You will have observed that many web sites regard visits from domains such as,  Pentagon.mil,  Army.mil,  Navy.mil,  or AF.mil, USMC.mil, (Welcome! 

Counselor:  What was that you said about the Marines? 

Yvonne please not now . . . It will be misunderstood.  Woman!)

USCG.mil, OSD.mil,  SouthCom.mil,Nga.mil, EUCom.mil, (Sirs, an honor), JFCOM.mil  (As always a high honor, Sirs.  I am at your service.  You need only ask. Welcome., 

Counselor:  Why are you groveling? 

I’m not groveling . . . merely paying my respects.  Sirs, thank you for your service.  Forgive her she is . . . .foreign born.

Counselor:  I came to America when I was four? 

Yes that’s what I mean, . . . you were not born here. 

Counselor: . . . . 

What?), dia.mil, disa.mil, dfas.mil, dla.mil, cifa.mil, (I have been doing a lot of this myself), ida.org, or Unresolved (that is why they are called spooks), or Nipr.mil,with  (“Meanwhile unclassified communications of the U.S.. Armed Services go through NIPRNET (Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router Network), which uses public Internet communications.”  NIPR in nipr.mil stands for Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router. --- Scientific American article (Oct 2002, p. 45))  NGA.mil suspicion if not out right hostility. 

Sirs, you will find none of that attitude here;  not here at New Ruskin College.  Here, we are honored by your visits.  I can safely say I speak for the entire College when I say, Welcome,  we are at your service.  Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Counselor:   He doesn’t get very many visitors. 

Thank you, Yvonne.  As a convenience to you and also to our visitors from, Senate.gov, House.gov, AHRQ.gov, CDC.gov, (a prime target for bio attack), CENSUS,gov, CIA.gov, DHS.gov, DOE.gov, DOT.gov,  DOLETA.gov, DTRA,  EPA.gov, FAA.gov, FCC.gov, FEMA.gov,  GSA.gov, GAO.gov,  HUD.gov, IRS.gov, JCCBI.gov,  NARA.gov, NASA.gov, NCIFCRF.gov, NOAA.gov, (everyone talks about the weather, why not do something about it?), NSF.gov, OPM.gov, PSC.gov of HHS, SEC.gov, SSA.gov,  State.gov, Treas.gov, UCIA.gov, USCourts.gov, USDA.gov, USDOJ.gov, USGS.gov, USPTO.gov, USUHS.mil, VOA.gov, WorldBank.org,  arlington.va.us, state.AR.us, state.AZ.us, state.CO.us, state.CT.us, state.FL.us, state.GA.us, state.IL.us, state.IN.us,  state.KY.us,  state.LA.us, state.MA.us, state.MS.us, state.MN.us, state.MO.us, state.MD.us, state.NC.us, state.NE.us, state.NM.us, state.ND.us, state.NH.us,  state.NY.us, state.OH.us, state.OK.us, state.OR.us, state.PA.us, PWCgov.org,  state.SC.us, state.TN.us, stateTX.us, state.VT.us, state.VA.us, state.WI.us, state.WY.us, and Sandia.gov, Idaho National Lab, Lawrence Livermore Labs and Argon Lab, Berkeley National Labs,  (a distinct honor by your visit. Very much appreciated.  We always hold physics up as a model of clarity of thought in the sciences. We always endeavor to practice in our own science those qualities we admire in yours, )   as well as our foreign guests from the UK and  United Arab Emirates, Austria, Argentina, Aruba, Australia, Bahamas, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria (ЗДРАВИСВАНЕ БЪЛГАРИЯ), Cambodia, Cayman, Chile,  China ( 你好中国 ), Cocos Islands, Colombia, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, (It would be helpful if the people of Cyprus could share their experience with a separation barrier.  A mass “time out” helped bring peace to Cyprus and may also in the Middle East.)  Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic,  Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, Georgia, Germany (hallo Deutschland), Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, (my great grandmother was from Iceland), India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy (ciao l'Italia), Japan (こんにちは日本),  Jordon (a great honor), Kenya, Korea (여보세요 한국), Lebanon, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico (hola México), Moldavia, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niue, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia (здравствулте! Россия), Saudi Arabia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia,  South Africa, Spain (hola España), Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, (the once and future leader of the Moslem World), Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vi-et-nam, Zimbabwe, even France;  we will compile here at the Army Navy Club an index of subjects covered at New Ruskin College which we think will be of interest to visitors with more, shall we say more practical interests. 

Counselor:  You forgot our visitors from Canada. 

Oh, well I suppose Canada is a foreign country, if you want to get technical.  Yes welcome Canada.   And the Canadian Patent Office, yes, welcome, you may find our discussion of copyright law in 'This is what is wrong with the Republican Party' of interest, it is located on the main campus.

And Ox.ac.uk and Ruskin.ac.uk.

Counselor: So?  What’s so special?

Well,  . . . they haven’t complained and demanded we change our name.

Counselor: Ah,  a great honor…

Yes!  This index of ideas will allow you to quickly review our current research,  rather than following the more leisurely scholastic approach with which these subjects are examined elsewhere at the College and its institutes. 

We also will set up an archive of required reading at the Moynihan to assist young officers as they prepare for the fight.

Index of Subjects at the Army Navy Club @ New Ruskin College.com:

Item No. 1:

Our main contribution, here at New Ruskin College, to the fight on terror is to point out the significance of what we call the 5^th Day of Creation.  Recombinant Genetics is not a new technique; it represents a fundamental break with all of History.  Nuclear bombs, the invention of the computer, the wheel, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, WWII, the discovery of electricity, etc., etc., are all important;  but from the perspective that is required to understand Recombinant Genetics all of these things are mere aspects of Agriculture.  All of human history is but one small insignificant phase in the history of the universe, however, Recombinant Genetics, is something new.  Its development is on the order of the first beginnings of life on Earth. 

With Recombinant Genetics we have a fundamental break with our past.  This is why Francis Fukuyama says that History has been “restarted.”  As can be imagined such fundamental changes create entirely new opportunities and also threats. 

With respect to threats:  one reason this changed circumstance is not generally appreciated is because our Government itself, after WWII, helped cover up the growing danger by classifying all papers related to Imperial Japan’s bio warfare program as top secret.  Only in the last few years, with the publication of “Factories of Death” has there been public scholarly examination of bio warfare during WWII.  30 million Chinese died as a result of Japan’s military actions in China.  Scholars disagree as to the number directly attributable to bio warfare.  Certainly it is millions.

Therefore, let this serve as a lesson and a warning to our young officer guests.  More often than not government secrecy is used to cover up problems than to protect the people; a point our old Magistor Ludi Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have understood.  And ‘particularly in a democracy,’ he would want us to add.  (Also see Lab 257 : The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Labortory,  by Michael C. Carroll ISBN 0-060-01141-6.  Once the culture of secrecy is started cover up becomes a way of life.)

Now we have several generations that have grown up ignorant of what was possibly the greatest crime of the Twentieth Century, the murder of 30 million Chinese, and also ignorant of the very real danger of bio warfare.     

In the future, when historians looking back at the great plagues of the Twenty First Century, the great die off of the old humans, they will see in the bio warfare of the Twentieth Century, the beginnings of the destruction of the old human race.  Perhaps they will wonder how the old humans were taken so by surprise. They will think us all a bunch of blockheads!  After the die off of the Twenty First Century will come the great age of machines.  And with the machines will come the new humans:  Homo Sapiens Engineerus. 

With them will begin a new Earth.  This will be the time of the great families.  Parents will live for hundreds of years and they will raise their engineered children for centuries at a time, generation after generation.  Century after century.  There will be great family reunions of tens of thousands of children, many with their own century old families.  The world will be organized not around nation states but around these incredibly large and complex families of genetically engineered people:  the new humans.

In other words young officers, I am afraid our best thinking is that you are going to lose this war.  In all likelihood there will be a massive die off.  It is too difficult to organize the old humans, our fellow men.  Elsewhere on this web site you can read about how I tried, in my own small way to warn, to prepare them, even to lead them, and how they set about to destroy me.

But then perhaps you will have better success in organizing them than I have had.

However, even if you are successful in this endeavor, and you are able to organize the defenses against the terrorists, your problems will not be over.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 2:

For it is our central and irrefutable finding, here at New Ruskin College, that Recombinant Genetics will change, must change the human race irreversibly.  It is this profound inevitability that causes us to call it the 5^th Day of Creation.

Even if you are able to defend against your current adversaries, this technology will itself completely alter you.  This technology is so powerful that it can lead to only one end:  the extinction of the human race as we have known it.  Personally we here at New Ruskin College say, ‘good riddance to them.’  But of course not everyone will agree with this.  Yet young officers I think you can agree, based only on what has been said so far, that a distinction is justifiably made between two kinds of destruction:  one, a blind die off of billions of humans caused by terrorists, and the second one in which, billions of people voluntarily choose to alter this section of their genetic code that will keep a cancer from forming, or that section that will improve their cognitive functioning, or keep their heart beating to the age of 250.  One is a die off of scarcely imaginable proportions; the other is called E V O L U T I O N (evolution).

As obvious as this distinction might seem to you, strange to say, there are many,  a great many, for example  Osama bin Laden, Ted Kaczynski, our Commander in Chief, most Ministers and Priests, Imams, and Rabbis,  i.e., nearly everyone, who disagree, and find fault with our evolution.  Would stop it if they could.  (They can not.)  Indeed, our visitors may well be forgiven if they wonder at whether they should agree with the best thinking from here at  New Ruskin College, or should not rather take the side of everyone else on the planet?

However, we do not intend to debate the question here at the Army Navy Club we are only disclosing the terrain for our young officers.  We explain how things will be.  We are not a debating society.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 3:

Returning to the practical:  Our first recommendation is that this fight will be determined by how much genetic code can be read and how quickly.  This should be the first number on the matrix.  In the new bio warfare, of the Recombinant Genetics kind, everything depends on:  detecting code, reading code, analyzing code, manipulating code, inserting code.  All of this must be done in real time.  Even a one hour delay in detection could be catastrophic.

As defenders we have some natural advantages.  First of all we have a 4 billion year old immune system.  Recombinant Genetics does make it obsolete yet still the attacker must first surmount this not insubstantial obstacle.  Secondly, as was said in the Right Stuff, “Our Germans are smarter than their Germans.”  As defenders we will always have better scientists.   For example, already at Cambridge University scientists are working on a scheme to read an entire strand of human DNA in a few seconds.  A few seconds?   Contrast that with 3.5 million years that it took before hominids were first able to read their genetic code.  They have set up a privately held company called Prizim. 

With this technology it will be possible to read and analyze code in real time.  Now gentlemen that is a big advantage for the defender.  Question:  How much code can your read and how fast?  Answer:  The entire genome in seconds.  Yes.  Very nice.  Do you see?

