Austrian Fritzl sentenced to life

Austrian Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter in a cellar and fathered her seven children, has been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Fritzl, 73, was found guilty of all charges against him, including rape, incest, murder and enslavement.

He showed no obvious emotion at the verdict, telling the court that he accepted it and would not appeal.

The court ordered that Fritzl should serve his life sentence in a secure psychiatric facility.

The judge said he could speak to his lawyer but he shook his head. Then he was led out of court with an impassive face.

See the Fritzl family tree

Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said outside the court after the verdict: "I would say that the verdict was a logical consequence of a confession.

"Of course if you have 3,000 cases of rape and 24 years of being kept in a cellar, it is evident that there can only be a punishment or verdict like this one."

Court officials describe the details of Fritzl's life sentence

The life sentence was handed down for the murder by neglect of one of the children, who died soon after birth.

The jury unanimously accepted prosecutors' arguments that the child could have survived if it had received medical care denied by Fritzl.

The defendant first denied murder and enslavement but changed his plea to guilty after seeing testimony from his daughter.

The verdict is final and irreversible, as neither the defence nor the prosecution is contesting it.

Co-ordination centre

The BBC's Bethany Bell at the court says there has been a huge amount of media interest in the trial, and its twists and turns have been enormous.

At the time of the first details of this case, no-one could grasp the extent of this man's crimes, she says, and Austria still has to come to terms with it.

Court officials said Fritzl would initially return to St Poelten jail, where he has been held in custody. Justice Ministry spokeswoman Katharina Swoboda told AFP news agency that he would remain there in the coming weeks.


I regret from the bottom of my heart what I've done to my family
Josef Fritzl

In pictures: Josef Fritzl trial
Timeline: Austrian cellar case
Profile: Josef Fritzl

The prison's deputy warden, Erich Huber-Guensthofer, said he would be kept under suicide watch.

He will then be sent to a co-ordination centre, where it will be determined how dangerous he is and whether he is able to undergo therapy, before going on to the psychiatric facility.

He could in theory be released from the facility if he is deemed to be cured of his illness and would serve the remainder of his sentence in a normal prison.

In this case he will be eligible for release after 15 years.

Court spokesman Franz Cutka said Fritzl's daughter could also bring a civil case against her father, adding that there was no limit to the damages she could request.

Regrets

The Austrian imprisoned his daughter in a cellar under his house for 24 years and repeatedly raped her.


FRITZL'S CRIMES
Murder by neglect
Enslavement
Deprivation of liberty
Rape
Incest
Coercion

Why did Fritzl change his mind?
Lawyer: 'Fritzl had to be powerful'
Day-by-day: Fritzl trial
The daughter and three of the children were kept captive in the cellar until the case came to light in April last year, when one of them became seriously ill and was taken to hospital.

In his surprise confession on Wednesday, Fritzl admitted murdering by neglect one of newborn twin boys his daughter gave birth to in 1996, having failed to arrange medical care for the ailing infant.

The other three children were raised in the family home by Fritzl and his wife, after he told people that his daughter had abandoned them and joined a sect.

The daughter and her six surviving children been recovering from their ordeal in a psychiatric clinic and at a secret location.

Addressing the jury before the verdict, Fritzl said: "I regret from the bottom of my heart what I've done to my family."

"Unfortunately I cannot undo what I did. I can only try to limit the damage done as best as I can," he said.

The world economy is set to shrink by between 0.5% and 1.0% in 2009, the first global contraction in 60 years.

In its gloomiest forecast yet, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that developed countries will suffer a "deep recession".

The global economic body says "the prolonged financial crisis has battered global economic activity beyond what was previously anticipated".

Just two months ago, the IMF predicted world output would increase by 0.5%.


In the event of further delays in implementing comprehensive policies to stabilise financial conditions, the recession will be deeper and more prolonged
IMF
EU to debate extra stimulus calls
What is a global recession?

But in its report drawn up for the G20 group of finance ministers, the IMF now says that the whole world economy will shrink, and predicts that the advanced economies will suffer a decline in output of between 3% and 3.5% in 2009, and barely grow in 2010, with growth of between 0% and 0.5%.

The IMF says this will happen despite a big fiscal stimulus from many G20 countries designed to boost growth.

It says that the G20 as a whole is adding 1.8% of GDP ($780bn) to boost growth this year - but that the EU is lagging behind with only 1%.

And it warns that the UK is building up the biggest fiscal deficit amongst all the G20 countries, which will amount to 11% of GDP by 2010.

Financial crisis unresolved

The IMF warns that the economic conditions could still deteriorate further if the banking crisis was not tackled head on by governments around the world.

"In the event of further delays in implementing comprehensive policies to stabilise financial conditions, the recession will be deeper and more prolonged," the report says.

Bangladesh textile workers
The global slowdown has affected exporters such as Bangladesh


The IMF says its revised projections reflect "unrelenting financial turmoil, negative incoming data, sinking confidence, and the limited effect to date of policy responses with respect to the restoration of financial system health."

Japan is forecast to decline the most, by 5.8% this year, while the eurozone will contract by 3.2% and the US by 2.6%.

The most urgent problem in restoring the banking system to health is in the United States, where the Obama administration has yet to reveal details of its plan for private-public partnership to buy up to $1tn in toxic assets.

At the G20 finance ministers meeting at the weekend, restoring lending by tackling problems in the financial system was cited as the "key priority" - a message reinforced by G20 business leaders who met in London on Wednesday.

Warning on Eastern Europe

Meanwhile, the IMF was also warns of a serious risk that emerging economies will be unable to secure external finance, as banks and investors in rich countries withdraw their money.


G20 LONDON SUMMIT
World leaders will meet next month in London to discuss measures to tackle the downturn. See our in-depth guide to the G20 summit.
The G20 countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the US and the EU.
The G20 make up 80% of the world economy and 90% of trade

Q&A: G20 Summit
What do G20 sherpas do?
Send us your comments

"The risks are largest for emerging countries that rely on cross-border flows to finance current account deficits," it says.

And this makes central and eastern European countries likely to be the "most adversely affected" - with the Baltic states, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria "suffering the greatest damage".

The IMF is already in negotiations about a rescue package for Romania.

East Asian countries, which rely heavily on manufacturing exports, have also been hard-hit by the decline of world trade, particularly in the IT sector.

In relative terms, the developing and emerging market countries as a whole, which are predicted to grow by just 1.5% to 2.5%, below the growth of population in many countries, have suffered the biggest downward revisions.

Fiscal stimulus

In addition to fixing the banking sector, many countries are now spending more public money to boost economic growth.

The IMF estimates that the G20 countries as a whole will spend an extra 1.8% of GDP ($780bn) in 2009 on fiscal stimulus, not far from its earlier recommendation that they spend at least 2% of GDP on boosting growth.

Taking into account the "automatic stabilisers", for example the increased spending on unemployment benefits that results from a slowdown, it says that in 2009 there will be a 2.4% boost to GDP from fiscal expansion.

