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Saving the Planet * Missile Defense Fraud * Who Are the Terrorists?

31 August 2002

1) Saving the Planet - Johannesburg Politics
2) Missile Defense Fraud Double-Take
3) Who Are the Terrorists?

"In my lifetime or my daughter's lifetime, the Arctic might be ice free."
Lee Cooper, scientist


Editor's Notes:

The truth hurts. Our planet is knocking off species at record pace. The weather is bizarre. Yet, George W. and team are slamming on the accelerator for quick profits, domination, and, in actuality, self-annihilation. How many of us will they take with them on their inevitable descent from power? Nevertheless, each day we have many choices on what course of actions we can take to make a difference. With only little support, a team of scientists and engineers could demonstrate the effectiveness of a new design for a Stirling engine, to convert waste heat and gases into clean producing electricity. Yet this is still under funded, while waste wreaks havoc on dying species, including human kind. Check the links to this positive developing technology and other Johannesburg Summit information in item 1.

Item 2 is another whistle blowing, tongue in cheek, article by Al Martin. As the title suggests, it's about a ‘Missile Defense Fraud Double-Take." Dennis Kucinich, who introduced Bills to ban space-based weapons, and for a US Department of Peace, is still making the case for stopping the arms race. Kucinich will be speaking at a Peace Summit at the University of Vermont, Burlington, September 28, 2002. For more information, visit: http://www.shiesl.com/peace/

And on another area program note, Flyby News will be presenting William Rivers Pitt on a talk on 911 and the US-proposed regime change in Iraq. William Rivers Pitt is a teacher of English Literature, Writing and Journalism from Cambridge, MA. He has authored two books: WAR ON IRAQ, by Context Press, which makes the case that the Bush administration's war plans for Iraq are a recipe for bloody disaster; and The GREATEST SEDITION IS SILENCE, to be published by Pluto Press in February, which describes in detail the erosion of American civil liberties since 9/11, among many other topics. Check this following Flyby News Archive link to a William Rivers Pitt article with Scott Ritter (in item 1) ==> http://www.flybynews.com/cgi-local/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1027607401,73232,

The program with William Rivers Pitt will begin promptly on Thursday, October 3, 2002 at 7:00pm in the Main Meeting Room at the Jones Library in Amherst, MA with a 25-minute video featuring Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich, called "Peace In Space & On Earth."

For more information, please write to Jonathan Mark – Email – info@flybynews.com .

Please contact us, too, if you wish to consider helping us pay for Flyby News bumper stickers. You may agree that these stickers will help raise consciousness. Our favorite space probe and planet will be pictured with a text overlay. Lahri Bond of Heartwork Graphics said he would help -- FREE THE NEWS – www.FlybyNews.com – for life's Survival in the 21st Century

A price quote for 250 bumper stickers run from $160 to $231.
{We could charge $1 per sticker to help repay a loan for them, too.}
Networking, support for campaigns, donations, are much appreciated, and can be sent to "Flyby News" P.O. Box 1999; Wendell Depot, MA 01380 USA

And what is Item 3 about -- "Who are the Terrorists?" Can we blame anyone for getting confused? It is hard to tell these days, yet Flyby News does its best, reporting commentaries based on evidences beyond the controls of corporate-run-media in cahoots with the military-industrial-academic complex.

"Until the United States changes its priority from regime change to disarmament, none. The United States Government will not allow inspectors back in."
Scott Ritter

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1) Saving the Planet - Johannesburg Politics

Saving the planet
by IGNACIO RAMONET
From the August Le Monde Diplomatique

JOHANNESBURG will host the world summit on sustainable development from 26 August to 4 September - an event of great importance, the biggest gathering of government leaders and heads of state in a decade, 60,000 people from more than 180 countries. The aim is to find answers to humanity's most pressing problems: how to save the environment, eradicate poverty, save our planet.

The planet is in a sorry state. The diagnosis of its ills was apparent a decade ago at the first earth summit, held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Alarm bells rang: global warming was a fact; world supplies of drinking water were running out; forests were disappearing; many species were en route to extinction; and poverty was destroying the lives of more than 1bn of our fellow humans.

The world's leaders agreed that "the major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment is the unsustainable pattern of consumption and production, particularly in industrialised countries, which is a matter of grave concern, aggravating poverty and imbalances". They adopted two conventions, one on climate change and one on biodiversity, as well as the plan known as Agenda 21, to promote sustainable development worldwide.

The idea of sustainability is simple: development is sustainable if future generations inherit a quality of environment at least equal to that inherited by their predecessors (1). Sustainable development presupposes the application of three principles: the precautionary principle, adopting a preventive rather than remedial approach; the principle of solidarity between all peoples of the world and between the present generation and those to come; and the principle of people participation in decision-making (2).

