Propaganda Redux

This is one article I am copying from Opinion Journal, because I want to be able to recall it. This is exactly what I have been trying to get across to people, but I do believe that someone with this type of background may have some more aurority so that the people will listen. Please do. If you do not, you do not at your own peril...and mine, too.

Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America's enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.

BY ION MIHAI PACEPA.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT.

During last week's two-day summit, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thanked President Bush for leading the global war on terror. Mr. Brown acknowledged "the debt the world owes to the U.S. for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism" and vowed to follow Winston Churchill's lead and make Britain's ties with America even stronger.

Mr. Brown's statements elicited anger from many of Mr. Bush's domestic detractors, who claim the president concocted the war on terror for personal gain. But as someone who escaped from communist Romania--with two death sentences on his head--in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a "liar," a "deceiver" and a "fraud."

I spent decades scrutinizing the U.S. from Europe, and I learned that international respect for America is directly proportional to America's own respect for its president.

My father spent most of his life working for General Motors in Romania and had a picture of President Truman in our house in Bucharest. While "America" was a vague place somewhere thousands of miles away, he was her tangible symbol. For us, it was he who had helped save civilization from the Nazi barbarians, and it was he who helped restore our freedom after the war--if only for a brief while. We learned that America loved Truman, and we loved America. It was as simple as that.

Later, when I headed Romania's intelligence station in West Germany, everyone there admired America too. People would often tell me that the "Amis" meant the difference between night and day in their lives. By "night" they meant East Germany, where their former compatriots were scraping along under economic privation and Stasi brutality. That was then.

But in September 2002, a German cabinet minister, Herta Dauebler-Gmelin, had the nerve to compare Mr. Bush to Hitler. In one post-Iraq-war poll 40% of Canada's teenagers called the U.S. "evil," and even before the fall of Saddam 57% of Greeks answered "neither" when asked which country was more democratic, the U.S. or Iraq.

Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler--as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink.

The communist effort to generate hatred for the American president began soon after President Truman set up NATO and propelled the three Western occupation forces to unite their zones to form a new West German nation. We were tasked to take advantage of the reawakened patriotic feelings stirring in the European countries that had been subjugated by the Nazis, in order to shift their hatred for Hitler over into hatred for Truman--the leader of the new "occupation power." Western Europe was still grateful to the U.S. for having restored its freedom, but it had strong leftist movements that we secretly financed. They were like putty in our hands.

The European leftists, like any totalitarians, needed a tangible enemy, and we gave them one. In no time they began beating their drums decrying President Truman as the "butcher of Hiroshima." We went on to spend many years and many billions of dollars disparaging subsequent presidents: Eisenhower as a war-mongering "shark" run by the military-industrial complex, Johnson as a mafia boss who had bumped off his predecessor, Nixon as a petty tyrant, Ford as a dimwitted football player and Jimmy Carter as a bumbling peanut farmer. In 1978, when I left Romania for good, the bloc intelligence community had already collected 700 million signatures on a "Yankees-Go-Home" petition, at the same time launching the slogan "Europe for the Europeans."

During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.

The final goal of our anti-American offensive was to discourage the U.S. from protecting the world against communist terrorism and expansion. Sadly, we succeeded. After U.S. forces precipitously pulled out of Vietnam, the victorious communists massacred some two million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Another million tried to escape, but many died in the attempt. This tragedy also created a credibility gap between America and the rest of the world, damaged the cohesion of American foreign policy, and poisoned domestic debate in the U.S.

Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, for example, Bush critics continued our mud-slinging at America's commander in chief. One speaker, Martin O'Malley, now governor of Maryland, had earlier in the summer stated he was more worried about the actions of the Bush administration than about al Qaeda. On another occasion, retired four-star general Wesley Clark gave Michael Moore a platform to denounce the American commander in chief as a "deserter." And visitors to the national chairman of the Democratic Party had to step across a doormat depicting the American president surrounded by the words, "Give Bush the Boot."