Now the war shifts to the defender’s advantage!  This is something we can work with. As for manipulation and insertion that is a ways off.  We need bio labs today  the same way a century ago we needed air craft carriers.  We need to find programs and chips that will allow us to write code on the fly.  The attacker hacks the genome and we have to counter it in minutes, certainly hours.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 4:

Quarantine Zones.     It has been estimated that the AIDS virus could have wiped out the human race by itself had it been more contagious.  For example if it had been pneumonic in transmission instead of limited to bodily fluids.  In other words if someone figures out how to edit AIDS with a section of the common flu code, die off.  Or if Nature on her own, plays around with the human immune system in one of the millions of AIDS patients in the world, say a patient in a rain forest some where, and the right connection is made, the right virus mutates the right way and:  die off again. 

Indeed, young officers, as one considers all the risk branches that lead to die off,  well you can see, this is a big problem.   There are many more ways to fail than to succeed.  Yet, still, as our President says, we must try!  We certainly are willing to help.  But we will not disguise our doubts.  Truth is all we have to offer. 

The explanation for why AIDS is particularly a problem is because it is a retrovirus. In military terms we would say it is stealthy.  This is why detection is so important.  And why we need to be able to read code so quickly.  You can not detect it unless you can read it.  In the case of AIDS for example,  you need to be able to read its code and see what it will do to the host after 10 years of incubation!   That’s retro.  (The first retrovirus epidemic to be scientifically studied involved the crew of a U. S. Navy war ship.)  Very, very difficult, my young friends.   . . .Very  . . .difficult. 

Counselor:  Wasn’t there something else you wanted to say?

Oh, yes, thank you my dear.  By the way the Counselor’s fees are not included in the college tuition.  You must make your own arrangements with her.  Let’s see where was I . . .Detection and Quarantine Zones go together like hand and glove.  The faster the detection the smaller the zone. 

What troubles us here at New Ruskin College about the subject of Quarantine Zones is that it  seems to be an example of decline and corruption.  America had better Quarantine Procedures in 1900 than it did in 2000.  Social decay, gentlemen.  The leadership is unwilling to deal with this issue.

Young officers will have read about the ancient war America fought, far away across the vast Western Sea, in Vi-et-nam.  In a nut shell millions died because the politicians chose to “manage” the war instead of winning it.  Their only concern was that they not be accused of “losing Vietnam.”  They did not want to win they just did not want to lose, or rather did not want to be accused of “losing.”

You will have heard it said that the strategic situation would have lead to nuclear holocaust if anything else had been done.  This is all nonsense, sirs.   More examples of how ignorance is the handmaiden of folly.  And this is not 20 20 hind sight.  William F. Buckley wrote in 1963 that if we were not going to win we should get out.  And at that time I proposed that the McNamara Line be extended into Laos and then crossed over the Mekong and thence up the Western bank to the head waters.  

The first objection was that the war can not be extended to Laos.  “Extended?”  The war was already in Laos.  But I think the real objection was that Americans do not like to take up the defense.  Even after the strategic decision was made not to advance to China, (see also Korea), still, the American military establishment would not advocate a defensive line, if for no other reason than that it was advocated by McNamara. 

We will not review here the history of defensive lines and fortifications other than to point out that the Maginot Line performed as it was designed.  Like all defensive lines it did force the enemy to concentrate its forces at key points.  As B. H. Liddell Hart said, ('Strategy'),  all strategy is an attempt to force one’s opponent onto the horns of a dilemma:   If he concentrates his force it can be attacked en masse;  if he spreads the force out to avoid the attack he lacks sufficient power to take the initiative.  The French Air Force was larger than the German Air Force.  But the French were unwilling to strike at the concentrating German forces that were strung out for 300 miles of traffic jams into Germany.  The problem was not with the Maginot Line but with the leadership which was unwilling to take advantage of the opportunity the Line created.

Yet among American military officers defensive positions are only for sissies or the French.  Had a Hadrian’s wall been built through Indochina millions might have been spared but we will never know.  In principle the McNamara line thus extended would have forced the enemy to concentrate his forces and thus play into America’s strength.  (Note, however, the absurdity of a line that stopped at the Laos frontier.  Such a policy could only be advocated by a leadership that was out of touch with reality and playing some political game that only makes since if you are an American politician.) The point here is not to relive ancient wars but to consider how prejudice clouds our thinking.

Quarantine Zones are another example of a defensive position.  But our leadership is prejudiced against the defense.  The need is clear but the base prejudice prevents the examination of this issue.  During the SARS outbreak American public health consisted of worried flight attendants calling doctors in destination cities to come to the air port and examine passengers.  There was no American public health policy.  We here at New Ruskin College have developed the idea of virtual quarantines but these would only be useful for very short time intervals.  So we are less prepared to Quarantine an epidemic than we were in 1900

This prejudice against the defense can be seen an many other examples.  In Mogadishu the Black Hawk went down because the armored vehicles that the local commander had requested were denied.  The leadership insisted on going on the offensive never mind the need for armor.  In Iraq an American General said in reply to a question about arresting suspects, “We are Americans, we don’t just round up people.”   Excuse me Mr. General Sir.  In Vi-et-nam America had a policy of relocating whole populations.  (This policy was allowed because it was thought to pose a low likelihood of igniting a nuclear war.)

We don’t just round up people?  In America, population 300 million, we have 3 million people in jail or prison or parole or probation or being watched for future arrest.  That is 1%.  (It represents a significantly higher percentage of the relevant population.)

Eleanor Holmes Norton:   What is that supposed to mean?

Just, . . . you know . . . a higher percentage of certain  . . . groups . . .

Eleanor Holmes Norton:  Like Blacks?  Are you talking about Black folk?

The Clintons continued to believe in the ideals of their youth long after most of their generation had grown up.  Two of those ideals were hand gun control and the nuclear test ban.

Hand gun control:

It will be recalled that the Clintons removed the hand guns from passenger airline flight crews the year before the 9-11 attacks.  It has been claimed by hand gun opponents that the guns posed the risk of bringing down a passenger jet if the bullet should pass through the fuselage causing ‘decompression.’ 

Not only is this wrong, it is absurdly wrong.

Nuclear test ban:

Many questioned why the Clintons assisted the Chinese in obtaining super computers.  The explanation is that the Clintons wanted the Chinese to agree to a nuclear test ban, and use computer simulations instead of actual tests.  However, after obtaining the computers the Chinese discovered, like anyone who has purchased a computer, that they also needed the software.  Unfortunately software which simulates nuclear explosions is not readily available to the retail consumer.  The data sets stolen from the Los Alamos Lab were needed to assure the Chinese that they could rely on computer simulations.  Anoter victory for the nuclear test ban, thanks to the Clintons!

Army Navy Club

Item No. 6:

We have identified three types of bio attack: 

Type 1, fast acting bio agents used in combination with conventional weapons and chemical weapons on a large civilian target;  Type 2, an advanced bio attack using binary engineered viruses on a military target such as an air craft carrier group;  and Type 3, a dooms day attack using a engineered highly contagious retro virus against the general population to cause a massive die off;  (The first two could in principle also use retro viruses), as follows:

Type 1 bio attack:  (see 45 Minutes and the Distortion of History)

So they will fill the battlefield with bio toxins;  botulinus, for example.  They spray the bacteria, which has been sealed in water soluble droplets that are invisible to the eye, all over the battlefield, the island of Manhattan, for example.   They spray all morning, from sprayers hidden in ladder racks on trucks, driving up and down Manhattan streets.  A fine invisible spray.  Then, six hours latter they take up positions in building, at bridges.  Bombs go off. Subways stop, traffic stops. Snipers open up.  Then people start vomiting.

Six hours is the incubation  period for the toxins to start killing, and nausea is the first symptom.  Killing not a few thousand, not a few hundred thousand but millions.  Difficult to save them at any time but now they are pinned down on the battleground of the IV World War.  Men in bio suits and respirators and AK 47s are shooting at them.  And bombs.  Did I mention the bombs?  How many men?  Let’s see.  There are 13 million, unknowns, in America.  Take any guess you like. 

What if it was only 100 men.  There does that make you feel better?  Now, after the bombs comes the poison gas. You know they have poison gas.  (You know this but your police still walk around without their gas masks and bio suits.  Why is that?  (Not that that would help them against the secret bio attack, but it might help with the poison gas.)  Oh, well, may be they can hold their breath while they empty their magazine.) The object is to hold the population down while the bio toxins and chemical agents kill every living thing.  In  a day or two, or a week, the terrorist will be gone, one way or the other, so will Manhattan and everyone who now lives there.

This is not a prediction.  It is an estimation of what the enemy could do.  Every item mentioned is on a United Nations Weapons manifest of Iraqi arms, some of which are still unaccounted for.  They have the technical means, the capability.

There are many counter measures that you could take; everything from stacking sand bags  at the approaches to the Manhattan bridges, (bad for real estate prices to say nothing of tourism), to a bio research project similar to the physics research project of the last century, ironically called the Manhattan Project, (too expensive, I don’t know, just the way you are, no reason.  Apart from bio warfare it would have enormous benefits.  The money spent on basic research is never wasted.  Oh, well, I don’t want to argue with you.)  Opening all mixed freight containers would create a lot of labor jobs in our big cities and would limit the importation of weapons.  (No.  Don’t want to do it, I have no idea why.)  Require American flight crews on all high risk air lines entering the U. S., (which is what the Russians used to do during the cold war).  (No, too unfriendly.)   Securing our borders would be technically simple.  (No, too . . . something.)  I realize all these things cost money but what is the value of Manhattan and the few millions that will be killed in the third bio attack?

Type 2 bio attack:  (see 45 Minutes and the Distortion of History)

Let me describe the battlefield of the IV World War.  The enemy combatants are suicidal.  The main criticism of bio weapons is that they kill everyone so who would want to use them?  (As if this were a draw back.  However this is no longer a technical problem.  They can be designed to kill discriminately.  For example a binary virus released up wind of the Norfolk Naval Base would infect those down wind.  As it is only a harmless retro virus it goes undetected.  (If you do not have a bio detector, you are the bio detector.) Later, in the Persian Gulf the other half of the virus is released up wind of a carrier task force.  Twelve hours later the carrier task force runs aground on the coast of Iran.  The reactor melts down, because there is no one on board to tend it, and the molten core drops through the hull of the carrier into the sea bed.  All hands dead.  However, only the Americans are dead from the release of the second virus.  The locals in both locations, Virginia and the Persian Gulf, are not harmed.  Only those who were in both locations are killed, as a result of the two viruses combining.)  Science fiction?  You think so because of the distortions of History.  You think you exercise the same degree of knowledge about this situation as you do about the history drama.  But you are wrong.  

