Flyby News Home - Flyby News Archives - Casinni NoFlyby - Flyby Links

Flyby  News

"News Fit to Transmit in the Post Cassini Flyby Era"




DU-WMD * Indict * 9/11 Omission * MeetCindy


09 August 2005

In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil
is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

Mahatma Gandhi

1) Depleted Uranium is WMD
- - A-Bomb Survivors for 2005 Nobel Peace Prize
- - Radiation and Public Health Awareness
2) Federal Indictment of AIPAC and DoD staff on Spying Charges
3)Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
4) Cindy Sheehan is every son's mother

Editor's Notes:


Please note that FN's online issues of August 02 and 07 have been updated regarding recent misleading posts via TomFlocco.com. So while the great crimes still go unnoticed by the mainstream media and government, record heat temperatures continue to soar, polar ice and glaciers melt, and life is being overtaken by clouds of accumulating exhaust, while a moral-less US energy policy was signed into law this week.

Item 1 covers the corrupt military pollution-denial issue in harming ecosystems for generations for penetrating-insanity weapons. DU dust is real and causing real cancers and harm to innocent life. Please, note, too, that in the prior issue, it includes a new article link from NPR on the Pu-238-Idaho production facility. Enough is enough. Lets halt production, and give funds to Idaho, elsewhere to clean up the mess already created

Sixty years ago the US government dropped an atomic bomb on one city, Hiroshima, and three days later, Nagasaki. What a human tragedy, loss for humanity! The Nihon Hidankyo is an organization of Hibakusha, survivors of the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent H-bomb testing in the Bikini Atoll, showing a better way for abolishing such weapons with compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. We are very much indebted to this organization for showing what it takes for peace to be realized. Hopefully the Nihon Hidankyo will receive the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

Item 2 is on the US-Israel spy connection that goes high up, with federal indictments. Such an entanglement have been reported back to when Israel first got the atomic bomb, and before, when the Israeli nuclear development program was opposed by President John Kennedy, and after his assassination.., this connection still haunts our precarious existence. Controlling the US government is stealth business, which got a boost when President Harry Truman in 1947 signed the "National Security Act", enabling secret agencies to supercede principles (or restrictions) in the US Constitution.

Item 3 is an article today by The New York Times about a key 9/11 omission. "More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress."

Item 4 is the heart and soul of America, motherhood at its finest; Cindy Sheehan is a compassion-driven human with an awakening consciousness. Thanks Cindy, and William Rivers Pitt for writing that article, and anyone helping campaigns for reclaiming a lost USA democracy.

"All it takes for evil to rule a land
is for good men to remain silent."


Daniel Webster



1) Depleted Uranium is WMD

- - A-Bomb Survivors for 2005 Nobel Peace Prize
- - Radiation and Public Health Awareness


Depleted Uranium is WMD
by Leuren Moret
Published August 9, 2005 by the
Battle Creek Enquirer (Michigan)

My grandfather, U.S. Army Col. Edwin Joseph McAllister, was born in Battle Creek in 1895. He does not know that his first grandchild is an international expert on depleted uranium. I have worked in two U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, and in 1991 I became a whistleblower at the Livermore lab. Depleted uranium is very, very, very nasty stuff:

Depleted uranium (DU) weaponry meets the definition of weapon of mass destruction in two out of three categories under U.S. Federal Code Title 50 Chapter 40 Section 2302.

DU weaponry violates all international treaties and agreements, Hague and Geneva war conventions, the 1925 Geneva gas protocol, U.S. laws and U.S. military law.

Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomicity equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global atmosphere. That is 10 times the amount released during atmospheric testing which was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs. The U.S. has permanently contaminated the global atmosphere with radioactive pollution having a half-life of 2.5 billion years.

The U.S. has illegally conducted four nuclear wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and twice in Iraq since 1991, calling DU "conventional" weapons when in fact they are nuclear weapons.

DU on the battlefield has three effects on living systems: it is a heavy metal "chemical" poison, a "radioactive" poison and has a "particulate" effect due to the very tiny size of the particles that are 0.1 microns and smaller.

The blueprint for DU weaponry is a 1943 Manhattan Project memo to Gen. L. Groves that recommended development of radioactive materials as poison gas weapons - dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty bullets.

DU weapons are very effective kinetic energy penetrators, but even more effective bioweapons since uranium has a strong chemical affinity for phosphate structures concentrated in DNA.

DU is the Trojan Horse of nuclear war - it keeps giving and keeps killing. There is no way to clean it up, and no way to turn it off because it continues to decay into other radioactive isotopes in over 20 steps.

Terry Jemison at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs stated in August 2004 that over 518,000 Gulf-era veterans (14-year period) are now on medical disability, and that 7,039 were wounded on the battlefield in that same period. Over 500,000 U.S. veterans are homeless.

