Tuesday 21 July 2009

Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters - Part 10

by Trowbridge H. Ford

When Professor J. Reece Roth, a noted University of Tennessee researcher of plasmas, was convicted on September 3, 2008 by a federal jury of 17 counts of security violations of vital national security secrets - essentially 'constructive treason' according to British terminology going back to the Napoleonic Wars - by allowing research assistants, especially a Chinese one, access to 15 Department of Defense articles on the subject, the Bush administration was confident, perhaps too confident, that its secret use of them in covert space weapons operations, most recently in China and Myanmar, would never be exposed. Roth continued to maintain his innocence, and seriously contemplated appealing the conviction which would likely result in the 72-year-old scientist spending his remaining days in jail, and paying thousands of dollars in fines. Roth was ultimately talked out of the appeal because there was virtually no chance of a jury verdict in such a high profile case being overturned or an order for a retrial, and his sentencing was set for early January 2009.

Equally important was Physics Today deciding to publish in its entirety Thomas Reed's article, "The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964-1996," in its September issue, showing better some of the Chinese facilities under National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) eyeballing, and possible Air Force targeting - Malan, Juiquan, Haiyan, Lanzhou, and Zitong. The photographs showed how vulnerable they were to attack if so decided. Its publication showed that Reed and Danny Stillman were directly challenging the intelligence community's federal injunction against it - what they might have ignored if it only appeared in the Pakistan Defense Forum - contending that it was only intended for Pakistani domestic consumption, and had already appeared.

For good measure, The New Yorker published Steve Coll's supporting article "Pakistan's Atomic Chinese Take-Out" in its September 2nd issue for American domestic consumption. While ignoring Stillman's intelligence role in his many visits to China, and acting as if he only had "...had difficulty winning clearance for publication of this material from the U. S. intelligence community," Coll pinpointed the coup that Pakistan's President Ghulam Khan and Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Mirza Aslam had engineered against then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto for trying to stop the country's growing involvement of its nuclear establishment with the Chinese at its Malan facility in developing and testing its nuclear weapons. The first successful test of a Pakistan weapon, based apparently upon one of Chinese design, occurred on May 26, 1990, and she was removed from office in August.

Thse developments showed just how self-serving to Washington the prosectution of Roth, and allowing Stillman to divulge some of the secrets he had gathered about the Chinese nuclear establishment were. While the US intelligence community, especially DCI Michael Hayden's Agency, was overlooking what Stillman had accomplished through the Air Force and Reed - what it had tried to prevent before cyclone Nargis and the Sichuan earthquake but without success - the Pentagon, particularly Secretary of Defense Robert Gates through its Defense Intelligence Agency, was making out that the plasma researcher was a Chinese spy who was succeeding in making it invulnerable to American defensive measures - what was far from the truth. In sum, the innocent research efforts by Roth were being used legally to provide a cover for Stillman's illegal disclosures.

It was Barack Obama's capitalizing upon Bhutto's assassination in December when coming back to Pakistan, apparently either by Al-Qaeda et al. or their supporters in Pakistan's covert government, which snatched the presidential campaign initiative away for Hillary Clinton over foreign policy - as she had supported President Bush's ouster of Iraq's Saddam Hussein - and led to his nomination at the Democratic Convention. Confident that it would win the November election, it started a search campaign for new office holders which caught the media's eye for its openness and throughness, but it was essentially just eyewash to fool the public about what was going on. It knew far too well from the past who would be serving it in the future, especially in the area of covert operations.

While the leading members of Obama's oil administration, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are well known, its lesser possible figures - Admiral Dennis Blair, Charles Freeman, Leon Panetta, Greg Craig, General Bruce Carlson, General Jim Jones, Peter Lavoy, Christopher Kojm, John Brennan, etc., and, most important, continuing Pentagon chief Robert Gates - are known far too little, especially what their new mission is. They are to keep the American public on board while it achieves what was sidetracked by the cockup over the 9/11 bombings - the pacification of Afghanistan so that a pipeline can be constructed through it, connecting Caspian oil on its eastern shores to Pakistan's Indian Ocean coast - what requires the defeat of its Taleban. If achieved, it would be a great blow to China's search for oil self-sufficiency, threatening even the loss of its oil-rich Xinjiang province, and making Iran's oil holdings much less important in global affairs.

In confirming the role of Big Oil, to use Antonia Juhasz's terminology in The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry - And What We Must Do To Stop It, the Obama administration has been largely bought by the industry despite its contentions to the contrary, particulary when one adds in what it has contributed to President Clinton, especially in the construction of his library. While Senator McCain received by far the biggest contributions from the oil industry since 1990, the total for the team of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Biden is comparable, a bit over $1,000,000 dollars. Obama also fudged his acceptance of money by renouncing money from oil industry Political Action Committees (PACs) while accepting it from oil company executives, and he has only been on the national political scene recently.

