Radar Stealth

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Radar Stealth

And now we get to what people really mean when they say “stealth”. This is the new technology that makes the latest combat aircraft look really funny. Why do they look that way? What is it that those shapes are trying to do?
To understand that, you need to first understand how radar works. In theory, radar works like visible light: A source shines it onto an object, the “illuminated” object reflects it towards a sensor, the sensor picks up this reflected light and can thus locate and identify the object. There is one big difference, though: With visible light, we are used to having many sources all over the place. Either it’s the sun and the sky and the things they illuminate, or it’s a bunch of light bulbs in at least a few spots in the room. With radar, however, there are no other sources, just the one by the sensor. This would be equivalent to wondering around a football field in a moonless night trying to with only a flashlight in your hand. Say I tell you that, somewhere on this field, there is a black pole sticking up a few feet from the ground, with a model airplane at the tip. How do you find it? You’ll probably sweep the flashlight beam slowly around you until you see it illuminate something that is not the ground.

If the model airplane is black, it will be harder for you to see it.
If the model airplane is shiny, it will reflect light from the flashlight… But it might reflect all your light away from you, and all you will see on it is the reflection of darkness, which is indistinguishable from the darkness behind the airplane, unless it reflects your light towards you and you catch the glint of the reflection of your flashlight on the shiny model.
Thus, to be stealthy to radar, an airplane can do two things: Absorb the radar reflection (be “black”), and reflect it away from the sender (be “shiny” and shaped in a way that does not reflect radar in every direction).
There is a third thing, but it’s a little trickier to understand. The airplane surface can reflect the radar signal twice, such that each reflection is half a wavelength out of tune with the other, so the reflections cancel out. That’s the basic idea behind noise-canceling headphones: They hear the sound outside and play for you the same sounds but half a wavelength off, thus canceling much of the ambient noise. They can do this and play music at the same time, or they can just play the external noise half a wavelength off if you just want some peace and quiet.
Of these three goals (reflecting radar away from the sender, absorbing the radar energy, and reflecting the radar waves in a way that cancels them out), reflecting radar away from the sender is by far the most important.
It is the thickness of your airplane’s skin, and the relationship between the skin and the internal components, that will determine whether you’ll reflect radar in such a way that it will cancel itself off.
It is the materials on your airplane skin that will either absorb the radar energy, reflect it, or let it pass through.
It is the shape of your airplane that will determine whether the radar gets reflected back to the sender or away from the sender.
Denys Overholser, a Lockheed mathematician and electrical engineer who had the brilliant idea of using a highly swept, wedge-like, faceted design for stealth (which eventually became the F-117), once famously said that there are four elements that are important in reducing the radar reflection of an airplane: “shape, shape, shape, and materials”. So you can guess which one of these really matters.
Before we go into how the skin shape, materials and thickness ought to be chosen, let me explain just a little bit about how radar reflections are described. In other words, how do you measure how “stealthy” a stealth plane really is?
Well, different shapes reflect radar in different ways when in different orientations. An airplane may reflect a lot of radar at you when seen from the side, but almost none when seen from the back, for example. So a small airplane seen from the side might return about as much radar as a large airplane seen from the back. Radar engineers and operators measure the radar return of a given airplane from a given angle in terms of its Radar Cross Section, or RCS. This is measured as an area, correspondent to the cross-sectional area of a sphere that returns the same amount of radar. So, if a 747 seen from the back has a Radar Cross Section of ten square meters, then this means that it returns as much radar as a sphere with a cross-sectional area of ten meters. (This sphere would be about 3.5 meters across). However, from the side, the 747 may have an RCS of 100 square meters (equivalent to a sphere about 11.3 meters across). Seen from below, it might have an RCS of a few hundred square meters. I just made all these numbers up, but you get the idea (and they’re probably in the ballpark for a 747’s RCS).
So the challenge is to reduce the RCS from as many angles as possible, especially from the front. Reducing RCS from the nose-on angle is by far the most important, as that is the angle your enemy will see you from while you are on your way to bomb them.

The problem with reducing RCS is that the detection range varies with the fourth root of the RCS. This means that if a given radar can detect an airplane from 100 miles away, then reducing the RCS by half would mean this airplane can be detected by this radar from 84 miles away. You’d have to reduce the RCS by a factor of sixteen, down to 6.25% of what it was, so that this radar could detect you from “only” 50 miles away – not really much of an improvement as far as evading the radar, given you had to reduce your RCS by a HUGE amount. You’d have to reduce your RCS to less than one percent of normal before you can fly with relative impunity from most radar systems. Many radar systems have a range of a few hundred miles. But to destroy them, you must get to within a few miles of them. To make this possible, RCS must be reduced by at least a factor of 10,000 – equivalent from taking an airplane the size of a large combat jet but having it return as little radar as a pigeon would.
Like I said, there are three ways of going about reducing RCS: absorbing radar (skin material), reflecting radar waves that cancel themselves out (skin thickness, “depth” of internal components), and reflecting radar away from its origin (aircraft shape). Of these, the last is by far the most important. So let’s start with what is the least important, and today the least commonly used:

Radar-Absorbent Materials (RAM)

The idea of using RAM to evade radar detection dates almost as far back as the first widespread military use of radar, naturally. During World War 2, England developed a wide and effective radar network to protect itself from German ships and air attacks. Towards the end of the war, aircraft (British, German, and American) started carrying radar to find enemy ships and other aircraft. The Nazis figured out that, if a material absorbs radar the same way that black things absorb visible light, then an airplane covered in this material might be able to slip through British radar.
Whether or not a material absorbs radiation of a certain wavelength has to do with the energy levels of the electrons in the atoms that make up that material’s molecules, as well as with the masses and structures of the atoms that make up the molecules. By finding a material whose molecules can vibrate in frequencies similar to those of radar waves, and/or whose electrons can absorb quantities of energy similar to those carried by photons of radar radiation, there is a good chance this material would absorb radar. Carbon products were found to absorb radar well. In addition, radar waves create small magnetic fields as they hit iron, so many small bits of iron could create magnetic fields in such a way as to absorb most of the radar energy. It turns out that small round particles coated with carbonyl ferrite (“iron balls”) are the best absorbers. They should be embedded in a dielectric material (usually a plastic like neoprene, possibly other materials) which slows down the radar waves and gives them more time to be absorbed.
The first use of RAM was to coat German submarine periscopes with the stuff. It is unknown how effective it was – the material covered what was already a very small target, one that was surrounded by waves a large fraction of the time, and thus almost impossible to detect with radar to begin with. The Horten brothers, designers of flying wings who were working on a twin-jet flying-wing bomber for the Nazis, suggested the use of this material on their bomber. The builders had developed a glue-like RAM made of adhesive, sawdust, and carbon, and the skin of the flying wing was to have been made of two layers of plywood sheet with the RAM glue sandwiched in-between. Only the first of three prototypes was finished by the time the war ended, and it did not have this RAM skin, although the second and third prototypes would have. These kinds of materials were later tested on Canberra bombers, but the RCS reduction was not substantial, so attempts at RAM use were eventually dropped in Europe.

When the US started investigating the possibility of building aircraft with radar-stealthy shapes in the 1970s, development of RAM was again picked up. The F-117, the first airplane designed with stealth as a primary design objective, was entirely covered with tiles made of a soft dielectric plastic (like neoprene), and these tiles had, embedded in them, round particles covered with carbonyl ferrite (“iron balls”). Any maintenance or damage to the aircraft had to result in the repair (patching) of this soft plastic tile surface. Dielectric putties, tapes, and adhesive sheets (with the “iron balls” embedded in them) were developed to make this process easier. Eventually, a dielectric paint was developed that had the “iron balls” suspended in it, and this made the process even easier, although the solvent for this paint is extremely toxic.

More modern stealthy airplanes rely almost entirely on their shape for stealth. As you will see below, the shape of the airplane skin can be designed such that radar is almost always reflected away from the emitter. These more modern aircraft use RAM only in places where radar is necessarily reflected in many directions, such as edges (like the lip of the engine air intakes, the perimeter of the wing, etc), joints/cracks (like where control surfaces, access panels, landing gear doors, the canopy edge, or bomb bay doors, meet their fixed neighboring surfaces), and other non-smooth features. RAM can now be sprayed on, making the maintenance of RAM surfaces even easier.

Lastly, it should be noted that some of the radar energy does penetrate the aircraft skin into its internal structure. Most of it is reflected or absorbed, but not all – the remainder goes bouncing around inside the airplane, and eventually comes back out. Metal does tend to reflect radar very well. Because of this, structures made of composite materials (many of which are carbon-based or can have carbonyl ferrite easily embedded in them) are widely used in stealth aircraft, rather than the more usual titanium, steel, nickel, or aluminum. Metal components – such as the engines and any other necessarily-metal parts – must be surrounded by materials that absorb radar or reflect it away, or must be at the right depth under the skin so as to use wave cancellation to cancel out any outgoing radar reflections. Which brings us to…

Wave Cancellation

Given that some of the radar waves will penetrate the skin of the aircraft and possibly bounce back towards the radar emitter, how do you minimize the impact from these waves? Well, you try to have them bounce from an internal structure (like a second skin inside the first skin) that is one-fourth of a radar wavelength inside in the airplane. In other words, you set up a second skin, which is one-fourth of a radar wavelength under the surface of the airplane. When radar bounces off this internal skin and leaves the airplane, it meets up with the radar reflection of the real surface. But the path of the radar wave that reflected internally is half a wavelength longer than the path of the wave that bounced off the surface (one quarter of a wavelength in, one quarter of a wavelength out), which means they are now approximately out of phase, and largely cancel each other out. That’s the theory, anyways.

The first attempt at radar stealth in the US used this approach. When the U-2 spyplanes were being flown over Russia in the late 1950s, it was known that the planes were being detected, and that they were not shot down only because they flew too high for a missile to hit them (a decreasing safety margin, one which eventually disappeared altogether). It was a matter of time before the U-2 was shot down – Lockheed knew this since before the U-2 was even operational, and the Blackbird was designed to fix this (it replaced the U-2 after less than 10 years). But until the Blackbird was finished, the engineers at Lockheed thought they could keep their U-2s from being detected by having them create a secondary radar reflection half a wavelength off the primary one. Under the top secret Project Rainbow, a U-2 was covered by a grid of thin but firm wires, held a quarter of a typical radar wavelength away from the skin of the airplane (and from each other) by non-conductive poles (originally bamboo, eventually fiberglass).
These U-2s came to be known as “dirty birds”. (An airplane in a “dirty” configuration has the landing gear, flaps, bay doors, weapons, or other things extended, adding to the drag). These wires were definitely a huge dent in the U-2’s stellar low-drag aerodynamics. And, it turns out, they did not make the U-2s stealthy: When the Soviet Union protested about the U-2 flights in early 1958, their report contained precise data about the “dirty birds” flight paths. At that point, the Rainbow apparatus was removed and never used again.
When Lockheed started investigating RCS reduction, they developed a RAM coating made of a dielectric plastic with carbonyl-ferrite-covered particles embedded in it. The figured out that the dielectric plastic slowed down the radar waves. While radar waves have wavelengths ranging from around one inch to a few feet while going through the air, they were slowed down in the material. This means the longer waves were squeezed into a wavelength of a few inches, while the shorter ones were a small fraction of an inch long. The thin RAM coating would mostly absorb the shorter waves and would reflect them in such a way that they would cancel out, as its thickness is about one quarter the wavelength of the shorter waves. But what about the longer, more penetrative waves? Under the RAM, engineers placed a thick layer of fiberglass honeycomb, which could be made to have its surface be less dense and its deeper layers becoming progressively denser. This meant that the medium waves would bounce somewhere along the middle of the honeycomb layer, and come out such that they had traveled the extra half-wavelength necessary for cancellation. The longer, more penetrative waves would travel deeper before bouncing, and thus would also travel approximately the extra (longer) half-wavelength. Engineers likened the RAM-on-honeycomb set-up to a multi-channel stereo system: You have a tweeter, which just takes care of the high-frequency (short wavelength) stuff, and you have a woofer, that is best equipped to handle lower frequencies (longer waves). Individually each of them misses a lot of the waves, but together they can handle a wide variety of wave lengths. Typically, longer-range radars use the lower frequencies (longer, more penetrative waves), while smaller radars on fighter planes use medium waves, and missile radars use the higher-frequency, short-wavelength waves. RAM alone cannot protect from longer-range radar waves, so the ingenious graduated-density fiberglass honeycomb layer absorbed some of it and cancelled out what it reflected. It acted as an internal skin, almost always one quarter of a wavelength below the surface. This multi-layered skin is another important feature of stealth aircraft design.

