But some government simulations of chemical and biological attacks in the past have been somewhat different.

  In the 1950s and sixties, scientists from the Fort Detrick biological weapons program ran a series of tests to determine how easy it would be to expose large numbers of people to a lethal bacteria. Containers of nontoxic bacteria were planted in the New York subway, bacteria was secretly pumped into the Pentagon ventilation system and clouds of bacteria were released in San Francisco. And germs that were meant to sicken but not kill humans were tested on conscientious objectors in the military.

• Leonard Cole, an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Rutgers-Newark in New Jersey. An expert in biological and chemical terrorism, Cole is also the author of "The Eleventh Plague, The Politics of Chemical and Biological Warfare," and "The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story."

AMY GOODMAN: To talk about all this, we are joined by Leonard Cole, who has written a book about the subject. An expert in biological and chemical terrorism, his book is called, The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Chemical and Biological Warfare. Welcome to Democracy Now!

  LEONARD COLE: Hi.

  AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. In a few minutes, I want to go to your next book, which is something I think a lot of people have forgotten about, and that is The Anthrax Letters. That’s right. Who did it, we don't know. But first let's go to this story.

  LEONARD COLE: Sure.

  AMY GOODMAN: The Grand Central experiment or the test that was done just a few weeks ago, do you know anything about it?

  LEONARD COLE: Only what I saw in the newspaper that was reported just a few days back that a non-toxic gas was flowed through the Central -- Grand Central Terminal, and as you said, the purpose was to see what the air flow would be like, so that presumably we could institute some protections and defenses. What I found interesting was that while the newspaper article reported that the gas was non-toxic, that it was invisible, odorless, it did not name the gas, and that would be interesting for to us find out.

  AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's go to something we know more about, and that is a previous experiment in the New York subways. Can you talk about that in as much detail as you know?

  LEONARD COLE: Sure.

  AMY GOODMAN: When did it happen?

  LEONARD COLE: The test in the subways was in 1966, and it was part of an experimental program that lasted 20 years, beginning in 1949, ending only in 1969. During that period, the army acknowledged that some 239 vulnerability tests had been conducted in which large numbers of people, of human citizens of this country, were exposed. They emphasized that the materials that were used to simulate anthrax and other deadly organisms were harmless. But in my research, and in the work that was published in the book, it was very clear that some of the materials were not totally harmless, that when you expose a million or 2 or 3 million people to relatively harmless materials, you still have a certain segment of the population that would be at risk.

  AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about specifically what happened in the subway.

  LEONARD COLE: Sure.

  AMY GOODMAN: How many agents went underground?

  LEONARD COLE: When you use the word agent, it has a double meaning. Sometimes it means human beings who are actually conducting the experiments, sometimes – and the army refers to them, the test, the people actually refer to the organisms as agents that were released. So I’ll try to be careful.

  AMY GOODMAN: So how many agents released agents?

  LEONARD COLE: Well, we don't know how many individuals went down to release. There were probably somewhere, my guess is in the order of anywhere from a half dozen to a dozen. More importantly, the number of bacterial agents that were released ranged in the trillions. In fact, the way this was done was kind of bizarre, and yet interesting. A light bulb was filled with some 87 trillion organisms, something called bacillus subtilis. And this bacillus, this bacterium, and is common in nature. And as I said before, most people would not be affected. However some people in immune compromised situation, very old people, babies, they would be more susceptible. Trillions and trillions were released. Light bulbs --

  AMY GOODMAN: When you say released, you’re talking light -- they're put into light bulbs?

  LEONARD COLE: They were placed in army laboratories in light bulbs and mixed with charcoal. The human agent would carry a paper bag containing some light bulbs filled with bacterium.

  AMY GOODMAN: Black light bulbs?

