[Seattle Times] Military recruiters work hard to leave no child off their lists

Military recruiters work hard to leave no child off their lists

By David Goodman
Special to The Times

Source: The Seattle Times

My daughter just started high school. This milestone was marked by the arrival in our home of a ream of paperwork. Along with the usual bureaucratic permissions, I found tucked into this package a seemingly innocuous form that carries extraordinary consequences: Failing to fill it out might result in my daughter being harassed, assaulted, or being fast-tracked to fight in Iraq.

This form asks us if we want to opt out of having our daughter's contact information sent to the U.S. military. If we overlooked this form, or did not opt out for some reason, our high school is required to forward her information to military recruiters. This is thanks to a stealth provision of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. It turns out that President Bush's supposed signature education law also happens to be the most aggressive military recruitment tool enacted since the draft ended in 1973.

The military recruiting requirement of NCLB has forced many schools to overturn longstanding policies on protecting student records from prying eyes. My local high school, like most in the country, carefully guards its student-directory information from the countless organizations, businesses and special-interest groups that are itching to tempt impressionable teens. Now, parents and schools are being shoved aside, and the military is being given carte blanche access to our kids. Not surprisingly, abuse has followed closely behind.

In August, an Associated Press investigation revealed that "more than 100 young women who expressed interest in joining the military in the past year were preyed upon sexually by their recruiters. Women were raped on recruiting office couches, assaulted in government cars and groped en route to entrance exams ... . One out of 200 frontline recruiters — the ones who deal directly with young people — was disciplined for sexual misconduct last year."

Take the case of Indiana National Guard Sgt. Eric P. Vetesy, accused of sexually assaulting six female high-school recruits in 2002 and 2003. According to the Indianapolis Star, Vetesy "picked out teens and young women with backgrounds that made them vulnerable to authority. As a military recruiter, he had access to personal information, making the quest easier."

The NCLB recruiter provision is but one piece of a concerted effort by the Bush administration to reach unwitting teens without their parents' permission. In June 2005, privacy advocates were shocked to learn that for two years, the Pentagon had been amassing a database of information on some 30 million students. The information dossiers on millions of young Americans were to help identify college and high-school students as young as 16 to target them for military recruiting.

The massive database includes an array of personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying. The Pentagon has hired the Massachusetts-based company BeNow to run the database. By outsourcing this work to a private firm, the government is circumventing laws that restrict its right to collect or hold citizen information.

If you are concerned about how this information on your children might be used, you should be: The Pentagon has stated that it can share the data with law enforcement, state tax authorities, other agencies making employment inquiries, and with foreign authorities, to name a few. Students will not know if their information has been collected, and they cannot prevent it from happening.

The main obstacle to getting kids into the military — concerned parents — has at long last been circumvented. Private companies can now harvest data on children, and provide recruiters — some of whom are also now private contractors — with the information they need to contact kids directly.

Should skeptical parents find out that the "Mr. Jones" calling for Johnny is offering their child a free ticket to Iraq, the military is spending millions to learn how best to persuade or bypass these negative "influencers." One Pentagon study is focused exclusively on changing mothers' attitudes to enable recruiters to "exert some influence on mothers who are currently against military service."

Grassroots groups are mobilizing against the Pentagon's massive student-recruitment and data-mining campaigns. Leave My Child Alone (www.leavemychildalone.org) offers online opt-out forms that students and parents can download and submit to schools to keep their names off of recruiter contact lists. The group estimates that as of 2006, 37,000 students have opted out of the No Child Left Behind requirement. Students can also file another form to send to the Pentagon to have their names removed from the giant student database.

I signed my form directing our local high school to withhold my daughter's contact information from military recruiters. Other parents undoubtedly missed it. When military recruiters eventually come knocking at their doors, these families will find out the hard way what President Bush really meant when he promised to "leave no child behind."

David Goodman is co-author of "Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back," published by Hyperion. He lives in Vermont.