One of the main developments in radar technology since the advent of stealth is the ability to detect aircraft using longer and longer wavelengths. These longer wavelengths, made up of lower-energy photons, are not absorbed much by RAM and are not cancelled out by the quarter-wavelength effect because they are so long. This means only the shape of an airplane, not its materials, can guarantee that is it hard to detect by modern radars.
These longer wavelengths start overlapping the range of wavelengths used in radio communications and other uses, therefore much noise is encountered. Interference with radio transmissions is undesirable for the radar operators (since it means more noise amidst which an aircraft has to be picked out) and for the radio operators and radio receivers (since the radar pulses become incorporated into the signals the radio people are trying to generate and to demodulate / listen to). However, modern computer algorithms do a good job of picking out an aircraft from the noise, so long-wave radars are being used in many countries’ defense networks nowadays.

Reflection

This is the most important challenge of all, the one that really allows stealth aircraft to be stealthy and that causes them to be shaped so strangely.
So far we have been talking about absorbing radar waves or canceling them out. But if you can reflect most radar waves away from the radar antenna to begin with, then only the rest need to be absorbed or cancelled, minimizing the need for complex multi-layer skins and for RAM. (And, like I just mentioned two paragraphs ago, modern long-wavelength radars emit energy that is not easily absorbed or canceled). However, this goal forces your airplane to be shaped in unconventional ways, some of which help aerodynamically, some of which do not.
Let’s get back to our “looking for something on a football field at night using a flashlight” analogy for radar.
Let’s say that the thing you’re looking for is shiny, rather than dull. That means that a narrow beam of light hitting its surface will bounce off at a certain angle, rather than being scattered all over the place. So as you look at this object in the middle of a dark field, what you see is really what it reflects. If some of the surface is at just the right angle, it will reflect the flashlight beam back at you, so you will see the reflection of the flashlight, and you will see the object. However, even if your flashlight beam hits it, if it only reflects the beam AWAY from you, then all you will see on the surface is the reflection of the darkness, and so you would not be able to pick out the object from its dark surroundings.
That’s the basic idea of making a shape that is stealthy to radar. If, when it is hit by a radar beam, it can reflect all the radar “light” away from the source, then the radar can’t see it (since the radar only sees the radar energy that is reflected back the way it came).
Say, for example, that I have a smooth, cylindrical-shaped piece of shiny metal. Say I shine a light onto it:

The light will be reflected in every direction, including me. In other words, if I shine a light on it, I will always observe that the middle of the cylinder looks very bright (as that is where the light I shine will always be reflected back in my direction).
Now say that I have a smooth, prism-shaped piece of shiny metal. Say I shine a light onto it:

The light will always be reflected away from me:
UNLESS, that is, I happen to be exactly at right-angles to one of the sides:

So, as you can see, something round reflects light in many directions, while something flat usually reflects light in one direction:

This was realized by the Lockheed team that built the F-117: Faceted surfaces reflect radar only in a few directions, and you’d have to be perfectly perpendicular to one of the facets to get the radar reflected right back at you. Since the airplane is always moving, the angle of each facet is always changing from the point of view of someone on the ground, so even if you ARE perpendicular to one facet, this only lasts a moment.
Now, let’s make things a little more complicated. First, radar does not bounce off a surface just like a laser off a mirror. SOME scattering does go on, similar to a surface that is shiny but not so perfectly shiny that you could adjust your hair by looking at your reflection. So beams bounce off mostly at the same angle they came in, give or take:

This means that you don’t have to be PERFECLY perpendicular to a facet in order to get energy reflected back at you. You just have to be kinda close to perpendicular:

The best way to ensure that no energy bounces back to where it came from is to try and have your surfaces at some angle relative to the radar source.
This is impossible to do from all directions: A surface that is angled away from one direction, is inevitably angled TOWARDS some other direction. So which direction is most important? Well, when an airplane flies towards enemy territory, all the enemies start out in FRONT of the airplane, so most of the radar sent its way comes approximately from the FRONT, at least at first. The more you reduce the reflection of radar energy sent from the FRONT, the longer you maintain the element of surprise. Anyone who has been caught speeding on a highway can appreciate the importance of a low frontal RCS (This has led the designers of many airplanes that are not very stealthy, like the F/A-18F, Gripen, and Eurofighter Typhoon, to work to reduce the “nose-on” radar reflection, which gives the most bang for your buck as far as implementing stealth technology goes. For example, much of the frontal radar reflection comes from the fan blades on the front of the engine compressor. Having your intake be curved (serpentine, S-shaped) so as to hide the engine compressor blades goes a long way in reducing frontal RCS).
So it you can have all the surfaces angled away from the front (that is, have the nose and leading edges look like a thin, pointy pyramid), then this is as good as a faceted design can get. The nose is like a wedge that pushes radar energy only a little bit out of the way:

This “wedge nose” idea guided the design of the Lockheed Have Blue prototype, the first aircraft that is stealthy in all modern senses of the word, and which evolved into the F-117. The Have Blue, however, flew very badly because of its extremely low-aspect-ratio and extremely high-sweep-angle wings. It was very draggy and very unstable. When the design was turned into an operational military aircraft, the angle was made not-quite-so-pointy. This may have increased the radar cross-section by a tiny amount, but it lowered the drag and tremendously improved handling characteristics.

Now, what do you do with the back of your airplane? There might be radar coming from there as well, right? You can’t make it pointy like the front, because you would then have a thin, unstable, diamond-shaped airplane, and it would be hard to add engine exhaust nozzles or a tail into that design, let alone ailerons or flaps. (When competing for the Have Blue contract, Northrop did have such a diamond-shaped configuration in their proposal, a design referred to by many as the “hopeless diamond”. As we know, Lockheed got that contract, and their Have Blue prototype eventually evolved into the F-117. Interestingly, Northrop later did fly a stealthy “diamond” during the X-47 program, but a revised version of the X-47 (the X-47B) did add wings to the “diamond”, making it look basically like a smaller and pointier B-2).
So you can’t really have a diamond. The wing needs to have a not-too-swept trailing edge, and the fuselage must stick out behind the wing root so that a tail (and some engine exhaust nozzles) could go all the way in the back:

The problem with this design is that, if any radar comes from behind, it will be perpendicular to one of the edges on the back if the radar comes from one of four directions. These four directions are so spread out, any radar coming from anywhere in the back will be dangerously close to perpendicular to ONE of the four edges.

Lockheed’s clever idea was to have the right wing trailing edge swept at the same angle as the left fuselage trailing edge, and the left wing trailing edge swept at the same angle as the right fuselage trailing edge. This means that there are only two directions between the four trailing edges:

This idea, of lining up edges into parallel groups, minimizing the number of directions from which a radar would be perpendicular to an edge, is one of the key concepts of modern stealth design:

One other thing to note is that no two edges – and no two surfaces – should be at 90 degrees to each other. Any two edges or surfaces that are at 90 degrees will ALWAYS reflect a radar beam RIGHT BACK to where it came. For example, here is a pair of lines at 90 degrees. Notice how a beam can hit the pair from any angle.

The beam bounces off the first line at (180 degrees minus original angle) and it bounces off the second line at 180 degrees minus THAT, which is (180 degrees minus (180 degrees minus original angle)), which is equal to the original angle! (This is why, if two mirrors meet at 90 degrees, you will ALWAYS see a reflection of yourself when you look into that corner, no matter where you stand). So it is important that edges and planes on an aircraft not meet at 90 degrees.
This means that, if an airplane has vertical stabilizers and horizontal stabilizers, any radar energy that hits one of them will bounce off it, then off the other, and then right back to where it came from. Same thing for the internal walls of rectangular air intakes. This means that having diagonal stabilizers and non-rectangular intakes drastically reduces the radar cross section of an airplane:

For the same reasons, the edges of landing gear doors and weapons-bay doors are also lined up with the airplane’s edges: If the door edges reflect radar, at least they should only reflect radar in the direction where the wing edges already reflect radar. Most doors and bumps on the F-117 are hexagonal – basically a rectangle aligned with the direction of the airplane, plus a pointy front and a pointy back to line up with edge directions.

But a bay door cannot always be pointy – there might not be enough room for it to stick forward enough to have a pointy front at the right angle. The solution? The front and back edges can be serrated:

Now let’s go back to the “wedge” idea. Of course only the nose can be a wedge in every dimension (that is, a pyramid), but if the aircraft has chines – that is, if the fuselage sides are a sharp ridge rather than a near-vertical wall – then basically the whole airplane is a “wedge”.

One other way of looking at this is: Most radar comes not from straight above or straight below but from a shallow angle, so it hits the airplane near the sides. So it is the vertical sides that reflect back the radar. Get rid of the vertical sides, leaving only the top and bottom, and this shape will only reflect the rare bits of radar energy coming from the top or the bottom. (Besides, if you’re flying right over a radar site or right under a fighter plane, you’re in trouble already…)

This approach was first tried in the Blackbird. The Blackbird was originally going to have an F104-like fuselage (pointy nose but pretty much round in cross section), plus delta wings – not too different from, say, a B-58. The center of lift was pretty far back, especially at high speeds, so it was difficult to (as stability demands) keep the center of gravity near the front. Canards were considered, and successfully tested in wind tunnels. But then the radar engineers at Lockheed suggested that chines be added to the sides. That way, the sides would not reflect radar back to where it came from. The aerodynamicists at first opposed this – it increases the overall surface area and makes skin friction much higher! But wind-tunnel tests showed that these chines generate vortices over themselves which actually create a lot of lift! All the way at the front, too! So no more need for canards, plus the airplane could turn tight without stalling, and takeoff and landing speeds were reduced as well. (In fact, these low-aspect-ratio lifting surfaces are now prominently used in most fighter jets to increase high-alpha lift, such as the F-16, F/A-18, MiG-29, and Sukhois).