Type 3 bio attack:  (see Item No. 4 above)

Army Navy Club

Item No. 9:

All U. S. Government mail should me scanned into the computer system and sent to Government offices electronically.  The courts allow electronic images to be submitted into evidence as long as the original is available and there is no dispute.  The originals can be warehoused. 

Many businesses scan there mail and store the originals simply for ordinary business reasons. 

This would prevent a third (3^rd!!) attack on the Senate, (at least from being carried out like the last two (2!)).

Army Navy Club

Item No. 10:

One year of staples should be stored for the American market.  This would protect America from a bio attack directed at our farms.  This would also help the rest of the world by protecting the poor people from having to compete with the rich Americans should there be a global interruption in food production. 

This program can replace the current agricultural subsidies, which are in any case a violation of international trade agreements.  Several years should be allowed for the completion of the program as new storage buildings will be required.  Long term the food reserve will normalize commodity markets making planning more accurate. 

Army Navy Club

Item No. 11

The next time you meet with the Shiite Clergy, after tea, ask them to tell you what the Prophet, may peace be with him, had to say, when he still walked this world with us, about gratitude?

Then take down their words and put them on bill boards and posters all over Iraq in white lettering on dark blue back grounds.  

Similarly, ask them to explain the meaning of the “well worn path?”

Army Navy Club

Item Number 12:  Insurance

In order to keep the emergency rooms open the insurance should be reorganized to cover every “mode, means, and instrumentality of harm and injury.”

Every “trauma” case that presents at an emergency can be identified by the admitting room notes, and or paramedic report, and or police report, etc.,  to have been caused by various modes, means, and instrumentalities (M.M.I).  All of these M. M. I. each have insurance, (trust me, they are all insured, ten ways to Tuesday).

The economics are that it is not always economical to even identify the harm agent, the M. M. I., much less collect the money.  For example a gun shot wound has as its M. M. I.  a gun, to say nothing of the person who discharged the gun. But, dear reader, and honored guest, please consider are their no other M. M. I.s?  There is the alcohol that was consumed?  Did you think about that?  The place that sold it?  A late night place perhaps? Special risk for late night places.  Did you know that? 

Again, take my word for this, there are people, very  smart people, people as smart as Dr. Teller, but who have not used their intelligence thinking about the mysteries of the universe and also, by the way, not thinking of ways to protect our country, (the way Dr. Teller did), but who are still every bit as smart, who have spent their lives considering such questions as the reader is now considering, perhaps for the first time.

Does the reader suppose that these people have as their first concern, how to keep the emergency rooms open, in case the reader should be injured?   They are not principally concerned with you.  They are concerned with studying these M. M. I. statistics and using these numbers to make money.  I am a conservative.  I do not condemn them.  For example Warren Buffett is a fan of insurance and he is himself no dummy.  But his business is not your nearest emergency room. 

I just want you to consider that for every injury there are a host of M. M. I.s that are responsible, for which premiums have been collected, for which risk has been calculated with exquisite precision, and about all of which the reader is completely ignorant.  You pay your premiums but what do you know?  Did you know that every purchase includes a premium?  Ladders cost half of what you pay.  The other half is all premium.  Bath tubs? Another big M. M. I., and they have a lot of insurance.  Did you know there are “med pay” policies on every piece of real estate?   $5,000, $10,000, $50,000, small denominations like that, but covering trillions of dollars worth of real estate.  Most policy holders do not even know about it, much less present claims for their injured guests.

There is a social policy question for us to consider, but first you need to know about what in health insurance is called “adverse risk selection,” or in general insurance “morale hazard,” or in Economics “free rider,” or in modern political rhetoric “welfare bums” or “cheats” or, well you get the idea.

We will not go into detail here but one can see that with “trauma” injuries this does not present as an important issue.  “Trauma” in quotes because the fine print of this proposed insurance policy is that the “trauma” must be “sudden” and “accidental” and “caused” by a M. M. I. that we have “insured.”  Again we are not here going to define each of these terms but suffices to say we expect few additional “traumas” to be presented at emergency rooms.  The few new ones will be the simple ones that cost little to treat and will more than offset the ones that are presented only after infection has set in.  “Trauma” should be presented and treated early to save money.

The point is that I can not solve all the emergency room problems with one policy.  Some patients will have traumas that are not “traumas.”  For example the lung cancer patient who starts to hemorrhage.  A trauma but not  “sudden” and “accidental.”  (Fine print.)  However, those big tobacco settlements took care of those cases right?  The Clintons helped give huge settlements to their trial attorney friends, and that solved that problem right? 

Here is the social policy question:   When you are brought unconscious to an emergency room do you want them to wait until your insurance is verified?  If you say no, then you must agree with me that we need to fund the emergency rooms. 

To assist the funding, new policies could be written for say auto accidents, which account for a large number of trauma cases.  Some people are “uninsured.”  To prevent these “free riders,” for example, gasoline could be covered by policies.  The premium to close this “uninsured” hole would amount to a penny per gallon.  On the other hand the medical payment portion of your aut policy would go down to nothing for the basic coverage, and would be added to your policy as an “extra” as now there would be no uninsured motorists. 

If you want more than say $100,000 standard coverage you could buy it.  (Would you want to live if you incurred more than $100,000 in emergency room charges?)

Some lawyers and bankers and insurance vice presidents will want to know how this scheme will be administered.  Obviously, as I have said, there are a lot of people who are smarter than me and the reader who will be able to work out the details. 

We need Robert Kudlow, or someone like that to figure it out.  (Warren Buffett probably will not help us because he likes insurance the way it is.)  I do not blame him.

I expect the system would be some sort of system for assessing policies individually, and then with an algorithm to  apportion the loss to an industry group, to spread the risk and  so as to collect from an entire underwriting group, with tiers similar to reinsurance.

But here the reader should consider this:  I am not as smart as Buffett but then I am looking out for you;  which do you prefer?   Brains alone, or do you appreciate having someone helping you when you are wheeled into the emergency room, even if not as smart as Buffett?

Army Navy Club

Item Number:  14

Simplest way to acquire human, animal, or plant pathogens:  set up a low cost testing laboratory in a tropical third world country.  Offer a promotional incentive to doctors and health workers who provide samples.

Behind the laboratory set up a “farm” to raise the strains thus acquired.  [Recall that it was the purchase of growth medium, (which was discovered by Israeli intelligence who obtained copies of purchase orders), plus the defection of his son in law, who ran the “special” weapons program, that caused Hussein to confess to the manufacture of bio and other illegal weapons, which are still unaccounted for.  10,000 liters of botulinum   toxin  are still missing.)

It would take several generations to weaponize  the pathogens.  Not human generation!  Months.

Army Navy Club

Item Number 15

Most low cost way to disrupt the American economy in 5 easy steps.

1 Obtain asbestos,  (Acquired by setting up low cost “removal service”, or stealing from dump, or reopening a refinery operation).

2 Grind into fine powder.

3 Spread over city by driving up and down the streets dropping powder out the bottom of the truck.  (A city like San Francisco would be ideal.)

4 Then send a sample with a letter of explanation to local leftwing newspaper. 

5  Real estate prices burst bubble. 

Army Navy Club

Item Number 16

Next low cost way to disrupt the American economy in 7 easy steps.

Combine Item Numbers 14 and 15.

Army Navy Club  

Item No. 17

The simplest way to disrupt agricultural production is to put a bio agent in the tanks of a motor home.  Motor homes are not subjected to the same scrutiny as trucks and buses.  Additional bio agent can be put in fitted plastic bladders in the storage compartments, and on the floor of the motor home.  (The suspension should be modified for the added load.)  Pumps and hoses can deliver the agent to roof mounted nozzles that can be concealed in roof antennas and luggage racks.  Drive the motor home upwind of the fields to be infected.  Refill at a warehouse where the agent can be grown.  Finance operations with commodity speculation. The next simplest is create an aphids production operation with the bio agent operation.  Infect the aphids and release in agricultural area. 

Counter measure should include quarantine zones for agricultural districts with inspection of all vehicles.    Monitor purchases of lab equipment and materials purchased in volume.  

Army Navy Club 

Item No. 18

In air operations the first targets are enemy radar, anti air capabilities, air fields, and production facilities.  In bio warfare the primary target is the science infrastructure.  New York, Atlanta, Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area, are primary targets due to their bio technology infrastructure. 

After these attacks people will be surprised how much scientific progress was dependent on simply having a great many scientist working on problems.  Every day scientific papers are published because there are tens of thousands of researchers working on a host of related issues.  Once progress in biological sciences is checked by killing off the leading researchers the general population will be highly vulnerable to the subsequent attacks.  This is why research is so urgent.  The research must be completed before the first general attack.  (Note: the next attack will be America’s fourth bio attack.) 

Bio warfare naturally targets the medical infrastructure as the casualties are always presented first to the hospitals.  (See #19).  Recall that Ebola was first called Marburg virus as the researchers at Marburg were its first victims.  Then the specialist in tropical diseases at Yale University were called into help investigate the virus and they were its next victims.  Children are vectors as most medical attention is directed to them.  (Toys, comic books, and candies contaminated with highly contagious agents most likely means.  Look for such items sealed in plastic left on walks to playgrounds and schools.) 

Counter measures should include placing bio labs outside population centers, quarantine zones with separate emergency rooms, universal precautions for medical workers.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 19

After the first wave most first responders will be dead.  Then allied professions will be called on.  Dentists, pharmacists, university and corporate researchers will be trained in medical practice.  These will be killed in the second wave.  After the second wave the survivors will be surprised to learn how much of medical practice was passed on word of mouth from doctor to doctor.  

Counter measure:  Develop courses on laser disks for medical profession.  Design course for laymen survivors.  Use the military medic training program as a model.

Army Navy Club 

Item No. 20

Electronically controlled consumer air fresheners are ideal means to aerosolize  contagious bio agents. 

Counter measure:  look for such units attached under subway train seats, under pay telephone shelves, in public bathrooms of airports, and other public places.  

Counter measure:  bio detectors, searches of persons and places, quarantine zones.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 21

Exponential growth always surprises.  However, in this scientific pursuit, Biology, the surprise will be enhanced by comparison with the slow progress in Physics. People have grown accustomed to hearing that fusion energy is always 50 years away, or that physicists have just learned some here before unknown thing, or that they have conflicting theories. 

The 5^th day is going to startle with its suddenness.  I noted that the New York Times had a Sunday article about how we have “already begun” to change ourselves.  Which is true.  But all of this, the discovery of the DNA molecule, the human genome project, even the clinical trials that have begun, are atmospherics.  The fingers of dawn in the upper atmosphere.  A gradual lightening.  Early light.

The disk of the sun has not yet risen above the horizon.  Indeed there is some fog so you may not actually see it when it crosses the horizon on June 5, 2006.  How complete will be the change will startle you.  This is because you have become accustomed to scientific delays due to the slow progress of Physics.  You have been lulled into a false sense of complacency. 