It says the fiscal expansion could add around 2% to world growth in 2009 and create approximately 7 million new jobs (or 19 million if China and India are included).

But the IMF warns that there is much less spending planned for 2010, with extra government spending of only $580bn (1.2% of GDP) across the G20, and a total fiscal boost of only 0.4%.

This has caused much dissent among G20 members, with the US, whose huge fiscal stimulus plan runs well into 2010, urging other G20 countries to boost their spending further.

Japan warns it may shoot down North Korean satellite launcher

Japan today threatened to shoot down a satellite that North Korea plans to launch early next month if it shows any signs of striking its territory.

Tokyo's warning that it would deploy its multibillion-dollar missile defence system raised tensions in the region after North Korea said that it had identified a potential "danger area" near Japanese territory along the rocket's flight path.

The regime told the International Maritime Organisation that the missile would be launched during daylight between 4 and 8 April, and that its boosters would fall into the Sea of Japan – about 75 miles (120km) from Japan's north-west coast – and the Pacific Ocean.

Officials in Tokyo said they reserved the right to destroy any threatening object in mid-flight, despite North Korean warnings that it would consider such a move an act of war.

"Under our law, we can intercept any object if it is falling towards Japan, including any attacks on Japan, for our security," Takeo Kawamura, the chief cabinet secretary, told reporters.

Despite repeated assurances from Pyongyang that the rocket is a vital part of North Korea's space programme, other countries in the region suspect the hardware is a Taepodong-2 ballistic missile.

South Korean intelligence has reported a build-up of activity in recent days near the missile's launch pad at Musudan-ri base on its neighbour's north-east coast.

Any missile launch, even one intended to put a satellite into orbit, would represent a snub to the US administration, which has repeatedly invited the communist state to return to negotiations over its nuclear weapons programme.

Last month the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, urged the north to cancel the launch, which US officials say would be in violation of a 2006 UN security council resolution.

The South Korean foreign ministry said in a statement: "If North Korea goes ahead with the launch, we believe there will be discussions and a response by the security council on the violation of the resolution."

The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said a missile or satellite launch would "threaten the peace and stability in the region."

After Japan's transport ministry ordered airlines and shipping companies operating in the area to take precautionary measures, Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways said they would alter flight paths on several European and other routes.

Speculation has been mounting for weeks that North Korea was about to put its hitherto unreliable missile technology to the test. The regime suffered a setback in 2006 when a Taepodong-2 missile – theoretically capable of reaching Alaska – blew up moments into its flight.

Japan has intensified efforts to protect itself against conventional missile attacks since 1998, when the north test-launched a long-range rocket over its territory without warning.

In response, Japan and the US have jointly developed a ballistic missile defence system that includes interceptor missiles on board ships and Patriot missiles dotted around Tokyo.

But experts believe that a rocket capable of launching a satellite into orbit may be too high to intercept.

Madoff to plead guilty, faces 150 years in prison

Bernard Madoff will plead guilty Thursday to 11 criminal counts including money laundering, perjury and securities, mail and wire fraud and will do so without a plea deal, knowing it carries a potential prison term of 150 years, lawyers said Tuesday in court.


Lawyers outlined the plea arrangement for the 70-year-old former Nasdaq chairman that was set to unfold later this week after Madoff waived several potential conflicts of interest between Madoff and his lawyer, Ira Sorkin.

He was charged in court papers with securities fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, false statements and perjury among other charges. U.S. prosecutor Marc Litt said there was no plea agreement with Madoff, accused of bilking thousands of investors worldwide over many years.
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The prosecutor told U.S. District Judge Denny Chin at a hearing that Madoff could face up to 150 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines. The judge said he would sentence Madoff in several months in the event of a guilty plea.

In court, Madoff's attorney Ira Lee Sorkin said there was an expectation that Madoff, 70, would plead guilty on Thursday to the criminal charges.

At the court hearing in New York over potential conflicts of interest for Sorkin, Madoff said "Yes, I am" when asked by the judge whether he was satisfied with his attorney continuing to represent him.

U.S. prosecutors have said Madoff, free on $10 million bail but under 24-hour house arrest and electronic surveillance in his luxury Manhattan apartment, ran a massive Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi scheme early investors are paid with money from new investors.

The purported swindle ran for decades with consistent returns of between 10% and 12%, but collapsed in last year's market meltdown

Put Maddoff and Blagojevich on work detail

When you hear about the outrageous accusations against Wall Street icon, now shamed, Bernard Maddoff, regarding his $50 billion Ponzi scheme and the corrupt thinking Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his peddling of Obama's Senate seat, it almost makes you want to bring back the firing squad because their offenses are almost treasonous.

Are we not in the midst of a financial battle of historic proportion? If the charges against them hold true, have they not destroyed the lives of thousands of people, not to mention the integrity of both the political and financial systems at a time when our nation is in crises?

Unfortunately, as they used to quip in another time; "hanging is too good for them!"

I have another solution for them and all white collar criminals doing soft time, even if it is a long time, PUT THEM TO WORK!


There are many manufacturing jobs we have exported to foreign countries because we have priced ourselves out of so many markets and we would not be competing with American labor to do so. Putting these felons to work would accomplish many beneficial results.

First of all we would be able to bring jobs home and the criminals would be helping to support the cost of their incarceration. Second we would be helping to balance (note the scales of justice) the trade deficit, which is hurting all of us more each year. Third, these guys need to do work that will help them better understand what it means to actually do an honest day's work. And lastly they could also make some restitution to those they have harmed.

Not to make light of President Bush's recent shoe incident in Iraq but I think the ideal job is to make shoes. I think it would be great if our "resort" jails had contracts with Skechers or Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) to bring their manufacturing home. While Bush showed his agility in avoiding getting hit by the flying shoes, white collar criminals should not be allowed to avoid being hit with a more severe and just penalty.

UFO Alien

Sistem Teknologi UFO
(Reverse-Engineering Roswell UFO Technology)

Oleh: Jack Shulman

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 6, Number 4 (June-July 1999)
from NexusMagazine Website


Computer company chief Jack Shulman argues that the transistor could never have been invented so suddenly at AT&T in late 1947 without the input of alien technology.

Edited from a lecture given by Jack Shulman
President
American Computer Company
at the Global Sciences Congress, Florida, USA, 11-17 March 1999
(Audiotape transcribed by Ruth Parnell)

Hi, I'm Jack Shulman. I'm the head of the American Computer Company. American Computer Company is part of the Technology International Group and Bell North America group of companies. I'm also one of the owners of the group of companies. I've been in the computer industry for about 28 or 29 years. I've worked for IBM as a professional services management consultant. I worked on the development of the personal computer in 1978 for FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology] and Simplicity Patterns, later adopted by IBM. I developed something called the "pattern creator". That's where we got the term "PC". Prior to that, I'd developed what you might call the first windowing operating system in 1975 for Citibank, and before that there were earlier versions I did for a company called Vydec. I'm a serious computer person - very, very serious - and also someone who's not generally inclined to leap to great predispositions about any unusual subject.

