HAARP – Shahidul News

THE POLITICS OF WEATHER: LOCAL AND GLOBAL

`Owning’ the weather??PART IX

By Rahnuma Ahmed

Does something lie behind the global warming agenda, behind the UN Summit at Copenhagen where world leaders had met to agree on how to tackle global climate change? Has weather warfare, as Michel Chossudovsky, director, Global Research (Canada), asks us, already started?
Some observers think, climate wars, caused by uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions, are the future. That the world will be ravaged by wars over land, food and water, forcing countries to use the military to barricade borders.
This scenario?climate wars caused by global warming?is distinct from the weather warfare one, which is related to planned projections of `owning’ the weather, of developing technologies which `weaponise’ the weather (`Weather as a Force Multiplier. Owning the Weather in 2025,’ US Air Force commissioned study, 1996). This is real, admittedly so, by top-ranking US policy makers. By Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor, “techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm” (1970). By William Cohen, former US secretary of defence, “alter[ing] the climate, set[ting] off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electro-magnetic waves…It’s real” (1997). By US Admiral Pier Saint-Armand, “We regard the weather as a weapon” (US Senate, 1972).
A reality further attested to by the ratification of an international Convention by the UN General Assembly, the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (Geneva: 18 May 1977), one to which both the US and Soviet Union were signatories.
I find it interesting that both global warming and ENMOD are assumed to lead to similar environmental disasters?droughts, storms, hurricanes, earthquakes?and thereby, to untold human suffering, but that global summits and international meetings express an orchestrated alarm over only set of anthropogenic activities, i.e., CO2 emissions. No mention of warfare. Of depleted uranium. Or CO2 emissions caused by warfare in Iraq. The Pentagon’s daily fuel consumption. Or, for that matter, HAARP.
Many scientists and climatologists have repeatedly pointed out that climate change is a misnomer because climates do change. Should change. That change, for God’s sake, is natural. Climate science, they say, is in its infancy. We know very little. In such a situation, to commit the whole planet to policies that are extensive and far-reaching?and in reality, are based on shaky scientific findings, the result of computer modelling, simulation exercises, anecdotal evidence, and worse still, what we now know post-CRU, that the data was forced to fit a pre-determined theory, that the raw data of temperature records was not stored but (horror of horrors) deleted?is downright stupid.
And close on the heels of Climategate were a series of other `gates,’ Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pachaurigate. Okay, we should have learnt our lesson, no rush. Calm down. Go slow.
But, as Andrew Orlowski points out, Climategate raises far more questions than it answers. How did such a small group of scientists, backing a new theory, in an infant field, come to have such a huge effect on global policy making? Why is the climate debate beset with “a sense of crisis and urgency, and the ascendancy of a quite specific and narrow set of policy options”? Why has it become the “Rosetta stone” of a whole political and business movement? Does the answer lie (only) in the billions to be made from carbon trading, predicted to become the world’s largest commodity market 5 years from now, worth $10 trillion?
There was another leak at Copenhagen in December 2009, the Danish text leak. Taken together with the CRU e-mail, close watchers are more convinced than ever that these are the acts of whistle-blowers, of dissident insiders. An idea difficult to stomach for those who think that dissidence belongs to the Cold War era. To people yearning to be free of the Iron Curtain. To flock to the `free world.’
Developing countries reacted furiously to the leaked draft agreement. It proposed to hand more power to rich nations. To sideline the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations. To abandon the Kyoto protocol, the only legally binding treaty on emissions reductions. It “force[d] developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement.” It proposed a green fund, to be run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (a partnership of 10 agencies including the WB and the UN Environmental Programme). It sought to put “constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.”? According to a diplomat, “being done in secret” it is effectively “the end of the UN process” (Guardian, December 8, 2010).
Pray, to be replaced by what? The UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon spoke of a global governance structure. ?The new EU president Herman van Rompuy said, it was another step towards the global management of our planet. Global governance and global agreements, said Al Gore. at 1:14 mts
Billed by the UN as possibly the most important meeting in the history of the world, the leaks, says Alex Jones (an American talk radio host and filmmaker, violently anti-communist he describes himself as an “aggressive constitutionalist”) discredited the globalists. It exposed the conspiracy of the international elite, a group of industrialists and bankers, to secretly institute a regime of global authority and global rule by an unelected bureaucracy. To scare the “world population into relinquishing their rights and turning it over to an IMF-World Bank elected government that taxes the West, then takes that money, and turns it back to third world and first world nations and then makes those nations agree to a list of demands to destroy their industrial capacity which will result in a death sentence.” To institute a system of climate colonialism. To conceal the fact that while the World Bank chief revels in biofuels having boosted food prices, ethanol production in the US took a third of grain production out, causing an additional 10 million people to starve to death in 2008. The Copenhagen summit, says Jones, was undoubtedly a massive failure. The conspiracy to coopt national sovereignty and elected governments, to force the people of the world to live under structures like the European Union which has forced Europeans to lose their sovereignty to “unelected bureaucrats in Brussels” was successfully resisted. But these elites will try again, this year. In Mexico. The fight against the usurpation of civil liberties and sovereignty, says Jones, must go on.
Has weather warfare really started? Some HAARP-watchers think that the earthquake in Sichuan province in China, which killed 68,000 people, was not natural. They cite the observance of luminous, glowing cloud-like phenomena in the sky 30 minutes before the earthquake took place on May 12, 2008 (recorded by cellphone in Gansu province 450 km northeast of epicenter). According to Epoch Times, several weeks after the quake, high-level Chinese military sources secretly disclosed that it had destroyed the Chinese army’s largest armory, new weapons test bases, and part of nuclear facilities including several nuclear warheads. Initial calls for help were reportedly ignored by the Chinese authorities for the first 72 hours because they did not want “potential spies from the outside world” snooping around. The presence of concrete debris, including concrete slabs and blocks, reported by witnesses, have led some experts to think that a nuclear explosion had occurred near the epicenter, that the concrete belonged to the concrete cover of underground military bases. News of nuclear explosion has raised questions about cause-and-effect: whether a nuclear explosion caused the earthquake or the earthquake caused the explosion. A nuclear accident was also said to have occurred, 2,700 chemical workers were sent to parts of the earthquake-hit area to help cleanup.