In many areas things have not improved in 10 years. They have got worse. With the acceleration of free-market globalisation, the "unsustainable pattern of consumption and production" has become even more entrenched. Social inequality is now at levels not seen since the times of the pharaohs. The fortunes of the world's three richest individuals now exceed the total wealth of the inhabitants of its 48 poorest countries. The ecological destruction of the biosphere by the rich countries has also accelerated.

Although the 30 most developed countries represent only 20% of world population, they produce and consume 85% of synthetic chemical products, 80% of non-renewable energy and 40% of drinking water. And their emissions of greenhouse gases per inhabitant are 10 times greater than those of the countries of the South (3).

During the past decade emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, increased by 9%. In the United States, the leading polluter, the figure increased by 18%. More than a billion people still do not have access to drinkable water, and almost 3bn (half of humanity) have only water of inferior quality. Thirty thousand people die every day as a result of drinking this polluted water - 10 times the number killed in the attacks of 11 September. The devastation of forests continues; 17m hectares disappear each year - an area four times the size of Switzerland. And since there are fewer and fewer trees to absorb the carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect and global warming worsen. More animal species are being eliminated - 13% of all bird species have gone, 25% of mammals, 34% of fish, a mass extinction the planet has not seen since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

The delegates who will gather for the summit travel with great hopes. But these will come to nothing if national egotism, the fetishism of growth, the logic of the market and the law of profit are allowed to take over. That was what happened during the preparatory conference in Bali in June. As a result it was unable to adopt a plan of action for sustainable development and ended in stalemate.

To save the planet it is imperative that the powerful nations meeting in Johannesburg commit themselves on at least seven key issues: an international programme for renewable energy, prioritising energy access for the South; undertakings on access to and supply of clean drinking water, aiming to reduce by the year 2015 the number of people who still lack this basic right; measures to protect forests, as already agreed in the biodiversity convention adopted in Rio in 1992; the establishment of juridical frameworks to make companies answerable for their ecological impact, and reaffirming the precautionary principle as the governing principle of all commercial activity; initiatives to modify the rules of the World Trade Organisation in the light of United Nations principles for the protection of ecosystems, and the standards of the International Labour Organisation; a commitment by developed countries to contribute at least 0.7% of their wealth to development aid; binding recommendations to wipe out the debt of the poorest countries.

By destroying the natural world mankind has been making planet Earth less viable as a place to live. There are processes under way that may lead to environmental catastrophe. The Johannesburg summit must find ways to reverse them. This is the challenge that we face at the start of the 21st century. Otherwise we may find that the human race is threatened with extinction.

Translated by Ed Emery
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2002 Le Monde diplomatique
http://MondeDiplo.com/2002/08/01edito?var_s=%5C%27saving+the+planet%5C%27

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The official UN website on the Johannesburg summit:
http://www.johannesburgsummit.org/
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For a solution-related Flyby News (June 27, 2002) article,
"New Power Source To Help Cut Global Warming," see:
http://www.flybynews.com/cgi-local/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1025191711,6186,

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Big business accused of hijacking Earth Summit

The UN World Summit is in danger of being hijacked by major corporations and a secret deal between the European Union and the United States, a coalition of non-profit organizations has
charged. "What we are seeing is quite literally a corporate takeover of this process. So far corporate accountability has been dropped from the implementation text at the summit," Daniel Mittler, spokesman for Friends of the Earth International warned at a Press conference. "Key negotiations in Johannesburg are in danger of being stitched up by a controversial deal struck between US trade officials and trade mandarins in the EU Commission," Oxfam and the World Wide Fund for Nature added in a statement.

For the complete article in the New Straits Times [Malaysia], 28 August 2002, see:
http://www.emedia.com.my/Current_News/NST/Wednesday/World/20020828081402/Article/

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For a related article:

"Corporate Capture"
by George Monbiot,
The Guardian

If the world's transnational corporations have their way, the Earth Summit in Johannesburg will not only fail to tackle the ecological crisis, it may make it worse.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldsummit2002/story/0,12264,777533,00.html

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Related Story: Bush's Environmental Blow-Off

George W. Bush's decision not to join 100 world leaders at this week's Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, is one more step in his go-it-alone foreign policy. It's also part of a strange strategy in which George Bush the Younger repudiates the actions of George Bush the Elder, when those actions offended the Republican conservative base in the first Bush administration.