  LEONARD COLE: I don't know what the color of the light bulbs were. But he would walk down during peak traffic hours to various subway platforms. This was during in a six-day period in September of 1966. As the train would be coming into the station, he would take a light bulb out of the bag, drop it onto the tracks, and as the train entered, you would see a whoosh of darkened air, darkened clouds. The darkness came from charcoal that was a mixed with the bacteria, because the bacteria themselves were invisible. There were various detection devices set up around the subway system so one could then estimate how many bacteria had survived, and how many of them had concentrated in various areas. At the end of six days, as reports were written, the ultimate report said that if a -- as they said, a pathogenic organism were released, that more than half of the people who were riding the subways could have become deathly ill.

  AMY GOODMAN: Do we know about people who got sick?

  LEONARD COLE: In the course of research, some years after, when the public first learned about this, and in writing the book, I wrote to the New York City Subway System or the -- I guess it was the authority -- the Subway Authority and asked for absentee records, people who were not showing up for work, just to see how this was around those dates, and I got a short reply back saying, when I wrote to them -- it was in the early 1980s -- they said they don't have records that go back that far.

  AMY GOODMAN: Because we do know about what happened in the Bay Area, right, with the release of toxins. Can you talk about that?

  LEONARD COLE: Sure. This was perhaps the most dramatic and well-reported incident, which we learned about only decades after it was actually conducted. In 1950, another bacterium, and any doctors or microbiologists will recognize this immediately as not something that you should play around with, it was called serratia marcescens. These bacteria were released from the Bay of San Francisco, a boat was spraying trillions of these bacteria onshore. And this is very interesting, because in San Francisco in 1950, a major hospital, university hospital, Stanford University Hospital was located, and they had never recorded any infections from serratia marcescens. Unbeknown to the doctors or anybody in the hospital, the army released the bacteria. Three days later, a case of the serratia marcescens was discovered in the hospital. A dozen or so occurred in the subsequent months. One of the patients died of serratia infection.

  AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean? What happens to the person?

  LEONARD COLE: These bacteria colonized his heart valve. The bacteria can infect various organs of the body, particularly with weakened people. Now, a person who was in the hospital who had had surgery emerged, became infected, and he died. And what is fascinating is that when the public first learned about this test, mind you, the test occurred in 1950, there were news reports about the test for the first time in the year 1976 and ‘77. The grandson of the -- the grandson of the person who died, Edward Nevin, who died, the grandson is named Edward Nevin the third, was reading about this, as he was commuting from his home in Berkeley, California, to his law office in San Francisco.

  AMY GOODMAN: So he's on the BART, and he’s reading about these tests.

  LEONARD COLE: Exactly. And he's reading about it. And then he sees his grandfather's name mentioned as a person who died from this bacterial infection. And he said, ‘Oh, my goodness, that's my grandfather.’ Well, to cut through a couple of years following that, he instituted suit against the government. In 1981, there was a trial. The Nevin family sued the US government for these tests, and for the death of their grandparent, and it -- they lost the case, but in the course of the trial, he managed to get tons of material that was exposed for the first time, and the public learned about it, much of which I have reported in my own research and book.

  AMY GOODMAN: Professor Cole, do we have reason to be concerned that with heightened fear and concern about a biological attack that these kind of tests to see, for example, air flow, etc., will now continue today?

  LEONARD COLE: Oh, I think that there's no reason to think they won't continue. I mean, certainly, we have evidence by a news report that they were instituted in Grand Central Terminal. My guess is that that would not be the only location. On the other hand, in fairness, we do have to understand that we want to defend ourselves against the possible release of these materials. The question is how you do it, what the material is that you are using as a test agent. If we use anything like the bacteria that were used in the 50s and 60s, we're creating risk situations for millions of people.

  AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Professor Leonard Cole. He teaches political science at Rutgers-Newark. His book is called The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare. You have also written The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story. We're talking about terrorist attacks right now. We know about September 11, we certainly know about Madrid, and what happened in London. Everyone was afraid when the anthrax letters targeted the National Enquirer and killed the post office workers, but seems to hardly ever have been raised. President Bush certainly hardly raises this. What do we know about who sent them soon after September 11?