In some studies of soldiers who had normal babies before the war, 67 percent of the post-war babies are born with severe birth defects - missing brains, eyes, organs, legs and arms, and blood diseases.

In southern Iraq, scientists are reporting five times higher levels of gamma radiation in the air, which increases the radioactive body burden daily of inhabitants. In fact, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are uninhabitable.

Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right conditions. One gram of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and releases 12,000 alpha particles per second.

Before my grandfather died, he told me that his generation had made a mess of this planet. I wonder what he would say to me now I would tell him to see "Beyond Treason" (www.beyondtreason.com), a new documentary about the history of treason by the U.S. government against our own troops: Atomic veterans, MK-Ultra, Agent Orange and DU. After Vietnam, Henry Kissinger said, "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. . ." (from Chapter 5 in the "Final Days" by Woodward and Bernstein).

Leuren Moret is an international radiation specialist, with a B.S. degree in geology from University of California at Davis, a M.A. degree in Near Eastern studies from University of California at Berkeley and has done post-graduate work in the geosciences at UC-Davis. She is environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley, Calif.

© 2005 Battle Creek Enquirer
www.battlecreekenquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050809/OPINION02/508090332/1014/OPINION

www.commondreams.org/views05/0809-33.htm

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

- - A-Bomb Survivors for 2005 Nobel Peace Prize

The Nihon Hidankyo is an organization of Hibakusha — survivors of the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent H-bomb testing in the Bikini Atoll. Flyby News is one of many Organizations supporting their receiving the Nobel Peace Prize award in 2005, which is the 60th Anniversary of the dropped Atomic Bombs on Japan. The focus of this group is for healing, the abolition of atomic bombs, for a peace-justice future for all. Please, if you know of anyone influential, please help us support such a choice for PEACE to honor the release of a negative past for an honorable future.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

- - Radiation and Public Health Awareness

The Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) was established by scientists and physicians dedicated to understanding the relationships between low-level, nuclear radiation and public health. The RPHP "Tooth Fairy Project" grew out of the work of Dr. Jay Gould, Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project and author of The Enemy Within: The High Cost of Living Near Nuclear Reactors. By analyzing 50 years of US National Cancer Institute data, Dr. Gould proved that.of the 3,000-odd counties in the United States, women living in about 1,300 nuclear counties (located within 100 miles of a reactor) are at the greatest risk of dying of breast cancer. Back in the days of the pre-Cassini-Earth flyby, a Letter of Concern by Dr. John W. Gofman provided ample evidence showing why there is no safe dose for alpha particles emitted by the radioactive decay of plutonium. This concern has also been realized by the impact from the use of Depleted Uranium missile shells, which has caused much harm to soldiers and civilians, but especially to the young. For more on these issues, actions, and campaigns, visit these web sites: Nuclear Information and Resource Service, New England Coalition, Citizens Awareness Network, Traprock Peace Center, and The Radiation and Public Health Project



2) Federal Indictment of AIPAC and DoD staff on Spying Charges

Bigger Than AIPAC
by Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com
TomPaine.com
( A Project of The Institute for America's Future )

Last week's federal indictment of AIPAC and DoD staff on spying charges could unravel the neocon policy machine and damage the Bush administration.

Bigger Than AIPAC
Robert Dreyfuss
August 09, 2005

Important new details of the U.S.-Israeli espionage case involving Larry Franklin, the alleged Pentagon spy, two officials of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, and an intelligence official at the Embassy of Israel emerged last week. Two AIPAC officials—who have left the organization—were indicted along with Franklin on charges of "communicat[ing] national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it." In plain English, if not legal-speak, that means spying.

But as the full text of the indictment makes clear, the conspiracy involved not just Franklin and the AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, but at least several other Pentagon officials who played intermediary roles, at least two other Israeli officials, and one official at a "Washington, D.C. think tank." It's an old-fashioned spy story involving the passing of secret documents, hush-hush meetings and outright espionage, along with good-old-boy networking.

But the network tied to the "Franklin case"—which ought to be called the "AIPAC case," since it was AIPAC that was really under investigation by the FBI—provides an important window into a shadowy world.

It is clear that by probing the details of the case, the FBI has got hold of a dangerous loose end of much larger story. By pulling on that string hard enough, the FBI and the Justice Department might just unravel that larger story, which is beginning to look more and more like it involves the same nexus of Pentagon civilians, White House functionaries, and American Enterprise Institute officials who thumped the drums for war in Iraq in 2001-2003 and who are now trying to whip up an anti-Iranian frenzy as well.

Needless to say, all of this got short shrift from the mainstream media when it was revealed last week.