Imagine how difficult it is to solve all the problems of Genetics.   However difficult it is we will call: @!.  @! is the entirety of the difficulty.  Some scientist say that the complete attainment of @! is hundreds of years away. 

Now consider @! times 2.  What if the complete resolution of all questions in Genetics  is actually twice as difficult as you first estimated it?  Will it take twice as long?  Answer: no.  Perhaps it will add another month.  Why?  This is the surprising nature of exponential growth.  Even if it is a 100 times harder than you thought just add another year maybe less.  Once the learning curve starts to near vertical in an exponential growth, time dwindles very quickly, then zero. 

Now consider @! – ? = HSE  (minus what portion will equal the information needed to begin creating Homo Sapiens Engineerus).  That is, setting aside complete resolution of all aspects of Genetics, all the protein molecules, the receptors, how they interrelate, all of that, just consider what remainder is essential for creating  homo Sapiens Engineerus?  What is the minimum?  However difficult you thought @! was, the knowledge we need to begin creating HSE is less than @!.  Much less.   Not hundreds of years.  We are only months away.

The important distinction is that Genetics, unlike Physics, is a finite subject completely contained in our three dimensional universe, operating at sizes well within the capabilities of our microscopes and instruments.  There is no “measurement problem” in Genetics.  And our knowledge is growing exponentially.  A finite problem being exhausted exponentially. 

We used to think, here at the Max Weber Institute for the Study of the 5^th Day of Creation,  that we should focus on cognition, so the cycle would become self reinforcing.  Then we discovered that the advances were so rapid that HSE will arrive before even the first baby could be raised.  That is we will begin modifying ourselves, our own genes in our own living cells much faster than the feed back from those changes can reinforce the growth. 

In other words advances are coming so quickly that  we will not need to genetically design scientists to accelerate the process; at least not for HSE.  No doubt advances in cell biology and genetics will improve cognition, and no doubt this increase in cognitive ability will advance the attainment of @!.  However our ordinary human scientist will be more than sufficient  for HSE to start, to be born, on June 5, 2006.  The disk of the sun just comes up over the horizon.  Happy birth day. Mark your calendars.

The reason you have been mislead by the slow advance of Physics is because the universe is a much bigger subject than the particulars of Earth based life chemistry: Genetics.  They are both sciences but the problems are not comparable.  The latter is in fact trivial by comparison.

Had our nation directed its resources to this problem earlier the advances could have happened much sooner.  There were no fundamental obstacles.  (The sole technical limitation was computational sciences.)  Such funding as there has been was directed to government and academic labs which are notorious for their plodding pace.  Recollect that prior to Dr. Graig Venter’s entry into the Human Genome Project the government scientists predicted a decade to completion.  Dr. Graig Venter reduced that time by seven years.

During the 1970s when inflation was gutting research budgets Biology funding failed to keep pace with Physics which was driven by National Defense concerns.  Ironically in the late 1980s AIDS activists and Democrats blamed Ronald Reagan for the AIDS related deaths.  They charged he had not requested enough hundreds of millions of dollars.  Yet it now can be seen twenty years and billions of dollars later that these charges were all lies.  There is still no cure in sight.

These activists were no where to be found in the 1970s when the Biology budgets were in need of support.  Indeed where are they now when we are so close that a few hundred million truly could make a difference, if not immediately in AIDS, certainly in all the allied areas of investigation?  (We have previously explained the National Security need for this research.  The die off is coming.)  Many lives could still be saved if research was increased.   

Army Navy Club

Item Number 22

An early warning sign of a pending Bio Warfare attack will be sudden peace offer by an enemy.  When a long time enemy learns that a bio attack is soon to be launched, expect the enemy to offer to reconcile all existing disputes and even offer to allow inspections of its weapons programs.  One of the chief advantages of Bio Warfare is that it can be conducted anonymously.  Therefore, an enemy planning on an attack, or even an uninvolved state, will want to normalize diplomatic relations prior to the victim state’s realization that it has been attacked.

Application: “We are particularly pleased that Libya is now committed to ending all military trade with states of serious weapons of mass destruction proliferation concerns,"  said Mr. John Bolton, Undersecretary of State. May 2004. (Note:  Gaddafi first promised to renounce W. M. D. in 1992.)

Army Navy Club

Item Number 23:

These PhDs,  Molecular Biologists, are “scared” but you are not?   Oh, I see, that is because you are so . . . brave?  Or stupid? 

You have no choice.  Our only chance at survival is to move up the learning curve faster than our enemies.  We have to master this technology before they do. 

“It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.

“That's because the therapy itself is a virus. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory assistant professors created a virus altered  . . . (by their design) . . . the researchers could begin animal testing by the end of this year.

“Arkin said this week at the International Biotech Summit at the University of California at Berkeley that it was almost too easy for him and his colleagues (Schaffer and then-grad student Leor Weinberger) to build the anti-HIV virus.

“ ‘If I can do it, anyone can do it,” Arkin said. “That's going to be a problem.’”---- Wired Magazine on line, May 2004.  

Complete text at Required Reading Army Navy Club, Moynihan Memorial Library.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 26:

06-12-04

Inflation is skyrocketing in education and medicine and you do nothing to control the costs.  Yet in low wage labor, in the bottom 20% of the economy, where real wages have declined, you flood the market with even more unskilled labor.  And yet you do nothing for the new immigrants.  No housing programs, education for new citizens, no path to citizenship, no plan of any kind.  You aren’t doing anything in technology in education, reform of medicine, tax reform, nuclear energy, . . . you are not making any plans for the future.  Why?

Then it came to me all of a sudden.  Why the whole country is just like me.  It is the end of time.  Of course, it does not matter.

The national debt is $25,000 per person with no effort of any kind to stop the rise let alone draw it down.  6 billion people, fresh water supplies being pumped dry.  Who cares!

When we started the war with Iraq I was at first concerned then astonished that no precautions were being taken to set up quarantine zones or screen arrivals, no preparations to fight a bio war.  For example, we had only the crudest bio detectors, and they were checked only once every 24 hours, primitive. 

But of course, what difference can it make.

General Franks, (USA Retired), said that he did not expect that the civilian government would survive the first general bio attack.

Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.“... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.”

“It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”- John O. Edwards, NewsMax.com Friday, Nov. 21, 2003

Now it makes sense.  After the attack the national debt, education, politics, nothing will matter.  Over population?  Why worry about something so easily cured?  You are not making plans for the future because there will be no future.

That’s it isn’t it?   I’ve guessed your strategy.  I thought there were things that we could do, but I was wrong, it really is hopeless.  That’s why you aren’t doing anything.  What’s the point?

In nuclear war planning we used to judge the winner by how many hours he outlasted the loser. In bio warfare I thought that we would judge the winner by what percentage of his population he was able to save.  For example, if we lose 100 million people you might think we lost.  But that is only 33%.  If the plague draws down the world population by 75% we look like winners.  No?

So, what?  Can we save 50%?  Can we save 10%?  Can we not save anyone?

This summer the Government announced that in the event a “near Earth object” is detected to be on a collision course the Government will not release the information in order to avoid panic. 

However, may I suggest, that the Government should at least appear to be continuing to plan and work for the future.  If it appears that the Government has given up, the people may be able to deduce the cause:  the loss of faith that there will be a future.  If you are trying to avoid panic you should try to keep up appearances.

Come up with some plans for the future.  Oh, do.  It will calm us. 

“A general with the U.S. Space Command is calling for a global early warning system for meteor explosions so that nuclear wars aren't started by mistake.

Brigadier Gen. Simon P. Worden, U.S. Space Command's deputy director for operations at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, said an exploding meteor came close to triggering a nuclear war this summer.

On June 6, U.S. satellites detected a 12-kiloton explosion in the atmosphere, equivalent to the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. It was a meteor vaporizing over the Mediterranean Sea, but had it hit the Earth's atmosphere a few hours earlier, it would have been seen as a bright flash and felt as a distant boom by Indian and Pakistani soldiers in the disputed Kashmir region.

At the height of tensions between the two nations, the blast could have been mistaken for a nuclear blast and started a nuclear war, said Worden.----TCS

Yes, you see, this is encouraging, at least the Air Force is thinking about the future.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 27:

06-16-04

The general attack will come when there is an inversion layer over the city, in the summer, when the windows are open and people are out doors.

Good luck.

Counter measure:  Set up whole house fans with HEPA filters and keep the house under positive air pressure.  (This would also help with allergies during peace time.)  However, this would only be effective against direct contamination for  only a few hours at most, even if there is immediate detection, because most people will fail to follow proper decontamination procedures.  Bio detectors.  Quarantine Zones.  Refugee camps.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 28:

06-17-04

The fifty year rule:  Technological solutions only need be effective for at most fifty years to be considered permanent solutions.

Because technology is changing so quickly it is impossible to make meaningful predictions beyond fifty years. 

For example, the often stated proposition that the nuclear power industry must store atomic waste for 10,000 years is absurd.  It is impossible to know what we will be able to do with the material beyond fifty years.  Therefore, containment for fifty years is the most that can be reasonably expected, for that is as far ahead as we can see.

In the event of a die off the pace of technological change will slow and we will be able to predict technology for longer periods. 

Army Navy Club

Item No. 28:

O6-18-04

The two year rule:  Proposals to secure the nation against bio attacks need only be effective for the next two years.

If we are able to prevent or contain the damage from a bio attack for even just the next two years, and if we continue to advance our knowledge of biology, the advances will allow us to increase the safety margin of our protective screens in a self reinforcing cycle.  The next two years are critical.  

The public will be more willing to accept bio defenses, such as quarantine zones, if it is explained that the inconvenience is short lived.  (Poor choice of words.)  Also it can be explained that within the quarantine zones the rules are merely  the same rules that applied generally in America in 1943 when restrictions on travel, import and export, were common.

At that time a great many restrictions were implemented on individuals and business. We can explain that the requirement that  authorizations be obtained in order to gain access to certain information (genetics in our case) and associated equipment are merely  a short term war necessity.  (Lab technicians are a primary security concern.)

Army Navy Club

Item No. 29:  race and war

06-17-04

One of the important features of the Vi-et-nam War which has received little comment is the role of race.

It also serves as an example of the role of “objective thinking” (see “Wrong”).

Because the Americans had decided that “race does not matter”, and this was no where more so than in the American military, which is also typified by “objective thinking” the importance of race in the minds of the people of Vi-et-nam was overlooked.  This is typical:  if it should not matter then “objectively” it does not matter.

MacNamara was a pioneer in “objective” management.  However, he was himself as well as his system of management  a perfect example of the limitations of this philosophy. 

Though the stated strategy of the U. S. was “attrition”,  (if this can be called a strategy), when a young Army Major presented MacNamara with a paper in which the numbers, the population and birthrate etc. were examined and it was proven, in numbers, that the “strategy” could not possibly work, and even though MacNamara had made his reputation as an “objective” manager, had demanded that all management decisions be based on the quantization of the “facts”, here, when shown to a mathematical certainty that the stated strategy could not work ignored the paper.  Why?  Possibly because the Major was not from M. I. T. or Harvard?

Also with race.  Because MacNamara thought “objectively” race does not matter then it could be ignored.  The fact is race did matter, like it or not.  The Left which should have known told us only that we were racists, never mentioning that racism was an important motivating factor for the other side.

And the Right?  Oh, “objectively” race does not matter.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 30:

07-04-04

The technical military term for “exit strategy” is victory.

Victory defined:  attainment of strategic objective.  

Army Navy Club

Item No. 31:   Welcome to Boston

07-13-04

The thing about vainglory is that the afflicted do not see themselves as vainglorious. The Czar did not think his prerogatives unreasonable.  The Kaiser thought himself only doing his duty.  And so we too,  think that we “have to go on with our lives,” even if this “going on” includes steering a very large vessel filled with highly volatile Liquefied Natural Gas right into the middle of a major metropolitan area.

As I watched the twin towers fall and the Pentagon burn it occurred to me that if NSA had information on this attack there could only be one explanation for allowing it to occur:  fear of an even larger one.

In other words, if I had an intelligence asset that provided information on 9-11 and there was any chance that interference with the attack would endanger that asset I would not only not act on the information to prevent 9-11, I would try to prevent its accidental detection by others,  in order to protect the asset, if I was concerned about an even larger, even more catastrophic attack, such as a bio attack.

3,000 casualties is a loss.  A hundred million is a strategic blow.

If this seems fanciful, consider the amount of ink spilt, the amount of air time consumed in the last year about whether or not the USA should be in Iraq.  If you think this is “speculation” what is the endless series of “news stories” about intelligence, and the “failure” of intelligence, and should we, if we knew then what we now know . . .etc. etc. and you say I am speculating? 

We thought he had bio weapons because he said he made bio weapons.  Because we had the purchase receipts for the growth medium used to grow the bio weapons.  Because Mr. Hussein threatened to attack us:

“If you use pressure, we will deploy pressure and force. We know that you can harm us although we do not threaten you. But we too can harm you. Everyone can cause harm according to their ability and their size. We cannot come all the way to you in the United States, but individual Arabs may reach you.”--- Saddam Hussein, On July 25, 1990, on the eve of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, to US Ambasssador April Glaspie.

Where is Mr. Abdul Rahman Yasin?  He is under Federal indictment.  Has he been sent to New York?  Do you know?  Have we done the genetic testing of all the Baluchi?  Are you checking the bio detectors every minute?   Have you secured your borders?  Do you know where your visitors are?

You see?  You do not feel your discussions, your long tedious discussions about what you would have done two years ago, if you had known, should you have known,  if you had been informed, should you have been informed, is speculation.  Speculation?  No, sensible review and consideration you think. 

Yes, of course. You do not see yourselves as idling away your time on trivialities as the coming catastrophe grows all around you.  Running LNG tankers into your metropolitan areas is just “going on with your lives.”   This is not vainglory?  You do not think yourselves vainglorious.  

Yes, Your Majesty, Your Royal Highness, American Czar.

Army Navy Club

Item No. 33:   An odd aspect

08-09-2004

I recommend the Irish Famine, the Potato Blight, to anyone wanting to understand the future of Bio Warfare.

It has often been said that the Irish reluctance to discuss the Famine is because, even today,

over a century later , there is the sense of “guilt.”

Guilt may sound strange for the “victim,”  yet this is because the reader does not fully understand the complexity of the circumstance of vicitmhood, or biological warfare.

If you could watch your sense of strangeness dissolve, you could learn not only about biological warfare, you could grasp the process of your thinking itself.

Why strange?  Don’t you think victims can feel guilt?  Then you do not understand victimhood.  Part of being a victim is the feeling of guilt for having become a victim.  (Discussion of examples of victims who feel guilt because of their survival, omitted.)

Imagine yourself in Ireland.  Do you suppose everyone is equally suffering starvation?   Are you a fool?  Do you not suppose that some Irish had food?  Money?  Do you not think that some survived?  Most survived?  Did the survivors not know about the suffering of those who starved to death?  Think about that.  (How many times has the visitor visited this site?)

Now imagine a herd in the African savanna.  Night.  A stampede.  An old, perhaps injured member of the herd is left behind.  Devoured by predators.  What do the other members think about the lost? 

This is the odd aspect also of  biological warfare.  The herd is thinned out;  there is loss, yet still, the survivors have an uninterrupted continuity.  Life goes on.  Eskimos always take the sled dog out of view of the team before they slit its throat.  Do you understand?  Are you watching your own mind?

Millions are killed.  But they are killed not “violently,” not all at once in a single act, but the virus works slowly.  The blood thickens and oozes from the pores under the arms and groin.  The breathing slows.  Blackened blood is coughed up.  The eyes become still.

This is the odd aspect of Biological Warfare. It does not cause the same “shock and awe” that conventional warfare causes.  (War Planners take note.)  (Comparison to normal “economic” social interactions omitted.)

Fortunately for us,  this also explains why conventional terrorists are not as interested in Biological Warfare.  It is just the “shock and awe” that the traditional, “political,” terrorist seeks. Political terrorists have some other motive than just killing people.

However, in the future, terrorists will seek “direct action.”  For them killing will be the only point.  Ted Kaczynski , for example, tried to directly stop scientific progress by killing scientists.  (see Rainbow Six) 

Osama bin Laden has often been criticized for “wanting to turn civilization back to the 12^th Century.”  However, if most people knew what the real issues were, they also would want to turn the process back.  (The process can not be reversed.)

Though Biological Warfare does not offer the same psychological impact, in the future terrorists will find in Biological Warfare the simplest means of achieving their goal:  the elimination of human progress.

Army Navy Club

Item No.: 34  

The most common strategic mistake made by inexperienced guerrillas is the attempt to take and hold territory.

The whole point of guerrilla warfare is to develop superior strength at a time and place for an attack and then to disappear back into the “sea” as Mao put it.

Twice now we have seen Iraqi Guerrillas take and hold ground:  al Faluja and now again in Najaf.   The failure to destroy these exposed forces is regrettable.

To some extent the guerrillas, once encircled are forced into their error, because the desert environment does not offer a deep  “sea” in which to flee.

The city itself could hide small numbers but their unwillingness to hide among the people may tell us something about their lack of confidence in themselves and their support among the people.

In the Middle East it is the custom in warfare to destroy everyone.  For the US this is not an option, therefore arrest is the alternative.  In al Faluja of the 250,000 residents, 50% are women.  Of the 125,000 remaining 50% are too young or old to pose a threat.  Thus 62,500 suspects could have been arrested if no other means of sorting them out could be found. 

Those arrested could be assigned to 30 day, 90 day, 6 month, etc. camps for education and rehabilitation.  The city, now a quieter place, could be attacked by women’s liberation squads to meet in small groups with the women of al Faluja while their men were away,  and make life hell for their men when they returned home.  As Sherman said, “War is all hell.”

Army Navy Club

Item.:  34

11-12-04

Arrest them.

“As in all guerrilla wars, a key challenge was distinguishing insurgents from civilians. The Christian Science Monitor reported from Fallujah on Thursday that Marines were encountering what they concluded were "sleeper cells" of Iraqis — unarmed civilians squatting in houses, claiming they had stayed behind to thwart looters. The Marines suspect the men are insurgents waiting for the main battle to die down so that they can pop up and resume their attacks.

On Wednesday, Marines encountered four men in a house who said they stayed behind to guard it and had been caught by insurgent fighters who tortured them. Later that day, Marines searching another building found another four men who told the same story. But further questioning found no signs of torture, and the Marines knew from experience that when insurgents encounter suspected traitors, they kill them.

"It was well rehearsed," said Lt. Michael Aubry from Arlington Heights, Ill. "The first time it didn't look suspicious, but the second time ... it did."

"There are sleeper cells all over the place," said Marine Capt. Gil Juarez, commander of a Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) company. "They are either going to start coming out of their holes and attack us or (they) will leave."

USA TODAY

Posted 11/11/2004 11:09

For victory in Fallujah, land grab not enough

By John Diamond, Steve Komarow and Tom Squitieri

Army Navy Club

Item:  35  : ditches, cell phones, Major Wilson, III

12-25-04

Ditches:

Rumsfeld: Iraqis Must Defeat Insurgency

12-25-04
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer

“  . . . Rumsfeld used a simple analogy to explain his view that the time is arriving for Iraqis to take responsibility for their own security.   Faced with a chore like digging a ditch, a typical American, he said, will grab a shovel and start digging. In Iraq now, however, the task is to step aside and get the Iraqis to dig their own ditches.

He warned against allowing the Iraqis to become too dependent on the U.S. military. More independence is what's needed, he said.   "That's the only way," Rumsfeld said during a meeting with top U.S. commanders in Tikrit, at the northern tip of the so-called Sunni Triangle . . .

Cell Phones:

. . . Batiste could use more specialized drone aircraft used for surveillance and reconnaissance, and that he needs more linguists because many of them have succumbed to the tactics of intimidation used by insurgents.  . . .”

Linguists via phone: 

Troops should be given two (2) cell phones to communicate with translators.  Call the translator explain the situation then hand the phone to the subject.  Have the translator call the other cell phone and translate what is being said.

“Next month Sanswire Networks,”  according to The Economist, 12-2-04, “ a company based in Atlanta, Georgia, is planning to launch the first airship satellite, or “stratellite”. Floating in the stratosphere at an altitude of about 20km (13 miles), the airship will behave just like a geostationary satellite, hovering over a particular spot and relaying radio signals to and from the ground. Such airships will, however, be much cheaper to launch and maintain than satellites—and can do things that satellites cannot.

Each 75-metre-long airship will be controlled autonomously, and will contain nearly 37,000 cubic metres of helium to keep it and its 1.4-tonne payload aloft, says Michael Molen, Sanswire's chief executive. At such high altitude, above the jet stream, the reduced air density means that the wind will be about 20 times weaker than at ground level, enabling the airship's solar-powered electric motors to keep it stationary with very little effort. The craft's aerodynamic shape not only reduces drag but also generates lift when facing into the wind, says Mr Molen.

Like satellites, these airships will be able to provide wide-area mobile-telephone coverage, paging and other communications services. The company is most excited by the prospect of being able to provide wireless broadband coverage, akin to Wi-Fi, over large areas. A single airship could, says Mr Molen, potentially provide coverage over an area of nearly 800,000 square kilometres, or about the size of Texas.”

Temporarily aircraft can orbit areas of operation.