Competition is indeed the engine that has driven the American dream forward, but unity in time of war has made America the leader of the world. During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to defeat Nazism, but their country of immigrants remained sturdily united. The U.S. held national elections during the war, but those running for office entertained no thought of damaging America's international prestige in their quest for personal victory. Republican challenger Thomas Dewey declined to criticize President Roosevelt's war policy. At the end of that war, a united America rebuilt its vanquished enemies. It took seven years to turn Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into democracies, but that effort generated an unprecedented technological explosion and 50 years of unmatched prosperity for us all.

Now we are again at war. It is not the president's war. It is America's war, authorized by 296 House members and 76 senators. I do not intend to join the armchair experts on the Iraq war. I do not know how we should handle this war, and they don't know either. But I do know that if America's political leaders, Democrat and Republican, join together as they did during World War II, America will win. Otherwise, terrorism will win. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi predicted just before being killed: "We fight today in Iraq, tomorrow in the land of the Holy Places, and after there in the West."

On July 28, I celebrated 29 years since President Carter signed off on my request for political asylum, and I am still tremendously proud that the leader of the Free World granted me my freedom. During these years I have lived here under five presidents--some better than others--but I have always felt that I was living in paradise. My American citizenship has given me a feeling of pride, hope and security that is surpassed only by the joy of simply being alive. There are millions of other immigrants who are equally proud that they restarted their lives from scratch in order to be in this magnanimous country. I appeal to them to help keep our beloved America united and honorable. We may not be able to change the habits of our current political representatives, but we may be able to introduce healthy new blood into the U.S. Congress.

For once, the communists got it right. It is America's leader that counts. Let's return to the traditions of presidents who accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender from our deadly enemies. Let's vote next year for people who believe in America's future, not for the ones who live in the Cold War past.

Lt. Gen. Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc. His new book, "Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination" (Ivan R. Dee) will be published in November.

Opposition declares victory in by-election

BEIRUT (Reuters) Test of strength weeks before electing new president.

A Maronite Christian opposition candidate won a by-election to Lebanon’s parliament yesterday, an opposition leader said, dealing a blow to the country’s Western-backed ruling coalition.
Tens of thousands of Lebanese voted to choose successors to two assassinated anti-Syrian lawmakers in the latest showdown between the government and its opponents.

Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun said his candidate closely beat Amin Gemayel, a former president and a key member of the ruling coalition, in a by-election in the Metn district northeast of Beirut.

The race to win the Maronite seat left empty after Pierre Gemayel was killed in November had shaped up as a test of strength between the ruling coalition and the opposition weeks before parliament was due to elect a Maronite as president.

There was no official confirmation of Aoun’s announcement but opposition sources said Camille Khoury had won by a margin of some 500 votes from around 75,000 cast.

Earlier, unofficial results showed pro-government candidate Mohammad Amin Itani winning by a large margin the Sunni Muslim seat in a Beirut district vacated by the killing of MP Walid Eido in June.

Prime Minister Fouad Siniora hailed the peaceful by-elections as a civilised response to political assassination.

“Democracy in Lebanon will defeat terrorism,” he said in a statement.

A nine-month-old political struggle has caused the worst civil strife since the 1975-1990 war, and some feared a new outbreak of violence during voting.

But no major incidents were reported at polling stations in the Christian heartland, where turnout was reported to be at around 45 per cent.

Thousands of Lebanese troops and police tightened security in the area, where flags and posters of the rival parties adorned balconies, electricity poles and cars.

Both Aoun and Gemayel, Pierre’s father and leader of the Phalange Party, had savaged each other during campaigning and both camps exchanged charges of forgery and vote-buying on election day.

Gemayel is a key player in the anti-Syrian majority coalition, which is supported by the United States, France and Saudi Arabia. Aoun is the main Christian leader in the opposition, which includes Hizbollah.

An independent monitoring body, Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections, said the polls were generally democratic but reported some violations.

The by-election for a Sunni seat in a Beirut district to chose a successor to Eido, who was assassinated in a car bomb attack in June, was a low-key affair. The winner, Itani, is a member of the main Sunni Future group of Saad Hariri.

The opposition had not launched a full-hearted challenge in Beirut due to the support Hariri enjoyed in that district. Turnout was around 20 per cent.