However, in considering what elected officials can do when it comes to energy policy - like not closing the "Enron Loophole" which the Commodity Futures Modernization Act permitted spreading to energy traders working for oil companies - researchers should not overlook what control of government institutions, particularly the Pentagon and the CIA, can mean in this regard. They can lay out an estimate of future world developments, where the expected problems are, how to deal with them, and why. The personnel responsible for making such estimates, plans, capabilities and outcomes are the most important officials in govenment in today's world, and their nomination and selection should be the top priority of any democratic system to make sure that the nation's power is really exercised by those who appear to be in control.

The whole corruption of the process started when the transition team announced on December 18th the appointment of Admiral Dennis Blair, Senator Obama's military adviser, to be Admiral Mike McConnell's replacement as National Intelligence Director who then joined other hawks on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Blair, while he had been Commander of the Pacific Fleet during the last days of the Clinton administration, had been so aggressive in dealing with Chinese counterparts that he should never have been even seriously considered for the position. During a 1999 meeting at Hawaii, Blair told a Chinese admiral two things when they were discussing the Taiwan situation: "First. I own the water out there. Second, I own the sky over the water out there. Now, don't you think we should talk abouit something constructive?" (Quoted from "Meet new DNI boss Dennis Blair," Tribune/Opinion, February 22, 2009.)

When Admiral Blair's tough talk helped induce Beijing to take a tough stand when a U. S. Navy EP-3E spy plane intruded into what the Chinese considered their airspace on April 1, 2001, forcing it to land on their island of Hainan Dao, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was most disturbed by what had happened, and why during the first foreign crisis of the new Bush administration. "As Rumsfeld dug deeper," Bob Woodward explained in State of Denial: Bush At War, Part III, "he was asking what the intelligence missions accomplished. Who authorized them? Who assessed the value of the intelligence that was gathered? What about the risks versus the rewards? (p. 29) Blair, attending the meeting with Rumsfeld, suggested that the spy flights resume immediately, and the SoD agreed, ordering him to supply a one-page recommendation for the resumption by the next morning.

Well, the next morning arrived, but there was no report from Blair. He had sent it to the office of the absent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and it would not make it available to Rumsfeld without his approval. Why he didn't provide it directly to Rumsfeld, as ordered, has not been explained though it seems that it was because it contained information about these missions which did not reflect well upon the indpendently minded admiral. Rumsfeld went absolutely ballistic over Blair's actions, being, as notetaker Rear Admiral J. J. Quinn noted, "about as furious as he had ever seen a human being." (p. 31) Needless to say, Rumsfeld soon saw the report, and the missions apparently were not resumed. In any case, Blair was passed over when it came to appointing a new Chairman of the Joint Chief, and he retired. Rumsfeld already had one too many Navy cowboys, CNO Vern Clark.

The first thing that Blair did as prospective DNI was to nominate veteran China watcher Charles Freeman to be the Director of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the body which draws up periodic National Intelligence Estimates about future global developments. The current Director, Peter Lavoy, was a holdover from the Bush administration, and he was too interested in predicting WMD surprises of a conventional nature by the usual suspected perpetrators. Blair wanted more alarming predictions, as he later told the Senate Intelligence Committee, especially about China's aggressive war-making plans which went well beyond its taking back Taiwan. He envisioned China soon fighting some kind of full-fledged war with the USA.

For more on Blair, see his article "Military Power Projection in Asia," in Ashley J. Tellis, Mercy Kuo and Andrew Marble, eds., Strategic Asia, 2008-09: Challenges and Choices (published by The National Bureau of Asia Research).

For a person with these views and this agenda to have nominated Freeman was simply ludicrous, an effort bound to fail given his additional views about Israel, and the suppression of the protesters at Tiananamen Square in 1989. Here is a good example of Freeman's thoughts about China from his article, "China in the Times to Come":

"China does not accept the logic of mutually assured destruction and it shows no interest in procuring stratgic lift, bomber forces, carrier strike groups, amphibious warfare or command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities that give U. S. armed forces their unrivaled capacity to conduct offensive operations in faraway places."

For more, see this link:

http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=6180

Little wonder that when the anticipated furore over his nomination developed, and Freeman withdrew from the proceedings, the Obama waited six months before replacing Lavoy, naming, of all people, George Washington University Professor Christopher Kojm from its Elliot School of International Affairs, Kojm was Deputy Director of the 9/11 Commission, thanks to his having worked in several capacities for Congressman Lee Hamilton, and helped craft the complete cover-up of the cock-up in its Report. Kojm even propagated its claims that the suicide bombings were a complete surprise by working for its Public Discussion Project. He certainly will have his hands full in this regard while working for the NIC.

Kojm's appointment had been slowed by Gabriel Schoenfeld's review of The Nuclear Express in The Wall Street Journal on January 17th, showing that Blair might well have been one of the sources when Reed and Stillman made their dire political predictions about Beijing: "The authors are deeply concerned about China, some of whose officials 'might not object to the nuclear destruction of New York or Washington, followed by the collapse of American financial power, so long as Chinese finger prints could not be found at the scene of the crime'." Blair made the connection crystal clear when he briefed the shocked Senate Intelligence Committee as if he were its own intelligence officer, "...telling them about the wars in which they ought now to show concern." (op. cit., "Meet new DNI boss Dennis Blair")

Little wonder that the sentencing of Professor Roth was put off indefinitely under the circumstances, hoping that future developments would provide insights into how to treat the alleged spy.

