheel driver car with independent front suspension.
Mohamed Dekkak with 1936 Cord 812 Classic
Car Model: Bentley S1
Details: Designed as luxury model. Produces with S: 3072 (145 with coachbuilt bodies) S long wheelbase: 35
Mohamed Dekkak & Bentley S1 1958
Mohamed Dekkak with Lilit Avetikyan & Bentley S1 1958
Car Model: Jaguar Winner Le Hans 1951-3
Details: XKC 008 Chassis; 1st C-Type delivered new to the United States. Major wins 1951 24 hours of Le Mans (Peter wallker/Peter Whitehead in XKC 003)
Mohamed Dekkak with Jaguar Winner Le Hans 1951-3
Car Model: Mercedes-Benz 170S Classic
Details:This 170S Cabriolet is one of 813 units built between 1949 and 1952. It was brought to the United States in 1951 by a United States Army Office.
Mohamed Dekkak with Mercedes-Benz 170S 1950 Classic
Car Model: FERRARI CLASSIC 250 SWB CALIFORNIA 1961
Details: It’s te classic embodiment of the sports car. the 11 most expensive cars ever sold at auction. Ferrar’s most successful early line of sports car.
Mohamed Dekkak with FERRARI CLASSIC 250 SWB CALIFORNIA 1961
Car Model: Land Rover Series 1 80inch
Details: 80-inch (2.03 m) wheelbase and a 1.6-litre petrol engine producing around 50 bhp (37 kW; 51 PS). The four-speed gearbox from the Rover P3 was used, with a new two-speed transfer box. This incorporated an unusual four-wheel-drive system, with a freewheel unit (as used on several Rover cars of the time)
80-inch (2.03 m) wheelbase and a 1.6-litre petrol engine producing around 50 bhp (37 kW; 51 PS). The four-speed gearbox from the Rover P3 was used, with a new two-speed transfer box. This incorporated an unusual four-wheel-drive system, with a freewheel unit (as used on several Rover cars of the time)
Mohamed Dekkak, Honorary President of The Moroccan Association of Ibn Battuta and Mustapha Oudadess, Secretary General of Tangier-Tetouan-El Hociema Region at the Art Exhibition as a part of International Frstival of Ibn Battuta (Festival of Peace and Tolerance)
Guest Speakers at the Opening Ceremony of the International Festival of Ibn Battuta (Festival of Peace and Tolerance - Universal Values)
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The Psychopathology of Judaism
by Der Stürmer
Source: https://www.counter-currents.com/2010/10/the-psychopathology-of-judaism/
By Hervé Ryssen
Judaism is not merely a “religion,” as many Jews are overt atheists or agnostics, and they do not consider themselves less Jewish for all that. Jewry is also not a race even if it is true that a “trained eye,” most of the time, can recognize a Jewish appearance, that is to say, a characteristic pattern which is the result of their strict observance of endogamy for centuries. Jews see themselves as the “chosen ones” of God, and marriage outside the community is strictly frowned upon. However, mixed marriages do exist and have also helped to renew the blood of Israel during all the centuries spent in the various ghettos where the Jews preferred to live, separately and apart from the rest of the population. The essential condition for such mixed marriages is that the mother be Jewish, since Orthodox Rabbis recognize as Jewish only the child born of a Jewish mother. However, having just a Jewish father or grandparent can suffice for a person to identify completely with Judaism. Jewishness is therefore a “mental race” that has been shaped over the centuries by the Hebrew religion and the universalist project of Judaism.
Judaism is a Political Project
Judaism is essentially a political project. It is important for Jews to work toward the emergence of a world at “peace,” a peace meant to be universal and permanent. It is therefore not a coincidence that this word “peace” (shalom in Hebrew) is found frequently in Jewish discourse worldwide. In the perfect world that they are building, all conflicts will disappear between the nations. This is why Jews have been militating tirelessly for many years for the abolition of all borders, the dissolution of national identities and the establishment of a global empire of “peace.” The very existence of separate nations is considered to be responsible for the triggering of wars and turmoil. so they must be weakened and eventually replaced by a world government, a “one world government,” a “New World Order,” one single world-ruling authority that will permit happiness and prosperity to reign, Jewish-style, on earth.
We find this idea more or less developed both in the writings of certain intellectual Marxists such as Karl Marx himself and the Jewish-French philosopher Jacques Derrida and also in the discourse of liberal thinkers such as Karl Popper, Milton Friedman and France’s Alain Minc. The idea is to unify the world by all means necessary and to generate cultural conflicts that will weaken nation-states. It is for this One World that intellectuals Jews labor tirelessly all over the world. Whether they call themselves left- or right-wing, liberal or Marxist, believers or atheists, they are the most ardent propagandists of the pluralistic society and of universal miscegenation, that is of racial mixture.
Thus, all their strength the Jews – basically, ALL the vocal Jews in the world – encourage non-white immigration into every country in which they are located, not only because the multicultural society is their fundamental political aim, but also because the disintegration of national identity in each nation and the massive presence of anti-white immigrants is designed to prevent the original white population from succeeding in any nationalistic outbursts against the Jewish sway over finance, politics, and the media. All Jewish intellectuals, without any exception, are focused on this question of building the “pluralistic society” and for this they practice constant “vigilance against racism.” In France, influential writers and journalists such as Bernard-Henri Levy, Jacques Attali, Jean Daniel, Guy Sorman, and Guy Konopniki agree on pluralism and anti-racism despite their political divergences in other areas. This obsession, which is very characteristic of Judaism, is also manifested in movies, where many producers and directors are influential Jews. As soon as a film starts defending and promoting interbreeding, “tolerance” and pluralism, we can be sure that the producer of it is Jewish.
Now we can understand better why the former communists and leftists of the 1970s did not have to make such a big leap to become today’s “neoconservatives.” They have merely switched to a different strategy to achieve the same goal: the rule by racially pure Jews over a racially mixed society.
The fact is that after the Palestinian intifada began in October 2000, the Jews in France and the rest of the Western world have realized that nowadays the danger to their interests and their project comes primarily from Islam and from young African immigrants, both Arabic and black. Their aim is to strengthen the modern race-mixing and race-blending society, which they have contributed so much to establish in our country of France. But this mosaic now threatens to break up into separate communities, and this the Jews do not want. They want no separate identities or separateness at all, except a separate Jewish identity and Jewish separateness. Former Marxists in France such as Alexandre Adler, André Glucksmann, and Pascal Bruckner thus support nowadays, along with Alain Finkielkraut, the right-wing, pro-Washington, pro-Zionist party of Nicolas Sarkozy. And yet they have not become French patriots. They react only for the exclusive benefit of Jewry, asking, as American Jews proverbially do on every issue: “Is it good for the Jews ?”
“Tolerance” as a Weapon
The members of the Jewish sect are the most proselytizing people on earth, but unlike Christians or Muslims, who dream of converting all peoples of all races to their faith, the Jews have no plan to convert the world to their own faith, Judaism, but simply to encourage other nationalities to give up their national and religious identities – and live only for the goal of “tolerance.” The unceasing campaigns to blame all Whites for slavery, colonialism, the plundering of the Third World or for Auschwitz have no other purpose than putting the opponent on the defensive, and getting him on his knees not by violence but via guilt. When the Jews are the only people left on earth who are keeping their faith and their traditions, they will finally be recognized by everyone as God’s “chosen people.”
Their “mission” (and Jews frequently use this term “mission”) is to disarm the other peoples, to dissolve anything which is not Jewish or Jewish-controlled, to grind the people down to a powder for making a new identity-free work force, and thus to favor a universal “peace” among the peoples who have no more “divisive” identities.
As their prophet Isaiah said: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the tiger will rest with the kid, the lion and the ram shall live together, and a young child will lead them” (Isaiah 11: 6-9). The Messiah, coming from Israel, and awaited for three thousands years, will establish anew the kingdom of David and will give the Jews an empire over all the earth. And certain Jewish texts explicitly call for this.
Jews are therefore continuously encouraged to campaign, in whatever society they inhabit, in order to promote the unification of the world – and thus to also hasten the arrival of their promised and cherished Messiah. Propaganda is a Jewish specialty, and it is no coincidence that Jews become so influential in all the media. In their hands, the concepts of “tolerance” and “human rights” have become incredibly efficient weapons of white guilt and accusation against the majority culture. In fact, it is not through Jewish-sounding names or a Jewish physical appearance that we can best recognize Jews, but rather from what they write and say wherever they are on earth.
Selective Amnesia and Fabulation
Many Jews, as we know, played an absolutely huge role in the Soviet tragedy 1917-1991 and the thirty million deaths that marked this era. Let us remember that Karl Marx was born into a Jewish family and that Lenin himself had a Jewish maternal grandfather, that Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik founder and head of the Red Army, was born a Bronstein, while Kamenev (real name: Rosenfeld) and Zinoviev (real name: Apfelbaum) were running the two Bolshevik-conquered capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg. But the list of Jews who stood out in the mega-crimes of Communism is endless. It must be said and it must be repeated: Jewish officials and Jewish torturers bore a very heavy responsibility in this tragedy. The “perfect” world they concocted and which was supposedly “historically inevitable” turned out from the very beginning to be a nightmare for the Russian population. It was not until 1948 when the Jewish intellectual elite Jewish began distancing itself from the Stalinist government, and this was only because Stalin had launched his “anti-Zionist” campaign, meant to purge pro-Israel Jews from senior leadership positions.
This indisputable Jewish guilt for the gigantic crimes of Bolshevism is now systematically being shoved down the Memory Hole (the phrase from George Orwell’s 1984). In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 2002 book Two Centuries Together, the Nobel Laureate and 11-year veteran of the Bolshevik gulag expresses outrage that Jewish intellectuals were still refusing to recognize their ethnic responsibility in the slaughter of millions of Christians. Solzhenitsyn also denounces modern Jews who pose as victims of an “antisemitic” Bolshevik government when that government was in fact heavily Jewish and Jews were among the worst perpetrators.
This selective amnesia is necessary for a people who ceaselessly proclaim their “innocence” of any provocative acts, as we regularly note in their writings, for example in an editorial in Israel magazine of April 2003, “the first Israeli monthly magazine in the French language” written under the name of a certain André Darmon.
He wrote: “To kill a Jew or a child makes God cry, for we are exterminating [in the Jew] the bearer of universal ethics and innocence.”
No less!
With this mindset of absolute innocence Jews cannot conceive bearing any responsibility for their atrocities. Jews are only victims, only “scapegoats” in an evil and hostile world. But very soon the Messiah will punish the “wicked” and will restore the victimized sons of Israel to their full rights.
Nevertheless, in this same Israel magazine editorial, a certain Frederick Stroussi asserted that the Nazi government was worse than the Stalin regime. He quoted the cruelties he claimed were perpetrated by certain SS men. For example, we learn from Stroussi that the Latvian SS man Cukur’s hobby was to toss Jewish babies in the air to shoot them in their head as in skeet shooting. He also writes of other episodes, such as the rape of children by the SS before they killed them. The Second World War has certainly stimulated the fertile imagination of the children of Israel.
Or perhaps this imagination is once again a case of the Jews’ own “projection” syndrome, that is, accusing others systematically of one’s very own crimes as a matter of consistent PR policy: always attack. We know in fact – even if the media never speak about it – that many Jews and their rabbis are involved in the felony crime of pedophilia (see Psychanalyse du Judaisme, 2007).
And murdering a child would seem to be more a Jewish specialty than a characteristic of the SS mind. The revelations of tenured professor Ariel Toaff of Bar Eilan University in Israel – the son of the former Grand Rabbi of Rome – and buttressed in February 2007 by his 147-page, heavily footnoted, scholarly work Pasqua di Sangue [ Blood Passover] – reveals proof of ritual murder among some Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of Eastern European origin).
Emotional Fragility
We outsiders are thus supposed to understand that the sufferings of Jews cannot be compared to those of any others. As a consequence, we are supposed to get as indignant as they do when a serious historian such as Stephane Courtois states (in the preface of his famous Black Book of Communism): “The death of a Ukrainian child of Kulak origin [ from the independent farmer class] who is deliberately forced to starve to death by the Stalinist government is as significant as the death of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto.” These simple words were enough to provoke the ire of Frederic Stroussi who declares he was “stunned” by such an affront. Such a remark, according to him, was “despicable” and represented a vulgar attack against Israel: “What does this comparison have to do here?” he writes. “Why do we have to use the slaughter of a Jewish child to transmit this underlying, false and hateful rumor that the Jews overshadow all other victims of totalitarianism and monopolize all the attention on themselves?”
The author of the article, as we can notice, reacts in a outraged and totally disproportionate way to the modest and certainly justified intentions of the level-headed historian Stephane Courtois. Stroussi demonstrates here the “great intolerance to the frustration” which are so characteristic of the Jewish intellectual. Such reactions are clearly not “normal.”
We note that Israel magazine is a monthly magazine designed for the Jewish community and that, consequently, one can hardly accuse Frederick Sroussi of lying to goyish readers, or hiding from the goyim the true nature of Bolshevism and the supposedly malefic cruelty of the SS. His discourse here does not correspond to any false dialectic, as anti-Semites claim, but here, in this magazine by and for Jews, he is reflecting, as a Jew among Jews, writing to Jews, the very essence of their soul: 1) We are always innocent – and 2) Jewish lives are more valuable than those of others.
There is an “attack anti-Semitism” that stems from a failure to understand the Jewish identity and only sees deliberate perfidy where there is in reality a genuine existential anxiety, one generated by a deep psychological dysfunction.
Hysterical People
The Jews have never dared to collectively approach the mirror on their inner lives represented by Freudian psychoanalysis, a prism through which the Jews claim to see all humanity, but which, on closer analysis, sheds far more light on the specific neuroses of Judaism. Psychoanalysis, like Marxism, is a “Jewish science” and a product of the Jewish mind. It was therefore logical to wonder how this Freudian “discovery” corresponds to Jewish specificities.
The answer was not initially obvious to the author, and it took the reading and analysis of hundreds of books of all kinds, mostly written by Jews themselves, for him to realize that the searing question of incest stands at the throbbing heart of the Jewish question, and not theoretically either.
Jewish mothers do love their sons, as is well known, but outright incest is at the origin of a well-known mental illness – one that especially afflicts Jews – called “hysteria.” Incest attracted early the attentions of Freud while he was developing his theories. The parallels between Judaism and hysterical pathology are quite natural.
Jewry is well-known for these syndromes: Hysteria, depression, introspection, amnesia, manipulation, pathological lying, ambivalent identity, prophetic deception, sexual ambiguity, and so on. Every Jewish symptom is found in hysteria.
Freud, as a loyal Jew, merely projected the traits of a specific community onto the rest of humanity. In reality, there is no “Oedipus complex” but rather an Israel complex (all Jews together technically being Israel, not just the Near Eastern state). In fact, Jews do not seem to really wish to discuss the topic of incest within their families. On the other hand, all the psychiatrists mention: “The hysterical woman so much wants a child from her father or her doctor that she can persuade herself that she is pregnant by one of them and thus develops a ‘nervous pregnancy.’”
It is interesting that all Jewish writers use the same term to refer to the coming of their Messiah, namely, the “delivery” of the Messiah. The whole Jewish community, we must understand, is “the wife of God” (the Shekhinah of the Kabbalist) who is some day supposed to give birth to the Messiah, and thus the whole of Jewry is indeed suffering from a “nervous pregnancy” not unlike that found in nervous, hysterical women.
Karl Kraus, the Austrian Jewish journalist who did not agree with Freud, wrote sarcastically: “Psychoanalysis is the mental illness of which it claims to be the cure.” But the right and the best formula can be stated in ten words: “Judaism is the disease that psychoanalysis is meant to cure.”
The Sexual Revolution
After Freud, other Jewish thinkers came along who produced a symbiosis between Freudian doctrine and Marxism. Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse preached sexual revolution in order to break down the patriarchal family and unleash “free sex.” Their theories largely inspired the student riots of May ‘68. The 1970s saw a new wave of Freudo-Marxism and Jewish women were in the forefront (such as Gisele Halimi and Elisabeth Badinter in France and Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem in the USA). As time passed, a series of Jewish-inspired laws appeared, one after the other, designed to dissolve the family. In France, a Neuwirth-promoted law legalized the contraceptive pill (1967), then came the challenge to the authority of the father as head of the household (1970), then divorce by mutual consent (1974) and the “right” to abortion promoted by “Holocaust survivor” Simone Veil (1975). A great wave of movie porn accompanied this “liberation” from traditional family values. Here we are compelled to note that Jewish producers and film directors play a very important role in the sex film industry. (See my La Mafia Juive [The Jewish Mafia], 400 pages, 2008). Parallel to this, the Freudian concept of bisexuality favored the acceptance of overt “gay pride” and homosexuality.
A War Machine against Humanity
In fact, the only tangible results of this moral “liberation” was the systematic demoralization and criminalization of the white man, who is denounced tirelessly in movies, literature and history as the cause of all the planet’s ills and of the collapse of the West. The appeal of egalitarianism – as intended by Jewry – tends to level all ethnic differences and identities and brings about their slow destruction.
Yitzhak Attia, director of French-language seminars at the Yad Vashem Holocaust institute in Tel Aviv wrote this himself in the same issue of Israel magazine:
Even if reason tells us, even shouts with all its force the very absurdity of this confrontation between the small and insignificant people of Israel [i.e, all Jewry worldwide, not just “the State of Israel”] and the rest of humanity… as absurd, as incoherent and as monstrous as it may seem, we are engaged in close combat between Israel and the Nations – and it can only be genocidal and total because it is about our and their identities.
You read it right : Between the Jewish people and the rest of humanity the struggle can only be “genocidal and total.” The “peace” which Israel intends to confer is no more and no less than “genocide,” the warrant for the execution of all humanity – except for those allowed to live as cultureless slaves.
The Neutralization of the Devil
The question is whether the aggressiveness of Judaism can be neutralized in order to save humanity from its evils, evils that could prove even more serious than Marxism such as psychoanalysis and the ideology of globalism. First of all, we must face the facts: After all these centuries of mutual misunderstanding, the anti-Semitic Christians, the Muslims, and Hitler have all failed to resolve the Jewish question. The fact is that the Jews feed on and grow off the hatred they have engendered among all the peoples of this world. This hatred, it must be said, is vital for their survival and for their spiritual genetics. It has allowed them for many centuries now to close ranks within their community against an external enemy, while other civilizations have disappeared.
For their part, the rabbis spare no efforts to keep their gene pool Jewish. And so even a renegade Jew remains a Jew, and therefore it is perfectly useless to attempt to leave the Jewish prison community. Judaism is indeed a prison. Claiming that a Jew cannot ever stop being Jewish works in favor of Jewry’s survival.
Our mission must be to accommodate these sick among us, because the Jews are not “perfidious” people as much as they are sick people to be cured.
Jews are to be loved individually and sincerely in order to free them from the prison in which they are locked. Only then will they become free from the cult’s grip – and from the threat they pose to themselves and to all humanity.
Only then we will become free from this grip, and at the same time, they will free themselves from the evil inside them that threatens all mankind.
Filed Under: The Jewish Sickness
3 Comments to “The Psychopathology of Judaism”
Ionwhite says:
YES – wonderfully outlined. And exactly true.
The Psychopathology of Judaism | Ionwhite says:
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Who is a Jew? – Jeshua-ists says:
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The search for ways to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty over the occupied Donbas: public opinion on the eve of presidential elections
This nationwide study was conducted jointly by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Razumkov Center sociological service on December 19-25, 2018, in all regions of Ukraine region except for Crimea and occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. A total of 2,017 respondents were polled age 18 and over. The theoretical sample error does not exceed 2.3%.
Funding for the nationwide survey was provided by the MATRA project of the Royal Dutch Embassy in Ukraine.
The regional public opinion study was conducted in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (on territory that is controlled by Ukraine) by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation (using the network of the Ukrainian Sociology Service firm) on October 15-25 (Donetsk oblast) and on November 1-11, 2018 (Luhansk oblast) . In every oblast, 500 respondents were polled based on a sample that represents the adult population of the oblasts (with the exception of occupied territories). The sample is representative of such indicators as sex, age, education and place of residence. The theoretical sample error does not exceed 3.5%.
The regional survey was conducted within the framework of the project “Moving forward the peace process in the Donbas: increasing inclusiveness of the local communities in the potential peace making mission and fostering local ownership of possible peace initiatives” and with financial support from the Embassy of Canada in Ukraine.
The majority of Ukrainian citizens share the idea that there is currently an ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia (72%). This view is most widespread in the western (91%) and central (79%) regions. In the south, this view is held by 62%, and in the east – by 47%. Nearly every fifth person in these regions was undecided in responding to this question. The public opinion study in the Ukraine-controlled part of the Donbas found that the views of this region’s residents were essentially split in half – 39% believe that currently there is an ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, and 40% say there is isn’t.
50% of Ukrainian citizens agree that for the sake of peace in the Donbas, it is worth to accept compromises with Russia and the self-proclaimed republics, but not all of them; only 16% are for any kind of compromises. Seventeen percent of Ukrainians support the use of force to resolve the conflict. Among Donbas residents there is a significantly higher level of readiness to find any kind of compromises to achieve peace (46%), and also less support for a forcible solution to the conflict (10%).
At the same time, Ukrainian citizens find the majority of possible compromises that are discussed publicly and provided for by the Minsk agreements as unacceptable. The least acceptable ones for Donbas residents, and for Ukrainian citizens overall, is the conduct of elections under the conditions of militants, amnesty for all combatants who fought against the Ukrainian army, and forming law enforcement bodies in the non-government controlled areas exclusively with local representatives. For Donbas residents, as well as for those in the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine, the most acceptable compromises are for giving “special status”to the non-government controlled areas, giving the Russian language official state, adopting a law on neutrality and non-aligned status for Ukraine, and restoring trade with the occupied territories.
Most Ukrainians believe that the most effective measures for achieving peace is to restore a normal life in the liberated territories (30%) and international pressure on Russia (32%). For Donbas residents, the main way to establish peace is restoring a normal life in the Ukraine-controlled territories (48%). 18% of respondents consider putting pressure on Russia in the form of sanctions as a necessary step for achieving peace. Compared to overall moods in Ukraine, people in the Donbas prefer such measures as, giving the occupied territories “special status” within Ukraine (24%) and making Russian an official state language (19%). The region’s citizens also more often, compared to Ukraine overall, believe measures of a social and humanitarian nature are appropriate such as, simplifying procedures for crossing the line of contact, social payments for residents of the occupied territories and trade with these territories.
Close to half of citizens in Ukraine overall and in the Ukraine-controlled part of Donbas prefer returning the occupied territories to pre-war conditions. Nearly 20% of Ukrainian citizens and 28% of Donbas residents see them as part of Ukraine, but more independent from the central government. It should be emphasized that neither Donbas nor Ukraine overall support independence for these territories or them being a part of Russia. In the Donbas, only 1.7% wanted to see “DPR” and “LPR” as independent states and 1.6% as part of Russia. However, Donbas residents assessed the likelihood of getting the occupied territories back ambiguously: 25% believe in their return in the next five years, another 25% – in the long-term prospective, and 17% believe it is impossible to return these territories to Ukraine.
The chances for having a U.N. peacekeeping mission in the occupied territories is most supported in the western (73%) and central (66%) regions, and considerably less in the southern (50%) and eastern (23%) regions as well as in the Donbas (30%). However, should there be a peacekeeping force, the majority of citizens are of the opinion that the peacekeepers should be stationed throughout the occupied territories up to the border with Russia and not only along the line of contact.
Forty-nine percent of Donbas residents believe that Russia is a party to the conflict in eastern Ukraine; 27% disagree with this opinion and 24% didn’t respond to this question. At the same time, a third of Donbas residents are convinced that Russia sends arms to the “DPR” and “LPR”, 27% say that Russia controls all the political and military actions of the self-proclaimed republics, and 23% say that Russian army fights on the self-proclaimed republics’ side. Another 24% mentioned humanitarian assistance from Russia to the Donbas.
The principal blame on what is currently happening in the Donbas, 57% of Donbas residents place on the current Ukrainian government, another 33% blame the previous regime of Viktor Yanukovych, 24% on the Maidan, 22% on Russia, 19% on the U.S., and 14% on the militants who used arms to seize power.
To resolve the conflict, citizens who live in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts more often place hope on the presidential candidate whom they support in the next elections (26%), on the Ukrainian people (24%), Armed Forces of Ukraine (14%) and incumbent Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (12%).
The main sources of information on events in the Donbas for the region’s residents is watching Ukrainian television channels (63%), online sources (47%), family, friends and acquaintances (41%) and social media networks (29%). Russian TV channels are watched by 16% of citizens, and another 15% get information in the local press.
Constructing a Political Nation: Changes in the Attitudes of Ukrainians during the War in the Donbas
Edited by Olexiy Haran and Maksym Yakovlyev
Reforms in Ukraine: public attitudes and expert evaluation
Donbass: public opinion about conflict
The fight against corruption in Ukraine: public opinion
The nationwide public opinion survey in Ukraine was conductedon May 19-25, 2018
Latest news from Opinion polls category
Reforms in Ukraine: public opinion
A national survey was conducted rom June 13 to 20, 2019
Civil Activism and Attitudes to Reform: Public Opinion in Ukraine
National Civic Engagement Poll was conducted in November-December 2018.
This nationwide study was conducted on December 19-25, 2018
The attitude of Ukrainians towards the internally displaced persons
The results of the monitoring of the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine “Ukrainian Society”
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Sign of the times: Marketers flock to Dmexco for direct deals with ad tech
September 14, 2017 by Seb Joseph
Advertisers may be hard to come by in the crowded halls of Dmexco, but those present are looking to build direct relationships with ad tech vendors, which agencies once did on advertisers’ behalf.
Gauging whether marketers are out en masse at the Koelnmesse in Cologne, Germany, is like trying to see how much of your marketing budget actually reaches a publisher. It’s tricky, but achievable if you know where to look and whom to ask. Some vendors at the conference are adamant that brands have stayed away this year, while others like The Trade Desk, Deloitte Digital and Salesforce say they will meet more senior marketers than ever throughout the course of the two-day event. Interestingly, those in the latter camp say they’re no longer only meeting brands’ chief media officers as they have in previous years. Now, those same marketers are accompanied by regional directors, procurement bosses and in Heineken’s case, even a chief marketing officer.
Heineken’s CMO was spotted at Salesforce’s secluded executive suite, along with several other executives from the beer brewer, meeting with the marketing cloud’s decision-makers. While Jon Suarez-Davis, the chief strategy officer of marketing cloud for Salesforce, would not disclose details about the meeting, he noted that it was an example of how marketers are increasingly bringing their senior leadership teams to Dmexco to rebalance their media spend.
“When marketers allocate significant investment to a medium, the importance of getting it right elevates in the C-suite,” said Suarez-Davis. “Heineken [is] using the Salesforce marketing cloud to take in data from their own first-party sources as well as purchase data to be able to activate it all through systems like a demand-side platform, which is what’s allowing them to control frequency and drive incremental reach.”
The subject of DSPs was a recurring one among the media executives who spoke to Digiday, with several noting how many of the brands they met on the first day wanted to know how to manage those platforms once they own the contracts to them. One Dmexco attendee, who spoke to Digiday on the condition of anonymity, said the increased interest would likely prove challenging for DSPs that aren’t used to reporting directly to advertisers. The source explained, “DSPs are not used to providing the same level of reporting that brands expect, so they’re trying to step up their analytics game at the conference because the agencies were the ones that would have done the slick PowerPoint presentations.”
“Advertisers didn’t know where their bread was coming from,” added another attendee, also speaking under the condition of anonymity. “Just by coming to Dmexco, they’re getting to know who the bakers are; they’re starting to know who the likes of Rubicon Project and Rocket Fuel are as they attempt to navigate the supply chain.”
However, this doesn’t signal another nail in the coffin for agencies, according to some attendees. Instead, brands and agencies at Dmexco are going into meetings together, both armed with technical questions, according to Sacha Berlik, managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at The Trade Desk, which replaced AudienceScience earlier this year as Procter & Gamble’s DSP.
“Brands are asking us questions about transparency, how they secure their brands and generate frequency, while agencies are asking about execution, like how to integrate programmatic with creative,” Berlik said. “What we have to understand is that it’s not that brands don’t trust their agencies, it’s that the digital pot has become so big and important to the growth of the company that they’re demanding the same level of accountability that they get from TV.”
Discussions around the adoption of a single viewability standard, the widespread implementation of third-party measurement and the collective fight against ad fraud continued across several panels on the first day of the conference. But away from the conference halls, the general consensus from the attendees who spoke to Digiday was that the issues are only being discussed so openly now because global advertisers are spending too much with the likes of Google and Facebook to ignore ads that don’t work.
IPG Magna predicts that by 2021, digital will represent half of global ad sales. And programmatic, which reached $19 billion in spend this year, has been and will continue to be a huge contributor, reaching $42 billion by 2020.
“I don’t think it’s by coincidence that the tipping point in the transparency conversation coincided with the tipping point in digital spend overtaking linear broadcast spend,” said Suarez-Davis.
Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard, speaking at Dmexco, urged marketers and tech companies to improve the ad experience for consumers. He said the average digital ad viewing time of 1.7 seconds, with only 20 percent of ads viewed more than two seconds, was not good enough and pushed the biggest online media owners to come up with “the next generation of digital ads.”
“Despite spending $600 billion a year on marketing, our collective industries still aren’t growing enough,” Pritchard said. “They’re stubbornly holding on to single digital market growth. You might say, never have so many done so much for so little.”
‘It’s the gut of ad tech’: Inside the rise of Dmexco
September 11, 2017 by Jessica Davies
The definitive Digiday guide to what’s in and out at Dmexco this year
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Administration Building, Old Capitol, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa
Administration b[uil]d[in]g., Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa
Looking south from central campus. Chicago Hall was constructed in 1883, costing approximately $20,000 excluding grading and landscaping. Razed in 1958 to provide space for construction of Burling Library. Number 22133. Series 9.
Administration building (Chicago Hall), Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa
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Commercial streets (x)
Dalton (photographer) (x)
(All Cars Stop at Talbott's) Broad St. N. From 4th Ave., Grinnell, Iowa
Transposed photo of trolley (right) onto Broad Street photo. 1912 postmark.
5th Street, west, Carroll, Iowa
Looking west from corner of Fifth Street and Main Street. Number 40681. Series 8A771.
Adams Street, East from Summit Hotel, Creston, Iowa
One of the first hotels in Creston, Iowa, the Summit Hotel, was built in 1880 by a stock company composed of Swan & Becker and Colonel Beckwith, among others, and was destroyed by fire in 1896. The hotel owners rebuilt on the same site later that year, but shortly before midnight on December 1916 another fire destroyed the building. The loss was estimated at $200,000 and defective electrical wiring was believed to have caused the fire. Creston centennial card, 1869-1969.
Adel State Bank, Adel, Iowa
Looking northwest at the corner of Ninth and Main Streets at the Adel State Bank, the Rexall Drug Store, and J.F. Tawney's Grocery Store. The building was built in 1908. It is located at 901 Main Street, Adel, Dallas County, Iowa, and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Number 19.
Aerial View, Kesley, Iowa
Aerial View, Radcliffe, Iowa
After Blizzard on March 9, 1909, Slater, Iowa
Albia square from the southeast corner, Albia, Iowa
Looking northwest at a panoramic view of the Albia square which includes the courthouse, bicycle, horses and carriages and electric lines. Listed in the National Register for Historic Places as the Albia Square and Central Commercial Historic District. 1909 postmark. Number 8109.
Armory, Red Oak, Iowa
Alexander, photographer (Albia, Iowa) (photographer) (1) + -
Hamley (Maquoketa, Iowa) (photographer) (1) + -
Harpel, A.O. (photographer) (1) + -
O'Brien, Helen, Ektachrome (photographer) (1) + -
Olson Photograph Co. (Plattsmouth, Neb.) (photographer) (1) + -
Pocket City Post Card Co. (McGregor, Iowa) (photographer) (1) + -
Stores and shops (180) + -
Dirt roads (122) + -
Stores & shops (105) + -
Vehicles (101) + -
Financial facilities (62) + -
Banks (46) + -
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Tank outside University of Manitoba (x) ›
Robinson, Rosa (x) ›
A photograph of the "A" company of the 196th Overseas Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. This company was made up of recruits from western universities, including members of the University of Manitoba COTC. This black-and-white photograph was taken at Camp Hughes, near Carberry, Manitoba, in 1916.
A photograph of the "A" company of the 196th Overseas Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. This company was made up of recruits from western universities, including members of the University of Manitoba COTC. This black-and-white photograph was taken ay Camp Hughes, near Carberry, Manitoba, in 1916.
A photograph of Canadian Air Force officers posted overseas. Left to right: R. Parr; Joyce McKay, posted to London, England; Mrs. C. K. Taylor; and Keith Taylor, posted to Metz, France. This black-and-white photograph depicts the four people attending a COTC Tri-Service Ball.
A photograph of four unidentified COTC cadets standing next to a tank.
A photograph of five unidentified COTC cadets.
A photograph of a group of COTC cadets on a raft at Canadian Forces Base Shilo. This black-and-white photograph was taken sometime after the First World War.
A photograph of a group of mounted COTC cadets in formation at Canadian Forces Base Shilo. This black-and-white photograph was taken sometime after the First World War.
A photograph of a group of COTC cadets outside a sod house at Canadian Forces Base Shilo. This black-and-white photograph was taken sometime after the First World War.
A photograph of a bridge at Canadian Forces Base Shilo, sometime after World War I.
A photograph of a group of COTC cadets in the field with a PIAT gun during training. Some of the men in the photograph are identified: C.D. Berg, Harasawich, Haywood, Winkler, Peever.
A photograph of a group of COTC cadets outdoors at training camp. This black-and-white photograph was taken in 1945.
A photograph of nine COTC cadets sitting at tables with paper and pen during a training session.
A photograph of nine COTC cadets standing in rows outdoors during a training session. An officer is instructing them.
A photograph of five COTC cadets using an anti-aircraft gun on the University of Manitoba campus.
A photograph of the University of Manitoba COTC curling team. This black-and-white photograph depicts the four unidentified men holding brooms and standing with several curling rocks.
A photograph of the COTC curling team. The four unidentified members are standing on a curling rink, holding brooms, with three rocks at their feet.
A photograph of a COTC member and two officers. One officer is holding a trophy while the other looks on.
A photograph of two unidentified men, one in uniform, speaking to each other. One is holding a box.
A photograph of four COTC members standing next to and looking at the engine of a military jeep parked outside the Administration Building at the University of Manitoba.
A photograph of COTC staff officers and members at the Namao Canadian Air Force base in Alberta. This black-and-white photograph, taken in the winter of 1962, depicts 13 men standing outdoors next to a plane.
A photograph of people in a receiving line at a Tri-Service Ball.
A photograph of people eating and having conversations at aTri-Service Ball.
A photograph of people walking around a buffet table at a Tri-Service Ball.
A photograph of people greeting each other at a Tri-Service Ball.
A photograph of people in a receving line at a Tri-Service Ball.
A photograph of people eating and having a conversation at a Tri-Service ball.
A photograph of people shaking hands at a Tri-Service ball.
A photograph of six students at a Tri-Service Ball.
Woodward-Jewsbury, J. (1) + -
Yelland, Horace George (1) + -
Youmans, Wray (1) + -
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« * The UK Lab That Let Al Qaeda Scientist Rauf Ahmad Leave With Virulent Anthrax in 1999 Made A Mistake; To Keep The Lab’s Identity A Secret Prevents Us From Learning From History
* Senate Torture Report: KSM wrote bin al-Shibh a letter referencing “Jafar the Pilot” and indicating that “Jafar” “ought to prepare himself” to smuggle himself from Mexico ; the letter was seized in September 2002 »
* update from GAO … 9/15/14 … report “sometime this fall” … NOTE: fall ends Dec 20, 2014 … two weeks until the end of fall … will GAO deliver?
Posted by DXer on December 6, 2014
I’m told by GAO the report will be issued the week of Dec 15
emails to/from Chuck Young,
Managing Director, Public Affairs,
Lew to Chuck … Any update now that summer is over? … Any comment on why it has taken so long? My guess is that the FBI has been fighting you every step of the way … LEW
Chuck to Lew … Sometime this fall and no, we wouldn’t comment on the report or information access issues until after it is released. Thanks, Chuck
This entry was posted on December 6, 2014 at 10:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. Tagged: *** 2001 anthrax attacks, *** FBI anthrax investigation, GAO review of FBI anthrax investigation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
196 Responses to “* update from GAO … 9/15/14 … report “sometime this fall” … NOTE: fall ends Dec 20, 2014 … two weeks until the end of fall … will GAO deliver?”
In MICROBIAL FORENSICS AND U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY SCIENCE AND STRATEGY (2014), Michael P. Garvey, Jr. explains:
“One can imagine that intelligence operations, which may utilize the collection of samples by assets, rely on secondary collection sites, or take prolonged periods of time to transport make this process more difficult. Microbial forensic attribution will only be plausible, if the evidence can be obtained in a reasonable manner and preserved for future testing. Otherwise, the results of sample analyses may be questioned. For example, one may not be able to determine whether a sample that tested negative is truly negative or was badly degraded during collection and transport. In the Amerithrax investigation, the FBI report discusses OCONUS samples that had inconsistent results for the presence of B. anthracis and possibly even indications of the presence of the Ames strain. However, these results were ultimately discarded by the FBI due to the inconsistencies in the various testing results, sampling procedures, and methodology used by the FBI and IC. As this case never reached trial and the details of this intelligence based collection is mostly classified, it cannot be fully addressed.” (pp. 219-220)
Is Dr. Garvey correct? Is it true “it cannot be fully addressed?”
Dr. Garvey, in his important treatment of these issues, recommends:
“Information integration – knowledge sharing Recommendation: Promote the acceptance and knowledge sharing of microbial forensics by limiting unnecessary classification of scientific material that lacks any direct operational intelligence. Considering the importance of national security, one cannot argue the need to classify operational information related to suspected biothreat sites, assets that are assisting in collecting information and/or samples, active intelligence operations, sensitive investigations and other operational activities that could place our national security interests in jeopardy. However, these issues have little relevance when it comes to the scientific methods of microbiology, immunology, and molecular biology that are employed to exploit intelligence or evidence once it is collected. In the days following the death of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. government reported that a positive identification had been made with DNA analysis. While details of the mission may have been classified, the scientific methodology by which one analyzes human DNA for identification purposes was not. In the same manner, the scientific details of microbial forensics should not be limited.” (p. 231)
Al Qaeda lab director Yazid Sufaat in Facebook posts and chat with me does not deny responsibility for the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings. (He pleads the Fifth Amendment).
In the occasions I contacted him, Al Qaeda anthrax scientist Rauf Ahmad wouldn’t provide answers unless I paid him money.
As for the USG not able to share information about their very, inexcusably late arrival at Al Qaeda’s anthrax labs, the usual redactions suffice to protect information that should remain exempt from disclosure.
The withholding beyond that is all about CYA. Like Senator Leahy has said, when the government screws up, they just mark it SECRET.
Don’t let any photographer in Afghanistan to have died in vain.
Where in Dr. Garvey’s “Timeline of Scientific Events in the Anthrax Mailings Investigation,” does he state the
date that bottle of “anthrax spore concentrate” harvested by Al Qaeda anthrax scientist harvested in April 2001 was
retrieved for testing?
The issue needs to be addressed:
“Since the anthrax attacks of 2001, the world has seen an increase in violence by both state
and non-state actors. Although there has not been another large scale biological attack,
the threat has not diminished. All subsequent intelligence threat reports still identify the
high risk of a biological attack, as well as, the importance of a robust microbial forensic response.” (p. 242)
The most recent discussion of aspects of the microbiological aspects of Amerithrax comes from the learned forensics-schooled Michael Garvey, who was a former Scientist / Manager of the Central Intelligence Agency (August 2003 – January 2011) (7 years 6 months) and before that, a Forensic DNA Examiner / Supervisor (June 1997 – August 2003 (6 years 3 months)
Michael Garvey explains that the word “microbial forensic” encompasses the analysis of interdicted materials. That point relates to identification of the strain pictured below and the strains given Rauf Ahmad by an unidentified scientist. Dr. Garvey, was this bottle of anthrax spore concentrate harvested in April 2001 by Rauf Ahmad tested by the FBI or CIA? What strain was it? Or did someone screw up by not seizing it after Kathy Gannon and her photographer came across it? What was the delay in arriving at the lab? Why is there an emphasis on swabbing a decontaminated lab years later rather than tracking down the large bottle of anthrax spore concentrate pictured by interviewing the lab scientists that Kathy interviewed? And why 13 years later hasn’t the information been made public?
Dr. Garvey writes:
“However, this study must evaluate the fact that, in a broader sense, microbial forensics is often taken outside of the legal context associated with the term “forensic” and encompasses the analysis of interdicted materials, samples provided by foreign partners, or samples acquired by other means, that are collected for intelligence purposes rather than being connected with the investigation of a particular incident where a biological agent was used. In some cases, the aim is to find evidence that biological agents are being developed, and possibly are intended for use.”
At page 5:
“To date, technical microbial forensics is largely untested in U.S. courtrooms or in international fora. The roles of microbial forensics in criminal prosecutions, in intelligence conclusions, and in policy decisions are for the most part ill-defined. For example, a list of WMD terrorism cases provided on an FBI-sponsored website does not cite any examples of technical forensic analysis providing critical evidence leading to indictment or conviction110. The most prominent biological terrorism case to date, the anthrax letters incident, will close without a trial of the declared suspect.”
“In the few cases where technical analysis of biological or chemical evidence was proffered to back US policy decisions, strong technical criticism from US experts was encountered, offsetting any weight such evidence might have had internationally. In light of these facts, coupled with the relative rarity of major biological terrorism events, finding solid examples of cases that have fully utilized a microbial forensics approach is challenging. However, one can still examine some recent examples under the optic of a microbial forensic approach and consider whether justice, intelligence, and/or the world community would have been better served if a microbial forensics capability would have been developed or implemented sooner.” (pp. 5-6)
Conversely, some may think the microbial forensics was a huge waste of money — when all that was needed was relevant evidence needed to be seized and preserved, and information needed to be shared.
“Technology & Applications to Microbial Forensics
What questions can Microbial Forensics actually answer, in principle?
A sound decision concerning the attribution of a biological incident relies on integrating all of the relevant information about an incident into a consistent and defensible narrative about the acquisition, production, and dissemination of the agent. This information will include traditional forensic evidence as well as other evidence gathered by law enforcement investigators and by intelligence community analysts and operatives. Each step in the narrative can be considered a hypothesis that is supported to some degree by the available evidence. Seen in this light, a microbial forensic analysis method can be regarded as a test of a particular hypothesis. The scientific inferences that can be made from microbial forensics alone must be carefully separated from provisory inferences that also depend on other kinds of information. Only the narrow scientific conclusions and their interpretation can be validated by scientific means, and it is important to control the expectations of non-technical consumers of scientific evidence by not overstating the inferences that can be drawn from it.”
Comment: For example, how did the strain of anthrax spore concentrate made by Pakistani government scientist Rauf Ahmad — pictured in the bottle below — get lost amidst talk of swabbing a lab years later after decontamination? Who is playing hide-the-ball here? The Taliban? Al-Qaeda? ISI? FBI? CIA? Who knows the strain of anthrax in the bottle but is not telling?
And if you don’t know why do you think you know jack shit about Amerithrax?
At page 69:
“To date, technical microbial forensics is largely untested in U.S. courtrooms or in international fora. For example, a list of WMD terrorism cases provided on an FBI- sponsored website does not cite any examples of technical forensic analysis providing critical evidence leading to indictment or conviction110. The most prominent biological terrorism case to date, the anthrax letters incident, will close without a trial of the declared suspect. In the open (unclassified) world at least, microbial forensics can point to no major successes that could provide public confidence. In the few cases where technical analysis of biological or chemical evidence was proffered to back US policy decisions, strong technical criticism from US experts was encountered, offsetting any weight such evidence might have had internationally. In light of these facts, coupled with the relative rarity of major biological terrorism events, finding solid examples of cases that have fully utilized a microbial forensics approach is challenging.”
“If there is any preliminary conclusion to be drawn from the existing case histories, it is that microbial forensic collection and analysis is not very effective when it is conducted as an ad-hoc activity, by non-specialists, using improvised methods and on-the-fly attempts at validation, without prior review by a knowledgeable community.”
At page 94-95:
“Based on national security, information related to the location and nature of the collections has been withheld. Additionally, information related to the analytical assays utilized by the IC is also classified. Therefore, there is no information regarding the sensitivity, specificity or reproducibility of these assays or the labs that performed them to help explain the inconsistent results. The reporting suggests that B. anthracis consistent with Ames strain was identified from this location. However, without full disclosure of the scientific data, one cannot ascertain whether these results are reliable.”
No one wants to admit that an intrepid reporter and accompanying photographer took a picture of the anthrax spore concentrate harvested by Rauf Ahmad in April 2001 and that the CIA didn’t procure it. Like Senator Leahy said, when the government screws up, they just mark it classified.
On Table 8, judging “Forensic Science Measures of Success,” forensics expert Michael Garvey concludes “Concordance across platforms for the comparison of results”, “Quality assurance and quality control standards” and “Robust and reliable databases each “Fails to meet expectations.” He similarly concludes that “Transparency and defensibility at trial as “Inconsistent or fails to meet expectations.” (p. 211)
On Table 9, “Microbial Forensics Criteria – Measures of Success,” Dr. Garvey concludes that the R&D standards and “Information integration – databases” both fail to meet expectations. (p. 212)
Does “Collection – evidence” meet minimal expectations, as he suggests, if an AP photographer was able to take a photo of the anthrax spore concentrate harvested by Rauf Ahmad in April 2001 but then no one working for the USG timely seized it before it was removed?
In his very learned PhD thesis, Dr. Garvey writes:
“Even in the Amerithrax investigation, the FBI conducted searches on an OCONUS site, multiple times with no way of controlling the site in between visits and a limited ability to fully exploit the area.” (p. 219)
But this overlooks the more important issue of decontamination PRIOR to their arrival — and the removal of samples (to include the “anthrax spore concentrate” created by Rauf Ahmad in April 2001).
It also overlooks the removal and destruction of machinery at the Kandahar lab that Rauf Ahmad set up in May 2001 (though a centrifuge and dryer was still there).
At page 212:
“Whether caused by the diversity of the law enforcement, intelligence and counterproliferation missions or by the vast number of agencies developing their own approach, microbial forensics has made little progress towards establishing itself as a fully standardized forensic sub-specialty, since the 2001 Amerithrax investigation.”
Michael P. Garvey, Jr. has written a 2014 PhD thesis.
For approximately fourteen years after obtaining his Masger of Science in Forensic Science, the author Michael P. Garvey, Jr. was employed with the federal government in various scientific and managerial roles.
In 2011, he returned home to Philadelphia to serve as the Director of Forensic Science for the Philadelphia Police Department.
(Prior to all that, he worked as forensic investigator for the DC Medical Examiner.)
I encourage you to read his discussion of selected aspects of the microbiological forensics in Amerithrax.
It is clear to me that this bottle of “anthrax spore concentrate” was removed before the scientists arrived.
Which sort of puts the science I’ve excerpted below in some context.
CIA and FBI Knew Rauf Ahmad harvested “anthrax spore concentrate” for Al Qaeda for experiment on guinea pigs on “7-4-001″ – handwriting on anthrax spore concentrate is same as handwriting of Rauf Ahmad in correspondence planning anthrax lab with Ayman Zawahiri
The GAO report, based on new information, is expected Friday, December 19, 2014.
A Gregory Koblentz directed PhD thesis at GMU titled “Microbial Forensics and U.S. National Security Science and Strategy, 2014 concludes
“If an incident involving a biological weapon were to occur within the United States or
against U.S. assets overseas, there would be great pressure on law enforcement and
intelligence agencies to identify those responsible, and accurately assess the probability
of additional attacks. Although the microbial forensic technologies are abundant, one
may question whether microbial forensics remains a nascent field or has developed into a
reliable forensic discipline.
Through case studies, a review of the U.S. national strategy on microbial forensics, and a
“lessons-learned” analysis of traditional forensic DNA Analysis, it is concluded that
microbial forensics, despite significant technological advances over the last decade, has
failed to mature as a forensic discipline. Lacking national standards, and often stymied
by the divergent nature of law enforcement and intelligence, the U.S. has made little
progress towards a comprehensive microbial forensics strategy since the 2001 anthrax
Therefore, it is recommended that the U.S. take an integrated approach to its disparate
microbial forensics disciplines and establish a true national capability built upon a
comprehensive National Commission on Microbial Forensics, created to coordinate and
apply scientific advances towards the ultimate goal of forensic attribution of microbial
threat agents. Through a system based in scientific integrity, a comprehensive program
of training, validation standards, quality assurance and quality control, research &
development strategies, a consolidated federal lab system, national databases, and
statistical approaches must be developed in an unclassified forum to allow all aspects of
microbial forensics to grow into a respected and reliable forensic discipline , capable of
providing scientific solutions to the challenges of the law enforcement, intelligence and
Counterproliferation missions. Conversely, unless and until the courts, policy makers or
public demand that sound science and quality conclusions drive microbial forensics, then
we should expect nothing more than the status quo; and should prepare for future ad hoc
processes like those utilized during the Amerithrax investigation, or the lack of any
scientific intelligence associated with the “Curveball” intelligence fiasco.
The Gregory Koblentz directed 2014 thesis at page 77 states:
“Shortly after the investigation began and B. anthracis had been identified, the FBI lab
concluded that the B. anthracis spores had been coated with a mixture of tin and silicon.
It was initially concluded that this chemical coating was an intentional manipulation of
the spores to allow for them to be better aerosolized and inhaled. This apparent
“weaponization” of the samples caused several U.S. policy makers and FBI investigators
to question the possibility of a state sponsored or state-assisted attack. In fact, Secretary
of State Colin Powell used this feature of the investigation, before the United Nations
Security Council in February 2002, to make unfounded links between an alleged Iraq
bioweapons program and the anthrax letters. Based on conflicting reporting from three
laboratories (Sandia National Laboratory, the FBI Laboratory, and the Armed Forces
Institute of Pathology), the concentrations of the “coating” were never confirmed. The
FBI eventually concluded that the silicon was not an additive for the purpose of
weaponizing aerosolized spores.”
The Gregory Koblentz directed 2014 GMU PhD thesis states:
“While finding no evidence that silicon had been added to the mailed anthrax, the National Academy of
Science panel, tasked with reviewing the Amerithrax investigation noted that the FBI had
provided “no compelling explanation” for conflicts in silicon test results between the
Sandia National Laboratories and its own lab. Further, it stated that it “cannot rule out
the intentional addition of a silicon-based substance … in a failed attempt to enhance
dispersion” of the New York Post powder. This conflicting interpretation of the silicon
data remains an area for future research and investigation.”
At page 87, the author of the 2014 GMU PhD thesis explains:
“Flask RMR-1029, identified by the FBI as the “parent material” for
the anthrax in the attack letters, was not the immediate source of spores used in the
letters. As noted by the FBI, one or more derivative growth steps would have been
required to produce the anthrax in the attack letters. Therefore, a level of appropriate
caution must be utilized in any source attribution claims.”
Page 89 of the Koblentz-directed PhD thesis states:
“Working with the US Intelligence Community (IC), the FBI explored another potential
connection to Al Qaeda. The FBI reports multiple collection missions by the FBI and/or
IC to exploit an undisclosed overseas location, which was identified based on intelligence
concerning Al Qaeda’s potential interest in anthrax and information of a production
facility. The alleged Al Qaeda anthrax site was searched multiple times with swabs,
swipes, and other samples being collected. In each instance, no viable B. anthracis was
recovered that could be cultured in a US laboratory. However, there were strong
indicators of the presence of anthracis at this location. In the first collection mission,
samples were found to be positive for the presence of Bacillus anthracis based on
molecular signatures. No further typing was conducted on these samples. During the
second collection, additional samples were collected from target areas identified in the
initial collection. The results of the analyses from the second collection yielded the
presence of Bacillus anthracis and indications of the Ames strain. However, these results
were complicated by the fact that not all replicates yielded consistent results.”
At page 93 of the thesis:
“The FBIR was limited in the fact that donor labs self-reported the data on what they provided and even in the samples that were sent.”
Page 95 of the 2014 GMU PhD Thesis:
“The reporting suggests that B. anthracis consistent with Ames strain was identified from this location. However, without full disclosure of the scientific data, one cannot ascertain whether these results are reliable. If reliable, did these results
indicate the presence of Ames strain in an Al Qaeda lab from a laboratory transfer or is there an isolate of B. anthracis that is located in the undisclosed region of the world that developed similar markers to the Ames strain through parallel evolution.”
“this investigation also pointed to areas of improvement for the microbial forensic field. It establishes the importance of
collaborative relationships between investigators and scientists. Finally, it reminds us of the limitations of current microbial forensic techniques to fully attribute the source of a sample or that of an attack. As a community, we must learn from this investigation and prepare for the next event.”
Forensic expert speaks on ‘Forensic Science in Major Cities’
A free public lecture, “Forensic Science in Major Cities: An Evolutionary (or is it a Revolutionary?) Approach,” will be given by Michael Garvey, the director of the Office of Forensic Science at the Philadelphia Police Department. This event is the third of four presentations on forensic science and its use as a law-enforcement tool in Penn State’s 2013 Forensic Science Lecture Series. The lecture is free and will be held on from 12:20 to 1:10 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 7, in 117 Hetzel Union Building Auditorium on the Penn State University Park campus.
In his lecture, Garvey will detail his account of the evolution of forensic science within major metropolitan cities. In addition to being the director of the Office of Forensic Science at the Philadelphia Police Department, Garvey is a panel member for both the National Quality Assurance Standards for Forensic DNA Testing Laboratories and for the Convicted Offender DNA Databasing Laboratories. In addition, he is a subcommittee member of the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods’s Quality Assurance program and a chairperson of the Major Cities Chiefs Association’s Forensic Science Committee.
In 1996, Garvey joined the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Washington, D.C. where he investigated all unnatural or undetermined deaths that occurred with the District of Columbia. In 1997, he joined the FBI in Washington, D.C., where he performed examinations of DNA and bodily fluids. In 1998, he was promoted to the position of supervisory forensic biologist and he spent the next five years assisting local, state, federal and international agencies in criminal matters through DNA-typing analyses. Garvey also provided expert-witness testimony in court proceedings, supervised a team of qualified biologists, and deployed with FBI Evidence Response Teams for complex crime-scene investigations. In 2003, Garvey joined the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served in several high-ranking positions.
In 2011, Garvey was selected as the Philadelphia Police Department’s director of the Office of Forensic Science. In this position, he manages scientific and technology issues for the department, and he oversees the Forensic Science Center, providing direct support to law-enforcement operations involving homeland security, intelligence gathering, and counter-terrorism activities.
Garvey received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science. He received a master’s degree in forensic science from George Washington University and a doctoral degree in microbial forensics from George Mason University.
“With the exception of human DNA analyses, many traditional forensic science disciplines have come under intense criticism recently for a lack of adherence to scientific standards of validation101. Therefore, microbial forensics, whether for criminal prosecutions or intelligence, must not be permitted to grow without a sound basis in scientific integrity.
At a fundamental level, the standard-of-proof issue is the same – critical decisions must rest on firm factual and inferential foundations, and we clearly want national security decisions made with at least as good a foundation as criminal prosecutions. In fact, it might be argued that the foundation for some decisions should be better, since the consequences are weightier. “
“It has been well documented that the three 9/11 sites were very difficult to process, and even more difficult to identify all of the human remains recovered from each site. The crash site in Somerset, PA from United Airlines Flight 93, while horrific, was more suitable for the identification of human remains. The flight manifest provided an accurate count of the number of individuals, and listed each by name. Based on this and extensive DNA comparisons to family members and indirect references (personal items of the deceased), authorities were able to distinguish the remains of victims (passengers and crew) from those of the four terrorists. This differentiation allowed the FBI to have USAMRIID and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) collect and analyze samples from each of the four terrorist remains for the presence of B. anthracis. In all of the analyses, only one assay provided a positive result for anthracis …”
“Early in the investigation, there were no established protocols. There was confusion on which labs should analyze the samples and what was the best course of analysis. The FBI lab lacked a dedicated unit to serve as a scientific focal point on these types of investigations. With the formation of the Chemical and Biological Sciences Unit in 2002, the FBI created a unit to fill this void and coordinate the scientific development of microbial forensic procedures, serve as a liaison to investigations related to chemical or biological threats, and coordinate the analyses of any investigative samples. The CBSU later was reorganized into the CBRNSU, the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Sciences Unit to handle the full scope of WMD related investigations. In the years since its formation and after the Amerithrax investigation, the CBRNSU continues to prepare for the next biological investigation.”
“the final assays used to evaluate the 4 genotypic markers were limited in scope, lacked data to allow for any interpretation of abundance or the ratio of morphotype to wild type, and yielded a substantial number of inconclusive results. One assay was disregarded in the final analysis due to the lack of reproducibility and inconclusive results. Normally, a weak assay would be discarded in development and not after being used on evidence
samples. The limited information on limits of detection, sensitivity, specificity, abundance ratios, and adequate population studies do not undermine the data that was presented by the FBI. However, it does raise questions of the ability of these techniques to reach the level of attribution.”
“This collection was not a traditional population database. It was not a random sampling of the B. anthracis population that could provide data on the variability of the organism in terms of geographic distribution or genetic mutations. Rather, it was a targeted collection of Ames isolates to serve as a comparative database for future attribution events. While there is nothing wrong with the establishment of this comparative database, one must be cautious of its use to establish a statistical representation of the rarity of the evidentiary morphotypes. The FBIR was limited in the fact
that donor labs self-reported the data on what they provided and even in the samples that were sent. The historical origins of isolates may lack provenance and a full explanation of their linkages to other samples in the dataset.”
On March 7, 2003, CIA Headquarters sent information on Jaffar al-Tayyar to the CIA’s DETENTION SITE BLUE, where KSM was located, for use in the interrogation of KSM.2040 The documents included the following: • a “targeting study” on Jaffar al-Tayyar completed by the CIA in January 2003;2041 • a letter from KSM to bin al-Shibh referencing “Jafar the Pilot” and indicating that “Jafar” “ought to prepare himself’ to smuggle himself from Mexico into an unspecified country; • a letter from Jaffar al-Tayyar to Ramzi bin al-Shibh asking for clarification of KSM’ s letter; and • additional background and reporting information on Jaffar al-Tayyar
“An email exchange the afternoon of March 18, 2003, between CIA personnel expressed the views of interrogators and officers at CIA Headquarters with regard to KSM and Jaffar al-Tayyar. The e-mail from KSM debriefer ________ stated:
“we finally gotten [KSM] to admit that al-Tayyar is meant for a plan in the US, but I’m still not sure he’s feting up to what Jafar’s role//plan really is.”
The CIA response to the report explained that debriefers — for all that KSM was telling him — was trying to protect Jaffar al-Tayyar. A bodyguard of lies protected precious truths.
Lew’s wife bakes a mean cookie when she is not going head to head with prosecutors in court in matters of national importance. She should give Lew a big hug for all his patient efforts.
For example, Lew uploaded page 68 of Lab Notebook 4010 years ago, describing the creation of Flask 1029 on October 22, 1997.
Getting people on the same page requires both people willing to read and correct their mistakes — and people willing to go through the laborious process of uploading documents to facilitate them coming to understand.
If they are still persisting that Flask 1029 was created in September 1998, who cares — they have no credibility because they are lazy and don’t read the contemporary evidence made available to them by the people working to keep this country safe.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/page-68-of-lab-notebook-4010/
RMR-1029 was registered as #7737 in Building 1412. USAMRIID should produce the “Anthrax Inventory” provided as an enclosure to its subpoena response without further delay. Five people were murdered.
Is it really going to be USAMRIID’s position that it threw out the document that may show the locations where the original source of the so-called “murder weapon” was stored?
Like it threw out the documents showing the disposition of the 98 vials of Ames grown from Flask 1029 pursuant to the DARPA project? Or the records showing which unidentified DARPA contractors were provided virulent Ames, as required under the contract?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/usamriid-provides-this-response-about-the-lack-of-documentation-associated-with-the-missing-98-vials-of-ames-anthrax-from-flask-1029-under-the-darpa-funded-jhu-apl-project-under-which-usamriid-was/
The Documentary Evidence Indicates That Flask 1029 Was Stored In Building 1412 In 1998-2000, Not In Building 1425 As The Prosecutors Claimed In Spinning The Theory That Bruce Ivins Was The Anthrax Processor And Mailer
Posted by Lew Weinstein on August 29, 2014
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/the-documentary-evidence-indicates-that-flask-1029-was-stored-in-building-1412-in-1998-2000-not-in-building-1425-as-the-prosecutors-claimed-in-spinning-the-theory-that-bruce-ivins-was-the-anthrax-p/
I have not heard from the wonderful USMRMC FOIA person about the continued delay in producing the “Anthrax Inventory” provided the FBI in February 2002 response to subpoena. It has been weeks now since the request. It had been a two week tasking — and it is just a single document to find and pull. I hope they find and produce it given the forthcoming GAO report. A prerequisite to accountability and transparency is the preservation of documents. The failure to preserve such a document constitutes what is called “spoliation.”
An inventory would show the location of other samples throughout Building 1412 and 1425 — it would be broader than just the records relating to Flask 1029 created in October 1997.
Dr. Bruce Ivins RMR-1029 inventory records, from 1997 to 2003, pursuant to a FOIA request
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/dr-bruce-ivins-rmr-1029-inventory-records-pursuant-to-an-foia-request/
Here is the expanded log showing additional known withdrawals from Flask 1029 — which was created in October 1997.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/the-fbi-should-produce-all-the-documents-relating-to-the-aerosolization-studies-cited-on-this-expanded-log-done-by-the-fbi-reflecting-the-use-of-ames-from-flask-1029-2/
Where is the contemporaneous documentary evidence confirming that the seventh batch from Dugway in late 1997 not put into RMR 1029 was in fact autoclaved?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/where-is-the-contemporaneous-documentary-evidence-confirming-that-the-seventh-batch-from-dugway-in-late-1997-not-put-into-rmr-1029-was-in-fact-autoclaved/
The undercover who did my graphics on Amerithrax once told me that the key to being a good undercover was to not care what people think of you. But as it was, I thought the world of him — team building through mountain climbing, sledding and the like was a lot of fun. I am still annoyed at the first undercover who (IMO) cost me millions of dollars in an unrelated matter involving benzene in soft drinks promoted to a captive audience of children internationally, the forced resignation of the US FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, childhood obesity, and much more. I sometimes talk Section 1983 civil liability mainly just to vent my displeasure while trying to understand things from the FBI’s point of view. (For example, today I am posting links of numerous podcasts in which the FBI gives its point of view on different related topics.
But the only thing worse than an FBI confused in its analysis is an FBI going out and having an effect in the lives of real people — acting on the botched analysis. It gets even worse when the FBI people encroach on constitutional rights or violate statutory standards and cause actual harm in the lives of “civilians.”
That’s why it is so important that the FBI now get Amerithrax right. Let it at least have been worth the wreckage the FBI left in its wake while responding to a difficult and challenging crime.
You capsize my canoe with your big boat, you can be sure I’ll catch up to you at the marina and share the story. (So be sure to turn around and make the recovery).
Anthrax, Al Qaeda, and Ayman Zawahiri: The Infiltration of US Biodefense
Undercover – I
Play Local/Download
Mr. Schiff: The FBI has used the undercover technique for a long time. Special Agent Dan DeSimone of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division has worked undercover…
Mr. DeSimone: “It’s really about taking on a new identity. It’s about staying true to who you are but becoming a new person whether it’s an international art thief or an international money launderer.”
Mr. Schiff: DeSimone says undercover work goes back to the late 60s and early 70s…
Mr. DeSimone: “Agents from three Northeastern field offices decided that they needed something different; something pro-active to be able to gather intelligence and evidence of crimes.”
Mr. Schiff: DeSimone says there have been some well known FBI investigations that went undercover…
Mr. DeSimone: “Probably the most notable, which is ABSCAM, an undercover case against politicians. Then the Donnie Brasco case which was an undercover case targeting La Cosa Nostra members.”
Mr Schiff: Learn more about undercover operations at http://www.fbi.gov. I’m Neal Schiff of the Bureau and that’s what’s happening at the “FBI, This Week.”
Undercover – II
http://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/thisweek/undercover-ii.mp3/view
Mr. Schiff: Undercover operations are a way for the FBI to try and catch criminals and spies…
Mr. DeSimone: “Usually it works where the undercover befriends or ingratiates himself or herself with a person or a group of people.”
Mr. Schiff: Dan DeSimone, an FBI Special Agent…
Mr. DeSimone: “We establish a relationship; we get on the inside; we get to know the people we are investigating. And ultimately that relationship allows us to collect intelligence or evidence, oftentimes, evidence of a crime.”
Mr. Schiff: It’s not easy …
Mr. DeSimone: “Very difficult. Very stressful. And sometimes very dangerous.”
Mr. Schiff: DeSimone says there’s constant contact and counseling is available…
Mr. DeSimone: “We want to make sure that the undercover agent, who’s portraying himself or herself as something or someone else, never loses sight of who they are and who they really work for.”
Freedom of Information Act – II
http://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/thisweek/freedom-of-information-act-ii.mp3/view
Mr. Miller: “There are national security considerations, and individual’s privacy considerations, and of course, we would never want to compromise an ongoing investigation.”
Counterproliferation Center
Mollie Halpern: Terrorists and criminals continue to try to get their hands on chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive materials. As the threat of weapons of mass destruction evolves, the FBI is launching a new Counterproliferation Center.
Vahid Majidi: The way that our adversaries are going after this is becoming more and more sophisticated. So, as a country, we have to develop a more and more sophisticated approach to prevent proliferation of our technology.
Halpern: I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau, and you’re listening to FBI, This Week. The Counterproliferation Center combines the expertise of the special agents, analysts, and professional support from the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Counterintelligence Division, and the Directorate of Intelligence. Assistant Director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate Vahid Majidi…
Majidi: So they look at material, technology, know-how that is involved in WMD programs, and they’re able to identify potential adversaries who are attempting to acquire this information from the United States illegally.
Evolution of the FBI
http://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/thisweek/evolution-of-the-fbi/view
Mollie Halpern: The FBI has become more of an intelligence-driven, threat-focused agency over the past decade.
Tom Harrington: Since 9/11, the equation changed for us. Our focus today really is on prevention and being ahead of the threat whenever possible.
Mollie Halpern: I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau, and this is FBI, This Week. To strengthen the FBI’s ability to disrupt terrorist threats and identify crime trends, the Bureau adopted lessons from the corporate world. FBI Associate Deputy Director Tom Harrington…
Harrington: So in today’s FBI, we have a very specific business model that holds us accountable to protecting the communities that we serve.
Halpern: This includes realigning our limited resources, improving technology, developing our leaders, and fostering partnerships.
Harrington: In the coming years, we’ll certainly be focused on trying to refine our business processes and improve our performance.
Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate Fifth Anniversary
http://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/thisweek/wmd_072911.mp3/view
http://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/thisweek/white-powder-letters.mp3/view
White Powder Letters
Mollie Halpern: The FBI is taking proactive measures to prevent, identify, and solve white powder letter crimes.
Robert Miranda: We in the FBI are looking to leverage technology to do a better job for us in identifying the perpetrators of these crimes.
Halpern: I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau, and this is FBI, This Week. Since 2006, the FBI has responded to more than 1,600 white powder letter incidents and opened 500 cases as a result. This comes more than a decade after the anthrax attacks which left five people dead. Assistant Section Chief in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate Robert Miranda…
Miranda: It’s a very widespread problem, and the response costs a ton of money. And people don’t realize that there is an effect on local communities.
Halpern: Although the majority of white powder letters are determined to be hoaxes, they are still serious federal crimes.
Miranda: They are felonies, and in many instances there’s also state and local crimes that have occurred as well.
Will the FBI be allowed access to any seized documents and Adnan’s electronic devices?
In a move demonstrating the FBI’s valuable role of protecting national security, Director James Comey has created a separate Intelligence Branch.
Intelligence Branch
http://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/thisweek/intelligence-branch.mp3/view
2002 “USG Analyssts Review Recovered Documents” from FBI website –
https://web.archive.org/web/20020811052046/http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/afghanistan/afghanistan.htm
United States Government Analysts
Review Recovered Documents
“Military action and law enforcement and intelligence activities in Afghanistan continue to uncover documents and information about Al-Qaeda. This information comes to the United States for further processing and analysis by the combined expertise of several agencies. The results are then disseminated and acted upon,” according to Dale L. Watson, FBI Executive Assistant Director.
“The information arrives in evidence boxes. These boxes contain a multitude of items including, videotapes, maps, notebooks and other documents. Analysts electronically scan the documents for ready translation and analysis. Ultimately, the digitized form of the information is returned electronically for continuing comparison to newly acquired documents and information,” Watson said.
Preventing Agroterrorism
http://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/thisweek/preventing-agroterrorism.mp3/view
The FBI’s top priority is protecting the United States from a terrorist attack—that includes preventing, detecting, and investigating intentional contamination of the U.S. food supply.
Comment: It would violate the hadiths to contaminate an enemy’s food supply.
Wayback in 2004….
https://web.archive.org/web/20040510190759/http://www.fbi.gov/page2/april04/043004threat.htm
THE TERRORIST THREAT INTEGRATION CENTER
Pictured are the TTIC logo and, at the May 1, 2003, ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Center, Richard Haver, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; J. Cofer Black, Ambassador at Large, Office of Coordination for Counter Terrorism, State Department; FBI Director Robert Mueller; DCI George Tenet; and Gordon England, Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary.
On May 1, 2003, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center was established for a very clear purpose: to centralize the universe of threats aimed at America, analyze them on the spot, every day, and produce an evolving big picture of threats that are instantly actionable.
How does it work? The concept is simple–like a war room you see in old films: Analysts from every agency in the U.S. Intelligence Community receive a steady stream of threat information developed by their agency agents and sources–and they continuously fit those pieces into the ongoing picture…question them…validate them…analyze their implications…demand fresh information from the appropriate agency wherever they see gaps…and produce sequential “fused” snapshots of threats that can be–and are–converted into alerts and actions.
They send daily reports to the President and senior policymakers and share them across agencies responsible for the protection of the country. They make terrorist threat information and finished analyses available 24/7 at TTIC Online to some 2,600 specialists at every major federal agency and department involved in counterterrorism activities.
Where exactly does the threat information come from? From everywhere in the world–because it is aggressively gathered from intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security, diplomatic, and military sources everywhere in the world, then immediately entered into agency information systems and databases and picked up by TTIC analysts. Eyes and ears in Omaha that report to the FBI, say, an embassy bomb plot in Africa can–and do–match with eyes and ears in remote corners of the globe that report the same plot to CIA, diplomatic, and military intelligence officers.
What’s the FBI’s role in this joint venture? The same as our colleagues there from CIA, the Departments of State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and other agencies: to provide credible information from the U.S. law enforcement community and from our law enforcement colleagues overseas; to produce focused analysis on specific terrorist issues; and to fuse it with our partners into pure intelligence that will prevent terrorist attacks and protect American people and interests.
On the occasion of TTIC’s one-year anniversary, we’d like to quote TTIC Director John Brennan on this crafting of a new national terrorism analysis and information sharing framework, which he correctly calls “a revolutionary concept”: “TTIC represents a new way of optimizing the U.S. Government’s knowledge and formidable capabilities in the fight against terrorism…that allows us to gain a comprehensive understanding of terrorist threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad and, most importantly, to provide this information and related analysis to those responsible for detecting, disrupting, deterring, and defending against terrorist attacks.”
This particular war room is designed precisely to prevent attacks.
Richard Joltes is to Oak Island what GAO will be to Amerithrax.
History, Hoax, and Hype
The Oak Island Legend
http://www.criticalenquiry.org/oakisland/
GAO,
Consider this email that was culled from Dr. Ivins’ emails.
It was produced only when I separately asked for all loose papers from Ivins’ office and reveals what Ivins was doing at 9:57 PM on the night of September 26, 2001.
Yet it had not been among the emails when they were produced electronically.
Of course, Ivins could have deleted some of his emails.
But I know that each batch of emails was vetted and subject to culling by a large committee at DOJ and FBI.
John P. would send them out and then the people on the list would take weeks to review each batch to see what they wanted withheld.
JAG, for example, as I recall pulled 300 emails because they were jokes and social chitchat — later restoring them to production when I complained.
DOJ/FBI only restored this email after I specifically withheld from production. There are many others still being withheld but your assistance is needed to pry them from DOJ/FBI.
By obtaining the emails in the format where they are sequentially numbered (like the one above), you will be able to see which emails were deleted.
DOJ didn’t even preserve the full depositions from Hatfill.
Prosecutors in Maryland, Virginia reviewing cases amid investigation into FBI agent
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/prosecutors-in-maryland-virginia-reviewing-cases-amid-investigation-into-fbi-agent/2014/11/06/e227d954-65b3-11e4-bb14-4cfea1e742d5_story.html
By Peter Hermann November 6 at 11:54 AM
An FBI agent accused of tampering with drug and gun evidence, forcing authorities in the District to drop charges against more than two dozen defendants, “is devastated by what has occurred here” and wants to cooperate with investigators, his attorney said Thursday.
The attorney, Robert C. Bonsib, called some of the accusations “grossly overblown” but said his client “intends to fully cooperate with investigators and will assist both the FBI and other authorities that are involved with this matter.” He said the 33-year-old agent, Matthew Lowry, wants “to help bring this matter to a fast conclusion.”
Authorities have not detailed the allegations against Lowry but said he has been suspended. The Justice Department’s inspector general is conducting a misconduct investigation.
Gibbs Rule No. 41: Don’t get high on seized evidence near the Navy Yard. That’s Gibbs country.
Below is some of “science” that the FBI relied upon in accusing Dr. Hatfill for a half decade. Why is it acceptable for the FBI toss it into the dumpster in back, out of sight, when it proves inconvenient to its next theory? The bloodhounds did NOT alert to Dr. Ivins. So why wasn’t that deployment sheet disclosed — it tended to be EXCULPATORY of Dr. Ivins.
Instead, the bloodhounds alerted to the scientist that Dr. Ivins wrote about the missings virulent Ames — the scientist the former Zawahiri thanked for her technical assistance in working with the virulent Ames supplied by Bruce Ivins. The DOJ shredded that scientist’s civil deposition. The FBI has acted in a highly selective manner in picking and choosing which science to sanitize and then spin.
How do you confuse an AUSA detetermined to close the case — that she is reporting on directly to the FBI Director and is under tremendous pressure to solve?
You throw two shovels down and say “take your pick.”
Then you reprimand her for going to interview the jihadi in jail — on the grounds that a “deal had been cut.”
Title: Analysis of the Uniqueness and Persistence of Human Scent
Author(s): Allison M. Curran; Scott I. Rabin; Kenneth G. Furton
Date Published: April 2005
Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation
Quantico, VA 22135
Sale Source: US Dept of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation
Laboratory Branch
Annotation: This research examined the use of solid phase microextraction gas chromatography-mass spectrometry as a method for extracting, separating, and identifying the volatile components of human scent, along with the persistence of human scent in a controlled environment.
Abstract: The method described was found to be an effective and reliable means for extracting, separating, and analyzing human odor. It showed that human scent is a combination of various compounds that differ in ratio from person to person, along with some compounds that are unique to certain people. The preliminary studies show that the compound ratio patterns produced in a person’s scent are reproducible over time. Although there was some variation in odor in the same person, the ratio pattern was still distinguishable among people, with significantly greater variation in the ratios of components observed among people tested than that found for one person. In addition to the ratio of common chemicals, the presence of different compounds varied among subjects. There was a relatively long persistence of the human-scent compounds in a controlled environment, with measurable amounts still present nearly 3 months after being deposited on sterile gauze. Two unrelated, 24-year-old males were evaluated in this study. They were required to use fragrance-free soap and to discontinue using deodorants, lotions, and perfumes for 48 hours before sampling, so as to minimize the influence to these odors. There was no attempt to control the diet of the two subjects. Each subject exercised outdoors for 1 hour wearing a tank top in order to eliminate compounds in clothing. Each subject then sampled himself, using a sterile gauze pad to wipe the armpit area, collecting his sweat. Samples were stored in 10 ml vials at room temperature for 24 hours before extraction was conducted by means of solid phase microextraction. 7 tables and 31 references
Now the FBI scientists who signed off on the use of bloodhounds may have thought that even though the method would not be admissible in Court, that it could result in leads. The problem with that approach is that the reason it would not be admissible in Court is that the method as applied to this case was unreliable — thereby resulting in FALSE leads and derailing the investigation. In any event, when it didn’t support an Ivins Theory, the method was just overlooked and tossed aside.
The FBI did not disclose the fact that the bloodhounds did NOT alert to Dr. Ivins — just like they didn’t disclose the other evidence and documents about the other methods that tended to be exculpatory of Dr. Ivins. There was a form about the bloodhounds being deployed as to Dr. Ivins and not alerting. See Rex Stockham deposition including the pages spoliated and not preserved by the DOJ. That document should have been released by the FBI — and should now be disclosed and released in connection with the GAO’s forthcoming report on the methods used by the FBI.
Bloodhounds & Baloney
http://leerburg.com/bloodhounds.htm
Specialized Use of Human Scent in Criminal Investigations
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/forensic-science-communications/fsc/july2004/index.htm/research/2004_03_research03.htm
Scents and Sense-Ability
http://www.forensicmag.com/articles/2006/04/scents-and-sense-ability
Bloodhounds were deployed against USAMRIID Aerobiology (Building 1412) Personnel; over 100 locations were to be checked by bloodhounds for matching human scent taken from the original anthrax tainted letters and envelopes.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/bloodhounds-were-deployed-against-usamriid-aerobiology-building-1412-personnel-over-100-locations-were-to-be-checked-by-bloodhounds-for-matching-human-scent-taken-from-the-original-anthrax-tainte/
For those who believe in Tinkerbelle (one of the dogs used) , while most jurisdictions allow bloodhound evidence, courts generally have reservations about the possibility of inaccuracy of the evidence (when dogs, in fact, have alerted to a particular individual). The dog cannot be cross-examined. There is always the possibility that the dog may make a mistake. Accordingly, there are strict foundational requirements. The notion that such evidence is of slight probative value or must be viewed with caution stems at least in part from fear that a jury will be in awe of the animal’s apparent powers and will give the evidence too much weight (as the ABC and Newsweek reports amply illustrated). Putting aside for a moment use of the scent transfer device, five specific requirements are commonly required to establish an adequate foundation for dog-tracking evidence: (1) the handler was qualified to use the dog; (2) the dog was adequately trained; (3) the dog has been found reliable; (4) the dog was placed on the track where the guilty party had been; and (5) the trail was not stale or contaminated. Attorney Glasberg, in an email, expressed pleasure over an article by Shane that discussed the limitations of bloodhound evidence on bloodhounds. But Shane’s reporting has always been good even when pursuing the evidence underlying a Hatfill Theory.
A bloodhound provided with the deceased tennis shoes might very reliably lead authorities to the deceased’s body in the woods. What would have been used for the scent pack here is the human scent, if any, on the letter on which the perpetrator rested his hand in writing the letter. Tennis shoes are far more likely to carry a scent than a piece of paper on which the perp rested his hand (while possibly using gloves) to write a 28-word letter. Just ask my wife. The dogs would not have been clued to the biological agent as biological agents such as anthrax tend not to have a distinctive scent.
Here, there would be no such log because the use of the dog would not have been the subject of pre-911 testing and training showing the dog performed reliably under similar circumstances. At a minimum, the “trail” would have been contaminated by the irradiation and anthrax, and would have grown stale by the passage of time. The FDA concluded that irradiation can produce small changes in the taste, smell, and sometimes texture of foods and that consumers should be informed of this. Jurors should too. Remember that scene from “Miracle on 34th Street” where the official finding of the agency of the United States’ government was deemed binding on the prosecution? Imagine Attorney Connolly or Grannis calling FDA scientists who found irradiation caused changes in smell, no doubt amplified by the much keener sense of a bloodhound.
The United States Post Office explains in a FAQ that “the materials in the mail are heated and may become chemically altered. Paper dries out and may become dusty, discolored, and brittle.” Some postal workers and federal agency staff have reported symptoms such as eye, nose, throat and skin irritation, headache, nausea and occasional nosebleeds. What does the USPS do under these circumstances? Their solution includes “[u]sing hypoallergenic deodorizers to eliminate any smells.” “Testing each batch of aired-out mail to ensure no detectable amoungs of gas exist before delivery.” Alas, Tinkerbelle’s lengthy pre-911 log shows that perfume does not confuse her, but likely is silent on this question of irradiated paper. The prosecution witness who might testify that a bloodhound’s sense of smell is 200 times as powerful as a human’s sense of smell would merely be helping the defense argument. No amount of log keeping or experiments after the fact would serve to permit admissibility under the court precedent. The bloodhound evidence was always a bogus and hugely prejudical diversion since the first sensational Newsweek story leaked by Daniel Seikaly, head of the Criminal Division of the District of Columbia United States Attorneys Office.
In any event, the mailer would have worn gloves and only briefly handled the letter. More broadly, there is an article that collects cases from 40 or so states and nothing approaching the delays has ever been found admissible. In a city landscape, the time period is much more restrictive. The Leahy letter, written by the perp sometime prior to the October 9, 2001 postmark, was not discovered until mid-November, and as of November 19, 2001 a protocol was still being developed for its opening. Thus, the 40 day period that had been passed by the (likely glove-wearing) perp already would have resulted in a stale trail.
There is a separate additional issue of use of the “scent transfer unit” here. A “scent transfer unit” such as used here looks like a Dustbuster, modified with a small frame at the end to secure a piece of gauze over its intake opening. The user attaches a piece of sterile gauze to the unit, activates the unit, and holds it against the item from which the scent is to be taken (such as where the person sat the night before). Depending on the jurisdiction, the scent transfer unit, which is a new technology, may be subject to the rule regarding new scientific methodology. Under that rule, the proponent of such evidence must establish the new scientific principle or technique is sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs under the circumstances of the case. Here, there is no such general acceptance as explained by Scott Shane in an article in the Baltimore Sun relying on experts in the Maryland area. The purpose of the requirement is to avoid factfinders from being misled by the `aura of infallibility’ that may surround unproved scientific methods. This would constitute a possible third independent grounds for excluding the evidence. Absent a training log showing the dog performed reliably under similar circumstances, given the time period that had passed, and in light of the use of the scent transfer unit, there is nothing the FBI or trainers would be able to do to save the admissibility of the bloodhound evidence because it will be found by a court to be unreliable. The trainers reportedly tested their dogs on irradiated paper — presumably before actually doing the search but after being asked to do so. That would not pass muster that past training be substantiated by a training log.
Absent a pre-911 training log showing the dog performed reliably under similar circumstances, given the time period that had passed, and in light of the use of the scent transfer unit, there is nothing the FBI or trainers would be able to do to save the admissibility of the bloodhound evidence because it will be found by a court to be unreliable.