On May 23, 2008, a chemical defense troop of the Chinese army was deployed to Chenjiaba Township, Beichuan County. (The Epoch Times) Benjamin Fulford, a Japan-based journalist, claimed in early 2007 that while interviewing Heizo Takenaka, a former finance minister in Japan, he confronted Takenaka, and accused him of “having sold the Japanese financial system over to the Rockefellers and Rothschilds.” According to Fulford, Takenaka’s response had been that a group representing ?American and European oligarchs? had used the threat of manmade earthquakes in an attempt to pressure the Japanese government to ?hand over control of the Japanese financial system.? Japan had intially refused, only to relent after the July 17, 2007 Niigata earthquakes. I have not come across any refutation or rejoinder of Fulford’s claims/allegations by any Japanese government spokesperson. Fulford further says, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake had coincided with the BRIC meeting [Brazil-Russia-India-China]. Two days before it took place, a Taiwanese satellite had reportedly “detected a 50% drop in the amount of electric energy in the ionosphere above the earthquake zone.? Working on the Weather series, and writing it has not been easy. Least of all, because as I explained to Anu Mohammed, who had called to tell me that he was eagerly reading each instalment, But Anu, I am not into weather and climate and such stuff. I’d only thought of writing about the earthquake in Haiti. But what I don’t understand is what on earth are our climate activists doing? The people on whom we rely to inform and educate us, to tell us what the score is, so that we can create well-informed demands in our struggle for social justice. I will skip what Anu replied. Shireen Huq, another friend said, I’m sure our climate activists have contacted you… No Shireen, I replied, no one has. I don’t expect anyone to, either. I think they are too busy regurgitating what’s said at international conferences and seminars. But I want to be proven wrong. There’s too much at stake. Published in New Age 29 March 2009