For the full August 26, 2002 story by Sam Parry, see:
http://Consortiumnews.com/2002/082602a.html

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2) Missile Defense Fraud Double-Take


Missile Defense Fraud Double-Take
by Al Martin
http://www.almartinraw.com/column29.html

The most recent Department of Defense fraud was a test in which a missile was allegedly destroyed by another missile over the Pacific.

A July 13 release by the Department of Defense claimed that this so-called ABM test has been declared a success.

The videotape, released to the media and shown on CNN and other networks, looks suspiciously similar to the admittedly dummied-up September 1985 Department of Defense videotape showing another supposedly successful interception of a ballistic missile under the former ASAT Program, the Anti-Satellite Ballistic Missile Program.

As a matter of fact, the videotapes are exactly the same.

How do I know? Not only do I remember it, but I have a hard copy printout. Having just compared it to the tape seen on CNN, it looks exactly the same. The only thing that's changed is the video-date readout at the bottom.

This latest "successful test" is another low-cost deception from the US Department of Defense.

I really don't blame them, though. They spend a lot of money dummying up the first test. It was later estimated by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) that the Department of Defense spent $43 million to dummy up this test. It actually cost a lot of money to do it the right way.

This latest fraud, however, is a very cost-effective deception.

You could call it Star War Fraud Redux. Now it's packaged up under the new ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) expenditures. But it was exactly the same tape they had shown before in 1985 -- a test which the Department of Defense later admitted was dummied up in an effort to continue congressional appropriations for Star Wars expenditures.

In that time frame (at the end of 1985), the Democrats in Congress were starting to get suspicious of the enormous Star Wars spending. This Star Wars spending peaked in 1986, and then it was sharply ratcheted down.

To put it in historical context, the GAO Report of 1988 stated that of the $531 billion spent by the Department of Defense from 1982 to 1988 under the guise of developing Star Wars projects, over 50 % of the money could not be accounted for.

In 1989, FARCO (Foreign Asset Recovery Control Office) revealed that during the peak years of expenditures on Star Wars programs (1985-1986), there was an enormous increase in the opening of offshore accounts by senior Reagan-Bush officials, including senior military officers and others closely connected to the Reagan Bush Regime, particularly in the defense industry.

That's one of the mandates of FARCO - to maintain an account of the flow of US monies as to foreign deposits.

According to a syndicated Newhouse report, current Department of Defense fraud is even worse than anyone can imagine. "For fiscal year 1999, the Pentagon Inspector General reported $2.3 trillion worth of untraceable accounting entries…"

"For fiscal year 2000, auditors or the Pentagon's inspector General's Office found $1.1 trillion in bookkeeping entries that could not be tracked or justified," (Story - http://www.newhouse.com/archive/story1a061301.html )

This was barely a minor blip in the news.

Originally, in the 1980s, it was the late Senator John Tower who was going to blow the whistle on the Star Wars Defense Fraud. He had planned to do so, and in fact he had documents regarding massive Department of Defense fraud involving the Star Wars program. He was carrying it in his high-security metal briefcase -- when his plane crashed.

The FAA still lists this as a "suspicious plane crash." It happened outside of Brunswick, Georgia. It should also be noted that the briefcase was never recovered after he crash The NTSB stated that they could not find the briefcase.

This is the Famous Briefcase Incident [See Chapter 9 of "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider" by Al Martin]*

Peggy Tower, his daughter, complained and asked about the briefcase's whereabouts, after she was informed by famed congressional investigator Tom Strzemienski.

Then an investigator for Charlie Rose, Chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee, Strzemienski was collaterally investigating the incident of the so-called "C130 Aircraft Diversion" from the US Forestry Service. He was trying to solve the problem -- why were all these C130s from the forestry department suddenly winding up in Libya?

He mentioned the type of documents her father was carrying to Peggy.

Subsequent to this event, in 1989, the Department of Defense did in fact return Senator Tower's battered briefcase to Peggy. It was still locked, by the way. When she had it opened, there were no documents inside.

This was the incident when the FAA inspectors showed up at the airport in Brunswick, Georgia. Later it was revealed that the men were not from the FAA, but were in fact from the Department of Defense. They were simply bearing FAA inspectors' identification badges.

Today the new ABM program is nothing more than a continuation of the old fraud of the Star Wars program.

The Al Martin Raw website predicts, as Senator Robert Byrd has already intimated, that five years from now, it will be discovered that fresh hundreds-of-billions of dollars in defense expenditures on the ABM Program are again unaccounted for -- disappearing into shadowy Republican-connected offshore accounts and institutions.

The ongoing frauds are so rampant and egregious that even the so-called watchdogs of the Department of Defense, the Pentagon Inspector General's Office has been publicly caught redhanded.

"Defense Department's inspector general's office is now under investigation for allegedly recreating financial records for an audit shortly before the documents were reviewed by an outside auditor."