Well, as it turns out, a few years ago I got my dose of reality. It was in the form of a visit from a friend of mine. When I was very young I'd got involved in technology, partly by virtue of the influence of a friend's father. I grew up in central New Jersey, which is around where AT&T and Bell Labs originated, and my friend's father was the head of Bell Labs. I ended up at a private school and ended up living at the household of the head of Bell Labs, going to that private school and going to college with his son as a roommate, and I kind of grew up around the various projects at Bell Laboratories in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I'd always held out that AT&T was this rather magnificent institution. Anybody here worked for AT&T in the past? So, you know when I say Bell Labs research, I'm speaking Holy Grail; and in certain parts of the defence community and in government I'm also speaking Holy Grail. Anyone here realise that AT&T and Bell Laboratories ran our nuclear arsenal for 45 years? Anybody who knows that, raise your hand. Not a one of you. I didn't really even know until a little bit later in my career, but I knew something strange was going on because it always seemed to me that AT&T always had what it needed to make innovations in technology, and subsequently such technology would migrate to an IBM or a Sarnoff Research or to an RCA.

And I could never really figure out, in the course of my young life, who were these magnificent, incredible scientists, other than that I frequently met them...like a fellow by the name of William Shockley. He was quite a frequent friend to Jack Morton's household, and I knew him, and I knew some of the other folks that he knew, like a fellow by the name of - well, I guess not too many people would know him - Bob Noyce, and Jack Kilby who was an acquaintance of theirs, and so forth. These names, if you've ever worked for AT&T or in the electronics industry, are also Holy Grail names. These are Mount Rushmores of the technology industry. Jack Kilby is credited with the invention of the integrated circuit.

I was rather shocked when, about late 1995, a dear friend came to me. He was at one time one of the very well known generals in the Pentagon, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is now a consultant. I'd known him a very long time through the Morton family and Bell and when working for IBM. He asked me to analyse some documents that he had in his possession. He showed me some pictures. I kind of turned up my nose. I said, "I don't believe this." He suggested they were pictures of an alien craft. I said to him, "Well, why do you come to me and ask me this?" "Because there are some documents that fell into my possession that I would also like you to see, that go beyond these drawings, these pictures, these photographs, that describe some technology; and I would like you to analyse this technology and make a determination for me of the veracity of these documents, help me to authenticate them." I said, "Fine. I don't believe this is real. I'm sceptical. I don't believe in aliens, I don't believe in UFOs, I don't believe in any of that." And he said, "Okay, well, I'd still want you to take a look at them, Jack." And I agreed.

I met with him at his home. I met a woman by the name of Mrs Jeffrey Proscauer. That's not her real name, but it's the name she goes by; she does not want her true identity revealed. And I got a chance to piece and look through some 28 boxes of materials that had come from Western Electric Laboratories in the late 1940s, 1947, early 1948 and beyond, and some subsequent documents.

Now again, if you've ever worked for AT&T, you know that the laboratories at Bell Laboratories are often quite distinct, and the documentation from a laboratory is kept in an ongoing, growing tome called a "Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook". It turns out that even in the super-secret laboratories, the ones in the part of Western Electric or Bell Laboratories that manage the nuclear arsenal, these notebooks are kept, and they grow and they're ongoing and they become almost like a living representation of what that laboratory did for a living.

Well, such as it is, I was rather shocked at what I had to see there in these boxes of materials, and I convinced them to let me look at them over the course of about three-and-a-half weeks. They were kept at the consultant's house during that time period, and he actually kept a security guard with them at all times because he was afraid that someone might come and steal them. Now of course, I wasn't sure why he was afraid, because at the time I didn't realise the full magnitude of what I was looking at.

In any event, after about two or three weeks of looking at them, I came back to him and we sat down over what turned out to be a Christmas Eve dinner, and I said to him: "I've got to tell you something. I'm having a real problem with this because what you're showing me looks like technology that we have not yet developed, that humanity has not yet developed, yet the documents you're showing me appear to be forty-eight, forty-nine years old. This would put them in 1947, 1948, 1949."

I suggested to him that before I could proceed I would have to have someone verify the age, carbon-date or come up with some other means to verify the age of the documents, and he agreed. So, with the help of a mutual acquaintance - a private investigator formerly with the Justice Department - we were able to take fragments of the documents without damaging them.

We sent them to an expert who formerly consulted for Scotland Yard; he's a fairly well known forensic expert at...I believe it's the University of Edinburgh in Scotland today; he was at a different university at the time. He analysed these fragments of these documents for me, and came back and told me that the ink, the paper, even the presentations were valid; that this was in fact a book or series of books from the 1947, '48, '49, 1950 time period. That took him about four and a half weeks of analysis, and I was for four and a half weeks, as you can imagine, holding my breath.

The things that I saw described in this Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook consisted of things that today would be more powerful than the Intel Pentium processor, for instance, or the Cray supercomputer. There were communications devices that were described; there were ways to sandwich-in very, very thin, micrometre-thin layers; special metals to produce moving parts for things like...from the descriptions that I read, the nearest thing I could describe...an anti-gravity propulsion unit for a spacecraft. They included dynamic electronic and power-control technology that even to this day we have not yet developed. They included communications technology that was described only as having been taken from an object of unknown or unearthly origin. The documents were very carefully worded not to reveal what was, in reality, in these boxes of materials.

I was sort of at a loss at that juncture, because even though we had forensic information at the time from this particular forensic expert that would date these boxes back to the late '40s, and even though they said "Western Electric, Bell Laboratories", part of them said something called "Z-Division" on them. We knew of the Z-Division: it was a segment of the United States Army, formed in 1947 and 1948. The implications were that this project was operating on the fringes of the nuclear bomb development project - then known as the Manhattan Project Group.

It turns out that in 1947 - between '47 and actually late '48 - Harry Truman decided he was going to grant a contract to AT&T to go through the overseeing and management of our nuclear arsenal and the commercialisation of derived product technologies from the nuclear bomb, from the bomb project: the physics, the electronics, the control systems, even the ballistics, the radar that was used, the ICBM technology that was under development in the late '40s after we got a hold of the V-series rockets from the Nazis, and so forth. The contract was inked by Truman in early 1949, if I recall correctly, but during the prior two-year period there was an informal relationship, during which AT&T played a greater and greater role in the organisation of super-secret military weapons-grade projects for the federal government and eventually got pretty much control of what was then known as the Z-Division.

Z-Division, believe it or not, originated in Roswell, New Mexico. I guess the reason is, that is where the original nuclear bomb armada was formed - the first bomber wing that carried the nuclear bomb - and it migrated over to Kirtland Air Force Base during the time period when Orlando Lawrence, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories fellow, was called in. He was called in by Teller, Oppenheimer...all those folks responsible for the nuclear bomb...Leo Szwilard. Lawrence was called in at the time because he could make accelerators, or "cyclotrons" as they were known at the time. Those cyclotrons were capable of refining uranium, refining plutonium...well, actually, back then, they weren't working with plutonium but with uranium.

