Able Danger, the 9/11 Commission & Sandy Berger

i've posted two other articles on this subject matter. if you're not familiar with it, see "Four in 9/11 plot are linked to al quaeda in '00" (read the key paragraph) and "No Evidence Pentagon Knew of Atta, 9/11 Panel Says" for background...

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Able Danger, the 9/11 Commission & the Strange (But Now Explainable) Actions of Sandy Berger

By Sean Osborne, Senior Analyst & Military Affairs Expert
& Douglas J. Hagmann, Director

10 August 2005: Hey America… do you remember the strange actions of President Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger during the 9/11 Commission investigation when he removed highly classified terrorism documents that should have been turned over to that independent commission? Did you ever wonder what Berger was attempting to hide and even more importantly, why? Did you also wonder why, even though he committed a felony, he received nothing more than a slap on the wrist while various political and intelligence officials played down his actions, wanting them to disappear as quickly as possible? It appears that we just might have discovered the answers to these and other troubling questions: Able Danger.

Able Danger is the code name of a secret team of U.S. Army military intelligence operatives created in 1999 under a directive signed by General Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about al Qaeda networks around the world. In mid-2000, the Able Danger team discovered the existence of the key 9/11 terror cell of Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawar al-Hamzi inside the U.S. and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to “take out that cell,” according to Representative Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania House member and vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. That information was presented in the summer of 2000 in the form of a chart complete with photographs of the terrorists to the Pentagon's Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Our intelligence was dead-on accurate, but was not acted upon a full year before the 9/11 attacks.

In fact, Representative Weldon said Able Danger members had recommended that the information they uncovered be shared with the FBI, but the idea was rejected and they “were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn’t exist.”

Despite the findings of Able Danger, absolutely no action was pursued to take out the cell during the weeks leading up to the 2000 presidential election, said Weldon. The reason? Mohammed Atta possessed a “green card” at the time. Under the rules of the Clinton Justice Department, lawyers working for Special Operations decided that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. They did not want to recommend that the FBI go after someone holding a green card, Weldon told his House colleagues on June 27, 2005 during a speech, known as a “special order,” which he delivered on the House floor. Defense Department lawyers were also said to be reluctant to suggest a bold action by FBI agents after the bureau’s disastrous 1993 strike against the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, Texas.

Read Curt Weldon’s June 27, 2005 Testimony This week, Representative Weldon and a former defense intelligence official said they had spoken with three Able Danger team members, all still working in the government, including two in the military, and that they were consistent in asserting that Mohammed Atta's affiliation with a Qaeda terrorism cell in the United States was known within the Defense Department by mid-2000 but was not acted upon. Further and after the fact, the 9-11 Commission was reportedly never told about Able Danger or its findings.

Enter Sandy Berger – During the 9/11 Commission

While the investigation by the 9/11 Commission was in progress, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, who served as Clinton's national security adviser for all of President's Clinton’s second term, was caught removing documents from the national Archives – the very same documents that should have been turned over to the independent commission probing the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Berger ultimately admitted to intentionally taking and destroying various classified documents relating to terrorism collected under the Clinton administration. Berger and his lawyer said on July 19, 2004 that he knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket, pants and socks, and also “inadvertently” took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio. Those documents reportedly included an assessment of America's terror vulnerabilities at airports, something very relevant to Able Danger’s findings and key to the 9/11 attacks. What Sandy Berger did was a! felony, yet was allowed a generous plea agreement of a fine and a three-year suspension of his security clearance.

Under the prism of Able Danger, we are now able to make sense out of the previously curious actions of Sandy Berger.

Able Danger & the Saga of the 9/11 Commission; Warren Commission Redux

According to Weldon, staff members of the 9/11 Commission were briefed on the findings of the Able Danger intelligence unit within the Special Operations Command and about the specific recommendation to break up the Mohammed Atta cell, yet those members reportedly decided not to brief the commission’s members on those matters. Why not?

Clearer now is the conflict of interest of having Jamie Gorelick, the Assistant Attorney General under Bill Clinton serving on the 9/11 Commission. Ms. Gorelick worked directly for Janet Reno and was directly involved in matters that were under review by the 9/11 Commission.

Remember the reason the findings of Able Danger were not acted upon? In his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft stated the following:

"In 1995, the Justice Department embraced flawed legal reasoning, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required," he said. "The 1995 Guidelines and the procedures developed around them imposed draconian barriers to communications between the law enforcement and intelligence communities. The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents. In 1995, the Justice Department designed a system destined to fail." Continuing his testimony, Ashcroft stated:

"Somebody built this wall.” Ashcroft added: "The basic architecture for the wall . . . was contained in a classified memorandum entitled 'Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations. Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of this Commission." Ashcroft was referring to Jamie Gorelick, who served as Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration as well as general counsel at the Department of Defense. Both jobs put her at the very center of the former administration's anti-terrorism efforts. Consequently, her actions, as well as those of her superiors, were the subject of review by the very commission on which she is a member. Most assuredly, that is a huge conflict of interest. In her position at the Justice Department, Gorelick wrote a memo that provides a picture of the role she played setting policy for intelligence gathering and sharing during the Clinton Administration. The memo stemmed from the Justice Department's prosecution of the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Gorelick wrote in 1995:

“During the course of those investigations, significant counterintelligence information has been developed related to the activities and plans of agents of foreign powers operating in this country and overseas, including previously unknown connections between separate terrorist groups." We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation." And therein is the framework for the legal conundrum faced by Able Danger, and why Atta and his minions were free to hijack 4 airliners on 9/11.

http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/analysts.asp

Half-price Colombian fighters offered for Iraq

HA! what a concept!
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Half-price Colombian fighters offered for Iraq

A US company operating out of Ecuador says it has signed up about 1,000 Colombian police and military staff to work as hired guns in Iraq, for less than half of their US counterparts' salaries.

Colombians "have been fighting terrorists for the past 41 years and are experts in their respective areas" such as explosives and guerrilla warfare, Epi Security and Investigation says on its website, iraqijobcenter.com.

The company based in the Ecuadoran city of Manta is run by American Jeffrey Shippy, who is in Baghdad, according to his Ecuadoran wife.

He works out of his home not far from the Manta air base Washington rented from the Ecuadoran Air Force to relocate some of the troops and planes it used to have in Panama.

The Colombian daily El Tiempo reported Friday that the Colombians would be paid $US2,500 to $US5,000 a month, roughly half what their US and British counterparts earn.

-AFP

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200508/s1437039.htm

Why Masonic Bible is Used at Presidential Inaugurations

Why Masonic Bible is Used at Presidential Inaugurations
By Patricia Zapor
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- As Ryan Johnson explains it, George Washington's inauguration ceremony was painstakingly planned down to the tiniest detail about seating arrangements -- with just one exception.

As the first president of the United States arrived at New York's City Hall by horse-drawn carriage and prepared to step onto the open balcony that April 30 in 1789, it belatedly occurred to organizers that there ought to be a Bible on which Washington could take the oath of office.

One of the men at hand, parade marshal Jacob Morton, also happened to be master of the St. John's Lodge No. 1 of the Masons and offered to provide one from the lodge, located nearby at the corner of Water and Wall streets.

The organization's 1767 King James Version was rushed to the hall and opened to Genesis, at the end of Chapter 49 and the beginning of Chapter 50, where Washington placed his hand for the ceremony.

As he completed the oath written for the occasion, Washington added the unscripted words, "I swear, so help me God," and bowed to kiss the Bible.

Thus was born a tradition followed by almost every one of the 42 presidents inaugurated since then, including some who have used the very same Bible.

The volume is still owned by the St. John's Lodge, which Johnson serves as chairman of the George Washington Inaugural Bible Committee. He was one of three lodge members who escorted the Bible to Washington in January for it to be displayed as part of an inauguration exhibit at the National Archives.

At a Jan. 10 presentation at the Archives, Johnson explained that in the 1770s it was something of a luxury to have a copy of the Bible, let alone one of as high quality as the Masons' edition.

Prior to the nation's independence, no publisher in the colonies had been allowed to print Bibles, because the authorization of the King of England was needed. Like the Masons' Bible, those used in the fledgling republic tended to
come from Europe and at great expense.

In commemoration of the new importance of the "George Washington Inaugural Bible", as it came to be known, it soon had a new engraved image of the president inserted to face the opening page portrait of King George II.

Johnson said it was likely unintentional, but the use of the Masons 'Bible for Washington's ceremony also may have dodged an ecumenical problem.

