Peer Review under the Spotlight

You’ve probably come across the expression “peer-reviewed” a lot recently, especially in discussions on GM food, mobile phones, or organic farming. It’s almost always used as part of a sentence that begins “There is no peer-reviewed evidence for …” or “There is nothing about this in any peer-reviewed journal …”

What you’re meant to understand by that is: “there is no credible evidence for whatever it is, and you can safely ignore anything you’ve heard about it.” When the question is about safety, as it often is, it means the regulatory authorities are not going to look into it.

A lot of people take peer review very seriously, or at least they say they do. When Sir David King, then the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government, put forward a code of ethics for scientists, one of his chief examples of unethical behaviour, right up there with plagiarism, was “disseminating work before it has been peer reviewed”. You may remember Arpad Pusztai who spoke for 150 seconds in a television programme on unpublished results indicating that genetically modified (GM) potatoes were harmful to rats, because he saw it his duty to warn the public. He was subjected to fierce attacks from the scientific establishment (led by the Royal Society) that continue to the present day.

The scientific establishment’s double standard

The scientific establishment may claim to oppose disseminating results that have not been peer-reviewed, but there is a blatant double standard being applied, and all too often. Just recently, a UK government research funding agency, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) put out a press release that was not only highly misleading about farmers being upbeat about GM crops ("UK Farmers Upbeat about GM Crops" Debunked and Marketing Masquerading as Scientific Survey , SiS 38); but was also based on research that had not been peer-reviewed, according to the ESRC’s own web site.

Another recent example came from the top mainstream journal Nature Biotechnology. In an editorial, it criticised the Italian National Research Institution for Food and Nutrition (INRAN) for not publishing some results that were allegedly favourable to GM crops.

The director of the project in question, Giovanni Monasatra, wrote to the journal to put the story straight, and his letter was published along with a response from the editor, Andrew Marshall. In his letter, Monastra dealt with the points raised in the editorial and expressed his surprise that Marshall, far from criticising Salute, Agricolura, Ricerca (SAGRI) for organising a press conference to publicise data that were, according to Marshall, “too preliminary for peer-reviewed publication,” instead complained that the Italian media did not give it even more coverage than they did.

Marshall’s response is that the data had [his italics] to be press released by SAGRI because they were of interest to the public and political debate. Yet, in 1999, Marshall had written in Nature Biotechnology that Arpad Pusztai’s work should be submitted for peer review before it could be considered, even when safety was at stake. The difference is that he was then writing about results that were against the interests of the biotech industry.

It is not at all unusual for scientific bodies and lobby groups to issue press releases and hold press conferences on non-reviewed material. The people who set themselves up as the guardians of sound science either say nothing or even join in, except when it is a matter of things the corporations don’t want the public to hear. In that case, they suddenly rediscover their strong objection to the practice.

Peer review is a useful part of the scientific process, but it is not as effective, as important, or as universal as some would have us believe, and it needs to be put in perspective.

What is peer review?

One of the distinguishing features of science is that when you discover something, you don’t expect other people just to take your word for it. You’re expected to describe exactly what you have done and why this justifies what you claim, and the usual way of doing this is to publish a paper in a scientific journal.

When you submit your paper to a journal, the editor will generally send it to be reviewed by experts in the field. The referees, usually two or three, are supposed to read the manuscript carefully and assure themselves as best they can that the work was done using appropriate techniques, that it takes into account and properly acknowledges earlier relevant work, and that the conclusions are properly derived from the data, or, in the case of a theoretical paper, that the arguments are sound. They advise on whether the work is interesting enough and contains enough that is new to be worth publishing, and, even if it is, whether they consider it is suitable for the particular journal. They may also suggest ways in which the paper could be improved.

This peer review system is important in science. It prevents many very poor papers from being published and it improves many others. Above all, it helps maintain a consensus of what is expected in a scientific paper; what you find in a scientific journal is very different not only from the popular press but even from most papers in the humanities or social sciences.

But peer review is very limited in what it can do. Referees, who are not paid, vary considerably in the time and effort they devote to the task. They are all too likely to nod a paper through if it looks plausible and comes from a lab or a group that they know and trust, or to reject one because they disagree with it or don’t understand it and haven’t the time or inclination to go through it carefully. They may reject a paper as “not interesting” when what they mean is that it’s not the sort of thing they and their friends are interested in.

Referees do not go into the laboratory to watch the experiments being carried out. They do not have access to the authors’ notes and raw data. They make their decisions on the basis of nothing more than what the reader will see if the paper is accepted. Even the most conscientious are simply not in a position to guarantee that the results are correct or even that the work was done properly.

Peer review could certainly be improved, and there are a number of ways in which this might be done. For example, research has confirmed the suspicion of many scientists that there is often bias, whether conscious or not, and it has been suggested that referees should not be told the authors’ names or institutions, or even their gender. But while the system could be improved, it is hard to see how it could do much more, even if we really want it to. The real test of a paper comes after it is published and is open for comment by the whole of the scientific community, and that can be a far more stringent test. Indeed, many poor or outright fraudulent works have been exposed after they were in print. One recent example is a paper published in the British Food Journal and given an Award for Excellence, which provoked 40 scientists and two MPs to sign an open letter demanding its retraction (Wormy Corn Paper Must be Retracted, SiS 37). We shouldn’t expect peer review to do more than it actually can, and by the same token we shouldn’t claim to the public that it does.

Not all science is peer reviewed

If all real science were peer reviewed before it was made public or used in decision making, then you might want to say that peer review, rightly or wrongly, defines real science. In fact, there are a number of ways in which science often gets into circulation without peer review. For example, the work can be published in the proceedings of scientific meetings or, especially in rapidly moving subjects like theoretical physics, circulated as a preprint or posted on a web server.

On the whole, exceptions like those don’t matter much. Most of the work will eventually be refereed or else just forgotten. In any case, it is out in the open for anyone to see and criticise.

The absence of peer-review matters in regulation but not as much as the absence of public scrutiny

There is, however, an area in which the absence of peer review matters a great deal, and that is in regulation. Many products, including pharmaceuticals and GM foods, have to be licensed. The manufacturers are required to carry out trials, safety tests and risk assessments and submit the results to the regulators.

Much of this work is never peer reviewed. What is more, much of it is never published, and worse, concealed from the public and often from the regulators as well under claims of “commercial confidentiality”, so that other scientists are never able to comment on it.

Companies use commercial confidentiality in much the same way that the UK government uses the Official Secrets Act, less as a means of keeping sensitive information from a possible competitor than to ensure that nothing embarrassing reaches the public. And as with the Official Secrets Act, the claim that something must be kept confidential on commercial grounds is seldom challenged. Just to quote one example, even after the TGN1412 trial went so disastrously wrong (see Post Mortem on the TGN1412 Disaster, SiS 30), and it was abundantly clear that the drug would never be developed further, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) still refused to release some details of the test protocol on the grounds of commercial confidentiality. It is hard to imagine how a competitor of either Te Genero, the company that developed the drug, or Parexel, the company that ran the trials, could have gained any unfair advantage from the information, though it might have been of use to anyone trying to improve the safety of trials, and more importantly, to provide effective remedy for the victims.

The absence of peer review is nowhere near as important as the absence of public scrutiny. To make claims on the basis of research that you will not reveal to the scientific community is to go against one of the basic principles of science: that we provide evidence for the claims we make. It is all the more serious when these claims can affect health and the environment. Such data should never be held secret on grounds of commercial confidentiality.

Conclusion

Peer review is a useful part of science but it is not and cannot be the dividing line between good science and bad, between what can be relied upon and what must be dismissed out of hand. In particular, when we are told that there is no peer-reviewed evidence, that does not mean that there is no evidence, nor does it mean there is no credible evidence. The scientific establishment has been deliberately applying a double standard to exclude evidence unfavourable to industry. What is worse, our regulators have accepted all kinds of evidence in approving new products and processes not just without peer review, but without the possibility of scrutiny by the public or even by the regulators themselves.