Both of the major police bloodhound associations howl against the reliability of the Scent Transfer Unit used by the three blood handlers. One of the dog handlers, Dennis Slavin, is an urban planner and reserve officer with the South Pasadena Police Department. One of the other dog handlers is a civilian who runs his own bloodhound business. Shane, in his very impressive Baltimore Sun article, explained that an FBI agent, Rex Stockham, examining the technology for the FBI lab says: “It’s going to be criticized. I’m critical of it myself.” The President of the Bloodhound Association, who is critical of the technology used by these handlers, had testified 21 times, and likely will have testified 22 if the FBI attempts to rely on the evidence in a prosecution. Shane notes that a federal jury awarded $1.7 million last year to a man wrongly accused of rape after police identified him in part based on the use of Slavin’s bloodhound, TinkerBelle. Shane’s article gives the further example of their use in the sniper investigation, where “given the scent taken from spent shell casings, followed two false trails in Montgomery County. One led to a house, for which a search warrant was obtained and which turned out not be relevant. The other led to a dog-grooming parlor, the officer said.” Phew. It’s no wonder Lucy responded to Hatfill. He is a ladies’ man, after all.
The New York Times also had an excellent article in December 2002 surveying the field that noted the case where dogs falsely indicated the presence of explosives in the cars of three medical students bound for Miami. The country watched the drama unfold on television as the men were held and authorities closed a major highway across Florida. No trace of explosives was found. When dog handlers are excited, dogs can overreact and give a false positive. “Dogs want rewards and so they will false alerts to get them. Dogs lie. We know they do,” an expert told the Times. One of ‘TinkerBelle’s most incredible talents,”her homepage touts, is her ability to find the person responsible for loading a gun using scent from an expended bullet casing.” Indeed, she finds the “smoking gun.” Most of all, the page notes, she too is a people person.
With the investigation going to the dogs, nearly 100 law enforcement officers gathered to watch some of their colleagues jump in a lake near where Dr. Hatfill lived, and in late January 2003, the FBI continued searching the forest in Frederick. Locals were amused that some of the ponds had been dry earlier that year. While they may seem to enjoy their dinners at Georgetown, FBI agents and surveillance specialists do not have an easy job. The public demands that they exhaustively pursue all leads, but then there is an uproar if they cross some unpredictable line and step on — or run over someone’s toe. They did just that in Hatfill’s case and he got ticketed for putting his foot under the car’s tire.
In any event, the bloodhounds did NOT alert to Ivins but the investigators just ignored that. Instead, they alerted to his chief accuser — whose deposition they shredded.
The investigators who came up with the Ivins Theory are just as resistant to correcting their course as the investigators who came up with the Hatfill Theory. Both were barking up the wrong tree. Neither group of investigators wanted to be in the doghouse.
By the failure to do a comparison of Atta’s handwriting with the Fall 2001 anthrax letters, the FBI abandoned sound scientific method and investigative practice. If a comparison of Atta’s handwriting was done but not produced, the FBI has violated FOIA. Relatedly, the FBI has violated FOIA by not producing the last page of Atta’s will in which the word R O O M was printed alongside a picture of a cadaceus, the symbol of medicine. The FBI should also produce the comparison of El-Shukrijumah’s and Jdey’s handwriting. Exemplars of Jdey’s handwriting are subject to the current FOIA litigation being briefed in federal court.
The List Of Comparisons Done By FBI’s Handwriting Analyst Who Found Ivins Probably DId Not Write The Anthrax Letters Is 22 Pages Long; The FBI Advises DXer That No Comparison Of Mohammed Atta’s Handwriting Is Among The Many Dozens Listed That Were Provided The Amerithrax Task Force
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/the-list-of-comparisons-done-by-fbis-handwriting-analyst-who-found-ivins-probably-did-not-write-the-anthrax-letters-is-22-pages-long-the-fbi-advises-dxer-that-no-comparison-of-mohammed-attas-h/
The USG Has Denied FOIA Requests For Atta’s Handwriting Since The Fall 2001 Anthrax Mailings On Grounds It Could Interfere With Enforcement Proceedings
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/the-usg-has-denied-foia-requests-for-attas-handwriting-since-the-fall-2001-anthrax-mailings-on-grounds-it-could-interfere-with-enforcement-proceedings/
Here is another handwriting sample of Bruce Ivins — this one discussing the planned visit by the former Zawahiri associate being supplied virulent Ames in early May 1998
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/here-is-another-handwriting-sample-of-bruce-ivins-this-one-discussing-the-planned-visit-by-the-former-zawahiri-associate-being-supplied-virulent-ames-in-early-may-1998/
The genetically distinctive subtilis found in the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings was NOT found in Dr. Bruce Ivins’ lab.
By the failure to sample all suspect labs for subtilis, the FBI abandoned sound scientific method and investigative practice. The FBI scientists chose to overlook inconvenient science that did not support an Ivins Theory. The FBI has not disclosed how many labs were tested for subtilis to include whether the Kandahar lab was tested for the genetically distinctive subtilis.
Subtilis Contaminant in Anthrax Mailed Fall 2001: Unclassified/For Official Use Only
The DOJ and FBI Should Produce To GAO All Forensic Analyses and Documents Relating to Swabbing And Testing For What Is Now Known As Bacillus subtilis subsp. inaquorosum subsp. nov.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/the-doj-and-fbi-should-produce-to-gao-all-forensic-analyses-and-documents-relating-to-swabbing-and-testing-for-what-is-now-known-as-bacillus-subtilis-subsp-inaquorosum-subsp-nov/
a recent article by Greg Gordon raises the potentially critical importance of b. subtilis contaminant found in the Brokaw and New York Post anthrax letters … not connected to Dr. Ivins … and substantially ignored by the FBI
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/greg-gordon-raises-importance-of-b-subtilis-contaminant-in-the-brokaw-and-new-york-post-anthrax-letters-not-connected-to-dr-ivins-substantially-ignored-by-the-fbi/
Simon Reeve in THE NEW JACKALS: RAMZI YOUSEF, OSAMA BIN LADEN AND THE FUTURE OF TERRORISM explained the connection between Ramzi Yousef and the apartment on Kensington Avenue called frequently in February 1993 by the subtilis expert.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/simon-reeve-in-the-new-jackals-ramzi-yousef-osama-bin-laden-and-the-future-of-terrorism-explained-the-connection-between-ramzi-yousef-and-the-apartment-on-kensington-avenue-called-frequently-in/
The science proves that the anthrax was NOT taken directly from Flask 1029. Yet proponents of an Ivins Theory uses the phrase “murder weapon” when Flask 1029 is no more the murder weapon than Dr. Heine’s samples from Building 1412 (as Dr. Heine explains so well). Proponents of an Ivins Theory attempted to use hetoric and spin to substitute for the peer reviewed science.
“Absence of Meglumine and Diatrizoate” in Scientific Approaches Used To Investigate The Anthrax Letters (February 2010)
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/absence-of-meglumine-and-diatrizoate-in-scientific-approaches-used-to-investigate-the-anthrax-letters-february-2010/
J Forensic Sci. 2012 Jul;57(4):923-31. doi: 10.1111/j.1556-4029.2012.02128.x. Epub 2012 Apr 26.
Trace detection of meglumine and diatrizoate from Bacillus spore samples using liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry.
Swider C1, Maguire K, Rickenbach M, Montgomery M, Ducote MJ, Marhefka CA.
Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, letters containing Bacillus anthracis were distributed through the United States postal system killing five people. A complex forensic investigation commenced to identify the perpetrator of these mailings. A novel liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry protocol for the qualitative detection of trace levels of meglumine and diatrizoate in dried spore preparations of B. anthracis was developed. Meglumine and diatrizoate are components of radiographic imaging products that have been used to purify bacterial spores. Two separate chromatographic assays using multiple mass spectrometric analyses were developed for the detection of meglumine and diatrizoate. The assays achieved limits of detection for meglumine and diatrizoate of 1.00 and 10.0 ng/mL, respectively. Bacillus cereus T strain spores were effectively used as a surrogate for B. anthracis spores during method development and validation. This protocol was successfully applied to limited evidentiary B. anthracis spore material, providing probative information to the investigators.
2012 American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Published 2012. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the U.S.A.
FBI Study Raises More Questions in Bruce Ivins Anthrax Case
An article published last week by the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) describes how a recent study adds more questions to the controversial investigation of USAMRIID scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax mailing attacks in the United States.
The initial FBI investigation linked spores found in the anthrax mailings to material contained in a flask labeled “RMR-1029” that was under Dr. Ivins’ control. Lab records later determined that the RMR-1029 material had been purified using a product containing two specific ingredients: meglumine and diatrizoate.
To determine if spore material from the letters also contained these ingredients, researchers from the CBRN Sciences Unit of the FBI developed novel methods to detect trace elements of meglumine and diatrizoate in dried anthrax spores.
Investigators confirmed the presence of the ingredients in the USAMRIID flask. However, utilizing the same methods they found no evidence of the ingredients in the spore samples from the letters used in the attacks.
The research study titled “Trace Detection of Meglumine and Diatrizoate from Bacillus Spore Samples Using Liquid Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry” was published last month in the Journal of Forensic Scientists.
– See more at: http://globalbiodefense.com/2012/05/29/fbi-study-raises-more-questions-in-bruce-ivins-anthrax-case/#sthash.pSRzauLT.dpuf
The relative ease Shurkrijumah may have had because of his “U.S. Status,” his looks, and his fluency in English, was increased due to his skill at creating fake travel documents. Jaffar al-Tayyar taught others “to falsify documents by substituting photographs, erasing entry/exit stamps, and removing visas.”
Adnan worked out of the media center in Kandahar which was a center for 911 planning and AQ’s anthrax planning.
http://dspace.wrlc.org/doc/get/2041/85662/03053_060901display.pdf
“Analyst Note: Padilla and al-Tayyar were known to work out of the media center in Kandahar. … Al-Tayyar is Adnan al-Shukrijummah who is currently at large.”
I first ventured the connection between the media center and the anthrax mailings well over a decade ago.
In 2001, before departing for the UAE, Al-Hawsawi had worked in the Al Qaeda media center As Sahab (Clouds) in Kandahar. The letter containing the first anthrax went to the American Media in Florida had blue and pink clouds on it.
On March 23, 2003, the Washington Post reported on documents allegedly discovered at the Abdul Qadoos Khan residence — on a seized laptop — relating to biochemical weapons. The documents indicated that Al Qaeda leaders may already have manufactured some of them. The documents at the Qadoos home reveal that Al Qaeda had a feasible production plan for anthrax. Confronted with scanned handwritten notes on the computer, Mohammed reportedly began to talk about Al Qaeda’s anthrax production program. KSM, however, denies that it was his computer. He says it was the computer of Mustafa Hawsawi, who was captured at the home the same day. It was Hawsawi who was Adnan El-Shukrijumah’s roommate in Karachi in February – April 2002 after Shukrijumah returned from travel to the United States.
Did Former Special Agent Scott Decker in his manuscript address the anthrax processing documents along with the semen stained panties in in USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins’ trash? Which is more probative of the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings? Agent Decker, after impressive academic training, started his career working on armored car robberies in Boston — perhaps my favorite subject right after treasure hunts. (Treasure hunts are like the planning of legal armored car robberies for law-abiding citizens).
Hawsawi worked under KSM who in turn worked for Zawahiri. Al-Hawsawi was a facilitator for the 9/11 attacks and its paymaster, working from the United Arab Emirates. He sent thousands to Bin Al-Shibh in the summer of 2001. After 9/11, he returned to Afghanistan where he met separately with Bin Laden, Zawahiri and spokesman Abu Ghaith. KSM worked closely with al-Hawsawi. It would make perfect sense that the computer is actually al-Hawsawi’s as KSM claims. The fact that the anthrax spray drying documents were on that computer, however, and that Al-Hawsawi had worked for As Sahab in Kandahar in 2000, serves to suggest that the undated documents predated 9/11, particularly given that extremely virulent anthrax reportedly was later found in Kandahar. At the same time, it suggests that Al-Hawsawi has personal knowledge relevant to anthrax. Al-Hawsawi in turn worked with Aafia Siddiqui’s husband-to-be, KSM’s nephew Al-Baluchi, in the UAE in the summer of 2001. The two provided logistical support for the hijackers.
Hawsawi worked as a financial manager for Bin Laden when he was in Sudan near Khartoum. He was associated with Egyptian Islamic Jihad shura leader Mahjoub, who was Bin Laden’s farm manager in Sudan. Mahjoub was the subject of the anthrax threat in January 2001 in Canada, upon announcement of his bail hearing. The day after Mahjoub’s bail was denied on October 5, 2001, the potent stuff was sent to US Senators Daschle and Leahy. The FBI needed to prioritize any lead involving individuals who knew Mahjoub; but in accusing Ivins, it appears that they failed to do so. Now the former FBI agents seem determined to argue their conclusions into retirement and second careers. In doing so, they should at least address the substantive issues so that people can “get on the same page.” CSI poses about methods that were not at all probative of anything much will not cut it. For example, the “four morphs” analysis merely narrowed the field of 700 known to have access to “up to 377” who had access — and that was just at USAMRIID. Instead, they should also address the traditional methods and not just the dogs that barked up the wrong tree or chased tail.
The Washington Post explained that “What the documents and debriefings show, the first official said, is that “KSM was involved in anthrax production, and [knew] quite a bit about it.” Barton Gellman in the Post explained that Al Qaeda had recruited competent scientists, including a Pakistani microbiologist who the officials declined to name. “The documents describe specific timelines for producing biochemical weapons and include a bar graph depicting the parallel processes that must take place between Days 1 and 31 of manufacture. Included are inventories of equipment and indications of readiness to grow seed stocks of pathogen in nutrient baths and then dry the resulting liquid slurry into a form suitable for aerosol dispersal.” The Washington Post story notes that U.S. officials said the evidence does not indicate whether al Qaeda completed manufacture. The documents are undated and unsigned and cryptic about essential details.
In addition to establishing him as paymaster for the hijackers, Al-Hawsawi’s computer disks reportedly also included lists of contributors worldwide, to include bank account numbers and names of organizations that have helped finance terror attacks. (This past week it was reported that Moussaoui has offered to testify about the names of organizations and individuals who helped fund 911.) In press accounts, one unnamed government official confirmed that the information has yielded the identities of about a dozen suspected terrorists in the US. In his substituted testimony in the Moussaoui case, Al-Hawsawi says he became part of Al Qaeda’s media committee in Afghanistan in about July 2000. Hawsawi lived at the media office. For about 4-5 months in 2000, Hawsawi worked as a secretary on al Qaeda’s media committee. Hawsawi’s role “was to copy compact discs and reprint articles for the brothers at the guesthouse in Qandahar. After 2000, Hawsawi worked at the direction of Sheikh Mohammed, transferring funds, and procuring goods.” KSM joined the committee in February 2001.
The first time that Hawsawi was asked to be come involved in operational activities was about March 2001, when he took his second trip to the UAE. Although Sheikh Mohammed did not use the word “operation,” Sheikh Mohammed told Hawsawi that he would be purchasing items, receiving and possibly sending money, and possibly meeting individuals whom Hawsawi would contact or who would contact him. Sheikh Mohammed also told Hawsawi that his stay would be lengthy, so he should rent an apartment. Sheikh Mohammed said Hawsawi did not need cover because he was carrying a Saudi passport, and it was a common practice for a Saudi to rent an apartment in the UAE. In approximately August 2001, Hawsawi, with Sheikh Mohammed’s blessing, decided to take an English course.
Sheik Mohammed told Hawsawi that he would be in contact with individuals called ‘Abd Al-Rahman (Muhammad Atta) and the “Doctor” (Nawaf al-Hazmi). Atta called Hawsawi four times while in the US. Hawsawi says he was never in contact with Hani or Nawaf while in the US. On September 9, Ramzi bin Shibh told him the date of the planned operation and urged that he return to Pakistan. He flew out on 9/11 and after a night in Karachi, flew on to Quetta. Hawsawi stated repeatedly that he never conducted any activity of any type with or on behalf of Moussaoui and had no knowledge of who made Moussaoui’s travel arrangements. Documents, however, reportedly show that al-Hawsawi worked with the Dublin cell to finance Moussaoui’s international travel. The indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui named al-Hawsawi as an unindicted co-conspirator. Moussaoui unsuccessfully tried to call KSM and Hawsawi as witnessses. References to al-Hawsawi turned up in the Dublin, Ireland, office of a Saudi-backed charity suspected of having links to bin Laden upon a raid after 9/11 by Irish authorities.
Hawsawi has said that it was Qahtani who was to have been “the 20th hijacker” rather than Moussaoui. Qahtani, Hawsawi said, had trained extensively to be one of the “muscle hijackers.” Atta went to pick Qahtani up at the Orlando airport but immigration officials turned Qahtani away. Al-Hawsawi said he had seen Moussaoui at an al-Qaeda guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan, sometime in the first half of 2001, but was not introduced to him and had not conducted any operations with him. At Moussaoui’s trial, the government pointed to FAA intelligence reports from the late 1990s and 2000 that noted that a hijacked airliner could be flown into a building or national landmark in the U.S., Such an attack was viewed “as an option of last resort” given the motive of the attack was to free blind sheik Abdel Rahman. Flying a plane into a building would afford little time to negotiate.
Zacarias Moussaou reportedly was in Karachi with anthrax lab tech Yazid Sufaat on February 3, 2001 when they bought air tickets through a local travel agency for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They reportedly left on a flight for KL on February 8, 2001. Moussaoui began at the Norman, Oklahoma flight school on February 26, 2001. KSM says that Moussaoui’s inquiries about cropdusters may have related to Hambali and Sufaat’s work with anthrax.
Sufaat has been interviewed on French television about his friend Zacarias Moussaoui.
Another reason not to underestimate Hawsawi’s role in an anthrax operation is his contact with al-Marri. Al-Marri, who entered the country on September 10, 2001, was researching chemicals in connection with a “second wave.” Al-Marri was also drafting emails to KSM. Although al-Marri denies being in contact with Hawsawi, phone records show otherwise. Email evidence also confirms messages drafted by al-Marri to KSM. An article by Susan Schmidt in the Washington Post on al-Marri notes that al-Marri picked up $13,000 in cash from al-Hawsawi. Al-Marri made the mistake of opening the briefcase containing the money in bundles and peeling off a few hundred dollars to pay his bail after being stopped on a traffic charge a couple days after 9/11. xxx In applying, he would not provide a home address or sign the application. “He was a very pugnacious individual,” the administrator told the Post. He was calling students. A number of people reported him as acting suspicious in the heightened sensibilities after 9/11. One student from whom he sought help was the local mosque imam, graduate student Jaloud. Jaloud curiously reports that he did not remember him as the fellow he had taken to the airport 90 minutes away in the summer of 2000, or the fellow he had argued about shipping the computer, or the fellow who had then put him to the expense of shipping the computer to Washington. (Jaloud reports when questioned in 2005, he told the Saudis that he did not remember the address in Washington where he sent the computer.)
Al-Marri is due to get out of prison this next January. Now Al-Marri’s book is one I especially want to read. By sharing perspectives and documentary evidence, we can all work to get on the same page — which is what solving difficult mysteries is all about.
Meanwhile, Hawsawi and KSM face trial still. Our justice system is truly broken.
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi897975833/
The FBI’s Hazmat WMD unit had the likes of John Ezzell who could advise on whether Al Qaeda had the necessary equipment to make a dried aerosol out of anthrax. Hopefully, Scott Decker, formerly of the FBI’s hazmat unit, will now address the equipment that Al Qaeda procured and the equipment at the Kandahar lab — to include both the equipment there, the equipment attempted to be destroyed and the equipment known to have been removed.
One fellow helping Yazid Sufaat procure equipment from Karachi was a PhD student in microbiology named Saeed Mohammed. A DIA (later CIA CTC) analyst in 2002 told me that Saaed Mohammed was thought mainly to be involved only in procurement. Saaed was rendered early on.
It was 1 a.m. in the morning on October 23, 2001. Parts of the airport runway were pitch black. Masked Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence (“ISI”) agents in a rented white Toyota sedan sped up with a shackled and blindfolded man. In the empty corner of the Karachi airport, a soldier with his face covered filmed the transfer of Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, age 27. Two weeks earlier a postal worker had died in the US from exposure to mailed anthrax. Authorities were rounding up the usual suspects — using a Gulfstream V jet registered to people in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. who existed only on paper. Mohammed had first come to Karachi in 1993 from Yemen’s capital city, Sana’a, and had recently been studying microbiology at the University of Karachi.
After an October 2001 bombing raid at a Qaeda camp in Darunta, Afghanistan US forces found 100+ printed, typed, handwritten pages of documents that shed light on Al Qaeda’s early anthrax planning. The Defense Intelligence Agency provided me the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents confirmed that it was Zawahiri’s plan to use established specialists and the cover of universities and charities as cover for weaponizing anthrax. From early on, the evidence suggested that charity is as charity does. 90 of the 100 pages are the photocopies of journal articles and the disease handbook excerpts. It was not clear whether or they had yet acquired virulent anthrax or weaponized it, but it was clear that the planning was well along. When Vice President Cheney was briefed on the documents in late 2001, he immediately called a meeting of FBI and CIA. “I’ll be very blunt,” the Vice President started. “There is no priority of this government more important than finding out if there is a link between what’s happened here and what we’ve found over there with Qaeda.” At one point, security personnel thought that the home belonging to Elizabeth Cheney, his daughter had been hit by an anthrax attack. Elizabeth had to call her nanny to get her to take the kids to be tested for exposure. A June 1999 memo from Ayman to military commander Atef said that “the program should seek cover and talent in educational institutions, which it said were ‘more beneficial to us and allow easy access to specialists, which will greatly benefit us in the first stage, God willing.’ ”Thus, in determining whether Al Qaeda was responsible for the anthrax mailings in the Fall of 2001, the FBI and CIA had reason to know based on the growing documentary evidence available by mid-December 2001, that Al Qaeda operatives were likely associated with non-governmental organizations and working under the cover and talent in universities.
After the September 11 attacks, Pakistani intelligence agents had started checking on Arab university students in the area. Mohammed’s teachers told investigators that they had not seen him on campus since late August. Agents staked out his apartment in Karachi and nabbed him upon his return. Mohammed was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole. In 1996, Pakistani authorities officials had arrested Mohammed in connection with the November 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. Ayman Zawahiri, speaking for the military wing of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, known as the Vanguards of Conquest, claimed responsibility for that embassy bombing. Mohammed was released without being charged for the embassy bombing. Mohammed re-enrolled at university in 1999. He was one of at least two lab technicians who were rendered by the CIA in 2001. I’ was told that Saeed Mohammed was not particularly expert — and spent most of his time in Karachi procuring equipment. Finding the scientist responsible for the mailed anthrax in the Fall 2001 would take a bit longer.
It was not until seven years later that we even learned that MIT-graduate Aafia Siddiqui — post-9/11 — worked at Karachi Institute of Technology as a lab technician after being tasked to research germ warfare. She worked there even though the FBI had announced up to a $5 million reward for her capture. Dr. L. Thomas Kucharski, psychiatrist for the defendant, explained in his affidavit filed July 2, 2009 that a man known as “Abu Lubaba” had tasked her to research germ weapons. When Aafia Siddiqui was captured, her thumb drive had e-mail correspondence referencing US-based cells and prior attacks. There were even document on how to weaponize ebola. Sometimes rather than being truly invisible or on the “dark side,” an enemy is merely hiding in plain sight — or hidden by inappropriate redactions or highly classified, compartmentalized, operations intended to avoid embarrassment to decision-makers or to further personal agendas. Most intelligence is “open source.” Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
The way to get people “on the same page” is to literally get them on the same page. In Amerithrax, however, DOJ did not preserve the full depositions from US v. Hatfill — in violation of DOJ rules requiring that the sworn civil depositions be kept (deeming them part of the agency record of the litigation).
Playing hide-the-ball is wrong regardless of your view of who is responsible for the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings. That is true whether it is due to CYA instincts or sloppy record-keeping or just institutionalized spoliation of documents. The senior litigators who did not preserve the civil depositions they conducted relating to the biggest criminal investigation in history have long known of the pending GAO probe.
The former head of the NYC FBI Field Office Borelli has said early on that it was decided that Amerithrax would go the way of secret prisons rather than prosecution.
GAO Should Obtain A Copy Of Rauf Ahmad’s Signed Written Statement Voluntarily Provided FBI Agent Borelli
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/gao-should-obtain-a-copy-of-rauf-ahmads-signed-written-statement-voluntarily-provided-fbi-agent-borelli/
We should compare what author Scott Decker has written about Yazid Sufaat’s work with virulent anthrax in Kandahar — while he and his two assistants were vaccinated — and compare it to what Yazid Sufaat and his assistant now says. (I believe his other assistant was killed). We should also consider what Dr. Decker says about the CIA and FBI interrogation of Rauf Ahmad at the ISI safe house in the spring of 2002 over tea and cookies.
Al Qaeda anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat’s former assistant indicted in Israel for holding biological weapons
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/al-qaeda-anthrax-lab-director-yazid-sufaats-former-assistant-indicted-in-israel-for-holding-biological-weapons/
George Tenet in his May 2007 In the Center of the Storm says: “Al-Qa’ida spared no effort in its attempt to obtain biological weapons. In 1999, al-Zawahiri recruited Pakistani national Rauf Ahmad, to set up a small lab in Khandahar, Afghanistan, to house the biological weapons effort. In December 2001, a sharp WMD analyst at CIA found the initial lead on which we would pull and, ultimately, unravel the al-Qa’ida anthrax networks. We were able to identify Rauf Ahmad from letters he had written to Ayman al-Zawahiri. … We located Rauf Ahmad’s lab in Afghanistan. We identified the building in Khandahar where Sufaat claimed he isolated anthrax. We mounted operations that resulted in the arrests and detentions of anthrax operatives in several countries.”
Delivering the James Smart Lecture, entitled “Global Terrorism: are we meeting the challenge?” at the headquarters of the City of London Police, Ms. Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, said: “Western security services have uncovered networks of individuals, sympathetic to the aims of al-Qa’ida, that blend into society, individuals who live normal, routine lives until called upon for specific tasks by another part of the network.” She concluded: “The threats of chemical, biological and radiological and suicide attacks require new responses and the Government alone will not achieve all of it; industry and even the public must take greater responsibility for their own security.”
Milton Leitenberg wrote in a chapter on evolving threats in Wenger and Wollenmann’s 2007 Bioterrorism: Confronting A Complex Threat: “The first significant and meaningful information on what Al-Qaida may at some point have hoped to achieve in the area of bioweapons appeared on a single page in the journal SCIENCE in mid-December 2003, and then in declassified documents that were obtained in the last week of March 2004. … Appended to the single page in SCIENCE via the internet address was a list of thirty-two items: eleven books and twenty-one professional journal papers nearly all dating from the 1950s and 1960s dealing with pathogens or bioweapons.” He explained: “They were found in Al Qaida training camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 2001. Half of the books dealt with historic or general aspects of bioweapons and would be of little practical use in an effort to produce bioweapons agents. However, at least some of the journal papers and the remaining half of the books might have been useful in such an effort. They were found only a few kilometers from the site near the Kandahar airport that contained the rudimentary equipment also procured by Al-Qaida.”Most important of all, the documents indicated that “al-Qaida’s BW initiative included recruitment of individuals with PhD-level expertise who supported planning and acquisition efforts by their familiarity with the scientific community.” Mr. Leitenberg concludes: “If it should turn out, as is currently assumed, that the Amerithrax perpetrator came from within the US government’s own biodefense program, with access to strains, laboratories, people and knowledge, then all previous conceptions about the significance of the events would be substantially altered.” He observes that “Al-Qaeda has actively recruited educated college graduates and … specifically sought individuals with particular knowledge and training. … Such recruiting patterns do not automatically translate into either an interest or capability in bioweapons, but they would be a key advantage should the interests of such a group turn in that direction, as Al-Zawahiri’s [1999] memorandum quoted above suggests they may.”
In 1999, a scientist from Porton Down had reported to sfam members on a conference in Taos, New Mexico in August that included a talk by Tim Read, (TIGR, Rockville, USA) and concerned the whole genome sequencing of the Bacillus anthracis Ames strain. The Ames strain may have been a mystery to many after the Fall 2001 mailings, but not to motivated Society for Applied Microbiology (“SFAM”) members, one of whom was part of Ayman Zawahiri’s “Project Zabadi.” As described by Dr. Peter Turnbull’s Conference report for SFAM on “the First European Dangerous Pathogens Conference” (held in Winchester), at the September 1999 conference, the lecture theater only averaged about 75 at peak times by his head count. There had been a problem of defining “dangerous pathogen” and a “disappointing representation from important institutions in the world of hazard levels 3 and 4 organisms.” Papers included a summary of plague in Madagascar and another on the outbreak management of hemorrhagic fevers. Dr Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University presented a paper on multilocus VNTR typing, for example, of Bacillus anthracis and Yersinia pestis. There were more than the usual no-show presenters and fill-in speakers. In his report, Dr. Turnbull looked forward to a second, fully international conference in 2000 focused on the ever increasing problems surrounding hazard levels 3 and 4 organisms and aimed at international agreement on the related issues. University of Maryland researcher Milton Leitenberg reports that the conferences described in the correspondence had been in July and September 1999.
The Sunday at the start of the Organization of the Dangerous Pathogens meeting in September 2000, which the SFAM director confirmed to me that Rauf Ahmad also attended, was gloomy. Planning had proved even more difficult than the International Conference on anthrax also held at the University of Plymouth, in September 1998. The overseas delegates included a sizable contingent from Russia. The organizers needed to address many thorny issues regarding who could attend. One of the scientists in attendance was Rauf Ahmad. The Washington Post reports: “The tall, thin and bespectacled scientist held a doctorate in microbiology but specialized in food production, according to U.S. officials familiar with the case.” Les Baillie the head of the biodefense technologies group at Porton Down ran the scientific program. Many of the delegates took an evening cruise round Plymouth harbor. The cold kept most from staying out on the deck. Later attendees visited the National Marine Aquarium — with a reception in view of a large tankful of sharks. Addresses include presentations on plagues of antiquity, showing how dangerous infectious diseases had a profound that they changed the course of history. Titles include “Magna pestilencia – Black Breath, Black Rats, Black Death”, “From Flanders to Glanders,” as well as talks on influenza, typhoid and cholera. The conference was co-sponsored by DERA, the UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.
Les Baillie of Porton Down gave a presentation titled, “Bacillus anthracis: a bug with attitude!” He argued that anthrax was a likely pathogen to be used by terrorists. As described at the time by Phil Hanna of University of Michigan Medical School on the SFAM webpage, Baillie “presented a comprehensive overview of this model pathogen, describing its unique biology and specialized molecular mechanisms for pathogenesis and high virulence. He went on to describe modern approaches to exploit new bioinformatics for the development of potential medical counter measures to this deadly pathogen.” Bioinformatics was the field that Ali Al-Timimi, who had a security clearance for some government work and who had done work for the Navy, would enter by 2000 at George Mason University in Virginia. Despite the cold and the sharks, amidst all the camaraderie and bonhomie no one suspected that despite the best efforts, a predator was on board — on a coldly calculated mission to obtain a pathogenic anthrax strain. The conference organizer Peter Turnbull had received funding from the British defense ministry but not from public health authorities, who thought anthrax too obscure to warrant the funding. By 2001, sponsorship of the conference was assumed by USAMRIID. USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins had started planning the conference held in Annapolis, Maryland in June 2001 three years earlier, immediately upon his return from the September 1998 conference.
According to the Pakistan press, a scientist named Rauf Ahmad was picked up in December 2001 by the CIA in Karachi. The most recent of the correspondence reportedly dates back to the summer and fall of 1999. Even if Rauf Ahmad cooperated with the CIA, he apparently could only confirm the depth of Zawahiri’s interest in weaponizing anthrax and provided no “smoking gun” concerning the identity of those responsible for the anthrax mailings in the Fall 2001. His only connection with SFAM was a member of the society — he was not an employee. The Pakistan ISI, according to theWashington Post article in October 2006, stopped cooperating in regard to Rauf Ahmad in 2003.
I have uploaded scanned copies of some 1999 documents seized in Afghanistan by US forces describing the author’s visit to the special confidential room at the BL-3 facility where 1000s of pathogenic cultures were kept; his consultation with other scientists on some of technical problems associated with weaponizing anthrax; the bioreactor and laminar flows to be used in Al Qaeda’s anthrax lab; and the need for vaccination and containment. He explained that the lab director noted that he would have to take a short training course at the BL-3 lab for handling dangerous pathogens. Rauf Ahmad noted that his employer’s offer of pay during a 12-month post-doc sabbatical was wholly inadequate and was looking to Ayman to make up the difference. After an unacceptably low pay for the first 8 months, there would be no pay for last 4 months and there would be a service break. He had noted that he only had a limited time to avail himself of the post-doc sabbatical. I also have uploaded a handwritten copy of earlier correspondence from before the lab visit described in the typed memo. The Defense Intelligence Agency provided the documents to me, along with 100+ pages more, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). 90 of the 100 pages are the photocopies of journal articles and disease handbook excerpts.
The Post, in an exclusive groundbreaking investigative report, recounts that the FBI’s New York office took the lead U.S. role — and its agents worked closely with the CIA and bureau officials in Pakistan in interrogating Rauf. Though not formally charged with any crimes, Rauf agreed to questioning. While the US media focused on the spectacle of bloodhounds alerting to Dr. Steve Hatfill and the draining of Maryland ponds, this former Al Qaeda anthrax operative provided useful leads. But problems began when the U.S. officials sought to pursue criminal charges, including possible indictment and prosecution in the United States. In earlier cases, such as the othopedic surgeon Dr. Amer Aziz who treated Bin Laden in the Fall of 2001, the Pakistani government angered the Pakistani public when it sought to prosecute professionals for alleged ties to al-Qaeda. In the case of Amer Aziz, hundreds of doctors, engineers and lawyers took to the streets to demand his release. In 2003, the Pakistanis shut off U.S. access to Rauf. By then, I had noticed the reporting of his arrest in a press article about the raid of a compound of doctors named Khawaja and published it on my website. According to Pakistani officials, there was not enough evidence showing that he actually succeeded in providing al-Qaeda with something useful. Since then, the Post reports, Rauf has been allowed to return to his normal life. Attempts by the Post to contact Rauf in Lahore were unsuccessful. Initially the government agency had said an interview would be possible but then backpedaled.
“He was detained for questioning, and later the courts determined there was not sufficient evidence to continue detaining him,” Pakistan’s information minister told the Post. “If there was evidence that proved his role beyond a shadow of a doubt, we would have acted on it. But that kind of evidence was not available.” Yazid Sufaat got the job handling things at the lab instead of Rauf Ahmad. More importantly, Zawahiri, if keeping with his past experience, would have kept things strictly compartmentalized — leaving the Amerithrax Task Force much to do.
George Tenet in his May 2007 In the Center of the Storm says Sufaat was “the self-described ‘CEO’ of al-Qai’da’s anthrax program.” Tenet reports that “Sufaat had impeccable extremist credentials” and “[i]n 2000 he had been introduced to Ayman al-Zawahiri personally, by Hambali, as the man who was capable of leading al-Qai’da’s biological weapons program.”
Participants at a key meeting in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000 included Hambali, Yazid Sufaat, two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar, Cole planner Attash aka Khallad, and others. Tawfiq Bin Attash was a long time Bin Laden operative. The Yemeni first went to Afghanistan in 1989. He came to lead Bin Laden’s bodyguards and was an intermediary between Bin Laden and those who carried out the bombing of the Cole in October 2000. Attash also had been a key planner in the 1998 embassy bombings, serving as the link between the Nairobi cell and Bin Laden and Atef. Khalid Almhidhar, one of the 9/11 hijackers, was from Saudi Arabia but was a Yemeni national. Almhidhar was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the indictment against Zacarias Moussaoui. Al-Hindi, who along with Adnan El-Shukrijumah would later case the NYC land DC andmarks, had gone to Kuala Lumpur with Khallad. While not at the meeting with the hijackers, Al-Hindi met Hambali shortly after that meeting.
Zacarias Moussaoui was alleged, at least initially, to have received his money from Yazid Sufaat, under the cover of a company managed by his wife named Infocus Tech. A legitimate company, the company has eight employees and virtually no connection to the US. The company was an importer of US computer software and hardware. After authorities found a letter signed by Yazid Sufaat purporting to authorize Zacarias Moussaoui as its marketing representative, authorities went looking for Sufaat. But by then, he had left for Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to his wife, he went to Pakistan in June 2001 because he wanted to do his doctorate in pathology at the University of Karachi. Dursina had attended Sacramento State with Sufaat. It was her mother who encouraged Yazid’s religious studies. According to his wife, Sejarhtul Dursina, “He had planned to set up a medical support unit in Afghanistan, near Kandahar.” Kandahar is where Al Qaeda established its anthrax lab and where extremely virulent anthrax reportedly was found at a home identified by Hambali after his capture.
Sufaat graduated from California State University, Sacramento in 1987. He received a bachelors degree in biological sciences, concentrating on clinical laboratory technology, with a minor in chemistry. Sac State biological sciences professor Robert Metcalf taught Sufaat a food microbiology class in the spring of 1986. The first lesson in class was to teach students how German physician Robert Koch proved that anthrax was caused by a specific bacterium. “All of my students know how to isolate anthrax in soil samples,” Metcalf told the Chicago Tribune. “Anthrax was the first organism we talked about.” Sufaat joined the Malaysian army, where he was a lab technician assigned to a medical brigade. After five years, he left the service with the rank of captain and worked for a civilian laboratory. In August 1993, he set up his own company, Green Laboratory Medicine. The 9/11 Commission Report notes that Sufaat started work on the al Qaeda biological weapons program after he participated in JI’s December 2000 church bombings. In December 2001, Sufaat was arrested upon returning from Afghanistan to Malaysia.
Malaysian officials, at the time, long sought to minimize Sufaat’s role. Sufaat merely was a foot soldier who provided housing and false identification letters and helped obtain explosives. “I would put it this way: If Hambali [Al Qaeda’s point man in Southeast Asia] was the travel agent, Sufaat was the guy at the airport holding up the sign.” Sufaat admits to having purchased 4 tons of ammonium nitrate to build a truck bomb for the Singapore cell. The 9/11 Commission Report indicates Zacarias Moussaoui was also involved in arranging the purchase — one plan was to load the explosives on a cargo plane. The ammonium nitrate eventually was found buried throughout the grounds of a plantation. The ammonium nitrate actually had never been part of a plan by KSM — Moussaoui, eager to be involved in an attack in the region, lied to Sufaat and told him it was. When Hambali found out, he was furious and flew to Pakistan to demand (unsuccessfully) that Moussaoui be recalled. The Malaysian officials report that they believe that Sufaat had no knowledge of what the hijackers who stayed at his condominium or Zacarias were planning. That is consistent with the principles of cell security ordinarily followed — also evasion in interrogation. At a minimum, however, the established facts relevant to the Amerithrax investigation show that in the Summer and Fall of 2001 an Al Qaeda supporter who had assisted in the 9-11 operation — and who was a lab technician working with anthrax — was in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Was he the fellow perceived as Filipino who the journalist met in Afghanistan in the Fall of 2001 bragging about his ability to manipulate anthrax? According to Sufaat’s attorney, Sufaat gave two FBI agents no fresh evidence during a 30-minute interrogation finally conducted in November 2002 (where they mainly wanted to know how he knew Zacarias). The U.S. has asked for his extradition in connection with hosting of the two 9/11 hijackers, but Malaysia refused. President Bush reported that US officials did not fully appreciate Sufaat’s role in Al Qaeda’s anthrax program until after KSM’s capture in March 2003.
As described in US News, a former reporter from the Kabul Times actually may have met a Filipino carrying papers from Zawahiri and bragging about his ability to manipulate anthrax. The man may have been Hambali’s lieutenant, Muklis Yunos, who had been Hambali’s right-hand man and was in charge of special operations for the Philippine Moro Islamic Liberation Front (“MILF”). British reporter Philip Smucker explained that the Afghan reporter working with him spoke fluent Arabic and made regular undercover trips into Afghanistan from Pakistan. He had visited three functioning al Qaeda camps at grave risk to his life. Smucker explains that his colleague had landed in a Kabul hotel with a Filipino scientist who had a signed letter from al Qaeda’s number two, Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, authorizing him to help the network develop biological weapons. The man at the hotel had described his own efforts to develop an “anthrax bomb.” Filipino Muklis Yunos was an explosives expert who had participated with Yazid Sufaat in the December 2000 church bombings. Upon his arrest in May 2003, Philippine intelligence said he had received anthrax training in Afghanistan. Perhaps he was who the journalist encountered.
In November 2007, FBI Director Mueller gave a speech in which he warned against the need to guard against spies at universities, who for example, may have access to pre-patent, pre-classification biochemistry information. “Al Qaeda is tremendously patient and thinks nothing about taking years to infiltrate persons in and finding the right personnel and opportunity to undertake an attack. And we cannot become complacent, because you look around the world, and whether it’s London or Madrid or Bali or recently Casablanca or Algiers, attacks are taking place.” Amerithrax was Exhibit A in support of his point.
An article in George Mason University Gazette, in “CAS Holds Terrorism Briefing on Capitol Hill,” dated October 16, 2001 stated: “On Friday, October 12, the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) hosted a legislative briefing on terrorism, bioterrorism, and extremist movements on Capitol Hill. The briefing provided legislators and their staffs with comprehensive background information on Islam, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, bioterrorism, and information security. Ken Alibek, affiliate faculty member at George Mason and president of Advanced Biosytems Inc., addressed chemical and biological warfare issues. Alibek served as first deputy chief of defense of the civilian branch of the Soviet Union’s offensive biological weapons program.” The briefing of Senators and Congressman had about 100 people present including a lot of media.
Alibek’s suitemate at George Mason University, Ali Al-Timimi, was knowledgeable about Islam, the Taliban and information security. Indeed, he was actively recruiting for the Taliban and was communicating with Bin Laden’s sheik and the so-called fellow Falls Church “911 imam” at the time. Al-Timimi was the main speak for an Ann Arbor charity IANA. In 2000, IANA radio ran an item “CIA to Monitor Foreign Students.” The item as published on the IANA website read: “American anti-terrorism policies are ‘seriously deficient according to the US National Commission on Terrorism, a body created by Congress after the bombing of 2 US
embassies in East Africa.'”
Infiltrator Ali Mohamed was the “Teflon terrorist.” Ali Mohammed, an EIJ member who was associated with the unit that killed Sadat, had an alibi for the Sadat assassination. He was at an officer exchange program studying at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina., Green Beret and Delta Force officers trained there. After he was forced out of the Egyptian Army for his radical beliefs, he went to work at Egyptair. As a security advisor, where he learned how to hijack airliners. He then joined the CIA and the US Army. He was a supply sergeant at the US Army’s Fort Bragg. He lectured Green Beret and Delta Forces on the middle east. He stole high resolution maps from the map shack and brought them to Zawahirii in Afghanistan. In 1989, Ali Mohamed traveled from Fort Bragg to train men that would later commit WTC 1993. When Ali Mohammed traveled to Brooklyn, he stayed with Islamic Group and Abdel-Rahman’s bodyguard Nosair, the man who would assassinate Rabbi Kahane in 1990. Ali Mohammed trained Cairo medical school dropout Dahab to send lethal letters. He and Dahab travelled to Afghanistan to report that they had recruited 10 American sleepers.
WTC 1993 prosecutor Andrew McCarthy concludes that “in small compass, [Ali Mohammed] is the story of American intelligence and radical islam in the eighties and nineties: the left hand oblivious not only to the right but to its own fingers … while jihadists played the system from within, with impunity, scheming to kill us all.” He emphasizes: “There is no way to sugar coat it: Ali Mohamed is a window on breathtaking government incompetence.” He writes: ”I raised holy hell … that I strongly suspected Mohamed was a terrorist, that the FBI should be investigating him rather than allowing him to infiltrate as a source … Because, you know what they say “IMAGINE THE LIABILITY.”
After Nosair’s arrest, the FBI did not bother to translate or study the dozens of boxes of materials seized from Nosair’s home. The documents included maps and cables from the Joint Chiefs stolen by Ali Mohammed. In 1991, when Bin Laden wanted to move from Afghanistan to Sudan, Ali Mohammed served as his head of security and trained his bodyguards. Along with a former medical student, Khalid Dahab, Ali Mohamed recruited ten Americans for “sleeper cells.” After the 1998 embassy bombings, when FBI agents secretly swarmed his California residence, they found a document “Cocktail” detailing how cell members should operate.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/the-head-of-intelligence-for-egyptian-islamic-jihad-had-a-document-on-his-computer-seized-by-the-fbi-that-outlined-principles-of-cell-security-that-would-be-followed/
Even Al Qaeda central would not know the identity of members and different cells would not know each other’s identity. It was Ali Mohamed who was the source for the December 4, 1998 PDB to President Clinton explaining that the brother of Sadat’s assassin, Islambouli, was planning attacks on the US. In November 2001, did the Quantico profilers and FBI scientist Scott Decker know of this egregious history of infiltration and harm flowing from treating the Nosair case as a “lone wolf” rather than an international conspiracy? One man’s “lone wolf” experiencing howling loneliness is another man’s Salafist operating under strict principles of cell security and “need-to-know.” In his powerpoints on the subject, former Agent Decker treats psychology as if it were a science. Instead, if anything, his approach should have been informed by the document review associated with intelligence analysis.
A former FBI agent in the New York office who asked not to be identified, told author Peter Lance: “Understand what this means. You have an Al Qaeda spy who’s now a U.S. citizen, on active duty in the U.S. Army, and he brings along a video paid for by the U.S. government to train Green Beret officers and he’s using it to help train Islamic terrrorists so they can turn their guns on us. By now the Afghan war is over.” Steve Emerson once said of the former US Army Sergeant who was Ayman Zawahiri’s head of intelligence: “Ali Mohamed is one of the most frightening examples of the infiltration of terrorists into the infrastructure of the United States. Like a [character in a] John Le Carre thriller, he played the role of a triple agent and nearly got away with it.” Those officials who sought to minimize the security breach would have to explain away the classified maps of Afghanistan he stole from the map shack, and the classified cables and manuals found in such places as the home of Nosair, the assassin of Rabbi Kehane. Not even Ali Mohammed, however, could boast the letter of commendation from the White House once given Ali Al-Timimi, previous work for White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, or a high security clearance. Ali Mohammed did not even have a security clearance but was merely a supply sergeant at the base where Special Operations was located. ‘Dr. Ali Al-Timimi’s Support Committee’ in an email to supporters dated April 5, 2005 explained: “This is a summary of the court proceedings that took place yesterday April 4th 2005. We will send a summary everyday inshallah. *** “In his opening statement, Defense attorney Edward B. MacMahon Jr. said that Al-Timimi was born and raised in Washington DC. He has a degree in Biology and he is also a computer scientist, and a mathematician. He worked for Andrew Card, who’s now the White House chief of staff, at the Transportation Department in the early 1990s.”
There was an elephant in the rooom no one talked about. A colleague of famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey, a prolific Ames strain researcher, has been convicted of sedition and sentenced to life plus 70 years in prison. He worked in a program co-sponsored by the American Type Culture Collection and had access to ATCC facilities, as well as facilities of the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense at George Mason University then run by Dr. Alibek and Dr. Bailey. The bionformatics grad student once had a high security clearance for mathematical support work for the Navy. I spoke to William Livingstone, one of the officers of ExecutiveAction, in advance of the group’s release of the monograph they wrote for Pharmathene titled “Spores: The Threat of a Catastrophic Anthrax Attack on America.” I asked him, “How much more obvious does a case of infiltration have to be — does he need to be sitting on Dr. Ken Alibek’s lap?”
Many commentators have long held strong and divergent opinions of what has been published in the media about Amerithrax, what they knew and their political views. But it turns out that they apparently have just been seeing the elephant in the living room from a different angle. Actually, they’ve just been in a position to see the elephant’s rump from outside the living room door. One US law professor, Francis Boyle, who has represented islamists abroad, first publicized the theory that a US biodefense insider was responsible. Now the banner has been picked up by Graeme MacQueen and activist Barry Kissin. Boyle has served as legal advisor to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and as counsel for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Separately the theory was adopted by professor Barbara Rosenberg. Professor Boyle and Rosenberg were not so far from the truth — just incorrect as to motive. We need to stop seeing such important issues through political lenses that lead to knee-jerk reactions rather than careful factual analysis. For example, the lawyer advocating for islamist clients, Professor Boyle, tells me that he assumes that the correspondence between Ayman Zawahiri and Rauf Ahmad provided me by the Defense Intelligence Agency under FOIA were forgeries. That is a baseless supposition and total irresponsible crock. If that were true, Ayman Zawahiri who appears on television more often than Wolf Blitzer would ridicule the United States government for the fraud. Instead, the documentary shows that Zawahiri’s plan was to infiltrate the US and UK biodefense establishment, and the evidence shows that is exactly what he did.
In a June 2005 interview in a Swiss (German language) weekly news magazine, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Ken Alibek addresses the anthrax mailings:
A. “What if I told you Swiss scientists are paid by Al Qaeda? You could believe it or not. It has become somewhat fashionable to disparage Russian scientists. Americans, Iraqis, or whoever could just as well be involved with Al Qaeda. Why doesn’t anyone speculate about that?”
Q. “But could one of your students build a biological weapon in the garage?”
A. “Let me reply philosophically: Two hundred years ago, it was unthinkable to believe that people would be using mobile telephones, wasn’t it? Everything changes. Our knowledge grows, and technology develops incredibly quickly. These days even high-school kids can breed recombinant microbial strains. I am not saying that a student is in a position to build a biological weapon all by himself. But the knowledge needed to do it is certainly there.”
No one who responded to my inquiries ever knew Al-Timimi to ever have been involved in any biodefense project. For example, former Russian bioweaponeer Sergei Popov did not know of any such work by Al-Timimi. Anna Popova had only seen him in the hall on a very rare occasion. Dr. Alibek thought of him as a “numbers guy” rather than a hands-on type. Given that the FBI knows what Al-Timimi had for dinner on September 16, 2001 and lunch on September 17, it is very likely that the past years have involved a continued search for the mailer and/or processor. His attorney emphasizes that while they searched for materials related to a planned biological attack when they searched his townhouse in late February 2003, they came up empty.
DOD official Peter Leitner, who also taught at GMU, supervised a 2007 PhD thesis by a graduate student that explores biosecurity issues at GMU. The PhD biodefense thesis on the vulnerability of the program to infiltration explains:
“As a student in the biodefense program, the author is aware that students without background checks are permitted to work on grants, specifically Department of Defense, that has been awarded to NCBD under the Department of Molecular and Microbiology at GMU. Students are also permitted to do research separately from work in the lab for their studies. Work and studies are separate, but related by the lab. Thus, student access, research and activities go unchecked and unmonitored. Students have access to critical information and technology.”
The author explains:
“A principal investigator (PI) may hire a student based on a one on one interview, post doctoral or masters interest, technical abilities, publications, previous work and lab experience, whether student qualifications match the principal interrogators current research, whether there is a space, and if the timing is right. There is no formal screening process or background check that the author is aware of for teaching or research assistantships.”
Other students took a “red cell” approach that have corroborated the findings of the thesis. The thesis points to a pretty big iceberg indeed. Proliferation leads to great risk of infiltration. LSU researcher Martin Hugh-Jones explained: “There were no more than ten labs in the nation working with the organism, and now it’s about 310—and they all want virulent strains. In the old days virtually everyone was paid by Department of Defense to do their research because that’s the only place where money came from because the organism wasn’t thought to be of economic importance. Now that it’s a bioterrorist threat and money’s available for research, experts have come out of the walls. The whole damn thing is bizarre.”A 2004 Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services report: “Serious weaknesses compromised the security of select agents at the universities under review. Physical security of select agents at all 11 universities left select agents vulnerable to theft or loss, thus elevating the risk of public exposure.”
Here is an excerpt from Chapter 13 from “Attribution: Investigating Anthrax – An Evolution of Forensics.” Author Scott Decker notes that the book is “creative nonfiction”.
(Nonfiction is said to be “creative” when the idea is to jazz it up and make it more exciting.)
“Reynolds would begin his meeting with the FBI by describing genetic tests that had been developed in the past two years. The new techniques went by novel and creative names: TaqMan, Molecular Beacon, PNA-clamping, Snapshot. All relied on the double-stranded structure of a helical DNA molecule and its ability to melt apart, become single strands when the temperature was raised, and then to rejoin—forming exactly as before, each building block of adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine pairing with its former partner when the heat removed. Changing the salt concentration of the liquid surrounding the DNA molecule invoked a similar effect and could be used in combination with temperature to fine-tune the melting and re-annealing.”
©2014 by R. Scott Decker (a Supervisory Agent on the FBI’s “science squad” in the Amerithrax investigation)
No one can dispute that US Attorney Taylor and the FBI was highly creative when on August 8, 2008 the FBI claimed the Amerithrax case had been solved and that Bruce Ivins used the lyophilizer. But it was a creative fiction — not nonfiction.
Who authored the script for the fictional story told about the lyophilizer on August 8, 2008? Who jazzed up US Attorney Taylor’s script in helping him try to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?
The lyophilizer in Building 1425 was in Suite B5, not Suite B3 where Dr. Ivins was on the nights in question (where he was doing the study with the 52 rabbits)
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/the-lyophilizer-in-building-1425-was-in-suite-b5-not-suite-b3-where-dr-ivins-was-on-the-nights-in-question-where-he-was-doing-the-study-with-the-52-rabbits/
In early 2003, Dr. Ivins explained that the lyophilizer was NEVER out of B5; he explained that he used to make MPL PA vaccine; how could the FBI and US Attorney Taylor have been so confused to suggest that the lyophilizer was in B3 given its large size?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/in-early-2003-dr-ivins-explained-that-the-lyophilizer-was-never-out-of-b5-he-explained-that-he-used-to-make-mpl-pa-vaccine-how-could-the-fbi-and-us-attorney-taylor-have-been-so-confused-to-sugge/
How could Dr. Bruce Ivins have moved the large and heavy lyophilizer (3 shelf Freeze Unitop) HL600 from the B5 into the B3? Would even a single one of the prosecutors or investigators be able to do it?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/how-could-dr-bruce-ivins-have-moved-the-large-and-heavy-lyophilizer-3-shelf-freeze-unitop-hl600-from-the-b5-into-the-b3-would-even-a-single-one-of-the-prosecutors-or-investigators-be-able-to-do/
Given the lyophilizer was B5 and not the B3 hot suite, all of the electronic records showing Dr. Ivins’ time in B3 working with the animals serves as an alibi rather than evidence of guilt
Posted by Lew Weinstein on January 1, 2012
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/given-the-lyophilizer-was-b5-and-not-the-b3-hot-suite-all-of-the-electronic-records-showing-dr-ivins-time-in-b3-working-with-the-animals-serves-as-an-alibi-rather-than-evidence-of-guilt/
From a Powerpoint talk that former FBI Special Agent Scott Decker presented at the University of Texas and George Mason this past year, we can see that the in 2002, there were two squads: AMX-1 and AMX-2. Then in 2003, there were three squads, AMX-1, AMX-2 & AMX-3 Squads.
Special Agent Decker’s role was Supervisory Special Agent, AMX-2 aka, “Science Squad.”
Under Non-Traditional Forensic Initiatives, he lists
“1) Printing Defects on Pre-Stamped Envelopes
2) Human Scent Dogs
3) Carbon-14 Dating of Spores
4) Psychological Assessment of Mental Health Records and Email messages
5) Anthrax Bacteria DNA “Fingerprinting”
6) Biology of Cultured Anthrax Bacteria — Growth Morphology
http://www.biologicsecure.com/presentation.html
As background on the use of the bloodhounds, see
“Bloodhounds May Have Found Anthrax Suspect,” October 22, 2002
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130053
“FBI’s use of bloodhounds in anthrax probe disputed,” Baltimore Sun, October 29, 2002.
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/fbisuseofbloodhounds.html
I think the use of the bloodhounds was highly regrettable and constituted unvalidated science on these facts.
But putting that aside, did the bloodhounds alert to Dr. Bruce Ivins or not? No. They alerted to Patricia Fellows, his assistant, whose civil deposiition from Stevens v. US, the DOJ shredded. The DOJ civil attorneys then failed to preserve copies of any of the other civil depositions from Hatfill v. United States. That constitutes spoliation of evidence. DOJ guidance instructs that civil depositions are part of the litigation record that must be preserved.
Meanwhile, at the same time DOJ plays hide the ball and James Kovakas in a telephone conversation cites FBI “equities” in doing so, the former FBI personnel have rushed to write books to put a spin on the science they relied upon.
Instead, DOJ and the FBI should have preserved the documents and then produced them under FOIA as required by federal law.
That would have been equitable.
Now as to former FBI Special Agent Scott Decker’s listed item
compare US Attorney Taylor’s presentation of the issue in early August 2008 and reliance on it as evidence of Ivins’ guilt.
DXer compares statements made by US Attorney Jeffrey Taylor and FBI Assistant Director Joseph Persichini at their August 8, 2008 press conference to the documentary evidence so far produced (NOTE: much more is still being withheld)
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/dxer-compares-statements-made-by-us-attorney-jeffrey-taylor-and-fbi-assistant-director-joseph-persichini-at-their-august-8-2008-press-conference-to-the-documentary-evidence-so-far-produced-note/
The United States Attorney Falsely Alleged That The Federal Eagle Stamp Was Uniquely Sold At Dr. Bruce Ivins’ Post Office And Then That Ran As An AP Headline. In fact, the envelopes with the printing defects are known to have been sold throughout Maryland and Virginia post offices (and that is where the hijackers were).
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/dxer-questions-about-the-federal-eagle-stamp-sold-at-the-post-office-used-by-dr-bruce-ivins/
How did US Attorney Taylor so badly botch the issue? His mischaracterization (see transcript above) then led to an AP story that made it seem like the envelopes were only sold in Bruce Ivins’ post office. (Indeed, Bruce lived very nearby Detrick and the Post Office served USAMRIID personnel more generally) What briefing did US Attorney Taylor, a busy man pressed by many criiminal and national security issues in 2008, receive on the issue? Certainly, upon Dr. Ivins’ suicide, there likely was a rush of events and people might not have had the chance to prepare and check their facts as carefully as might ordinarily been done.
Records showed that the “Federal Eagle” envelope printed during the January 2001 to June 2002 run was sold by 45 offices in Virginia and Maryland — including Laurel, Maryland, where Atta and the hijackers had their need for postal supplies served by the Mail Boxes Etc. office in Laurel.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/records-showed-that-the-federal-eagle-envelope-printed-during-the-january-2001-to-june-2002-run-was-sold-by-45-offices-in-virginia-and-maryland-including-laurel-maryland-where-atta-and-the/
from DXer … infiltration of U.S. Biodefense? … was code used in the anthrax letters?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/from-dxer-infiltration-of-u-s-biodefense-was-code-used-in-the-anthrax-letters/
Anthrax letters suspect Adnan El-Shukrijumah was in DC in 2001 casing targets. It doesn’t exclude him, does it?
Anthrax weapons suspect (his defense counsel’s term) Ali Al-Timimi, was in Northern Virginia. He shared a suite with the leading Ames anthrax researchers, whose work with virulent Ames was being done by SRI in downtown Frederick. It doesn’t exclude him, does it?
The hijackers such as Mohammed Atta were in Northern Virginia and Maryland. It doesn’t exclude Atta, does it?
The key hijackers (Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid Mihdhar) — who met at the planning meeting of the Al Qaeda anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat — were in Northern Virginia and Maryland. It doesn’t exclude them, does it?
So whether or not the analysis of the printing defects was sound or not seems relatively inconsequential and pretty academic.
A far greater priority should have been the usefulness of computer forensics directed at probing alibis. For example, the FBI did not know that Ivins was at his regularly scheduled group therapy session the evening of September 17, 2001 until after his suicide. That was the window when the FBI had determined the first mailing was sent. Although a Wash Po report had law enforcement speculating that he mailed the letters in the afternoon, he would not have had time to make the round trip.
Instead these scientists turned to psychology and suppositions rather than computer forensics in creating a timeline of Dr. Ivins’ physicial movements.
Additional sources bearing on the use of the Federal Eagle stamp and the printed defect on the envelope:
“Was the North Brunswick computer person Mazen Mokhtar who mirrored Al Qaeda’s website azzam.com (which explained the symbolism of the “green birds”) in contact with subtilis expert Walied Samarrai in 2001?”
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/was-the-north-brunswick-computer-person-mazen-mokhtar-who-mirrored-al-qaedas-website-azzam-com-which-explained-the-symbolism-of-the-green-birds-in-contact-with-subtilis-expert-walied-samarra/
“Awlaki submitted his e-book on “Lives of the prophets” to the Copyright Office in which he explains the meaning of the “Green Birds” on October 4, 2001”
Posted by Lew Weinstein on August 2, 2012
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/awlaki-submitted-his-e-book-on-lives-of-the-prophets-to-the-copyright-office-in-which-he-explains-the-meaning-of-the-green-birds-on-october-4-2001/
“Envelope Shipments”
“In his coded message to Ramzi Binalshibh written in German, in August 2001, Atta used codename “Jenny” and discussed attack involving four schools”.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/in-his-coded-message-to-ramzi-binalshibh-written-in-german-in-august-2001-atta-used-codename-jenny-and-discussed-attack-involving-four-schools/
Third on FBI Former Special Agent Scott Decker’s list is:
That analysis, as I recall, indicated that the anthrax had been grown within the past two years. (In contrast, Flask 1029 was grown four years prior to the 2001 mailings — in 1997). Thus, the analysis pointed AWAY from Flask 1029 and pointed to growth of the mailed anthrax within the two years prior to mailing.
The Al Qaedas anthrax program began in 1999 and then got up and running in late Spring 2001, with the lab relocated to Kandahar in May 2001.
The Carbon-14 Dating of Spores, done early on, in no way pointed away from Al Qaeda.
Indeed Yazid Sufaat does not deny responsibility for the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings in written correspondence with me. He invokes the Fifth Amendment.
Even if a smidgeon came originally from Flask 1029, the scientific method served to prove that the mailed anthrax did not come directly from Flask 1029.
Now compare that finding to the US Attorney’s spin of Flask 1029 as the “murder weapon.”
Hyperbole, rhetoric and spin took the place of what the science actually proved.
Additional documents showing that Al Qaeda’s anthrax program occurred within the 2 year window 1999-2001, consistent with the carbon dating results:
GAO: On Rauf’s Quest For Virulent Anthrax For Ayman Zawahiri, Was The Second Lab He Visited A BL-3 Lab at Porton Down? Was He Cleared To Go?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/gao-on-raufs-quest-for-virulent-anthrax-for-ayman-zawahiri-was-the-second-lab-he-visited-a-bl-3-lab-at-porton-down-was-he-cleared-to-go/
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/abdur-raufs-i-have-successfully-achieved-letter-to-ayman-al-zawahiri-what-justification-is-there-for-not-removing-the-redactions/
Abdur Rauf’s notes … as he went about his mission of obtaining anthrax spores and weaponing technology for al-Qaeda prior to the 2001 anthrax attacks.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/abdur-raufs-notes/
TOP SECRET – 02/14/2001 – Bin Laden and his associates have experimented by crude means to make and deploy biological agents. Bin Laden has sought to acquire military-grade biological agents or weapons.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/top-secret-02142001-bin-laden-and-his-associates-have-experimented-by-crude-means-to-make-and-deploy-biological-agents-bin-laden-has-sought-to-acquire-military-grade-biological-agents-or-wea/
FBI Special Agent Scott Decker, as the fourth “forensic” method used, includes:
Huh. This is in the science squad? “Bones” (on the TV show) once said she had assumed “Sweets” went into psychology because he was bad at math.
Abby from NCIS certainly wouldn’t let a Sweets-type set up in her lab. McGee would have focused most closely on the computer forensics associated with the emails and other electronic records such as examination of hard drives. For example, if working on Amerithrax, McGee would have focused on locating the missing laptop that Ivins might have used to surf porn.
I’ve read all the thousands of Dr. Ivins’ emails that have been disclosed. Over the course of years, I’ve also requested and read the email attachments where they seemed pertinent. There is no evidence supporting his guilt for the anthrax mailings. Instead, the emails showed what he was doing those nights in the lab — he was working
on the formaldehyde experiment with the 52 rabbits.
It was AMX-2, the squad charged with reading the emails, that dropped the balls in developing the timeline of how Dr. Ivins’ spent his time. The emails needed to be integrated with the lab notebooks, protocols etc. — the notebooks and protocols also were within the purview of AMX-2.
“Why did the DOJ and FBI deem it acceptable not to return all of the lab notebooks — when the AUSAs appreciate the importance of the contemporaneous record of events provided by the notebooks?”
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/why-did-the-doj-and-fbi-deem-it-acceptable-not-to-return-all-of-the-lab-notebooks-when-the-ausas-appreciate-the-importance-of-the-contemporaneous-record-of-events-provided-by-the-notebooks/
It seems then that it was in AMX-2 that the 52 rabbits were first stuffed down a hat — with AUSA Lieber perhaps merely the lovely assistant gracing the stage who presented the issue.
Of course, it did not help for the FBI and DOJ to instruct John Peterson at USMRMC to pull emails from production under FOIA. In terms of accountability, that episode was extremely outrageous. The emails went to a large group at DOJ and FBI before each installment was produced to me. FBI Special Agent Decker should appreciate that there are
no secrets as to what was pulled and who pulled them. It is all a matter of contemporary documentary evidence and computer forensics. For example, one email that was pulled from production was this email — it was produced only when I specifically identified it as culled from production.
(My graphics were done by a federal undercover agent so I do tend to know some secrets.)
It was from the date the FBI alleged Bruce Ivins mailed the letters and established his whereabouts at that time. I was told in writing — expressly by USAMRMC — that it didn’t care whether GAO received all of Ivins’ emails.
To identify the emails culled by DOJ and GAO, the GAO should obtain the emails in this format (of the above message) that shows the emails sequentially numbered. Then armed with the list of missing numbers, GAO has the missing emails identified.
JAG also vetted production — for example, JAG culled and then restored 300 emails that were social chitchat and jokes. (But all emails are potential gold in terms of computer forensics and a full production of all the emails still being withheld should now be made.)
As for the psychology as it applies to Amerithrax, does Scott Decker know that the psychologist’s key witness, Ivins first counselor, has written a 2009 book explaining that in 2000-2001 she thought she was controlled by an alien who had implanted a microchip in her butt? She says she received her instructions each night from the alien.
“The Psychiatrists Are Selling A Report Relying On A Counselor Who Says She Was Granted Special Powers By An Alien Controlling Her By A Device Implanted In Her Butt, But The USG Has Taken Steps To Keep The DOJ’s Reliance On That Evidence Sealed For 5 Years”
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/the-psychiatrists-are-selling-a-report-relying-on-a-counselor-who-says-she-was-granted-special-powers-by-an-alien-controlling-her-by-a-device-implanted-in-her-butt-but-the-usg-has-taken-steps-to-ke/
If Sweets from the “Bones” TV show had written a report relying on such a witness, he would pulled the report. Not only did the psychiatrists or psychologists consulting with the Amerithrax Task Force not pull the report (despite my requests), but initially they were selling the book and making quite a bit of money for consultant Gregory S’s group.
What motivates someone to write a book for money rather than forthrightly correct mistakes in a matter in which lives may be at stake? Let’s consult a psychologist to ascertain motive. It’s not money for these well-paid consultants, is it? Isn’t it a CYA instinct? No one wants to think they drove someone to suicide because they swabbed a fragile guy
for DNA — even though they already had his DNA…. The FBI had found semen stained girl’s panties in late Spring 2008. Dr. Ivins in November 2007 was so upset by the first discovery that he needed to be medicated. He told all this to the agents.
So what did the science squad that swabbed him for DNA upon the discovery think was going to be Ivins’ reaction. Wasn’t it precisely for the purpose of pressurizing Ivins? Given that the AMX-2 folks already had Ivins’ DNA from a cup, what was the purpose of swabbing him in the summer of 2008 leading up to his suicide?
Maybe Dr. Ivins had plenty of reasons to commit suicide after being intentionally isolated from his friends — with his friends expressly told by Command not to talk to him about the investigation.
Additional sources re the “psychological” evidence relied upon by the FBI.
David Willman relies extensively upon Dr. Ivins’ first therapist, Judith M. McLean, who writes of how she acquired her psychic abilities in her book available for sale on Amazon.com — from a being from another planet
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/david-willman-relies-extensively-upon-dr-ivins-first-therapist-judith-m-mclean-who-writes-of-how-she-acquired-her-psychic-abilities-in-her-book-available-for-sale-on-amazon-com/
Excerpts from David Willman’s key witness (from her book ASCENSION JOURNEY)
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/excerpts-from-david-willmans-key-witness-in-his-book-mirage-man/
Former FBI Special Agent Scott Decker describes the next “Non-Traditional Forensic Initiative” as
Ah, yes, this is where the fingerprint matched 300 people just at USAMRIID and unknown number of others around the world — with samples having been voluntarily submitted. (For example, there were 42 at a Battelle location).
The initiative contemplated that the perp would take his own fingerprints and send them in — and that they had collected all the Ames samples even though they knew that some countries would not cooperate and regularly covertly obtained samples from USAMRIID.
But even that result was totally mischaracterized at the August 8, 2008 press conference by US Attorney Taylor. US Attorney Taylor spun the “murder weapon” as uniquely having Dr. Ivins’ fingerprints on it. Creative fiction is fine, Scott — but this should be nonfiction that we are hearing about in connection with Amerithrax.
The overreliance on the 4 morphs analysis was total bullshit from start to finish — even while we credit the cutting edge 4 morphs analysis. (The lead geneticists consulting with the FBI said had major holes in it on its own).
It was always known that Ivins had the big repositiory of Ames strain and that he was the one who gave it out to researchers. That should have been a beginning of the analysis — not the end point.
The genetically matching sample from CDC7738 was obtained from Building 1412, and not Building 1425 ; a key false premise of the FBI’s “Ivins Theory” Announced in early August 2008 was that only 100 at USAMRIID needed to be eliminated rather than up to 300 (and that was just considering those with access at USAMRIID)
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/the-genetically-matching-sample-from-cdc7738-was-obtained-from-building-1412-and-not-building-1425-a-key-false-premise-of-the-fbis-ivins-theory-announced-in-early-august-2008-was-that-only/
The FBI’s review showed that 300 identifiable individuals entered rooms providing access to the Ames material used in the aerosol challenges. Another thirty (30) individuals utilized the access points but used non-identifiable badges or non-identifiable personal identification numbers; so that would make 330 individuals who needed to be eliminated in connection to that single building at USAMRIID — including 30 who were not identifiable.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/the-fbis-review-showed-that-300-identifiable-individuals-entered-rooms-providing-access-to-the-ames-material-used-in-the-aerosol-changes-another-thirty-30-individuals-utilized-the-access/
Some additional links re:
FBI genetics expert Claire Fraser-Liggett … I think that the (FBI’s use of the) evidence on science probably was misleading … I have no way to know whether or not Bruce Ivins was really the perpetrator
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/fbi-genetics-expert-claire-fraser-liggett-this-is-not-an-airtight-case-by-any-means/
Dr. Patricia Worsham, a leading anthrax and genetics expert who testified before the NAS, was not persuaded by the FBI’s argument on the issue of “morphs” and sample submissions
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/dr-patricia-worsham-a-leading-anthrax-and-genetics-expert-who-testified-before-the-nas-was-not-persuaded-by-the-fbis-argument-on-the-issue-of-morphs-and-sample-submissions/
The genetics inquiry just narrowed things from “over 700″ to “up to 377″ individuals who had access to Ames during the time of the 2001 mailings
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/the-genetics-inquiry-just-narrowed-things-from-over-700-to-up-to-377-individuals-who-had-access-to-ames-during-the-time-of-the-2001-mailings/
Scott Decker lastly points to:
This was hugely exculpatory of Dr. Bruce Ivins.
“April 26, 2012 FBI Quantico Publication: The Detection of Meglumine and Diatrizoate In No Way Pointed To Bruce Ivins As The Perpetrator Or Involved At All; Meglumine and Diatrizoate were both detected in the USAMRIID RMR 1029 sample — but Meglumine and Diatrizoate were NOT detected in the 2001 letter spore evidence”
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/april-2012-fbi-quantico-publication-the-detection-of-meglumine-and-diatrizoate-in-the-mailed-anthrax-in-no-way-pointed-to-bruce-ivins-as-the-perpetrator-or-involved-at-all-meglumine-and-diatrizo/
“Armed Forces Institute of Pathology … the mailed anthrax was not genetically manipulated; but wasn’t it microencapsulated?”
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/armed-forces-institute-of-pathology-the-mailed-anthrax-was-not-genetically-manipulated-but-wasnt-it-microencapsulated/
The FBI Should Produce To GAO All Of The Research, Unpublished Or Not, By Dr. Bannan And His Colleagues On Heat Shocking As A Substitute For Use Of Renografin In Purification, To Include Whether Heat Shocking Was Used In Connection With The Fall 2001 Mailings, Whether It Was Used For Intramuscular And Aerosol Challenges Done In USAMRIID Building 1412, And Whether Heat Shocking Was Studied In Connection With Virulence Studies.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/the-fbi-should-produce-to-gao-all-of-the-research-unpublished-or-not-by-dr-bannan-and-his-colleagues-on-heat-shocking-as-a-substitute-for-use-of-renografin-in-purification-to-include-whether-hea/
Some additional sources on the subject of growth morphology/subtilis contaminant:
The newly released Senior Executive Brief, dated 7 August 2001 reports that Bin Laden wanted to follow example of WTC 1993 bomber Ramzi Yousef (associated with subtilis expert)
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/the-newly-released-senior-executive-brief-dated-7-august-2001-reports-that-bin-laden-wanted-to-follow-example-of-wtc-1993-bomber-ramzi-yousef-associated-with-subtilis-expert/
The address/phone number associated with the WTC 1993 bomber Ramzi Yousef was frequently called by subtilis expert Walied Samarrai in February 1993 (up to the time and hour of the first arrests). See WTC 1993 trial, Exhibit 818. That address is separately associated with Dr. Samarrai, a subtilis expert, in this Intellius Report. Did the subtilis expert know WTC 1993 bomber Ramzi Yousef? Who does Walied Samarrai think is responsible for the anthrax mailings? Is it correct that in 2001 Professor Samarrai lived at one of the two addresses about 20 miles from the mailbox in Princeton?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/the-addressphone-number-associated-with-the-wtc-1993-bomber-ramzi-yousef-was-frequently-called-by-subtilis-expert-walied-samarrai-in-february-1993-up-to-the-time-and-hour-of-the-first-arrests/
Former Amerithrax investigator Bradley Garrett, who took the lead on the Hatfill searches, rode on the plane with KSM’s nephew, WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef, upon his rendering to the US. How did Agent Garrett exclude the subtilis expert living 20 miles from the mailbox who frequently called and was called by the number associated with Abdul Yasin and Ramzi Yousef in February 1993? On the mistaken grounds that Dr. Ayman Zawahiri did not have access to virulent anthrax?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/former-amerithrax-investigator-bradley-garrett-who-took-the-lead-on-the-hatfill-searches-rode-on-the-plane-with-ksms-nephew-wtc-bomber-ramzi-yousef-upon-his-rendering-to-the-us-how-did-agen/
According to Abu Zubaydah, Adnan El-Shukrijumah travelled to the US after September 1, 2001 (he knew Adnan under an alias). Adnan was back with Al-Hawsawi in Karachi from Feb- April 2002.
Hawsawi had the anthrax processing documents on his laptop. The process took about 30 days.
Where in his manuscript does former FBI Special Agent Scott Decker address these facts? His powerpoint discusses growth morphology — but what about study of drying methods?
Was a fluidized bed dryer used rather than a spraydryer or lyophilizer?
http://amerithrax.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/anthrax-and-al-qaeda-the-big-picture/screen-shot-2012-12-05-at-6-09-59-am/
Let’s also tuck the isotope ratio analysis into the growth morphology.
In connection with this item on Dr. Decker’s powerpoint, let’s turn to scientific matter of Ehleringer’s isotope analysis and his map of isotope ranges in the water used to grow the anthrax.
Let’s turn to the map and ask Agent Decker: why did the FBI find that it could not rely on Ehleringer’s analysis as to geographic location that the anthrax was grown?
Don’t the ratio of tap waters point to a lab in Kandahar — which has isotope ratios similar to the Northeastern United States? And don’t the isotope ratios EXCLUDE Maryland?
http://wateriso.utah.edu/waterisotopes/pages/data_access/figure_pgs/asia.html
http://wateriso.utah.edu/waterisotopes/pages/data_access/figures.html
The FBI scientists reportedly were able to distinguish between water isotopes ratios in the anthrax.
Ehleringer and his colleagues published a March 2007 article titled “Stable isotope ratios of tap water in the contiguous United States” in “Water Resources Research.” The study was funded by the “federal government.” The raw data survey results have been embargoed by the federal government.”
Selected Sources:
Bowen, G. J., J. R. Ehleringer, L. Chesson, E. Stange, and C. E. Cerling. 2007. “Stable isotope ratios of tap water in the contiguous USA,” Water Resour. Res. 43:W03419.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2006WR005186/full
Kreuzer-Martin, H. W., M. J. Lott, J. Dorigan, and J. R. Ehleringer, “Microbe forensics: oxygen and hydrogen stable isotope ratios in Bacillus subtilis cells and spores,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100:815-819 (2003).
http://www.pnas.org/content/100/3/815.abstract?ijkey=fab4cbbab441ba7dff87548c7f41866771a131bb&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
Look at the yellow and light green swaths on the maps. Aren’t the yellow and light green swaths that characterize Northeastern United States also throughout much of Afghanistan — to include Kandahar in southern Afghanistan? Didn’t the same range exist there (as in the Northeastern United States) but NOT in Maryland?
It will require experts such as Dr. Ehleringer to tell the GAO.
The MSNBC report on the issue only focused on the United States — which was the subject of the CIA-funded study.
Dr. Majidi and Dr. Decker,
Why did the FBI blow off Dr. Ehleringer’s isotope ratio analysis? Didn’t it point to the lab in Kandahar and exclude the lab in Frederick, Maryland? Where are the materials relating to the consultants work on this issue?
STABLE ISOTOPES AND COURTS James R. Ehleringer* and Scott M. Matheson, Jr.* (2010)
http://epubs.utah.edu/index.php/ulr/article/viewFile/423/321
“Even the methods of stable isotope analysis will vary from application to application, thereby requiring a reliability showing for a particular methodology. We are mindful of Rule 702’s requirement to show that stable isotope analysis has been reliably applied to the facts of the specific case.
For the foregoing reasons, and in acknowledgement of the Supreme Court’s admonition to address the Daubert analysis to the “task at hand,”167 we will include discussion of the application of stable isotope analysis to the investigation of the anthrax attacks of 2001 (referred to as Amerithrax), which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently closed.168 In this case of a bio-weapons attack, spores from Bacillus anthracisis (anthrax) were contained within letters mailed to news media offices across the United States and to two U.S. Senators. As a result of the anthrax attack, five people were killed and an additional seventeen individuals were afflicted and survived. The chemical and biological analyses of spores recovered from the letters sought to determine the origins of the spores and the identity of the perpetrator(s) behind the attack. Among the many diverse tests employed were stable isotope ratio analyses of spores, culture medium, water used along with culture medium, and envelopes.
Five applications of stable isotope ratio analysis were relevant to the Amerithrax case: (1) identification of the culture medium most likely to have been used to culture the anthrax; (2) characterization of the geographic region(s) most likely to have been associated with the culturing of the anthrax; (3) similarity comparisons among spore specimens recovered from different anthrax-containing letters; (4) similarity comparisons between the anthrax spore evidence and the different culture medium used to culture bacteria (including anthrax); and (5) similarity comparisons of the cellulose composition of letters used to mail the spores.171
The following questions address two fundamental aspects of stable isotope analysis relevance: similarity and location.
First, were the Amerithrax specimens isotopically indistinguishable from each other and therefore more likely to be related and be consistent with having a common origin?
Second, were the isotopic compositions of the anthrax spore specimens consistent with bacterial spores that had been cultured in a particular geographic region? Additionally, based on the stable isotope ratio measurement, could some geographic regions be excluded as origin-of-culture possibilities?
Third, were the isotopic compositions of the anthrax spore specimens consistent with observations expected for the culture of the bacteria grown using a particular culture medium? Additionally, based on the stable isotope ratio measurement, could some culture medium be excluded from further consideration as culture medium possibilities?
These questions presume that reliable data could be obtained and that appreciable stable isotope ratio variations existed in culture water and culture medium to allow a meaningful interpretation of the data.
Answers to these questions should achieve a more probable understanding of the origin and location of the anthrax recovered from the 2001 letters and should assist a trier of fact. If stable isotope analysis assists to provide such answers, then it should be considered relevant and helpful under Rule 702.
We already have used the Amerithrax case to illustrate aspects of the reliability analysis. We will expand here on the application of stable isotope ratio analysis to the anthrax attacks.
A court presentation in the Amerithrax case would require a showing that the stable isotope ratio analyses were based on and consistent with peer-reviewed and validation studies in the field that demonstrate the testability and reliability of the principles and methods applied. It would also call for demonstrating a sufficiently small risk of error to allow for reliable conclusions. Reliability also would depend on a showing that laboratory protocols were followed, that the instrumentation was properly calibrated and used, that measurements were accurately recorded and interpreted, and that samples were properly handled. The level of certainty for conclusions about common source of origin and location of origin would need to be supported as set forth earlier.
To understand this application, consider the life cycle of bacteria. The spores that were mailed in the Amerithrax case represented the dormant or resting stage of bacterial growth.208 Spores are a cell form produced by some, but not all, bacteria in the growth-phase transition from active vegetative growth, nutrient-rich bacteria cultures to a much slower growth. The transition to a dormant spore form occurs as medium becomes depleted in the essential nutrients to maintain the actively dividing bacteria form. During all stages of the bacteria growth cycle, the bacteria take up nutrients from their external environment (known as medium when bacteria are actively cultured).
The application of stable isotope methodology allows for the establishment of reliable patterns and for the testing of specific hypotheses. During bacteria growth, the compounds that are part of each bacterium are built within the bacteria cell based on the uptake and chemical conversion of nutrients derived from the external medium (e.g., water, salts, carbon source, nitrogen source). “You are what you eat” is an appropriate phrase to describe the stable isotope composition of both microbial and animal systems. There are precise, predictable, and reliable relationships between the carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of the nutrient medium and those of the cell walls, proteins, and carbohydrates that characterize the bacteria.209 Thus, from measurements of the carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of a bacterial spore, it is possible to reconstruct the carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of the growth medium used to culture the bacteria.
The studies by Kreuzer-Martin and colleagues additionally showed that different growth medium often had distinctive carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios. Thus, from analyses of the carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of bacteria spores, it is possible to reconstruct or predict the carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of the growth medium and, in some cases, to predict the specific culture medium used to produce the bacterial spores. From such analysis, relevance is clear. Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analyses allow the investigator to compare among samples to see whether they possibly share a common growth medium and to predict the growth medium type used to culture the bacteria. This in turn could provide a significant lead to determine whether the growth media in one or more laboratories are consistent with or not consistent with the growth media that were likely to have been used to cultivate the anthrax.
During bacterial growth, hydrogen and oxygen atoms from water in the culture medium are incorporated into the proteins, carbohydrates, and outer cell wall complex of the bacteria being cultured. There are very predictable relationships between the hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios of bacteria spores and the hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios of the water used to culture the bacteria.210 The geographic patterns of hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios of local waters differ across a continental landscape and exhibit predictable and reliable spatial patterns.211 This observation allowed Kreuzer-Martin and colleagues to determine whether the isotope ratios of a spore were consistent with or not consistent with growth using a particular water source in different geographic regions of the United States. The predictability of the pattern was tested by culturing the same bacteria in different parts of the United States using the same medium and reliably reconstructing the region from which the different bacteria had been grown. The combination of experimental studies in the laboratory and then field validation of the technique to identify different geographic regions is possible for most stable isotope studies.