`Owning' the weather? PART V Katrina and Haiti

By Rahnuma Ahmed

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present?and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, US President (1953-61), and five-star general in US army
Jerry E Smith thinks there is a “scientific-technological elite” in the US. Precisely the kind of elite which Eisenhower had spoken of in his farewell address to the nation, nearly half a century ago (17 January 1961). One to which, not only American public policies, but global ones too, have become captive.
Smith, a writer, editor and activist for over three decades, is the author of Weather Warfare: The Military’s Plan to Draft Mother Nature (2006), and HAARP. The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy (1998).
In a conference organised by Adventures Unlimited titled, `HAARP and the ultimate weapon of the conspiracy,’ Smith speaks of war and how changing weaponries through human history have impacted on the way war is fought: “Whenever you change the way fundamentally that war is fought, it’s called Revolution in Military Affairs, an RMA, and I believe we are in the 7th or 8th one in recorded history. The invention of gunpowder or the realisation that gunpowder could be used in warfare, created an RMA. The development of bows and arrows created an RMA and so forth. We stand now on a new RMA, in fact right after the fall of the Soviet Union, RMA was the hot topic in military intelligentsia circles. The war college circles and so forth were cranking out a large number of papers on this subject. One of the aspects of this that I find most disturbing, we went from weapons that could target individuals, swords, bows, guns, to weapons that could target groups of individuals, Greek fire, artillery. [We then went] to weapons that could target whole battlefields, i.e., the chemical weapons. And then we went on to those that could target whole cultures, whole ethnicities, i.e., the biological weapons; the atomic weapons are somewhat in-between. Now we are at the point where with the electromagnetic weapons we can target the whole planet. We can target whole continents, whole hemispheres.
“The guys at the Strategic Studies Institute who wrote this paper, titled:
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Electromagnetic Weapons.
The Revolution in Military Affairs and Conflicts Short of War
came up with a very interesting realisation… that the kinds of technologies we were developing, the kinds of weapons they were working on, were contrary to American morals and beliefs. And so, what was their contention, what did they say? [Did they say] Oh my gosh, this is immoral, we can’t do this? No. [Instead] they said, how do we change America, so that America will be willing to accept us playing with these toys. This is the tail wagging the dog. And this is that aspect [which I find most disturbing], we are being fed a world of disinformation on a continuing basis, because the military planners are re-designing our thinking to let them go forward in playing with these toys.”
As I watch and transcribe Smith’s lecture on You Tube, I think, so, is the `war on terror’ part of this re-design? Listening to Smith talking of `disinformation’ leads me to musing about why a scientist as brilliant as Nikola Tesla, is so unknown. Tesla, after all, had not only invented fluorescent lighting, the Tesla induction motor, the `Tesla’ coil (still used in radio, TV sets, other electronic equipment), the alternating current (AC) electrical supply system, 3-phase electricity,?but also the modern radio (no, not Marconi). Further, he is said to have invented a particle beam weapon, which some call a ?peace ray,? while others, a “death ray” . In theory, it was capable of generating an intense, targeted beam of energy and sending it across great distances to demolish warplanes, foreign armies. He is also said to have invented a doomsday device which could disrupt all communication systems on Earth, an idea long kept secret by the US government.
Most probably, I think, it was because of his invention of `free energy.’ If this line of research had been pursued, writes Ken Adachi on the basis of Dr Peter Lindemann’s meticulous research, “Unlimited electricity could be made available anywhere and at any time, by merely pushing a rod into the ground and turning on the electrical appliance.” (The Free Energy Secrets of Cold Electricity, lecture, 2000).
Free energy, derived from nature. For all. But surely initiating that kind of a revolution wouldn’t have appealed to the scientific-technological elite, would it?
Climate and weather are two different things, says Smith. Climate is what one expects, while weather is what one gets. Mainstream science recognises that human beings have the ability to alter the weather intentionally, only on a limited scale, and unintentionally, on a vastly larger scale. But the fact is, says Smith, “what can be done intentionally is far greater than what the mainstream is willing to or able to admit.” ?And there are, as Smith points out, a lot of intentional players around: academic, commercial and military. Who have a lot of intended objectives: financial, militaristic and political. To be acheived irrespective of the human costs involved. But no, actually, from the perspective of the scientific-technological elite, it is this wondrous humanity that is the problem. After all, as former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger had put it, the world’s population needs to be decreased by 50 percent. Population increases, he had asserted, harm US national security interests. ?(He too had received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1973).
In Weather Warfare, Smith provides instances of “earthquakes on demand”: (a) the development of a “tsunami bomb” during World War II (revealed in documents recently declassified by the New Zealand government) (b) Project Faultless, which had caused a massive earthquake in the Nevada desert after a high yield atom bomb was intentionally detonated on a fault line. Smith also provides evidence of human initiation of several major quakes, and the 2004 Christmas tsunami, with “scalar” or other electromagnetic waves.
“There was nothing natural about the disaster that befell New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath,” writes James Ridgeway (Mother Jones, 28 August 2009). Four years later, “confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways,” it increasingly becomes clear that what had taken place in this devastated American city was “no less than a war” where the victims were treated as enemies of the state. Their only crime was being black. Being poor.
“Every 30 or 40 minutes someone was dying,” recollects Marc Creswell, an Acadian medic. The company sent in outside doctors and nurses. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) rejected the help. “When the doctors asked why they couldn’t help these critically ill people lying there unattended, the FEMA people kept saying, ‘You’re not federalized.’ ” I scan through headlines reporting FEMA failures, in the major media:
FEMA refuses hundreds of personnel, dozens of vehicles – Chicago Tribune, 9/2/05
FEMA won’t let Red Cross deliver food – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/3/05
FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board – Chicago Tribune, 9/4/05
FEMA turns away state-of-the-art mobile hospital from Univ. of North Carolina – CNN, 9/5/05

