PHOENIX FIVE EARTH CHANGES BULLETINMonitoring The Changes In The EarthAdvertising above is not connected to the Bulletins

edited by Michael Wells Mandeville copyright June 16 2004

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Please Note: This Bulletin os conceived as a System. It is still in an early stage of evolution. We intend to progressively

Earth Changes Bulletin Update As Of June 16 2004You have heard of the Weather Report?  Here exclusively is this week’s  "Earth Report" - a short review of the “big picture” about how the dynamic changes in the Sun and the Earth are effecting our lives more and more intensely, with the latest prognostications and predictions for weathermen, farmers, investors, businessmen, and every man.

You may click here for the full text of the Earth Changes Bulletin Update for this week, or use this  URL http://www.michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/ecbulletins/2004/ecb_June_16_04.htm

FLUX OF HISTORICAL CHANGE WITH BLACK ARTS TORTUREAND SYSTEMIC GOVERNMENT LYING

WILL SOON OVERWHELM AMERICAN POLITICS

SPECIAL NOTE THIS WEEK: There is an enormous amount of change of Major Historical Proportions in flux this very week. Fortunately for the Bulletin Service, I have been able to stabilize formats for the EC Bulletin and the upcoming new Earth Monitor so that I can begin to focus on content again. This week’s edition is primarily focused on the Black Arts Nation, the tragic situation in Iraq, and the raging “civil war” which has broken out in the open in Washington DC and which will profoundly disturb the entire world.

On the geophysical front, for the moment the solar vortex forces in the Cosmos are lulling rapidly expanding and rising. The Venus | Earth alignment may be pulling out a belated sunspot peak which may double yesterday’s number of 84 (June 15). Though weather forces are now lulling, weather dynamics will increase during the next week and may become quite stormy before the end of the month. On the Earth itself, shape shifting is muting out and the New Moon Syzygy at Apogee, which begins more or less now, is likely to produce very little in the way of seismic and volcanic activity.  On the geopolitical front, the strange year is now unfolding at such a rapid rate into deepening strangeness that the transformation of American politics into a parody of its worst nightmares has become a virtual blur. The stalemate of all factors broadens and the American government is collapsing into paralysis. National Security experts and media professionals are predicting “BOMBS” of extreme political controversy will drop in Washington DC. this week or next, showing the American People to be a nation which even tortures children as their mothers look on…

THIS IS THE BREAKING NEWS which professional journalists in Washington DC claim is about to BLOW UP in the capital:

link into this synopsis system all of the major news feeds of Planet Earth which articulate aspects of the profound historical Change In The Earth which is underway.

Very shortly, the world will be shocked and profoundly revolted to learn that the U.S. intelligence agents in Iraq have sponsored U.S. soldiers to torture Iraqi children in front of their mothers. In the words of an article by TomDispatch.Com (article below), the greatest controversy over Iraq is yet to come but it will to take off this week or next when a major U.S. mass media organization breaks the silence. It will show pictures it has which depicts the hardest truth which Americans have yet to face about their government. They will shortly see that a legion of Dr Strangelove’s in U.S. government REALLY will stop at nothing in leveling the world into the category of chattel which can be manipulated and disposed of at will.

The world will also learn that the American government is rapidly disintegrating into impotence from the in-fighting which is now engulfing the Imperial Faction and the Republicrats which dominate both of the major parties. The professional journalists in Washington DC who are contributing to TomDispatch are pointing to what is beginning to be described as a “civil war” among the apparatchiks of the Military Industrial Academic CIA complex. The complex, for the first time since the Vietnam War, is splitting into hostile camps As a result of this fractionation, government “secrets” are being outed in large quantities on the street. Pentagon, Military, CIA, and State Department memos, reports, eye witness accounts, secret policy statements, pictures, and intelligence assessments are being made available to journalists and investigators seeking them.

Apparently, people who know have decided that George W. Bush can no longer govern….and events are rapidly eroding any semblance of believable authority away from the White House. The country will be politically deadlocked until 2005 and possibly beyond. It is highly probable that within the next several months Bush’s fall will be as complete as Nixon’s.

Go to detailed synopsis…

NOTESGrayed items are not yet operational

PREVIOUSWEEKLYUPDATES

June 2, 2004May 26, 2004May 19, 2004May 12, 2004

Program Thesis:What are we trying to do with the Earth Changes Bulletin?Most news media do not handle technical and scientific subjects like geology and earth sciences very well.  They don't understand the causes and effects of activities in the Sun and Earth.  Accordingly, they often do not understand if, when, how, why to report earthquakes, volcanic activity, global warming effects  The treatment often sounds absent-minded, poorly qualified, and frequently contains various technical errors.  Seldom is the treatment entertaining and genuinely educational. Based on new scientific principles which have emerged during the past thirty years, many of the dynamic activities of the Sun and Earth can be linked together to see how a range of effects are linked together.  This makes it possible to paint "the big picture" into a perspective which explains many diverse events and processes, especially climate and weather patterns such as global warming and El Nino. From the "big picture", long range predictions can be made for weeks and even months ahead.  The result is sophisticated cutting-edge information which is objective, balanced, astute, relevant, and can be easily seen and appreciated by lay audiences.  The perspective is generally global, seldom parochial. For the framework of concepts, terms, and current conditions which are used or described in the these Bulletins, see the Earth Changes 2003 Almanac Calendar.

To see the internet resources which are used to prepare this Update, take a look at the Earth Monitor front pagehttp://www.michaelmandeville.com/earthmontor/

SPONSORING:THE COMING ECONOMIC COLLAPSE OF 2006, which puts today, tomorrow, and the trends together into the Cayce 25 year economic cycle which will “bottom” in 2006/2007.  Download fromhttp://www.michaelmandeville.com/collapse2006

THIS BOOK STILL COOKS AND IT WILL COOK THE POLITICIANS AND THE ECONOMY ALL THE WAY THROUGH TO 2008:  This synthesis is far ahead of the daily digests in all halls of the internet media: so far (since may 2003) the track record on this set of predictions for 2003-2008 is running 100 per cent.  If you have not purchased this book, you will remain ignorant of the main dynamics which are rapidly changing everything. 

LATEST UPDATE NOTE AS OF JUNE 16, 2004 – THE LOSS OF CONFIDENCE IN THE U.S. IS STILL IN AN EARLY STAGE. THE NEXT SIX MONTHS WILL BE THE MOST DIFFICULT PERIOD SINCE THE VIETNAM TRAGEDY – AND INDEED IT IS LIKELY TO SURPASS ANYTHING WHICH HAS EMERGED SINCE THE 1930’S.

LATEST UPDATE NOTE JUNE 9, 2004 – NO CHANGE SINCE THIS NOTE OF  MAY 12, 2004:   As discussed this week and herein, the Collapse 2006 schedule, MORE LIKELY THAN NOT, IS CURRENTLY ACCELERATING AS A RESULT OF WORLDWIDE LOSS OF CONFIDENCE IN THE ELEMENTARY COMPETENCE OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS.

HOUSEKEEPING

MANDEVILLE IS ON THE RADIO EVERY WEDNESDAY WITH Alex Merklinger (Millennium Radio) show at 6 PM Arizona Time (also 6 PM Pacific Daylight Saving Time).   Regular Weekly Update For The Earth Changes Bulletin.  To find Iway archives and stations, see http://www.millenniumradionetwork.com/

After spending far too much time during the past four weeks to learn how to use various web oriented software tools for re-inventing what I do, I finally abandoned all of the new tools and reverted to updated versions of what I have been using all along – Word, Notepad, and Frontpage. I have found beyond doubt that all other tools are far too tendentious for the general content user, such as I. Dreamweaver failed, Mozilla composer failed, Open Office Html Editor, and others, all failed. Their organization of functions is very poor in my estimation, their “concept” or metaphor of what you are doing is very obscure and thus there remains, after all these years, nothing “intuitive” about their operations. What I can do with one click in Word toolbars often took three to four levels of clicking in the other systems. Worse, their formatting is mutually destructive, they trash each other’s tables, formats, etc. I swore many a mighty swear in seeing elaborately constructed templates trashed in these other setups.

