By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer 16 minutes ago
Mayor Ray Nagin ordered an immediate evacuation Sunday for all of New Orleans, a city sitting below sea level with 485,000 inhabitants, as Hurricane Katrina bore down with wind revved up to nearly 175 mph and a threat of a massive storm surge.
Acknowledging that large numbers of people, many of them stranded tourists, would be unable to leave, the city set up 10 places of last resort including the Superdome arena.
"This is a once in a lifetime event," the mayor said. "The city of New Orleans has never seen a hurricane of this magnitude hit it directly."
The mayor called the order unprecedented, but said Katrina's storm surge would likely top the levees that protect the city from the surrounding water of Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and marshes. The bowl-shaped city must pump water out even during normal times, and the hurricane threatened pump power.
"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," Nagin said.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Interstate 10, which was converted Saturday so that all lanes headed one-way out of town, was totally gridlocked.
At 11 a.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center said Katrina's maximum sustained wind speed had stepped up to nearly 175 mph, with higher gusts. The hurricane's eye was about 225 miles south-southeast of the mouth of Mississippi River.
The storm was moving toward the west-northwest at nearly 12 mph and was expected to turn toward the north-northwest, the hurricane center said.
The mayor said people who opted to go to the Superdome should come with enough food and supplies to last three to five days. He police and firefighters would fan out throughout the city telling residents to get out. He also said police would have the authority to commander any vehicle or building that could be used for evacuation or shelter.
A hurricane warning was in effect for the north-central Gulf Coast from Morgan City, La., to the Alabama-Florida line, meaning hurricane conditions were expected within 24 hours, the hurricane center said. Tropical storm warnings extended east to Indian Pass, Fla., and west to Cameron, La.
Katrina had been blamed for nine deaths in South Florida.
The storm had the potential for storm surge flooding of up to 25 feet, topped with even higher waves, as much as 15 inches of rain, and tornadoes, the National Hurricane Center said.
Only three Category 5 hurricanes — the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale — have hit the United States since record-keeping began. The last was 1992's Hurricane Andrew, which leveled parts of South Florida, killed 43 people and caused $31 billion in damage. The other two were the 1935 Labor Day hurricane that hit the Florida Keys and killed 600 people and Hurricane Camille, which devastated the Mississippi coast in 1969, killing 256.
The hurricane's landfall could still come in Mississippi and affect Alabama and Florida, but it looked likely to come ashore Monday morning on the southeastern Louisiana coast, said Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. That put New Orleans squarely in the crosshairs.
"If it came ashore with the intensity it has now and went to the New Orleans area, it would be the strongest we've had in recorded history there," Rappaport said in a telephone interview Sunday morning. "We're hoping of course there'll be a slight tapering off at least of the winds, but we can't plan on that. So whichever area gets hit, this is going to be a once in a lifetime event for them."
He said loss of life was "what inevitably occurs" with a storm this strong.
"We're in for some trouble here no matter what," he said.
Blessed are thy Saints, O God and King, who have traveled over the tempestuous sea of this mortal life, and have made the harbour of peace and felicity. Watch over us who are still in our dangerous voyage; and remember such as lie exposed to the rough storms of trouble and temptations. Frail is our vessel, and the ocean is wide; but as in thy mercy thou hast set our course, so steer the vessel of our life toward the everlasting shore of peace, and bring us at length to the quiet haven of our heart's desire, where thou, O our God, are blessed, and livest and reignest for ever and ever.
Once Mined for Pathogens in Bioweapons Program, Labs Lack Security
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 20, 2005; Page A01
ODESSA, Ukraine -- For 50 years under Soviet rule, nearly everything about the Odessa Antiplague Station was a state secret, down to the names of the deadly microbes its white-coated workers collected and stored in a pair of ordinary freezers.
Cloistered in a squat, gray building at the tip of a rusting shipping dock, the station's biologists churned out reports on grave illnesses that were mentioned only in code. Anthrax was Disease No. 123, and plague, which killed thousands here in the 19th century, was No. 127. Each year, researchers added new specimens to their frozen collection and shared test results with sister institutes along a network controlled by Moscow.
Today, the Soviets are gone but the lab is still here, in this Black Sea port notorious for its criminal gangs and black markets. It is just one of more than 80 similar "antiplague" labs scattered across the former Soviet Union, from the turbulent Caucasus to Central Asian republics that share borders with Iran and Afghanistan. Each is a repository of knowledge, equipment and lethal pathogens that weapons experts have said could be useful to bioterrorists.