"No church's Bible would have been acceptable to people of the various denominations," he explained. By using one owned by a fraternal organization instead of a Bible from one of New York's 22 different churches, a potential disagreement over the president favoring one denomination over another was avoided,
Johnson said.

In the two centuries since then, the Washington Bible has been used at a variety of national events, including other inaugurations, the dedication of the Washington Monument and the laying of the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol building, Johnson said. Lodge rules also allow it to be used for various Masonic ceremonies and the inaugurations of NewYork governors.

Records weren't kept to indicate whether other early presidents may have used the Washington Bible for their inaugurations, but four in the 20th century did: Warren G. Harding in 1921, Dwight D. Eisenhower in1953; Jimmy Carter in 1977 and George H.W. Bush in 1989. President George W. Bush had hoped to use it for his first inauguration in 2001, but the damp weather that day put a crimp in the plans.

Johnson explained that the Bible was brought to Washington for the ceremony, but the Secret Service wanted it in place on the podium an hour before the ceremony started.

Given the Bible's age and historic value, the Masons weren't willing to let it be exposed to the cold drizzle that long, so Bush used a family Bible.

Records kept by the Architect of the Capitol suggest only one president in the 216 years since Washington was inaugurated did not take the oath of office with one hand on a Bible. Franklin Pierce, the 14th president, "affirmed"-- but did not "swear" -- his oath with one hand on a law book, instead of a Bible.
Some historical records say Pierce did so because of a crisis of faith after his only remaining child, an 11-year-old boy, was killed in a train accident a few weeks before the inauguration.

The nation's only Catholic president to date, John F. Kennedy, used his family's Douay Version of the Bible. The 1850 edition was brought by his Fitzgerald ancestors from Ireland, according to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. That Bible, a massive to me now on display at the library, was kept current with records of family births through the time of Kennedy's presidency.

There are some firm rules about the use and handling of the George Washington Bible. Only a president being sworn in is allowed to touch the pages of the Bible without gloves, for instance. But Johnson said one popular belief -- that
it cannot travel by airplane -- is a myth.

The misconception that the Masons wouldn't allow it to be transported by airplane was based on the refusal of a previous grand master of the lodge to fly ever again after he returned from a stint in the military as a helicopter pilot, Johnson said. If he wouldn't fly, neither could the Bible when he was
escorting it.

Gilbert Savitzky, grand secretary of the lodge, said the Masons do obtain special permission for the Bible not to be X-rayed for airport security, however. Instead, when it must be transported by air, arrangements are made for it to
be inspected by hand, including being screened for explosives residue.

No Evidence Pentagon Knew of Atta, 9/11 Panel Says

ok, who knew what when! see the NY Times article entitled " Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00" further down in my blog to see the first article (and key paragraph) which set this off.

my wild hair guess here is that since the intel analyst from the first article is unidentified, the 9/11 panelists are betting that this guy won't out himself.

if this guy does out himself, look for some fireworks.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201655.html

No Evidence Pentagon Knew of Atta, Panel Says
9/11 Probers Reject Claims on Lead Hijacker

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 13, 2005; Page A03

Investigators for the Sept. 11 commission have found no evidence to support allegations by a House Republican that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta was identified by a classified Pentagon program before the 2001 attacks, according to a commission statement issued last night.

Commission leaders Thomas H. Kean (R) and Lee H. Hamilton (D) said in the joint statement that panel staff members have found no documents or other witnesses to back up claims made by a U.S. Navy officer, who told the commission staff in July 2004 that he recalled seeing Atta's name and photograph on a chart prepared by another officer. Panel officials also said they have found no evidence to support similar claims made to reporters by a second person, a former defense intelligence official.


"None of the documents turned over to the commission mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers," the commission statement said. "Nor do any of the staff notes on documents reviewed in the [Defense Department] reading room indicate that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers were mentioned in any of those documents."

The statement marks the latest development in several days of public skirmishing between the commission and Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who accused the panel of ignoring allegations that Atta and other hijackers had been identified by Pentagon analysts before the Sept. 11 attacks but that the information had not been shared with other agencies.

Weldon said in a statement last night that the commission's findings still leave key questions unanswered and complained that the Sept. 11 panel had given varied responses to the allegations over the last week.

"I will continue to push for a full accounting of the historical record so that we may preclude these types of failures from happening again," Weldon said.

The dispute centers on a now-defunct Pentagon effort called "Able Danger," which the commission statement describes as a "link analysis" program that mapped connections among terrorist suspects and produced diagrams of terrorist networks. Weldon said the program was a planning effort assigned to the Special Operations Command by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to help the military "manipulate, degrade or destroy the global al Qaeda infrastructure."

The commission statement raises significant doubts about the likelihood that Able Danger could have identified Atta or other Sept. 11 hijackers as al Qaeda operatives and placed them in Brooklyn in 1999 or early 2000. Atta never lived in New York and did not enter the United States until June 2000, and two other key hijackers mentioned by the intelligence officer in media interviews were not in the country until 2001, the statement said.

But Weldon said Able Danger was "not about dates and times" but "was about linkages and associations of individuals identified with direct links to al Qaeda."

Two sources are at the heart of Weldon's allegations. One, a former defense intelligence official, has told media outlets and Weldon that he briefed the commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, and three other staff members about Able Danger's identification of Atta during an overseas meeting in October 2003. The commission said in its statement that its records of the briefing, held in Bagram, Afghanistan, include no mention of Atta and that none of the staff members who attended recalls such a claim.

The second person, described by the commission as a U.S. Navy officer employed at the Defense Department, was interviewed by senior panel investigator Dieter Snell and another staff member on July 12, 2004, 10 days before the release of the commission's best-selling report.

According to the commission, the officer said he briefly saw the name and photo of Atta on an "analyst notebook chart." The material identified Atta as part of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell and was dated from February through April 2000, the officer said.

"The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document," the statement says, because Pentagon lawyers were worried about violating restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.

But the commission statement said that because no documents or other evidence had emerged to support the claim, "the commission staff concluded that the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation."

The Able Danger program is also not mentioned in the final report because "the operation itself did not turn out to be historically significant," the statement said.

Italian archeologists on trail of ancient warships

Italian archeologists on trail of ancient warships
Fri Aug 12, 2005 2:42 PM BST
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By Shasta Darlington

ROME (Reuters) - Italian archaeologists believe they are on the verge of finding the ancient ships downed in the battle of the Aegates Islands more than 2,000 years ago thanks to modern technology and a police tip-off.

"This project has an enormous historical value, but perhaps more important is the relevance for archaeology," Sebastiano Tusa, Sicily's chief of marine culture, told Reuters on Friday.

"What we find will help us understand how wars were waged at that time and how battleships were built."

After two years of underwater searches around the islands, which lie west of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, experts last year found a bronze helmet and some amphorae from about 241 BC, the date of the decisive Roman victory over the Carthage fleet.

At around the same time, a team of Italy's famed art police busted a collector who had a ship's bronze battering ram from the same period on display in his home. It turned out the relic had been illegally looted using nets from the same area.

Unfortunately for Sicily's archaeologists, that area lies 70 metres (230 feet) below sea level.

"We couldn't dive on it, so about four months ago we started a technical probe of the region," Tusa said.

Experts from Sicily and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Austin, Texas used sonar and multi-beam bathymetric technology to scan the sea bed and sent down remotely controlled cameras.

"Now, we're certain we have found the location of the battle, but we have yet to discover how much was actually preserved," he said.

"What we really expect to find are remnants of the warships with battering rams and various other weapons like helmets, lances and the heavier tools that would have sunk immediately."

He said works, which were put on hold for analysis of the data, will resume in September and that a discovery could be announced as soon as October.

The Battle of the Aegates Islands was the final naval battle between the fleets of Carthage and the Roman Republic during the First Punic War and marked a turning point for the two powers. Carthage went into decline after its defeat.

Pinpointing the location of the battle and the some sunken 60 ships has been difficult since fighting lasted for up to four hours while the vessels moved in a southerly direction.

The Carthaginian force included 250-300 newly built warships as well as about 400 cargo ships bearing food and agricultural and war equipment.

Tusa said the finds will be the showcase of a new museum dedicated to the battle being built in a former tuna fishing factory on the isle of Favignana.


© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Drugs that cure cancer, are shelved

Bottom line: The market is so small, lives are sacrificed for profits. The following is a transcript of the segment from CNN... (CNN makes news, but nobody notices!)