For my purposes, Office XP Professional Word has very powerful web editing functions and excellent PDF conversion ability. No need even for Frontpage for straight up web pages. These are the main tools I will

use.

Using these tools, I will now begin to reformat the entire Earth Monitor Website to accommodate a variety of web loggers and news feeds. I have some fairly radical, advanced concepts in mind for reinventing the nature of all informational media within today’s cybernetic environment. I hope to bring in many editors and contributors to systematically access the Earth.

As stated in the “Coming Economic Collapse of 2006”, the nature of human politics reflects the communication abilities of the human species. As we transform the media, as we have been on the Iway, we will transform human politics and the entire Earth. Making the way for the New Earth is operationally equivalent to making a new Media on the Iway. Not that that is all that there is to it. Not by a long shot…but IT IS one of the essentials we need to dissolve the blockages and dance around the tyrannies.

PLEASE NOTE: THE COLUMNS TO THE LEFT (NARROW YELLOW) AND THE COLUMN TO THE RIGHT (INVISIBLE – SAME COLOR AS THE BACKGROUND) ARE INTENDED FOR BANNERS AND LINKS. These will be made available to those offering transformative information and services. Regular paid subscribers will be able to post links, pix, banners for their causes, interests, and businesses. Please do not inquire just yet. I can’t keep up with inquiries at the moment.

Begin SynopsisSPIRITUAL WATCH How to converge and express the spirit of mass transformation into manifestation, HOW to be, IS the question. How to do is the praxis of the time.  Examining this question, probing it, is the chief trendline of this year. 

I wrote these words a few weeks ago:

As is now plain to see, the “Great Purification” has clearly commenced, pretty much right on the schedule suggested by the Q’ero, the Maya, and the Hopi. For additional discussion, see especially the commentary of May 19, 2004.

How amazing that these ancient oral traditions could tune into 2003 and June of 2004 to advise us that this was a period of profound historical turning involving The Great Purification?

THIS WEEK BRINGS THE NEWS AND POSSIBLE PUBLIC SHOWING OF PICTURES WHICH ARE CURRENTLY IN THE HANDS OF THE AMERICAN MASS MEDIA WHICH ARE RUMORED TO DISPLAY AMERICAN FORCES TORTURING CHILDREN IN FRONT OF THEIR MOTHERS….

Meanwhile the U.S. Navy sanguinely reveals that it subjected the U.S. to

mass experimentation of its new “communications disrupter” weapons, causing major portions of the so-called “immune” Internet to collapse for a few hours. This was a gift of the assembled Naval Armada exercises which are under way and have caused so much rumor mill activity on the Iway.

Or how about the 5.0 plus mag quake near North Carolina this week which was not a “quake”? (See Mitch Battros, earthchangestv.com)

Quite clearly the Black Arts Nation is totally out of control and has infected major portions of the U.S. As it comes out of the closet to demonstrate American Dominance with the old trusty tools of Fascism Uber Alles,

A TERRIBLE SHIT STORM IS BLOWING OUR WAY AND IT WILL BLAST THROUGH AMERICAN POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT LIKE A MAG 10 EARTHQUAKE.

AS ADVISED LAST WEEK:

What is to come is genuine tragedy.  Sadness, hard times, confusion, betrayal, absurdity, and pain.  None of that will go away….until you let go the bank of the river which fixates you on the Century 20 and Century 21 illusions.  Love may help YOU transform these things in self and family, but it will not prevent the collective tragedy.  Realize the depth of the tragedy, that the human species is too crazy and too irrational to solve its problems WITH POWER AND CONTROL.

…and let go of the river banks of what you once thought was stability.

Let go of America The Greatness Uber Alles, the U.S. government, the U.S. constitution, the “Free Enterprise” Economy, the Plutocracy, economic security, the so-called “Christian” evangelism, and Catholicism.  Let go all these tired illusions which failed a long time ago.

Let go, Bush, Kerry, and all the would-be leaders of the Most Amazingly Stupid Oligarchy ever created. None of them will save a soul, let alone a continent of souls. Simply let go of the river banks of Century 20. Let it recede in the distance of your memory.

ALL IS IN TRANSISTION. FLOW WITH IT AS YOU LET GO OF OLD PATTERNS. WORK DILIGENTLY AROUND THE DISRUPTIONS TO BRING USEFUL CONCLUSIONS.

THE NEW BASIS IS GESTATING….THE time to link the spiritual communities of the Earth. The Whole Earth. IT HAS BECOME URGENT TO LINK THE SPIRITUAL COMMUNITIES WITHIN A BROAD MOVEMENT WHICH PROVIDES NEW CURRENTS OF SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP.

POLAR MOTION What is happening to the motion of the Earth. For the overall summary of the status of polar motion GO TO:http://michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/ecbulletins/statusreports.htm#polarmotion(watch the word wrap on the URL)

To see the current graph of polar motion, seehttp://www.michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/topten_monitor.htmScroll down the page until you get to the black and white graphs with show the x and y coordinates of the North Spin Axis on two separate graphs.

After a strangely deviant "jog" in the Y dimension, Polar Motion on the X Wave is once again more or less appearing normal.

AS PREVIOUSLY REPORTED:  Steady as she goes. A slow acceleration in the shifting of the poles has been underway for perhaps the past 100 years and the last three decades has shown an increase in the rate of acceleration.  This has appeared to accelerate even more during the past decade.

MAGNETIC POLES – SHIFTING What is happening to the magnetic fields of the Earth. For the overall summary of the status of the changes in the magnetic field GO TO:http://michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/ecbulletins/statusreports.htm#earthfield(watch the word wrap on the URL)

No real change during the past year:  a magnetic pole shift is not something to be very concerned about within this decade at least.

PLANETS & ALIGNMENTS(all time coordinates here and elsewhere are in UTC unless otherwise noted)For background and the current information on planetary alignments GO TO:http://michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/ecbulletins/statusreports.htm#planets(watch the word wrap on the URL)See Earth Changes 2003 Almanac Calendar for additional detailshttp://www.michaelmandeville.com/ebooks/calendar2004/The Almanac lays out the planets and the lunar phases for entire year in advance to allow you to find the best and worst periods of weather, earthquake activity, ethereal “lunar” influences, etc.

We are now still decoupling from the Venus | Earth alignment and the strong electrical circuit which these two inner planets formed between them.  Though the alignment will disappear over the next week as Venus pulls ahead of the Earth in their mutual race around the Sun, the coupling between their atmospheres via the long electromagnetic tail of Venus will continue to influence the Earth for at least another couple of weeks.

There are no other significant planetary alignments during June.

The Moon this day is now near North of the Equator (its North Node) 28 days past the last New Moon and shy a few hours of the next New Moon. It is now approximately 405,404 KM from the Earth. It is 0% of the Full Moon (visibility).  The next New Moon is June 17 2004 at 20:38 UTC and the New Moon will be in Apogee while 406574 km from the Earth only four hours before the moment of perfect New Moon alignment.

This New Moon in Apogee should be one of the weakest seismic periods of the year.

The Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, will be June 21 at 00 57 UTC

The next Full Moon will by July 2, 2004 at 11 09 UTC.

(Perigee = the Moon’s closest approach to the Earth during its monthly orbit which increases gravitational influence of the Moon by as much as 15%; Apogee = the Moon’s greatest distance from the Earth during its monthly orbit).   (Berkland has a more complex formula for syzygy and his dates are often different.)  For details see http://www.syzygyjob.com/

PLANET WATCHING   For background and the current information on observable planets and planetary alignments GO TO:http://michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/ecbulletins/statusreports.htm#planets(watch the word wrap on the URL)

SUNSPOTS The events in the solar atmosphere which impact weather and climate patterns, the magnetic field and auroras, including forecasts for the week, month, and year ahead.  For background information, CLICK HERE: http://michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/ecbulletins/statusreports.htm#sunspots(watch the word wrap on the URL)To follow the numbers below, view the Solar Cycle 23 Chart athttp://www.michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/topten_monitor.htmOr, get the data in a table fromhttp://www.sec.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/DSD.txt

SUNSPOT COUNT AT 84 on June 15, 2004 AND RISING.