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Bush's Endless Hypocrisy on Terror

Is a government guilty of terrorism if it harbors known terrorists? What should one say about a country that permits open fund-raising on behalf of a terrorist implicated in the mass killing of civilians?

What about a government that secretly arms a guerrilla army that wantonly kills and abuses civilians while seeking to overthrow an elected government?

If your answer to those questions is to recite George W. Bush’s dictum that a government that harbors or helps terrorists should be punished just like the terrorists, then you must turn your wrath on the U.S. government and the Bush family -- guilty on all the above points.

But the U.S. political/media system continues to view the world through a cracked lens that focuses outrage on “enemy” regimes while refracting away a comparable fury from similar actions by U.S. officials.

So, while President Bush ponders whether to add Venezuela to the terrorist list – because of a captured Colombian guerrilla computer that appears to implicate Hugo Chavez’s government in weapons smuggling – Bush would broach no criticism of Ronald Reagan who armed Nicaraguan contra guerrillas in the 1980s.

Reagan continued that covert war even after the ruling Sandinistas won an election in 1984 that most outside observers praised as free and fair and even after the facts of the contras’ human rights abuses – kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians – became widely known and were acknowledged by some senior contra leaders.

Though Reagan was well aware of the contras’ cruelty (he privately called them “vandals”), he hailed them publicly as “freedom fighters” and equated them with America’s “Founding Fathers.”

Reagan kept arming the contras even after Congress ordered him to stop and the World Court ruled against the CIA’s secret mining of Nicaragua’s harbors.

Reagan also backed vicious rebel forces in Angola and Afghanistan (including foreign Islamic fundamentalists who later coalesced into al-Qaeda) and supported state terror against civilian populations in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands.

By any stretch of the imagination – if any other country had so brazenly violated international law and human rights standards – that government would be condemned by civilized nations and would be treated as a terrorist pariah.

However, the vast majority of Republicans and many Democrats view Reagan as a political icon deserving of honors, such as having Washington’s National Airport renamed Ronald Reagan National Airport.

To suggest that the late President was a war criminal or a sponsor of terrorism is unthinkable within the U.S. political mainstream. [For details on Reagan’s war crimes, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

Bush Family Terrorism

Similarly, it is unacceptable to note how the Bush family has protected Cuban-American terrorists – from 1976 when George H.W. Bush ran the CIA to the present when George W. Bush balks at an extradition request for Luis Posada Carriles, wanted on Venezuelan terrorism charges for blowing up a Cubana airliner and killing 73 people in 1976.

On May 2, 2008, more than six years into President Bush’s “global war on terror,” there was a remarkable scene in Miami as Posada, now 80, was feted at a gala fundraising dinner. Some 500 supporters chipped in to his legal defense fund as he remains free facing half-hearted U.S. government litigation on a minor immigration charge.

Posada, who has had plastic surgery to repair damage to his face from a shooting in the late 1980s, arrived to thundering applause. Then, in a bristling speech against the Castro regime in Cuba, Posada told his supporters, “We ask God to sharpen our machetes.”

Venezuela’s Ambassador the United States, Bernardo Alvarez, protested the Bush administration’s tolerance of the dinner. “This is outrageous, particularly because he kept talking about [more] violence,” the ambassador said.

Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan citizen who worked for Venezuela’s intelligence agency in the 1970s, masterminded the 1976 Cubana airline bombing, according to evidence compiled by the U.S. government and in South America.

Despite Posada’s record – and despite the strong evidence against him in U.S. government files – Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made little effort to capture Posada when he sneaked into Miami in 2005. Posada was detained only after he held a news conference.

Then, instead of extraditing Posada to Venezuela, the Bush administration engaged in a lackadaisical effort to have him deported for lying on an immigration form.

During a 2007 court hearing in Texas, Bush administration lawyers allowed to go unchallenged testimony from a Posada friend that Posada would face torture if he were returned to Venezuela. The judge, therefore, barred Posada from being deported there.

After that ruling, Ambassador Alvarez accused the Bush administration of applying “a cynical double standard” in the “war on terror.” As for the claim that Venezuela practices torture, Alvarez said, “There isn’t a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela.”

Different Standards

The kid-glove treatment of Posada and other right-wing Cubans stands in marked contrast to President Bush’s tough handling of Islamic militants. While Posada is afforded all U.S. legal protections and then some, suspected Islamic terrorists are locked away without trial at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and face “alternative interrogation techniques.”

On May 15 in a speech to the Israeli Knesset, Bush even denounced Western political leaders who advocate negotiations with “terrorists and radicals,” likening the idea to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

But Bush’s hard-line stance doesn’t apply to terrorism that’s in line with U.S. foreign policy or that connects to Bush’s family. In those cases, opposite standards apply.

For instance, even as Posada’s record for terrorism was relevant to his immigration case, the Bush administration sat on evidence implicating him in a series of 1997 hotel bombings in Havana that killed an Italian tourist.

The Associated Press reported that an FBI document, belatedly filed with the court, revealed that a confidential source had planted a listening device in a Guatemalan utility company office, picking up conversations about smuggling a “putty-like explosive” into Cuba in the shoes of operatives posing as tourists.

The source added that another employee of the utility company found 22 plastic tubes in a closet in August 1997 labeled "high-powered explosives, extremely dangerous." The explosives were being mixed into shampoo bottles, the employee said.

According to the AP, the confidential source provided the FBI with a fax about wire transfers from individuals in New Jersey that was signed Solo, one of Posada’s aliases.

The FBI concluded that at least $19,000 in wire transfers connected to the hotel bombings were sent from the United States to El Salvador and Guatemala to a "Ramon Medina," the code name used by Posada in the 1980s when he worked on Oliver North’s operations. [AP, May 4, 2007]

In 1998, in interviews with a New York Times reporter, Posada admitted a role in the Havana bombings, citing a goal of frightening tourists away from Cuba.

But Posada later denied making the admissions. He also has denied masterminding the 1976 airliner bombing in collusion with another notorious Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch, who moved to Miami, too, with the help and protection of the Bush family.

Not only did the Bush administration take a dive during Posada’s deportation hearing by letting the Venezuela torture claim go unchallenged, but also it ignored Bosch’s statement a year earlier, when he justified the 1976 mid-air bombing in a TV interview with reporter Manuel Cao on Miami’s Channel 41.

When Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the Cubana plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, "In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

“But don’t you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?” Cao asked.

“Who was on board that plane?” Bosch responded. “Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese.” [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]

Bosch added, “Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies…”

“And the fencers?” Cao asked about Cuba’s amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. “The young people on board?”

Bosch replied, “I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. … She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.

“We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny.” [The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976 and which involved a CIA undercover asset.]

“If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn’t you think it difficult?” Cao asked.

“No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba,” Bosch answered.

Venezuela Case

Beyond Bosch’s incriminating statements about the Cubana Airlines bombing, other evidence of his and Posada’s guilt is overwhelming.

Declassified U.S. documents show that soon after the Cubana Airlines plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the bombing.

But in fall 1976, Bush’s boss, President Gerald Ford, was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Still, inside the U.S. government, the facts were known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in anti-communist Cuban extremists Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP.

The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said.

“Following the 6 October Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

In South America, police began rounding up suspects. Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack.

A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez.

After President Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush took power in Washington in 1981, the momentum for fully unraveling the mysteries of anti-communist terrorist plots dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism.

Iran-Contra Role

In 1985, Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison, reportedly with the help of Cuban exiles. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Miami-based Cuban activist Jorge Mas Canosa for providing the $25,000 that was used to bribe guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison.

Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to Vice President Bush. Rodriguez was handling secret supply shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, a pet project of President Reagan.

After fleeing Venezuela, Posada joined Rodriguez in Central America and began using the code name “Ramon Medina.” Posada was assigned the job of paymaster for pilots in the White House-run contra-supply operation.

When one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada alerted U.S. officials and shut down the operation’s safe houses in El Salvador. Even after the exposure of Posada’s role in the contra-supply operation, the U.S. government made no effort to bring the accused terrorist to justice.