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GUPTA: Immther, the drug that apparently saved her life, is still available as part of the Dr. Kleinerman's ongoing clinical trial, but after that, it disappears.

(on camera): So there was a drug out there that, as far as you could tell, at least seemed to be working?

EUGENIE KLEINERMAN, CHIEF, PEDIATRIC DIVISION: Correct.

GUPTA: And then you got a phone call saying that they weren't going to manufacture the drug anymore.

KLEINERMAN: Correct. Basically, I was getting the message that our marketing people have done research and we're never going to be able to recoup our research and development costs. And it doesn't matter who we're going to help and who we're not going to help, the marketing people have made the decision that we're not putting any more resources in this.

GUPTA: And the outcome?

KLEINERMAN: The outcome is we still have only a certain amount of drug.

GUPTA (voice-over): Just enough to treat 60 kids, or about one- third of the kids that get Ewing's Sarcoma each year.

(on camera): This isn't the kind of story people want to hear. If a drug works, why wouldn't they make more of it?

KLEINERMAN: Because sarcomas are a very rare tumor, and you have to understand that drug companies, pharmaceutical companies, have to report to their stockholders, and they're interested in their financials, and this will never be a money-maker.

GUPTA: This really does keep you up, doesn't it?

KLEINERMAN: Oh, yes, of course.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA: Really remarkable, Carol. You know, Allie remains cancer free, and she is doing well. But no one knows what's going to happen for another patient that comes in with Ewing's Sarcoma after these drugs run out.

COSTELLO: Well, this makes me really angry. My brother died of Ewing's Sarcoma when he was 25. So when you talk about how rare it is...

GUPTA: Sorry, Carol.

COSTELLO: It doesn't really matter when you have a family member who has it. So I have a couple of questions. Is there anything you can do? Because, you know, the drug -- it just seems cruel.

GUPTA: Yes. You know, and we -- I think everybody feels the same way. It's really one of these things that sort of boggles the mind. Couple things. There is something called the Orphan Drug Act. This was actually from federal government to try and create drugs for diseases that affect less than 200,000 people in the United States.

But what we found as we sort of explored this was the pharmaceutical companies, even with these federal incentives, don't always want to make these drug. So maybe there needs to be improvements and amendments to the Orphan Drug Act.

But, you know, I'm sorry to hear about your brother, but this is the reality right now with some of these medications.

COSTELLO: I mean, I'm shaking I'm so mad. Another thing, clinical trials. We had no idea that these drugs existed. So how do you find out something like that? Because he may have been saved.

GUPTA: And there is better ways of doing that now, Carol. There is a Web site, for example -- this is pretty simple. It's called cancer.gov/clinicaltrials. You can go to this Web site, you can punch in the kind of cancer that you have and you can find out about clinical trials that are going on at places like M.D. Anderson or places that are, perhaps, closer to you as well.

And it's important for people to know about this because, when you're given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, this is an option for you if you're someone who wants to fight.

COSTELLO: All right. You're going to have a special on, too, this weekend that I hope will get the message out to a lot of people.

GUPTA: Carol, we're going to tell stories of people like your brother. We're going to honor them, I think, with this special and talk about where we've come in this fight against cancer. You know, it was 35 years ago they declared war. Where are we? I think the stories are going to be uplifting, optimistic, more so than people think -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Thank you, Sanjay. Appreciate it.

GUPTA: Thank you.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0508/12/ltm.02.html

Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00

guess this article is the genesis of the new whipping post. i hope everything clears itself up.

here is the key paragraph in this article:

The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger
report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn"
cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta
arrived in the United States. The former intelligence
official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow
and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission
staff about Able Danger when they visited the
Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/politics/09intel.html
?ei=5094&en=8cdd39c879100274&hp=&ex=1123646400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print


The New York Times
August 9, 2005
Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 - More than a year before the Sept. 11
attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence
unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future
hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating
in the United States, according to a former defense
intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

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

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

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

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

Mr. Weldon first spoke publicly about the episode in June,
in a little-noticed speech on the House floor and in an
interview with The Times-Herald in Norristown, Pa. The
matter resurfaced on Monday in a report by GSN: Government
Security News, which is published every two weeks and
covers domestic-security issues. The GSN report was based
on accounts provided by Mr. Weldon and the same former
intelligence official, who was interviewed on Monday by The
New York Times in Mr. Weldon's office.

In a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr.
Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones by
at least three other former intelligence officers with
direct knowledge of the project, and said that some had
first called the episode to his attention shortly after the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The account is the first assertion that Mr. Atta, an
Egyptian who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was
identified by any American government agency as a potential
threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers,
only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been
identified as potential threats by the Central Intelligence
Agency before the summer of 2000, and information about
them was not provided to the F.B.I. until the spring of
2001.

Mr. Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of
data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work of the
Able Danger team.

The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of
anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political
support and the possible financing for future data-mining
operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been
established by the Special Operations Command in 1999,
under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton,
then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble
information about Al Qaeda networks around the world.

"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers
options for taking out Al Qaeda targets," the former
defense intelligence official said.

He said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the
Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and
said that it had been based on information from
unclassified sources and government records, including
those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something
about them," the former intelligence official said.

The unit, which relied heavily on data-mining techniques,
was modeled after those first established by Army
intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment
Center, now known as the Information Dominance Center, at
Fort Belvoir, Va., the official said.

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

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

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

In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been
aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11
attack, when members of the team first brought it to his
attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the
deputy national security adviser, about it in a
conversation in September or October 2001, and had been
surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no
mention of the operation.

Col. Samuel Taylor, a spokesman for the military's Special
Operations Command, said no one at the command now had any
knowledge of the Able Danger program, its mission or its
findings. If the program existed, Colonel Taylor said, it
was probably a highly classified "special access program"
on which only a few military personnel would have been
briefed.

During the interview in Mr. Weldon's office, the former
defense intelligence official showed a floor-sized chart
depicting Al Qaeda networks around the world that he said
was a larger, more detailed version similar to the one
prepared by the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000.

He said the original chart, like the new one, had included
the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi,
as well as Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi, who were identified
as members of what was described as an American-based
"Brooklyn" cell, as one of five such Al Qaeda cells around
the world.

The official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term
of art rather than to be interpreted literally, saying that
the unit had produced no firm evidence linking the men to
the borough of New York City but that a computer analysis
seeking to establish patterns in links between the four men
had found that "the software put them all together in
Brooklyn."

According to the commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr.
Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the
C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a
terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to
Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither
man was put on a State Department watch list before they
flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not
warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts
to track them were made until August 2001.

Neither Mr. Shehhi nor Mr. Atta was identified by the
American intelligence agencies as a potential threat, the
commission report said. Mr. Shehhi arrived in Newark on a
flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000, and Mr. Atta arrived
in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.

The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger
report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn"
cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta
arrived in the United States. The former intelligence
official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow
and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission
staff about Able Danger when they visited the
Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.

The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a
member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the
staff encouraged him to call the commission when he
returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did
so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.

Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman,
said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former
staff members who participated in the briefing.

"They all say that they were not told anything about a
Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about
the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the
Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned
anything that startling, it would have gotten their
attention."

As a result of the briefing, he said, the commission staff
filed document requests with the Pentagon for information
about the program. The Pentagon complied, he said, adding
that the staff had not hidden anything from the
commissioners.

"The commissioners were certainly told of the document
requests and what the findings were," Mr. Felzenberg said.

Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for
this article.


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Siberia's rapid thaw causes alarm

it's not well publicized by the left media, but pluto, neptune, saturn, mars, earth and venus are all experiencing global warming. so we, the solar system, are experiencing "system" warming. the EQ prior to last december's tsunami, is an indicator of heat WITHIN the earth escaping, AND contributing to global warming. in addition to siberia, yellowstone is a prime example of gases escaping at a large UNMONITORED rate into the atmosphere.

in my purely uneducated opinion, global warming might be good considering that the earth is under "attack" from the sun's solar flares. perhaps this earth system is instinctively regenerating it's atmospheric layer system on a level which present science doesn't understand. after all, the earth is inside a massive cycle, of which, science has only intelligently monitored 50 years or so.

mankind is not the be all and end all of this planet. yes, we're contributing to GW, but to think that mankind is the only contributor, is egocentric.