The first pictures of the Blackbird to be publicly released were taken in profile (from the side), so that these chines were not apparent. It looked like just another delta-winged plane, kind of a cross between an F-104 and a B-58, albeit with odd (or, should we say, “retro”) engine placement (engines in the middle of the wings) and big spikes at the inlets (smaller spikes were not unusual in fighters at the time).
Modern stealth UAVs make use of these two shape principles to stay stealthy: chines that make for a wedge-like cross-section, and edges that only reflect radar in a few directions:

Even the noses of the JSF and F-22 have a slight “edge” along the sides, rather than a flat and purely vertical side:


The Sukhoi-32 and -34 “Platypus” has horizontal ridges going back along the sides of the nose and forward fuselage, much like the F-22 and F-35 and X-36, somewhat like the Blackbird and X-45. The Russians claim these ridges reduce the RCS of the Platypus. However, the rectangular engine intakes, the engine’s compressor blades placed not too deep in a non-serpentine intake, plus all the surfaces at right angles (weapon pylons and wings, engine pods and wings, engine pods and belly, horizontal and vertical tail fins), probably make the Platypus’ RCS too great for chines to really make any significant dent in it.
Now, you will notice that many of these modern stealth aircraft have curved surfaces, not facets. You may say, “But we just saw how curved surfaces reflect energy in more directions!!!”. This is true, but it’s all right, for two reasons:
One; If the curved surface is at an angle to the radar source, it will reflect the beam away. Remember the “wedge”. Sure, a slightly curved wedge might reflect the beam in more directions than a straight-sided wedge, but those directions will all be AWAY from the radar source anyways, so you’re ok. As long as the aircraft is, overall, fairly flat (that is, made up of few slightly curved surfaces (ideally just a top and a bottom) that meet at a sharp edge), it will only strongly reflect radar if it comes from straight above or straight below (and if you’re flying right over a radar station or right under a fighter plane, then you’re in trouble already).


Now hopefully you can see why flying wings have such low RCS.
The second reason why curves are ok is that, on modern stealth planes, their radius is rarely constant. They never look like circles when seen from any angle, and no part of the surface is spherical or cylindrical: they always look like squashed ellipses blended together with hyperbolae and parabolae. What that means is, as the orientation of a curvy stealth airplane changes in relation to you as it flies around, the part of the curvy surface that is perpendicular to you RIGHT NOW will have a different radius of curvature than the part that was perpendicular to you one second ago. As the airplane flies, the part of the surface that is perpendicular to you changes. But since each point in the surface has a different local radius of curvature, the parts that are reflecting energy back at you keep changing their radius of curvature as the airplane moves. Why is this important? Because something with a small radius of curvature (something very curvy) reflects less radar back at you than something with a large radius of curvature (something flat).

This means that the amount of radar energy being returned by the airplane keeps fluctuating. So even if a radar IS perpendicular to the surface (like a fighter plane right above it or a radar station on the ground right below it), it will be hard to get a radar lock, or even to tell the airplane from the random static around it. Non-constant radii of curvature ensure that the radar reflection changes a lot as the airplane moves (flies), making it hard to lock onto.

In summary...

... a stealthy shape will reflect radar back to the receiver only if the receiver is in one of a few directions. You can minimize the number of directions by having your airplane made of flat (or flattened) shapes, and by having groups of parallel edges (all of the B-2’s edges line up along only two directions). A wedge-like shape (be it the pointy front of the F-117 or the sharp chines on the Blackbird or X-47) tends to deflect radar light away from where it came from. If nothing else, hiding particularly radar-reflective parts (like the fan in the front of your jet engine) goes a long way. And use curves with non-constant radii, since this will cause your radar return to fluctuate, making it harder for it to stand out from the background noise and for the enemy to get a radar lock.

The Future

What is the future of radar stealth? Two emerging technologies that may become used more widely are plasma stealth and active signal cancellation.
Remember how I said that radar wave cancellation works like noise-reducing headphones? The idea is that a wave of a certain profile, when mixed with a copy of that wave that is inverted or half a wavelength out of phase, is mostly cancelled out. Noise-reduction headphones work by “listening” to the ambient noise with a microphone, and then playing this noise to you but inverted and/or out-of phase, so that the noise it plays cancels out the real noise. Now, stealth aircraft skins are made of multiple layers, so that the radar waves bouncing off the internal layers are half a wavelength out of phase with (that is, an inverted form of) the waves that bounce off the surface. But what if an aircraft could sense the incoming radar wave and figure out what direction it’s coming from, figure out what the aircraft’s radar reflection wave would look like, and then emit an inverted / out-of-phase version of that wave? The first part – detecting the radar wave and where it’s coming from – is easy and already an important part of most combat aircraft’s defenses. The second part – figuring out what your reflection would look like to that radar and from that direction – is trickier but not impossible. The third part – emitting a radar burst that cancels out the original – is much harder, because this burst must stop as soon as the original burst ends, otherwise your plane is sending out radar waves that are not canceling anything out and so can act as a beacon, signaling enemy radars to your airplane’s presence and location. It is also extremely important that the emitted radar-canceling wave matches the naturally-reflected waves very well, otherwise instead of cancellation, you get MORE radar waves coming from your airplane. Because the direction, phase, and timing of the emitted radar waves must be very precise, this system is significantly more complicated than the noise-reduction headphones it mimics. However, there are unconfirmed rumors of such systems being in use on the Rafale (the latest French fighter jet) and on the B-2.
“Plasma stealth” is not as spectacular as it sounds. Basically, it has been found that ionized air does a good job of absorbing radar waves. I actually have personally worked with trying to ionize air flowing around an object, even a wing – in my case, though, this was done for the sake of aerodynamic advantages, not stealth. Still, the fact is, with the right electric field, air flowing over a surface can be ionized easily and with little power. All you need is a high-voltage electric field. (In my case, I used a high-voltage high-frequency alternating field between two conductive strips, one of them exposed on the surface and one of them hidden just under the surface no more than a couple millimeters away). The strong electric field ionizes the air that flows into it – pull electrons one way and atom nuclei the other way. But the field can be set up so that the ions don’t actually hit the electrodes (if the field’s frequency is high enough, for example, the ions just vibrate and don’t really move very far), so you only need really low currents – not much power at all. And you don’t have to ionize air right on the surface of the airplane: You could also have some air from the engine intake or exhaust be fed through a strong electric field somewhere inside the airplane, which would ionize this air, and then pump it out somewhere near the front of the airplane. From there, it would be blown back, bathing the airplane in a shroud of ionized air. Or some completely different ionization system could be used, I don’t know. But the point is, once you have ionized air around your airplane (something that is quite doable), it might be much harder to pick up by radar. Again, there is no evidence that such an idea is operational or that it is even being tested on real aircraft, but that doesn’t mean it’s not, and it might be in the future.

Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Luis_Cardinal_Cipriani_Thorne

Criticism
Since the early 1980s Cardinal Cipriani Thorne has been known in some quarters for his hostile attitude to some human rights groups, including groups led by some Catholic priests and laypeople. In contrast with his predecessor, the Jesuit Augusto Vargas Alzamora, Cipriani is often accused of not giving heed to claims of human rights abuses purportedly committed by Peruvian state forces during the 1980s and 1990s.
He was also accused of hampering the efforts of Jesuit human rights workers in Ayacucho while he was the archbishop of that troubled province of Peru. Global intra-ecclesial rivalries between groups and philosophical tendencies (especially, between the Jesuits and Opus Dei) do play a part in this row.[citation needed] Several Peruvian bishops who represent the leftist liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez are decided opponents of conservative Cipriani[citation needed].
Cardinal Cipriani Thorne has been accused of having made some questionable remarks. Perhaps most famously, in a 1994 interview with Caretas, he referred to the Human Rights Coordinator as "esa cojudez," which roughly translates to "that bullshit." [3]
In the same interview, Cardinal Cipriani expounded his views on human rights. Part of the interview was reproduced in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission`s Final Report, as well as below
Cipriani- In a violent context such as that of Ayacucho, deaths, disappearances, and abuses are a part of the battles of war. The defenders of human rights call that dirty war. I cannot justify excesses that were committed on behalf of the police or armed forces, excesses that were committed that created violence, but if there are people who silently kill during the night like snipers, they have to be opposed by justice. I believe that the armed forces had to use methods to figure out who and where those acts occurred. And when they used those methods, naturally there were dead people all around.Interviewer- You mean like the disappeared persons?Cipriani- If you can call them that. It is certain that some people tried to attack during an ambush or a battle was were killed.Interviewer- But hundreds of people were kidnapped and later disappeared.Cipriani- That is true, it could be, but I have not investigated any of those cases. And what do those people want?
[4]
Cardinal Cipriani also said that people who believed that the La Cantuta massacre was committed by the Army of Peru were guilty of "treason of the fatherland."[5] The massacre was later proved to have indeed been committed by members of the Army Intelligence Service working within Grupo Colina.
Cardinal Cipriani is also an avid supporter of capital punishment, and accused Peruvians who opposed the institution of the death penalty of being cowards. [6] Shortly after the capture of Abimael Guzmán, Cipriani said that the Shining Path leader should be executed.
In 1997, the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, in Lima, barred a gay student organisation from holding any events. The organisation, Parenthesis Collective (Colectivo Paréntesis), was formed by two third-year students, Rodrigo Vecco and Bernardo Nieuwland. In addition, the university distributed a pamphlet, “Sexual Identity: Is It Possible to Choose?” which described homosexuality as a curable illness. The pamphlet was prepared at the request of the university’s chancellor, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, Archbishop of Lima.
In 2005, during a Mass marking the 36th anniversary of Ricardo Palma University, Cipriani commented on the recent legalisation of homosexual unions in Spain. He denounced the existence of a worldwide campaign that sells “damaged goods,” calling a relationship that is “not between a man a woman” marriage, and he warned that by legalising homosexual unions, society is disfigured. He warned that, “In today’s world, evil disguises itself as good, it is imposed on others, and woe to him who does not accept it!”. The cardinal called on the faithful not to refer to relationships that “are not between a man and a woman” as marriage.
“Call it what you want but don’t sell damaged goods, don’t traffic in that dictatorship of moral relativism in which there is nothing good, only opinions and trends of thought.”

Women, why aren't you running the world yet?

Women - why aren't you running the world yet? Frankly I'm disappointed in you. Men are still far too dominant for their own good, and consequently we've made a testosterone- sodden pig's ear of just about everything: politics, the economy, religion, the environment ... you name it, it's in a gigantic man-wrought mess. The world's been one big dick-swinging contest, and we've caught our collective glans in a nearby desk fan. By rights we should be squealing for your help, but we're not, because we're too damn stupid and too damn proud. We swagger convincingly, and that's about it. And swaggering's fine for scraping by in primitive times, but the world we've built is altogether more complex now. We've got stock exchanges and nuclear warheads. It's too easy to swagger your way into big trouble without even realising. Well, we've had our turn. It's time for the Rise of the Ladies.
We don't need a few women in conspicuous positions of power scattered here and there - we need a 10-year prohibition on all forms of male power. Seriously: a decade in which men don't get to control anything, from the remote control upwards. Imagine the consequences. For one thing, there would be an instant and massive reduction in armed conflict around the globe. Sure, nations would routinely bitch about each other in secret (and with a new, hair-curling viciousness) , but there'd be fewer intercontinental punch-ups and a far smaller bodycount.
The economy should clearly be run by women. City boys are dicks, plain and simple. Look at them. Listen to them. Consider the carnage of the past 10 years. What the hell were these idiots thinking? Even now they're still at it. In any sane world they'd all be herded into a shed and blasted with hoses until they promised to stop. Everything they say, think, do, watch, read and fill up their iPods with is awful. Even their girlfriends are awful. Straight women, reading this: if your partner is a city boy, leave him. Leave him now. Dump him with a text message, right this very second. It'll hurt for about six days, then your life will improve beyond measure. Sod that little number-swapping dick who dares call himself a man. Lob him in the shed with the other squeaking fakes and train the cold jets on the bastards. Shut the door and let them shiver.
Men love machines, because machines remind them of themselves. As a result, men quickly became very very good at building machines and then driving them round rather too quickly, shouting "Toot toot! Look at me in my brilliant car!" This was cute for a while, but the novelty's worn off now that the planet's teetering on the brink of becoming an inhospitable cinder. Please, women, for all our sakes: just lock us in a room with some Lego or something. I'm sorry, but we're just too bloody stupid to save the planet. Looks like you'll have to clean up our mess once again. Mankind's depending on you.
"This is all very well, but none too realistic," thinks the female reader. "Men aren't just going to hand over the reins that easily. I know what men are like. They're self-righteous and stubborn - just like women, but worse."
Oh, you. Pretty, silly you. We've got you brainwashed. See, that's what our incessant, ruinous swaggering was all about: pretending to be more complex and dangerous than we actually are. In truth your suspicions are correct: we're very, very simple. We're lazy and we like blowjobs. That's all there is to us. Literally: that's it. From Sir John Betjeman to Barack Obama, from Copernicus to Liam Gallagher. The core software we run on could fit in the memory of a digital watch circa 1985 without even scraping the sides.
And you know this, you women. You know this of course, but it's so dazzlingly obvious you actually doubt it's true. Most of my friends are women. I often find myself counselling them as they agonise for hours, trying to fathom what men are thinking, what men want. Yet no matter who they're talking about, or what the circumstance, from my perspective the answer always seems so glaringly basic it could be scratched on the back of a button. This one wants a shag. That one wants a biscuit. Every time: the butler did it.
The only mistake women make is crediting men with far more mystery than they're capable of. We're impulsive yet thuddingly predictable, and you'd better learn to love us for it because that's just about all we can muster. That's why we bollocksed the planet up. We didn't mean to. We're men, that's all.
And now, surely now, it's time for you to shunt us off the podium and take charge for a decade. If only as an experiment to see what happens. I for one welcome our titted overlords. Give us our toys and our daily bread and permit us to lie on the sofa for 10 whole years, like snoozy, spluttering pigs. We get to loll around contentedly, you get to save the world. Sound good? Do we have a deal? Well do we, you wonderful bitches?