War Plan:  Major Wilson

U.S. lacked formal Iraq post-war plan: Army historian

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilising the country and this continues
to undercut the military effort there, the Washington Post has quoted a U.S. Army historian as saying.

Saturday's edition of the newspaper quoted Major Isaiah Wilson, an official historian of the Iraq campaign, as saying the overall performance
of the U.S. Army in Iraq has been "mediocre" and it failed to recognise it is engaged in a "people's war."

As a result, the United States is "perhaps in peril of losing the 'war,' even after supposedly winning it," the Post quoted Wilson as saying.

The critique is significant because it comes from a military insider and strategist who is positioned to be familiar with top-secret planning.

Many Army officers have blamed Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon's civilian leadership for failing to anticipate and plan
for the difficult occupation of Iraq. But Wilson reserved his toughest criticism for Army commanders.

According to the Post, he concluded that these commanders failed to grasp the strategic situation in Iraq and no one produced a document
laying out the strategy to consolidate victory after major combat operations ended.

Those who planned the war suffered from "stunted learning and a reluctance to adapt," the paper quoted him as saying.

"While there may have been 'plans' at the national level, and even within various agencies within the war zone, none of these 'plans'
operationalised the problem beyond regime collapse ...," Wilson wrote in an essay delivered at several academic conferences but not
published, the Post said.

Army Navy Club

Item:  36  :  The Real Biowar

12-25-04

Everyone thinks the bio-attack will come from Moslem terrorists.  This is short sighted.

The book The Cobra Event has a Ted Kaczynski like character as the attacker.  The novel Rainbow Six has radical environmentalists.  In Rainbow Six the Olympics is used as the vector.  However, in the modern world everyday the airports of the world move more people than attend the Olympics. 

And death might not be the motive.  For example the attackers may release an agent that they think will make the women sterile only to discover the agent mutates into a lethal form.  

This is why the “kill them over there so we do not have to fight them here” is so dishonest.  The technology is developing so fast that the attackers could come at us from any quarter, or even by accident.      

Army Navy Club

Item  No.:  37   

How the End Will Come

12-30-04

Death toll from tsunami:                          150,000

Death toll from resulting disease:              50,000

                        Total:                                200,000

Expected death toll:

From Naturally Occurring Pandemic:  500,000,000

From Engineered Military Virus:      5,900,000,000

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) – . . . International health officials at a conference in Singapore earlier this month warned that the world's next pandemic was likely to be a potent mix of avian influenza and a human flu virus - and that it was likely to emerge from Asia. . . .

. . . Animal health officials have recently warned that seasonably cool temperatures and the increased transportation of poultry between now and the Lunar New Year holiday in early February create conditions favouring the spread of the virus. . . .

A 16-year-old girl from southern Vietnam has become infected with the bird flu strain that killed 32 people earlier this year and devastated the poultry industry across Asia, a doctor said Thursday. . . .

Vietnam has suffered recurring outbreaks of the disease in chicken farms - most recently in southern provinces - since a big wave of infections sickened poultry across much of Asia earlier this year. The virus has jumped to people in Vietnam, where it killed 20, and Thailand, where it killed 12.

The girl from Dong Thap is Vietnam's 29th person confirmed with the disease.

"She is still in critical condition and is being hooked to a respirator," Hien said.

The girl had slaughtered a chicken she brought with her from Dong Thap province to southern Tay Ninh province, where she was visiting her uncle. She developed the disease's typical symptoms of high fever, coughing and breathing difficulties on Dec. 19, said Huynh Tan Kiet of the Tay Ninh provincial Preventive Medicine Centre. . . .

During the outbreaks earlier in the year, more than 100 million chickens and ducks were culled or died in 10 countries and territories in Asia, including more than 40 million in Vietnam.

Army Navy Club

Item No.: 38

Prison Campuses

01-03-05

And every man arrested has a brother.  In Iraq every man has on average 1.5 brothers.  And his father and  uncles:  2.5.  And 3.75 cousins.  That is 7.75 additional suspects.  Oh, and then there are the brothers in law,  so let us make it an even dozen. 

Arrest the whole clan.  What?  Bring them in and let’s talk.  Tea?

We could call them Prison Campuses instead of camps.  Would that make it better?

What we have in mind is more in the way of education than punishment.  We offer 30 day courses in Civics, 90 day courses, six month courses, and for the real scholars we have our one, two, and five year full degree programs.

Iraq National Guards Hold 228 Suspected Insurgents

© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Sun Jan 2, 2005 11:25 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi National Guards detained 228 suspected insurgents in a series of raids this week in a lawless area south of Baghdad dubbed the "triangle of death," the interim government said on Sunday.

"National Guard forces raided the Mahmudiya area and detained 217 suspects and took large quantities of arms ... that were in their possession," it said in a statement.

Another unit in the same town arrested Hatem al-Zawbai, who the statement said was believed to head the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an Iraqi militant group that has claimed to have kidnapped foreigners in Iraq.

The group, which takes its name from Iraq's fight against British rule, said last year it had kidnapped a U.S. Marine of Lebanese origin. He later showed up in Lebanon amid speculation that he had arranged his own abduction to desert the military.

The group also claimed responsibility for the abduction of an American of Lebanese origin who worked at Baghdad airport, and has warned in an Internet statement it would behead any Lebanese working with the U.S. army in Iraq.

Iraqi National Guards also arrested 10 suspected insurgents after they returned to Mahmudiya from Mosul, the statement said.

Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, began slipping into chaos last year and by November, when the U.S. launched a major assault on the rebel city Falluja, insurgents were overrunning Mosul police stations and clashing with U.S. forces.

U.S. and Iraqi officials say Islamist militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists who had based themselves in Falluja slipped out before the offensive began, possibly to rebase in Mosul.

Insurgents and bandits rule the dangerous highways in the "triangle of death," a cluster of towns between Falluja, Baghdad and the main road south.

U.S. Marines and Iraq's fledgling security forces have been raiding houses in the area in search of fighters and weapons.

Army Navy Club

Item No.: 39

It is not too late.

01-28-05

What needs to be said is that these expenditures will not be wasted.  Even without biowar we will still want to know about our immune system, our DNA.   

Call for New 'Manhattan Project' to Fight Bioterror

Thu Jan 27, 2005 12:32 PM ET

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - The world needs an effort similar to that behind the creation of the atomic bomb to tackle the multi-faceted threat of biowarfare, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Thursday.

"We need to do something that even dwarfs the Manhattan project," Frist told the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Manhattan project was the codename for the United States's World War II effort to devise an atomic weapon.

"The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological. Why? Because unlike any other threat it has the power of panic and paralysis to be global."

He predicted that the world would experience another bioweapon attack within the next decade, following the limited casualties seen when anthrax was sent through the U.S. mail system in 2001.

Next time, the death rate could be a much, much higher, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor John Deutch.

An attack using the smallpox virus is overwhelmingly the largest risk, he believes.

The disease was officially eradicated three decades ago but Deutch said it was possible former Soviet stocks were still at large or even that small quantities could be extracted from graves.

"Every country has a vulnerability here," he said.

VACCINE

In a bid to protect citizens, the U.S. government has ordered millions of doses of smallpox vaccine as part of a wide-ranging security drive in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Other governments are also following suit in stocking up on smallpox shots. But experts warned that other avenues were open to would-be terrorists, with diseases such as plague and Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus options for weaponisation.

More worryingly still, sophisticated groups might in the future use genetic engineering to produce hybrid microbes against which there are no defenses.

Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, said such developments raised the question of whether there should be restrictions on publication of some scientific research in biology.

Physicists are already limited from sharing information on atomic weapons technology.

Collins said openness was the best strategy but he suggested there could be specific information about protocols used to create dangerous super-bugs that might, in future, be classified.

© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Army Navy Club

Item No.:  40

March 1, 2005

“WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has asked his chief ally in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to consider the United States as a target for terrorist attacks, a U.S. counterterrorism official said yesterday.

"There has been communication between bin Laden and Zarqawi, with bin Laden suggesting to Zarqawi the U.S. homeland as a target," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Bin Laden was in touch with al-Zarqawi within the past two months in an effort to enlist him in attacks.

But the official declined to provide details for fear of compromising U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.

The Department of Homeland Security has warned state officials around the country that the government had received nonspecific information about al Qaeda's plans to attack the United States.”  ---- New York Post

My concern about Bio-weapons in the Second Gulf War was that Saddam Hussein would use them on the U.S. at the commencement of hostilities.  I was shocked that no quarantine procedures were established prior to the war.

But my worry was that Mr. Bush would be blamed if 100 million Americans were killed.  (A 33% kill rate is a naturally occurring effectiveness, and does not require genetic recombination.)  People are so short sighted that they would tie the bio attack to the war.

But the bio attack might come at any time from any quarter.  Mr. Hussein might have launched it in 2002, or now, or someone else might have launched it then or now.  This is the point.  These weapons are uncontrollable.  This is why quarantine, defense, is so important.

British Prime Minister Blair took a lot of criticism for saying, a year after the war that he had understood that Iraq might have been able to strike Britain in forty five minutes with Bio-weapons, not just the troops in Iraq.

But of course the Prime Minister was perfectly correct.  There was no reason that an Iraqi “special weapons officer,” planted in a second floor apartment overlooking Piccadilly could not have tossed a “viral glass” tray out the window upon receipt of a phone call from his control.

Indeed, so little has been disclosed that there is no reason to believe the danger has passed with respect to Iraq or North Korea or Iran or Syria or Al Qaeda. 

If I were Al Qaeda and I had put an attack in place I would put out a communiqué over a compromised network that I was certain was being monitored by the intelligence services.

I would try to tie my attack to the battle in Iraq.  All the more so if I realized that the tide had changed and the new Iraq was emerging victorious.

I would try to cover my defeat there in Iraq, by striking New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington D. C. with bio agents.   

And because no one has talked honestly to the people about the peril we face, they may well believe that there is a connection to the new Iraq, or the Second Gulf War, or to anything that is put before them.

We really should warn them before the attack, so they will know why they are being killed . . .

Army Navy Club

Item No.: 42

New Improved Consolidated World Philosophy

05-23-05

Troops round up suspected insurgents

By TOM LASSETER,  Knight Ridder Newspapers

Posted on Mon, May. 23, 2005

Much of the early rhetoric by U.S. officials in Iraq about defeating the insurgency has been replaced by the Bush administration's goal of training Iraqi forces to carry on the fight so that U.S. forces can withdraw. Operation Squeeze Play was the largest joint Iraq-American effort in the capital to date.

“Terrorists intended to separate the Iraqi people from their elected government. From what I can tell, they have merely cut themselves off from the majority of the Iraqi people," said Maj. Richard Goldenberg, of the 42nd Infantry Division, which is responsible for a swath of land north of Baghdad that's roughly the size of West Virginia. "The spectacular attacks against civilians or Iraqi police and army forces reinforce what most Iraqis already knew. Terrorists, whether foreign born or formerly Baathist, hold no concern for Iraqi or Islamic lives. They are a common enemy of all Iraqis."