After decades of operating in the shadows, the labs are beginning to shed light on another secret: How the Soviet military co-opted obscure civilian institutes into a powerful biological warfare program that built weapons for spreading plague and anthrax spores. As they ramped up preparations for germ warfare in the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet generals mined the labs for raw materials, including highly lethal strains of viruses and bacteria that were intended for use in bombs and missiles.
The facilities' hidden role is described in a draft report of a major investigation by scholars from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. The main conclusions of the report, which was provided to The Washington Post, were echoed in interviews with current and former U.S. officials familiar with the labs. Most scientists who worked in antiplague stations in Soviet times knew nothing of their contributions to the weapons program, the report says.
The labs today are seeking to fill a critical role in preventing epidemics in regions where medical services and sanitation have deteriorated since Soviet times. But an equally pressing challenge is security: How to prevent the germ collections and biological know-how from being sold or stolen.
"They often have culture collections of pathogens that lack biosecurity, and they employ people who are well-versed in investigating and handling deadly pathogens," said Raymond A. Zilinskas, a bioweapons expert and coauthor of the draft report on the antiplague system. "Some are located at sites accessible to terrorist groups and criminal groups. The potential is that terrorists and criminals would have little problem acquiring the resources that reside in these facilities."
Managers of the old antiplague stations are aware of their vulnerabilities but lack the most basic resources for dealing with them, according to the Monterey authors and U.S. officials. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, budgets at the institutes have fallen so steeply that even the simplest security upgrades are out of reach. One facility in a Central Asian capital could not even afford a telephone and had no way of contacting police in the event of a break-in. At least two antiplague centers outside Russia have acknowledged burglaries or break-ins within the past three years, though there are no confirmed reports of stolen pathogens or missing lab equipment, Monterey officials said.
The lack of modern biosafety equipment is also raising concern among U.S. officials about the potential for an accidental release of deadly bacteria and viruses. In Odessa, where 44 scientists and about 140 support staff carry out research in the I.I. Mechnikov Antiplague Scientific and Research Institute, scientists wearing cotton smocks and surgical masks work with lethal microbes that in the West would be locked away in high-containment laboratories and handled only by scientists in spacesuits.
The lab's scientists said their training in handling dangerous materials allowed them to work safely with pathogens without Western-style safety equipment -- which they viewed as unnecessary and which in any case they cannot afford.
"Many of the institutes are located in downtown areas, and some work with pathogens with windows wide open," said Sonia Ben Ouagrham, who coauthored the Monterey study with Zilinskas and Alexander Melikishvili.
The obscurity of the antiplague stations is hampering their ability to fix the problems, the researchers said. The institutes were not officially part of the Soviet bioweapons complex, so they have been deemed ineligible for the tens of millions of dollars in aid given each year by U.S. and Western governments to keep former weapons scientists from selling their expertise.
Western governments are just beginning to look for ways to help the institutes, and not only because of the bioterrorism threat. In a two-year study of Russia's biotech industry, a panel of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recently urged former Soviet republics to modernize the antiplague labs and integrate them with other global networks that seek to prevent outbreaks of diseases from becoming pandemics. "The Russian Anti-plague System, regardless of any involvement it might have had in the former offensive program, serves an important public health need," said David Franz, panel chairman and director of Kansas State University's National Agricultural Biosecurity Center.
Any weakening of the antiplague network has consequences for the control of infectious diseases throughout the world, and especially in Europe, said Monterey's Zilinskas.
"These institutes have served to prevent diseases such as plague, tularemia and Crimean-Congo fever from spilling over," he said, referring to a flulike fever sometimes referred to as "rabbit flu" and a hemorrhagic viral fever. "Some Europeans are unaware of this biological threat on their southeastern flank. Others are aware, but so far, are choosing not to be engaged."
Growth of a Secret Soviet System
The name "antiplague" reflects a grim reality of the Czarist and early Soviet periods, when the first antiplague stations were created: Plague, or black death, was a frequent visitor to Russia and neighboring countries well into the 20th Century.
Plague is caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis , and it is most commonly transmitted to people by animal or insect carriers, such as rats. It is the same illness that killed an estimated one-third of the population of Europe in the 14th century. Today, plague is easily treated with antibiotics, although a rare form of the disease -- pneumonic plague, caused by breathing the bacteria into the lungs -- is highly lethal and is considered a weapon of choice for germ warfare or bioterrorism.
In Odessa alone, a sea port of just over 1 million people, tourists can visit eight different cemeteries for plague victims, including Plague Mountain, a grassy mound that served as a mass grave for victims of an 1812 outbreak that killed more than 2,600 people.
The first antiplague stations were established to help contain such outbreaks. A dozen of them already were operating by the end of the reign of the last czar. The start of the Soviet era in 1917 brought many new institutes, new priorities and an expanded list of diseases, including tularemia, cholera and anthrax.