I guess you could imagine what it must have been like in the time period. They were in the middle of a war when they were building the nuclear bombs and they had to do everything secretly, so this Z-Division was created with super-secrecy as its fundamental core.

Ultimately Lawrence was called in because they had to build enough of an accelerator to refine enough uranium to make the bomb possible, and, in spite of all the greatest minds of nuclear physics assigned to the Z-Division in the Manhattan Project, none of them could figure out how to refine enough uranium to make the nuclear bomb a possibility. This was before the first bomb was exploded. So Lawrence was brought in because he knew how to make a cyclotron; but his cyclotron, the biggest one he'd ever created, was about the size of this white board over here, and it could produce about a thimbleful of refined uranium - which would have been about enough to make a nuclear bomb capable of blowing off your left foot.

In any event, Lawrence one day is called in and he's asked: "How do we build a cyclotron big enough?" He makes a few calculations and hands a requisition order to Harold Ackerman - today a federal judge, and who was the chief supply clerk for the Manhattan Project - to requisition enough silver to build a big silver racetrack; something like 12 million tons of silver. In fact, he took it to the United States Treasury, handed it to the then Secretary of the Treasury - I guess it was Morganthal - and Morganthal was asked to fill a 12-million-ton order, which also necessitated the relocation of Z-Division to some place where they could put all this silver and build this racetrack.

We decided one day at American Computer Company that we were going to be brave. I talked with my board and I talked with some of the people at the company and they agreed. "Yeah, we can try this; let's see what happens."

We decided that we were going to take the story that had been conveyed to me about this unusual Shopkeeper's Notebook with these unusual technological artifacts in them, and naively and blithely put a panel on the Internet, describing in black and white and colour what we had found, and raise the question. However, the picture that we put up was a picture of Testor's model of the so-called Roswell Lander. It's a picture of what looks like a spacecraft with wings and a jet propulsion system, with a pod in the front to hold alien occupants who were piloting it. We superimposed the picture over an image from the Thunder Range - of course, we picked the wrong place; the Plains of San Agustin was the right place, actually - and we put a little bit of rhetoric on this panel and just placed it right in the middle of our American Computer Company website.

Now that probably was the stupidest thing we ever did. Here's this picture of a Roswell alien lander sitting on a panel in the middle of a computer company website, and on it it said something like: "Did AT&T receive stolen alien technologies from the US Government in 1947 and thereby invent the transistor, the laser, the integrated circuit, and...on and on and on...different technologies?" Well, we figured the reaction we would get from the public would be one of, "Oh gee, isn't that cute? That's funny, X-Files, you know..." The reaction we got was not one we had anticipated.

Three days after we placed the image onto our website, we received a very strange series of military faxes to our tech support fax machine, referring to a piece of hardware known as "Sky Station". Anybody ever hear of anything called Sky Station? Never heard of it, have you? Well, it's up there. It's an orbital platform of some kind. We were receiving live messages from Sky Station for a day or two and we decided this wasn't right; we were going to call the Pentagon and tell them about it.

So I picked up the phone and first I called Fort Monmouth; then I called down to Langley Air Force Base. They wanted to know, "Why are you calling Langley Air Force Base?" Well, where else would I call about a satellite that's sending messages to our fax machine...talk about sounding strange...that say this satellite is about to crash, it's coming down, its communications systems are breaking down. Well, finally we got to somebody who was of authority. It was Colonel James that we got to, and he gets on the phone with me...I'm in my car, on my car phone...and he says: "Mr Shulman, please secure these faxes. Do not let anyone see them. We'll take care of it. We'll let you know what to do with the faxes." It's like...the military goes silent.

That next day our offices were broken into. Our front door was smashed, our glass was smashed to smithereens all over the place, and everything was taken out of the file cabinets in our offices. My office was a wreck when I got in there. It was awful. We came in the next day to work and it was like: what happened, what happened?

I had these faxes in my briefcase. I'd taken them with me, home. So apparently, by not leaving them there, I probably worsened the situation. It might have been better if I'd left them there, to be frank; if they'd found them and had just come and arrested us, taken us away. They were top level, five-level clearance. We're not supposed to even see or even know such a thing, but inadvertently, as a result, we became aware of the fact that there's an orbital DSP [Defense Space Platform], called Sky Station, which is nuclear-hardened and equipped to carry nuclear weapons, because it was described in these faxes.

It is not a very pleasant place to be, to discover that now, here we are at the end of the Cold War with an agreement that there will be no nuclear weapons in space in orbit, and there is apparently a platform up there that the United States secretly put up back in the '60s or '70s or '80s, that's equipped; it's nuclear-hardened, it's one of the Star Wars SDI series, based on Spacelab, equipped to handle and carry nuclear weapons.

So now, not only did we have a picture of an alleged alien craft on our website, talking about alien technologies being transferred to AT&T, but we also were in possession of very high level, Level Five, Top Secret security clearance military faxes describing something called Sky Station.

That week we had visits from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. They came up and they interviewed us. They put me through a day-long third degree. We didn't want it happening in the middle of our customers coming in and seeing us or selling personal computers and servers, so I took them to an out-of-the-way part of the office, down the hall, down the elevator to a little office downstairs, and I got a query about everything just short of...well, it included my shoe size, when I was born, names of parents, names of grandparents, when they entered the country, driver's licence number. They went through a Q&A with me and with my staff, that just came short of asking me the wrong question - if you know what I mean.

We were very startled, naturally. We weren't certain what in fact was going on, but we're not ones to back down at American Computer so we decided that instead of running for cover and taking the picture down off of our website...because we kind of connected that the two things might have something to do with each other...instead of backing down and turning it all off, we would go the other direction. So we moved the picture to a separate section of our website and created an entire website within our website, called American Computer Company Special Investigation. This is what happens when you grow up in New Jersey! Of course, we couldn't have rubbed salt into a deeper wound: "Some have claimed that alien technology was found on board a UFO crashed in Roswell, 1947. Very dramatic. Is it true? Did the US military discover something strange in the desert near Albuquerque, New Mexico? Did they alter human history? Was the transistor one of those alien marvels? Click here for the original story."

We tried to be a little cute. We put up a picture, and if you go to our website it's still there. If you go to our main website, http://accpc.com/, at the bottom of the page is a nav bar with a pointer in the middle of the corporate info products, catalogue, features, tech support, Roswell 1947, help. You can go to that link and click on it and it'll take you to this special page which, of course, has now grown tremendously. It has something like, we estimate, about 9,000 messages and articles now stored within it. We started off on one Internet server and moved it to five Internet servers, and now we are on one of our super-servers which consists of four groups of four Pentium XEONs and three different service-provider carriers and a whole lot of communications just to handle the load.

We get about, we estimate, three million to three and a half million visitors a month to the site. And they're not necessarily people like yourselves, open-minded, interested; they're kids from college, kids from high schools, military people from countries like Iran...I'm serious! I mean, we can track some of the addresses that show up in our logs. I didn't even know Iran had Internet! We've got a very strange reaction to our story.