Tank Haiti — A US Army soldier speaks on a radio on the top of a military vehicle in downtown Port-au-Prince, Tuesday. Thousands of US troops arrived to the country after the Jan. 12 earthquake to treat the wounded, distribute relief supplies, clear roads and direct air traffic. ?Ramon Espinosa/AP

FEMA won’t accept Amtrak’s help in evacuations – Financial Times, 9/5/05
FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks – New York Times, 9/6/05
FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel – New York Times, 9/6/05
FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid – News Sentinel, 9/8/05
FEMA asks media not to take pictures of dead – Washington Post, 9/8/05
FEMA turns back German government plane loaded with 15 tons of food – Spiegel, 9/12/05
While civilian aid for victims was made scarce, private security forces already had boots on the ground. As Jeremy Scahill reported in The Nation, Blackwater (re-named Xe) had set up an HQ in downtown New Orleans. Members of this private militia company were armed, and operated, as in Iraq: automatic rifles, guns strapped to legs, pockets overflowing with ammo, driving around in SUVs and unmarked cars with no license plates. When asked one of them replied: We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary.
And the US government’s response to the earthquake in Haiti, on Jan 12 this year? A massive deployment of military hardware and personnel. Nine to ten thousand troops, including 2000 marines. Overall humanitarian operation led by the Pentagon. Dominant decision making role entrusted to US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). The US, as the French cooperation minister remarked before being quickly shushed-up, seemed to be `occupying’ rather than helping Haiti. But why on earth would the US want to occupy a poor, impoverished nation like Haiti?
Haiti, according to recent revelations, has oil reserves which in comparison to Venezuela’s are like an Olympic swimming pool is to a glass of water. The US, according to Haitian scholar Dr. Georges Michel, has known of Haiti’s oil and natural gas reserves since 1908. After completing their explorations in the 1950s, they locked up what had been discovered, as “strategic reserves for the US.” To be tapped only when Middle Eastern oil becomes less available. Other Haitian scholars add, not only oil, but also Haiti’s strategic position, cheap labor, deep water ports, mineral resources (iridium, gold, copper, uranium, diamond, gas reserves, zyconium deposits), lands, waterfronts, offshore resources for privatization or the exclusive use of the world’s wealthy oligarchs and US big oil monopolies.
As I come across news reports, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez says the US was playing God by testing weapon that caused Haiti quake (Russia TV), I cannot help but trace parallels in the US government’s response to the disasters in Katrina and Haiti. The former seems to have been a dress rehearsal for the latter. Re-designing our thinking. The project of domination, as Eisenhower had put it.
Published in New Age 1 March 2010

`Owning' the weather? PART IV: More on HAARP

By Rahnuma Ahmed

It all began with the Haiti earthquake.
I must write about it, I thought. Soon after I began researching, I came across HAARP. And then, across a 1996 report for the US Air Force which looked forward to the idea of `owning the weather’ by 2025. Through capitalising on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications.., so it read.
Readers know the rest. I have already written three instalments, with several more to follow. The more I read, the more I uncover connections. More stories need to be told, I tell myself.
When I began writing this series?one which promises to be longer than the one on Pakistan, `The Unfolding Crisis in Pakistan,’ 4 parts, New Age, 11-19 May 2009?I had not been able to foresee the number of pieces I’d be writing. Now, midway through the series, I’ve become worried about the absence of sub-titles as it might make it difficult for readers to trace what lies in individual pieces. Hence I backtrack, I want to give Part I a sub-title, `Laying the Groundwork,’ to Part II, `Weather Warfare,’ and to Part III, `HAARP and weaponising the ionosphere.’ The sub-title of today’s instalment, Part IV, is `More on HAARP.’
Earthquakes, as Jason Jeffrey points out in a piece in New Dawn, a journal of alternative news and information, are not only natural, i.e., those caused by the movement of tectonic plates over the Earth’s mantle, but can also be the result of human effort.
Officially-speaking, earthquakes can be induced by:
(a) fluid injection into the Earth. For instance, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a chemical weapons manufacturing centre operated by the US Army in Colorado where a deep injection well had been constructed for testing purposes; the periods and amounts of injected waste coincided with the frequency and magnitude of quakes in the Denver area, 1962-65
(b) fluid extraction from the Earth e.g., at certain geothermal power plants
(c) mining or quarrying for e.g., removal of natural gas from subsurface deposits, such as, in northern Netherlands where 10 quakes have occurred since gas drilling began in 1986
(d) nuclear testing e.g., the detonation of a 50 megaton bomb code-named Ivan in the Soviet Union in 1961; it produced a seismic shock so powerful that it was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth, and
(e) the construction of dams and reservoirs for e.g., the 128 meter high Kariba dam in Zambia; since its construction the Kariba reservoir, which is located in a tectonically active area, has caused numerous earthquakes, 20 of them larger than 5 on the Richter scale.
Earthquakes can also be induced, as part of weather warfare. According to critics of HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program), the physics of HAARP and the political agenda behind the programme suggest that weather and earthquake manipulation is “both possible and likely.”

