USA And The Future Of The World

[dhu]

Finally, we have an incident confirming American decline. It's over for the US. The childish snickering of these top-tier students would never be seen in any Indian/Chinese/Iranian setting.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Submitted by mohan sivaswamy, Sep 27, 2007 03:44

I was shocked by the language used by the Columbia University President Bolllinger to his guest President Ahmedinijad. It is not the way to treat a guest, however repulsive the guest may be. And mind you the guest was invited, so the responsibility was with Bollinger to extend decent, human courtesy. He failed miserably in that, in public, in front of the students whom the University is supposed to educate in worldly ways.

My sympathies for President Ahemdinijad have increase manifold by watching his smiling face and unruffled reacion to the insults.

And don't forget the points he made. He was right about 'why Palestinians have to pay for what the White man did to Jews in Europe'. The British created the Palestine situation and as is their practice, got out of Palestine in a hurry, dividing the people there and creating arbitrary boundaries between nations and people. Americans stepped in later to exploit the troubled circumstances and made sure they got oil cheaply for decades. It was very correct of President Ahmedinijad to bring this point to the fore.

As for as nuclear energy is concerned, every nation on earth is entitled to expoit it. The real grudge of America is that Iran is not buying the technology and materials from it. If tomorrow Iran were to offer a business deal to USA, then all opposition would vanish. Witness the 123 deal with India. It is money that tickles Americans' fancy and that is what they live and die for in far off lands. What a shame?

I am glad that Bollinger gave a chance to President Ahmedinijad to show his statesmanship and tolerance and intelligence.

However Bollinger himself lost a good chance to show the 'Good American' to the world.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Submitted by Pete, Sep 26, 2007 06:41

Just a quick message to say how appaled I was to hear the introduction from Bollinger, supposedly an academic....he could have read that introduction from the back of an FBI, CIA,etc cornflakes box. In Buddhism there is a concept of the 3 poisons which include Greed/Lust, Hatred/Anger and Delusion/Denial of the truth...all of which inflate the ego and destroy the intelligence and spirit...it seem to be the driving force in the US now

Diplomacy?...He must have gone to the Bush school of diplomacy and charm or was he merely trying to provoke the visiting President into an incident...the only thing he didn't accuse Mr Ahmadinejad of being was ugly looking...'o, look at his eyebrows...he must be evil, etc'.....What a racist country the Us is....and ignorant beyond belief.

As for all the questions about poor, unprotected, weak Israel with its nuclear bombs and Us billions in aid, weapons and backing...oppresor of other so called inferior races.....all you have to do is look at Israel as a microcosm for Imperial strategy for the rest of the world...if they couldn't establish peace and equality in this small country( which they have no intention of doing, of course)...what do they think they can convince other, non brainwashed societies they can do anywhere else.

...The bald eagle looks like its lost a few more feathers...<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->DontBelieveJewsNews  :

Haha that is the behavior of a "University President" in one of your "best schools"? No wonder you have to grab educated people from all over the world to come work in the U.S. with lies about a "better life". Your own schools are a sh1t hole run by boorish mafia controlled gangters with the manners of a barn yard animal! <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
he got on the wrong side of the right wing liars who did not want Ahmadinejad given a chance to talk, and now he's lost the support of the truth seekers.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->What caught my eye most was not the lack of respect for a foreign leader in the minds of 600 university students, but the fact that their educated opinions could not be changed even after a considerably long and candid session with the Iranian president. This fact was obvious, from the boos that sounded in the auditorium at certain answers from President Ahmadinejad. It shows a lot about the tolerance of a nation that is intent on shaping the future of the entire world.

From MeridyM  link<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

Complete text of Lee C. Bollinger's lecture, for archives sake.

video here: worldleaders.columbia.edu/video/wlf07_ahmadinejad dot ram

is there a text of Ahmadinejad's reply available?

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->columbia.edu/cu/news/07/09/lcbopeningremarks.html

President Lee C. Bollinger's Introductory Remarks at SIPA-World Leaders Forum with President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Sept. 24, 2007

I would like to begin by thanking Dean John Coatsworth and Professor Richard Bulliet for their work in organizing this event and for their commitment to the role of the School of International and Public Affairs and its role in training future leaders in world affairs.  If today proves anything it will be that there is an enormous amount of work ahead for all of us.  This is just one of many events on Iran that will run throughout this academic year, all to help us better understand this critical and complex nation in today’s geopolitics. 

Before speaking directly to the current President of Iran, I have a few critically important points to emphasize. 

First, since 2003, the World Leaders Forum has advanced Columbia’s longstanding tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate, especially on global issues. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

Second, to those who believe that this event never should have happened, that it is inappropriate for the University to conduct such an event, I want to say that I understand your perspective and respect it as reasonable.  The scope of free speech and academic freedom should itself always be open to further debate.  As one of the more famous quotations about free speech goes, it is “an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”  I want to say, however, as forcefully as I can, that this is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing norms of free speech, the American university, and Columbia itself. 

Third, to those among us who experience hurt and pain as a result of this day, I say on behalf of all of us we are sorry and wish to do what we can to alleviate it. 

Fourth, to be clear on another matter - this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any “rights” of the speaker but only with our rights to listen and speak.  We do it for ourselves. 

We do it in the great tradition of openness that has defined this nation for many decades now.  We need to understand the world we live in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers.  It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament.  In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to exercise extraordinary self- restraint against the very natural but often counter-productive impulses that lead us to retreat from engagement with ideas we dislike and fear.  In this lies the genius of the American idea of free speech.

Lastly, in universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth.  We do not have access to the levers of power.  We cannot make war or peace.  We can only make minds.  And to do this we must have the most full freedom of inquiry.   

Let me now turn to Mr. Ahmadinejad. 

THE BRUTAL CRACKDOWN ON SCHOLARS, JOURNALISTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES
Over the last two weeks, your government has released Dr. Haleh Esfandiari and Parnaz Axima; and just two days ago Kian Tajbakhsh, a graduate of Columbia with a PhD in urban planning.  While our community is relieved to learn of his release on bail, Dr. Tajbakhsh remains in Teheran, under house arrest, and he still does not know whether he will be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country.  Let me say this for the record, I call on the President today to ensure that Kian Tajbaksh will be free to travel out of Iran as he wishes. Let me also report today that we are extending an offer to Dr. Tajbaksh to join our faculty as a visiting professor in urban planning here at his Alma Mater, in our Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.  And we hope he will be able to join us next semester.

The arrest and imprisonment of these Iranian Americans for no good reason is not only unjustified, it runs completely counter to the very values that allow today’s speaker to even appear on this campus. 

But at least they are alive.

According to Amnesty International, 210 people have been executed in Iran so far this year – 21 of them on the morning of September 5th alone.  This annual total includes at least two children – further proof, as Human Rights Watch puts it, that Iran leads the world in executing minors. 

There is more.

Iran hanged up to 30 people this past July and August during a widely reported suppression of efforts to establish a more open, democratic society in Iran.  Many of these executions were carried out in public view, a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a party. 

These executions and others have coincided with a wider crackdown on student activists and academics accused of trying to foment a so-called “soft revolution”.  This has included jailing and forced retirements of scholars.  As Dr. Esfandiari said in a broadcast interview since her release, she was held in solitary confinement for 105 days because the government “believes that the United States . . . is planning a Velvet Revolution” in Iran. 

In this very room last year we learned something about Velvet Revolutions from Vaclav Havel. And we will likely hear the same from our World Leaders Forum speaker this evening – President Michelle Bachelet Jeria of Chile. Both of their extraordinary stories remind us that there are not enough prisons to prevent an entire society that wants its freedom from achieving it.

We at this university have not been shy to protest and challenge the failures of our own government to live by these values; and we won’t be shy in criticizing yours.

Let’s, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.

And so I ask you:

Why have women, members of the Baha’i faith, homosexuals and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?

Why in a letter last week to the Secretary General of the UN did Akbar Gangi, Iran’s leading political dissident, and over 300 public intellectuals, writers and Nobel Laureates express such grave concern that your inflamed dispute with the West is distracting the world’s attention from the intolerable conditions your regime has created within Iran?  In particular, the use of the Press Law to ban writers for criticizing the ruling system.

Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?

In our country, you are interviewed by our press and asked that you to speak here today.  And while my colleague at the Law School Michael Dorf spoke to Radio Free Europe [sic, Voice of America] viewers in Iran a short while ago on the tenets of freedom of speech in this country, I propose going further than that. Let me lead a delegation of students and faculty from Columbia to address your university about free speech, with the same freedom we afford you today?  Will you do that?

THE DENIAL OF THE HOLOCAUST
In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a “fabricated” “legend.”  One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.

For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda.  When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous.  You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.  

You should know that Columbia is a world center of Jewish studies and now, in partnership with the YIVO Institute, of Holocaust studies.  Since the 1930s, we’ve provided an intellectual home for countless Holocaust refugees and survivors and their children and grandchildren.  The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history.   Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments about the “debate” over the Holocaust both defy historical truth and make all of us who continue to fear humanity’s capacity for evil shudder at this closure of memory, which is always virtue’s first line of defense.

Will you cease this outrage? 

THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL
Twelve days ago, you said that the state of Israel “cannot continue its life.”  This echoed a number of inflammatory statements you have delivered in the last two years, including in October 2005 when you said that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” 

Columbia has over 800 alumni currently living in Israel.  As an institution we have deep ties with our colleagues there.  I personally have spoken out in the most forceful terms against proposals to boycott Israeli scholars and universities, saying that such boycotts might as well include Columbia.  More than 400 college and university presidents in this country have joined in that statement.  My question, then, is: Do you plan on wiping us off the map, too? 

FUNDING TERRORISM
According to reports by the Council on Foreign Relations, it’s well documented that Iran is a state sponsor of terror that funds such violent group as the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran helped organize in the 1980s, the Palestinian Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. 

While your predecessor government was instrumental in providing the US with intelligence and base support in its 2001 campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, your government is now undermining American troops in Iraq by funding, arming, and providing safe transit to insurgent leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces. 

There are a number of reports that also link your government with Syria’s efforts to destabalize the fledgling Lebanese government through violence and political assassination. 

My question is this:  Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and civil society in the region? 

PROXY WAR AGAINST U.S. TROOPS IN IRAQ
In a briefing before the National Press Club earlier this month, General David Petraeus reported that arms supplies from Iran, including 240mm rockets and explosively formed projectiles, are contributing to “a sophistication of attacks that would by no means be possible without Iranian support.” 

A number of Columbia graduates and current students are among the brave members of our military who are serving or have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They, like other Americans with sons, daughters, fathers, husbands and wives serving in combat, rightly see your government as the enemy. 

Can you tell them and us why Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq by arming Shi’a militia targeting and killing U.S. troops? 

FINALLY, IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM AND INTERNATIONAL SANCTIONS
This week the United Nations Security Council is contemplating expanding sanctions for a third time because of your government’s refusal to suspend its uranium-enrichment program.  You continue to defy this world body by claiming a right to develop peaceful nuclear power, but this hardly withstands scrutiny when you continue to issue military threats to neighbors.  Last week, French President Sarkozy made clear his lost patience with your stall tactics; and even Russia and China have shown concern.

Why does your country continue to refuse to adhere to international standards for nuclear weapons verification in defiance of agreements that you have made with the UN nuclear agency?  And why have you chosen to make the people of your country vulnerable to the effects of international economic sanctions and threaten to engulf the world with nuclear annihilation? 

Let me close with this comment.  Frankly, and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions.  But your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us.  I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do.  Fortunately, I am told by experts on your country, that this only further undermines your position in Iran with all the many good-hearted, intelligent citizens there.  A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country (as in your meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations) so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections.  May this do that and more. 

I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for.  I only wish I could do better.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

ok here it is. complete transcript of what happened after the above speech.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->MR. COATSWORTH: Thank you, Lee.
Our principal speaker today is His Excellency the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. President. (Applause.)
INTERPRETER: The president is reciting verses from the Holy Koran in Arabic. (Not translated.)

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: Oh, God, hasten the arrival of Imam al- Mahdi and grant him good health and victory, and make us his followers and those who attest to his (rightfulness ?).

Distinguished Dean, dear professors and students, ladies and gentlemen. At the outset, I would like to extend my greetings to all of you. I am grateful to the Almighty God for providing me with the opportunity to be in an academic environment, those seeking truth and striving for the promotion of science and knowledge.

At the outset, I want to complain a bit on the person who read this political statement against me. In Iran, tradition requires that when we demand a person to invite us as a -- to be a speaker, we actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgment, and we don't think it's necessary before the speech is even given to come in -- (applause) -- with a series of claims and to attempt in a so-called manner to provide vaccination of some sort to our students and our faculty.