The Telling of Our Story.........

I don't know how to love him- Helen Reddy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i12PWD9EQvE&feature=related

It was time to close the door. I looked after him as he asked me what he should do. I told him to walk away. It was time for him to follow his path and it was time for me to return to my journey.

I closed the door and turned around. The hallway was much longer than I remembered but then again it spanned a 60 year history. I was returning to the past and he was progressing to the future.

Until now it had been a joint venture in the present but it was time now for him to develop new skills and it was time for me to return to the memories to do my part in educating the masses.

As I turned to walk down the hallway, I was aware of all the visions. They were familiar but different somehow. I was to learn how different with each passing moment as 'We the People' had been lied to most of the 60 years.

I remember when we had joined forces some years ago. It was to be a life full of love and sweet times shared. I was of the old school and my robots were put together from used parts. His robots were futureistic.

That above statement in and of itself tells much about us. We were polar opposites in many ways (indeed we were opposites as he was all male and I was all female) and yet in other ways very similar. It was and remains still a unique relationship.

Each footstep took me to new places, even though the places were already visited, my vision now was different. I knew with each scene I would have to research to see if indeed what I was viewing was real or a lie.

I had my own history lived inside of my brain and home and it included my truth but that was mixed in with many things from the outside world that I now needed to explore.

I could revisit stories written in the newspapers with a new eye. It would be up to me what to believe and what to research further for truth.

I took two steps before realizing that the visions on the walls of the hallways were to be represented in cinamatic form. It was to be an exciting venture I decided right away.

The scenes were intermingled chronologically as I guess that's how they were stored in my memory bank.

I remember seeing the USS Liberty and it was only a minute or two after closing the door. I was shocked as I saw vividly what had taken place that day. I could see the planes and the flag. It was so real.

The next few minutes were very frightening as I realized the planes were Israeli planes.

I could see the captain on the phone........... I then saw a few of the men taking down the American flag and raising a bigger one. I was astonished and feeling very surreal.

I stepped back and closed my eyes, it was too much to comprehend. I stood there riveted until I opened my eyes once again. The scenery had changed. I was now looking at a movie screen with Sean Connery. It was Goldfinger. (That was the night that my first husband and I were told his father had passed.)

I didn't want to go through that experience again so I shut my eyes and squinted hoping the movie screen would disappear. It did.

I continued walking down the hall quickly and as I did the bits and pieces merged until I found the door I was going to enter. I would return another day to continue my journey.

I opened the door today to the hallway..... The first thing I saw was a newsreel from my high school days.

REAL Vietnam Footage... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC4tpeN6pj4&feature=related

The above youtube is very much like the newsreels of my memories. The stories on present TV are not at all like the newsreels of the past.

I remember the nightly news back then and it was all about body counts of our guys. It was all about watching it over and over and seeing our kids carried out of the jungle. It was much harder back then watching it all on TV. It was even harder when our hometown newspaper carried the names of kids who had just graduated from high school in the obituaries.

I vividly remember the hundreds of times the TV news showed the JFK assassination. I remember watching over and over the horse with the boot in the stirup backwards. It will forever have a place in my memory as one of the saddest days of my life.

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/K/htmlK/kennedyjf/kennedyjf.htm

The saturation coverage of the assassination and burial of John F. Kennedy and the startling murder of his alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on live television yielded a shared media experience of astonishing unanimity and unmatched impact, an imbedded cultural memory that as years passed seemed to comprise a collective consciousness for a generation.

Was it all planned? I remember not long before the JFK assassination that our high school had installed an intercom system........ hmmmmmm

................ to be continued


Tonight I heard laughter from the neighborhood and the memories came forth in a gush. I closed my eyes and listened and then stepped out into the hallway.

I was pleasantly surprised at the story being played out on the wall. It was me, David, John and Bea. We were at a dinner dance and I was dressed in a pink blouse and a flowered long beautiful skirt. I had on beautiful heels and even if I do say so myself, I looked fine. hee hee.

I remember David opening the door of our new Cadillac and feeling beautiful. My hair looked great with it's hints of blonde and I felt like a princess.

The dinner, as usual, was steak, salad, bread, and a veggie. There was plenty of wine and the bar was open for all sorts of wonderful, delicious drinks.

John looked great and we talked of their trip to Hawaii. It was fun.

The band was from Lucca's in Madera and as always........ fun was had by all. The GodFather Theme

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkTQdEZbjQA&feature=related

I remember the dance with John when he asked me to meet him for lunch in Merced. Of course, we were friends and I always enjoyed our times together. This time was to be different as I recognized his true feelings for me. I would later receive a ring and necklace from Hawaii.

I never suspected what my relationship with John did to his wife. I was to learn many many years later that she had become a closet alcoholic during these years.

David and I danced and laughed and socialized with many of the attendees.

Ed and his girl friend showed up late...... hmmmmmm, I wondered how his wife would react to his latest adventure. It was always drama when Ed was involved.

John asked me to dance and it was wonderful. He always looked out for me and when he saw Ed arrive with Linda he knew I would be outraged.

Ed, in his own charismatic way asked me to dance and winked at me when David invited Linda to do the same.

I remember stepping on Ed's toes and he winced but didn't comment. In his usual condescending way, he shared with me his latest escapade at the bank. It was too much and I left him standing on the dance floor.

John walked over and handed me a drink and we laughed at the situation and just as I swallowed the last sip of my drink David walked over and invited Bea to take a whirl on the dance floor. It was a night to behold as the moon was full and the breeze was blowing and the music played softly in the background.

The band took a break and I walked over and talked to the trumpet player as I had gotten to know him on our many trips to Luccas. He handed me a flower and asked if he would see me and Dave soon.

I told him we were planning an outing in two weeks and maybe, if they were playing we'd stop over to the dance floor and kick up our heels. He just laughed and sighed and walked away.

I was getting a bit flushed with all the excitement of the night and with the wine. I sat down at the table and to my surprise my husband joined me.

As the night progressed our table seemed to fill up with friends and as the band began to pack up we said our goodnights and started for the car.

It had been a nice evening and as we walked past the bar, John and Bea walked over and we left together. Ed and Linda came out of the dark and seemed to be rearranging their clothes. John called out to him and tried his damndest to embarass him but Ed never even noticed.

David commented that Ed was a bit tipsy tonight and he mentioned that he saw he and Linda walking out of the ladies room together earlier.

I was embarrassed for Gayle as I knew it humiliated her when Ed flaunted his affairs in public.

After all was said and done it had been a beautiful California night and the party had been fun.

As I watched the cinema shutting down the movie, I smiled to myself and realized it had all been soooooooo real. I cannot for the life of me remember why I had stopped at this particular place to watch tonight but it had been quite the experience reliving that night.

It was indeed better than some of the memories from my past. All of this from hearing laughter in the neighborhood in Colorado with grandkids and all. OMG, what a life I've had.

Spanish Government Divided Over Indicting Bush Administration Torturers

http://rockcreekfreepress.tumblr.com/post/98279412/spanish-government-divided-over-indicting-bush
Recent Articles in the Creek
Washington, DC

The Rock Creek Free Press: A fiercely independent newspaper, not afraid to print the truth.

Contact us at: editor@RockCreekFreePress.com



Apr 20


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Spanish Government Divided Over Indicting Bush Administration Torturers
By Sheila Casey / RCFP

An internationally renowned Spanish judge is attempting to prosecute six former Bush officials for their role in allowing torture at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Despite being urged by the Spanish Attorney General to drop the case, Judge Baltasar Garzon has submitted the case to a lottery system which will now assign it at random to one of six high court judges. As one of those high court judges, Garzon has a one in six chance of getting the case back.

Spain has jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents claim to have been tortured at Guantanamo Bay.

The language used by Spanish Attorney General Conde-Pumpido, such as calling the case “fraudulent,” has led some observers to conclude that Conde-Pumpido bowed to pressure from the Obama administration. The AG also said: “If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out.”

US Attorney General Eric Holder said that he isn’t going to prosecute any Central Intelligence Agency employees who water-boarded suspects. Holder said that it would be unfair to prosecute those who actually carried out acts of torture because it was considered legal at the time by the Justice Department. Holder also said the US would defend the CIA torturers against attempted prosecutions from overseas.

The 1984 Convention Against Torture states: “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture…” Both Spain and the US are signatory to the Convention, which the US was involved in negotiating.

Judge Baltasar Garzon is well known as a fearless crusader against tyranny and torture. Garzon had Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet served with an arrest warrant while he was visiting Britain in 1998. During 17 years in office, Pinochet ordered the murders of thousands of his political enemies and the torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of others.

Pinochet was held under house arrest for over a year until British Home Secretary Jack Straw declared, based on a medical examination, that the former tyrant was brain damaged and unable to stand trial. Pinochet died in 2006 without ever being brought to justice.

The officials named in the Spanish complaint are former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes II, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s former legal counsel, David Addington.

Jay Bybee and John Yoo wrote the infamous torture memos, including the opinions that water-boarding isn’t torture, nor was anything torture, short of “death, organ failure or permanent impairment of a significant body function.” The Pentagon’s chief counsel, William J. Haynes, resigned after a magazine article accused him of rigging the trials of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Cheney’s chief counsel, David Addington, was a strong advocate of torture.

If the case lands with a judge who feels as strongly about torture as Garzon, the prosecution of these men will go forward. However, any convictions obtained could be essentially symbolic, as the US will not honor a request for extradition of former government officials.

The Obama administration has stated that it plans to continue to use rendition (kidnapping suspects and flying them to another country for torture or imprisonment). If Spain claimed for itself the same right to rendition that the US is claiming, we could see Bybee, Yoo or Addington kidnapped off an American street and into a Spanish prison.

Numerous Bush operatives have admitted that torture was committed, and the recently released torture memos make clear that prisoners, including children, were slapped, deprived of sleep for up to 11 days, subjected to stress positions, slammed against walls, water-boarded, and tortured with insects.