The Monterey Institute's report studies how the institutes evolved under Soviet leadership , and draws on scores of interviews and visits to more than 40 antiplague institutes and field stations. Some details emerged previously from the writings and testimony of Soviet weapons scientists.
By all accounts, the antiplague network grew dramatically under the Soviets, both in size and sophistication. By the end of the Soviet period it boasted 14,000 employees and 88 permanent facilities, including six major antiplague institutes, 26 regional stations and 53 smaller field stations.
Odessa's facility was a regional station, first opened in 1937 to battle recurring outbreaks of plague linked to infected rats that were arriving by ship. The original building on a municipal dock was later exchanged for a walled compound of three-story buildings painted pale blue. Inside, scientists dissected infected rats and birds in separate virology and bacteriology labs, using equipment that would be considered outmoded in many U.S. high schools today. For years, until the lab purchased autoclaves for cremating contaminated materials, the bodies of the diseased animals were simply buried in the lab's courtyard.
Beginning in the 1950s, the Soviet military began to exert influence over research priorities in the facilities. At first, the Monterey report says, antiplague institutes were asked to help bolster the nation's defenses against a possible foreign biological attack. The assignment was code-named "Problem Five," and it required scientists to expand on their already-proven ability to respond to a sudden outbreak. Researchers refined techniques for detecting and identifying pathogens, established rapid-response teams and aided the investigation of new drugs.
A growing international consensus against biological warfare prompted the Soviets to shift to a new direction. In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon unilaterally halted U.S. production of biological weapons. Three years later, the Soviet Union joined the United States and other nations in signing the Biological Weapons Convention, outlawing biological weapons. Within the next two years, the Soviets secretly began to build a massive offensive weapons program. Much of it was hidden inside a sprawling civilian-run enterprise called Biopreparat, which put tens of thousands of scientists to work on bioweapons projects disguised as pharmaceutical research.
The ruse worked. Western governments did not become fully aware of true of purpose of Biopreparat until a leading Soviet scientist, Vladimir Pasechnik, defected to Britain in 1989.
A Steady Supply of Virulent Strains
When Soviet generals began their expanded buildup of bioweapons in the 1970s, they looked to the antiplague network for help, the Monterey authors said. The largest antiplague institutions were enlisted into a new program, code-named "Problem F," or simply "Ferment."
According to Zilinskas and others, the antiplague institutes were a goldmine for the military because they provided "ready-to-use information, biomaterial and expertise."
Precise details of the antiplague institutes' work remain unclear. The Russian government still refuses to officially acknowledge the existence of the Soviet Union's offensive weapons program. Russia also has outlawed any disclosures of classified information from the pre-1992, Soviet era. But scientists now living outside Russia have brought many key facts to light, the researchers said. It is now known, for example, that key antiplague institutes during this period came under the command of Soviet military officers, some of whom once worked at military biological facilities.
It is also clear, they said, that Soviet bioweapon engineers relied on the antiplague institutes for basic research and identification of pathogen strains that were exceptionally lethal.
"There was a secret law that enjoined all antiplague institutes to send the government any kind of virulent strain that might be used for defensive purposes," said Zilinskas. Soviet bioweapons that most likely originated in antiplague centers include bacterial strains that cause plague, anthrax and tularemia, the report concludes. In addition, it is believed that one of the antiplague facilities, in Volgograd, helped Biopreparat scientists develop weaponized versions of the bacteria that cause glanders and melioidosis, two livestock diseases that also attack humans. "This collaboration probably went beyond the mere supplying of strains," the authors write. "It included efforts to weaponize wild bacterial strains."
The bioweapons program was so secret that many researchers didn't know about it. Lev Mogilevsky, deputy director of the Odessa research facility and a 36-year veteran of the antiplague system, said he believed it was impossible that his institute could have contributed to the creation of offensive biological weapons. But he did remember working on joint projects with military medical units in the 1970s and '80s, during which the exchange of information was decidedly one-way.
"We would hold meetings to discuss Problem Five, and there would be many institutes participating, including military ones," Mogilevsky recalled. "Our contributions would be open, but the military's never were. They revealed nothing."
Under-funded, Under-staffed and Unsecured
Today, the Odessa antiplague station and others like it throughout the former Soviet Union face a new generation of difficulties. Even the simple task of gathering field specimens can be a challenge, because it requires travel. That means using the institute's aging van, which is often in need of repairs, and purchasing gasoline, which the lab cannot afford.
To grow bacteria for testing, the scientists need a sterile nutrient broth, or growth medium, common to biological labs all over the world. But again, the Odessa lab has no money for such supplies. Workers improvise by collecting meat scraps, boiling them down in the lab and skimming off the fat.