  LEONARD COLE: Soon, indeed. The first postmarked letters that were later identified were September 18; exactly one week later, they had been sent out. We don't know who did it. When I say we, I mean, the public. The FBI has focused on the notion that it was probably a lone disaffected American domestic scientist who had access to these bacteria, highly refined virulent bacteria, dangerous bacteria, access to them in one of the laboratories in the US.

  There are a lot of things that have happened in retrospect that sound amazing. For example, it wasn't until two years ago or three years ago, actually, in the year 2001, that we even had regulations that required scientists who handle these virulent dangerous bacteria to report to the Centers for Disease Control that they have them in stock. But until now, or until that period, people had stocks of terribly dangerous materials in their laboratories, and nobody would necessarily know about them, except they themselves who had them there. And that was perfectly legal. So, at the time that these bacteria were released, there were possibilities for access, getting to these materials by a lot of people. So, we don't know who did it.

  It is -- I find it quite interesting that the notion that the bacteria were sent out exactly seven days, the first letters were sent out seven days after September 11, and then a whole bunch of other circumstantial dots, as I suggest, would suggest that maybe there was some, at least, awareness by whoever sent them out about September 11 in advance because to prepare this material, to find out who you want to send these poisoned letters to, to get them out and write the letter, and do it all in six days' time, while it's certainly physically possible, but it would be an awful stretch to think that it could be done easily.

  AMY GOODMAN: What is the profile the government has of who this person or people are?

  LEONARD COLE: Amazingly specific. And I can cut through by saying that the profile that they offered on the website, the FBI put on its site, ultimately closely fits somebody who was actually named in the year 2002 by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, as quote, “a person of interest.” The man's name is Steven Hatfill. Hatfill has never been charged. And when the press asked the Attorney General, ‘Well, is he a suspect?’ the Attorney General said, ‘No, no. He's just a person of interest.’ No other persons of interest were named, although ostensibly there were dozens who were being looked at. Hatfill, since his being named, lost his job, can't get a job anyplace and has sued the government for millions of dollars. And his case is still pending.

  AMY GOODMAN: Do you think if the person of interest had been a different ethnic background or religious background, that there would have been a great deal more of attention paid, media focusing on this issue?

  LEONARD COLE: There was a gentleman of Egyptian extract who worked at Fort Detrick, and he was also investigated. He was never named publicly, but the word got out through, I guess through the gossip mill at Fort Detrick and elsewhere that a man of Arab extract who said that he had been discriminated -- suffered discrimination there in any case ultimately was being investigated carefully. There were probably scores of scientists, scores of people who fit the profile, but the only one named, as I say, was Hatfill.

  AMY GOODMAN: And what is your conclusion? 

  LEONARD COLE: I would -- my conclusion -- I don't mean to be glib or flip, I would just say that there's a very good chance that a year from now we will be asking the same question, what is my thought? I don't know who did it. I would say that all options are open. If the FBI has information more than has been released to the public, I think we ought to be hearing more about it.

  AMY GOODMAN: Leonard Cole, I want to thank you for being with us, Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, Newark. Author of The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare and his latest book, The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story.

MOSCOW: Russia is a likely partner in a plan envisaging construction of 20 nuclear power stations in Iran, a senior member of Iran's Parliament announced. "A plan has been approved in Parliament obliging the government to study the possibility of building 20 nuclear power stations ... Various countries, including Russia, can participate and we hope Russia will continue to cooperate with us on this question," Kazem Jalali, head of the Iranian Parliament's foreign affairs committee, said.

Jalali was speaking during a visit by an Iranian delegation to the Russian capital aimed at developing economic ties between the two countries.

Russia is constructing Iran's first nuclear reactor at Bushehr, part of a technological cooperation agreement with Tehran in 2002 that opened the way for construction of up to five reactors over the coming 10 years.

Both the United States and Israel have objected to the building of the Bushehr reactor, which could be turned on next year, as they claim Iran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons and that having such a facility will be a proliferation risk. - AFP

US misses the next wave: China

Beijing is making the running in Asia, leaving America well behind

By Peter Hartcher.