“This battle is to complete (Lebanon’s) sovereignty, confirm Cedar Revolution and accomplish the goals of the independence uprising,” Gemayel said, in reference to street protests that forced Syria to end its 29-year military presence back in 2005.

“Our main goal is participation (in government). We extend our arm to all the Lebanese to rebuild Lebanon and to salvage it from this big crisis,” Khoury said after voting.

Source: Bahrain Tribune.

'Military plan against Iran is ready'

This article has been reprinted from The Jerusalem Post. Go Sen. Joe! At least someone is watching...

By YAAKOV KATZ

Predicting that Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon within three years and claiming to have a strike plan in place, senior American military officers have told The Jerusalem Post they support President George W. Bush's stance to do everything necessary to stop the Islamic Republic's race for nuclear power.

Bush has repeatedly said the United States would not allow Iran to "go nuclear."

• Israel successfully launches Ofek 7 spy satellite.
• JPost special: US candidates talk tough on Iran.

A high-ranking American military officer told the Post that senior officers in the US armed forces had thrown their support behind Bush and believed that additional steps needed to be taken to stop Iran.

Predictions within the US military are that Bush will do what is needed to stop Teheran before he leaves office in 2009, including possibly launching a military strike against its nuclear facilities.

On Sunday, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut said the US should consider a military strike against Iran over its support of Iraqi insurgents.

"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," he said. "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

According to a high-ranking American military officer, the US Navy and Air Force would play the primary roles in any military action taken against Iran. One idea under consideration is a naval blockade designed to cut off Iran's oil exports.

The officer said that if the US government or the UN Security Council decided on this course of action, the US Navy would most probably not block the Strait of Hormuz - a step that would definitely draw an Iranian military response - but would patrol farther out and turn away tankers on their way to load oil.

On Sunday, the Israel Air Force held joint exercises with visiting US pilots, but IDF sources dismissed speculation that the drills were connected to an attack on Iran.

The US officer said that perhaps even more dangerous to Israel and the Western world than Iranian nukes was the possibility that a terrorists cell associated with al-Qaida or global jihad would acquire a highly radioactive "dirty bomb" or a vial of deadly chemical or biological agents. The officer said al-Qaida was gaining a strong foothold in the Middle East and that Israel was being surrounded by global jihad elements in Lebanon, Jordan and Sinai.

"Iran is a state-sponsored type of terrorism that can be dealt with," he said, adding that it was far more difficult to strike at the source of an isolated terrorist cell.

To combat this threat, the US Navy has come up with a plan for a "1,000-ship navy" - a transnational network composed of navies from around the world that would raise awareness of maritime threats and more effectively thwart sea-based terrorism and the illicit transfer of arms by sea.

"The idea is to allow free trade and to prevent criminal and terror activity at sea," the officer said.

A smaller-scale example of the US Navy's vision is NATO's Active Endeavor antiterrorism operation based in Naples. Israel plans to send an officer to be stationed there in the coming months. NATO launched Operation Active Endeavor in wake of 9/11 and has succeeded in bringing together a number of Mediterranean countries to work together in Naples to share information on naval terrorism and suspicious vessels in the region.

Moderate Muslim Voices Silenced

Written by: Dallas News.

PBS won't show 'Islam vs. Islamists,' but you should see it, says ROD DREHER
02:19 PM CDT on Sunday, May 13, 2007

I've asked myself a thousand times since 9/11: Where are all the moderate Muslims? We're assured that there's a silent majority of Muslims who want nothing to do with the jumped-up jihadists. But those voices are few and far between.

Here's the good news: The makers of the PBS-commissioned documentary Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Center found some outspoken moderate Muslims and profiled them and their astonishing courage. The film shows these men mounting a lonely resistance against Muslim leaders in the West who are fronting a false moderate face to the public while using oil money from Gulf Arab sources to make their hard-line version of Islam the norm.

Here's the bad news: PBS refused to air the film as part of its recent "America at the Crossroads" series, even though it had been scheduled. I saw Islam vs. Islamists and concluded that it's absolutely vital to informed public debate. That PBS decided not to show, at least for now, such an important film is shocking.