While Freeman's nomination was a complete fraud to fool the public, Leon Panetta's nomination to replace DCI Hayden - who was a convenient fallguy for the Bush administration's vast, illegal wire-tapping operation - was a pure deception. Panetta, President Clinton's former chief of staff, has long been involved in national security interests, especially those concerning the oceans. He was head of the Pew Oceans Commission while Admiral James Watkins ran the United States Commission on Ocean Policy - what were ultimately combined. While its Joint Initiative stressed the importance of what it was seeking for the nation's economic health, and that of the oceans, there was a national security concern pervading the whole exercise, as Watkins well knew when he was CNO, helping stalk the Red Banner Fleet's submarine force in various waters in anticipation of a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War after the assassination of Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme was intended to trigger its coountdown.

Instead of everyone's talking about this and more, they all acted as if Panetta was a complete ignoramus in such matters, and complained about not being informed of the choice before it was made - what they claimed would make for a bumpy confirmation process. Well, it didn't turn out that way, Panneta cruised through, though he was asked by Senator Carl Levin if he ever thought that as a contributor to the Institute for Polcy Studies, he would ever fall under the control of DNI Blair. While he foolishly answered affirmatively, "...he added that the CIA was an 'operational arm' and that the admiral's job was to 'coordinate activities' with the National Security Agency, the still rarely mentional National Reconnaissance Office and other agencies." (ibid., though note that I had reversed what was "foolish" and what was not in Panetta's answers by author Dateline D. C.)

Unfortunately, Panetta, though quickly confirmed, was in for a big surprise when President Obama agreed on April 7th to a "huge new classified spy satellite system" involving "electro-optical" capabilites - one which would just improve successful models used by the NRO in the past. It sounds like just more powerful Misty satellites with eyes which can identify even the smallest targets with the highest resolution.

For more, see this link:

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/04/´07/president-approves-new-satellite-system/

This immediately prompted the resignation of NRO Director Scott Large, the biggest support he had from DNI Blair getting his way in offensive operators. While sources put the usual kind of spin on his surprise - being tarred with the failure of the Future Imagery Architecture program, and not having had a chance under former Director Donald Kerr, Large had served for two years, and obviously saw what Blair and Gates were doing as a reversal to what had been going on at NRO before Kerr arrived.

For more on the resignation, see this:

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/04/08/spy-satellite-agency-head-resigns/

Large's resignation also shows that Gates is a key player in developments, and not just a caretaker, waiting for his permanent replacement.

America is now preparing for the even greater use of space weapons, and in the meantine it still has the capability to cause problems for troublesome countries, especially Iran, North Korea, and China. If I were a betting man, I would put my money on another earthquake in Iran, somewhere between Tehran and Esfahan, say Kom. And then there are all kinds of similar ones possible in China, ready to be hit if Blair gets the urge.

Let's hope that I would lose my wager, proving apparently that God does better.

Wednesday 15 July 2009

Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters - Part 9

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Washington, Beijing and Rangoon were all most eager to cover up the causes, consequences, and outcomes of the devastating cyclone Nargis in April 2008, and the earthquake in Sichuan ten days later, but all for very different reasons.

America was understandably most eager to hide the means by which it had wrought these disasters, what it had achieved by them, and the massive collateral destruction which had resulted in a most false, self-serving way to its biggest global challenger and its most self-assured ally. Beijing wanted a similar cover up to hide the process by which it had opened itself up to this most damaging strategic setback to its nuclear deterrent, the personnel responsible for making them, and the means of delivering them at the hands of the Americans, one whose consequences would plague the regime for years to come. The Burmese junta had been taught that its insulated relationship with China was a two-way street which could result in terrible consequences, and leave it with no recourse if it or its patrons stepped unduly on the toes of America's empire.

Washington was eager to portray the cyclone and earthquake as simply natural disasters which neither Myanmar nor Beijing had properly anticipated and prepared for - unlike what Bangladesh and Thailand had down in the wake of Indian Ocean tsunamis, and Iran had done after the 1990, 2003 and 2006 earthquakes. The Bush administration concentrated on reporting the thousands of children killed in the disasters, especially those 8,000 or so killed when eight schools around Mianyang were simply crushed by falling rock. There was no account of the 80,000 others who died when their offices, living quarters, testing laboratories, nuclear manufacturing and storage plants, rocket launching sites, etc., were simply swallowed up or smashed in the ensuing collapse of the whole area. And these were among the most skilled people China had in making, testing and producing its strategic arms, the core of its whole defense establishment.

Beijing was similarly inclined to explain away the vast destruction as just another natural disaster, though it was most desirous of learning the full scope of its destruction - what the imagery people of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) were most happy to supply. Of course, it gave the ignorant public the false impression that the USA had had nothing to do with its cause. China was particularly interested in knowing how badly its underground nuclear facilities, and its dams in the region had been damaged, fearing that even more destruction was imminent. In doing so, NRO Director Scott Large -who had served on its Imagery System Operations and Acquisitions Directorate, and was noted for coordinating its efforts with all its revelant intelligence community partners - was providing the Air Force with all the information it needed to assess what its Misty satellite laser had wrought.

The Burmese junta was still in the dark about what had hit it. It struggled to admit the number of casualities, and damaged done by the cyclone, only really opening its doors to relief efforts after the Chinese earthquake. Meanwhile, Washington played its cat-and-mouse game with Rangoon about relief efforts, claiming that it would only provide help through its own agents for fear that the junta would distribute it only for its own benefit. When the earthquake in Sichuan occurred, cutting off almost all Chinese assistance, the junta was eager for any help it could get, and Washington
responded accordingly, raising its measly offers of a little over $3 million to $43 million. The prey seemed to be making itself more vulnerable by accepting those offering gifts.

When these coverup efforts still did not quiet claims that these most suspicious disasters should have been at least anticipated if not predicted, and much less devastation caused, particularly an estimated 300,000 deaths, Beijing's interest in having high-definition images to better assess the damage began to create dangerous blowback as they started appearing on internet sites despite its efforts to prevent it. Especially troubling were those of the Zipingpu Dam since accommodating seismologists on both sides of the new Iron Curtain were trying to still claims that the earthquake was deliberately man-made, and should have been predicted because they showed that it had not really been seriously
damaged. In fact, it had been opened to the public so that it could better meet its personal needs while the Red Army battled to prevent the river's backup from drowning what was left of Dujiangyan.

While the photographs of all this appeared on cryptome.org, and other Western internet sites despite Beijing's efforts, they soon disappeared in the West because of pressure, apparently from the NRO, because they apparently disclosed too much. For their current status, see these links:

http://eyeball-series.org/zipingpu/zipingpu-dam/zipingpu-dam.html
http://cryptome.cn/cn-quake/cn-quake.htm
http://cryptome.cn/cn-quake2cn-quake2.htm
http://cryptome.cn/cn-quake3cn-quake3.htm
http://cryptome.cn/cn-quake4cn-quake4.htm
http://cryptome.cn/cn-quake5cn-quake5.htm
http://cryptome.cn/cn-quake6cn-quake6.htm

Now they disclose hardly anything at all about strategic infrastructure damage, only individual deaths, injuries, mourning, dwelling destruction and the like.

And the red-herring about the Zipingpu dam causing the earthquake soon lost much of its persuasiveness when neither it nor any of the other 366 dams in the area collapsed. The biggest fault in the claim is that the dam had nowhere near enough water at the dam to be unsafe. The depth of the water was only 120 meters, far below what scientists concerned about its possible role in earthquake recommended - no more than 300 meters of water. To still save the claim as the real cause, they then went on to talk about the millions of tons of water backed up behind the dam. For more on the government-sponsored diversion, see this link:

http://internationalrivers.org/en/node/3845

Just to make sure that Washington had control of the coverup, it then indicted Dr. J. Reece Roth, the plasma expert, for providing Beijing with vital information about it, as if the Chinese had somehow been able to use it in preventing the earthquake. The case was an open-and-shut one as Roth's alleged co-conspirator Max Sherman, also working with Atmospheric Glow Technology, Inc., had pled guilty on April 15, 2008 to violating the Arms Export Control Act. The most serious charge against Roth was that he had allowed a Chinese graduate assistant, Xin Dai, access to 15 Defense Department articles about plasmas in his research. The government had entrapped the naive Roth no matter what, even if it had decided to cause another earthquake in Iran instead of in China as he also had an Iranian research assistant.

The Justice Department still dragged out Roth's easy prosecution, certain conviction and lengthy sentencing until the dangers of the whole space warfare program being exposed had passed.

Then Naomi Klein kicked in her two cents' worth about these natural disasters, making it crystal clear that both Nargis and the earthquake had certainly been due to God's orders, not Bush's. In the June 2nd issue of The Nation, she wrote that their occurrence reminded her of what a Guangzhou-based surveillance company had been doing in the area of crowd control for the Beijing government rather than what Washington had been doing to promote disaster capitalism. "Of course," she added conveniently to spread the damage, "surveillance cameras have other uses too - like helping to make 'Most Wanted' posters of Tibetan activists."

The terrible result was allegedly because of Beijing's trying to build up too fast as a world power, especially in the construction of its Olympic Stadium. "But when China comes tumbling down -including at least eight schools - the truth," she added, "has a way of escaping." In alluding to the death of China's children, she failed to mention the other 80,000 persons killed, especially in its scientific and engineering elites. As for Burma, according to her, the cyclone's killing of 145,000 people plus had worked to the junta's advantage, like the coup did in Pinochet's Chile, by opening up the country to disaster capitalism. "This isn't incompetence, or even madness, It's laissez-faire ethnic cleansing."

The only downside of the disasters to their self-serving leaderships, she concluded, was that they had exposed the weaknesses of these autocratic regimes - what blogs and reporters, even state-sponsored ones, are going wild to exploit by their reporting. "This may be the greatest threat that natural disasters pose to repressive regimes."