07/07/05 "SMH" - - WHEN Jimmy Carter was in the White House in 1978, he decided to finish the task of normalising relations with China. It was something that Richard Nixon had started six years earlier, but the Watergate scandal got in the way and the US still did not recognise Beijing as the capital of the one and only China.

So Carter sent his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Beijing, and a year later China's Deng Xiaoping was trying on 10-gallon hats in Texas and being feted in the White House.

Today Brzezinski, 77, one of the more important thinkers on US foreign policy, remains a close student of China. This is what he sees: "There is no doubt that China is quietly creating a very successful Chinese co-prosperity sphere in East Asia. The countries of the region increasingly are paying China due deference, something to which the Chinese graciously respond."

The term "co-prosperity sphere", of course, carries a dark connotation. It was the euphemism Imperial Japan used for its plan to dominate Asia.

There is a gathering sense in Washington that while China continues to build its power and wealth in the Asia-Pacific region, the US has been falling behind in a contest for influence in the region that is home to half the world's population.

The critique is that the US, preoccupied with Iraq, has failed to tend to its role as the leading power in the region. The potential superpower China, which has been assiduous in cultivating the region, has stolen a march on the reigning superpower.

One development has sharpened this general US unease to a specific point of alarm. It is the East Asia Summit. This summit will convene in Kuala Lumpur in December. One of its explicit purposes is to exclude the US.

A White House official remarked privately that it was destined to become "a plaything of the Chinese".

The summit's advent is a case of delayed gratification for the former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who first advocated such a grouping nearly 20 years ago. He called the idea the East Asian Caucus; it was quickly nicknamed the Caucus without caucasians. It would have excluded Australia, New Zealand and the US. It was an outgrowth of Mahathir's race-based view of the world, but masquerading as a high-minded pan-Asianism.

But Mahathir was outmanoeuvred. Bill Clinton, in conjunction with Paul Keating and Indonesia's Soeharto, countered by channelling the drive for more regional integration into the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation group. To keep it as politically neutral as possible in a region rife with mutual suspicions and unfamiliar with close co-operation, APEC kept to trade. It had no political, diplomatic or strategic agenda. And when its trade agenda stalled, APEC lost its purpose.

It is now a useful chance for regional leaders to meet - for example, it is the only scheduled annual event where the leaders of China and Japan come face to face. But that's about all it is.

And still Asia, the region with most of the world's military flashpoints, has no real venue where its leaders can discuss the big issues of war and peace, and, in particular, how to avoid the former and extend the latter.

Who has stepped in to fill this void? The 10-country Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), with the strong encouragement of the Chinese, proposed the East Asia Summit.

It is not to be the racial enclave that Mahathir wanted - New Zealand will be an inaugural member, and Australia will be, too, when the Howard Government gets around to signing ASEAN's tokenistic Treaty of Amity and Co-operation. But the summit will satisfy Mahathir's aim of shutting the US out.

Alarmed, the Bush Administration is on the point of acting to try to counter this development. "The East Asia Summit has concentrated the mind of this Administration," says Jim Steinberg, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former deputy national security adviser to Clinton.

The US Deputy Secretary of State, Bob Zoellick, is working to develop a US proposal for some other form of discussion about security issues in Asia - one that includes the US. He explains his thinking: "I was frequently asked, you know, does the United States want to try to stop China's inroads in South-East Asia? And my answer was, you know, that would be both foolish and impossible. The US response should not be to try to stop someone, it should be to be active in our own right. Our response to others' activism should be activism, not negativism."

In short, the US must enter the new contest over the future shape of Asia if it wants to win it.

Steinberg, a Democrat, concurs with this thinking by Zoellick, a Republican: "It's to Bob's credit that he's understood the US has to have its own proposals as an alternative if we are going to have any chance of influencing the evolution of the security architecture in Asia."