Or is it? Most of the U.S. media has done a lousy job of critically covering Muslim organizations here, of asking serious questions about what their leaders believe and where they get their funding. These folks are quick to shriek "Islamophobia!" when a journalist points out their connections to radical Islam or asks straightforward questions about what they believe. The idea – and it's a successful one – is to squelch a legitimate and necessary public discussion.

As Islam vs. Islamists documents, it's a tactic they use with far less finesse on dissenting Muslims. Tarek Fatah and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, two of several moderates featured in the film, told me that the Islamophobia canard is useless against them because they are proud, practicing Muslims. Yet they say they can't get a hearing at many mosques or Islamic institutions because those places have been taken over by Islamists – adherents to a highly politicized form of the faith.

"They've basically turned our mosques into a political party of their own," says Dr. Jasser, a Phoenix physician. "We have nowhere to go to have this debate."

He's talking about the discussion regarding their religion and its role in a pluralistic society, especially in this time of war. Dr. Jasser warns that many Muslim denunciations of terrorism are deceptive.

"Terrorism is simply a means," he says. "The Muslim community has not had a debate about whether or not they endorse the ends of the Islamists" – namely, an America that is thoroughly Islamicized and organized around sharia law.

In the film, Dr. Jasser expresses confidence that most American Muslims are not violent but advises that most accept the Islamist view of world politics – conspiratorial, self-pitying and quick to blame America for all the Muslim world's problems. We also see in the movie a leading Arizona imam denouncing the reasonable and patriotic Dr. Jasser as an "extremist liberal."

Which raises a troubling question the film does not answer: How representative of the Muslim mainstream are these Muslim Which raises a troubling question the film does not answer: How representative of the Muslim mainstream are these Muslim moderates? The truth, as one counterterrorism investigator told me, is that the Jassers and Fatahs are probably in the minority – "but their voices need to be heard."

Indeed. Muslims, especially young ones, need exposure to competing voices from within their own traditions making the case for pluralism. And the rest of us need to take seriously the warnings these anti-Islamist Muslims are sounding: Muslim leaders' honeyed words when talking to the media and English-speaking audiences do not necessarily make them moderates or friends of peace.

Why would PBS not want to air this film defending moderate Muslims under attack – even facing death threats – from religious hardliners? An official at WETA, the Washington, D.C., public television station overseeing the "America at the Crossroads" series, has slighted the documentary as "alarmist," "unfair" and "irresponsible."

Nonsense – as any fair-minded viewer of the thoroughly professional film would attest, if only they could see it. Islam vs. Islamists would only appear alarmist and unfair to those whose cover it blows – and by useful media dupes willing to protect them. If PBS is too embarrassed to broadcast this movie, it should release the rights so someone else can, and let the American people can judge for themselves.

The West is waging a war of ideas with well-funded Islamists who far too often have the mainstream media on their side. If we ignore prophetic Muslim voices warning us that most Islamic leaders among us are not the gentle lambs they claim to be, and if we leave Muslim allies to fight the battle against these wolves alone, we only sabotage ourselves.

Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist. He may be reached here.

Iran lifts 9-month ban on moderate newspaper

By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Tuesday, May 15, 2007.

TEHRAN: Shargh (East), the flagship newspaper of Iran's moderates, returned to newsstands Monday after a nine-month ban to join a diverse range of other moderate titles. The return of Shargh, a newspaper with a 100,000 daily circulation that was known for its criticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government, came a day after the like-minded Ham Mihan republished after a seven-year ban. The paper has held on to the same editorial team from before the ban and is keeping the same moderate line, although its publisher vowed to work within the framework of the country's laws. "Since Shargh wants to work within the framework of the ... Iran's media policies, we will adhere to respecting people's privacy," wrote Mehdi Rahmanian in an editorial. After a series of warnings, the paper was shut down last year for printing a cartoon depicting a donkey, its head surrounded by an aura, facing a knight on a chess board. The cartoon was deemed insulting to the president who said he had felt surrounded by an aura of light during his speech to the UN General Assembly in 2005. - AFP.