About water-boarding, the soon to be Attorney General Eric Holder said in January: “If you look at the history of the use of that technique, we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam… . Water boarding is torture.” President Obama has made clear that he has no intention of holding anyone accountable for torture, saying: “This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past….that is why we must resist the forces that divide us and, instead, come together on behalf of our common future.”

Evidently Obama believes that those who want torturers to pay for their crimes constitute “forces that divide us.” The case against the Bush 6 was initiated when a Spanish human rights group, the Association for the Dignity of Prisoners, filed a 98-page complaint with the National Court in Madrid, which specializes in international crimes. The court assigned the case to Judge Baltasar Garzon. Although the Spanish Attorney General recommended that the case be dropped, Garzon submitted it to a lottery system for another judge to continue.

The 1984 Convention against Torture states:

Article 2

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture… .

Article 15

Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.

This language makes clear that signatories have not just the right, but the duty, to prosecute torture, that there are “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” that can be used to justify torture, and that statements obtained as the result of torture cannot be used in a court of law.

Sheila Casey is a DC based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams. She blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com


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Scientists Find Explosives in World Trade Center Dust
By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

Scientists have detected flecks of undetonated explosives in four samples of dust from the World Trade Center catastrophe. A paper just published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal describes the findings of nine scientists after 18 months of work.

The paper is titled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”. The primary authors are Niels Harrit, professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and Jeffrey Farrer, professor of Physics at Brigham Young University (BYU), Provo, Utah.

The research was initiated when Dr. Steven Jones, then also at BYU, observed small red/grey chips in the magnetic fraction of dust he was analyzing from the WTC disaster. The scientists studied four independently collected samples of dust. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC tower, two samples were collected the next day, and a fourth was collected about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).

After careful study of the material the scientists concluded that the red component of the bi-layer chips is a high-tech explosive nano-material known as super-thermite. The material is composed of ultra-fine grains of iron oxide intimately mixed with nano-sized aluminum metal in a matrix of silicon and organic compounds. While these chips are very small (typically less than a millimeter) tests show that the material is highly energetic and can be ignited to produce a micro-explosive effect. The observed properties and composition of the thermitic material appears to match the published descriptions of nano-thermite fabricated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere. These high-tech explosives were relatively new at the time of the disaster, with some of the first published descriptions appearing in the literature in the late 1990s.

The scientists begin the paper with an explanation of their motivation for pursuing the research. “The destruction of three skyscrapers (WTC 1, 2 and 7) on September 11, 2001 was an immensely tragic catastrophe that not only impacted thousands of people and families directly, due to injury and loss of life, but also provided the motivation for numerous expensive and radical changes in domestic and foreign policy. For these and other reasons, knowing what really happened that fateful day is of grave importance.”

While several government agencies, including NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) produced reports on the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings, they pointedly did not analyze the debris for the presence of explosives. This omission is at odds with the requirement of the national standard for fire investigation (NFPA 921), which calls for testing related to thermite and other pyrotechnics. It is also at odds with the video evidence of explosions, and the testimony of fire department personnel, more than 100 of whom officially reported hearing or seeing explosions. NIST also failed to explain the source of large quantities of molten metal in the WTC rubble, or the abundant amounts of iron microspheres in the dust.

NIST spokesperson Michael Neuman was challenged by Hartford Advocate reporter Jennifer Abel on this glaring omission in the WTC report…

ABEL: … what about that letter where NIST said it didn’t look for evidence of explosives?

NEUMAN: Right, because there was no evidence of that.

ABEL: But how can you know there’s no evidence if you don’t look for it first?

NEUMAN: If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re wasting your time….

And NIST cannot claim that it is unfamiliar with the nano-thermitic materials. Several of the lead 9/11 investigators at NIST collaborated with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, in the late 90s, to test and characterize sol-gel preparations of high-power thermitic materials. Arden Bement, the former deputy secretary of defense who was appointed director of NIST by President Bush immediately after 9/11, was a metallurgist and expert on fuels and materials and former director of DARPA’s office of materials science and a former executive at TRW. He would be expected to be familiar with nano-thermite since DoD and DARPA are lead agencies in its development and TRW supplies NASA with advanced propellants including nano-gelled thermite.

[In an interesting side note: Bement was also a director of Battelle Corporation which was most likely the source of the weaponized anthrax spores used in the anthrax attacks of 2001.]

Some of the same individuals and organizations contracted by DoD and DARPA to develop nano-thermitic materials were selected by the Bush administration to investigate the collapse of the towers and Building 7. What the Scientists Found

The red/grey chips were found to be present in all samples of fine WTC dust analyzed to date. While the grey layer is the subject of ongoing investigation, the current paper focuses on the red layer. Very high magnification electron microscopy of the layer reveals a sponge-like structure composed of very small particles of several types. By using XEDS, researchers were able to map the elemental composition of the material. Iron oxide particles, shown as white in the image above, are fairly uniform in size and shape and about 100 nanometers long while the metallic aluminum appears as plate-like structures about 50 nanometers thick and up to a micron (1000 nanometers) in length. Other elements such as silicon and carbon were also detected in the red layer. This is significant because the presence of carbon in the material would supply the hot gas reaction products needed to turn the thermitic material from an incendiary into a low explosive. The authors avoided describing the material as “explosive” because the flakes studied are too small to assess the bulk properties of the material.

To test the power of this thermitic material, small samples were heated in a Differential Scanning Calorimeter, a very sensitive device for detecting the heat generated by a chemical reaction. The samples ignited at about 430ºC and generated as much or more heat than an equal mass of high explosive such as TNT. They also produced, as a reaction product, tiny metallic iron microspheres, just like the iron microspheres found in abundance in all samples of WTC dust as previously reported by USGS, FEMA and NIST.

Conclusions

“The chips are clearly a nano-engineered material with two types of extremely small particles, each highly consistent in shape and size, held in close stable proximity by a durable matrix which is laminated to a hard homogeneous material. The student of energetic materials will appreciate that this description matches exactly that of a super-thermite in which the reactant particles are suspended in a sol-gel matrix applied to a substrate.” (Jim Hoffman, 2009)

Sol-gels of nano-thermites are described in the literature as being very stable and safe to handle in liquid form. They can be applied to surfaces by spray or even paintbrush. It is entirely possible that the explosives were applied to the building disguised as a paint or as a spray-on fireproofing.

Researcher Kevin Ryan has previously published a paper (Journal of 9/11 Studies) noting the extreme coincidence that the floors in the towers where structural failure was initiated exactly correspond to the floors where fireproofing had recently been “upgraded” in 1999 and 2000. (See diagram)

Researchers have estimated, based on the weight of red/grey chips found in the four samples tested, that these chips make up as much as 0.1% of the mass of the fine dust produced on 9/11. While it is difficult to estimate the total mass of fine dust produced that day, the dust did cover Manhattan from river to river and for several miles in all directions. The dust mass was certainly at least several thousand tons (estimates range as high as 30,000 tons) which would mean several tons of the red/grey material is involved.

How did several tons of unexploded super-thermite end up in the dust of the World Trade Center disaster?



View Open Chemical Physics Journal article here.

Apr 06


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Eyewitnesses Contradict Pentagon 9/11 Story

BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP

Two California men who call themselves the Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) have compiled impressive video evidence that the plane seen flying towards the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 could not have caused the death and damage at the Pentagon, nor the damage to five light poles outside the Pentagon.

Frustrated with the inability of 9/11 researchers to do anything other than speculate about what really happened that day, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis decided to take matters into their own hands. They have repeatedly flown in from southern California, canvassed the area near the Pentagon on foot to find people who saw a plane just prior to the fireball, and then quizzed these eyewitnesses extensively on camera to establish exactly what they saw, when they saw it and where they saw it from.

Their research is summarized at their website: thepentacon.com, as well as in four DVDs containing interviews with 13 witnesses who attest that they saw a plane fly to the north of the Citgo gas station on Pentagon property, not south of the Citgo station as required by the official story.

CIT had each witness draw the flight path he witnessed on a map; the compilation from all the witnesses is shown in the photo above. The yellow curved lines clustered together toward the top of the map are from the witnesses; the single straight line angling up from the bottom edge of the map is the official flight path of the plane, as described by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

Taken together, the 13 witnesses deliver a devastating blow to the official story about the Pentagon attack. Five 40-foot, 247-pound light poles were knocked down that day. If the plane flew north of the Citgo station, it could not have knocked down those poles. The west side of the Pentagon was damaged as if it were hit by a plane heading north, with the zone of destruction angling north. If the plane flew to the north of the Citgo station before hitting the Pentagon, it would not have caused this kind of damage.

CIT’s evidence is compelling for a number of reasons. Three of their witnesses are Pentagon police officers who were on duty at the time of the attack. Most of the others were government employees at their jobs, and their presence at that place and time can be verified. This stands in sharp contrast to the witnesses who claim they saw the attack from their cars, as their presence on the road cannot be confirmed.

CIT’s witnesses are quite sure about what they saw. Sergeant William Lagasse, an officer with what is now known as the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, was fueling his patrol car at the Citgo station when the jet flew past him. He has stated that he is “100% sure” that the plane flew to the north of the gas station, that he would “bet his life on it.”

There is a remarkable degree of congruence in the witnesses’ accounts. They are not 9/11 researchers and none of them seemed to be aware that they were describing a flight path at odds with the official story, thus they had no reason to be less than forthcoming. Each was interviewed separately, yet their stories are quite similar.

CIT includes each interview in its entirety, without editing. Although this makes for a long video, it preempts any accusations of misinterpreting or leading the witnesses. We have the advantage of seeing the witnesses’ body language and hearing their tone of voice. We get a glimpse into their personalities and character, and are given the maximum amount of information possible with which to assess if they are telling the truth. We found the witnesses credible and convincing.

After thousands of hours of painstaking investigation and analysis, Ranke and Marquis have concluded that the plane seen by so many people did not hit the Pentagon, but flew over the building at the same time that pre-planted explosives caused a huge fireball and thick, black smoke, obscuring the fact that the plane was still in the air and flying away.

Several of CIT’s witnesses mentioned a second plane that came along about 30 seconds later, but media reports immediately after 9/11 talked about a second plane “shadowing” the attack plane. The belief that there were two planes in very close proximity serves as a useful fiction to confuse anyone who saw the plane fly over the Pentagon as the fireball exploded. Rather than concluding that the plane never actually hit the building, observers would almost certainly conclude that they had seen the “shadowing” second plane.

All of CIT’s witnesses also believe that the plane they saw hit the Pentagon, although this cannot be possible. This fact has been used to dismiss CIT’s work as irrelevant, but it’s not a compelling argument.

Less than an hour earlier, America had seen the south tower of the World Trade Center being hit by a plane and exploding into a huge fireball. Most people were aware that an attack was underway. If they saw a jet heading directly towards the Pentagon, and next saw a massive fireball, it is doubtful that one person in a thousand would question whether the plane had crashed and caused the fireball. To conclude that the fireball was caused by explosives preplanted in one of the most heavily guarded buildings on the planet, in an intentional false flag attack to justify war, would require observers to have a degree of perspicacity that was extremely rare in the pre-9/11 world, and only slightly less rare now.

The most riveting segment in the CIT footage is of the interview with Lloyde England, a taxi cab driver who was photographed numerous times just after the attack. In all the photos, England and his cab are on Route 27, on the bridge going over Columbia Pike. The front windshield of his cab has a big hole in it and the cab is at a stop and straddling the lanes. A broken light pole lies nearby.