The methods used in the anthrax analysis included five sets of key observations, which established that:
(1) The hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios of Bacillus spores were distinctly, linearly, and predictably related to the hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios of the local water source used to culture the bacteria.212
(2) There were distinctive and predictable spatial zones of hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios of local water sources and geographic regions across the United States.213
(3) The carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of the Bacillus spores were distinctly, linearly, and predictably related to the carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of the growth medium.214
(4) There were distinct and predictable differences in the relationships between hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios of Bacillus spores that allowed determination of their culture in liquid vessels versus agar plates, and if grown on agar plates, a timeline of spore harvest from agar
plates.215 (5) The patterns observed for Bacillus spores from several taxa applied to
both virulent and non-virulent Bacillus anthracis (anthrax) spores.216”
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/10/15/decades-later-seeking-shed-light-cia-conduct-congressional-inquiry-jfk-assassination/dUf8qawsBQWfM2kxm7w7DM/story.html
Answers sought on CIA role in ‘78 JFK probe
Investigators say files could prove interference
By Bryan Bender | GLOBE STAFF OCTOBER 15, 2014
KATE MELTON FOR THE GLOBE
Eddie Lopez was the investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
WASHINGTON — It was nearly four decades ago that Eddie Lopez was hired by a congressional committee to reinvestigate the 1963 murder of President John F. Kennedy, a role that had him digging through top secret documents at the CIA.
In the end, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reported in 1978 that it believed the assassination was probably the result of a conspiracy, although it couldn’t prove that, and its conclusions are disputed by many researchers.
But now Lopez is seeking answers to a lingering question: Could still-classified records reveal, as he and some of his fellow investigators have long alleged, that the CIA interfered with the congressional investigation and placed the committee staff under surveillance?
While Lopez’s latest effort to uncover new information may seem quixotic, given the seemingly endless spate of JFK conspiracy theories, it has taken on new meaning in the wake of revelations that the CIA earlier this year spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee in an unrelated case.
CIA employees hacked into the computers of Senate staffers reviewing the agency’s counterterrorism tactics. When the allegations were corroborated, the CIA apologized and vowed to take disciplinary actions.
While this year’s controversy has no direct relation to the Kennedy inquiry, it has raised new questions about how far the CIA has undermined congressional oversight, including the investigation into Kennedy’s murder in Dallas.
“It was time to fight one last time to ascertain what happened to JFK and to our investigation into his assassination,” Lopez, who is now the chief counsel for a school district in Rochester, N.Y., said in an interview. He is joined in the effort by two other former investigators, researcher Dan Hardway and G. Robert Blakey, the panel’s staff director.
Lopez, 58, charges that the CIA actively stymied the probe and monitored the committee staff members as they pursued leads about the events leading up to the assassination.
Lopez and his two colleagues are asking the CIA to release “operational files you have regarding operations aimed at, targeting, related to, or referring to” the House panel they worked for, along with records about the “surveillance of any and all members of the staff.”
Their attorney, James Lesar of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, in Silver Spring, Md., asserts they have a right to any CIA files about themselves under provisions of the CIA Information Act of 1984 and the Privacy Act of 1974, which could “shed light on the confused investigatory aftermath of the assassination.”
Blakey, who is now a professor at the University of Notre Dame, said he is anxious to know what the CIA was up to. “I was at Danny’s home and it looked like there were surveillance vans,” he recalled. “I would like to know what they had.”
The CIA declined to comment directly on the case, but said in a statement it intends “to treat these inquiries as we would any others, in full accordance with the respective laws and regulations.”
Some observers said the CIA has a long history of blocking congressional oversight of its activities.
“I think there is a pattern,” said John Prados, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University and author of “The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power.”
He cited two congressional investigations in the mid-1970s of the agency’s assassination plots against foreign leaders and the arms-for-hostages operation known as the Iran-Contra Affair in the 1980s. In those cases, Prados and other historians allege, the CIA withheld information, spread false stories, or did not make available all witnesses.
Lopez, Blakey, and Hardway contend they were rebuffed during their investigation when they asked about a CIA-backed group of Cuban exiles who had been seeking to overthrow Castro that had widely publicized ties to alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. They were informed that such a case officer did not exist for the so-called Revolutionary Student Directorate — also known by its Spanish-language acronym DRE . Their suspicions grew when they learned from a lawsuit in the late 1990s that one of the agency’s chief liaisons to the assassination panel, the late George Joannides, was operating “under cover” and it was Joannides, a career intelligence operative, who helped manage the Cuban group before the assassination.
”He, the [DRE] case agent, denied that there was a case agent and they could not find the DRE file,” Blakey said of Joannides in an interview. “He was an inhibitor, not a facilitator, which is what he was supposed to be.”
Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter whose lawsuit against the CIA shook loose some of the revelations about Joannides’ true identity and covert background, maintains that a host of files about the mysterious officer remain secret.
“Was there a mission to deceive [the panel]?” asks Morley, who runs the independent research organization JFKfacts.org.
The former House investigators believe so but now want the CIA to fully come clean.
Said Hardway: “I hope to learn some more parts to the puzzle that the agency has kept hidden.”
Comment I once worked for an employer where my sense was that the country of Panama was being run from the 6th floor. Every day, I walked from the metro past this parked van that each morning would have new beer bottles set outside. One day I walked up and stood up on my tiptoes and wrote “CIA” in the dust. The next day the word was wiped clean.
Congress, did the FBI or CIA exercise influence over the long-delayed GAO inquiry through appointments and reassignments at the outset? (I have no idea but understood there was quite a lot of shuffling of personnel.)
The Pentagon’s “Operation Dark Winter”: June 2001 Bioterror Exercise Foreshadowed 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pentagons-operation-dark-winter-june-2001-bioterror-exercise-foreshadowed-911-and-anthrax-attacks/5407575
Although I disagree with the blogger (and author Graeme’s conclusion) — and their gross bias they demonstrate in simply overlooking of Al Qaeda’s anthrax program — I think it is very interesting to see scripted news clips used in the June 2001 “Dark Winter” exercise.
Kudos to whoever obtained them. (Offhand, I don’t know how they were obtained but I’m guessing that perhaps they were obtained under FOIA). It would be interesting to see as many documents from “Dark Winter” as possible. Mr. Woolsey’s involvement is an interesting thread to pull, for example. (As an attorney, he later lobbied for an anthrax pharma company). I am also curious about a fuller list of participants. (I always try to follow the money because of its important role in motivating human behavior).
The Dark Winter exercise demonstrates the importance of GAO’s forthcoming report.
It’s almost as if Graeme (the book author) does not think it is proper for the US to run tabletop exercises and drills preparing — for example, for an outbreak of a deadly disease — even though Dr. Ayman Zawahiri’s intention had been expressly announced.
Or that Al Qaeda’s intentions were not known and thus a tabletop warranted.
Ayman Zawahiri, Anwar Awlaki, Anthrax, and Amerithrax: The Infiltration Of US Biodefense
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/ayman-zawahiri-anwar-awlaki-anthrax-and-amerithrax-the-infiltration-of-us-biodefense/
Or that there was not a realistic concern that Al Qaeda would get help from Saddam. (In 2001, Dr. Ayman sent four senior EIJ operatives to northern Iraq to bring together an amalgamation of four groups to form Ansar Al-Islam). The top CIA Zawahiri analyst, Scheuer, no friend of the Bush Administration, says it is 100% certain that Al Qaeda was experimenting with anthrax.
The argument by Graeme, who worked at the religious studies academic at McMasters, implodes when you look at the actual documentary evidence. One sees that the reliance on the Dark Winter materials, without much more, is cotton candy spin that dissolves in the mouth — in the face of looking at the more relevant documents establishing Dr. Ayman’s to intent to use anthrax as a weapon.
But having said that, I think “Dark Winter” is definitely worth learning more about — along with other DIA and CIA biodefense projects in 2000 and 2001 leading up to the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings.
I think we have much more to learn from such posts of the contemporaneous documents from 2001 and I encourage the effort’s of this blogger “Washington” or whoever is seeking to obtain contemporaneous documents from 2001.
Relatedly, I think the President’s February 2001 CIA briefing about Bin Laden’s interest in biological weapons should be declassifed.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/dxer-if-we-knew-what-president-bush-knew-in-february-2001-amerithrax-would-be-seen-with-entirely-different-eyes/
Separately, I like BHR — often associated with “The Hatfill Theory” — very much. We just have very different view of how the Amerithrax dots connect. She has said to me in effect “who knows, maybe we’ll end up meeting up at the same place.”
If it had become known that the Administration had allowed this infiltration — the Bush Administration would never have won a second term
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/if-it-had-become-known-that-the-administration-had-allowed-this-infiltration-the-bush-administration-would-never-have-won-a-second-term/
I’ll try to follow the same money trail with my nose to the ground like a truffle-hunting pig rooting for arguments.
But I can talk about theories such as the FBI’s Hatfill Theory all day and explain why it is mistaken under the true crime facts.
In contrast, these bloggers and theorists do not even begin to address the documents underlying an Al Qaeda theory. They just avoid the subject. (For example, the article saying WH told FBI to blame it on AQ is a classic example; for all blogger Washington knows Seikaly was the reporter’s source).
Besides, why wouldn’t the WH think Al Qaeda was responsible? It had been announced that Dr. Ayman was going to use anthrax to retaliate for the rendering of the Blind Sheik and other EIJ leaders.
Have you ever seen Graeme, BHR, Washington or others with similar theories discuss Shurkrijumah, Sufaat, the details of Al Qaeda’s anthrax program and infiltration, and KSM’s house in Kandahar? They would choke on their cotton candy spin.
Once you approach the facts from Kandahar, then you quickly meet up at the (once-partly CIA supported) Blind Sheik Services organization in Brooklyn. You find Adnan El-Shukrijumah, the son of a Saudi missionary who worked as the Brooklyn imam and translator for Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman.
He then was a close associate of lead hijacker Atta in Florida — a fact the FBI neglected to share with the Joint Inquiry and 911 Commission. Shukrijumah had cased the NYC and DC targets in 2001.
You also find Saudi head of intelligence Prince Bandar on the porch of the White House on 9/13/2001 and Bush’s ranchhouse in August 2002.
It’s not at all clear where the opposing theories might meet up. And if they are right and I’m wrong — I wish them the best. I just want the dots connected and the person(s) responsible brought to justice.
One overlap in the theories is already clear however: a failure to connect the dots contributed to the invasion of Iraq. And the invasion of Iraq is viewed by many as a grave misstep — and led to the mess the world is in now. GAO’s input is sorely needed.
There needs to be much greater transparency and accountability as to the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings.
http://bioprepwatch.com/news/darpa-adds-biological-sciences-to-public-web-portal/339229/
DARPA adds biological sciences to public web portal
September 3, 2014 10:00 AM By Paul Tinder
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced on Friday that it expanded its research listings on the DARPA Open Catalog to include materials from its Biological Technologies Office(BTO) and Defense Sciences Office (DSO).
The DARPA Open Catalog, a six-month-old public web portal, organizes and shares the results of DARPA research. The portal seeks to complement other open-government initiatives and respond to research-related queries from the research and development community.
“The launch of the Open Catalog has been quite successful, both in terms of quickly sharing a lot of material and getting enthusiastic buy-in from key DARPA audiences,” Chris White, a program manager for DARPA, said. “DARPA’s investments in a multitude of scientific fields over the past 50 years have helped define our high-technology world, and by sharing results through our Open Catalog, we hope to accelerate continued breakthroughs in key technical areas.”….
I haven’t found the bio documents in the Open Catalog yet.
http://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog/
The Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Office of Freedom of Information is responsible for all DARPA Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
FOIA requests may be submitted in writing to the Office of Freedom of Information or electronically.
Directions on how to submit an electronic FOIA request are available online, along with additional information on the Office of Freedom of Information’s FOIA program, athttp://www.dod.gov/pubs/foi/.
Graeme’s book is discussed in a column by Iranian TV. I find Dr. Paul Craig Roberts’ reliance on the fact Bin Laden initially denied the 911 attacks foolish. But this article does weigh in favor, for example, of releasing the “28 pages” removed from the Joint Inquiry report.
9/11, anthrax attacks, and beyond
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/10/14/382278/911-anthrax-attacks-and-beyond/
The anthrax attacks of October 2001 have been forgotten, but Professor Graeme MacQueen in The 2001 Anthrax Deception(Clarity Press, 2014) shows that the anthrax attacks played an essential role in setting the stage for the government’s acquisition of unaccountable police state power. Two Democratic Senate committee chairmen, Thomas Daschle and Patrick Leahy, were disturbed by the Bush regime’s overreach for carte blanche power, and were in a position to block the coming police state legislation and the ability of the executive branch alone to take America to war.
Both senators received anthrax letters, as did major news organizations. The TV network news anchors, such as Dan Rather, who compared the collapse of WTC skyscrapers to buildings brought down by controlled demolition, had not yet been fired by Republicans on framed-up charges.
Initially, the anthrax letters, which caused the deaths of some USPS employees, were seen as the second stage of the 9/11 attack. Fear multiplied. The senators and media shut up. Then it was discovered that the anthrax was a unique kind produced only by a US government military facility.
The response to this monkey wrench thrown into the government’s propaganda, was the FBI’s frame-up of a dead man, Bruce Edwards Ivins, who had been employed in the military lab that produced the anthrax and was driven to suicide by the false charges. The dead man’s colleagues did not believe one word of the government’s false story, and nothing in the dead man’s past indicated any motive or instability that would have led him to such a deed.
Initially, the US government tried to frame up Steven Jay Hatfill, but despite the best efforts of the New York Times and Nicholas Kristof the attempt to frame Hatfill failed. Hatfill received $5 million from the US government for the false accusation that ruined his life. So the corrupt US government moved on to Ivins.
Ivins was dead and couldn’t defend himself, but his colleagues did.
The entire episode stinks to high heaven. Justice is something that exists outside the borders of the United States. Never expect to find justice within the United States.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books
are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.
In a “60 Minutes” interview, FBI Director Comey says “You cannot trust people in power.”
At the same time, we see the former WMD head saying that he is confident Director Comey, his former supervisor, has his back. The implication is that Amerithrax will remain closed notwithstanding that the science is not what it was claimed to be at the August 2008 press conferences — and exculpatory forensic evidence was suppressed and relevant documents were withheld.
In Amerithrax, WMD head Majidi in his e-book, marketed to his former FBI colleagues via linked-in, says he is confident that his former supervisor, James Comey (who now is FBI Director). has his back.
Loyalty is a good thing in that it builds a esprti de corp. I can appreciate FBI Director Mueller, for example, not giving polygraphs because it would have undermined morale. Moreover, the rules relating talking to reporters may have been unclear and the science of polygraphs not validated. Polygraphs might have just distracted the investigation further.
And I also certainly understand that in the rush of events it was easy for investigators to think an Ivins Theory was the solution of the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings.
By way of example, the Hatfill Theory also seemed reasonable. In the rush of events, it took time to marshal and master the documetns.
I’m not interested in having anyone get in touble — I’m just interested in having the course corrected so that people realizes that the case is in fact unsolved. The richness of life is that we make missteps and then move forward.
So when the FBI Director says that “You cannot trust people in power” I see that just as effective PR given his failure to personally order the reopening of Amerithrax. It represents a loyalty to both Majidi and to FBI Director Mueller — with the result of a lack of straight-shooting that goes to heart of a key national security issue. It never is too late to be right — until it is.
FBI DIrector Comey’s PR is part of the problem and not part of the solution unless and until the FBI starts playing straight on Amerithrax.
As the most recent example, for the DOJ’s part, not preserving the civil depositions in US v. Hatfill illustrates that the DOJ and FBI is not acting in good faith or in furtherance of justice and transparency in Amerithrax. James Kovakas at DOJ Civil FOIA should have personally picked up the phone and found the civil depositions.
NYT article about “60 Minutes” interview tonight –
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/fbi-director-james-comey-americans-question-government-article-1.1970821
FBI director James Comey says Americans should question the government, cell phones should be searchable
FBI director James Comey told CBS’ ’60 Minutes’ that if a judge decided information on someone’s cell phone was critical to a criminal case or security issue, the government should be able to get ahold of it.
BY GINGER ADAMS OTIS NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, October 11, 201
“You cannot trust people in power,” he added.
Comey’s full interview will air at 7 p.m. Sunday on “60 Minutes.”
Garrett: Five myths about Ebola
By LAURIE GARRETT, Special To The Washington Post.
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/five-myths-about-ebola-laurie-garrett-1.9489635
Laurie Garrett in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: Reporting on Biosecurity from America to Zaire (January / February 2012) (subscription required) … Ms. Garrett Calls For Thorough Investigation Of Attacks Comparable to The 9/11 Commission Report
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/laurie-garrett-in-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists-reporting-on-biosecurity-from-america-to-zaire-january-february-2002-subscription-required/
Laurie Garrett: FBI did not fully pursue evidence that might link the attacks to al-Qaida
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/laurie-garrett-fbi-did-not-fully-pursue-evidence-that-might-link-the-attacks-to-al-qaida/
excerpts from an NPR interview (8/26/11) of Laurie Garrett … the FBI completely botched the anthrax investigation … there’s so much evidence that al-Qaeda was behind the anthrax mailings … bin Laden’s Tora Bora cave twice tested positive for the same Ames anthrax strain as was found in the letters.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/excerpts-from-an-npr-interview-of-laurie-garrett-the-fbi-completely-botched-the-investigation/
Comment: What is Laurie Garrett’s sourcing on the claim that it was Tora Bora cave (rather than the Kandahar lab) that tested positive twice for the Ames strain of anthrax?
(It had always been Dr. Ayman’s plan to move the lab every 3 months — painting the walls so that they could be wiped down with insecticide (to remove traces of the anthrax) upon moving.
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Law-Beat-G-man-Don-t-trust-rulers-in-power-5792427.php
Law Beat: G-man: Don’t trust rulers in power
ROBERT GAVIN, LAW BEAT
Published 9:02 pm, Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Guess who doesn’t trust the government?
The director of the FBI.
James B. Comey, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said as much last Tuesday while visiting his agency’s Albany field office on McCarty Avenue.
“I believe the American people should be deeply skeptical of government power — I am,” Comey said. “I think the founders of this country were. They divided the power among three branches because you can’t trust people in power. You just can’t.”
Comey’s words came in response to a question about measures the government has taken since 9/11, such as warrantless wiretapping, which have prompted many Americans to feel their freedoms have been encroached upon.
“I love those questions,” Comey said. “You can’t trust people in power, so you want to know, how are they constrained? How is interest set against interest? I love those conversations because the FBI is constrained in all kinds of ways that you would want us to be. My life is chock full of federal judges and oversight by Congress and inspectors general. That’s the way it should be.”
Comment: The more you know about the context of AUSA Lieber’s decision-making in that office in 2008 the more you realize that the FBI’s “Ivins Theory” is mistaken. There are no secrets.
In 2004, in a well-written essay “The “Official” Operative Clique For The Next 9/11?”, someone was taking my focus on El-Shukrijumah and turning it inside out. The author seems to make me out to be part of the grand conspiracy that (in his mind, falsely) attributed 911 to Al Qaeda and set up El-Shukrijumah and his associates as the patsy for any future anthrax or other WMD attack.
At least this fellow addressed the operatives. God forbid that author Graeme should address the unresolved allegation that Adnan El-Shukrijumah visited McMasters, where Graeme taught for decades. The modern crop (like Graeme, with an assist from political activist Barry) doesn’t dare even discuss Al Qaeda anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat lest his argument implodes.
I don’t know what these political outliers read but they don’t seem to have read the Detainee Assessment excerpts about Ayman Zawahiri’s anthrax program. If they did, it would bring them to focus on the need that the 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry be disclosed — and they would understand the relevance of the 28 pages to the true crime whodunnit of Amerithrax. Rather than making a (wildly anti-US) political argument, these folks should spend their time examining the contemporary documentary evidence.
I love the author’s writing style in “The ‘Official’ Operative Clique” — but he should apply that same lucid writing to analysis of the documentary evidence.
DXer says: Adnan El-Shukrijumah is the anthrax mailer … on or about 9/13/2001, he phoned from KSM’s house to tell his mom he was coming to the US
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/dxer-adnan-el-shukrijumah-is-the-anthrax-mailer-on-9132001-he-phoned-from-ksms-house-to-tell-his-mom-he-was-coming-to-the-us/
[ His mom says he was calling from Trinidad although a detainee had said he saw him at KSM’s house, where Yazid Sufaat also stayed, on about 9/13 ]
In February 2003, the FBI announced that “Jafar the Pilot” (aka Adnan El-Shukrijumah) had entered the country sometime after September 1, 2001
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/in-february-2003-the-fbi-announced-that-jafar-the-pilot-aka-adnan-el-shukrijumah-had-entered-the-country-sometime-after-september-1-2001/
Al Hawsawi, who had the anthrax processing documents scanned on his laptop, was closely affiliated with Adnan El-Shukrijumah
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/al-hawsawi-who-had-the-anthrax-processing-documents-scanned-on-his-laptop-was-closely-affiliated-with-adnan-el-shukrijumah/
One of the men who set up Yazid Sufaat’s anthrax lab in Kandahar in May 2001 acknowledged association with Jaffar al-Tayyar aka (Adnan al-Shukrijumah) but apparently the interrogator was confused by the multiple aliases
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/one-of-the-men-who-set-up-yazid-sufaats-anthrax-lab-in-kandahar-in-may-2001-acknowledged-association-with-jaffar-al-tayyar-aka-adnan-al-shukrijumah-but-apparently-the-interrogator-was-confused/
Here is the essay:
The “Official” Operative Clique For The Next 9/11?
By Chaim Kupferberg
Global Research, August 20, 2004
I’m sure many of you out there are noticing a unified narrative taking shape in advance of the next expected attack. In calibrated drips and dollops, the mainstream media, in partnership with the 9/11 panel, are laying the evidentiary trail pointing to the next “Atta” and his insular cell, which apparently already seems to be “in place” stateside.
Having no access at all to any insider reports, one can almost foretell the Official Legend that will follow in the wake of this clique’s first big explosion into the public consciousness – just by reading the mainstream news.
Certainly, three of these major operatives – Adnan Shukrijumah, Abderrouf Jdey, and Aafia Siddiqui – are already being linked together. But Shukrijumah and Jdey are the ones to watch, for they are being intimately seeded into the Padilla/dirty bomb and Ahmed Ressam/Canadian clique/West Coast threads of 9/11.
Recently, Shukrijumah was mentioned as the guy likely doing surveillance of the New York buildings in the latest terror alert. But that was supposed to be old information. Yet Shukrijumah has been showing up all over the radar in the past year alongside Jdey and Siddiqui.
When Abu Musab Zarqawi was publicly unveiled by Colin Powell before the UN in February 2003, he had yet to make his very public splash as the next Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. But in the opening months of 2004 – as I surmised back in October 2003 – Zarqawi would lay his own foundation in the public mind (particularly by way of the Daniel Pearl-like Berg killing) as the guy tagged to head up the next “big one.”
If the Ressam-connected Canadian clique is involved, the likely target is the U.S. West Coast. I suspect this is the case due to three items: the bulletin last May that alerted the public to Shukrijumah, Jdey, Siddiqui, Gahdan, el-Maati, and others; a reported sighting the next day of Shukrijumah and Jdey at a Denny’s in Colorado (they stated that they were “from Iran” and were en route to the West Coast from New York); the release, two weeks later, of the official 9/11 staff report that now placed Jdey (in cahoots with Moussaoui) as an original member of an aborted 9/11 “second wave” attack on the West Coast; and a reported sighting of Shukrijumah at a nuclear research facility in Ontario (while el-Maati had previously been reported casing nuclear facilities near Ottawa).
Ressam’s Canadian clique was part of the “botched” West Coast millennial operations. No doubt, Canadian operatives like el-Maati are part of this clique. It also seems that – in light of the flurry of strange articles coming out of Canada – that the Syrians are being set up to be the next proxy/patsies, particularly in regards to their “handling” of the el-Maati brothers and their unfortunate cohorts. What are the Syrians doing? Apparently, they seem to be “extracting” confessions out of some Canadian Muslims – or, unwittingly, playing their part to set up the legends for el-Maati et al. in Canada.
Shukrijumah (aka “the next Atta”) apparently seems to be threaded into the 1993 bomb plots by way of his father’s connection to Clement Hampton-El. But more strangely, it seems that Shukrijumah will make his way into the Oklahoma City Bomb thread by way of his Florida connection with “dirty bomb” guy Jose Padilla. To shore up the Oklahoma thread, we also have the Zarqawi/Moussaoui/ Nick Berg connection.
But let’s step back and take a stab at guessing at what is happening here. The new legends will be used to strengthen the foundations of the old ones. In parallel to the official account, however, the existing counter-legends will also be beefed up. In short, the narratives are getting all too muddled with the growing interlinking chains. The growing complexity of these new interlinking legends will operate to turn off a good portion of those who might be seriously interested in examining the truth behind 9/11.
And what of the rest of us? Will we be locked in a never-ending cycle of polarized argument – with each of us picking his favorite conspiracy thread? How many of us will look at Shukrijumah and see the fingerprints of Iran? How many of us will look at the Canadian clique and sense the hand of Syria behind it all? And if they find that the next operation was pulled off with forged New Zealand passports, how many of us will dig up the newspaper account of the Mossad/ New Zealand passport scandal and go “Aha! Once again the Israelis!”
And what about the anthrax thread? In recent months, a writer by the name of Ross Getman has been posting accounts that read like excerpts from a future Official 9/11 Sequel Report. Going by Getman’s writings, it would appear that a possible Boston connection would involve anthrax by way of Aafia Siddiqui’s connection to Brandeis University and its anthrax facility. Also note that a first sighting of Shukrijumah and Jdey a year ago occurred in Maine, where they were spotted driving with a Massachusetts license plate.
So, to sum up: Shukrijumah seems to be part of a “dirty bomb” or radiological thread, while Siddiqui seems to be part of an anthrax thread. Perhaps the Shukrijumah/Jdey/Siddiqui clique is planning a bi-coastal attack involving radiological materials (or perhaps an attack on a nuclear facility) and a simultaneous attack involving anthrax. Shukrijumah has been marketed as an “Atta-level” pilot.
Whatever the case, a definite evidentiary trail seems to be clearly laid so as to give the impression of the dots connecting up. Shukrijumah was also spotted recently in the Honduras, but I wouldn’t give that one much credence. The Denny’s item seems the most likely to be resurrected post-facto as an example of institutional incompetence and blindess. Perhaps the Honduras item was meant to give the impression that Shukrijumah was not yet in the U.S.
According Getman’s writings, al-Qaeda bigwig Ayman al-Zawahiri attaches significant symbolic value to the dates of September 17 and October 6 (or possibly October 7, as it is the date of entry into Afghanistan). September 17 is the date for the anthrax thread, as well as the signing of the Camp David Accords (i.e. the catalyst for Zawahiri’s original “crusade”). October 6 is the date of the Sadat assassination (which has symbolic value, as many of the Egyptian operatives involved with the 1993 bomb plots were born out of the Sadat “op” – and then subsequently run as CIA assets in Afghanistan.) So I regard these dates as “danger” dates. But somehow, I find myself wondering if the Official Legend would have far more credibility if any follow-up attack occurred under Kerry’s watch. In other words, maybe all this “pre-election attack” speculation by the government is similar to the “millennial attack” warnings that lulled us into complacency when they didn’t materialize.
In the aftermath of this next one, there will be those who will point to new instances of incompetence and blindness – who will say that the dots couldn’t be connected. Hopefully, perhaps none of the above will ever come to pass. Perhaps Shukrijumah, Jdey, and Siddiqui will never make their “historical” mark – and we’ve all been treated to nothing more than a cunningly orchestrated campaign of fear-mongering by the government.
Whatever the case, it seems that a very clear narrative – with accompanying threads – is being built up for potential use. In the event this particular chapter of the narrative ever goes “operational” … well, at least you’ll all know that the mainstream media had put the dots in place beforehand.
A September 25, 2014 letter from some members of Congress to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel expresses strong support for the 28 pages from the “Joint Inquiry.”
http://www.browardbulldog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Letter-to-ISCAP-from-Members-of-Congress.pdf
Given that Adnan El-Shukrijumah was the son of a Saudi missionary who testified as a defense witness in connection with the WTC 1993-related prosecution, these 28 pages are useful historical context in understanding Amerithrax and the movements of Nawaf and Al-Hazmi.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/amerithrax-hazmi-and-mihdhar-timeline/
In Southern California, the two men were helped by alleged intelligence operative Osama Basnan.
“Mystery men link Saudi intelligence to Sept 11 hijackers,” The Guardian, November 24, 2002
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/25/alqaida.saudiarabia
“However, Newsweek magazine reported yesterday that there was more evidence linking Mr Basnan to Riyadh, saying he visited Houston in April just as Crown Prince Abdullah passed through with a large government entourage. The magazine quoted sources as saying Mr Basnan met “a high Saudi prince who has responsibilities for intelligence matters”.
“The leaks about Mr al-Bayoumi and Mr Basnan are a symptom of rivalry in Washington. Congress is preparing a report into the September 11 investigation criticising the administration for failing to pursue leads that point to the Saudi establishment. The FBI is also frustrated that its inquiry into the Saudi role was stymied for political reasons.”
The signers have all reviewed the materials and conclude that the pages are not property classified at this time. The signers believe that declassification of the 28 pages would enhance, not harm, U.S. national security interests.”
The signers believe that declassification would advance national security by contributing to the national debate over, in part, the lingering mystery of whether the perpetrators received support from persons linked to foreign governments.
The members of Congress express their confidence that the panel “will agree that the time has come to declassify the 28 pages in question.” The members of Congress who signed the letter include Thomas Massie, Walter Jones, Paul Broun, Ted Yoho, Mark Sanford, Howard Coble, Steve Stockman and Michael Grimm.
Relatedly, Dietrich Snell oversaw deletion pages on the subject of the main text of the 911 Commission. Material was relegated to the footnotes.
From author Peter Lance’s website:
“Dietrich Snell, was the former prosecutor of [WTC 1993 plotter] Ramzi Yousef, whose very office had failed to act on the evidence from the Philippines National Police that Yousef was tied to the planes operation.” …
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/the-newly-released-senior-executive-brief-dated-7-august-2001-reports-that-bin-laden-wanted-to-follow-example-of-wtc-1993-bomber-ramzi-yousef-associated-with-subtilis-expert/comment-page-1/#comment-35363
Ramzi Yousef was KSM’s nephew. A draft letter found on a laptop threatened use of biochemical weapons if the Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman was not released.
Attorney Snell prosecuted Ramzi Yousef in connection with the Bojinka plot.
http://information.iran911case.com/Exhibit_5.pdf
Peter Lance writes:
“As I saw it, Dietrich Snell should have been a witness before the 9/11 Commission, subpoenaed to testify under oath in open session. Instead he was hired as its senior counsel, and given the job of determining “the origin of the plot”—the most important question facing the 9/11 Commission. After all, f they couldn’t tell when the plot commenced, they couldn’t rightfully hold U.S. intelligence agencies responsible for not stopping it. But it soon became clear that the commissioners, and investigators like Snell, had little interest in assessing blame. Almost half of the commission’s staff was made up of alumni from the very agencies that failed to stop the attacks. In short, the foxes had been hired to guard the chicken coop.”
While crediting everyone’s good faith in the editing of the 911 Commission report, perhaps if the material had remained elevated, people would have appreciated that the son of the Brooklyn imam who served as the Blind Sheik’s translator, was a prime candidate for being the anthrax mailer — particularly given that he was Mohammed Atta’s close associate and was known to have returned to the US from KSM’s house where Al Qaeda anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat was staying.
From History Commons:
“June 2004: Zelikow, 9/11 Commission Team Leader [Dietrich Snell] Delete Passages about Apparent Saudi Support for Hijackers from Main Text of Final Report
In a late-night editing session, 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow and Dieter Snell, head of the Commission team investigating the 9/11 plot, delete sections of the 9/11 Commission Report linking two of the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, to suspected Saudi government operatives.
Evidence of Saudi Link – The sections were drafted by two of Snell’s team members, Mike Jacobson and Raj De, and deal with Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who had helped the two hijackers (see January 15-February 2000); Fahad al-Thumairy, another of their associates (see June 9, 2000); cash transfers from the wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington to an associate of al-Bayoumi (see December 4, 1999); and a taxi driver who said he had seen the two hijackers in Los Angeles (see 2002).
Disagreement – However, Snell, a former prosecutor, is opposed to these sections, as he thinks the hijackers’ links to Saudi intelligence are not 100 percent proven, so it is better to leave them out. Jacobson is notified of the editing session just before midnight; he calls De and they both go into the Commission’s offices to discuss the material. Snell says that the final report should not contain allegations that cannot be backed up conclusively, but Jacobson and De say demanding this level of proof would exonerate the guilty.
Saudi Ties Moved to Endnotes – Zelikow appears sympathetic to Jacobson and De, and had also entertained suspicions of the Saudis at one point. However, he apparently sees his role at this late stage as that of a mediator and allows Snell to delete the sections from the main body of the report, although Jacobson and De are then permitted to write endnotes covering them. [SHENON, 2008, PP. 398-399]Material unfavorable to Pakistan is also omitted from the report (see July 22, 2004).”
Attorney Snell is a partner in the Litigation Department at Proskauer. I once worked at Proskauer at the Colgate-Palmolive building in New York. Litigation partners at large law firms have been known to advise that when you want to know what the other party wants the judge to overlook — the issues that the other litigant can’t handle — look to the footnotes of their brief.
We should understand that compartmentalization of information and CYA instincts often will lead to a failure in counterintelligence analysis — even as we credit everyone’s good faith (as I do).
Adnan El-Shukrijumah at last report was the head of Al Qaeda’s external operations for North America and is planning an attack on New York City.
It’s time to write the history — and to connect the dots in connection with the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings.
Here are 104 pages of 911 Commission interviews of Saudis.
http://cryptome.org/2014/09/saudi-911-interviews.pdfdesk
The evidence in the Bojinka prosecution included a letter that threatened to “launch a biochemical attack if one of their co-conspirators was not released from custody.” Not only were the anthrax letters part of the modus operandi of the 911 planners, it could be understood as a signature.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: life of terror
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/south/03/02/mohammed.biog/
“Authorities searching Yousef’s laptop computer found detailed plans to blow up the airliners — including flight numbers and schedules and bomb-making formulas.
Also in the computer was a communication signed by “Khalid Shaikh” and a letter that threatened to attack American targets “in response to the financial, political and military assistance given to the Jewish state in the occupied land of Palestine by the American government.”
The letter, apparently written by Mohammed and his associates, also threatened to assassinate the president of the Philippines, attack aircraft, or even launch a biochemical attack if one of their co-conspirators was not released from custody.”
Various people have written recently to ask for an overview of my theory of Amerithrax in text rather than graphic form.
But first, here is the 4-page summary in graphic form.
Here are some of the individual full-sized graphics:
One DIA (then CTC) analyst has said that an intelligence analysis has to be capable of being summarized in no more than two pages for the purpose of briefing top decision-makers. In contrast, my approach in commenting on Lew’s blog, however, has been to pick up puzzle pieces from the floor and wish the GAO good luck in trying to put them together. I have sought to support each issue with a particular uploaded document, so that the factual support is found in the uploaded documents. The GAO has the advantage of being able to request documents from the FBI — and obtain unredacted copies of documents previously disclosed. The GAO can get questions answered.
I did once self-publish a several hundred page analysis “Vanguards of Conquest.” The now unpublished analysis addressed the means, motive, modus operandi and opportunity of the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings. Vanguards of Conquest was the name of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad outside of Egypt which I have argued was responsible for the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings. (Zawahiri merged his group into Al Qaeda in 1998 without consulting the shura). Since first emailing a lengthy (unsolicited) memo to the CIA in December 2001, I’ve always felt that to understand the mailings, you needed to understand the historical context and motive going back to WTC 1993, Brooklyn, the Blind Sheik Services Organization, and even the assassination of Sadat by Islambouli. At this point, anyone who does not know that Al Qaeda had the means, motive, modus operandi and opportunity just isn’t paying attention — or has a uniquely personal agenda. It may seem that I’m working for free but I like to think of myself as working for the $25 million offered for information that avoids the next 9/11.
In debunking an Ivins Theory in the face of bureaucratic inertia, the devil lies in the detail — in the documentary evidence. Unlike documentary evidence, news reports are not probative. But the news coverage provides an overview of the matter.
I will post about four randomly selected sample links for each of the following subjects:
1. Ivins Theory
2. Al Qaeda Theory
3. Dr. Ayman Zawahiri’s Anthrax Program
4. Afghanistan Lab(s)
5. Yazid Sufaat
6. The ongoing and future Al Qaeda anthrax threat
7. Al Qaeda – some historical context
8. Ongoing GAO review
9. Hatfill Theory
10. Access to Genetically Matching Ames
12. Lax Security
13. Hijackers/ lesion and cropdusting inquiries
14. Al-Timimi at DARPA funded Center For Biodefense
15. Silica and tin
16. FBI’s profile
17. Lyophilizer
18. Forensics – Miscellaneous
1 IVINS THEORY –
Wired Magazine – Mar. 24, 2011 – “Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy?”
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ff_anthrax_fbi/
“Broken Justice,” Frederick Gorilla, January 2012
http://www.frederickgorilla.com
The New York Times – Feb. 24, 2010 (opinion) – “Haste Leaves Anthrax Case Unconcluded”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/us/25iht-letter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Frederick News-Post – Feb. 23, 2010 – “FBI report fails to end questions about Ivins’ guilt”
http://m.fredericknewspost.com/archive/article_43e2ef3b-ad51-5567-9c22-db1b002889c1.html?mode=jqm
2. AL QAEDA THEORY –
Jeffrey Bartholet, “Terrorist Sleeper Cells: A U.S.-Based Al Qaeda ‘Sleeper Cell’ Was Poised to Launch a Post-Sept. 11 Attack on a Major Washington Target; Would-Be Terrorists Went Underground or Fled U.S. Evidence Indicates Al Qaeda Had Russian Help Developing Anthrax; Al-Zawahiri Believed Involved in Bin Laden’s Biological Weapons Program.” Newsweek, December 9, 2001.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/a-us-based-al-qaeda-sleeper-cell-was-poised-to-launch-a-post-sept-11-attack-on-a-major-washington-target-would-be-terrorists-went-underground-or-fled-us-74535997.html
“Computer in Kabul holds chilling memos,” Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2001.
http://www.culteducation.com/reference/alqaeda/alqaeda36.html
“Al Qaeda-Anthrax Link?,” CBS News, March 23, 2002
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-224_162-504460.html
3. DR. AYMAN ZAWAHIRI’S ANTHRAX PROGRAM AND PLANNING
“Suspect and A Setback In Al-Qaeda Anthrax Case,” October 31, 2006
“Interrogation: Al Qaeda and Anthrax,” Newsweek, April 12, 2004
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/NEWSWEEK+PERISCOPE%3A+INTERROGATION+-+Al+Qaeda+and+Anthrax.-a0114903244
“Sketches of anthrax bomb found in Pakistani scientist’s office,” Rediff.com, November 28, 2001
http://www.rediff.com/us/2001/nov/28ny5.htm
“Poison trail that started in al-Qaeda safe house,” TimesOnline, January 8, 2003
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/article1984825.ece
USA Today – Oct. 2, 2011 – “Al Qaeda lab lingers in anthrax story”
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/story/2011-10-02/anthrax-terror-lab/50633496/1
“US says al-Qaeda weapons lab found,” BBC News, March 22, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1890484.stm
“Evidence of Anthrax Labs Near Kandahar,” March 25, 2002, ABCNews
http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80052
“Lab Suggests Qaeda Planned to Build Arms, Officials Say,” New York Times, September 14, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/international/asia/14LAB.html
“F.B.I. to question suspect in Malaysia,” New York Times, September 18, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/18/world/threats-and-responses-fbi-to-question-suspect-in-malaysia.html
“Yazid hails 9/11 attackers as ‘marketers of Islam’ ”
“Anthrax, ricin detected in Afghan labs,” United Press International, March 25, 2002
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2002/03/25/Anthrax-ricin-detected-in-Afghan-labs/UPI-11631017095729/
6. ONGOING AND FUTURE THREAT –
(Chertoff interview) “Bio Terror ‘Next Threat’ For US,” SkyNews, October 31, 2008
http://news.sky.com/story/644706/bio-terror-next-threat-for-us
“Bio-terror strike ‘is inevitable’,” BBC News, November 21, 2005
The world must face the inevitability of a bio-terror attack by al-Qaeda, the head of Interpol has warned.
“Commission: Al-Qaida made surprising advances on biological weapon,” April 1, 2005
http://www.ocala.com/article/20050401/NEWS/204010349
“Is Al Qaeda Making Anthrax?” CBS News, October 9, 2003
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-577395.html
Target America II: Bio-Weapons
[website’s “About Us”
We are a staff of retired military members with varying backgrounds. Several of us served in the US Army Special Forces and others served as Intelligence Analysts in the Air Force, Navy, Army or Marines.”
August 30, 2014 / ISIS Study Group
http://isisstudygroup.com/?tag=yazid-sufaat
“Since we mentioned Sufaat and his work with al-Qaida in developing anthrax, let’s take a look at this agent. In 2001, we were subject to a series of bio-attacks where anthrax was sent to the targets via letters in dust form to be inhaled. It resulted in 5 deaths and 22 infections, but created mass hysteria since it occurred after the 9-11 hijackings. In many ways, the mission objectives were met in that chaos was created and the FBI never really found out who was responsible for the attacks (the lab technicians suspected of being involved were exonerated except for one that they claim was “responsible” yet having no evidence). There are many lessons to be gleaned from the anthrax letter attacks that we assess several terror organizations have likely taken note of – with IS being one of those groups.”
[GAO, it seems that you should have access to Intelpedia entry regarding Amerithrax. [And query whether the entry is subject to FOIA. I have seen a lot of FOIA requests for Intelpedia articles, which is like the iC’s Wikipedia ]
“And what about Ebola? As we’ve stated earlier in this piece as well as in previous articles, unconfirmed reports suggested that Sufaat was attempting to weaponize a strain of Ebola prior to his detainment. However, he wasn’t the only one trying to weaponize the disease. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo had sent some personnel to Zaire to collect samples of Ebola to be used in creating a weaponized strain, and even attempted to contaminate the areas outside of military bases stationed in Japan with nothing to show for it.”
I don’t know anything about ISIS.
And I don’t know anything about Yazid Sufaat and ebola. In his filmed published interview he did say he wanted an agent that acted more quickly and with more dramatic effect than anthrax. I don’t have the exact quote handy but, as I recall, he said something similar to preferring something wham-bam. He might have borrowed a word from his native language — I don’t recall offhand. Sitting here today, I figure he was referring to ricin. There were traces of ricin found at the lab(s). There was an experiment with aerosolized ricin by Ansar al-Islam where they reportedly followed the man to the marketplace.
I don’t know what to make about this website and know nothing about it or the people associated with it. In 2002 and then since, I have had correspondence with a DIA analyst thought of him as a thoughtful type.
On the subject of agents, I asked Yazid Sufaat what experiments were done prior to 911 by Abu Khabab involving rabbits and he pled the Fifth.
Yazid Sufaat similarly declined to identify the strain of a bottle of anthrax spores harvested in June 2001 that I showed him.
Here is an article addressing the issue of the bioterrorism potential of ebola.
The Bioterrorist Threat of Ebola in East Africa and Implications for Global Health and Security
Amanda M. Teckman
http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Teckman%20-%20The%20Bioterrorist%20Threat%20of%20Ebola%2005.13.pdf
It was Aafia Siddiqui who later had the plans for spreading ebola. FN 1
She had been in Karachi in the spring of 2002 and was asked by her new husband, Al-Balucchi, to assess Yazid Sufaat’s assistant capability to handle the anthrax lab. Her new husband had worked with Hawsawi in getting the 911 hijackers into the US. Adnan El-Shukrijuijumah was staying with Al-Hawsawi from Feb – April 2002.
I never was sure of whether Aafia had gone to Liberia in 2001 before 9/11.
These points just go to the unacceptability of having Amerithrax remain closed but still a mystery.
FN 1/
Lady al Qaeda: The World’s Most Wanted Woman
The Taliban wanted to trade Bergdahl for her. The Islamic State offered to swap Foley. Why does every jihadi group want the U.S. to free Aafia Siddiqui?
BY SHANE HARRIS • AUGUST 26, 2014
“Siddiqui was arrested in 2008 in Afghanistan carrying sodium cyanide, as well as documents describing how to make chemical weapons and dirty bombs and how to weaponize Ebola.”
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/26/lady_al_qaeda_the_worlds_most_wanted_woman
ISIS demanded release of Lady al Qaeda before beheading James Foley, • AUGUST 22, 2014
http://www.news.com.au/world/isis-demanded-release-of-lady-al-qaeda-before-beheading-james-foley/story-fndir2ev-1227032756835
“She admitted to interrogators she had detailed plans on how to kill by spreading Ebola and was also found with two pounds of highly toxic sodium cyanide hidden in her bag.”
FN 2
Aafia Siddiqui – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/…/Aafia_Siddiqui
The identification of Siddiqui was made three years after the incident by one of the go-betweens in the Liberian deal. Alan White, former chief investigator of the …
Who’s Afraid of Aafia Siddiqui? | Boston Magazine
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/…/whos-afraid-of-aafia-siddiqui/
She would arrive in Liberia’s bustling capital, Monrovia, on a plane from … MIT graduate and former Boston resident Aafia Siddiqui was the only woman on the …
“Muslim Calls for Bio-Weapon Holy War,” Sunday Times, September 5, 1999
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg23183.html
“Did Bin Laden buy bioterror: trial testimony says he did,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 21, 2001.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Did-bin-Laden-buy-bioterror-1999-testimony-2866900.php
“Bin Laden group ‘has bio-weapons,” BBC News, October 9, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1589104.stm
“Bin-Laden Men Reportedly Possess Biological Weapons,” Al-Sharaq al-Awsat, March 6, 1999 (FBIS/FTS 19990306000273)
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1999/03/990306-bin-ladin-bw.htm
8. ONGOING GAO REVIEW –
The Times of Trenton – Feb. 26, 2010 – “Holt: Last word not in on anthrax case”
http://www.nj.com/news/times/regional/index.ssf?/base/news-19/126716676555360.xml&coll=5
Stephen Engelberg et al., The Macon Telegraph – Oct. 11, 2011 – “Was FBI’s science good enough to ID anthrax killer?”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/11/126584/was-fbis-science-good-enough-to.html
Nature – Feb. 15, 2011 – “Science falls short in anthrax investigation”
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/02/science_falls_short_in_anthrax.html
The Gazette – Oct. 12, 2011 – “Questions remain 10 years after anthrax mailings”
http://www.gazette.net/article/20111012/NEWS/710129418/1009/questions-remain-10-years-after-anthrax-mailings&template=gazette
9. HATFILL THEORY –
MSNBC – Apr. 16, 2010 – “Exonerated anthrax suspect: FBI harassed me”
http://www.today.com/id/36565308
The Atlantic – Apr. 16, 2010 – “The Wrong Man”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/05/the-wrong-man/308019/
The Hunting of Steven J. Hatfill
Why are so many people eager to believe that this man is the anthrax killer?
SEP 16, 2002, VOL. 8, NO. 01
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/623rbipi.asp
“U.S. attorney’s office accused of anthrax case leaks,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2007
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/12/nation/na-anthrax12
CNN – Feb. 15, 2011 – “Scientific review reaches no conclusion on source of anthrax”
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/02/15/anthrax.source/
Zawahiri’s Plan To Obtain the Ames Anthrax Strain
http://www.globalpolitician.com/print.asp?id=612
NPR (Laurie Garrett interview) – Aug. 26, 2011 – “A look back at 9/11 in ‘I Heard the Sirens Scream’”
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/26/139972661/a-look-back-at-9-11-in-i-heard-the-sirens-scream
“UNM Anthrax May Be Twin To Strain in Attacks,” Albuquerque Journal, December 19, 2001
http://www.abqjournal.com/terror/anniversary/542878news12-19-01.htm
“Report Sounds Alarm Over Bioterror: Bipartisan Study Finds Insufficient Laboratory Safeguards, Loose Regulations,” Washington Post, November 30, 2008
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-11-30/news/36831924_1_anthrax-attacks-biodefense-nuclear-terrorism
“For Decades, Mailing Germs Was Routine,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 2, 2002
http://articles.philly.com/2002-10-02/news/25350883_1_germ-warfare-biological-weapons-anthrax-bacteria
ProPublica.com – Oct. 24, 2011 – “Secret Reports: With Security Spotty, Many Had Access to Anthrax”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/24/128012/secret-reports-suggest-ivins-and.html
13. HIJACKERS/LESION AND CROPDUSTING INQUIRIES
“FBI Checking Crop-Dusting Planes, Pilots,” Associated Press, April 22, 2004
http://www.policeone.com/terrorism/articles/85144-FBI-Checking-Crop-Dusting-Planes-and-Pilots-Still-Worried-About-Possible-Terror-Use/
“Cropdusters grounded in poison alert: Toxic threat Pesticide planes could be used to spray cities,” Guardian, September 24, 2001
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/24/afghanistan.terrorism9
14. AL-TIMIMI AT DARPA-FUNDED CENTER FOR BIODEFENSE
“GMU Bioterrorism Center Unites Former Foes,” Washingon Post, February 14, 2002
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/GMUformerfoes.html
“Hardball Tactics in an Era of Threats,” Washington Post September 3, 2006
Jerry Markon, “Government Secrecy May Lead to New Trial In Va. Terrorism Case,” Washington Post, November 21, 2007; Page A08
15. SILICA AND TIN –
The New York Times – Oct. 9, 2011 – “Scientists’ Analysis Disputes F.B.I. Closing of Anthrax Case”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/science/10anthrax.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Science Magazine – Oct. 11, 2011 – “New Challenge to FBI’s Anthrax Investigation Lends an Ear to Tin”
http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/10/new-challenge-fbis-anthrax-investigation-lends-ear-tin
“Silicon highlights remaining questions over anthrax investigation,”Nature, Sept. 29, 2008
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080929/full/news.2008.1137.html
New Scientist – Feb. 16, 2011 – “Scientists critical of FBI’s anthrax conclusions”
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/02/who-was-the-anthrax-attacker-s.html
Remember Anthrax?
Despite the evidence, the FBI won’t let go of its “lone American” theory.
APR 29, 2002, VOL. 7, NO. 32
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/147vnjgh.asp
“Al Qaeda’s Anthrax: Osama bin Laden behind the mail attacks?” Technology Review, April 16, 2002
http://muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/03_Al_Qaeda_Anthrax.htm
17. LYOPHILIZER –
MSNBC – July 19, 2011 – “Government lawyers backtrack on anthrax case”
http://www.today.com/id/43814463/ns/us_news-security/
The Sacramento Bee – July 20, 2011 – “Justice Dept backtracks on anthrax claims”
http://www.salon.com/2011/07/19/anthrax_25/
Village Voice (blog) – July 19, 2011 – “Bruce Ivins Maybe Didn’t Send Anthrax, Government Admits in Court Papers”
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/07/bruce_ivins_anthrax_fbi_pbs_documentary.php
WTOP.com – Feb. 10, 2009 – “Lawyer: Evidence against Bruce Ivins ‘Undercut’”
http://www.wtop.com/25/1597836/Lawyer-Evidence-against-Bruce-Ivins-undercut
“The Kinko’s Connection,” TIME, December 17, 2001
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1001477,00.html
“Experts Debate Theory Hijacker Was Exposed”
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/memoroilsanthraxprobe.html
“Hijacker’s lesion deepens mystery,” Baltimore Sun, March 24, 2002
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/hijackerslesionmystery.html
11. For the $25 million dollar reward, I supposed I should add #11 – ADNAN EL-SHUKRIJUMAH
“Law Review: City firm keeps making case against Saudis and 9/11”
http://articles.philly.com/2014-10-02/news/54522621_1_saudi-arabia-9-11-attacks-grand-mosque
“Maybe the most important unanswered question is: Will the U.S. and Saudi governments ever fill in the blanks?”
Hazmi and Mihdhar Timeline
http://amerithrax.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/anthrax-and-al-qaeda-the-big-picture-125-2-draft-beta/screen-shot-2012-12-05-at-9-09-45-am/
In connection with the GAO’s ongoing review of the science relied upon in the Amerithrax investigation, the search of the Maryland ponds was one of the most dramatic episodes.
The father of the pro bono attorney representing “anthrax weapons suspect” Ali Al-Timimi had been supervising the Amerithrax investigation during the derailment of the investigation in the early years.
Consider what Attorney Seikaly told the press — without even pausing to consider whether the leaks were appropriate. Consider whether, as a matter of science, what was being told the press was true. For example, were wrapped vials in fact found?
Ask yourself further: Isn’t it outrageous that the DOJ Civil says it did not preserve the depositions that lay bare the reasons for the derailment of the Amerithrax investigation?
Indeed, wouldn’t Daniel Seilaly have the lead role in deciding how to handle “911 imam” Anwar Awlaki, the fellow coordinating with Ali Al-Timimi?
The head of the Amerithrax prosecution Daniel Seikaly pled the Fifth Amendment about leaking the hyped Hatfill stories that derailed the Amerithrax investigation for 7 years. His daughter later came to represent “anthrax weapons suspect” (to borrow defense counsel’s phrase) Ali Al-Timimi pro bono. GAO: Was an apparent conflict of interest avoided on the grounds that her representation began after her father left DOJ? Or was there a continuing appearance of a conflict of interest?
Posted by Lew Weinstein on September 3, 2011
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/the-head-of-the-amerithrax-prosecution-daniel-seikaly-pled-the-fifth-amendment-about-leaking-the-hyped-hatfill-stories-that-derailed-the-amerithrax-investigation-for-7-years-his-daughter-later-ca/
Who does former lead Amerithrax prosecutor Daniel Seikaly and his daughter, Ali Al-Timimi’s former defense counsel, think is responsible for the anthrax mailings of Fall 2001?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/who-does-former-prosecutor-daniel-seikaly-and-his-daughter-ali-al-timimis-former-defense-counsel-think-is-responsible-for-the-anthrax-mailings-of-fall-2001/
Catherine Herridge’s NEXT WAVE: Anwar Awlaki, Ali Al-Timimi and why FBI Agent Wade Ammerman wanted to allow Anwar Awlaki to meet with Ali Al-Timimi in October 2002
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/catherine-herridges-next-wave-anwar-awlaki-ali-al-timimi-and-why-fbi-agent-wade-ammerman-wanted-to-allow-anwar-awlaki-to-meet-with-ali-al-timimi-in-october-2002/
Source citations to Seikaly leaks:
Agents discovered in pond vials and gloves wrapped in plastic. See Lengel Dep. at 95:1- 96:1; see also id. at 346:21-347:6, 349:4-12.
Anthrax tests on pond materials were continuing after conflicting results. See Lengel Dep. at 95:1- 96:1; see also id. at 346:21-347:6, 349:4-12.
Hatfill told an acquaintance that anthrax could be made in the woods and evidence tossed in a lake. See Klaidman Dep. at 107:19-108:16; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
Pond search also found vials wrapped in plastic. See Lengel Dep. at 72:19- 73:7; see also id. at 346:21-347:6, 349:4-12.
Lab tests of soil taken from pond showed no signs of anthrax. See Lengel Dep. at 72:14- 73:7; see also id. at 346:21-347:6, 349:4-12.
Pond search occurred because Hatfill once said he might dispose of contaminated materials in pond. See Klaidman Dep. 102:15-103:7, 104:16-21, 107:7-10, 107:19-108:16; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
Initial test of box found in pond tested positive for anthrax, but subsequent tests were negative. See Klaidman Dep. at 109:1-22; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
Pond search found a clear box with holes to accommodate gloves. See Lengel Dep. at 72:14- 73:7; see also id. at 346:21-347:6, 349:4-12.
Hatfill used Cipro. See Klaidman Dep. at 91:17-92:12; see also Deposition of Daniel Klaidman (Dec. 12, 2007) (“Klaidman Dep. II”) at 10:13-19, 11:5-20 (confirming that Mr. Seikaly was “Source DOJ4”).
Bloodhounds were used in the anthrax investigation. See Klaidman Dep. at 45:11-21; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
Details about how dogs were used and their reaction to Hatfill. See Klaidman Dep. at 51:12-16, 52:18-53:5, 59:8-17, 62:1-63:4; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
Dogs were quietly brought to various locations. See Klaidman Dep. at 61:13-15, 62:1-63:4; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
Dogs immediately became agitated at Hatfill’s apartment. See Klaidman Dep. at 66:22-67:11, 68:1-6; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
One of the dogs “excitedly bounded right up to Hatfill”. See Klaidman Dep. at 80:8-81:10; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
Dogs picked up scent at restaurant where Hatfill had eaten the previous day and at Hatfill’s girlfriend’s apartment. See Klaidman Dep. at 69:9-17; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
Pond search was tied to Hatfill and triggered by “hypothetical statement Hatfill had made about anthrax. See Klaidman Dep. at 72:1-10; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
Hatfill “continues to be a key focus of the probe.” See Lengel Dep. at 133:6- 143:16; see also id. at 346:21-347:6, 349:4-12.
FBI focus on Hatfill due in part to his admitted use of Cipro. See Klaidman Dep. at 91:17-92:21; see also Klaidman Dep. II at 10:13-19, 11:5-20.
As another example, DOJ Civil, by letter, reports that DOJ Civil did not preserve the deposition of Edward Cogswell. The deposition was conducted November 16, 2007. He was represented by Attorney Freeborne.
Mr. Cogswell served as a public affairs specialist. to my eye, his “so-called leaks” were far less substantive than Attorney Seikaly’s.
I am missing many of the pages from the copy of the deposition available to me to upload (to incldue pages 2-17, 24-27, 34-48, 57-83, 157-163, 180–233, 348 to the end of his deposition.)
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/amerithrax-depositions-vol-2.pdf
The “public interest” favors that the DOJ Civil look harder for Mr. Cogswell’s deposition and provide it.
The following so-called alleged “leaks” are attributed to Mr. Cogswell, whose job was press relations.
FBI was unimpressed with Hatfill’s denials. See Ross Dep. at 137:19- 138:13.
Investigators had a growing case of circumstantial evidence against Hatfill. See Ross Dep. at 140:20- 141:14.
Hatfill was FBI’s main focus. See Ross Dep. at 148:2- 12; see also id. at 305:17- 306:12.
FBI had “too many questions” about Hatfill to back off. See Ross Dep. at 170:12- 15; see also id. at 305:17- 306:12.
Plaintiff was the “one and only” suspect. See Ross Dep. at 257:14- 258:5; see also id. at 305:17-306:12.
FBI’s case against Hatfill was circumstantial but still “potentially significant”. See Ross Dep. at 185:2- 16; see also id. at 305:17- 306:12.
Fort Detrick search was a “last-ditch effort” by FBI to get evidence regarding Hatfill. See Ross Dep. at 187:12- 188:3; see also id. at 305:17-306:12.
By mid-2004, FBI had set itself an internal deadline of October 1, 2004, to make a case against Hatfill that would stand up in Court. See Ross Dep. at 187:12- 188:3, 191:1-18, 310:10- 312:11, 319:2-323:5
Investigators were aware of a Greendale Elementary School near where Hatfill lived in Africa and were interested in the lead. See Ross Dep. at 109:11- 110:11, 110:14-111:8.
The DOJ Civil says it did not preserve the sworn deposition of James Fitzgerald, the FBI profiler who in early October 2001 contributed to what I’ll call the “lone nut” profile. That profile figured very importantly, in my estimation, in setting things off on the wrong course. I’ve never seen any indication that Agent Fitzgerald even know that Dr. Zawahiri’s intention to use anthrax had been publicly announced when he helped develop the FBI’s profile. The deposition was conducted on October 7, 2005. I do not have pages 2-8, 13-101, 106-157, 164 to the end.
Handwriting, linguistics, profiling — these were all methods relied upon by the FBI in Amerithrax. DOJ Civil should have preserved this deposition — and should go back and try harder to find it. The forthcoming report by GAO is focused on government operations in the course of this Amerithrax investigation.
“Q Do you agree or disagree with the last sentence of that paragraph, “Never have I encountered such reluctance to examine potential critical documents””
A I have a level of agreement that” (p. 159)
Q And then in the next column two-thirds of the way down [Professor Foster] writes, “As for Hatfill.” Do you see where that is?
A Yes.
Q “It was the FBI’s best team of trained bloodhounds, not an offender profile nor my text analysis, that finally persuaded the Amerithrax Task Force in July 2002 to associate Hatfill with the anthrax letters and put him under 24-hour surveillance.” (p. 160)
The US DOJ Civil, by failing to preserve (and now produce under FOIA) the civil depositions in Hatfill v. US, is doing exactly what the lead Amerithrax investigator Lambert cautioned against.
In an April 11, 2008 motion for summary judgment, he and his colleagues explained the dangers of not sharing information:
“See Lambert Deposition Tran., Ex. 54, at 206: 5-11 (The FBI Director “actually directed that we take measures in terms of the dissemination and the flow of information among agents on the three squads to basically compartmentalize the various facts of the investigation that were occurring. id. at 351:21 – 352:4 (“I was opposed to this and offered my opinion that such compartmentalization within the Amerithrax task force would inhibit our ability to ‘connect the dots’ in a case of this magnitude.”) Indeed, in the words of the lead investigator:
Well, if you look at the timing of this and the fact that it occurs on the heels of 9/11, and that the findings of both the 9/11 Commission and the Joint Inquiry Commission are that the FBI and the intelligence community failed to connect the dots, I was very concerned about compartmentalizing information and there being all the pieces that fit together to solve this case, but because of the compartmentalization and because the failure to integrate the flow of information, that would never be realized. And, in light of 9/11, I felt very strongly about that point. I expressed my opinion to the Director. He said, “I still want you to compartmentalize the case,” and that’s exactly what I did.
Id. at 353:10 – 354:5.”
JEFFREY M. SMITH was on the brief with Elizabeth Shapiro and Paul Freeborne. Perhaps he knows where the civil depositions are.
The issue of production of these depositions being withheld by DOJ Civil FOIA is pretty straightforward. It all relates to the adequacy of the search by Elizabeth J. Shapiro, Paul Freeborne and the other counsel who had the depositions. Elizabeth J. Shapiro was the DOJ lawyer who so skillfully represented Attorney General Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller in the Hatfill v. US litigation. According to DOJ Civil FOIA James Kovakas, she did not preserve the civil depositions and (excerpt for four of the depositions) the requested civil depositions in the Hatfill litigation are nowhere to be found at DOJ Civil.
Elizabeth J. Shapiro (“Betsy”) has been given awards for avoiding the production of documents under FOIA. There perhaps is no one known or distinguished at the Department as more skilled at preventing the disclosure of documents.
The balancing of disclosure and withholding due to national security concerns, however, requires complicated balancing. Lawyers tend not to be ideally suited at striking balances.
Unfortunately, in this instance, the same compartmentalization of information and withholding of information that led to 911 is actively encouraged here by the DOJ.
Rule No. 1 in inappropriate document withholding is: Don’t withhold documents a third party already has.
If Betsy and Paul Freeborne were to reach to the computer copies of the depositions presumably in the bowels of DOJ Civil, then James Kovakas or someone he supervises could redact them under FOIPA. Redactions pursuant to (b)(6) and (b)(7), if any are deemed necessary, could be made on the pages I haven’t uploaded. (The most junior attorney on the briefs and the paralegal did the closest work on the case are the ones most likely to be able to put their hands on the missing depositions.) (Personally, if Betsy defended the Attorney General of the United States and FBI Director at deposition and does not have access to a copy, I’ll be very surprised).
The true expertise under FOIA lies in knowing when disclosure should be made and complying with the statute. The goal is compliance with the statute, as amended — not in withholding. Withholding the depositions, under all these facts, however, is just another misstep related to the Amerithrax investigation. Failing to share information is what led to the greatest failure in counterintelligence analysis in the history of the United States.
As another example, FBI Tampa should have told the “Joint Inquiry” and 911 Commission about the Sarasota investigation involving Adnan El-Shukrijumah, who I argue to be the mailer of the Fall 2001 anthrax letters. He met with my former Facebook Friend Yazid Sufaat before travelling to the US in September 2001. They both stayed with KSM in Kandahar in September 2001. In written exchanges, Al Qaeda anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat does not deny to me Al Qaeda’s responsibility for the anthrax mailings.
Now I appreciate that there is the counterargument that the entire Hatfill litigation — and derailing of the investigation — was due to IMPROPER sharing. I, more than anyone, realizes that the issue is both sensitive and complicated. Here, the depositions are sought to explain how the investigation was derailed — such as Bob Roth’s shutting out AUSA Cathleen Corkin (and visa versa).
The FOIA requirement that the depositions be produced is pretty straightforward. The issue relates to the adequacy of the search. I am venturing that the search was inadequate and that there should be a re-do led by Attorneys Shapiro and Freeborne.
In a telephone conversation this week, DOJ Civil FOIA James Kovakas questioned whether the depositions had even been conducted — which of course is nonsense. He then didn’t want to talk about the details. Even if FBI tried to corral all documents so that the FBI could control the flow of information (which is in fact what happened), the purge of civil depositions from DOJ Civil computers was not in fact successful and it now is well past time to give them up and retrieve them from the computers and files where duplicate copies sit waiting
At the end of the day, there are no secrets.
At the end of the day, the Department of Justice stands first and foremost for the rule of law — not CYA. These DOJ Civil attorneys are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
Justice Department’s Civil Division Honors Top Lawyers | Main Justice
http://www.mainjustice.com/…/justice-departments-civil-division-honors-top- lawyers/
Dec 7, 2012 … Elizabeth J. Shapiro, an expert on FOIA litigation, came away with the year’s top award.
“But at the ceremony, Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Shapiro went home with the year’s top honor, the Stanley D. Rose Memorial Award, for making an “outstanding contribution of of long-term impact,” to the division. She’s an information expert, having a number of cases related to the “explosion in [Freedom of Information Act] itigation has overlapped with her tenure,” as they related to questions of national security, the award states. For more than 20 years she has served as a lawyer in the division’s Federal Programs Branch and for the past decade has headed the Government Information Area.
In her capacity, she has advised officials in the executive branch on how to handle questions of information disclosure. She has recently worked on headline-grabbing information cases, including the disclosure of WIkiLeaks documents, access to the White House visitor logs, requests to release photographs from the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden and requests for President Richard Nixon’s grand jury testimony. In the past year, she handled a FOIA challege related to the use of drones to target suspected terrorists abroad.”
9 – Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/…/CALEA_DOJ_Answer.pdf
ELIZABETH J. SHAPIRO. Deputy Branch Director, Federal Programs Branch … civil action and its FOIA requests to Defendants, to which no response is required …
Docket for the Hatfill vs Ashcroft lawsuit
Defendant U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE represented by Alan Stuart Modlinger (See above for address) ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED. Elizabeth J. Shapiro
Approximately 40% of Attorney Shapiro’s filed court cases have involved FOIA. For example, she’s handled cases involving Judicial Watch, Freedom Watch Inc., Holy Land Foundation, Al Barak Investment, ACLU, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.
Given that Attorney Shapiro is the award-winning expert on FOIA, let’s turn to her court filings to see what she deems to constitute an adequate search — and to get a sense whether she thinks that throwing out a sworn deposition is what is contemplated by the FOIA statute. Let’s examine her court filings to see whether she thinks civil depositions are agency records within the meaning of the statute that need to be preserved.
http://www.justice.gov/archive/transition/protect.htm
CIA Asks to Destroy Email of Non-Senior Agency Officials
Posted on Oct.01, 2014 in CIA, Secrecy by Steven Aftergood
The Central Intelligence Agency has asked for authority to destroy email messages sent by non-senior officials of the Agency. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has tentatively approved the proposal.
In an August 18 appraisal of the CIA request, Meredith Scheiber of NARA wrote that any permanently valuable material in the emails would almost certainly be captured in other permanent CIA records.
“It is unlikely that permanent records will be found in these email accounts that is not filed in other appropriate files appraised as permanent,” the appraisal said.
“There are multiple records systems to capture the actions and decisions of employees and multiple internal controls in place in the event an employee was engaged in malicious activities.”
Any “remaining email not captured in other recordkeeping systems is routine or administrative in nature; transitory; or personal in nature.”
The NARA appraisal of the CIA proposal noted in passing that “The Agency’s current email policy is to print and file” rather than to save permanently valuable email in softcopy format.
“The average career of an Agency employee is 22 years,” the NARA appraisal also observed.
The CIA proposal for email disposal authority and the accompanying NARA appraisal were announced for public comment in the Federal Register on September 17.
Comment: Did the Department of Justice ever get approval to destroy the sworn statements taken before a court reporter of the United States Attorney General and FBI DIrector on the conduct of the Amerithrax investigation?
DOJ Civil FOIA Kovakas tells me that DOJ had no duty to preserve the sworn civil deposition of Attorney General Ashcroft and FBI DIrector Mueller in the largest criminal investigation (outside of 911) in history. Isn’t Attorney Kovakas mistaken?
Former FBI Director Mueller appeared and testified under oath on March 30, 2006. He was represented at deposition by distinguished senior DOJ Civil Attorney Elizabeth Shapiro.
He tended to be briefed on the investigation — in which he took an intense interest — each Friday.
Pages of his deposition (that are not available by reason of having not been filed in court) include but is not limited to 2-6, 10, 19-32, 48-51, 71-76, 83-88, 107-120, 125-129 136-end.
The FBI Director’s civil deposition should be produced by DOJ without further delay or withholding.
GAO should obtain the full deposition and have it released by DOJ Civil and/or FBI pursuant to FOIA.
I have uploaded those pages currently publicly available here:
DOJ Civil reports that it did not preserve the sworn testimony of the leading AUSA who saw Amerithrax through from the Hatfill Theory to the Ivins Theory. AUSA Kenneth Kohl was deposed on January 27, 2006. Mr. Modlinger represented Ken Kohl at deposition.
Missing pages from the copy available to me here include pages 2-14, 47-53, 60-64, 70-95, 110-146, 162-182, 191-206, , 232-234, 247-260, 273-279, 283 to end. DOJ Civil should attempt a more thorough search.
Depositions are an agency record that a DOJ litigator is supposed to preserve. http://www.justice.gov/archive/transition/protect.htm
Lead Amerithrax investigator Richard Lambert was deposed on August 3, 2005. He was represented at deposition by Elizabeth Shapiro, who saw the matter through to its settlement in mid-2008 when the DOJ agreed to pay Hatfill $5.8 million.
Q Would — so that suggests some great interest on the part of the Director in this investigation?
A Very intense interest. (p. 24)
Agent Lambert briefed FBI Director Mueller on Fridays, subject to the DIrector’s schedule.
DOJ Civil FOIA’s James Kovakas — apparently overlooking the guidance I’ve cited that indicates that the sworn depositions should have been preserved — advises me that DOJ had no duty to preserve the depositions. The depositions included the depositions of the US Attorney, the FBI Director and others.
The pages not available to us from the Lambert deposition (by reason of not having been filed in court) include but are not limited to pages 2-23, 27-30, 32-33, 47-61, 67, 179-191, 227-261, 269-274, 284-296, 303-325, 358- end)
After an appeal and defense to a suit under FOIA (to include affidavits not only from Attorneys Shapiro, Freeborne and Modlinger, but others who had copies of the depositions on their computers), it may turn out that FBI instructed agencies to batten down the hatches. The FBI may have instructed to send all documents not anchored to the deck back to the FBI . It may turn out that the FBI wanted to control the release of information.
In technical legal parlance, that is playing hide-the-ball. The acronym is “CYA.”
The FBI did the same thing with critical lab notebooks at USAMRIID — lab notebooks are still being withheld and are unavailable for production by USAMRIID.
One difference is that USAMRIID FOIA fought to get those notebooks back — while DOJ FOIA Civil’s James offered me bus fare in going on a multi-year trip to visit Dave Hardy at the FBI and submit a new request.
Mr. Hardy supervises 200 employees. Individuals like James Kovakas and Dave Hardy are named in their role of heads of the operation they supervise and the point-of-contact. In reality, many people are needed to staff the FOIA functions and only David and James get credit for alleged wrongful withholding.
On the ground, it is the people in the substantive line positions — to include the lawyers and their paralegals — that have to actually pull the documents from the bowels of the beast.
Attorney Paul Freeborne, when I asked by email to confirm that he in fact still had access to the depositions, hasn’t yet responded.
DOJ Civil FOIA at the same time referred the four depositions it did preserve to the FBI due to the “equities” (his word) being at FBI. I telephoned James, who is extremely well-versed and well-spoken, and I asked that upon the referral FBI be ask if they had the other notebooks. He said no.
I could start a request anew, he suggested. It wouldn’t piggyback on the request made a half year ago to DOJ Civil. (In an earlier conversation, when he was helping me with the Stevens v. US depositions, he previously has acknowledged the much longer queue at the FBI and the associated delays).
Given the many requests he handles, James may have forgotten my experience of being denied the civil depos in Stevens v. US by USAMRIID because DOJ Civil was the originating agency, not the defendant USAMRIID. (This was true even though the JAG attorney was the one who defended and had copies of the depositions).
This is similar to the game of “keep away” fourth graders play with a hat.
GAO is the agency that needs to send the kids to the principal’s office and reminds them of the rules. GAO should obtain the depositions and then have the DOJ, as the originating agency, release them under FOIA.
GAO will have better luck in piercing the BS claim that these lawyers don’t have copies of the depos. They were using them in electronic form (and numerous of the individual attorneys had duplicates on their computer).
testified:
“The only case I’m aware of that would have been larger in is cope and complexity would have been the investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”
Unfortunately, these attorneys are so good at what they do that when they stonewall and play hide-the-ball with your hat, you will never get it back. There will neither transparency nor accountability.
Their taunts appear only between the lines of the boilerplate letters they send that at the end of the day say nothing more than “the anthrax smelling bloodhound ate my homework.”
Amerithrax was not botched due to the game of hide-the-ball without a lot of run-arounds by a lot of participants.
It was compartmentalization of information and a failure to share that led to the greatest counterintelligence analysis in the history of the United States.
When I pointed that out, James said that was a matter of speculation. (If he picked up the phone and encouraged Elizabeth Shapiro and Paul Freeborne to reach to the computer with the depositions, it wouldn’t be).
Daniel S. Seikaly was deposed on October 10, 2007.
He moved to the U.S. Attorney’s office from the CIA in [September] 2001. pp. 25-26.
Once he came back to Justice from the CIA in September 2001, he did not have any trials.
“Q And had you worked with Mr. Kohl back when you were in the transnational section?” (p. 35)
The transnational section had him involved in extradition — such as when the FBI sent the Lear Jet with darkened windows for KSM in Qatar.
Pages 36-40 are not included in the court-filed excerpt I obtained.
So we don’t know whether Ken Kohl worked for Attorney Seikaly while in the transnational section.
Other missing pages include 2-24, 45-47, 53-73.
He asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege on numerous occasions.
See, e.g., 74. (“I’m going to assert my Fifth Amendment privilege.”)
For example, across many pages of the deposition he used in connection with giving information to Daniel Klaidman and the use of the anthrax smelling bloodhounds. see pp. 74-98.
He also, for example, pleads the Fifth Amendment numerous times regarding leaks to Alan Lengel of the Washington Post. Remember when Alan based on a single source (according to Marilyn T.) reported about the trace of anthrax found on the rope?
It’s almost that Attorney Seikaly’s leaks about the science were intended to fixate the FBI on Hatfill rather than the client, Ali Al-Timimi, that his daughter then came to represent for free — “anthrax weapons suspect” (to borrow his defense counsel’s phrase) Ali Al-Timimi.
Did being born in Haifa in 1948 — and his sister-in-law saying that to be born in Palestine is to be a political activist — bias Attorney Seikaly into favoring former CIA clandestine service Vince Cannistraro’s lone nut/ sexual dysfunction profile?
DOJ Civil FOIA James Kovakas says DOJ didn’t preserve this sworn statement. when this senior prosecutor overseeing Amerithrax pled the Fifth Amendment numerous times.
Failing to preserve this sworn civil deposition, however, would violate DOJ rules I’ve linked.
Where is the accountability again? Where is the transparency?
Is DOJ Civil FOIA’s James Kovakas saying that as an institution DOJ does in fact follow these rules that seem to require that sworn depositions taken in litigation the Civil Division conducts be preserved?
Attorney Freeborne was there on behalf of the government: “Judge Walton has ordered us to recognize that bloodhounds ostensibly used for law enforcement purposes were used in that investigation.”
Now DOJ FOIA Civil James Kovakas, if he likes, can imply that Mr. Freeborne failed to preserve a sworn copy of this sworn deposition.
But in defending a FOIA lawsuit, Mr. Freeborne is going to have to swear an affidavit to that effect. He threw it out? Why? The CD was taking up too much room?
DOJ regulations required that he keep it — and because I credit his good faith I’m assuming he did. IMO DOJ FOIA just has to do a better job at tracking it down. (It’s okay — sometimes I let my wife help me find a clean pair of socks).
Mr. Freeborne’s copy was in electronic form. I haven’t heard back from him yet as to whether he can help DOJ Civil FOIA lay their hands on it.
I believe it was Eric Dubelier who sat for the deposition defending Attorney Seikaly. (Offhand, I don’t know where I came to think Plato Cacheris did).
If DOJ’s administration FOIA does not ensure accountability and transparency, that we need GAO to step up to the plate.
At page 116,
Q Mr. Seikaly, are you familiar with the acronym SCIF?
Q What does it stand for?
A Special compartment information facility.
Then the next two pages (pp. 117-118) where the issue is discussed we don’t have.
And the withholding is not based on an exemption under the FOIA statute — it is based on a claim that “the dog ate my homework.”
DOJ stands for the rule of law and DOJ Civil FOIA needs to do better on this issue of finding the civil depositions from Hatfill v. United States.
I’ve uploaded the Amerithrax depositions (to the extent I have the excerpts) here.
http://mrmc.amedd.army.mil/index.cfm?pageid=foia_reading_room.overview#
The DOJ Civil Division has failed to produce the deposition in which the lead prosecutor pled the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination dozens of times. (I only have some excerpts filed in court).
The DOJ FOIA Supervisory Attorney mistakenly argues that Civil had no duty to preserve the deposition.
I think he’s mistaken. But more importantly, what does GAO think?
By FOIA, I requested from the Stephen Hatfill v. United States case, copies of the depositions of Stephen Hatfill, Robert Mueller, Kenneth Kohl, Dwight Adams, John Ashcroft, Gary Boyd, Tom Carey, Edward Cogswell, James Fitzgerald, Robert Roth, and Daniel Seikaly.
The DOJ says that they cannot find the depositions.
There may be a mystery as to who sent the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings, but this illustrates well that the DOJ/FBI is able to drop the balls and lose track of information — even many hundreds of pages of sworn on-point testimony about the Amerithrax investigation.
As to the four depositions they did find, James Kovakas says he declines to produce them and has referred them to the FBI.
James M. Kovakas, Senior Supervisory FOIA Counsel is expert, hard-working and highly experienced. I would think that in your review you would greatly benefit from having the full depositions.
If you don’t already have them, perhaps Attorney Kovakas could encourage his colleagues to try harder at tracking them down for you.
In the civil deposition that DOJ Civil FOIA has failed to produce of Bob Roth, Co-Case Agent Bob Roth was represented by Attorney Freeborne testified about shutting out from the investigation the counterterrorism AUSA pursuing an Al Qaeda theory (pp. 288-289)
A “There was a lady early on in the investigation who kind of — she wanted to go do her own thing and she wanted briefings and it took us a little while to figure out that she was just doing that so she could go run off and kind of do a side investigation and after that we kind of cut her off.
Q Who was that lady?
A. [C]athleen Corkin.
Q She’s the Deputy Chief of the Terrorism and Violent Crime Unit?
A I couldn’t tell you where she was at the time.
Q Is it fair to say you viewed her as a distraction?
A Yes, a problem.
Q In what fashion?
A She was conducting a parallel investigation without coordinating with us. It was — that was early on that’s October-November-December of ’01.
Q. How did that get resolved?
A I don’t know if she lost interest. She just kind of disappeared. She went someplace else or something — —
Then the next 3 pages are omitted.
Cathleen M. Corken is the distinguished former deputy chief of counterterrorism at the Justice Department who worked on the Richard Reid shoe bomber case.
“Cathleen Corken has served in the Department of Justice for more than 20 years, specializing in terrorism-related cases. She was Deputy Chief of the Counterterrorism Section of the Department of Justice for four years, during which she assisted in the successful prosecution of Richard Reid, the so-called “Shoe Bomber,” and numerous other cases involving terrorism-related charges. Since 2004, she has been an Assistant United States Attorney in Eastern District of Michigan. She previously worked for the United States Department of State.”
http://www.justice.gov/usao/mie/news/2012/2012_10_18_staffawards2012.html
She famously prosecuted the underwear bomber, for example, and is an AUSA in Detroit.
http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/0906/090611detroit.htm
Al Qaeda anthrax lab director was a good friend of Zacarias Moussaoui and noted that Zacarias wanted to fly the big planes like the hijackers — but Yazid didn’t have the same confidence that he was up to it.
For his part, Zacarias Moussaoui claimed he and Richard Reid were slated to fly a Fifth plane into the White House.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/keyword/zacarias-moussaoui
“I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House’
By RICHARD A. SERRANO and RICHARD A. SERRANO,LOS ANGELES TIMES |March 28, 2006
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Taking the stand over his lawyers’ protests, al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui declared yesterday that he and Richard Reid, later arrested as the so-called “shoe bomber,” were to hijack a fifth airliner on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House. But Moussaoui’s bombastic testimony – doubted by intelligence officials – was immediately contradicted by the words of captured Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who said in an interrogation read aloud in court that Moussaoui was too “problematic” and unreliable to join the 19 hijackers on their suicide missions.
If GAO wants to understand whether co-case lagent Bob Roth was clued in to El-Shukrijumah, then it is important that GAO understand that Bob Roth and his colleagues shut Cathleen Corken off.
WIth the continued withholding of documents and information — such as FBI Tampa’s failure to tell the Joint Inquiry and 911 about Atta and Adnan El-Shukrijumah — Amerithrax was doomed from the start.
Amerithrax was destined to follow anthrax smelling bloodhounds and rummage through garbage for stained panties.
It is outrageous that DOJ Civil FOIA now thinks it is okay to play hide-the-ball with the civil depositions. Those depositions were paid for with taxpayer money — and taxpayers paid the $5.8 million to Hatfill.
The least DOJ Civil could do is have Attorney Freeborne do a more thorough job in looking for the civiil depositions. More than one of his colleagues has them on their computer.
I only have excerpts from the Roth deposition — same with all of them.
Missing pages of the sworn deposition that DOJ Civil has failed to produce include but is not limited to 2-11, 18-23, 37-38, 45-53, 73-76, 107-112, 117-118, 123-126, 133-151, 168-172, 180-181, 226-230, 245-253, 257-265, 270-271, 290-293. 298-318, 321 – end)
Agent Robert Roth, who seems a straight-shooting Booth (from BONES) type of FBI Agent, was on bank robbery squad and happened to be sitting out in the squad area when the complaint came in so it was his ticket at that point.