By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch also was out of Venezuela’s jails and back in Miami. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by U.S. officials who warned that Washington couldn’t credibly lecture other countries about terrorism while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.

But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when Jeb's dad, President George H.W. Bush, blocked proceedings against Bosch, letting the unapologetic terrorist stay in the United States.

In 1992, also during the first Bush presidency, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 ½ hours at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras. Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush’s vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush’s national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.

“Posada … recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg,” the FBI summary said. “Posada knows this because he’s the one who paid Rodriguez’ phone bill.” After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry’s Lost History.]

More Plotting

Posada soon returned to his anti-Castro plotting.

In 1994, Posada set out to kill Fidel Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot, according to a Miami Herald account. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]

The Herald also described Posada’s role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States.

“This afternoon you will receive via Western Union four transfers of $800 each … from New Jersey,” said one fax signed by SOLO, a Posada alias.

Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama.

Panamanian authorities arrested Posada and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety.

Four months after the sentencing, however, lame-duck Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso – who had a home in Key Biscayne, Florida, and had close ties to President George W. Bush’s administration – pardoned the convicts.

Just two months before Election 2004, three of Posada’s co-conspirators – Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez – arrived in Miami to a hero’s welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters.

While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men – also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida – alight on U.S. soil.

Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons that “there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11 (2001), fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets.” [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004]

Posada reportedly sneaked into the United States in early 2005 and his presence was an open secret in Miami for weeks before U.S. authorities did anything. The New York Times summed up Bush’s dilemma if Posada decided to seek U.S. asylum.

“A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists,” the Times wrote. “But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother, Jeb.” [NYT, May 9, 2005]

Only after Posada called a news conference to announce his presence was the Bush administration shamed into arresting him. But even then, the administration balked at sending Posada back to Venezuela where the Chavez government – unlike some of its predecessors – was eager to prosecute.

The next Bush move was to bungle the immigration case and thus let Posada live out his golden years as a hero in Miami.

The handling of the Posada-Bosch cases – when they are put next to Bush’s tough-guy attitude toward Islamic terrorism – point to one unavoidable and unpleasant conclusion: that the Bush family regards terrorism – defined as killing civilians for a political reason – as justified or at least tolerable in cases when their interests match those of the terrorists.

A principled rejection of terrorism only applies to the other guys.

[For more on how the senior George Bush looked the other way on Chile’s international terrorism, see Consortiumnews.com’s “When the Terrorists Were Our Guys.”]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

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Controversy Over Guajira - U.S. Military Bases in South America

By NIKOLAS KOZLOFF

Despite his record unpopularity, it would appear that President Bush wants to go out of office with a bang. Having failed to overthrow Hugo Chávez through an attempted coup, the White House now hopes to escalate pressure on Venezuela’s President by other means.

On Saturday, a U.S. navy plane strayed into Venezuelan airspace. Venezuelan Defense Minister Gustavo Rangel said that the aircraft "practically flew over" the island of La Orchila - where Venezuela has a military base and President Hugo Chávez has a residence - and another island before turning back. U.S. officials claimed the plane had “navigational problems.”

"This is just the latest step in a series of provocations," Rangel said.

From Orchila to the Fourth Fleet

Indeed, tensions have been mounting in recent days. The Navy is now reactivating its fourth fleet in the Caribbean. The fleet, which will include a nuclear aircraft carrier, will be based in Mayport, Florida.

The fleet hasn’t seen any action in Caribbean waters since World War II. In February 1942, the Germans sank a number of oil tankers full of Venezuelan crude. The attack caused a nationalist outcry in Venezuela and Caracas began to side more openly with the allies. In response to the attacks the U.S. patrolled the area, hunting down Nazi submarines which were wreaking havoc on allied shipping. After the war, with no more German U-boats prowling Caribbean waters, the Fourth Fleet was dissolved.

So, why resuscitate the fleet now?

The navy claims the move is necessary to protect maritime security. The real reason however may have more to do with Washington’s desire to wage a kind of psychological war against the Chávez government and to foment a climate of political tension.

From Laptops to Border Incursions

In its quest to get rid of Chávez, the White House has also sought to spark tensions between Colombia and Venezuela. There’s a good chance that the U.S. Southern Command passed crucial military intelligence to the Bogotá government when the latter attacked an encampment of FARC guerrillas inside Ecuadoran territory. After the March 1 assault, which resulted in the deaths of guerrilla leader Raúl Reyes as well as 20 other insurgents, and which arguably constituted an act of international terrorism, the Colombian authorities claimed that Chávez and Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s pro-Venezuelan President, were doing their utmost to support the FARC.

As evidence they produced documents allegedly found on FARC laptop computers which remarkably survived the attack intact. The documents, Colombia says, prove that Chávez has provided weapons, munitions, and $300 million in aid to the FARC. After conducting its own investigation, Interpol declared that Colombia did not modify, delete or create any files, although the Andean nation did not always follow internationally accepted methods when handling the computers. The agency stated that the documents came from a FARC camp, but investigators could not conclusively prove that the information contained within the documents was totally accurate.

In Washington, State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack pounced on Interpol’s report, remarking that the laptop files indicating Venezuelan support for the FARC were “highly disturbing.” Chávez has rejected the accusations, calling the Interpol report a "clown show" that "doesn't deserve serious comment." The Venezuelan leader said all relations with Colombia as well as his country’s cooperation with Interpol would undergo “deep review.” Seeking to rhetorically destroy his adversaries, Chávez referred to Interpol chief Ronald Noble as a "mafioso” and “an aggressive Yankee cop." In yet another memorable outburst from the Venezuelan leader, Chávez added that Noble’s true name was "Mr. Ignoble.”

As if relations between Colombia and Venezuela could slip no further, on Saturday, the same day that the U.S. navy plane passed into Venezuelan airspace, Chávez accused Bogotá of sending its troops across the border in an illegal incursion. The two South American nations share a 1,370-mile border that winds through mountains and thick patches of jungle. In a written statement, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro said that 60 Colombian troops had been intercepted in Venezuela's western Apure state, about 875 yards from the nations' shared border.

Controversy Over Guajira

Amidst ominous signs that the U.S. might be seeking to destabilize the Venezuelan government, a new controversy is swirling. William Brownfield, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, recently remarked that the U.S. would consider relocating its military air base at Manta, Ecuador to Colombia. According to the New York Times, an area mentioned in later reports was the Guajira region near the Venezuelan border. Colombia’s foreign minister, Fernando Araújo, quickly denied that Colombia had any plans to allow the United States to establish a base in Guajira.

The controversy could not have come at a worse time.

Already, tensions have risen as a result of secessionist efforts in the westernmost state of Zulia which spans the Venezuelan Guajira region. Recently, the Chávez opposition in Zulia proposed a feasibility study for potential independence from the federal government. What’s more, Zulia Governor Manuel Rosales, who lost to Chávez in the December 2006 presidential election, announced his support for his state’s autonomy.

Speaking on his weekly TV show Aló, Presidente!, Chávez warned opposition leaders that any move towards Zulia autonomy would lead to confrontation. “I advise those individuals who want to break up Venezuela to think it through very well. We won’t tolerate a political fragmentation of our country,” he declared, adding that any such attempts would be met with force. The Venezuelan leader went on to say that Zulia autonomy constituted an “imperial plan” designed and supported by the United States to take control of strategic oil areas.

An impoverished region, the Guajira is home to Wayúu Indians who come and go across the frontier. The area is full of barren desert and straddles the Colombian-Venezuelan border. Geographically remote, the Guajira has historically been embroiled in diplomatic controversy. In 1928, Colombian authorities were so concerned about secessionist plots in the region that Bogotá's House of Deputies met in secret session to discuss "moves of Yankee agents in the Departments of Santander and Goagira which sought to provoke a separatist movement which, united to Zulia [in the midst of the Venezuelan oil zone] would form the Republic of Zulia."