[Infowarsnews] Media Hypes Nutcase Scribblings as "Terror Plot Admission"

Media Hypes Nutcase Scribblings as "Terror Plot Admission"
Admits no funding, no bombs, no vehicles, but still saturates fairy tale story while ignoring biggest explosives find in British history

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | October 12 2006

The British media is feverishly hyping the deranged notes of a screwball Muslim Londoner as evidence of a huge "terror plot admission" in which Wall Street and other prominent buildings were the target - despite the fact that the suspect had no means whatsoever to carry out the attack - meanwhile completely ignoring a report earlier this week where the largest haul of explosives and a rocket launcher were found at a white man's house in Burnley.

"A man has pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder people in a series of bombings on British and US targets," reports the BBC.

"The plans were for attacks on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank buildings in Washington, the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup buildings in New York and the Prudential buildings in Newark, New Jersey."

According to the latest manufactured monster in the closet fairy tale, Dhiren Barot, of north London, planned to use a radioactive "dirty bomb" as well as blowing up cars in underground UK parking lots using gas cylinders and explosives.

Here's the kicker.

"The Crown could not dispute claims from the defence that no funding had been received for the projects, nor any vehicles or bomb-making materials acquired."

No money, no vehicles, no bombs - just some retarded nutcase scrawling absent-minded empty threats in a notebook. Should he be investigated by the police? No doubt about it. Should his "confession" of scribbling demented ramblings in a paper pad be splashed all over the top of the BBC website and head up the evening news as a major foiled bomb plot?

No. That's outright fearmongering and artificially inflating a nothing story to feed into the public's fear of its own shadow - greasing the skids for Blair to shred the remaining tatters of liberty and blanket the country with more shouting telescreens.

The hype surrounding this nothing story is especially vacuous when you consider that earlier in the week the "largest ever" haul of explosives was found at a house in Burnley - including a chemicals, bio-suits and even a rocket launcher. The find was briefly reported on by a handful of local town newspapers but completely blacked out by the national print and TV press.

Some charge that the BBC were complicit in burying the story.

Why was it nixed and why was the suspect later released? Because he wasn't and Arab or Muslim. He couldn't be stereotyped, pigeon-holed and packaged as another example of how deadly Al-Qaeda cells are running around in our back gardens - but Mr. Limo Bomber (pictured above) can. If this guy had dark skin we would be hearing about the biggest terror bust in British history for weeks.

As it is we've heard next to nothing but the government and media are content to luridly obsess about the alleged fantasies of a crackpot who had no means whatsoever of carrying out his ridiculous "Gas Limos Project" - no gas and no limos for a start.

Compare it with past examples where Muslims were targeted, raided, demonized as terrorists, and salacious stories about their supposed impending massacres were given saturation coverage for weeks - before the evidence vanished into thin air and tiny retractions were issued on page 30.

An alleged Al-Qaeda cell was arrested on suspicion of preparing to poison the London Underground with Ricin in January 2003. The government used the incident as a scare tactic to rally Britons behind the imminent war on Iraq. It was eventually disclosed that no Ricin was ever found and all the members of the supposed plot were released with no evidence or charges against them.

In April 2004 police in Manchester arrested a group of Kurds and subsequent newspaper headlines claimed that they were an Al-Qaeda cell planning to bomb Old Trafford football stadium. Their evidence for such a claim was based on police interviews with one of the individuals who had attended a Manchester United game two years previously. Simply because he had attended a football game because he supported the team, the tabloid newspapers invented the story that he was planning on bombing the stadium. All of the suspects, who ironically had come to Britain to escape the regime of Saddam Hussein, were released without charge and with no evidence against them.

The London Guardian reported,

"Of the 701 people arrested under the Terrorism Act since the September 11 attacks, half have been released without charge and only 17 convicted under the act. Only three of those cases relate to allegations of Islamist extremism."