The basic facts of the case have been known for a while. Lawrence Anthony Franklin, a Department of Defense official, was caught red-handed giving highly classified papers to two officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, of AIPAC—in part, concerning U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq and the war on terrorism. But from the carefully worded indictment, it is clear that a lot more may have been going on. All in all, along with revealing tantalizing new information, the indictment raises more questions than it answers.

To wit:

First, the indictment says that from "about April 1999 and continuing until on or about August 27, 2004" Franklin, Rosen and Weissman "did unlawfully, knowingly and willfully conspire" in criminal activity against the United States. So far, no one has explained what triggered an investigation that began more than six years ago. But it reveals how long the three indicted conspirators and "others, known and unknown to the Grand Jury," engaged in such criminal activity. In any case, what appeared at first to be a brief dalliance between Franklin and the two AIPAC officials now—according to the latest indictment, at least—spans more than five years and involves at least several other individuals, at least some of whom are known to the investigation. What triggered the investigation in 1999, and how much information has FBI surveillance, wiretaps and other investigative efforts collected?

Second, the indictment makes it absolutely clear that the investigation was aimed at AIPAC, not at Franklin. The document charges that Rosen and Weissman met repeatedly with officials from a foreign government (Israel, though not named in the indictment) beginning in 1999, to provide them with classified information. In other words, the FBI was looking into the Israel lobby, not Franklin and the Defense Department, at the start, and Franklin was simply caught up in the net when he made contact with the AIPACers. Rosen and Weissman were observed making illicit contact with several other U.S. officials between 1999 and 2004, although those officials are left unnamed (and unindicted). Might there be more to come? Who are these officials, cited merely as United States Government Official 1, USGO 2, etc.?

Third, Franklin was introduced to Rosen-Weissman when the two AIPACers "called a Department of Defense employee (DOD employee A) at the Pentagon and asked for the name of someone in OSD ISA [Office of the Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs] with an expertise on Iran" and got Franklin's name. Who was "DOD employee A"? Was it Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy? Harold Rhode, the ghost-like neocon official who helped Feith assemble the secretive Office of Special Plans, where Franklin worked? The indictment doesn't say. But this reporter observed Franklin, Rhode and Michael Rubin, a former AEI official who served in the Pentagon during this period and then returned to AEI, sitting together side by side, often in the front row, at American Enterprise Institute meetings during 2002-2003. Later in the indictment, we learn that Franklin, Rosen and Weissman hobnobbed with "DOD employee B," too.

Fourth, Rosen and Weissman told Franklin that they would try to get him a job at the White House, on the National Security Council staff. Who did they talk to at the White House, if they followed through? What happened?

Fifth, the charging document refers to "Foreign Official 1," also known as FO-1, obviously referring to an Israeli embassy official or an Israeli intelligence officer. It also refers later to FO-2, FO-3, etc., meaning that other Israeli officials were involved as well. How many Israeli officials are implicated in this, and who are they?

Sixth, was AEI itself involved? The indictment says that "on or about March 13, 2003, Rosen disclosed to a senior fellow at a Washington, D.C., think tank the information relating to the classified draft internal policy document" about Iran. The indictment says that the think tank official agreed "to follow up and see what he could do." Which think tank, and who was involved?

The indictment is rich with other detail, including specific instances in which the indicted parties lied to the FBI about their activities. It describes how Franklin eventually set up a regular liaison with an Israeli official ("FO-3") and met him in Virginia "and elsewhere" to communicate U.S. secrets.

It is an important story, arguably one that has greater implications for national security than the scandal involving the churlish outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. So far, at least, the media frenzy attending to the Plame affair is matched by nearly total silence about the Franklin-AIPAC affair? Can it be true that reporters are more courageous about pursuing a story that involves the White House than they are about plunging into a scandal that involves Israel, our No. 1 Middle East ally?

This article is posted at:
www.tompaine.com/articles/20050809/bigger_than_aipac.php

Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.



3) Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
By Douglas Jehl
The New York Times

[EXCERPT]

Tuesday 09 August 2005

Washington - More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.

The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode.

..Mr. Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the significance of the episode only recently, when he contacted members of the military intelligence team as part of research for his book, "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored It."

Mr. Weldon's book prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer to strongly dispute the reliability of one Iranian source cited in the book, saying the Iranian "was a waste of my time and resources."

Mr. Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger episode with Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and that at least two Congressional committees were looking into the episode.

For the complete article, see:

www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/politics/09intel.html?hp&ex=1123646400&en=8cdd39c879100274&ei=5094&partner=homepage
or
www.truthout.org/docs_2005/080905I.shtml

For FN's resource, see:
The Bush Conspiracy and 9/11 Investigative Reports,
looking into the unanswered questions.



4) Cindy Sheehan is every son's mother

Every Mother's Son
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 08 August 2005

[Excerpt]

George W. Bush hauled stakes for Texas and a vacation a few days ago. Cindy Sheehan followed. She got off a bus Saturday afternoon and started walking to the Crawford ranch. She wanted some answers and was going to get them.