- - - - -


Siberia's rapid thaw causes alarm

The whole western Siberian sub-Arctic region has started to thaw


The world's largest frozen peat bog is melting, which could speed the rate of global warming, New Scientist reports.

The huge expanse of western Siberia is thawing for the first time since its formation, 11,000 years ago.

The area, which is the size of France and Germany combined, could release billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

This could potentially act as a tipping point, causing global warming to snowball, scientists fear.

The situation is an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming," researcher Sergei Kirpotin, of Tomsk State University, Russia, told New Scientist magazine.

The whole western Siberian sub-Arctic region has started to thaw, he added, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

Warming fast

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere on the planet, with average temperatures increasing by about 3C in the last 40 years.

The warming is believed to be due to a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical atmospheric phenomenon known as the Arctic oscillation and feedbacks caused by melting ice.


When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable
David Viner, climate scientist
The 11,000-year-old bogs contain billions of tonnes of methane, most of which has been trapped in permafrost and deeper ice-like structures called clathrates.

But if the bogs melt, there is a big risk their hefty methane load could be dumped into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming.

Scientists have reacted with alarm at the finding, warning that future global temperature predictions may have to be revised.

"When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable," David Viner, of the University of East Anglia, UK, told the Guardian newspaper. "There are no brakes you can apply.

"This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."

The intergovernmental panel on climate change speculated in 2001 that global temperatures would rise between 1.4C and 5.8C between 1990 and 2100.

However these estimates only considered global warming sparked by known greenhouse gas emissions.

"These positive feedbacks with landmasses weren't known about then," Dr Viner said. "They had no idea how much they would add to global warming."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4141348.stm

Why great minds can't grasp consciousness

MSNBC.com

Why great minds can't grasp consciousness
Subject no longer just for philosophers and mystics, but remains a mystery
By Ker Than
LiveScience
Updated: 3:42 p.m. ET Aug. 8, 2005

At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. Nestled among queries about black holes and the nature of dark matter and dark energy were questions that wandered beyond the traditional bounds of physics to venture into areas typically associated with the life sciences.

One of the Gross's questions involved human consciousness.

He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature is an example of a phase transition.

In a recent email interview, Gross said he figures there are probably many different levels of consciousness, but he believes that language is a crucial factor distinguishing the human variety from that of animals.

Gross isn't the only physicist with ideas about consciousness.

Beyond the mystics
Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness.

Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.

It wasn't that long ago that the study of consciousness was considered to be too abstract, too subjective or too difficult to study scientifically. But in recent years, it has emerged as one of the hottest new fields in biology, similar to string theory in physics or the search for extraterrestrial life in astronomy.

No longer the sole purview of philosophers and mystics, consciousness is now attracting the attention of scientists from across a variety of different fields, each, it seems, with their own theories about what consciousness is and how it arises from the brain.

In many religions, consciousness is closely tied to the ancient notion of the soul, the idea that in each of us, there exists an immaterial essence that survives death and perhaps even predates birth. It was believed that the soul was what allowed us to think and feel, remember and reason.

Our personality, our individuality and our humanity were all believed to originate from the soul.

Nowadays, these things are generally attributed to physical processes in the brain, but exactly how chemical and electrical signals between trillions of brain cells called neurons are transformed into thoughts, emotions and a sense of self is still unknown.

"Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what's in the brain and consciousness," says David Chalmers, a philosophy professor and Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. "The question is what kind of explanation that will give you. We want more than correlation, we want explanation -- how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That's the big mystery."

Just accept it
Chalmers is best known for distinguishing between the 'easy' problems of consciousness and the 'hard' problem.

The easy problems are those that deal with functions and behaviors associated with consciousness and include questions such as these: How does perception occur? How does the brain bind different kinds of sensory information together to produce the illusion of a seamless experience?

"Those are what I call the easy problems, not because they're trivial, but because they fall within the standard methods of the cognitive sciences," Chalmers says.

The hard problem for Chalmers is that of subjective experience.

"You have a different kind of experience -- a different quality of experience -- when you see red, when you see green, when you hear middle C, when you taste chocolate," Chalmers told LiveScience. "Whenever you're conscious, whenever you have a subjective experience, it feels like something."

According to Chalmers, the subjective nature of consciousness prevents it from being explained in terms of simpler components, a method used to great success in other areas of science. He believes that unlike most of the physical world, which can be broken down into individual atoms, or organisms, which can be understood in terms of cells, consciousness is an irreducible aspect of the universe, like space and time and mass.

"Those things in a way didn't need to evolve," said Chalmers. "They were part of the fundamental furniture of the world all along."

Instead of trying to reduce consciousness to something else, Chalmers believes consciousness should simply be taken for granted, the way that space and time and mass are in physics. According to this view, a theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about this idea, however.

'Not very helpful'
"It's not very helpful," said Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University.

"You can't do very much with it," Greenfield points out. "It's the last resort, because what can you possibly do with that idea? You can't prove it or disprove it, and you can't test it. It doesn't offer an explanation, or any enlightenment, or any answers about why people feel the way they feel."

Greenfield's own theory of consciousness is influenced by her experience working with drugs and mental diseases. Unlike some other scientists -- most notably the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and his colleague David Koch, a professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech -- who believed that different aspects of consciousness like visual awareness are encoded by specific neurons, Greenfield thinks that consciousness involves large groups of nonspecialized neurons scattered throughout the brain.

Important for Greenfield's theory is a distinction between 'consciousness' and 'mind,' terms that she says many of her colleagues use interchangeably, but which she believes are two entirely different concepts.

"You talk about losing your mind or blowing your mind or being out of your mind, but those things don't necessarily entail a loss of consciousness," Greenfield said in a telephone interview. "Similarly, when you lose your consciousness, when you go to sleep at night or when you're anesthetized, you don't really think that you're really going to be losing your mind."

Like the wetness of water
According to Greenfield, the mind is made up of the physical connections between neurons. These connections evolve slowly and are influenced by our past experiences and therefore, everyone's brain is unique.

But whereas the mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, Greenfield believes that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass, both of which are properties that are the result of -- that is, they emerge from -- the actions of individual molecules.

For Greenfield, a conscious experience occurs when a stimulus -- either external, like a sensation, or internal, like a thought or a memory -- triggers a chain reaction within the brain. Like in an earthquake, each conscious experience has an epicenter, and ripples from that epicenter travels across the brain, recruiting neurons as they go.

Mind and consciousness are connected in Greenfield's theory because the strength of a conscious experience is determined by the mind and the strength of its existing neuronal connections -- connections forged from past experiences.

Part of the mystery and excitement about consciousness is that scientists don't know what form the final answer will take.

"If I said to you I'd solved the hard problem, you wouldn't be able to guess whether it would be a formula, a model, a sensation, or a drug," said Greenfield. "What would I be giving you?"
© 2005 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8873364/

Military Drafts War Plans for Terrorist Attacks on US soil

Proof that the Pentagon could take over the USA, if necessary.

- - - - - -

August 8, 2005
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post

COLORADO SPRINGS -- The US military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to officers who drafted the plans.

The classified plans, developed here at Northern Command headquarters, outline a variety of possible roles for quick-reaction forces estimated at as many as 3,000 ground troops per attack, a number that could easily grow depending on the extent of the damage and the abilities of civilian response teams.

The possible scenarios range from ''low end," relatively modest crowd-control missions to ''high-end," full-scale disaster management after catastrophic attacks such as the release of a deadly biological agent or the explosion of a radiological device, several officers said.

Some of the worst-case scenarios involve three attacks at the same time, in keeping with a Pentagon directive earlier this year to plan for multiple simultaneous attacks.

The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Defense officials continue to emphasize that they intend for the troops to play a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters, and other civilian response groups.

But the new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks that could quickly overwhelm civilian resources.

''In my estimation, [in the event of] a biological, a chemical or nuclear attack in any of the 50 states, the Department of Defense is best positioned -- of the various eight federal agencies that would be involved -- to take the lead," said Admiral Timothy J. Keating, the head of Northcom, which coordinates military involvement in homeland security operations.

The plans present the Pentagon with a clearer idea of the kinds and numbers of troops and the training that might be required to build a more credible homeland defense force. They come at a time when senior Pentagon officials are engaged in an internal, yearlong review of force levels and weapons systems, attempting to balance the heightened requirements of homeland defense against the heavy demands of overseas deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Keating expressed confidence that existing military assets are sufficient to meet homeland security needs. Major General Richard J. Rowe, Northcom's chief operations officer, agreed, but he added that ''stress points" in some military capabilities probably would result if troops were called on to deal with multiple homeland attacks.