The list goes on: Glassware. Lab chemicals. Fax paper. Microscope parts. Testing kits.
"Our budget has been very much decreased. The equipment that we have is old," said Mogilevsky. "Basically what we have is enough to sustain the lab at a very low level of activity."
Other shortages, unrelated to lab work, trouble the institute's deputy director. He worries about broken alarm sensors, ancient locks that need replacing and walls that should be built higher and stronger to keep out intruders. He wonders whether a single guard is enough, and if not, how he could possibly afford another.
When the Monterey Institute and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group, brought scores of antiplague scientists together two years ago for their first post-Soviet-era meeting, complaints about inadequate supplies and plummeting budgets were a common refrain. In fact, Odessa's plight was nowhere near the worst.
"All were in poor shape," said Zilinskas, who has helped launch a program that brings antiplague scientists to the United States for training. "Some of the facilities received literally no money from their governments, at all."
Many of the centers in the ex-Soviet republics continue to maintain high professional standards, the researchers said, thanks in part to a core of older scientists who were trained under the Soviet system in classic laboratory techniques. But today, training is harder to come by, even for the few young scientists who are willing to accept starting salaries of less than $25 a week.
Over time, continued cost-cutting inevitably will undermine the labs' ability to function at all. And that, the researchers said, has a cost of its own.
"If the system shuts down because of lack of equipment and funding, there's a risk of an epizootic outbreak among animals that becomes an outbreak among humans," said Monterey's Ouagrham. "And humans travel."
“Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.”
– Matthew 25:13
Rejoice, O Christian soldiers, the Rapture is at hand;
With lamps all trimm'd and burning, we must before Him stand.
We have no time to loiter or tarry by the way;
The Bridegroom is approaching—He may be here today.
Oh, rouse ye, saints and sinners, the hour is growing late,
Gird up yourselves for battle with sword and with breastplate;
The enemy with fury is seeking to break down
The wall of faith and courage and rob us of our crown.
O Christian, be not idle; be winning precious souls,
The time to work for Jesus is drawing to a close.
The clouds of tribulation each day are hov'ring low'r;
So do your best for Jesus in this the closing hour.
CHORUS:
Be standing, watching, waiting, in faith and constant pray'r,
Who knows, perhaps tomorrow we'll meet Him in the air.
RUSSIA and China today launched unprecedented joint military exercises involving air, sea and land forces, aimed at sending a message to the United States about their growing influence.
The eight days of war games also present a commercial opportunity for Russia, China's biggest supplier of arms and weapons technology, to sell its wares, analysts say.
"The main target is the US. Both sides want to improve their position for bargaining in terms of security, politics and economics," said Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at the People's University of China.
Both countries say Peace Mission 2005, which involves 10,000 troops, is aimed at building ties between their militaries and analysts say it is not targeted at any third country. But it is likely to be viewed with concern by others in the region.
Greenland's ice is melting rapidly. In some places, glacial levels have been falling by 10 metres a year and ultimately contributing to rising sea levels. Travelling to Greenland, Richard Hollingham sees the impact of climate change for himself.
The gleaming white executive jet taxied to a stop on the cracked concrete apron beside a couple of derelict hangars.
Beyond the rusty barbed wire and crude prefabricated buildings surrounding the airport perimeter, cliffs of dark granite rose from the valley to blend with the equally ominous grey of the sky.
No trees, no colour, no signs of life.
The door of the private plane swung down.
Onlookers, had there been any, might have caught a glimpse of the deep leather seats and walnut panelling of the interior.
Perhaps a group of sharp suited executives would emerge looking dynamic and business-like. Or perhaps some sinister men-in-black types, here on covert government business.
The first person to climb down was wearing oversized shorts, stout walking boots and a hat that looked like it had seen rather more of the world than it was perhaps designed for.
Its enormous ice cap, a sea of white stretching seemingly forever, overflows into thousands of glaciers
The next man was dressed in a clashing array of outdoor clothing and sported large tortoise-shell glasses and an unkempt beard.
Each man muttered something about the landscape being bleak.
I would like to be able to tell you that when the BBC descended from the plane we stood apart with our sartorial elegance.
But if you have ever met any BBC types, particularly radio reporters, you would know that would be a lie.
Research
We had landed at Kangerlussuaq, a community whose existence depends solely on the airstrip.
This used to be a bustling US base, servicing America's early warning system.
These days it is somewhat self perpetuating. The airport brings in supplies for the people who live here who mostly work at the airport.
I was tagging along with a group of eminent scientists, funded through the foundation of a billionaire philanthropist, Gary Comer. He has devoted his retirement to the science of global warming.