Sheehan had met Mr. Bush once before. On April 4, 2004, just shy of a year after Bush stood on an aircraft carrier beneath a banner that read "Mission Accomplished," Cindy Sheehan's son, Army Specialist Casey A. Sheehan, was killed in Iraq when his unit was attacked by rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. He was 24 years old.

After Casey's death, Cindy Sheehan was invited to the White House for a visit with Mr. Bush in June of 2004. Her first memory of Bush's appearance that day was when he walked into the room and said in a loud, bluff voice, "Who we'all honorin' today?"

"His mouth kept moving," Sheehan later recalled of her meeting with Bush, "but there was nothing in his eyes or anything else about him that showed me he really cared or had any real compassion at all. This is a human being totally disconnected from humanity and reality. His eyes were empty, hollow shells." Bush called her "Ma" or "Mom" throughout the whole meeting, and never got around to learning her name.

"The whole meeting was simply bizarre and disgusting," Sheehan said later. "designed to intimidate instead of providing compassion. He didn't even know our names. I just couldn't believe this was happening. It was so surreal and bizarre. Later I met with some of the other fifteen or sixteen families who were at the White House the same day and, sure enough, they all felt the same way I did."

That was it. Cindy Sheehan, who had never been politically active in her life, became an activist. She traveled the country to speak to whomever would listen, she told the story of Casey's life and death, and she threw fire at George W. Bush with the passionate anguish of a mother who was forced to bury her son.

..In June of 2005, Cindy Sheehan testified at a hearing in Washington DC about the Downing Street Minutes, the recently leaked British intelligence documents which exposed the fact that Bush intended to invade Iraq almost from the beginning of his first term, and that "Intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invasion.

"I believed before our leaders invaded Iraq in March, 2003," said Sheehan in her testimony, "and I am even more convinced now, that this aggression on Iraq was based on a lie of historic proportions and was blatantly unnecessary. The so-called Downing Street Memo dated 23 July, 2003, only confirms what I already suspected: the leadership of this country rushed us into an illegal invasion of another sovereign country on prefabricated and cherry picked intelligence. It appears that my boy Casey was given a death sentence even before he joined the Army in May of 2000."

And so it came to pass that George W. Bush hauled stakes for Texas and a vacation a few days ago, and Cindy Sheehan followed. She got off a bus Saturday afternoon and started walking to the Crawford ranch. She wanted some answers and was going to get them. She got as far as a police checkpoint, and has gotten no further. She is still there, waiting to speak to Mr. Bush so she can get an answer to her question. Why did her son die?

The folks on the Crawford ranch sent out some important people to speak to her. They sent Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser. They sent Joe Hagin, a deputy White House chief of staff. Cindy Sheehan sent them both packing.

By Sunday, a media frenzy had erupted around her. On Sunday night, the New York Times published a story about Sheehan's Texas standoff. "Her success in drawing so much attention to her message - and leaving the White House in a face-off with an opponent who had to be treated very gently even as she aggressively attacked the president and his policies - seemed to stem from the confluence of several forces," wrote the Times. "The deaths last week of 20 Marines from a single battalion has focused public attention on the unremitting pace of casualties in Iraq, providing her an opening to deliver her message that no more lives should be given to the war."

"At the same time," continued the article, "polls that show falling approval for Mr. Bush's handling of the war have left him open to challenge in a way that he was not when the nation appeared to be more strongly behind him. It did not hurt her cause that she staged her protest, which she said was more or less spontaneous, at the doorstep of the White House press corps, which spends each August in Crawford with little to do, minimal access to Mr. Bush and his aides, and an eagerness for any new story."

Casey Sheehan was every mother's son. Cindy Sheehan is every son's mother. She loved him with every cell in her body and every breath in her soul, and mourns his absence in every second of every day, and will have some answers for her pain and loss, or will know the reason why. She is down in Crawford, right now, waiting for George W. Bush to stop sending lackeys to placate her. She wants to speak to the man who sent her son to die. She is waiting.

For the complete article, see:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/080805I.shtml

For more information, visit MeetWithCindy.org


The views expressed herein are the writers' own and not necessarily those of Flyby News.
A "Fair Use Policy" that describes Flyby News' use of copyrighted material is posted at flybynews.com.
Your feedback for story suggestions and networking Flyby News are welcomed and appreciated.
You can write to the publisher/editor Jonathan Mark via email: info@flybynews.com


Flyby News is educational and nonviolent in focus, and has supported critical campaigns
for a healthy environment, human rights, justice, peace, and nonviolence,
since the launching of NASA's Cassini space probe in 1997.

=====News Fit to Transmit in the Post Cassini Flyby Era====>

= = = = = = www.FlybyNews.com = = = = =



Email address: