-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Information Warfare US Proclaims New Year's Terrorist Threat What kind of terrorism is the government planning? WASHINGTON - The U.S. government is warning all Americans traveling or living abroad to take extra security precautions from now through the first week in January because intelligence officials have obtained ''credible information'' that terrorists are planning attacks ''specifically targeting American citizens.'' The global caution, issued by the State Department less than three weeks before the new year, said the intelligence information ''indicates that attacks could be planned for locations where large gatherings and celebrations will be taking place.'' The advisory did not name specific terrorists who were suspected of making preparations to harm Americans. Administration officials were cautious in discussing terrorist groups, but indicated that the group headed by Osama bin Laden, the fugitive the Saudi businessman, was the most important organization seeking to undermine U.S. interests. A State Department spokesman, James Foley, said the government had no evidence that Americans in the United States would be in danger but that U.S. citizens were among the targets of attacks that could occur anywhere else in the world. The U.S. national security adviser, Samuel Berger, said Sunday that the information about possible attacks was ''not specific with respect to location,'' adding that it constituted ''not a stop sign'' for travel, but a caution. Americans abroad, Mr. Berger said, should check with local embassies or consulates to find out ''if there are particular places they should stay away from.'' Asked by ABC News whether the warning applied to the Middle East in particular, Mr. Berger said: ''This is not just in the Middle East, but in any location. So I think there's a caution sign up. But not a stop sign.'' Secretary of State Madeleine Albright appeared to try to walk a careful line between cautioning and frightening people. ''We are concerned, obviously because there are a lot of activities going on, and I think that there are more specific indications'' of a possible attack, she told CBS News on Sunday. ''But we don't want to discourage people. We want people to be very vigilant and we want people to contact our embassies.'' She would not say whether there was particular concern about Mr. bin Laden, adding that more than one group might be involved. She repeated that the warning was meant for Americans abroad, not at home, and said, ''We are concerned about Americans traveling abroad and being in large groups.'' But she stopped short of advising year's end revelers to stay home. The new warning says that attacks could occur any time from now through New Year's and the first week in January, when the monthlong Muslim holy days of Ramadan end. The warning urges Americans abroad to ''avoid large crowds and gatherings, keep a low profile, and vary routes and times of all required travel.'' Two senators on the Select Intelligence Committee said Sunday that credible evidence had prompted the State Department's warning. ''These kind of warnings are not made lightly,'' Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, said on CNN. ''This is a serious proposition. It should be taken seriously.'' Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, suggested on the same CNN program that the terrorists were working in Russia. ''There is a great deal of instability in a region where we would rather have stability,'' he said, which weakens law enforcement and oversight of activity by terrorists there. Government officials said the caution signaled a heightened degree of government concern. ''This means we have specific and credible information that terrorists are planning something,'' a senior administration official said. The threat to Americans that prompted the weekend warning is comparable in magnitude to ones that intelligence officials detected this year during the war in Kosovo or the ones that arose from Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, a State Department official said. ''This sounds to me fairly larger than many of the ones we've put out,'' the official said, noting that the worldwide caution comes at a time when ''people are already worried because of Y2K.'' ''You don't want to over-alarm them, but if we have this information, there's an obligation to tell them.'' The Los Angeles Times quoted a government source as saying: ''There have been a slew of threat reports over the past few weeks, mainly bin Laden-related. And then one emerged in the past couple of days that seemed much more credible and specific than all the others.'' Mr. bin Laden, who is living in Afghanistan under the protection of its ruling Taleban militia, has been indicted by a New York grand jury on charges of conspiracy and murder in the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 220 people. This year, the Clinton administration banned U.S. trade with and investment in Afghanistan because the Taleban refused to deliver Mr. bin Laden for prosecution. In mid-October, the UN Security Council gave the regime a month to produce him and said it would face similar sanctions imposed by the United Nations unless it complied. International Herald Tribune, December 13, 1999 Disease "AIDS" Devastating African Economies HIV or not, people are dying like flies. CHEGUTU, Zimbabwe - Planting season is just around the corner, and if this were any other year, Mark Magaya would be waiting anxiously for the first good spring rain to soften the coarse soil for his plow. But things are different this year. Mr. Magaya, 