The researchers all make regular visits to the Arctic to assess the impact of climate change, not, it should be said, always in such comfort.
Retreating glaciers
Greenland is a massive island locked in ice. And from the air there is little evidence that it is melting.
Its enormous ice cap, a sea of white stretching seemingly forever, overflows into thousands of glaciers.
These in turn carve their way through the mountains to the coast.
It is only when you get near to the base of the glaciers that you can see how the landscape is changing.
A few metres above the ice, the rock is totally bare. A scar running horizontally across the valleys.
It is as if the ice has been drained away, like water in a bath, to leave a tide mark. Which is, in effect, what has happened.
The ice has melted and the glaciers have retreated hundreds of metres over the past 150 years.
New vegetation
The weather cleared and with the edge of the glacier, a giant wall of ice behind us, glaciologist Richard Alley led me across the barren rock.
This land was being exposed for the first time in millions of years
As I tripped and stumbled behind him, he bounded through scree and leapt over crevasses.
I have never seen a scientist more in his element as he pointed out deep grooves in the rock where the ice had raked the stone, or the giant boulders lifted by the glacier to balance precariously on top of tiny pebbles.
This land was being exposed for the first time for millions of years. Even a century ago, where I stood would have been solid ice, and I was struck by just how much vegetation there was.
Phillip, the biologist on the trip, was every bit as excited as Richard, identifying the dark brown lichens on the rocks, the grasses and beautiful purple flowers somehow managing to cling to just a few millimetres of soil.
Agricultural return
The Earth's climate has warmed before, albeit naturally.
A ruined church on the banks of a fjord marks the remains of a Viking farming civilisation.
The sun casts shadows through the arched window to the site of the altar, last used in the 1400s before the area was abandoned when it became too cold to support habitation.
Today, the farmers are back.
Sheep once again graze the surrounding hillside and shiny new tractors work the fields near the southern coast.
Greenland is turning green, something the rest of us should be very worried about indeed.
08/17/05 "LewRockwell" -- -- With every poll showing majorities of Americans both fed up with Bush’s war against Iraq and convinced that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has made Americans less safe, the White House moron proposes to start another war by attacking Iran. VP Cheney has already ordered the US Strategic Command to come up with plans to strike Iran with tactical nuclear weapons.
Bush refuses to meet with Cindy Sheehan, instead using his vacation time at the Crawford ranch to talk war with Israeli television. In a recent interview with Israeli TV, Bush said: "All options are on the table" with regard to Iran.
Israel’s Likud government is Bush’s last remaining ally in his war against "Islamic terrorism." Israel, which is loaded with nuclear weapons and is not a signatory to the nuclear pacts, is the accuser against Iran, asserting that Iran’s nuclear energy program is just a veil behind which to produce weapons. Iran, however, has signed the nonproliferation pact and is willing for the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor the nuclear energy program.
Bush, however, dismisses all facts and assurances and is willing to attack Iran based on nothing but paranoia.
Bush can ignore the American public, because the Democrats, like the Tory Party in the UK, have completely collapsed as an opposition party.
The only check on Bush is the lack of US troops. Bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, US commanders are stating that a third rotation of our exhausted and demoralized troops in Iraq can be avoided only by troop withdrawals by next spring.
However, on August 11 Bush nixed the military’s talk of reducing US troops in Iraq. The next day the commander of US logistics in Iraq announced that the number of insurgent attacks on US forces along supply routes has doubled in the last year, making it clear that far from winning, the US is not even holding its own.
Cindy Sheehan has the right question for Bush: What noble cause is being served by all this suffering and destruction?
Bush is in hiding from Mrs. Sheehan, because he knows only ignoble causes are being served. According to the CIA, the main beneficiary of the war is Osama bin Laden’s recruitment drives. While America’s military recruitment falters and US generals announce that the war has broken the Reserves and National Guard, the cause of Islamic extremism basks in the Iraqi war.
Gentle reader, do you realize the danger of having a president so disconnected from reality that he plots to attack Iran – a country three times the size of Iraq – when he lacks sufficient forces to occupy Baghdad and to protect the road from Baghdad to the airport?
Despite all the high profile "sweeps" of US forces through insurgent strongholds, US commanders report a doubling of insurgent attacks.
The Bush administration is insane. If the American people do not decapitate it by demanding Bush’s impeachment, the Bush administration will bring about Armageddon. This may please some Christian evangelicals conned by Rapture predictions, but World War III will please no one else.
Dr. Roberts <mailto:paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com> is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
08/17/05 -- --TEHRAN -- (MNA) -- “The excellent discipline in the Chinese Army is one of the most illustrious characteristics of the country,” the commander of the Ground Forces of the Iranian Army, Brigadier General Nasser Mohammadi Far, said here on Wednesday.