What we did in the story was we isolated a few pointers, some of which only I was privy to. One of them was that there was some relationship between the government and AT&T that resulted in the transistor's invention. I mentioned I grew up in the household of the head of Bell Labs, so I knew that there was something strange about the transistor because I knew Bill Shockley, and Bill Shockley was something of a witless buffoon. There's no way he could have invented the transistor.

The symbol for the transistor is made up of three pieces: positive, positive and negative; or negative, negative and positive...silicon dioxide doped with arsenic and boron, in 1947. Now, in 1947, doping things with boron was not easy. It required the sort of equipment that even Bell Labs in 1946 did not possess. They had this type of equipment at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories - but it would have taken thousands and thousands and thousands of man-hours to invent the transistor.

If you look back at it historically, what AT&T was claiming was that one day this "genius", William Shockley, was working with a rectifier; he looked at it and he noticed it had unusual propensities, and there, bingo, he invented the transistor! He figured it out right there! And to verify that, the two other "geniuses" that they got to help work on the transistor, Dr Bardeen and Dr Brattain, both said: "Oh yeah, I remember a guy by the name of Case was [allegedly] talking about transistors in 1931, and I knew back then we were going to have them."

That is the history of the transistor at AT&T prior to 1948, other than claiming it was invented in December of 1947 by Dr Shockley. Anybody believe that story? Me neither. And I knew, because the administrative head of the transistor project was Jack Morton - the man at whose house I was staying to go to school and whose sons I was friends with - and he often commented on the fact that it was really a shame that those three idiots got responsibility for the transistor and he didn't. And I always wondered, because he too didn't possess the scientific ability to develop the transistor. He was a brilliant man who had invented the radiobroadcast vacuum tube, the close-spaced triode, but it appears as if he was brought in to head up the project to try to draw back the transistor in time to radio tubes and the things that Shockley talked about; and it was as if the whole thing was just a ploy and he might as easily have been given responsibility and got the Nobel Prize as Bill Shockley. Professional jealousy?

In any event, for most of my young life I believed that the transistor had come from a government project and that they were just hiding its origins. Which government project, I did not realise until I saw the Shopkeeper's Notebook in the possession of my friend, the consultant.

Now, I'd heard a lot about Roswell in my life and I'd read the Project Blue Book books and I'd read a lot of books like Berlitz's books and so forth, but I was not someone who believed in Roswell, who believed that a UFO had crashed at Roswell at the time, in any event. There I was, stuck with all this information and having created this rather minor scandal on the Internet...well, maybe not minor, with the Air Force coming to visit us.

Next thing I know, radio talk show host Art Bell sends science reporter Linda Moulton Howe to my office. She has to be there because she has to see whether or not our offices were actually broken into. A beautiful woman, very intelligent...she shows up at the office with a tape recorder. I'm exhausted...the weeks have been going not so good lately, and we're still picking up the pieces of glass out of the sofas in the lobby. She sees the windows are broken in the front and we have a wooden partition set up to try to keep the air out of the building, and she records me answering questions about all this. I try to be as vague as I can and answer the questions about what's going on here, and she talks about the story. And next thing I know, she plays the tape on "Dreamland", on Art's show. I swear to God, it was the strangest thing we had ever seen happen!

That very next day we got well over 3,000 phone calls from people all trying to get in to see me personally; they had to come to see me personally, to tell me about Roswell. We received mail and e-mail by the 10,000 pieces. Our normal 2,000 visitors a day on our World Wide Web site jumped up so high that one of our carriers refused to carry us anymore.

At that point I realised there's more than just a casual interest on the part of the public, so we decided we would carry the original ACC Roswell story right through to its ultimate conclusion. We have been for several years now.

UFO Alien

Sistem Teknologi UFO
(Reverse-Engineering Roswell UFO Technology)

Oleh: Jack Shulman

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 6, Number 4 (June-July 1999)
from NexusMagazine Website


Computer company chief Jack Shulman argues that the transistor could never have been invented so suddenly at AT&T in late 1947 without the input of alien technology.

Edited from a lecture given by Jack Shulman
President
American Computer Company
at the Global Sciences Congress, Florida, USA, 11-17 March 1999
(Audiotape transcribed by Ruth Parnell)

Hi, I'm Jack Shulman. I'm the head of the American Computer Company. American Computer Company is part of the Technology International Group and Bell North America group of companies. I'm also one of the owners of the group of companies. I've been in the computer industry for about 28 or 29 years. I've worked for IBM as a professional services management consultant. I worked on the development of the personal computer in 1978 for FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology] and Simplicity Patterns, later adopted by IBM. I developed something called the "pattern creator". That's where we got the term "PC". Prior to that, I'd developed what you might call the first windowing operating system in 1975 for Citibank, and before that there were earlier versions I did for a company called Vydec. I'm a serious computer person - very, very serious - and also someone who's not generally inclined to leap to great predispositions about any unusual subject.

Well, as it turns out, a few years ago I got my dose of reality. It was in the form of a visit from a friend of mine. When I was very young I'd got involved in technology, partly by virtue of the influence of a friend's father. I grew up in central New Jersey, which is around where AT&T and Bell Labs originated, and my friend's father was the head of Bell Labs. I ended up at a private school and ended up living at the household of the head of Bell Labs, going to that private school and going to college with his son as a roommate, and I kind of grew up around the various projects at Bell Laboratories in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I'd always held out that AT&T was this rather magnificent institution. Anybody here worked for AT&T in the past? So, you know when I say Bell Labs research, I'm speaking Holy Grail; and in certain parts of the defence community and in government I'm also speaking Holy Grail. Anyone here realise that AT&T and Bell Laboratories ran our nuclear arsenal for 45 years? Anybody who knows that, raise your hand. Not a one of you. I didn't really even know until a little bit later in my career, but I knew something strange was going on because it always seemed to me that AT&T always had what it needed to make innovations in technology, and subsequently such technology would migrate to an IBM or a Sarnoff Research or to an RCA.

And I could never really figure out, in the course of my young life, who were these magnificent, incredible scientists, other than that I frequently met them...like a fellow by the name of William Shockley. He was quite a frequent friend to Jack Morton's household, and I knew him, and I knew some of the other folks that he knew, like a fellow by the name of - well, I guess not too many people would know him - Bob Noyce, and Jack Kilby who was an acquaintance of theirs, and so forth. These names, if you've ever worked for AT&T or in the electronics industry, are also Holy Grail names. These are Mount Rushmores of the technology industry. Jack Kilby is credited with the invention of the integrated circuit.

I was rather shocked when, about late 1995, a dear friend came to me. He was at one time one of the very well known generals in the Pentagon, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is now a consultant. I'd known him a very long time through the Morton family and Bell and when working for IBM. He asked me to analyse some documents that he had in his possession. He showed me some pictures. I kind of turned up my nose. I said, "I don't believe this." He suggested they were pictures of an alien craft. I said to him, "Well, why do you come to me and ask me this?" "Because there are some documents that fell into my possession that I would also like you to see, that go beyond these drawings, these pictures, these photographs, that describe some technology; and I would like you to analyse this technology and make a determination for me of the veracity of these documents, help me to authenticate them." I said, "Fine. I don't believe this is real. I'm sceptical. I don't believe in aliens, I don't believe in UFOs, I don't believe in any of that." And he said, "Okay, well, I'd still want you to take a look at them, Jack." And I agreed.