So we have made some progress with our “rhetoric”  good!

Of course it is more than rhetoric, it is strategy we are talking about.

What is the strategy?

Today it is the same as the first day.  To stand up a new government after removing the old corrupt one.  (Hey, could they do the same here at home for us?)

The Major is quite right.  The car bombs do not help the terrorists with any conceivable political strategy.  They can make the Iraqis miserable, but they will still be miserable free people.  Welcome to democracy.  The only real advantage is that we can laugh at our rulers wile they screw us over, and then we put a bullet in our own head.  Of course, as with the old KGB, we have to pay for the bullet ourselves.

The terrorists have completed the transition to total nihilism.  They are the new terrorists.  They kill only to kill.  Killing is their political program.  Think of Pol Pot, killing anyone with glasses.  Think of Chechnya.  They had autonomy prior to the “Islamic” fundamentalists militancy.  Militancy?  Killing.

One thing to think about is how peaceable the Islamic world is.  Internally.  It is young, average age 17.  It is expansionist.  Coming into contact with the world there is violence at the edges of contact.  Yet from the point of view of the fundamentalist radicals the Muslims are too passive.  True they have repressive governments but why do they have such governments?  Where is the history of turmoil, revolution?  Why no Cairo Commune?  Consider the sweet pacifism of the people living for generations, a thousand years, under the dictatorial rule of one potentate or another.  You hear the car bombs, your attention is drawn to the beheadings, but think of all the others, the billion other Muslims who live every day, as the Shia say, staying on the well worn path.

Being of the West you do not readily appreciate the point.  Not studying philosophy you are ignorant of the principles.  But you can understand this much:  after your ignominious retreat from Iraq after the First Gulf War, 50,000 Shiites were slaughtered by Saddam Hussein.  Your front line troops heard the killing.  The best of them wept.  You, did not listen to my advise and those good people were slaughtered.  Note conservatives how your liberal brethren take no responsibility for this.  See the empty expressions on their faces.  Kerry.  Kennedy.  Dodd.  Clinton. (Either one.)  Empty headed souless . . .

Yet, and you may not be able to follow this, the Shia have not rounded up the Sunni.  No vengeance murders of the hundreds of thousands.  They have talked only of courts, and law, and establishing the state.  But you should at least pause a moment and reflect on all you do not understand of the East.    

Islam teaches, as do most Eastern religions, submission.  It comes as a surprise to most of you that Western philosophy has come to agree with the East.    While most of you have been watching the M&A action on Wall Street you will be surprised to learn that Western and Eastern philosophy have decided it is more efficient to merge so there has been a global consolidation.

It is instructive to note that though West and East started out from different positions working in seemingly different directions they have arrived at the same place.  Many simple minded are vaguely aware of this and have interpreted it as a failing of the “West.”  As if we had given up, or surrendered, etc., etc.

Rather you should regard Mr. Alan Watts as a typical English Imperialist who when to the East and plundered its wealth and brought the loot back home.  The fact that the riches he stole were freely given ought not slacken your revelry in the spoils.

For, Western philosophy having reasoned itself into an appreciation of the “floating world” decided that it was more efficient to consult with others who had already had some experience in this philosophy.  Why reinvent the wheel?  The best teachers of the East always explain to their students that there is no reason to give up Judaism or Christianity in their study of what the East has to offer.  (Some fundamentalist types will not credit this.  ‘How can you be a Buddhist and a Christian?’ they thunder.  As if :  ‘the ball must be red or it must be a ball, it can not be both!’  The proper Buddhist reply is not to say ‘well you are not a very good Christian,’  rather one should bow and say ‘Ah, yours is such a pure Christianity.  Congratulations!’)

Whether this merger will result in a more “passive” West remains to be seen.  Japan, China, Singapore, Korea, India, and all the rest seem to be displaying all the dynamism associated with the Nineteenth Century West in their modern economic development.  India’s current success has been achieved by throwing off the socialism they learnt from our British cousins.   

Islam has been different.  The passivity of the people is in a way a provocation to the radicals.  Part of what drives the radicals to such stupefying violence is, in their minds, to counterbalance, or goad, the general population into action.  In the end, as has been already observed, is violence for violance’s own sake.  We have seen this sort of radicalism in the West.  President McKinley was killed by one such.  This radicalism, who can be most radical, always burns itself out.

The car bombs can not alter the strategic fact that the new Iraqi government is in power.  This is our strategic aim.

Now the proof of the superiority of the new consolidated world philosophy:

If you are a typical simple minded conservative, (and here I must pause to apologize to the simple minded conservatives for years I have been tweaking you not realizing just how bad the liberal boobs were until I started monitoring Air America),  you might think that military science is an ‘objective’ fact.

Your failure to see the subjective nature of our world has, is, causing much waste in Iraq.

Why are our troops, armed with the most expensive weapons, the best educated in the world, the best paid, the best trained, etc., working on clearing road side bombs?

If you believe in an objective world you say, ‘Because the experts say . . .’  which is not really an answer.   I want you to tell me.

Or look at it as a question of market dynamics.  The market is so successful in organizing human action just because it takes into account, is the consolidation of, subjective opinions.  (Dr. Moynihan:  That is what a statistic is, just lots and lots of anecdotes.)   Our troops are too expensive to be used in such an unproductive manner.  In a market they would not be employed on trivialities no one could afford to use them this way.  My father used to say he thought it a good bargain if he could replace one sailor on a ship with eight million dollars worth of machinery.  Today the trade off must be in the hundreds of millions.

You must first make a global analysis.  Why are we in Iraq?  What is the strategic objective?  And much more.   What is the value of one American life verses the objective?  You can not make a risk assessment with out these answers.  The idea that your military experts can focus only on the objective military facts is a delusion.  Moving on Baghdad is not like the final push on Berlin and that offensive was different than D-Day.  The military officer must make a political assessment.  You think not, you think that the military officer must never consider the political,  only because of your limited “rational” foolish belief in “objectivity” and bureaucracy.   There is not objectivity there is only subjectivity.   

What if, for example, your experts base their judgments on a draft army?  What if they examine all questions as if their army will always be replenished with conscripts?  What if this has been their experience?  All the battles they have read about?  All the prior risk assessments they have made have been based on different “realities?”

What if your experts are as deluded as you, and think that “their”  “reality” is “objective?”

How else?

Ask the British?   They have a considerable experience with small professional armies.  For several hundred years their officers worked quite closely with , . . . ah . . . how to say . . . (times have changed one must be politically correct) . . .  indigenous peoples.

Now without listing all the things you did not do up till now let us just look at what you are not doing now.

In making your assessment of what to do you are not saying what HAS to be done to stand up the new government?  Nothing else matters.  Do not tell me ‘but the experts say’ . . . you have to think for yourself there is no objective standard.  Your experts think they have a draft army and everything they do is important.

For example, if a car bomb goes off it is terrible but that is not part of our strategic plan.  It does not even enter the discussion.  It has nothing to do with us.

Again without going over all the things that should already have been done . . . the Iraqi government must control the terror to show the people it is in charge and can help them.  That is the Iraqi government’s objective.  But your generals, like you, are still living in a Nineteenth Century Western paradigm of “objectivism.”  If the generals tell you ‘we must . . .’  you think, ‘ok, you are the experts, it must be objectively true that we must . . .’  But your generals are as deluded as you.   (After MacArthur they fear making personal subjective judgments.  They learned the wrong lesson from Mac.)

They too think that they are not allowed to make subjective political judgments.  This is how we end up with these SNAFUs.  Into the big muddy, or Vi-et-nam.  The car bomb goes off and the general thinks, ‘something must be done let’s go men.’  Yes something but by whom?  I say the Iraqis.  (Now we could talk about transponders on all  vehicles, cameras, rolling checkpoints, monitoring of the people’s movements, data bases, even strategic strikes at bomb shops, and terror cells, much can be done, but it is a subjective judgment of whether you go “police” the crime scene or organize police units.  Again in market terms where is the most value added?) 

Our new consolidated philosophy requires you to think:

“The fight is intractable in part because the U.S. military has used force and not diplomacy, said Abdul Ahmed, a political science analyst at Baghdad University. American officials - who say they won't negotiate with insurgents - have galvanized insurgents and alienated many Iraqis who might have opposed the insurgency, Ahmed said.”

“"It's very easy to use your machine guns ... but it is very difficult to pursue a political solution," he said. "They should take some time to go to Ramadi, to Mosul, to find a peaceful way because violence only pushes the people away from you. ... The United States negotiates with North Korea. Why can't it negotiate with the Iraqi insurgency?"”

Most simple minded conservatives, (the liberals do not think, they only react, this is why we call them knee jerks), will think,  ‘who is he to tell us what to do . . .”  and you only display again that you have not understood the first thing.  Think.  Say, ‘Yes, sir, Dr. Ahmed,  may the blessings and the peace of the Profit be with you, kind sir,  please . . . go ahead, please go to Ramadi and make peace . . .” 

Again, our strategic objective is to stand up the government, nothing else is of interest to us.  The primacy of our philosophy, now East AND West, is this, first we must make this subjective judgment.  It is not objective.  We, you and I, we must decide.  Think.  What is job one?  It is not objective we have to do this.  Thinking.

I mentioned the British, now let us talk Romans.  There was no greater libertarian, no one more committed to human freedom than our dear Ludwig von Mises.  Yet even he not only would not disagree with this next point, he said it himself:   At the center of the state is the double headed ax.  Only the state has the right to kill.  But around the state’s ultimate power is a bundle of sticks.  (His point was that the market works on an entirely different principle, i.e. voluntary associations of mutual assent.)  But it is the state, the law, that makes these other things possible.   The Romans delegated the sticks to others.  Their concern was to control the ax, from which everything else follows.

In Iraq, the Americans are the double headed ax not the sticks!  The sticks, (clearing roadside bombs, visiting Ramadi), these are the sticks, others can do them because they are not vital, the main issue, the central point, the core value, ----- they are not strategic.

They are “not strategic” as an objective “fact”.  They are not strategic because I say they are not.

I assert a value judgment.

I do not pretend an objective reality.

I say so.

If  I did not say so it would not be “true”.  For example: 

I say you should not suffer the mentally ill to sleep on the streets.  This is not “objective;” it is true because I say so.

I say you should not have allowed the rich to use exclusionary zoning and distort the market.  Again not “objective.”

And so on.

The subjective judgment was made in 2002 not to start a “Free Iraq Army.”  Even though the Kurds were ready and able.  You could have parachuted Mr. Baer into . . . what?  Oh, ok,  you could have flown him back . . .

Let us not go over what could have been.  The Kurds have finally been normalized into the Iraq Army.  Finally.