As a result of the tangled history, any talk of installing a U.S. presence in the area inevitably stirs nationalist passions. Chávez has stated that "We will not allow the Colombian government to give La Guajira to the empire,” referring to the U.S. As media reports surfaced, local authorities in the Guajira raised their voices in protest. Eber Chacón, a Chávez supporter and the Mayor of Páez, a local indigenous municipality, called on the Wayúu in Colombia and Venezuela to repudiate attempts by the Venezuelan opposition to divide them with their "autonomist and separatist positions." Chacón added that installing a U.S. base in Guajira would represent a potential threat to hemispheric security.

From Manta to Colombia

How did we get to the point where the U.S. is actually thinking about closing its military base in Manta, Ecuador and opening a new one in Colombia? That is a question I seek to answer in my book, Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan), just released in April of this year.

In Ecuador it is difficult to ignore the public climate of hostility towards the U.S. military base at Manta, which is used for drug over flights of Colombian air space. The facility, located 160 miles southwest of Quito on the coast, is a large installation which is technically not controlled by the United States but belongs to the Ecuadoran air force.

Many Ecuadorans believe that the United States is trying to draw their nation more deeply into the Colombian conflict, which has spilled over the border. The air base at Manta was leased to the U.S. military for 10 years in 1999, and President Rafael Correa made it clear even before he was elected that he did not plan to extend the lease once it expired in 2009.

During a trip to Quito, I found myself on the campus of the city’s Catholic University. At a table, a woman was registering people to go on a bus trip to the coast to protest the base at Manta. In the hallway, I met Gualdemar Jiménez, a local activist.

U.S. Air Base at Manta: A Social Disaster

“Manta used to be a purely fishing town,” he explained. “Now the fishermen don’t have access to certain parts of the ocean, which are closed off for security reasons.” On the sea, U.S marines had intercepted Ecuadoran boats, even sinking some vessels. “The marines are not the Ecuadoran coast guard,” Jiménez declared indignantly.

He went on to tick off a number of other problems associated with the U.S. airbase. For example, the base had gradually expanded over time. This expansion had displaced campesino farmers from their traditional lands. In addition, there had been environmental damage: within the local area, hillsides had been destroyed in an effort to acquire the necessary raw materials to mix asphalt and repave the runway.

The Manta air base contributes some $7 million to the local economy annually, but activists are critical of the lack of real economic development in the area. The marines don’t do any shopping in Ecuadoran markets, nor do they utilize local transportation. “The only thing they contribute to is local discos and prostitution,” Jiménez explained bitterly.

“What you´re describing is hardly unique,” I remarked. “It reminds me of the history of other U.S. military bases.”

“It´s a trend that is repeated around the world,” Jiménez said. “In Vietnam, you had houses of prostitution springing up as well.”

Now that Correa is likely to give the U.S. the boot, the Americans must figure out where they may go next. The Defense Department doesn’t have too many options: across South America, Pink Tide nations are unlikely to host a prolonged U.S. military presence on their soil. About the only country which might agree is Colombia, but for different reasons such a move would prove perilous.

If U.S. troops were deployed to Colombia, they would be stationed in the middle of a war zone and would be exposed to attacks by the FARC. Politically, opening a new base on Colombian soil would further antagonize Chávez across the border. Whether the Pentagon decides to station its base in Guajira amongst the Wayúu or elsewhere in Colombia, the installation is likely to give rise to prostitution and other negative social consequences for the local population, just like Manta.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave Macmillan, April 2008).

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The Ethics of Climate Change: Pay Now or Pay More Later?

Weighing our own prosperity against the chances that climate change will diminish the well-being of our grandchildren calls on economists to make hard ethical judgments

What should we do about climate change? The question is an ethical one. Science, including the science of economics, can help discover the causes and effects of climate change. It can also help work out what we can do about climate change. But what we should do is an ethical question.

Not all “should” questions are ethical. “How should you hold a golf club?” is not, for instance. The climate question is ethical, however, because any thoughtful answer must weigh conflicting interests among different people. If the world is to do something about climate change, some people—chiefly the better-off among the current generation—will have to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases to save future generations from the possibility of a bleak existence in a hotter world. When interests conflict, “should” questions are always ethical.

Climate change raises a number of ethical questions. How should we—all of us living today—evaluate the well-being of future generations, given that they are likely to have more material goods than we do? Many people, some living, others yet to be born, will die from the effects of climate change. Is each death equally bad? How bad are those deaths collectively? Many people will die before they bear children, so climate change will prevent the existence of children who would otherwise have been born. Is their nonexistence a bad thing? By emitting greenhouse gases, are the rich perpetrating an injustice on the world’s poor? How should we respond to the small but real chance that climate change could lead to worldwide catastrophe?

Many ethical questions can be settled by common sense. Sophisticated philosophy is rarely needed. All of us are to some extent equipped to face up to the ethical questions raised by climate change. For example, almost everyone recognizes (with some exceptions) the elementary moral principle that you should not do something for your own benefit if it harms another person. True, sometimes you cannot avoid harming someone, and sometimes you may do it accidentally without realizing it. But whenever you cause harm, you should normally compensate the victim.

Climate change will cause harm. Heat waves, storms and floods will kill many people and harm many others. Tropical diseases, which will increase their range as the climate warms, will exact their toll in human lives. Changing patterns of rainfall will lead to local shortages of food and safe drinking water. Large-scale human migrations in response to rising sea levels and other climate-induced stresses will impoverish many people. As yet, few experts have predicted specific numbers, but some statistics suggest the scale of the harm that climate change will cause. The European heat wave of 2003 is estimated to have killed 35,000 people. In 1998 floods in China adversely affected 240 million. The World Health Organization estimates that as long ago as 2000 the annual death toll from climate change had already reached more than 150,000.

In going about our daily lives, each of us causes greenhouse gases to be emitted. Driving a car, using electric power, buying anything whose manufacture or transport consumes energy—all those activities generate greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. In that way, what we each do for our own benefit harms others. Perhaps at the moment we cannot help it, and in the past we did not realize we were doing it. But the elementary moral principle I mentioned tells us we should try to stop doing it and compensate the people we harm.

This same principle also tells us that what we should do about climate change is not just a matter of weighing benefits against costs—although it is partly that. Suppose you calculate that the benefit to you and your friends of partying until dawn exceeds the harm done to your neighbor by keeping her awake all night. It does not follow that you should hold your party. Similarly, think of an industrial project that brings benefits in the near future but emits greenhouse gases that will harm people decades hence. Again suppose the benefits exceed the costs. It does not follow that the project should go ahead; indeed it may be morally wrong. Those who benefit from it should not impose its costs on others who do not.

Ethics of Costs and Benefits
But even if weighing costs against benefits does not entirely answer the question of what should be done about climate change, it is an essential part of the answer. The costs of mitigating climate change are the sacrifices the present generation will have to make to reduce greenhouse gases. We will have to travel less and better insulate our homes. We will have to eat less meat. We will have to live less lavishly. The benefits are the better lives that future people will lead: they will not suffer so much from the spread of deserts, from the loss of their homes to the rising sea, or from floods, famines and the general impoverishment of nature.

Weighing benefits to some people against costs to others is an ethical matter. But many of the costs and benefits of mitigating climate change present themselves in economic terms, and economics has useful methods of weighing benefits against costs in complex cases. So here economics can work in the service of ethics.

The ethical basis of cost-benefit economics was recognized recently in a major report, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, by Nicholas Stern and his colleagues at the U.K. Treasury. The Stern Review concentrates mainly on comparing costs and benefits, and it concludes that the benefit that would be gained by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases would be far greater than the cost of reducing them. Stern’s work has provoked a strong reaction from economists for two reasons. First, some economists think economic conclusions should not be based on ethical premises. Second, the review favors strong and immediate action to control emissions, whereas other economic studies, such as one by William Nordhaus of Yale University, have concluded that the need to act is not so urgent.