Mohammadi Far made the remarks in a meeting with a Chinese military delegation that has come to Iran to hold negotiations on developing military relations between Iran and China, deepening bilateral ties between the two countries, and paving the way for military cooperation.
He went on to say that the vast country of China has organized a powerful army in the region through relying on efficient military training, perseverance, and discipline.
“Our mutual enemies possess advanced military technology, and undoubtedly they would rely on this technology in any possible future wars. Therefore, it seems necessary that both Iran and China upgrade their defense and military technology,” he noted.
Mohammadi Far added that, relying on Almighty God and the eight-year experience of the Iraqi imposed war on Iran, the Army of the Islamic Republic has increased its defense capabilities such that it can turn the tide in any possible war.
For his part, the head of the Chinese military delegation expressed satisfaction about his visit to Iran and his talks with Iranian military officials.
Iran and China have had close relations in various spheres and have always maintained their brotherly relations over the course of history, since they have always had some mutual objectives, he observed.
At the end of the meeting, Mohammadi Far presented the military emblem of the Iranian Army to the Chinese delegation and received the military emblem of the Chinese Army in return.
08/17/05 "Reuters" -- -- Russia warned on Wednesday against using force to stop Iran's nuclear program, saying any such action would have grave and unpredictable consequences.
"We favor further dialogue and consider the use of force in Iran counter-productive and dangerous, something which can have grave and hardly predictable consequences," said a statement posted on the ministry's Web site www.mid.ru.
The West fears Iran's nuclear program, which the oil-rich state insists is aimed only at the peaceful generation of nuclear power, conceals ambitions to develop atomic weapons.
Iran angered the European Union and the United States by resuming work at a uranium conversion plant earlier this month, rejecting EU incentives offered in return for giving up its nuclear program.
Earlier this month U.S. President George W. Bush said military force remained a last resort to press Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
"We consider that problems concerning Iran's nuclear activities should be solved through political and diplomatic means, on the basis of international law and Tehran's close cooperation with International Atomic Energy Agency," the Russian statement said.
Russia, which has constructed a nuclear power plant for Iran and is hoping for more such contracts, has criticized Tehran for restarting the uranium conversion.
Moscow says there is no technical need for Iran to convert its own uranium since Moscow has agreed to supply all necessary nuclear fuel for the Bushehr power plant due to go into operation next year.
“Which kills more: ideology or religion?”1 asks author Andrew Kenney in the title of what is certainly one of the more startling pieces I’ve read in some time.
For Kenney, however, it’s not the meat of that question that’s really up for debate, and it’s not his answer to the meat of it that’s startling; after all, a summary finger count shows that the man who favors the religious wars has his work cut out to match the math of the fascist and communist regimes that have dropped the metaphorical guillotine since the French Revolution.
What makes Kenney’s article startling is not that the self-professed atheist necessarily concludes that the reds (communists) and the browns (fascists) have contributed much more heartily to history’s flow of blood than any religion, but that, of the three available ideological colors, it is the extremists of the green standard whose hands are perhaps guiltiest for the last century’s outpouring of crimson.
According to Kenney over 50,000,000 people died in the 20th century because of the gratuitous recklessness of eco-extremists; this estimate is actually quite conservative in comparison to junkscience.com’s claim that over 80,000,000 have dropped at the hands of the tree-huggers.
“In purely numerical terms,” says Kenney about the alleged murderous scheme, “it was the worst crime of the 20th century.”
But what was the worst crime?
“The banning of DDT,” says Kenney.
Of course this could be comfortably put to rest as the ranting of just another, competing ideological nut were it not that Kenney is in very, very good company.
A New York Times article of January of this year, titled It’s Time to Spray DDT proclaimed what long ago became the obvious, that “the evidence is overwhelming: DDT saves lives.”2 The American Council on Science and Health printed an article in 2002 entitled The DDT ban turns 30 – millions dead of malaria because of ban, more deaths likely.3 In 2003 Front Page Magazine ran an article entitled Rachel Carsons’ Ecological Genocide, similarly concerned with the DDT ban, and employing that loaded word “genocide”.4 And in his popular novel, State of Fear, Michael Crichton also espoused this view, describing the DDT ban as “arguably the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.” He continues, “since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.”5
2. The Tragic History Of DDT and Silent Spring
The history of DDT is a tragic one. The chemical, the proper name of which is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, was first isolated in the late 19th century. No practical use was found for it, however, until Paul Herman Muller determined in 1939 that it made for an effective insecticide.