Agent Roth remembers who came up with the term “person of interest.” He says John Kerr did one day as they were sitting around thinking that the word “suspects” was too harsh a term. (p. 58)
He disagrees with the suggestion that Hatfill “had not risen to the level of suspect.” (p. 61)
Part of assessing the science used was to see how it was used to rationalize whoever was the current suspect.
Co-lead case agent Roth discusses the use of polygraphs, part of the science used by the FBI in forming its conclusions about Amerithrax:
“Q Yes, so I’m saying before August, 1, 2002, did he ever refuse to talk to you?
A In that January, February, early March time frame after the polygraph he didn’t want to talk to use after that polygraph. (p. 66)
Q Was it in your mind that Dr. Hatfill had refused to cooperate after the June 25 search?
A He had. He had failed to keep a promise that he had been making since January of ’02.
Q Which is what?
A To finish taking that polygraph. (p. 207)
The co-lead discusses the anthrax smelling blood hounds.
Q The first, second, and fourth paragraphs of this on page 1 go into some detail about the use of bloodhounds. Is that the case?
A Mm-hmm.
Q Was it appropriate in any way for any law enforcement official to disclose information about bloodhounds?
A Not in my mind.
Q I mean, it’s pretty egregious.
The FBI never found out who tipped off the media about the bloodhounds — just like they never found out who tipped KSM off in Qatar. So perhaps they never had occasion to consider whether it was the same person.
The AUSA shut out of the Amerithrax Task Force briefings by Agent Roth and his colleagues, Cathleen Corkin, later prosecuted this underwear bomber case involving Awlaki. Agent Roth’s full deposition is needed to learn more about the exclusion from Amerithrax briefings of the AUSA from the terrorism and violence section.
Awlaki Trained Suspected Christmas Jet Bomber How to Detonate Underwear, Document Reveals
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/10/04/al-awlaki-trained-suspected-christmas-day-jet-bomber-how-to-detonate-underwear/
The strike also hit a vehicle with other suspected Al Qaeda members inside, killing Samir Khan, another American Muslim militant and the co-editor of an English-language Al Qaeda web magazine called “Inspire.”
Khan admitted he was also behind the October 2010 cargo printer bomb plot, according to the federal bulletin issued after the strike.
The bulletin also warned that the killing led to a spike in traffic on Jihadist websites, raising concerns about retaliatory attacks.
“AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) external operations to date have focused on the aviation subsector, and the group has also revealed its interest — highlighted in two issued of Inspire magazine – in carrying out an attack against the United States using unconventional means, such as chemical or biological agents,” the bulletin reads.
Elizabeth Shapiro represented Debra Weierman, the press spokesman for the DC Field Office. At pp. 396-401 Debra testifies about the FBI’s hoax investigation and the Brian Report that Dr. Hatfill was in London on the very day that the hoax was sent to Senator Daschle on November 15, 2001.
(FWIW, Adnan El-Shukrijumah travelled from Trinidad via London in 2001. The GAO should ask to see the hoax letter sent from London to Daschle in any event).
Q Were you the person with the FBI who told ABC News that it’s very confident that it has found the person responsible for the anthrax murders?
A. No.
Q Did you know who was?
Q What is your view of the FBI telling ABC News it’s confident that it has found the anthrax killer.
A If they did tell ABC it would be quite inappropriate. (p. 417)
Vince Cannistraro, former head of CIA’s clandestine operations when it was using the Blind Sheik’s Services Organization in Brooklyn in the 1980s was an ABC News consultant.
He and two colleagues were helping lead co-case agent Bob Roth in Amerithrax and set up a lone nut / sexual dysfunction website, offering to use it as a honey trap to collect IPs.
In 2002, the “anthraxhunt.com” website was an “FBI sting” that sought to provoke a reaction from the perpetrator. Did it work?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/in-2002-the-anthraxhunt-com-website-was-an-fbi-sting-that-sought-to-provoke-a-reaction-from-the-perpetrator-did-it-work/
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.anthraxhunt.com
“If you are the Anthrax Killer and have a guilty conscience, now is the time to surrender.
Or if you know who the Anthrax Killer is, or have verifiable leads and evidence,
please send them to this e-mail address.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20040202231409/http://www.anthraxhunt.com/
But it just served to anchor that bullshit profile.
Vince worked as an ABC consultant. Maybe he has insights who was giving ABC the stuff for its sensational reports. For all I know, maybe the CIA attorney Seikaly who transferred in September 2001 to the DC US Attorneys Office — whose daughter came to represent anthrax suspect Ali Al-Timimi for free — was not the source. Attorney Seikaly pled the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination the dozens of times — we don’t know the precise number because of the pages being withheld. Plato Cacheris, the criminal defense lawyer who defended the lead Amerithrax prosecutor at the civil deposition, is quite famous. At the very least, he has just about the coolest name in DC.
As a point of history, lead prosecutor Seikaly was the fellow who wrote the lengthy CIA IG report getting the CIA former director in trouble for taking some maps from Afghanistan home on a laptop. Separately, as I recall, Attorney Seikaly was in charge of extradition for the DOJ when the Lear Jet was sent to pick up KSM in Qatar but someone tipped off KSM.
At the time, KSM was in a cell with Islambouli planning attacks on the US. in 1995 Islamboul and Zawahiri visited Brooklyn mosque where Adnan El-Shukrijumah was. We know this from the 1999 court testimony of Dahab, the fellow who informally set up the Services Organization the year before it was formally registered. Dahab says he was taught to make booby-trapped letters by EIJ intelligence head Ali Mohammed. Bob Roth may not have known about this given how persuasive he thought it was that the bloodhounds liked Dr. Hatfill. In the deposition DOJ Civil has failed to produce, Agent Roth he had shut out counterterrorism AUSA Cathleen Corkin from the investigation because she didn’t share with him while running what he understood to be a parallel counterterrorism investigation.
Adnan El-Shukrijumah was Atta’s buddy but the FBI Tampa did not tell the Joint Inquiry or the 911 Commission. Did they at least tell Bob Roth on the Amerithrax Task Force so Bob (if he was fixed on a BS profile) could consider whether maybe Adnan had sexual issues and tended to be a loner? (Heck, I doubt being head of Al Qaeda’s external operations for attacking North America has helped Adnan with his love life any.
First Bob Roth shut out counterterrorism AUSA Cathleen Corkin from the investigation and then Bob Roth instead turned to a consultant for Saudi Arabia/Prince Bandar and his colleagues for his insights — and became convinced Hatfill was guilty because some dogs could purportedly smell anthrax on him.
Amerithrax represents the greatest counterintelligence analysis in the history of the United States.
It begins with the compartmentalization of information that prevented the dots from being connected.
It ended with BS science being used to rationalize the guilt of the recent poor chap who fit the BS profile.
p.s. DOJ Civil FOIA has deferred this Debra Weierman deposition (for which I only have excerpts) to the FBI because that is where the “equities” lie.
That’s ironic — because i couldn’t get the civil depositions in the Stevens litigation from the Army attorney who defended the depositions. Instead, I was forced to turn to DOJ Civil because DOJ Civil was the originating agency.
It seems like DOJ Civil FOIA bends the supporting principles to fit the result that they want — just like the Task Force did in Amerithrax with the scientific principles.
For example, the FBI falsely claimed that the Flask 1029 was not stored in Building 1412 to eliminate a couple hundred people with access.
Then the FBI falsely claimed that the lyophilizer was available to be used by Ivins those nights he provably was in the lab to work with the 52 rabbits.
DOJ Civil FOIA:
If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
The Intersect computer was designed to avoid the effects of compartmentalization — where the NSA, CIA and FBI drop the ball in a counterintelligence analysis because of the failure to share information.
The only peer-reviewed article uploaded by the FBI under FOIA describes the DARPA research for which Dr. Ivins, Dr. Fellows and Dr. Linscott were among those who provided helpful suggestions in the performance of the initial anthrax studies
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/the-only-peer-reviewed-article-uploaded-by-the-fbi-under-foia-describes-the-darpa-research-for-which-dr-ivins-dr-fellows-and-dr-linscott-were-among-those-who-provided-helpful-suggestions-in-the/
FBI is still withholding from the public and GAO the notebook pages relating to the research involving the virulent Ames spores provided in 1998 to the DARPA researchers studying this decontamination agent described in this August 2012 patent; Flask 1029 distributions to researchers doing work at USAMRIID were not recorded on the Flask 1029 inventory where it was done at USAMRIID.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/fbi-is-still-withholding-from-the-public-and-gao-the-notebook-pages-relating-to-the-research-involving-the-virulent-ames-spores-provided-in-1998-to-the-darpa-researchers-researching-this-decontamina/
A ’98 Vulnerability Assessment of Ft. Detrick Assessed The Threat By PETA and ALF to be higher than the Egyptian Islamic Jihad; senior EIJ leaders had not yet publicly announced Zawahiri’s intention to use anthrax as a weapon against the US
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/a-98-vulnerability-assessment-of-ft-detrick-assessed-the-threat-by-peta-and-alf-to-be-higher-than-the-egyptian-islamic-jihad-senior-eij-leaders-had-not-yet-publicly-announced-zawahiris-intent/
USAMRIID reports it cannot locate records relating to work by foreign Egyptian national with virulent Ames alongside Dr. Ivins in the BL-3 suite; friends of the scientist were recruited by Dr. ZAWAHIRI who planned to attack US with anthrax.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/usamriid-reports-it-cannot-locate-records-relating-to-work-by-foreign-egyptian-national-with-virulent-ames-alongside-dr-ivins-in-the-bl-3-suite-friends-of-the-scientist-were-recruited-by-dr-zawah/
It was contemplated that the work with the visiting Egyptian scientist might involve fixation of the spore preparations to determine if there were any ultrastructure changes in the spores that could be observed with electron microscopy.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/it-was-contemplated-that-the-work-with-the-visiting-egyptian-scientist-might-involve-fixation-of-the-spore-preparations-to-determine-if-there-were-any-ultrastructure-changes-in-the-spores-that-could/
DXer … It’s naive and uninformed to think that Al Qaeda could not have obtained Ames just because it tended to be in labs associated with or funded by the US military. … The reality is that a lab technician, researcher, or other person similarly situated might simply have walked out of some lab that had it.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/dxer-its-naive-and-uninformed-to-think-that-al-qaeda-could-not-have-obtained-ames-just-because-it-tended-to-be-in-labs-associated-with-or-funded-by-the-us-military-the-realit/
from DXer … infiltration of U.S. Biodefense? … virulent Ames anthrax at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/infiltration-of-u-s-biodefense-virulent-ames-anthrax-at-the-u-s-army-dugway-proving-ground-in-utah/
In 2004, USAMRIID Advised The FBI That It Could Not Locate The Documents, Laboratory Notes Or Other Papers Of A USAMRIID Laboratory Technician Who Participated In the “Biological Warfare Decontamination Efficacy Study”. Who Was The Laboratory Technician? What Research Involving The Efficacy Of A Decontamination Agent Was Done?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/in-2004-usamriid-advised-the-fbi-that-it-could-not-locate-the-documents-laboratory-notes-or-other-papers-of-a-usamriid-laboratory-technician-who-participated-in-the-biological-warfare-decontamin/
Was antifoam used used for the “Biological Warfare Decontamination Efficacy Study” for which the laboratory technician’s documents went missing?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/was-antifoam-used-used-for-the-biological-warfare-decontamination-efficacy-study-for-which-the-laboratory-technicians-documents-went-missing/
Who knew who?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/who-knew-who/
from DXer … the lifelong friends of Dr. Tarek Hamouda, supplied virulent Ames by Bruce Ivins, actively denounce their former medical school associate Ayman Zawahiri as a fanatic – one serving as President of CAIR-St. Louis and the other as author of INSIDE JIHAD.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/the-lifelong-friends-of-dr-tarek-hamouda-supplied-virulent-ames-by-bruce-ivins-actively-denounce-their-former-medical-school-associate-ayman-zawahiri-as-a-fanatic-one-serving-as-president-of-ca/
Newly released Ivins emails show that no record was kept of transfers to former Zawahiri associate because it was done at USAMRIID
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/newly-released-ivins-emails-show-that-no-record-was-kept-of-transfers-to-former-zawahiri-associate-because-it-was-done-at-usamriid/
The scientist who made the large amount of virulent Ames that is missing, who was thanked by the former Zawahiri associate for providing technical assistance re the Ames, is the person who could explain about the rabbits ; but she’s not talking.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/the-scientist-who-made-the-large-amount-of-virulent-ames-that-is-missing-who-was-thanked-by-the-former-zawahiri-associate-for-providing-technical-assistance-re-the-ames-is-the-person-who-could-exp/
from DXer … documents related to interactions between Dr. Bruce Ivins and University of Michigan researchers
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/from-dxer-documents-related-to-university-of-michigan/
links? Dr. Bruce Ivins … University of Michigan researcher … Ayman Zawahiri
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/links-dr-bruce-ivins-university-of-michigan-researcher-ayman-zawahiri/
The work with virulent Ames was done under Biolevel-3 and the University of Michigan researchers working with Dr. Ivins, Fellows and Linscott were required to receive anthrax and plague vaccinations in advance of the BL-3 work.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/the-work-with-virulent-ames-was-done-under-biolevel-3-and-the-university-of-michigan-researchers-working-with-dr-ivins-fellows-and-linscott-were-required-to-receive-anthrax-and-plague-vaccinations/
The University of Michigan researchers indicated that they looked forward to future research with Dr. Ivins and his laboratory staff (Dr. Fellows and Dr. Linscott)
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/the-university-of-michigan-researchers-indicated-that-they-looked-forward-to-future-research-with-dr-ivins-and-his-laboratory-staff-dr-fellows-and-dr-linscott/
It Constitutes Investigative Incompetence For The FBI Not To Have Searched Keycard Access Records For the Zawahiri Associate Until February 2005 (Even Assuming University of Michigan and Ivins Withheld Subpoenaed Documents)
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/it-constitutes-investigative-incompetence-for-the-fbi-not-to-have-searched-keycard-access-records-for-the-zawahiri-associate-until-february-2005-even-assuming-university-of-michigan-and-ivins-withh/
Dr. Ivins in February 2005 told the FBI that Michigan researchers Hayes and Hamouda were “at each others throats”
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/dr-ivins-in-february-2005-told-the-fbi-that-michigan-researchers-hayes-and-hamouda-were-at-each-others-throats/
I called the Michigan lab tech who worked with Ivins and Fellows and Linscott and he said “You don’t want to know.”
But I do. I contacted Dr. Hamouda by email to ask what Egyptian Islamic Jihad or Egyptian Islamic Group members he knew (from either Sudan or his 10 years in Cairo after graduating Cairo Medical) but he didn’t respond.
December 23 USAMRIID FOIA Response: There was no key card access system in May 1998 that recorded access to the B3 with Ivins by the former Zawahiri associate supplied with Ames.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/december-23-usamriid-foia-response-there-was-no-key-card-access-system-in-may-1998-that-recorded-access-to-the-b3-with-ivins-by-the-former-zawahiri-associate-supplied-with-ames/
Dr. Mara Linscott told the FBI that she needed to see her lab notebooks to refresh her recollection of details, but that checking on the animals would take approximately two hours and was usually a one-person job; the FBI provided the one publication on which she worked involving the former Zawahiri associate but she notes that USAMRIID was a military institution and thus not all of the projects would be published.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/dr-mara-linscott-told-the-fbi-that-she-needed-to-see-her-lab-notebooks-to-refresh-her-recollection-of-details-but-that-checking-on-the-animals-would-take-approximately-two-hours-and-was-usually-a/
Did the foreign scientist from Egypt visiting from University of Michigan have his own access into the B3 suite or did someone have to let him in? Dr. Ivins could not recall.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/did-the-foreign-scientist-from-egypt-visiting-from-university-of-michigan-have-his-own-access-into-the-b3-suite-or-did-someone-have-to-let-him-in-dr-ivins-could-not-recall/
EPA, USAMRIID and University of Michigan Have All Failed To Produce Under FOIA Documents Relating To the 1998 Research By The Former Zawahiri Associate Alongside Bruce Ivins In The Bio-Level 3 At USAMRIID
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/epa-usamriid-and-university-of-michigan-have-all-failed-to-produce-under-foia-documents-relating-to-the-1998-research-by-the-former-zawahiri-associate-alongside-bruce-ivins-in-the-bio-level-3-at-us/
Why did the University of Michigan researchers working with Dr. Ivins also have to be vaccinated for plague?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/why-did-the-university-of-michigan-researchers-working-with-dr-ivins-also-have-to-be-vaccinated-for-plague/
Who gave the referenced tour to the University of Michigan researchers scheduled to be at USAMRIID from about April 27, 1998 – May 8, 1998?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/who-gave-the-referenced-tour-to-the-university-of-michigan-researchers-scheduled-to-be-at-usamriid-from-about-april-27-1998-may-8-1998/
The argument that Ayman Zawahiri would choose to use a natural strain from Afghanistan rather than a laboratory strain is very uninformed. It is contradicted by the documentary evidence that goes to the efforts that Ayman went dating to 1999 to obtain the desired laboratory strain. There is no excuse for overlooking the on-point documentary evidence as to whether Zawahiri would choose to use a natural or laboratory strain. People are entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts.
For example, on this issue, a typed memo reporting on a lab visit, which included tour of a BioLevel 3 facility, where there were 1000s of pathogenic samples. The memo mentioned the pending paperwork relating to export of the pathogens. The documents were provided to me by the Defense Intelligence Agency (“DIA”) under the Freedom of Information Act. Earlier correspondence between Rauf Ahmad and Dr. Zawahiri from before the lab visit described in the typed memo. The handwritten letter was reporting on a different, earlier visit, where the anthrax had been nonpathogenic. There are additional handwritten notes about the plan to use non-governmental-organizations (NGOs), technical institutes and medical labs as cover for aspects of the work, and training requirements for the various personnel at the lab in Afghanistan.
THEN I WENT TO __________ TO MEET WITH DR. ______IN CHARGE OF ______IN ORDER TO SEE THE FATE OF OUR DEMAND OF CULTURES. I VISITED ALONG WITH HIM ALL THE UNITS OF _______INCLUDING THE SPECIAL CONFIDENTIAL ROOM IN WHICH THOUSANDS OF CULTURES ARE PLACED. HE ALSO SHOWED ME THE HIGHLY ADVANCED LEVEL-3 PATHOGEN LABORATORY. HE ALSO SHOED THE REVALENT DCUMENTS FOR THE SUPPLY OF OUR CULTURES. THE ____ HAVE CONTRACTED THE ___ REGARDING THE EXPORT LICENSE AND THEY HAVE INFORMED THEM THAT THEY ARE GOING THROUGH EXTERNAL CHECKS.
DR. ______ ALSO POINTED OUT THAT I MUST HAVE A SHORT TRAINING IN HIS LEVEL-3 LABORATORY DEAILING WITH ALL TYPES OF PATHOGENS.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1389433/FBI-anthrax-attack-team-to-question-Porton-Down-scientists.html
FBI anthrax attack team to question Porton Down scientists
By Rajeev Syal
12:01AM GMT 31 Mar 2002
FBI agents tracing the source of deadly anthrax attacks in America want to question scientists at Porton Down, the British defence establishment over fears that the spores may have been smuggled out of a British laboratory.
They have established that the Ministry of Defence’s centre in Wiltshire has experimented on the Ames strain of anthrax – identical to that sent to American journalists and politicians. Agents in Washington will request a list of scientists who have had access to the samples of anthrax used in MoD laboratories over the past 15 years. The British Government is currently developing a new vaccine against the disease.
FBI officials confirmed that they would approach British scientists while tracing the anthrax strain. A spokesman said that officers are aware that the strain was kept in Britain and are covering all possible outlets.
Sue Ellison, the spokesman for Porton Down, confirmed last night that the authorities were aware of FBI inquiries and would help when approached. “We keep a full list of where the anthrax samples are sent, and would give these details to the relevant authorities. In the UK, we work closely with our American partners and we will continue to do so.”
Four American citizens died after more than 20 parcels and letters were found to contain a fine, white powder that was a refined form of the deadly bacteria. Scientists and law enforcement agents have established that anthrax sent in some letters was the Ames strain of the virus – originally used by the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), in Ford Detrick, Maryland.
Bulk quantities of the Ames strain were sent to Porton Down in the mid-1980s because British scientists wanted to develop vaccines against the disease.
A spokesman for USAMRIID confirmed that the Ames strain was sent to Ministry of Defence scientists in the 1980s. “We have provided a list of places where we sent the disease to the appropriate authorities,” she said.
In October or November 2001, Al Qaeda’s spokesman Abu Ghaith wrote a letter to the US Administration with the message that they would use their biological weapons if the US did not stop their financial and military support for Israel and the Muslim regimes.
A letter from Abu ‘Abullah Al-Kuwaiti outlined the next attack against the Americans and issued a statement to the Americans to let them know of their fighters’ readiness to kill hundreds of thousands with their nuclear and biological arsenal.
Abu Gha’ith, Bin Laden’s spokesman, was from Kuwait and made a similar threat in a videotape released June 2002. The letter has been declassified and cleared for release by West Point Combatting Terrorism Center in 2006.
“Your Brother Abu ‘Abdullah Al-Kuwaiti;
1- Announcing publicly the next attack.
2- Announcing publicly that we gave some groups the green light to move.
3- The groups that are present in America and Europe are above suspicion.
4- We obtain our intelligence information from your government and intelligence agencies.*
5- The statement/letter should be directed to the American people.
A- There is no animosity between us. You involved yourselves in this battle.
The war is between us and the Jews. You interfered in our countries and influenced our governments to strike against the Moslems.
If the American people are ready to die as we are ready to die, then our combat groups along with our military, nuclear, and biological equipment will kill hundreds of thousands of people we don’t wish to fight.
from DXer … infiltration of U.S. Biodefense? … document seized in Afghanistan
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/from-dxer-infiltration-of-u-s-biodefense-document-seized-in-afghanistan/
Abu Ghaith has now been sentenced to life in prison.
Abu Ghaith defense counsel Stanley Cohen is due to be formally sentenced himself on October 21. The docket — which I am unable to access on PACER today — is said to contain a recent series of sealed letters to the court.
More details on tax scheme by anti-Israel attorney Stanley Cohen
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/09/more-details-on-tax-scheme-by-anti-israel-attorney-stanley-cohen/
Posted by William A. Jacobson Friday, September 12, 2014
“One wonders, is there something going on whereby Cohen’s sentence will be shortened? Is he cooperating with the feds now?
Has he agreed to dine with a Zionist instead of serving 18 months?”
I seriously doubt Attorney Cohen is cooperating. For example, when he was representing the jihad supporting doctor who authored in JAMA about Nguyen’s infection, he had angry words about snitches.
The government’s sentencing memo In Attorney Cohen’s matter says that the parties have agreed that he will be sentenced by the federal court district judge in Syracuse, NY — in the Northern District of New York rather than Southern District.
The memo mentions that he has agreed to satisfy substantial tax obligations — perhaps the sealed letters simply relate to giving him the extra month or two to arrange to satisfy some or all of the past tax obligation … in support of a request of a lesser sentence.
Or perhaps he needed to slip the sentencing date to allow him to appear at Abu Ghaith’s sentencing.
As the former counsel for the Blind Sheik, Attorney Cohen certainly had a unique historical perspective.
Did the FBI not pursue the lead relating to Adnan El-Shukrijumah as anthrax mailer because it had failed to pursue him in connection with the investigation earlier that year?
On March 13, 2001, Mandhai told an undercover agent: “Brother, why don’t you come with us to Adnan…Probably he, he will join with us.”
In 1999, Adnan organized garage sales and car washes to raise money for Muslim refugees of the war in Bosnia. ”I remember him telling me once that he felt like those people were his family too,” said Adnan’s mother Zurah Abdu Ahmed, who is originally from Yemen.
At the time, his family said, neither they nor Adnan were aware that the charity they supported — Global Relief Fund — was allegedly involved in funding terrorist organizations.
About the same time, the family befriended a man named Imran Farooq Mandhai — who later would become the genesis of the FBI’s suspicions about Adnan.
Mandhai was ensnared in a federal terrorism investigation in early 2001 in which discussions of his plots were recorded by undercover agents. It is in these recordings that Adnan’s name first became known to federal authorities.
After 9/11, it became clear the son was under suspicion. The family said the first time they met with FBI agents was in the weeks following Sept. 11. It was the first in a half-dozen visits from agents looking for information.During the first FBI visit, the family said, Adnan had not been in touch.
After Sept. 11, federal sources said Mandhai was given a lie-detector test in which he was asked whether he knew any of the suspected terrorists involved in the attacks.The polygraph indicated he was lying when he said no, sources said. Confronted with the deception, Mandhai told authorities that he was thinking of Adnan, sources said.
The federal search for El’Shukri-jumah went worldwide following the March 1 arrest in Pakistan of Khalid Shaik Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and a top al Qaeda commander. And, the head of the FBI’s Miami office called a news conference to say El Shukri-jumah “has been identified by senior members of the al Qaeda organization as a very, very, very serious threat.”
Adnan’s father, Gul Shir, stayed in the Kingdom for 27 years before moving to the United States with his family in 1986 after receiving American citizenship, the spokesman said.
Gul Shir is originally from Guyana. “I worked in Trinidad as an Islamic preacher for six years before moving to New York in 1986 and then to Florida,” he said.
“Terrorist or Much Ado About Nothing,” Carribean Voice, April 2003, Caribbean Voice,
http://caribvoice.org/Features/terrorist.html
Rabih Haddad, founder of the Global Relief Foundation, taught as a volunteer at the school in Ann Arbor, Michigan twice a week.
After learning about Global Relief Foundation fundraiser Adnan El-Shukrijumah from KSM upon his capture, in March 2003, the FBI questioned people in Ann Arbor, MI and asked them if they knew of any conspiracies against the United States.
Homam Albaroudi, co-founded the Islamic Association of North America in 1993, reports he was among those the FBI sought to question. He had been a member of the Ann Arbor Muslim Community Association (“MCA”) since 1999. He served on its board for 3 years. He organized the Free Rabih Haddad Committee in December 2001 for the Global Relief founder. He sought to garner support for Mr. Haddad in connection with the closed proceedings relating to his immigration status.
Bassem Khafagi, the Chairman who had been questioned about Ali Al-Timimi before 9/11 lived in Ann Arbor. The MCA held numerous rallies and fundraisers supporting Rabih Haddad in connection the closed proceedings on his immigration status. The ACLU reports that after the FBI raided IANA’s offices in February 2003 and Al-Timimi’s residence in Northern Virginia.
According to Ali Al-Timimi’s lawyer, Bassem Khafagi was specifically asked about Dr. Al-Timimi’s connection to Bin Laden prior to Dr. Al-Timimi’s arrest.” Given that, according to his counsel, Al-Timimi was an “anthrax weapons suspect,” it appears that much of the investigation of former and present charity officials related to that suspicion about IANA’s celebrated speaker Al-Timimi.
The Muslim Community Association (“MCA”) runs the Michigan Islamic Academy which is right across from the University of Michigan North Campus where Global Relief Foundation founder Rabih Haddad taught. In 2001, Dr. Albaroudi was head of its PTO. As the American Civil LIberties Union explained in a suit against the United States Department of Justice in 2003, approximately 1000 people attend services at the mosque each Friday. MCA employs about 20 people and has about 700 registered, dues-paying members. Approximately 200 students were enrolled at the Michigan Islamic Academy which offered classes from pre-K through 11th grade. In addition to the standard academic curriculum used in state public schools, the ACLU explained, the school offers classes in Arabic language, Quranic recitation and Islamic Studies. The mission of the school is to provide students with the basic knowledge require to preserve their basic Islamic heritage, religion and cultural identity.
The documents relating to the anthrax program show that Zawahiri planned to use the cover of charities and universities in developing anthrax as a weapon.
On August 20, 2001, Saleh Hussayen, who would soon be appointed minister of the Saudi government and put in charge of its two holy mosques, arrived in the United States to meet with some of this country’s most influential fundamentalist Sunni Muslim leaders. He met with officials of the Global Relief Foundation. He also met with IANA representatives in Ann Arbor, Michigan according to court testimony by an FBI agent in the unsuccessful prosecution in Idaho of his nephew Sami Hussayen. IANA promoted the views of Bin Laden’s sheiks. On the night before September 11, Hussayen stayed at a Herndon, Virginia hotel where three of the Saudi hijackers stayed.
As a Detroit Free Press headline explained in 2004, “Unproven weapons claim led to Islamic charity raid in [mid-December] ‘01.” Global Relief Founder (”GRF”) co-founder Rabih Haddad was associated with Bin Laden’s Makhtab al-Khidamat, which was headed by Mohammed Islambouli in Peshawar.The government froze the assets of GRF on December 14, 2001, saying it was a financial conduit to terrorists. No warrant had been obtained before the FBI arrived at Global Relief’s headquarters in Bridgeview, Illinois. The search was done pursuant to a provision in FISA that permitted a warrantless search when the Attorney General declares that an emergency situation. The 911’s Terrorist Financing Monograph notes that GRF’s newsletter, “Al-Thilal” (“The Shadow”) openly advocated a militant interpretation of Islam and armed jihad. The 911 Commission reports that the FBI suspected the Executive Director of being affiliated with the blind sheik’s Egyptian Islamic Group. The 911 Commission explains: “In early 2000, Chicago informed Detroit that GRF’s executive director, Chehade, had been calling two Michigan residents. One of these subjects was considered GRF’s spiritual leader and the other, Rabih Haddad, was a major GRF fund-raiser.” Its Chairman, Ann Arbor, Michigan community leader Rabih Haddad was arrested in mid-December 2001 for overstaying his visa. Haddad taught twice a week at an Ann Arbor school and was an assistant to the leader at Ann Arbor’s mosque. He was an imam there. Rabih Haddad was an effective fundraiser for the mosques in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti and for the Ann Arbor chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). His students have testified that he stated unequivocally that the attacks on September 11, 2001 were not the acts of true Muslims.
Congressman John Conyers, Jr, of Michigan joined several newspapers in suing to force the government to open the hearings. Mr. Conyers argued that Rabih Haddad was being unfairly targeted as a Muslim cleric. After a visit by Congressman Conyers in March 2002, Mr. Haddad was removed from solitary confinement and placed with the general prison population.” Haddad was allowed to make phone calls and for the first time watch television. Mr. Haddad’s lawyer, Ashraf Nubani, of Northern Virginia, said at the time “The government never established, other than smoke screen and innuendo, that he was linked to terrorism.” Attorney Nubani said that his client travelled mostly to Pakistani as part of his relief efforts. Haddad refused to testify before a grand jury unless granted full immunity. As part of DARPA-funded research, Dr. Bruce Ivins of USAMRIID supplied virulent Ames to Ann Arbor researchers whose office by September 2001 was 2 minutes –1 mile — from the mosque where Mr. Haddad was an imam. Although the evidence is “secret,” most intelligence is open source.
The New York Times reported at the time that “Prosecutors said they were keeping some evidence secret to protect terrorism investigations.” It was Haddad’s lawyer who arranged the pro bono representation for the Virginia Paintball defendants, including Al-Timimi. Mohammed Islambouli was head of a cell with KSM planning the attacks on the United States. Mohammed Islambouli led the faction of the Egyptian Islamic Group that joined Al Qaeda. KSM came to spearhead the attack using anthrax on the United States. It was his assistant, al-Hawsawi, who had the anthrax spraydrying documents on his laptop. Al-Hawsawi was a close affiliate of GRF fundraiser Adnan El-Shukrijumah, who was helping Atta in Florida and had cased NYC and DC targets in Spring 2001. Al-Hawsawi was working with Al-Baluchi to get the 911 hijackers into the country. Al-Baluchi would marry MIT-graduate Aafia Siddiqui. An Assistant United States Attorney asserted in passing in open court, without naming her, that Aafia was willing to participate in an anthrax attack if asked. She had been tasked by “Abu Lubaba” to study germ warfar and advise on a bioweapons lab in Karachi — assessing whether after Sufaat’s capture in December 2001, Sufaat’s assistant was up to snuff. Historically, Aafia Siddiqui is associated with Ann Arbor addresses near the mosque where her brother and sister-in-law, an MD, lived.
Global Relief Foundation (“GRF”) and Benevolence International Foundation (”BIF”) attorneys in unison explained that the US had supported Makthab al-Khidamat in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Bosnia in the 1990s. (BIF head Arnaout, a Syrian, was at the meeting at which Al Qaeda was founded.) Investigation of the two charities was well underway prior to 9/11, although plagued by lengthy unnecessary delays emanating from headquarters. The 9/11 Commission Report notes that on April 21, 1999, upon weekly dumpster diving, FBI “agents had recovered from BIF’s trash a newspaper article on bioterrorism, in which someone had highlighted sections relating to the United States’ lack of preparedness for a biological attack.” (Many articles that year quoted famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek who was at George Mason University in Falls Church, Virginia.) As University of Maryland researcher Milton Leitenberg has pointed out, “[u]nfortunately, ten years of widely broadcast public discussion has provided such groups, at least on a general level, with suggestions as to what paths to follow.” The FBI had a better relationship with the CIA in the investigation of BIF than with GRF. The 9/11 Commission noted that “[t]he Chicago agents believed the CIA wanted to shield certain information from the FBI because of fears of revealing sources and methods in any potential criminal litigation in the United States.” Chicago agents benefited from the New York Office files on the two charities but the New York FBI office personnel were overwhelmed and working their own leads. The Illinois-based investigations remained an intelligence gathering exercise with no thought given to a criminal prosecution to disrupt the financing of Al Qaeda until after 9/11. In mid-October 2001, Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University told an NPR reporter that an insider could have taken some anthrax from a lab. He didn’t want to be interviewed on tape. ‘If I were to guess,’ he says, ‘it was probably some summer intern talking to a friend in a local bar. The friend said, “Could you get me some?”‘ Hugh-Jones says various protest groups have been scouting for anthrax for years.
In January 2003, the Chairman of Ann Arbor-based Islamic Assembly of North America, which promoted the views of Bin Laden’s sheiks, was arrested for bouncing a $6,000 check. Dr. Bassem Khafagi operated International Media Group out of his home. Before 911, according to the counsel for Falls Church scientist Ali Al-Timimi, Ann Arbor resident Khafagi was asked about Al-Timimi “purportedly at the behest of American intelligence. [redacted ] He was specifically asked about Dr. Al-Timimi’s connection to Bin Laden prior to Dr. Al-Timimi’s arrest. He was later interviewed by the FBI about Dr. Al-Timimi. Clearly, such early investigations go directly to the allegations of Dr. Al-Timimi’s connections to terrorists and Bin Laden — [redacted]” IANA had a spin-off or dba about 1 mile from me in Syracuse, New York that I would pass each day. After the son of blind sheik Abdel-Rahman was captured in mid-February 2003, 100 agents came here to Syracuse and simultaneously interviewed 150 supporters who had given money to the IANA dba or spin-off called “Help The Needy” (HTN). HTN sought donations for the needy in Iraq. The raid was part of OPERATION IMMINENT HORIZON. They moved simultaneously the day and minute they searched Al-Timimi’s townhouse. Khafagi was a good friend of microbiologist Ali Al-Timimi and his personal papers were later found in Al-Timimi’s residence.
In September 2006, federal agents investigating the Muslim charity Life for Relief and Development seized more than $134,000 in cash from the Ann Arbor home of Mujahid Al-Fayadh, a board member and founder of the organization. Dr. Mujahid Al-Fayadh has a Ph. D. in the field of Food Biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Al-Fayadh also maintains a B.Sc. and M. Sc. in Dairy and Food Technology. He was the imam and project manager of the Hidaya Muslim Community Association in Ann Arbor. The association operated the Michigan Islamic Academy at Plymouth Road in Ann Arbor where the Global Relief Foundation founder taught twice a week. One mile down the road at Plymouth Park was the company whose researchers Bruce Ivins had supplied Ames strain years ago for DARPA-funded biodefense research. The company was called NanoBio.
Dr. Tarek Hamouda at NanoBio thanked Louisiana State University researchers for making space available for the research. The LSU had provided four characterized strains while Bruce Ivins had provided virulent Ames. “I decided in 1993 or ‘94 that if there was a terrorist attack using anthrax we had to be able to fingerprint it to tell where it came from, sort of like the casing on a bullet,” Dr. Hugh-Jones said. After the anthrax mailings, “We’ve had subpoenas left, right and center. We were inspected twice by the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hugh-Jones told a reporter. “The FBI is frequently calling in. We’re cooperating closely.” “It very quickly became clear that we have good control over it, and it didn’t come from here,” Martin Hugh-Jones said. “We handle a lot of deadly items very frequently as a matter of routine.” The Ann Arbor researchers in December 1999 went to Dugway, a military installation in the remote Utah desert to demonstrate the effectiveness of their biocidal cream on an aerosolized anthrax surrogate. In late August 2001, NanoBio moved in to its new offices from less impressive digs in the basement of a bank. Bruce Ivins had supplied its University of Michigan researchers Ames strain a couple years earlier for DARPA-funded biodefense research.
Ann Arbor-based charity IANA had as its lead writer the Cairo-based Kamal Habib, the founder of Ayman Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. An IANA journal in Arabic focused on tactics that might be used to free Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman, Attorney Stanley Cohen’s client.
Kamal Habib had had spent 10 years in jail for the assassination of Anwar Sadat. In the late 1970s, the cell run by the young doctor Zawahiri joined with three other groups to become Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) under Habib’s leadership. After a visit in 2000, Gamal Sultan said Pittsburgh was known as the “American Kandahar,” given its rolling hills. In Egypt he formed the Islah (“Reform”) party with Gamal Sultan. While contributing to Al Manar al Jadeed, the Ann Arbor-based IANA’s quarterly journal, the pair sought the blind sheik’s endorsement of their political party venture in March 1999. They were not seeking the official participation of organizations like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad or the Egyptian Islamic Group. They were just hoping the groups would not oppose it. The pair wanted members of the movement to be free to join in peaceful partisan activity. They were not deterred when the blind sheik responded that the project was pointless, at the same he withdrew his support for the cease-fire initiative that had been backed by the imprisoned leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Group.
Ann Arbor-based charity IANA had as its lead speaker Ali Al-Timimi.
Al-Timimi’s defense attorney explained in a court filing that unsealed in April 2008 that Ali “was a participant in dozens of international overseas calls to individuals known to have been under suspicion of Al-Qaeda ties like Al-Hawali” and “was described during his trial by FBI agent John Wyman as having ‘extensive ties’ with the ‘broader al-Qaeda network.” Al-Timimi was on an advisory board member of Assirat al-Mustaqueem (”The Straight Path”), an international Arabic language magazine. Assirat, produced in Pittsburgh beginning in 1991, was the creation of a group of North American muslims, many of whom were senior members of IANA. Its Advisory Committee included Bassem Khafagi and Ali Al-Timimi. As Al-Timimi’s counsel explained in a court filing unsealed in April 2008:
“[IANA head] Bassem Khafagi was questioned about Dr. Al-Timimi before 9-11 in Jordan, purportedly at the behest of American intelligence. [redacted passage ] He was specifically asked about Dr. Al-Timimi’s connection to Bin Laden prior to Dr. Al-Timimi’s arrest. He was later interviewed by the FBI about Dr. Al-Timimi. Clearly, such early investigations go directly to the allegations of Dr. Al-Timimi’s connections to terrorists and Bin Laden.”
Two staff members who wrote for Assirat then joined IANA’s staff when it folded in 2000. They had been members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and were activists in the movement. One of the former EIJ members, Gamal Sultan, was the editor of the quarterly IANA magazine in 2002. Mr. Sultan’s brother Mahmoud wrote for Assirat also. The most prominent writer was the founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Kamal Habib. He led the Egyptian Islamic Jihad at the time of Anwar Sadat’s assassination when young doctor Zawahiri’s cell merged with a few other cells to form the EIJ. Two writers for Assirat in Pittsburgh had once shared a Portland, Oregon address with Al Qaeda member Wadih El-Hage. Wadih al Hage was Ali Mohammed’s friend and served as Bin Laden’s “personal secretary.”
In early April 2001, Nawaf Alhazmi and Hani Hanjour rented an apartment in Falls Church, Virginia, for about a month, with the assistance of a man they met at the mosque. Nawaf Al-Hazmi had been at the January 2000 meeting at Yazid Sufaat’s Malaysian condominium in January 2000. Hijackers Nawaf and Hani Hanjour, a fellow pilot who was his friend from Saudi Arabia, attended sermons at the Dar al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, where Al-Timimi was located until he established the nearby center. The FBI reports that at an imam named Awlawki who had recently also moved from San Diego had closed door meetings with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar in 2000 while all three of them were living in San Diego. Police later found the phone number of the Falls Church mosque when they searched the apartment of 9/11 planner Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Germany. In his 2007 book, Center of the Storm, George Tenet noted that Ramzi bin al-Shibh had a CBRN role.
Yusuf Wells, who was a fundraiser for the Benevolence International Foundation, visited Northern Virginia over the April 14-15, 2001 weekend. The previous month he had been at Iowa State University on a similar visit. On April 15, 2001, he was brought to a paintball game. In the second season, they had become more secretive after an inquiry by an FBI Special Agent was made in 2000 of one of the members about the games. Part of BIF fundraiser Wells’ job involved writing reports about his fund raising trips. In his April 15, 2001 report he writes:
“I was taken on a trip to the woods where a group of twenty brothers get together to play Paintball. It is a very secret and elite group and as I understand it, it is an honor to be invited to come. The brothers are fully geared up in camouflage fatigues, facemasks, and state of the art paintball weaponry. They call it ‘training’ and are very serious about it. I knew at least 4 or 5 of them were ex US military, the rest varied.
Most all of them young men between the ages of 17-35. I was asked by the amir of the group to give a talk after Thuhr prayer. I spoke about seeing the conditions of Muslims overseas while with BIF, and how the fire of Islam is still very much alive in the hearts of the people even in the midst of extreme oppression. I also stressed the idea of being balanced. That we should not just be jihadis and perfect our fighting skills, but we should also work to perfect our character and strengthen our knowledge of Islam. I also said that Muslims are not just book reading cowards either, and that they should be commended for forming such a group.
Many were confused as to why I had been ‘trusted’ to join the group so quickly, but were comforted after my brief talk. Some offered to help me get presentations on their respective localities.”
A man named Kwon recalled driving Al-Timimi home from the mosque Sept. 11, 2001 after the terrorist attacks. He said Al-Timimi and another scholar argued, with Al-Timimi characterizing the attacks as a punishment of America from God. “He told me to gather some brothers, to have a contingency plan in case there were mass hostilities toward Muslims in America.” Kwon said Al-Timimi told the group that the effort to spread Islam in the United States was over and that the only other options open to them were to repent, leave the U.S. and join the mujahadeen —e preparing to defend Afghanistan against the coming U.S. invasion.
After 9/11, although a dinner that night was cancelled in light of the events of the day, Al-Timimi sought “to organize a plan in case of anti-Muslim backlash and to get the brothers together.” The group got together on September 16. Al-Timimi when he came in told the group to turn of their phones, unplug the answering machine, and pull down the curtains. Al-Timimi told the group that Mullah Omar had called upon Muslims to defend Afghanistan. Al-Timimi read parts of the al-Uqla fatwa to the group and gave the fatwa to Khan with the instructions to burn it after he read it. Al Timimi said the duty to engage in jihad is “fard ayn” — an individual duty of all Muslims. Over a lunch with two of the group on September 19, Al-Timimi told them not to carry anything suspicious and if they were stopped on the way to Pakistan to ask for their mother and cry like a baby. He told them to carry a magazine. The next day the pair left for Pakistan. The group from the September 16 meeting met again in early October, and a number left for Pakistan immediately after that meeting.
Al-Timimi’s lawyer explains that Al-Timimi was in telephone contact with Al-Hawali on September 16, 2001 and September 19, 2001:
“The conversation with Al-Hawali on September 19, 2001 was central to the indictment and raised at trial. Al-Timimi called Dr. Hawali after the dinner with Kwon on September 16, 2001 and just two hours before he met with Kwon and Hassan for the last time on September 19, 2001.”
Al-Timimi was urging the young men go defend the Taliban against the imminent US invasion. A recent open letter to Ayman Zawahiri from a senior Libyan jihadist, Bin-Uthman, now living in London, confirms that Ayman Zawahiri and Atef, at a several day meeting in Kandahar in the Summer of 2000, viewed WMD as a deterrent to the invasion of Afghanistan.
Kwon, who had just become a U.S. citizen in August 2001, went to the mountain training camps of Lashkar-e-Taiba. The U.S. placed on its terrorist list in December 2001. Kwon practiced with a semi-automatic weapons and learned to fire a grenade launcher, but he was not able to join the Taliban. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan closed as U.S. forces took control of Afghanistan shortly before Kwon completed his training. His trainers suggested that he instead go back to the United States and gather information for the holy warriors. Kwon told jurors at al-Timimi’s trial how he first heard Al-Timimi speak in 1997 at an Islamic Assembly of North America conference in Chicago and then found that Al-Timimi lectured locally near his home in Northern Virginia. “Russian Hell” — a jihad video that featured bloody clips of a Chechen Muslim rebel leader executing a Russian prisoner of war — was a favorite among the videos that the group exchanged and discussed. “They (the videos) motivated us. It was like they gave us inspiration,” Kwon told the jurors.
In 2001, Al-Timimi kept the personal papers of IANA President Khafagi at his home for safekeeping. His taped audio lecturers were among the most popular at the charity Islamic Assembly of North America in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He knew its President, Khafagi, both through work with CAIR and IANA. The same nondescript office building at 360 S. Washington St. in Falls Church where Timimi used to lecture at Dar al Arqam housed the Muslim World League.
Al Timimi was close to his former teacher Safar al Hawali, the dissident Saudi sheik whose writings hail what he calls the inevitable downfall of the West. (Under pressure from authorities after 9/11, Al Hawali has played a public role in mediating between Saudi militants and the government.) Al-Timimi sought to represent and explain the views of radical sheik Al-Hawali in a letter he sent to members of Congress on the first anniversary of the mailing to the US Senators Daschle and Leahy. The Hawali October 6, 2002 letter drafted by Al-Timimi was hand delivered to every member of the US Congress just before their vote authorizing the use of force against Iraq, warning of the disastrous consequences that would follow an invasion of Iraq. Dr. Timimi’s defense committee explained on their website:
“Because Dr. Al-Timimi felt that he did not have enough stature to send a letter in his name on behalf of Muslims, he contacted Dr. Al-Hawali among others to send the letter. Dr. Al-Hawali agreed and sent a revised version which Dr. Al-Timimi then edited and had hand delivered to every member of Congress.”
In addition to the lucidly written October 6, 2002 letter, drafted by Al-Timimi, Hawali had sent a lengthy October 15, 2001 “Open Letter” to President Bush in which he had rejoiced in the 9/11 attacks. One Al-Hawali lecture, sought to be introduced in the prosecution of the IANA webmaster, applauded the killing of Jews and called for more killing, praised suicide bombings, and said of Israel that it’s time to “fight and expel this hated country that consists of those unclean, defiled, the cursed.”
Bin Laden referred to Sheik al-Hawali in his 1996 Declaration of War on America. Prior to the 1998 embassy bombings, Ayman’s London cell sent letters to three different media outlets in Europe claiming responsibility for the bombings and referring to Hawali’s imprisonment. In two of the letters, the conditions laid out as to how the violence would stop were (1) release of Sheik al-Hawali (who along with another had been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia in 1994) and (2) the release of blind sheik Abdel Rahman (who had been imprisoned in connection with WTC 1993). Hawali was released in 1999 after he agreed to stop advocating against the Saudi regime.
The anthrax letters used large paper, such as standard in Europe but not in US.
MSNBC: anthrax letters written on European-type paper
MSNBC | 12/11/01
Dan Abrams of MSNBC reported that the photo-copier paper used for the anthrax-containing letters to Tom Brokaw and the New York Post was of a size almost never used in this country. He said that it is more typical of paper used in European copy machines.
“The first four pages of both documents [Atta’s instructions to the hijackers, handwritten in Arabic] are handwritten on large paper”
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/09/28/guide.htm
What does the forensic comparison of the composition of the paper reveal? None of the comparisons of the paper composition used by Ivins was a match — and there were hundreds of pages taken from his home and office.
The letter, which read in part, “Death to America,” wasn’t printed on a paper size normally found in the U.S., says an FBI official familiar with the matter.
Source: Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2001.
The Anthrax Probe Ranges Far and Wide As Investigators Scour Tips, Trash for Leads
By MARK SCHOOFS, GARY FIELDS and MAUREEN TKACIK, Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/anthraxprobefarandwide.html
Far too many people don’t read relevant materials and thus are reaching conclusions based on 2002 newspaper articles.
The later WMD Commission years later headed by former US Senator Bob Graham summarized: “The Intelligence Community concluded that at the time of the commencement of the war in Afghanistan, al-Qa’ida’s biological weapons program was both more advanced and more sophisticated than analysts had previously assessed.”
http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/wmd_chapter3.pdf
Assuming a review of other exemplars confirms that it is Atta’s handwriting (and not Adnan, who was assisting him at the immigration office on his visits), note that among the other exemplars that the FBI can provide GAO is a postcard sent to USINS TSC (Immigration and Naturalization Services), in which Atta, listed as the sender of the postcard, put a horizontal line across the top and bottom line on the “I” in USINS and MESQUITE and he put a cap on the number 1s in the zipcode 851182 and 75185-1182.
http://www.911myths.com/images/8/86/Team5_Box51_Hijacker-Primary-Docs_AA11-ChronologySaudiVisaApps.pdf
The poisonous letter is the title of one section on poisons:
“Write a letter to the victim mentioning very exciting and very interesting news,” it reads. “Wipe the envelope from the inside with silicone sealant,” it goes on, “so it would not kill the mailman.”
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0111/15/ltm.01.html
What do Al Qaeda manuals advise regarding cell security? Do they recommend that the person preparing the poisonous letter be different than the one delivering it?
That the person doing the casing be different than the one preparing the lethal letter?
Separately, if the message of the letters is that the souls of the hijackers will go to heaven upon the wings of green birds, is it surprising that Atta would be the one to write the letter?
Consider the last page of his document found in the hijackers’ luggage that is being withheld.
The pages were instructions to hijackers. The drawing of the picture is of a caduceus with the word ROOM written vertically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caduceus
The FBI should produce the letter to GAO given the printed letter R O O M. Why is that page exempt from production under FOIA on the grounds of law enforcement exemption?
In Hijacker’s Bags, a Call to Planning, Prayer and Death
By: Bob Woodward
September 28, 2001; Page A01
http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6606
“Everybody hates death, fears death,” according to a translation of highlights of the document obtained by The Washington Post. “But only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death.” …
A recurring theme is the promise of eternal life.
“Keep a very open mind, keep a very open heart of what you are to face,” the document says. “You will be entering paradise. You will be entering the happiest life, everlasting life.”
The author doodled on the paper, drawing a small, arrowhead-like sword. Two circles entwine the shaft, which also has serpentine swirls drawn onto it. The doodle also resembles a key.
The word “ROOM” is written vertically in large double-block letters at the end.
To summarize for all those lost souls who think either Tara O’Toole or a First Grader was involved for the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings,
Adnan El-Shukrijumah was living with KSM when he called his mom from Kandahar upon 9/11 to say he was coming to the US (over her protests).
KSM was the 911 plotter. KSM’s assistant Hawsawi had the anthrax spraydrying documents on them.
(Al Qaeda anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat stayed with KSM too.)
Kandahar was where Al Qaeda’s anthrax lab was — the one that Dr. Relman explains in SCIENCE tested positive for the DNA for the Ames strain of anthrax. It had been up and running since May 2001, with Yazid Sufaat’s initial work with two assistants done at Omar Hospital. In written correspondence with Yazid Sufaat, he does not deny responsibility for the anthrax mailings. I hope to someday see a book by him also — he says, Allah willing. (In the meantime he faces certain terrorism charges but I sense that his legal defense is optimistic of his prospects).
(Hawsawi and KSM were also in contact with chem operative Al-Marri who entered the country on September 10, 2001; I look forward to Al-Marri’s book after his release in January 2015).
Adnan had stayed in New Jersey earlier in 2001 while casing the targets in NYC and DC with Dhiren Barot and one other individual. They stayed with Dhiren Barot’s relatives in New Jersey.
Upon going back abroad, Adnan stayed with Hawsawi in Karachi from Feb 2002 – April 2002. Hawsawi, again, the fellow with the anthrax spraydrying documents on his laptop.
As with the Al Hayat letter bombs sent to symbolic targets in DC and NYC, there were two waves.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2706&dat=19970114&id=x_5JAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BR4NAAAAIBAJ&pg=1004,246508
http://archive.redstate.com/story/2005/8/4/182231/3611
Ayman Zawahiri sent deadly letters to newspapers in DC and New York City, as well as to people in symbolic positions. There were two waves of letters. He never claimed responsibility. It related in part to retaliation for detention of the blind sheikh and others responsible for the 1993 WTC attack — and the “lies” he perceived being told by the media. It was January 1997.
He does the same thing four years later — in September and October 2001 — and no one mentions the earlier bombings. A memo seized in the 1995 arrest proposed flying an explosive laden plane into CIA headquarters. Anyone reading the Washington Post in the mid-1990s read about the plan to fly a plane into CIA headquarters over their morning coffee. It’s important that as a country we learn from our mistakes and not pay short shrift to the evidence on the issue of modus operandi relating to Zawahiri’s planned use of anthrax.
This was not the first time the Egyptian islamists sent letter bombs to newspaper offices in connection with an attack on the World Trade Center. NPR set the scene. It was January 2, 1997, at 9:15 a.m. at the National Press Building in Washington, D.C. The employee of the Saudi-owned newspaper Al Hayat began to open a letter. It was a Christmas card — the kind that plays a musical tune. It was white envelope, five and a half inches by six and a half inches, with a computer-generated address label attached. It had foreign postage and a post mark — a post mark in Alexandria, Egypt. It looked suspiciously bulky, so he set it down and called the police. Minutes later they found a similar envelope. These were the first two of four letter bombs that would arrive at Al Hayat during the day.” A fifth letter bomb addressed to the paper was intercepted at a nearby post office. They all looked the same. Two similar letter bombs addressed to the “parole officer” (a position that does not exist) arrived at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth. It was evident how some Grinch had spent the holidays in Alexandria, Egypt.
On January 7 Col Muhammad Makkawi (aka Saif Adel) purporting to be speaking for the Egyptian Vanguards of Islamic Conquest denied responsibility for sending the letter bombs. He said: “Those are messages of admonishment. There is no flirtation between us and the Americans in order for us to send them such alarming messages in such a manner.” Makkawi said that “the Vanguards of Conquest “are heavyweight and would not embark on such childish actions.”
US press and political commentaries had hinted at the Vanguards of Conquest organization’s involvement. In his statement to `Al-Hayat, Makkawi expressed surprise at the accusations against the Vanguards of Conquest in connection with the mailing. He said: “I am surprised that we in particular, and not other parties, should be accused of such an operation.”
(In the past, I believed he was referring to the Egyptian Islamic Group but maybe he was referring to Al Qaeda).
But then someone else credited with being the Vanguards official spokesman denounced Makkawi’s authority to speak for the group, referring to the January 5th statement it had made denying responsibility. This other claimed spokesman said “We welcome any Muslim who wants to join us, and if Makkawi wants to [join us], he will be welcomed to the Vanguards march, but through the organizational channels. But if words are not coupled with actions, we tell him: Fear God, and you can use a different name other than the Vanguards to speak on its behalf.”
Egyptian Saif Adel (Makawwi), thought to be in Iran, was involved in military planning. Adel was a colonel in the Egyptian Army’s Special Forces before joining Al Qaeda. He helped plan the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Africa. He was also a planner in the attack on the USS Cole and has served as the liaison officer between Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. There was part of a long-running disagreement with Saif Adel (Makawwi) and Ayman, however. As Attorney Al-Zayyat has said, Makkawi had many times claimed responsibility for operations that were carried out inside Egypt, but when the perpetrators were arrested, it would be al-Zawahiri’s name whose name they shout loyalty to from the docks. Some would even say they did not know a person named Makkawi.
The FBI would not speculate as to who sent the letters or why. But this was your classic “duck that walks like a duck” situation. As NPR reported at the time, “analysts say that letter bombs are rarely sent in batches, and when they are it’s generally prompted by politics, not personal animus.” Al Hayat was a well respected and moderate newspaper. It was friendly to moderate Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt — just as, say NBC and CBS. That, without more, was accurately discerned by observers at the time as sufficient to make the newspaper outlet a target of the militant islamists. The newspaper, its editor explained, does not avoid criticizing militant islamists. Jihan Khazen, Al Hayat Editor-in-Chief explained: “We’ve been opposed to all extremists in the Arab world, especially the fundamentalists.” Vince Cannistraro at the time said that the color and smell of the bombs suggests semtex was used.
Mohammed Salameh, a central defendant in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was sent to Leavenworth in 1994. The other three Egyptian extremists convicted in the bombing were sent to prisons in California, Indiana and Colorado. Like the blind sheik, Abdel Rahman, Salameh had complained of his conditions and asked to be avenged. The Blind Sheik was particularly irked that the prison officials did not cut his fingernails. Anthrax mailing suspect Adnan El-Shukrijumah was the son of a Brooklyn imam who sometimes translated for the Blind Sheik’s translator. Father and son then moved to Florida; Adnan El-Shukrijumah, I believe, first travelled to Afghanistan in 1995; Ayman Zawahiri and Islambouli (who was in a planning cell with KSM) travelled to Brooklyn in 1995.
Rahman was convicted in 1995 of seditious conspiracy, bombing conspiracy, soliciting an attack on an U.S. military installation, and soliciting the murder of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. His followers were indicted for plotting to bomb bridges, tunnels and landmarks in New York for which Rahman allegedly had given his blessings. The mailing of deadly letters in connection with an earlier attack on the World Trade Center, was not merely the modus operandi of militant islamists, it was the group’s signature — it’s their calling card. Khaled Abu el-Dahab, a naturalised American, from Silicon Valley in a confession detailed in a state security document from Egypt’s defense ministry dated October 28, 1998, explained that he was trained to make booby-trapped letters to send to important people, as well as asked to enroll in American aviation schools to learn how to fly gliders and helicopters. He was a friend Ali Mohammed, a former special forces officer in the Egyptian army and former US Army Sergeant.
After the Al Hayat letter bombs to newspapers in DC and NYC and people in symbolic positions, in January 1997, both the Blind Sheikh and his paralegal, Sattar, were quoted in separate articles in Al Hayat (in Arabic) denying that they or their supporters were responsible. The Blind Sheikh commented that al Hayat was fair and balanced in its coverage and his supporters would have no reason to “hit” them. Sattar noted that the bombs were mailed on December 20, one day before the brief in support of the blind sheik on appeal. He questioned whether someone (like the FBI) was trying to undermine the appeal’s prospects. For its part, al Hayat reporters, editor and owner were not expressing an opinion — though the owner did lay out various possibilities (e.g., Iraq, Iran etc.).
The owner of the paper had commanded Saudi forces during the Persian Gulf War, when Bin Laden was so upset about American troops on the Arabian peninsula. Moreover, al Hayat had recently opened up a Bureau in Jerusalem, giving it a dateline of Jerusalem rather than al Quds, which some thought blasphemous. But none of the possibilities would plausibly explain why the letter bomb was sent to Leavensworth where three of the WTC 1993 defendants were imprisoned, including Ramzi Yousef’s lieutenant who had asked that his mistreatment be avenged. (That was the person who returned to Ryder to reclaim his deposit after blowing up the truck at WTC). Egyptian security officials claimed that said that the paper from outside of Egypt, the stamps were not available in Egypt, and that the postmark was not Alexandria as reported. The common sense answer, however, is that it was someone who was upset that KSM’s and Ramzi Yousef’s associates had been imprisoned, to include, most notably, the blind sheik. Whoever is responsible for the anthrax mailings, it is a very good bet that they are upset the blind sheik is detained. That should be at the center of any classified profile of the crime.
In the al Hayat letter bombings, Ayman allowed the finger to be pointed at Libya. In the Amerithrax letters, he allowed the finger to be pointed elsewhere. The Al Qaeda anthrax lab director was captured in December 2001. Anthrax mailing suspect Adnan El-Shukrijumah had additional missions that required travel in North and South America. He was the “next Atta.” He now is the head of Al Qaeda external operations. This is not the time to suffer fools gladly or let the Administration and FBI withhold documents where the withholding is against the public interest favoring public accountability.
1. El-Shukrijumah, after casing targets in March 2001 or so, he travelled to Afghanistan via Trinidad and London, arriving in Afghanistan by June 2001.
CNN, 2010
“Just before 9/11, the FBI says Shukrijumah crossed the U.S. by train. Later, he scoped out the Panama Canal as a target.
He went to Trinidad, London and — by June 2001 — Afghanistan.
On 9/11, his mother says he called home for the last time.”
2. While casing targets in New York, he stayed with Barot’s aunt in New Jersey.
British Terror Plotter Gets Life In Prison – CBS News
Sep 10, 2009 – Prosecutor Says Dhiren Barot Was Caught Just In Time, Before Attacks … visiting an aunt in New Jersey on both occasions, Lawson said.
Barot made two reconnaissance trips to the United States in August 2000 and March 2001 — visiting an aunt in New Jersey on both occasions, Lawson said.
A 1-hour, 20-minute New York reconnaissance film was later discovered in London spliced into a video tape copy of “Die Hard With A Vengeance.”
Lawson said the camcorder footage of buildings on New York’s Broad Street and Wall Street was shot in 2001, when Barot also took two helicopter trips across Manhattan.
Prosecutors said Barot’s U.S. targets included the World Bank headquarters and the International Monetary Fund, both in Washington, the Citigroup buildings in New York and the Prudential building in Newark, New Jersey.
http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2006/Man-to-Be-Sentenced-in-British-Bomb-Plot/id-2cf8766625abdc9c9f974dc466638fdd
3 In 2001, the pair stayed with Barot’s aunt in New Jersey before driving a rental car to Washington to case targets.
MAN TO BE SENTENCED IN BRITISH BOMB PLOT
DAVID STRINGER, Associated Press
Nov. 6, 2006 12:34 PM ET
Investigators confiscated Barot’s notes that showed he gained extensive training in the use of weapons, chemicals and bomb design. In 1998, he traveled to Malaysia and the Philippines in 1999, where he attended the Jamaah al-Islamiya terror training camp, Lawson said.
In August 2000 and March 2001, Barot went on two reconnaissance trips to the United States, Lawson said.
Plans outlining details of the U.S. attacks, including reconnaissance videos filmed in August 2001, were found on a computer after Barot’s arrest in August 2004, prosecutors said.
Discovery of his purported plot against U.S. targets that included the World Bank headquarters in Washington, Citigroup headquarters in New York and the Prudential building in Newark, N.J., led President Bush to raise the U.S. terrorism threat level.
Barot and an alleged accomplice arrived in New York in 2000 and told immigration officers they were tourists, giving an address of a hotel in the city, according to Lawson, who said the pair stayed with Barot’s aunt in New Jersey before driving a rental car to Washington.
On a second trip with another alleged conspirator [El-Shukrijumah] in March 2001, Barot told his aunt he was planning to visit California and meet a group of girls. Instead, Barot went to Washington and also took a helicopter trip across Manhattan.
It was this 2001 trip to Manhattan when prosecutors said the video of the World Trade Center was shot.
The FBI determined casing the helicopters seemed for use of a biochemical weapon. Dhiren was in the country pretending to go to a community college in Upstate New York, Mohawk Valley Community College Along with his aunt, I’ve previously suggested that Dhiren Bharot (Barot) stayed in New Jersey with Dhiren’s cousin Meeta and her husband. They could describe Adnan El-Shukrijumah’s visit in 2001.
Former FBI Agent Don Borelli, who questioned Zawahiri’s infiltrating scientist Abdur Rauf (Rauf Ahmad) over tea and cookies at an ISI safehouse in February 2002, has noted this week that the NYC’s demographics unit had not been useful in ferreting out Zazi. By February 2002, Adnan El-Shukrijumah was holed up in a Karachi apartment, hiding with Al-Hawsawi, KSM’s assistant with the anthrax drying documents on his laptop. Zawahiri had never trusted Rauf Ahmad because his motivation was money whereas Yazid Sufaat’s motivation was ideological. So Rauf Ahmad was unlikely to lead Agent Borelli to Adnan El-Shukrijumah. Although Agent Borelli had expected a prosecution, he says the investigation went the way of secret prisons instead. It just recently has been revealed that one of Sufaat’s vaccinated assistants was secretly detained — it just has recently been revealed that the assistant is being held by Israel. These secret detentions have done much to obscure analysis.
Catching the bad guys is very much a matter of starting with a bad guy such as Ayman Zawahiri and working backwards, figuring out who knew who. Putting a microchip in their butt or in the battery of their satellite phone works too.
But closing a case when it is your own witness (Bruce Ivins’ first counselor, Judith) who thinks an alien is controlling her through a microchip is not a fruitful approach.
“He is learnt to have stayed for two months with his cousin Meeta (Sudhaben’s daughter) and her husband in New Jersey— who had no clue to his activities.”
Gujarat roots: Britain’s terror king is Indian import – Hindustan Times
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news-feed/nm19/gujarat-roots-britain-s-terror-king-is-indian-import/article1-170745.aspx
Nov 8, 2006 … And the operative was India-born Dhiren Barot, a Gujarat native, …
In 1999, he authored a tome, The Army of Madinah in Kashmir, under the name Abu Esa Al Hindi — narrating his experiences and describing ways to kill Indian soldiers. Abu Musa Al Hindi became one of his several aliases. In the late 1990s and early 2000, he served as an Al-Qaeda agent and in 2000, he visited the United States on a student visa. He was sent to the United States several times between 2000 and 2001 by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the 9/11 masterminds, to scope out targets. He is learnt to have stayed for two months with his cousin Meeta (Sudhaben’s daughter) and her husband in New Jersey— who had no clue to his activities. Sources said when Meeta’s father visited her after post 9/11, the US police grilled him as Barot’s cover had blown by then. –
El-Shukrijumah wrote Atta’s name in large capital letters in helping him with his visa at the Miami immigration District Office. In the anthrax letters, the letters A-T-T-A were double-lined.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/why-did-fbi-agent-darin-steele-think-that-the-t-in-next-was-double-lined-in-concocting-his-interpretation-of-a-code/
Amerithrax: GAO And Reporters Should Obtain Handwriting Exemplars Of Atta’s Associate El-Shukrijumah, Al Qaeda’s Head of External Operations, Who Promoted His Father’s Language Course
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/amerithrax-gao-and-reporters-should-obtain-handwriting-exemplars-of-attas-associate-el-shukrijumah-al-qaedas-head-of-external-operations-who-promoted-the-esl-language-course/
9/11 and Terrorist Travel Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/911_TerrTrav_Monograph.pdf
Atta’s walk-in inspection at the Miami Immigration District Office
On May 2, 2001, Atta and two companions stood in a long line at the Miami District Immigration Office. INS district offices adjudicate all types of immigration benefits inspections, including naturalization interviews, applications for permanent residency based on marriage to a U.S. citizen, and deferred inspections for students lacking the proper paperwork upon entry. But Atta had something else in mind. He wanted his companion, who was likely Jarrah, to obtain the same eight-month length of stay that he had (wrongfully) received in January.114
By late morning, Atta finally made it to the inspection desk. An inspector from Miami International Airport was getting ready to take a break for lunch at about 11:30 A.M. when three men approached her at the counter. This inspector had worked primary and secondary inspections at airports, as well as of ship crews, since 1988 in Fort Lauderdale and Miami. However, because she had never before worked at this district office, she recalled the encounter with Atta vividly.115
One of Atta’s companions, proficient in English, spoke first. He told the inspector, “My friends have a question about their I-94 arrival records.” When she asked, “Do you need to see immigration?” he said no. The inspector then instructed him to go sit down and that she would help him with his friends, and he complied. She told them that the person needing help should write his name on the sign-in sheet. In large capital letters, he wrote, “ATTA.”116
114 The companion who first spoke to the inspector, she recalled “was a great looking kid,” which she also mentioned to a colleague. When the FBI’s Most Wanted photo of Adnan G. El Shukrijumah appeared on the inspectors’ bulletin board after September 11, and after the FBI interviewed her, the inspector says she told her supervisor at the port that she was “75 percent sure” that she could identify the man who was with Atta as Shukrijumah. In checking Shukrijumah’s immigration status, she learned that he was a legal resident and had worked in south Florida. Information about the September 11 plot has not to date associated Shukrijumah with the plot. However, Shukrijumah is considered a well-connected al Qaeda operative, otherwise known as “Jafar the Pilot” and he is still wanted by the FBI. Shukrijumah’s father is a well known imam in South Florida, having testified on behalf of Sheik Rahman during his trial for the conspiracy to destroy New York landmarks in June 1993.
115 See immigration inspector of Mohamed Atta on May 2 interview (Mar. 25, 2004).
116 Ibid.
Note that it was Adnan El-Shukrijumah helping Atta with his paperwork on May 2, 2001 — and for example signed in A-T-T-A in all capital letters.
Handwriting is part of the science relied upon by the FBI in its Amerithrax investigation.
It is imperative that GAO obtain as many exemplars as possible of Atta’s and El-Shukrijumah’s handwriting and obtain the FBI’s comparison of the handwriting to the Fall 2001 anthrax letters.
In the anthrax letters, the letters A-T-T-A were double-lined.
One of Atta’s companions, proficient in English, spoke first. He told the inspector, “My friends have a question about their I-94 arrival records.” When she asked, “Do you need to see immigration?” he said no. The inspector then instructed him to go sit down and that she would help him with his friends, and he complied. She told them that the person needing help should write his name on the sign-in sheet. In large capital letters, he wrote, “ATTA.”116 ”
This revised I-94 shows in the red-ink stamp the result of it being shortened from 8 months to 6 months. It was issued on May 2, 2001.
See also Travel Monograph, p. 186 for I-94
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/911_TerrTrav_Monograph.pdf
“Mohamed Atta’s revised immigration arrival record (I-94) created on May 2, 2001 at the Miami INS district office. Atta had gone to the office seeking a length of stay equal to the 8-months he received for a colleague—possibly Ziad Jarrah. Tourists were not normally granted a length of stay of more than 6 months. The INS officer in Miami refused to grant 8 months to Jarrah and instead rolled-back Atta’s length of stay to the standard six months, until July 9, 2001. He departed the United States on July 7 and returned on July 19, at which time he was granted another 6-month length of stay.”
Attorney Abdel-Bary — who now wants to plead guilty to his involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings — knows Adnan El-Shukrijumah from his days in Brooklyn helping with the defense of the Blind Sheik’s bodyguard Nosair, the assassin of radical rabbi Kehane.
Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden – Google Books Result
Peter L. Bergen – 2002 – Political Science
Among them is Abdel Abdel-Bary, a lawyer who represented Jihad in Egypt and …Abdel-Bary also helped in the defense of El Sayyid Nosair — a key member of …
What can Abel-Bary tell the FBI about Adnan El-Shukrijumah?
When Adnan El-Shukrijumah was not fighting in Bosnia, visiting Saudi Arabia, before moving to Miramar Florida in 1996, he was in Brooklyn with his father Gulshair, who was a translator for Blind Sheikh Abdel-Rahman at al-Farouq mosque.
Since December 2001, I have argued that the Fall 2001 anthrax mailer was connected to the detention of the Blind Sheikh Abdel-Rahman and Brooklyn, NY. Just a few months before, a short, asthmatic young man named Adnan had called his mom from KSM’s house, in Kandahar. Kandahar was where Yazid Sufaat had his anthrax lab; Yazid had assured KSM that there was no risk in working with the virulent anthrax because he and his assistants had been vaccinated. When Adnan called his mom, she urged him not to come because he would be arrested for 911. She protested but he was insistent.
The extradition of Egyptian islamists has been one motive for Zawahiri’s crimes over the past quarter-century. In 1993, Abdel Sattar was 33. The US Post Office employee was a member of the board at Abu Bakr mosque in Brooklyn. He was already a close associate of Abdel-Rahman. In talking to a Washington Post reporter, he took a zigzag ride to a place chosen at random at the last minute. He explained that bad things likely would happen if the blind sheik was not released. In December 1994, Algerian Islamic militants seized control of an Air France jetliner in Algiers in an unsuccessful bid to crash it into Eiffel Tower on Christmas Day. The hijackers demanded the release of the blind sheik.
The United States State Department, on its webpage, explains that the Egyptian Islamic Jihad “[h]as threatened to retaliate against the United States for its incarceration of Shaykh Umar Abd al-Rahman and, more recently, for the arrests of its members in Albania, Azerbaijan, and the United Kingdom.” As one informant would later testify, Al Qaeda leadership, then in Khartoum, Sudan, found the blind sheikh’s arrest “very sad and.. very bad.” They concluded they had “to do something.. They talk about what we have to do against America.”
Blind sheik Abdel-Rahman spoke to Mary Anne Weaver, author of the seminal A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam in the mid-1990s. Abdel-Rahman first went to Peshawar in 1985. He left from Peshawar for a trip into Afghanistan after being released after three years in an Egyptian prison after Sadat’s assassination. He settled into the back seat of the U.S.-supplied camouflaged truck shortly after prayers, helped into a flak jacket by his friend, Afghan resistance leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar was receiving half of the CIA’s financial support even though he was one of the most anti-US leaders in the resistance against Soviet occupation. Mary Anne Weaver wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1996: “They had much in common: both were exceedingly charismatic religious populists; both had committed their lives to jihad, or Islamic holy war; both were fiery orators. They were both given to elliptical, colorful turns of phrase, and their shared message was clear: the imperative to overthrow a secular government — whether in Afghanistan or Egypt — and establish an Islamic state.” Weaver recounts that joining them in the truck was Mohammed Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s assassin. The 60 CIA and special forces officers in Peshawar considered Abdel-Rahman an asset. In preaching jihad, Abdel-Rahman travelled to Islamic centers in Germany, England, Turkey, and the United States.
Weaver explained that Sheikh Omar’s closest friend in Peshawar was Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a highly respected Palestinian. He was killed by a car bomb in 1989. Azzam established the Service Office, which he led until November of 1989, which like its sister office at the Alkifah Refugee Center, on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, recruited Arab volunteers. Islambouli headed the office after Azzam’s death. Mohammed Islambouli had been a student of Sheikh Omar’s at the Upper Egyptian University of Asyut. WTC 1993 prosecutor McCarthy explained in a 2008 book: “In Peshawar, both in 1985 and several times thereafter, Abdel Rahman would enjoy the august company of his former student Mohammed Shawky al-Islambouli, a fixture there. A rising jihadist star in his own right, Shawky’s prominence owed much to his mythogenic brother…”
By the time Weaver wrote her article for the Atlantic Monthly, Mohammed Islambouli had joined a cell with KSM in planning the aircraft and other attacks on the US and was with him in Doha, Qatar.
In December 1995, the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad was attacked by a devastating car bomb following threats from militant Egyptian Islamist groups who demanded that the government of Pakistan stop extraditing their members who had stayed in Peshawar when the war came to an end. The groups also demanded that the United States release Sheikh Abdel-Rahman who had been imprisoned in connection with a plot to blow up New York City landmarks.
In a booklet written by al Zawahiri, distributed among his colleagues in Pakistan and Afghanistan, al Zawahiri discussed the reasons that led to Egyptian Islamic Jihad to blow up the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. He criticized all branches of the Egyptian government from the Minister of Information, to the army and police forces, the justice system, the public prosecutor’s office, and the religious scholars. But his harshest criticism was directed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which was responsible for pursuing jihad members abroad and kidnapping and extraditing them. In September 2000, in an interview with an Arabic-language television station, Usama Bin Laden called for a “jihad” to release the “brothers” in jail “everywhere.” In the book he wrote at the time of the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings, he explained that the reason for the attack on the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan in 1995 was because Egypt had been extraditing fundamentalists from Pakistan. When surveillance of the US embassy showed that it was perhaps too difficult a target, the Egyptian embassy was targeted as a symbol. Zawahiri wrote in the Fall 2001 that : “It left the embassy ruined as an eloquent and clear message.”
An FBI 302 memo dated December 30, 1996 relating to intelligence gathered from the jailed WTC 1993 plotter Ramzi Yousef reflected the same warning of a hijack-of-an-aircraft-to-free-the-blind sheik plot.
Bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war on the United States complained of the arrests of Sheik al-Hawali and another colleague. In an interview, Bin Laden conducted with CNN’s Peter Arnett in 1997, Bin Laden told Arnett: “When the Saudi government transgressed in oppressing all voices of the scholars and the voices of those who call for Islam. I found myself forced, especially after the government prevented Sheikh Safar Al-Hawali and some other scholars, to carry out a small part of my duty of enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong.” The views of these two sheiks were promoted by the US-based charity, Islamic Assembly of North America (“IANA”).
In a public relations debacle for the islamists, on or about November 17, 1997, six terrorists shot and stabbed a group of tourists visiting an archaeological site in Luxor, Egypt. Fifty-eight tourists were killed along with four Egyptians. The terrorists left leaflets explaining their support for the Islamic Group and calling for the blind sheik’s release. The torso of one was slit and a leaflet inserted: “No to tourists in Egypt.” It was signed “Omar Abdul Rahman’s Squadron of Havoc and Destruction — the Gama’a al-Islamiya, the Islamic Group.” Intelligence concluded that Bin Laden had financed the operation and that Luxor was ordered by Egyptian Islamic Group military commander Mustafa Hamza.
Dale Watts, Chief of the FBI’s International Terrorism Section, explained in a 1998 Statement Before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee: “There is an indication that the November 1997 attack on foreign tourists in Luxor, Egypt, was apparently an example of this type of interwoven violence. The ambush appears to have been carried out in an attempt to pressure the United States into releasing Sheik Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for his part in planning attacks against the president of Egypt and several sites in New York City. ”
In 1998, the blind sheik issued a fatwa directing that Americans be killed to avenge his imprisonment. During the trial relating to bombing the U.S. embassies in Africa, one witness testified that Abdel Rahman smuggled a flier from prison calling on Muslims to avenge indignities he sustained as a prisoner. “Oh people, oh men of Allah, rise up from your deep slumber. .. Rise up and see justice done,” the sheik wrote in a letter smuggled out of prison.
Zawahiri gave the same motivation for the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. In 1998, the “Information Office of the Jihad Group in Egypt” issued a statement — a copy of which was received by Al-Hayat — entitled “About the extradition of three of our brothers.” It said that “the US government, in coordination with the Egyptian government, arrested three of our brothers in some East European states.” The statement said: “The accusation leveled at our three brothers was participation in a group declaring jihad against the United States and Israel and their trade, and cooperation with the mujahidin in Kosovo outside US influence.” It continued: “We are interested in briefly telling the Americans that their message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being [prepared], because we — with God’s help — will write it in the language that they understand.
Three days later, 220 people at the embassies, mostly Africans, were killed. Zawahiri deemed many were working on intelligence matters against islamists in the region. In response to a retaliatory cruise missile strike after the embassy bombings, Zawahiri told a Pakistan journalist by satellite phone that “The war has only just begun.” The phone had been bought by a charity worker in Columbia, Missouri who later lived with the father of the leader of the Virginia Paintball defendants Royer.
In the Spring and Fall of 1999, the Blind Sheik’s assistant, Sattar, was in telephone communication with Deputy Military Commander Mustafa Hamza, the blind sheik’s successor Taha, Yassir al-Sirri, and al-Zayat. They spoke on conference calls about the blind sheikh’s withdrawal of his support for the cease fire. Although suspecting his phone was wiretapped, Sattar continued to talk vaguely in code about these issues with these people, all of whom were closely connected to al-Zawahiri. This was the period Zawahiri moved forward his anthrax planning and there was a public dialogue between Bin Laden and a London cleric’s call for a holy biowar.
On September 21, 2000, an Arabic television station, Al Jazeera, televised an interview with Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and Islamic leader Abu Yasser (of the Islamic Group and Al Qaeda), and Mohammed Abdel Rahman (the blind sheik’s son), during which they pledged jihad to free Abdel Rahman. They urged that his followers avenge the “insult” paid him by his imprisonment for conspiracy to commit murder. Bin Laden vowed “to work with all our power to free our brother, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and all our prisoners in America, Egypt, and Riyadh. Bin Laden told his followers to remember Nosair, the man who assassinated Rabbi Kahane. It was Abdel-Bary, pleading guilty to the 1998 embassy bombings this week, who helped with Nosair’s defense. In an audio overlay, Mohammed was heard saying “avenge your sheik” and “go to the spilling of blood.” Who does Abdel-Bary think is responsible for the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings?
When Abdel-Rahman visited Peshawar in the late 1980s and early 1990s Abdel-Rahman stayed in a large house outside of Peshawar with Mohammed Islambouli and Zawahiri. Al-Timimi would speak alongside Abdel-Rahman’s son at IANA conferences in 1993 and 1996. Alarm bells should have gone off when Al-Timimi in the late 1990s first started walking down the hallways with famed Russian bioweaponeer and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey. There is no indication that they did.
Zawahiri wrote in Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet published at the time of the second anthrax mailing that he agreed with the supporter of the “blind sheik” who said: “the Egyptian Government is guilty of a major shortcoming by not intervening to safeguard the shaykh, guarantee his humanitarian rights inside the US jail, and find a solution to his case because, in the final count, he is an Egyptian national, a Muslim scholar, and a professor at Al-Azhar university. Finally he is a blind and sick old man. His continued detention and the inhuman way in which he is treated will continue to be a source of tension on all levels.
The ruling shura (council) of Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the mid-1990s had 14 members, including three in London. Two of those three, Adel Abdel Bari and Ibrahim Eidarous, at the time of the anthrax mailings, were the ones who had announced that the 1998 embassy bombings were in retaliation for the detention of the blind sheik and Sheik al-Hawali. They were in Belmarsh prison fighting extradition to the United States for alleged involvement in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Ahmed and Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, two of the Egyptian sheikh’s 13 children, were named as co-conspirators in the September 11 attacks.
In late May 2000, Post Office employee Sattar had telephone conversations with Islamic Group leaders in which he explained that Abdel Rahman (1) did not object to a return to “work” (terrorist operations); (2) agreed that the IG should escalate the issues in the media; (3) advised the IG to avoid division within the IG’s leadership; and (4) instructed the IG to hint at military operation even if the group was not ready for military action.
On October 4, 2000, US Postal employee Sattar called the Vanguards of Conquest publicist in London, Al-Sirri, and read to him a fatwa to be issued under Abdel Rahman’s name entitled, “Fatwah the Killing of Israelis Everywhere,” which Al-Sirri agreed to distribute. The next day, the fatwa appeared on a web-site operated by Al-Sirri.
On or about November 21, 2000, Al Jazeera featured a meeting of Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Taha under a banner that read “Convention to Support Honorable Omar Abdel Rahman. The three pleaded “jihad to free Abdel Rahman from incarceration in the United States. Mohammed Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik’s son, was heard urging others to “avenge your Sheikh” and “go to the spilling of blood.” But the blind sheik’s plight was also of concern to alleged Al Qaeda operatives in the US.
Members of an alleged Detroit, Michigan terror cell had an angry conversation in June 2001 about Abdel Rahman’s imprisonment.
Similarly, the Government’s Indictment of the Buffalo defendants explained that one of the reasons motivating the terrorists actions was that “al Qaeda opposed the United States Government because of the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of persons belonging to Al Qaeda or its affiliated terrorist groups or those with whom it worked.”
IANA writer Kamal Habib, the founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was in charge of the “National Campaign to Release Detainees.” It perhaps was inevitable that IANA would be caught in the crossfire just as was Abdel-Rahman’s attorney Lynne Stewart.