I met with him at his home. I met a woman by the name of Mrs Jeffrey Proscauer. That's not her real name, but it's the name she goes by; she does not want her true identity revealed. And I got a chance to piece and look through some 28 boxes of materials that had come from Western Electric Laboratories in the late 1940s, 1947, early 1948 and beyond, and some subsequent documents.

Now again, if you've ever worked for AT&T, you know that the laboratories at Bell Laboratories are often quite distinct, and the documentation from a laboratory is kept in an ongoing, growing tome called a "Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook". It turns out that even in the super-secret laboratories, the ones in the part of Western Electric or Bell Laboratories that manage the nuclear arsenal, these notebooks are kept, and they grow and they're ongoing and they become almost like a living representation of what that laboratory did for a living.

Well, such as it is, I was rather shocked at what I had to see there in these boxes of materials, and I convinced them to let me look at them over the course of about three-and-a-half weeks. They were kept at the consultant's house during that time period, and he actually kept a security guard with them at all times because he was afraid that someone might come and steal them. Now of course, I wasn't sure why he was afraid, because at the time I didn't realise the full magnitude of what I was looking at.

In any event, after about two or three weeks of looking at them, I came back to him and we sat down over what turned out to be a Christmas Eve dinner, and I said to him: "I've got to tell you something. I'm having a real problem with this because what you're showing me looks like technology that we have not yet developed, that humanity has not yet developed, yet the documents you're showing me appear to be forty-eight, forty-nine years old. This would put them in 1947, 1948, 1949."

I suggested to him that before I could proceed I would have to have someone verify the age, carbon-date or come up with some other means to verify the age of the documents, and he agreed. So, with the help of a mutual acquaintance - a private investigator formerly with the Justice Department - we were able to take fragments of the documents without damaging them.

We sent them to an expert who formerly consulted for Scotland Yard; he's a fairly well known forensic expert at...I believe it's the University of Edinburgh in Scotland today; he was at a different university at the time. He analysed these fragments of these documents for me, and came back and told me that the ink, the paper, even the presentations were valid; that this was in fact a book or series of books from the 1947, '48, '49, 1950 time period. That took him about four and a half weeks of analysis, and I was for four and a half weeks, as you can imagine, holding my breath.

The things that I saw described in this Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook consisted of things that today would be more powerful than the Intel Pentium processor, for instance, or the Cray supercomputer. There were communications devices that were described; there were ways to sandwich-in very, very thin, micrometre-thin layers; special metals to produce moving parts for things like...from the descriptions that I read, the nearest thing I could describe...an anti-gravity propulsion unit for a spacecraft. They included dynamic electronic and power-control technology that even to this day we have not yet developed. They included communications technology that was described only as having been taken from an object of unknown or unearthly origin. The documents were very carefully worded not to reveal what was, in reality, in these boxes of materials.

I was sort of at a loss at that juncture, because even though we had forensic information at the time from this particular forensic expert that would date these boxes back to the late '40s, and even though they said "Western Electric, Bell Laboratories", part of them said something called "Z-Division" on them. We knew of the Z-Division: it was a segment of the United States Army, formed in 1947 and 1948. The implications were that this project was operating on the fringes of the nuclear bomb development project - then known as the Manhattan Project Group.

It turns out that in 1947 - between '47 and actually late '48 - Harry Truman decided he was going to grant a contract to AT&T to go through the overseeing and management of our nuclear arsenal and the commercialisation of derived product technologies from the nuclear bomb, from the bomb project: the physics, the electronics, the control systems, even the ballistics, the radar that was used, the ICBM technology that was under development in the late '40s after we got a hold of the V-series rockets from the Nazis, and so forth. The contract was inked by Truman in early 1949, if I recall correctly, but during the prior two-year period there was an informal relationship, during which AT&T played a greater and greater role in the organisation of super-secret military weapons-grade projects for the federal government and eventually got pretty much control of what was then known as the Z-Division.

Z-Division, believe it or not, originated in Roswell, New Mexico. I guess the reason is, that is where the original nuclear bomb armada was formed - the first bomber wing that carried the nuclear bomb - and it migrated over to Kirtland Air Force Base during the time period when Orlando Lawrence, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories fellow, was called in. He was called in by Teller, Oppenheimer...all those folks responsible for the nuclear bomb...Leo Szwilard. Lawrence was called in at the time because he could make accelerators, or "cyclotrons" as they were known at the time. Those cyclotrons were capable of refining uranium, refining plutonium...well, actually, back then, they weren't working with plutonium but with uranium.

I guess you could imagine what it must have been like in the time period. They were in the middle of a war when they were building the nuclear bombs and they had to do everything secretly, so this Z-Division was created with super-secrecy as its fundamental core.

Ultimately Lawrence was called in because they had to build enough of an accelerator to refine enough uranium to make the bomb possible, and, in spite of all the greatest minds of nuclear physics assigned to the Z-Division in the Manhattan Project, none of them could figure out how to refine enough uranium to make the nuclear bomb a possibility. This was before the first bomb was exploded. So Lawrence was brought in because he knew how to make a cyclotron; but his cyclotron, the biggest one he'd ever created, was about the size of this white board over here, and it could produce about a thimbleful of refined uranium - which would have been about enough to make a nuclear bomb capable of blowing off your left foot.

In any event, Lawrence one day is called in and he's asked: "How do we build a cyclotron big enough?" He makes a few calculations and hands a requisition order to Harold Ackerman - today a federal judge, and who was the chief supply clerk for the Manhattan Project - to requisition enough silver to build a big silver racetrack; something like 12 million tons of silver. In fact, he took it to the United States Treasury, handed it to the then Secretary of the Treasury - I guess it was Morganthal - and Morganthal was asked to fill a 12-million-ton order, which also necessitated the relocation of Z-Division to some place where they could put all this silver and build this racetrack.

We decided one day at American Computer Company that we were going to be brave. I talked with my board and I talked with some of the people at the company and they agreed. "Yeah, we can try this; let's see what happens."

We decided that we were going to take the story that had been conveyed to me about this unusual Shopkeeper's Notebook with these unusual technological artifacts in them, and naively and blithely put a panel on the Internet, describing in black and white and colour what we had found, and raise the question. However, the picture that we put up was a picture of Testor's model of the so-called Roswell Lander. It's a picture of what looks like a spacecraft with wings and a jet propulsion system, with a pod in the front to hold alien occupants who were piloting it. We superimposed the picture over an image from the Thunder Range - of course, we picked the wrong place; the Plains of San Agustin was the right place, actually - and we put a little bit of rhetoric on this panel and just placed it right in the middle of our American Computer Company website.