I think the text read by the (dear ?) gentleman here, more than addressing me, was an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here, present here. In a university environment, we must allow people to speak their mind, to allow everyone to talk so that the truth is eventually revealed by all. Most certainly he took more than all the time I was allocated to speak. And that's fine with me. We'll just leave that to add up with the claims of respect for freedom and the freedom of speech that is given to us in this country.

In many parts of his speech, there were many insults and claims that were incorrect, regretfully. Of course, I think that he was affected by the press, the media and the political sort of mainstream line that you read here, that goes against the very grain of the need for peace and stability in the world around us.
Nonetheless, I should not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment.
I will tell you what I have to say, and then the questions he can raise and I'll be happy to provide answers. But for one of the issues that he did raise, I most certainly would need to elaborate further so that we for ourselves can see how things fundamentally work.

It was my decision in this valuable forum and meeting to speak with you about the importance of knowledge, of information, of education. Academics and religious scholars are shining torches who shed light in order to remove darkness and the ambiguities around us in guiding humanity out of ignorance and perplexity. The key to the understanding of the realities around us rests in the hands of the researchers, those who seek to undiscover (sic) areas that are hidden, the unknown sciences. The windows of realities that they can open is done only through efforts of the scholars and the learned people in this world. With every effort, there is a window that is opened and one reality is discovered.
Whenever the high stature of science and wisdom is preserved and the dignity of scholars and researchers are respected, humans have taken great strides towards their material and spiritual promotion. In contrast, whenever learned people and knowledge have been neglected, humans have become stranded in the darkness of ignorance and negligence. If it were not for human instinct, which tends towards continual discovery of the truth, humans would have always remained stranded in ignorance and no way would have discovered how to improve the lives that we are given. The nature of man is, in fact, a gift granted by the Almighty to all. The Almighty led mankind into this world and granted him wisdom and knowledge as his (kind ?) gift, enabling him to know his God.

In the story of Adam, a conversation occurs between the Almighty and his angels. The angels called human beings an ambitious and merciless creature and protested against his creation, but the Almighty responded, quote, "I have knowledge of what you are ignorant of," unquote. Then the Almighty told Adam the truth, and on the order of the Almighty, Adam revealed it to the angels.
The angels could not understand the truth as revealed by the human beings.
The Almighty said to them, quote, "Did not I say that I am aware of what is hidden in heaven and in the universe?" unquote. In this way, the angels prostrated themselves before Adam.

In the mission of all divine prophets, the first sermons were of the words of God, and those words "piety," "faith" and "wisdom" have been spread to all mankind. Guiding the holy prophet Moses -- may peace be upon him -- God says, quote, "And he was taught wisdom, the divine book, the Old Testament and the New Testament. He is the prophet appointed for the sake of the children of Israel, and I rightfully brought a sign from the Almighty. Holy Koran -- (inaudible word) -- sura," unquote.

The first words which were revealed to the holy prophet of Islam call the prophet to read, quote, "Read, read in the name of your God, who supersedes everything," unquote. The Almighty, quote again, "who taught the human being with the pen," unquote; quote, "the Almighty taught human beings what they were ignorant of," unquote.

You see in the first verses revealed to the holy prophet of Islam words of reading, teaching and the pen are mentioned. These verses in fact introduce the Almighty as the teacher of human beings, the teacher who taught humans what they were ignorant of. And another part of the -- (inaudible word) -- on the mission on the holy prophet of Islam -- it is mentioned that the Almighty appointed someone from amongst the common people as their prophet in order to, quote, "Read for them the divine verses," unquote; and, quote again, "and purify them from ideological and ethical contaminations," unquote; and, quote again, "to teach them the divine book and wisdom," unquote.

My dear friends, all the words and messages of the divine prophets, from Abraham and Isaac and Jacob to David and Soliman and Moses to Jesus and Mohammed, delivered humans from ignorance, negligence, superstitions, unethical behavior and corrupted ways of thinking with respect to knowledge and a path to knowledge, light and rightful ethics.

In our culture, the word "science" has been defined as "illumination." In fact, the "science" means "brightness" and the real science is a science which rescues the human being from ignorance to his own benefit. In one of the widely accepted definitions of science, it is stated that it is the light which sheds to the hearts of those who have been selected by the Almighty; therefore, according to this definition, science is a divine gift, and the heart is where it resides.

If we accept that "science" means "illumination," then its scope supersedes the experimental sciences, and it includes every hidden and disclosed reality. One of the main harms inflicted against science is to limit it to experimental and physical sciences; this harm occurs even though it extends far beyond this scope.
Realities of the world are not limited to physical realities. And the material is just a shadow of supreme realities, and physical creation is just one of the stories of the creation of the world. Human being is just an example of the creation that is a combination of the material and the spirit.

And another important point is the relationship of science and purity of spirit, life, behavior and ethics of the human being. In the teachings of the divine prophet, one reality shall always be attached to science. The reality of purity of spirit and good behavior, knowledge and wisdom is pure and clear reality. It is -- science is a light. It is a discovery of reality, and only a pure scholar and researcher, free from wrong ideologies, superstitions, selfishness and material trappings, can discover the reality.

My dear friends and scholars, distinguished participants, science and wisdom can also be misused, a misuse caused by selfishness, corruption, material desires and material interests, as well as individual and group interests. Material desires place humans against the realities of the world. Corrupted independent human beings resist acceptance of reality and even if they do accept it, they do not obey it.
There are many scholars who are aware of the realities but do not accept them. Their selfishness does not allow them to accept those realities. Did those who in the course of human history wage wars not understand the reality that lives, properties, dignity, territories and the rights of all human beings should be respected? Or did they understand it but neither have faith in nor abide by it?
My dear friends, as long as the human heart is not free from hatred, envy and selfishness, it does not abide by the truth, by the illumination of science and science itself. Science is the light and scientists must be pure and pious. If humanity achieves the highest level of physical and spiritual knowledge, but its scholars and scientists are not pure, then this knowledge cannot serve the interest of humanity, and several events can ensue.

First, the wrongdoers reveal only a part of the reality which is to their own benefit and conceal the rest, as we have witnessed with respect to the scholars of the divine religions in the past too. Unfortunately today we see that certain researchers and scientists are still hiding the truth from the people.
Second, scientists and scholars are misused for personal, group or party interests. So in today's world, ruling powers are misusing many scholars and scientists in different fields, with the purpose of stripping nations of their wealth.
And they use all opportunities only for their own benefit.

For example, they deceive people by using scientific methods and tools. They, in fact, wish to justify their own wrongdoings, though, by creating nonexistent enemies, for example, and have insecure atmosphere. They try to control all in the name of combatting insecurity and terrorism. They even violate individual and social freedoms in their own nations under that pretext. They do not respect the privacy of their own people. They tap telephone calls and try to control their people. They create an insecure psychological atmosphere in order to justify their warmongering acts in different parts of the world.

As another example, by using precise scientific methods and planning, they begin their onslaught on the domestic cultures of nations, the cultures which are the result of thousands of years of interaction, creativity and artistic activities. They try to eliminate these cultures in order to separate the people from their identity and cut their bonds with their own history and values. They prepare the ground for stripping people from their spiritual and material wealth by instilling in them feelings of intimidation, desire for imitation and mere consumption, submission to oppressive powers, and disability.

Making nuclear, chemical and biological bombs and weapons of mass destruction is yet another result of the misuse of science and research by the big powers. Without cooperation of certain scientists and scholars, we would not have witnessed production of different nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Are these weapons to protect global security? What can a perpetual nuclear umbrella threat achieve for the sake of humanity? If nuclear war wages between nuclear powers, what human catastrophe will take place? Today we can see the nuclear effects in even new generations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima residents which might be witness in even the next generations to come. Presently, effects of the depleted uranium used in weapons since the beginning of the war in Iraq can be examined and investigated accordingly. These catastrophes take place only when scientists and scholars are misused by oppressors.

Another point of sorrow, some big powers create a monopoly over science and prevent other nations in achieving scientific development as well.
This, too, is one of the surprises of our time. Some big powers do not want to see the progress of other societies and nations. They turn to thousands of reasons, make allegations, place economic sanctions to prevent other nations from developing and advancing, all resulting from their distance from human values, moral values and the teachings of the divine prophet. Regretfully, they have not been trained to serve mankind.

Dear academics, dear faculty and scholars, students, I believe that the biggest God-given gift to man is science and knowledge. Man's search for knowledge and the truth through science is what it guarantees to do in getting close to God, but science has to combine with the purity of the spirit and of the purity of man's spirit so that scholars can unveil the truth and then use that truth for advancing humanity's cause.

These scholars would be not only people who would guide humanity, but also guide humanity towards the future, better future. And it is necessary that big powers should not allow mankind to engage in monopolistic activities and to prevent other nations from achieving that science. Science is a divine gift by God to everyone, and therefore it must remain pure. God is aware of all reality. All researchers and scholars are loved by God.

So I hope there will be a day where these scholars and scientists will rule the world and God himself will arrive with Moses and Christ and Mohammed to rule the world and to take us towards justice.

I'd like to thank you now, but refer to two points made in the introduction given about me, and then I will be open for any questions.

Last year, I would say two years ago, I raised two questions. You know that my main job is a university instructor. Right now as president of Iran I still continue teaching graduate and Ph.D.-level courses on a weekly basis. My students are working with me in scientific fields. I believe that I am an academic myself, so I speak with you from an academic point of view.

And I raised two questions. But instead of a response, I got a wave of insults and allegations against me, and regretfully, they came mostly from groups who claimed most to believe in the freedom of speech and the freedom of information. You know quite well that Palestine is an old wound, as old as 60 years.
For 60 years, these people are displaced; for 60 years, these people are being killed; for 60 years, on a daily basis, there's conflict and terror; for 60 years, innocent women and children are destroyed and killed by helicopters and airplanes that break the house over their heads; for 60 years, children in kindergartens in schools, in high schools are in prison being tortured; for 60 years, security in the Middle East has been in danger; for 60 years, the slogan of expansionism from the Nile to the Euphrates has been chanted by certain groups in that part of the world.

And as an academic, I ask two questions, the same two questions that I will ask here again. And you judge for yourselves whether the response to these questions should be the insults, the allegations and all the words and the negative propaganda, or should we really try and face these two questions and respond to them? Like you, like any academic, I, too, will keep -- not get -- become silent until I get the answers, so I am awaiting logical answers instead of insults.
My first question was, if, given that the Holocaust is a present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives? Our friends refer to 1930 as the point of the departure for this development; however, I believe the Holocaust, from what we read, happened during World War II after 1930 in the 1940s. So, you know, we have to really be able to trace the event.

My question was simple. There are researchers who want to push the topic from a different perspective. Why are they put into prison? Right now there are a number of European academics who have been sent to prison because they attempted to write about the Holocaust, so researchers from a different perspective, questioning certain aspects of it -- my question is, why isn't it open to all forms of research? I have been told that there's been enough research on the topic. And I ask, well, when it comes to topics such as freedom, topics such as democracy, concepts and norms such as God, religion, physics even or chemistry, there's been a lot of research, but we still continue more research on those topics. We encourage it. But then why don't we encourage more research on a historical event that has become the root, the cause of many heavy catastrophes in the region in this time and age? Why shouldn't there be more research about the root causes? That was my first question.

And my second question -- well, given this historical event, if it is a reality, we need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it or not. After all, it happened in Europe. The Palestinian people had no role to play in it. So why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price of an event they had nothing to do with?

The Palestinian people didn't commit any crime. They had no role to play in World War II. They were living with the Jewish communities and the Christian communities in peace at the time. They didn't have any problems. And today, too, Jews, Christians and Muslims live in brotherhood all over the world, in many parts of the world. They don't have any serious problems.
But why is it that the Palestinians should pay a price, innocent Palestinians? For 5 million people to remain displaced or refugees of war for 60 years are -- is this not a crime? Is asking about these crimes a crime by itself? Why should an academic, myself, face insults when asking questions like this? Is this what you call freedom and upholding the freedom of thought?

And as for the second topic, Iran's nuclear issue -- I know there's time limits, but I need time. I mean, a lot of time was taken from me.

We are a country. We are a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency. For over 33 years we were a member state of the agency. The bylaw of the agency explicitly states that all member states have the right to the peaceful nuclear fuel technology. This is an explicit statement made in the bylaw. And the bylaw says that there is no pretext or excuse, even the inspections carried by the IAEA itself -- that can prevent member states' right to have that right.