Palestinian interior minister quits in protest

Compiled by Daily Star staff
Tuesday, May 15, 2007.

The Palestinian interior minister resigned on Monday, rocking a two-month-old unity government after the biggest surge in factional fighting in months revived fears of civil war.

Despite an Egyptian-brokered truce, two Palestinian gunmen and two civilians caught in crossfire were killed in clashes between the Hamas and Fatah groups in in Gaza. Nine people have been shot dead since a new round of violence erupted on Friday.

"I told all parties I cannot accept being a minister without authority," Interior Minister Hani al-Qawasmeh told a news conference after Premier Ismail Haniyya accepted his resignation.

Qawasmeh accused Palestinian both Haniyya and President Mahmoud Abbas of having failed to support him.

"From the beginning, I faced obstacles that robbed the ministry of its powers and made my position empty, without authority," he said. "I reached the conclusion the whole [security] situation is not being dealt with seriously ... The combined force that has been agreed is made up of opposing forces that are fighting as we speak."

Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti said the Cabinet decided to deploy security forces controlled by Abbas and the interior minister under one leadership. He said the forces would answer to Haniyya, who would temporarily take charge of Qawasmeh's ministry.

"We urge all factions to with-draw gunmen from [Gaza] streets," Barghouti said.

"We will not let Gaza become a new Somalia," he added. "We will attack the security mess and beat it inside its home."

Haniyya urged Palestinians to protect the power-sharing agreement and called Fatah and Hamas officials to a meeting at his office later Monday.

On the ground, masked gunmen patrolled Gaza's streets as ordinary Palestinians opted to stay indoors and keep children home from school. Shops were shuttered and taxi drivers took detours to bypass checkpoints set up by rival armed groups.

Hamas' political chief, Khaled Meshaal, said Monday he wants to keep the power-sharing government despite the renewed fighting, a report said Monday. Speaking to Japan's Kyodo News, he said that talk of the Islamists wanting a government to themselves amounted to "false reports."

"We are keen on the national unity government," Meshaal told Kyodo News, which said it conducted the interview Sunday at his base in Syria. "The problem is not between us and Fatah," he was quoted as saying.

At the center of the latest fighting is a dispute over who controls the security forces. A majority of the 80,000 forces in the occupied West Bank and Gaza are loyal to Abbas, the Fatah leader, while Hamas set up its own 6,000-strong "Executive Force" last year.

In forming their coalition in March, Hamas and Fatah put off dealing with the explosive security control problem. At the time, the two sides agreed on Qawasmeh, a long-time civil servant, as the interior minister who would be in charge of the security forces. However, there was little expectation that Qawasmeh would actually be given the authority to restore order and integrate the rival units.

Two weeks ago, a frustrated Qawasmeh threatened to resign, complaining that his plan had been ignored by both sides.

The latest round of fighting began last week after Abbas ordered the deployment of 3,000 troops in Gaza, over the objections of Hamas. Clashes intensified Sunday, with the killing of a local Fatah militant leader.

Among four killed Monday was a truck driver who was delivering bread and was struck by a stray bullet during a firefight near a Gaza City security compound. Three Fatah supporters were shot dead in clashes in Gaza City and the southern town of Khan Younis.

In one incident Sunday, two employees of a Hamas-affiliated newspaper were pulled out of a taxi at a Fatah-manned roadblock and shot dead, according to Hamas' account.

Reporters Without Borders, an international press watchdog group, expressed "deep concern" about the killing of the newspaper employees.

Earlier, sources in Fatah said tensions could lead to the collapse of the unity government within days.

Moin Rabbani, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the International Crisis Group think tank, said the new government was now in jeopardy unless it acted more decisively to exert control and overcome factionalism.

"Unless there is a real effort to resolve these issues, it could be the beginning of the end of this experiment and, should this government collapse, the situation could get very much worse," he said.

However, Abbas is unlikely to dissolve the coalition soon because it would be difficult to hold new elections in the violent climate. Hamas would certainly object to new elections after winning a four-year term in last year's vote. - Agencies.