As a source, the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the U.S.” mentions “a senior EIJ member” living in California. The reference is to former US sergeant Ali Mohammed, Ayman Zawahiri’s head of intelligence. The references in the PDB to the threat of aircraft hijacking in an attempt to free blind sheik Abdel-Rahman were perhaps underscored a month later when, the week before 9/11, the Taliban government offered to exchange eight Christian missionaries in exchange for Sheik Abdel-Rahman. Whether viewed as blackmail or retaliation, the detention of the blind sheikh and numerous other detainees in custody prior to 9/11 figured as an important part of the motive for all the terrorist attacks by the Salafist-Jihadis for years leading up to the anthrax mailings.
In April 2005, Moussaoui confessed to a plot to fly a 747 into the White House if the United States government refused to free the blind sheikh. Bin Laden had considered hijacking a plane in an attempt to flee the blind sheikh but determined it was impractical. The United States government kept secret that it had detained El-Shukrijumah’s associate, Jdey, at the same time as Moussaoui — but released him.
And now Adnan El-Shukrijumah remains in the wind, posing a serious threat to the United States. As the 911 Commission found, compartmentalization of information very often leads to a failure of analysis such as resulted in 9/11.
In the Amerithrax Third Squad’s testing of the theory that a supporter of the Salafist-Jihadis mailed the anthrax, concern for detention of blind sheik Abdel-Rahman should have been a major factor.
I submit that the same compartmentalization and failure to connect the dots has led to Amerithrax not being solved.
Reuters is reporting that Abdel Bary’s son , aka “John the Beatle,” is suspected to be the ISIS terrorist who beheaded James Foley.
Failing to solve and prosecute crimes — to include failing to arrange for extradition — can lead to unfortunate real-world consequences. It can even turn the tide of history, leading to yet another unnecessary war. If you want to work for peace, work for justice. Connect the dots rather than merely to your emotions and predispositions — or submitting to your supervisor’s or some Saudi Prince’s whims.
http://nypost.com/2014/09/19/dad-of-john-the-beatle-admits-to-98-embassy-bomb-plot-with-osama/
Dad of ‘John the Beatle’ suspect admits Osama terror plot
By Rich CalderSeptember 19, 2014
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary (left), aka “John the Beatle,” is suspected to be the ISIS terrorist who beheaded James Foley.
The father of the British rapper suspected of beheading American journalist James Foley admitted Friday to conspiring with Osama bin Laden in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa that left 224 people dead, including 12 Americans.
Adel Abdel Bary — the father of suspected ISIS terrorist Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, also known as “John the Beatle” — copped a guilty plea in Manhattan federal court to charges of making a threat to use an explosive device and conspiracy to murder Americans.
“I agreed with others … to kill American citizens anywhere in the world — either civilian or military,” the elder Bary told Judge Lewis Kaplan while shaking his head, sobbing and wiping his eyes with tissues.
The suspected terrorist is the son of Adel Abdel Bary, who used to make terrorism plots with Osama bin Laden.
When asked afterward if the 54-year-old Bary’s decision to plead guilty has anything to do with “his son’s situation” — or if he’s spoken about his son’s alleged terror acts — Bary’s lawyer, Andrew Patel, declined comment.
The younger Bary, 23, fled his million-dollar home in London last year, reportedly to wage jihad in Syria, and recently tweeted a picture of himself holding a severed head.
After KSM’s capture (which authorities claim occurred on March 1, 2003), we learned that Adnan El-Shukrijumah HAD in fact come to the US.
After 911, FBI officials say he was living in Miami under the alias Jaafaral al-Tayyar. In March 2003, NBC reported that Mohammed Atta’s associate “El Shukrijumah has used at least a half-dozen aliases, including Jaafaral al-Tayyar, the name he was living under in Miami, the officials said.”
The FBI should disclose all that is known about Atta’s whereabouts in 2001. We know he called his mother on or about 9/11/2001 or 9/13/2001 (the reports vary between the two dates) and told her he was coming to the US. We know at the time he was living with KSM, who also for 6 days lived with Yazid Sufaat. Yazid described his work with virulent anthrax and had earlier briefed Zawahiri and Hambali over the course of a week. In written correspondence with me, Yazid Sufaat does not deny involvement with the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings. He pleads the Fifth. He now is back in jail.
In Amerithrax, the FBI has said that it could exclude everyone else who might possibly have mailed the anthrax. Well, the GAO has been tasked by Congress to check its work. The FBI kept the documents about El-Shukrijumah from the “Joint Inquiry” and the “911 Commission” but should now give them to the GAO, so that Congress might 13 years later fulfill its oversight function.
The FBI should disclose all the historic documents (-2003) relating to El-Shukrijumah and what is known of his travels in 2001.
After the anthrax mailings, Adnan El-Shukrijumah then lived with Al-Hawsawi in Karachi in the Spring of 2002. (I need to get you sourcing on the issue). Al-Hawsawi was KSM’s assistant who had the anthrax spraydrying documents on his laptop.
“The officials who spoke with NBC News said El Shukrijumah was known
to have been in the United States since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, living for a time in Miami.”
FBI ISSUES BULLETIN
The FBI on Thursday asked police, the public and authorities around
the world to be on the lookout for El Shukrijumah.
“The United States has information indicating he may be involved in
al-Qaida and may pose an imminent threat to U.S. interests at home or
overseas,” said a bulletin sent to law enforcement agencies around the
Law enforcement officials who spoke with NBC News described El
Shukrijumah as a suspected al-Qaida operative with pilot training and said
he may be in the United States and planning a “major attack.”
One official, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity,
said authorities fear the man could be “another Mohammed Atta.”
Word of the search for El Shukrijumah came as U.S. authorities were
on a heightened alert for possible terrorist attacks tied to the beginning
of the war in Iraq.
KNOWN TO HAVE BEEN IN U.S.
2001, living for a time in Miami. His whereabouts now are not known.
Federal agents on Thursday raided a home where the suspect was last
known to have lived and interviewed his brother, Nabil …
The law enforcement bulletin described El Shukrijumah as 27, about
5-foot-4 and 132 pounds or heavier and said he may or may not have a beard.
Although born in Saudi Arabia, El Shukrijumah carries a Guyana
passport and could attempt to enter the United States with a Saudi, Canadian
or Trinidad passport as well, the FBI says. The officials said it was not
immediately known how he had entered the country.
El Shukrijumah has used at least a half-dozen aliases, including
Jaafaral al-Tayyar, the name he was living under in Miami, the officials
said. He also speaks English fluently, they said.
The FBI alert did not specify the nature of the threats El
Shukrijumah, nicknamed “Jaafaral the Pilot,” may pose to U.S. interests.
But the officials who spoke with NBC News said his pilot training
raises the possibility that he might be planning an airborne attack similar
to that carried out by Atta, the ringleader of the 19 hijackers who carried
out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
One FBI official, who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of
anonymity, said El Shukrijumah only recently came to the agency’s attention,
but the official did not say how.”
Hawsawi — who had the anthrax spraydrying documents on his laptop, wants his trial severed from the trial of KSM and the others. He is closely associated with anthrax letters mailing suspect Jafar al Tayar ( aka Adnan El-Shukrijumah).
“Detainee [Hawsawi] identified a photo of Adnan el-Shukri Jumah as resembling Tayar when detainee last saw him in April 2002. Detainee and Tayar had also shared two Karachi safe houses from February until April 2002.”
Given that Hawsawi was the roommate of Adnan El-Shukrijumah from February until April 2002, he likely knows something about Adnan Shukrijumah’s travel to the United States in Fall 2001 immediately after 9/11, when he left from KSM’s house where anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat also stayed.
Hawsawi delivered supplies to Zawahiri in October 2001 — Zawahiri was in the mountains. Then Hawsawi in October 2001 returned to Kandahar to stand guard at a compound. (That was where the anthrax lab was).
Hawsawi does not sit with KSM and the others in the courtroom. Given the anthrax spraydrying documents were found on his laptop when he was captured at the home of the bacteriologist, he likely has keen insights into Al Qaeda’s anthrax program.
http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/10011-mustafa-ahmed-al-hawsawi
Note that while in Karachi, Adnan was busy preparing a different WMD attack.
In the Spring of 2002, while living with Al-Hawsawi in Karachi, Adnan El-Shukrijumah is thought to have been giving advice to Muhammad Binyam who was going to assist Jose Padilla. (El-Shukrijumah knew Padilla from Florida.) Binyam’s detention report mentions Jaffar Al-Tayar.
“KU-10024 [KSM] and his nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, aka (Abd al-Aziz Ali), ISN US9PK-010018DP (PK- 10018), instructed both US-10008 and detainee on the methods to execute this operation. Detainee was to return to the UK where he would obtain valid travel documents before traveling to the US to meet US-10008. Following their meetings with KU-10024, Jaffar al-Tayyar taught detainee and US-10008 to falsify documents by substituting photographs, erasing entry/exit stamps, and removing visas.17 Al-Qaida operative and 11 September coordinator Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, ISN US9YM-010013DP (YM-10013), taught them how to encode a telephone number before passing it to another individual. The co-conspirators then surrendered their passports to PK-10018, who forged a Pakistani visa and departure authorization. For the last week of March 2002, detainee and US-10008 spent time creating email addresses on the internet for communication while abroad. On 4 April 2002, PK- 10018 gave them a total of $16,000 US. Later, they met again with KU-10024, YM-10013, and Abd al-Rahim Moulana Gulam Rabbani, ISN US9PK-001460DP (PK-1460), at which
time KU-10024 provided US-10008 with an additional $5,000 US and they exchanged email
17 Analyst Note: This is believed to be the same Jaffar al-Tayyar, aka (Adnan el-Shurijumah), who has ties to the dirty bomb plot and numerous ties with senior al-Qaida leadership. Additionally, al-Tayyar had previous ties with
US-10008 in Florida; however, detainee has denied recognizing Jaffar. Detainee’s non-recognition can be found in: 001458 FM40 27-OCT-2004. For additional information linking detainee and US-10008 with Jaffar al-Tayyar,
reference: IIR 7 718 0116 03, TD-314/09403-04.
Note that Ayman Zawahiri reported to Atef on the anthrax program. In the summer of 2001, Atef initially had tasked Padilla to be trained by Shukrijumah in explosives.
This press conference the official explains that Shukrijumah and Padilla didn’t get along — Binyam as I recall his name, was brought in.
Tuesday, June 1, 2004 Posted: 1815 GMT (0215 HKT)
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/06/01/comey.padilla.transcript/
Two months later, in June of 2001, Padilla returned to Afghanistan and sought out Mohammed Atef. He met with Atef at a safe house that was reserved for the instructors and the leaders of al Qaeda. According to Padilla, about a month later, his mentor Atef asked him a question. He asked his American disciple if he was willing to undertake a mission to blow up apartment buildings in the United States using natural gas. Padilla told him he would do it.
Atef then sent Padilla to a training site near the Kandahar airport, where Padilla would train under the watchful eye of an al Qaeda explosives expert and be trained with the man who was to be his partner in this mission to destroy apartment buildings, another al Qaeda operative. When Padilla saw this other operative, he recognized him immediately because he had known him from Florida.
Padilla and the other operative trained under the guidance of this explosives expert and learned about switches and circuits and timers. They learned how to seal an apartment to trap the natural gas and to prepare an explosion using that gas that would have maximum yield and destroy an apartment building.
I told you that Padilla recognized this other al Qaeda operative who was to be his partner, recognized him immediately. You will, too. Because that other operative was Adnan Shukrijumah, also known as Jafar or Jafar the pilot, a man that the attorney general and the FBI director told this country about last week; one of the seven we want so badly to find.
Padilla and Jafar, though, could not get along. That personality conflict led them to abandon this operation, although only temporarily, after Padilla reported to Atef that he didn’t think he could work with Jafar and he couldn’t work this operation alone.
As I continue with Padilla’s story, let me note, as the attorney general and Director Mueller did last week, that Jafar took another path and remains out there somewhere and is extraordinarily dangerous: an explosives expert who is also an experienced commercial pilot.
Al-Marri was a operative researching chemical weapons connected to both Al-Hawsawi and KSM who entered the US on September 10, 2001.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ali-al-marri-pleads-guilty-conspiracy-provide-material-support-al-qaeda
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/dxer-adnan-el-shukrijumah-is-the-anthrax-mailer-on-9132001-he-phoned-from-ksms-house-to-tell-his-mom-he-was-coming-to-the-us/comment-page-1/#comment-26088
Al-Marri will be out in January 2015 and can write a book to tell about his relationship with Al-Hawsawi and KSM etc.
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=ali_saleh_kahlah_al-mari
His computer, after his research, was sent to someone in Washington. He can identify that person.
I think a book by Al-Marri would be fascinating.
*What did Omar Al-Hadrami, the facilitator in charge of operations in Lahore, tell Dr. Batarfi, about the individuals suspected of the US anthrax mailings?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/what-did-omar-al-hadrami-the-facilitator-in-charge-of-operations-in-lahore-tell-dr-batarfi-about-the-individuals-suspected-of-the-us-anthrax-mailings/
Apr 25, 2011 … I have ventured that Adnan El-Shukrijumah was the mailer of the Fall … Al-Marri, as I recall, cased the NYC and DC targets with Al-Hindi and …
The strange saga of Jose Padilla: Judge adds four years
Yahoo News – Sep 9, 2014
Unlike Padilla, there is direct evidence that Mr. Marri was involved with Al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
At Mr. Mohammed’s direction, Marri came to the US and set to work identifying potential terror targets. There is also evidence that Marri was in contact with Mustafa al-Hawsawi, an alleged moneyman in the 9/11 attacks.
Marri was held for six years in military detention and interrogated. At one point during the harshest treatment, he smeared the inside walls of his cell with his own excrement.
Unlike Padilla, Marri eventually entered a plea agreement with the US government and was promised no more than a 15-year sentence. The judge, taking into consideration Marri’s treatment in the brig, cut the sentence to eight years.
The government did not appeal that reduction. As a result, Marri is expected to walk out of prison on Jan. 18, 2015 – in four months.
Graeme MacQueen in his recent wildly misconceived “2001 Anthrax Deception” 2014 book does not address Al Qaeda’s anthrax program or the Al Qaeda operatives who reportedly visited McMaster University. Graeme was in the religious studies at McMaster for 30 years.
The former top CIA analyst, in a Harvard report says that Abderraouf Jdey was also at MacMaster University in Canada. He says Jdey was detained at the same time as Moussaoui but released. He notes Jdey had biology books.
Given Graeme is located there and has decades of personal contacts there among religious-minded people, perhaps he could research and share all the information available about Jdey’s and Shukrijumah’s time at McMaster. (I don’t purport to know anything about what they did there or who they met and knew). Even with pending Court litigation being briefed this month on summary judgment, I have been able to obtain any corroboration of this startling report by the top CIA WMD analyst about Jdey. See Dillon v. FBI. (the docket notes that an extension has been granted for filing of plaintiff’s response to the motion for summary judgment) Nor was I ever able to make sense of the poorly sourced, contradictory and debunked articles about McMasters.
All the press reports about Shukrijumah at McMaster too are mud — and so Graeme is the one who could dig in. That is, if he is really interested in the truth and isn’t weren’t just a political propagrandist denying that Bin Laden and his recruits were responsible for 9/11.
As for production of the withheld documents from the “Joint Inquiry” and “911 Commission”, by all means, they should be released. Indeed, as Bob Graham says, “Follow the money”, ask hard questions, and get explanations. And after the 28 pages, let’s start with the release of the interviews of President Clinton and Bush, focusing on the relationship with Prince Bandar.
But the documents point to El-Shukrijumah, not Tara O’Toole.
Anyone purporting to want to promote nonviolence needs to have a modicum of common sense in knowing who the documentary evidence demonstrates has a willingness to murder innocents, whether with planes or anthrax.
Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass destruction threat: hype or reality?
By rolf Mowatt-larssen Foreword by Graham Allison
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/al-qaeda-wmd-threat.pdf
Some casing-related activity and contacts allegedly take place between Mohammed Atta, organizer and leader of the September 11th attacks, and WMD-associated figures, including Adnan Shukrijumah, an al Qaeda member named by the FBI as a “future facilitator” for attacks against the U.S. by al Qaeda. According to the FBI, Shukrijumah, aka Jaffar al-Tayyar (“the pilot”), cased targets in New York City for possible attacks; he has been associated with al Qaeda’s interest in a nuclear weapon and/or “dirty bomb” plot.32
Note: A person fitting Atta’s description sought to apply for a loan in Florida to purchase a crop duster, but was refused.33 This information prompted the FBI to approach all crop duster companies in the US, in an effort to identify any possible links to terrorists.34
Detention of Abderraouf Yousef Jdey, a biology major with possible interest in biological and nuclear weapons,35 who traveled with Zacharias Moussaoui from Canada into the United States. Moussaoui is detained with crop duster manuals in his possession;36 Jdey had biology textbooks.37 Earlier, they attended McMaster University in Canada, along with Adnan Shukrijumah.38
Note: There has been unconfirmed speculation that they were slated to be part of a “second wave” of attacks post-9/11.39 Their whereabouts are unknown.
In 2009, an FBI undercover informant explained to ABC News that he was upset that he didn’t undertake to thwart Atta and El-Shukrijumah when he saw them together at a mosque outside of Miami. (That involved the plant involving some angry young men and a power plant). Note the FBI’s response: That the matter was thoroughly reviewed by the Joint Inquiry and the 911 Commission as part of the Congressional oversight. Yet the head of the Congressional “Joint Inquiry” Bob Graham and the Co-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Kean and Hamilton say they were never told of the Sarasota investigation — which involved both Atta and El-Shukrijumah. Thus, the FBI’s PR office’s response missed the mark. Congressional oversight was not possible because the documents were not disclosed. We need less PR spin from the FBI officials spinning conclusions and more disclosure.
Hindsight is 20/20. In the power plant investigation, it is not surprising that the FBI supervisor steered the informant away from El-Shukrijumah. The talkative angry loud young man and his closest friends were a more attractive investigative target than Adnan, who was coolly hanging back, being understandably wary of federal undercovers at the mosque amidst the gathered angry young men one particular night. But rather than being for the purpose of enabling 20/20 hindsight, the purpose in disclosing the documents about El-Shukrijumah is that it might permit the solution of the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings.
I know one fellow’s whose entire argument for a decade was that a First Grader wrote the letters! And that the hijackers were “dead, dead, dead” and had no US-based accomplices.
He reasons that there is no evidence, he says, that Adnan El-Shukrijumah got on a plane after he told his mom on 9/11 or 9/13 that he was coming to the US. Thus, the fellow reasons that we should presume that he didn’t.
That’s like the guy from McMasters who makes the same stupid argument — claiming that the there is no evidence the hijackers got on the plane. Adnan El-Shukrijumah, according to the top CIA analysis now at Harvard, was at McMasters, Did Graeme know him and his friends? Graeme was at McMasters for 30 years and a member of the religious studies department. Adnan’s gig was selling Islamic books. Otherwise I don’t how to explain his failure to discuss Rauf Ahmad, Yazid Sufaat, the lab at Kandahar, etc.
Not only did the hijackers have an accomplice in Florida but he lived in the same residence — KSM’s residence — at the Kandahar residence where anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat lived, Both Adnan and Atta were in the area of St. Petersburg that was of such interest to Graeme in his wholly misconceived book..
Someone should ask Graeme if he knew Adnan from McMasters.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/fbis-undercover-informant-asaad-is-frustrated-that-he-and-fbi-missed-opportunity-to-thwart-mohammed-atta-and-anthrax-letter-suspect-adnan-el-shukrijumah-al-qaedas-current-head-of-external-opera/
In connection with the Sarasota documents the FBI is withholding, the FBI has not produced the documents evidencing that it learned in 2002 that Adnan El-Shukrijumah had re-entered the country after 9/11.
Al Qaeda anthrax lab technician tells DXer that he realizes that by addressing these issues he may “jack myself up” but says that the “plan is on the way” — what does he mean when he says the “plan is on the way”?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/al-qaeda-anthrax-lab-technician-tells-dxer-by-chat-that-he-realizes-that-by-addressing-these-issues-he-may-jack-myself-up-but-says-that-the-plan-is-on-the-way-what-does-he-mean-when-he-s/
What did Al Qaeda anthrax lab head Yazid Sufaat discuss at the meeting in Kandahar with Adnan El-Shukrijumah and KSM before Adnan set off to return to the United States shortly after 9/11?
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/what-did-al-qaeda-anthrax-lab-head-yazid-sufaat-discuss-at-the-meeting-in-kandahar-with-adnan-el-shukrijumah-and-ksm-before-adnan-set-off-to-return-to-the-united-states-shortly-after-911/
CNN: President Obama reportedly promised to release the pages in the “Joint Inquiry” report addressing involvement of some Saudi employees in providing assistance to the hijackers. The pages should now be released without further delay.
http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2014/09/08/lead-dnt-tapper-28-pages-9-11.cnn&cid=C13888a07&video_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Ftbm%3Dvid%26hl%3Djv-US%26source%3Dhp%26q%3D%252228%2Bpages%2522%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BNggoleki%26gbv%3D2
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=islamic_assembly_of_north_america
September 10, 2001: Three 9/11 Hijackers Stay at Same Hotel as Senior Saudi Official
Three hijackers, Hani Hanjour, Khalid Almihdhar, and Nawaf Alhazmi, check into the same hotel as a prominent Saudi government official, Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen. [WASHINGTON POST, 10/2/2003] Hussayen originally stayed at a different nearby hotel, but moved to this hotel on the same day the hijackers checked in. [TRENTO AND TRENTO, 2006, PP. 45] Investigators have not found any evidence that the hijackers met with Hussayen, and stress it could be a coincidence. [DAILY TELEGRAPH, 3/10/2003] However, one prosecutor working on a related case will assert, “I continue to believe it can’t be a coincidence.” [WALL STREET JOURNAL, 10/2/2003] An FBI agent will later say that Hussayen “may have had some connection to the attacks and is likely to have met with those funding the hijackers if not the hijackers themselves.” [TRENTO AND TRENTO, 2006, PP. 45]Hussayen is interviewed by the FBI shortly after 9/11, but according to testimony from an FBI agent, the interview is cut short when Hussayen “feign[s] a seizure, prompting the agents to take him to a hospital, where the attending physicians [find] nothing wrong with him.” The agent recommends that Hussayen “should not be allowed to leave until a follow-up interview could occur.” [WASHINGTON POST, 10/2/2003] The agent returns to the hotel the next day, but finds Hussayen unhelpful. After she leaves, Hussayen calls the Saudi embassy, which contacts the FBI. Another, less aggressive agent is sent to talk to Hussayen and finds no additional information, so the FBI says he can leave the US. The first agent does not want him to go without answering her questions, but, according to authors Joe and Susan Trento, “Because of pressure from [Saudi ambassador to the US] Prince Bandar on the Bush administration… the agent’s superiors overruled her.” The superiors are not named. [TRENTO AND TRENTO, 2006, PP. 45] For most of the 1990s, Hussayen was director of the SAAR Foundation, a Saudi charity that is being investigated for terrorism ties and will be raided in early 2002 (see March 20, 2002). A few months after 9/11 he is named a minister of the Saudi government and put in charge of its two holy mosques. Hussayen had arrived in the US in late August 2001 planning to visit some Saudi-sponsored charities. Many of the charities on his itinerary, including the Global Relief Foundation, Muslim World League, IIRO (International Islamic Relief Organization), IANA (Islamic Assembly of North America), and World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), have since been shut down or investigated for alleged ties to Islamic militant groups. [WASHINGTON POST, 10/2/2003] His nephew, Sami Omar Hussayen, will be indicted in early 2004 for using his computer expertise to assist militant groups, and will be charged with administering a website associated with IANA, an organization which expressly advocated suicide attacks and using airliners as weapons in the months before 9/11. Investigators also will claim the nephew was in contact with important al-Qaeda figures. [WASHINGTON POST, 10/2/2003; SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, 1/10/2004] The nephew will be acquitted later in 2004 of the terrorism-related charges. The defense will not dispute that he posted messages advocating suicide bombings, but will argue that he had the Constitutional right to do so. The jury will deadlock on most of the counts.[WASHINGTON POST, 6/11/2004] IANA apparently will remain under investigation, as well as the flow of money from the uncle to nephew. [DAILY TELEGRAPH, 3/10/2003]The uncle is not charged with any crime. [WALL STREET JOURNAL, 10/2/2003]
As 911 “Joint Inquiry” Chairman Bob Graham urges in advocating for release of the 28 excised pages, if we don’t learn from history, we may be bound to repeat it. He is urging that we follow the money from Prince Bandar to Bayoumi, who arranged things for Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Mihdhar.
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/amerithrax-hazmi-and-mihdhar-timeline/.
Once disclosed, Prince Bandar can explain that things were just made to look bad. But withholding the documents just makes things look worse. As Prince Bandar noted in 2003, you can’t argue against the implications of blank pages.
As an example of learning from history, note that KSM’s Bojinka planning involved “a plan to crash a plane into the CIA headquarters in Virginia.”
Who is ‘Boogie’?
By Francisco Tuyay | Sep. 19, 2014 at 12:01am
http://manilastandardtoday.com/2014/09/19/who-is-boogie-/
“But his vital role in the uncovering of the famous Bojinka plot of 1995 and the discovery of the Rajah Solaiman Islamic Movement has cemented his growing reputation as a counter-terrorism expert.
The Bojinka plot was a large-scale three-phase terror attack hatched by Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abdul Hakim Murad in the early 1990s.
It involved a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II, an air bombing of 11 airliners flying from Asia to the United States and a plan to crash a plane into the CIA headquarters in Virginia.
The plot was backed by Osama bin Laden and Hambali and was funded by Laden’s brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa and Wali Khan Amin Shah, an Afghan who laundered the money through his girlfriend and other women in Manila.
Before the plot was discovered, Yousef detonated test bombs in a mall and theater, injuring scores of people, as well as Philippine Airlines Flight 434, killing one person and nearly causing enough damage to result in the destruction of the aircraft.
But Bojinka was accidentally discovered after a chemical fire drew police attention to the hotel where Ramzi Yousef was staying and their plans were found in their computers.
Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were able to escape, but Murad was captured and it was Mendoza who interrogated him which eventually led to Yousef’s arrest in Pakistan after 21 days.”
Daily News (New York)
July 8, 2010 Thursday
SPORTS FINAL EDITION
‘VERY BUSY’ TERROR THUG NIGHTMARE FOR G-MEN
BYLINE: BY JAMES GORDON MEEK and LARRY McSHANE DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS With Lisa Lucas in Miami
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 286 words
HE’S AMONG the FBI’s most wanted, with a $5 million bounty on his head and ties to four terror plots targeting New York.
Adnan Shukrijumah, a slight and asthmatic former Brooklynite, is still bedeviling U.S. authorities seven years after they first sought his arrest.
The shadowy 34-year-old is considered among Al Qaeda’s best and brightest, a naturalized U.S. citizen responsible now for coordinating attacks on America, officials say. His profile is higher than ever after CIA drone strikes killed veteran Al Qaeda operatives Saleh al-Somali and Rashid Rauf, a U.S. counterterrorism official said.
“Shukrijumah clearly has his fingers in many operations,” the senior official told the Daily News. “He is a very busy guy now.”
He was earlier linked to the 9/11 attacks, to a plot to blow up Kennedy Airport and to a Pakistani neuroscientist arrested with notes on potential U.S. targets.
His gray-haired mother, speaking with The News at her South Florida home, said her son didn’t hate the United States or its people.
“He hates the way the world is corrupting human nature,” said Zuhrah Ahmed, 49, a mother of six. “Maybe he was chosen by God to make people realize that Islam is a better way of life.”
Shukrijumah’s mother said she hasn’t heard from him in years. U.S. officials suspect he’s hiding in northwest Pakistan.
His New York ties go back decades. His father was once a Muslim missionary assigned to the Al Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, where worshipers were connected to two terror plots.
His dad also served as translator for blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack.
A Daily News editorial described Shukrijumah last week as the “embodiment of evil.”
National Post (f/k/a The Financial Post) (Canada)
August 16, 2005 Tuesday
Toronto Edition
Gaps found in border database: Dangerous individuals not red-flagged
BYLINE: Adrian Humphreys, National Post
SECTION: CANADA; Pg. A4
Five suspected terrorists with links to Canada — including three facing $5US-million bounties and another wanted in the bombing of the World Trade Center — are not flagged as wanted or dangerous in the computer system used by front-line officers at Canada’s borders.
Also not listed as being dangerous in the border database are about half of the people on a government list of wanted war criminals, many on the RCMP’s Most Wanted list and the top offenders wanted by the Ontario Provincial Police’s Repeat Offender Parole Enforcement squad, the National Post has learned.
Recent checks of dozens of wanted men — described as “some of the worst of the worst” — on the Primary Automated Lookout System (PALS) computer database used by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers at land border crossings failed to identify them as possibly armed and considered dangerous, sources say.
That leaves officers blind to the danger they may face and unprepared to respond appropriately should the wanted individuals attempt to flee into the country, critics say.
The checks were done on dozens of men on the PALS database this summer. Included in the search were five men wanted by the FBI in relation to terrorism investigations, including:
– Abderraouf Jdey, a Canadian citizen who lived in Montreal and faces a $5US-million reward from the U.S. government for his arrest. The U.S. government says Mr. Jdey trained with the 9/11 hijackers and appeared in a “martyrdom video” found in an al-Qaeda base in 2001;
– Faker Ben Abdelazziz Boussora, another Canadian citizen facing a $5US-million bounty, is sought for possible terrorist activity within the United States. Authorities are concerned he may attempt to return to Canada to plan a terrorist attack;
– Amer el-Maati, a third Canadian citizen, is wanted by terrorism investigators. A licensed pilot and suspected al-Qaeda member, he is accused of planning to hijack a plane and crash it into a U.S. building, according to the FBI;
– Adnan El Shukrijumah, also with a posted $5US-million reward for his arrest, is wanted for possible terrorist threats and, according to the FBI, may be travelling on a Canadian passport.
– Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi, is accused of helping to build the truck bomb used in the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 that preceded the 9/11 attacks.
When Messrs. El-Maati, El Shukrijumah and Yasin were run on PALS they came back only as being subject to a simple immigration inquiry — with no indication of terrorism concerns or warnings of possible danger, a source said.
Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia)
March 22, 2003 Saturday
FBI warns cities of dirty-bomb suspect
BYLINE: Shannon McCaffrey, John J. Lumpkin
THE FBI has issued a worldwide alert for a suspected Al-Qaeda operative who law enforcement officials believe could be plotting a dirty bomb attack on Americans.
Adnan el Shukrijumah, 27, is a Saudi national who last lived in a south Florida suburb before disappearing.
One senior law enforcement official said el Shukrijumah was connected to Jose Padilla, an American being held in a military brig in South Carolina for allegedly trying to acquire and use a dirty bomb — an explosive laced with radioactive material.
Using one of his six aliases, el Shukrijumah also had enrolled in an unidentified flight school, but authorities were unsure whether he attended, a federal law enforcement official said.
Before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, 15 of the 19 suicide terrorists received training at US flight schools.
El Shukrijumah is known to carry a passport from Guyana but also could have passports from Saudi Arabia, Canada or Trinidad, officials said.
The FBI said if el Shukrijumah was involved with Al-Qaeda, he would pose a serious threat to US citizens and interests worldwide.
His whereabouts are unknown.
El Shukrijumah came to the attention of the FBI after the recent arrest in Pakistan of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the top Al-Qaeda planner now being questioned at an undisclosed location.
Amerithrax: Hazmi and Mihdhar Timeline
August 7, 2010 Saturday
MADE IN U.S.A. TERROR OSAMA DEPUTY’S DAD WAS B’KLYN IMAM, RAISED IN FLA.
BYLINE: BY SEAN ALFANO and CORKY SIEMASZKO DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS With John Marzulli
A HOMEGROWN terrorist who plotted several attacks on New York City has been tapped by Osama Bin Laden to be his new No. 2, the feds revealed yesterday.
Adnan Shukrijumah, whose dad was a Brooklyn imam and who was reared in a Miami suburb, will take his orders directly from Bin Laden.
” ‘He’s making operational decisions’ is the best way to put it,” Brian LeBlanc, the FBI’s lead investigator into Shukrijumah, told The Associated Press.
“He’s looking at attacking the U.S. and other Western countries. Basically through attrition, he has become his old boss.”
Shukrijumah, 34, replaces Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
What makes Shukrijumah especially dangerous is that he lived in the U.S. for 15 years and knows how America works, LeBlanc said.
“He knows how to get a driver’s license,” he said. “He knows how to get a passport.”
Shukrijumah is also a master manipulator. He was pulling the strings of Najibullah Zazi and the other New York-based terrorists involved in a failed plot to bomb the subways.
“It was basically Adnan who convinced them to come back to the United States and do this attack,” LeBlanc said. “His ability to manipulate someone like that and direct that, I think it speaks volumes.”
One of the accused subway plotters, Adis Medunjanin, pleaded not guilty yesterday to a new charge of trying to ram another car on the Whitestone Expressway in January while shrieking to a 911 operator, “We love death!”
Shukrijumah’s dad was a Muslim missionary, born and raised in Guyana, who was assigned to the Al Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn.
The father, who died in 2004, also served as translator for blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack.
Now his son is on the FBI’s most wanted list, with a $5 million bounty on his head, believed to be hiding out in northwestern Pakistan.
His mom told the Daily News last month he didn’t hate the U.S. or Americans but said she hadn’t heard from him in years.
“He hates the way the world is corrupting human nature,” Zuhrah Ahmed, 49, said at her home in Miramar, Fla. “Maybe he was chosen by God to make people realize that Islam is a better way of life?”
Slight, asthmatic and one of five kids, the Saudi-born Shukrijumah was studying chemistry and computer science at a local community college in the 1990s when he chose to become a terrorist.
He was angry over attacks against Muslims in Chechnya and Bosnia, the FBI says. He reportedly moved first to Trinidad, and just before the Sept. 11 attacks he made it to an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.
There, Shukrijumah met another American-raised jihadist, Jose Padilla, and began his rise to the top of the terror network by scrubbing pots in the camp kitchen.
By 2004, Shukrijumah was on American radar and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft dubbed him a “clear and present danger.”
Shukrijumah is also a suspect in terror plots against Norway and the United Kingdom and is believed to have hatched a plan to bomb the Panama Canal.
October 16, 2004 Saturday NSW Country Edition
Mexico al-Qa’ida ‘back door’ to US
BYLINE: Robert Lusetich
Terrorists may have found a new American blind spot, reports Robert Lusetich
INTELLIGENCE reports that 25 Chechen terrorism suspects have illegally entered the US from Mexico have refocused attention on a porous border from which many believe the next major attack on Americans could come.
Despite the $US9 billion ($12.326 billion) budget, and assurances from President George W. Bush that border security is tighter than it has ever been, public figures of all political stripes in the border states say the danger of al-Qa’ida infiltrating the US from Mexico has never been higher.
“This is a very sensitive time. People on both sides have reasons not to want to talk about it. For Republicans, they don’t want to upset the apple cart for Bush, while for Democrats, they know this whole issue of the border is very sensitive within the Hispanic community.”
The FBI and CIA, however, are apparently very interested, especially after intelligence reported that a key lieutenant to Osama bin Laden, Adnan El Shukrijumah, was seen in Honduras and northern Mexico in recent months.
The Herald (Glasgow)
Al Qaeda agent smuggles people into United States
BYLINE: Ian Bruce Defence Correspondent
SECTION: Pg. 12
AN al Qaeda agent who helped plan the September 11 attacks has met leaders of a Salvadorean crime syndicate which controls the smuggling of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border into the US, according to intelligence sources.
The CIA fears Adnan el Shukrijumah, 29, a Yemeni with a £ 3m bounty on his head, is negotiating a deal to infiltrate terrorist network members into American cities to stage attacks in the run-up to the presidential elections in November.
El Shukrijumah was identified during surveillance of a meeting of Mara Salvatrucha gang leaders in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, where security forces are on alert for al Qaeda operations against British, Spanish and US embassies.
Mara Salvatrucha, whose first name is taken after a breed of soldier-ants, runs a base in Matamoros, Mexico, just south of the Texas state line, and controls street gangs in Los Angeles, Washington and New York.
The al Qaeda agent is known to have crossed into Honduras illegally from Nicaragua this summer to meet the gang.
El Shukijumah was identified in 2001 and from interrogation of captives at Guantanamo Bay as a key “fixer” who had a hand in the preparations for the hijacking of the aircraft used on September 11.
At that time, he lived in Florida and had a pilot’s licence. He was named in May as one of seven al Qaeda suspects wanted in connection with new plots for attacks in the US.
In 2003, he escaped from Canada after authorities there claimed he was seeking radioactive material for a “dirty bomb”.
Sarasota Herald Tribune (Florida)
April 1, 2014 Tuesday
Judge orders renewed search for Saudi Sarasota documents
BYLINE: MICHAEL POLLICK
FBI: Agency sought to dismiss lawsuit seeking information over 9/11 ties
A federal judge Monday denied the FBI’s request to dismiss a Freedom of Information lawsuit pertaining to a Saudi family that lived in Sarasota and left just before the 9/11 terror attacks.
Instead, U.S. District Court Judge William Zloch granted a motion by Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Bulldog, the news organization that started the lawsuit, to get the federal agency to do a better search.
In mid-March, Zloch allowed the Herald-Tribune and the Miami Herald to intervene in the case by filing their own “friend-of-the-court” brief saying how a further search for documents surrounding this Florida event, which may be tied to 9/11, would be in the public’s interest.
Judge Zloch “is not letting them get away with what they wanted to do, which was to dismiss the case, without looking for the documents that we had sought,” said Thomas Julin, Broward Bulldog’s attorney.
Agents linked together phone calls with the Prestancia residents dating back more than a year “and found they lined up with the known suspects,” the Bulldog has reported.
The phone links were not only to Atta and his fellow pilots but to 11 other terrorist suspects, the Bulldog reported. One was Adnan Shukrijumah, still on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list for an attempted attack on New York’s subway system.
“The real question is whether they found out too much, that they found there was a Saudi network existing in Sarasota,” said Julin, the Bulldog’s attorney, “and that it was pulled out by the Saudi government before the attacks on the United States.”
March 21, 2003 Friday
FBI on Global Hunt for Saudi Al Qaeda Suspect
BYLINE: Dan Eggen and Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post Staff Writers
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A07
The FBI launched a global manhunt yesterday for a suspected Saudi al Qaeda member who is feared to be planning terrorist attacks, even as federal agents fanned out across the country as part of a wartime plan to interview Iraqi nationals and arrest those in violation of immigration laws.
The FBI called Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, 27, an “imminent threat to U.S. citizens and interests” who is “suspected of planning terrorist activities.” A senior law enforcement official described him as a possible terrorism organizer in the style of Mohamed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But authorities said they have no details on what kind of plot he might be involved in.
An alias used by El Shukrijumah “kept coming up in numerous places,” including interrogations of captured al Qaeda lieutenant Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an official said. El Shukrijumah is believed to have a connection, as yet unclear, to Jose Padilla, the American al Qaeda suspect held on charges he was plotting to explode a radiological bomb in the United States.
U.S. authorities also recovered a document that links the same alias to the Oklahoma flight school where Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in the United States charged as a conspirator in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, studied aviation, an official said. There is no evidence that El Shukrijumah received pilot training in the United States, the official said.
El Shukrijumah may be traveling on passports from Guyana, Trinidad, Canada or Saudi Arabia, the FBI said. He last entered the United States before the terrorist attacks in New York and on the Pentagon and left later that year, a law enforcement official said. An official said that although authorities do not know where he is, there are indications he is in Morocco. But authorities fear he may have reentered the United States illegally.
The El Shukrijumah family moved to Miramar, a suburb north of Miami, in 1995, according to Neville and Una Khan, who live in the same neighborhood and have known the family since the 1960s. The Khans said that El Shukrijumah’s father is a prominent Muslim leader in this suburb north of Miami and is the head of a prayer center, Masjid al Hijrah, next door to the family home. That home was searched yesterday by FBI agents.
Una Khan described Adnan El Shukrijumah as a devout student of the Koran who worked with children at the prayer center. He tended to be modern in his thinking, she said. “He never indicated in any way that he was extremist. . . . This is such a shock; this is something I don’t understand. I can’t believe it.”
The Khans say they have not seen El Shukrijumah for several years. They believe he is doing Islamic missionary work, though they don’t know where. He was also earning money by selling Islamic books, they said.
Several officials said the FBI decided to issue a public alert because of El Shukrijumah’s tentative connections to Padilla and Moussaoui, the apparent references to him in terrorism-related documents and interrogations, and because they were unable to find him. One of El Shukrijumah’s recent addresses was a house in Pembroke Pines, Fla., where Padilla attended a mosque.
The public plea for information came after weeks of investigation that centered on an alias of El Shukrijumah that the FBI had attached to another man, a law enforcement official said. The bureau yesterday rescinded a February alert issued under that man’s name, Mohammed Sher Mohammed Khan. That earlier search was one factor that led to the elevation of the U.S. threat level last month.
“El Shukrijumah is possibly involved with al Qaeda terrorist activities and, if true, poses a serious threat to U.S. citizens and interests worldwide,” the FBI said in a news release yesterday.
http://pibillwarner.wordpress.com/2010/09/12/info-on-terrorist-and-used-car-dealer-adnan-g-el-shukrijumah-in-florida-new-york-and-trinidad/
“Adnan is thought to have gotten back into the USA on several occasions…”
FromDePauw.edu
Government Openness Lacking, Needed: Lee Hamilton ’52
“Secrecy and a widespread failure to share information both within government and with the American people remain major barriers to the effective operation of representative democracy,” writes veteran statesman Lee H. Hamilton in a newspaper opinion column.
“One of the fundamental lessons of the 9/11 tragedy was that our government carried a share of blame for the failure to stop the attacks,” writes Hamilton, who served 34 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and, after retirement from Congress, was vice chair of the 9/11 Commission. “Not because it was asleep at the switch or ignorant of the dangers that al-Qaeda posed, but because the agencies charged with our safety did not share what they knew, either up and down the chain of command, or with each other. The attacks were preventable with shared information … So, it’s worrisome that today it seems harder than ever to know what our government is doing, and not just when it comes to national security. Secrecy and a widespread failure to share information both within government and with the American people remain major barriers to the effective operation of representative democracy.”
The Democrat opines, “This unwillingness to be open often arises for the wrong reasons. In many cases, officials claim they’re trying to prevent harm to the national security, but actually want to avoid embarrassing themselves or to sidestep the checks and balances created by our Constitution. So, secretiveness infiltrates government culture.”
In Hamilton’s view, “Failing to share information makes us weaker. It enfeebles congressional oversight, which is one of the cornerstones of representative democracy and which, when aggressively carried out by fully informed legislators, can strengthen policy-making. It makes it far more difficult to maintain our system of checks and balances. It exacerbates mistrust between branches of government and between the government and the American people. And it chips away at the foundation of our system, which rests on a public that is well-informed about what government is doing and why. Without that information, we are poorer in our ability to exercise discriminating judgment on the conduct of policy and of politicians, and we lose our advantage over authoritarian societies: the spread of knowledge to people searching for a solution to our society’s challenges and problems.
“In short, on most issues, we’re better off if the American people know what’s going on. Full disclosure doesn’t produce good government by itself, but it makes it more likely.”
About the time the FBI was discovering the first bag of semen-stained panties that Bruce Ivins had put out to the garbage, I was explaining how Hawsawi’s laptop could be understood as a key to solving the Amerithrax mystery. Adnan El-Shukrijumah had joined up with Hawsawi in Karachi for the February 2002- April 2002 period. There is every reason to think Hawsawi had the laptop at the time.
http://baddbrothers.blogspot.com/2007/11/hawsawi-and-laptop-as-possible-hub-for.html
Handwritten notes by Rauf provided to me by the DIA under FOIA confirm the plan indicated by a memo from Zawahiri to Al Qaeda military leader Atef. Zawahiri planned to recruit specialists and to use charities and universities as cover for their anthrax program that he codenamed “Zabadi” or “Curdled Milk.”
On August 20, 2001, Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen, who would soon be appointed minister of the Saudi government and put in charge of its two holy mosques, arrived in the United States to meet with some of this country’s most influential fundamentalist Sunni Muslim leaders. He met with officials of the Global Relief Foundation. He also met with IANA representatives in Ann Arbor, Michigan according to court testimony by an FBI agent in the unsuccessful prosecution in Idaho of his nephew Sami Hussayen. IANA promoted the views of Bin Laden’s sheiks. On the night before September 11, Hussayen stayed at a Herndon, Virginia hotel where three of the Saudi hijackers stayed. The Administration is withholding “28 pages” from the “Joint Inquiry” on the subject, according to the man who authored the pages, former US Senator Bob Graham. Graham had been the head of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.
The government froze the assets of the Global Relief Foundation (GRF”) on December 14, 2001, saying it was a financial conduit to terrorists. No warrant had been obtained before the FBI arrived at Global Relief’s headquarters in Bridgeview, Illinois. The search was done pursuant to a provision in FISA that permitted a warrantless search when the Attorney General declares that an emergency situation. The 911’s Terrorist Financing Monograph notes that GRF’s newsletter, “Al-Thilal” (“The Shadow”) openly advocated a militant interpretation of Islam and armed jihad. The 911 Commission reports that the FBI suspected the Executive Director of being affiliated with the blind sheik’s Egyptian Islamic Group. The 911 Commission explains: “In early 2000, Chicago informed Detroit that GRF’s executive director, Chehade, had been calling two Michigan residents. One of these subjects was considered GRF’s spiritual leader and the other, Rabih Haddad, was a major GRF fund-raiser.” Its Chairman, Ann Arbor, Michigan community leader Rabih Haddad was arrested in mid-December 2001 for overstaying his visa. Haddad taught twice a week at an Ann Arbor school and was an assistant to the leader at Ann Arbor’s mosque. He was an imam there. Rabih Haddad was an effective fundraiser for the mosques in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti and for the Ann Arbor chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). His students have testified that he stated unequivocally that the attacks on September 11, 2001 were not the acts of true Muslims. Congressman John Conyers, Jr, of Michigan joined several newspapers in suing to force the government to open the hearings. Mr. Conyers argued that he was being unfairly targeted as a Muslim cleric. After a visit by Congressman Conyers in March 2002, Mr. Haddad was removed from solitary confinement and placed with the general prison population.” Haddad was allowed to make phone calls and for the first time watch television. Mr. Haddad’s lawyer, Ashraf Nubani, of Northern Virginia, said at the time “The government never established, other than smoke screen and innuendo, that he was linked to terrorism.” Attorney Nubani said that his client travelled mostly to Pakistani as part of his relief efforts. Haddad refused to testify before a grand jury unless granted full immunity. As part of DARPA-funded research, Dr. Bruce Ivins of USAMRIID supplied virulent Ames to Ann Arbor researchers whose office by September 2001 was 2 minutes –1 mile — from the mosque where Mr. Haddad was an imam. Although the evidence is “secret,” most intelligence is open source.
The New York Times reported at the time that “Prosecutors said they were keeping some evidence secret to protect terrorism investigations.” It was Haddad’s lawyer who arranged the pro bono representation for the Virginia Paintball defendants, including Al-Timimi. As a Detroit Free Press headline explained in 2004, “Unproven weapons claim led to Islamic charity raid in [mid-December] ‘01.” Global Relief Founder (”GRF”) cofounder Rabih Haddad was associated with Bin Laden’s Makhtab al-Khidamat, which was headed by Mohammed Islambouli in Peshawar. Mohammed Islambouli was head of a cell with KSM planning the attacks on the United States. Mohammed Islambouli led the faction of the Egyptian Islamic Group that joined Al Qaeda. KSM came to spearhead the attack using anthrax on the United States. It was his assistant, al-Hawsawi, who had the anthrax spraydrying documents on his laptop. Al-Hawsawi was working with Al-Baluchi to get the 911 hijackers into the country. Al-Baluchi would marry MIT-graduate Aafia Siddiqui. An Assistant United States Attorney asserted in passing in open court, without naming her, that Aafia was willing to participate in an anthrax attack if asked. Aafia Siddiqui is associated with Ann Arbor addresses near the mosque where her brother and sister-in-law, an MD, lived.
Global Relief Foundation (“GRF”) and Benevolence International Foundation (”BIF”) attorneys in unison explained that the US had supported Makthab al-Khidamat in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Bosnia in the 1990s. (BIF head Arnaout, a Syrian, was at the meeting at which Al Qaeda was founded.) Investigation of the two charities was well underway prior to 9/11, although plagued by lengthy unnecessary delays emanating from headquarters. The 9/11 Commission Report notes that on April 21, 1999, upon weekly dumpster diving, FBI “agents had recovered from BIF’s trash a newspaper article on bioterrorism, in which someone had highlighted sections relating to the United States’ lack of preparedness for a biological attack.” (The article quoted famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek who was at George Mason University in Falls Church, Virginia.) As University of Maryland researcher Milton Leitenberg has pointed out, “[u]nfortunately, ten years of widely broadcast public discussion has provided such groups, at least on a general level, with suggestions as to what paths to follow.”
The FBI had a better relationship with the CIA in the investigation of BIF than with GRF. The 9/11 Commission noted that “[t]he Chicago agents believed the CIA wanted to shield certain information from the FBI because of fears of revealing sources and methods in any potential criminal litigation in the United States.” Chicago agents benefited from the New York Office files on the two charities but the New York FBI office personnel were overwhelmed and working their own leads. The Illinois-based investigations remained an intelligence gathering exercise with no thought given to a criminal prosecution to disrupt the financing of Al Qaeda until after 9/11. In mid-October 2001, Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University told an NPR reporter that an insider could have taken some anthrax from a lab. He didn’t want to be interviewed on tape. ‘If I were to guess,’ he says, ‘it was probably some summer intern talking to a friend in a local bar. The friend said, “Could you get me some?”‘ Hugh-Jones says various protest groups have been scouting for anthrax for years.
In January 2003, the Chairman of Ann Arbor-based Islamic Assembly of North America, which promoted the views of Bin Laden’s sheiks, was arrested for bouncing a $6,000 check. Dr. Bassem Khafagi operated International Media Group out of his home. Before 911, according to the counsel for Falls Church scientist Ali Al-Timimi, Ann Arbor resident Khafagi was asked about Al-Timimi “purportedly at the behest of American intelligence. [redacted ] He was specifically asked about Dr. Al-Timimi’s connection to Bin Laden prior to Dr. Al-Timimi’s arrest. He was later interviewed by the FBI about Dr. Al-Timimi. Clearly, such early investigations go directly to the allegations of Dr. Al-Timimi’s connections to terrorists and Bin Laden — [redacted]” Khafagi was a good friend of microbiologist Ali Al-Timimi and his personal papers were later found in Al-Timimi’s residence.
In September 2006, federal agents investigating the Muslim charity Life for Relief and Development seized more than $134,000 in cash from the Ann Arbor home of Mujahid Al-Fayadh, a board member and founder of the organization. Dr. Mujahid Al-Fayadh has a Ph. D. in the field of Food Biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Al-Fayadh also maintains a B.Sc. and M. Sc. in Dairy and Food Technology. He was the imam and project manager of the Hidaya Muslim Community Association in Ann Arbor. The association operated the Michigan Islamic Academy at Plymouth Road in Ann Arbor where the Global Relief Foundation founder taught twice a week. One mile down the road at Plymouth Park was the company whose researchers Bruce Ivins had supplied Ames strain years ago for DARPA-funded biodefense research with a microbiologist working at USAMRIID working under the direct supervision of Bruce Ivins. The company was called NanoBio.
Dr. Tarek Hamouda at NanoBio thanked Louisiana State University researchers for making space available for the research. The LSU had provided four characterized strains while Bruce Ivins had provided virulent Ames for the research done by a microbiologist at USAMRIID under Dr. Ivins direct supervision. “I decided in 1993 or ‘94 that if there was a terrorist attack using anthrax we had to be able to fingerprint it to tell where it came from, sort of like the casing on a bullet,” Dr. Hugh-Jones said. After the anthrax mailings, “We’ve had subpoenas left, right and center. We were inspected twice by the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hugh-Jones told a reporter. “The FBI is frequently calling in. We’re cooperating closely.” “It very quickly became clear that we have good control over it, and it didn’t come from here,” Martin Hugh-Jones said. “We handle a lot of deadly items very frequently as a matter of routine.” Dr. Hugh-Jones has told Lew that he has no idea where the research using Ames was done and that only USAMRIID-Ames via Porton Down was supplied by LSU pursuant to the subpoena. Dr. Baker at University of Michigan separately notes that no virulent Ames was University of Michigan, as that would have been illegal he says. (Anthrax was a BL-2 pathogen at the time in its liquid form, rather than BL-3).
In late August 2001, NanoBio had moved in to its new offices from less impressive digs in the basement of a bank. Bruce Ivins had supplied its University Of Michigan researchers Ames strain a couple years earlier for DARPA-funded biodefense research. The Ann Arbor researchers in December 1999 went to Dugway, a military installation in the remote Utah desert to demonstrate the effectiveness of their biocidal cream on an aerosolized anthrax surrogate.
Where are the notes by Bruce ivins, Pat Fellows and Mara Linscott in connection with the NanoBio research done at USAMRIID?
from DXer … infiltration of U.S. Biodefense? … Co-inventors of the patent using silica in the culture medium and their Salafist-Jihadi colleague
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/from-dxer-infiltration-of-u-s-biodefense-floor-plan-of-george-mason-university-discovery-hall-in-2001/#comments
In a filing unsealed in United States v. Al-Timimi, Dr. Ali Al-Timimi’s lawyer, Professor and MSNBC commentator Jonathan Turley, explained that his client “was considered an anthrax weapons suspect.” Al-Timimi was a computational biologist who came to have an office 15 feet from the leading anthrax scientist and the former deputy commander of USAMRIID. A motion filed in early August 2008 seeking to unseal additional information in federal district court was denied. The ongoing proceedings are highly classified
Dr. Al-Timimi’s counsel summarizes
“we know Dr. Al-Timimi:* was interviewed in 1994 by the FBI and Secret Service regarding his ties to the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing;
* was referenced in the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”) as one of seventy individuals regarding whom the FBI is conducting full field investigations on a national basis;
* was described to his brother by the FBI within days of the 9-11 attacks as an immediate suspect in the Al Qaeda conspiracy;
* was contacted by the FBI only nine days after 9-11 and asked about the attacks and its perpetrators;
*was considered an anthrax weapons suspect;
* was described during his trial by FBI agent John Wyman as having “extensive ties” with the “broader al-Qaeda network”;
* was described in the indictment and superseding indictment as being associated with terrorists seeking harm to the United States;
* was a participant in dozens of international overseas calls to individuals known to have been under suspicion of Al-Qaeda ties like Al-Hawali; and
* was associated with the long investigation of the Virginia Jihad Group.
The conversation with [Bin Laden’s sheik] Al-Hawali on September 19, 2001 was central to the indictment and raised at trial. ***
[911 imam] Anwar Al-Aulaqi goes directly to Dr. Al-Timimi’s state of mind and his role in the alleged conspiracy. The 9-11 Report indicates that Special Agent Ammerman interviewed Al-Aulaqi just before or shortly after his October 2002 visit to Dr. Al-Timimi’s home to discuss the attacks and his efforts to reach out to the U.S. government.
[IANA head] Bassem Khafagi was questioned about Dr. Al-Timimi before 9-11 in Jordan, purportedly at the behest of American intelligence. [redacted ] He was specifically asked about Dr. Al-Timimi’s connection to Bin Laden prior to Dr. Al-Timimi’s arrest. He was later interviewed by the FBI about Dr. Al-Timimi. Clearly, such early investigations go directly to the allegations of Dr. Al-Timimi’s connections to terrorists and Bin Laden [redacted]”
The letter attached as an exhibit notes that in March 2002 Al-Timimi spoke with Al-Hawali about assisting Moussaoui in his defense. Al-Hawali was Bin Laden’s sheik who was the subject of OBL’s “Declaration of War.” Moussaoui was the operative sent by Bin Laden reportedly to be part of a “second wave” who had been inquiring about crop dusters. The filing and the letter exhibit each copy defense co-counsel, the daughter of the lead prosecutor in Amerithrax. That prosecutor pled the Fifth Amendment concerning all the leaks hyping a “POI” of the other Amerithrax squad, Dr. Steve Hatfill. His daughter withdrew as Al-Timimi’s pro bono counsel on February 27, 2009.
‘Dr. Ali Al-Timimi’s Support Committee’ in an email to supporters dated April 5, 2005 explained: “This is a summary of the court proceedings that took place yesterday April 4th 2005. We will send a summary everyday inshallah. *** “In his opening statement, Defense attorney Edward B. MacMahon Jr. said that Al-Timimi was born and raised in Washington DC. He has a degree in Biology and he is also a computer scientist, and a mathematician. He worked for Andrew Card, who’s now the White House chief of staff, at the Transportation Department in the early 1990s.”
Bruce Ivins had supplied the virulent Ames strain of anthrax to Ann Arbor researchers. One of the researchers, Dr. Hamouda, obtained his PhD in microbiology from Cairo Medical in 1994. He and his wife came to the United States to settle that year. By 1998, he was working on a DARPA-funded project involving nanoemulsions and a biocidal cream. In December 1999, he and two colleagues travelled to a remote military installation in Utah, Dugway, to test its effectiveness in killing aerosolized anthrax surrogates. An April 2001 report describing testing at Dugway concluded that the best performing decontamination agents were from University of Michigan, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL).
The FBI and CIA may have been concerned that Ali Al-Timimi had a security clearance for work for the Navy in the late 1990s. The defense webpage reported he had once served as the assistant for the White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. (Mr. Card had been Secretary of Transportation in 1992-1993; from 1993 to 1998, Mr. Card later was President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association.) As time off from his university studies permitted, Ali was an active speaker with the Ann Arbor-based charity Islamic Assembly of North America.
A laptop evidencing Al Qaeda’s intent on weaponizing anthrax was seized in Baku in July 1998. Two months later, Dr. Ken Alibek, then Program Manager, Battelle Memorial Institute, testified before the Joint Economic Committee on the subject of “Terrorist and Intelligence Operations: Potential Impact on the U.S. Economy” about the proliferation of know-how. Dr. Alibek noted that “[t]here are numerous ways in which Russia’s biological weapons expertise can be proliferated to other countries.” Indeed. Sometimes such proliferation is funded by DARPA and any student who wanted to apply to work in the building could submit an application. One applicant accepted was this Salafist preacher seeing signs of the coming day of judgment and the inevitable clash of civilizations. He had been mentored by the sheik named in Bin Laden’s declaration of war in 1996. In 1999, Al-Timimi had a high security clearance for work for the Navy. His father worked at the Iraqi embassy.
Dr. Alibek testified before the House Armed Services Committee Oversight Panel on Terrorism again in May 2000 about the issue of proliferation of biological weapons. He explained: “Terrorists interested in biological weapons are on the level of state-sponsored terrorist organizations such as that of Osama bin Laden; on the level of large, independent organizations such as Aum Shinrikyo; or on the level of individuals acting alone or in concert with small radical organizations.”
Dr. Alibek in 2003 told me he knew Ali was a hardliner. More recently he described Ali as a fanatic. Dr. Alibek explained to the Congressional Committee in May 2000: “When most people think of proliferation, they imagine weapons export. In the case of biological weapons, they picture international smuggling either of ready-made weapons material, or at least of cultures of pathogenic microorganisms. However, this area of proliferation is of the least concern. Even without such assistance, a determined organization could obtain virulent strains of microorganisms from their natural reservoirs (such as soil or animals), from culture libraries that provide such organisms for research purposes, or by stealing cultures from legitimate laboratories.” American Type Culture Collection, the largest microbiologist depository in the world, co-sponsored Ali’s bioinformatics program. Dr. Alibek explained: “The proliferation issue is particularly complex for biological weapons. In many cases, the same equipment and knowledge that can be used to produce biological weapons can also be used to produce legitimate biotechnological products.”
By 2001, Al-Timimi was allowed access to the most diverse microbiological repository in the world and allowed to work alongside staff at the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense. The Center for Biodefense personnel were working under the largest biodefense award in history. Delta (avirulent) Ames was supplied by NIH. Raymond H. Cypess, president of the germ bank, said of the Ames strain, “We never had it,’ and we can say that on several levels of analysis.” ATCC refuses to confirm to me whether its patent repository, as distinguished from its online category, had Ames, but we can assume government scientists would have ensured that the patent repository was considered at the same time as the online catalog and, to the best of their ability, excluded as a source of the Ames.
Al-Timimi had supervised Cairo-based militants writing for the Pittsburgh-based Assirat and then for IANA. One of them, Kamal Habib, was the founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and a friend of Ayman Zawahiri. The Cairo-based writers Kamal Habib and Gamal Sultan approached the blind sheik Abdel Rahman about starting a political party in early 1999. On March 1 and 2, 1999, Lynne Stewart and translator Yousry visited Abdel Rahman in prison in Rochester, Minnesota and relayed the proposal. On March 6, 1999, the first press reports about anthrax appeared quoting the blind sheik’s Cairo lawyer, Montasser al-Zayat, and detainees in a massive trial al-Zayat was defending. He explained that Ayman likely was going to use anthrax against US targets to retaliate against the rendering and detention of the Egyptian militants.
An article in George Mason University Gazette, in “CAS Holds Terrorism Briefing on Capitol Hill,” dated October 16, 2001 stated:
“On Friday, October 12, the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) hosted a legislative briefing on terrorism, bioterrorism, and extremist movements on Capitol Hill. The briefing provided legislators and their staffs with comprehensive background information on Islam, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, bioterrorism, and information security.
Ken Alibek, affiliate faculty member at George Mason and president of Advanced Biosytems Inc., addressed chemical and biological warfare issues. Alibek served as first deputy chief of defense of the civilian branch of the Soviet Union’s offensive biological weapons program.”
Ali Al-Timimi was knowledgeable about Islam, the Taliban and information security. Indeed, he was actively recruiting for the Taliban and was communicating with Bin Laden’s sheik and the so-called fellow Falls Church “911 imam” at the time.
In 2000, IANA radio ran an item “CIA to Monitor Foreign Students.” The item as published on the IANA website read: “American anti-terrorism policies are ‘seriously deficient according to the US National Commission on Terrorism, a body created by Congress after the bombing of 2 US embassies in East Africa.’”
In November 2007, FBI Director Mueller gave a speech in which he warned against the need to guard against spies at universities, who for example, may have access to pre-patent, pre-classification biochemistry information.
“Al Qaeda is tremendously patient and thinks nothing about taking years to infiltrate persons in and finding the right personnel and opportunity to undertake an attack. And we cannot become complacent, because you look around the world, and whether it’s London or Madrid or Bali or recently Casablanca or Algiers, attacks are taking place.”
Infiltrator Ali Mohamed was the “Teflon terrorist.” Ali Mohammed, an EIJ member who was associated with the unit that killed Sadat, had an alibi for the Sadat assassination. He was at an officer exchange program studying at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina., Green Beret and Delta Force officers trained there. After he was forced out of the Egyptian Army for his radical beliefs, he went to work at Egyptair. As a security advisor, where he learned how to hijack airliners. He then joined the CIA and the US Army. He was a supply sergeant at the US Army’s Fort Bragg. He lectured Green Beret and Delta Forces on the middle east. He stole high resolution maps from the map shack and brought them to Zawahirii in Afghanistan. In 1989, Ali Mohamed traveled from Fort Bragg to train men that would later commit WTC 1993. When Ali Mohammed traveled to Brooklyn, he stayed with Islamic Group and Abdel-Rahman’s bodyguard Nosair, the man who would assassinate Rabbi Kahane in 1990.
In 1991, when Bin Laden wanted to move from Afghanistan to Sudan, Ali Mohammed served as his head of security and trained his bodyguards. Along with a former medical student, Khalid Dahab, Ali Mohamed recruited ten Americans for “sleeper cells.” After the 1998 embassy bombings, when FBI agents secretly swarmed his California residence, they found a document “Cocktail” detailing how cell members should operate. Even Al Qaeda central would not know the identity of members and different cells would not know each other’s identity. It was Ali Mohamed who was the source for the December 4, 1998 PDB to President Clinton explaining that the brother of Sadat’s assassin, Islambouli, was planning attacks on the US. In November 2001, did the Quantico profilers know of this egregious history of infiltration and harm flowing from treating the Nosair case as a “lone wolf” rather than an international conspiracy? One man’s “lone wolf” experiencing howling loneliness is another man’s Salafist operating under strict principles of cell security and “need-to-know.”
A former FBI agent in the New York office who asked not to be identified, told author Peter Lance: “Understand what this means. You have an Al Qaeda spy who’s now a U.S. citizen, on active duty in the U.S. Army, and he brings along a video paid for by the U.S. government to train Green Beret officers and he’s using it to help train Islamic terrorists so they can turn their guns on us. By now the Afghan war is over.”
Steve Emerson once said of the former US Army Sergeant who was Ayman Zawahiri’s head of intelligence: “Ali Mohamed is one of the most frightening examples of the infiltration of terrorists into the infrastructure of the United States. Like a [character in a] John Le Carre thriller, he played the role of a triple agent and nearly got away with it.” Those officials who sought to minimize the security breach would have to explain away the classified maps of Afghanistan he stole from the map shack, and the classified cables and manuals found in such places as the home of Nosair, the assassin of Rabbi Kehane.
Not even Ali Mohammed, however, could boast the letter of commendation from the White House once given Ali Al-Timimi, previous work for White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, or a high security clearance. Ali Mohammed did not even have a security clearance but was merely a supply sergeant at the base where Special Operations was located. ‘Dr. Ali Al-Timimi’s Support Committee’ in an email to supporters dated April 5, 2005 explained: “This is a summary of the court proceedings that took place yesterday April 4th 2005. We will send a summary everyday inshallah. *** “In his opening statement, Defense attorney Edward B. MacMahon Jr. said that Al-Timimi was born and raised in Washington DC. He has a degree in Biology and he is also a computer scientist, and a mathematician. He worked for Andrew Card, who’s now the White House chief of staff, at the Transportation Department in the early 1990s.”
There was an elephant in the rooom no one wants to talk about. The documentary evidence shows that a colleague of famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID Deputy Commander Charles Bailey, a prolific Ames strain researcher, has been convicted of sedition and sentenced to life plus 70 years in prison. He worked in a program co-sponsored by the American Type Culture Collection and had access to ATCC facilities, as well as facilities of the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense at George Mason University then run by Dr. Alibek and Dr. Bailey. The bionformatics grad student once had a high security clearance for mathematical support work for the Navy.
Many commentators have long held strong and divergent opinions of what has been published in the media about Amerithrax, what they knew and their political views. But it turns out that they apparently have just been seeing the elephant in the living room from a different angle. Actually, they’ve just been in a position to see the elephant’s rump from outside the living room door. One US law professor, Francis Boyle, who has represented islamists abroad, first publicized the theory that a US biodefense insider was responsible. He has served as legal advisor to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and as counsel for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Separately the theory was adopted by professor Barbara Rosenberg. But Professor Boyle and Rosenberg and now author Graeme MacQueen were not entirely off in the weeds — just incorrect as to motive, and thus incorrect as to appears to have been involved in the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings (such as Al Qaeda lab director Yazid Sufaat and infiltrating scientist Rauf Ahmad). The documentary shows that Zawahiri’s plan was to infiltrate the US and UK biodefense establishment, and the evidence shows that is exactly what he did.
A. “Let me reply philosophically: Two hundred years ago, it was unthinkable to believe that people would be using mobile telephones, wasn’t it? Everything changes. Our knowledge grows, and technology develops incredibly quickly. … I am not saying that a student is in a position to build a biological weapon all by himself. But the knowledge needed to do it is certainly there.”
Other students took a “red cell” approach that have corroborated the findings of the thesis. Proliferation leads to great risk of infiltration.
LSU researcher Martin Hugh-Jones explained: “There were no more than ten labs in the nation working with the organism, and now it’s about 310—and they all want virulent strains. In the old days virtually everyone was paid by Department of Defense to do their research because that’s the only place where money came from because the organism wasn’t thought to be of economic importance. Now that it’s a bioterrorist threat and money’s available for research, experts have come out of the walls. The whole damn thing is bizarre.”A 2004 Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services report: “Serious weaknesses compromised the security of select agents at the universities under review. Physical security of select agents at all 11 universities left select agents vulnerable to theft or loss, thus elevating the risk of public exposure.”
Dr. Leitner in a letter to the Fairfax County Police Department wrote:
“Now we see that Sergeant Rasool was the subject of a several-year long investigation – in fact, he was under investigation at the time he lodged his complaints against us — and was recently convicted of a very serious security breach involving misusing FBI databases to assist another person under FBI investigation for Federal terrorism charges.” Rasool had sought to stop the training work being done by Dr. Leitner, who taught biosecurity work at George Mason University’s Center for Biodefense.
The Administration should declassify the “28 pages” being withheld from “Joint Inquiry” report, according to the author of the 28 pages, former Senator Bob Graham. The pages relate to a US-based network involving Saudi funding and charities. Those 28 pages may bear very directly on the correct analysis of the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings.
http://www.amerithrax.wordpresss.com
Ross Getman’s slide presentation at the Nov 29 anthrax letters seminar
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/seminarpresentation-2.pdf
Former Senator Says Huge Breakthrough Is Coming With Classified 9/11 Information
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/08/01/former-senator-says-huge-breakthrough-is-coming-with-classified-911-information/
It’s Time to Declassify Those 28 Pages
Seeking the American government’s analysis of the 9/11 attacks, most people look to the 9/11 Commission Report. There is, however, another report that merits equal attention: the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.
President George W. Bush censored 28 pages of this report—an entire section said to describe the involvement of specific foreign governments in the attacks. After reading it, Congressman Thomas Massie described the experience as “disturbing” and said, “I had to stop every two or three pages and rearrange my perception of history…it’s that fundamental.”
In the interest of achieving justice for victims and preventing future attacks, knowledge of foreign government involvement in 9/11 must be shared with the American people…and with the world.
28Pages.org was launched in July 2014 to help build awareness of this classified material and to bolster the growing, bipartisan movement to pressure Congress and the President to finally disclose it. Use 28Pages.org to study the issue, follow efforts to declassify the 28 pages and learn how you can help pressure the government to do the right thing.
http://28pages.org/
Some historical contest:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2001/09/21/saudis.htm
Saudis offer support, but that could change
By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister promised President Bush on Thursday to do “everything that is in our capacity” to support the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism. But following through on that pledge won’t be so simple: U.S. retaliation could rattle an already difficult relationship with the world’s largest oil producer. Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of many of the suspects in the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil, and its ruling monarchy faces opposition from ultra-fundamentalist Muslims.
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Bandar bin Sultan, viewed photo lineups of possible suspects last week at the request of U.S. investigators, says Vince Cannistraro, a former head of counterterrorism for the CIA. “They’re under great pressure to cooperate,” Cannistraro says. …
More than a dozen of the 19 men who hijacked four U.S. airliners, destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon are believed to be Saudi nationals. So are many of those detained since the attacks for questioning.
Cannistraro says the apparent preponderance of Saudis among the hijackers underlines the importance of the attacks to Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire believed to be the mastermind.
Bin Laden apparently wanted fellow Saudis to carry out his most audacious mission, Cannistraro says.
Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, says the ruling family will be “reasonably supportive (of retaliation), providing we can demonstrate that we are reasonably sure of the facts.”
Intelligence sharing with the United States may be hampered by the Saudi government’s recent dismissal of its longtime intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal. He helped organize an Arab volunteer force, in part bankrolled by bin Laden, that fought Soviet control of Afghanistan in the 1980s and formed the basis of bin Laden’s terrorist network. …
The Saudi record of intelligence-sharing with the United States has been spotty since the 1991 Gulf War. They would not let the FBI talk to suspects in a 1995 bombing that killed five Americans in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The suspects were convicted and executed. The government also made it difficult for the FBI to interview suspects in a 1996 bombing that killed 19 U.S. airmen. More than a dozen remain in Saudi jails.
Saudi Arabia stripped bin Laden of his citizenship in 1994, but wealthy Saudis still support him through a network of charitable fronts. “The Saudi government has not been able to stop the mosque collections for causes it doesn’t support,” Freeman says.
It is one of only three countries — along with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates — that recognize Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which harbors bin Laden. The Taliban practices a version of Islam only slightly more strict than in Saudi Arabia, where women are limited in where they can go, work and study.
What largely binds the United States and Saudi Arabia is oil. Saudi Arabia has one quarter of the world’s known oil reserves and provides 17% of U.S. crude oil imports. Protecting the kingdom is a top U.S. priority.
“It’s an ambivalent relationship … inexorably bound by many interests,” says David Long, a Saudi expert.
Vince Cannistraro volunteered to help out with Amerithrax and steer things in the right direction.
The anthraxhunt website set up by Mark Smith was set up at the suggestion of former CIA Vince Cannistraro. (according to the website archived version linked). The FBI sting operation was encouraged by lead investigator Bob Roth who desperately wanted to close the case, according to the washington post article “The Pursuit of Steve Hatfill.” It was intended to prompt a reaction by characterizing the writer as sexually dysfunctional, bi-polar, paranoid etc. Vince and Mark and the lead investigator Bob Roth can tell us what reaction they wanted to prompt. They can also tell us who the other colleague was involved in setting up the website.
The other website Mark Smith set up gave an email to send tips. It was called handtomind.org and asked for verifiable leads to be forwarded. I never noticed that website. But, in any event, I never knew any bi-polar, sexually dysfunctional, paranoid types to tell the CIA about; only folks, for example, coordinating with Anwar Awlaki, childhood friends of Dr. Ayman, folks associated with the charity funded by some Saudis who helped finance 9/11, El-Shukrijumah (the son of the Saudi employee and missionary who translated for Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman), that sort of thing.
But the FBI had no interest in Mr. Awlaki, for example, and released him in 2002 so he could visit Ali Al-Timimi, the fellow sharing the suite with the leading DARPA-funded Ames researchers. Adnan El-Shukrijumah was already in the wind.
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20040520000227/http://www.handtomind.com/
Mark and Vince and Bob deserve a lot of credit — if it turns out that they were right in the profile. Dr. Ivins fit the graphologist’s opinion to a tee — and that is without even knowing what color paranormal aura he gave off!
Now I don’t know how Don Foster, the other “handwriting expert” consulted in July 2002 by the FBI, got all the attention… just because he pointed to Dr. Hatfill.
…when all the while this Amerithrax/CIA backed Mark Smith was pointing to a profile that fit Dr. Ivins to a tee!
Dr. Ivins committed suicide only after the FBI swabbed him for DNA to test the semen on the panties
https://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/dr-ivins-committed-suicide-only-after-the-fbi-swabbed-him-for-dna-to-test-the-semen-on-the-panties/
For the details of his analysis,
“New Anthrax Terrorist Profile Released
On 9/11 foreign terrorists struck the United States of America. Over the next several weeks, we were struck again, this time by a domestic terrorist who is still at large, and may strike again.
You can help to take this threat of terrorism out of our daily lives.
This killer has waged psychological and biological terrorism on us using our own postal service, with just a few letters. Now lets use psychological profiling and analysis to take the war to him.
This NEW detailed profile is based on the handwriting analysis of the anthrax killer, done by Mr. Mark Smith, at the request of Vince Cannistraro, former CIA Director of Counter Terrorism, and verified as accurate by Law Enforcement Officials currently working on the case.
Mr. Mark Smith is a 35 year veteran and autority on handwriting analysis. The methods used to compile this new profile on the Anthrax Killer is revealed in his new ebook “Hand to Mind” – How to Analyze Anyone’s Handwriting … even the Anthrax Killers:
Click Book
How to Analyze Anyone’s Handwriting
…. even the Anthrax Killer’s.”
HandToMind.com
Mr. Smith is most known for his live on-the-air handwriting analysis of Oprah Winfrey, during which he revealed her “childhood abuse issues” eight years prior to her public admission.
It is a certainty that many of us, at one time or another, have come in contact with this man, through work, school or even possibly in the military.
Please review the Anthrax letter handwriting samples and handwriting analysis on this web site then consider:
Have you seen this handwriting anywhere before?
Does our profile sound like someone you know?
A person’s handwriting speaks volumes if you know what to look for. Even an expert can only disguise a limited number of things by deception in their writing.
It is more important now, than ever, to arm yourself with knowledge and help prevent this from happening again. There is no emergency warning system, of any color, for this kind of terrorist threat.
What is more terror provoking than the possibility of having a lethal weapon delivered right to your mailbox? Learn what to look for on envelopes before you open them.
Remember that two of the people that died, the medical worker, and the elderly lady in Connecticut had no seeming connection to the other cases, and no link has yet been found. It can happen again.
If you need a greater incentive than simply helping to find this killer, the FBI is offering 2.5 million dollars for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person who sent these letters.
Don’t assume that your information is unimportant. The FBI has asked that you report your information even if you think it might be unimportant or that someone else may have already reported what you know.
You may know the anthrax killer, and be able to bring this murderer to justice. Your call may be the one that provides them with the one piece of information they need to solve this case.”
Chasing Islambouli’s Ghost: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
When dealing with Ayman Zawahiri, it never pays to underestimate the importance to him in the 1990s of the terrorist infrastructure in Brooklyn. In the late 1990s, Steve Emerson traced the development of the “Mekhtab Al-Khidemat Al-Mujahideen,” or the “Office of Services of the Mujahideen,” from its formation in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the early 1980′s to the Al Kifah Refugee Centers which spread throughout the United States and internationally. Zawahiri visited Brooklyn’s al Farouk mosque, which was part of Khidmat Services in Peshawar and was used to funnel jihadists and funds to Afghanistan. The blind sheik’s lawyer, Montasser al-Zayat, visited in 1990. Islambouli was head of the office in Peshawar. In a 1990 documentary by SBS-TV “Cutting Edge” series entry called “Sword of Islam,” Islambouli said: “Islam grows on the severed limbs and blood of martyrs. Islam will be back, and take over the world.”
The CIA’s December 4, 1998 PDB to President Clinton explained that Mohammed Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s assassin, was planning an attack using aircraft and other means on the United States. After Bojinka, which can be thought of as the origin for the 911 planning, Islambouli had been in a cell with KSM in planning the attacks. KSM came to be head of the cell planning to use anthrax as a weapon against United States targets. Therefore, it is important to understand who Islambouli knew and consider his historical connection to the al-Farook mosque in Brooklyn, New York.
Now the surest way to know who Islambouli knew would be to go back to the late 1970s leading up to Sadat’s assassination and study membership in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad cells at the universities. But the story also can fruitfully be picked up a decade later in the context of Islambouli’s ongoing connection to al-Farook. The Al-Kifah Refugee Center had found its home in the early 1990s at the Al-Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue. Some of the men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing worshipped at the mosque, as did the blind sheik’s bodyguard El-Sayyed Nosair, who killed the radical Israeli Rabbi Meir Kahane.
The Brooklyn office of Makhtab Khidmat al-Mujahiden was staffed by Egyptian Islamic Jihad operative Khaled Dahab, a used car salesman from Santa Clara. Dahab handled the logistics for terrorists out of his home. He patched through calls for Egyptian Islamic Jihad members and transferred money. Ayman called Dahab periodically — once to price telephone surveillance equipment. Dahab at last report was in jail in Egypt. Dahab had been recruited by Ali Mohammed, the former US Army sergeant who was Bin Laden’s chief of security during the move from Afghanistan to Sudan. Ali Mohammed helped conduct the surveillance leading much later to the embassy bombings. He trained Dahab on how to make letter bombs.
When Ali Mohammed would visit Brooklyn, he would stay with a fellow Egyptian Nosair, who assassinated Meir Kahane. Nosair had been one of the men practicing with the men at the Calverton shooting range in Long Island under Mohammed’s instruction (along with some of the WTC 1993 bombers).
In 1992, Mohammed Islambouli, was in regular fax contact from his Peshawar Mujahedeen Office in Peshawar, Pakistan and the Brooklyn Al-Kifah office. One 1992 memo from Islambouli’s Peshawar office read: “The military wing of the Jihad seals its news with success everywhere. However, the matter is the hands of the leadership to form the Islamic government to manage the country.”
Sheik Abdel-Rahman would lecture regularly at al-Farook. He would visit Islambouli in Pakistan from Brooklyn in 1989 and during the early 1990s. It was not until April 1993, upon a crackdown on the foreign fighters, that Islambouli and Zawahiri had to move their operations into Afghanistan. Islambouli moved a scant 100 miles. Before disappearing into Afghanistan, Islambouli told the press the group would continue its holy war against the Egyptian government. In 1993, after he had to leave Peshawar, Islambouli lived at the Samarkhiel Guest House in Jalabad, a town in eastern Afghanistan three hours by road from the Pakistan border. In April 1993, a fax to Western news media threatened American interests if anything happened to Abdel-Rahman. At the time, Egyptian Islamic Group had about 200 members in Jalabad.
Even back then, moreover, there was a connection between Brooklyn and the Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines. For example, a 1992 memo read:
“We urge you to support them and to support them and to contribute to their developments, programs and projects in order that they may do their part in accomplishing our jihad and mission of raising the World of Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala and the Message of our Prophet Muhammad (saw) to the Highest.” Another memo from the Moro National Liberation Front read: “THIS IS TO CERTIFY that according to the records of this office, that Mr. Abdul Zindani had shown his sincerity, loyalty, and devotion to his work and noble project as Chairman of:
AL-KIFAH REFUGEE CENTER OF AMERICA
P.O. Box – 294, Brooklyn NY -11217
Telephone No. 718-797-9207
We urge you to help all kinds of support needed to all concern Islamic movements, specially our Muslim Mujahidin around the Globe including those in Bosnia Herzegovinia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Kurdisn, Burma, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Lebanon, India, Trinidad, Somalia and Bangsamoro in Southern Philippines.”
By 1995, Nosair was in prison and a defendant in a trial for sedition along with the Blind Sheik. The father of Adnan El-Shukrijumah (“Jafar the Pilot”) once translated for the Blind Sheik and was a character witness for Clement Rodney Hampton one of the defendants in the 1995 sedition trial. Jafar’s father was Bilal Philip’s mentor. Bilal Philips in turn was Al-Timimi’s mentor (and he continued to be in contact with him). Hampton-El testified that Philips was the head of “Project Bosnia.” He explained that Philips funneled money from Saudi Arabia to pay for noncombatant support services for the mujahideen in Bosnia. Project Bosnia also recruited combatants and men for paramilitary training. Numerous cities would come to have subsidiary Al Kifah offices. Aafia Siddiqui would be associated with the one in Boston, which after WTC 1993 was renamed Care International. The Care head was MIT MSA Imam Suheil Laher. He worked with Aafia in fundraising.
In 2003, prosecutors alleged in a complaint unsealed in Brooklyn federal court that a Yemeni cleric raised millions, some of it through Al-Farooq mosque, that was then funneled to al-Qaida terrorists. Prosecutors alleged that Sheik Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad used the mosque to raise money for Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network in 1999. He allegedly told an FBI informant that he supplied al-Qaida with more than $20 million, recruits and weapons in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks. The government sought to extradite Al-Moayad and his assistant. The complaint said much of the money came from contributors in the United States, including the Al-Farooq mosque.
If the federal investigative interest over the years has been any indication, it appears that authorities perceived that a tree grew in Brooklyn. But given the FBI and CIA’s suppression of information relating to the role that Brooklyn and fund-raising charities had in Al Qaeda — as illustrated by the withholding of 28 key pages in the “Joint Inquiry” led by US Senator Bob Graham — intelligence analysis was seriously hampered.
The Supporters of Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman
Bin Laden’s 1996 Declaration of War focused not only on dissident Saudi sheik al-Hawali’s imprisonment, but also invoked the detention of the Egyptian sheik Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “the blind sheik.” Three years earlier, on July 4, 1993, United States Postal employee Ahmed Abdel Sattar had spoken to the press about Abdel Rahman’s arrest and said “we haven’t decided the time or place, but our Muslim community will demonstrate its outrage at the arrest of the Sheik.”
In the indictment of the Staten Island Post Office employee who worshipped in Brooklyn, the United States government alleged that following his arrest, Abdel Rahman, in a message to his followers recorded while he was in prison, urged: “Oh Muslims! Oh Muslims! It is a duty upon all the Muslims around the world to free the Sheikh, and to rescue him from his jail.” Referring to the United States, he implored, “Muslims everywhere, dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships, and shoot down their planes, kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.” His list is a pretty concise summary of the terrorist actions taken over the next decade.
The tactic of lethal letters delivered by the US Post Office — although not mentioned in this list by Abdel-Rahman — was not merely the modus operandi of the militant islamists inspired by Abdel-Rahman, it was their signature. The islamists sent letter bombs in late December 1996 from Alexandria, Egypt to newspaper offices in New York City and Washington, D.C. and people in symbolic positions. Musical Christmas cards apparently postmarked in Alexandria, Egypt on December 21, 1996 contained improvised explosive devices. The bombs were mailed on the Night of Decree or Night of Measures. It is known as the Night of Qadr. The letters were sent in connection with the earlier bombing of the World Trade Center and the imprisonment of the blind sheik.
The former leader of the Egyptian Al-Gamaa al-Islamiya (”Islamic Group”), Abdel-Rahman was also a spiritual leader of Al Qaeda. There initially was an outstanding $2 million reward. Under the rewards for justice program, the reward now is up to $5 million. There was no claim of responsibility. There was no explanation. Once one had been received, the next ten, mailed on two separate dates, were easily collected. Sound familiar? Two bombs were also sent to Leavenworth, where a key WTC 1993 defendant was imprisoned, addressed to “Parole Officer.” (The position does not exist).
The FBI suspected the Vanguards of Conquest, led by Egyptian Islamic Jihad head Ayman Zawahiri. The group can be thought of as either the military wing of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad or perhaps just EIJ by another name. It is sometimes known as the New Jihad. Yassir Al-Sirri was the Egyptian Islamic Jihad/ Vanguards of Conquest publicist and worked out of his London-based home while on the public dole.
The blind sheik Abdel Rahman simultaneously was the spiritual leader of Al Qaeda, Egyptian Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad/Vanguards of Conquest. The next month, on February 12, 1997, the Islamic Group, for its part, issued a statement: “The Islamic Group declares all American interests legitimate targets to its “jihad until the release of all prisoners, on top of whom is Abdel Rahman.” Abdel-Rahman’s friend, Ayman Zawahiri, was head of Al Qaeda’s biochemical program. The blind sheik’s son, Mohammed, was on Al Qaeda’s three- member WMD committee.
Jemaah Islamiah (”JI”) in Indonesia also was committed to Abdel-Rahman’s release. JI-member Yazid Sufaat was a member of Al Qaeda. The US-trained Malaysian biochemist Yazid Sufaat met with 9/11 plotters and two hijackers in January 2000. JI has ties with the Moro Front. Sufaat used his company called Green Laboratory Medicine to buy items useful to Al Qaeda. Zacarias Moussaoui, who had a crop dusting manual when he was arrested, stayed at Sufaat’s condominium in 2000 when he was trying to arrange for flight lessons in Malaysia. Yazid Sufaat provided Moussaoui with a letter indicating that he was a marketing representative for Infocus Technologies signed “Yazid Sufaat, Managing Director.” Sufaat had given Moussaoui an e-mail greenlab@usa.net that was accessed by authorities on September 19, 2001. The cropdusters were to be part of a “second wave.” Al Qaeda’s regional operative, Hambali, was at the key January 2000 meeting and supervised Sufaat. Khalid Mohammed’s involvement dates back to Bojinka, as did Hambali’s. The money for Bojinka, a plot to simultaneously bomb airliners and to assassinate the Pope, went from Bin Laden’s brother-in-law Khalifa to the Abu Sayyaf Group, Al Qaeda’s primary Philippine affiliate, and then on to the cell that included KSM.
Al-Kifah in Brooklyn had long since become the headquarters of Abdel-Rahman’s supporters in the US. After the anthrax mailings, the Amerithrax investigation naturally considered whether the solution to the mystery had its roots in Brooklyn. Abdel-Rahman was the spiritual leader of both Egyptian Islamic Group and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He was close to Ayman Zawahiri, known to be head of Al Qaeda’s anthrax weaponization project. FISA warrants issued immediately after 9/11 but did not prove fruitful. At Fitzgerald’s urging, a criminal investigation of the two charities, Benevolence International Foundation and Global Relief Foundation, was opened in October 2001. The 9/11 Commission Report notes that in December 2001, “[t]hese plans were dramatically accelerated when CIA analysts, drawing on intelligence gathered in an unrelated FBI investigation, expressed concerns that GRF could be involved in a plot to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).”
On December 14, 2001, the FBI raided the charity offices of the two charities. BIF and GRF offices were raided in Illinois — a BIF office in Newark, New Jersey also was searched. The GRF Founder Rabih Haddad was the imam at the Muslim Community Association and volunteer at Michigan Islamic Academy not far from Ames research Tarek Hamouda, the former Zawahiri associate. Germs author and New York Times journalist Judy Miller (or her colleague) called the GRF office in Illinois the night before the search. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was furious. He had been the AUSA who handled the prosecution of Bin Laden earlier that year in the case involving the 1998 embassy bombings. Authorities had planned on waiting and watching to see how the US charity personnel responded to a search of offices abroad. Their hand was forced when GRF officials in Illinois began shredding documents.
At a White House press conference on December 17, 2001, Ari Fleischer said: “There is nothing that has been final that has been concluded. But the evidence is increasingly looking like it was a domestic source. But, again, this remains something that is not final, nor totally conclusive yet. I can just report to you the information that I’ve heard. I can’t give you the scientific reasons behind it. But you can assume that they’re based on investigative and scientific means.” He emphasized: “There’s a big difference between the source of it and who sent it, because the two do not have to be tied.”
Codename “Swift Knight”: Bin Laden’s Plan With Ibn Khattab To Use Charities And Infiltrators In Creating Biological Weapons
The surest indication that the Administration credited the claims concerning Al Qaeda’s intention to anthrax as a weapon is that Vice President Cheney and his staff allegedly knew to take Cipro on 9/11. That was a full week before the first anthrax letter was mailed. An unclassified CIA report in January 2003 vaguely summarized the information available from open sources: “A senior Bin Ladin associated on trial in Egypt in 1999 claimed his group had chemical and biological weapons. Documents and equipment recovered from al-Qa’ida facilities in Afghanistan show that Bin Ladin has a more sophisticated biological weapons research program than previously discovered.
Tenet in his May 2007 In the Center of the Storm wrote:
“As we researched the information we were slowly gathering from myriad sources, we unlocked a disturbing secret: the group’s interest in WMD was not new. They had been searching for these weapons long before we had been looking for them. As far we know, al-Qa-ida’s fascination with chemical weapons goes back to the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March 1995 by a group of religious fanatics called the Aum Shinrikyo. Twelve people died in that attack, but had the dispersal devices worked as planned, the death toll would have been higher. Al-Qai’da leaders were impressed and saw the attack as a model for achieving their own ambitions.”
In Khartoum, Sudan, bin Laden sought to bring together Agiza’s Vanguards of Conquest faction and Saif Adel’s EIJ faction — both of which had splintered off from Zawahiri’s leadership. The Vanguards of Conquest initially had been set up by Ahmed Hussain Agiza, a physician graduated from Cairo Medical School, and split off from Zawahiri. Agiza had a falling out with Zawahiri in 1993 over the arrest of 800 Vanguards members in Egypt. By 1995, Zawahiri was serving as the group’s spokesman in connection with the attempted assassination of President Mubarak in Ethiopia. In 1997, the US State Department named Zawahiri as leader of the Vanguards of Conquest group. (Agiza was extradited from Sweden in December 2001). EIJ has maintained the goal of seizing power in Egypt since the coup planned by Jihad in 1981 despite the Egyptian government’s success in cracking down on the group. At the same time of their developing interest in anthrax, the pro-Bin Laden elements diversified the targets. Al Qaeda would no longer limit its tactics to the blowing up of installations. It launched joint action with other groups and organizations, both local groups and others operating outside their countries.
Formerly the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Zawahiri assumed the #2 position after Bin Laden upon a merger of some of Islamic Jihad into Al Qaeda. The Vanguards of Conquest called creation of the front “a step forward and in the right direction,” but urged Bin Laden to “expand its membership to include other tendencies on the scene.. [and] all colors of the fundamentalist movement wishing to join such alliance in the Arab and Islamic worlds.” Upon the merger in 1998, the most senior planners in Al Qaeda relating to tactics and biological weapons were Egyptian Islamic Jihad, to include Ayman Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef, and Midhat Mursi aka Abu Khabab. Zawahiri was always the real “brains” behind Al Qaeda, not Bin Laden. (This week some reports even suggest that Dr. Ayman had sidelined Bin Laden in recent years while others suggest he has continued to have hands-on role in plotting.
Egyptian Abu Yasir — known as Taha –the blind sheik’s successor as leader of the Islamic Group, also was a senior member of Al Qaeda. Taha signed the 1998 statement declaring war on the United States along with Bin Laden and Zawahiri. Taha (now imprisoned in Egypt) had not conferred with the Egyptian Islamic Group shura council. Moreover, Zawahiri apparently had not obtained the approval of EIJ’s shura council to their great consternation. While the US government views Al Qaeda and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad as having merged in 1998, they have essentially been the same organization, with the merger having occurred some years earlier.
In a statement in February 1998, the Vanguards of Conquest said that Muslims should unite against the “real enemies of Islam,’ the United States and Israel. “The time has come to coordinate..to stop our knee-jerk reactions and killing those who are not the enemy..we have to think strategically,” the group said. Under one view, EIJ by this time was Vanguards of Conquest by another name — with Zawahiri its leader and spokesperson. The Egyptian government claimed that Yasser al- Sirri managed and financed the group Vanguards of Conquest, also known as the New Jihad, from his London home while on the public dole. Zawahiri’s wrath against the United States sharpened in 1998 upon the extradition to Egypt of the islamic jihad members from Albania. The trial of the 107 defendants in the “Albanian returnees” in 1999 was the biggest trial of militant islamists since the assassination of Sadat. Zawahiri was sentenced to death in absentia, as was his brother, Muhammad. Muhammad was responsible for Jihad’s military wing and was a member of its shura council. Muhammad Zawahiri was in charge of contacts with EIJ leaders inside Egypt and traveled with Ayman.
A 1998 Defense Intelligence Agency document produced to Judicial Watch four years ago confirms Bin Laden’s plans to penetrate US biodefense. It describes OBL’s biological aspirations in association with the late Arab Chechen fighter Ibn Khattab. The means by which a worldwide caliphate was to be established was by terror, “latent penetration,” and control over nuclear and biological weapons. After 9/11, Ibn Khattab was killed by a poison letter.
The typed document was derived from handwritten documents obtained through a classified intelligence project with the unclassified nickname “Swift Knight.” According to the report, the documents were written during the first two weeks of October 1998. The document stated in part:
THE NEW PROGRAM INCLUDES TOPICS IN– “DIVERSIONS” WITH THE HELP OF WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, INCLUDING BACTERIOLOGICAL, AND INCENDIARY MIXTURES
A reference to the murder of Khattab by poison letter is described in a page omitted from a Detainee Assessment. Some things are just too scary for you to know to include the funding that Ibn Khattab was poised to receive under the cover of a major charity.
What the Amerithrax Task Force Knew And When
Eric Lichtblau writes in BUSH’S LAW: The Remaking of American Justice (2008):
“Over the past two and a half years, a team of NSA technicians, analysts, and translators working round-the-clock out of cubicles at an open office the size of a small newsroom at Fort Meade had eavesdropped without warrant on the phone calls and e-mails of several thousand people in the United States suspected of ties to terrorists. An Islamic charity in Oregon had apparently been monitored. So had a woman in Baltimore [Fowzia Siddiqui]whose sister [Aafia] was suspected of being an al Qaeda ‘facilitator, an imam [Aref] at a mosque in Albany with suspected ties to militants in Iraq, and a truck driver in Cleveland [Faris] who talked of taking a blow torch to the Brooklyn Bridge.”
In United States v. Ali Al-Timimi, attorneys have wrangled about the government’s failure to produce law enforcement interviews of Al-Timimi after WTC 1993 and after 9/11 — as well as failure to produce NSA intercepts from 2002. Al-Timimi’s original attorney was the first to tell us in 2003 that the FBI raided Ali’s townhouse on February 26, 2003 because they feared he was part of a planned WMD attack. Al-Timimi’s townhouse was raided two weeks after the blind sheik’s son, Mohammed Abdel-Rahman — a member of Al Qaeda’s 3-member WMD committee — was captured in Quetta, Pakistan. Al-Timimi’s attorney, Edward McMahon, in the Moussaoui case, stipulated to a timeline of events in 2001 related to what the US knew about a planned attack. Over this same period the United States government was failing to disrupt the coming attacks, microbiologist Al-Timimi was publicly lecturing on the signs of the coming day of judgment. In both July and August 2001, in Toronto and then London, Al-Timimi was lecturing on the end of times alongside the man known as the “911 imam.” “911 imam”, Awlaqi, was a fellow Falls Church iman who counseled key hijackers first in San Diego and then in Falls Church. Before that, in 1993 and twice in 1996, the man joining Al-Timimi at the podium was none other than Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheik’s son. Mohammed Abdel-Rahman would serve on Al Qaeda’s WMD committee and recruit scientists. Al-Timimi was granted a high security clearance and allowed to work alongside top anthrax bioweaponeers at the same time law enforcement and intelligence memos were flying fast and furious about Al Qaeda’s interest in biological weapons and the planned attack known to relate, in part, to the detention of blind sheik Abdel-Rahman.
Although the timeline by Al-Timimi’s defense attorney begins on February 6, 2001, I have added some notes from the first week in February 2001 that set the stage. In February 2001, the CIA briefed the President in a Presidential Daily Brief (”PDB”) on “Bin Laden’s Interest in Biological and Radiological Weapons” in a still-classified briefing memorandum. Like the PDB on Bin Laden’s threat to use planes to free the blind sheik, the February 2001 PDB would illustrate the wisdom that most intelligence is open source. There was little about Ayman’ s plan to use anthrax against US targets in retaliation for rendering of EIJ leaders that was not available to anyone paying attention. The blind sheik’s attorney in Cairo had announced that Zawahiri likely would use weaponized anthrax to protest the detention of senior Egyptian militants. The previous military commander of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, then on trial, had made the same claim, along with yet another EIJ shura member. In September 1999, a London cleric even had a dialogue with Bin Laden, in open letters read at mosques in Pakistan and London, in which the cleric called for a holy biowar against the United States and Bin Laden responded.
The timing of the specific PDB on Al Qaeda’s biological weapons in early February 2001, however, was due to anthrax threat letters sent in late January 2001 to the Immigration Minister in Canada and the Justice Minister. The letters were sent upon the announcement of bail hearing for a detained Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader who had managed Bin Laden’s farm in Sudan. Canada announced on January 18, 2001 that an Egyptian Islamic Jihad Shura member, Mahjoub, would have a January 30 bail hearing. Someone sent an anthrax threat letter to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. Minister Caplan had signed the security certificate authorizing Mahjoub’s detention. After arriving in Canada in 1996, Mahjoub continued to be in contact with high level militants, including his former supervisor in Sudan, al-Duri, an Iraqi reputed to be Bin Laden’s chief procurer or weapons of mass destruction. Beginning on February 6, 2001, another former colleague of al-Duri in Sudan, Jamal Ahmad Al-Fadl, began his testimony in the Southern District of New York in United States v. Bin Laden about his own early efforts on Bin Laden’s behalf to obtain WMD. Then Assistant United States Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was the prosecutor. (The United States has been required to produce 900 pages of transcripts of video conferences between FBI agents and al-Fadl.) Al Duri, while living in Tucson, Arizona, was acquainted with Wadi al Hage. Wadi al Hage was another witness cooperating with authorities in connection with the prosecution of Bin Laden in Spring 2001 relating to the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa.
On February 6, 2001, a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief (”SEIB”) indicated a heightened threat of Sunni extremist terrorist attacks against United States facilities, personnel, and other interests. (A SEIB, once called the National Intelligence Daily, is a CIA-produced intelligence summary similar to the President’s Daily Brief; it must be returned to the CIA within 5 days.
In March and April 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency disseminated a series of reports warning that Abu Zubaydah was planning an operation in the near future.
On April 13, 2001, the FBI sent an all-office message summarizing the intelligence reporting to date on the Sunni extremist threat.
On April 20, 2001, a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief indicated that that Osama Bin Laden was planning multiple operations.
On May 3, 2001, a SEIB indicated Bin Laden’s “public profile may presage attack.”
On May 23, 2001, a SEIB reported a possible hostage plot against Americans abroad to force the release of prisoners, including Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was serving a life sentence for this role in the 1993 plot to blow up landmarks in New York City. (The anthrax letters followed the pattern of letter bombs mailed in late 1996 to NYC and DC newspaper offices, along with people in symbolic positions associated with the detention with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and the WTC bombers. That is, the modus operandi of the anthrax letters was not just the modus operandi of The Friends of Abdel-Rahman, it was their signature).
On May 26, 2001, a SEIB indicated that Bin Laden’s plans were advancing.
In June 2001, over the course of a week, Yazid Sufaat briefed Ayman Zawahiri and Hambali on his efforts at cultivating anthrax).
On June 19, 2001, a CIA report passed along biographical information on several terrorists mentioned, in commenting on Khalid Mohammed, that he was recruiting people to travel to the United States to meet with colleagues already there so that they might conduct terrorist attacks on Bin Laden’s behalf. (An early December 1998 PDB to the same effect to President Clinton — declassified and included in the 911 Commission Report — reported that the aircraft and attacks were being planned by the brother of Sadat’s assassin, Mohammed Islambouli. Islambouli was in a cell with Khalid Mohammed (”KSM”), who by December had come to lead the cell planning anthrax attacks in the United States.
On June 21, 2001, after a press report from a journalist reporting from Bin Laden’s entourage, United States embassies raised the force protection condition for United States troops in six countries to the highest possible level, Delta. The embassy in Yemen was closed. (In February 1999, militants had threatened to attack with anthrax if Americans did not promptly leave the country; the militants were thought to be connected to Abu Hamza in London; Ayman Zawahiri was in contact with a cell in Yemen).
The unclassified portion of “Daily UBL/Radical Fundamentalist Threat Update” for June 22, 2001 under “Newly Reported Threats and Incidents” (recently uploaded to intelwire.com) states:
“State notified all embassies and the national security community of a terrorist threat warning on 6/22/01. ‘The State Department has been made aware of the following uncorroborated threat information indicating a possible near term strike against U.S. interests (NFI). Usama Bin Laden reportedly intends to strike against U.S. interests within the next two days according to the information held by an Arab in Kabul, Afghanistan on 6/21/01. The Arab in Kabul was sure that the strike, whose location he did not disclose, would generate an American response. The DOD European also put out a similar warning to all military commands.”
On June 22, 2001, the CIA notified all its station chiefs around the world about intelligence suggesting a possible al Qaeda suicide attack on a United States target over the next the few days. The same day, the State Department notified all embassies of the terrorist threat and updated its worldwide public warning.
On June 23, 2001, the title of a SEIB warned, “Bin Laden Attacks May be Imminent.”
On June 25, 2001, a SEIB titled Bin Laden and Associated Making Near-Term Threats reported that multiple attacks were being planned by Bin Laden and his associates over the coming days, including a ’severe blow’ against United States and Israeli “interests,” during the next two weeks. (Senator Leahy is in charge of the subcommittee that oversees appropriations to Egypt and Israel).
Also, on June 25, 2001, an Arabic television station reported Bin Laden’s pleasure with al Qaeda leaders who were saying that the next few weeks “will witness important surprises” and that the United States and Israeli interests will be targeted. At the end of June 2001, an Qaeda intelligence report warned that something “very, very, very, very” big was about to happen, and most of Bin Laden’s network was reportedly anticipating the attack.
In late June 2001, a CIA terrorist threat advisory indicated a high probability of near-term “spectacular” terrorist attacks resulting in numerous casualties.
On June 30, 2001, a SEIB titled “Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks,” repeated that Bin Laden operatives expected near-term attacks to have dramatic consequences of catastrophic proportions. The SEIB contained an article titled “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.”
The intelligence reporting at the end of June consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil and that they would consist possibly of multiple — but not necessarily simultaneous — attacks.
Threat reports surged in June and July 2001.
On July 2, 2001, a SEIB indicated that the planning for Usama Bin Laden’s attacks continue, despite delays.
Also on July 2, 2001, the FBI issued a National Law Enforcement Telecommunications (”NLETS”) message concerning potential anti-United States attacks. The message summarized the information regarding the threats from Bin Laden and warned that there was an increased volume of threat reporting. The message indicated a potential for attacks against United Statets targets abroad from groups “aligned or sympathetic to Usama Bin Laden.” The message further stated, “The FBI has no information indicating a credible threat of terrorist attack in the United States.” The message asked recipient to “exercise extreme vigilance” and “report suspicious activities” to the FBI. (Later that summer, when a flying school instructor reported Zacarias Moussaoui and it was known he was associated with Bin Laden’s colleague Ibn Khattab, who intelligence showed was related to Bin Laden’s CBRN aspirations, FBI HQ denied the request that a FISA warrant be sought for his laptop.)
On July 5, 2001, the CIA briefed the Attorney General on the al Qaeda threat, warning that a significant attack was imminent. In addition, the Attorney General was told by the CIA that preparations for multiple attacks were in late stages or already complete and that little warning could be expected. The briefing addressed only threats outside United States.
On July 13, 2001, a SEIB indicated that Bin Laden’s plans had been delayed, maybe for as long as two months, but not abandoned.
On July 19, 2001, one of the items mentioned by the Acting FBI Director in a conference call with his special agents in charge, was the need, in light of increased threat reporting, to have evidence response teams ready to move at a moment’s notice, in case of an attack. The Acting Director did not task FBI field offices to try to determine whether any plots were being considered within the United States or to take any action to disrupt any such plots.
On July 25, 2001, a SEIB stated that one Bin Laden operation was delayed, but that others were ongoing.
On August 1, 2001, the FBI issued an advisory that in light of the increased volume of threat reporting and the upcoming anniversary of the bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa (which occurred on August 7, 1998), increased attention should be paid to security planning. The advisory noted that while most of the reporting indicated that the potential for attacks were on U.S. interests abroad, the possibility of an attack in the United States could not be discounted.
On August 3, 2001, the CIA issued an advisory concluding that the threat of impending al Qaeda attacks would likely continue indefinitely. The advisory suggested that al Qaeda was lying in wait and searching for gaps in security before moving forward with the planned attacks.
An article in the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (”PDB”) titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S” was the 36th PDB item in 2001 relating to Bin Laden or al Qaeda and the first devoted to the possibility of an attack in the United States. The PDB again mentioned the detention of the blind sheik Abdel-Rahman as motivating the attack.
On August 7, 2001, a SEIB indicated that Osama Bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States.
On August 23, 2001, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet received a briefing on Zacarias Moussaoui, titled “islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” (Both Zacarias Moussaoui and Mohammed Atta had made cropduster inquiries during the summer).
On August 24, 2001, a foreign intelligence service reported that Abu Zubaydah was considering mounting terrorist attacks in the United States to Attack Targets in the United States.
The Stipulation ended just before the most interesting pre-911 data point.
A report titled “Risk Assessment of Anthrax Threat Letters” issued on September 10, 2001. It was a study of the mailed anthrax threat in January 2001. In contrast to a 1998 study by William Patrick that had been requested by Dr. Hatfill’s employer SAIC, the Canadian study found considerable exposure to those in the room resulted when such a letter was opened. Bacillus globigii spores (in dry powder form) had been donated by the US Department of Defense (Dugway Proving Ground, Utah). “The letter was prepared by putting BG spores in the center of a sheet of paper, folding it over into thirds, placing the folded sheet into the envelope and sealing using the adhesive present on the envelope. The envelope was then shaken to mimic the handling and tumbling that would occur during its passage through the postal system.” The aerosol, produced by opening the BG spore containing envelope, was not confined to the area of the desk but spread throughout the chamber. Values were almost as high at the opposite end of the chamber, shortly after opening the envelopes. 99% of the particles collected were in the 2.5 to 10 mm size range. The report explained: “In addition, the aerosol would quickly spread throughout the room so that other workers, depending on their exact locations and the directional air flow within the office, would likely inhale lethal doses. Envelopes with the open corners not specifically sealed could also pose a threat to individuals in the mail handling system.” The authors of the study emailed the study to the head of the CDC’s investigation of the anthrax mailings but he did not open or read the email. The lead CDC investigator explained: “It is certainly relevant data, but I don’t think it would have altered the decisions that we made.” In the week after 9/11, only an estimated 16 individuals in the United States knew of the report). Question: Was Ali-Al-Timimi one of the 16 who knew of the Canadian report on the danger of anthrax aerosols from mailed anthrax? Was the Canadian report faxed to the Alibek/Bailey/Timimi fax number or sent to his mail drop?
On October 5, 2001, bail was denied for Egyptian Islamic Jihad shura member Mahjoub. The anthrax mailer then rushed to mail the potent anthrax to the author of “Leahy Law” — that allows continued appropriations to security units in the event of “extraordinary circumstances.” The postmark was Tuesday, October 9, but Monday was a holiday, leaving the possibility the anthrax was mailed as early as October 6.
In March 2003, the FBI questioned people in Ann Arbor, MI and asked them if they knew of any conspiracies against the United States. Homam Albaroudi, co-founded the Islamic Association of North America in 1993, reports he was among those the FBI sought to question. He had been a member of the Ann Arbor Muslim Community Association (“MCA”) since 1999. He served on its board for 3 years. He organized the Free Rabih Haddad Committee in December 2001 and sought to garner support for Mr. Haddad in connection with the closed proceedings relating to his immigration status. The Muslim Community Association (“MCA”) runs the Michigan Islamic Academy which is right across from the University of Michigan North Campus.
USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins supplied former Zawahiri associate Tarek Hamouda, whose laboratory was right near the University of Michigan campus and near the Michigan Islamic Academy, virulent Ames for a DARPA-funded project. The work was done at Ft. Detrick under the direct supervision of Bruce Ivins. FBI anthrax expert John Ezzell tells me that he had previously made dry powdered anthrax at Ft. Detrick for DARPA and according to Ivins, it was the closest match to the attack anthrax.
In 2001, Dr. Albaroudi was head of its PTO. As the American Civil Liberties Union explained in a suit against the United States Department of Justice in 2003, approximately 1000 people attend services at the mosque each Friday. MCA employs about 20 people and has about 700 registered, dues-paying members. Approximately 200 students were enrolled at the Michigan Islamic Academy which offered classes from pre-K through 11th grade. In addition to the standard academic curriculum used in state public schools, the ACLU explained, the school offers classes in Arabic language, Quranic recitation and Islamic Studies. The mission of the school is to provide students with the basic knowledge require to preserve their basic Islamic heritage, religion and cultural identity. Rabih Haddad, founder of the Global Relief Foundation, taught as a volunteer at the school twice a week. Bassem Khafagi, the Chairman who had been questioned about Ali Al-Timimi before 9/11 lived in Ann Arbor. The MCA held numerous rallies and fundraisers supporting Rabih Haddad in connection the closed proceedings on his immigration status. The ACLU has noted that Dr. Albaroudi stepped down from the IANA becaue of personal differences with other IANA leaders. The ACLU reports that after the FBI raided IANA’s offices in February 2003 and Al-Timimi’s residence in Northern Virginia, the FBI sought to question him notwithstanding he no longer was associated with IANA.
The ACLU explains:
“The FBI contacted Mr. Albaroudi again in or about March 2003. On this occasion, the FBI agents who contacted him said they had not singled him out but rather were interviewing many people in the area to find out whether anyone had learned of any conspiracies against the United States Mr. Albaroudi explained to the FBI that he would have contacted them of his own accord if he had learned of any conspiracies against the United States. The FBI then asked Mr. Albaroudi about another co-founder of IANA [Bassem Khafagi], who had recently been arrested for an overdraft check and then detained on immigration charges. The FBI did not pursue efforts to speak with Mr. Albaroudi after he informed them he did not feel comfortable speaking without an attorney present.”
According to Ali Al-Timimi’s lawyer, Bassem Khafagi was specifically asked about Dr. Al-Timimi’s connection to Bin Laden prior to Dr. Al-Timimi’s arrest.” Given that, according to his counsel, Al-Timimi was an “anthrax weapons suspect,” it appears that much of the investigation of former and present charity officials related to that suspicion about IANA’s celebrated speaker Al-Timimi. Whatever the US knew– and was keeping from the American public — it appears they wanted to know more. Al-Timimi had been the former assistant to the White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. GMU and DARPA had negligently allowed the infiltration at the program sponsored by the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) housed in the same building as the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense.
US DOJ: Inside the beltway, it isn’t over until the fat lady sings. It’s never too late to get it right.
From 2007 commentary on Amerithrax emphasizing that charity is as charity does:
” “It likely was a happy coincidence for Ayman, then, that an active supporter of the Taliban — and associate of Bin Laden’s spiritual advisor, dissident Saudi Sheik al-Hawali — was a graduate student in the same building where famed Russian bioweapon Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey worked at George Mason University’s Discovery Hall in a biodefense program funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”). In 2000 and 2001, Timimi was a graduate student in computational sciences. His field was bioinformatics. Al-Timimi tended to travel to give speeches on interpretation of the koran only during semester breaks. He spoke in very moderate, measured tones in the UK, Canada, and Australia — once even in China — against feminism, about the unfavorable treatment of islam in the secular media, about judgment day and the correct interpretation of the koran and hadiths, and the destruction of the Buddha statutes by the Taliban. Locally, he spoke regularly at the Falls Church center that also housed offices of the charity, the Muslim World League. Timimi was associated with the charity Islamic Assembly of North America (“IANA”), based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His speeches are widely distributed on the internet and focus on religious rather than political issues.
After a bombing raid at a Qaeda camp in Darunta, Afghanistan US forces found 100+ pages of typed and handwritten pages of documents that shed light on Al Qaeda’s early anthrax planning. It was not clear whether or not they had yet acquired virulent anthrax or weaponized it, but it was clear that the planning was well along. When Cheney was briefed on the documents in late 2001, he immediately called a meeting of FBI and CIA. “I’ll be very blunt,” the Vice President started. “There is no priority of this government more important than finding out if there is a link between what’s happened here and what we’ve found over there with Qaeda.” A June 1999 memo from Ayman to military commander Atef said that “said the program should seek cover and talent in educational institutions, which it said were ‘more beneficial to us and allow easy access to specialists, which will greatly benefit us in the first stage, God willing.’ ” Thus, in determining whether Al Qaeda was responsible for the anthrax mailings in the Fall of 2001, the FBI and CIA knew based on the growing documentary evidence available by December, that Al Qaeda operatives were likely associated with non-governmental organizations and working under the cover of universities. From early on, the CIA and FBI knew that charity is as charity does.”
Anthrax: Details of Possible US Biodefense Insider Connection
Ross Getman19 maart 2007
http://www.indymedia.be/index.html%3Fq=node%252F8004.html
Ross Getman19 maart 2007 – 21:09
The civil rights suit by US scientist Dr. Steve Hatfill in a Virginia federal district court hit a road bump today as individual government defendants were dismissed insofar as they were sued in their individual capacity. But along with Khalid Mohammed’s confession about supervising a cell to weaponize anthrax for use against the US this week, the court’s dismissal provides a reminder that there is still no answer to the mystery of the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings in the US. There may be lots of reason that the United States government finds itself in an awkward situation both in the pending civil rights litigation and the anthrax investigation generally.
After the September 11 attacks, Pakistani intelligence agents started checking on Arab university students in the area. Mohammed’s teachers told investigators that they had not seen him on campus since late August. Agents staked out his apartment in Karachi and nabbed him upon his return. Mohammed was wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole. In 1996, Pakistani authorities officials had arrested Mohammed in connection with the November 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. That attack was financed by the Canadian islamist and charity worker, Khadr and his charity Mercy International, a charity funded by Osama Bin Laden’s late brother-in-law Khalifa and founded by Saudi dissident Sheik Al-Hawali. Ayman Zawahiri, speaking for the military wing of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, known as the Vanguards of Conquest, claimed responsibility for the bombing. Mohammed was released without being charged. Mohammed re-enrolled at university in 1999. He was one of at least two microbiologist lab technicians who were rendered by the CIA. Saeed Mohammed was not particularly expert — and spent most of his time in Karachi procuring equipment. Washington announced Saeed had been rendered, but senior Pakistani officials continued to deny that the transfer had taken place.
The scene would repeat itself at a different airport two months later with the rendition of Ahmed Agiza, former head of the Vanguards of Conquest before Zawahiri. Swedish officials prepared an expulsion order at 4 p.m. on December 18. Agiza, a 39-year old physician, was picked up on the street by 6 p.m. and he was in the air by 10 p.m. In a small room at the airport, six-hooded figures took Agiza and another prisoner and changed them into dark red overalls. The men cut off his clothes, without having to remove his handcuffs and leg irons. They inserted a suppository containing a sedative while putting on diapers. Then they hung him, blindfolded and hooded, in a harness in the plane. Dr. Agiza had been convicted in his absence in 1999, together with 106 others, by a military court in Cairo for membership in the Vanguards of Conquest (“Talal al-Fateh”). The crew of the plane did not use the term “extraordinary rendition” — they just referred to the process as “snatches.” The Egyptian government had promised not to torture the suspects, but Agiza claims that they applied electric shocks through electrodes fastened to sensitive parts of his body — to his genitals, nipples, tongue, ear lobes, and underarms.
These renditions were just two of the opening volleys in what would prove to be a 5 year effort to find the parties responsible for the letters containing anthrax sent to US Senators and media outlets. The anthrax was mailed shortly after the planes attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In 1999, captured leaders of Zawahiri’s Vanguards of Conquest had said that Ayman was going to use weaponized anthrax against US targets in retaliation for the rendering of EIJ leaders and supporters to places like Cairo and Amman. The letter to the Senator Leahy, author of the “Leahy Law” that permitted continued appropriations to security units under “extraordinary circumstances”, read: “We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid?”
The tactic of lethal letters was not merely the modus operandi of the militant islamists inspired by Ayman Zawahiri, it was their signature. The islamists sent letter bombs in late December 1996 from Alexandria, Egypt to newspaper offices in New York City and Washington, D.C. and people in symbolic positions. Musical Christmas cards apparently postmarked in Alexandria, Egypt on December 21, 1996, (which is Laylat al-Qadr, literally the Night of Decree or Night of Measures), contained improvised explosive devices. The letters were sent in connection with the earlier bombing of the World Trade Center and the imprisonment of the blind sheik, Sheik Abdel Rahman. The former leader of the Egyptian Al-Gamaa al-Islamiya (“Islamic Group”), Abdel-Rahman was also a spiritual leader of Al Qaeda. The letter bombs were sent in connection with the treatment of the Egyptian islamists imprisoned for the earlier attack on the WTC and a related plot. The purpose of the letter bombs — which resulted in minimal casualty — was to send a message. (There initially was an outstanding $2 million reward — under the rewards for justice program, the reward now is up to $5 million.) There was no claim of responsibility. There was no explanation. Once one had been received, the next ten, mailed on two separate dates, were easily collected. Sound familiar? Two bombs were also sent to Leavenworth, where a key WTC 1993 defendant was imprisoned, addressed to “Parole Officer.” (The position does not exist). The FBI suspected the Vanguards of Conquest, a mysterious group led by Egyptian Islamic Jihad head Ayman Zawahiri. The group can be thought of as either the military wing of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad or perhaps just EIJ by another name. It is sometimes known as the New Jihad.
Zawahiri was head of Al Qaeda’s biochemical program. Ayman named it Zabadi or “Curdled Milk.” The CIA has known of Zawahiri’s plans to use anthrax since July 1998, when the CIA seized a disc from Ayman Zawahiri’s right-hand, Ahmed Mabruk during his arrest outside a restaurant by the CIA in Baku, Azerbaijan. Mabruk, at the time, was the head of Jihad’s military operations. Mabruk was handed over to Egyptian authorities. Mabruk was a close associate and had been his former cellmate in Dagestan in 1996. Mabruk would be at Ayman’s side while Ayman would fall to his knees during trial and weep and invoke Allah. Their captors reportedly did not know the true identity of the prisoners. The CIA refused to give the FBI Mabruk’s laptop. FBI’s Bin Laden expert John O’Neill, head of the FBI’s New York office, tried to get around this by sending an agent to Azerbaijan to get copies of the computer files from the Azerbaijan government. The FBI finally got the files after O’Neill persuaded President Clinton to personally appeal to the president of Azerbaijan for the computer files. FBI Special Agent Dan Coleman would later describe the laptop as the “Rosetta Stone of Al Qaeda.” O’Neill died on 9/11 in his role as head of World Trade Center security. He died with the knowledge that Ayman Zawahiri planned to attack US targets with anthrax — and that Zawahiri does not make a threat that he does not intend to try to keep.
Mabruk claimed that Zawahiri intended to use anthrax against US targets. At the time, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (“DTRA”) set up a program at Lawrence Livermore to combat the Bin Laden anthrax threat. The CIA also snatched Egyptian Al-Najjar, another senior Al Qaeda member (a shura or policy-making council member no less) who had been working for the Egyptian intelligence services. Al-Najjar confirmed Ayman’s intent to use weaponized anthrax against US targets in connection with the detention of militant islamists in a sworn lengthy confession. Even Zawahiri’s friend, Cairo lawyer al-Zayat, who was the blind sheik’s attorney, in March 1999 said that Bin Laden and Zawahiri were likely to resort to the biological and chemical agents they possessed given the extradition pressure senior Al Qaeda leaders faced. An islamist who had been a close associate of Zawahiri later would explain that Zawahiri spent a decade and had made 15 separate attempts to recruit the necessary expertise to weaponize anthrax in Russia and the Middle East.
Zawahiri was associated with a faction of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad known as the Vanguards of Conquest. Zawahiri and the Vanguards of Conquest were seeking to recreate Mohammed’s taking of mecca by a small band through violent attacks on Egyptian leaders. By the late 1990s, Zawahiri had determined that the Egyptian Islamic Jihad should focus on its struggle against the United States and hold off on further attacks against the Egyptian regime.
A February 1999 letter signed by “Army of Suicidals Group 66, Bin Laden Militant Wing” threatened anthrax attacks against Westerners if they stayed in Yemen beyond a 11-day ultimatum ending February 27, 1999. Investigators considered a possible connection to the attempted extradition to Yemen of the London-based Egyptian Islamic preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri.
Emails in the Spring of 1999 from Zawahiri to Egyptian Mohammed Atef, Al Qaeda’s military commander, and former Cairo police sergeant, indicate that Ayman was a close student of the USAMRIID anthrax program. He believed that the Koran instructed that a jihadist should use the weapons used by the crusader. “What we know is that he’s always said it was a religious obligation to have the same weapons as their enemies,” former CIA Bin Laden unit counter terrorism chief Michael Scheuer said.
It likely was a happy coincidence for Ayman, then, that an active supporter of the Taliban — and associate of Bin Laden’s spiritual advisor, dissident Saudi Sheik al-Hawali — was a graduate student in the same building where famed Russian bioweapon Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey worked at George Mason University’s Discovery Hall in a biodefense program funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”). In 2000 and 2001, Timimi was a graduate student in computational sciences. His field was bioinformatics. Al-Timimi tended to travel to give speeches on interpretation of the koran only during semester breaks. He spoke in very moderate, measured tones in the UK, Canada, and Australia — once even in China — against feminism, about the unfavorable treatment of islam in the secular media, about judgment day and the correct interpretation of the koran and hadiths, and the destruction of the Buddha statutes by the Taliban. Locally, he spoke regularly at the Falls Church center that also housed offices of the charity, the Muslim World League. Timimi was associated with the charity Islamic Assembly of North America (“IANA”), based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His speeches are widely distributed on the internet and focus on religious rather than political issues.
Among the supporters of these militant islamists were people who blended into society and were available to act when another part of the network requested it. Two letters — one typed and an earlier handwritten one — written by a microbiologist named Rauf detail his efforts to obtain a pathogenic strain of anthrax. He attended conferences on anthrax and dangerous pathogens such as one in September 2000 at the University of Plymouth cosponsored by DERA, the UK Defense Evaluation and Research Agency. A handwritten letter from 1999 is written on the letterhead of the oldest microbiology society in Great Britain. The 1999 documents seized in Afghanistan by US forces by Rauf describe the author’s visit to the special confidential room at the BL-3 facility where 1000s of pathogenic cultures were kept; his consultation with other scientists on some of technical problems associated with weaponizing anthrax; the bioreactor and laminar flows to be used in Al Qaeda’s anthrax lab; a conference on dangerous pathogens cosponsored by UK’s Porton Down and Society for Applied Microbiology he attended, and the need for vaccination and containment. Rauf had arranged to take a lengthy post-doc leave from his employer and was grousing that what the employer would be paying during that 12-month period was inadequate. Malaysian Yazid Sufaat, who told his wife he was working for a Taliban medical brigade, got the job instead of Rauf.
I have uploaded a scanned copy of a typed memo reporting on a lab visit, which included tour of a BioLevel 3 facility, where there were 1000s of pathogenic samples. The memo mentioned the pending paperwork relating to export of the pathogens. The documents were provided to me by the Defense Intelligence Agency (“DIA”) under the Freedom of Information Act. I also have uploaded a copy of earlier correspondence between Dr. Rauf and Dr. Zawahiri from before the lab visit described in the typed memo. The handwritten letter was reporting on a different, earlier visit, where the anthrax had been nonpathogenic. Finally, on the same linked page, there are handwritten notes about the plan to use non-governmental-organizations (NGOs), technical institutes and medical labs as cover for aspects of the work, and training requirements for the various personnel at the lab in Afghanistan.
US-trained Malaysian biochemist Yazid Sufaat met with 9/11 plotters and two hijackers in January 2000. Sufaat was a member of Al Qaeda and a member of Jemaah Islamiah (“JI”). JI has ties with the Moro Front. Sufaat used his company called Green Laboratory Medicine to buy items useful to Al Qaeda. Zacarias Moussaoui, who had a crop dusting manual when he was arrested, stayed at Sufaat’s condominium in 2000 when he was trying to arrange for flight lessons in Malaysia. Yazid Sufaat provided Moussaoui with a letter indicating that he was a marketing representative for Infocus Technologies signed “Yazid Sufaat, Managing Director.” Sufaat had given Moussaoui an e-mail greenlab@usa.net that was accessed by authorities shortly after 9/11. The crop dusters were to be part of a “second wave.” Al Qaeda’s regional operative, Hambali, was at the key January 2000 meeting and supervised Sufaat. Khalid Mohammed’s involvement dates back to Bojinka, as did Hambali’s. The money for Bojinka, a plot to simultaneously bomb airliners and to assassinate the Pope, went from Bin Laden’s brother-in-law Khalifa to the Abu Sayyaf Group, Al Qaeda’s primary Philippine affiliate, and then on to the cell that included KSM.
When 9/11 hijacker Saeed Al-Ghamdi videotaped his will in 2000, he praised Saudi Sheik Al-Hawali. Telephone records for Mounir el-Mottasedeq, a Moroccan convicted in Germany of helping Mohammed Atta and other members of the “Hamburg cell” that planned 9/11 show that, in the months prior to the attacks, he made repeated calls to Al-Hawali’s Riyadh offices.
In late January 2001, the Immigration Minister in Canada and Justice minister received an anthrax threat in the form of anthrax hoax letters. The letters were sent upon the announcement of bail hearing for a detained Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader who had managed Bin Laden’s farm in Sudan. Canada announced on January 18, 2001 that an Egyptian Islamic Jihad Shura member, Mahmoud Mahjoub, would have a January 30 bail hearing. The court dismissed a motion directed to the constitutionality of his detention on January 23. Soon after, someone sent an anthrax threat letter to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. Minister Caplan had signed the security certificate authorizing Mahjoub’s detention. After arriving in Canada in 1996, Mahjoub continued to be in contact with high level militants, including his former supervisor, al-Duri, an Iraqi reputed to be Bin Laden’s chief procurer or weapons of mass destruction. In the early 1990s, al-Duri lived in Phoenix and then in the late 1990s lived in British Columbia. In the intervening years, he had worked for Bin Laden’s businesses in Sudan and had been involved in an attempt to buy uranium for Bin Laden.
In February 2001, the CIA briefed the President in a “Presidential Daily Bulletin “(“PDB”) on “Bin Laden’s Interest in Biological and Radiological Weapons” in a still-classified briefing memorandum. Like the PDB on Bin Laden’s threat to use planes to free the blind sheik, the February 2001 would illustrate the wisdom that most intelligence is open source. There was little about Ayman’ s plan to use anthrax against US targets in retaliation for rendering of EIJ leaders that was not available to anyone paying attention.
On March 14, 2001, former USAMRIID head and Ames researcher Charles L. Bailey and famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek filed a patent application for a process to treat cell culture with hydrophobic silicon dioxide so as to permit greater concentration upon drying. Dr. Bailey was in Room 156B of GMU’s Discovery Hall. at the Center for Biodefense. Ali Al-Timimi, an associate of radical Saudi sheik al-Hawali, considered to be Bin Laden’s spiritual mentor, was a graduate student who worked in the same building.
The website of the Islamic Assembly of North America (“IANA”) contained “Provision of Suicide Operations,” dated June 19, 2001, that stated: “The mujahid [or warrior] must kill himself if he knows this will lead to killing a great number of the enemies … or demolishing a center vital to the enemy or its military forces. … In this new era, this can be accomplished with the modern means of bombing or bringing down an airplane on an important location that will cause the enemy great losses.” On August 26, 2001, IANA’s websitewww.islamway.com published a propaganda statement that encouraged individuals to join arms against the West titled “An Invitation to Jihad,” stating that “t]he mujahid brothers will accept you with open arms and within a period of two weeks you will be given commando training and will be sent to the frontline.” Whatever the debate on whether nonconventional weapons were forbidden (haram), some of the sheiks whose fatwas were appearing on the IANA website were likely to take a more permissive view.
A week after 9/11, someone mailed some newspapers letters containing anthrax and a message urging the destruction of the US and Israel. Then, on or about October 6, 2001, someone sent very fine powderized anthrax to US Senators Leahy and Daschle with a similar message. An infant visiting ABC was one of the first affected, which should have been haram in anyone’s book. Five people died.
One of the first things FBI Special Agent Jack Cloonan from the FBI’s New York Office did after the anthrax mailings was to fly down to Sudan with CIA agents and meet with al-Duri, Mahjoub’s former supervisor at Bin Laden’s farm in Sudan. After 9/11, FBI agents questioned Ali Al-Timimi, a microbiology graduate student in a program jointly run by George Mason University and the American Type Culture Collection (“ATCC”). An undercover operation was run at the Falls Church islamic center.
By spring of 2002, Ali Al-Timimi was on GMU staff and paid $70,000 a year. At sometime in 2002, officials learned of communications between Al-Timimi and Bin Laden’s spiritual adviser, radical Saudi sheik al-Hawali.
In March 2002, a crude biological weapons site was found. U.S. forces discovered a site near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar that appeared to be an Al Qaeda biological weapons lab under construction. Zawahiri’s plan, evidenced in the documents found previous in the Fall, was to move the location of the lab every 3 months.
In August 2002, Afghan police found a store of chemicals in a house in Kabul formerly occupied by a Saudi non-governmental organization, the WAFA Humanitarian Organization. Local media reports called it a terrorist laboratory. “Some containers and documents have been found by the police authorities,” a spokesman for international peacekeepers said. One local report said that the discovery included 36 types of chemicals, explosive materials, fuses, laboratory equipment and some “terroristic guide books.” It said the laboratory was found in a residence in the diplomatic area of Kabul in a building that had been used by an Arab national who headed the group prior to 9/11. WAFA was a militant supporter of the Taliban. Documents found in WAFA’s offices in Afghanistan revealed that the charity was intimately involved in assassination plots against U.S. citizens as well as the distribution of “how to” manuals on chemical and biological warfare. U.S. officials have described WAFA as a key component of Bin Laden’s organization.
In 2002, a man Singh tried to purchase over the internet a wireless video module and a control module for use in an unmanned aerial vehicle (“UAV”). He chose an airborne video system with a camera and transmitter able to transmit video images from a UAV back to a receiver from as far as 15 miles away. The video camera could be used in military reconnaissance and in helping aim artillery and other weaponry across enemy lines. Singh placed his order from England, but the company was unable to confirm Singh’s overseas credit card. Two young men from Northern Virginia, among the group later known as the “Virginia Paintball Defendants,” Chapman and Khan, assisted him in completing the purchases. In the summer of 2002, Singh visited Virginia, staying first with one of them and then with another. Ali Timimi was unindicted co-conspirator number 1 in the Virginia Paintball Case, and was only later identified by Prosecutors (and then separately indicted). As the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals later explained, the pair “attended the Dar al Arqam Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia where Ali Timimi, a primary lecturer, spoke of the necessity to engage in violent jihad against the enemies of Islam and the “end of time” battle between Muslims and non-Muslims.”
Ali Al-Timimi drafted a letter from dissident Saudi sheik Hawali dated October 6, 2002 and had it hand delivered it to every member of the US Congress just before their vote authorizing the use of force against Iraq. The letter was from al-Hawali (not Timimi), and warned of the disastrous consequences that would follow an invasion of Iraq. Dr. Timimi’s defense committee explained on their website:
“Prior to the Iraq war authorization vote, Dr. Al-Timimi drafted a letter to the US Congress cautioning the disasterous consequences that would follow a pre-emptive strike. Because Dr. Al-Timimi felt that he did not have enough stature to send a letter in his name on behalf of Muslims, he contacted Dr. Al-Hawali among others to send the letter. Dr. Al-Hawali agreed and sent a revised version which Dr. Al-Timimi then edited and had hand delivered to every member of Congress.”
Rm 154A in George Mason’s Discovery Hall (down from Dr. Bailley in Rm 156B) would be Victor Morozov’s room number when he first assumed Timimi’s phone number in 2004 (and before he moved to the newly constructed, adjacent Bull Run Hall). Morozov was the co-inventor with Dr. Bailey of the related cell culture process under which the silica was removed from the spore surface — but with the silicon still detectable by an EDX (Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis) by reason of having been absorbed in the spore coat. (Compare 2003 and 2004 GMU Directories at Wayback Machine at archive.org)
Later that year, the head of the wing of the Al-Gamaa al-Islamiya (Egyptian Islamic Group) summarized the Amerithrax investigation, dedicating the treatise on American intelligence and law enforcement to: “To the pious and the hidden who are not known when they come and who are not missed when they disappear — To those whom their God will answer when they pray to Him. To all the eyes that are vigilant late at night to bring victory to this religion.” It was publicized by a former EIJ member who had been detained in London in 1999 and then released, and now was an oft-quoted expert on Zawahiri and his followers.
In mid-February 2003, Abdel Rahman’s son, who was on the WMD committed with Egyptian Midhat Mursi, was captured in Quetta, Pakistan. That month, a chemistry professor tasked with working on biological and chemical weapons met with Uzair Paracha and others at an ice cream parlor. The plan was to smuggle a chemical into New York City using a large shipping container controlled by Paracha’s father. In connection with that prosecution, the Assistant United States Attorney would later say that MIT-graduate Aafia Siddiqui was prepared to participate in an anthrax attack if asked. In the Spring of 2003, Aafia Siddiqui married Amar al-Baluchi, who had been a key lieutenant for KSM during the 9/11 planes operation.
In late February 2003, authorities searched the townhouse of Ali Al-Timimi, a graduate student and employee in bioinformatics at George Mason University who shared a fax with famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head and anthrax researcher Charles Bailey. Al-Timimi was a celebrated speaker and religious scholar associated with the Islamic Assembly of North America (“IANA”), an Ann Arbor-based charity. The Washington Post later summarized: “The agents reached an alarming conclusion: ‘Timimi is an Islamist supporter of Bin Laden’ who was leading a group ‘training for jihad,’ the agent wrote in the affidavit. The FBI even came to speculate that Timimi, a doctoral candidate pursuing cancer gene research, might have been involved in the anthrax attacks.”
A walk-in to the CIA then led to the dramatic capture of Khalid Mohammed, Al Qaeda’s #3, on March 23, 2003. Mohammed allegedly was hiding in the home of the Pakistani bacteriologist Dr. Abdul Qadoos Khan. Along with Zawahiri, Abdel Rahman and his two sons have had considerable influence over Bin Laden. He reportedly treated them like sons. Although while in jail in the early 1980s, Zawahiri caused considerable tension by challenging the blind sheik’s ability to lead a coalition of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Egyptian Islamic Group, Zawahiri and Bin Laden are Rahman’s friends. The imprisoned WTC 1993 plotter Yousef was KSM’s nephew. Indeed, KSM claims to have been responsible for the planning of WTC 1993. The leaders in charge of Al Qaeda’s anthrax production program thus had a close connection to those imprisoned in connection with the earlier bombing of the World Trade Center. WTC 1993 mastermind Ramzi Yousef had been the mentor of the new husband of MIT-graduate Aafia Siddiqui.
In March 2003, handwritten notes and files on a laptop seized upon the capture of KSM, Al Qaeda’s #3, included a feasible anthrax production plan using a spray dryer and addressed the recruitment of necessary expertise. Although the details of the documents on Mohammed’s computer may (or may not) point to possible difficulties in aerial dispersal, they are fully consistent with the product used in the anthrax mailings. Al Qaeda had both the means and opportunity. Mohammed told his interrogators that Moussaoui was not going to be part of 9/11 but was to be part of a “second wave.” KSM explained that Moussaoui’s inquiries about crop dusters may have been related to the anthrax work being done by US-trained biochemist and Al Qaeda operative, Malaysian Yazid Sufaat. Zacarias Moussaoui once told the judge at his trial in a filing that he wants “anthrax for Jew sympathizer only.”
Microbiologist Abdul Qadoos Khan was charged along with his son, Ahmed, for allegedly harboring KSM. As of March 28, 2003, he was in a hospital for a cardiac problem and had been granted “pre-arrest bail.”
A man named Muklis Yunos, who reportedly received training on use of anthrax as a biological weapon in Afghanistan according to Philippine intelligence reports, was arrested on May 25, 2003, and cooperated with authorities over a bucket of spicy Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yunos had been Hambali’s right-hand man and was in charge of special operations of Moro Islamic Liberation Front (“MILF”).
In early June 2003, a Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) report publicly concluded that the reason for Mohammed Atta’s and Zacarias Moussaoui’s inquiries into cropdusters was for the contemplated use in dispersing biological agents such as anthrax. It had long been known Osama Bin Laden was interested in using cropdusters to disperse biological agents (since the testimony of millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam). An early September 2003 Newsweek article included a rumor by a Taliban source that at a meeting in April 2003 Bin Laden was planning an “unbelievable” biological attack, the plans for which had suffered a setback upon the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He had been captured the previous month in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
The attorney for White House staffer Scooter Libby would reveal that Libby in July 2003 was preoccupied with many national security issues, including the possibility al-Qaida had brought anthrax into the United States. He met more than once with Germs author Judy Miller in DC. Libby’s attorney read about these threats from a court-approved summary of classified information in arguing that Libby had honestly forgotten what he told reporters about Valerie Plame being a CIA operative. (When Libby’s attorneys announced that Libby in fact was not going to testify, the Judge excluded any testimony about terrorist matters in July 2003 that Libby may have addressed.)
Anthrax lab coordinator Hambali was arrested in August 2003 in the quiet city of Ayuttullah, Thailand, which is about half way between Bangkok and Chang Mai. He was sent to Jordan. In Autumn 2003, extremely virulent anthrax was found at a house in Kandahar — after regional operative Hambali was harshly interrogated. Al Qaeda had the extremely virulent anthrax before 9/11. Sufaat’s two principal assistants — and Egyptian and a Sudanese man — were also captured and are in custody. They had been assisting Sufaat prior to 9/11. The FBI dropped the continuous conspicuous surveillance of Dr. Steve Hatfill in early Fall 2003, after extremely virulent anthrax that they knew could be readily weaponized — i.e., treated under this process so as to permit greater concentration — was found at a house in Kandahar pointed out by Hambali. Prior to that, the “Hatfill theory” had been an alternative hypothesis pursued by one of the squads within Amerithrax.
In connection with defending a civil rights claim by former USAMRIID scientist Steve Hatfill, the FBI described the anthrax probe as “unprecedented in the FBI’s 95-year history.” Agents had spent 231,000 hours up to that date. The head of the investigation explained that the investigation as “active and ongoing” and said agents’ time was divided between checking into individuals who might be connected to the attacks and a scientific effort to determine how the spores themselves were made using “cutting-edge forensic techniques and analysis.” The court papers did not indicate that Dr. Hatfill was still among those being investigated. Hatfill was labeled a “person of interest” in the probe in August 2002 by Attorney General John Ashcroft in responding to press inquiries for the reason for searches and surveillance that Dr. Hatfill had reported. By late 2003, all conspicuous surveillance had ended, according two unnamed federal law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The head of the investigation cautioned that Hatfill’s lawsuit could force the FBI to divulge its “interest in specific individuals,” who could flee the country, destroy evidence, intimidate witnesses, or concoct alibis.
In mid-December 2003, two brothers, Michael Ray and James Stubbs, were arrested in a Manila suburb where they were fundraising for a charity that supported the militant islamists and allegedly in contact with militant brothers. Michael Ray, an American, had been a HVAC technician at Lawrence Livermore near San Francisco — until March 2000 — where the Defense Threat Reduction Agency had launched a program to combat the Bin Laden anthrax threat in 1998. His brother, James, Jr., also known as Jamil Daud Mujahid. James reportedly was monitored saying that he had been a classmate of bin Laden and had named his son Osama. James once was a policeman in California and a teacher in Missouri. James allegedly met with members of Abu Sayyef and Moro Islamic Liberation Front while in the Philippines doing charity fundraising. The brothers had been under surveillance at the time of their arrest. James Stubbs, according to some reports, had recently left a job as a teacher in California to study Arabic in Sudan. Other reports suggested that his recent work instead involved training dogs. Authorities allege that the brothers in May 2003 had met with several charity groups suspected of being al-Qaida fronts, founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law Khalifa.
In mid-April 2004, Patrick Hughes, Lieutenant General (Retired), Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis, Homeland Security Department testified before the 9/11 Commission. He explained that interrogations and other evidence revealed that Al Qaeda wanted to strike the US with a nonconventional weapon, most notably anthrax.
In May 2004, Palestinian Marwan Jabour was arrested by authorities in Lahore, Pakistan. “He was in touch with top Al Qaeda operational figures and was strongly linked to Al Qaeda chemical and biological efforts and had provided some funding for an Al Qaeda [biological weapons lab,” one anonymous counterintelligence official was quoted in the press as saying. After dinner with a Professor at Lahore University, some men on the street approached him and asked him about his friend, before forcing him into a car. The men also arrested the Professor and another friend who had joined them for dinner. The men took him to the local station of the Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence (“ISI”) When finally released two years later, he gave a rare glimpse into the conditions in which detainees have been secretly held. He first was held for a month at a secret detention facility operated by the U.S. and Pakistan, as described in detail in the report “Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention.” He was flown to a CIA secret prison, that he believes was in Afghanistan, before finally being flown to Jordan last summer, transferred to Israel and eventually released in the Gaza Strip. He admits having trained in Afghanistan in 1998 and then fighting with the Taliban. He acknowledges helping some Al Qaeda figures escape to Pakistan in 2003. Jabour denies any ties to terrorism. He says the mujahideen he helped relocate to Pakistan in 2003, because of his familiarity with the area and his fluency in Urdu, were “unaffiliated” and had not sworn an oath of loyalty to Al Qaeda.
In a statement issued June 16, 2004, the 9/11 Commission Staff concluded that “Al Qaeda had an ambitious biological weapons program and was making advances in its ability to produce anthrax prior to September 11. According to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, al Qaeda’s ability to conduct an anthrax attack is one of the most immediate threats the United States is likely to face.” On August 9, 2004, it was announced that in the Spring of 2001, a man named El-Shukrijumah, also known as Jafar the Pilot, who was part of a “second wave,” had been casing New York City helicopters. Photographs from a seized computer disc included the controls and the locks on the door between the passengers and pilot. In a bulletin, the FBI noted that the surveillance might relate to a plot to disperse a chemical or biological weapon.
MSNBC, relying on an unnamed FBI spokesperson, reported that the FBI has narrowed the pool of labs known to have had the US Army anthrax strain known as the ” Ames strain” that was a match from 16 to 4 but could not rule out that it was obtained overseas. Thus, not only was it likely that an Al Qaeda perpetrator was associated with an NGO and university, but there had to have been access to a virulent anthrax strain that was only in a score or so of known labs, most of which were affiliated in some way with the US government. Although sometimes reports referred to its “ubiquitous” distribution, the major revelation on the subject came in 2005 when pursuant to two treaties, samples of anthrax was evaluated from Georgia and Azerbaijan and it was determined that former Republics of Russia also had Ames. Just as former bioweaponeer Ken Alibek had said in 2001, Russia had obtained Ames years earlier through a spy at Ft. Detrick.
Authorities had received information, for example, from at least one detainee at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that there was an anthrax storage facility in the Kabul area. Amerithrax Agents checked the Kabul area in May 2004 but came up empty. Then in November 2004, on further information, agents had spent several weeks unsuccessfully searching an area in the Kandahar mountains, several hundred miles outside of Kabul. In 2005, an internal report was prepared summarizing the status of the investigation.
On March 31, 2005, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, in its “Report to the President of the United States,” concluded “al-Qai’da’s biological program was further along, particularly with regard to Agent X [anthrax], than pre-War intelligence indicated. The program was extensive, well-organized, and operated for two years before September 11, but intelligence insights into the program were limited. The program involved several sites around Afghanistan. Two of these sites contained commercial equipment and were operated by individuals with special training.” One technician was named Barq. Another was named Wahdan.
In a court filing dated May 20, 2005, an attorney for the United States Department of Justice wrote: “The investigation into the anthrax attacks is one of the largest and most complex investigations in law enforcement history. To bring those responsible to justice, the investigation remains intensely active.”
In June 2005, President of Pakistan Gen. Pervez Musharraf told CNN in a filmed interview: “These people were involved in the .. production of anthrax.”
After a small plane accidentally entered restricted airspace near the White House and Capitol in 2005, the danger passed quickly, but not before bringing back frightening memories for Senator Patrick Leahy.
“Having been one of the two Senators they tried to kill with the anthrax letter– yes, I do react to that. But here I’m far more concerned about all of the other people, because whatever the threat was they thought it was enough to threaten everybody here. And there are thousands of good men and women who work on the hill, plus the tourists, the visitors and we want to keep them safe.”
In a press conference in October 2005, Director Mueller said that the FBI was pursuing all domestic and international leads. He said “remember Oklahoma City. Remember 9/11.” He declined to say if they had a suspect. That year, FBI agents visited Asia, Africa and Afghanistan in the course of the Amerithrax investigation.
In the opening argument of the Uzair Paracha trial in November 2005, the Assistant United States Attorney claimed that MIT graduate Aafia Siddiqui was willing to help with an anthrax attack. Any evidence supporting the dramatic statement was later excluded from evidence on the grounds that it would be unduly prejudicial.
That month, Interpol head Ronald Noble urged: “Al Qaeda’s global network, its proven capabilities, its deadly history, its desire to do the unthinkable and the evidence collected about its bio-terrorist ambitions, ominously portend a clear and present danger of the highest order.” Henry Crumpton, the U.S. State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator agreed: “The threat is real. But what really concerns me is weapons of mass destruction,” Crumpton said, pointing to this evidence U.S. officials said they found in Afghanistan that al-Qaeda was working on anthrax weapons. From 1999 to 2001, Crumpton was deputy chief of operations for the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. He led the CIA’s counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2002.
The CIA has been quietly building a case that the anthrax mailings were an international plot. This is old news. It’s just no longer bureaucratically impolite to openly contest the FBI’s early theory about a lone, American scientist. Many people have argued that a US-based Al Qaeda operative is behind the earlier Fall 2001 anthrax mailings in the US, and that the mailings served as a threat and warning. Princeton islamist scholar Bernard Lewis has explained that while islamists may disagree about whether killing innocents is sanctioned by the laws of jihad, extremists like Zawahiri agree that notice must be given before biochemical weapons are used. “The Prophet’s guidance,” says Michael Scheuer, an al-Qaeda analyst retired from the CIA who once headed its Bin Laden unit, “was always, Before you attack someone, warn them very clearly.” The anthrax mailings followed the pattern of letters they sent in January 1997 to newspaper branches in Washington, D.C. and New York City, as well as symbolic targets. The letter bombs were sent in connection with the detention of the blind sheik Abdel Rahman and those responsible for the earlier World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
A key question is how they acquired the anthrax strain — the “Ames strain” first isolated by the Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Lab in 1980. The US Army recipe from the 1950s was not used, and obtaining the unprocessed Ames strain of anthrax does not warrant the weight given it by some press accounts. Although coveted as the “gold standard” in vaccine research, it is known to have been at about a score of labs and over the years an estimated 1,000 people may have had access.
Al Qaeda’s anthrax production plans on Khalid Mohammed’s computer, according to an unnamed source relied upon by the Washington Post, did not evidence knowledge of advanced techniques in the most efficient biological weapons. At least according to the public comments by bioweaponeer experts William Patrick and Kenneth Alibek, under the optimal method, there is no electrostatic charge. In the case of the anthrax used in the mailings, there was an electrostatic charge. (According to the technical representative for Bucchi, a static charge is unavoidable with their mini-spraydryer). Although there was a dominance of single spores and a trillion spore concentration, there were clumps as large as 40 – 100 microns. (Spores must be no bigger than 5 microns to be inhalable.) The sophistication and effectiveness of the product perhaps lay not in just its concentration, but in its crumbliness and how it floated right out of the envelope. The “trillion spore” issue was an aspect of the mistaken theory that state sponsorship was necessarily indicated. Many point to the trillion spore concentration as extraordinary. It is far simpler, however, to achieve a trillion spore concentration in the production of a few grams than in industrial processing typical of a state sponsored lab.
An FBI Lab scientist on composition of powders from the Hazardous Materials Response Unit published the comment in 2006: “Individuals familiar with the composition of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents. However, a widely circulated misconception is that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapon production. The issue is usually the basis for implying that the powders were inordinately dangerous compared to spores alone. The persistent credence given to this impression fosters erroneous preconceptions, which may misguide research and preparedness efforts and generally detract from the magnitude of hazards posed by simple spore preparations.”
In January 2007, Muhammad Hanif, a spokesman for the Taliban, spoke quietly to the camera. Taliban leader Mullah Omar, he said, was living in Quetta under the protection of the Pakistan ISI. In a press conference, the governor of the province on the border of Afghanistan and Pakisan reported that they had found packets of powdered anthrax in his home upon his arrest. As reported by Afghan Islamic Press news agency and translated by BBC Worldwide Monitoring, the Governor said: “A biological substance, anthrax, was also seized from those arrested. They planned to send the substance in envelopes addressed to government officials….”
In March 2007, Khalid Mohammed confessed before a military tribunal that “I was directly in charge, after the death of Sheikh Abu Hafs [Atef] of managing and following up on “the cell for the production of biological weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on dirty-bomb operations on American soil.”
On the issue of motive and the reason Senators Daschle and Leahy would have been targeted — they are commonly simplistically viewed as “liberals.” Zawahiri likely targeted Senators Daschle and Leahy to receive anthrax letters, in addition to various media outlets, because of the appropriations made pursuant to the “Leahy Law” to military and security forces. That money has prevented the militant islamists from achieving their goals. Al Qaeda members and sympathizers feel that the FBI’s involvement in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines undermines their prospects of establishing a worldwide Caliphate. The Fall 2001 letter from Al Qaeda spokesman al- Kuwaiti, directed to the American public — but which was not released until 2006 — claimed that the green light had been given for a US -bio attack (1) from folks that were US-based, (2) above suspicion, and (3) with access to US government and intelligence information. He explained: “There is no animosity between us. You involved yourselves in this battle. The war is between us and the Jews. You interfered in our countries and influenced our governments to strike against the Moslems.”
Senator Leahy was Chairman of both the Judiciary Committee overseeing the FBI and Appropriations Subcommittee in charge of foreign aid to these countries. In late September 2001, it was announced that the President was seeking a blanket waiver that would lift all restrictions on aid to military and security units in connection with pursuing the militant islamists. This extradition and imprisonment of Al Qaeda leaders, along with US support for Israel and the Mubarak government in Egypt, remains foremost in the mind of Dr. Zawahiri. At the height of the development of his biological weapons program, his brother was extradited pursuant to a death sentence in the “Albanian returnees” case. It’s hard to keep up with the stories about billion dollar appropriations, debt forgiveness, and loan guarantees to countries like Egypt and Israel and now even Pakistan. Those appropriations pale in comparison to the many tens of billions in appropriations relating to the invasion of Iraq. Al Qaeda had a motive in mind.
The anthrax that infected the first victim, Bob Stevens, was contained in a letter to AMI, the publisher of tabloids — in a goofy love letter to Jennifer Lopez enclosing a Star of David and proposing marriage. A report by the Center for Disease Control of interviews with AMI employees (as well as detailed interviews by author Leonard Cole) supports the conclusion that there were not one, but two, such mailings containing anthrax. (The letters were to different AMI publications — one to the National Enquirer and another to The Sun).
Just because Al Qaeda likes its truck bombs and the like to be effective does not mean they do not see the value in a deadly missive. As Brian Jenkins once said, “terrorism is theater.” A sender purporting to be islamist sent cyanide in both early 2002 and early 2003 in New Zealand and ingredients of nerve gas in Belgium in 2003. There’s even a chapter titled “Poisonous Letter” in the Al Qaeda manual.
The “Federal Eagle” stamp used in the anthrax mailings was a blue-green. It was widely published among the militant islamists that martyrs go to paradise “in the hearts of green birds.” In the very interview in which they admitted 9/11, and described the codes used for the four targets for the planes, the masterminds admitted to the Jenny code, the code for representing the date 9/11, and used the symbolism of the “Green Birds.” Osama Bin Laden later invoked the symbolism in his video “The 19 Martyrs.” A FAQ on the Azzam Publications website explained that “In the Hearts of Green Birds” refers to what is inside.
The mailer’s use of “Greendale School” as the return address for the letters to the Senators is also revealing. A May 2001 letter that Zawahiri sent to Egyptian Islamic Jihad members abroad establish that Zawahiri used “school” as a code word for the Egyptian militant islamists. Green symbolizes Islam and was the Prophet Mohammed’s color. By Greendale School, the anthrax perp was being cute, just as Yazid Sufaat was being cute in naming his lab Green Laboratory Medicine. “Dale” means “river valley.” Greendale likely refers to green river valley — i.e., Cairo’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad or the Islamic Group. The mailer probably is announcing that the anthrax is from either Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Egyptian Islamic Group or Jihad-al Qaeda, which is actually the full name of the group after the merger of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. At the Darunta complex where jihadis trained, recruits would wear green uniforms, except for Friday when they were washed. In a Hadith the Messenger of Allah explains that the souls of the martyrs are in the hearts of green birds that fly wherever they please in the Paradise. The “4th grade” in the return address “4th Grade, Greendale School, is American slang for “sergeant” — the rank of the head of Al Qaeda’s military commander Mohammed Atef, who along with Zawahiri had overseen Project Zabadi, Al Qaeda’s biochemical program.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) unit in the Department of Justice has traditionally been known as the “Dark Side.” Everything coming from Khalid Mohammed’s laptop, for example, as Agent Van Harp, the former (now retired) Amerithrax head, once explained, is classified. To understand the matter, journalists would have to have the cooperation of someone coming over from the Dark Side — which would be a felony. The FBI and CIA counterterrorism analysts working on the Dark Side in trying to avoid the next 9/11 are not even allowed to tell their spouses about their work. Based, however, only on the “open source” material readily available through databases such as “google news” and the CIA’s “Foreign Broadcast Internet Service (“FBIS”), it appears that the solution to the Amerithrax case does not likely lie at the intersection of Bin Laden and Saddam streets among those cubicles at Langley with desktop PCs. Instead, it lies with the Zawahiri Task Force at Langley which hopefully has an intersection of Ayman Avenue and Rahman Road. If not, we might be looking at a different crossroads altogether. …
And former Congressman Hamilton on C-SPAN coverage of the 9/11 Commission Report 10th Anniversary on July 22, 2014 — “I am embarrassed that they are not declassified. We emphasized throughout transparency. And I assumed incorrectly that our records would be public — all of them, everything. And then when I learned that a number of the documents were classified and even redacted, I was surprised and disappointed. I want those documents declassified. I am embarrassed to be associated with a work product that is secret.”
What the FBI is hiding, for example, is that Adnan El-Shukrijumah is known to have come back into the country.
The Senator who says the FBI is hiding key information was head of the Congressional “Joint Inquiry” relating to 911.
He was head of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Adnan was the son of a Saudi missionary.
10 Investigates allegations of FBI 9/11 coverup
WTSP 10 News – 3 days ago
… calling for the reopening of the 9/11 investigation and it is being led by one of Florida’s most influential leaders: former Senator Bob Graham.
Former senator: Government, FBI hiding full 9/11 story FOX 13 Tampa Bay, WTVT-TV
FBI lawsuit the latest chapter in Suncoast 9/11 connections WWSB ABC 7
Ex-Senator: FBI covered up 9/11 investigation
Lawrence Wright quotes someone who refers to the “shock and awe” that would be caused by the 28 pages.
I am in shock and awe — and delighted — by Lawrence Wright’s contributions to the New Yorker.
Another one that comes to mind was his September 15, 2002 piece on Dr. Ayman Zawahiri.
His work embodies why journalism is important.
The Twenty-Eight Pages
BY LAWRENCE WRIGHT
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/twenty-eight-pages
http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/story/26511322/2014/09/11/former-senator-government-hiding-full-911-story
TAMPA (FOX 13) –
Former Florida Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham co-chaired the 9/11 investigation in Congress. He claims we still don’t know the full story behind the September 11th attacks because our own government is covering it up.
While President Obama just called on Saudi Arabia to help us fight the ISIS terrorists (and while Secretary of State John Kerry is currently rallying support from Arab diplomats in Saudi Arabia), Graham claims the Saudi government is already sponsoring the terrorists.
“They essentially are the creator of ISIS and the primary source of its financial support today,” Graham said. “Saudi Arabia feels they can do almost anything and nothing is going to happen (to them) because they’re being protected, covered up by the U.S. government.”
Graham helped write classified documents that he says reveal Al Qaeda had help launching the September 11th attacks. He claims there is evidence of a terror-support network in the United States, that supported Al Qaeda, and may still be in place for ISIS today.
Presidents Bush and Obama have both refused to release 28 pages of those classified records. Though Graham cannot reveal the specific contents, he accuses the Saudi government of working against us behind the scenes, and he accuses the U.S. government of keeping it a secret (possibly to protect our oil interests or alliance with the Saudi Arabia).
“For 13 years, that information has been denied to the American people,” said Graham. “The pot is going to break soon.”
He says only a few members of congress have seen the information.
“Without exception, when they have put down the 28 pages, their reaction has been, ‘Oh God, I can’t believe this has really happened!”
We’ve also learned the Tampa FBI office received a message in 2002, stating that a person of interest in the terrorist investigation had re-entered the country. So had others on the FBI’s radar, and that may just be scratching the surface. The FBI once said it had no documents relating to the investigation in the Tampa Bay area, but that appears to have changed.
“Now the FBI has given to a judge, under lock and key, 80,000 pages of information about what went on in Sarasota and adjacent areas,” Graham said. “It has allowed an organization that supported the hijackers to possibly remain in place because it’s not been disclosed and been made available for the next attack against the United States.”
A Florida judge could order the release of those 80,000 pages of FBI records. There is also a resolution in Congress to declassify the 28 pages that Graham helped write.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed by the families of September 11th victims could reveal much more.
A Mystery Man Who Keeps the FBI Up at Night
Officials hunting virtually full time for a Florida computer technician see him as the ultimate `sleeper agent’ in the post-9/11 world.
September 03, 2006|Josh Meyer | Times Staff Writer
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/03/world/fg-manhunt3
Father a Missionary
Many Al Qaeda devotees came to the cause of militant Islam as young men; Shukrijumah grew up in it.
His father, Sheik Gulshair el Shukrijumah, was a Muslim missionary from Guyana who worked for the government of Saudi Arabia.
In the early 1990s, Sheik Gulshair was assigned to the Al Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, some of whose congregants were soon linked to two Islamist terrorist plots: the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and an unsuccessful conspiracy to blow up the United Nations, Holland Tunnel and other landmarks.
Sheik Gulshair came to the FBI’s attention because of translation work he did for a blind cleric named Omar Abdel Rahman, who was implicated in the first World Trade Center bombing. Abdel Rahman, head of an Egyptian terrorist organization linked to Al Qaeda, was sentenced to life in prison for his lead role in the plot to bomb the tunnel and other New York City landmarks.
Sheik Gulshair, who denied any affiliation with terrorists, retired from service to the Saudi government in 1995 and moved his wife and six children to Miramar, southwest of Fort Lauderdale, where he had been given a small stipend to run the Masid al Hijra Mosque.
By the late 1990s, some of his followers had attracted the attention of the FBI’s counterterrorism squad in Miami. One of them was his eldest son, Adnan.
Adnan was born in June 1975 in either Saudi Arabia or Guyana. After the family moved to Florida, he attended Broward Community College, where he excelled in chemistry and biology, as well as computers, according to the FBI. …
When Shukrijumah reemerged in the FBI’s consciousness in March 2003, Pasquale “Pat” D’Amuro, then the FBI’s senior counter-terrorism official and a veteran Al Qaeda tracker, felt an acute sense of dread.
“We thought he was a grave danger to the security of the United States,” D’Amuro recalled recently. “We thought he could be anywhere.”
In the months before Sept. 11, he had traveled widely through the United States and Canada, scouting potential terrorist targets, say FBI officials, who believe he spent about a week each in New York, Washington, Chicago and Montreal. …
Tracking Down Leads
In their hunt for Shukrijumah, the FBI dispatched teams of agents to Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Yemen, where he had relatives. Agents also tracked leads through Europe, Asia and South America.
One of those leads took them to Charlieville, Trinidad, where a Muslim cleric had called federal agents to say Shukrijumah was traveling to and from the island and “had company.”
At the same time I started pointing to Yazid Sufaat upon his capture in February 2002 — I was arguing against what author Graeme MacQueen calls “The Double Perpetrator” hypothesis — where Iraq was instrumental in assisting Al Qaeda as to its anthrax capability. I summarized:
“The bottom-line was that Al Qaeda did not necessarily need Iraq to commit this crime. It was more prudent to limit the conclusion to Al Qaeda’s involvement through infiltration of US and UK biodefense absent additional evidence.”
I previously have explained that a Bloomberg article reported:
“Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.
Cheney said today that information by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 ‘turned out not to be true.’ Still, Cheney said a longstanding relationship existed between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
‘I thought it was strong at the time and I still feel so today,’ Cheney said at a National Press Club lunch in Washington. ‘There was a relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. That’s not something I made up.’ …
On whether Hussein helped al-Qaeda carry out the 2001 terrorist attacks, Cheney said, ‘I do not believe, and I have never seen any evidence, that he was involved in 9/11.’ ”
The Bloomberg article continued:
“Several months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said it was ‘pretty well” confirmed that Mohamed Atta, one of the leaders of the attack, had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April 2000, according to a Washington Post account. [Editor’s note: At the meeting, there was a sensational claim that a witness saw a hand-off of a vial]. Cheney later said the meeting’s existence couldn’t be proven, the Post said.”
Let’s review the history of how the claim of Atta, Prague and the alleged Iraq connection was debunked.
According to some reports encouraged by Vice-President Cheney’s aide “Scooter” Libby Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi case handler and obtained the anthrax from Iraq then. The reported transfer of a vial of anthrax, however, was totally unproven. The origin of the story seems to have been based simply on speculation of what might have occurred (at a meeting never established to have occurred). For his part, al-Ani denies meeting with Atta. In a statement submitted for the record to the Armed Services Committee and released in July 2004, the CIA concluded that there was an “absence of any credible evidence” that a meeting occurred in 2001 between Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. A declassified portions of classified June 21, 2002 CIA report, “Iraq and al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship” states: “Reporting is contradictory on hijacker’s Mohammad Atta’s alleged trip to Prague and meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer, and we have not verified his travels. A declassified portion of “CTC Iraqi Support for Terrorism” dated January 29, 2003 similarly concludes “the most reliable reporting to date casts doubt on this possibility.”
In contrast to what most of the senior Czech officials have said, the Prague Post quoted the director general of the Czech foreign intelligence service UZSI (Office of Foreign Relations and Information), Frantisek Bublan, denying the much-touted meeting. He also then may (or perhaps not) have been joined by the Czech President. But never let it be said the White House has been consistent on the issue either. Apparently the report was based on a waiter’s recollection of customers several months earlier. Even the Czech intelligence officials who supported the report only cited a 70 percent probability that it was Atta. The bottom-line was that Al Qaeda did not necessarily need Iraq to commit this crime. It was more prudent to limit the conclusion to Al Qaeda’s involvement through infiltration of US and UK biodefense absent additional evidence. Even if there was a meeting, maybe it related just to taking action against Radio Free Europe.
Some hawks advising the Administration, both in the government and in private business (to include Richard Perle and James Woolsey), argued that there was powerful evidence showing Iraq is giving biological and chemical weapons and training to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld, whose comments of course could not be taken lightly, described the evidence as “bulletproof.” CIA intelligence assessments such as the declassified portions of classified June 21, 2002 CIA report, “Iraq and al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship” noted the involvement of Iraqi nationals in al-Qa’ida CBRN efforts, but concluded “we cannot determine, which, if any, of these Iraqi national Baghdad directed.” There were, indeed, some reports by defectors concerning Al Qaeda’s coordination with Saddam on biological and chemical weapons but those reports all depended on the reliability and detail of those reports by defectors. We now knew, for example, that the son of a Chalabi aide made up info about mobile biolabs. Similarly, someone else forged documents relating to uranium. Shouldn’t there be criminal prosecutions? A truth commission (perhaps with grants of immunity) as urged by Leahy? Classified CIA and DIA reported to the White House expressly questioned and doubted the reliability of what senior Al Qaeda Al-Liby was saying under the Administration’s enhanced interrogation” — who Secretary of State Powell would later expressly rely upon in his speech before the UN in which he held up a vial of anthrax.
The briefs made by President Bush and Tony Blair lacked a “smoking gun” in this regard. The information released by Powell similarly contained no “smoking gun” on the question of an Iraq/ Al Qaeda connection. It seems to have turned out that there was merely a tolerance of Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam by the Iraqi regime. The nature of any cooperation between Al Qaeda and Iraq has remained an open (at least disputed) question though criticism of the Administration’s distortion of intelligence has grown sharply and then was reflected by voters’ choice at the ballot box. As in the game Monopoly, sometimes practical alliances can be formed for tactical purposes against a common enemy. A detailed argument relating to the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda could always be found online in the trillion dollar complaint against Iraq filed by the law firm Kreindler & Kreindler in connection with 9/11. There also was a lengthy Spring 2003 article by PhD microbiologist Dany Shoham who had been with the Israeli military intelligence and now is at an Israeli university.