After bobbing up to 82 on June 7, sunspot count sank to 28 on June 12 and than inexplicitly began to rise again to 84 as of yesterday.

WRONG PREDICTION: … for June.  Sunspots will likely decline to below 50 and remain there, bobbing up and down between 10 and 50.

The Solar Flux, which partially determines the sunspot count, began to rise a few days ago and is at 110 as of June 15. The steep shape of this curve suggests that the sunspot count will continue to rise again. The appearance of two new huge sunspot groups on the Eastern edge of the Sun virtually guarantees it.

What is going on? Hard to be certain. The question could probably be answered if we had the solar system’s activity and planetary relationships well modeled for the past 50 years or so (which could be done with considerable time and some money).

For the time being all I can do is hazard this guess.

Currently the planetary bodies are fairly widely dispersed at various positions around the Sun, EXCEPT for a still fairly straight alignment of Venus, Earth, and Pluto…So far, the sunspot peak for this alignment, which perfected about June 8, was far more tepid than I have been predicting. A flaccid 82.

ARE WE JUST NOW HEADING INTO A (LATE) SUNSPOT PEAK FOR THIS ALIGNMENT?

If so…OH OH…

SOLAR ACTIVITYAs reported by NASA/NOAA unless otherwise stated. (Sudden surprises and huge storms are always possible even during sunspot minima periods such as the one we are currently headed into).

With the sudden new rise in the sunspot count and the emergence of two new huge areas, solar activity has once again steadily increased.

As of today,

The Solar Wind was quite robust at 511.3 km/s this day but it was pushing a mild density of 1.4  protons/cm3”. 

The Fluxgate Chart at the University of Alaska (which measures magnetic disturbances in the Earth’s atmosphere created by solar winds and ion storms) showed a major disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field about 36 hours ago (atmospheric) (as of this time, about 2 PM Mountain time US). Additionally, the charts demonstrate that we are presently heading into a huge, deep, and broad ionic flux disturbance “in the force”. To see the Fluxgate moment to moment, go to http://137.229.36.30/cgi-bin/magnetometer/plotstations.cgi?

NASA PREDICTS: “Two big sunspot groups, each larger than Venus, have emerged over the Sun's eastern limb. This could signal a period of increased solar activity in the days ahead. A solar wind gust from…a…coronal hole could reach Earth on or about June 18th.” Probabilities for an M-class or X-class solar flare during the next 24/48 hours: about 5% to 30%, with a 5% to 30% probability for robust to severe geomagnetic disturbances during the next 24/48 hours, depending upon latitude. 

Jan Alvestad reports: “The geomagnetic field was quiet to minor storm on June 15. Solar wind speed ranged between 399 and 586 km/sec under the influence of a high speed stream from coronal hole CH101. Solar flux measured at 20h UTC on 2.8 GHz was 109.4…At midnight there were 5 spotted regions on the visible disk. The solar flare activity level was low. A total of 1 C class event was recorded during the day…June 13-15: No fully or partly Earth directed CMEs observed. A recurrent coronal hole (CH101) in the southern hemisphere was in a geoeffective position on June 12. A recurrent trans equatorial coronal hole (CH102) was in a geoeffective position on June 14-15.”

Jan Alvestad predicts: “The geomagnetic field is expected to be quiet to unsettled on June 16 and quiet to active on June 17-18 under the influence of a high speed stream from coronal hole CH102.“  Alvestad also predicts for the next 24 hours, 0-20% probability of coronal holes, 0% probability of CME's, 20-60% probability of M and X Class Flares

MONTHLY AVERAGES IN SOLAR CYCLE 23: (These numbers are reported by Jan Alvestad) Over all, the sunspot average count (ISSN) for

February 2004 was 46.0. March 2004  was even higher with the ISSN average count at 48.9  April’s count was radically lower at 39.3.  The May 2004 average count of 41.5 was SLIGHTLY HIGHER THAN in April.  This was about 9% higher than predicted. 

Solar Cycle 23 appeared to be waning in its influence the prior two weeks but at the moment solar activity is headed back up.

WORLD WEATHER SUMMARYThose who have been following the patterns have seen that the correlations between sunspot peaks and major storm fronts coming in off the oceans to track across the continents is roughly pretty good, sometimes very much exactly on the mark.  Accordingly, our “sloppycasts” (approximate continental weather patterns) this past few years have proven out to be fairly worthwhile.

Plan for practically anything.  Conditions are unstable and unpredictable.

EARTH WEATHER PREDICTION FOR THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS (Northern Hemisphere) This “sloppycast” is based on sunspot counts, planetary alignments, and visual data shown on satellite and radar.

Things appear to be moderating down into normal patterns. BUT Plan for practically anything.  Conditions are unstable and unpredictable.

EARTH WEATHER PREDICTION FOR SUMMER SEASON (Northern Hemisphere) This “sloppycast” is based on sunspot counts, planetary alignments, and visual data shown on satellite and radar.

Things appear to be moderating down into normal patterns. BUT Plan for practically anything.  Conditions are unstable and unpredictable.

SOUTHWEST CONDITIONS for background or more details seehttp://michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/ecbulletins/statusreports.htm/#weather(watch the word wrap on the URL)

NO CHANGE FROM LAST WEEK: Hot alternating with wind!!!.  Very little moisture is apparent, the dry wind is sucking plants dry.  Great time for drying anything…Bad time for farms.

The winds seem to be falling off…but if the sunspots keep rising, expect another highly unusual blast of weather over North America.

EL NINO & LA NINA WATCHThe watch is now open again; Pacific water activity appears mostly normal, we are between the extremes of the ENSO; but all Auguries point to next year for the next onset.

NEW THIS WEEK: There was no update of the NOAA animation temperature charts this week so this information is as June 6 2004.

AS PREVIOUSLY REPORTED: The patch of cool water off the coast of Peru continues to break up and decrease in size.  It would seem that no

Nino or Nina is indicated as of the moment and conditions seem to be verging away from either condition.

ADDITIONAL NOTE:  The year 2004 and/or 2005, in accordance with the 100 year X Wave Graph of the motion of the spin axis in Chandler’s Wobble, COULD BE EL NINO YEARS.   Graphs of various El Nino periods seem to show that the beginning of temperature build-up can occur as late as April of an El Nino year.  So 2005 may not be callable until early Spring 2005.

GLOBAL WARMINGIt is becoming obvious that we have a long term real shift in the average temperatures and climate regions related to the latitudes.  This climate shift is creating a growing environmental disaster in the polar zones and in the desert-prone latitudes such as in the Pacific Southwest.

KEEP WATCHING ESPECIALLY THE ARCTIC AND ANTARCTIC. Those areas are the most objective front line observatories of the climate shift.

For the latest short review, seeEarth Changes Bulletin Update As Of May 26, 2004

IONIZING SOLAR ACTIVITY & MASS BEHAVIOR

AS PREDICTED: THE FOLLOWING IS NOW COMING FORTH IN WAYS WICH ARE MAKING INCREASINGLY HEAVY WAVES.

CONFIRMED: AS PREVIOUSLY REPORTED:  The ionic flux and the human contradictions of denial have focused people into thinking and plotting intensely their next round of moves within a highly polarized mental and emotional atmosphere.  Expect heavy choppiness in all things human.  Sudden shifts, both good and ill, everywhere.

The most tangible ways in which we are currently seeing this manifest is in the progressive, HIGHLY SKILLED AND ORGANIZED violence in the Middle East, and the outbreak of a sort of civil war between the experts in the U.S. bureaucracies, offices, and agents.