Used extensively during WWII and afterwards, the remarkably cheap and easy-to-process pesticide is widely credited with the complete eradication of the scourge of malaria from the Western world. The white powder, once dusted on the walls of a house or on the human body, works by killing malaria and typhus carrying vectors such as mosquitoes or lice.
According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia DDT performed the feat of reducing the worldwide malaria mortality rate from a hefty 192 per 100,000 to a low of 7 per 100,000. Paul Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1948 for his lifesaving work with DDT.
With Muller’s miracle-pesticide in widespread use the movement towards a malaria-free earth was progressing swimmingly until Rachel Carson erupted hysterically onto the international scene. She alleged in her deeply influential 1962 book Silent Spring that DDT caused cancer and was aiding the rapid extinction of raptors such as bald eagles by thinning their egg shells. Environmentalists everywhere took up the cause and soon achieved the first great and unifying victory of the modern environmental movement—the worldwide banning of DDT.
And that would be perfectly all right, perhaps, if any of Carson’s allegations were true.
3. Rachel Carson’s Allegations Disproved
But in 2004 a study in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons concludes “Public pressure [to ban DDT] was generated by one popular book and sustained by faulty or fraudulent research. Widely believed claims of carcinogenicity, toxicity to birds, anti-androgenic properties, and prolonged environmental persistence are false or grossly exaggerated. The worldwide affect of the U.S. ban has been millions of preventable deaths .”6 In fact, it is difficult to choose which of the countless studies that have vindicated DDT over the years I should cite.
One study saw volunteers consume 35mg of raw DDT daily for a period of two years with no short or long-term ill effects .7 One anti-DDT-ban scientist began his every lecture on the subject by ingesting a teaspoon of DDT powder.8 Of the workers who applied thousands of tons of DDT without any protection, none have shown an increased risk of cancer or any other illness. Even the alleged thinning of the eggshells of raptors that environmentalists now tout as a last and desperate reason for continuing the archaic ban has been proven false.
4. The DDT Ban Put In Perspective
Allow me to provide some perspective. According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO), DDT is classified as Group 2B carcinogenicity; that is, there is an admitted insufficient evidence of carcinogenicity.9 On the other hand, a report issued but a few weeks ago by the IARC classified combined estrogen-progestogen oral contraceptives, the most widely prescribed contraceptive on the market, as Group 1 carcinogenicity.10
The oral contraceptives, which the WHO claims over 100 million women worldwide regularly ingest, are by this classification defined as definitely carcinogenic. And yet, DDT, by now proven innocent as a babe after decades of scrutiny, the harmless miracle-chemical the purpose of which is to prevent the excruciating death of millions, is strictly regulated with a worldwide ban, while the proven carcinogenic, cancer-causing contraceptive, used to prevent the creation of human life, is handed out like candy.
But here’s the real kicker. According to the WHO there is some evidence that besides causing substantially increased risks of breast, liver, and cervical cancer, combined oral contraceptives may cause a decrease in the risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer. The WHO therefore justifies downplaying the immediate risk to hundreds of millions of women worldwide because “it is possible that the overall net public health outcome may be beneficial.”
Curiously, however, the WHO’s analysis of DDT grants the pesticide no such benevolent handicap. DDT has saved millions of lives, and the ban, based upon long disproved claims of carcinogenicity, is perpetuating the annual death of millions. Talk about a beneficial “overall net public health outcome”! But of course, maybe after another forty years of testing and research it will be found that DDT powder once caused someone to sneeze to death.
Adding insult to injury, over the past five years numerous powerful international bodies have sought to make the DDT ban even stricter.
Currently it is possible for tropical nations most ravaged by malaria to apply for exceptions to the DDT ban, which exceptions undergo review every three years by the WHO. This provision is of little use to most third world nations, since there is a global stigma attached to DDT, and many charitable bodies will not fund relief efforts unless it is agreed that DDT will not be used. Besides that, the cost of DDT has increased substantially. But in 2000, a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) convention in Johannesburg flaunted science and common sense and sought to choke that final loophole of grace and make the DDT ban total; ultimately they failed in their bid, due to the ardent pleas of malaria experts and the third world countries most affected by malaria. In addition the Stockholm Convention, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund have all clamoured since the year 2000 for the total banning of DDT.
5. Why Does the DDT Ban Continue?
But if it is so patently illogical and scientifically apocryphal, why is it that the ban continues unabated?
The answer to that riddle is likely beyond even the powers of Oedipus to discover in full, and is certainly beyond the limited scope of this article. It probably has a lot to do with what Charles Wurter, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund said in October 1969: “If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before. In a sense, much more is at stake than DDT.”11 It seems more than safe at this point to call that statement prophetic. For the green extremists to admit defeat now would be to renege in large part the authority won by the victory they achieved in the DDT war.