From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype

Source: New York Times.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 13, 2007.

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”

Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”

Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.

“He’s a very polarizing figure in the science community,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. “Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.”

“An Inconvenient Truth,” directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released last May and took in more than $46 million, making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times list.

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,” he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.”

He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.

“He has credibility in this community,” said Tim Killeen, the group’s president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way.”

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, “Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,” adding that Mr. Gore often did so “better than scientists.”

Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president’s work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws.” He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

“We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is,” Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. “On the other hand,” Dr. Hansen said, “he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate.”

In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. “Of course,” he said, “there will always be questions around the edges of the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions.”

He said “not every single adviser” agreed with him on every point, “but we do agree on the fundamentals” — that warming is real and caused by humans.

Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work. “I have received a great deal of positive feedback,” he said. “I have also received comments about items that should be changed, and I have updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments.” He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.

He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, “I think that I’m finally getting a little better at it.”

While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of “shrill alarmism.”

Some of Mr. Gore’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.

It estimated that the world’s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.

Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering. “Climate change is a real and serious problem” that calls for careful analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. “The cacophony of screaming,” he added, “does not help.”

So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.

“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

“For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished himself for integrity.

“On balance, he did quite well — a credible and entertaining job on a difficult subject,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “For that, he deserves a lot of credit. If you rake him over the coals, you’re going to find people who disagree. But in terms of the big picture, he got it right.”

Zimbabwe Opposition Leader Appears in Court

Source: New York Times.

By MICHAEL WINES
Published: March 13, 2007.

JOHANNESBURG, March 13 — Limping and missing part of his hair, apparently because of a head wound, the Zimbabwe political opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai appeared in a Harare court today after being jailed and beaten for his role in a banned anti-government meeting.

He was later taken from the court to a hospital under police guard, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Tsvangirai was joined in court by scores of other opposition activists and leaders, some also injured, who had been swept up by the authorities on Sunday when riot police violently broke up the planned meeting in a poor southern Harare neighborhood called Highfields. One man was shot and killed by police.

The European Union and the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, joined the United States today in condemning the crackdown on the activists.

In a written statement, the United Nations human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, cited “shocking reports of police abuse” and called for an inquiry by Zimbabwe’s government into the violence.

The State Department earlier had called the violence brutal and unwarranted.

The Zimbabwean government of President Robert G. Mugabe did not immediately respond to the criticism.

Its crackdown on political dissent spread today to one of Mr. Mugabe’s sharpest critics, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, whose offices were raided by the government secret police, the Central Intelligence Organization.

Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian regime has come under increasing pressure in recent months, as inflation has soared and staple commodities have vanished from store shelves. According to the official estimate, which some economists say is conservative, the annual inflation rate in Zimbabwe now exceeds 1,700 percent.

On Monday, police officers remained present in force in the Highfield neighborhood of Harare, the capital, where the rally was to have taken place on Sunday, as well as in the city’s center, witnesses said.

The heavy police presence underscored the government’s determination to contain what many opposition figures and analysts say is growing unrest in the face of economic collapse.

The court appearance by opposition leaders and activists today came after the government ignored an earlier order by the nation’s High Court to allow lawyers and doctors to talk to and examine the imprisoned activists.

A second High Court order issued late on Monday demanded that the activists either be charged with offenses or released by midday today.

Mr. Tsvangirai and a second opposition leader, Arthur Mutambara, stood side by side in the courtroom today, news agencies reported, before the police cleared spectators from the building and sealed it off.

The two men lead rival factions of the Movement for Democratic Change, the only substantial and active opposition party in a nation dominated by Mr. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front.

Mr. Tsvangirai’s lawyer, Innocent Chagonda, told reporters that his client was seriously injured and in need of medical care, news agencies reported.

Mr. Tsvangirai appeared to have a head wound, and one of his eyes was swollen nearly shut, according to journalists who saw him in the courtroom before being expelled.

Another prominent civic leader, Lovemore Madhuku of the National Constitutional Assembly, was reported to be in serious condition in a Harare hospital with a fractured arm and head injuries.