Those two issues are connected. Stern’s conclusion differs from Nordhaus’s principally because, on ethical grounds, Stern uses a lower “discount rate.” Economists generally value future goods less than present ones: they discount future goods. Furthermore, the more distant the future in which goods become available, the more the goods are discounted. The discount rate measures how fast the value of goods diminishes with time. Nord­haus discounts at roughly 6 percent a year; Stern discounts at 1.4 percent. The effect is that Stern gives a present value of $247 billion for having, say, a trillion dollars’ worth of goods a century from now. Nordhaus values having those same goods in 2108 at just $2.5 billion today. Thus, Stern attaches nearly 100 times as much value as Nordhaus does to having any given level of costs and benefits 100 years from now.

The difference between the two economists’ discount rates is enough to explain the difference between their conclusions. Most of the costs of controlling climate change must be borne in the near future, when the present generation must sacrifice some of its consumption. The benefits will mostly come a century or two from now. Because Stern judges the present value of those benefits to be higher than Nordhaus does, Stern can justify spending more today on mitigating climate change than Nordhaus can.

The Richer Future
Why discount future goods at all? The goods in question are the material goods and services that people consume—bicycles, food, banking services and so on. In most of the scenarios predicted for climate change, the world economy will continue to grow. Hence, future people will on average possess more goods than present people do. The more goods you already have, the less valuable are further goods, and so it is sound economic logic to discount them. To have one bathroom in your house is a huge improvement to your life; a second bathroom is nice but not so life-changing. Goods have “diminishing marginal value,” as economists put it.

But there may be a second, purely ethical reason for discounting goods that come to relatively rich people. According to an ethical theory known as prioritarianism, a benefit —by which I mean an increase in an individual’s well-being—that comes to a rich person should be assigned less social value than the same benefit would have if it had come to a poor person. Prioritarianism gives priority to the less well off. According to an alternative ethical theory known as utilitarianism, however, a benefit has the same value no matter who receives it. Society should simply aim to maximize the total of people’s well-being, no matter how that total is distributed across the population.

What should the discount rate be? What determines how fast the value of having goods in the future diminishes as the future time in question becomes more remote? That depends, first, on some nonethical factors. Among them is the economy’s rate of growth, which measures how much better off, on average, people will be in the future than they are today. Consequently, it determines how much less benefit future people will derive from additional material goods than people would derive now from those same goods. A fast growth rate makes for a high discount rate.

The discount rate also depends on an ethical factor. How should benefits to those future, richer people be valued in comparison to our own? If prioritarianism is right, the value attached to future people’s benefits should be less than the value of our benefits, because future people will be better off than we are. If utilitarianism is right, future people’s benefits should be valued equally with ours. Prioritarianism therefore makes for a relatively high discount rate; utilitarianism makes for a lower one.

The debate between prioritarians and utilitarians takes a curious, even poignant turn in this context. Most debates about inequality take place among the relatively rich, when they consider what sacrifices they should make for the relatively poor. But when we think about future people, we are considering what sacrifices we, the relatively poor, should make for the later relatively rich. Usually prioritarianism demands more of the developed countries than utilitarianism does. In this case, it demands less.

Temporal Distance
Another ethical consideration also affects the discount rate. Some philosophers think we should care more about people who live close to us in time than about those who live in the more distant future, just because of their temporal distance from us. If those philosophers are right, future well-being should be discounted just because it comes in the future. This position is called pure discounting. It implies we should give less importance to the death of a 10-year-old 100 years in the future than to the death of a 10-year-old now. An opposing view is that we should be temporally impartial, insisting that the mere date on which a harm occurs makes no difference to its value. Pure discounting makes for a relatively high discount rate; temporal impartiality makes for a lower one.

To determine the right discount rate, therefore, the economist must answer at least two ethical questions. Which should we accept: prioritarianism or utilitarianism? And should we adopt pure discounting or be temporally impartial?

These questions are not matters of elementary morality; they raise difficult issues in moral philosophy. Moral philosophers approach such questions by combining tight analytical argument with sensitivity to ethical intuitions. Arguments in moral philosophy are rarely conclusive, partly because we each have mutually inconsistent intuitions. All I can do as a philosopher is judge the truth as well as I can and present my best arguments in support of my judgments. Space prevents me from setting forth my arguments here, but I have concluded that prioritarianism is mistaken and that we should be temporally impartial. For more detail, see chapter 10 of my book Weighing Goods (1991) and section 4.3 of my book Weighing Lives (2004).

Market Discount Rates?
Stern reaches those same ethical conclusions. Since both tend toward low discounting, they—together with Stern’s economic modeling—lead him to his 1.4 percent rate. His practical conclusion follows: the world urgently needs to take strong measures to control climate change.

Economists who oppose Stern do not deny that his practical conclusion follows from his ethical stance. They object to his ethical stance. Yet most of them decline to take any ethical position of their own, even though they favor an interest rate higher than Stern’s. As I have explained, the correct discount rate depends on ethical considerations. So how can economists justify a discount rate without taking an ethical position?

They do so by taking their higher discount rate from the money market, where people exchange future money for present money, and vice versa. They adopt the money-market interest rate as their interest rate. How can that be justified?

First, some values are determined by people’s tastes, which markets do reveal. The relative value of apples and oranges is determined by the tastes revealed in the fruit market. But the value that should be attached to the well-being of future generations is not determined by tastes. It is a matter of ethical judgment.

So does the money market reveal people’s ethical judgments about the value of future well-being? I doubt it. The evidence shows that, when people borrow and lend, they often give less weight to their own future well-being than to their present well-being. Most of us are probably not so foolish as to judge that our own well-being is somehow less valuable in old age than in youth. Instead our behavior simply reflects our impatience to enjoy a present benefit, overwhelming whatever judgment we might make about the value of our own future. Inevitably, impatience will also overwhelm whatever high-minded arguments we might make in favor of the well-being of future generations.

But for the sake of argument, suppose people’s market behavior genuinely reflected their judgments of value. How could economists then justify proclaiming an ethically neutral stance and taking the discount rate from the market? They do so, purportedly, on democratic grounds—leaving ethical judgments to the public rather than making them for themselves. The economists who criticize Stern claim the democratic high ground and accuse him of arrogantly trying to impose his own ethical beliefs on others.

They misunderstand democracy. Democracy requires debate and deliberation as well as voting. Economists—even Stern—cannot impose their beliefs on anyone. They can only make recommendations and argue for them. Determining the correct discount rate requires sophisticated theory, and we members of the public cannot do it without advice from experts. The role of economists in the democratic process is to work out that theory. They should offer their best recommendations, supported by their best arguments. They should be willing to engage in debate with one another about the ethical bases of their conclusions. Then we members of the public must reach our own decisions with the experts’ help. Without their help, our choices will be uninformed and almost worthless.

Once we have made our decisions through the democratic process, society can act. That is not the job of economists. Their recommendations are inputs to the process, not the output of it. The true arrogance is imagining that you are the final arbiter of the democratic process.

Ethical considerations cannot be avoided in determining the discount rate. Climate change raises many other ethical issues, too; they will require serious work in ethics to decide what sacrifices we should make to moderate climate change. Like the science of climate change, the ethics of climate change is hard. So far it leaves much to be resolved. We face ethical as well as scientific problems, and we must work to solve them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Broome is Whites Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He was previously a professor of economics at the University of Bristol. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. His books include Weighing Goods, Counting the Cost of Global Warming, Ethics out of Economics and Weighing Lives.

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Earthquakes: Natural or Man-Made?

By Jason Jeffrey

Precautions against unconventional arms must be intensified as potential terrorists develop chemical and biological weapons and electromagnetic methods that could create holes in the ozone layer or trigger earthquakes or volcanoes.
– Former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen speaking at the University of Georgia, 1997

The devastating tsunami created December 26, 2004 by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people on the shores of the Indian Ocean caught the world off guard. It was the largest earthquake since the 9.2 magnitude Good Friday Earthquake off Alaska in 1964, and ties for fourth largest since 1900.