I told you at the time how to control the population and two years later, the transponders, the face scans, (biometric), the data base, the intelligence networks, the prison campuses, the rolling checkpoints, etc. have not been done.

It does not matter because though the new Iraqi government needs to do these things they are not central to our aims.

You have a small professional army dependent on volunteers, you have commanders who are still acting as if they were running a “Nation at War”, or “Total War” army.  Note that this is a problem of their subjective judgment about the situational, relative, circumstance they are in. 

Think.

Tell your generals to read “Nature, Man, Woman”  by Allan Watts.

Do more by doing less.

Listen to the call to prayers.  Think of all the Muslims who go to pray, and do not set off car bombs next to children playing in the street, or among women in the market,  . . . think of all the rest.

Sit. Watch.  Listen.  Think. 

Army Navy Club

Item No.: 43

Operation Spear

06-23-05

U.S., Iraqi Forces Complete Operation Spear Near Syrian Border

American Forces Press Service

From:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2005/20050623_1824.html

WASHINGTON, June 23, 2005 – Iraqi security forces and U.S. Marines and sailors with Regimental Combat Team 2 completed Operation Spear on June 22, concluding a five-day operation in and around the city of Karabilah, near Iraq's border with Syria, military officials in Baghdad reported today.

Counselor: . . .

The operation  . . . .

. . . Yes? . . . Yvonne…?

Counselor: . . .

. . . Dear . . .?

Counselor: . . .  

Ah, . . .  . . . rooted out terrorist strongholds, killing 47 and detaining one for questioning, officials said.

While patrolling through the small town along the border, Iraqi security forces and U.S. Marines discovered a terrorist torture house, with four hostages bound and gagged inside, officials reported. The hostages received medical attention for wounds they suffered at the hands of their captors.

The hostages said they were tortured and held for three weeks. According to media and others who spoke with the men, officials reported, they said they were neither interrogated by the terrorists nor told why they were being tortured.

The building where the hostages were held contained an improvised explosive device factory in the basement. This building was part of a compound containing a school with bomb-making instructions on the classroom's blackboard.

Three car bomb factories were discovered in separate locations by Iraqi soldiers and U.S. Marines in western Karabilah. A total of 17 car bombs were located, including a tractor-trailer, a dump truck and a van rigged with explosives, which were destroyed in place by a Marine tank unit. Large secondary explosions were observed coming from the explosive-laden vehicles. Iraqi forces and Marines also discovered small weapons caches with machine guns, mortar rounds and rockets.

There have been no signs or indications of any large-scale displacement of the citizens of Karabilah, officials said. Marines manning the checkpoints outside of the city, designed to capture fleeing terrorists, did not report large numbers of citizens leaving the city. (From a Multinational Force Iraq news release.)

Car-bomb factories explosives uncovered in Operation Spear raids


Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Wednesday, June 22, 2005

. . .  Operation Spear was the latest in a series of actions near the Syrian border. U.S. military officials have repeatedly said insurgents use the porous borders to smuggle arms, money, supplies and foreign fighters into Iraq.

Spear was supported by U.S. air power. Monday, residents of Karabilah told the Associated Press that at least three neighborhoods suspected of housing insurgents were targeted by airstrikes. Some dozen houses, shops, four mosques, two schools and a medical center were among the buildings hit, according to wire service reports.

U.S. officials said 33 buildings were “damaged or destroyed” in the four days of the operation.

“The only buildings fired upon were those occupied by terrorists or foreign fighters,” read a press release from the military’s Baghdad headquarters.

“Several of the buildings were fortified, reinforced and barricaded structures with the windows bricked up and replaced by small rifle firing ports. The terrorists in the buildings were struck either by the main gun rounds of Marine tanks or by airstrikes.”

Some 13 Iraqis have been compensated for damage to their property, officials said.

During raids in the area, U.S. and Iraqi forces confiscated foreign passports from countries such as Sudan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

Insurgents in the area have used large-scale car bombs in a series of audacious attacks. In one, suicide bombers driving a firetruck tried to attack a Marine outpost; Marines defending the base repelled the assault.

Army Navy Club

Item No.:  44

07-03-05

And this is why we must arrest large numbers of suspects.  This is the lesson of Kenya, Algeria, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam,  . . .

Because most of those arrested will be innocent they must all be treated well.  Movies shown at night on out door screens, soccer, sun shelters with electric fans and misters, generators to avoid black outs, three meals a day, prayers five times a day . . .

Truly prison campuses.

But they must be arrested.

There crime?  Being related to terrorists.  Living next door to terrorists and not reporting it.  Etc. etc.

They must be detained for a period of time.  There must be courses of indoctrination.   We must break the cycle of violence.

For if you do not get control of the situation there will be civil war.

BAGHDAD, Iraq --The Shiite mourners were crying for blood, threatening to burn down a Sunni town where dozens of Shiite travelers had been slain. Their rage boiled over after a fresh spate of bombings killed nearly 40 people in Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad.

 A senior Shiite politician, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, appealed for calm, telling the 2,000-strong crowd that Sunnis and Shiites must live in peace together. Yet he had sent a very different message just two days before, suggesting Shiites set up vigilante groups to track down "terrorists" in the Sunni-led insurgency and report them to security authorities, which are dominated by Shiites.

Tensions between Shiite Arabs and the Sunni minority are rapidly worsening, pushing Iraq closer to a civil war that could disrupt its young democracy and lead to its breakup.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime more than two years ago, tensions have flared several times. But each time, historical ties binding the two groups and appeals for calm from religious leaders have averted conflict.

In the face of spiraling violence, however, anti-Sunni sentiments among Shiite leaders are being articulated publicly, with impunity and tacit approval from powerful political circles.

On Tuesday, a Shiite lawmaker joined al-Hakim's call for vigilante groups, finding so much support in parliament that some fellow Shiites forfeited their turn to speak so he could finish.

"The rage of our young people is putting pressure on us," said Khidir al-Khozai, who warned Sunni Arab political parties not to remain silent over the Baghdad bombings.

The bombings last week in the Shula and Karradah districts, and the killing Tuesday of a Shiite legislator in his 80s, have pushed anti-Sunni sentiments to levels never seen since Saddam's ouster. Beside making the rounds of parliament, the issue also had been discussed in the home of Shiite spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

"There is a terrifying amount of sectarian tension in Iraq these days," warned Adnan al-Janabi, a senior Sunni Arab legislator and a moderate.

Mohammed Abdul-Hassan al-Shammari, a 37-year-old tennis pro, was among the victims of the Karradah bombings. Mithaq Salem, his Sunni colleague and friend of 13 years, was with al-Shammari's family for four consecutive days to help with the funeral, sitting with family and friends under an outdoor tent drinking bitter coffee and listening to Quranic verses.

"Everyone was cursing the Sunnis and praying to God that He takes revenge on them," Salem recalled. "But what can I do? Not all of us are terrorists. Mohammed and his brother Fayez taught me everything I know. We are like brothers. This Shiite-Sunni thing never came up."

In Shula, storekeepers have taken matters into their hands, prohibiting parking in parts of the neighborhood by placing tires, metal containers and palm tree trunks alongside sidewalks.

There's virtually nothing in looks or speech to distinguish between ordinary Sunnis and Shiites, yet Salem Lazem Hussein, who runs an electrical supplies store by the site of one of last week's car bombs, said: "We have become so alert now that we can tell who is an outsider right away."

“I close the store when I hear the call to sunset prayers. You cannot see your enemy in the dark, so I stay home," said the 37-year-old father of six.

Shiite-Sunni tensions were most palpable at the June 26 ceremony marking the bombing deaths in Karradah and Shula. It was held at the offices of Iraq's biggest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Many in the 2,000-strong crowd cheered the Badr Brigade -- a Shiite militia associated with al-Hakim's party and which many Sunnis accuse of targeting their community.

Most of their ire was directed at sheik Harith al-Dhari, leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni group known to have ties to the Sunni-dominated insurgency.

"Al-Sistani is the sword of the Shiites, if he gives the order we will burn down Latifiyah," they chanted, alluding to the Sunni town south of Baghdad notorious for killings of Shiites.

The mood of the crowd appeared to reflect the angry tone of al-Hakim's June 24 statement in which he called on Shiites to set up "popular committees" in their neighborhoods to "uncover terrorist cells" and report them to security forces -- most of which are Shiite-dominated.

The call for vigilante groups appeared to suggest a system very similar to what was used by Saddam's Baath party and security agencies to ferret out critics of the regime.

In a statement Saturday, al-Hakim warned against sectarian strife and called on the Iraqi government to step up efforts to fight with militants.

"We stress the importance of being alert and cautious not to be carried away toward the sectarian strife that our enemies want for us," he said. "We ask the Iraqi government, particularly the security apparatuses, to exert more efforts to strike these terrorist groups."

Shiite tribal sheiks, meanwhile, have been begging al-Sistani to issue a fatwa, or edict, permitting them to go after Sunnis who kill their fellow Shiites, according to Iraqis familiar with the meetings held at the cleric's home in the holy city of Najaf.

Al-Sistani, whose word is law for many Shiites, has refused to grant such permission, but has signaled his concern about the rising tensions.

He told Shiite and Sunni politicians who met him Monday at the holy city of Najaf that it was "unacceptable" from a religious viewpoint for Muslims to kill each other.

Over the past century, Iraq's Sunni Arab minority dominated the country -- pushing the Shiites and Kurds to the sidelines. That ascendancy ended with the ouster of Saddam, their last patron. The domination by Sunnis of the two-year insurgency, and the rise to power of a Shiite-Kurdish alliance after elections in January, have deepened the rift.

Sunni Arabs account for up to 20 percent of Iraq's estimated 26 million people. Their inclusion in the political process -- drafting a constitution, putting it to a vote in October and holding a general election two months later -- is essential for its credibility and success.

If Sunni-Shiite tensions burst into conflict, the process will be derailed, throwing the country's political future into doubt and possibly causing the breakup of Iraq.

Already, the process is troubled over problems of a sectarian nature -- Shiite opposition to come of the Sunnis on the committee drafting Iraq's constitution, and a growing desire in the oil-rich, mainly Shiite south of Iraq for autonomy modeled on Iraqi Kurdistan.

There, 14 years of self-rule have reduced Baghdad's authority to virtually nothing. Replicated in the south, it could spell the breakup of Iraq, a country that has existed in its present shape for less than a century.

For some, the marble plaza outside the Shiite Kazimiya shrine in northern Baghdad offered some respite from the mounting pressures. Here, large families of robed women, children and men picnicked on rice, lamb and vegetables as worshippers prepared for the sunset prayers.

"Peace and tranquility are found here," said Abu Bilal al-Basri, a silver-bearded man who came with a friend to pray. "For us, it's the only safe place in Baghdad."

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Associated Press reporter Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed to this story from Baghdad.

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