To stir the pot ever more robustly, I strongly hunch that Alqaeda will show its hand in the U.S. sometime this summer.

Now there is a definite possibility that another huge wave of ionic influx from another sunspot peak near 150 will hit the Earth during this coming week. This would make for a July which is even more chaotic than June….

EARTHQUAKESAround the world to see the current and potential patterns of seismic activity, with coverage of the windows of danger.  I prepared this section by pulling out the Earth Changes 2003 Calendar which has everything plotted on it.  You should too.  Check out the Almanac as well, it discusses all of the windows for the year and even spotlights the

two most dangerous windows. Unless otherwise specified, all quake activity which is discussed is based on the USGS database charts and tables which list quake activity in excess of 2.0 mag. and above. FOR MORE QUAKE INFO RELATED TO SYZYGY WINDOWS, Jim Berkland calculates syzygy windows with considerably more sophistication than I do.  See http://syzygyjob.com

THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ACTION OF THE WEEK is a little hard to define. True to the pattern of a non-syzygy period, quake activity was muted in both frequency and magnitude. The largest daily total for quakes above mag 2.5 was only 12 quakes on June 10.  The daily average for the remainder of the last six days was way down, in the range of 6-10 per day.

Quake activity, such as it was the past seven days, appears to have been randomly distributed in four major zones which formed nearly a perfect X four cornered mirror of the Pacific Rim of Fire: the South Pacific zone, Kamchatka/Japan, Carib Plate, and Chile

There were only two shapeshifting quakes in the range of 5.0 to 5.5 during the past seven days in the Great Rift which winds around the Earth across the bottom of the oceans. 

{The quake activity in the Great Rift is one of the most important harbingers for the Earth Changes Watch to monitor. As the Earth’s crust adjusts its shape in response to gravitational and spin energy vectors, quakes in the Great Rift increase and tectonic activity all around the world increases}’’

There were two 3 plus quakes in the Madrid fault area of Missouri, suggesting North America is still changing its shape as a result of the past few months of exceptional activity in Alaska and in the Mid Atlantic. There were also several small quakes from Northern California up to the Olympic Peninsula and the ocean floor to the west of Vancouver Island, suggesting that Western upliftment relative to the Pacific Ocean Plate is occurring.

NORTH AMERICAN WATCHUnless otherwise specified, all quake activity which is discussed is based on the USGS LOCAL AREA database charts and tables which list quake activity in excess of 1.0 mag. and above. Generally most of the quakes which appear in these counts are in the range of 1 to 2 in magnitude.

Seismic activity in North America overall for quakes in the range of 1.0 and was down in frequency, as should be, though not by much, for the last seven days:

494 quakes in U.S./Alaska as a whole, down from 527 last week, mostly widely scattered;

371 in California and Nevada, up from 340 last week, widely scattered in all the usual places, but including a fairly unusual 5.3 quake on the Western edge of the Baja Plate, well out to sea to the West of San Diego;

41 in the Pacific Northwest, up from 32 reported last week (two week period) – these were mostly scattered along the spine of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State and Oregon, two near St. Helens,

15 in Utah, scattered throughout, down 22 from last week

16 in the Mammoth Lakes, Long Valley Volcanic Field, up from 10 last week,  all small microtremors only weakly focused.

YELLOWSTONE WATCHUnless otherwise specified, all quake activity which is discussed is based on the USGS LOCAL AREA database charts and tables which list quake activity in excess of 1.0 mag. and above. Generally most of the quakes which appear in these counts are in the range of 1 to 2 in magnitude.

22 in Yellowstone, up from 10 last week, highly focused mostly about 5 miles out of W. Yellowstone (which is near Old Faithful). For Yellowstone activity, seehttp://www.seis.utah.edu/recenteqs/Maps/111-45.html

WEEK’S MOST SIGNIFICANT QUAKES

Kinda of a stumper…got any candidates?

VOLCANOESAround the world with the most interesting and relevant volcano stories; briefs on the likely eruptions as well as coverage of on-going activity. For information on current eruptions, see the Southwest Volcano Centre at:http://www.swvrc.org/cerupt.htmor see “Breaking Volcano Eruption News” athttp://www.volcanolive.com/volcanolive.html(For the past couple of years I have been counting volcanoes in the classifications used by the Southwest Volcano Centre.  But the Centre cleaned house this first week and dropped all volcanoes off its list which it could not confirm to be in one of the three categories as of the beginning of the year. This means that a lot of volcanoes dropped off the lists, making the stats from this moment on un-comparable with last year’s numbers.)

OVERALL WORLD VOLCANIC ACTIVITY NOW SEEMS TO BE AT ABOUT THE SAME PLATEAU AS LAST WEEK.  There appears to be very little change from last week’s numbers and activities, but there was one volcano added to the active list. Despite this addition, the torpor in the others should advise against drawing any conclusions.(This is a fairly subjective guestimate based on the numbers and data reported by the SWVC, quake data, and other reports)

Here are the SWVC volcanic activity numbers as of June 16 2004

5 on restless list (could go on active list at any moment) (same as last week)

43 on alert list (pre-cursors suggesting that activity may begin), same as last week.

24 on active list (seismic, gas, steam, lava, ash, or explosive activity) (one up from last week)

Popo gave an 18 puff day yesterday.  Centrapred reports for June 16 (17:00 GMT) that “In the last 24 hours the activity of Popocatepetl volcano remained stable. There were 13 small exhalations accompanied by steam and gas. The other monitored parameters remain without important changes. At the moment of this report we can see the volcano, with fumarolic activity…continuous subsidence is observed in

the inner crater; an external lava dome at the bottom of the crater cannot be distinguished. Due to the low levels of activity shown in the past days, the scenarios consisting of explosions and ash emission are less probable.”

MOST ACTIVE VOLCANOES THIS WEEK from Volcano Breaking News by Volcanologist John Seachat http://www.volcanolive.com/volcanolive.htmlVolcano Travel:  john@volcanolive.comDates in red are posted in Eastern Australian Time (UT + 10 hr)

Bromu and Awu remain the two most unpredictively active but their activity seems to be tapering off.

BLACK ARTS NATION

MWM: This short dispatch may explain a lot. It certainly explains the disruption of the internet this week. The Navy was using us Guinea Pigs, same as they use dolphins and whales, to test Herr Strangelove’s electromagnetic weapons for destroying practically anything. They apparently are even willing to disrupt the operations of major corporations. This dispatch may also explain much about the upcoming crop of injured whale and dolphin beachings which are likely to occur in record numbers along with the record number of Navy Armadas sailing the Seven Seas. The first beachings should begin immediately. This dispatch may also explain the 5.6 “quake” reported off the coast of the Carolinas which has been removed from U.S. quake databases.

Likely, it is fair to conclude that the not-so-invisible Black Arts Nation, from HAARP to the Navy, to the Bush/Ashcroft prisons in Iraq/Afghanistan and Cuba, are as far out of ethical, moral, constitutional, and treaty control as has been widely feared. I write this as a huge chemtrail has just been written over my head, stretching from horizon to horizon, showing the classic, slow fantailing into a broad ribbon.

Navy Comes Clean After ECTV Disclosure…06/16/04by Mitch Battros (ECTV) EarthChangesTV

It appears yesterday’s ECTV article on ‘false reading’ earthquakes and vast electronic interference, has prompted a response from DoD’s media department. A rather unusual announcement was released this morning, disclosing to the public for the first time, a previous top secret testing operation in the Atlantic. It is known as operation “Northern Edge”. This exercise appears to be utilizing HAARP.

Cmdr. Joe Murphy, U.S. Alaskan Command reports “a new combat system is being tested. The new testing devise is used for what is commonly known as “jamming,” the Improved Capabilities System III (ICAP III) overloads specific hostile communication bandwidths, causing users to temporarily lose service.