The earthquake that struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra occurred in a location geologists know is susceptible to powerful earthquakes. The quake occurred along a “subduction zone,” in which the Indian tectonic plate is being subducted, or pulled beneath, the Burma tectonic platelet. The overlying plate jumped upward more than 4.5 metres, lifting the water above it and setting off the tsunami.

For some, the finger of blame doesn’t point squarely at nature but at top secret military testing in the waters of the Indian Ocean.

The Egyptian weekly magazine Al-Osboa claimed the earthquake that triggered the tsunami “was possibly” caused by an Indian nuclear experiment in which “Israeli and American nuclear experts participated”.

An Australian researcher, Joe Vialls,1 in his article “Did New York Orchestrate The Asian Tsunami?” analyses how easy it would be to deliver “a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon to the bottom of the Sumatran Trench, and then detonate it with awesome effect.”

Days after the disaster, Canadian Professor Michel Chossudovsky wrote an article titled “Foreknowledge of A Natural Disaster: Washington was aware that a deadly Tidal Wave was building up in the Indian Ocean”.2 He noted “the US Navy was fully aware of the deadly tidal wave, because the Navy was on the Pacific Warning Centre’s list of contacts. Moreover, America’s strategic Naval base on the island of Diego Garcia had also been notified. Although directly in the path of the tidal wave, the Diego Garcia military base reported ‘no damage’.”

“With modern communications, the information of an impending disaster could have been sent around the world in a matter of minutes, by email, by telephone, by fax, not to mention by live satellite television,” he adds.

Others see the catastrophe as a ‘sign of the times’ in which we live, and a portent of what is to come as the Earth and humanity experience even more changes as part of the end of a world cycle.

Natural Earthquakes

Natural earthquakes are caused by the movement of tectonic plates over the Earth’s mantle. Sandwiched between Earth’s crust and molten outer core, the vast mantle accounts for 83 percent of the planet’s volume. It is filled with solid rock but, heated by the core and by its own radioactive decay, it circulates like a pot of impenetrable soup. That circulation is the driving force behind the surface motion of tectonic plates, which builds mountains and causes earthquakes.

The destructive power of an earthquake comes from the momentum gathered when two opposing “faults” or tectonic plates that may have been locked together for decades, suddenly move apart. The result is that solid rock which normally moves only with the passing of geological ages accelerates briefly to 8000 kmh, unleashing huge quantities of energy and creating a shaking movement of up to a metre a second.

Most people consider earthquakes to be natural in origin, but what if there was such a thing as man-made earthquakes? Well, there are. There is the official version of what constitutes a man-made earthquake, and then there is a body of suppressed research pointing to a more insidious agenda.

Artificially-Induced Earthquakes

Officially, there is an area of research devoted to man-made earthquakes. Geologists and seismologists agree earthquakes can be induced in five major ways: fluid injection into the Earth, fluid extraction from the Earth, mining or quarrying, nuclear testing and through the construction of dams and reservoirs.

In fact, there are officially recorded instances of earthquakes caused by human activity.

Geologists discovered that disposal of waste fluids by means of injecting them deep into the Earth could trigger earthquakes after a series of quakes in the Denver area occurred from 1962-1965; the periods and amounts of injected waste coincided with the frequency and magnitude of quakes in the Denver area. The earthquakes were triggered because the liquid, which was injected under very high pressure, released stored strain energy in the rocks.

Man-made earthquakes may seem like something out of the X-Files, and it’s probably only a matter of time before the idea is picked up by Hollywood.

The plotline of Hammer of Eden, written by best-selling author Ken Follett, revolves around a terrorist group threatening to level San Francisco with a man-made earthquake. When asked by Salon magazine how real is the idea of a man-made earthquake, Follett replied that, “Some of the seismologists told me, ‘There’s no way this could happen.’ But others gave sad little shrugs and said, ‘It’s hard to say. Who knows? Maybe. It’s within the realm of possibly.’”

Suppressed Research:
Tesla Technologies

Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Nikola Tesla is one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists. A prodigious inventor of electronic devices and pioneer of free energy, Tesla never gained the recognition he deserved because his scientific breakthroughs were deemed too ‘sensitive’ by the corporate and government powers of the day.

In a book entitled Tesla – The Lost Inventions, a section is headed “Man-Made Earthquake”. It discloses Tesla’s fascination with the power of resonance and how he experimented with it not only electrically but on the mechanical plane as well. In his Manhattan lab, Tesla built mechanical vibrators and tested their powers. One experiment got out of hand.

Tesla attached a powerful little vibrator driven by compressed air to a steel pillar. Leaving it there, he went about his business. Meanwhile, down the street, a violent quaking built up, shaking down plaster, bursting plumbing, cracking windows, and breaking heavy machinery off its anchorages.

Tesla’s vibrator had found the resonant frequency of a deep sandy layer of subsoil beneath his building, setting off a small earthquake. Soon Tesla’s own building began to quake. It is reported that just as the police broke into his lab, Tesla was seen smashing the device with a sledge hammer, the only way he could promptly stop it.

In a similar experiment, on an evening walk through the city, Tesla attached a battery powered vibrator, described as being the size of an alarm clock, to the steel framework of a building under construction. He adjusted it to a suitable frequency and set the structure into resonant vibration.

The structure shook, and so did the earth under his feet. Tesla later boasted he could shake down the Empire State Building with such a device. If this claim was not extravagant enough, he went on to say a large-scale resonant vibration was capable of splitting the Earth in half.

An article from the July 11, 1935 issue of the New York American entitled ‘Tesla’s Controlled Earthquakes’, stated Tesla’s “experiments in transmitting mechanical vibrations through the Earth – called by him ‘the art of telegeodynamics’ – were roughly described by the scientists as a sort of controlled earthquake.”

The article quotes Tesla as saying:

The rhythmical vibrations pass through the Earth with almost no loss of energy. It becomes possible to convey mechanical effects to the greatest terrestrial distances and produce all kinds of unique effects. The invention could be used with destructive effect in war…

The January 1978 edition of Specula magazine ran an article describing an incredibly profound phenomenon that could be produced within the Earth by what is called the ‘Tesla Effect.’

According to the article, electromagnetic signals of certain frequencies can be transmitted through the Earth to form standing waves in the Earth itself. In certain cases, coherence to this standing wave can be induced wherein a fraction of the vast, surging electromagnetic current of the Earth itself feeds into and augments the induced standing wave.

In other words, “much more energy is now present in the standing wave than the ...amount being fed in from the Earth’s surface.” By interferometer techniques, giant standing waves can be combined to produce a focused beam of very great energy. This can then be used to produce earthquakes induced at distant aiming points.

Tesla expressed grave concerns about the effects of this technology because it is exactly the type of thing that could easily get out of control once it begins vibrating within the Earth – and it could actually cause the Earth to vibrate to pieces.

Another leading Tesla researcher and nuclear engineer, Lt. Col. Thomas Bearden, lecturing at a Symposium of the US Psychotronics Association (USPA) in 1981, stated:

Tesla found that he could set up standing waves… in the Earth (the molten core), or, just set it up through the rocks – the telluric activity in the rocks would furnish activity into these waves and one would get more potential energy in those waves than he put in. He called the concept the Tesla Magnifying Transmitter (TMT).

Bearden goes on to explain how TMTs worked:

They will go through anything. What you do is that you set up a standing wave through the Earth and the molten core of the Earth begins to feed that wave (we are talking Tesla now). When you have that standing wave, you have set up a triode. What you’ve done is that the molten core of the Earth is feeding the energy and it’s like your signal – that you are putting in – is gating the grid of a triode… Then what you do is that you change the frequency. If you change the frequency one way (start to dephase it), you dump the energy up in the atmosphere beyond the point on the other side of the Earth that you focused upon. You start ionising the air, you can change the weather flow patterns (jet streams etc) – you can change all that – if you dump it gradually, real gradually – you influence the heck out of the weather. It’s a great weather machine. If you dump it sharply, you don’t get little ionisation like that. You will get flashes and fireballs (plasma) that will come down on the surfaces of the Earth… you can cause enormous weather changes over entire regions by playing that thing back and forth.