As United States District Judge Harold Baer noted, and as Director Tenet has acknowledged, some of the early high-level contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq related to a non-aggression pact. Judge Baer, upon the default of all the opposing parties and their failure to defend the lawsuit brought by the law firm Kreindler & Kreindler, found that CIA Director Woolsey and Laurie Mylroie had not presented any facts supporting their position, but that a jury could find in their favor by crediting their opinion. He described the evidence relied upon as consisting of layers of hearsay and therefore inadmissible.
Mylroie’s theory, however, required that Khalid Mohammed was an Iraqi intelligence agent — along with his nephew Ramzi Yousef. She even posited that Murad, a participant in the Bojinka operation, was necessarily an Iraqi agent. If her argument had been correct, however, it was odd, then, that Murad did not disclose the fact in “tactical interrogation” (i.e., torture) by Philippine authorities and that his statement to US officials recounted the names and location and details of his many family members. It was odder still that KSM did not disclose the fact in his months of interrogation. WTC 1993 plotter Ramzi Yousef also failed to admit the fact — even in the course of extensive operations by the FBI involving a mafiosa defendant who had a nearby cell. In June 2004, yet another nephew of KSM was captured. No clear evidence emerged even after Iraq was invaded.
When a mid-level of aide of Jordanian poison expert Zarqawi captured in Iraq was a member of Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad, that sort of development pointed to Al Qaeda’s presence in Iraq — not a connection with the regime.
Dr. Richard Spertzel, the former UN inspector in Iraq, for years argued that the product here was well within Iraq’s capability. UNSCOM determined that the Iraqi weapons program produced dried anthrax as well as the more primitive wet form. Dr. Spertzel argued: “Iraq certainly knows how to produce 100 percent pure spores. That is a technique that they developed .. which is capable of giving them the kind of concentrations that we are seeing in the Daschle letter.”
Given that at the time we knew where Saddam lived, and he was a survivalist, he would have wanted to maintain deniability in the event he had assisted in the anthrax mailing. A terrorist state sponsor would have wanted to use a strain that was not associated with it. Thus, Iraq as a source of the Ames was entirely possible and needed to be explored as a hypothesis. It’s just that it was not indicated by any of the evidence. Two top Iraqi scientists, codenamed Charlie and Alpha, helped the coalition to learn more about Iraq’s anthrax program according to Dr. David Kay, head of the Iraq survey group in charge of the hunt for WMD, said. He has said that the Iraqis had made surprising innovations in the milling and drying processes needed to weaponize anthrax. But no forensic or documentary evidence ever pointed to Iraq, rather than Al Qaeda’s planned infiltration of US and UK biodefense as behind the anthrax mailings.
In February 2003, in a much anticipated presentation about Iraq and its weapons, Secretary of State Colin Powell reported that a senior al Qaeda operative in custody has said that a terrorist operative was sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring biological and chemical weapons. He was sent after Bin Laden determined that Al Qaeda labs were not sophisticated enough. In a document found on his computer, Zawahiri had indicated that experts would have to be recruited, particularly using universities as a cover, because using unsophisticated talent had not proved successful. Accordingly, based on what Ayman had written, the FBI should be giving priority to connections with researchers at universities and NGOs. That document was obtained by a WSJ reporter upon buying Zawahiri’s old computer from a used computer dealer after his own computer broke. It had been looted by someone who jumped over the wall after bombing. Vice President Cheney was briefed on related papers relating to Zawahiri’s plan to use anthrax against US targets in mid-December 2001 upon a CIA analyst’s discovery of the documents shipped from Afghanistan. So as of mid-December 2001, Vice-President Cheney knew that Al Qaeda was planning to use universities and charities to develop the expertise needed to aerosolize anthrax for use against US targets. He further separately knew from the February 2001 PDB from the CIA to President Bush that Al Qaeda’s motivation was the rendering and mistreatment of senior Egyptian detainees. Unfortunately, he had already arranged for his lawyers to give him the greenlight to torture those detainees.
There’s every reason to think Zawahiri succeeded in recruiting the necessary expertise — just no compelling reason to think he obtained the expertise from Iraq. The papers found at headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s feared secret police, show that an entourage from Al Qaeda group was sent to the Iraqi capital in March 1998 from Sudan. The talks are thought to have ended badly for Iraq. According to some reports, Bin Laden rejected the suggestion of an alliance — preferring to pursue his own concept of jihad. According to other information, it was Saddam who wanted to distance himself from Al Qaeda. He reportedly never responded to an Al Qaeda request that it be allowed to establish training camps. He viewed Al Qaeda as a threat to his regime.
Ramadan, former Iraqi Vice-President who hosted Ayman in Baghdad in 1998, was arrested by Kurdish forces. Saddam, of course, was also captured. And so there came to be quite a lot of information available about the Al Qaeda-Iraq contacts so as to clarify outstanding issues.
Some have pointed to reports that a leader, the late Abu Musab Zarqawi, thought to be involved in the planned ricin attacks, was a clear link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Zarqawi reportedly was at the safe house in Afghanistan where traces of ricin and other poisons were found. According to an article that appeared in the conservative National Review, Iraq’s embassy in Islamabad hosted some Iraqi biochemical scientists, who trained Zarqawi and his lab technicians under the cover of the Taliban embassy. No further details, however, ever emerged or were corroborated and the speculation arose that Al-LIbi had merely misled US interrogators after his capture in December 2001. He recanted his claims in 2004.
There were reports of an Al Qaeda facility in northern Iraq where there was testing of chemical and biological weapons (such as ricin) on barnyard animals and a human. The area, however, was in an area not controlled by Saddam Hussein. Al Qaeda had sent four of its senior leaders, including Abu Yasir (Taha), the former head of the Egyptian Islamic Group, to northern Iraq. Taha, 51, with a degree in commerce from Assiut University, served a five-year sentence for terrorist activities. Following his release, he left the country and settled in Afghanistan. He is credited with planning the massacre of tourists in Luxor in 1997.
Taha and his colleagues formed a fighting group of 600 men — known as Ansar al-Islam — out of an amalgamation of existing groups. ABCNEWS reported that there is evidence the terrorists tested ricin in water, as a powder and as an aerosol. (Some experts dispute that ricin can effectively be used as an aerosol or water contaminant.) The militants used it to kill donkeys and chickens, and at one point, allegedly exposed a man to the toxin in an Iraqi market and followed him home and watched him die several days later. In a television interview in January 2006, Michael Scheuer said he was 100% sure that in 2002, Ansar al-Islam was also experimenting with anthrax.
The senior Al Qaeda leader (and successor to the blind sheik) Abu Yasir, (Taha) before being extradited to Egypt, had lived in a suburb of the capital of Iran. Under the Administration’s logic, does that mean there was also state sponsorship by Iran?
The “bomb Iraq” crowd relied on only wisps of hearsay evidence and glimmers of ambiguous facts. In other contexts, the evidence was fabricated (such as related to the purchase of enriched uranium from Niger or the mobile bio labs). No hijacker was shown to have trained at Salman Pak, alleged to be a terrorist training facility (where a 747 was located), rather than a counterterrorist training facility.
On the other hand, while Bin Laden declared Saddam’s party apostate and infidel, he urged that there was a religious duty to cooperate with a secular ruler if it furthers jihad. The Iraqi intelligence chief Hijazi, who according to the Iraqi National Congress allegedly once met with Osama in Afghanistan. In August 2003, former Iraqi Vice-President Ramadan, who met Zawahiri in 1998, was also captured. Saddam seemed to enjoy the debate with interrogators and at trial was defiant towards the court.
Polls (and perhaps the regime change that occurred in the United States upon the Presidential election also) show that most Americans think that the invasion of Iraq has led to an increase in the likelihood of terrorism rather than a decrease. Like his recent OpEd in the Washington Post, Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, presented powerful support for the view, from an insider’s perspective. He was not merely “in the loop” — he as much as anyone was or at least always should have been the loop had they heeded his urgent requests for a meeting of the Principals. The same applies to the threatened use of biological weapons.
A lawsuit by former FBI counterterrorism official, John O’Neill, filed in August 2003 alleged connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq, based in part on statements by Iraqi defectors, information from Iraq and al-Qaeda prisoners, and documents uncovered in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Complaint alleged that Iraqi intelligence provided al-Qaeda with training in document forgery and chemical and biological weapons in a series of contacts that spiked in 1996, and again after 1998. The Complaint, In re Estate of John P. O’Neill, Sr. et al. v. Republic of Iraq et al, D.D.C. 8/20/03 ^ alleges that -Zawahiri met with Iraqi intelligence in 1992 and 1998, and that contact between Iraq and al-Qaeda increased in 1998, when Al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. According to a report by the Department of Defense to the Senate Intelligence committee, in the early 1990s, the main intermediary between Al Qaeda and Iraq was Sudanese strongman Hassan al-Turabi, a leader of the Al Qaeda-affiliated National Islamic Front.
But relying on the far more reliable evidence provided by Ayman Zawahiri’s computer, we see that Zawahiri wrote EIJ/AQ military commander a memo in the Spring of 1999 saying that they only got the idea for biological weapons when US officials kept telling them how easy it was. More importantly, in his correspondence with a Pakistan scientist named Rauf Ahmad, we see that his longstanding efforts to recruit specialists to develop anthrax as a weapon were just bearing fruit. The Defense Intelligence Agency gave me his correspondence and yet, notwithstanding that he is a very approachable fellow and has resumed his former life, reporters have not succeeded in interviewing him. I once uploaded the resume he gave me — with notably omitted his work for Ayman. He stopped email contact with me when I prematurely mentioned that I had copies of his correspondence with Zawahiri.
A memo by Undersecretary of Defense Feith was even more dramatic. Not credited by the CIA or Richard Clarke, the memo did not represent an analysis of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, as much as a laundry list of possible data points, many of which were not confirmed.
The 9/11 Commission, in contrast, concluded that Atta did not visit Prague in April 2001. On April 4, 2001, there is a picture of him at a Virginia ATM. On April 6, 9, and 10, 2001, there were calls made to his cell phone from within Florida to Florida. Then on April 11, 2001 he is known to have been in Florida. Moreover, “Newsweek has also learned that Czech investigators and U.S. intelligence have now obtained corroborated evidence which they believe shows that the Iraqi spy who allegedly met Atta was away from Prague on that day.”
When seeking to resolve such issues, people need to put politics aside and pull together to get conclusive objective proof, one way or the other. Like authors Coen and Nadler said in their book, “This is not a Republican issue. It is not a Democratic issue. It is not even an American issue. It is a global issue.”
Unfortunately, author Graeme MacQueen did not put politics aside. Some people are still in a 2002 political mode — rather than a connect the dots through documentary evidence mode.
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Seminarians installed as acolytes and lectors
Men studying for the priesthood were instituted as lectors and acolytes Nov. 7 at St. Patrick’s Seminary & University in Menlo Park. San Francisco Auxiliary Bishop Robert F. Christian, OP, was principal celebrant and installed the men in their new roles. The installed seminarians are from the archdioceses of Agaña and San Francisco, the dioceses of Fresno, Honolulu, Oakland, Portland, Sacramento, Santa Rosa and Spokane, and The Contemplatives of St. Joseph.
“Lectors are responsible for proclaiming the readings of Sacred Scripture, with the exception of the Gospel reading,” said Stephen Terlizzi, director of marketing and communications, on the seminary website in a blogpost about the rite. Lectors may also announce the prayers of the faithful and proclaim the psalm. Acolytes assist at liturgies, prepare the altar and the sacred vessels and, when necessary, act as extraordinary ministers of holy Communion.
The Archdiocese of San Francisco had three seminarians installed as acolytes and one Contemplative of St. Joseph whose provincial house is in South San Francisco: Gerardo Vazquez, Jerald Geronimo, James Precobb, and Contemplative of St. Joseph Brother Francis Coyne. An additional eight acolytes and nine lectors were also installed.
A prayer before the installation tells the new acolytes: “Dear sons in Christ, as people chosen for the ministry of acolyte, you will have a special role in the Church’s ministry. The summit and source of the church’s life is the Eucharist, which builds up the Christian community and makes it grow. It is your responsibility to assist priests and deacons in carrying out their ministry, and as special ministers to give holy Communion to the faithful at the liturgy and to the sick. Because you are specially called to this ministry, you should strive to live more fully by the Lord’s sacrifice and to be molded more perfectly in its likeness.”
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T.I., Kendrick Lamar, B.o.B. - "Memories Back Then" (Feat. Kris Stephens)
6 years ago by Kiku Shinfuku
As a blogger, it's easy sometimes to get so lost in the weirdest parts of the internet that quality mainstream tracks, like T.I.'s “Memories Back Then,” get lost in the hustle and bustle of everyday searching.
While the song has been out for a little bit, visuals for the track were just released today. Working with Kendrick Lamar, B.o.B, and Kris Stephens, the music video has a special kick with these artists that a veteran like T.I. can't always provide by himself. Miss Stephens also further brought a little sexy to the video, perfect for the otherwise macho-vibe, even though her vocals were my least favorite part of the song.
I do miss the old T.I. days when he was yelling “Bring Em Out,” but I think that's more of a personal nostalgia for the Hip Hop of my youth. Despite my wish that that style would come back, T.I. Did a real number to the song, and the end product is very enjoyable.
T.I. has a whooping 46 concerts listed on Soundkick, including a tour with Lil Wayne, as well as this single out on iTunes. To no one's surprise, Kendrick Lamar is having another massive year, including a college tour with Steve Aoki; B.o.B.'s home page also indicates a busy schedule for him as well.
T.I. on Twitter
Kendrick Lamar on Twitter
B.o.B. on Twitter
Kris Stephens on Twitter
B.o.B. · kendrick lamar · Kris Stephens · T.I.
Logic gets real with "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" [Video]
by Gregory Castel
2 Chainz drafts all-star team of hip-hop's best on 'Rap or Go To The League'
by Bryson "Boom" Paul
Slide back in time with some future funk, brought to you by Lion Babe's "The Wave"
by James Schiff
JID surpasses all expectations with "Off Da Zoinkys" on latest 'Dicaprio' EP
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Acteon Group: a revolution in customer service
Ben Mouncer - Technology - Aug 08, 2018
Technology is taking Acteon Group’s customer experience to new heights, as Chief Digital Officer and Customer Services Director Olivier Blanc explains to Business Chief.
As Chief Digital Officer (CDO), Olivier Blanc has a vision to elevate Acteon Group above its peers through the implementation of a company-wide technology transformation.
Already one of Europe’s premier manufacturers of high-end medical devices, primarily in the field of dentistry, Acteon – with Blanc playing a pivotal role – has embraced changes to a host of its internal and customer-related processes, all with the aim to stand alone in the level of service offered to its clients.
These are not the lofty, often unattainable ambitions of a business valiantly attempting to ride the digital wave – in fact, Blanc insists that such disruption is an essential undertaking as Acteon looks to secure future growth and profitability.
“I really believe that if we're not doing that, and the others are doing it, in five years’ time we'd be out of the market,” he tells Business Chief. “It is really critical for us to be able to use technologies and give a good customer experience because in five years’ time, there won't be any business that isn’t using those technologies. I think all the things that we are doing right now give us a little bit of an advantage against our competitors, but we really want to carry that on in order to maintain that position.”
Salesforce: a crucial partnership
Customer service is priority number one for Acteon as the medtech company fights to stave off its competition in the industry. Back in 2015, new Chief Executive Officer Marie-Laure Pochon kicked off her reign by announcing plans to build a wholly new customer relationship management (CRM) system fit for an era where buyer relationships are everything.
Acteon’s working model sees it split into four separate manufacturing units – equipment, imaging, pharma and medical – with its technologically-advanced dentistry products supplied to individual clients through its trusted network of customers. Since its foundation, the French firm has grown to have a presence in over 100 countries the world over.
With the target of creating a best-in-class CRM for that continually-expanding network, Pochon quickly enlisted the services of Salesforce, the billion-dollar, US-based technology giant. Blanc was recruited into the business in October 2015 as CDO and Customer Services Director to oversee integration of its CRM and as of last November, a quarter of Acteon’s employees were already taking advantage of its solutions. “We are really focusing on how we can use Salesforce to improve the way that we are doing our customer service,” Blanc explains. “What it also allowed us to do is create more customer communication that we had before.
“For example, when we used to receive the products to be repaired, we never sent an email to the customer saying that we have received their product and that we are going to take care of them as soon as possible. Now, that is something that we are able to do. We also create the quote in Salesforce, which allows us to have the same practice for everyone and to be really focused in the way the quote is created. Everything is now integrated in the same place.
“Another benefit is that it allows the commercial people to see what's going on, so if they have a question from the customers they are able to answer directly, without having to call internally to try and find the right person to answer the question.”
Acteon’s Salesforce integration has proven to be a straightforward change, with staff at its Bordeaux headquarters and its Marseilles manufacturing site now fully up-and-running with the refreshed system. Blanc is currently managing its implementation outside of France, a task that recently involved an excursion to the vital US market.
Blanc’s next mark of progress will be to see the Salesforce technologies that have been seamlessly deployed within the organisation made directly available to customers – a level of service that he wants, in basic terms, to compare to that of the world’s biggest online retailer, Amazon.
“The ability for the customers to see what’s going on in complete transparency – that is where we want to get to,” he adds. “We want them to be able to see and follow their orders. As I have said before, I do not want us to be Amazon… but to get as close as we can be, then I’ll be happy!”
A new online hub
Blanc’s customer obsession doesn’t just stop at servicing Acteon’s relationships with its current clients. His team has also, alongside the company’s marketing department, delivered a comprehensive overhaul of its corporate websites as it looks to attract more business.
Working in tandem with Publicis Activ, the development arm of the French publishing and PR behemoth Publicis, Acteon has created a truly global suite of platforms that deliver Acteon’s key messages and promote its offerings in multiple languages, representing a vast improvement on its archaic website of old.
“When I came to the company it had a different website which was really, I would say, old-fashioned,” Blanc admits. “We have worked really hard with the marketing team to follow their objectives and the new website really reflects that marketing shift that has been so important to Acteon. It is also crucial for our own marketing to be understood everywhere in the world.
“The second thing would be, as I said, to have a place where customers can see what's going on with their active orders, somewhere where they would be able to interact with us as well. This is certainly something that we need to work on.
“Obviously we are looking at SEO and social networks too, they are items of interest, but another really key area is how we show documents that we need to show on the site, either for our own purposes or regulatory purposes. We have SharePoint, which is a Microsoft Office365 product that we are using internally, and our objective is to find a way for all the websites to interact with that.”
Manufacturing 4.0
Perhaps the industry most affected by the onset of transformative technologies, the manufacturing sector is in the midst of changes so powerful that they have the potential to shake up almost every established business model. In the UK alone, up to 700,000 manufacturing jobs could be lost to artificial intelligence and robotics by 2037, according to recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study.
Though this doesn’t fall directly under his area of responsibility, Blanc offers some telling insights into how a frontrunning manufacturer such as Acteon is approaching the inevitable switch from a predominantly human workforce to an automated, connected future.
“I would say that we are still very much a manual company,” he says. “A lot of our products are made in a really manual way, though obviously we have an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Infor that is helping us to deal with the manufacturing process.
“We want to make the warehouse better by implementing some digital tools and a new Warehouse Management System (WMS). We are currently in the process of looking for a more sophisticated WMS provider, one which will be more flexible than what we have and what will be able to meet different diverse units in the same shipment, all while working in unison with our ERP.”
One man’s journey
Prior to joining Acteon, Blanc served for eight years at French telecommunications company SFR, where he progressed to become its customer marketing director. Educated at the Parisian École Polytechnique, he has enjoyed a diverse career since – but one major passion has emerged.
“My last role centered around customer experience, and that's what drove me to come to Acteon, because I thought that I had a lot of possibility to enhance the customer experience here,” he concludes.
“Now my role also involves all things digital, so digital transformation in order to improve the customer experience – that is how I would define what I do.”
Acteon,
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Virginia Tech Summer League Report
Published by Aaron Bishop on August 27, 2017 August 27, 2017
(Photo courtesy of northwoodsleague.com)
As the 2017 summer league season comes to an end, it is time to roll out CBBSN’s collegiate summer league updates from around the country. Over the next several weeks, our scouts will be sharing how their school’s players have fared over the season, and how they look to project going into fall practice.
The Hokies are looking to the future as John Szefc was hired from Maryland as the new head coach and an entirely new baseball complex await the players when they return. Tech is coming off a disappointing season where it finished 23-32 (9-21 ACC), but still sent many players to various summer leagues across the country. Let’s take a look and see how some of these underclassmen fared in their respective leagues.
Jack Owens: Peninsula Pilots, Coastal Plains League
The Hokies’ most consistent hitter from last season had an impressive summer posting a .351 average. Owens only played in 11 games this summer but still managed to score 10 runs while also stealing six bases. Look for him to be among the leaders in hits this coming season while holding down second base.
Paul Hall Jr.: Peninsula Pilots, Coastal Plain League
Hall made 12 appearances for the Pilots this summer posting a 7.27 ERA while working 26 innings. Known as a matchup pitcher in relief situations for the Hokies, Hall actually started three games this summer. He will be vital out of the bullpen this coming season, especially if he can hone in his fastball control as he had a 27 to 20 strikeout-to-walk ratio this summer.
JD Mundy: Battle Creek Bombers, Northwoods League
Mundy had his struggles like any freshman would last season, posting a .232 average across 40 games, but had a strong summer for the Bombers. He had a .281 average with 15 doubles, nine home runs and 39 runs scored on his way to being named an All-Star. He will line up all over the field this upcoming season for Tech and will be a tough out in the middle of the lineup.
Stevie Mangrum: Wisconsin Woodchucks, Northwoods League
Mangrum returned to Wisconsin for the second straight summer and had a MVP-caliber season for the Woodchucks. He hit .324 with 16 doubles, two triples, 12 home runs, 48 RBIs and 51 runs in 63 games. He would be a lock for league MVP if his team had fared better on the season. Mangrum was selected as an All-Star and played in the Major League Dreams Showcase as well. Like Mundy, Mangrum will line up at many different positions and bat in the middle of the lineup this spring.
Dylan Hall: Strasburg Express, Valley Baseball League
Hall had a very good summer for the Express as he pitched in nine games (six starts) with a 3.34 ERA. He finished the summer with a 2-1 record, a total of 35 innings and nearly a three to 1 strikeout-to-walk ratio. Hall only pitched out of the bullpen for the Hokies last season so he was able to show off his versatility like Hall Jr. Both of these pitchers will be important to the success of the team this upcoming season.
Nic Enright: Baltimore Redbirds, Cal Ripken League
Enright missed all of last season after undergoing Tommy John surgery, but was healthy enough to pitch for the Redbirds this summer. He pitched very well for someone coming off an injury as he made eight appearances going 1-0 with a 5.23 ERA across 22 1/3 innings. He was named an All-Star and struck out the side in his one inning of work in that game. Tech will be hoping that he can stay healthy and provide some much-needed depth to the pitching staff.
Graham Seitz: Loudoun Riverdogs, Cal Ripken League
Seitz didn’t get much work last season for the Hokies, but that should change this year. He went 2-3 for the Riverdogs this summer with a 5.34 ERA across 32 innings of work. Seitz also recorded 22 strikeouts to only 12 walks. Look for him to get much more than time on the mound than the 5 2/3 innings he got last year.
Virginia Tech was full of upperclassmen last year and that will not change this season. The Hokies will look to have a more successful season this year with new head coach Szefc taking over at the helm. The players listed above will have a big say in how the inaugural season of the new coaching staff plays out.
Categories: ArchivesSticky
Aaron Bishop
Scout with CBBSN. Virginia Tech.
EM’s Official 2019 MLB Mock Draft
As the conference tournaments came to an end as of last weekend, the next big event circled on the baseball calendar comes on June 3-5. The 2019 MLB Draft is less than a week away Read more…
Pete Horner, Perfect Game All American Classic Review
Rich and Lance are joined by the Midwest’s Regional Manager Pete Horner as they review the 2018 Perfect Game All American Classic. Discussion includes thoughts on Riley Greene, Jaden Brown, Derek Diamond, Daniel Espino and Read more…
Pocket Radar, Injury Prevention
Austin Carroll rejoins the show along with our friends at Pocket Radar to talk about using a radar gun for injury prevention. Podcast brought to you by the Collegiate Baseball Scouting Network. CBScout.net Published Read more…
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Chicago, see Jon Stewart’s Rosewater early and for free
Cameron Scheetz
Jon Stewart recently stepped out from behind the desk at The Daily Show to tackle Rosewater, his directorial debut. Back in 2009, Stewart interviewed journalist Maziar Bahari on his show, the footage of which would eventually be used as “evidence” that Bahari was working with an American spy and led to his imprisonment and torture in Iran for over 100 days. The drama, which follows Bahari’s struggle to keep hope alive behind bars, stars Gael García Bernal. The film opens in Chicago on November 14, but The A.V. Club has an opportunity for you to attend a free early screening on November 11. For a chance to win screening passes, follow the link here and enter your contact information. Remember, seating is first come, first serve, so arrive early! A trailer and synopsis for the film can be found below.
“The feature film Rosewater is based on The New York Times best-selling memoir Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival, written by the BBC journalist Maziar Bahari. Rosewater follows the Tehran-born Bahari, a 42-year-old broadcast journalist with Canadian citizenship living in London. In June 2009, Bahari returned to Iran to interview Mir-Hossein Moussavi, who was the prime challenger to controversial incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As Moussavi’s supporters rose up to protest Ahmadinejad’s victory declaration hours before the polls closed on election day, Bahari endured great personal risk by submitting camera footage of the unfolding street riots to the BBC. Bahari was soon arrested by Revolutionary Guard police, led by a man identifying himself only as “Rosewater,” who proceeded to torture and interrogate the journalist over the next 118 days.”
Recent from Cameron Scheetz
The glory of Mad Dog: Dial M For Maple interviews Riverdale and Pearson's Eli Goree
Our Riverdale podcast closes the curtains on a crazy season with character superlatives and a call from mom
In a satisfying season finale, the Riverdale teens becomes pawns in a villainous revenge fantasy
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Tag Archives: irwin allen
The Amazing Captain Nemo (1978)
I’m a nostalgic and forgiving kind of guy, and so I’m pretty certain that every single thing from my childhood that I loved as a child is something I can look at from the dull light of middle age and see what appealed to me when I was small. Then there’s The Return of Captain Nemo, which ran for three episodes on CBS in 1978. I saw the first two installments and loved that show like you wouldn’t believe.
This morning, we watched The Amazing Captain Nemo, a compilation movie made from the three TV episodes, whittled down from about 150 to 105 minutes. If I didn’t have my six year-old son hopping with excitement from the laser gun fights, underwater action, and explosions, I would have wandered away from this turkey to go play mublety-peg or something. I’d say that it’s the stupidest thing we’ve watched for this blog, were it not for the unfortunate reality that I know what we’re watching next week.
The Return of Captain Nemo seems to have come about because CBS was very much aware of bandwagons, but they were too timid to actually jump on any of them. In the spring of 1977, NBC showed a series of TV movies called Man From Atlantis. They starred Patrick Duffy as a comic book-type hero, with a former Batvillain, Victor Buono, as a recurring enemy. These were so successful that NBC ordered a weekly series, and CBS and Warner Brothers followed suit with an idea for a clone, even casting another former Batvillain, Burgess Meredith, as their show’s baddie. Captain Nemo was in the public domain, and while Irwin Allen had left weekly TV production behind for big-budget disaster movies like The Towering Inferno, he knew how to make bottom-of-the-sea television without a lot of money, so they asked him to produce it.
Then Star Wars happened. Suddenly Burgess Meredith got an alien robot henchman and a lot of golden androids. The important rooms of his submarine, the Raven, got turned into black-curtained “limbo” sets like everywhere in the third season of Batman so the set designer could spend money making all the corridors into Death Star hallways to stage laser gun shootouts.
Then Man From Atlantis died as a weekly series. CBS decided that they maybe only wanted three episodes, and called it a pilot mini-series. The mini-series flopped, and Irwin Allen and Warner Brothers got to make a little money back by turning the three hours into a film version, cropping the 4:3 picture into widescreen. The three-part version has apparently never been screened anywhere since an April 1981 broadcast in the UK; the film is the only way to see it. Only Irwin Allen completists need bother.
I’m assuming some of the intricacies must have been lost in the editing, because the speed with which the kind and patient Nemo works out a deal with naval intelligence to be their go-to man to battle the evil Professor Cunningham is really the most amazing thing about this movie. We never learn anything about Cunningham’s alien buddies or weird technology, Lynda Day George is present only because if she wasn’t, there would not be a single female character in this movie at all, and Atlantis itself is treated as a mild curiosity and depicted with a no-budget-at-all white set with two Greek columns. All of the dialogue is hilariously macho – “I’m going alone,” “no time for explanations,” etc. – and the two action man leads, played by Tom Hallick and Burr DeBenning, look like they were cast because there weren’t any cop shows that needed them that month.
But holy anna, our six year-old loved it. He was hopping up and down and shouted “This is AMAZING!” at one point. He liked the underwater gunfights so much that he’ll probably pass out when he sees Thunderball one of these days. He did creep behind the sofa at one point when Captain Nemo was captured and Cunningham uses one of those mind probes you see in sci-fi shows to get the equations and blueprints for the Nautilus and its laser(!) from his brain. We’ve seen Captain Nemo in four films now, and this is the most ridiculous thing to happen to him in any of them.
And it was always thus. In the seventies, my parents were good friends with a fellow named J.D. Faulkner, who always confused me by being unmarried. My folks knew nine thousand people and I swear J.D. was the only bachelor among them. He always arrived unannounced, and one terrible Wednesday – March 22, 1978 – he showed up raving about this restaurant in Marietta, insisting that Mom and Dad drop plans and join him there. It is perhaps amazing that I grew up loving food and restaurants as I do after what happened next. This insidious trip to whatever that restaurant was – my parents never admitted its name under interrogation – cost me the third episode of the show, but I guarantee I ruined their meal by whining about it. I started crying because the second part had a cliffhanger ending. I mean, it said on the screen “TO BE CONTINUED,” so that meant my parents were obliged to let me see what happened next.
Somehow, in that strange logic of six year-olds, I concluded that the cost for missing part three of The Return of Captain Nemo was twenty-four dollars. My father agreed to pay it to shut me up, and I ate my spaghetti in silence. It wasn’t even good spaghetti. Mom made better spaghetti than this. Mom made, and continues to make, better spaghetti than anybody else on the planet. I don’t know why I ordered it.
Then my dad refused to pay the twenty-four dollars. Then there wasn’t an episode four of The Return of Captain Nemo. Somehow I didn’t become a serial killer.
Filed under captain nemo, movies, star wars cash-ins
Tagged as burgess meredith, burr debenning, captain nemo, fantastic cinema, irwin allen, jose ferrer, lynda day george, star wars cash-ins
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May 5, 2013 By Hannah Goyer
Klein Independent School District selects Enterprise Systems Corporation For significant expansion of Avaya LAN Systems
HOUSTON, TEXAS – May, 2013 – It was announced that Klein ISD has selected Enterprise Systems Corporation to provide an extensive expansion and upgrade its Local Area Network Avaya Ethernet Switching fabric. The upgrade includes Avaya 4850 series switches supporting approximately 7500 Ethernet ports.
ABOUT KLEIN ISD
Klein ISD covers 87.5 square miles of north Harris county. The center of the district is approximately 40 minutes from downtown Houston.
Klein Independent School District, encompassing approximately 87.5 square miles, is located in northwestern Harris County, Texas. Its southern portion is adjacent to the corporate limits of the City of Houston. Most of the District is located between Interstate Highway 45 (IH 45) on the east and State Highway 249 (SH 249) on the west. The southern boundary follows Cypress Creek for a considerable distance and a portion of the northern boundary of the District is the same as the northern boundary of Harris County. The District is comprised of four (4) high schools, nine (9) intermediate schools, twenty-eight (28) elementary schools and one early childhoold & pre-kindergarten center for a total of forty-two (42) schools with more than 46,600 stude
For print friendly version : Press Release Klein ISD May 2013
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Follett Challenge 2019 Winner is First Ever from Outside U.S.
Grand Prize Goes to Saskatchewan, Canada’s Regina Catholic School Division
MCHENRY, IL, Apr 25, 2019 – Saskatchewan’s Regina Catholic School Division has been named the Grand Prize winner of the 2019 Follett Challenge, marking the first time a school or district from outside the United States has claimed the top spot in the contest, now in its ninth year.
For its winning entry — “Tinker Tub Project” — Regina Catholic School Division earns a $60,000 USD prize in Follett products and services plus a celebration at their school, which will include a visit from Kwame Alexander, a New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Medalist, who served as a Follett Challenge judge for the first time.
“We are thrilled and honored to be the grand-prize recipient of this year’s Follett Challenge,” said Kelley Ehman, superintendent of education services, Regina Catholic School Division. “We are so proud of the work our curriculum consultants and coordinators have been doing to promote 21st century learning.”
In line with the Saskatchewan curriculum, Regina’s Tinker Tubs revolve around eight themes that ignite critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity as students discover, explore, create, invent, and share. The Tinker Tubs are designed to encourage students to learn how to adapt and create in a digital world and prepare them for the increasingly global workplace.
“The Tinker Tub initiative has the potential to create a legacy of sustained change in professional practice to support student learning now and in the future,” said Sherry Chase, curriculum coordinator, Regina Catholic School Division. “Our hope is continued improvement in on-time graduation rates, as well as test scores for Saskatchewan students, but ultimately the success of our students as life-long learners engaged in empowered citizenship.”
Last month, Follett Challenge announced Regina Catholic School Division as one of this year’s three semifinalists, having won the middle school category. The other semifinalists were Valley Stream (N.Y.) School District 24, the elementary school category winner, and Lindblom Math and Science Academy, the high school category winner from Chicago (Ill.) Public Schools. Valley Stream and Lindblom each earn $30,000 in Follett products and services.
Another 10 schools, whose video submissions received the highest number of online votes from the public, each earn $8,000 in Follett products and services. The total amount awarded is $200,000.
According to Shannon McClintock-Miller, a judge for this year’s Follett Challenge, Regina Catholic’s project “is one of the coolest collaborative and innovative projects I have ever seen from a school district.”
“Tinker Tubs not only empowers students to take ownership over their learning but is the glue that brings the entire community together through collaborative and purposeful curricular projects, themes and outcomes,” said Miller, a K-12 district teacher librarian at Van Meter Community School District in Iowa. “A project like this will continue to make an impact on the students for years to come. I can’t wait to see how being this year’s Follett Challenge winner will bring even more change and innovation to this special district.”
Among those joining Miller on the judging committee was Alexander, who is partnering with Follett on a literacy campaign (“All Books for All Kids”). Alexander and Follett Challenge officials will visit Saskatchewan to celebrate the contest win with Regina Catholic School Division administrators, teachers, and students.
Last year’s Grand Prize winner was Tudor Elementary School in Anchorage, Alaska. For a complete look at all the Follett Challenge winners over the years, visit https://follettchallenge.com/winners/pastwinners.cfm.
Follett Challenge entrants completed an online application and submitted a three- to five-minute video outlining how their program has made a positive impact. All public and private K-12 schools/districts in the United States, Canada, and Australia are eligible to apply, and submissions are open to all K-12 educators and Parent Teacher Organizations.
For more information about the Follett Challenge, visit www.follettchallenge.com. For more on Follett, visit www.follettlearning.com.
About Follett’s PreK-12 Business| FollettLearning.com
Find Follett on Facebook, and follow on Twitter (@FollettLearning).
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Phase Two of Las Vegas Convention Center Expansion Breaks Ground
LAS VEGAS, NV — The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) and local leaders gathered to celebrate the historic ceremonial groundbreaking for the Las Vegas Convention Center District (LVCCD) Phase Two Expansion project on Jan. 8.
“This is an incredibly exciting milestone for the entire destination, as this expansion will allow us to not only retain our status as the No. 1 convention city, but ensure our economic future by continuing to provide the unparalleled experience our guests and clients have come to expect,” said Rossi Ralenkotter, LVCVA President and CEO. “The LVCCD project is one of the most thoroughly vetted in Nevada history, which is fitting as we prepare to move forward with a world-class expansion to our facility. Las Vegas thrives on evolution and reinvention, and the LVCCD project will give us a convention center tantamount to one of the world’s most iconic and vibrant cities.”
Community and business leaders, including Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, Clark County Commissioners Steve Sisolak and Lawrence Weekly, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, and Consumer Technology Association President and CEO Gary Shapiro, joined Ralenkotter to officially kick off the beginning of one of the most significant economic development projects in Southern Nevada.
The LVCCD’s Phase Two is an $860 million expansion project that will add 1.4 million sq. ft. to the current convention center facility, including at least 600,000 sq. ft. of new, leasable exhibit space. The expansion is slated for completion in time to welcome CES in 2021.
Phase Three will be the complete renovation of the existing 3.2 million-sq.-ft. facility, with a projected completion date of 2023. The phased approach will ensure that no business will be displaced during the construction and renovation.
Convention Center/ CVB News
Sheraton Portland Airport Hotel Completes Multi-Million Dollar Renovation
Javits Center Launches Online Ordering System for Exhibitors
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'Podemos have now suffered great damage due to us. All, however, are linked: one of the reasons for which the official Europe appeared so determined to crush us, was the rise of Podemos. The Social Democrats in Germany and elsewhere were afraid our success. If we had succeeded to restart the Greek economy, they would end up like PASOK in Greece, ie 4%. Therefore, they had to crush us, which they did,'
“The referendum was not held for us to win but to lose, find an excuse in the face of an inevitable subjugation”. With this phrase, the former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, describes in the French magazine L 'Observateur what happened the night of the Greek referendum, when the “NO” prevailed with 62%.
“Truly, I'm thinking of it. On the night of the referendum, when this grand 62% for the 'NO' came out, I was in seventh heaven. But this was not the result that Tsipras wanted. It was written clearly on his face. Well, that night he said: it is time for us to surrender. And I answered: not for me. (...) He thought that Greece could be destroyed if we continued. I did not share this view. And I left.”
Referring to the role of Podemos in Spain, Varoufakis said: “We did great harm to them. Podemos have now suffered great damage due to us. All, however, are linked: one of the reasons for which the official Europe appeared so determined to crush us, was the rise of Podemos. The Social Democrats in Germany and elsewhere were afraid our success. If we had succeeded to restart the Greek economy, they would end up like PASOK in Greece, ie 4%. Therefore, they had to crush us, which they did,” he said among other things.
Concerning eurozone, Varoufakis said characteristically:
“To believe someone that there is a German psychological 'type', is the beginning of racism. I do not agree entirely with Mélenchon, as I told to him in the celebration of Humanité. This is mainly a weak thought, because eurozone was created, not by a German government, but by a coalition of French, German and Greek elites, which are equally responsible for the catastrophic architecture.”
http://tvxs.gr/news/ellada/baroyfakis-i-nyxta-poy-o-tsipras-moy-eipe-prepei-na-paradothoyme
A brief description of the financial war on Greece
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Trade Date and Settlement Date
By Kaye A. Thomas
Current as of May 20, 2018
For most purposes, the tax law relies on the trade date and ignores the settlement date — but there are exceptions.
Many investors think a purchase or sale of stock is complete when the broker fills their order. As a practical matter this is true: buyer and seller are locked into the transaction, and the price, as of that time. Yet the shares and the cash generally don’t actually change hands until two business days later. The day your broker fills the order is known as the trade date, and the day the transaction closes is the settlement date.
It’s important to know which date controls for tax purposes. Here are some of the reasons it matters:
We need to know whether a sale transaction occurred before or after the end of a year.
We need to know whether the holding period was short-term or long-term at the time of a sale.
If you sold shares at a loss, we need to know if any transaction in which you bought replacement shares occurred within the wash sale period.
If you received a dividend, we need to know whether you held the shares long enough for it to be a qualified dividend.
In all these cases, we may get one answer when using the trade date but a different one if we measure by the settlement date. In part this is because the time for settlement is measures in business days, but the time periods used in the tax law generally use calendar days. For example, the 61-day wash sale period includes the date of sale plus the 30 calendar days before and after that date. The time between the transaction date and settlement date can be anywhere from two to five days, depending on whether a holiday and/or weekend intervenes.
General rule: trade date controls
For most purposes, the tax law uses the trade date for both purchases and sales. For example, if you sell stock on December 31, you’ll report the gain or loss that year, even though the transaction will settle in January. Trade dates also govern in determining whether your holding period is short-term or long-term, in determining whether the wash sale rule applies, and in determining whether you have a qualified dividend.
You should be aware of a couple of exceptions:
When you close a short sale at a loss, the tax law treats the transaction as occurring on the settlement date. See Last Day to Sell.
If you hold more than one lot of shares and sell part of your holdings, you may want to identify the shares you’re selling. You can identify shares (or change your identification) until the settlement date. See How to Identify Shares.
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Anthony Archibald
Guitarist in Im9 6be
19,263 views on fandalism
Anthony Archibald - Harmonica
Busking with my mate Max on Douglas North Quay, summer 2011
Messed about with a harmonica from the age of 13. Took up guitar at college aged 21 and became interested in folk singing. Next got a 5-string banjo as a birthday present age 25 and about the same time bought my first autoharp. More recently I have been trying to play mandolin and also ocarina.
You would think that after all that time I would be a virtuoso on at least one of them, but I am merely fairly competent at using them mainly to accompany my singing, my voice being in my humble opinion my best instrument!
For over three years now I have been uploading songs on YouTube and include lyrics and chords as annotations on-screen to help others learn to play along with me. These annotations are best seen on full-screen, which you can do by clicking on the YouTube icon to the bottom right of the video.
I have just produced an eBook containing 50 songs (first volume hopefully provided it sells) which can be seen and purchased by following this link:
http://store.blurb.com/ebooks/316519-50-songs-from-the-threelegsoman-collection
The Dubliners at the Palace Ballroom, Douglas, Isle of Man some time in the 60s
I was performing on the same bill, but in those days I was a folk dancer not a singer.
6 and 12-string EKO Ranger guitars. Oscar Schmidt 21chord Autoharp. Ozark flat-back Mandolin. Lee Oskar, Honer and Suzuki Harmonicas. Remo Weatherking Banjo
Dubliners; Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem; Ian Campbell Folk Group; Liverpool Spinners; Tom Paxton and other folk musicians. Took to folk music after visiting Dublin when as a teenager I was a Manx Dancer.
I have recently joined with 6 others to form a band called The Cronk Illiam Scratchers.
In Manx, Cronk means hill; Illiam is William. A shortened form of William is Billy, so we are the Hill Billy Scratchers and play and sing music normally associated with the Appalachian Mountains.
Any of the folk groups that so influenced me in my formative years, e.g, The Dubliners; The Spinners; The Clancy Brothers; The Corries and individuals like Tom Paxton, Gordon Lightfoot, Eric Bogle etc
Back in 1981, I paired up with a friend singing folk songs. We were invited to entertain a group of people in a local pub after they had been at a concert at the Erin Arts Centre given by an up-and-coming young violinist.
During our performance, the audience were not really listening to us, being more interested in ingratiating themselves with the 16 year old violinist. He, however, was getting fed up and asked us if he could join us.
Neither Liam my friend, nor myself being professional players, so we were a bit dubious to begin with, but the lad said he could vamp along with us, so we agreed. Wow! What a difference he made to our performance. His playing was magical enhancing our performance tremendously.
Not really surprising, as the lad's name was (and still is) Nigel Kennedy!
I suppose that the biggest audience I have performed in front of would have been about 200 or so at the Peel Centenary Centre in the Isle of Man with the Cronk Illiam Scratchers, and the smallest an audience of three at Reayrt Y Chrink, the sheltered accommodation at which I live and give a monthly sing-around session on the last Friday of each month with help from quite a few of my musical friends. The audience usually 12 to 20 in number was only 3 for Boxing Day 2014.
Tom Paxton's Rambling Boy.
This was the first vinyl LP I ever bought and introduced me to Tom's fabulous repertoire.
Live concert at The Horse and Plough, Douglas, Isle of Man 10th Jan 2016
Anthony Archibald - Autoharp
Im9 6be
Anthony Archibald - 5-string banjo
Live concert at The Horse and Plough, Douglas, Isle of Man, 10th Jan 2016
Anthony Archibald - Guitar
St Patrick's Night at The Horse and Plough, Douglas, Isle of Man
Anthony Archibald - Kazoo
This is the National Flag of The Isle of Man, known at 'The Three Legs of Mann' which I have contracted to threelegsoman for my YouTube name.
2012 July 1st, The Cronk Illiam Scratchers in Ramsey park, Isle of Man
The Cronk Iliam Scratchers at a Hooley in the Barn
An open mic night at the Queen's Hotel, Douglas in the Isle of Man
Guitar: Flowers in the Valley (Including lyrics and chords) Back to songs from the BBC programme "Singing Together" today for a song I have uploaded previously, but on that occasion I sang it from memory and did not get the timing right according to the sheet music I found in Joe Offer's collection of songs from Singing Together. Consequently, I have done it again, this time following the music score.
Guitar: We Got Paid by Cash (Including lyrics and chords) One of my American pen friend, Tammy Statler's favourite artists was Johnny Cash. She put her surname and Johnny Cash into her search engine and came up with this song performed by The Statler Brothers. They step up the key of each verse, but I am not skilled enough on the guitar to be able to do this, so I have kept to the key of C throughout. When I came to put in the annotations, I realised that I had sung the first line incorrectly. The annotations are correct and are what I should have sung . This song was written by "The Statlers" as a tribute to Johnny Cash with whom they had a long association as explained in Wikipedia: The Statler Brothers (sometimes simply referred to The Statlers) were an American country music, gospel, and vocal group. The quartet was formed in 1955 performing locally and, in 1964, they began singing backup for Johnny Cash until 1972. Originally performing gospel music at local churches, the group billed themselves as The Four Star Quartet, and later The Kingsmen. In 1963, when the song "Louie, Louie" by the garage rock band also called The Kingsmen became famous, the group elected to bill themselves as The Statler Brothers. Despite the name, only two members of the group (Don and Harold Reid) are actual brothers and none has the surname of Statler. The band, in fact, named themselves after a brand of facial tissue they had noticed in a hotel room (they joked that they could have turned out to be the Kleenex Brothers). Don Reid sang lead; Harold Reid, Don's older brother, sang bass; Phil Balsley sang baritone; and Lew DeWitt sang tenor and was the guitarist of the Statlers before being replaced by Jimmy Fortune in 1983 due to DeWitt's ill health. DeWitt continued to perform as a solo artist until his death on August 15, 1990, from heart and kidney disease.
Guitar: Mass Rock in the Glen (Including lyrics and chords) "Mass Rock in the Glen" is a request from my American friend Ken Shuttlesworth. Wikipedia has the following regarding Mass Rocks: Following the religious strife of the seventeenth century and the passing of penal laws in 1695, celebrating Catholic mass in Ireland became a dangerous practice for priest and congregation. Isolated and secluded sites were selected for worship, and natural rocks and boulders often came to be used as an altar or Mass rock. It is often through local knowledge that their locations are still identifiable. The practice of celebrating mass in such fashion was in decline by the middle of the eighteenth century, when many Catholics worshipped in thatched 'mass-houses'. I have chosen to play this one using chord shapes for the key of G, but have put the capo at the 5th fret, so I am really playing and singing in the key of C. The reason for doing it this way is purely personal as I found it easier to pick out snippets of melody in my strumming this way rather than using chords shapes for the key of C.
Autoharp: Daisy Bell (Including lyrics and chords) The theme for the July meeting of the Manx Autoharpers is "Names", so I have chosen to sing this one about "Daisy". Like so many songs from the music hall era, the chorus of this one is very well known, but the verses, less so. It was written by Harry Dacre in 1892. According to Wikipedia: When Dacre, an English popular composer, first came to the United States, he brought with him a bicycle, for which he was charged import duty. His friend William Jerome, another songwriter, remarked lightly: "It's lucky you didn't bring a bicycle built for two, otherwise you'd have to pay double duty." Dacre was so taken with the phrase "bicycle built for two" that he soon used it in a song. That song, Daisy Bell, first became successful in a London music hall, in a performance by Katie Lawrence. Tony Pastor was the first to sing it in the United States. Its success in America began when Jennie Lindsay brought down the house with it at the Atlantic Gardens on the Bowery early in 1892. The song was originally recorded and released by Dan W. Quinn in 1893.
2019 June walks in the Isle of Man This is my monthly diary of photographs of highlights of some of the walks taken during the month of June. The weather this month has been mixed as is often the case. At the beginning of the month, damp and misty weather caused havoc with the TT races and for the first time ever, there were practice races held on the first Sunday of the month which is traditionally “Mad Sunday”. This put a lot of walkers off from joining in the walk on that day. Most of the walks throughout the month however were undertaken in fine weather, and all walks went ahead as scheduled. As usual, to accompany the photos I have added audio tracks from some of the videos I have uploaded this month. They are: Baby Pipes – MuseScore created Violin – My own composition It’s Magic – Guitar La Pique – Guitar Mountain Duel – Guitar The Leprehaun – Guitar Riding in the TT Races – Guitar The Oak and the Ash – Guitar My Bonny Cuckoo – Guitar Linstead Market – Guitar My Love’s an Arbutus – Guitar and MuseScore created Violin The Limejuice Ship – Guitar O ‘Twas in the Broad Atlantic (Married to a Mermaid) – Guitar Bonny Mary of Argyle – Autoharp Birlinn Ghodraigh Chrobhan – Guitar Beautiful Island – Guitar; Electric Guitar; Bass and Harmonica – My own composition (Electric Guitar and Bass played by my late friend Ian Blacklaw Richardson). Borderlands – Guitar Gentle on my Mind – 5-string Banjo In My Life – Guitar Pennsylvania Polka – Guitar Da Slockit Light – Guitar with MuseScore created Violin If you would like to see more photos taken on these walks, visit the Facebook site “Isle of Man walks”, or my own Google photographs page which you should find at: https://photos.google.com/albums
Anthony Archibald - Guitar/5-string banjo/autoharp
Guitar: My Master's Call (Including lyrics and chords) Written and performed by Marty Robbins, My Master's Call appeared on his 1959 album "Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs". It has been requested by subscriber Nima Pourkarimi.
Guitar: With My Little Stick Of Blackpool Rock (Including lyrics and chords) I have uploaded a few of George Formby's better known songs recently and commenting on one of them, subscriber Athull08 requested this song, so I have given it a try. Like many of Formby's songs, this one was written by Harry Gifford and Fred Cliffe. Like his song "When I'm Cleaning Windows", "With My Little Stick of Blacpool Rock" was banned by the BBC as Wikipedia explains: "In 1946 the song "With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock", which Formby had recorded in 1937, began to cause problems at the BBC for broadcasts of Formby or his music. The producer of one of Formby's live television programmes received a letter from a BBC manager that stated "We have no record that "With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock" is banned. We do however know and so does Formby, that certain lines in the lyric must not be broadcast". Other sources, including the BBC, state that the song was banned from being broadcast." I realised I had omitted one line of the song when I came to add the annotations, the line being: "Every day wherever I stray the kids all round me flock", which should have been included after the line: "No wonder every girl I danced with stuck to me tight", but felt it did not detract from the performance, so I did not re-record it.
Guitar: Green Eyes (Including lyrics and chords) I was introduced to this song a few weeks ago by my friend Steve Cain who plays and sings at our Tuesday night sessions. Written and performed by Kate Wolf, and American folk singer/songwriter. Kate sadly passed away aged only 44 after a long battle with leukemia in 1986. Trying to get the timing as close to hers as I could has taken a while, but here is my interpretation of her lovely song.
Guitar: Oak and the Ash (The) (Including lyrics and chords) "The Oak and the Ash" is today's upload from the BBC programme "Singing Together". The song dates back to at least the eighteenth century as evidenced by the following: Sir Walter Scott, in his novel Rob Roy, makes the narrator of the tale (Francis Osbaldiston) in recounting recollections of his childhood, tell how his Northumbrian nurse (old Mabel) amused him by singing the ditties of her native countie, and specially names O! the Oak and the Ash and the bonny Ivy Tree as a Northumbrian ballad. The stately tune started life as a dance tune, found in many places and under many titles but especially in Sir James Hawkin's Transcripts of music for the virginals, and the Dancing Master, of 1650, under the title Goddesses. I have made my own chord progression for the song and have experimented by playing the first sequence of chords Am, G, F and E starting up the neck rather than my usual open chording.
Guitar: O 'Twas In The Broad Atlantic (Married to a Mermaid) (Including lyrics and chords) Today's song from the BBC programme "Singing Together" according to the site: "Contemplator", first appeared in 1740 in The Masque of Alfred by James Thomson (1700-1748) and David Mallet. There is debate over which of them actually wrote it. In 1751 Mallett altered the words, omitting three of the original six stanzas and adding three others, written by Lord Bolingbroke. It became extremely popular when Mallet produced his Masque of Britannia at Drury Lane Theatre in 1755. I uploaded the version from "Contemplator" some years ago under the title "Married to a Mermaid!, but this version is slightly different. As with most of the songs in the "Singing Together" series, I have created my own chord progression for it.
Guitar: My Bonny Cuckoo (Including lyrics and chords) A short but sweet song today from the BBC programme "Singing Together". According to the notes in the pamphlet: This is taken from the Carendon Song Book II, Oxford University Press. The tune is noted as 'Old Irish Air' but is not further identified. It is generally considered that Carolan used this tune as the basis for his Si Bheag, Si Mhor. Once again, the chord progression I am using is of my own devising.
Guitar: Mountain Duel (Including lyrics and chords) Today's upload from the BBC programme "Singing Together" is a song about a young man fighting the elements to reach his true love, only to find her unimpressed by his efforts. The pamphlet acknowledges John Emlyn Edwards for the lyrics, but does not say if he is the author or a translator. Again, the chord progression I am using is of my own devising.
Guitar and MuseScore Violin: My Love's An Arbutus (Including lyrics and chords) Still picking songs from the BBC programme "Singing Together", this one has lyrics written by A P Graves, an Irish poet and songwriter. The melody is a traditional Irish tune: "I rise in the morning with my heart full of woe": a Cavan air. Also known as "The Coola Shore". As I was not familiar with this tune, I wrote out the score, but felt the tempo was far too fast, so after listening to a version posted on YT by Thomascow Mc Mullan I changed the tempo and have experimented by playing the MuseScore created violin and playing my guitar and singing over it to produce this video. The chord progression is of my own devising. The word "Machree" is an Anglicization of the Irish "mo chroí", an exclamation meaning "my heart", a term of endearment.
Anthony Archibald - Guitar/musescore violin
MuseScore created Violin: Baby Pipes (Instrumental) This is a tune I composed a couple of days ago. I played it on my penny whistle, but I am not accomplished enough on that to play along with the video, so I wrote it out in MuseScore and for convenience set it as a violin voice as they do not seem to have a bagpipe voice. (I had to mark the score as fortississimo (very loud) to get enough volume for this recording, but if playing it on an instrument it does not reuire and dynamics. My friend Sharon plays flute, whistles and bagpipes. She often brings her small pipes to our sessions as they are not as loud as the big pipes. She calls them her baby pipes, hence the title of this tune.
Anthony Archibald - Musescore violin
Guitar: Llangollen Market (Including lyrics and chords) Another song from the BBC programme "Singing Together", Llangollen Market is a Welsh folk song in which the singer bemoans that her lover has gone away, (though why we do not know), and she will not go to the market where they used to meet until he returns. Again, I was able to work out the melody from the score, but the chord progression I had to work out for myself. (I was at a picnic after or walk last Thursday and unfortunately we were attacked by a swarm of midges, hence the angry looking lumps on my head. Apart from their unpleasant appearance, they do not hurt or itch, though the ones around my ankles itced like crazy for a few days.)
Guitar: My Old Man (Including lyrics and chords) Written by Ewan MacColl, (real name: James Henry Miller), "My Old Man" is a song about a Sheffield steel worker. He worked for a company called the Cyclops Steel Works which later merged with the Openshaw Works of Manchester to create the English Steel Corporation.
Guitar: Linstead Market (Including lyrics and chords) Linstead Market is another song from the BBC programme "Singing Together" this one published in the summer of 1978. Wikipedia informs us that: "Linstead Market" is a Jamaican folk song of the mento type that tells of a mother who goes to the market with her ackee fruit but does not sell any, with the result that her children will go hungry. A quattie (or quatty) is a low value coin worth about a penny -halfpenny in pre-decimal currency. I vaguely remember this song and think it was probqbly one sung by Cliff Hall as a member of the Liverpool folk band The Spinners.
2019 May walks in the Isle of Man This is my monthly diary of photographs of highlights of some of the walks taken during the month of May. The weather this month has been mixed as is often the case in May. Fine weather at the beginning of the month, but rain and colder temperatures later. All walks went ahead as scheduled though. As usual, to accompany the photos I have added audio tracks from some of the videos I have uploaded this month. They are: First of May - Autoharp The Green Grass Grows All Around – Guitar When I’m Cleaning Windows– Guitar La Pique – Guitar Hey Ho The Morning Dew – Guitar From a Distance – Guitar Da Slockit Light – Guitar with MuseScore created Violin Smoky Mountain Rain – Guitar The Leprehaun – Guitar Jenny Go Gentle –Guitar Leaning on a Lamp-post – Guitar Riding in the TT Races – Guitar It’s Magic – Guitar Following The Leader – Guitar Jack and Bramble – Mandolin, Guitar and MuseScore created Violin If you would like to see more photos taken on these walks, visit the Facebook site “Isle of Man walks”, or my own Google photographs page which you should find at: https://photos.google.com/albums
Anthony Archibald - Guitar/autoharp/mandolin
Guitar: Leprehaun (The) (Including lyrics and chords) Back to the BBC programme "Singing Together" for a short amusing little ditty called The Leprehaun. Leprehauns are Irish fairy folk and tradition has it that if you catch one, they are supposed to give you a fortune in gold. However, they are mischievous beings and tricky, so even though the singer of this song succeeds in capturing one of them, he is tricked and gets nothing for his troubles. According to the footnote in the pamphlet: The song appears to have been written by Patrick Weston Joyce, c.1873, though it's also attributed to his brother, Robert Dwyer Joyce, who wrote the words of The Boys of Wexford. Like all of the songs I have been performing from "Singing Together", I have put my own chord progression to the melody.
Guitar: Riding in the TT Races (Including lyrics and chords) This is number three of songs performed by George Formby that I have learned in readiness for a sing-around at sheltered accommodation in Ramsey next week at the request of one of the residents. "Riding in the TT Races" was not only performed by Formby, but written by him and Harry Gifford and Frederick E. Cliffe and was featured in the film "No Limit" in which he starred. Wikipedia has the following about the film: No Limit is a 1935 British musical comedy starring George Formby and Florence Desmond. The film, which was directed by Monty Banks, was made on location at the TT motorcycle race on the Isle of Man. It was the first of eleven films that Formby made with Associated Talking Pictures. Although Formby had already made two moderately successful films (Boots! Boots! and Off the Dole), No Limit was the film that put him on the road to stardom. It is still regarded as one of his best and funniest featuring good songs, humorous scenes and numerous stunts. The TT races are still run in the Isle of Man and in fact today is the final day of "TT week", though sad to relate, the weather for this year's event has not been good and has played havoc with the schedules. However, I believe they managed to organize things in such a way that most of the races were completed even if the number of laps had to be curtailed. George Formby performed the song accompanying himself on the ukulele banjo, an instrument on which he was particularly skilled. I don't play the uke, so am using my guitar and have simplified the chord progression to suit my own limited abilities.
Guitar: It's Magic (Including lyrics and chords) Three weeks ago, Doris Mary Kappelhoff passed away at the age of ninety-seven. She was better known as Doris Day, taking her stage name from a song she performed, "Day After Day". She was one of my favourite actresses and I particularly loved her performance as the title character from the musical "Calamity Jane". My friend Sylvia Horn sings a number of Doris Day's songs and asked me if I knew "It's Magic" as she wants to sing it, so I looked it up, worked out a chord progression that I am able to play and hope that soon, Sylvia will be able to sing it to my accompaniment. According to Wikipedia: "It's Magic" is a popular song written by Jule Styne, with lyrics by Sammy Cahn. The song was introduced by Doris Day in her film debut, Romance on the High Seas (known in the United Kingdom as It's Magic after the song), and was published in 1947. Versions which made the Billboard magazine charts in 1948 were recorded by Doris Day, Tony Martin, Dick Haymes, Gordon MacRae, and Sarah Vaughan. It was nominated for a Best Song Oscar in 1948, losing to "Buttons and Bows." In 1952, Doris Day made the song the theme of The Doris Day Show, her Hollywood radio series. This video is my own interpretation of the song.
The Limejuice Ship (Including lyrics and chords) This is another song of the sea I found in the catalogue of songs from the BBC programme "Singing Together". In the days of sail, on long voyages, great loss of life was caused by the disease, "scurvy". A Scottish doctor experimented with citrus fruits such as lemons and oranges and found that regular use of these prevented the disease and eventually crews of British ships were given doses of lemon juice in particular often added to their daily ration of "grog". At that time, the word "lime" was often used to refer to any of the citrus fruits. North American sailors would refer to the British sailors in a derogatory way as "Limeys" . (Lime juice was not in fact as effectual for curing "scurvy" as lemon or orange juice, but was also tried for a while). Another reason that British sailors were healthier than other nationalities was cleanliness aboard their ships. Much of the crew's time on deck was spent scrubbing with holystones to keep them clean, so even when they were not aloft in the rigging, the sailor's working hours were filled with hard work and they needed to be strong and healthy. The "limejuice" helped keep them strong and healthy. The melody I was able to work out from the score, but the chord progression I am using is of my own devising. Singing together was a programme for school children, so I was very surprised to find that in the chorus, the line which I sing as "...damn and beggar the navy..." was in the pamphlet "...damn and bugger the navy..." I did not feel comfortable singing that, so changed the word to "beggar"
Guitar: La Pique (Including lyrics and chords) This song comes from the summer 1979 edition of the BBC programme "Singing Together". The following information comes from mudcat.org in a discussion on the song: "The Pique was a 36-gun frigate, and was, according to Whall [Sea Songs and Shanties], 'the flash packet of the Navy in her day'. He puts the date of the song at about 1838, a period when the ship was particularly notorious for spit-and-polish. The song seems to have been a favourite in both Navy and merchant service, and 'The Dreadnought' was made in imitation of it." Mudcat provided the score, but did not include chords, so once again the chord progression is of my own devising.
Guitar: John Kanaka (Including lyrics and chords) *John Kanaka" is another song from the BBC programme "Singing Together". Footnote from the pamphlet reads: Source: Hugill, Stan, (1969), Shanties and Sailors Songs, London, Herbert Jenkins. Stan Hugill wrote: This halyard song is the only known representative of a sizeable group of Anglicized Polynesian work-songs popular at one time among seamen in the various Pacific Islands trades. Dana, in his Two Years before the Mast, refers to such songs and the singing of them by Mahana, an Hawaiian shantyman in the hide carriers of the Pacific Slope of America in the 1830s He also says "The writer collected this version from a coloured seaman from Barbados, in the West Indies." The following comes from "Sea Songs and Chanteys": This was a “long haul” chantey, used at the halyards for hoisting up the sails. Many Hawaiians worked aboard ships that sailed the Pacific, and were renowned for their excellent seamanship. English-speaking sailors often had difficulty pronouncing their names, however and so called them by the Hawaiian name "Kanaka," which means "Hawaiian Man." The lyrics "tu lai-e" also come from the Hawaiian language, and are a remnant of the chantey singing tradition of combining the music and language of different seafaring cultures. The chord progression I am using is of my own devising.
Guitar: Jenny Go Gentle (Including lyrics and chords) This is yet another song from the BBC programme "Singing Together". It is a variant on the Scottish song ""Wee Cooper of Fyfe", this one sourced from The Penguin Book of Canadian Folk Songs. The chord progression is of my own devising.
Guitar: I Will Give You The Keys of Heaven (Including lyrics and chords) This song is another from the BBC programme "Singing Together". The following are notes from the publication: Source: Lucy Broadwood and J A Fuller Maitland. 1893, English County Songs, Leadenhall Press, London Notes: From the Rev S. Baring-Gould, who had it from the Rev F Partridge. Lucy Broadwood wrote: The first two stanzas and the tune come from CHeshire, the other verses were forgotten, but are restored from an East country version. In a version sent from Masham, Yorkshire, the second line of verse 1 runs; "To lock the gates when the clock strikes seven." See Halliwell's Popular Rhymes, p 21; Chambers's Rhymes of Scotland, p 213; Mason's Country Songs, for other versions. In many the lady's cupidity is at last excited by some especially magnificent offer, and, on her consenting, the man refuses to have anything to do with her. As this is a song for two people, a man and a woman, I have shown the male's lyrics in white and the female's lyrics in red. The song is similar to "Paper of Pins", but in this case, the man's courtship proves to be successful and the lady is not a "gold digger".
Guitar: Hey Ho The Morning Dew (Including lyrics and chords) "Hey Ho The Morning Dew" is another song from the BBC programme "Singing Together" published in their Autumn 1973 edition. They attribute the song as being Irish, but there is no definintive provenance that this is so. I just liked the tune and created my own chord progression for it by ear.
Guitar and Violin: Da Slockit Light (Instrumental including score with chords) A bit of a departure today from my usual uploads. One of our Friday night session musicians suggested a new accompaniment to the tune "Da Slockit Light", so I have recorded my guitar over a MuseScore violin version of the tune. The tune was written by Shetland fiddler Tom (Tammy) Anderson, who according to Wikipedia said the following about his inspitation for the tune: "I was coming out of Eshaness in late January, 1969, the time was after 11 pm and as I looked back at the top of the hill leading out of the district, I saw so few lights compared to what I remembered when I was young. As I watched, the lights started going out one by one. That, coupled with the recent death of my wife, made me think of the old word ‘Slockit’ meaning, a light that has gone out, and I think that is what inspired the tune" – from a taped interview with Tammy by a student in 1970.
Guitar: When I'm Cleaning Windows (Including lyrics and chords) Having uploaded the George Formby song "Leaning on a Lamp-post" a couple of days ago, I thought I would have a go at another oh his songs, namely "When I'm Cleaning Windows". Wikipedia has the following about the song: "When I'm Cleaning Windows" is a comedy song performed by Lancastrian comic, actor and ukulele player George Formby. It first appeared in the 1936 film Keep Your Seats, Please. The song was credited as written by Formby, Harry Gifford and Frederick E. Cliffe. Formby performed the song in A♭ in Keep Your Seats, Please. For the single release, the key was changed to B♭. The song was so successful that George Formby recorded another version of the song entitled "The Window Cleaner (No. 2)". This song uses similar orchestration to the original version and it is about further things which were seen on a window cleaning round. Because the song’s lyrics were racy for the time, it was banned by the BBC from being played on the radio. The corporation's director general John Reith stated that "if the public wants to listen to Formby singing his disgusting little ditty, they'll have to be content to hear it in the cinemas, not over the nation's airwaves"; Formby and his wife and manager Beryl Ingham were furious with the block on the song. In May 1941, Ingham informed the BBC that the song was a favourite of the royal family, particularly Queen Mary, while a statement by Formby pointed out that "I sang it before the King and Queen at the Royal Variety Performance". The BBC relented and started to broadcast the song. The record's sales were so successful that Regal Zonophone awarded Formby the first silver disc for sales of over 100,000 copies.
Guitar: Leaning on a Lamp-post (Including lyrics and chords) At the monthly sing-around at Kerroo Glass shetered accommodation in Ramsey last week, one of the ladies requested that I do the song she remembered from the George Formby film "No Limit". She couldn't remember the name of the song, but it came to her after a little time and was "Leaning on a Lamp-post". The song was written by Noel Gay and was in fact used in a George Formby film, "Feather Your Nest". It was incorporated in the musical "Me and My Girl" in 1985, though not in the original 1937 version of that show. For those not familiar with some of the chords, I am playing the following as shown below: Gmaj7 = 320002; G6 = 320000;l D6 = x00303. The ukulele is not an instrument I can play, so I have worked out my own accompaniment on the guitar using a much simplified chord progression. George Formby is very much associated with the Isle of Man, especially for his film "No Limit" which has been shown in cinemas in the island every year around the time of the TT races, and there is a statue of George in racing gear with his banjo leaning against a lamp-post on Regent Street in Douglas
Guitar: Green Grass Grows All Around (Including lyrics and chords) Requested by "jdbeard184", I had thought that I had uploaded this song some time ago, but then realised it was not this one, but "The Rattling Bog" (https://youtu.be/NbOfcKpcsK8) which is basically the same song, but to a different tune and a slight difference in the lyrics. Both songs are cumulative, making it more and more difficult to get all the words in on one breath!
Guitar: Bonnie Ship The Diamond (Including lyrics and chords) In response to a comment from subscriber, Paul Wunder, on my first upload of this song which I did nine years ago using inferior recording equipment, I have done a newer version which I present here. The following information is what I included with my first version: "The Bonnie Ship The Diamond" is an old Scottish song popularized by The Corries and Bob Dylan. The following information comes from the site from which I acquired the lyrics: Over-fishing in the Greenland sea during the early 19th century had a devastating toll on the whale stocks. A new hunting ground, the South-West Fishery, was discovered in the region of the Davis Straits and it was mostly here that The Diamond fished. In 1830 The Diamond, Eliza Swan and The Resolution along with seventeen other whaling ships were caught in the ice of Melville Bay. The ships were lost and many sailors lost their lives.
Guitar: Smoky Mountain Rain (Including lyrics and chords) Another request from my American pen friend Tammy Statler, Smoky Mountain Rain also introduced me to an American country singer who I had not come across before. Wikipedia has the following about the song and singer: "Smoky Mountain Rain" is a song written by Kye Fleming and Dennis Morgan, and recorded by American country music singer Ronnie Milsap. It was released in September 1980 as the first single from his Greatest Hits album. The single became one of his best-known songs. The song was Milsap's 16th number one hit on Billboard magazine's Hot Country Singles chart where it stayed at the top for one week in December 1980. "Smoky Mountain Rain" also fared well as a crossover hit and was his first of two number one hits on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart (the other being "Any Day Now"), as well as number 24 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2010, "Smoky Mountain Rain" became Tennessee's eighth state song as a result of action by the Tennessee General Assembly on June 3, 2010. In 2014, Rolling Stone magazine ranked "Smoky Mountain Rain" number 96 in their list of the 100 greatest country songs.
Guitar: Locked Out Blues (Including lyrics and chords) This is another song written and performed by my late friend Ian Blacklaw Richardson. A video of Ian playing and singing this one with me accompanying him on the harmonica can be seen at: https://youtu.be/ouM175zQeis Ian, or Max as he was known, was a far more accomplished guitarist than I am, and I used to love to play along with him on my harmonica.
Anthony Archibald - Guitar/harmonica
Guitar: From a Distance (Including lyrics and chords) Another song introduced to me by my American pen friend Tammy Statler, "From a Distance" was written by Julie Gold and originally recorded by Nanci Griffiths in 1987, then covered by Bette Midler in 1990. I have based my own interpretation on the Bette Midler version.
2019 April walks in the Isle of Man This is my monthly diary of photographs of highlights of some of the walks taken during the month of April. The weather this month has been kind with plenty of sunny days, though east winds did bring with them hazy air which sometimes made it difficult to see the lovely views expected. Conversely, it also had the effect of making conditions perfect for taking shots of the sun as it was setting. All walks went ahead as scheduled. As usual, to accompany the photos I have added audio tracks from some of the videos I have uploaded this month. They are: Take a Long Walk – Guitar – Written by my good friend Ian Blacklaw Richardson better known as Msx. Forgive Me – Guitar – Also written by Max. Flowers on the Wall – Guitar It must be love – Guitar Sound of Silence – Guitar Castles in the Air – Guitar I Still Miss Someone – Guitar The Old Rustic Bridge – Guitar More Than a Name on the Wall – Guitar Wait Till The Clouds Roll By – Autoharp ‘Til The Rivers All Run Dry – Guitar Song For The Captain – Guitar We Should Be Together – Guitar When It’s Springtime In The Rockies – Autoharp Si Bheag Si Mhor – Autoharp If you would like to see more photos taken on these walks, visit the Facebook site “Isle of Man walks”, or my own Google photographs page which you should find at: https://photos.google.com/albums
Anthony Archibald - Guitar/autoharp
Guitar: Castles in the Air (Including lyrics and chords) This song was written by Anne Swithinbank and was performed by the Liverpool folk group, "The Spinners" in 1975. This is not the same song as Don McLean's "Castles in the Air" which is in fact what led me to this one thanks to subscriber Allie Riley who wrote a comment on my version of the Don McLean song mentioning the Anne Swithinbank song. I found the lyrics easily enough but had to work out the chord progression for myself. I chose to sing and play in the key of Eb simply because that is the key in which The Spinners did it.
Guitar: Till The Rivers All Run Dry (Including lyrics and chords) Till The Rivers All Run Dry, (or more correctly; "Til The Rivers All Run Dry), is a song performed by Don Williams and written by himself and Wayland Holyfield. It comes as a request from my American pen friend Tammy Statler. In playing the accompaniment to this one, I have chosen to play the G chord in the first three lines of the chorus using the D chord shape moved up five frets.
Guitar: More Than A Name On The Wall (Including lyrics and chords) This song is another that my American pen friend Tammy Statler introduced to me and comes from the repertoir of "The Statler Brothers", no relation to Tammy though. The song was written by Jimmy Fortune and John Rimel and was released in 1989, reaching number 6 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles Chart.
Guitar: Song For The Captain (Including lyrics and chords) A request from subscriber "Nima Pourkarimi" introduced this song to me. I was unable to find any information about the song other than it was one of the tracks on Roger Whittaker's 1980 album "Voyager" and is attributed to "Hansell, Parker". Not being able to find the lyrics to the song, even with help from Mudcat.org, I eventually resorted to transcribing them from a YouTube video. This led me to create a "mondegreen" when I could not quite decide what one of the lines in the song actually said. At first, I heard: "tied water canyons" which made no sense to me, so I thought it must me "tight water canyons". I created my video, adding the annotatioins and was about to upload it when I decided to give Roger Whittaker's video another listen as I was still not satisfied that I had it right. This time, it dawned on me there is another way of spelling "tied", i.e. "tide" and that made much more sense, so I re-recorded the song and added the annotations which you see now. The chords too are my own interpretation of the song.
Guitar: Flowers on the Wall (Including lyrics and chords) "Flowers on the Wall" is another song requested by my American pen friend, Tammy Statler who as far as I know is not related to the Statler Brothers who performed the song. According to Wikipedia: "Flowers on the Wall" is a song made famous by the country music group The Statler Brothers. Written and composed by the group's original tenor, Lew DeWitt, the song peaked in popularity in January 1966, spending four weeks at No. 2 on the Billboard magazine Hot Country Singles chart, and reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song was used in the soundtrack to the 1994 film Pulp Fiction and as the title theme of the 2001-2002 BBC Radio 4 sitcom Linda Smith's A Brief History of Timewasting. I remember this one from my college days. They say: if you remember the 60's, you weren't there! In that case, I guess I wasn't really there!!!
Guitar: We Should Be Together (Including lyrics and chords) This song, written and performed by Don Williams is another request from my American pen friend Tammy Statler. It was released in 1974 and reached number five in the charts.
Guitar: Old Rustic Bridge By The Mill (The) (Including lyrics and chords) This is a request from my young American friend, Ken Shuttlesworth. The song was written by T.P.Keenan from Castletownroche, Fermoy, Co Cork. An article on Castletownrioche on Facebook has the following: ''The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill'', composed by T P Keenan is synonymous with Castletownroche. Known in his profession as Tommy Conway, he was a versatile and prolific writer and composer. When you list his compositions, among them are '' When Irish Eyes are Shining'', ''Mother Macree'', That's an Irish Lullaby'' you realise he must have been one of the greatest writer of Irish popular songs. He was an all round performer, singing, dancing, playing the piano, providing all all his own material when he toured the country doing the circuits of music halls all over the country. While in Co. Cork with his company in 1927, Tommy got pneumonia and died. He was 61 years of age. He was buried in Castletownroche Cemetery overlooking the Bridge on the river Awbeg and the Mill.His grave was unmarked for 53 years until locals erected a memorial to his memory on the wall inside the Cemetery gate, the exact spot where he was buried is unknown. Thomas Keenan dedicated many song to his late wife Margaret Lillis whom he married in the early 1890's, among these were ''The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill''. In looking for information about the song, I discovered that according to the Library of Congress, the song is attributed to a J.P.Skelly. Whether J.P.Skelly was a pseudonym for T.P.Keenan or whenter he was a plagorist, I do not know. As I was singing the song, I had great difficulty with the line "the old rustic bridge". I could not get out of my head a similar line in the song "The Old Rugged Cross". Without realising it at the time, I ended up singing "the old rugged bridge", but have decided to keep it rather than try to re-record the whole song. The annotations give the correct lyrics!
Autoharp: Wait Till The Clouds Roll By Jenny (Including lyrics and chords) When checking out my music files the other day, I came across the lyrics for this song which I can only assume was requested by somebody, but I did not get around to performing it. My apologies to that person for my tardiness, but the old memory is not as good now as it was before it got so bad!!! The song was written as a parlour song in 1894 with words by T.J.Wood and music by H.J.Fulmer and has been covered by many artists including Uncle Dave Macon who was the first to record the song in 1939. The version I listened to and based my own recording on was by Foster and Allen. When I wrote out the title for the video, I omitted the name Jenny, but it should have been "Wait Till The Clouds Roll By, Jenny". When I wrote out the annotations, I had intended to play and sing the middle eight in the last verse slightly differently to the way it came out when I recorded it, so the annotations shown do not quite match up with what I am playing and singing.
Guitar: It Must Be Love (Including lyrics and chords) Another song from Don Williams, I was directed to this one by my American pen friend, Tammy Statler. Wikipedia has the following about the song: "It Must Be Love" is a song written by Bob McDill, and recorded by American country music artist Don Williams. It was released in July 1979 as the third single from the album Expressions. The song was Williams' ninth Number One single on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles charts. In 2000, country music artist Alan Jackson recorded a cover of the song and released it as the third single from his album Under the Influence. Like Williams' version before it, Alan's cover also reached Number One on the Billboard country charts, a position that it held for one week. It also managed to reach the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #37.
Guitar: Forgive Me (Including lyrics and chords) This is another of the songs written by my friend Ian Blacklaw Richardson, better known as Max to his friends who passed away last year.
Guitar: Take a Long Walk (Including lyrics and chords) A year ago this week, my good friend, singer/songwriter Ian Blacklaw Richardson and very accomplished guitarist suddenly lost the ability to play his guitar. The cause of this was discovered a few days later. He had a large aggressive tumour on his brain. It was incurable and within three months, it took his life. Tonight, we are holding a concert in his memory and I intend to sing some of his own songs at it. Ian, better known to us as Max, wrote hundreds of songs and performed them at our sing-around sessions each week. He wrote "Scotland Will Flourish" and the music for "My One and Only Love", both of which were recorded by "The Corries" "Take a Long Walk" is one I particularly loved as I would play an accompaniment to it on my harmonica as Max sang it. The first time we performed this one together was at a concert in Laxey videos of which can be found on my playlist "Max and Me": https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... Sadly, although he sang his songs regularly, there are only a few that I have the lyrics to and even fewer that I know the tunes of. Those I do know, I am going to upload from time to time.
Guitar: Sound of Silence (Including lyrics and chords) A bit of self-indulgence today; I uploaded this song ten years ago when I was using a webcam for my recordings. The microphone was not too good and tended to cause crackling when I put any volume into my singing or playing. Also, I added the lyrics and chords using YouTube annotations, but these have become obsolete since 2017 and even though YouTube promised they would still be available, they have reneged on that promise. So I am presenting a new version with annotations on screen from my own editing app. The song of course was written by Paul Simon and performed by himself with Art Garfunkel, though the first time I heard it, it was performed by an Irish group called "The Bachelors".who recorded a cover version of the song in 1966, and this earned the group their last top 10 hit in both Ireland (#9) and the UK (#3). The original version by Simon & Garfunkel has never charted in either Ireland or the UK.
Guitar: Song of the Shieldwall (Including lyrics and chords) This song is new to me and comes as a request for subscriber "Nima Pourkarimi". None of the videos I found of it on YT gave a clear impression of the tune, so I was despairing of being able to do it as I need to hear a song before I can perform it, but I was able to find the sheet music and lyrics at: https://angerweit.tikon.ch/lieder/fan..., so wrote it out using MuseScore, then listened to the tune repeatedly until I had it fixed in my head. I recorded it and realised that in verse two I had mispronounced the word "fyrdmen" as "freedmen", but apart from that, the rest of the recording was good, so I have presented the song as is including the mispronunciation. Set during the period of British history of the eleventh century, the song is attributed to T: Malkin Grey (Debra Doyle) M: Peregrynne Windrider (Melissa Williamson).
2019 March walks in the Isle of Man This is my monthly diary of photographs of highlights of some of the walks taken during the month of March. The weather at the start of the month was not kind, with rain falling during the first couple of walks, but they went ahead despite this. Happily, the weather improved for the remainder of the month and on some of the walks, we even doffed outer clothing when it got too warm. As usual, to accompany the photos I have added audio tracks from some of the videos I have uploaded this month. They are: I’m No Stranger to the Rain – Guitar Lord, I Hope This Day is Good – Guitar Birlinn Ghodraidh Chrobhain – Guitar Si Bheag Si Mhor – Autoharp instrumental The Northwest Passage – Guitar Birthday of St Patrick – Autoharp Scraping Up Sand At The Bottom Of The Sea – Guitar Men of Harlech – Guitar The Handsome Butcher – Guitar Queen Anne’s Lace – Autoharp The First of May – Autoharp Some Broken Hearts Never Mend – Guitar Three Maidens a-milking Did Go – Guitar Tulips from Amsterdam – Autoharp Three Pirates Came to London Town – Guitar Sunset – Autoharp instrumental – my own composition. If you would like to see more photos taken on these walks, visit the Facebook site “Isle of Man walks”, or my own Google photographs page which you should find at: https://photos.google.com/albums
Autoharp: When It's Springtime In The Rockies (Including lyrics and chords) Written by Mary Hale Woolsey, "When It's Springtime in the Rockies" was recorded by Gene Autry, but I have based my performance on a recording by a group called "Sons of the Pioneers". Wikipedia informs us: The song gained popularity in the Provo area and at Brigham Young University. Earl J. Glade, manager of the KSL radio station in Salt Lake City, Utah, named "When It's Springtime in the Rockies" the national song of Utah and the West. A popular radio duo of the time, Bob and Monte, was requested to sing the song and later record it. After the recording was sent to publishers thirteen times, it was finally released. Later Milt Taggart, who was the head of a music store in Salt Lake, had the copy of the song. He made a contract with Woolsey and Sauer that he would split the profits with them if there were any. They sold the song to Charlie Daniels. Milt Taggart was named the co-author. The song was heard worldwide and became a bestseller in England. The instrument I am playing is a 21-bar chromatic "ChromAharp" which I acquired recently with a view to selling it on.