Several people on the staff here and at the Pentagon said in interviews that the debate and analysis within the US government regarding the extent of the homeland threat and the resources necessary to guard against it remain far from resolved.

Pentagon authorities have rejected the idea of creating large standing units dedicated to homeland missions. Instead, they favor a ''dual use" approach, drawing on a common pool of troops trained both for homeland and overseas assignments.

Particular reliance is being placed on the National Guard, which is expanding a network of 22-member civil support teams to all states and forming about a dozen 120-member regional response units. Congress last year also gave the Guard expanded authority under Title 32 of the US Code to perform such homeland missions as securing power plants and other critical facilities.

The Northcom commander can also quickly call on active-duty forces. On top of previous powers to send fighter jets into the air, Keating earlier this year gained the authority to dispatch Navy and Coast Guard ships to deal with suspected threats off US coasts. He has immediate access to four active-duty Army battalions based around the country, officers here said.

Nonetheless, when it comes to ground forces possibly taking a lead role in homeland operations, senior Northcom officers remain reluctant to discuss specifics. Keating said such situations, if they arise, probably would be temporary.

Military exercises code-named Vital Archer, which involve troops in lead roles, are shrouded in secrecy. Other homeland exercises featuring troops in supporting roles are widely publicized.

Civil liberties groups have warned that the military's expanded involvement in homeland defense could bump up against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of troops in domestic law enforcement. But Pentagon authorities have told Congress they see no need to change the law.

According to military lawyers here, the dispatch of ground troops would most likely be justified on the basis of the president's authority under Article 2 of the Constitution to serve as commander in chief and protect the nation. The Posse Comitatus Act exempts actions authorized by the Constitution.

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com:80/news/nation/articles/2005/08/08/military_drafts_war_plans_for_terrorist_attacks

Remains of Ancient Church Found in Egypt

Remains of Ancient Church Found in Egypt

Sat Aug 6,10:32 PM ET

The remains of an ancient church and monks' retreats that
date back to the early years of monasticism have been
discovered in a Coptic Christian monastery in the Red Sea
area, officials said Saturday.

Workers from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities found
the ruins while restoring the foundations of the Apostles
Church at St. Anthony's Monastery. The remains are about 2
or 2 1/2 yards underground, said the head of the council,
Zahi Hawass.

The monastery, which is in the desert west of the Red Sea,
was founded by disciples of St. Anthony, a hermit who died
in A.D. 356 and is regarded as the father of Christian
monasticism. A colony of hermits settled around him and he
led them in a community.

The remains include the column bases of a mud-brick church
and two-room hermitages.

The remains of a small oven and a stove for food were found
in one hermitage room, Hawass said. Another room had Coptic
writing on the walls and a small mud-brick basin.

"These hermitages are the oldest in Egypt and they cast
light on the history of monasticism in Egypt," Abdullah
Kamel, the head of the council's Islamic and Coptic
Antiquities department, told The Associated Press.

Kamel could not offer a precise date for the hermitages.

Christians account for an estimated 10 percent of Egypt's
population and belong mainly to the Coptic Church, an
Orthodox church that traces its origins to St. Mark.

Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press.

The United States Secret Proposal to the U.N.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05210/545823.stm

Why the US wants to end link between time and sun
Friday, July 29, 2005
By Keith J. Winstein, The Wall Street Journal


What time is it when the clock strikes half past 62?
Time to change the way we measure time, according to a U.S. government proposal that businesses favor, astronomers abominate and Britain sees as a threat to its venerable standard, Greenwich Mean Time.
Word of the U.S. proposal, made secretly to a United Nations body, began leaking to scientists earlier this month. The plan would simplify the world's timekeeping by making each day last exactly 24 hours. Right now, that's not always the case.
Because the moon's gravity has been slowing down the Earth, it takes slightly longer than 24 hours for the world to rotate completely on its axis. The difference is tiny, but every few years a group that helps regulate global timekeeping, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, tells governments, telecom companies, satellite operators and others to add in an extra second to all clocks to keep them in sync. The adjustment is made on New Year's Eve or the last day of June.
But adding these ad hoc "leap seconds" -- the last one was tacked on in 1998 -- can be a big hassle for computers operating with software programs that never allowed for a 61-second minute, leading to glitches when the extra second passes. "It's a huge deal," said John Yuzdepski, an executive at Symmetricom Inc., of San Jose, Calif., which makes ultraprecise clocks for telecommunications, space and military use.
On Jan. 1, 1996, the addition of a leap second made computers at Associated Press Radio crash and start broadcasting the wrong taped programs. In 1997, the Russian global positioning system, known as Glonass, was broken for 20 hours after a transmission to the country's satellites to add a leap second went awry. And in 2003, a leap-second bug made GPS receivers from Motorola Inc. briefly show customers the time as half past 62 o'clock.
"A lot of people encounter problems with their software going over a leap second," said Dennis D. McCarthy, who drafted the U.S. leap-second proposal while serving as the Navy's "Director of Time." Because of these problems, the U.S. government last year quietly proposed abolishing leap seconds to the International Telecommunications Union, the U.N. body that tells the Earth Rotation Service how to keep time.
"Safety of life is an issue," said William Klepczynski, a senior analyst at the State Department in favor of the U.S. proposal, who asserts that programmers who ignore the need to add leap seconds present a "risk to air travel in the future" because a glitch might shut down traffic-control systems.
Eliminating leap seconds will make sextants and sundials slowly become inaccurate, but supporters say that's OK now that the satellite-supported GPS can give exact longitude and latitude bearings to anyone with a receiver. Sailors "don't navigate with the stars any longer," said Dr. McCarthy.
But the U.S. proposal, which an ITU committee will consider in November, has upset some of the most powerful people in timekeeping -- including the Earth Rotation Service's leap-second chief, Daniel Gambis, of the Paris Observatory. "As an astronomer, I think time should follow the Earth," Dr. Gambis said in an interview. He calls the American effort a "coup de force," or power play, and an "intrusion on the scientific dialogue." A 2002 survey of his subscribers found that 90 percent were content to keep leap seconds, he said.
On July 5, Dr. Gambis sent an email out to those timekeepers, tipping them off about the U.S. proposal, which would end leap seconds starting in 2007. Dr. Gambis urged email recipients to contact their countries' ITU delegations.
This has set off a wave of passionate opposition from astronomers, who argue that removing the link between time and the sun would require making changes to telescopes, changes that would cost between $10,000 and $500,000 per facility. That's because a fancy telescope uses the exact time and the Earth's position for aiming purposes when astronomers tell it to point at a specific star.
"We should not so blithely discard the ties between our clocks and the rotation of the Earth," wrote Rob Seaman, a programmer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatories in Tucson, Ariz. Jean Meeus, an influential Belgian astronomer, called the U.S. proposal "a disaster for classical astronomy" and a "dirty trick."
The U.S. effort to abolish leap seconds is also firmly opposed by Britain, which would further lose status as the center of time. From 1884 to 1961, the world set its official clocks to Greenwich Mean Time, based on the actual rise and set of the stars as seen from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, just outside London.
When countries moved to the current Coordinated Universal Time, which uses extremely precise atomic clocks, they agreed to insert leap seconds in order to keep the official time within one second of the old Greenwich time. Even though Big Ben -- and the time broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corp. -- now follow Coordinated Universal Time, Parliament has declined to change the country's official standard away from Greenwich time, which remains a point of English pride.
Abandoning leap seconds would force the issue and make the world slowly drift away from Greenwich time. So Britain's science minister, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, decided in April, during Tony Blair's re-election campaign, to oppose the U.S. proposal. "It could have been used to attack the government," said Peter Whibberley, a scientist who represents Britain to the ITU. "People regard GMT with some sensitivity," he said. "It gets tied up with the general anti-Europe feeling."
Ending leap seconds would make the sun start rising later and later by the clock -- a few seconds later each decade. To compensate, the U.S. has proposed adding in a "leap hour" every 500 to 600 years, which also accounts for the fact that the Earth's rotation is expected to slow down even further. That would be no more disruptive than the annual switch to daylight-saving time, said Ronald Beard of the Naval Research Laboratory, who chairs the ITU's special committee on leap seconds and favors their abolishment. "It's not like someone's going to be going to school at four in the afternoon or something," he said.
For now, U.S. officials still regard their proposal as secret, despite Dr. Gambis's email and the public comments. The head of America's delegation to the ITU's timing committee, D. Wayne Hanson of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, declined to take calls on the matter. Through a spokeswoman, he said that the U.S. proposal is a private matter internal to the ITU and not for public discussion.
That secrecy outrages the astronomers, who complain that there is no reason to make the change by 2007, especially when many telescopes will have to be upgraded. The State Department's Dr. Klepczynski argues that it's better to eliminate possible computer bugs before an accident happens. "Some people are afraid to act on prevention," he said.
The astronomers are not convinced. "If your navigation system causes two planes to crash because of a one-second error, you have worse problems than leap seconds," said Steve Allen, a University of California astronomer who maintains a Web site about leap seconds.
Deep down, though, the opposition is more about philosophy than cost. Should the convenience of lazy computer programmers triumph over the rising of the sun? To the government, which worries about safety more than astronomy, the answer is yes. In Mr. Allen's view, absolutely not. "Time has basically always really meant what you measure when you put a stick in the ground and look at its shadow," he said.