Of course, the IAEA is responsible to carry out inspections. We are one of the countries that's carried out the most amount of -- level of cooperation with the IAEA. They've had hours and weeks and days of inspections in our country. And over and over again, the agency's reports indicate that Iran's activities are peaceful, that they have not detected a deviation, and that Iran has -- they've received positive cooperation from Iran. But regretfully, two or three monopolistic powers, selfish powers, want to force their word on the Iranian people and deny them their right. They keep saying -- one minute. (Laughter, applause.)

They tell us you don't let them -- they won't let them inspect. Why not? Of course we do. How come is it anyway that you have that right and we can't have it? We want to have the right to peaceful nuclear energy. They tell us, "Don't make it yourself. We'll give it to you."

Well, in the past, I tell you, we had contracts with the U.S. government, with the British government, the French government, the German government and the Canadian government on nuclear development for peaceful purposes. But unilaterally, each and every one of them canceled their contracts with us, as a result of which the Iranian people had to pay the heavy cost in billions of dollars.
Why do we need the fuel from you? You've not even given us spare aircraft parts that we need for civilian aircraft for 28 years, under the name of the embargo and sanctions, because we are against, for example, human rights or freedom? Under that pretext you deny us that technology?

We want to have the right to self-determination towards our future. We want to be independent. Don't interfere in us. If you don't give us spare parts for civilian aircraft, what is the expectation that you'd give us fuel for nuclear development for peaceful purposes?

For 30 years we've faced these problems; for over $5 billion to the Germans and then to the Russians, but we haven't gotten anything, and the worst have not been completed. It is our right, we want our right, and we don't want anything beyond the law, nothing less than what international law. We are a peaceful-loving nation. We love all nations. (Applause, cheers, booing.)

MR. COATSWORTH: Mr. President, your statements here today and in the past have provoked many questions which I would like to pose to you on behalf of the students and faculty who have submitted them to me.
Let me begin with the question to which you just --

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: (In English.) It is one by one, one by one.
MR. COATSWORTH: One by one, it is, yes. (Applause.)
The first question is: Do you or your government seek the destruction of the state of Israel as a Jewish state?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: We love all nations. We are friends with the Jewish people. There are many Jews in Iran living peacefully with security. You must understand that in our constitution, in our laws, in the parliamentary elections, for every 150,000 people we get one representative in the parliament. For the Jewish community, one-fifth of this number they still get one independent representative in the parliament. So our proposal to the Palestinian plight is a humanitarian and democratic proposal.

What we say is that to solve the 60-year problem we must allow the Palestinian people to decide about its future for itself. This is compatible with the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations and the fundamental principles enshrined in it. We must allow Jewish Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians and Christian Palestinians to determine their own fate themselves through a free referendum. Whatever they choose as a nation everybody should accept and respect. Nobody should interfere in the affairs of the Palestinian nation. Nobody should sow the seeds of discord. Nobody should spend tens of billions of dollars equipping and arming one group there.

We say allow the Palestinian nation to decide its own future, to have the right to self-determination for itself. This is what we are saying as the Iranian nation. (Applause.)

MR. COATSWORTH: Mr. President, I think many members of our audience would be -- would like to hear a clearer answer to that question, that is -- (interrupted by cheers, applause).

The question is: Do you or your government seek the destruction of the state of Israel as a Jewish state? And I think you could answer that question with a single word, either yes or no. (Cheers, applause.)

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: And then you want the answer the way you want to hear it. Well, this isn't really a free flow of information. I'm just telling you where I -- what my position is. (Applause.)

I'm asking you, is the Palestinian issue not an international issue of prominence or not? Please tell me, yes or no. (Laughter, applause.)
There's a plight of a people.

MR. COATSWORTH: The answer to your question is yes. (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: Well, thank you for your cooperation.
It is -- we recognize there is a problem there that's been going on for 60 years. Everybody provides a solution, and our solution is a free referendum. Let this referendum happen, and then you'll see what the results are. Let the people of Palestine freely choose what they want for their future. And then what you want in your mind to happen, it will happen and will be realized. (Applause.)

MR. COATSWORTH: Which was posed by President Bollinger earlier and comes from a number of other students. Why is your government providing aid to terrorists? Will you stop doing so and permit international monitoring to certify that you have stopped?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: Well, I want to pose a question here to you. If someone comes and explodes bombs around you, threatens your president, members of the administration, kills the members of the Senate or Congress, how would you treat them? Would you award them or would you name them a terrorist group? Well, it's clear. You would call them a terrorist.

My dear friends, the Iranian nation is a victim of terrorism. For -- 26 years ago, where I work, close to where I work, in a terrorist operation, the elected president of the Iranian nation and the elected prime minister of Iran lost their lives in a bomb explosion. They turned into ashes.

A month later, in another terrorist operation, 72 members of our parliament and highest ranking officials, including four ministers and eight deputy ministers, bodies were shattered into pieces as a result of terrorist attacks. Within six months, over 4,000 Iranians lost their lives, assassinated by terrorist groups, all this carried out by the hand of one single terrorist group. Regretfully that same terrorist group, now, today, in your country, is being -- operating under the support of the U.S. administration, working freely, distributing declarations freely. And their camps in Iraq are supported by the U.S. government. They're secured by the U.S. government.

Our nation has been harmed by terrorist activities. We were the first nation that objected to terrorism and the first to uphold the need to fight terrorism. (Applause.)

MR. COATSWORTH: A number of questioners, sorry, a number of people have asked.

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: We need to address the root causes of terrorism and eradicate those root causes.

We live in the Middle East. For us, it's quite clear which powers sort of incite terrorists, support them, fund them. We know that. Our nation, the Iranian nation, through history has always extended a hand of friendship to other nations. We're a cultured nation. We don't need to resort to terrorism.

We've been victims of terrorism ourselves, and it's regrettable that people who argue they're fighting terrorism, instead of supporting the Iranian people and nation, instead of fighting the terrorists that are attacking them, they're supporting the terrorists and then turn the fingers to us. This is most regrettable.
MR. COATSWORTH: A further set of questions challenge your view of the Holocaust. Since the evidence that this occurred in Europe in the 1940s as a result of the actions of the German Nazi government, since that -- those facts are well-documented, why are you calling for additional research? There seems to be no purpose in doing so, other than to question whether the Holocaust actually occurred as an historical fact. Can you explain why you believe more research is needed into the facts of what are -- what is incontrovertible?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: Thank you very much for your question. I am an academic, and you are as well. Can you argue that researching a phenomenon is finished forever, done? Can we close the books for good on a historical event? There are different perspectives that come to light after every research is done. Why should we stop research at all? Why should we stop the progress of science and knowledge? You shouldn't ask me why I'm asking questions. You should ask yourselves why you think that it's questionable.

Why do you want to stop the progress of science and research? Do you ever take what's known as absolute in physics? We had principles in mathematics that were granted to be absolute in mathematics for over 800 years, but new science has gotten rid of those absolutism, gotten -- forward other different logics of looking at mathematics, and sort of turned the way we look at it as a science altogether after 800 years. So we must allow researchers, scholars to investigate into everything, every phenomenon -- God, universe, human beings, history, and civilization. Why should we stop that?

I'm not saying that it didn't happen at all. This is not (the ?) judgment that I'm passing here. I said in my second question, granted this happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people? This is a serious question. They're two dimension. In the first question, I --

MR. COATSWORTH: Let me just -- let me pursue this a bit further. It is difficult to have a scientific discussion if there isn't at least some basis -- some empirical basis, some agreement about what the facts are. So, calling for research into the facts when the facts are so well-established represents for many a challenging of the facts themselves and a denial that something terrible occurred in Europe in those years. (Applause.)
Let me move on to -- (pause).

Mr. President, another student asks, Iranian women are now denied basic human rights, and your government has imposed draconian punishments, including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals. Why are you doing those things?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: Those in Iran are genuine true freedoms. The Iranian people are free. Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedoms. We have two deputy vice -- well, two vice presidents that are female at the highest levels of speciality; specialized (roles ?) in our parliament and our government and our universities, they are present in our biotechnological fields and our technological fields. There are hundreds of women scientists that are active in the political realm as well.

It's not -- it's wrong for some governments, when they disagree with another government, to sort of -- try to spread lies that distort the full truth. Our nation is free. It has the highest level of participation in elections. In Iran, 80 percent -- 90 percent of the people turn out for votes during the elections, half of which -- over half of which are women, so how can we say that women are not free? Is that the entire truth?

But as for the executions, I'd like to raise two questions. If someone comes and establishes a network for illicit drug trafficking that affects the (use ?) in Iran, Turkey, Europe, the United States by introducing these illicit drugs and destroys them, would you ever reward them? People who lead the lives -- cause the deterioration of the lives of hundreds of millions of youth around the world, including in Iran, can we have any sympathy to them? Don't you have capital punishment in the United States? You do, too. (Applause.)

In Iran, too, there's capital punishment for illicit drug traffickers, for people who violate the rights of people.

If somebody takes up a gun, goes into a house, kills a group of people there, and then tries to take ransom, how would you confront them in Iran with -- in the United States? Would you reward them? Can a physician allow microbes, symbolically speaking, to spread across a nation? We have laws. People who violate the public rights of the people by using guns, killing people, creating insecurity, sell drugs, distribute drugs at a high level are sentenced to execution in Iran, and some of these punishments -- very few are carried in the public eye, before the public eye. It's a law based on democratic principles. You use injections and microbes to kill these people, and they are executed or they're hung, but the end result is killing.

MR. COATSWORTH: (Off mike) -- and drug smugglers. The question was about sexual preference and women. (Applause.)

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. (Laughter.) We don't have that in our country. (Booing.) In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it. (Laughter.)
But as for women, maybe you think that being a woman is a crime. It's not a crime to be a woman. Women are the best creatures created by God. They represent the kindness, the beauty that God instills in them. Women are respected in Iran. In Iran, every family who's given a girl is given -- in every Iranian family who has a girl, they're 10 times happier than having a son. Women are respected more than men are. They are exempt from many responsibilities. Many of the legal responsibilities rest on the shoulders of men in our society because of the respect culturally given to women, to the future mothers. In Iranian culture, men and sons and girls constantly kiss the hands of their mothers as a sign of respect, a respect for women, and we are proud of this culture.

MR. COATSWORTH: (Off mike) -- one is, what did you hope to accomplish by speaking at Columbia today?
And the second is, what would you have said if you were permitted to visit the site of the September 11th tragedy?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: Well, here I'm your guest. I've been invited by Columbia, an official invitation given for me to come here, but I do want to say something here.

In Iran, when you invite a guest you respect them. This is our tradition required by our culture, and I know that American people have that culture as well.
Last year, I wanted to go to the site of the September 11th tragedy to show respect to the victims of the tragedy, show my sympathy with their families, but our plans got overextended. We were involved in negotiations and meetings `till midnight, and they said it would be very difficult to go visit the site at that late hour of the night. So I told my friends then that we need to plan this for the following year, so that I can go and visit the site and to show my respects. Regretfully, some groups had very strong reactions, very bad reactions. It's bad for someone -- to prevent someone to show sympathy to the families of the victims of the September 11 event -- tragic event.

This is a respect from my side. Somebody told me this is an insult. I said: What are you saying? This is my way of showing my respect. Why would you think that? Thinking like that, how do you expect to manage the world and world affairs? Don't you think that a lot of problems in the world come from the way you look at issues because of this kind of way of thinking, because of this sort of pessimistic approach towards a lot of people because of certain level of selfishness, self-absorption that needs to be put aside so that we can show respect to everyone, to allow an environment for friendship to grow, to allow all nations to talk with one another and move towards peace?

I wanted to speak with the press. There is 11 September -- September 11 tragic event was a huge event. It led to a lot of many other events afterwards. After 9/11, Afghanistan was occupied and then Iraq was occupied, and for six years in our region there is insecurity, terror and fear. If the root causes of 9/11 are examined properly -- why it happened, what caused it, what were the conditions that led to it, who truly was involved, who was really involved -- and put it all together to understand how to prevent the crisis in Iraq, fix the problem in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

MR. COATSWORTH: A number of questions have asked about your nuclear program. Why is your government seeking to acquire enriched uranium suitable for nuclear weapons? Will you stop doing so?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: Our nuclear program, first and foremost, operates within the framework of law, and second, under the inspections of the IAEA, and thirdly, they are completely peaceful. The technology we have is for enrichment below the level of 5 percent level, and any level below 5 percent is solely for providing fuel to power plants. Repeated reports by the IAEA explicitly say that there is no indication that Iran has deviated from the peaceful path of its nuclear program. We're all well aware that Iran's nuclear issue is a political issue; it's not a legal issue.