Despite this fact we are regularly bombarded with screaming headlines about mass terror sweeps, and it goes unmentioned that in nearly every case every so-called 'terrorist' is released with no evidence against them. The arrests are at the top of the evening news for days but there is no clarification or retraction when the suspects are set free. This leaves the viewer with the impression that terrorists are everywhere and that only a draconian police state can protect them against the threat.

In June London Metropolitan police had to apologize for a bungled raid in which an innocent man was shot and no evidence of terrorism preparation was found at a Forest Gate home. The raid, which involved nearly 300 armed police, was based on the testimony of a retarded government informant.

Later the same month, British authorities announced they had foiled an Al-Qaeda plot to fly planes into buildings in Canary Wharf. The fact the this story was thoroughly discredited back in November 2004 as a collusion of imaginative government lobbyists and lapdog media collaborators was completely omitted and the story was recycled and regurgitated to re-fuel the politics of fear.

Then came the infamous "transatlantic bomb plot" in August, discredited by a former British Ambassador as "propaganda" and like the Barot case admitted to have been supported by no concrete material evidence.

The origins of the plot strongly indicate it was concocted from within the Pakistani ISI, British MI6 and the CIA - and was intended to go ahead before being scuppered by good intelligence agents who were doing their jobs.

The constant barrage of hyped phony terror alerts and false raids are becoming increasingly transparent to the British public - with only 20% believing their veracity according to a recent Guardian/ICM poll.

[Infowars.com] Biggest bomb plot in British history - doesn't make news

Biggest bomb plot in British history - doesn't make news

The Truth Will Set You Free | October 11 2006

Why?

Because the suspects are NEITHER ARAB, NOR MUSLIM.

A RETIRED Grange dentist is accused of being part of a bomb plot after a record number of explosives were seized in a Lancashire town.

David Bolais Jackson, 62, of Trent Road, Nelson, was arrested on Friday in the Lancaster area after leaving his Grange practice for the last time.

Jackson was charged with being in possession of an explosive substance for an unlawful purpose. [Notice the absence of terrorism charges]

However, it is unclear who or what the intended target might have been.

Police found rocket launchers, chemicals, British National Party literature and a nuclear or biological suit [!!!] at his home.

The find came shortly after they had recovered 22 chemical components from the house of his alleged accomplice, Robert Cottage, a former BNP election candidate, who lives in Colne.

The haul is thought to be THE LARGEST EVER FOUND AT A HOUSE IN THIS COUNTRY.

Aaah, so what? What's a few rocket launchers and a record number of explosives among friends?

They probably had them 'just in case' some Arab Muslims showed up to sell them falafel or hummus - or worse yet, baklava.

After all, they're white - they would never harm their fellow Brits. Whoops! I could be wrong:
[T]he last London mad-bomber – neo-Nazi David Copeland, who nail-bombed the Admiral Duncan and two other pubs in 1999 – caused far more genuine fear than all these alleged Islamist plots in the alleged "pre-planning" (ie coffee-shop bullsh-t) stage.

Copeland "only" killed three people (and maimed about a dozen more) but not for want of trying – the blast of the last bomb he placed was blocked by a pillar. Targeting places where gay, black and Asian people hang out – ie inner-city pubs with good music and food – he was charged simply with murder.
Let's compare and contrast how Cottage, possessing both rocket launchers and explosives, was treated with how Arab Muslim 'suspects', armed with nothing but their names, were treated:

Unlike the Forest Gate raid in east London in June, which involved 250 police, some of them armed, Lancashire police entered Cottage's home with a handful of unarmed officers.

There was no “air exclusion zone” or assaults on neighbours, no closing down of surrounding streets, and no smear stories about those arrested.

Superintendent Neil Smith instantly moved to reassure residents and stressed, “It is not a bomb making factory.” He was able to add that it was not related to terrorism.

Let's face it - it's just not newsworthy.

Move along, there's nothing to see here.