Now that probably was the stupidest thing we ever did. Here's this picture of a Roswell alien lander sitting on a panel in the middle of a computer company website, and on it it said something like: "Did AT&T receive stolen alien technologies from the US Government in 1947 and thereby invent the transistor, the laser, the integrated circuit, and...on and on and on...different technologies?" Well, we figured the reaction we would get from the public would be one of, "Oh gee, isn't that cute? That's funny, X-Files, you know..." The reaction we got was not one we had anticipated.

Three days after we placed the image onto our website, we received a very strange series of military faxes to our tech support fax machine, referring to a piece of hardware known as "Sky Station". Anybody ever hear of anything called Sky Station? Never heard of it, have you? Well, it's up there. It's an orbital platform of some kind. We were receiving live messages from Sky Station for a day or two and we decided this wasn't right; we were going to call the Pentagon and tell them about it.

So I picked up the phone and first I called Fort Monmouth; then I called down to Langley Air Force Base. They wanted to know, "Why are you calling Langley Air Force Base?" Well, where else would I call about a satellite that's sending messages to our fax machine...talk about sounding strange...that say this satellite is about to crash, it's coming down, its communications systems are breaking down. Well, finally we got to somebody who was of authority. It was Colonel James that we got to, and he gets on the phone with me...I'm in my car, on my car phone...and he says: "Mr Shulman, please secure these faxes. Do not let anyone see them. We'll take care of it. We'll let you know what to do with the faxes." It's like...the military goes silent.

That next day our offices were broken into. Our front door was smashed, our glass was smashed to smithereens all over the place, and everything was taken out of the file cabinets in our offices. My office was a wreck when I got in there. It was awful. We came in the next day to work and it was like: what happened, what happened?

I had these faxes in my briefcase. I'd taken them with me, home. So apparently, by not leaving them there, I probably worsened the situation. It might have been better if I'd left them there, to be frank; if they'd found them and had just come and arrested us, taken us away. They were top level, five-level clearance. We're not supposed to even see or even know such a thing, but inadvertently, as a result, we became aware of the fact that there's an orbital DSP [Defense Space Platform], called Sky Station, which is nuclear-hardened and equipped to carry nuclear weapons, because it was described in these faxes.

It is not a very pleasant place to be, to discover that now, here we are at the end of the Cold War with an agreement that there will be no nuclear weapons in space in orbit, and there is apparently a platform up there that the United States secretly put up back in the '60s or '70s or '80s, that's equipped; it's nuclear-hardened, it's one of the Star Wars SDI series, based on Spacelab, equipped to handle and carry nuclear weapons.

So now, not only did we have a picture of an alleged alien craft on our website, talking about alien technologies being transferred to AT&T, but we also were in possession of very high level, Level Five, Top Secret security clearance military faxes describing something called Sky Station.

That week we had visits from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. They came up and they interviewed us. They put me through a day-long third degree. We didn't want it happening in the middle of our customers coming in and seeing us or selling personal computers and servers, so I took them to an out-of-the-way part of the office, down the hall, down the elevator to a little office downstairs, and I got a query about everything just short of...well, it included my shoe size, when I was born, names of parents, names of grandparents, when they entered the country, driver's licence number. They went through a Q&A with me and with my staff, that just came short of asking me the wrong question - if you know what I mean.

We were very startled, naturally. We weren't certain what in fact was going on, but we're not ones to back down at American Computer so we decided that instead of running for cover and taking the picture down off of our website...because we kind of connected that the two things might have something to do with each other...instead of backing down and turning it all off, we would go the other direction. So we moved the picture to a separate section of our website and created an entire website within our website, called American Computer Company Special Investigation. This is what happens when you grow up in New Jersey! Of course, we couldn't have rubbed salt into a deeper wound: "Some have claimed that alien technology was found on board a UFO crashed in Roswell, 1947. Very dramatic. Is it true? Did the US military discover something strange in the desert near Albuquerque, New Mexico? Did they alter human history? Was the transistor one of those alien marvels? Click here for the original story."

We tried to be a little cute. We put up a picture, and if you go to our website it's still there. If you go to our main website, http://accpc.com/, at the bottom of the page is a nav bar with a pointer in the middle of the corporate info products, catalogue, features, tech support, Roswell 1947, help. You can go to that link and click on it and it'll take you to this special page which, of course, has now grown tremendously. It has something like, we estimate, about 9,000 messages and articles now stored within it. We started off on one Internet server and moved it to five Internet servers, and now we are on one of our super-servers which consists of four groups of four Pentium XEONs and three different service-provider carriers and a whole lot of communications just to handle the load.

We get about, we estimate, three million to three and a half million visitors a month to the site. And they're not necessarily people like yourselves, open-minded, interested; they're kids from college, kids from high schools, military people from countries like Iran...I'm serious! I mean, we can track some of the addresses that show up in our logs. I didn't even know Iran had Internet! We've got a very strange reaction to our story.

What we did in the story was we isolated a few pointers, some of which only I was privy to. One of them was that there was some relationship between the government and AT&T that resulted in the transistor's invention. I mentioned I grew up in the household of the head of Bell Labs, so I knew that there was something strange about the transistor because I knew Bill Shockley, and Bill Shockley was something of a witless buffoon. There's no way he could have invented the transistor.

The symbol for the transistor is made up of three pieces: positive, positive and negative; or negative, negative and positive...silicon dioxide doped with arsenic and boron, in 1947. Now, in 1947, doping things with boron was not easy. It required the sort of equipment that even Bell Labs in 1946 did not possess. They had this type of equipment at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories - but it would have taken thousands and thousands and thousands of man-hours to invent the transistor.

If you look back at it historically, what AT&T was claiming was that one day this "genius", William Shockley, was working with a rectifier; he looked at it and he noticed it had unusual propensities, and there, bingo, he invented the transistor! He figured it out right there! And to verify that, the two other "geniuses" that they got to help work on the transistor, Dr Bardeen and Dr Brattain, both said: "Oh yeah, I remember a guy by the name of Case was [allegedly] talking about transistors in 1931, and I knew back then we were going to have them."

That is the history of the transistor at AT&T prior to 1948, other than claiming it was invented in December of 1947 by Dr Shockley. Anybody believe that story? Me neither. And I knew, because the administrative head of the transistor project was Jack Morton - the man at whose house I was staying to go to school and whose sons I was friends with - and he often commented on the fact that it was really a shame that those three idiots got responsibility for the transistor and he didn't. And I always wondered, because he too didn't possess the scientific ability to develop the transistor. He was a brilliant man who had invented the radiobroadcast vacuum tube, the close-spaced triode, but it appears as if he was brought in to head up the project to try to draw back the transistor in time to radio tubes and the things that Shockley talked about; and it was as if the whole thing was just a ploy and he might as easily have been given responsibility and got the Nobel Prize as Bill Shockley. Professional jealousy?

In any event, for most of my young life I believed that the transistor had come from a government project and that they were just hiding its origins. Which government project, I did not realise until I saw the Shopkeeper's Notebook in the possession of my friend, the consultant.