The International Atomic Energy Organization -- Agency has verified that our activities are for peaceful purposes. But there are two or three powers that think that they have the right to monopolize all science and knowledge. And they expect the Iranian people, the Iranian nation, to turn to others to get fuel, to get science, to get knowledge that's indigenous to itself -- to humble itself. And then they would of course refrain from giving it to us too.
So we're quite clear on what we need. If you have created the fifth generation of atomic bombs and are testing them already, what position are you in to question the peaceful purposes of other people who want nuclear power? (Applause.) We do not believe in nuclear weapons, period. It goes against the whole grain of humanity.

So let me just tell a joke here. I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs or are testing them, making them -- politically they are backward, retarded. (Applause.)

MR. COATSWORTH: I know your time is short and that you need to move on.
Is Iran prepared to open broad discussions with the government of the United States? What would Iran hope to achieve in such discussions? How do you see, in the future, a resolution of the points of conflict between the government of the United States and the government of Iran?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: From the start, we announced that we are ready to negotiate with all countries. Since 28 years ago, when our revolution succeeded and we established -- we took freedom and democracy that was held at bay by a pro-Western dictatorship, we announced our readiness that besides two countries, we are ready to have friendly relations and talks with all countries of the world. One of those two was the apartheid regime of South Africa, which has been eliminated, and the second is the Zionist regime. For everybody else around the world, we announced that we want to have friendly, brotherly ties.
The Iranian nation is a cultured nation. It is a civilized nature. It seeks, it wants, new talks and negotiations. It's for it. We believe that in negotiations and talks, everything can be resolved very easily. We don't need threats; we don't need to point bombs or guns; we don't need to get into conflict if we talk. We have a clear logical about that.

We question the way the world is being run and managed today. We believe that it will not lead to viable peace and security for the world, the way it's run today. We have solutions based on humane values and for relations among states. With the U.S. government, too, we will negotiate. We don't have any issues about that, under fair, just circumstances with mutual respect on both sides.
You saw that in order to help the security of Iraq, we had three rounds of talks with the United States. And last year, before coming to New York, I announced that I am ready, in the United Nations, to engage in a debate with Mr. Bush, the president of the United States, about critical international issues. So that shows that we want to talk, having a debate before the world public -- before all the audience, so that truth is revealed, so that misunderstandings and misperceptions are removed, so that we can find a clear path for brotherly and friendly relations. I think that if the U.S. administration -- if the U.S. government puts aside some of its old behaviors, it can actually be a good friend for the Iranian people, for the Iranian nation.

For 28 years they've consistently threatened us, insulted us, prevented our scientific development, every day under one pretext or another. You all know Saddam the dictator was supported by the government of the United States and some Europeans countries in attacking Iran. And in -- he carried out an eight-year war, a criminal war. Over 200,000 Iranians were -- lost their lives. Over 600,000 Iranians were hurt as a result of a war. He used chemical weapons; thousands of Iranians were victims of chemical weapons that he used against us. Today, Mr. Nobal Vinh (ph), who is a reporter, an official reporter, international reporter, who was covering U.N. reports in U.N. for many years, he is one of the victims of the chemical weapons used by Iraq against us.

And since then, we've been under different propaganda sort of embargoes, economic sanctions, political sanctions. Why? Because we got rid of a dictator? Because we wanted the freedom and democracy that we got for ourselves? But we can't always tell. We think that if the U.S. government recognizes the rights of the Iranian people, respects all nations, and extends a hand of friendship with all Iranians, they too will see that Iranians will be one of its best friends.
Will you allow me to thank the audience a moment?

I -- well, there are many things that I would have liked to cover, but I don't want to take your time any further. I was asked, would I allow the faculty and Columbia students here to come to Iran? From this platform, I invite Columbia faculty members and students to come and visit Iran, to speak with our university students. You are officially invited. (Applause).

University faculty and the students that the university decides are the student association's chosen select are welcome to come. You're welcome to visit any university that you choose inside Iran. We'll provide you with a list of the universities. There are over 400 universities in our country, and you can choose whichever you want to go and visit.

We'll give you the true platform. You can -- we'll respect you 100 percent. We will have our students sit there and listen to you, speak with you, hear what you have to say.

Right now in our universities on a daily basis, there are hundreds of meetings like this. They hear, they talk, they ask questions, they welcome it.
In the end, I'd like to thank Columbia University. I had heard that many politicians in the United States are trained in Columbia University, and there are many people here who believe in the freedom of speech, in clear, frank conversations; I do like to extend my gratitude to the managers here in the United States -- at Columbia University -- I apologize -- the people who so well-organized this meeting today. I'd like to extend my deepest gratitude to the faculty members and the dear students here. I ask Almighty God to assist all of us to move hand in hand to establish peace and future filled with friendship and justice and brotherhood. Best of luck to all of you. (Applause.)

MR. BOLLINGER: I'm sorry that President Ahmadinejad's schedule makes it necessary for him to leave before he's been able to answer many of the questions that we have or even answer some of the ones that we posed to him. (Laughter, applause.) But I think we can all be pleased that his appearance here demonstrates Columbia's deep commitment to free expression and debate. I want to thank you all for coming to participate. (Applause.)

www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/202820 dot php
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

Bollinger is definitely a twat. But this is true:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a “fabricated” “legend.”  One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Where's the contrast when there's no one to root for? Ahmadinejad-the-Holocaust-denier ain't no hero. If one were to tolerate that, then what next? - Accepting Nepali maoists denial of Khmer Rouge's genocide of Cambodians; or the ignoring/denying/rewriting of the genocide of Bangladeshi Dharmics by TSP?

I was looking forward to someone to cheer for after reading Bollinger's long whine: after all, he did an excellent job of making such a classic villain of himself so that anyone would be ready to automatically wave a flag for whoever he's opposing. But I nevertheless found myself booing his antagonist, regardless of his composure.

[acharya]

HISTORY OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE


17th and 18th centuries
All forms of domestic livestock, except turkeys, are imported at some time; crops borrowed from Indians include maize, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, gourds, squashes, watermelons, beans, grapes, berries, pecans, black walnuts, peanuts, maple sugar, tobacco, and cotton
17th and 18th centuries
New crops from Europe include clover, alfalfa, timothy, small grains, and fruits and vegetables; African slaves introduce grain and sweet sorghum, melons, okra, and peanuts
18th century
Tobacco is the chief cash crop of the South
1793
First Merino sheep imported
1795-1815
Sheep industry greatly emphasized in New England
1800
1805-15
Cotton begins to replace tobacco as the chief southern cash crop
1810-15
Demand for Merino sheep sweeps the country
1815-25
Competition with western farm areas begins to force New England farmers out of wheat and meat production and into dairying, trucking, and later, tobacco production
1815-30
Cotton becomes the most important cash crop in the Old South
1819
Secretary of Treasury instructs consuls to collect seeds, plants, and agricultural inventions

1820

1820s
Poland-China and Duroc-Jersey swine are developed, and Berkshire swine are imported
1821
Edmund Ruffin's first Essay on Calcareous Manures
1836-62
Patent Office collects agricultural information and distributes seeds
1830s-1850s
Improved transportation to the West forces eastern staple growers into more varied production for nearby urban centers


1840
1840
Justus von Liebig's Organic Chemistry
1840-50
New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are the chief wheat States
1840-60
Hereford, Ayrshire, Galloway, Jersey, and Holstein cattle are imported and bred
1849
First poultry exhibition in the United States
1850s
Commercial corn and wheat belts begin to develop; wheat occupies the newer and cheaper land west of the corn areas, and is constantly forced westward by rising land values and the encroachment of corn; alfalfa grown on the west coast
1858
Grimm alfalfa introduced
1860
1860s
Cotton Belt begins to move westward; Corn Belt begins stabilizing in its present area
1860
Wisconsin and Illinois chief wheat States
1866-89
Era of the Great Plains cattlemen
1870s
Increased specialization in farm production; Illinois, Iowa, and Ohio chief wheat States; foot-and-mouth disease first reported in the United States
1874-76
Grasshopper plagues in the West
1877 U.S. Entomological Commission established for work on grasshopper control
1880
1880s
Cattle industry moves into the western and southwestern Great Plains
1882
Bordeau mixture (fungicide) discovered in France and soon used in U.S.; Robert Koch discovers tubercle bacillus
Mid-1880s
Texas the chief cotton State
1886-87
Blizzards, following drought and overgrazing, disastrous to northern Great Plains cattle industry
1889
Bureau of Animal Industry discovers carrier of tick fever
1890
Minnesota, California, and Illinois chief wheat States; Babcock butterfat test devised
1892
Boll weevil crosses the Rio Grande and begins to spread north and east; eradication of pleuropneumonia
1899
Improved method of anthrax inoculation
1900

1900-10
Turkey red wheat emerges as commercial crop
1900-20
Extensive experimental work to breed disease-resistant varieties of plants, to improve plant yield and quality, and to increase the productivity of farm animal strains
1903
Hog cholera serum developed
1904
First serious stem-rust epidemic affecting wheat


1910

1910
North Dakota, Kansas, and Minnesota chief wheat States; durum wheats become important commercial crops; 35 States and territories require tuberculin testing of all cattle entering
1910-20
Grain production reaches into the most arid sections of the Great Plains
1912
Marquis wheat introduced; Panama and Colombia sheep developed
1917
Kansas red wheat distributed

1920
1926
Ceres wheat distributed; first hybrid-seed corn company organized; Targhee sheep developed
1930

1930-35
Use of hybrid-seed corn becomes common in the Corn Belt
1934
Thatcher wheat distributed; Landrace hogs imported from Denmark
1938
Cooperative organized for artificial insemination of dairy cattle





1940

1940s and 1950s
Acreages of crops, such as oats, required for horse and mule feed drop sharply as farms use more tractors
1945-55
Increased use of herbicides and pesticides
1947
U.S. cooperates with Mexico to prevent spread of foot-and-mouth disease




1950




1955s
Sterile flies used for screwworm control
1960

1960s
Soybean acreage expands as an alternative to other crops
1960
96% of corn acreage planted with hybrid seed
1961
Gaines wheat distributed
1966
Fortuna wheat distributed



1970

1970
Plant Variety Protection Act; Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Norman Borlaug for developing high-yielding wheat varieties
1972
Molecular biologist Paul Berg pioneers the techniques that make possible the transfer of genes from one strand of DNA to another
1975
Lancota wheat introduced
1978
Hog cholera officially eradicated
1979
Purcell winter wheat introduced
1980

1980
The first American patent for a genetically engineered organism, a bacterium used to clean up oil spills, is granted
1980s
Biotechnology becomes viable for improving crop and livestock products
1983-84
Avian influenza of poultry eradicated before it spreads beyond a few Pennsylvania counties
1986
Antismoking campaigns and legislation begin to affect the tobacco industry


1990-2000

1990s
Biotechnology brings important new developments in dairy, corn, and other commodities; genetically engineered crops and livestock appear
1990s
Livestock waste becomes a major issue
Mid-1990s
USDA meat inspection programs modernized in response to concerns about food safety
1997
'New Leaf Superior,' a potato developed by Monsanto that carries a beetle-killing BT gene, is registered as an insecticide with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
1997-98
Tobacco industry settles lawsuits; aid proposed to tobacco farmers

[acharya]

McCain: I'd prefer Christian president

Sun Sep 30, 3:29 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain said in an interview published Saturday that he would prefer a Christian president over someone of a different faith, calling it "an important part of our qualifications to lead."

In an interview with Beliefnet, a multi-denominational Web site that covers religion and spirituality, the Republican presidential hopeful was asked if a Muslim candidate could be a good president.

"I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith," McCain said. "But that doesn't mean that I'm sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president."

Later, McCain said, "I would vote for a Muslim if he or she was the candidate best able to lead the country and defend our political values."

Asked about Republican rivals Mitt Romney's Mormon faith, McCain said, "I think that Governor Romney's religion should not, absolutely not, be a disqualifying factor when people consider his candidacy for president of the United States."

The Arizona senator was also asked about the confusion over which Christian denomination he belongs to. "I was raised Episcopalian, I have attended the North Phoenix Baptist Church for many years and I am a Christian," McCain said. He added that he has considered being baptized in the Baptist church, but he does not want to do it during the presidential race because "it might appear as if I was doing something that I otherwise wouldn't do."