[Infowars] School Says Police, Social Services Will Snatch Kids Of Late Parents

School Says Police, Social Services Will Snatch Kids Of Late Parents

 

A junior high school in Indiana threatens parents with police and child protective service involvement if they fail to pick up their child on time after mandatory Friday classes for missed homework.

 

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2006/051006snatchkids.htm

[Infowars] Al Qaeda Tapes: Direct Link To Military Psyops And Donald Rumsfeld

Al Qaeda Tapes: Direct Link To Military Psyops And Donald Rumsfeld
Following the trail for five minutes leads to Pentagon

Steve Watson / Infowars.net | October 5 2006

Related: Surprise Surprise, It's Another Al Qaeda Blockbuster Release

Related: Atta's Father Says Video Fake, Credibility of 'Hijackers Tape' Crumbles

U.S. Government Caught Red-Handed Releasing Staged Al-Qaeda Videos

Following on from our three features on the latest dubious Al Qaeda video, We can reveal that further investigation into the origin of Al Qaeda video and tape release leads straight back to US military intelligence and Donald Rumsfeld.

The origin of the latest video, starring Mohammed Atta and flight 93 hijacker Ziad Jarrah, has been swept under the carpet by the mainstream media who bizarrely admit that the government has had the tape since late 2001 but still suggest it is a new release by Al Qaeda.

Interesting also is the fact that in an NBC article, they admit that before receiving the "exclusive US analysis" of the London Sunday Times' tape, they had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same tape of Atta earlier this year:

"The Sunday Times said it had obtained the video “through a previously tested channel” but gave no further details. NBC News filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the videotapes early this year, but the Pentagon has not yet turned them over. "

This is an open admission that it is the Pentagon that has released this tape and not Al Qaeda. this dovetails with our previous analysis that revealed that the footage has been seen before in a docudrama, the Road to Guantanamo, where it is shown to detainees at camp Delta as an intelligence surveillance tape.

Along with experts on Islamic terrorist groups who are baffled by the video and have declared that it has come from a security agency, the very journalist who received the tape also says the source was not Al Qaeda.

It is also interesting that this journalist, Yousri Fouda is not only a Sunday Times journalist but also the London Bureau Chief of Al Jazeera. He is the guy who normally breaks all the Al Qaeda tapes anyway, so really the London Times connection is just a smokescreen.

All evidence indicates that the tapes are provided to Fouda and Al Jazeera by As Sahab, the "production company" of Al Qaeda, via a group known as Intelcenter, who also SELL the videos online.

Intelcenter normally have the tapes available for sale as soon as they are released, indeed in the past they have even predicted when they are going to get a tape before it is released, as they did with the second London bomber tape on the anniversary of 7/7.

Intel center is run by Ben Venzke, who is an interesting character. A google search results in the revelation that he used to be the director of intelligence at a company called IDEFENSE, which is a verisign company. IDEFENSE is a web security company that monitors intelligence from the middle east conflicts and focuses on cyber threats among other things.

It is also heavily populated with long serving ex military intelligence officials.

The Director of Threat intelligence, Jim Melnick, served 16 years in the US army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and worked in psychological operations. From the IDEFENSE website:

Prior to joining iDefense, Mr. Melnick served with distinction for more than 16 years in the U.S. Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency. During this period, Mr. Melnick served in a variety of roles, including psychological operations, international warning issues with emphasis on foreign affairs and information operations and Russian affairs. He also served in active political/military intelligence roles with an emphasis on foreign affairs. Mr. Melnick is currently a U.S. Army Reserve Colonel with Military Intelligence, assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Mr. Melnick has been published in numerous military and foreign affairs journals, and has received numerous military and DIA awards. Mr. Melnick has a Master of Arts in National Security and Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College, a Master of Arts in Russian studies from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Political Science from Westminster College.

So here we have a company that by it's own admission has a senior military psy-op intelligence officer who has worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld. As Intelcenter and Ben Venzke are directly connected to IDEFENSE, this puts Rumsfeld 3 small steps away from the Al Qaeda propaganda videos.