Zimbabwe government officials called for the public to remain calm and accused the activists of plotting violence against the police and ordinary citizens alike.

The spokesman for Zimbabwe’s national police, Wayne Bvudzijena, said on Monday that he did not know how many people were arrested when the meeting was broken up, nor whether anyone was injured. If there were any injuries, he said, they probably stemmed from efforts to resist arrest.

“We’ve got confirmation that they are hired to go about and commit violence,” Mr. Bvudzijena said of the arrested activists in a telephone interview. “I wouldn’t know about their being injured in police custody, but the situation yesterday was that whether they were M.D.C. youths or others, they were attacking the police, resisting arrest.”

The rally in Highfield on Sunday, a rare joint effort by Zimbabwe’s feuding opposition groups, had been billed as a prayer meeting, apparently to bypass a government ban on rallies. Three weeks earlier, riot police had crushed a much larger antigovernment demonstration, but only after widespread street violence and injuries.

The police took few chances this time, cordoning off all routes into Highfield as early as two days before the meeting. Protesters who tried to enter the neighborhood were arrested, and the 200 or so who managed to gather near the rally site, a sports field, were arrested or driven away.

The police shot and killed one protester. Mr. Bvudzijena said the man had been leading a crowd that was throwing stones and other objects at the riot police. Three police officers were injured in the disturbance, he said.

On Monday, the nation’s High Court ordered the police to allow lawyers access to Mr. Tsvangirai, Reuters reported. Before then, lawyers were not allowed to talk to any of the jailed protesters, said Beatrice Mtetwa, an attorney for some of the activists, and Alec Muchadehama, a lawyer for Mr. Tsvangirai.

Mr. Muchadehama said that the police allowed a second lawyer to see Mr. Tsvangirai at a distance, and that the activist leader seemed to have suffered a deep head wound.

Mr. Madhuku surrendered peacefully to the police on Sunday afternoon, the official of his organization said. “We have not been able to talk to him,” the official said, “but we can only speculate that his injuries happened in his cell, because he didn’t have much resistance to his arrest.”

The violence drew a sharp response from a spokesman at the State Department, who said the United States was shocked by the reports of injuries to protesters.

“This is unfortunately, again, just another example of the increasingly harsh treatment that those wishing to express opposition political views face under President Mugabe,” said a department spokesman, Tom Casey.

Rain Forests, It Seems, Need the Dry Season

Source: New York Times.

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: March 13, 2007.

To the uninitiated, the Amazon rain forests are a vast ocean of trees that are unchanging throughout the year.

Scientists know better. Like trees in more temperate regions, those in the tropics display what is called phenological behavior — budding and other events that recur seasonally.

“We always find there seems to be some sort of seasonality” in the rain forests, said Ranga B. Myneni, a professor in the department of geography and environment at Boston University, that corresponds to the rainy and dry (or rather, not so rainy) seasons.

But the overall impact of this seasonal behavior has been largely unstudied. Now, Dr. Myneni and other researchers have discovered one effect: leaf area in the Amazon changes significantly between wet and dry seasons.

The researchers used data from NASA’s Terra satellite, which can measure reflected sunlight from the ground at various frequencies, to analyze the “greenness” of given areas over time.

They found that compared with the annual average, the Amazon had 25 percent more leaf coverage in the dry season and 25 percent less in the rainy season. The findings are reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Myneni said the results were counterintuitive, because rain forest trees have been thought to be limited by available water.

But the study shows that the trees are worse off in the rainy season, when many leaves die but relatively few new ones are produced. In the dry season they thrive; far more new leaves are produced than are shed, allowing the tree to benefit from the season’s increased sunlight. In fact, Dr. Myneni said, it appears that the trees anticipate the dry season, putting out leaves earlier, suggesting that they have evolved to take maximum advantage of the light.

The findings show that water is not the limiting factor. “These plants are kind of clever,” Dr. Myneni said. “They have deep roots and are able to tap water deep in the soil. What’s really limiting them is light.”

The results also may help answer a longstanding question as to how the rainy season starts. More leaves mean more water vapor in the atmosphere through transpiration. So the additional growth during the dry season, Dr. Myneni said, “seems to be a strong driver for triggering the onset of the wet.”