: Bernard Eastlund, the patent holder of HAARP, 2nd from left (others are, Scott Stevens, Richard Heene and Barb Slusser). November 4, 2007, Saint Louis in Missouri, USA.

But its defenders, disagree. The amount of energy at the project’s disposal is “miniscule compared to the colossal energies dumped into the atmosphere by solar radiation and thunderstorms.” Ionospheric heating cannot be performed while the sun illuminates the ionosphere. There is “no serious scientific evidence” to support the accusation (or, others equally “exotic”) that the 2003 North America blackout had been caused by HAARP. Supporters further say, aeronomers and space-physicists, who have “a solid understanding of the accusations levelled against HAARP” reject the criticisms as “utter nonsense.” As they do Dr Nick Begich Jr.’s book, Angels Don’t Play HAARP (1995), which, I read in a website, is distributed and privately “ridiculed”. HAARP enthusiasts add, the scientific community does not feel called upon to defend the programme since those who do so lack a “sufficient understanding of science to criticize HAARP competently.”
As I crawl through various websites, I muse to myself, if teacher, author, activist, executive director of the Lay Institute of Technology Inc., Dr Nick Begich Jr.,? who has a doctorate in traditional medicine (also, is the son of a US Congressman) can be subjected to “ridicule” for daring to criticise HAARP, how can I, and others like me, venture to discuss high tech weapons of weather warfare, we, who are not scientists?
But, I think, surely a social science background provides one with the intellectual resources to raise questions from the other end, to seek answers which will aid in gaining a more total understanding of things: such as, who are these HAARP supporters?these scientists with a solid understanding?in a social sense? What economic backgrounds do they come from, what networks of power are they embedded in? I may not understand science, but surely, I understand politics? At least, sufficiently, to know that when questions such as those that are being raised about HAARP and weather warfare are dismissed straightaway and labelled “exotic” by solid scientists?without taking the politics, both past and present, of the military-industrial complex (or, military-industrial-media-entertainment complex, as recent analysts say) that the US has become?it is, by the standards of solid social science, strange. It is suspect. Like others who are close observers of contemporary politics, I know that it is important to delve not only into history but also into the philosophy of science, into issues of epistemology and ethics, into the culture of science (a rapidly-burgeoning field within anthropology). And of course, being interested in the culture of science would also mean being interested in issues to do with hierarchies within the scientific profession. The ideologies of scientific practice. The politics of research funding. And in matters such as these, as international relations theorist Steve Smith reminds us, the stakes are “high.” Those who swim outside “safe waters” risk more than simply the judgment that their theories are wrong. Their entire ethical or moral stance may be ridiculed. Or, seen as dangerous. (Interestingly enough, Dr Nick Begich Jr’s Wikipedia Biography has been deleted).
Nikola Tesla, it is said, is one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists. But Tesla had never gained the recognition that he deserved, not even to this day, because his scientific breakthroughs were considered to be too sensitive by corporate and government forces. Fascinated with the power of resonance, Tesla had built mechanical vibrators to test their powers. Once, in his Manhattan lab, he attached a powerful little vibrator driven by compressed air to a steel pillar, and went out on some work. “A violent quaking built up, shaking down plaster, bursting plumbing, cracking windows, and breaking heavy machinery off its anchorages.” It seems that Tesla had set off a small earthquake, and soon, his building started to quake. When the police broke into his lab they found him? smashing his own device with a sledge hammer. It was the only way he could promptly stop it.
Tesla?s ?experiments in transmitting mechanical vibrations through the Earth… were roughly described by the scientists as a sort of controlled earthquake? (?Tesla?s Controlled Earthquakes,’ New York American , July 11, 1935). An article published in Specula magazine described an incredibly profound phenomenon that could be produced within the Earth, as the ?Tesla Effect? (January 1978). Tesla himself, it is said, expressed grave concerns about the effects of this technology. Once it begins vibrating within the Earth, it is the type of thing which could easily get out of control. His worry was that it could actually cause the Earth to vibrate to pieces.
The key technology behind HAARP is the brainchild of American physicist Bernard J Eastlund (1938-2007); the major inspiration for Eastlund?s ionospheric heater was Tesla as is stated in his patent, “Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere; and/or Magnetosphere” (U.S. Patent # 4,686,605), which was sealed for a year under a government Secrecy Order.
Published in New Age, 23 February 2010
(more, next week)

`Owning' the weather? Part III

By Rahnuma Ahmed

“Primarily the work is aimed at giving the US Navy and the other armed forces, if they should care to use it, the capability of modifying the environment, to their own advantage, or to the disadvantage of an enemy. We regard the weather as a weapon. Anything one can use his way is a weapon and the weather is as good a one as any” (emphasis added).