Hidden black holes located in gravity wells

Hidden black holes finally located in many undetected gravity wells
By Robert Roy Britt, Senior Science Writer, posted: 07 August 2005,
07:24 a.m. ET


A host of hidden black holes have been revealed in a narrow region of
the sky, confirming astronomers' suspicions that the universe is loaded
with many undetected gravity wells.

Black holes cannot be seen directly, because they trap light and
anything else that gets too close. But astronomers infer their presence
by noting the behavior of material nearby: gas is superheated and
accelerated to a significant fraction of light-speed just before it is
consumed.
The activity releases X-rays that escape the black hole's clutches and
reveal its presence.

The most active black holes eat so voraciously that they create a
colossal cloud of gas and dust around them, through which astronomers
cannot peer. That sometimes prevents observations of the region nearest
the black hole, making it impossible to verify what's actually there.

These hyperactive black holes are called quasars. They can consume the
mass of a thousand stars a year and are thought to be precursers to
large, normal galaxies. The exist primarily at great distances, seen as
they existed when the universe was young.

A few quasars have been identified, but many more are thought to await
discovery, based on the total number of X-rays detected in broad sky
surveys.
"From past studies using X-rays, we expected there were a lot of hidden
quasars, but we couldn't find them," said study leader Alejo
Martínez-Sansigre of the University of Oxford, England.

New observations with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope cut through dust to
spot quasars blocked by their own clouds, as well as other quasars
hidden inside galactic dust. Spitzer records infrared light, which
penetrates dust. It found 21 quasars in a small patch of sky.

"If you extrapolate our 21 quasars out to the rest of the sky, you get a
whole lot of quasars," said study team member Mark Lacy of the Spitzer
Science Center at the California Institute of Technology. "This means
that, as suspected, most super-massive black hole growth is hidden by
dust."

The results are detailed in the Aug. 4 issue of the journal Nature.
-----------------------------------------
© 1999-2005 Imaginova Corp. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

CAFTA Passes: Tricks and Consequences

CAFTA Passes: Dirty Tricks and Devastating Consequences

Scott Ritsema/Prison Planet | August 3 2005

This past week, CAFTA passed the House of Representatives by a 217-215 vote. This vote, especially on the Republican side of the isle, does not reflect the views of the American people or the U.S. Constitution. Even many Rush Limbaugh listeners have called in to voice their strong opposition to this so-called “free trade agreement.” In fact, one poll suggests that half of the country’s Republican voters opposed CAFTA! Why, then, did roughly 80% of Congressional Republicans favor it? But we all know that the Washington insiders are completely out of touch with the American people and the Constitution. So, let’s turn our attention to so-called “free trade agreements” and what they are all about, as well as how CAFTA was actually passed.

CAFTA and NAFTA are not simply agreements; rather, they set up authorities that trump federal, state, and local laws and constitutions. When our elected officials signed CAFTA into law, they signed over a piece of our sovereignty. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress and only Congress the power to regulate trade. NAFTA, on the other hand, sets up a tribunal to rule on all maters of trade. For example, one dispute between the state of Massachusetts and a Canadian real estate company was decided in the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The NAFTA tribunal, however, had different things in mind, and overruled the previous court decision. So, these are unconstitutional decision-making, power-wielding bodies that have no business in American affairs.

CAFTA and NAFTA will not/have not improved economic conditions in America; rather, they have (coupled with intrusive government) decimated the manufacturing base of many communities. Ask any American who lives in a community that has lost manufacturing jobs to Mexico, and you will likely get the same strong condemnation of NAFTA. NAFTA has clearly hurt the American economy. Our trade deficit is growing and our manufacturing base is disappearing. Not to mention the often-neglected fact that having foreign nations manufacturing all our goods is a national security risk. CAFTA will do the very same things to our economy that NAFTA has done.

CAFTA and NAFTA are not simply about economics; rather, they are about open borders and political union as part of the New World Order. As has been hidden in plain sight by the CFR, the economic union is only a stepping stone to the long-dreamed of political union. The stones are as follows: NAFTA then CAFTA then the FTAA then the Pan-American Union (and a regionalized world) then the UN or the New World Order (world government). The massive amounts of evidence supporting this assertion needs its own article. Suffice it to say that the CFR globalists have been open about their plans as well as their strategies, seeking to make an “end-run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece” (Richard Gardner, CFR; in his piece “The Hard Road to World Order” in a 1974 issue of Foreign Affairs, the CFR’s publication).

Finally, CAFTA was not passed fairly by the House; rather, immoral scheming got the CAFTA vote through. The Republicans, who are supposedly the “moral values” party, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The CAFTA vote was stolen, and is a total sham. As Kent Snyder of the Liberty Committee noted, CAFTA was defeated after its allotted 15-minute vote window. Unhappy with the results, the House broke the rules by keeping the vote alive for another hour. At the end of that vote, CAFTA had passed. Or did it? One of the two Congressmen who supposedly abstained from voting, North Carolina Republican, Charles Taylor, did vote “no” on CAFTA, but for some reason his vote didn’t show up on the register.

In sum, CAFTA and NAFTA are surrounded by lies, misunderstandings, and misinformation on all sides. The average American, though, senses the danger in these phony free trade agreements. And, the Constitution prohibits them. It’s time for a wake up call in Congress.
----------------------------------

U.S. Sovereignty; Slip-Sliding Away

U.S. Sovereignty; Slip-Sliding Away
Posted: August 6, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Henry Lamb © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

It began in 1994. All the attention was focused on the new WTO emerging from the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations. Little attention was paid to the Summit of the Americas meeting in Miami. The assembled ministers agreed to create a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and that it would be completed by January 2005, entering into force by December 2005.

For ten years, 34 governments have been conducting negotiating sessions throughout the Americas, fashioning a new trade agreement that will swallow up both NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and, quite literally, much of the U.S. Constitution.

The final draft agreement addresses every aspect of trade in the Western Hemisphere and requires that every dimension of the agreement be "WTO compliant." Chapter II contains two provisions that should disqualify the document immediately from any serious consideration by the U.S. Congress.

Article 4.2 contains this language:

4.2. The Parties shall ensure that their laws, regulations and administrative procedures are consistent with the obligations of this Agreement. The rights and obligations under this Agreement are the same for all the Parties, whether Federal or unitary States, including the different levels and branches of government. ... This language requires that existing laws – at every level of government – be conformed to the requirements of the agreement. It requires that all future laws conform as well. The effect of this agreement takes away law-making power from duly elected representatives of the people and gives it to unelected bureaucrats, most of whom represent foreign nations.

This language is consistent with the WTO, NAFTA and CAFTA, all of which were approved by Congress. Both NAFTA and the WTO have required revisions of dozens of domestic laws. CAFTA will do the same, and the FTAA will continue to take away laws that the peoples' representatives have enacted.

This process is transforming the meaning of national sovereignty. Article 3(g) stipulates that the agreement is governed by the principles of "sovereign equality." This is a term that arises from the 1995 publication of "Our Global Neighborhood," the report of the U.N.-funded Commission on Global Governance. In Chapter II, under the heading Democracy and Legitimacy (page 66), a lengthy discussion proclaims that the concept of national sovereignty must be revised. Ideas are introduced such as:

"... countries are having to accept that in certain fields, sovereignty has to be executed collectively ..." (page 70) "... there is a need to weigh a state's right to autonomy against its people's right to security." (page 71)

"It is time to think about self-determination in the emerging context of a global neighborhood rather than the traditional context of a world of separate states." (page 337)

Thus, the concept of "sovereign equality" emerges to replace the concept of national sovereignty.