HAARP: The Pentagon’s Ultimate Weapon

In an Arctic compound 450 kilometres east of Anchorage, Alaska, the Pentagon has erected a powerful transmitter designed to beam more than a gigawatt of energy into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Known as Project HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), the experiment involves the world’s largest “ionospheric heater,” a device designed to zap the skies hundreds of kilometres above the Earth with high-frequency radio waves.

Why irradiate the charged particles of the ionosphere (which when energised by natural processes make up the lovely and famous phenomenon known as the Northern Lights)? According to the US Navy and Air Force, co-sponsors of the project, “to observe the complex natural variations of Alaska’s ionosphere.” As well, admit the Pentagon, to develop new forms of communications and surveillance technologies to enable the military to send signals to nuclear submarines and to peer deep underground.

Ever since the existence of HAARP became public, a number of independent researchers have warned the operation has a secret agenda including weather modification, mind control, hi-tech military experiments, and the triggering of earthquakes.

HAARP transmissions may also be used for the detection and monitoring of electromagnetic or “plasma” phenomena, precursors of seismic activity and tectonic movement. Researchers believe HAARP transmissions are actually being used to activate or trigger exactly the same electromagnetic conditions that can cause tectonic movement.

Jerry Smith in his book HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy, warns many atmospheric scientists working on the secretive military project might be unaware of HAARP’s grave potential to wreak havoc on the Earth. He writes:

If HAARP is a TMT [Tesla Magnifying Transmitter], and these researchers correctly understand Tesla’s work, we could be in a lot of trouble. It is quite possible that the scientists working on HAARP do not know what they are playing with… Beyond that their ignorance might be compounded if HAARP is indeed a secretive black-ops military project. The military has devised a way of keeping secrets called ‘compartmentalisation’ where each unit knows only what it needs to know… Only the control group knows what’s going on… If there is a control group familiar with TMTs directing the actions of scientists unschooled in Tesla technology, those lower level operatives could be directed to wreak havoc with created weather or manufactured earthquakes….

The key technology behind HAARP is the brainchild of scientist Bernard Eastlund. Judging from his APTI patent, Tesla was a major inspiration for Eastlund’s ionospheric heater. A New York Times story, dated December 8, 1915, describes one of Tesla’s ideas which are remarkably similar to Eastlund’s.3

In 1966, Professor Gordon J.F. MacDonald was associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, a member of the US President’s Science Advisory Committee, and later a member of the US President’s Council on Environmental Quality.

He published papers on the use of environmental-control technologies for military purposes. MacDonald made a revealing comment: “The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy.”

World-renowned scientist MacDonald developed ideas for using the environment as a weapon system and he contributed to what was, at the time, only in the wildest dream of a futurist. When he wrote his chapter, “How To Wreck The Environment,” for the book Unless Peace Comes, he was not kidding around. In it he describes the use of weather manipulation, climate modification, polar ice cap melting or destabilisation, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering, ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet’s energy fields.

He speculated these types of weapons would be developed and, when used, would be virtually undetectable by their victims. Is HAARP one such weapon?

In her book Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War, renowned scientist and nuclear activist Dr. Rosalie Bertell says such electromagnetic weapons “have the ability to transmit explosive and other effects such as earthquake induction across intercontinental distances to any selected target site on the globe with force levels equivalent to major nuclear explosions.”

Her book explains that pulsed, extremely low frequency (ELF) waves can be used to convey mechanical effects and vibrations at great distances through the Earth.

Such manipulation of the Earth, she states, “has the capability to cause disturbance of volcanoes and tectonic plates, which in turn, have an effect on the weather,” creating storms and torrential rains over an area. Anyone notice the world’s weather has been very strange in recent months?

Beachings and Seismic Tests

On November 28, 2004, Reuters reported that during a three day span, 169 whales and dolphins beached themselves in Tasmania, an island off the southern coast of mainland Australia. The cause for these beachings is not known, but Bob Brown, a senator in the Australian parliament, said “sound bombing” or seismic tests of ocean floors to test for oil and gas had been recently carried out near the sites of the Tasmanian beachings.

According to Jim Cummings of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, seismic surveys utilising airguns have been taking place in mineral-rich areas of the world’s oceans since 1968. Among the areas that have experienced the most intense survey activity are the North Sea, the Beaufort Sea (off Alaska’s North Slope), and the Gulf of Mexico; areas around Australia and South America are also current hotspots of activity.

The impulses created by the release of air from arrays of up to 24 airguns create low frequency sound waves powerful enough to penetrate up to 40km below the seafloor. The “source level” of these sound waves is generally over 200dB (and often 230dB or more), roughly comparable to a sound of at least 140-170dB in air.

According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, these 200dB – 230dB shots from the airguns are fired every 10 seconds or so, from 10 metres below the surface, 24 hours a day, for 2 week periods of time, weather permitting.

These types of tests are known to affect whales and dolphins, whose acute hearing and use of sonar is very sensitive.

On December 24, 2004 there was a magnitude 8.1 earthquake more than 800 kilometres southeast of Tasmania near New Zealand, with a subsequent aftershock 6.1 a little later in the morning that same day.

Then on December 26 the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck leading to the devastating tsunami that killed more than 300,000 people.

On December 27, 20 whales beached themselves 180 kilometres west of Hobart on the southern island state of Tasmania.

Interestingly, the locations of the whale beachings over the previous 30 days correlates with the same general area struck by the 8.1 Australian earthquake. The seismic testing also took place in the same area. Then two days after the Australian tectonic plate shifted, the 9.0 earthquake shook the coast of Indonesia.

There is strong evidence suggesting oil exploration activities have induced earthquakes in the past, although a link is yet to be established in this case.

A paper “Seismicity in the Oil Field” by Russian academics admit, “Scientists have observed that earthquakes can be triggered by human action…. Some geophysicists, including the authors of this article, believe that if the natural tectonic regime had been taken into account during the planning of hydrocarbon recovery, the earthquakes might have been avoided.”4

This is a sobering admission when we consider that some geologists say the Australian quake was the likely trigger for the Indonesian quake.

Sign of the Times?

The death and devastation caused by major earthquakes around the world can only worsen in years to come, as growing urban development and unprecedented population growth compound the lethal effects of natural and, as some researchers claim, man-made seismic hazards.

With the world’s population nearing an estimated 6.5 billion, there are fewer unpopulated places for quakes to strike. And with ever more people to accommodate, there is more multistoried construction in vulnerable fault zones.

Frightening and controversial projects like HAARP, with applications ranging from weather modification to mind control, should be of great concern to us all. And most worrying is mounting evidence the US military now has the ability to create earthquakes – the ultimate weapon of war.

Was the earthquake of December 26 man-made or the result of natural forces? There are many who believe such events are part of a cyclic period of earth changes. Strange weather patterns, an increase in earthquake activity, and natural disasters across the planet, are anticipated at the end of major world cycles.

Christians often call attention to the Gospel account where Jesus says a sign of the end of the world age would be “earthquakes in diverse places” (Matthew 24:7). Many believe this verse refers to the times in which we live.

In traditional Hindu cosmology, we are now nearing the end of the Kali Yuga which is the final and most negative of four evolutionary cycles which are Satya Yuga (Golden Age), Treta Yuga (Silver Age), Dwapara Yuga (Bronze Age), and Kali Yuga (Iron Age).

Similarly, the ancient Greeks traced the lineage of mankind through five successive “ages” or “races” from the “Golden Age” to the present “Iron Age.”

The Visuddhimagga, a compendium of Theravada Buddhist philosophy, gives further details about the recurring cycles that destroy mankind and cleanse the Earth. The text relates there are 64 world destruction cycles in which the world perishes seven times by fire, and an eighth time by water. This cycle of eight destructions repeats itself seven times, and then at the end of the eighth cycle the final destruction is by wind rather than water. Then the cycle of 64 begins anew.