— Admiral Pier Saint-Amand, Naval Ordinance Laboratory in China Lake, California?(conducted research on cloud seeding; applied in Vietnam, Cambodia).?Quoted in US Senate, Subcommittee on Oceans and International Environment, 26 July 1972.

“If the Americans cannot stop such hostile weather from devastating their own country, it will be naive to think they can play God to control the nature. By writing about controlling weather, Rahnuma Ahmed is giving Americans supernatural powers they cannot even dream of,” thus concluded Mahmood Elahi in his letter, published in New Age on 10 February 2010.
A serious allegation, indeed. It is my act of writing that is to blame, it is this which makes Americans powerful… In earlier times, those who delivered bad news were beheaded. I should surely consider myself fortunate.
But I couldn’t help thinking, all those days and weeks spent in researching, in poring over official reports, cross-checking news items, watching videos, transcripting?all in vain. There was no need to engage, neither with what key US policy-makers and high-up administration officials have written or said, such as, Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Cohen. Nor with the European parliament’s concerns over HAARP. Nor the evidence advanced by a host of keen observers including reputable academics like Michel Chossudovsky.
But before responding to Mr Elahi’s comments I would like to thank him for having read my piece, for having taken the trouble to comment. Acknowledging this, before pointing out areas of disagreement, is important.
Elahi writes, blizzards, floods and hurricanes?the likes of some have never been seen before?have caused devastation in the US this year. Interestingly enough, this observation matches what Chossudovsky says when he writes, extreme and unusual weather patterns have ravaged not only the US, but every major region of the world over the last couple of years (`Owning’ the Weather?, Part 1, February 1, 2010). Based on a close and careful scrutiny of evidence, Chossudovsky goes on to argue that both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to `manipulate the World’s climate.’ That weather warfare, in all probability, has already started. That although global warming is important, it is highly unlikely that it is the one and only cause for these disturbances.
Elahi assumes that I am writing about `control’ rather than `ownership’ (the two are separate concepts); from this mistaken assumption, he quickly dismisses the possibility that weather modification techniques exist. If they did, surely the Americans would have deployed them to prevent devastation in Washington DC, California, Nevada, Dakota, and southern California? Controlling nature is an act of God; for me to think otherwise?that human beings have devised techniques to control weather?is nothing short of naivete.
If careful research is countered with an incredulous disbelief based on common-sensical thinking, surely Americans, surely God… what else can I do but point out how some had insisted, many moons ago, if God had intended people to fly, He would surely have given them wings. But later, as we all know, aeroplanes were invented. People did fly. They still do. As for the `surely Americans’ argument, the idea that Americans are undivided, that both rulers and ruled work in concert for their common good… well, even stalwart supporters of the US regime have recently struggled exceedingly hard to maintain this myth. The federal bailout of Wall Street?according to Troubled Asset Relief Program estimates, $23.7 trillion?has led to immiseration and impoverishment of the majority, and to multi-million dollar bonuses for (failed)/bank executives. Surely `the’ Americans could have acted to prevent their country’s economic ruin?
But I am not done with God. Not yet. HAARP watchers and analysts are persuaded that the idea that (only) God can control nature, provides the perfect cover for HAARP. In this context, some even cite former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s assertion, expressed in policy documents: “depopulation” should be the highest in US foreign policy priorities towards third world countries. Population increases harm US “national security” interests; they need to be decreased by 50%. “Progress… must be made,” Kissinger asserts, in Bangladesh and in 12 other countries where “population moderation” must be assisted (National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests, 1974).
To persuade skeptics, HAARP watchers argue: if what the former US secretary of defence William Cohen had said was true, that eco-terrorists can alter the climate, that they can remotely set off earthquakes and volcanoes through the use of electromagnetic waves, it is difficult to believe that the American government, more so, the American military has stayed away from developing these techniques. The US armed forces, in the words of Admiral Pier Saint-Amand quoted above, regards “the weather as a weapon.”