National sovereignty embraces the belief that every nation has equal sovereignty – independent and supreme authority over its territory. "Sovereign equality," on the other hand, is the belief that every nation has equal sovereign authority – under a common, or collective, supreme authority. The FTAA represents this supreme authority in the Western Hemisphere, in much the same way as the European Union seeks to become the supreme authority in Europe, both of which are subservient to the WTO, which functions within the United Nations' family of international organizations.

These two provisions alone should be enough to scrap this agreement. The negotiators have accepted this language, as has the administration. Congress is the only hope Americans have to reject this entangling agreement. Congressmen will not read this language, however. They will listen, instead, to the lobbyists, the arm-twisting messengers from the administration and editorials from the major media.

They will be told that the agreement is an expansion of free trade and that failure to approve the agreement will label the U.S. as isolationist, a rebel in the global neighborhood. These arguments have been successful with NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO. Ordinary people know better.

Ordinary people still have time to be heard on this agreement. Ordinary people elect these representatives, and politicians are dependent upon them for re-election. Ordinary people are the only power on earth greater than the power of the U.S. government. If ordinary people fail to defend their freedom, no one will defend it for them.

The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas is an extraordinary erosion of freedom, for this nation and for every citizen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International.

Are Earth ice ages created by stars?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/234872_ice02.html

Are Earth ice ages created by stars?
Researchers link solar system travel, terrestrial climate

By KEAY DAVIDSON
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

It might sound preposterous, like astrology, to suggest that galactic events help
determine when North America is or isn't buried under immense sheets of ice taller than
skyscrapers.

But new research suggests that the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly
from our solar system's passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in
the Milky Way galaxy.

Resembling the curved contrails of a whirling Fourth of July pinwheel, the Milky Way's
spiral arms are clouds of stars rich in supernovas, or exploding stars. Supernovas emit
showers of charged particles called cosmic rays.

Theorists have proposed that when our solar system passes through a spiral arm, the
cosmic rays fall to Earth and knock electrons off atoms in the atmosphere, making them
electrically charged, or ionized. Since opposite electrical charges attract each other, the
positively charged ionized particles attract the negatively charged portion of water vapor,
thus forming large droplets in the form of low-lying clouds.

In turn, the clouds cool the climate and trigger an ice age -- or so theorists suggest.

In that regard, researchers are finding correlations between the timing of Earth's ice
ages and epochs when our solar system passed through galactic spiral arms.

The latest evidence appears in a recent issue of Astrophysical Journal. The article is
the result of an unusual collaboration between an astronomer, professor Douglas Gies of
Georgia State University's Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy, and a 16-year-old
student at Grady High School in Atlanta, John Helsel. They report the results of their
effort to determine how the sun has moved through the galaxy over the last half-billion
years.

By making a variety of assumptions about the rate of solar motion and the distribution of
spiral arms in the galaxy -- which are difficult to map because galactic dust and
foreground stars get in the way -- Gies and Helsel conclude that "the sun has traversed four
spiral arms at times that appear to correspond well with long-duration cold periods on
Earth."

"This," they continue, "supports the idea that extended exposure to the higher cosmic-ray
flux associated with spiral arms can lead to increased cloud cover and long ice age
epochs on Earth."

Gies and Helsel's article is the long-term result of a project that Helsel began working
on "as a science fair project," Gies said. Gies, 50, is a neighbor of Helsel's.

Gies had previously "developed a scheme to model the motion of some massive stars in the
galaxy," and when Helsel approached him for guidance on the science fair project, their
"conversation quickly focused on studying the sun's motion and encounters with spiral arms
in the galaxy."

The Physics of Interstellar Travel

http://www.mkaku.org/articles/physics_of_space_travel.shtml

The Physics of Interstellar Travel
To one day, reach the stars.
By Michio Kaku

When discussing the possibility of interstellar travel, there is something called “the
giggle factor.” Some scientists tend to scoff at the idea of interstellar travel because of
the enormous distances that separate the stars. According to Special Relativity (1905),
no usable information can travel faster than light locally, and hence it would take
centuries to millennia for an extra-terrestrial civilization to travel between the stars. Even
the familiar stars we see at night are about 50 to 100 light years from us, and our
galaxy is 100,000 light years across. The nearest galaxy is 2 million light years from us. The
critics say that the universe is simply too big for interstellar travel to be practical.

Similarly, investigations into UFO's that may originate from another planet are sometimes
the “third rail” of someone's scientific career. There is no funding for anyone seriously
looking at unidentified objects in space, and one's reputation may suffer if one pursues
an interest in these unorthodox matters. In addition, perhaps 99% of all sightings of
UFO's can be dismissed as being caused by familiar phenomena, such as the planet Venus,
swamp gas (which can glow in the dark under certain conditions), meteors, satellites, weather
balloons, even radar echoes that bounce off mountains. (What is disturbing, to a
physicist however, is the remaining 1% of these sightings, which are multiple sightings made by
multiple methods of observations. Some of the most intriguing sightings have been made by
seasoned pilots and passengers aboard air line flights which have also been tracked by
radar and have been videotaped. Sightings like this are harder to dismiss.)

But to an astronomer, the existence of intelligent life in the universe is a compelling
idea by itself, in which extra-terrestrial beings may exist on other stars who are
centuries to millennia more advanced than ours. Within the Milky Way galaxy alone, there are
over 100 billion stars, and there are an uncountable number of galaxies in the universe.
About half of the stars we see in the heavens are double stars, probably making them
unsuitable for intelligent life, but the remaining half probably have solar systems somewhat
similar to ours. Although none of the over 100 extra-solar planets so far discovered in deep
space resemble ours, it is inevitable, many scientists believe, that one day we will
discover small, earth-like planets which have liquid water (the “universal solvent” which
made possible the first DNA perhaps 3.5 billion years ago in the oceans). The discovery of
earth-like planets may take place within 20 years, when NASA intends to launch the space
interferometry
satellite into orbit which may be sensitive enough to detect small planets orbiting
other stars.

So far, we see no hard evidence of signals from extra-terrestrial civilizations from any
earth-like planet. The SETI project (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) has
yet to produce any reproducible evidence of intelligent life in the universe from such
earth-like planets, but the matter still deserves serious scientific analysis. The key is to
reanalyze the objection to faster-than-light travel.

A critical look at this issue must necessary embrace two new observations. First, Special
Relativity itself was superceded by Einstein's own more powerful General Relativity
(1915), in which faster than light travel is possible under certain rare conditions. The
principal difficulty is amassing enough energy of a certain type to break the light barrier.
Second, one must therefore analyze extra-terrestrial civilizations on the basis of their
total energy output and the laws of thermodynamics. In this respect, one must analyze
civilizations which are perhaps thousands to millions of years ahead of ours.

The first realistic attempt to analyze extra-terrestrial civilizations from the point of
view of the laws of physics and the laws of thermodynamics was by Russian astrophysicist
Nicolai Kardashev. He based his ranking of possible civilizations on the basis of total
energy output which could be quantified and used as a guide to explore the dynamics of
advanced civilizations:

Type I: this civilization harnesses the energy output of an entire planet.

Type II: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a star, and generates about 10
billion times the energy output of a Type I civilization.

Type III: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a galaxy, or about 10 billion
time the energy output of a Type II civilization.

A Type I civilization would be able to manipulate truly planetary energies. They might,
for example, control or modify their weather. They would have the power to manipulate
planetary phenomena, such as hurricanes, which can release the energy of hundreds of hydrogen
bombs. Perhaps volcanoes or even earthquakes may be altered by such a civilization.

A Type II civilization may resemble the Federation of Planets seen on the TV program Star
Trek (which is capable of igniting stars and has colonized a tiny fraction of the near-by
stars in the galaxy). A Type II civilization might be able to manipulate the power of
solar flares.

A Type III civilization may resemble the Borg, or perhaps the Empire found in the Star
Wars saga. They have colonized the galaxy itself, extracting energy from hundreds of
billions of stars.

By contrast, we are a Type 0 civilization, which extracts its energy from dead plants
(oil and coal). Growing at the average rate of about 3% per year, however, one may calculate
that our own civilization may attain Type I status in about 100-200 years, Type II status
in a few thousand years, and Type III status in about 100,000 to a million years. These
time scales are insignificant when compared with the universe itself.