And what sort of influence does the US hope to exert? Zoellick says the aim of US policy is to commit a rising China to preserving the existing rules and norms for the behaviour of nation states: "For 20 years, we've been pursuing a policy of how do we integrate China into the global system. Well, as events in oil markets to soybean markets to currency markets suggest, that integration has occurred. The challenge now is how to encourage responsible stakeholding in those systems, whether they be WTO, whether they be security issues or others."

The US, in other words, wants China to be bound by the structures of global rules of responsible behaviour.

There is irony here. The US wants China to accept the status quo of world affairs at a time when the US is discontented. Zoellick again: "Normally, when you are a dominant power, you try to preserve the status quo. This is one of those rare times in history that a dominant power [the US] is actually trying to transform the status quo" with, for instance, its revolutionary plans for the democratisation of the Middle East.

So the world now sees an ambitious rising power competing for influence in the Asia-Pacific region with a restless superpower. The real trick is to prevent the competition from getting ugly. These are the choppy seas that Australia and all the other countries of the region must navigate. Says Brzezinski: "I don't predict a collision. It's not inevitable. But we have to avoid taking positions that make collision a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Copyright © 2005. The Sydney Morning Herald.
 http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/us-misses-the-next-wave-china/2005/07/07/1120704490598.html

Should We Bomb Iran?

Israeli military blow would not annihilate Iran’s nuclear capability

By Alon Pinkas

Oil ' will hit $100 by winter' 

Worst-ever crisis looms, says analyst · Surging demand to keep prices high 

Heather Stewart, economics correspondent

07/03/05 "The Observer" - - Oil prices could rocket to $100 within six months, plunging the world into an unprecedented fuel crisis, controversial Texan oil analyst Matt Simmons has warned.
After crude surged through $60 a barrel last week, nervous investors were pinning their hopes on a build-up in US oil-stocks to depress prices in the coming months.

But Simmons believes surging demand will keep prices bubbling well above $50. 'We could be at $100 by this winter. We have the biggest risk we have ever had of demand exceeding supply. We are now just about to face up to the biggest crisis we have ever had,' he said.

Opec producers held emergency talks last week to consider making their second 500,000 a barrel increase in production quotas in a fortnight: but the discussions were suspended last Thursday after prices dipped back below $60.

The looming oil crisis is not high up the agenda at this week's G8 meeting, although the heads of state are expected to repeat their finance ministers' call for greater transparency from Opec and other oil-producing nations about their reserves.

However, global warming is one of Britain's two major priorities, and Tony Blair hopes to secure a pledge to pour more cash into developing alternatives to the oil-intensive technologies that cause climate change.

Simmons believes such moves will be too little, too late. He will publish a hard-hitting book this week in which he argues that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest producer, is running out of oil, and further price rises are inevitable as supplies decline. He warns that the scramble for resources could eventually descend into war.

Many analysts expect extra production over the next year, as high prices boost investment by energy firms. But Simmons says after many years of underinvestment, there is even a shortage of drilling rigs.

'Many of these projects are aspirations; many of them won't create peak production in the first year, and many of them within five years will be in decline,' he said.

However, the Economist Intelligence Unit predicts that oil prices will peak by the end of this year, and decline by 10 per cent in 2006 as the Chinese economy slows, reducing demand. Chinese imports have been crucial to propping up the oil price in the last two years.

But the EIU warned that its forecasts - which show a 30 per cent increase in oil prices for 2005 - could prove too conservative if there are further wobbles in supply. 'The narrow margin of spare production capacity has made prices vulnerable to unforeseen reductions in supply or rises in demand,' it said.

Paul Horsnell, head of commodities analysis at Barclays Capital, said supply constraints would continue to bite for the rest of the year. 'It's all getting a bit tight'

Brent crude closed almost $2 a barrel higher in New York on Friday night, while futures contracts for heating oil, widely used in the US, hit a record high, which analysts said was unusual for summer.

'It's fear,' said Kyle Cooper, an analyst at Citigroup. 'It's not based on what is happening now. It's based on fear of what could happen.'

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005