The NBC "US analysis" should be the focus of the latest tape and not the Times articles. It is an astounding piece of psyop propaganda that attempts in a shoddy way to fill in the "gaps" in 9/11 intelligence. The analyst, Evan Coleman, after admitting that the Pentagon has been "sitting on it" goes on to say:

"It is important for people to watch and realize that this video is conclusive proof that 9/11 was orchestrated by Al Qaeda at the most senior levels."

He then makes a direct assault on the 9/11 truth movement by saying:

"This is the kind of video proof that is going to put a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theorists out in the cold and for good reason."

View the video below:

Coleman contradicts himself throughout his own report by saying the Pentagon has had the video since 2001 whilst still towing the line that it was Al Qaeda that released the video.

The U.S. government's role in obtaining and carefully stage-managing the dissemination of these tapes, many of them old footage re-released over and over again, is now without a doubt manifestly obvious and demands immediate Congressional investigation. Please spread this information wide and help us expose the most duplicitous and manipulative administration in history, a regime that is engaging in psychological warfare against the American people.

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

INFOWARS: BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND

[Spiked-Online] Stop bullying fat kids

Stop bullying fat kids

The plan to weigh all schoolchildren as part of the 'war on obesity' will stigmatise those who don't fit New Labour's blueprint.
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
Wednesday 24 May 2006

Source: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/315/

In the past, fat kids only had to worry about the playground bully. Now the politicians, the doctors and their teachers are all out to get them - and their parents.

In the next few weeks children aged four and ten are all going to be lined up at school for measurements of height and weight (1). This is necessary because the government, having already set a target for reducing childhood obesity, has realised that nobody knows how many children are overweight. The plan is to repeat these measurements in 12 months’ time and then to write to the parents of obese children to warn that they risk long-term health damage unless they lose weight.

Even the government’s own health advisers have warned that the mass weigh-in will inevitably stigmatise overweight children and will provoke widespread anxiety and distress among both children and parents (2). Public health doctors are well aware that it is illegitimate to diagnose individual health risks on the basis of population statistics and that there is no scientific justification for this approach. But, having fostered the obesity panic by promoting scares about fast food and snacks, they are ill-equipped to resist the zealots now driving government policy.

The politicians are now gripped by the dogma that exhorting people to eat less and exercise more will banish obesity. One of the few things that emerges clearly from half a century of research is that this approach simply does not work (3). While the scale of the problem of childhood obesity remains controversial - and both its causes and consequences are uncertain - it is widely recognised that no form of intervention has been found to be effective (4).

The crusade against childhood obesity has become dangerously irrational. Like most of the government’s most cherished initiatives, it is exempted from the requirements of evidence-based policy. It is driven by the most desperate imperative of New Labour: the need to connect, with at least that section of the electorate that has responded so impressively to the charms of the celebrity TV chef Jamie Oliver. In the childhood obesity panic, the insecurities of the nation’s elite are projected into our primary schools, reflecting, as American academic Paul Campos observes, a culture that is ‘ultimately all about fear, self-loathing and endless dissatisfaction’ (5).

Once again this week, the tired metaphors of ‘epidemic’ and ‘time-bomb’ have been mobilised to raise the emotional temperature (6). Obesity is presented as a modern plague, as a source of contagion and risk, which therefore justifies the sort of authoritarian measures considered necessary to protect society from extreme danger. These metaphors provide new forms of expression for deep-rooted prejudices against ordinary people, particularly against poorer people, who are more likely, in most Western societies, to be overweight. As the Australian educationalists Michael Gard and Jan Wright observe, ‘the idea of the"obesity epidemic” appears to lock commentators into a view of people as childlike in their stupidity, short-sightedness and utter self-centredness’. To be overweight is to be regarded as being ‘out of control, undisciplined, deviant, dangerously unhealthy’ (7).