On this scale, one may now rank the different propulsion systems available to different
types of civilizations:

Type 0:

Chemical rockets
Ionic engines
Fission power
EM propulsion (rail guns)

Type I

Ram-jet fusion engines
Photonic drive

Type II

Antimatter drive
Von Neumann nano probes

Type III

Planck energy propulsion

Propulsion systems may be ranked by two quantities: their specific impulse, and final
velocity of travel. Specific impulse equals thrust multiplied by the time over which the
thrust acts. At present, almost all our rockets are based on chemical reactions. We see that
chemical rockets have the smallest specific impulse, since they only operate for a few
minutes. Their thrust may be measured in millions of pounds, but they operate for such a
small duration that their specific impulse is quite small.

NASA is experimenting today with ion engines, which have a much larger specific impulse,
since they can operate for months, but have an extremely low thrust. For example, an ion
engine which ejects cesium ions may have the thrust of a few ounces, but in deep space
they may reach great velocities over a period of time since they can operate continuously.
They make up in time what they lose in thrust. Eventually, long-haul missions between
planets may be conducted by ion engines.

For a Type I civilization, one can envision newer types of technologies emerging. Ram-jet
fusion engines have an even larger specific impulse, operating for years by consuming the
free hydrogen found in deep space. However, it may take decades before fusion power is
harnessed commercially on earth, and the proton-proton fusion process of a ram-jet fusion
engine may take even more time to develop, perhaps a century or more. Laser or photonic
engines, because they might be propelled by laser beams inflating a gigantic sail, may have
even larger specific impulses. One can envision huge laser batteries placed on the moon
which generate large laser beams which then push a laser sail in outer space. This
technology, which depends on operating large bases on the moon, is probably many centuries away.

For a Type II civilization, a new form of propulsion is possible: anti-matter drive.
Matter-anti-matter collisions provide a 100% efficient way in which to extract energy from
mater. However, anti-matter is an exotic form of matter which is extremely expensive to
produce. The atom smasher at CERN, outside Geneva, is barely able to make tiny samples of
anti-hydrogen gas (anti-electrons circling around anti-protons). It may take many centuries
to millennia to bring down the cost so that it can be used for space flight.

Given the astronomical number of possible planets in the galaxy, a Type II civilization
may try a more realistic approach than conventional rockets and use nano technology to
build tiny, self-replicating robot probes which can proliferate through the galaxy in much
the same way that a microscopic virus can self-replicate and colonize a human body within
a week. Such a civilization might send tiny robot von Neumann probes to distant moons,
where they will create large factories to reproduce millions of copies of themselves. Such
a von Neumann probe need only be the size of bread-box, using sophisticated nano
technology to make atomic-sized circuitry and computers. Then these copies take off to land on
other distant moons and start the process all over again. Such probes may then wait on
distant moons, waiting for a primitive Type 0 civilization to mature into a Type I
civilization, which would then be interesting to them. (There is the small but distinct possibility
that one such
probe landed on our own moon billions of years ago by a passing space-faring
civilization. This, in fact, is the basis of the movie 2001, perhaps the most realistic portrayal of
contact with extra-terrrestrial intelligence.)

The problem, as one can see, is that none of these engines can exceed the speed of light.
Hence, Type 0,I, and II civilizations probably can send probes or colonies only to within
a few hundred light years of their home planet. Even with von Neumann probes, the best
that a Type II civilization can achieve is to create a large sphere of billions of
self-replicating probes expanding just below the speed of light. To break the light barrier, one
must utilize General Relativity and the quantum theory. This requires energies which are
available for very advanced Type II civilization or, more likely, a Type III
civilization.

Special Relativity states that no usable information can travel locally faster than
light. One may go faster than light, therefore, if one uses the possibility of globally
warping space and time, i.e. General Relativity. In other words, in such a rocket, a passenger
who is watching the motion of passing stars would say he is going slower than light. But
once the rocket arrives at its destination and clocks are compared, it appears as if the
rocket went faster than light because it warped space and time globally, either by taking
a shortcut, or by stretching and contracting space.

There are at least two ways in which General Relativity may yield faster than light
travel. The first is via wormholes, or multiply connected Riemann surfaces, which may give us
a shortcut across space and time. One possible geometry for such a wormhole is to
assemble stellar amounts of energy in a spinning ring (creating a Kerr black hole). Centrifugal
force prevents the spinning ring from collapsing. Anyone passing through the ring would
not be ripped apart, but would wind up on an entirely different part of the universe. This
resembles the Looking Glass of Alice, with the rim of the Looking Glass being the black
hole, and the mirror being the wormhole. Another method might be to tease apart a wormhole
from the “quantum foam” which physicists believe makes up the fabric of space and time at
the Planck length (10 to the minus 33 centimeters).
The problems with wormholes are many:
a) one version requires enormous amounts of positive energy, e.g. a black hole. Positive
energy wormholes have an event horizon(s) and hence only give us a one way trip. One
would need two black holes (one for the original trip, and one for the return trip) to make
interstellar travel practical. Most likely only a Type III civilization would be able
harness this power.

b) wormholes may be unstable, both classically or quantum mechanically. They may close up
as soon as you try to enter them. Or radiation effects may soar as you entered them,
killing you.

c) one version requires vast amounts of negative energy. Negative energy does exist (in
the form of the Casimir effect) but huge quantities of negative energy will be beyond our
technology, perhaps for millennia. The advantage of negative energy wormholes is that
they do not have event horizons and hence are more easily transversable.

d) another version requires large amounts of negative matter. Unfortunately, negative
matter has never been seen in nature (it would fall up, rather than down). Any negative
matter on the earth would have fallen up billions of years ago, making the earth devoid of
any negative matter.

The second possibility is to use large amounts of energy to continuously stretch space
and time (i.e. contracting the space in front of you, and expanding the space behind you).
Since only empty space is contracting or expanding, one may exceed the speed of light in
this fashion. (Empty space can warp space faster than light. For example, the Big Bang
expanded much faster than the speed of light.) The problem with this approach, again, is
that vast amounts of energy are required, making it feasible for only a Type III
civilization. Energy scales for all these proposals are on the order of the Planck energy (10 to
the 19 billion electron volts, which is a quadrillion times larger than our most powerful
atom smasher).

Lastly, there is the fundamental physics problem of whether “topology change” is possible
within General Relativity (which would also make possible time machines, or closed
time-like curves). General Relativity allows for closed time-like curves and wormholes (often
called Einstein-Rosen bridges), but it unfortunately breaks down at the large energies
found at the center of black holes or the instant of Creation. For these extreme energy
domains, quantum effects will dominate over classical gravitational effects, and one must go
to a “unified field theory” of quantum gravity.

At present, the most promising (and only) candidate for a “theory of everything”,
including quantum gravity, is superstring theory or M-theory. It is the only theory in which
quantum forces may be combined with gravity to yield finite results. No other theory can
make this claim. With only mild assumptions, one may show that the theory allows for quarks
arranged in much like the configuration found in the current Standard Model of sub-atomic
physics. Because the theory is defined in 10 or 11 dimensional hyperspace, it introduces
a new cosmological picture: that our universe is a bubble or membrane floating in a much
larger multiverse or megaverse of bubble-universes.

Unfortunately, although black hole solutions have been found in string theory, the theory
is not yet developed to answer basic questions about wormholes and their stability.
Within the next few years or perhaps within a decade, many physicists believe that string
theory will mature to the point where it can answer these fundamental questions about space
and time. The problem is well-defined. Unfortunately, even though the leading scientists
on the planet are working on the theory, no one on earth is smart enough to solve the
superstring equations.
Conclusion
Most scientists doubt interstellar travel because the light barrier is so difficult to
break. However, to go faster than light, one must go beyond Special Relativity to General
Relativity and the quantum theory. Therefore, one cannot rule out interstellar travel if
an advanced civilization can attain enough energy to destabilize space and time. Perhaps
only a Type III civilization can harness the Planck energy, the energy at which space and
time become unstable. Various proposals have been given to exceed the light barrier
(including wormholes and stretched or warped space) but all of them require energies found
only in Type III galactic civilizations. On a mathematical level, ultimately, we must wait
for a fully quantum mechanical theory of gravity (such as superstring theory) to answer
these fundamental questions, such as whether wormholes can be created and whether they are
stable enough to allow for interstellar travel.
© 2005 MKaku.org | All rights reserved.