[dhu]

Husky,

In the debate, the Iranian position seemed more tentative, sincere, and open than all the familiar canards thrown by the Americans. Ahmadinejad did not have the werewithal to formulate openly that The Holocaust experience is "irrelevant" to geopolitical considerations in the Mideast and that is why he <i>feels</i> an indifference to the issue of whether it happened or not. This is almost the same as when a Hindu is confronted by a missionary canard of whether Jesus existed or not or whether Jesus can save souls. I got the feeling that Ahmadinejad have some vedic type moorings left in him. These are the fellows who held out against full arabization.

<img src='http://hosting.opml.org/0147153/blog/decorations/Bases2.GIF' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
US bases sorrounding Iran

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-dhu+Oct 1 2007, 10:10 AM-->QUOTE(dhu @ Oct 1 2007, 10:10 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Husky,
In the debate, the Iranian position seemed more tentative, sincere, and open than all the familiar canards thrown by the Americans.  Ahmadinejad did not have the werewithal to formulate openly that The Holocaust experience is "irrelevant" to geopolitical considerations in the Mideast and that is why he <i>feels</i> an indifference to the issue of whether it happened or not.  [right][snapback]73753[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->I watched some of his holocaust-denial on the news - a long while back now. It was not mere indifference. It was islami callousness, plain old anti-semitism.
If he were merely indifferent he could have said 'so what' and done the usual equal-equal thing of bringing in the 'oppression of Palestine' or whatnot. But his was outright denial.
If I hadn't watched it on the news and had only read the response to Bollinger/the speech posted somewhere above, I'd have agreed to a greater extent with you on this:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I got the feeling that Ahmadinejad have some vedic type moorings left in him.  These are the fellows who held out against full arabization.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Though he's muslim, the way he formulates/understands his beliefs are very.... Iranian. He imagines a depth (in islam) that is simply not there. Wasted energy and thought IMO. It's merely like how poets can make anything feel appetising - until you see exactly what they've been describing (yech). In the end, such descriptions/feelings say more about the poet than the object described.


<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->US bases sorrounding Iran<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Wow. I never saw that one coming. The Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are serving so many purposes, or was this a major one...


Another matter.
Earlier on, forgot to add my two cents on this:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Submitted by mohan sivaswamy, Sep 27, 2007 03:44
[...]
My sympathies for President Ahemdinijad have increase manifold by watching his smiling face and unruffled reacion to the insults.

And don't forget the points he made. He was right about 'why <b>Palestinians</b> have to pay for what the White man did to Jews in Europe'. The British created the Palestine situation and as is their practice, got out of Palestine in a hurry, dividing the people there and creating arbitrary boundaries between nations and people. Americans stepped in later to exploit the troubled circumstances and made sure they got oil cheaply for decades. It was very correct of President Ahmedinijad to bring this point to the fore.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The 'mohan sivaswamy' who wrote this only read up on Partition and not on Israel/rest of ME apparently, but nevertheless thinks it must all be the same. 'Bother history, you hear one story and you know them all, right - and who cares about them pesky little details anyway?'

Or did he fall for the old "once upon a time, there lived in the country of Falastina a peaceful and happy people: the Falastinians. <Blablabla> Until the evil Jews came along and...."
I keep hearing that drivel - and variations on it - a lot these days. Quaint dawaganda. Strangely, though, it actually seems to fool a lot of people.
But it doesn't hold water for many reasons. Besides the documented fact that the land was practically deserted in the 19th century until the Israelis started settling there, there is a somewhat basic impediment to the setup of a "Falastina":
- Arabians don't have a P, they only have an F.
- Greco-Romans have both a P and an F. Hence you have <b>P</b>etrus, <b>P</b>aulus, <b>F</b>lavius Julianus, and Arabia <b>F</b>elix as the Romans called Arabia.
- From what I recall, <b>P</b>alestina is how the Greco-Romans referred to the region. If it had ever originally been a '<b>F</b>alastina' (as is these days alleged by the Arabians from Jordan living in the region now), then the Romans would have preserved the 'F' - it would have been no trouble for them at all.
But it was <i>not</i> an Arabic name: the placename was known to the Romans as <b>P</b>alestina. The 'Palestinians' of today have merely taken over that old name to give themselves some legitimacy, and have plugged their 'f' in there to replace the 'p' that they don't have. You would think they'd have come up with a more convincing 'original' name, rather than one that looks to disprove their claims.

[acharya]

Initial post: Oct 8, 2007 11:14 PM PDT
Prometheus says:
First, if you are a Brit, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, so if you want to defend your people you can do so here, and if you make a good case I'll reconsider what I have to say.

Okay here goes. I recently had the displeasure of encountering one of the nastiest most bigoted individuals I have ever come across. And wouldn't you know it, this individual was a Brit. Here's what he had to say. He hates the Irish (calls them "evil papists") and hates the pope, calls him a "Nazi pope". Then he hates Eastern Europe (he regards everything outside of England as "Eastern Europe") and calls their people "lazy good for nothings". He also hates America and calls its people stupid. Now I've got to ask you, is this kind of prejudice common among the British upper classes, because honestly I have to say it is. Hardcore know nothing type Protestant bigots seem to occupy a lot of prestige among the British. This is eerily reminiscnet of the kind of Germanophobia that existed in Britain during the First World War, a war that I largely regard as a huge waste of time and energy.

H. L. Mencken (an atheist unfortunately, but otherwise a clever wit) had this to say of the notions of Anglo Saxon supremacy that existed in America and Britain during his day. He argued in an extremely humorous essay that the Anglo Saxons were the most cowardly race. And I happen to enjoy reading his essay quite a bit.

Other phenomena that have come out of the British upper classes in recent times includes the rampant hate of such idiots as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (a man who is so slimey that I believe he ranks among the lowest of the low). And we are all familiar with the kind of rampant class hatred and class prejudice that exists amongst these people.

So Brits. Now it's your turn. Tell me where I am wrong about the upper classes of your country?

[acharya]

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein (Author)

AMAZON - SEE THE VIDEO



The neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed social spending—that the Chicago School and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous—depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author's accounting—their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market reforms the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia's state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans's public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein's economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market shock therapies to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Both admirers and detractors agree that the late Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman was an extraordinarily influential economist. Canadian Klein assails Friedman's free-market precepts as their exponents have applied them to a series of formerly state-dominated economies since 1975, when Friedman persuaded Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to adopt his program. Klein's entirely negative interpretation of the results of "shock therapy" only lays the foundation for her book's thesis: that Friedman's prescriptions require a crisis and are ineluctably bound with the application of violence. This perspective informs her criticism––condemnation, in fact––of reform programs in the last three decades that have aimed to separate the state from the economy in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, China, the UK, and elsewhere. The process of market liberalization, Klein maintains, has created a "disaster capitalism complex," consisting of corporations that thrive on catastrophe; the author particularly arraigns security and logistics firms in the U.S. and Israel. Assiduously researched, energetically expressed, Klein's report bears an ideological perspective that won't leave readers neutral about her economic interpretations. Taylor, Gilbert



In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein brilliantly proposes a compelling counter-story to the prevailing fable of free market infallibility. Buttressed by painstaking and wide-ranging research, and an ability to see connections where others only see coincidence, Ms. Klein amply shows that profit-making is not the essence of democracy as Milton Friedman and his minions would have it. She shows instead that the machinery of the state and the requirements of "disaster capitalism" are now so tightly synchronized in their exploitation of disasters both man-made and natural as to be virtually one in the same.

Citing pertinent examples to prove her thesis that "disaster capitalism" is now rampant around the world - in Russia, in China, in Iraq to name just a few - she describes how in times of crisis, elites everywhere have learned that they can profit by implementing policies, e.g., "shock therapy" or "shock and awe," that would have been vigorously opposed in normal times. When these changes to Friedmanite free-market dicta are opposed, as they were in Chile, a third shock is implemented. This, according to Klein is a shock that is entirely man-made - the torture and murder of those who would stand in the way of the takeover of the public sector, or, as neo-liberal economists would have it, the bringing forth of a new birth of freedom.

During the "Reagan Revolution," Klein argues, the notion of the `Entrepreneur As Hero' was buffed to a high gloss though the influence of right-wing think tanks whose pronouncements were reported by a cowed and obedient media. A decade later in the dot.com era, entrepreneurs were burnished to blinding sheen when the media fed the world images of swashbuckling venture capitalists who were touted as bringing forth a new millennium through the Internet. Klein maintains that George W. Bush's "public offering" -- the War on Terror - covered slavishly and avidly by the media, has been wildly successful, lining the pockets of investors in the new Homeland Security sector as promises of taxpayer money everlastingly flowing into the coffers of the military-industrial-energy complex have been fulfilled. This is the new "new economy:" the looting of the public sector through the now tried-and-true methods of disaster capitalism.

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE reveals the many wounds that disaster capitalism has inflicted upon the body politic both here in the U.S. and throughout the world over the past 25 years. It is a breathtaking achievement. Highly recommended.

This is an expose of the evil that is the modern American policies. The descriptions of how torture is used in implementing radical economic change are enough to make you feel sick to your stomach. The author tries hard to expose what goes on underneath the friendly veneer of public policy and shows that history is repeating itself. The people the CIA tortured in MKUltra were just guinea pigs for the people that the US Government is torturing now. The people of Chile, who had their government overthrown by US influence and support, were just guinea pigs for the people that the United States is currently overthrowing and democratizing. And it just goes on and on, as if there is a never ending spigot of evil that is washing over the world.

[acharya]

We are in a true crisis, and it is heartening that in the last little while it seems that Americans are beginning to awaken to the nature and gravity of the threat against us. I argue in The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, that there are ten classic-, time-tested steps that would-be despots always take when they are seeking to close down an open society or crush a democracy movement, and that we are seeing each of these steps unfolding in America today. I looked at Italy in the 20's, Germany in the 30's, East Germany in the 50's, Czechoslovakia in the 60's, Chile in the coup of 1973, and China in the 1980's, and so many echoes leap from the pages that it is hard to avoid the hypothesis that someone influential in this administration has studied these great successes in the coercion of civil society and is reproducing not only tactics but language, imagery, scenes, photo-ops and actual laws that worked the first time around to shut down democracy or crush democracy movements, and press citizens increasingly to yield to a violent state authority.

There is an historical blueprint for what I call a `fascist shift' -- the point at which the state starts to use force against individual citizens, and other aggressive measures, in a systematic pushback against democracy. I argue that there are crucial moments -- which you can predict by looking at `the blueprint' -- that show turning points in the pressure to close down a society. One such turning point was the day that we established a network of secret prisons where torture takes place -- that is Step Two, `Establish Secret Prisons.' Another turning point was reached when the President claimed the power to call anyone -- you or me or your son or daughter or mother or father -- an `enemy combatant', no matter that we are innocent US citizens, and hold us in solitary confinement for months or years awaiting the filing of charges. Certainly a turning point is the revelation in yesterday's Washington Post that the State has compiled a database on essentially anyone's reading material, friends, personal contacts, visiting destinations, seatmate, and other minutiae related to your travel that would put the Stasi files to shame. Last week we saw one such turning point, when Andrew Meyer, 21, was tasered at a University of Florida event when he asked a question.

(Amazon community members should know that the University of Florida is a state school which means that the President reports to the Board of Regents -- which in turn reports to Jeb Bush. My chapter `Target Key Individuals' shows how Mussolini in Italy and the National Socialists in Germany both systematically used political pressure on regents to press state universities to target dissenters, and shows that this pattern, among many others engineered by the great mid-twentieth century dictaors, and emulated later by petty dictators or would-be dictators around the would, has begun to emerge in the US as well). If you were familiar with the blueprint that The End of America identifies, you would have predicted last fall that if the State began with establishing a network of secret prisons where some kinds of abuse were legalized, and those tortured were at first those seen as `other' -- Muslims, brown people, non-English speakers -- that by the time the Military Tribunals were up and running some of the first prisoners to be tried would be white and English speaking (that took place five months ago) and that it would take about six months after that for people whom we identify with as `ordinary Americans -- say, an Andrew Meyer -- to get hurt by the State when asking a question that challenges the group in power. `The blueprint' of this kind of shift is extraordinarily frightening -- especially because, as a certain point, usually just as people begin to wake up to the dangers, the assaults start to cascade, as we are seeing them do now. But history also shows that this is a moment of great opportunity because if we wake up in time, recognize the ten steps and their signposts in time and push back in time, we can still save our nation -- and, not least, ourselves.

Those who would like to know more should visit Crooks and Liars. This link shows a clip of a conversation I had on "The Colbert Report" that conveys my key message. Other links to visit include my author blog on Powells.com, and my recent writings on the Huffington Post website.