“Training and testing of ICAP III is a stepping-stone for the Navy,” said Chief Aviation Structural Mechanic Ron Szpynda, Air Test Evaluation (VX) 9. “This is the first time we have used this system.”

VX-9's EA-6B Prowlers are being used to test the system. The aircraft provides protection for strike aircraft, ground troops and ships, by jamming enemy radar, electronic data links and communications.

“The system floods an opposing bandwidth with more frequency than those operating systems release,” said Cmdr. Jim Winship, VX-9 branch head. “This causes users to temporarily lose service. Everything from telephones to sophisticated electronic equipment goes static, because the jammer can overwhelm the frequencies they use.”

ECONOMY WATCH  For background information, use password to go to:  (watch the word wrap on the URL)

The economic bubble is still barely being maintained. All factors and dynamics are in a chaotic flux with no clear trendlines. Housing starts are down, interest rates are softening again, but the corporate profits are high and the Fed is making noises about raising rates as food and energy inflation rolls through the economy.

All of this makes splendid nonsense, suggesting strongly, as it has all year, that this bubble is an illusion. When in doubt, always punt for the low point.

Proprodictions, a group psychic prediction system, predicts a slow creeping upwards, with the DJI to reach past 11,000 amidst slow job expansion, with 2005 a more robust year. They also predict Bush will dump Cheney and Rumsfeld and win re-election. Frankly I almost agree with most of this, but disagree that Bush can or will win re-election. Since their track record is no better than mine at best, sometimes worse, I will stick to my own projections.

AS PREDICTED: The next 90 days is likely to be full of contradictory news, with a lot of chops (up and down) in the stocks and equities, with a constant jawboning of illusions of economic recovery.  A good part of the “good” economic news will be politically motivated.  Pay it little heed except for news of price increase.  Those are real and those are permanent, a definite lowering of the average standard of living. 

FOR THE STAND PAT ECONOMIC PREDICTION FOR THIS YEAR,

 See the Earth Changes Bulletin Update Of May 12 2004

LONG TERM PREDICTION:  As the loss of value of the dollar accelerates, job creation in all the main old line pursuits will become nearly impossible in the U.S.  New production of new goods which solve real problems, along with companies which directly export American-produced goods, are the keys to the economic future.   But in the meantime, things will get funkier and funkier.  You have 2.25 years at max to the transition point at bottom.

GENERAL PREDICTION DJI AVERAGES

The DJI finished today at 10,379, a mere $11.00 higher than the close of last Wednesday at 10,368. This chop will continue with 100 point mood swings for the next few weeks unless a major disruption is created by terrorists.   Most likely we are in the final bubble in the DJI. The failure of Bush to get ANYTHING from the G8 conference, at which he was beggaring for money and troops to help bail him out of Iraq, seals his isolation. The revelations about prisoner abuse and the Black Arts Nation, which will continue to pour out of the U.S. government like a river of pus from a huge boil, will continually sap any sense of confidence. And probably Al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents will muster out another major round of psychological shocks. 

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY, LIQUIDATE ALL STOCK POSITIONS.   Given the massive loss of confidence in the U.S. and the Bush Administration, which is being discounted and undercut by many of the world’s wealthiest people, it is very doubtful that the boomer bubble is going to go much higher.  As I predicted more or less in the Coming Economic Collapse of 2006, 10,500 is about as high as it is going to get. It could go to 11,000 or so, but so what. You can’t possibly make much money on general stocks and you will make yourself a nervous wreck trying to do so.

AS PREVIOUSLY PREDICTED: FORMING UP NOW:  As I predicted last week, there may be one small rise left between now and the final slide, but don’t count on it. The small rise, IF IT COMES, is likely to come this Summer/Fall as a result of the decision of the House of Saud to support the Bush Imperial Faction with a major expansion in the production of oil to force a drop in the retail price.  This will be even more effective than a tax cut.  It will suddenly stimulate people to do things with the cheaper fuel prices.  Lowered fuel prices will thus increase activity, confidence, sales, gross revenues, and equity values, most esp. stock prices. So a “timely” boomlet may form up by October 2004, based on draconian manipulation and outright sorcery by the Imperial forces that be.  This of course will allow Bush and Company to say, “see, we told you so, there there everything is all right after all.”  But do not expect that even this scenario will proceed smoothly.  There is too much instability and too much mass attitude change underway, with Al Qaeda also able to jitter the market on any given week with several hundred points of pure terror.

For additional discussion, see the:Earth Changes Bulletin Update As Of May 26, 2004

EURO WATCH 

The dollar held firm this week, at 0.8335, barely above the 0.8304 per euro last Wednesday. 

AS PREVIOUSLY PREDICTED: As oil prices continue to drop, the value of the dollar will probably fall into a more stable, slow slide and it may even rebound slightly for a short while. 

But the overall erosion is likely to slowly continue through the year and

may bottom at $0.65 to $0.70 per euro by the end of 2004.

MUST READ:  “The Dollar Panics” in “The Coming Economic Collapse of 2006”, which lays out the dynamics of what is happening.  see http://www.michaelmandeville.com/calendar/collapse2006.htm

SURVIVAL WATCH

FOOD WATCH

All prices are going up substantially this year.

JOB WATCH

Government stats at the national level have become just another “Big Brother” lie.  We are adrift without real information.  This is not likely to change until the Orwellian Regime under the Imperial Faction is liquidated.

POLITICAL WATCH How are the sunspots likely to most effect human affairs during the weeks and months ahead? SIGN OF THE TIMES: Ken Lay, who is now widely described as the biggest corporate swindler of all time, is still scott free and has never even been indicted. (ONE OF THE WORST ECONOMIC TERRORISTS OF ALL TIME).  At this time I will hazard the guess that he will be pardoned by Bush during the final days of his administration.  ANOTHER NEARLY EQUAL SIGN OF THE TIMES:  The lawyers who have been settling the Enron collapse for all parties, are billing the remaining net assets of Enron for approximately $1 billion for their services.  This is a new heavenly-ordained definition for the term Chutzpah.  I CALL IT CLASS ECONOMIC TERRORISM. 

THIS IS BREAKING NEWS…Very shortly, the world will be shocked and profoundly revolted to learn that the U.S. intelligence agents in Iraq have sponsored U.S. soldiers to torture Iraqi children in front of their mothers. In the words of an article by TomDispatch.Com (article below), the greatest controversy over Iraq is yet to come but it will to take off this week or next when a major U.S. mass media organization breaks the silence. It will show pictures it has which depicts the hardest truth which Americans have yet to face about their government. They will shortly see that a legion of Dr Strangelove’s in U.S. government REALLY will stop at nothing in leveling the world into the category of chattel which can be manipulated and disposed of at will.

The world will also learn that the American government is rapidly disintegrating into impotence from the in-fighting which is now engulfing the Imperial Faction and the Republicrats which dominate both of the major parties. The professional journalists in Washington DC who are contributing to TomDispatch are pointing to what is beginning to be described as a sort of “civil war” among the apparatchiks of the Military Industrial Academic CIA complex. The complex, for the first time since the Vietnam War, is splitting into hostile camps As a result of this fractionation, government “secrets” are being outed in large quantities on the street. Pentagon, Military, CIA, and State Department memos, reports, eye witness accounts, secret policy statements, pictures, and intelligence assessments are being made available to journalists and

investigators seeking them.

Apparently, the people who know have decided that George W. Bush can no longer govern….and events are rapidly eroding any semblance of believable authority away from the White House. The country will be politically deadlocked until 2005 and possibly beyond. It is highly probable that within the next several months Bush’s fall will be as complete as Nixon’s.

TomDispatch also has been able to draw out the historical “formative’ elements in these run-amok intelligence operations of the Black Arts Nation. They began to tool up from the massive flows of money which the “Reagan Revolution” made available to the U.S. Military Industrial Complex to fight populist revolutions in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Everything which has been done in the Tragedy of Iraq was well honed into operational programs in the CIA and has been professionally maintained and procedural zed ever since. America has been directly responsible for torture and dirty tricks for a long time, probably including the training of Saddam Hussein.