The label of obesity legitimises the public monitoring of behaviour and provides a licence for ridicule and harassment. For politicians and pundits, public health advocacy groups and popular television programmes, parents are a particular focus of condescension and contempt. According to Tam Fry of the Child Growth Foundation, ‘parents are very ignorant about what a healthy weight is’ (8). In truth, within wide limits, there is no such thing as a healthy (or an unhealthy) weight - a simple fact parents know much better than these self-appointed experts.

The shift in focus of the obesity panic towards children is a particularly invidious development. A younger generation is now being indoctrinated with a deeply misanthropic and neurotic attitude towards the joys of life, such as eating, drinking and playing. As Tom MacMillan of the Food Ethics Council observes, health ‘neither is nor ought to be [the] main criterion in rational lifestyle choices’ (9).

Eating and drinking are modes of sensual enjoyment and social engagement, ways of expressing individual and group identity, which are impoverished by the narrow preoccupations of the health fetishists. But instead of learning the pleasures of eating and sharing a wide variety foods, children are being coerced into consuming ‘five-a-day’ fruit and veg, even though an authoritative study confirms that this yields no significant reduction in the development of chronic disease (10). Playing sport for pleasure is now being reduced to taking exercise for health, despite the fact that ‘no link between school physical education and either the long-term health, body weight or physical activity of children has ever been established’ (11).

The crusade against child obesity is likely to produce, not healthy outcomes, but miserable children and anxious parents and epidemics of dieting and eating disorders.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is author of The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle, Routledge, 2000 (buy this book from Amazon UK or Amazon USA).

(1) Obesity tests for four year olds, BBC News, 22 May 2006

(2) Francis Elliott. Megan Waitkoff, Fat: how the national obsession is coming into the classroom, Independent on Sunday, 21 May 2006

(3) Michael Gard, Jan Wright, The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology, Routledge 2005

(4) Peter Marsh, Fattened Statistics 27 April 2006

(5) Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth, Gotham 2004.

(6) Obesity tests for four year olds, BBC News, 22 May 2006

(7) Michael Gard, Jan Wright, The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology, Routledge 2005

(8) Obesity tests for four year olds, BBC News, 22 May 2006

(9) Tom MacMillan, ‘Getting personal: shifting responsibilities for dietary health’. Food Ethics Council. December 2005.

(10) Hsin-Chia Hung et al. .Fruit and vegetable intake and risk of major chronic disease’, Journal of National Cancer Institute, 2004; 96: 1577-84.

(11) Michael Gard, Jan Wright, The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology, Routledge 2005

[Reuters] Bomb plot suspect refuses to give trial evidence

Bomb plot suspect refuses to give trial evidence

Mon Sep 18, 2006 01:02 PM BST

 

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's biggest post 9/11 terrorism trial -- an alleged plot to bomb targets including night clubs and shopping centres -- was brought to a dramatic halt on Monday when a key defendant refused to answer questions from his own lawyer.

Omar Khyam, a British Muslim, is accused with six other men of planning the attacks.

On the start of the third day of his evidence, Khyam was asked by his lawyers about his purchase of 600 kg of fertiliser and why he had stored it.

But Khyam, 24, from West Sussex, refused to answer, saying he feared he might endanger his family back in Pakistan.

Last week the former London Metropolitan University student told the Old Bailey the 9/11 attacks had made him happy.

But he said he was joking when he told friends he wanted bomb parliament during Prime Minister's questions, the weekly session attended by the country's most senior politicians.

Khyam denies charges that he and his co-defendants planned to set off bombs in pubs, clubs, trains, a shopping centre and synagogues using explosives made from ammonium nitrate fertiliser.

On Monday, Khyam's lawyer Joel Bennathan asked his client: "Mr Khyam in November 2003, did you with the assistance of another or others buy and then store 600 kg of fertiliser".

Khyam responded by saying the Pakistani intelligence service had spoken with his family members in Pakistan about what had already been said about them in court.