Readers who recognize themselves or their own recent experiences in my description of the ten steps now being put into place have been sending me emails -- I am grateful, since their collective testimony confirms the larger picture. For instance, I wrote about how the Transportation Security Administration has been putting critics of the administration on Watch Lists and even No-Fly lists and I have been sent chilling furher testimonies about those stories and about a new wave of experiences that people are having when they fly -- that TSA agents suddenly shout to passengers waiting in line at security to `Freeze!' -- for up to half an hour -- in scenes that, like so many others I recount in The End of America, reproduce techniques developed by the despots of the 20's and '30's that progressively frightened members of civil society and intimidated dissenters. Please keep the emails coming; and please know that each of the streams of stories now developing along these lines -- the TSA `watch list' story, the `we know what you are reading on the plane' story, the tasering of a student, the reframing of criticism as `treason' and `impugning the honor of the armed forces', the FISA wiretappping developments, the attempted purge of the US Attorneys (see Goebbels, April 1933), the invocation of the 1917 Espionage Act against New York Times reporters and editors, and so many others, actually make a new kind of sense when you are familiar with `the blueprint' that has always worked historically, in many times and places, to close down a democracy. I will be tracking and explaining those stories here and please go to the American Freedom Campaign website to sign up if you are ready to do as the Founders asked -- to confront those who are committing crimes against our system of government, and to drive an American democracy movement to restore the rule of law in time -- that is, while we are still free enough to do so.
-Naomi Wolf, September 24, 2007

[acharya]

http://www.politico.com/whitemalegap/


Dems must woo white men to win


By: David Paul Kuhn
Back To Story Page »
Michael Dukakis
Michael Dukakis took time out in 1988 to tell General Dynamics workers that he's not soft on defense.
Photo by AP

The 2008 election offers the most diverse array of presidential candidates in history. But this rainbow campaign will hinge on the most durable reality of American politics: White men matter most.

Every election cycle, a new slice of the electorate — suburban mothers, churchgoing Hispanics, bicycling Norwegians — comes into vogue as reporters and analysts study the polls and try to divine new secrets about who wins and why in American politics.

The truth is that the most important factor shaping the 2008 election will almost certainly be the same one that has been the most important in presidential elections for the past 40 years: the flight of white male voters away from the Democratic Party.

The hostility of this group to Democrats and their perceived values is so pervasive that even many people who make their living in politics scarcely remark on it. But it is the main reason the election 13 months from now is virtually certain to be close — even though on issues from the war to health care, Democrats likely will be competing with more favorable tail winds than they have enjoyed for years.

The “gender gap” has been a fixture in discussions about American politics since the early Reagan years. But it is usually cast as a matter of women being turned off by Republicans. By far the greater part of this gap, however, comes from the high number of white men — who make up about 36 percent of the electorate — who refuse to even consider voting Democratic.

In 2000, exit polling showed white women backed George W. Bush over Al Gore by 3 percentage points, but white men backed him by 27 percentage points. Four years later, with John F. Kerry carrying the Democratic banner, the margin was 26 points.

The Bush years have echoed with what-if questions: What if the votes in Florida had been counted differently in 2000, if Ralph Nader had not run or if Gore had been able to carry his home state? What if Kerry had responded more deftly to the Swift Boat Veterans in 2004?

A more powerful what-if is to imagine that Democratic nominees had succeeded in narrowing the white male gap to even the low 20s instead of the mid-20s. Both Kerry and Gore would have won easily.

In 2008, Democrats are assembling behind a front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, with singular problems among white males. Polls show her support among this group is approaching the record lows scored by Democrats during the peak of Ronald Reagan’s popularity in the 1980s. Some recent hypothetical matchups — which are highly fluid at this stage of a contest — showed Clinton winning roughly a third of white males in a race against Republican Rudy Giuliani.

In the past three decades, the only two Democrats to win the presidency, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, were politicians who organized campaigns around rhetorical and ideological pitches that were designed to reassure voters skeptical of liberal values — an attitude that dominates among white males. Even these victories, however, took place amid special circumstances, with the Watergate backlash of 1976 and the Ross Perot independent boom undermining Republicans in 1992.

“Concern for the common man”

Easy enough to say. But actually achieving this feat in Ohio and elsewhere for Democrats requires reckoning with political attitudes that have had several decades to take root — and are twisted not simply around policies but also deep cultural and economic shifts.

Trying to understand this history is what led to “The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma.” The idea for the book began during the 2004 election, when I was traveling the country for CBS News. Many of these men, even three years ago, had lost their patience for the Iraq war. Often they had obvious reservations about George W. Bush. But it was made clear in conversations the contempt they felt for Democrats — and felt in return from Democrats. For these voters, it was an election with no real competition for their votes.

As I later learned, this was precisely the circumstance that some Republican strategists had vividly anticipated a quarter-century earlier.

Early in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, his pollster Richard Wirthlin wrote a book-length campaign plan — never previously obtained — detailing a strategy expressly designed to “break up” the Democratic coalition. To “target the populist voter,” the campaign would work toward the “development of the aspiring American populist theme of ‘anti-bigness — big government, big business, big labor.’” The media messages were to be “simple, direct and optimistic.” They were to focus on “blue collar” voters utilizing “principal themes” that “project a realization that these voters are no longer solely motivated by economic concerns but by larger social issues, as well.”
<b>
It was an idea that informed not simply the 1980 campaign but also the next 25 years of GOP strategy. It was to “position [Reagan] as a doer, a man of action,” the “decisive leader capable of making tough decisions.” But above all, Reagan was to “solidify a public impression” that he “has concern for the common man and understands the problems facing voters in their daily lives.”</b>

It was Wirthlin who first coined the term “gender gap.” But once “the press ran with the idea — the question they always asked was, ‘Why is Reagan doing so poorly among women?’ But that’s only one blade of the scissors. The question I was always interested in was, ‘Why was Reagan doing so well among men?’” he says. “It’s been a mystery to me for 25 years why that wasn’t recognized.”

From 1980 on, Democrats never won more than 38 of every 100 white men who voted. Soon Republicans seemed to own masculinity itself.

There has been much discussion about the GOP’s ability to reach poor and working-class whites. But the phenomenon was overwhelmingly a story of men.

Between 1948 and 2004, for the poorest third of Americans, white women’s support for Democrats hardly shifted. For white working-class men, there was a 25 percent decline. Within the middle class of white America, the Democratic Party lost the support of 15 percent of white women. But white men left Democrats at twice that rate: 29 percent.

The white backlash against liberalism, of course, predated the 1980 election. It was Lyndon Johnson, 16 years earlier, hours after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, who turned to Bill Moyers and said, “I think we have just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

Racial animus may have been part of the problem for Democrats. At least Democrats could feel good about themselves while losing elections. But it was one of Johnson’s own confidants, Harry McPherson, who later concluded that the problem with white male voters was far more complex — not confined to the South or racial politics.

“Democratic primaries and conventions often rocked with the language of rebuke,” McPherson wrote in a 1972 memoir. “Very like, it has occurred to me, the language many wives use in speaking to their husbands, particularly toward the end of marriages. You never think of the children, or of my mother, or of me; only of yourself. Substitute the ignored disadvantaged, the homeless, people trapped downtown. The reaction among husbands, for whom read ‘white male voters,’ is what is normally provoked by attempts to burden people with a sense of guilt.”

As portrayed by the new breed of liberalism, the white man held all the cards, and everyone else’s bad deal was his fault. The problem was that the bulk of white men did not feel like dealers or players. They felt like pieces on someone else’s table, and their livelihood, their family’s very stability, was in richer men’s hands, as well. Increasingly, as Reagan assumed the presidency, many white men, particularly those in industrial trades, found their lives marked by instability. This was true in the home, as cultural changes refashioned the role of women and the place of sex in popular culture. And it was especially true in the workplace, as many once-secure union jobs disappeared.



Between 1979 and 1983 alone, more than 9 million Americans were added to the poverty rolls and more than half were from white, male-headed families. In 2004, white men still constituted the vast majority of leading CEOs. Yet many more white men still live the hardscrabble life. About 21 percent of white men and 22 percent of white women who voted in 2004 made $30,000 to $45,000 in household income.

These men are seen as failing to capitalize on “white male privilege.” Those who felt powerless, like so many women and minorities, were told they were indeed powerful. Conservatives came to validate a struggle many liberals had demeaned as merely the anger of the “angry white male.”

“Liberals didn’t realize they had a whole constituency of disenfranchised people without rights who were called standard masculine men,” Harvard University social psychologist William Pollack explains. “I’m not saying that all liberal Democrats saw these men as the enemy, but they didn’t see them as the victim — but these men felt more and more victimized.”

Today, many white men continue to feel disempowered, distant from liberal mores and unmoored from the stability that their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed. Like others, white men feel controlled by bosses and compelled by fiscal responsibility. They take on thankless work to meet their obligations, and it often creates a sense of compromised manhood. If a white man’s salary places him in the upper class, his self-worth is often tied to that wage. For many, the definition of being a man has meant surrendering what one wants to do for what one must do. This has long been true. But modern liberalism no longer saw it that way. The hard life was said to be the easy life if one was born white and male.

Yet many Democrats expected middle- and lower-class whites to ignore their grievances with liberalism and vote Democratic based on tax policy, as if issues like the breakdown of the American family were a superficial concern. This was the worldview behind the 2004 Thomas Frank bestseller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”

But the voters Democrats lost were not conned by distracting “wedge issues” like abortion or gun control. They quite knowingly voted for their self-interest, but they defined that interest in ways that were deeper than the size of their paychecks.

Even when efforts were made to reach some white men in 2004, it was limited to shallow discussions. The regular white guy was referred to as the “NASCAR dad.” Like Republicans’ outreach to African-Americans in the 2000 and 2004 general elections, the rhetoric failed because it was accurately perceived by both groups as mostly artifice.

In some sense, Kerry was touted as the war hero to appeal to these men, and their wives, many of whom share similar values. But when it came time to defend his fight in Vietnam against a conservative veterans group, Kerry’s senior aides counseled reticence.

It was “my mistake,” says the Kerry campaign’s chief strategist, Tad Devine, though other senior officials gave similar advice. “Obviously [I was] too much lawyer and not enough soldier,” Devine continues. “Not that I’m a soldier. I’m a lawyer. That’s my problem. I needed to not be a lawyer. I needed to appeal to the gut in [Kerry].” He adds, “We should have pleaded guilty to being tough and stayed with it, because, really, it was much truer to John.”

A failed experiment

Today, many leading liberal intellectuals continue to argue that Democrats should not concern themselves with fundamental weaknesses. Thomas F. Schaller, author of “Whistling Past Dixie,” has argued Democrats should ignore their deficit with white men (again, more than a third of voters) as well as the South (which remains the nation’s largest region, by a margin of tens of millions of Americans).

In fact, this has been the de facto Democratic strategy for decades. Safe to say the experiment has failed.

The recent midterm elections exhibit the potential for Democrats in closing the white male gap. Democrats never would have won back the Senate in 2006 without candidates not of the urbane sort winning more white men. In crucial Senate contests, from Montana farmer Jon Tester to Robert P. Casey Jr. in Pennsylvania — whose father was barred from speaking at the 1992 Democratic convention because of his anti-abortion views — the Democrats’ victory was, above any other, dependent upon significant improvements with white men, according to exit polls.

Recently, in a conversation with veteran liberal strategist James Carville, I raised the popular belief within the liberal base that Democrats should ignore their weaknesses with white men and the South. Carville scoffed and called it an “idiotic argument.”

Yet that is exactly the argument that has kept Democrats the minority party for decades.

It is, after all, the white working man who once was the backbone of the Roosevelt coalition. America has changed since. But Democrats’ need to compete for white men’s votes has not.

This article was adapted from “The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma,” published Thursday by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press.

[Guest]

<!--emo&:clapping--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clap.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='clap.gif' /><!--endemo--> Ex-VP, intergovernmental body jointly honored for global warming work

Daniel Sannum-lauten / AFP-Getty Images
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, holds a photo of Al Gore during the announcement Friday in Oslo.

OSLO, Norway - Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.

World leaders, President Bush among them, congratulated the winners, while skeptics of man's contribution to warming criticized the choice of Gore.

For his part, Gore in a statement said he was " deeply honored ... We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."


Gore won an Academy Award this year for his film "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary on global warming, and had been widely expected to win the prize.

"His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change," the Nobel citation said. "He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."

It cited Gore's awareness at an early stage "of the climatic challenges the world is facing."

Panel's two decades
The Nobel Peace Prize committee also cited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for two decades of scientific reports that have "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming."