The veil on all of this has been pierced…and the “Great Purification” can be brought forth if people stand tall and refuse to be conned any longer by the toadies in government and media. Here below are some of the breaking news items from TomDispatch.Com. Get some tissue paper before attempting to read this.

Water-boarding in the White House

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1497http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/indexprint.mhtml?pid=1497

Quotes of the week:

"As early as Sept. 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney, in his first interview after the 9/11 attacks, said, ‘It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective'… In February 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "The reality is, the set of facts that exist today with al-Qaeda and the Taliban were not necessarily the set of facts that were considered when the Geneva Convention was fashioned." (Amanda Ripley, Redefining Torture, Time Magazine)

"National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice yesterday said President Bush 'has given broad authority to a variety of people to do what they have to do to protect this country… It's a new kind of war," she told Fox News. "We're fighting on a lot of different fronts.' Rice's comments came after Amnesty International questioned Bush on the Nov.3 attack using a Hellfire missile, which killed senior al Qaeda thug Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, a key plotter in the deadly October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Al-Harthi and five others were killed by a missile fired by an unmanned Predator drone operated by the CIA. Amnesty International asked the United States to issue a statement that it does not support

'extra-judicial executions.'" (Aly Sujo, "We're Ready to Unleash More Hellfire," the New York Post, November 11, 2002)

"France, Russia, Germany, and Canada, which did not support the war but have since labored to repair their relations with the United States, were particularly vocal in their criticism of the restrictions [on Iraqi reconstruction contracts], outlined Tuesday in a Pentagon memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. In Berlin, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, standing alongside UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, suggested the memo could be contrary to the spirit of international law, a remark that Bush later scoffed at while speaking with reporters. ‘International law?' Bush said. ‘I'd better call my lawyers.'" (Stephen J. Glain, Bush Defends Plan on Iraq Contracts, the Boston Globe, December 12, 2003)

"The Bush administration pledged yesterday for the first time that the United States will not torture terrorism suspects or treat them cruelly in an attempt to extract information, a move that comes as the deaths of two Afghan prisoners in U.S. custody are being investigated as homicides… Bush, in honoring U.N. Torture Victims Recognition Day yesterday, said, ‘The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment.'" (Peter Slevin, U.S. Pledges to Avoid Torture, the Washington Post, June 27, 2003)

"Leading this fight by example"

On Sunday, in part one of this dispatch on our global torture system, George Orwell… meet Franz Kafka, I wrote: "There will be so much more to learn. Already, when it comes to Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Pentagon keeps heaping investigations on top of one another, each subsequent one led by a figure with a higher rank and so more capable of investigating responsibility at higher levels, and I think it can be said with certainty that this will only get worse -- worse probably than anything we now imagine." As it happens, this administration is hemorrhaging documents. It took exactly twenty-four hours for my modest prediction to come true.

In the space of a day, we learned much more; it got significantly worse; and the Pentagon announced yet another investigation, this time of prisoner conditions at Guantanamo, where, it is rumored, much treatment and mistreatment was systematically and bureaucratically videoed, filed, and stored. Though this may seem but the next case of the criminal investigating the crime, there are numerous military men and intelligence officials angry enough, often disgusted enough, at what this administration has let loose to make even insider investigations dangerous for the administration these days.

Were the subject at hand anything but the creation of an American torture regime (and implicitly "high crimes and misdemeanors"), some of what's happened would be hilarious. For instance, Attorney General Ashcroft has stiff-armed Congress, refusing to declassify the

memoranda that the administration's many legal minds produced justifying torture and the most literal sort of imperial presidency (to be presided over by a torturer-in-chief); and yet, in the last day or so, these memos have sprouted like so many wretched weeds at news sites all over the Internet. (To read several of these lengthy, tedious, pretzeled documents posted in their grim near-entireties, go to the Washington Post, Newsweek, or Global Beat and click away.)

What they make clear is that the Bush administration had torture on the brain. Its officials were fixated on the subject, which went so naturally with the President's new-style, no-holds-barred, we're-the-only-law-in-town, dead-or-alive, assassination-and-kidnapping "war on terrorism." It's no longer a matter of whether knowledge of the acts committed at Abu Ghraib prison reach the President and his advisors, but of what can only be termed a complete obsession with the subject of torture among those figures. The highest officials at the Pentagon, in the military, in the CIA, and at the Justice Department clearly couldn't stop thinking about torture -- as over the course of more than a year they requested legal memorandum after memorandum, all chewing over how to define torture so that various inhumane acts involving the infliction of mental and physical pain would not be considered such; over how far to go when too far was never quite far enough. In this sense, whether they were aware of the individual acts of horror at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere (and a number of them evidently were), they were certainly intensely aware that acts of this nature and worse were a "necessity" of their war (even if photos of them were not).

Just to sum up the last day or so of news on the subject:

We now know from an Andrea Elliott report in the New York Times (Unit Says It Gave Earlier Warning of Abuse in Iraq) that at least some of those wild and wacky guys in military intelligence at Abu Ghraib were actually reporting the abuses at that prison and other "detention facilities" in the country to their superiors. This was well before the January date at which top military officials claim to have first learned about the abuses from the now notorious photos turned in by a soldier/whistleblower.

Oh, and among the abuses the intelligence men reported were: "electric shocks at other holding facilities before arriving in Abu Ghraib," "burns on the body" (recorded in photos in a prisoner's file), and the beating to bloody pulps of five generals of Saddam's defeated military, who do, of course, fall uncontrovertibly into the category of prisoners of war and so under the Geneva Conventions.

(By the way, a phenomenon to note: Wherever this administration or its minions conceived of or committed horrors, there was usually someone disturbed enough to record the fact and in some way protest it. To take but one example, as Dana Priest and Bradley Graham reported recently in the Washington Post, "[O]n Dec. 2, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a set of more aggressive interrogation methods to be used on Mohamed al Qahtani, a Saudi detainee [at Guantanamo] who some officials believed may have been the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A naval psychologist at the base protested the use of some techniques meant to humiliate prisoners and sought

help from the Navy's top civilian lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, to stop them, according to three defense officials knowledgeable about the debate."

We now know as well, thanks to a piece (The Torturers) by Justin Raimondo, the fierce libertarian columnist for Antiwar.com, that New Yorker magazine journalist Seymour Hersh, who first pushed the Abu Ghraib story into the light of day, is saying more than he's yet written. Here is a summary Raimondo got of part of a recent Hersh talk at the University of Chicago:

"He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened…."

So we still have on-camera acts of horror against children to look forward to. (Is there no irony in the fact that the Bush administration has managed, through its war on terrorism, to feed every perverse sexual fantasy it would otherwise decry? But irony is inconceivable when you're dealing with planners incapable of recognizing the category of "unintended consequences.")

Oh, and thanks to Time magazine, we now know that other horrors are still to be described elsewhere in the imperium: "A Republican Senator says charges of manslaughter and rape may soon be brought against U.S. personnel involved in handling detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Thanks to Newsweek's Michael Hirsh, John Barry, and Daniel Klaidman (A Tortured Debate), we now know something of what went on in the White House itself after "President Bush had declared war on Al Qaeda, and in a series of covert directives, he had authorized the CIA to set up secret interrogation facilities and to use new, harsher methods… The handling of [captured al-Qaeda figure] al-Libi touched off a long-running battle over interrogation tactics inside the administration. It is a struggle that continued right up until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April -- and it extended into the White House… [Justice Department lawyer John] Yoo's August 2002 memo [now posted] was prompted by CIA questions about what to do with a top Qaeda captive, Abu Zubaydah, who had turned uncooperative. And it was drafted after White House meetings convened by George W. Bush's chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Department general counsel William Haynes and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel, who discussed specific interrogation techniques, says a source familiar with the discussions. Among the methods they found acceptable: ‘water-boarding,' or dripping water into a wet cloth over a suspect's face, which can feel like drowning; and threatening to bring in more-brutal interrogators from other nations."