Urban Ants Take the Heat

There may be some remaining pockets of resistance to the idea that the planet is heating up, but no one can deny that cities have been growing warmer. Urban areas can be as much as 20 degrees hotter than nearby rural ones, a result, among other factors, of all that concrete and asphalt pumping out heat as sunlight hits it.

Sweltering temperatures affect humans, of course, but are there other biological consequences of what are known as urban heat islands? A study by Michael J. Angilletta Jr. of Indiana State University and colleagues shows that there is. Urban ants, they report in PLoS Biology, can stand the heat better than those from out of town.

The researchers studied leaf-cutter ants in and around São Paulo, Brazil, where surface temperatures at midday in summer can rise above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. This is hot enough to stop an ant in its tracks, so ants that can better tolerate heat would be better able to reach shelter as temperatures approached the danger point.

To compare the heat-tolerating abilities of urban and rural ants, the researchers exposed both to temperatures near the maximum, about 108 degrees, and measured how long it took before they became immobilized. Ants from within São Paulo lasted 20 percent longer than those from rural areas outside the city.

The researchers say they do not know whether the difference in tolerance has been wired into the ants genetically or whether it is more that all individuals can become acclimatized to environmental conditions.

Either way, they say, their study shows that urban heat can affect species. And since, when it comes to warming, cities are far ahead of the rest of the globe, studies like this can give researchers an idea of the types of changes that may occur with other species as the whole planet heats up.

Arsenic Levels in Rice

Rice may be a great accompaniment to a main dish, but some rice apparently comes with an accompaniment of its own — the toxic element arsenic.

In the journal Environmental Science and Technology, P. N. Williams and colleagues at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland report on a study of rice bought at American supermarkets. Comparing products from the nation’s two major growing regions, the researchers found that rice from South-Central states like Arkansas and Louisiana had about 30 micrograms of arsenic per gram, or nearly twice the level found in rice from California.

The most likely reason for the difference, the researchers say, is that rice growers in South-Central states are increasingly using old cotton fields, where years of application of inorganic arsenic as a pesticide has contaminated the soils.

Arsenic is a carcinogen and can cause skin, reproductive, developmental and other disorders. Given that most Americans do not eat large amounts of rice, the arsenic levels in the tested rice may not result in excessive exposure to arsenic.

But the researchers note that some population subgroups — among them Hispanics, Asian-Americans and people who suffer from celiac disease and must avoid wheat products — eat much more rice on average. So for them, the researchers calculate, exposure may exceed the limits established for arsenic intake from water, the main source of the element for most Americans.

Satellite Resuscitation

It’s a sad fact of orbital life, but all satellites eventually die, eventually running out of propellant or other consumables needed to keep them in orbit.

But a satellite experiment launched last week called the Orbital Express has the potential to change that. The experiment, the work of NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will test the robotic repair and refueling of satellites in orbit.

It consists of two satellites, one carrying extra propellant and batteries and equipped with a small robotic arm. The two spacecraft will practice autonomous rendezvous and docking maneuvers, and the servicing satellite will try to transfer propellant and batteries to the other.

Frostbite Ends Bancroft - Arnesen Trek

Source: New York Times.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 12, 2007.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

"Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.

On Monday, the pair was at Canada's Ward Hunt Island, awaiting a plane to take them to Resolute, Canada, where they were to return to Minneapolis later this week.

Bancroft, 51, became the first woman to cross the North Pole on a 1986 expedition. She and Arnesen, 53, of Oslo, Norway, were the first women to ski across Antarctica in 2001.

But the latest trek got off to a bad start. The day they set off from Ward Hunt Island, a plane landing near the women hit their gear, punching a hole in Bancroft's sled and damaging one of Arnesen's snowshoes.

They repaired the snowshoe with binding from a ski, but Atwood said the patch job created pressure on Arnesen's left foot, which led to blisters that then turned into frostbite.

Then there was the cold -- quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.

"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.

She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen's foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze.

The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft's 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.

Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.

"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."