England’s story is that he was going 40 mph when he felt the jet go over head, and then the light pole came smashing through his front windshield. He says he then skidded sideways to a stop, and that a stranger stopped and helped him remove the light pole from the windshield, and then left without ever giving his name or even speaking a word.

England’s story is suspect because photos show the hood of his sedan untouched and gleaming like a mirror, although his front windshield was destroyed. England is quite clear that it was not the smaller section at the top of the light pole that impaled his windshield, but the big, 40 foot, 247 pound pole. He contends that after it pierced his windshield, with perhaps five feet of the top end of the pole inside the cab, that the other 35 feet stuck straight out into the air, not touching the hood of the cab.

The question is, with the windshield destroyed, what held the pole up the in air? CIT drove with England to his property in the country to inspect the cab. They hypothesized that perhaps the narrow end of the pole had pierced the back seat or floorboards of the cab, holding it in place and not allowing it to touch the hood of the cab. But their inspection showed that there was only an insignificant rip in the rear seat, and no damage to the floorboards. Although the dashboard was damaged, no part of the hood, including the edge near the windshield, showed any damage.

What makes the story even more incredible is that England claims that as he was removing the pole from the windshield, he fell down, but managed, even as he was on the ground, to keep holding the pole in the air. Remember that the pole is 40 feet long and weighs 247 pounds, while England appears to be about 65 years old.

Pressed to explain how it can be that the pole never touched the hood of the sedan, England said only “The car speaks for itself.” Unfortunately for England, the car seems to be saying that his account cannot possibly be true. In addition, with 13 eyewitnesses saying that the plane went nowhere near those light poles, it seems clear that something else caused the damage to England’s windshield.

The video with England validates CIT’s practice of keeping the camera rolling as much as possible, even during casual conversation, as the most damning statements from both England and his wife came out spontaneously and unexpectedly. While Ranke and England’s wife were chatting at the Englands’ home, Ranke told her that they had determined that the jet never hit the Pentagon, but kept on going, and, amazingly, she agreed! The audio is hard to hear and she then refused to say more, but her meaning was clear. Mrs. England, who works for the FBI, also said that she knows why her husband’s car was not impounded as evidence, but wasn’t going to tell.

England spontaneously offered this damning statement: “You gotta understand something. When people do things and get away with it, you…eventually it’s gonna come to me, and when it comes to me, it’s gonna be so big, I can’t do nothing about it.”

CIT also kept the camera running during the 90-minute drive to see England’s car, and captured a few very interesting statements on tape. Although England speaks generally and indirectly, in the context of a conversation about the attack at the Pentagon, his meaning is clear.


England: I wasn’t supposed to be involved with this, this is too big for me, man, this is a big thing. This is a world thing happening, I’m a small man…I’m not supposed to be involved in this. This is for other people, people who have money and all this kind of stuff.

Ranke: Your point that these people who have all the money…

England: This is their thing.

Ranke: This is their event.

England: This is for them.

Ranke: Meaning they’re doing it for their own reasons…

England: (with conviction) That’s right. I’m not supposed to be in it.
…
Ranke: They must have planned it.

England: It was planned.
…
England: You know what history is? It’s not the truth. It’s “his story.” Has nothing to do with the truth.


As someone who has been researching the 9/11 story for two years, and has experienced mockery, abuse and denials from the government and media, I was a thrilled to hear someone who was directly involved in the cover-up admit on tape that it was a big event, a world event, planned by rich people for their own reasons.

Incredibly, once Ranke explained that 13 witnesses had all placed the jet at the north side of the Citgo station on a trajectory that could not have knocked down the five light poles, England changed his story and declared that he was not where all the photographs show him to be, but actually well north of Columbia Pike. Ranke showed England numerous photos of himself, his damaged cab and the downed light pole on the bridge over Columbia Pike. Even faced with incontrovertible evidence of his exact location, England resolutely maintained that pictures don’t always tell the truth and that the accident with the light pole had taken place much further north.

The 90-minute video of the interview with Lloyde England, completely discredits England. Ranke points out that England may well be a victim himself, in that he may have been forced to tell the story of the pole impaling his windshield. But his story is so incredible, and his protestations that he was not in the
location where multiple photos and videos place him on that day are so absurd, that Lloyde England’s account now stands as perhaps the most vulnerable point in the edifice of lies that constitute the official story of the attack on the Pentagon.

The entire body of work from CIT is a testament to the tremendous power of dedicated citizen journalists to uncover the truth behind a government story. Using thousands of dollars of their own money and thousands of hours of unpaid time, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis have performed a significant public service. They have created a body of work that definitively shows the government story about the Pentagon to be a lie.

CIT’s next move is to consolidate their research into a more concise format that edits all the lengthy interviews into a single 60 minute video called “National Security Alert.” The video will have no music or other artistic flourishes, which will make it suitable for informing government or media figures. Within the next 30 days, they expect to go live with a new website at CitizenInvestigationTeam.com. That site will have a link for free downloads of their new video, plus detailed information on how citizens can use the video to get action, including a series of steps to take if the appropriate authorities don’t respond.

Ranke and Marquis will be returning to the DC area to present a four hour conference in tandem with Pilots for 9/11 Truth. The free conference will be held at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) conference center in Arlington, Virginia from 12:30 pm to 5 pm on Saturday, July 11.

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams. She
blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com

Mar 25


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Cheney Directed Assassination Ring
BY MATT SULLIVAN / RCFP

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed during a talk at the University of Minnesota, March 10, that Dick Cheney orchestrated assassination squads directly out of the office of the vice president.

Here is what Hersh said: “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

“Right now, today, there was a story in The New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him [Cheney].

“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s anexecutive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leader, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.” Interestingly, Hersh gives us two pieces of information here. First he tells us that the CIA has been “deeply involved” in domestic operations; something that is forbidden by law. And second, he reveals that the office of vice president has been directing assassination squads abroad, also clearly illegal underdomestic and international law.

It is not much of a leap of logic to put these two bits of information together and ask the question: ‘Did the CIA engage in domestic assassination as well?’ Clearly the fact that this would be illegal is no barrier; according to neocon doctrine, the unitary executive is above and beyond any law.

Let’s see if there have been any likely assassinations that may be the handiwork of the Cheney hit teams. For example:

September 9, 2001; Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan just two days before the 9/11 attack. His death cleared the way for the Afghan invasion.

Shortly before his October 2002 death in a mysterious airplane crash, Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone met with the Vice President. Cheney was rounding up Senate support for the vote giving the administration the go ahead to invade Iraq in spite of United Nations objections. At a campaign stop in Willmar, Minn., days before his death, Wellstone told attendees that Cheney told him, “If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.” Senator Wellstone’s death cleared the way for the Iraq Invasion.

On February 5, 2005, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harari was killed in an explosion. His death was immediately blamed on Syria, but without any evidence. Within weeks Syrian peacekeeping forces which had been in Lebanon for a decade, were forced to leave. Syria’s departure cleared the way for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

The DC Madam, Deborah Palfrey, found dead on May Day, 2008, was very likely murdered. She had a very embarrassing little black book of clients for her prostitution service which included Washington lobbyists, defense contractors, intelligence operatives and even, reportedly, Dick Cheney himself. Before she was ‘suicided’ she made several public statements, including in radio interviews, that she had no intention of committing suicide and that if she was to be found dead, that it would be murder.

Mike Connell was a republican IT specialist: He helped the GOP orchestrate the electronic theft of the 2004 Ohio election (among others). He was scheduled to testify in a federal probe about not only the election thefts, but also about the “missing” White House e-mails. Before his death, Connell’s lawyers were on-record requesting protection for their client based on threats from Karl Rove.

Connell’s death appears to be part of a ‘clean-up’ operation.

This is but a brief list of possible, even likely, executive assassinations. Now that it has been revealed that a sophisticated covert program of assassination has been ongoing under the direction of VP Cheney, a thorough review of unsolved, politically convenient murders would seem to be in order.

Let’s start with the 3000 killed in lower Manhattan.



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Feb 24


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NY Times Complicit in FBI Anthrax Coverup


BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP

Back in 2001, just months after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, several articles came out in mainstream newspapers that pointed clearly to the CIA and Army as the most likely sources of the weaponized anthrax. Articles in The Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald, Washington Post and New York Times laid out the facts that incriminated Battelle Memorial Labs in West Jefferson, Ohio, and the Army’s lab at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah as the only logical sources for the anthrax. These facts, as reported in 2001, include:

1. For over a decade, Army scientists at Dugway have been making weapons-grade anthrax that is “virtually identical” to the anthrax used in the attacks.

2. The anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was extremely concentrated, with a trillion spores per gram. The Dugway anthrax had a similar concentration.

3. The FBI was increasingly focused on US government bioweapons research programs as the source of the deadly anthrax.

4. Both the lab in Utah and the lab in Ohio received anthrax samples from the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, although USAMRIID deals only with wet anthrax and ships it wet.

5. The investigation was focused on the Dugway anthrax, and Dugway was described as the only facility that was known to be weaponizing anthrax.

6. One FBI official said that the CIA’s anthrax was “the best lead we have at this point.”

7. Army officials said that Fort Detrick did not have the equipment for weaponizing anthrax.

The FBI has never explained what became of this initial focus on the labs in Utah and Ohio. Instead, after the death of Fort Detrick anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins in July, 2008, the FBI attempted to make the case that Ivins was the murderer and all other suspects had been cleared of suspicion.

Since Ivins’ death, the media have, with very few exceptions, passively swallowed the line dispensed by the FBI, and have acted as little more than stenographers in parroting the hollow arguments presented by the FBI that Ivins is guilty.

On December 12, 2001, The Baltimore Sun published a seminal article by Scott Shane that clearly laid out just how strong the evidence was against the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Subtitled “Organisms made at a military laboratory in Utah are genetically identical to those mailed to members of Congress,” Shane’s article also includes this eyebrow-raising line: “Scientists familiar with the anthrax program at Dugway described it to The Sun on the condition that they not be named.”

Apparently Shane has forgotten all that he reported seven years ago. Now with The New York Times, Shane’s latest piece, published January 4, 2009, raises troubling questions about the independence of The Times, and the memory hole that Shane must have used to shunt away all that he once knew about the case the FBI code-named Amerithrax.

Shane calls his 5,200 word article “the deepest look so far at the investigation.” Titled “Portrait Emerges of Anthrax Suspect’s Troubled Life,” it is primarily a hatchet job on Bruce Ivins. Filled with innuendo and unsubstantiated allegations, the purpose of the article is clearly to solidify the perception that Ivins was the killer, and to pooh-pooh the widely held belief that the anthrax came from a CIA or military lab in Utah or Ohio.

Shane dismisses these beliefs breezily, stating: “The Times review found that the FBI had disproved the assertion, widespread among scientists who believe Dr. Ivins was innocent, that the anthrax might have come from military and intelligence research programs in Utah or Ohio.” Not a single piece of evidence is presented to back up this sweeping claim.

Halfway through his article, Shane springs another shocker on us. “By early 2004, FBI scientists had discovered that out of 60 domestic and foreign water samples, only water from Frederick, Maryland, had the same chemical signature as the water used to grow the mailed anthrax.”

Really? Do FBI scientists think that anthrax researchers go to the kitchen sink for the water they use to grow the anthrax? According to Wikipedia, biochemistry labs use only highly purifi ed water, such as double-distilled. Distilled water is created by boiling water and collecting the steam. To obtain double-distilled water, the process is done twice, so that all impurities and minerals are removed. Distilled water has the same chemical signature, namely none, no matter where in the world it originates.

It is unprecedented to have a major development in a high profi le case go unreported for a full five years. Not only has the FBI never before mentioned this so-called discovery about the signature of the water, but when they were specifically asked if anything could be learned from the water, they said no.