Imagine. Water-boarding in the White House.

On Sunday, when I wrote the first part of this dispatch, we had a vague report from the Washington Post that, according to one military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, the White House had been requesting information from the prison. (This was when the administration was in a

sweat about who exactly the Iraqi insurgents, so unexpectedly resisting, really were.) Today, thanks again to Justin Raimondo, we have this fascinating passage from an on-line diary, a blog -- the Internet is a kind of bizarre wonder, isn't it? -- by Joe Ryan, evidently an employee at Abu Ghraib of a private "contractor," CACI International. On March 30, Ryan wrote:

"The other big news at work was a message sent to us from Ms. Rice, the National Security Advisor, thanking us for the intelligence that has come out of our shop and noting that our work is being briefed to President Bush on a regular basis. Now if we could declassify some of it in order to shut up these people who say we have no business over here, that would be the best day!"

Robert Fisk, reporter for the British Independent, mentioned Ryan in late May in the following curious way: "One of Staphanovic's co-workers, Joe Ryan – [a CACI employee] who was not named in the Taguba report -- now says he underwent an ‘Israeli interrogation course' before going to Iraq."

And from Julian Coman of the British Telegraph we have word that worse is yet to come, possibly sometime this week:

"New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House. The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly."

By the way, when the notoriously close-mouthed Red Cross begins to let its private documents dribble out, you know that we're in dire and desperate straits. Coman quotes Scott Horton, former chairman of the New York Bar Association, "who has been advising Pentagon lawyers unhappy at the administration's approach," as saying that "the biggest bombs in this case have yet to be dropped."

Every time there is a further revelation, Rumsfeld piles on another insider investigation. But note -- though no one has noted it – that while the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA asked for all sorts of in-house legal opinions on various possible acts of torture (in the CIA case, clearly to cover future butts and implicate larger groups, should something slip out someday), no one in our government ever thought to consult, say, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or any other group that might be considered both concerned with such matters and not completely self-interested. While this may seem obvious indeed -- they were, after all, planning to commit acts they knew would horrify the international human rights community, who were seen as a bunch of namby-pamby global sissies -- nonetheless, it's worth stating that it should never be up to potential torturers (or lawyers in their pay) to decide what is and is not torture.

Reagan and Bush: An unnoticed similarity

In his typical manly fashion, at a news conference last week the President bravely confronted the issue of torture head on. Here are the two relevant passages:

Q Mr. President, the Justice Department issued an advisory opinion last year declaring that as Commander-in-Chief you have the authority to order any kind of interrogation techniques that are necessary to pursue the war on terror. Were you aware of this advisory opinion? Do you agree with it? And did you issue any such authorization at any time?

THE PRESIDENT: No, the authorization I issued, David, was that anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations. That's the message I gave our people.

Q Have you seen the memos?

THE PRESIDENT: I can't remember if I've seen the memo or not, but I gave those instructions…

Q Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?

THE PRESIDENT: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. If I -- maybe -- maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions out of -- from me to the government.

I hope you're comforted. "We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws…" Actually, as we now know, Mr. Bush's lawyers did exactly that, and assumedly when the President says we're adhering to those laws, he means to the interpretations of those laws offered by his own people -- about which Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale University's law school and a former assistant secretary of state, was recently quoted in the British Financial Times as saying, "They are blatantly wrong, It's just erroneous legal analysis. The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide." Well, exactly, and that should comfort you.

You would think, given his performance on U.N. Torture Victims Recognition Day (quoted above), that the President might have taken to the podium and denounced torture done in the name of his administration and anyone connected in any way with it or who advocated anything like it. He might have insisted that they would be prosecuted zealously and to the full extent of the law, but he preferred, for obvious reasons, to follow the path he had already hacked through the underbrush of the Valerie Plame case.

Oh, and on that unnoticed similarity to Ronald Reagan, don't overlook the President's wonderful, "I can't remember if I've seen the memo or not." How about not just that memo but any of the memos? How about not just seen, but heard about, or heard summaries of advice from? Hmm. Can't remember if I even asked those questions. In any case, what I think we can already see developing is the famed Reagan Iran-Contra defense: I-can't-remember, I-don't-recall. It worked for his hero, why not for him?

In the meanwhile, for those who think no domestic "unintended consequences" will flow from the pseudo-legalisms developed by the White House's legal wizards and applied in Iraq and elsewhere with such mayhem -- think again. After all, as Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer points out in the case of former Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay S. Bybee (Tout Torture, Get Promoted), the President has been intent on appointing the same legal brains to judgeships. Let this go into a second term and the creators of an American legal theory of torture will be judging us all.

Looking Back

It's worth recalling how much, in the course of Torturegate, we have chosen to forget. For instance, we treat the Abu Ghraib photos as if they were the first shocking photos from our offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, but check out a different set of photos, slipped to progressive websites way back in November 2002. These were remarkable photos of exactly how we transported Taliban and al-Qaeda captives whom we had just declared non-POWs (for reasons that now put every one of the tens of thousands of "contract workers" in Iraq at desperate risk) to Guantanamo. At the time, they caused no ripples in the American mainstream media, and yet they were declared genuine by the Pentagon. To the best of my knowledge, the identity of the photographer is still unknown, but he or she represented one of the earliest insider-whistleblowers in this ongoing disaster. Today, looking back, these photos seem like a signal from hell, from the very bowels of a future Abu Ghraib.

Similar photos of the prisoners on reaching Guantanamo caused shock and anger around the world, but again barely a ripple here. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both protested, but were generally ignored. Here are a couple of passages from a January 23, 2002 Houston Chronicle piece ("Rumsfeld explicitly denies critics' torture accusations") by Michael Hedges:

"Amnesty International, the human rights organization, went further Tuesday, calling the shackling of prisoners and the use of goggles and ear muffs torture. 'The imposition of sensory deprivation bears the hallmarks of known methods to break prisoners prior to interrogation,' said Director of Policy Claudio Cordone. 'While there are legitimate security considerations . . . we feel the measures adopted in their regard . . . go well beyond what is necessary from a security point of view.'"

This was also the moment when Donald Rumsfeld first insisted:

"The United States is treating them -- all detainees -- consistently with

the principles of the Geneva Convention. They are being treated humanely… Guantanamo Bay's climate is different than Afghanistan. To be in an 8-by-8 cell in beautiful, sunny Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is not inhumane treatment."

Here's a moderate British view of these proceedings, offering a sense of what could indeed be seen back then, were you not locked in the American media bubble. On January 17, 2002, Hugo Young of the Guardian wrote in part (We will not tolerate the abuse of war prisoners: Guantanamo could be where America and Europe part company):

"For Washington, Camp X-Ray is plainly an extension of the war. The captives are not allowed to be called prisoners of war, but are held under rules of war defined by the side that's continuing to fight and maybe win it. They're kept off US territory, and outside the reach of the Geneva Conventions, so they can be treated the way American generals and politicians rather than American lawyers want to treat them: which is to say, without fundamental rights or international protection… When the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said he had "not the slightest interest" in the camp's conditions, he signalled simultaneously contempt for the prisoners and bilious disdain for any critics who might dare to speak…

"Mr Roth [of Human Rights Watch] likened the military tribunals President Bush has announced to those of a tin- pot tyrant wanting to get rid of his political enemies - which in another life Washington would be the first to condemn. But HRW is not the mainstream. The mainstream all flows in one acquiescent direction. Searching the New York Times and Washington Post websites, I can find neither an editorial nor a column that criticised the regime Rumsfeld approves for [Guantanamo's] Camp X-Ray. The rights and wrongs are barely discussed. Here's a considerable issue of principle, staked out by a president in seeming defiance of international conventions, which the big US papers would normally be full of. Instead, it succumbs to the fog of loyalty that has choked the oxygen out of controversy in the citadels of the US media ever since September 11."