37, sleeps most of the day. His legs tremble when he wanders more than a few yards from his tiny mud hut. AIDS has pilfered his muscular physique, and he depends on his wife to bathe him, clothe him, help him to his feet when visitors arrive. The tuberculosis that occupies his lungs makes every breath a chore. There will be no harvest this year. ''I am too weak to farm,'' Mr. Magaya said one recent afternoon while lying on the floor of his home. ''Usually, I grow enough maize to feed my wife and baby girl, and then I sell the surplus. That gets us through the year. But this is the second year that I've been unable to farm, and I don't know how we will make it. My family survives on handouts from friends and family. My condition grows worse from worry and hunger.'' This is Africa's dry season. As surely as drought, as swiftly as locusts, acquired immune deficiency syndrome is devouring this continent's cash crops by idling the once able-bodied farmers who work the land. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to two-thirds of the world's 33.4 million people living with AIDS, and the mostly agrarian economies here are doubly cursed. Nowhere are people more dependent on strong backs and sturdy legs for survival, yet no population on Earth is as feeble. AIDS, confined largely to the urban poor and gay men in the Western world, has cut a much wider swath in Africa, coursing along the continent's major trucking routes. Spread mostly through heterosexual contact, AIDS in the Third World is the curse of the young - men and women with children to raise and work to do. ''When the breadwinner gets sick, the whole family shuts down in a sense,'' said Timothy Stamps, Zimbabwe's health minister. ''We're burying people faster than we can replace them, and there just aren't enough hands left to do the work. It's really disrupting how we do business as a nation.'' AIDS in Africa has metastasized into a disease whose progression is no longer measured solely by the depletion of a patient's T-cells but increasingly by every percentage point that is shaved from a nation's gross domestic product. More than 5,000 people with AIDS die each day in Africa, and epidemiologists expect that figure to climb to almost 13,000 by 2005. By that time, health experts say, more people in sub-Saharan Africa will have died from AIDS than in both world wars combined or from the bubonic plague, which killed 20 million people in 14th-century Europe. Ten percent of the work force in southern Africa has been infected, and economists estimate that the shrinking labor pool - coupled with rising health and welfare costs, reduced spending power and lost investment - will slow the continent's rate of economic growth by as much as 1.4 percentage points each year for the next 20 years. In Africa's most industrialized states, including South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya, the gross domestic product - an economist's best gauge of prosperity - could be 20 percent lower by 2005 than it otherwise would have been. ''HIV is now the single greatest threat to future economic development in Africa,'' said Callisto Madavo, the World Bank's vice president for Africa. But it is not Africa's burden alone. AIDS is growing fastest in Asia, and many health experts say it may overtake Africa in the number of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That creates a vexing problem for investors in Europe and North America as their economies peak and they increasingly turn to the Third World for profits. ''What happens to the global market economy if there's no one left to do the work?'' asked Peter Piot, executive director of the United Nations' AIDS organization. That is precisely the problem facing sub-Saharan Africa. At Zambia's largest cement company, absenteeism has increased 15-fold since 1992; over the same period, Uganda's railroad company has lost 15 percent of its work force annually. AIDS accounts for 60 percent of all the employee claims for death benefits filed with Southampton Assurance, Zimbabwe's largest insurance company. At Eskom, South Africa's electric utility, 11 percent of the workers are infected with HIV, the company chairman, Reuel Khoza, said. Barclay's Bank of Zambia has lost more than a quarter of its senior managers to AIDS, and a government survey of Kenyan businesses revealed that costs associated with the disease have slashed profits by almost 4 percentage points a year since 1994. Surveys in Uganda indicate that 40 percent of its military force has HIV, while classrooms in Malawi stay empty because a third of all schoolteachers are infected. ''These are people who cannot be replaced quickly or easily,'' Mr. Piot said. "When they die, who will teach these children?'' In Zimbabwe, where nearly a quarter of the 12 million residents are infected, managers at the Vitafoam mattress and furniture factory cope with employee turnover by training three new hires for every job. ''We expect to lose two of them within a year's time," said Taanda Marongwe, the plant supervisor in the industrial center of Bulawayo, about 320 kilometers (200 miles) southwest of the capital, Harare. ''This way, work doesn't just grind to a halt when an employee can no longer come to work. It is a difficult way to run a factory, but it's the best way under these circumstances.'' But it is in arid, hardscrabble villages such as Chegutu where AIDS has done the most damage, leaving the sick to die, and their survivors often without food on the table. Maize production by Zimbabwe's peasant farmers and on small commercial farms declined by 61 percent last year because of illness and death from