Ionosphere 1 — ?http://www.viewzone.com/haarp.skip.gif

Ionosphere 2 — http://www.viewzone.com/haarp.lens.gif

The idea of weaponising weather was enabled through patenting technology invented by Bernard Eastlund, a physicist, in the 1980s, of which has been said, “when eventually disclosed, [it] will render many of Albert Einstein’s innovations obsolete.” Eastlund’s patents have been sealed under a US Secrecy Order. His discovery involves beaming High Frequency (HF) and Extremely High Frequency (EHF) waves, of extremely high power, directly at a point on the ionosphere which becomes heated as a result of the accumulating electrical energy. One might think of it as “cooking” the ionosphere.
How does HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) work? The most easily understood explanation that I have come across, developed for lay persons, describes it thus: The site, officially located in Gakona, Alaska, consists of a collection of antennae, arranged in a computer-controlled grid, known as a “phased array” which has the ability to focus radio signals in a precise direction, without turning the antennae. The phased array is not a radar but it uses some of the same extremely high frequencies (EHF) to focus a powerful radio beam to specific locations in the Earth’s ionosphere. The latter is a highly charged layer of atmosphere (particles or `ions’) about 60 miles above surface which reflects short wave radio waves. EHF waves are much shorter than short waves, they are said to propagate along the “line of sight,” retaining their strength over long distances, much like the antenna of a satellite TV dish, which as we know needs to be pointed in the direction of the satellite. (http://www.viewzone.com/haarp11.html)
At the Gakona site, High Frequency transmitting antenna are located in environmentally protected domes. Thousands of antennae focus billions of watt into a pencil thin stream that is steered by computers and aimed at the sky. The following three phases, helps to describe how weather is modified to turn into a weapon of warfare:

Heating Radio waves cause the ionosphere to increase in height and to be better able to absorb and store the energy.?A small area of the ionosphere is heated with HF radio waves.?Bilions of watts heat the ionosphere to form a bubble

Random pulsing The bubble accumulates and amplifies enormous energy.?Phased array systems like the one that is operational in Alaska are computer controlled and focus their powerful radio beams on the atmosphere over the target area.

Discharge This energy is discharged in a nuclear sized explosion on earth.?Within minutes a nuclear size explosion can be snapped to earth with no radiation danger.?A minimum of twelve installations in carefully chosen locations around the world will give the system the potential to attack anywhere and anytime without any warning.

According to some scientists, the reckless use of these power levels in our natural shield? the ionosphere?could be cataclysmic. Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning, authors of The Military’s Pandora’s Box, quote one such scientist Paul Schaefer who says, “Unless we desire the death of our planet we must end the production of unstable particles which are generating the earth’s fever. A first priority to prevent this disaster would be to shut down all nuclear power plants and end the testing of atomic weapons, electronic warfare and ‘Star Wars’.”
But what does the US (and presumably, also the Russian) military do? It builds its biggest ionospheric heater in Gakona, to deliberately create more instabilities in the ionosphere. After all, anything one can use his way is a weapon. Even if it leads to the death of the planet.

(more, next week)
Published in New Age, 15 February 2010

`Owning' the weather? PART II

By Rahnuma Ahmed

“Technology will make available to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised… techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.”

–????????? Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security advisor, Between Two Ages (1970)

Weather modification technology is being perfected by the US under the High Frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP). From the military point of view, it is, as I had written last week, citing Professor Michel Chossudovsky (editor, Centre for Research on Globalization and visiting professor of economics, University of Ottawa)?a weapon of mass destruction.
According to keen observers, HAARP has the ability to trigger floods and hurricanes. To produce, as Brzezinski forecasts above, “prolonged periods of drought or storm.” To set off, as former US secretary of defense William Cohen had said, earthquakes and volcanoes. He, of course, had blamed `others’ for plotting these acts of terror. The baddies. The enemies of civilisation. I quote in full: “Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves? So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations? It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts” (1997).
The US government presents HAARP to the public as a harmless programme. As scientific and academic research aimed at further advancing “our knowledge of the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere which can affect our military and civilian communication and navigation systems” . A view endlessly regurgitated in mainstream media by a host of administration officials, defence and security experts, journalists and writers. Any questioning of the government version, interestingly enough, is met with ridicule, is immediately dubbed a `conspiracy theory.’ There are nutters, one comes across scores of them spooking away on the web, as is only to be expected, but it’s interesting to see how serious and well-founded questioning of the official versions of events, whether 9/11, or HAARP, immediately get labelled as `conspiratorial.’ At how this catch-all phrase is continuously employed to block off any critical inquiry in the public domain about America’s rulers, and their ways of ruling. To provide an instance in the case of HAARP, `Strange new Air Force facility energizes ionosphere, fans conspiracy flames’ (Noah Shachtman, Wired magazine, 20 July 2009). A title that is complicit in the all-powerful Western myth: `others’ wreak terror. `Others’ possess WMDs.
And what if the West’s `others’ don’t? What if a western leader who took his country to war on make-believe grounds, is finally forced to admit it publicly? As was former British prime minister Tony Blair who testified before the Chilcot inquiry last week. Reverting to, what seemed to me, amazing English bedtime story-speak, Blair responded: but Saddam was still a “monster.” And therefore he had to be removed. The world had to be made “safer.” So what if in that process, 1,366,350 Iraqis died? Blair insisted, he had no “regrets.” Like the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. When pressed about the death of 567,000 Iraqi children due to the 1990s US sanctions, she responded, “We think the price is worth it.”
In February 1998, in response to a report tabled by Mrs. Maj. Britt Theorin, Swedish MEP and longtime peace advocate on the “potential use of military-related resources for environmental strategies,” the European parliament’s committee on Environment, Security and Foreign Affairs called the HAARP project a matter of global concern because of “its far-reaching impact on the environment.” It passed a resolution calling for its “legal, ecological and ethical implications to be examined by an international independent body before any further research