With America apparently off the hook in every way about what happened, it was hardly surprising that the Pentagon started disposing of the culprits to establish a clean slate in such matters for the new administration whether it be Senator Obama or McCain. A few days later, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asked for the resignations of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, and Chief of Staff General Michael Moseley, justifying their termination after an investigation by Admiral Kirkland Donald into an errant shipment of nuclear missile fuses instead of helicopter parts to Taiwan in 2006, and a B-2 bomber flying across the States with six unknown nuclear missiles on board a year later.

It all seemed a bit bizarre since Admiral Donald had not been asked to investigate the knocking dowm on the Misty satellite, and the subsequent destruction of a B-2 bomber in Guam which had just occurred - what was either caused by débris from the smashed Misty, or was deliberately caused to make the Air Force look like it was hopelessly out of control in anticipation of the operations against Burma and China. Furthermore, it seemed most contrived to blame the Secretary and the Chief of Staff in Washington, who had most difficult positions to coordinate their planning of new
equipment and seeing to their use in operations with other agencies, for a routine sales error and a tactical nuclear mishap. It almost seemed as if one could expect some unexpected nuclear explosion from the Air Force almost anywhere.

During the August holiday seaon, Dr. Ronald Sega, the Undersecretary of the Air Force, then departed in order to take up a position at Colorado State where he had been Dean of its Engineering College. Sega, twice a NASA astronaut, was the Air Force's executive agent for space, seeing that its war-fighting missions were in tune with its capabilities. Sega had saved its dominance of space despite the cost-cutting efforts by National Intelligence Directors John Negroponte and Mike McConnell. He, it seems, put together the packages which caused Nargis and the Sichuan earthquake.

For more on the least known maker of America's space dominance, see this link:

http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/253567/air_force_reviewing_troubled_space_programs/

Once the government resumed around Labor Day, it put the finishing touches on the coverups of these most destructive operations. Dr. Roth was tried in a most paranoid environment for spying, and found guilty on all counts after a seven-day trial. While his defense had argued that these alleged violations of the Arms Export Control Act were simply the result of an oversight by the professor in a most gray area of the law while he was conducting complicated research, the prosecution acted as if it were the result of most serious spying by the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Patrick Rowan stating that the conviction was a most timely warning to those who would betray "...a very real threat to our national security, particularly when we know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their military development."

More important, Danny Stillman's most secret information about the locations of various Chinese nuclear facilities - what DCI Michael Hayden had prevented the publication of, and had ordered the Agency to make sure that it was not disclosed to other agencies for operational purposes - was essentially published in a article by Thomas Reed, entitled most prosaically "The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964-1996." Reed was a former nuclear researcher who had worked at Los Alamos too, and later was a Secretary of the Air Force during the Carter Administration. Just at this time, Reed and Stillman were preparing their book, The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation, for publication - what would exploit Stillman's most secret information about Chinese nuclear facilities and their use even more.

In the article, Reed stated all he could about Stillman's first two visits to China in 1990 without any fears of legal prosecution, acting as if they showed that the Chinese, rather than the Americans, had been totally committed to spying on what the other side was doing, going to Los Alamos a few years earlier. Acting as if the five Chinese visitors were simply unknown guests, Reed used the information that Stillman obtained by visiting Mianyang's Science City, and Xi'an's Dashita nuclear testing center as proof of how deeply Beijing had stolen America's nuclear and related secrets. The article, in sum, was completely intended to confuse the ignorant public about who was really doing what and why.

While I could write a whole new article about what Reed's article contains - its subtlety in dealing with Stillman's alleged police work, mining of details of China's nuclear deterrent, opening up new areas for exploitation at Beijing's expense, etc. - it should be read in its original entirety to properly appreciate it:

http://www.defence.pk/forums/china-defence/14150-chinese-nuclear-tests-1964-1996-a.html

Now America's covert government was sure that its most destructive covert capability and operations were well and truly beyond public disclosure no matter who would be George Bush's successor, but again it would be disappointed. There were still too many participants in them still in government, and more unexpected disclosures would appear.

Tuesday 7 July 2009

Glimpses of America's Man-Made Disasters - Part 8

by Trowbridge H. Ford

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell's inaugural address in June 2007 about cancelling the Misty satellite program - what Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra, Republican Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, conveniently said was a serious compromise of national security - was a most clever move to dissuade America's opponents from thinking that it would have undetected space ability to destroy their capability to defend themselves, whether it be tracking such weapons or destroying them in case of war. It seemed that America had only two such satellites according to Professor Jeffrey Richelson, author of The Wizards of Langley - one put up in 1990 and another in 1999 - and the cancellation apparently left America naked to its potential enemies, as the first one was certainly not even still airborne, as satellites only have a shelf-life of about six to eight years, and time was clearly running out on the second one if it was still in the sky.

The ending of the $9.5 billion project, way over budget, was justified because America no longer needed stealth satellites to spy on the Soviets but smaller, trickier ones after the 9/11 attacks to track down difficult "...terrorist cells and underground sites for nuclear programs run by countries such as Iran and North Korea." (Associated Press, "Spy Chief Scraps Satellite Program," June 21, 2007) Lexington Institute's Loren Thompson, an independent space weapons expert, confirmed that the budget decison was indeed a fact, while Congresswoman Heather Wilson, the top Republican on its intelligence panel, downplayed the consequences of the termination by explaining that some of the technology developed by the Misty program could be used in other ones, though she conveniently declined to provide any examples.