Guitar: I Still Miss Someone (Including lyrics and chords) "I Still Miss Someone" is a song written by Johnny Cash and his nephew Roy Cash Jr. and was first recorded by Johnny Cash in 1958 when was released as the B-side to "Don't Take Your Guns To Town". I thought I had done this one before, but discovered it is one that slipped me by, so here is my interpretation of it.
Guitar: Some Broken Hearts Never Mend (Including lyrics and chords) Another song requested by my American pen friend, Tammy Statler, "Some Broken Hearts Never Mend" is a song written by Wayland Holyfield, and recorded by American country music artist Don Williams. It was released in January 1977 as the first single from the album Visions. "Some Broken Hearts Never Mend" was Don Williams' sixth number one on the country chart. The single stayed at number one for a single week and spent a total of 12 weeks within the top 40. The song was also an international hit for Telly Savalas. It topped the Swiss charts for two weeks, and peaked at No. 2 in Austria and No. 4 in Netherlands. The Bellamy Brothers covered the song in 1999 in a reggae style for the album Reggae Cowboy. This version was also a single, but did not chart.
Guitar: Handsome Butcher (The) (Including lyrics and chords) Today, I am returning to my source of songs from the BBC programme, Singing Together. "The Handsome Butcher" comes from the Autumn 1974 pamphlet, but there is no information regarding its origin or source. I believe however that it is an English translation of an Hungarian folk song. There are only three verses, so I sang the first verse again to lengthen it.
Autoharp: Tulips From Amsterdam (Including lyrics and chords) I uploaded a guitar accompanied version of this song five years ago and included a little story of how I met the entertainer, Max Bygraves, who was a childhood hero to me and who made this song popular in the UK. As a young man, I took up the game of golf and after playing for about a year on my local course at Port Erin, I felt competent enough to try to tackle Castletown Golf Links but as I was on my own I asked the professional if he could fix me up with a partner to play with. After a bit of a wait, he managed to get me a game with none other than Max Bygraves and a friend, and so I actually met my childhood hero and found that he was indeed a very nice unassuming man. Tulips From Amsterdam was originally a German song written by Klaus-Günter Neumann but it was re-written by Ernst Bader, with a new tune written by Ralf Arnie. Today I am uploading a version using the autoharp as our monthly challenge for the Manx Autoharpers was to find a song about Spring, and this is my offering. Incidentally, I am playing this one without using picks, but if I were to play it for an audience, I would probably use them.
Guitar: Men of Harlech (Including lyrics and chords) I have uploaded a version of this song using my 12-string guitar for accompaniment, but have been requested to do a six-string version by subscriber " LokiTheKing". This is a powerful marching song to rally the troops. Of course it started life as a Welsh song in their fight against the Saxon invader, i.e. the English, but in later years became a favourite of British Troops of all nations of the British Isles. One of the most moving renditions of it can be heard in the film Zulu when the beleaguered troop of Welsh Engineers are about to face the final battle with the far superior numbers of the Zulu warriors at Rourke's Drift. There are a number of variations in the words, this being a version of the song that appeared in The Songs of Wales, (ed. Brinley Richards, 1873). In this version the words are by John Oxenford.
Autoharp: Queen Anne's Lace (Including lyrics and chords) My American pen friend, Tammy Statler, introduced me to this song which was written by David Olney and performed by The Del McCoury Band. New to me, here is my interpretation of this bluegrass number. My aplogies for being so close to the camera that you cannot see my left hand, but my eyesight is not as good as it once was and I had to be close enough to my computer screen to read the lyrics.
Guitar: Birlinn Ghodraidh Chrobhain (including lyrics and chords) I found this version of "Birlinn Ghodraidh Chrobhain" on a thread in Mudcat.org a few days ago. "Ghodraidh Chrobhain" is a name well known in the Isle of Man as Godred Crovan or King Orry. He was a viking warrior who fought at the Battle of Stamford Bridge from which battle he escaped with his life. He later conquered Dublin and became "King of Dublin and the Isles". The isles included the Isle of Man, referred to as "Mann", and Islay, and this song is a translation from a Scottish song telling of his journey from Mann to Islay. There is a Manx version of the song, but sadly I do not speak the Manx language, so am unable to perform it in Manx. This therefore is my interpretation of the song. The chorus is similar to the Manx version, but not quite the same as far as my ear can tell. The words of the chorus may have no meaning.
Guitar: Three Pirates Came to London Town (Including lyrics and chords) This song comes from the BBC Singing Together programme from the Autumn 1971 edition. The footnote in the pamphlet reads: Identified as "English Folk Song." Taken from Voices of America (Follett Educational Corporation) The chords shown in the annotations are for strumming accompaniment and may not match up with my finger-style picking.
Autoharp: Si Bheag Si Mhor (Instrumental) I don't usually upload two videos on the same day, but I have just seen a stumming version of this O'Carolan tune played on a diatonic autoharp by Will Smith, and it inspired me to see if I could manage it myself on my chromatic 'harp. By no means perfect, but playing entirely by ear and never having attempted it before, I think it is a reasonable effort. (I am playing it in G and only using G, C and D7 chords) Happy St Patrick's Day.
Guitar: Three Maidens a milking Did Go (Including lyrics and chords) Today, I am returning to the BBC programme Singing Together for a song from one of their pamphlets, (it does not say which), about which the following footnotes were given: Roud: 290 Source: Kidson F, 1891, Traditional Tunes, A Collection of Ballad Airs, Oxford, Taphouse and Son Notes: Kidson wrote: This air my friend, Mr Holgate, remembers being sung in and about Leeds. If not very old, it is good, and it could only be wished that the succeeding verses to the first (the only one I have printed) were equally meritorious and more suitable for this work. The additional text added above is not traditional as such, as it has been copied from Stephen Sedley's book The Seeds of Love (Essex Music/EFDSS, 1967, p. 85): "Text collated from two broadsides (one from the Baring-Gould collection and one from the files of Kendrew, a York printer of the early 19th century), and from sets noted by Hammond in Dorset and Priscilla Wyatt-Edgell in Devon." Given that caveat, it's a perfectly reasonable text, and not too far from examples actually found in tradition; though it does seem that some singers were unaware of the nature of the symbolism, so it sometimes gets rather muddled. Frank Purslow (Marrowbones, EFDSS 1965 p. 2) prints a similar text noted by Hammond from William Poole (Taunton, Somerset, 1905), and Palmer (English Country Songs, Dent 1979 p. 124) gives the original text noted by Baring Gould from Roger Hannaford of Lower Widdecombe, Devon, hitherto only published in heavily edited or completely rewritten forms. Even restored, this latter is quite innocent compared to the broadside versions, some mid-19th century examples of which can be seen at Bodleian Library Broadside Ballad: Three maids a-milking would go According to Palmer, the song first appeared in print in the 1820s. It persisted in tradition at least to the mid-20th century; Bob Copper recorded a set from Fred Hewett of Mapledurwell, Hampshire, in 1955. (Songs and Southern Breezes, Heinemann 1973, p. 280; Kennedy, Folk Songs of Britain and Ireland, Oak 1984, p. 422)
Guitar: I'm No Stranger to the Rain (Including lyrics and chords) This song is another request from my friend Tammy Statler. Tammy wondered if I knew of Keith Whitley, who wrote and performed "I'm No Stranger to the Rain". As it happens, I have uploaded another of his songs previously, namely: "When You Say Nothing At All", but I had not heard this song, so here is my interpretation of it.
Guitar: Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good (Including lyrics and chords) This is a request from my American pen friend Tammy Statler. Tammy has sent me a list of songs by various artists, so I will have my work cut out for a while checking them out and recording those I like. According to Wikipedia: "Lord, I Hope This Day is Good" is a song written by Dave Hanner, and recorded by American country music artist Don Williams. It was released in November 1981 as the third single from the album Especially for You. "Lord, I Hope This Day is Good" was Don Williams' twelfth number one on the country chart. The single stayed at number one for one week and spent a total of twenty weeks on the country music charts. Hanner also recorded the song as a member of Corbin/Hanner, who released it as the b-side to the 1982 single "One Fine Morning."
Guitar: Scraping Up Sand In The Bottom Of The Sea (Including lyrics and chords) With all the requests I have been uploading, it is some time since I last uploaded a song from the BBC Singing Together programme. This one comes from the 1957 Autumn pamphlet and is simply entered as: "From 'American Folk Songs for Children' (Doubleday & Co., New York)" It has the feel of a sea shanty to me.
Autoharp: The Birth of St Patrick Including lyrics and chords) HAPPY ST PATRICK'S DAY! I know that St Patrick's Day is celebrated on 17th March, but this amusing little song written by Samuel Lover (1797 - 1868) explains why I am uploading it today on 8th March. When I prepared this video, I incorrectly titled it "Birthday of St Patrick" instead of its correct title "The Birth of St Patrick".
Guitar: World's Last Truck Drivin' Man (The) (Including lyrics and chords) I received a request for this song yesterday morning from subscriber "Mike Smith". I have not come across it before getting the request and found it quite a challenge making me go up the neck of the guitar, something I used to avoid doing until recently. The song was written by Shel Silverstein and Rob Goldstein and was performed by Bobby Bare in the video I watched. Whilst I was able to find the lyrics online, I had to work out the chord progression for myself by ear. I worked on this all morning and recorded this video in the afternoon. By no means perfect, but fun to do. For the benefit of those on this side of "The Pond", the "Lucky" referred to in verse 2 is a brand of cigarette called "Lucky Strike"
2019 February walks in the Isle of Man This is my monthly diary of photographs of highlights of some of the walks taken during the month of February. The unusually mild weather we have experienced so far this winter has continued and Spring flowers are appearing at least a month earlier than normal. All walks went ahead as scheduled even though on a couple of occasions the skies were overcast and foggy. As usual, to accompany the photos I have added audio tracks from some of the videos I have uploaded this month. They are: Motherland – Guitar How Great Thou Art – Guitar The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – Autoharp Love Divine All Loves Excelling – Guitar Fruit of the Yew – Guitar I Vow To Thee My Country – Guitar El Paso – Autoharp Green Door – Guitar The Green Willow Tree – Guitar If you would like to see more photos taken on these walks, visit the Facebook site “Isle of Man walks”, or my own Google photographs page which you should find at: https://plus.google.com/+TonyArchibald
Autoharp: First of May (Including lyrics and chords) My friends Derek Oates and Margaid Bird sang this Beegees' song a few weeks ago at one of our weekly sing-arounds and I decided it was time I gave it a go myself. Of course, the Isle of Man has a strong connection to the Beegees, as all three brothers of the group were born in Douglas, and my friend Derek actually went to school with Barry Gibb until they moved to Manchester in 1955. I thought it might sound rather nice using the autoharp for accompaniment. I hope you agree.
Northwest Passage (The) (Including lyrics and chords) Written and performed by the late great Stan Rogers, "The Northwest Passage" has been requested by subscriber, "The Nereverine". Stan Rogers sang this one "a cappella", but others have chosen to sing it with accompaniment as have I. The chord progression I am using is mostly the same as found on Ultimate Guitar, but I have "tweaked" is slightly. Lord Franklin attempted to find a northwest passage around the north of Canada, from Baffin Bay in the Arctic Ocean to the east of norhtern Canada to the Beaufort Sea to the west, but during the expedition, the two ships involved became ice-bound and never sailed again. The crews including Franklin all died either of hypothermia, starvation or lead poisoning. According to part of an article in Wikipedia: Though the provisioner's "patent process" was sound, the haste with which he had prepared thousands of cans of food led to sloppily-applied beads of solder on the cans' interior edges, allowing lead to leach into the food. Additionally, the water distillation system may have used lead piping and lead-soldered joints, which would have produced drinking water with a high lead content.
Guitar: Green Door (Including lyrics and chords)"Green Door" is a song that popped into my head a couple of nights ago, and as I have never sung it before, I decided to have a go.Wikipedia has the following about it:"The Green Door" (or "Green Door") is a 1956 popular song with music composed by Bob "Hutch" Davie and lyrics written by Marvin Moore. The song was first recorded by Jim Lowe, whose version reached number one on the US pop chart. The hit version of the song in the United States was recorded by Jim Lowe, backed by the orchestra of songwriter Davie, with Davie also playing piano, and by the vocal group the High Fives. The track was arranged by Davie, who added thumbtacks to the hammers of his piano and sped up the tape to give a honky-tonk sound.[1] Released by Dot Records, the single reached #1 on the Billboard charts for one week on November 17, 1956, replacing "Love Me Tender" by Elvis Presley.In the United Kingdom, Lowe's version reached #8 on the charts, but a version by Frankie Vaughan was even more popular, reaching #2. Another UK recording, by Glen Mason, reached #24 on the UK chart. The most popular British version was by rock and roll revivalist Shakin' Stevens which spent four weeks at number one in August 1981.
Autoharp: El Paso (Including lyrics and chords) Requested a couple of days ago by "DB Physique", the song "El Paso" was written and perfomed by Marty Robbins and is probably known as his greatest hit. When I searched for the lyrics, I copied them from the Ultimate Guitar site and did not check on the spelling of the name of the "Mexican maiden" whose name I copied as "Felina". On checking information in Wikipedia, it appears here name should have been "Feleena". I have done a 12-string guitar accompanied version of this one back in 2010, but I feel this autoharp version sounds better.
Autoharp: Ring of Fire (Including lyrics and chords) Last week, I watched a YouTube video of June Carter Cash performing "Ring of Fire" in which she stated that she wrote the song for Johnny Cash with help from Merle Kilgore. It was first recorded and released in 1962 by her sister Anita Carter, but was not a hit, so after a few monthsm in 1963, Johnny Cash recorded his own version which included mariachi-style horns and it was a big hit, I had done a version using my Ashbury chromatic autoharp, but on seeing a version done by a player new to the instrument on the Facebook page "Autoharp", namely Sarah Meadows, i was inspired to have another go at it myself using my new Oscar Schmidt chromatic 'harp. I gave it its first public performance yesterday afternoon at the monthly sing-around I host at the sheltered accommodation at which I live.
Guitar: How Great Thou Art (Including lyrics and chords) This is a request for my American pen friend "Tammy Statler". From Wikipedia: "How Great Thou Art" is a Christian hymn based on a Swedish traditional melody and a poem written by Carl Boberg (1859–1940) in Mönsterås, Sweden in 1885. It was translated into German and then into Russian. It was translated into English from the Russian by English missionary Stuart K. Hine, who also added two original verses of his own. Tammy particularly likes a version performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford, so I have modelled mine on his performance, though he only sings one verse.
Guitar: Fruit of the Yew (Including lyrics and chords) I received a request for this song three days ago from "Nima Pourkarimi". I had never come across the song, so I watched performances on YouTube by a few other people, but could not find chord progressions that sounded right to my ears, so I worked out my own accompaniment after listening to the a cappella version by "Tessa da Verona". The song is attributed to James Treebull the Stubborn (Jim Pipkin) Historically, Welsh archers were the most sought after "artillery" of British armies in the 14th and 15th centuries . Their yew bows were formidable weapons and skilled archers could shoot accurately and lethally over long distances.
Guitar: Love Divine All Loves Excelling (Including lyrics and chords) Subscriber "JA S" asked for this hymn, specifically to the tune "Blaenwern". As it happens, this is the tune we used to sing it to in school assemblies when I was a pupil, so I am familar with it even though I have never played it on the guitar before. This is probably the most popular of Charles Wesley's hymns. (I sang "undaunted love" which should have been "unbounded love" in the first verse, but only spotted that when I came to put in the annotations. I decided to leave it as I did not want to try to record the whole song again.)
Guitar: Green Willow Tree (The) (Including lyrics and chords) The Green Willow Tree is another song from the BBC programme "Singing Together". According to the footnote in "Singing Together" : Source: The Penguin Book of Canadian Folk Songs. Abridged notes from The Penguin Book. The old British sea ballad of the Golden Vanity or the 'Sweet Trinity' was very popular in Canada. This version from Stanley James is unusually complete, and closer to the Child texts than most North American versions.
Guitar: Men's Clothes I Will Put On (Including lyrics and chords) Today, I am returning to songs from the BBC programme "Singing Together". "Men's Clothes I Will Put On" is also known as "The Banks of the Nile". A footnote in the pamphlet gives the following information: Source: Randolph, V, 1982. Ozark Folksongs, Illinois Press, Urbana Notes: Randolph wrote: Sung by Linne Bullard, Pineville, Mo., July 7, 1926. Mrs Bullard says that it is sometimes known as "The Banks of the Nile." Ord gives a Scottish version of this piece, remarking that it refers to the battle of Aboukir, Egypt, in 1801. A similar "Banks of the Nile" song was printed in the Aurora Advertiser (Mo.), Apr 20, 1939
Guitar: I Vow To Thee My Country (Including lyrics and chords) A request from "The Nerevarine" led me to attempt this patriotic hymn which I have heard, but never sung before. From Wikipedia: "I Vow to Thee, My Country" is a British patriotic hymn, created in 1921, when a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice was set to music by Gustav Holst. The origin of the hymn's text is a poem by diplomat Sir Cecil Spring Rice, written in 1908 or 1912, entitled "Urbs Dei" ("The City of God") or "The Two Fatherlands". The poem described how a Christian owes his loyalties to both his homeland and the heavenly kingdom. In 1921, Gustav Holst adapted the music from a section of Jupiter from his suite The Planets to create a setting for the poem. The music was extended slightly to fit the final two lines of the first verse. At the request of the publisher Curwen, Holst made a version as a unison song with orchestra (Curwen also published Sir Hubert Parry's unison song with orchestra, "Jerusalem"). This was probably first performed in 1921 and became a common element at Armistice memorial ceremonies, especially after it was published as a hymn in 1926. In 1926, Holst harmonised the tune to make it usable as a hymn, which was included in the hymnal Songs of Praise.[7] In that version, the lyrics were unchanged, but the tune was then called "Thaxted" (named after the village where Holst lived for many years). The editor of the new (1926) edition of Songs of Praise was Holst's close friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, which may have provided the stimulus for Holst's co-operation in producing the hymn.
Autoharp: First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (The) (Including lyrics and chords) Looking for a song for Valentine's Day which is coming very soon, I settled on this on which was written in 1957 by James Henry Miller, better known by his stage name, Ewan MacColl. He wrote it for Peggy Seeger with whom he was having an affair at that time, and whom he later married. Peggy Seeger used to sing the song at concerts, but at a much quicker tempo than my interpretation. I have based mine on the later version popularised by Roberta Flack in 1972.
Autoharp: On Boot Hill (Including lyrics and chords) The author of this song, Stan Keach, contacted me last week and suggested that I watch a video of it performed by Ralph Stanley II and the Clinch Mountain Boys: https://youtu.be/OjLb-ZdB9dw Stan sent me the lyrics which he wrote along with his friend Rick Lang and asked me if I would do a version for him. Stan himself has a version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEEWi.... As the Stanley/Clinch Mountain Boys version is a bluegrass one using all the usual instruments of that genre, and Stan's own version is accompanied by guitar and harmonica, I said I would see what it sounded like using the autoharp, so here is the result.
Guitar: Motherland (Including lyrics and chords) A request from "Jonathan Oldham" introduced me to this song written and performed by Natalie Merchant with lyrics written by her and Jimmy Khwambe.
January walks in the Isle of Man This is my monthly diary of photographs of highlights of some of the walks taken during the month of January. For the most part, January had been unusually mild up to the last couple of weeks. All walks went ahead as scheduled. As usual, to accompany the photos I have added audio tracks from some of the videos I have uploaded this month. They are: January Hymn – Autoharp Juniper, Gentle and Rosemary – Guitar Dashing White Sergeant – MuseScore created violin plus Guitar Gathering of Peascods – Guitar Alnwick Football Song – Guitar Place To Be – Guitar Cold, Haily, Windy Night – Guitar Dance To Your Daddy – Guitar Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron – Guitar Highwayman – Guitar Farmer In Cheshire – Guitar Where Is My Stolen Child Tonight? – Guitar Sunday Morning Coming Down – Guitar Gently, Johnny My Jingalo – Guitar Georgie Jeems – Guitar If you would like to see more photos taken on these walks, visit the Facebook site “Isle of Man walks”, or my own Google photographs page which you should find at: https://plus.google.com/+TonyArchibald
Anthony Archibald - Autoharp/guitar/musescore created violin
Guitar: Gresford Disaster (The) (Including lyrics and chords) Another song from the BBC programme "Singing Together". The chords I have shown work for strumming along to my finger-style accompaniment. Background: The Gresford disaster occurred on 22 September 1934 at Gresford Colliery, near Wrexham, in northeast Wales, when an explosion and underground fire killed 266 men. Gresford is one of Britain's worst coal mining disasters: a controversial inquiry into the disaster did not conclusively identify a cause, though evidence suggested that failures in safety procedures and poor mine management were contributory factors. Further public controversy was caused by the decision to permanently seal the colliery's damaged districts, meaning that only eleven of those who died were recovered. The Westminster and United Collieries Group began to sink the pit at Gresford in 1908. Two shafts were sunk 50 yards (46 m) apart: the Dennis and the Martin. They were named after Sir Theodore Martin, the company chairman, and Mabel Dennis, wife of the company managing director Henry Dyke Dennis, who had ceremonially cut the first sods for each of the respective shafts. Work was completed in 1911. The mine was one of the deepest in the Denbighshire Coalfield: the Dennis shaft reached depths of about 2,264 feet (690 m) and the Martin shaft about 2,252 feet (686 m).
Guitar: Highwayman (Including lyrics and chords) A request from "Reunite The British Empire" instigated my doing this version of the song written by Jimmy Webb and famously performed by the super-group The Highwaymen consisting of Willie Nelson; Kris Kristofferson; Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. I have done this one before using my 12-string guitar, but that was nine years ago when I was using a web-cam. The audio track was full of crackles as the mic in the camera did not like much volume in the voice, so last night I felt the inspiration to do it again using my 6-string guitar and a finger-style accompaniment. I have just realised, I sang a line in the second verse incorrectly: I sang "...round the horn of Mexico" where it should have been "...round The Horn to Mexico". Wikipedia has the following about the song: "Highwayman" is a song written by American singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, about a soul with incarnations in four different places in time and history: as a highwayman, a sailor, a construction worker on the Hoover Dam, and finally as a captain of a starship. The song was influenced by the real-life hanged highwayman Jonathan Wild. The dam builder verse alludes to the deaths of over one hundred men during the construction of Hoover Dam near Boulder City, Nevada. Webb first recorded the song on his album El Mirage, released in May 1977. The following year, Glen Campbell recorded his version, which was released on his 1979 album Highwayman. In 1985, the song became the inspiration for the naming of the supergroup The Highwaymen, which featured Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson. Their first album, Highwayman, became a number one platinum-selling album, and their version of the song went to number one on the Hot Country Songs Billboard chart in a twenty-week run. Their version earned Webb a Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 1986. The song has since been recorded by other artists. Webb himself included a different version on his 1996 album Ten Easy Pieces, a live version on his 2007 album Live and at Large, and a duet version with Mark Knopfler on 2010 album Just Across the River.
Guitar: Georgie Jeems (Including lyrics and chords) According to the footnote in the Singing Together pamphlet, this song was sourced from "Randolph, V, 1982. Ozark Folksongs, Illinois Press, Urbana", with the following notes: Randoph wrote: The old ballad "The Lass of Roch Royal" (No 76 in Child's collection) has been reported somewhat rarely from the United States, although twice it was found in West Virginia, by Cox (1925), and Combes (1925). Even here, according to Cox's headnote, it seems to derive from print. But the "who will shoe my foot" line, evidently derived from this ballad, is common in many songs of lovers' parting. A. K. Davis (1929), found several of these pieces in the Virginia collection, but does not admit them to the full status of variants of Child 76. The same is true of Belden (1940), who gives a very full discussion of this question. Sung by Irene Carlisle, Fayetteville, Ark., Dec 9, 1941. She calls it "Georgie Jeems" and learned it from her grandmother about 1912. I have never heard the song, working out my interpretation from the sheet music accompanying the lyrics in the pamphlet.
Guitar: Gently Johnny my Jingalo (Including lyrics and chords) Having caught up with requests, today I am returning to songs from the BBC programme "Singing Together". I have to wonder just how did this and many other such songs get past the censors to be published in a pamphlet designed for young children. I found the following comments on the song on a site called "SecondHandSongs": A song describing the seduction of a woman, from the perspective of the jingalo (a term for a gypsy, derived from the corruption of the Italian "zingaro"). The publication date above (1916) is Sharp's "One Hundred English Folksongs". He is listed here as a co-lyricist because he bowdlerised some of the traditional lines which he notes "were rather coarse". I am playing the accompaniment as a melody, but the chords shown for the first verse which I have worked out for myself, should work if you wish to strum along.
Guitar: Sunday Morning Coming Down (Including lyrics and chords) My pen friend from Iowa, Tammy Statler, suggested this song for me to do. I thought I had already done it, but find I had not uploaded it to YouTube and did not have the lyrics and chords in my own files, so here is my interpretation of the song. It was written by Kris Kristofferson. According to Wikipedia: "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" is a song written by Kris Kristofferson that was recorded in 1969 by Ray Stevens before becoming a number one hit on the Billboard US Country charts for Johnny Cash. Kristofferson released his own recording of the song, and it is on his version and lyrics I have based this uipload.
Guitar: Elma Turl (Including lyrics and chords) Requested by my young friend from America, Ken Shuttlesworth, this is a song written by Mike Cross. I have covered a few of his songs in the past and know he is fond of fitting a lot of words to the line as he does in this case. The story behind the song is the same as a Trinidadian folk song, "Shame and Scandal in the Family" which I have sung in the past: https://youtu.be/SlzrCiiCpDw
Guitar: Where Is My Stolen Child Tonight (Including lyrics and chords) Fellow autoharp player Dan Schatz from America,uploaded a video a few weeks ago of a song, originally written by Robert Lowry (1877) under the title "Where is my Wandering Boy Tonight" which in the light of what is happening in the USA at the present time Dan wrote new lyrics to the verses. I asked Dan's permission to cover his song using my guitar for accompaniment as he has already done a very moving version on the autoharp. (https://youtu.be/8JPvgTC76D4). Dan wrote the following with his upload: The practice of separating migrant children from their parents and placing them in prisons and detention camps represents one of the cruelest moments in American history. Sadly, in 2019, some families have not been reunited. The practice of separation continues, albeit on a smaller scale - immigration agents can simply claim suspicion of a crime committed by their parents, or express doubt about their parentage, to justify taking a child away. Somme children have been taken for no reason other than their parent's inability to produce a birth certificate. The tragedy and cruelty of child separation led me to write this song - a rewrite of an 1877 song, "Where is My Boy Tonight?" So with permission granted, here is my version.
Guitar: Place To Be (Including lyrics and chords) A request from "Xuren" led me to attempt this Nick Drake song. Not a song I have heard of before, this according to Ultimate Guitar and other sources for chords uses only three chords, two of which are played in a way not familiar to me. D is played as xx0232, i.e. without using the fifth string as one would normally do. (Although not shown in the annotations, it is alternated with a Dsus by lifting off the first finger on the third string, then hammering it on at the 2nd fret). Em/F# is the normal Em but adding F# on the sixth string: 222000. (Again, not shown in the annotations, this one alternates with an Em7 plus F# by lifting the third finger off the fourth string, then hammering it on at the 2nd fret).
Props 17,046
Location Im9 6be
Instruments Guitar, Mountain Ocarina, Autoharp, 5-String Banjo, Mandolin, Harmonica
Genres Blues, Country, Folk, Oldies, Prog Rock, Pop
Influences The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, The Corries, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, The Beatles, Liverpool Spinners, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Johnny Cash, Ian Campbell Folk Group, The Dubliners, Tom Paxton
Private message to Anthony Archibald
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fastMatter
fastMatter and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
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Philippe Entremont
The exceptional career of Philippe Entremont began at the age of eighteen when he came to international attention with his great success at New York’s Carnegie Hall playing Jolivet’s piano concerto and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Since then, he has pursued a top international career as a pianist, and for the last 30 years, on the podium as well.
The 2010–2011 and 2011–2012 seasons will take Philippe Entremont all over the world, with many orchestral tours including the Munich Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Festival Orchestra, the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie, and the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra. He will also guest conduct European and American orchestras as well as perform numerous piano and chamber music concerts. Moreover, in the 2010–2011 season, Philippe Entremont became Principal Conductor of the Boca Raton Philharmonic and Lifetime Laureate Conductor of the Munich Symphony Orchestra.
His renown as an orchestral conductor and his dedication to developing orchestras’ artistic potential have led to numerous international tours, playing before full houses: ten tours in the US and seven in Japan with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, a tour of eleven concerts with the Orquestra de Cadaqués in capitals of countries in Asia, and a tour in Switzerland and Germany conducting the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra. As Principal Guest Conductor of the Munich Symphony Orchestra, he has led tours internationally, including the US in 2005 and 2006, conducting from the piano as well as the podium. He returned in both capacities for the Munich Symphony’s highly successful 15-concert US tour in February of 2009.
In 1997, Philippe Entremont founded the biennial Santo Domingo Music Festival, of which he is Artistic Director and Conductor of the Festival Orchestra. The Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2007 with a special concert series featuring the premieres of two Festival-commissioned symphonies by Dominican composers, and performances by internationally renowned guest artists such as André Watts, Dan Zhu, Arturo Sandoval, and Vitalij Kowaljow. He is also Principal Guest Conductor of the Orquestra de Cadaqués. In 2006, in connection with the “Mozart Year,” he conducted the Tokyo-based Super World Orchestra. Philippe Entremont was also among the 10 world-class pianists chosen to perform in the “Piano Extravaganza of the Century” at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
Mr. Entremont was Music Director of the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra between 1981 and 1986, after which he became Music Director of the Denver Symphony. He was also Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra until 2002. After having served as Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra for almost thirty years, he is now Conductor Laureate for Life. He was also Music Director of the Israel Chamber Orchestra and is now their Conductor Laureate.
Philippe Entremont has directed the greatest symphony orchestras of Europe, Asia and America: Philadelphia, San Francisco, Detroit, Minnesota, Seattle, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Montreal, The Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orquestra Nacional de España, the Academy of Santa Cecilia of Rome, l’Orchestre National de France, the orchestras of Göteberg, Stockholm, Oslo and Warsaw, the NHK of Tokyo, the KBS Orchestra of Seoul, the Vienna Symphony and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Bergen, to name a few. He has worked with the worlds greatest soloists, both instrumental and vocal.
One of the most recorded artists of all time, Philippe Entremont has appeared on many labels, including CBS Sony, Teldec and Harmonia Mundi, and he has garnered all of the leading prizes and awards in the industry. His 2008 releases include Mozart’s Concertone; Concerto for Violin and Piano with the Wiener Kammerorchester; Strauss’ lieder with Sophie Koch (mezzo-soprano); and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 with the Orquesta del Festival Musical de Santa Domingo.
Great Cross of the Austrian Republic Order of Merit, Officer of the French Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, Commander of the Order of Arts et Lettres, Philippe Entremont has also been awarded the Arts and Sciences Cross of Honor of Austria. He is President of the International Certificate for Piano Artists, President of the Bel’Arte Foundation of Brussels and is Director of the famed American Conservatory of Fountainebleau, a post formerly held by the legendary Nadia Boulanger.
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Category Archives: storm ecology
Is Maria Dead?
Posted on May 7, 2018 by rangerdon
USA Today has run a front-page article announcing that names used for last year’s devasting season have been retired, never to be used again. If the newspaper, or those who killed the names for storms had done any research, they’d have learned that Maria stands apart for all storms and should have never had her name retired.
Maria was the name George R. Stewart had his Young Meteorologist give the tiny storm he was tracking. Maria would grow into a hearty adulthood, reshaping the human and natural world over the twelve days of her life. She was a West Coast/Sierra Nevada version of a great hurricane. Her interaction with humans gives his fine novel its ecological focus and can’t-put-it-down drama.
Stewart’s naming of the storm was an idea borrowed from Napier Shaw. (Always ethical, GRS admits it in the beginning of the book.)
STORM is the book that gives us the practice of naming storms.The book was widely-read, especially the WW II paperback version issued to GI troops, (The GI version had the kind of racy cover encouraging young men to read it in search of the action the cover promised.) After the war, some of the military readers – Vic Moiteret comes to mind, since he eventually became “Chief Areologist” (Meteorologist) for the Navy and had influence – and the idea was adopted as a formal practice.
Now we’re told Maria’s name is no more. (Ironically, it’s not Maria that caused the greatest human suffering, but national inattention to post-storm conditions in Puerto Rico.)
Be reassured! Stewart’s Maria has NOT been put to death. If the World Meterological Organization or the national fishwrap had bothered to do some research they would have discovered that the first named storm, the one which gave us the practice of naming storms, is NOT “Maria,” “Mar-ee-a.” It’s “Maria” – pronounced, as GRS puts it, in the old-fashioned way, with a long i: “Mar-eye-a.” Since Walt Disney filmed the novel for TV and Lerner and Loew “borrowed” the name for one of their best-known songs, Maria will thrive whether the WMO puts their Maria out to pasture or not.
Long live our Maria.
Posted in American History, American literature, California Literature, Chief Meterologist, USN, Disney films, Ecological novel, ecology, environmentalism., Geography, George R. Stewart, Lerner and Loew, meteorology, movies, storm ecology, storm-naming, They call the wind maria, Uncategorized, Walt Disney, World history | Tagged music | 3 Replies
Earth Day Reflections on George R. Stewart
I am convinced that the Founding Father of Earth Day and the Environmental Movement was George R. Stewart. Many contributed, of course – Mary Austin, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, the Sierra Club, Stephen T. Mather, Ansel Adams, TR, Gifford Pinchot, and so on. But before Stewart, the preservationists, conservationists, and environmentalists spoke mainly to a literate urban elite, not a vast middle class. So the ideas stayed within a comparatively small circle of people.
George R. Stewart, professor at Berkeley, was a member of that elite circle; but he was also a great admirer of the common man. His interest was in educating the general literate middle class about the ecological point of view. So he wrote for that audience (and did it in a manner so well-researched and literate that he also reached those in the small circle of elite environmentalists). His first ecological novel, STORM, focused on common folks as ecological heroes.
In FIRE, his next ecological novel, Stewart makes the different but related views of the common man and the elite when he introduces two characters who represent the views of the two groups: In one of the most remarkable passages, an old ranger and the young college-educated Chief Ranger debate the value of fire in the ecosystem.
Stewart used several techniques to reach the literate middle class. Primary among these was basing the novel’s human protagonists on the common man – and in fact at times using the real stories of real people who became the real-life models for the heroes in his novels. Johnny Martell (as I recall the name) apparently did walk across the front of a Sierra dam as storm water poured over the dam’s top.
Other characters, like The Junior Meteorologist, are never named — thus making them Everyman.
Letters to Stewart show how powerful and appreciated was his presentation of common folks as environmental heroes. In one, now in the Stewart Papers at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, a supervisor involved in the incident with the over-flowing dam, thanks GRS for showcasing the daily courage of such people, most never named or known. In another, relating to Earth Abides, the writers talk about how that book encouraged to “the little people” like themselves. (That letter is also in the Stewart Papers.)
STORM and FIRE became international best-sellers and Book-of-the-Month Club selections. Millions of people, most of them NOT in the older environmental elite, read the books and were educated in the ecological/environmentalist point of view and were inspired to see humans and their world in a entirely new way. Although there was little in the national media about that viewpoint – the media, like the government, is usually years behind the general literate population – it had spread widely, long before there was an “Environmental Movement.”
Some elites helped the process when they, like GRS, spread the word. Walt Disney, a great fan of Stewart, presented a fine short film version of Storm on the widely-viewed Disney television program and the ecological message of the novel reached a massive audience. A Storm Called Maria, aired in 1959, trumpeting Stewart’s educational message to a huge audience. Since it was airing when the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams/Nancy Newhall exhibit, This Is The American Earth, was first presented, the Disney film saw its influence – and the teachings of GRS – multiplied exponentially. Those who’d read the GRS novel could see the characters – especially the storm, Maria – come to vivid life, reinforcing the message that environmentalism belongs to all of us. Those who’d not read the novel were educated in the ecological point of view by the film.
Since Disney used real people in the real roles they play in the novels, it underscored the idea that common men and women, not simply the elites, are environmentalists. Disney’s subseqent TV film, “A Fire Called Jeremiah” expanded the audience and reinforced the GRS message.
By the time Stewart wrote Fire he understood what his vision was and how he could teach it to others. In an extraordinary letter, sent in 1948 in answer to questions from the publicist for the Book-Of-The-Month Club, Stewart wrote:
I consider the main theme … to be the problem of the relationship of man to his environment. I really think of myself, in most of my books, as what might be called an ecologist.
Long before “ecology” became a common phrase, Stewart had realized he was teaching his readers – his vast number of readers, some in the elite but mostly middle class people – the values and principles of the ecological or environmentalist point of view. He was doing it as early as the mid-1930s, in his ecologically-based history Ordeal By Hunger. But by 1948 – seven years before This Is The American Earth and two decades before the first Earth Day, Stewart was preparing his readers – teaching them – educating them – to the ecological point of view.
Clearly, George R. Stewart was a Founding Father of Earth Day. Perhaps THE Founding Father.
Posted in American History, American literature, California Literature, Disney films, Ecological novel, ecology, Education, Enlightenment, environmentalism., fire ecology, Geography, George R. Stewart, Lake Tahoe area, meteorology, movies, Novels into movies, storm ecology, storm-naming, TV mini-series, Uncategorized, Walt Disney, World history | Leave a reply
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Learn more about Differential Tuition in the College of Geosciences
The Department of Geology and Geophysics, the largest in the College of Geosciences, with 34 faculty and around 650 students, offers unparalleled, unique and immersive learning opportunities for your consideration all over the world. Geology and Geophysics are two fields of study for those who enjoy solving scientific mysteries, exploring the outdoors, leaning more about the world around you and having a variety of meaningful career options. Our program takes an integrative approach to our Earth systems and includes topics such as natural energy resources and sustainability, climate change, tectonics, earthquakes and volcanoes, environmental science and geochemistry. Global science issues fall in to the purview of today's geoscientist and geologists and geophysicists are leaders in developing solutions to the issues we face today and preparing for our needs tomorrow.
The field of geology includes the scientific study of all aspects of the solid Earth, from fundamental processes that shape it to knowledge that benefits society. The undergraduate curricula in geology foster critical thinking, and the application of scientific skills to the study of Earth materials (rocks, minerals, fossils, structures, landforms and subsurface fluids) and geologic processes. Courses provide a broad background in geology, emphasize knowledge transfer from other sciences to geologic problems and promote application to practical problems in petroleum exploration, environmental management and civil engineering.
The Department of Geology and Geophysics offers two undergraduate programs in geology, the Bachelor of Arts and the Bachelor of Science. The BS program is appropriate for students seeking careers as geologists or preparing for graduate school in geology, whereas the BA program is designed for students wishing to combine geology with other disciplines, and includes less rigorous mathematics and physics. Details of the two programs are given below along with specialty options and tracks.
Graduates must pass two Writing Intensive courses within their major. This requirement is described in Requirements for a Baccalaureate Degree. GEOL 311 and any geology or geophysics class with a 9xx section number meets the requirement. To remain in satisfactory academic standing, students must maintain a 2.0 or better GPR in all technical courses (geology, geophysics, chemistry, math and physics). Some courses in geology require field trips. Students are required to pay expenses incurred on such trips.
Geophysics includes all areas of scientific inquiry that deal with the physical state of Earth and other planets and the dynamic processes, which act on and within planetary bodies. The Department of Geology and Geophysics offers the Bachelor of Science in Geophysics for students who wish to combine a proficiency in mathematics with an interest in Earth. The objective of this program is to develop a physically-motivated approach to the study of Earth phenomena, through treatment of physical and geological principles and development of mathematical tools. Graduates will be well-prepared for careers in the energy and environmental industries, and for advanced study at top-ranked graduate programs. Minors in Geology and Geophysics
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Now that you've decided to be a geologist or a geophysicist, consider this: the number of available jobs in the geosciences will grow by 22% in 2016 as compared to 10% growth in all other careers; as of 2005, the average starting salary for a geoscientist was $74k per year and that's nearly 10% higher than it was in 2004; in 2013, the average salary of a petroleum geoscientist with a B.S. Degree was around $96k per year and around $104k per year for a petroleum geoscientist with an M.S. It's a vital and viable career strategy! You'll find career opportunities in the energy industry, or an engineering firm, government agency, or private consulting. After you graduate, you'll have background and skills that are highly valuable and unique to Texas A&M geoscientists. The faculty's deep ties to the energy sector help place students with major oil companies as well as with independent operators, national labs and even universities.
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Zoolander (2001)
Cast: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Christine Taylor, Milla Jovovich, Jerry Stiller, Jon Voight
Screenplay: Drake Sather, Ben Stiller, John Hamburg
90 mins. Rated PG-13 for sexual content and drug use.
Zoolander is one of those movies that probably shouldn’t have had a sequel. The film itself exists as a cult hit but it didn’t make any money worthy of setting up another. It also didn’t really need a sequel fifteen years later. But here we are, fifteen years later, and with Zoolander no. 2 on the way, I thought we should take a trip back to the original film.
Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Tropic Thunder) is no longer the top fashion model after he loses the award to rising runway master Hansel (Owen Wilson, Midnight in Paris, Cars 2), and his bad run of luck continues when an article from Matilda Jeffries (Christine Taylor, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, License to Wed) tarnishes his reputation even further. After a tragedy forces him to leave the fashion industry, only the request of fashion mogul Mugatu (Will Ferrell, Step Brothers, Daddy’s Home) is enough to bring him back. But Mugatu has a motive up his sleeve. He needs to use Derek as a weapon for his own fiendish plans, and its up to Matilda and Derek to stop him.
Zoolander does have a lot to love, and the film would have been more widely accepted today than it was back then. For one, the sheer amount of cameos is jarringly amazing. My personal favorite? David Bowie. My least favorite? A terrible human being who wishes to be president. But enough about Donald Trump. Enough forever.
Zoolander does a great job of building up the mythos of the male model. The entire film is strange and unusual and kind of lovable. Ben Stiller has great chemistry with Wilson and of course his wife Christine Taylor. The film even features Stiller’s mother and sister in cameos, but the big cheese of awesome that is Jerry Stiller (TV’s The King of Queens, Hairspray) steals every scene as Derek’s agent Maury Ballstein. In fact, the best characters of the film are the supporting roles with David Duchovny (TV’s The X-Files, Phantom) as J.P. Pruitt and Jon Voight (TV’s Ray Donovan, Mission: Impossible) as Derek’s father Larry.
But that is perhaps the issue of the film. Derek Zoolander isn’t all that likable nor is he accessible. The film would have more engaging if Matilda had been the focus character and Zoolander could’ve been seen through her eyes. Sadly, she makes a bad decision early on that makes her less likable and Zoolander is just kind of there.
Zoolander is pretty enjoyable, and it does get better the more you see it. Is it worthy of a franchise revisiting fifteen years later? Probably not. Am I still going to watch it? Yeah, but it’s my thing.
For my review of Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, click here.
2001, Ben Stiller, Cars 2, Christine Taylor, Daddy's Home, David Bowie, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Donald Trump, Drake Sather, Hairspray, Jerry Stiller, John Hamburg, Jon Voight, License to Wed, Midnight in Paris, Milla Jovovich, Mission: Impossible, Owen Wilson, Phantom, Ray Donovan, Step Brothers, The King of Queens, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The X-Files, Tropic Thunder, Will Ferrell, Zoolander, Zoolander no. 2
[31 Days of Horror 3] Day 31 – Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
One thought on “Zoolander (2001)”
Pingback: Kyle’s Top Ten Worst Films of 2016 – AlmightyGoatman
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Campus Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Be Offensive
Jerry Newcombe May 2, 2019
In 1989 U.N. Claimed Climate Change Would Destroy the Earth by Year 2000
“But It’s Not Happening in My Child’s School. . .“
Gary DeMar May 9, 2014
Down with the Tea Party, Up with the Wall Street Protestors?
Egypt Gets a New Dictator like the Old Dictator
Gary DeMar November 24, 2012
Public School Bans Christian Books
Gary DeMar September 25, 2014
Apple Cracks Down on Christians in App Store, Removes Ministry App to Suit LGBTQ Activists
Warner Todd Huston January 1, 2019
Drag Queen Admits that Library Kids ‘Story Time’ is Meant to ‘Groom’ Them for LGBTQ Lifestyle
Warner Todd Huston November 28, 2018
ConstitutionCorruptionCultureDemocratsEconomyTaxesWelfare
How the Constitution’s ‘Welfare Clause’ Has Become a Wax Nose
Any document can be made to say anything if a word or phrase is taken out of context. Ripped from its context, “judge not” (Matt. 7:1) means something different from the point Jesus was making in the next verse (7:2) and other verses (John 7:24). The apostle Paul had no problem judging the sexual behavior of someone in the church at Corinth (1 Cor. 5:1-2).
The Bible says, “there is no God” (Ps. 14:1), therefore, the Bible supports atheism, until the rest of the passage is read: “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.”
The same type of out-of-context mumbo-jumbo can be found with people who do not read the Constitution carefully. Consider the use of the word “welfare.” A Bernie Sanders supporter was asked about his thoughts on socialism in America. Here’s what he said:
“It says it right in the very, very beginning. The preamble of the Constitution says what our country is all about. ‘We the people in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and provide the general welfare.’… “Saying ‘general welfare’ is a socialist reality!”
First, he misquotes the Preamble. It does not say “provide the general Welfare” but “promote the general Welfare.”
The assumption is that “general welfare” means wealth redistribution, something the Constitution does not say. Since the income tax amendment wasn’t ratified until 1913, it’s hard to make the case that our founders were pushing ways to abolish “wealth inequality” since there was no instrument to tax people unequally.
The “general welfare” clause appears again in Art. I, sec. 8 of the Constitution:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Available at American Vision
Second, it’s clear that the “general welfare” clause is not about wealth redistribution. There are 18 powers granted to the Federal government in the full context of Article 1, section 8 with no mention of wealth redistribution, education, retirement security, or healthcare.
As Rob Natelson put it in his paper, The General Welfare Clause and the Public Trust: “The clause was designed as a trust-style rule denying Congress authority to levy taxes for any but general, national purposes. Because the Clause prevented Congress from using tax revenue for local or special interest purposes, the Clause indirectly qualified the appropriation power. Even if some enumerated power could be enlisted to support the appropriation, federal tax money was not to be used for the private benefit of a museum-however worthy-in Savannah, nor an artist-however-struggling in New York.”
To take the clause as a general grant of power for the federal government to do anything that promotes the general welfare would, as Madison put it, “would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” (Tenth Amendment Center)
Third, it was the Supreme Court in 1937 that ruled that Social Security came under the “General Welfare” provision of the Constitution in Helvering v. Davis. It’s obvious that the seven justices who upheld the 1935 legislation did not read the Founders and their understanding of the General Welfare clause.
Consider this from the court: “The proceeds of both the employee and employer taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like any other internal revenue generally, and are not earmarked in any way.”
As James Madison made clear in Federalist 41, the phrase “general welfare” is immediately followed “and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon.” He went on to state that “[n]othing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars,” which the Constitution does.1 Read the list for yourself.
The thing of it is, so many people today (1) don’t read, (2) and if they read don’t understand what they read, and (3) don’t care what the facts are because their agenda trumps the facts and the law. If a man can become a woman and a woman a man then “general welfare” can mean socialism.
“General welfare” in constitutional terms means welfare that benefits everyone more or less equally and can only apply to enumerated powers of which there are very few. This can be clearly seen in providing “for the common Defense.” Taxes collected to defend the nation benefit everyone generally.
Taxing some people so other people can have decent housing or a college education or healthcare is not general welfare. Wealth redistribution, what Socialism is all about, is particular welfare, a form of theft. Taking money from some people so it can be given to other people is not what the constitution means by general welfare. The welfare State is contrary to the Constitution.
The Federalist No. 41: General View of the Powers Conferred by the Constitution (January 19, 1788). [↩]
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Ambitious Italian American who adheres to his own personal code of honor.
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The success of Grace Bay Resorts is a result of our team’s entrepreneurial and innovative spirit. We are proud to have the first luxury all-oceanfront-suite resort on the island with all ocean front amenities, the longest bar in the Caribbean, the first pop-up restaurants, and partnerships and collaborations that encourage and support fresh thinking. Led by our CEO & Principal, Mark Durliat and COO & Principal, Nikheel Advani and inspired by their vision, our team is consistently striving to redefine luxury handmade experiences.
Mark Durliat
CEO & Principal
Mark Durliat is driven by his desire to create a legacy of excellence and opportunity where none existed. His ability to identify talented individuals who share his vision has allowed him to achieve exceptional results.
A dynamic and inspiring leader, Mark’s distinct and compelling vision was built on his experiences gained around the world. Having graduated from USC with majors in Business and French, he seized his first opportunity to travel abroad. He initially moved to Paris, where a fortunate meeting with Gary Player forever changed his career path. From this encounter, he travelled to South Africa, where he began developing master-planned communities, as well as residential and hospitality properties.
Driven to create a distinctive destination in the Caribbean, Mark set off to find the right opportunity in the right location. After ten months of searching, he discovered a hidden gem called Turks and Caicos. Here, he found that rare combination of perfection and potential, and planted the seed for his vision. He purchased Grace Bay Club, when it was just a small, 20-plus-room hotel. Today calling Turks and Caicos his home, he continues to lead and inspire the growth and ongoing innovation of Grace Bay Resorts through his foresight and dedication to this location and its people.
Mark’s goal is to build the company into one that manages ten luxury resort and residential properties in Turks and Caicos and in the Caribbean region, with each resort and residence providing the customer-focused, handmade experiences that define the Grace Bay Resorts brand.
Nikheel Advani
COO & Principal
When Nikheel Advani arrived at Grace Bay Club in 2004, his vision was to elevate luxury service at the resort, and redefine exceptional service in the Caribbean.
Internationally acknowledged as one of the most distinguished hoteliers, he possesses an unwavering commitment to personal guest satisfaction — a focus that inspires each member of the Grace Bay Resorts team, and a sensibility that is palpable when on every property that carries the Grace Bay Resorts brand. Through his drive to deliver handmade luxury experiences to guests, Nikheel has transformed how Grace Bay Resorts delivers its elite level of handmade experiences. His vision and commitment to excellence has been extensively recognized. In 2012, he was honored with the ‘Ultimate Hotelier of the Year’ award by Island Destinations. Under his leadership, Grace Bay Club was most recently awarded 'Member of the Year' for the team’s outstanding collaboration and partnership amongst the prestigious hotels within Leading Hotels of the World.
As Chief Operating Officer and Principal - Advani has played an integral role in Grace Bay Resorts’ overall growth. He served as the top operational executive in the successful expansion and renovation of Grace Bay Club from a USD 15 million 21-room boutique hotel to a USD 250 million full-service luxury resort with 82 suites and The Estate residences; as well as expanded the brand with The Veranda Resort, West Bay Club, and the exclusive 'micro resort' of luxury beach residences, The Private Villa Collection. Today, in addition to the strategic oversight and growth Nikheel provides leadership to the dynamic and influential sales and marketing powerhouse team of Grace Bay Resorts branded properties.
Nikheel holds expertise and insight gained from decades at the helm of some of the most celebrated brands in the industry. He came to Grace Bay Club after serving as Hotel Manager of the renowned Raffles Hotel Singapore, where he also served as the Food and Beverage Champion for the entire Asia Pacific region. Prior to his time at Raffles, he held senior leadership roles in the opening of seven Ritz-Carlton properties, including New York, Singapore and Osaka.
When he’s not managing growth and development, he’s teaching at Cornell University, speaking at Les Roches, and sits on various boards including Leading Hotels of the World and The Bondhi Tree Foundation. He is also an active member in the local community serving on the British Governors Business Advisory Group and is the Vice President of the Turks and Caicos Hotel and Tourism Association. Passionate about training, mentoring and maximizing human potential, Nikheel also serves as the Chairman of the board for the Turks and Caicos International University. Nikheel graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with an honors degree in Hotel, Restaurant and Travel Administration, and successfully completed the General Manager Program at Harvard Business School.
Michael Brewster
Chairman & Principal
Michael Brewster is the Chairman and Principal of Grace Bay Resorts. A founding partner of Denver-based SV Capital Partners, he was the initial lead investor in the development of Grace Bay Club.
Mike’s extensive expertise with boutique luxury resort properties provided him with the acumen to recognize the exceptional opportunity that was Grace Bay Club. His ability to identify and build remarkable resort destinations is fueled by his three decades of experience as an international developer and investor in real estate markets in Mexico, the Caribbean, Europe and the US. He continues to provide his foresight and insight to the transactions and opportunities that define and determine the future of Grace Bay Resorts.
Earlier in his career, Mike was head of Capital Markets for Republic Financial Corporation, a diverse Investment-Acquisition-Leasing company, and prior to that he was Vice President-Finance at Leprino Food Company, a privately held, billion dollar food manufacturer. Mike received his B.Sc. in Accounting from the University of Evansville and upon graduation was employed with Arthur Andersen & Co.
Thierry Grandsire
Managing Director GRACE BAY CLUB | Executive Vice President of Operations GRACE BAY RESORTS
As Group Director of Operations of Grace Bay Resorts & General Manager of Grace Bay Club, Thierry inspires in his team exceptional levels of service and a commitment to effective and successful hotel management practices.
A respected leader in the luxury hospitality industry Thierry has over 30 years of hotel management experience, he is responsible of the overall operations of Grace Bay Club, the company’s flagship resort, as well as Grace Bay Resorts’ branded properties.
Thierry's career began in Nice, studying at a Law School that started his management leadership experience. He worked with The Ritz Carlton brand for over 18 years, including properties in the United States and Middle East, holding integral leadership roles within the organization.
Before joining Grace Bay Club he served as General Manager of Pelican Hill, an ultra luxurious resort spanning 500 acres with 382 guest rooms, all ocean views, including 170 bungalows, 32 bungalow suites, 128 villas - 2, 3 and 4 bedrooms, two championships golf courses, 11 food and beverage outlets, 23,000 sq. ft. spa with 22 treatment rooms, 3 retail outlets.
Today he brings his extensive training and experience to the properties of Grace Bay Resorts, sharing his unrelenting standards of excellence, leadership and drive with his staff.
Scott Khile
With 25+ years of experience in the hospitality industry, Scott has an innate ability to identify and develop unique marketing and sales programs that capture the essence of a Grace Bay Resorts property.
Prior to bringing his talent and dedication to Grace Bay Resorts, Scott was the Director of Key Account Management for Sol Melia’s 20 premium hotels and resorts worldwide. He has also held the role of Business Development Manager for GOGO Worldwide Vacations, and several sales management roles with The Travel Corporation. Previously, Scott spent five years traveling, working and living in Africa, the South of France, Germany, India and London. He brings his love of travel to every meeting he has and every marketing program he develops. Scott holds a BA in Business Administration from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Joseph Harvey
Vice President of Finance, Grace Bay Resorts
Joseph brought innovation and drive to his previous role as Group Director of Finance and we can expect the same with his newly appointed role as Vice President of Finance for Grace Bay Resorts.
With more than 30 years of experience in the hospitality industry, Joe is a seasoned financial advisor and executive in management and negotiation of varied business operations and complex financial transactions, specializing in luxury properties where he has opened several Five Star Luxury resorts for The Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, Mandarin Oriental, and Conrad organizations.
Sheba Wilson
Group Director of Human Resources, Grace Bay Resorts
Sheba pursued a degree in Mass Communication with concentration in print journalism at the Barbados Community College but always knew that she was interested in serving and helping people.
On returning to the Turks and Caicos Islands, she took a position as a journalist with the Free Press newspaper but in 2001, Sheba embarked on a new journey by entering the hospitality industry as a personal assistant.
With her love for National Issues and Politics weighing on her, Sheba decided to enter the Political Arena. Sheba has worked in both of former Premier Galmo Williams' election campaign teams which were very successful. She joined Williams as his personal assistant/advisor in 2004 and worked across three government ministries over nearly six years. In 2010, Sheba rejoined the hospitality industry with the Grace Bay Club as Personal Assistant to the General Manager. The knowledge and experience gained during her years in the public service, propelled her to a course of study in Human Resources and in October 2013, she obtained a Masters' certification in Human Resource Management from the prestigious Cornell University and currently heads our Human Resources Department as Group Director of Human Resources.
Adelphine Pitter
General Manager, West Bay Club
Adelphine Pitter is a native of Turks and Caicos, and a living example of Mark Durliat’s vision to provide exceptional local talent with opportunities for excellence.
Adelphine has spent almost two decades with Grace Bay Club, and has embraced every challenge presented to her. Her commitment to unparalleled service and an elevated guest experience identified her as a rising star at the resort. She earned several promotions within Grace Bay Club, bringing her talents and strategic thinking to each new position. With her extensive experience with Grace Bay Club, and her extraordinary dedication, work ethic and talent, she was ideally suited for the position of General Manager, West Bay Club. Adelphine possesses a B.Sc. in Medical Technology. She is one of the founders of the Grace Bay Resorts Community Foundation, bringing her integrity, hard work and core values to her ongoing mentorship of local youth in the tourism industry. Adelphine infuses her remarkable dedication and intense pride in her community into her work and vision for the growth of West Bay Club, and shares these qualities with those who bring handmade experiences to the property’s guests each day.
Christopher Meredith
Group Director of Food & Beverage, Grace Bay Resorts
Christopher Meredith, Group Director of Food & Beverage, brings more than 20 years of extensive knowledge in the food and beverage industry to his role, where he is responsible for the management and successful operation of all dining outlets at Grace Bay Resorts’ properties, including Grace Bay Club, West Bay Club and The Private Villa Collection.
Meredith launched his career in the United Kingdom where he rose through the ranks at some of the top Michelin-starred kitchens in the world. At the age of 29, Meredith landed the title of Executive Chef at The Samling Hotel in Ambleside, where he earned his first Michelin Star. He went on to earn his second Michelin Star when he headed the kitchen at Gilpin Lodge, and was named Upcoming Chef of the Year by Relais and Chateaux in 2007.
Meredith went on to hold leadership positions at renowned eateries across the United Kingdom, including Culinary Director at Punch Bowl Inn, which was named Michelin Pub of the Year in 2009 under his supervision, and Executive Chef at Coworth Park, a luxurious five-star country house hotel and part of the iconic Dorchester Collection. Next, he served as Executive Chef at the iconic Sandy Lane resort in Barbados before moving on to the role of Culinary Director at Raffles Seychelles, a luxury resort in the heart of Praslin, where he oversaw ten separate food and beverage outlets and led a team of more than 110 staff members before joining the team at Grace Bay Resorts.
When not in the kitchen, Chris enjoys cycling, squash, motorsports and paddle boarding with his daughter.
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Developed by The Turks and Caicos Islands’ esteemed Grace Bay Resorts, Rock House will be a 14-acre residential resort nestled into the untouched limestone cliffs of Providenciales’ north shore. Offering 41 cottages and four hillside homes designed by Coast Architects, each of these Mediterranean-inspired spaces will feature breathtaking views of the Atlantic Ocean from the property’s elevated cliffside location. Architectural details will include local artisan-crafted custom rock facades built with limestone excavated directly from the terrain. Interiors will be crafted by AD100 interior designer Shawn Henderson featuring an eclectic mix of contemporary and traditional design, including Scandinavian and custom-made furnishings. The focal point of Rock House will be its secluded, pristine beach and elevated pool perched upon a 25-foot ancient limestone cliff with steps leading to the white sand and ocean’s edge. The resort’s restaurant, bars, spa and fitness center will sit upon the hilltop featuring 180-degree views of the Atlantic Ocean. The studio suites, one-, and two-bedroom cottages in the development will range from 600-1,750 square feet and are priced from $600,000 to $1.4 million.
Learn more at www.rockhouseresort.com.
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California State University, Stanislaus (also known as Stanislaus State or simply Stan State and formerly known as CSU Stanislaus) is a public university in Turlock, California. It is part of the California State University system. It was established in 1957 and is also the only campus in the system to offer a bachelor's degree in cognitive studies. The university offers 133 Bachelor's degrees, 35 Master's degrees, two Doctoral degrees (Doctor of Education), and 14 teaching credentials.[3][4]
Stanislaus State College (1957–85)
Engaging - Empowering - Transforming
Public university
Parent institution
California State University system
$16.4 million (2018)[1]
Ellen Junn
9,762 (Fall 2016)[2]
Suburban, 228 acres (92 ha)
NCAA Division II – CCAA
www.csustan.edu
Stanislaus State has been rated in the top 10 public universities in the new West Coast Master's category by U.S. News & World Report magazine as well as a best buy in higher education for the past seven years.[5] Stanislaus is also one of the two campuses (other one being Sonoma State University) in the 23-campus CSU system listed among the best undergraduate colleges by The Princeton Review.[6] A 2015 study commissioned by National Public Radio found that Stanislaus State was ranked 5th in the nation for upward mobility.[7]
In 1957 the California State Legislature established what was then called Stanislaus State College.[8] The college was first accredited in 1964. Classes began on the Stanislaus County Fairgrounds in September, 1960, and the college moved to its current location five years later. It gained university status and its current name in 1986, and received a ten-year accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges in 1999 and 2010.[9]
In 1974 the University established an extension program at the campus of San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton in neighboring San Joaquin County. In 1998 the Stanislaus State-Stockton Center expanded and moved to its own permanent campus in downtown Stockton.
AcademicsEdit
Fall Freshman Statistics[10][11][12][13][14][15]
Freshman Applicants
13,656 5,804 5,763 5,387 4,896 4,421
Admits
9,654 4,280 4,158 4,128 3,726 3,460
% Admitted
3,040 1,224 1,109 1,251 1,029 966
SAT Composite (out of 1600)
California State University, Stanislaus offers 42 undergraduate programs, 23 master's degree programs and eight graduate certificate programs, seven school credential programs and a doctoral degree program in Educational Leadership.[16][17] Its academic disciplines are clustered within four colleges:
College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
College of Education, Kinesiology and Social Work
Stanislaus State's College of Business Administration is accredited by the AACSB.[18] Its Human Resource Management program has the nation's top student testing success rate.[19] In fall 2012, Stanislaus State launched an online Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree program, the first fully online AACSB-accredited MBA program offered in the state of California.[20]
The California State University, Stanislaus bookstore
The university library building was originally named for founding president Dr. J. Burton Vasché. The library currently holds over 370,000 volumes, 841 print journal subscriptions, access to 141 electronic databases, and a growing number of electronic journals, video recordings, and compact discs.[21] The University Library also contains a Children's collection, which has more than 5,900 titles of children's literature. The library offers access to more than 70 electronic databases and also contains federal, state, and local documents.
As of Fall 2017, the five most popular bachelor's degrees Programs are: BS Business Administration, BA Psychology, BA Liberal Studies, BA/BS Biological Sciences, and BA Criminal Justice.
ResourcesEdit
The university has several resources available for students. The Tutoring/Writing Center is located in the Vasche Library and offers individual and group tutoring. Some of the services available include essay planning, organization, development and revision, writing across the curriculum, ESL, and WPST test preparation.[22] The university also has a bookstore that features marble herms by sculptor Andrew Wilson alongside other artwork, as well as a university police department and financial aid office.
RankingsEdit
Forbes[23]
Times/WSJ[24]
U.S. News & World Report[25]
Master's University class
Washington Monthly[26]
2019 USNWR departmental rankings[27]
Public Affairs 199
Social Work 196
Cal State Stanislaus was ranked the #10 college in the United States by the 2015 Social Mobility Index college rankings.[28]
In 2015, Washington Monthly's "Best Bang for the Buck —Western Rankings" ranked Stanislaus State 10th among 233 schools in the Western United States for five criteria: net price based on annual family income; graduation rate; student loan default rate; percent of applicants admitted; and applicants' ACT/SAT scores.
Sequoia Lake at CSU Stanislaus.
AthleticsEdit
Main article: Cal State Stanislaus Warriors
Stanislaus State, in the Division II of the NCAA, competes in the California Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA). Stanislaus State fields 13 sports for men and women for the fall, winter, and spring seasons. Fall sports for men include soccer and cross country. Fall sports for women are soccer, volleyball and cross country. The winter sport for men is basketball and for women it is basketball and indoor track and field. Spring sports for men include baseball, golf, and track and field. Spring sports for women include softball, track and field, and tennis.
Ed & Bertha Fitzpatrick ArenaEdit
Ed & Bertha Fitzpatrick Arena (aka Warrior Gym) is a 2,000-seat multi-purpose, built in 1978, which is the home arena for the university's Warriors basketball teams. It was also briefly the home of the defunct Big Valley Shockwave of the American Basketball Association. In the 2010-2011 season the name of the basketball arena was changed to Ed & Bertha Fitzpatrick Arena.[29]
Student lifeEdit
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (March 2012)
Fall 2018 Demographics of student body[30]
* All levels, freshman through graduate
Filipino American
White European Americans
Native American/American Indian
Mexican American/Chicano
Central Americans, South Americans, and Caribbean
Multiracial Americans
The university has a Hmong Students Association. In 2004 the association and a former member led the Project Ready for School to help children arriving in the United States from a Thai refugee camp for preparing for school.[31]
As of fall 2018 CSU Stanislaus has the third larges enrollment percentage of Mexican Americans in the California State University system.[32]
Greek Life - Sororities and FraternitiesEdit
Greek Life at CSUS includes:[33]
Music-based social fraternities
Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia ΦΜΑ
Sigma Alpha Iota ΣΑΙ
Sororities (NPC)
Alpha Xi Delta ΑΞΔ
Phi Mu ΦΜ
Phi Sigma Sigma ΦΣΣ
Latino Based Sorority
Alpha Pi Sigma ΑΠΣ
Regional/ Local Organizations
Delta Phi Gamma ΔΦΓ
Lambda Sigma Gamma Sorority, Inc. ΛΣΓ
Phi Lambda Rho ΦΛΡ
Sigma Omega Phi Multicultural Sorority Inc. ΣΩΦ
Upsilon Kappa Delta ΥΚΔ
Fraternities (NIC)
Kappa Sigma ΚΣ
Nu Alpha Kappa ΝΑΚ
Omega Delta Phi ΩΔΦ
Tau Kappa Epsilon ΤΚΕ
Theta Chi ΘΞ
Omega Nu Omega (Co-Ed) ΩΝΩ
Clubs & OrganizationsEdit
There are over 100 clubs and organizations offered at Stan State. The various clubs and organizations range from academic, political, recreational, pre-professional, social, special interest, cultural, religious and a lot more! Some of the benefits of being involved with a club or organization include the opportunity to make friends and meet other students with common interests, enhance leadership skills, define and shape career goals, networking opportunities, civic engagement, academic & character development, mentoring, feeling better connected to the campus community, self-governance, and other aspects that support student success.[34]
Accounting Society Academic
ACDA Student Chapter Academic
Agriculture Ambassador Academic
Alcohol Ed University
Alpha Phi Omega Service
Alpha Pi Sigma Greek
Alpha Xi Delta Greek
American Association of University Women Special Interest
Anthropology Club Academic
Art Club of CSU Stanislaus Academic
Asian Pacific Islander Club Cultural
Assyrian Club Cultural
Beta Alpha Psi Honorary
Bhagat Puran Singh Health Initiative Service
Biology Student Association Academic
Black Student Union Cultural
California Association of Bilingual Education Academic
Catholic Student Association Religious
Chicanos Unidos for Academic Achievement Special Interest
Chicanos/Latinos in Health Education Special Interest
College Panhellenic Association at CSU Stanislaus Greek
Combatives Special Interest
Computer Science Club Academic
Criminal Justice Club Academic
Delta Phi Gamma Sorority Greek
Democratic Party Club Political
Economic Student Association Academic
Ethnic Studies Club Academic
Faculty Mentor Program University
Faculty Mentor Program Student Organization Special Interest
Finance Association Academic
First Generation Student Club Special Interest
Fraternity Council Greek
Future STEM Educators Club Special Interest
Gaming Club Special Interest
Healthy Community University
Healthy Relationships University
Hermanas Unidas Cultural
Hmong Student Association (dis-banded) Cultural
Honors Endeavor Special Interest
Human Resource Management Club Academic
Hunger Network Service
Indigenous Students in Activism Special Interest
International Justice Mission Special Interest
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Religious
Jakara Movement Club Service
Kappa Sigma Fraternity Greek
Queer Trans People of Color Collective Special Interest
This article is missing information about Missing entries after K?. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page. (March 2019)
ControversyEdit
Sarah Palin's selection as the keynote speaker at Stanislaus State's main fundraising event in 2010 resulted in the most successful fundraiser in the campus's history. It provoked speculation and debate when the university refused to disclose her speaking fee and certified public accountants representing Clendenin Bird & Company from Modesto, California were called in to do an internal audit regarding the investigation. The event was organized by a school foundation.[35]
AlumniEdit
Dennis Cardoza
Carrie Henn
Steve Andrade – Major League Baseball pitcher for the Kansas City Royals
Gregorio Billikopf – professor and author
Dennis Cardoza – U.S. Representative for California's 18th congressional district
Gary Condit (B.A., 1972)[36] – former Congressman from California, initially implicated in the Chandra Levy murder case, before being cleared.
Leo Dottavio – Reality television personality, actor, and comedian, known for his performance on The Bachelorette Season 14
Carrie Henn – Child actress who starred in Aliens
Rusty Kuntz – former Major League Baseball outfielder and 1984 World Series Champion; current Kansas City first base coach
Brian Nixon– Author, Journalist, and Broadcaster
Rico Oller (1980) – former California State Senator
FacultyEdit
As'ad AbuKhalil - Professor of Political Science
Richard Weikart – Professor of History, fellow at the Discovery Institute
^ As of June 30, 2018. "U.S. and Canadian Institutions Listed by Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 Endowment Market Value and Change in Endowment Market Value from FY 2017 to FY 2018" (PDF). National Association of College and University Business Officers and Commonfund Institute. 2018. Retrieved 2019-07-12.
^ a b c "Total Enrollment by Sex and Student Level, Fall 2016". The California State University. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
^ Search CSU Degrees
^ [1].California State University Stanislaus Facts. Retrieved on February 12, 2012.
^ [2]. The Best 376 Colleges. Retrieved on February 12, 2012.
^ Austin, Nan (2015-10-23). "Turlock university ranks with Ivy League in moving students up and onward Stanislaus State lands lofty spot on national list". Modesto Bee. McClatchy Company. Retrieved 2015-10-24.
^ [3]. Timeline and Milestones 1960s. Retrieved on February 13, 2012.
^ [4].Institutional Accreditation- California State University Stanislaus. Retrieved on February 13, 2012.
^ New Students
^ CSU APPLICATIONS AND ADMISSIONS REPORTS, FALL 2012
^ http://www.csustan.edu/ir/documents/CDS_2012-2013-FINAL.pdf
^ http://www.csustan.edu/ir/documents/c3t2.ftfresh.college_sat_001.pdf
^ http://www.csustan.edu/ir/documents/FINALDRAFTFall2002-2013FTFCohortTables112113.pdf
^ [5].Quick Facts- California State University Stanislaus. Retrieved on February 13, 2012.
^ [6].Majors & Programs Designed for Success- California State University Stanislaus. Retrieved on February 13, 2012.
^ [7].Accreditation- College of Business Administration, California State University Stanislaus. Retrieved on February 13, 2012.
^ http://www.calstate.edu/impact/campus/stanislaus.html | Stanislaus State economic impact report
^ [8].Stanislaus State To Offer the First Fully Online AACSB Accredited Master of Business Administration (MBA) Degree in California. Retrieved on February 13, 2012.
^ [9].California State University Stanislaus 2009-2010 Catalog (Page 11). Retrieved on February 13, 2012.
^ "Tutoring Center". California State University Stanislaus. Retrieved 2017-08-08.
^ "Best Colleges 2019: Regional Universities Rankings". U.S. News & World Report. November 19, 2018.
^ "2018 Rankings -- Masters Universities". Washington Monthly. Retrieved November 19, 2018.
^ "California State University–Stanislaus - U.S. News Best Grad School Rankings". U.S. News & World Report. Retrieved July 12, 2019.
^ CollegeNET. "Social Mobility Index 2015 - CollegeNET". Socialmobilityindex.org. Retrieved 2015-10-20.
^ "Stanislaus State Athletics - Facilities (old)". Warriorathletics.com. Retrieved 2015-12-30.
^ "Ethnicity Enrollment Profile". www.calstate.edu. Retrieved 2019-07-09.
^ Carlson, Cheri. "Students Try to Ease Hmong Transition." Merced Sun-Star. Thursday July 15, 2004. Local A01.
^ "Clubs & Organizations". California State University Stanislaus. Retrieved 2019-02-26.
^ Los Angeles times Sarah Palin's Cal State Stanislaus fundraiser brings in record donations, officials say
^ CONDIT, Gary Adrian - Biographical Information
California portal
Cal State Stanislaus Athletics website
Coordinates: 37°31′30″N 120°51′21″W / 37.52500°N 120.85583°W / 37.52500; -120.85583
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=California_State_University,_Stanislaus&oldid=906714398"
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Crown advocate
(Redirected from Crown Advocate)
See also: King's Advocate
See also: Crown counsel
Crown advocate is a title used in some former British colonies (and until recently in Britain) for a government prosecutor. In former British Colonies and certain British extraterritorial courts the title is (or was) used by the senior government advocate. Until recently, in Britain the title is used for entry level prosecution counsel employed by the Crown Prosecution Service.
Great BritainEdit
In the United Kingdom, the role of a crown advocate (now called a crown prosecutor) is to analyse, review, prepare and present a wide range of cases in the Crown Court and the Court of Appeal, including as a junior advocate in the more serious and complex cases. Crown advocates will be expected to have an up-to-date knowledge of all criminal offences and will maintain a high volume of casework, which will include the review of more serious and complex cases.[1]
There are also senior and principal crown advocates.
British Supreme Court for China and JapanEdit
The position of Crown Advocate was created in the British Supreme Court for China and Japan in 1878. The first holder of the position was Nicholas John Hannen. The position was similar to the position of an Attorney General in a colony. The Crown Advocate was not a full-time employee of the Foreign Office but received payment for acting as Crown Advocate. The Crown Advocate was allowed to accept cases from private clients that did not conflict with his role as Crown Advocate.[2]
MaltaEdit
The position of Crown Advocate was created in 1839 to replace the office of Attorney General. The position was abolished in 1922 and taken over by the Treasury Counsel. In 1936, the role of Treasury Counsel was taken over by the newly re-created office of Attorney General.[3]
New South WalesEdit
The Crown Advocate is appointed under the provisions of the Crown Advocate Act, 1979 (Act No.59).
The Crown Advocate advises the Attorney General, particularly on questions arising under the criminal law, and appears for the NSW Government in criminal proceedings of special significance Under the Act the Crown Advocate assists the Solicitor General in respect of the exercise or discharge by the Solicitor General of any powers, authorities, duties or functions delegated by the Attorney General under section 4 of the Solicitor General Act, 1969.[4]
South AustraliaEdit
The Crown Advocate is responsible for the conduct of the State’s major civil and commercial litigation, and will act as senior trial counsel in more complex matters.[5]
TasmaniaEdit
From 1973 to 1986 the senior government prosecutor in Tasmania was known as the Crown Advocate. The title was changed to Director of Public Prosecutions in 1986.[6]
^ Job description of Crown Advocate from CPS website.
^ Clark, Douglas, Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943), Volume 1, p193-5 ISBN 9888273086
^ http://www.euro-justice.com/member_states/malta/country_report/2827/
^ NSW State Records Investigatgor
^ South Australian Premiers press release 25 July 2014
^ "Tasmanian Director of Public Prosecutions, Annual Report 2009-2010" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-02-04. Retrieved 2014-01-20.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Crown_advocate&oldid=905900203"
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Discovery Park (Seattle)
Aerial view of Magnolia peninsular neighborhood in Seattle, facing north north west. The forested area is Discovery Park, with the brown area being the Fort Lawton Military Reserve.
Discovery Park is a 534-acre (2.16 km2) park on the shores of Puget Sound in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. It is the city's largest public park and contains 11.81 miles (19.01 km) of walking trails. United Indians of All Tribes' Daybreak Star Cultural Center is within the park's boundaries. A lighthouse is located on West Point, the westernmost point of the park and the entire city of Seattle, and on the south side of the North Beach strip is a sewage treatment plant, but it is almost entirely concealed from the marsh, beach, and trail. The Discovery Park Loop Trail, designated a National Recreation Trail in 1975, runs 2.8 miles (4.5 km) through the park, connecting to other trails.[1]
The park is built on the historic grounds of Fort Lawton; most of the Fort Lawton Historic District (FLHD) falls within the park (although an enclave within the district remains in military hands), as does the West Point Lighthouse. Both the FLHD and the lighthouse are on the National Register of Historic Places.
Forests, beaches, prairies, and bluffs dominate the landscape of the park.
AmbienceEdit
The park is one of the best places in the city to view wildlife, especially birds[2] and marine mammals.[3] The Seattle Audubon Society has compiled a checklist of 270 species of birds seen in the park and nearby waters.[4] Elliott and Shilshole Bays are home to harbor seals and California sea lions, while the wooded areas support Townsend's chipmunks. Most visitors enjoy hiking the Loop Trail, which forms a circuit through forest, meadow, and shrub habitats around the upland portion of the park, and provides excellent views of Puget Sound. The shoreline is accessible by road or trail (the hike back up from the north beach is mildly strenuous), however, a permit is required prior to driving a vehicle to the beach. Free permits can be obtained at the Environmental Learning Center in the East Parking Lot and are designated for qualified individuals only (groups with children 7 and under, seniors 62+, and people with a physical disability). The south beach is on the windward side of the peninsula, Elliott Bay, and the north beach is on the leeward side and has views of Shilshole Bay. At the point between the north and south beaches is West Point and the West Point Lighthouse. Coniferous forest is mostly to be found in the north bluff region and can be accessed from the road that leads to the beach. Deciduous woods surround the two parking lots and the visitor center. Overlooking the south bluff is a large meadow with small trees and shrubs. Bigleaf maple, red alder, bitter cherry, Douglas-fir, western red cedar, and western hemlock make up a large percentage of the tree cover in the park.[5] Invasive species such as Himalayan blackberry, Scot's broom, English ivy, and holly are present throughout, requiring active on-going management to suppress.[6]
Daybreak Star Cultural Center
Discovery Park is a relatively recent creation, having been created in the early 1970s from land surplus to the U.S. Army's Fort Lawton. The site for the 1,100 acres (4.5 km2) fort had been given to the Army by the city in 1898, and the fort opened in 1900. The Army offered to sell it back to the city for one dollar in 1938 but the city refused, citing maintenance concerns. Much of the land was surplused in 1971, given to the city in 1972, and dedicated as Discovery Park in 1973. Fort Lawton continued as an Army Reserve facility until it was officially closed at a ceremony on February 25, 2012.[citation needed] The Grunge band Temple of the Dog filmed the music video for their hit single "Hunger Strike" on the shores of Discovery Park.
IssuesEdit
West Point Lighthouse
The most controversial issue regarding the Discovery Park is what to do with former military property acquired in and around the park. In 2004, the City of Seattle announced it would purchase 23 (later 24) acres of U.S. Navy property within the park. The decision was ultimately made to demolish the structures to create open space.[7] In 2008, plans to close Army base Fort Lawton opened up debate over what to do with the former military properties: housing advocates wanted it converted into affordable housing, while some neighborhood groups opposed the idea.[8] The City Council approved building up to 216 housing units, leading to a lawsuit.[9] As of March 2009, the King County Superior Court Judge ordered the city to comply with the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) process.[10]
In 2008, a group of homeless people and homeless rights advocates set up camp in the park, but was forced to vacate by the city.[11]
In September 2010, the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) approved the 10 October 2008 Proposed Redevelopment Plan and Homeless Assistance Application for the US Army Ft. Lawton Complex. The HUD letter to the mayor of Seattle stated the need for homeless housing outweighed the need for other redevelopment proposals and that 144 family housing units and over 2000 beds in "supportive" permanent housing should be built and that HUD was ready to assist the city of Seattle, if required.[12]
The park has a remarkable tendency to attract wild animals. In the winter of 2008-2009, a coyote in the park made headlines,[13] and in May 2009, a black bear was seen.[14] In September 2009, the park was closed because of the presence of a cougar. The animal was trapped and transported to the Cascade mountains.[15]
The beach has a history of sporadic clothing-optional use in the more remote areas of its shoreline. However, such use is currently not officially sanctioned by the City. A beach rally organized by The Body Freedom Collaborative's Seattle Free Beach Campaign[16] on September 4, 2004 to shore support for clothing-optional use resulted in the arrest of a man sunbathing, after a complaint was made to the Seattle Police.[17]
^ "Discovery Park Loop Trail". American Trails. 2013-04-23. Retrieved 2014-08-14.
^ Hunn, Eugene S. (1982). Birding in Seattle and King County. Seattle Audubon Society. ISBN 978-0-914516-05-7.
^ "Marine Protected Areas within Puget Sound (Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife)". Archived from the original on 17 October 2009. Retrieved 19 December 2009.
^ "Birds of Discovery Park, a Checklist" (PDF). Retrieved 5 November 2009.
^ "Discovery Park. Final Vegetation Management Plan, March 5. (J&S 01383.01.)" (PDF). Jones & Stokes, Bellevue, WA. Prepared for Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, Seattle, WA. Retrieved 19 December 2009.
^ "Seattle Parks and Recreation Vegetation Management Plan". Retrieved 19 December 2009.
^ Pian Chan, Sharon (20 September 2007). "City will demolish housing at Discovery Park". The Seattle Times. Seattle. Archived from the original on 10 June 2008. Retrieved 13 September 2009.
^ Bhatt, Sanjay (26 April 2008). "City will demolish housing at Discovery Park". The Seattle Times. Seattle. Retrieved 13 September 2009.
^ Pian Chan, Sharon (16 October 2008). "Magnolia group sues Seattle to halt housing for homeless". The Seattle Times. Seattle. Archived from the original on 19 October 2008. Retrieved 13 September 2009.
^ "Magnolia Neighborhood Planning Council". Retrieved 13 September 2009.
^ Clark, Noelene (6 October 2008). "Magnolia group sues Seattle to halt housing for homeless". The Seattle Times. Seattle. Archived from the original on 11 December 2008. Retrieved 13 September 2009.
^ "Letter to Seattle mayor Michael McGinn from the U.S. Department of Housing and Development's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Needs" (PDF). 2010-09-14. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-07-27.
^ Gilmore, Susan (1 February 2008). "USDA lets coyote remain in park". The Seattle Times. Seattle. Retrieved 13 September 2009.
^ O'Hagan, Maureen; Brunner, Jim (17 May 2009). "Black bear reported near Discovery Park". The Seattle Times. Seattle. Archived from the original on 21 May 2009. Retrieved 13 September 2009.
^ Turnbull, Lornet; Clarridge, Christine (6 September 2009). "Elusive cougar captured in Magnolia's Discovery Park, already released into the wild". The Seattle Times. Seattle. Archived from the original on 9 September 2009. Retrieved 13 September 2009.
^ Seattle Free Beach Campaign, accessed November 24, 2007.
^ Tan Vinh, Group rallies to allow nudity Archived February 11, 2009, at the Wayback Machine, Seattle Times, September 5, 2004. Accessed November 24, 2007.
Media related to Discovery Park (Seattle) at Wikimedia Commons
Official site, Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation
Friends of Discovery Park
Seal Sitters (volunteer Harbor Seal pup watch group)
Coordinates: 47°39′42.4″N 122°25′8.5″W / 47.661778°N 122.419028°W / 47.661778; -122.419028
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discovery_Park_(Seattle)&oldid=901325396"
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