The IPCC groups 2,500 researchers from more than 130 nations and issued reports this year blaming human activities for climate changes ranging from more heat waves to floods. It was set up in 1988 by the United Nations to help guide governments.

Climate change has moved high on the international agenda this year. The U.N. climate panel has been releasing reports, talks on a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate are set to resume and on Europe's northern fringe, where the awards committee works, there is growing concern about the melting Arctic.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the Earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

Gore said he would donate his share of the $1.5 million that accompanies the prize to the non-profit Alliance for Climate Protection.

Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the prize committee, said the award should not be seen as singling out the Bush administration for criticism.

"A peace prize is never a criticism of anything," he said. "A peace prize is a positive message and support to all those champions of peace in the world."

President Bush abandoned the Kyoto Protocol because he said it would harm the U.S. economy and because it did not require immediate cuts by countries like China and India. The treaty aimed to put the biggest burden on the richest nations that contributed the most carbon emissions.

The U.S. Senate voted against mandatory carbon reductions before the Kyoto negotiations were completed. The treaty was never presented to the Senate for ratification by the Clinton administration.

“Al Gore has fought the environment battle even as vice president,” Mjoes said. “Many did not listen ... but he carried on.”

The White House said the prize was not seen as increasing pressure on the administration or showing that President Bush’s approach missed the mark.

“Of course he’s happy for Vice President Gore,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. “He’s happy for the international panel on climate change scientists who also shared the peace prize. Obviously it’s an important recognition.”

Fratto said Bush has no plans to call Gore.

[Guest]

US Congress has spoken on the Armenian genocide.
When are they going to acknowledge Bangladesh?
The Continuing Rape Of Bangladesh

[acharya]

roshaniya
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->... the powerful society of Afghanistan in ancient times called the Roshaniya--illuminated ones. The major tenets of this cult were: the abolition of private propety; the elimination of religion; the elimination of nation states; the belief that illumination emanated from the Supreme Being who desired a class of perfect men and women to carry out the organization and direction of the world; belief in a plan to reshape the social system of the world by first taking control of individual countries one by one, and the blief that after reaching the fourth degree one could communicate directly with the unknown supervisors who had imparted knowledge to initiates throughout the ages. Wise men will again recognize the Brotherhood.

...The Roshaniya also called themselves the Order. Initiates took an oath that absolved them of all allegiance except to the Order and stated, "I
bind myself to perpetual silence and unshaken loyalty and submission to the Order... All humanity which cannot identify itself by our secret sign is our
lawful prety." The oath remains essentially the same to this day. The secret sign was to pass a hand over the forehead, palm inward; the counter-sign, to hold the ear with the fingers and support the elbow in the cupped other hand. Does this sound familiar? The Order is the Order of the Quest.

...The Roshaniya took in travelers as initiates and then sent them on their way to found new chapters of the Order. It is believed by some that the Assassins were a branch of the Roshaniya. Branches of the Roshaniya or
the "illuminated ones" or the Illuminati exists and still exist everywhere. One of the rules was not to use the same name and never mention "the Illuminati." That rule is still in effect today. I believe that it is the
breaking of this rule that resulted in Adam Weishaupt's downfall.

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<b>
Now, I don't see a direct progression from Roshaniya to Weishaupt's Illuminati within Freemasonry in Bavaria in 1776, and I suspect FreeMason could say more about the coincidence of that year for founding of the Illuminati with New World kinds of things (and probably has)... but I do see some of the tenets as being unique to this Afghan group and not replicated since.</b>

Much of it, if it has progressed and been actively passed down, has been bastardized by secret societies besides Freemasonry, especially in the abolition of private property and the elevation of personal greed - and in the tolerance of branded religious faith.

[Hauma Hamiddha]

USA helped Pakistan to get the N-bomb

Why did the Neo-cons do this?
Because they wanted to balance India. The west is not going to tell you this.

[ramana]

I am posting the Guardian article on Rich Barlow in full or it has some facts relevant to India. My comments below the article

The man who knew too much


<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The man who knew too much


He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's to have his day in court. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report

Saturday October 13, 2007
The Guardian


Rich Barlow idles outside his silver trailer on a remote campsite in Montana - itinerant and unemployed, with only his hunting dogs and a borrowed computer for company. He dips into a pouch of American Spirit tobacco to roll another cigarette. It is hard to imagine that he was once a covert operative at the CIA, the recognised, much lauded expert in the trade in Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
He prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at the Pentagon, for the upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office. But when he uncovered a political scandal - a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear bomb - he found himself a marked man.

In the late 80s, in the course of tracking down smugglers of WMD components, Barlow uncovered reams of material that related to Pakistan. It was known the Islamic Republic had been covertly striving to acquire nuclear weapons since India's explosion of a device in 1974 and the prospect terrified the west - especially given the instability of a nation that had had three military coups in less than 30 years . <b>Straddling deep ethnic, religious and political fault-lines, it was also a country regularly rocked by inter-communal violence. "Pakistan was the kind of place where technology could slip out of control," Barlow says.
He soon discovered, however, that senior officials in government were taking quite the opposite view: they were breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to shelter Pakistan's ambitions and even sell it banned WMD technology. In the closing years of the cold war, Pakistan was considered to have great strategic importance. It provided Washington with a springboard into neighbouring Afghanistan - a route for passing US weapons and cash to the mujahideen, who were battling to oust the Soviet army that had invaded in 1979.</b> Barlow says, "We had to buddy-up to regimes we didn't see eye-to-eye with, but I could not believe we would actually give Pakistan the bomb.

How could any US administration set such short-term gains against the long-term safety of the world?" Next he discovered that the Pentagon was preparing to sell Pakistan jet fighters that could be used to drop a nuclear bomb.

Barlow was relentless in exposing what he saw as US complicity, and in the end he was sacked and smeared as disloyal, mad, a drunk and a philanderer. <b>If he had been listened to, many believe Pakistan might never have got its nuclear bomb; south Asia might not have been pitched into three near-nuclear conflagrations; and the nuclear weapons programmes of Iran, Libya and North Korea - which British and American intelligence now acknowledge were all secretly enabled by Pakistan - would never have got off the ground.</b> "None of this need have happened," Robert Gallucci, special adviser on WMD to both Clinton and George W Bush, told us. "The vanquishing of Barlow and the erasing of his case kicked off a chain of events that led to all the nuclear-tinged stand-offs we face today. <b>Pakistan is the number one threat to the world, and if it all goes off - a nuclear bomb in a US or European city- I'm sure we will find ourselves looking in Pakistan's direction.</b>"

<b>US aid to Pakistan tapered off when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. Dejected and impoverished, in 1987 Pakistan's ruling military responded by selling its nuclear hardware and know-how for cash, something that would have been obvious to all if the intelligence had been properly analysed.</b> "But the George HW Bush administration was not looking at Pakistan," Barlow says. "It had new crises to deal with in the Persian Gulf where Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait."

<i>{Not entirely true. there were ummah considerations also. Syria and KSA are among the other hidden recievers }</i>

As the first Gulf war came to an end with no regime change in Iraq, a group of neoconservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Donald Rumsfeld were already lobbying to finish what that campaign had started and dislodge Saddam. Even as the CIA amassed evidence showing that Pakistan, a state that sponsored Islamist terrorism and made its money by selling proscribed WMD technology, was the number one threat, they earmarked Iraq as the chief target.

When these neocons came to power in 2001, under President George W Bush, Pakistan was indemnified again, this time in return for signing up to the "war on terror". Condoleezza Rice backed the line, as did Rumsfeld, too. Pakistan, although suspected by all of them to be at the epicentre of global instability, was hailed as a friend. All energies were devoted to building up the case against Iraq.

It is only now, amid the recriminations about the war in Iraq and reassessments of where the real danger lies, that Barlow - the despised bringer of bad news about Pakistan - is finally to get a hearing. <b>More than 20 years after this saga began, his case, filed on Capitol Hill, is coming to court later this month.</b> His lawyers are seeking millions of dollars in compensation for Barlow as well as the reinstatement of his $80,000 a year government pension. Evidence will highlight what happened when ideologues took control of intelligence in three separate US administrations - those of Reagan, and of the two Bushes - and how a CIA analyst who would not give up his pursuit for the truth became a fall guy.

Born in Upper Manhattan, New York, the son of an army surgeon, Barlow went to an Ivy League feeder school before attending Western Washington University on America's northwest tip. Even then he was an idealist and an internationalist, obsessively following world events. He majored in political science, and his thesis was on counter-proliferation intelligence; he was concerned that the burgeoning black markets in nuclear weapons technology threatened peace in the west. "I got my material from newspapers and books," he recalls. "I went to congressional hearings in Washington and discovered that there was tonnes of intelligence about countries procuring nuclear materials." After graduation in 1981, shortly after Reagan became president - avowedly committed to the non proliferation of nuclear weapons - <b>Barlow won an internship at the State Department's Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), </b>which had been established by John F Kennedy in the 60s.

At first Barlow thought he was helping safeguard the world. "I just loved it," he says. <b>His focus from the start was Pakistan, at the time suspected of clandestinely seeking nuclear weapons in a programme initiated by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of Benazir. "Everywhere I looked I kept coming up against intelligence about Pakistan's WMD programme," Barlow says. "I thought I was telling them what they needed to hear, but the White House seemed oblivious." </b>Immersed in the minutiae of his investigations, he didn't appreciate the bigger picture: that Pakistan had, within days of Reagan's inauguration in 1981, gone from being an outcast nation that had outraged the west by hanging Bhutto to a major US ally in the proxy war in Afghanistan.

Within months Barlow was out of a job. A small band of Republican hawks, including Paul Wolfowitz, had convinced the president that America needed a new strategy against potential nuclear threats, since long-term policies such as détente and containment were not working. Reagan was urged to remilitarise, launch his Star Wars programme and neutralise ACDA. When the agency's staff was cut by one third, Barlow found himself out of Washington and stacking shelves in a food store in Connecticut, where he married his girlfriend, Cindy. He was not on hand in 1984 when intelligence reached the ACDA and the CIA that Pakistan had joined the nuclear club (the declared nuclear powers were Britain, France, the US, China and Russia) after China detonated a device on Pakistan's behalf.

<i>{In the BRM article I said India was the last country in the world to nuclearize in 1988 after RG authorized the process and Rao implemneted it. This is huge admission buried in an English newspaper}</i>


Soon after, Barlow was re-employed to work as an analyst, specialising in Pakistan, at the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research (OSWR). The CIA was pursuing the Pakistan programme vigorously even though Reagan was turning a blind eye - indeed, Reagan's secretary of state, <b>George Schultz, claimed in 1985: "We have full faith in [Pakistan's] assurance that they will not make the bomb."</b>

Back on a government salary, Barlow, aged 31, moved to Virginia with his wife Cindy, also a CIA agent. From day one, he was given access to the most highly classified material. <b>He learned about the workings of the vast grey global market in dual-use components </b>- the tools and equipment that could be put to use in a nuclear weapons programme but that could also be ascribed to other domestic purposes, making the trade in them hard to spot or regulate. <b>"There was tonnes of it and most of it was ending up in Islamabad," he says. "Pakistan had a vast network of procurers, operating all over the world." </b>A secret nuclear facility near Islamabad, known as the <b>Khan Research Laboratories, was being fitted out with components imported from Europe and America</b> "under the wire". But the CIA obtained photographs. Floor plans. Bomb designs. Sensors picked up evidence of high levels of enriched uranium in the air and in the dust clinging to the lorries plying the road to the laboratories. Barlow was in his element.

However, burrowing through cables and files,<b> he began to realise that the State Department had intelligence it was not sharing</b> - in particular the identities of key Pakistani procurement agents, who were active in the US. Without this information, the US Commerce Department (which approved export licences) and US Customs (which enforced them) were hamstrung.

Barlow came to the conclusion that a <b>small group of senior officials was physically aiding the Pakistan programme. "They were issuing scores of approvals for the Pakistan embassy in Washington to export hi-tech equipment that was critical for their nuclear bomb programme and that the US Commerce Department had refused to license</b>," he says. Dismayed, he approached his boss at the CIA, Richard Kerr, the deputy director for intelligence, who summoned senior State Department officials to a meeting at CIA headquarters in Langley. Barlow recalls: "Kerr tried to do it as nicely as he could. He said he understood the State Department had to keep Pakistan on side - the State Department guaranteed it would stop working against us."

Then a Pakistani nuclear smuggler walked into a trap sprung by the CIA - and the Reagan administration's commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons was put to the test.