"I think they (the intelligence service) are worried about what I may end up revealing about them. So right now my priority is the security of my family there. As much as I want to clarify matters I am going to stop."

A clearly shocked Bennathan then asked for an adjournment, after which Judge Michael Astill warned Khyam about the potential consequences.

He told the defendant that if he refused to answer questions "the jury may draw such inferences as appear proper from your failure to do so."

In evidence last Thursday, Khyam said he had gone to Pakistan in 2000 to train with the country's intelligence service, the ISI, so he could help "free Kashmir", the Himalayan region claimed by both India and Pakistan.

Prosecutors have already told the court Khyam was secretly recorded discussing possible targets such as the biggest nightclub in London -- The Ministry of Sound -- and that the seven men had links to al Qaeda.

The key prosecution witness in the trial is a Pakistan-born U.S. supergrass who has admitted terrorism-related offences in New York.

During evidence Mohammed Babar gave earlier in the trial, he said he had met some of the defendants at terrorism training camps in Pakistan.

Khyam, his younger brother Shujah Mahmood, 18, Anthony Garcia, 27, Nabeel Hussain, 20, Jawad Akbar, 22, Waheed Mahmood, 33, and Salahuddin Amin, 30, are accused of conspiring to cause an explosion likely to endanger life.

Khyam, Garcia and Hussain are also charged with possessing 600 kg (1,300 lb) of ammonium nitrate fertiliser for terrorism purposes and Khyam and Mahmood also deny having aluminium powder -- an ingredient in explosives.

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

[Aljazeera.net] Fish to guard water

Fish to guard water
by
Monday 18 September 2006 6:40 PM GMT

The system was originally developed for the US army

A common type of US fish is being enlisted in the fight against terrorism as a guard for US cities' drinking water.

San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using bluegills - also known as sunfish or bream - as a sort of canary in a coal mine to safeguard their water.

Small numbers of the fish are kept in tanks constantly replenished with water from the municipal supply.

Sensors in each tank work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and swimming patterns of the bluegills that occur in the presence of toxins.

The Intelligent Aquatic BioMonitoring System, as its known, was originally developed for the army and starts at around $45,000.

"Nature's given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning centre out there," said Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, a Southern California company that makes and sells the bluegill monitoring system.

"There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill."

Highly attuned

Since the September 11 attacks the US government has taken very seriously the threat of attacks on its water supply.

Federal law requires that nearly all community water systems assess their vulnerability to terrorism.

Big cities employ a range of safeguards against chemical and biological agents, constantly monitoring, testing and treating the water. But electronic protection systems can trace only the toxins they are programmed to detect, Lawler said.

Bluegills - a species about the size of a human hand - are considered more versatile.

They are highly attuned to chemical disturbances in their environment and, when exposed to toxins, they experience the fish version of coughing, flexing their gills to expel unwanted particles.

The computerised system in use in San Francisco and elsewhere is designed to detect even slight changes in the bluegills' vital signs and send an email alert when something is wrong.

San Francisco's bluegills went to work about a month ago, guarding the drinking water of more than one million people from substances such as cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides.

Eight bluegills swim in a tank deep in the basement of a water treatment plant south of the city.

"It gave us the best of both worlds, which is basically all the benefits that come from nature and the best of high-tech," said Susan Leal, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

Attack limitations

New York City has also been testing its system since 2002 and is seeking to expand it.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection has reported at least one instance in which the system caught a toxin before it made it into the water supply. The fish noticed a diesel spill two hours earlier than any of the agency's other detection devices.

The fish do have limitations. While the bluegills have successfully detected at least 30 toxic chemicals, they cannot reliably detect germs.

They are also no use against other sorts of attacks - say, the bombing of a water main, or an attack by computer hackers on the systems that control the flow of water.

Still, Lawler said that several other cities have ordered the anti-terror apparatus, while San Francisco plans to install two more bluegill tanks.

Agencies
By 

You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/6B1BD9C3-15C0-4F31-B64D-E527184B5BFC.htm