Perhaps this malaria holocaust is, in large part, allowed to continue because the millions who needlessly die by the disease do so outside of the scope of the roving eye of the West. DDT long ago made malaria a tropical and not a Western phenomenon, and thus the millions of third world malarial deaths have no visible faces to excite Western sympathies or funding.
However, more fundamental than that, it appears, is the singular and sinister nature of modern environmentalism as an ideology. Professing a creed that is eminently respectful of life of such, it often happens that adherents of the green ideology come out with things that don’t jive. The scientist mentioned earlier, J. Gordon Edwards, who regularly consumed raw DDT powder before speaking about it, once called Rachel Carson’s philosophy a “lack of concern for human lives.” He continued, “She could vividly describe the death of a bird…but nowhere in the book does she even think to describe the death of a human by an insect-borne disease.” 12
And Carson, as one of the mothers of environmentalism, has left that sordid legacy behind her.
Earth First! Founder Dave Foreman’s beliefs typify that legacy. “Ours is an ecological perspective,” he said in his book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, launching into a description worthy of Wordsworth, “that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g. malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”13 Unless, I presume, Mr. David Foreman happened to be the one convulsing to death.
The environmentalist movement long ago distanced itself from whatever token respect it once professed for human life and has come out instead in cooing support of panda life. This would be cute were it not murderous.
Apparently, however, some eco-extremists are coming to recognize the deficiencies of their own ideology. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in their controversial essay The Death of Environmentalism allege that “Environmental groups have spent the last 40 years defining themselves against conservative values like cost-benefit accounting, smaller government, fewer regulations, and free trade, without ever articulating a coherent morality we can call our own. Most of the intellectuals who staff environmental groups are so repelled by the right's values that we have assiduously avoided examining our own in a serious way.” 14
If we are to believe these remarks of Shellenberger and Nordhaus (and I certainly do), then environmentalists have initiated and stubbornly sustained a genocidal ban on DDT, because they are “repelled” by the morality of the “right”. And like rebellious teens they would rather react and continue to react against an established order than to consider the destruction they are leaving in their wake.
6. DDT and Population Control
But that is certainly not yet the end of the story. One of the most revealing quotations related to the issue at hand is another by Charles Wurster, who was reported to have said in 1971, after it was pointed out to him by a reporter that the widespread usage of the pesticide DDT saved lives: “So what? People are the main cause of our problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them…”
Some members of the left have alleged that this quote by Wurster is false, fabricated by a disgruntled former employee of Wurster’s. And that may be so though it has hardly been proven; but either way, that statement remains in essence the clearest, bluntest _expression of a theory and an attitude that has flourished ever since Thomas Malthus published his infamous work “An Essay on the Principle of Population”; individuals as diverse as Nietzsche, Hitler and Margaret Sanger have all expressed it in one form or another.
Francis Galton, the influential British eugenicist, elucidated these ideas in a more ‘academic’ fashion in his book Memories of My Life, saying:
[Eugenics] first object is to check the birth rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for; and those only of the best stock. 15
It is no coincidence that population control and environmentalism have always been inextricably entwined in the grand scheme of liberal ideology. Both are founded upon an pernicious belief that man is little more than a pollutant, a scum to be prevented from interfering any more than necessary with the purity of the natural biosphere. As such it is especially difficult to believe that the fact that malaria is yet another of the scourges unleashed upon the poor and sick of the third world that goes unchecked by the Western world is merely a coincidence.
The DDT ban, ostensibly supported by false and archaic claims of carcinogenicity, makes no sense unless the goals of environmentalist/over-population activists are taken into account. As one environmentalist commentator put it: “What I said is that the mosquitos [sic] and malaria in question acted as a natural population control. After the introduction of DDT into some areas of Africa, the population increased so much that people began starving. Population control sounds a lot better to me than starvation and the environmental destruction caused by overpopulation.”16
Junkscience.com claims that “In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, ‘Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing’.”
In short, it is much easier for the West to kill off the poor, or allow them to die at the hand of “natural” diseases, than to determine how to feed them. And that is quite true, for the mouth of a corpse doesn’t cry out to be fed. But is it right? No; a thousand times no.
The “green eco-imperialist legacy of death” mentioned above junkscience.com’s infamous malaria clock,17 which calculates over 89,000,000 malaria-ravished corpses since DDT was banned, is exactly right. But now it is time for that genocidal legacy to come to an end; it is time that environmentalists threw off their adolescent petulance, admitted their grievous wrong, learned to respect the lives of all no matter their race, creed or economic status, and again permitted Third World countries what they deserve—easy access to the desperately needed, life-saving malaria-fighting pesticide DDT.
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