AIDS, according to a survey by the Zimbabwe Farmers Union. Cotton, vegetable, groundnut and sunflower crops were cut nearly in half, and cattle farming declined by almost a third, according to the study. Overall, agricultural output dropped nearly 20 percent last year as a result of AIDS, Mr. Stamps, the health minister, said. Business at the nameless convenience store in Chegutu has declined dramatically in the past few years. ''People just don't have the money to spend anymore,'' said the owner, Phillip Mowere. School attendance has dropped as well. Parents are hard pressed to come up with school fees, and many children are kept at home to do the chores that would have ordinarily been done by a parent, said Samson Musinanake, a project officer for a health clinic in Chegutu. Nicholas Soku, 69, would have retired years ago if not for the pestilence that has struck his family. With the help of his son, the widowed peasant farmer harvested just enough maize and cotton for his family of three to get by in years past. But his 41-year-old son died of AIDS in June, leaving him to tend the crops and care for his ailing daughter, who is infected with the HIV virus. ''My son was unable to help me in the fields the last two years of his life, and last year, we harvested almost nothing,'' said Mr. Soku, rail-thin and shirtless, his face heavily creased by age and hard living. ''I do what I can now, but I am old, and most of my time is spent looking after my daughter. We eat with the handouts and odd jobs my neighbors hire me to do. But we are scrambling to survive.'' International Herald Tribune, December 13, 1999 Fin-de-siecle Columbine Killers Made Home Videos More proof that Hollywood and TV kill. Ban them both now. THE motives of two teenagers who killed 13 people in the Columbine High School massacre became clearer yesterday as details were released of home videos they had made. These show them arguing about whether Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino would be best suited to make a film about the atrocity. It was disclosed that Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, made five tapes for posterity while planning the massacre. They intended to kill scores at their school with guns and pipe bombs. "I hope we kill 250 of you," said Klebold on one tape. "It's going to be like fucking Doom." Harris interjected: "Tick. Tick. Tick. Haaa! That fucking shotgun is straight out of Doom." At another point Harris said: "Isn't it fun the respect that we're going to deserve?" The tapes, seen by Time magazine, are part of the investigation into the murders in Denver, Colorado, in April. After killing 12 pupils and a teacher, Harris and Klebold killed themselves. From the tapes, it seems that they were motivated primarily by hate and anger at being alienated from their families. They were intent on a "final performance" that would make them famous. The tapes, they hoped, would be pored over by historians and film-makers. On the day of the massacre, Klebold said: "I didn't like life very much . . . Just know that I'm going to a better place . . . It's what we had to do." Harris said: "I know Mom and Dad will be in shock and disbelief." The only people to whom they expressed regret were their parents. "It fucking sucks to do this to them," said Harris. Klebold told his mother and father they had been "great" parents. "I'm sorry I have so much rage." Harris told of moving around with his military family and starting "at the bottom of the ladder" at new schools where other children would make fun of "my face, my hair, my shirts". Klebold said: "If you could see all the anger I've stored over the past four fucking years." He complained of his more popular brother Byron "ripping" on him and said his extended family treated him like the runt of the litter. "You made me what I am. You added to the rage." Harris said they were "going to kick-start a revolution". He promised to haunt the survivors and "create flashbacks from what we do and drive them insane". The tapes show that there were signs that the pair were planning something terrible and they were nearly caught with guns several times. Klebold predicted that his parents would say: "If only we could have reached them sooner or found this tape. If only we had searched their room." Klebold expected the build-up to the killings to be the most "nerve-racking 15 minutes of my life, after the bombs are set and we're waiting to charge through the school. Seconds will be like hours. I can't wait. I'll be shaking like a leaf". Harris recalled that his mother had seen a gun handle sticking out of his gym bag but assumed it was a toy. Klebold said that his parents once walked in when he was trying on a black leather trenchcoat with a sawn-off shotgun hidden underneath. "They didn't even know it was there." They boasted about how they had hidden their intentions at school. "I could convince them that I'm going to climb Mount Everest or that I have a twin brother growing out of my back," said Harris. "I can make you believe anything. " After Klebold said that "directors will be fighting over this story", they argued about whether Spielberg or Tarantino could be trusted with it. On the final tape, they said goodbye to their parents. Harris asked for a music album called Bombthreat Before She Blows to be given to a girl he liked. Their three sets of bombs did not go off. Instead, the two walked into the school and fired at random. The London Telegraph, December 13, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations, Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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