Of course, distinguishing stealth satellites from image and radar-seeking ones is a most false one as all satellites should have a stealth capability so that they can most effectively do what they are designed to do, whether it was to capture images of Soviet ICBMs going on line for a possible launch, or discover bunkers of some potential enemy where its nuclear weapons are stored. Without a stealth capability, the ICBMs might only be prepared for launch during overcast conditions, or the potential enemy might move them underground which prevents them from being seen under any conditions. The distinction, in short, seems to have been disinformation to confuse potential targets of America's satellites from suspecting what it was preparing for.

The problems with this public demonstration was that its disclosures were largely belied by what the Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne had said months before. In an article about Chinese ground-based lasers blinding US image and radar satellites, the usually tight-lipped Wynne said that America still had an "enormous" lead over the Chinese in space, and, consequently, the Pentagon and the American public should not be worried. The US had at least three heavy satellites of the Keyhole-Lacrosse-Misty kind, so even if one of them became inoperable or crashed, it would still have its normal complement for dealing with the problem.

For more on the subject, see this link:

http://sci.tech-archive/Archive/sci.space.policy/2006-09/msg00666.html

As for what the real complement of space satellites of military value the Pentagon had, there was still that infamous National Reconnaissance Office shoulder patch which showed four satellites, three apparently of an image-making variety, and one with a radar-destruction capability - what a big airborne laser could achieve. Director Donald Kerr had replaced it because it was too revealing of their offensive capabilities. The replacement patch did not change the agency's capability, though, only provided a less alarming cover of what it was capable of - what illustrated in spades the capability that Wynne had alluded to.

At this time, the American government was preventing the publication of Danny B. Stillman's book, Inside the Chinese Nuclear Weapons Program - a big book about what he had learned while he was working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, finishing up as its intelligence director. Stillman had visited China nine times during the 1990s, obtaining a good view of what Deng Xiaoping had had rebuilt in the mountains near Chengdu after the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan - the one apparently destroyed by Soviet airborne lasers - had effectively wiped out its first nuclear establishment. During Stillman's visits to China, he learned all about its Institute of Nuclear Physics and Chemistry around Mianyang; Beichnan, the home of the father of China's nuclear program, Deng Jiaxian; the nuclear research, testing, and manufacturing center way up west in the mountains at Dashita; and the nuclear underground assembly and storage facilities still further north in this most remote area.

When Stillman tried to get the courts to overturn the refusal by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon to allow the publication of 23 long passages in the manuscript despite the contracts he had signed about disclosures - what, in effect, gutted the project's attractiveness - he finally failed, the Appeals Court for the District of Columbia explaining that its publication could "...cause serious damage to national security, create serious risks to intelligence sources and methods, and/or cause significant strategic and diplomatic setbacks to the United States. The Court also is convinced that the disputed passages contain information that is not in the public domain." (Danny B. Stillman v. Central Intelligence Agency)

It did not require a rocket scientist to determine that the manuscript was a road map to the essentials of China's nuclear capability, its publication might ruin future efforts to mine what it was developing, and its outcome might well result in a serious setback to Chinese-American relations.

The reason why the American defense establishment fought so hard against the publication of Stillman's manuscript was because it was most concerned about China's possible proliferation of nuclear technology to Libya, Pakistan, North Korea and other rogue states - what could well call for focused counter measures to punish the growing Pacific power. When it was finally learned through Colonel Qaddafi that Beijing had indeed been helping these powers gain a nuclear capability through its help in providing them with the technology for generating electricity through atomic power, Washington was understandably looking for ways of stopping the process. China justified the covert operation in the hope of stopping India from becoming the primary player in the region by helping Pakistan and possibly others keep up with its nuclear achievements.

Any questioning or concern about this situation was completely undermined by the finishing touches that Naomi Klein put to The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Earthquakes, especially their causes, were not even considered disasters except when she was alluding to the consequences of the Indian Ocean tsunamis in Sri Lanka. Thanks to the role of climate change, she claimed, "disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand." (p. 540) No conspiracy theories were required for dealing with all the disasters, only how their consequences were handled. There was no more a conspiratorial dimension to disasters than thinking that the US government "...had a hand in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them 'because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East'."(p. 539)

This was all apparently written with a straight face while recounting that "...hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires (were) all increasing in frequency and intensity," (p. 525) while Lockheed Martin, the aerospace giant noted for making satellites, missiles, airborne lasers, integrated defense systems, and the like, was taking in $25 billion of taxpayer money in 2005 alone, more than the gross national product of 103 countries, and more than a good bit of the US government itself. In recounting what it made, she somehow left them out, preferring to site its running the government's computer systems, data management, sorting the mail, totalling up one's taxes, running space flights, and monitoring air traffic.