Much more could obviously be written on the subject, but consider this a modest reminder of all the obvious clues and cues that were simply avoided, denied, ignored in this country -- largely missing-in-action (if you weren't on the Internet or reading a few, relatively isolated American columnists like James Carroll of the Boston Globe or Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times) until the Abu Ghraib moment which broke like a sudden storm. Just remember that those who claim the photos did it -- which they did -- are also missing part of the picture.

Nazi doctors… Neocon lawyers?

In the midst of the recent round of revelations that began with Abu Ghraib, I've noted a curious phenomenon, one that (as with so much else in the past year) brought the Vietnam era to mind: The "Nazi analogy" is making its slow way into the critical mainstream. Of course, since at least 9/11 this analogy has been alive and well at the wilder fringes of the Internet. (There, people have long been asking: Are we already in the Nazi era, or are we at the desperate end of the Weimar

Republic? Were the attacks of 9/11 another Reichstag burning?)

Now, variations on this Nazi analogy are suddenly thriving -- and not in obscure political websites either. (I've always avoided the analogy myself because it's such a minefield and tends to send everyone flying in strange and unfruitful directions.) To take just a couple of recent examples, columnist William Pfaff wrote in the International Herald Tribune (When laws get in the way of torture):

"The Bush administration's civilians had been complaining about how law, international treaties and conventions, and military norms and inhibitions, were interfering with their determination to seize and hold anyone they pleased in secret prisons, declare them without legal rights even when they were American citizens, torture them whenever they wanted and keep them forever, if they liked (a totalitarian ambition, obviously). They wanted these obstructions removed. Their complaints sounded like the complaints of Adolf Eichmann, when he described during his trial in Israel the irksome bureaucratic and legal obstacles he ran into in wartime Germany in carrying out his genocidal responsibilities."

In the Chicago Sun Times, columnist Andrew Greeley embedded the analogy in his title: Is US like Germany of the '30s?; while Eric Margolis, the conservative columnist for the Toronto Sun, in a column praising the Reagan Presidency (U.S. Honor Ambushed) cited both of the great totalitarian systems of the previous century:

"The justice department, which is supposed to uphold the law, actually sent a memo worthy of the Nazi legal system explaining why the Geneva Conventions and U.S. laws did not apply to 'terrorism suspects.' Any American may apparently be arrested as a 'terrorism suspect,' and tortured, according to justice lawyers. Replace 'terrorism suspect' with 'enemy of the people' and you have Stalin's Soviet tyranny… When legal and moral constraints are removed, or undermined, states run rampant over their people's rights. Both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union embarked on their monstrous crimes after co-operative lawyers set the legal stage for their actions."

And they weren't alone. The lawyers for this administration seem, by the evidence of their memos, to have spent time considering the "superior orders" or Nuremberg defense and its uses, concluding in their March 6 memorandum, as Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal put it (Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture):

"For members of the military, the report suggested that officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders 'may be inferred to be lawful' and are 'disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.' Examining the 'superior orders' defense at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the Vietnam War prosecution of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley for the My Lai massacre and the current U.N. war-crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the report concluded it could be asserted by 'U.S. armed forces personnel engaged in exceptional interrogations except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful.'"

When, in the inner counsels of our government, lawyers find themselves pouring through the defenses of war criminals to provide cover for "exceptional interrogations," you might think a signal flag or two would go up in the heart of the administration (and not just among sidelined JAG military lawyers). It tells us much that they could include any version of the Nuremberg defense in their advisories without blinking, and it tells us a good deal more, not so much about historical analogies, as about the extremity of our moment that people like Greeley, Pfaff, and Margolis, not to speak of the government's best lawyers now find Nazism and totalitarianism creeping into their brains.

A similar extreme analogization (to coin a terrible word) happened in the Vietnam era. In those years, each side of an inter-American struggle over the course of that war proclaimed the other "brownshirts" once tempers started to rise. Endless confusions ensued, wonderfully caught by the journalist Elinor Langer at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. When the antiwar demonstrators outside the convention hall looked at the Chicago police, who were mercilessly beating them, many, in the atmosphere of the moment, saw Nazis and chanted not only "the whole world's watching," but "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" Others, however, saw only future comrades, oppressed working-class whites, and shouted out, "Join us, join us!" As Langer wrote afterwards, "In the middle of Chicago, at the nominating convention of one of America's two major parties, half of us thought we were in Germany and half of us thought we were in Russia." (The police charged the demonstrators, screaming, "Kill the Commies!")

In the post-9/11 moment, it was "liberal" war hawks and administration supporters who were probably the first to leap for the Nazi analogy, applying it and various other aspects of totalitarianism to al-Qaeda and fanatic Islamist movements around the world. Now, it seems, like so much else, the analogy is heading home, another of unintended consequence to be pinned on itself like that tail on the donkey.

And, I have to admit, just considering the Bush lawyers and their chilling documents, it's hard not to think of those doctors who, as Robert Jay Lifton wrote so powerfully in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, turned the pledge to heal into a commitment to murder in service to Hitler's regime. The lawyerly equivalent would be, I suppose, the turning of a commitment to uphold justice into the protection from prosecution of those who administer pain for our regime. While this doesn't reach the depths of those Nazi doctors (and lawyers), it certainly is shameful; or, as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius put it today (Small Comfort) while describing the August 2002 memorandum, "in its dry, lawyerly way, [it] is as shocking as the Abu Ghraib photographs." Tom

(Thanks to Nick Turse for research help.)

THE STRATEGIC SITUATION – Final SynopsisFor predictions related to the mess in Palestine, the Middle East, and the Bush political era, check out http://www.michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/ecbulletins/statusreports_political.htm#strategic(watch the word wrap on the URL)

AS PREVIOUSLY OBSERVED:  Al Qaeda has the U.S. just exactly where they want it, its military extended and exposed to the grenades of  an endless Arab "snipe hunt" across a vast unfriendly territory.  They use their random attacks like the lances of bullfighters, to weaken and confuse the American Bull.  Their strategy is winning, mainly because Bush, Rumsfeld and his Imperial Faction are incompetent buffoons and continue to step into the traps Al Qaeda lays as well as hand delivering on a silver platter an oafish continuation of the killing fields of Iraq.  An astute leader could turn the entire situation around in 120 days but none has arisen among the Americans.

In North America, mass numbers of Americans are bitterly fractionating in disgust as they finally awaken to the sordid nature of their governance by crooks, Black Arts policies, police proactive aggression dominance techniques, and manipulation procedures which have created a house-of-cards nation of illusions, gross deceptions, sadistic torture chambers, and legions of Dr. Strangelove’s weaving their fascist fantasies of global experimentation on their chattel whilst hiding anon in luxury villas everywhere.

Their government collapses in fragmentation and politics among them will be deadlocked for the next six months. Tendencies to violence and superb venues for it are clearly obvious. An increasingly nervous mass broadcast media attempts still to look the other way, insisting that the ethical and moral world of Truman, Eisenhower, and JFK still exists…

somewhere…if they could only find it.

But a new media now arrives, floating down the river Iway, and with it comes a new consciousness of the world and the lies which have driven so much of the past 50 years….

From this, the future will arise as the old world slowly collapses.

All else is fluid, in transition. Thank God Almighty!

Michael Wells Mandeville,The Hills of Arizona USA at mwman@earthlink.netMaster Website Index is at: http://www.michaelmandeville.com

Author of  several books, including: "Return of the Phoenix" at http://www.michaelmandeville.com/phoenix/phoenix.htmand "The Coming Economic Collapse of 2006" athttp://www.michaelmandeville.com/calendar/collapse2006.htm_________________________________________________To order any books or products go tohttp://www.michaelmandeville.com/catalog/cosmic_cat.htm

To check the latest status of the Change In The Earth and the location of Earth's Axis, go to:http://www.michaelmandeville.com/earthmonitor/

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