"As described by an internal Pentagon report, the apparent fabrication required a dozen staffers to work long hours including overtime at a personnel cost of $63,000." (See "Who shall inspect the inspectors general?" http://www.coxnews.com/washingtonbureau/staff/malone/061301IG-FRAUD13.html )

Remember - it costs a lot to commit serious fraud.

The Pentagon should actually be commended for recycling their old Star Wars Fraud video as their latest so-called "successful" ABM missile defense test.

After all, a really good fraud deserves a double-take…

# # #

AL MARTIN is America's foremost whistle-blower on government fraud and corruption. A retired US Navy Lt. Commander and former officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence, he has testified before Congress (the Kerry Committee and the Alexander Committee) regarding Iran-Contra. Al Martin is the author of "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider" (2001, National Liberty Press, $19.95; order line: 1-866-317-1390.) He lives at an undisclosed location, since the criminals named in his book have been returned to national power and prominence. His column "Behind the Scenes in the Beltway" is published regularly on Al Martin Raw: Criminal Govt Conspiracy

http://www.almartinraw.com

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3) Who Are the Terrorists?

Want another good reason not to attack Iraq? "Massacre at Mazar" is a film with testimonies accusing US of war crimes, [For a June 13, 2002 Guardian article on this, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,736324,00.html ]. Such accounts were confirmed this week by an exclusive CBS News report, in which terrorized Afghanistani prisoners gave accounts of thousands of prisoners dying by suffocation during transport, and buried in mass graves, with US Special Unit Forces' knowledge. The CBS News report aired this last week, but no transcript is currently posted at their site.

In another media breakthrough this week, PBS News Hour's Margaret Warner conducted a debate on whether the U.S. should return UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. Included were two former inspectors; David Kay, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Iraq in 1991 and '92, (on Iraq's nuclear weapons development program); and Scott Ritter, inspector for the United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM, from 1991 to '98, (focused on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons).

The complete program transcript is posted:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/July-dec02/inspections_8-28.html

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Related Story:

Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas
By Patrick E. Tyler - The New York Times - August 18, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/18/international/middleeast/18CHEM.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 - A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.

Those officers, most of whom agreed to speak on the condition that they not be identified, spoke in response to a reporter's questions about the nature of gas warfare on both sides of the conflict between Iran and Iraq from 1981 to 1988. Iraq's use of gas in that conflict is repeatedly cited by President Bush and, this week, by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, as justification for "regime change" in Iraq.

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‘UN Chief Warns US Over Iraq'\
By John Lloyd in Kabul
Published in the Financial Times on August 28, 2002

The head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan warned the US on Wednesday that it faced rising Afghan anger at its troops' presence in the region.

Lakhdar Brahimi, a highly respected diplomat and veteran UN troubleshooter, said the US-led coalition forces hunting al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan "are realising they must be more careful. The Americans are very much aware of how much anger there is against them."

Afghan frustration at the US grew after the discovery of mass graves near Sherbeghan prison, which may contain bodies of prisoners allegedly murdered by the Northern Alliance after capture. The prison was run by the Alliance, a close ally of the US in the war against terrorism.

The UN has led its own investigation but Mr Brahimi accused his predecessor, Francesc Vendrell, now the European Commission's special representative in Afghanistan, of "addressing the gallery" in calling for punishment for those who had perpetrated the alleged murders.

In a separate interview, however, Mr Vendrell said: "There must be an end to this culture of impunity which has plagued the society for 23 years."

On the separate issue of a possible US military strike on Iraq, Mr Brahimi said Washington should first gain UN assent before it could launch an attack on Iraq.

Mr Brahimi voiced deep concern at US plans for unseating the regime of Saddam Hussein.

He said: "If you were so certain in helping humanity you shouldn't have any problem in going to the UN and getting assent.

"If you want to intervene in Iraq, for example, you shouldn't have a problem in coming and getting support."

Mr Brahimi insisted the UN "must not be trampled on. It's an extremely useful instrument. It's not perfect - but it's the only instrument we have and we must use it in the best way possible."

Mr Brahimi's comments come in the wake of Monday's speech by Dick Cheney, US vice-president, giving strong support for an attack on Iraq.

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Related article: Cheney/Rumsfeld link to CIA Horror
"The Secret Sharers: The CIA, the Bush Gang and the Killing of Frank Olson"
by Chris Floyd – Published by CounterPunch - August 28, 2002

http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd0828.html

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Your feedback, networking Flyby News, and forwarding us articles of interest, are welcomed and appreciated. You can write to the publisher/editor Jonathan Mark info@flybynews.com

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