US foreign aid legislation stipulated that if Pakistan was shown to be procuring weapons of mass destruction or was in possession of a nuclear bomb, all assistance would be halted. This, in turn, would have threatened the US-funded war in Afghanistan. So there were conflicting interests at work when Barlow got a call from the Department of Energy. <b>"I was told that a Pakistani businessman had contacted Carpenter Steel, a company in Pennsylvania, asking to buy a specific type of metal normally used only in constructing centrifuges to enrich uranium. His name was Arshad Pervez and his handler, Inam ul-Haq, a retired brigadier from the Pakistan army, had been known to us for many years as a key Pakistan government operative."</b> Barlow and <b>US customs set up a sting</b>. <b>"Pervez arrived to a do a deal at a hotel we had rigged out and was arrested," Barlow says. "But ul-Haq, our main target, never showed."</b>

Trawling through piles of cables, <b>he found evidence that two high-ranking US officials extremely close to the White House had tipped off Islamabad about the CIA operation.</b> Furious, Barlow called his superiors. "The CIA went mad. These were criminal offences," Barlow says. The State Department's lawyers considered their position. <b>They argued that an inquiry would necessitate the spilling of state secrets. The investigation was abandoned just as Reagan made his annual statement to Congress, testifying that "Pakistan does not possess a nuclear explosive device."</b>

But the Pervez case would not go away. <b>Congressman Stephen Solarz, a Democrat from New Jersey, demanded a closed congressional hearing to vet the intelligence concerning Pakistan's bomb programme.</b> Barlow was detailed to "backbench" at the meeting, if necessary offering advice to the White House representative, General David Einsel (who had been chosen by Reagan to head his Star Wars programme). An armed guard stood outside the room where the hearing was held.

Barlow recalls that Solarz got straight to the point: "Were Pervez and ul-Haq agents of the Pakistan government?" Without flinching, Einsel barked back: "It is not cut and dried." It was a criminal offence to lie to Congress, as other hearings happening on the same day down the corridor were spelling out to Colonel Oliver North, the alleged mastermind behind Iran-Contra. Barlow froze. <b>"These congressmen had no idea what was really going on in Pakistan and what had been coming across my desk about its WMD programme," he says. "They did not know that Pakistan already had a bomb and was shopping for more with US help. All of it had been hushed up."</b>

Then Solarz called on Barlow to speak. <b>"I told the truth. I said it was clear Pervez was an agent for Pakistan's nuclear programme. Everyone started shouting. General Einsel screamed, 'Barlow doesn't know what he's talking about.' Solarz asked if there had been any other cases involving the Pakistan government and Einsel said, 'No'." Barlow recalls thinking, " 'Oh no, here we go again.' They asked me and I said, 'Yes, there have been scores of other cases.' "</b>

The meeting broke up. Barlow was bundled into a CIA car that sped for Langley. It was a bad time to be the US's foremost expert on Pakistan's nuclear programme when the administration was desperate to prove it didn't exist. Shortly after, Barlow left the CIA, claiming that Einsel had made his job impossible.

Later that year, Reagan would tell the US Congress: "There is no diminution in the president's commitment to restraining the spread of nuclear weapons in the Indian subcontinent or elsewhere."

Once again, Barlow was able to bounce back. <b>In January 1989</b>, he was recruited by the Office of the Secretary of Defence (OSD) at the Pentagon to become its first intelligence analyst in WMD. For a man uncomfortable with political pragmatism, it was a strange move: he was now in a department that was steeped in realpolitik, balancing the commercial needs of the US military industry against America's international obligations. <b>Within weeks, he had again built a stack of evidence about Pakistan's WMD programme, including intelligence that the Pakistan army was experimenting with a delivery system for its nuclear bomb, using US-provided technology. "Our side was at it again," Barlow says.</b>

Still optimistic, still perhaps naive and still committed to the ideal of thwarting the Pakistan programme, Barlow convinced himself that his experience in the CIA was untypical, the work of a handful of political figures who would now not be able to reach him. When he was commissioned to write an intelligence assessment for Dick Cheney, defence secretary, giving a snapshot of the Pakistan WMD programme, he thought he was making headway. Barlow's report was stark.<b> He concluded that the US had sold 40 F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan in the mid-80s - it had been a precondition of the sale that none of the jets could be adapted to drop a nuclear bomb. He was convinced that all of them had been configured to do just that. He concluded that Pakistan was still shopping for its WMD programme and the chances were extremely high that it would also begin selling this technology to other nations. Unbeknown to Barlow, the Pentagon had just approved the sale of another 60 F-16s to Pakistan in a deal worth $1.4bn, supposedly with the same provison as before.</b>

"Officials at the OSD kept pressurising me to change my conclusions," Barlow says. He refused and soon after noticed files going missing. A secretary tipped him off that a senior official had been intercepting his papers. <b>In July 1989, Barlow was hauled before one of the Pentagon's top military salesmen, who accused him of sabotaging the new F-16 deal. Eight days later, when Congress asked if the jet could be adapted by Pakistan to drop a nuclear bomb, the Defence Department said, "None of the F-16s Pakistan already owns or is about to purchase is configured for nuclear delivery." Barlow was horrified.</b>

<b>On August 4 1989, he was fired.</b> "They told me they had received credible information that I was a security risk." Barlow demanded to know how and why. "They said they could not tell me as the information was classified." All they would say was that "senior Defence Department officials", whose identities were also classified, had supplied "plenty of evidence". The rumour going around the office was that Barlow was a Soviet spy. Barlow went home to Cindy. "We were in marriage counselling following my fall-out at the CIA. We were getting our relationship back on track. And now I had to explain that I was being fired from the Pentagon."

Barlow still would not give up. His almost pathological tenacity was one of the characteristics that made him a great analyst. With no salary and few savings, he found a lawyer who agreed to represent him pro-bono. <b>At this point, more documents surfaced linking several familiar names to Barlow's sacking and its aftermath; these included Cheney's chief of staff, Libby, and two officials working for Wolfowitz.</b> Through his lawyer, Barlow discovered that he was being described as a tax evader, an alcoholic and an adulterer, who had been fired from all previous government jobs. It was alleged that his marriage counselling was a cover for a course of psychiatric care, and he was put under pressure to permit investigators to interview his marriage guidance adviser. "I had to explain to Cindy that her private fears were to be trawled by the OSD. She moved out. My life, professionally and personally, was destroyed. Cindy filed for divorce."

Barlow's lawyers stuck by him, winning a combined inquiry by the three inspector generals acting for the Defence Department, the CIA and the State Department (inspector generals are the equivalent of ombudsmen in Britain). By September 1993, the lead inspector, Sherman Funk, concluded that the accusation of treachery was "an error not supported by a scintilla of evidence. The truth about Barlow's termination is, simply put, that it was unfair and unwarranted." The whole affair, Funk said, was "Kafka-like" - Barlow was sacrificed for "refusing to accede to policies which he knew to be wrong".

It seemed Barlow had been vindicated. However, when the report was published it had been completely rewritten by someone at the Pentagon. Funk was appalled. When Barlow's lawyers called the Pentagon, they were told it was the department that had been exonerated. <b>Now it was official: Pakistan was nuclear-free, and did not have the capability of dropping a bomb from an American-supplied F-16 jet and the reputation of the only man who claimed otherwise was destroyed. Later, Barlow's lawyers would find his brief to Cheney had been rewritten, too, clearing Pakistan and concluding that continued US aid would ensure that the country would desist from its WMD programme.</b>

<b>The Pentagon officials who were responsible for Barlow's downfall would all be out of government by 1993, when Bill Clinton came into the White House.</b> In opposition they began pursuing an aggressive political agenda, canvassing for war in Iraq rather than restraining nuclear-armed Pakistan. Their number now included Congressman Donald Rumsfeld, a former Republican defence secretary, and several others who would go on to take key positions under George Bush, including Richard Armitage, Richard Perle and John Bolton.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz headed the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which concluded in July 1998 that the chief threat - far greater than the CIA and other intelligence agencies had so far reported - was posed by Iran, Iraq and North Korea: the future Axis of Evil powers. Pakistan was not on the list, even though just two months earlier it had put an end to the dissembling by detonating five nuclear blasts in the deserts of Balochistan.

It was also difficult not to conclude that Islamist terrorism was escalating and that its epicentre was Pakistan. The camps that had once been used to train the US-backed mujahideen had, since the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, morphed into training facilities for fighters pitted against the west. Many were filled by jihadis and were funded with cash from the Pakistan military.

<b>It was made clear to the new president, Bill Clinton, that US policy on Pakistan had failed. The US had provided Islamabad with a nuclear bomb and had no leverage to stop the country's leaders from using it. When he was contacted by lawyers for Barlow, Clinton was shocked both by the treatment Barlow had received, and the implications for US policy on Pakistan. He signed off $1m in compensation. But Barlow never received it as the deal had to be ratified by Congress and, falling foul of procedural hurdles, it was kicked into the Court of Federal Claims to be reviewed as Clinton left office.</b>

<b>When the George Bush came to power, his administration quashed the case. CIA director George Tenet and Michael Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, asserted "state secrets privilege" over Barlow's entire legal claim.</b> With no evidence to offer, the claim collapsed. Destroyed and penniless, the former CIA golden boy spent his last savings on a second-hand silver Avion trailer, packed up his life and drove off to Bear Canyon campground in Bozeman, Montana, where he still lives today.

Even with Barlow out of the picture, there were still analysts in Washington - and in the Bush administration - who were wary of Pakistan. They warned that al-Qaida had a natural affinity with Pakistan, geographically and religiously, and that its affiliates were seeking nuclear weapons. Some elements of the Pakistan military were sympathetic and in place to help. But those arguing that Pakistan posed the highest risk were isolated. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were in the ascendant, and they returned to the old agenda, lobbying for a war in Iraq and, in a repeat of 1981 and the Reagan years, signed up Pakistan as the key ally in the war against terror.

Contrary advice was not welcome. <b>And Bush's team set about dismantling the government agency that was giving the most trouble - the State Department's Nonproliferation Bureau.</b> Norm Wulf, who recently retired as deputy assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation, told us: "They met in secret, deciding who to employ, displacing career civil servants with more than 30 years on the job in favour of young, like-thinking people, rightwingers who would toe the administration line." <b>And the administration line was to do away with any evidence that pointed to Pakistan as a threat to global stability, refocusing all attention on Iraq.</b>

The same tactics used to disgrace Barlow and discredit his evidence were used again in 2003, this time against Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador whom the Bush administration had sent to Africa with a mission to substantiate the story that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material to manufacture WMD. When Wilson refused to comply, he found himself the subject of a smear campaign, while his wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA agent. <b>Libby</b> would subsequently be jailed for leaking Plame's identity (although released on a presidential pardon). Plame and Wilson's careers and marriage would survive. Barlow and his wife, Cindy's, would not - and no one would be held to account. Until now.

When the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress in 2006, Barlow's indefatigable lawyers sensed an opportunity, lodging a compensation claim on Capitol Hill that is to be heard later this month. This time, with supporters of the Iraq war in retreat and with Pakistan, too, having lost many friends in Washington, Barlow hopes he will receive what he is due. "But this final hearing cannot indict any of those who hounded me, or misshaped the intelligence product," he says. "And it is too late to contain the flow of doomsday technology that Pakistan unleashed on the world."

· Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark are the authors of Deception: Pakistan, The United States And Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy, published later this month by Atlantic Books, £25.

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What to say when Indians hear about how US wants to support the rise of India? In 1988 the Cold War was over. So what is the rationale for suppressing the news about TSP and giving them 60 more F-16s which can be used only against India? It was only in 1990 after the twin crises when they found that India would reply in kind that the US invoked Pressler amendment and let PRC provide more support during the Clinton years. It was the resolve shown by ABV in Kargil that changed the US mind that India wont go away with one hard blow and made them sign up and tell Badmash to vacate the hills.

[Guest]

ramana, what are the twin crises you are alluding to in 1990?

[ramana]

In 1990 Pakistan twice esaclated and created a nuke crisis. The then Cabinet secy give details of what India response would be to the Gates mission and soon after we had Hersh article in New Yorker and the Pressler was invoked. Not for too long though. TSP friends in SD found a role to bring them out as uncle stormtroopers under UN flag in Somalia which they botched up leading to the Blackhawk down etc.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->What to say when Indians hear about how US wants to support the rise of India? <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Babus and media who are working for west and current empty skull leadership are creating this impression that west is supporting India for good, some even suggest that India will know about nuclear deal when it will be discussed in US congress, when you have this kind of talent or mind set in India who still are mentally slave, no hope.