The disparity between what Lockheed Martin manufactures, and what Klein said it does seems more than accidental, especially when one reads what she said about Boeing, the giant airplane, satellite, and arms manufacturer. Boeing is now particularly known for its lasers, airborne weapons, and integrated defense systems but she made it look like primarily a civilian aviation industry which has sprouted into making a $2.5 billion project to fence off Canada and Mexico from the USA with electronic sensors, unmanned aircraft, surveillance cameras and eighteen hundred towers. (p. 555) She even mentioned it providing $20 million to start up neocon Richard Perle's Trireme Partners, a venture capital firm to develop products and services for homeland security and defense. (p. 405)

As if this wasn't strange enough, Ms. Klein added that Deng Xiaoping's China was primed for a bout of disaster capitalism because of its having adopted a double dose of the Chicago boys' shock treatment - the first to open up its command economy to globalization, and the second when it crushed the protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989. With the eradication of popular opposition to Deng Xiaoping's radical reforms, the Chinese leadership risked terrible blowback if there was some kind of disaster, especially if it exposed helter-skelter work that was done in the process. The raw terror of the suppression, she concluded, kept the country quiet for awhile, but it was now increasing in incidence and vehemence. "China too," Klein concluded, "is coming out of shock." (p. 579)

In so concluding, Ms. Klein overstated the role of Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and future President Jiang Zemin had played in the showdown with the rebellious students, thanks to their meeting with neocon rabblerouser Milton Friedman - what she thought indicated a serious division within the Party leadership over how to deal with the protests, and threatened a new civil war. Actually, Zhao never really saw himself as the instigator of serious trouble, and didn't realize that he had been sent into exile until years after the uprising had been suppressed. In the process, she vastly overstated how many had been killed, two to seven thousands (p. 237), rather than the 300 to 700 - what indicated that China was less of a powderkeg than she thought.

To set the stage for triggering the still necessary disaster, McConnell made his pursuit of bringing down the Misty satellite an obsession, as I have already discussed:

http://cryptome.org/misty-eyed.htm

The demonstration knockdown was to show the Chinese leadershp that Washington could knock down its own, spent satellites with a missile too - what Beijing had secretly done to one of its own satellites two years previously, starting the whole process of somehow figuring how to deal with the troublesome Chinese. Beijing was helping block what Washington wanted done, especially in North Korea and Myanmar.

After the Misty satellite was knocked down, the Air Force could have failed to keep track of its falling debris, leading to the first loss of one of its famous stealth bombers, a B-2, while it was taking off from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam. At least, that was the way it seemed when the Air Force provided of video of the group of four B-2s taking off. After the first one lifted off without difficulty, the second one was doing the same until right after liftoff when apparently a piece of the runway bounced up, hitting the trailing edge of the left wing, causing its engine to explode, and the plane quickly crashing in front of the control tower, the two pilots ejecting safely in the split-second, slam-bang operation. It all almost seemed staged to give the impression that the Air Force was hopelessly out of control in its operations.

For more, see this link:

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2008/03/calling-guam-did-misty-debris-bring.html

America's covert government then sprang into high gear, hoping that its actions to help loosen Chinese control of Tibet would ultimately so shake its control in other foreign areas, especially Myanmar and North Korea, and even domestically that its continued existence would be placed in jeopardy. The campaign was triggered by the Dalai Lama, head of Tibet's government in exile, condemning China's brutal rule of the country in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the failed coup in 1959 - what was precipatated by the successful flight of the 14th Dalai Lama when it really commenced. The current one's speech triggered riots in Lhasa and throughut the country, resulting in the death of many ethnic Chinese residing there, and of some Tibetan protesters. The results did not augur well for similar Chinese living in Myanmar and North Korea if further rioting occurred, thanks to unexpected events or disasters.

Tibet's continuing plight reminded the CIA all too well about its own troubled past in the isolated country. Its first two heroes, Douglas Mackiernan and Hugh Redmond, had died in trying to prevent the Chinese communists from occupying the country, and then promoting its rollback. Mackiernan had been killed, beheaded, and buried in an unmarked grave by Tibetan border guards while entering the country in 1950, hoping to mobilize the Muslims in surrounding areas of western China against Mao's advancing People's Liberation Army. As Ted Gup wrote in The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives, "...a key part of his mission was to embolden and advise the very resistance..." (p. 20) which he had only alluded to in a letter to his wife Pegge.

Redmond's mission the next year was to infiltrate as a foreign illegal operative, posing as a business man, the newly established communist regime with agents recruited from Shanghai in the hope of mounting resistance against it through acts of sabotage. (p. 50) Redmond was simply rounded up, though, by the communist authorites as a security measure, and languished in prison for the next nineteen years after havign been convicted of espionage in 1954. In 1970, just when young Robert Gates - the current Secretary of Defense - was starting his career with the Agency in earnest, it was shocked to learn that Redmond had finally committed suicide after a covert ransom plan, invovling famous Americans, and a $1,000,000 in Agency funds, to gain his release had failed.