The question came up on August 18, 2008, when the FBI held a science briefi ng to follow up on the highly publicized August 6 press conference by DOJ attorney Jeff Taylor. The science briefi ng was hosted by Dr. Vahid Majidi, Assistant Director of the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.

Dr. Majidi was asked: “In your looking at the elemental and chemical properties, could you tell anything about the water that was used to fi lter this anthrax, and did that do you any good?”

Dr. Majidi replied: “No. No.”

Yet here we are, five months later, with Scott Shane telling us that the FBI has known since 2004 that the anthrax was grown near Fort Detrick, because of the chemical signature of the water.

Beyond these outrageous claims, Shane’s article is busy assassinating Bruce Ivins’ character. We have Nancy Haigwood saying of Ivins “he did it,” for no apparent reason other than she doesn’t like him and thinks he’s odd. She also thinks Ivins vandalized her house 27 years ago and impersonated her. No reason is given for why she believes these things.

Shane editorializes heavily. He charges that Ivins was “chipper” even as five people were dead or dying of anthrax inhalation, and was relishing his moment in the spotlight. No evidence is presented for how Shane reached these conclusions about Ivins.

Words Shane uses to describe Ivins (including quotes from others) are: corny, dour, scary, provocative, emotionally laden, thin-skinned, aggressive, goody two shoes, very sensitive, creepy, possessing an unnerving hubris, stressed, depressed, rude, sarcastic, nasty, devious, jumpy and agitated.

We find out that Ivins had been a nerdy, awkward teenager, was not popular in high school, and was still bitter about this.

He liked to eat a mixture of peas, yogurt and tuna for lunch and wore outdated bell-bottoms, practices that, according to Shane, got him labeled an “oddball.” The words odd, oddball or oddities appear five times in Shane’s article.

The final reference, regarding “a man whose oddities, for many people, made the FBI’s anthrax accusation more plausible,” tips Shane’s hand. His constant harping on Ivins oddness betrays the poverty of the FBI’s case, which Shane acknowledges has “yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch” that Ivins was the killer.

Fortunately for many of us, being odd is not a crime.

But was Ivins odd? The Frederick News Post published a letter from Amanda Lane on August 10, 2008 that includes: “I want to shout from the mountain tops that Bruce was the kind of man we look up to … He was a decorated scientist and the humblest of men who didn’t use his title as a status symbol. He picked up a mop or emptied the trash without a moment’s hesitation. If he thought you were having a bad day he would offer candy or a catchy tune to cheer you up. If someone had to stay late to accomplish a task, Bruce would work with you so that the task would get completed faster.

“He was not the greatest athlete, but he was the best cheerleader present at every game to support his friends. I will truly miss his good humor, as there are few people in life who measure up to this man. I hope that he knew how much joy he brought to my life and others around him. If I learned anything from Bruce, it was to enjoy life and to always smile. His friendship brightened so many lives. I hope that Americans will remember Bruce for the funny and compassionate person that he was, because that is all Bruce knew how to be.”

Although Shane does mention that Ivins’ colleagues cherished him, the implication is that they didn’t really know him, as “he hid from them a shadow side of mental illness, alcoholism, secret obsessions and hints of violence.”

The New York Times has published a hit piece, devoid of incriminating facts, more gossip than journalism. Shane’s article raises disturbing questions about the relationship between The New York Times and the US government. What happened to the FBI’s original focus on the CIA and Army labs? Who is behind the drive to pin the attacks on a dead man who possessed neither the means nor the motive to carry them out? And why is The Times acting as a PR arm for those with an agenda that has nothing to do with journalism?

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has been published by the Chicago Sun-Times, Reuters, the Denver Post, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams.
Jan 24


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Top Scientists Ask Journal "Science" To Retract Original AIDS Papers
BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP

Thirty-seven doctors, senior researchers and attorneys have asked the journal Science to retract four articles published in 1984 that supposedly established that HIV was the cause of AIDS. The articles, by a group led by Dr. Robert Gallo, have drawn criticism for some time. An investigation in the early 90s by the US Department of Health and Human Services concluded that the lead paper was “fraught with false and erroneous statements.” A Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations produced a staff report onthe papers which contains scathing criticisms of their integrity.

Now, new analysis of the documentation behind the papers has revealed even more reason to doubt Gallo’s findings. The letter refers to “recent revelation of an astonishing number of previously unreported deletions and unjustified alterations made by Gallo…”

Dr. Mikulas Popovic wrote the manuscripts while Gallo was in Europe, but Gallo made handwritten changes to the manuscripts upon his return. Popovic wrote: “Despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified.” This sentence was deleted and replaced by a statement that the findings suggest that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

Gallo submitted micrographs to Science that were identified as containing the HIV virus. But just four days before he submitted them, Dr. Matthew A. Gonda, then head of the Electron Microscopy Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, wrote a letter to Gallo and Popovic stating that he “does not believe” that the micrographs contain images of HIV. The micrographs were published in Science on May 4, 1984 and identified as containing HIV.

These developments add to the mounting body of evidence that the original conclusion that HIV causes AIDS is deeply flawed.

Thus far there has been no response from Science regarding the request for retraction.


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Cartoon by Joe Sutliff, Rock Creek Free Press, Feb. 2009
Dec 17


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A Call for a Re-evaluation of the AIDS Dogma


By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

A paper about to be published in a scientific journal raises the intriguing possibility that many AIDS cases are in fact misdiagnosed cases of syphilis. The paper was authored by an International group of scientists led by National Academy of Sciences member Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Wolfgang E. Krumbein, professor of Geo-microbiology in Oldenburg, Germany.

The paper, titled Spirochete round bodies. Syphilis, Lyme disease & AIDS: Resurgence of “the great imitator,” will be published in SYMBIOSIS V47, No.1, 2009.

John Scythes, one of the researchers on the paper, reports that he has not found a single case of an immune suppressed patient (regardless of HIV status) who has died of complications of syphilis since the discovery of AIDS in the early 80s. The implications of this are staggering. It is simply not possible that syphilis stopped being fatal just as the new disease of AIDS came on the scene.

The researchers speculate that, because of its immune suppression effect and its ability to imitate other diseases, syphilis is being missed or misdiagnosed as AIDS. Now that improved tests for syphilis infection are available, the researchers urge a large scale investigation into the extent that this is happening.

In addition to Dr. Margulis, other co-authors include Andrew Maniotis PhD. Department of Patholog, University of Illinois at Chicago, J. MacAllister, U. Mass Amherst; J. Scythes of the Community Initiative for AIDS Research, Ontario, Canada; O. Brorson, Tonsberg, Norway; J. Hall, U. Mass. Amherst; W.E. Krumbein, Carl von Ossietzky Universität, Oldenburg Germany; and M.J. Chapman, U. Mass, Amherst.

Ever since Luc Montagnier of the Institut Pasteur in Paris first described HIV virus-like particles isolated from “patient 1” in 1983, a close connection has been shown between AIDS and a history of syphilis exposure.

As with AIDS, patients infected with syphilis do not die from syphilis directly, but rather suffer from opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, or dysentery.

Syphilis was once known by doctors as “the great imitator” because of its immune suppression effects and its ability to mimic the symptoms of many other diseases. If syphilis and other spirochete diseases are being misdiagnosed as AIDS, that would explain why the number of reported syphilis deaths has plummeted since the introduction of AIDS.

Many human infections such as Lyme disease, syphilis, anthrax and many others are caused by a class of bacteria called spirochetes. These bacteria are characterized by a spiral free swimming form, and by the ability to revert into a cyst form when subjected to threat such as heat, starvation or antibiotic attack. This ability to form cysts (also called “round bodies”) makes spirochete diseases extremely resistant to treatment.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that syphilis is easily treated with antibiotics, the disease is frequently impervious to antibiotic treatment except in its earliest stages. Far from eradicating syphilis, antibiotics have driven the disease underground.

Until recently, the only way to definitively tell if someone had the syphilis germ, was high magnification microscopy by an expert microscopist. Since this is not usually done for patients in a clinical setting, reported cures of either syphilis or Lyme disease are suspect.

Spirochetes are an ancient form of bacteria. The oldest spirochete in the fossil record was discovered in the intestine of a 20 million year old termite preserved in amber.

Scientists know that Lyme and syphilis are caused by spirochete bacteria because the spirochete is able to cause the symptoms of the disease when it is introduced into a healthy test subject. This observation is one of the steps needed to verify that an infectious agent is the cause of a disease. Called Koch’s Postulates, the four steps require that the agent must:
1. be found in all cases of the disease;
2. be isolated from the host;
3. cause the same disease when injected into a healthy host, and
4. then be found growing again in the newly infected host.

While syphilis and Lyme bacteria meet the test of Koch’s postulates, HIV fails all four.

In the case of both Lyme and syphilis, it is very likely that the disease-causing bacteria establishes a permanent human-spirochete symbiosis soon after infection. The symptoms of the disease vary greatly and may be easily overlooked or misinterpreted.

Most spirochetes are harmless, free swimming species in nature, unrelated to any disease, therefore unknown to medical science. Animals and spirochetes have co-existed for millions of years and have co-evolved to the point that they have a symbiotic relationship, a partnership. It is theorized that some components of mammalian cells such as sperm tails and cilia are descended from these ancient bacteria. If this theory is correct, spirochete remnants have dwelled in stable symbiotic partnership inside animal cells for about 1 billion years.

Over eons of time, integrated symbiotic bacteria (which include Lyme and syphilis as well as many other non-pathogenic bacteria) have lost the ability to live independently. They have shed much of their own DNA and have become dependent on the gene products of the human host.

Scientists call this relationship “cyclical symbiosis” and have shown that in this type of symbiosis, virus-like particles are created as part of the integration process between the symbiont partners. These virus-like particles are not the disease-causing agents themselves; they are simply packets of genetic information being exchanged between co-evolved symbionts. Reverse transcriptases and virus-like particles are abundant in such cyclical symbioses.

Is it possible that HIV and other retroviruses are not disease-causing agents at all, but are rather genetic messages being passed between symbiotic partner cells? If so, that would explain why AIDS vaccine trials failed so spectacularly. It would also explain why HIV fails every one of Koch’s postulates for a disease causing agent.

Is it possible that the conventional HIV-AIDS medical orthodoxy is wrong? That certainly would explain why we are no closer to a cure today than we were 25 years ago when AIDS was first discovered; nor have we experienced the long predicted “AIDS pandemic.” There were approximately 1 million AIDS cases in 1990 and there are roughly that number today.

But the implications for public health are far more serious. The ongoing disintegration of the conventional medical theories about HIV-AIDS demonstrates that the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have failed the public spectacularly yet again. It also means that thousands of patients are being erroneously treated with toxic, potentially deadly, AIDS drugs.

The entire HIV-AIDS paradigm must be re-evaluated.


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The only “change” we are likely to get.
Nov 24


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Everything You Know About AIDS is Wrong
By Sheila Casey / RCFP

On April 23, 1984, Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler and researcher Robert Gallo from the National Cancer Institute held a press conference and announced that Gallo had found the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the retrovirus HIV. Heckler estimated that a vaccine would be available in just two years. That same day in 1984, Gallo patented the blood test to detect the HIV antibodies.

As a retrovirus researcher, Gallo had previously tried to pin the blame for Alzheimer’s, leukemia and neurological disorders on a retrovirus, all without success. Now AIDS was in his sights.

But Gallo had skipped an important step in the scientific process: his HIV research had never been subjected to peer review, and was not published until after the press conference with Heckler had already conferred legitimacy on it.