HAARP’s array can beam up to 3.6 megawatts of energy into the sky. Photo Joao Canziani

Skeptics think, one billion watts is more likely.? See documentary on HAARP by Canada’s public broadcasting network CBC.

and testing” was conducted. It also expressed regrets at the “repeated refusal of the United States Administration to send anyone in person to give evidence to the public hearing [held by the committee in Brussels] or any subsequent meeting held by its competent committee into the environmental and public risks connected with the HAARP programme currently being funded in Alaska.” Despite all this, as an excellent documentary on HAARP made by CBC, Canada’s public broadcasting network points out, officials at HAARP still insist that “the project is nothing more sinister than a radio science research facility.”
The United Nations, on the other hand, inspite of a vast body of scientific knowledge, never includes in its climate change agenda the “issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use.” Even though, writes Chossudovsky, the UN 1977 Convention explicitly states that “military or any other hostile use of such techniques could have effects extremely harmful to human welfare,” a convention to which both US and Soviet Union were signatories. (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, United Nations, Geneva, 1977).
The issue of “weather warfare” or “environmental modification techniques” (ENMOD) is not, as Chossudovsky points out, raised either by governments or environmental action groups. Even though both Americans and Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the World’s climate. The publicly shared consensus is that greenhous gas emissions constitute the “sole cause” of climate instability. But in reality, the manipulation of climate for military use is potentially “a greater threat to humanity” than CO2 emissions. Military analysts are silent, metereologists do not investigate the matter, while environmentalists keep harping on global warming and the Kyoto protocol. It is a situation which, by being “narrowly confined to greenhouse gases,” serves Washington’s strategic and defense objectives.
Another documentary on HAARP, made by the History Channel, says: “Electromagnetic weapons … pack an invisible wallop hundreds of times more powerful than the electrical current in a lightning bolt. One can blast enemy missiles out of the sky, another could be used to blind soldiers on the battlefield, still another to control an unruly crowd by burning the surface of their skin. If detonated over a large city, an electromagnetic weapon could destroy all electronics in seconds. They all use directed energy to create a powerful electromagnetic pulse.” And also, this: “Directed energy is such a powerful technology it could be used to heat the ionosphere to turn weather into a weapon of war. Imagine using a flood to destroy a city or tornadoes to decimate an approaching army in the desert. The military has spent a huge amount of time on weather modification as a concept for battle environments. If an electromagnetic pulse went off over a city, basically all the electronic things in your home would wink and go out, and they would be permanently destroyed.” (WantToKnow.info team website).
With president Obama proposing a $548.9 billlion outlay for defence, a budget that boosts the Defence department’s outlay by 3.4% over the 2010 enacted level, does the HAARP official site’s answer to the Frequently Asked Question, Can I Visit HAARP?? “The HAARP Research Station does not employ sufficient on-site staff… as a result, we hold an annual open house at which any and all are invited”?sound convincing? (italics mine).
Unconvinced too, is Louise Lindley, who runs the coffee shop and trading post in the village that is HAARP’s closest neighbour. In response to the question, You have been here since the beginning. What do you? think they are doing down there? she replies, “They tell us we’re up here doing research on HAARP, we’re studying the northern lights, you don’t study the northern lights for 25 years, come on.” (Jesse Ventura exposes HAARP conspiracy, truTV).
(more, next week).
First published in New Age on 8th February 2010