And then there was the plight of other agents, and missionaires who finally were freed by Beijing. China, in sum, was the biggest source of losses by the CIA, even bigger than the former USSR, and it was high time for a payback for all its setbacks - what former DCI George Tenet had started with the laser-guided bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the campaign to force Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, due to its "faulty information". Gup concluded: "This was paired with scandalous accounts of Chinese spying at U.S. nuclear weapons labs and wholesale theft of America's most sensitive secrets." (p.371)

To give added credence to this claim about "wholesale theft of America's most sensitve secrets", and provide insurance against being seen as the culprit as the countdown of the attack against China neared its end, the Justice Department was putting the finishing touches on its indictment of fallguy Dr. J. Reece Roth - an expert on plasma technology, what the latest Misty satellites were equipped with to make them undetectable by Chinese radar - for spying for Beijing. Roth was working with graduate students from China and Iran on protecting drones with plasma technology, and had visited China twice to help in the research. Upon his return in 2006, he was arrested by the FBI, and it ultimately determined that Roth's lack of concern about the security of his research, especially allowing his assistants to see many Defense Department articles about plasmas, constituted espionage, and, like Samuel Loring Morison back in 1985, Roth faced a long time in prison if convicted of the 18 counts.

To pull off an earthquake around China's nuclear weapons center in Sichuan with the least cause of suspicions, the Air Force heated up with its latest Misty laser satellite Cyclone Nargis in the Bay of Bengal in late April 2008, much like it had Hurricane Katrina when it passed by Cuba in 2005, changing its direction to the northeast, and having it slam into the militarily-led Myanmar with deadly consequences. Its junta had long been on the Pentagon's hit list because of its close relationship with China, and its continued holding hostage of democratically elected Aung San Suu Kyi. Its generals simply did not know what had hit it, and how to respond to its devastation, as this link recounts:

http://topics.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/myanmar/cyclone_nargis/index.html

While the world was mesmerized by how the Burmese junta would react to the devastation Nargis had wrought, especially how it would treat the help offered by the French and Americans in ships lying offshore, the US Air Force turned the aim of its space weapons upon targets northwest of the Sichuan area in China, the desert where its qanats were attacked, causing a minor eathquake which loosened the connections between the Indian and Asian plates, hoping to destabilize the connections at their other end where the threats of underground facilities collapsing, landslides, rock falls, cave-ins, dams bursting, viaduct failures and the like had been increased by Chinese secret development of the area. It was all very similar to what the USS Jimmy Carter did to the Indian-Australian plate's connection to the Antarctic one in anticipation of the earthquate which occurred two days later where it met the Burmese one.

As the process moved to the Wenchuan area further south, the signs of an impeding but most unexpected earthquake increased, leading to all kinds of warnings to officialdom, but Beijing could not afford to heed them because of the rapidly approaching Olympic Games. China was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If it reacted vigorously to the reports - say even attempting to shoot down the offending Mistry satellite, an apparent act of war - it risked the most expensive Games turning out to be a non-event. If it did nothing, it seriously risked national security, especially if the suspected earthquake turned out to be a massive disaster. In sum, it just had to act as if nothing serious was happening, and hope that whatever happened would not threaten the regime itself.

Starting on May 2nd, there were increasing reports of cloud formations coming from Sichuan, a precursor of a large earthquake occurring according to Professor Zhonghao Shou's vapor theory about their cause, though he was surprisingly quiet about it all, leading one to suspect that the Pentagon had shut him up too by making him sign secrecy contracts in order to receive remuneration. Ever since 1991, Papa Bush had insured that no federal employees could blow the whistle on anything the government did except waste, fraud, and waste to Congress. (Angus Mackenzie, Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, p. 171)

A laser was apparently causing them, peppering the open, loose area with beams which increasingly shook and dried out all the underground places where water was. The whole area was a kind of qanat system where man had helped nature in opening up the whole area to catastrophic collapse. When the Air Force became worried that the Chinese might be on to what was going on, especially after there was a massive toad migration at Mianzhu three days before the quake - a traditional precursor of one - it had the Misty satellite activate its plasma envelope, causing the second kind of rainbow clouds, which made it invisible to Chinese radar, and permitted the beaming to continue during the daytime.

For more on the two types of cloud, etc., see this link:

http://pinewooddesign.co.uk/2008/05/12/earthquake-cloud-prediction/

On May 12th, the devastating earthquake happened, burying everything in the area in rubble except for those places which had a firm rock foundation. Beichuan city, thanks to a rippled effect it received from the epicenter, was simply buried in rubble - what no kind of earthquake protection building would have prevented - and the Chinese government has simply left untouched as a memorial to the dead. The underground nuclear assemly plant, and nuclear weapons storage sites high in the mountains received the same fate. The testing site at Dashita was so severely damaged that its nuclear reactor exploded during the earthquake, but was completely covered in the ensuing rubble as if the Chinese themselves had programmed its destruction as if it were simply a test.

For a picture of the devastation, see this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/12/world/05132008_CHINA_MAP.html#

It was the best example yet of what Naomi Klein had called "so-called Acts of God or by Acts of Bush (on orders from God)," and it is most interesting to see how the world, especially Ms. Klein, reacted to what had been wrought, as we shall see.

Gaza - The Hidden Truth Series #10