Billions of dollars poured into research programs and millions of people lined up to have their blood checked; by 2006, 72 million Americans had been tested, with a third of that number tested every year. As its creator, Gallo received a percentage of the cost of each test.

To receive a positive HIV test result was considered a death sentence: you would get AIDS and die a miserable death, sooner or later.

As the years passed, it became apparent that this was not true. Only five percent of the people who tested HIV positive went on to develop AIDS. A vaccine has never been found. And there is now a growing group of scientists who dispute that HIV causes AIDS.

Peter Duesberg is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg earned renown as one of the scientists to discover a cancer gene in 1970, and earned tenure at UC Berkeley at the age of 36. At 49 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1986 he received a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health.

He was on the fast-track to receive the Nobel until he published an article in 1987 in Cancer Research challenging the consensus that HIV is the cause of AIDS. After that his funding dried up and he was dismissed as a misguided contrarian by those with careers and billions in funding riding on the view that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

The views of Dr. Duesberg, David Crowe, Dr. Charles Geshekter, and other disidents who dispute the infectious model for AIDS are summarized below.

1) All viruses are harmless after antibody immunity. Disease is caused before the antibodies are created, because it is the antibodies that neutralize the pathogen and enable the host to recover. When people test positive for the antibodies, that means they have developed resistance, ‘immunity’ to the virus. No microbe causes disease only after antibodies have appeared, as HIV is claimed to do. Why develop a vaccine for people who already have the antibodies to the disease? Duesberg: “there is no virus in AIDS patients, only antibodies.”

2) Retroviruses, which are one type of virus, do not kill T-cells. They do not kill the cell they infect—ever. (AIDS is diagnosed partly by a deficiency of T-cells.)

3) HIV does not infect enough T-cells to cause disease.

4) No retrovirus causes disease and there is no logical reason why they should.

5) Viruses replicate quickly; there is no such thing as a slow virus. If a host cannot mount an immune defense quickly enough, the virus will overwhelm and kill the host in a matter of days or weeks. Yet we are told that HIV can cause up to 30 different diseases ten years after initial infection. None of these diseases are specific to AIDS; all existed prior to the “discovery” of AIDS.

6) HIV is not a new virus. When a virus is new in a population that has never been exposed to it, it explodes exponentially. But this is not what we see with AIDS. The number of AIDS cases hasn’t changed since 1985.

7) It fails Koch’s Postulates, which require four steps to verify that an infectious agent is the cause of a disease.

1. the agent must be found in all cases of the disease;

2. it must be isolated from the host;

3. it must cause the same disease when injected into a healthy host; and

4. it must then be found growing again in the newly infected host.
HIV fails all of these tests. Although theoretically it can be found and isolated from a host, this is in practice very difficult to do, since the HIV virus is not found in humans; only antibodies to HIV are found.

The history of medicine has many examples of diseases which were assumed to be infectious but later proved not to be. Scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, Beriberi is caused by a thiamine deficiency, and pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency. All failed Koch’s postulates and all ultimately proved to be non-infectious dietary deficiencies.

8) AIDS has remained in its original risk groups and has not broken out into the general population. Outside of Africa, 97% of AIDS patients are homosexuals, IV drug users, hemophiliacs and transfusion patients.

9) The US Army tests recruits for HIV and finds the virus evenly divided between men and woman, yet AIDS is 90% a male disease.

10) With other infectious diseases, cases are always seen among the doctors and nurses who work with infected patients—but this has not happened with AIDS. Medical workers are actually less likely to become sick with AIDS than the general population.

11) AIDS behaves differently depending on geography. African AIDS appears to be a completely different disease. In part, this is because in Africa, no HIV test is necessary for diagnosis. A patient is considered to have AIDS if he exhibits three of the 4 symptoms: persistent cough, persistent fever, persistent diarrhea and weight loss. These also happen to be the symptoms of malaria, malnutrition and tuberculosis, but there are no large funding programs for those diseases. If something is called AIDS, money pours in.

12) According to David Crowe, president of Rethinking AIDS, and founder and president of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, HIV is not transmitted sexually. He quotes a study done in the 90s on seroconversion in couples where one partner was HIV positive and the other HIV negative. Not a single case was found where the HIV negative partner became positive, even after years of unprotected sex.

13) Different risk groups manifest AIDS in a different way. IV drug users get tuberculosis and wasting syndrome, gays get Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Yet these specific diseases also occur in high numbers among members of these risk groups who do not have HIV infection. If an IV drug user has tuberculosis and no HIV antibodies, he is simply diagnosed with tuberculosis. If he has tuberculosis and does have HIV antibodies, he is diagnosed with AIDS. It is this method of defining AIDS that assures a high correlation between HIV infection and the constellation of diseases defined as AIDS.

14) HIV supposedly causes 30 different diseases. All other viruses cause only one disease. Duesberg: “There is no HIV specific disease anywhere.”

15) AIDS occurs without HIV infection, and 95% of those with HIV infection never get AIDS. Despite all this, it is clear that people are sick and dying. If not HIV, what are they dying from? AIDS is a condition of suppressed immunity, and there are many things that can suppress immunity. One of the worst is the HIV drug AZT, which destroys the bone marrow and which Duesberg describes as “the most toxic drug ever licensed for long term consumption in the free world.” Many people who test positive for HIV antibodies are told they must go on these dangerous drugs—even though they are completely healthy.

In a tragic case described by Celia Farber in the March 2006 Harpers magazine, Joyce Ann Hafford, a healthy 33 year old single mother, four months pregnant, was enrolled in an HIV drug trial, put on three anti-HIV drugs in June, and was dead by August 1. Although Hafford felt completely well prior to the drug trial and the drugs immediately made her violently ill, she stayed on them in the belief that she must, at all costs, prevent passing the HIV virus on to her unborn child. Hafford had only one HIV test prior to enrolling in the study, and was never told that pregnancy can cause a false positive HIV test.

According to Duesberg, recreational drug use also suppresses immunity and the gay community has, to some degree, brought their woes upon themselves. He points out that it is common knowledge that toxic foreign substances cause disease: alcohol causes cirrhosis of the liver and smoking causes emphysema. But gay activists typically dismiss it as homophobia to point out that drug use and sexual promiscuity can result in lowered immunity.

Crowe says that gay community leaders essentially had a choice between facing up to promiscuity in the gay population, or to the rampant use of recreational drugs such as inhalant nitrate poppers. They were willing to face up to the promiscuity, but not the drug use.

Because recreational drugs such as heroin, cocaine, speed and poppers suppress immunity, many gay men use large amounts of antibiotics to combat infections. Repeated antibiotic use eventually wears down the immune system.

If a gay man with a depressed immune system develops pneumonia and is found to be HIV positive, he will be diagnosed with AIDS and put on toxic HIV drugs, which will further destroy his immune system and virtually guarantee his eventual death.

According to AIDS dissidents such as Crowe and Duesberg, gay community leaders have unwittingly contributed to prolonging the fiction of a viral cause of AIDS, due to their unwillingness to confront and change the behaviors that are destroying the immune systems of gay men. Instead, they have successfully clamored for more research dollars focusing on the infectious model, drawing a disproportionate amount of funding away from other, more prevalent diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

But what about Africa? Surely there are not large numbers of Africans inhaling poppers and overloading their immune systems with antibiotics? Yet we are told that AIDS is decimating Africa, and that Africa is teeming with AIDS orphans who have lost both parents to the disease.

Yes, say the AIDS dissidents, Africans are much sicker now than they were 25 years ago. Colonialism has destroyed traditional societies, and there is rampant malnutrition, malaria, war, poverty and a lack of clean drinking water.

According to Charles Geshekter, Ph.D., a three-time Fulbright scholar who teaches African history at California State University in Chico, the current explanation for the AIDS epidemic in Africa is based on racist beliefs about African promiscuity. In fact, says Geshekter, the European communities in South Africa are far more promiscuous than the Africans, yet AIDS is practically unknown among the Europeans, who are much richer, well-fed, and have access to clean drinking water.

Also, virtually all HIV testing in Africa is done at pre-natal clinics. Although pregnancy causes high numbers of false positives, statisticians extrapolate from the tiny numbers at the clinics to the continent at large, giving the impression of a vast epidemic. In addition to pregnancy, there are 70 different conditions—including use of cosmetics and skin lighteners—that can cause false positives for the HIV antibody.

“After 25 years of a so-called epidemic, with unlimited amounts of money being spent, there is absolutely nothing to show for it,” says Geshekter. He posits that there is not supposed to be an end to the AIDS epidemic in Africa – it is just supposed to keep going. “To ask hard questions threatens the livelihood of the thousands of AIDS researchers, as well as the journalists who have won Pulitzer Prizes for conforming to the received wisdom about AIDS in Africa,” says Geshekter.

Geshekter says that humanitarian groups have a strong incentive to hide the truth about AIDS in Africa. “All the people with money in Africa are those in AIDS programs.” He goes on to explain that there is little money for organizations helping Africans build wells and improve their nutrition and sanitation—but billions upon billions poured into programs to fight AIDS. As for journalists, Geshekter states baldly that those who report the truth about AIDS lose their jobs, while massive research organizations would shrivel up and die if it became known that HIV does not cause AIDS.

The pharmaceutical companies would be wiped out by lawsuits from the survivors of the millions of people who have died after taking toxic HIV drugs, if the truth were to come out. It seems that everyone is making money from the AIDS epidemic – all at the expense of those who suffer and die from the constellation of diseases, many of them pharmaceutically induced, we call AIDS.

In 1990, Neville Hodgkinson, then medical and science correspondent of the London Sunday Times, wrote: “If HIV does not cause AIDS, then we will have witnessed the biggest medical and scientific blunder of this century.”

Eighteen years later, it seems all but certain that Hodgkinson was right.

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams and the Rock Creek Free Press. She blogs at sheilacasey.com

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God's appointed servants

God's appointed servants.... Truth....
Anyone who feels called to work for Me and to work on earth in My name always and forever has to let himself be drawn and guided by Me, he has to let Me speak to Him through the voice of His heart, he has to listen to what this voice tells him and comply with the prompting of his heart. Anyone who feels called has to stay in constant contact with Me, he has to subordinate himself unconditionally and without resistance to My will. Only then can I work through him, only then is he My servant in truth, the labourer, who conscientiously carries out the work for His Lord. However, he will feel his appointment by Me in the desire to proclaim My Word, My will.... he will feel urged to inform people about the meaning and purpose of earthly life, he will feel urged to admonish and warn them since he himself, if he has been appointed by Me to work for My kingdom, knows the pure truth and will also always want to spread it. The appointment by Me is the result of spiritual maturity which enables the human being to accept the pure truth from Me, and thus no person can ever be appointed by Me who was not taught by the spirit within himself first.

Although he is also able to accept knowledge intellectually it does not enable him to spread the truth because he does not completely recognise the truth in the knowledge he received. However, it is necessary to recognise the pure truth first before he can pass it on to his fellow human beings. And this recognition can only be imparted to him by My spirit.... The human being has to be spiritually reborn, only then will he have the right
understanding and recognition for pure truth, only then will he have been taught by Me Myself and will be able to work as My servant on earth. The inner desire to serve Me will also result in his calling by Me, because I will accept everyone who offers himself to work for My kingdom on earth and prepare him in accordance with his spiritual maturity. And if he gives himself to Me entirely he will follow the faintest prompting of his heart and thus always comply with My will when I require him to work for Me. For this reason he has to completely detach himself from the world, he has to look at his contact with Me as utmost bliss and as far as possible ignore all worldliness.

Then he will hear the spirit within himself ever more brightly and clearly and follow this voice ever more gladly, and then he will be a suitable worker for My kingdom on this earth....
Amen