Man’s most ancient traditions tell us these cycles reflect the creative process of the cosmos. The memories of a lost ‘Golden Age’, found in all earthly cultures, point to a time in the distant past when harmony and balance prevailed. This harmony is upset during the Iron Age, which is prophesied to end amid a proliferation of inverted spiritual values and rampant materialism, accompanied by devastating natural disturbances.

Act of man or act of nature, the recent earthquake and tsunami may indeed be another ‘sign of the times’ signalling the last days of the present world order. We do well to recall the words of the gifted French esotericist Rene Guenon:

This end only appears to be the “end of the world,” without any reservation or specification of any kind, to those who see nothing beyond the limits of this particular cycle;… the end now under consideration is undeniably of considerably greater importance than many other, for it is the end of a whole Manvantara [world age]… this end will itself immediately become the beginning of another Manvantara... if one does not stop short of the most profound order of reality, it can be said in all truth the “end of a world” never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.


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Firms Seek Patents on 'Climate Ready' Altered Crops

A handful of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies are seeking hundreds of patents on gene-altered crops designed to withstand drought and other environmental stresses, part of a race for dominance in the potentially lucrative market for crops that can handle global warming, according to a report being released today.

Three companies -- BASF of Germany, Syngenta of Switzerland and Monsanto of St. Louis -- have filed applications to control nearly two-thirds of the climate-related gene families submitted to patent offices worldwide, according to the report by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, an activist organization that advocates for subsistence farmers.

The applications say that the new "climate ready" genes will help crops survive drought, flooding, saltwater incursions, high temperatures and increased ultraviolet radiation -- all of which are predicted to undermine food security in coming decades.

Company officials dismissed the report's contention that the applications amount to an intellectual-property "grab," countering that gene-altered plants will be crucial to solving world hunger but will never be developed without patent protections.

The report highlights the economic opportunities facing the biotechnology industry at a time of growing food insecurity, as well as the risks to its public image.

Many of the world's poorest countries, destined to be hit hardest by climate change, have rejected biotech crops, citing environmental and economic concerns. Importantly, gene patents generally preclude the age-old practice of saving seeds from a harvest for replanting, requiring instead that farmers purchase the high-tech seeds each year.

The ETC report concludes that biotech giants are hoping to leverage climate change as a way to get into resistant markets, and it warns that the move could undermine public-sector plant-breeding institutions such as those coordinated by the United Nations and the World Bank, which have long made their improved varieties freely available.

"When a market is dominated by a handful of large multinational companies, the research agenda gets biased toward proprietary products," said Hope Shand, ETC's research director. "Monopoly control of plant genes is a bad idea under any circumstance. During a global food crisis, it is unacceptable and has to be challenged."

Ranjana Smetacek, a spokeswoman for Monsanto, said companies deserve praise for developing crop varieties that will survive climate change.

"I think everyone recognizes that the old traditional ways just aren't able to address these new challenges. The problems in Africa are pretty severe," she said, noting that Monsanto and BASF are participating in a project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to develop drought-resistant corn that would be made available to farmers in four southern African countries royalty-free. "We aim to be at once generous and also cognizant of our obligation to shareholders who have paid for our research," Smetacek said.

Gene patents allow companies to limit others from marketing those genes. The 35-page ETC report, "Patenting the 'Climate Genes' . . . and Capturing the Climate Agenda," documents about 530 applications for climate-related plant genes filed at patent offices in the past five years. A few dozen patents have been issued; hundreds of others are pending.

Of the 55 major gene families at the heart of those applications, BASF filed 21, the report says. Other major players include Syngenta, seven; Monsanto, six; and Bayer of Germany, five.

Among the report's concerns is the breadth of many applications. Protective genes are usually discovered in one variety of plant, and after minimal testing they are presumed to be useful in others, Shand said. In one typical case, a BASF patent claim for a gene to tolerate "environmental stress" seeks to preclude competitors from using that gene in "maize, wheat, rye, oat, triticale, rice, barley, soybean, peanut, cotton, rapeseed, canola, manihot, pepper, sunflower, tagetes, solanaceous plants, potato, tobacco, eggplant, tomato, Vicia species, pea, alfalfa, coffee, cacao, tea, Salix species, oil palm, coconut, perennial grass and a forage crop plant."

Publicly funded developers of freely accessible plant varieties could succumb to biotech's market dominance, the report warns. One of the biggest is the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which runs 15 research centers worldwide and is funded by several international aid organizations. CGIAR has long emphasized non-biotech breeding to develop varieties ideal for subsistence farmers and their local conditions.

Facing big budget cuts from its traditional funders, CGIAR is now a central player in the Gates-funded collaboration with Monsanto and BASF -- a project that a CGIAR spokesman defended as a "global public good."

Other experts said that both sides have oversimplified the pros and cons of biotech crop patents.

"I don't mind Monsanto developing these tools. I mind that we don't have an economic ecology that lets other companies compete with them," said Richard Jefferson, founder and chief executive of Cambia, a nonprofit institute based in Australia that helps companies worldwide sort through patent holdings so they can build on one another's work instead of stymieing one another.

Under the current system for patenting genes, he said, "the little guys shake out and the big guys end up in a place a lot like a cartel."

Jefferson characterized the ETC report as extreme in its anti-corporate views but praised it for drawing attention to what he said is a real problem of corporate consolidation in the seed industry. Happily, he said, patent offices are "getting a lot better" about not allowing overly broad gene patents.

Jonathan Bryant, managing director of BASF's U.S. division, said plants have tens of thousands of genes, most of them unexplored. "I think there's still plenty of opportunity for many companies and institutions," he said. "We're all looking to bring our technology together for a common good."

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Lake Macquarie City Council maps reveal rising sea level threat

Thousands of properties are under threat from rising sea levels this century, Lake Macquarie City Council documents show.

The Herald has obtained the documents after a five-month freedom of information battle with the council.

The council released the documents after a confidentiality agreement with the Department of Planning lapsed.

The council’s environmental systems manager Quentin Espey said the documents were made for a presentation to councillors 10 months ago to raise awareness of the need to adapt to climate change.

The council made the maps with airborne laser technology data, provided by the Department of Planning, to assess areas vulnerable to future sea level rise.

Dr Espey said sea level rise would be an “extremely gradual process, happening at about one centimetre a year”.

“There are ways to hold back water, such as using seawalls, that we will have to consider in the near future,” Dr Espey said.

The documents show four scenarios of sea levels rising by 0.53metres, 0.88metres and 1.4metres by 2100, and six metres by 2500.

The two lower levels were based on mid-range and high-range scenarios predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world authority on the subject.

The 1.4-metre scenario was based on a comparison of pre-industrial age data with the IPCC’s future warming scenarios.

The six-metre rise scenario was based on climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck’s predictions, which featured in Al Gore’s award-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, and Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers.

Dr Espey said it was based on half of the Greenland ice sheet and half of the West Antarctic ice sheet melting, but that was predicted to take 300 to 500 years.

Under the 0.53-metre scenario, 2800 lots or 750 hectares would be vulnerable to inundation.

The lots include developed and vacant land.

With a rise of 0.88metres, 4700 lots or 1300 hectares would be under threat of being permanently flooded, and a rise of 1.4metres would place 8500 lots or 2400 hectares in danger.

A six-metre rise would leave 18,000 lots or 6500 hectares under threat.

THE MAPS

The maps below show the consequences of a 0.88-metre rise in sea levels, as contained in Lake Macquarie City Council documents.

Red areas on maps show land under threat from sea levels.

Under four possible scenarios, the following threats would apply:

Rise.............Lots threatened..Hectares..Year

0.53 metres.........2800.............750.......2100

0.88 metres.........4700............1300......2100

1.4 metres..........8500.............2400......2100

6 metres............18,000...........6500......2500

Note: Land shaded red near the coast and waterways will be most vulnerable to rising sea levels. Inland areas shaded red will be under threat from increased rainfall and storm surge caused by climate change.

FILES

MAP 1: CENTRAL

MAP 2: NORTHERN

MAP 3: SOUTH WEST

MAP 4: SWANSEA

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