Now, I'd heard a lot about Roswell in my life and I'd read the Project Blue Book books and I'd read a lot of books like Berlitz's books and so forth, but I was not someone who believed in Roswell, who believed that a UFO had crashed at Roswell at the time, in any event. There I was, stuck with all this information and having created this rather minor scandal on the Internet...well, maybe not minor, with the Air Force coming to visit us.

Next thing I know, radio talk show host Art Bell sends science reporter Linda Moulton Howe to my office. She has to be there because she has to see whether or not our offices were actually broken into. A beautiful woman, very intelligent...she shows up at the office with a tape recorder. I'm exhausted...the weeks have been going not so good lately, and we're still picking up the pieces of glass out of the sofas in the lobby. She sees the windows are broken in the front and we have a wooden partition set up to try to keep the air out of the building, and she records me answering questions about all this. I try to be as vague as I can and answer the questions about what's going on here, and she talks about the story. And next thing I know, she plays the tape on "Dreamland", on Art's show. I swear to God, it was the strangest thing we had ever seen happen!

That very next day we got well over 3,000 phone calls from people all trying to get in to see me personally; they had to come to see me personally, to tell me about Roswell. We received mail and e-mail by the 10,000 pieces. Our normal 2,000 visitors a day on our World Wide Web site jumped up so high that one of our carriers refused to carry us anymore.

At that point I realised there's more than just a casual interest on the part of the public, so we decided we would carry the original ACC Roswell story right through to its ultimate conclusion. We have been for several years now.

Obama Overturns Bush Policy on Stem Cells

President Obama signed an executive order Monday repealing a Bush-era policy that limited federal tax dollars for embryonic stem cell research.

Obama's move overturns an order signed by President Bush in 2001 that barred the National Institutes of Health from funding research on embryonic stem cells beyond using 60 cell lines that existed at that time.

Obama also signed a presidential memorandum establishing greater independence for federal science policies and programs.

"In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values," Obama said at the White House.

"In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent. As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research -- and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly."

The Mafia and Freemasonry

'A Web of Favoritism and Corruption'

Brother, foot to foot teaches you that you should, whenever asked, go on a brother's errand, if within the length of your cable-tow, even if you should have to go barefoot and bareheaded. Knee to knee, that you should always remember a Master Mason in your devotions to Almighty God. Breast to breast, that you should keep the Master Mason's secrets, when given to you in charge as such, as secure and inviolable in your breast as they were in his own before communicated to you. Hand to back, that you should support a Master Mason behind his back as before his face. Mouth to ear, that you should support his good name as well behind his back as before his face.

'The Five Points of Fellowship'
Master Master Initiation Ritual

You must conceal all crimes of your brother Masons...and should you be summoned as a witness against a brother Mason be always sure to shield him...It may be perjury to do this, it is true, but you're keeping your obligations.


Ronayne
Handbook of Masonry, page 183



The committee feels that the link between Cosa Nostra and institutions is mostly through the "Massoneria" (freemasonry):

The fundamental terrain on which the link between Cosa Nostra with public officials and private professions was created and reinforced is the Massoneria. The Massoneria bond serves to keep the relationship continuous and organic. The admission of members of Cosa Nostra, even at high levels, in Massoneria is not an occassional or episodical one, but a strategic choice. The oath of allegence to Cosa Nostra remains the pivot point around which "uomini d'onore" (men of honor) are prominently held. But the Massoneria associations offer the mafia a formidible instrument to extend their own power, to obtain favors and privileges in every field: both for the conclusion of big business and "fixing trials", as many collaborators with justice have revealed.


Commissione Parlamentare d'inchiesta sul fenomeno della mafia e sulle altre associazioni criminali similari
(CPA: Commissione Parlamentare Antimafia)
Relazione sui Rapporti tra Mafia e Politica, Page 59
Roma, 1993

CSD - Centro Siciliano di Documentazione "Giuseppe Impastato"

Law Enforcement in Italy and Europe against mafia and organized crime

Umberto Santino

Premise: The Sicilian Mafia as a local and transnational criminality and the proliferation of criminals of the mafia type

1. The laws regarding organized crime in Italy

1.1. 114 laws in ten years
1.2. From Palermo's maxi-trial to the arrest of mafia bosses
1.3. The Antimafia Committee's report on mafia and politics
1.4. The mafia as a political subject. Double mafia in a double State

2. European Unity: first tentatives at anticrime politics

2.1. A continent of variable legality
2.2. The drug plan in the European Union
2.3. Measures against money laundering
2.4. EEC fraud and organized crime

3. The contradictions of today's society: basic trends and compensative measures

The Author
Endnotes
References


Premise: The Sicilian Mafia as a local and transnational criminality and the proliferation of criminals of the mafia type

The Sicilian Mafia is probably the best known form of organized crime, so much so, that mass media represents it as sort of a universal Evil. The "octopus" that directly or indirectly controls all criminal activities: from drug to arms trafficking and now even radioactive substances. In reality the Sicilian Mafia can be considered a "winning model" of organized crime (at least up until now) due to its complexity and long-standing role in society, but care must be taken against stereotypes that always see the octopus' tentacles everywhere.

The mafia's strength lies in its capacity to be both local and international, in the sense that it grew to a worldwide level without losing its roots in Sicilian society. Its strong-point has historically been the capacity to combine continuity with innovation: it has never abbandoned its traditional activities (extortion for example) but knew how to choose the most profitable activities and become a part of them.

Immigration to the United States during the end of the XIX century has also had a role in the formation of this "cultural elasticity and adaptibility", eventhough, at first the connections between Sicilian Mafiosos and Sicilian-Americans were rare. Only after the second world war has the connection between them grown closer and drug trafficking has "welded" Sicily to the United States, but both groups remain autonomous. In the last few decades the Sicilian Mafia has grown on the national, European and international level. It has trafficked heroin with the Corso-Marsigliesi (the French Connection), with Turkish, Middle East and Asiatic clans and now deals cocaine with the Latin American Cartels. International channels are used for money laundering from Switzerland to the tax havens worldwide. At first the mafia organization was only present in the western part of Sicily, now it is found in all of Sicily and in many Italian regions, countries of Europe and in th e world. Besides this spread of the mafia, the development of illegal activities, the formation and strengthening of other criminal groups similar to the mafia are causes for worry. Many criminal organizations are present in Italy: the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Camorra in Campania, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia and other groups. On the international level, besides historical groups like the Japanese Yakusa and the Chinese Triads, new organizations like the South American Cartels and the Russian Mafia have formed.

Today's criminal market is complex because the criminal activities are more articulated and the criminal groups have grown in number. Therefore, it is misleading to sustain that the mafia or any other criminal organization has a monopoly on world crime. There isn't a monarchy, a Number One, in the organized crime world, but there are many republics that variously interact and are protagonists of the international division of criminal labor.

Today's society produces criminality because of some of its main characteristics (the contradictions will be dealt with at the end of the chapter) and the intertwining of legal and illegal economies, that have grown closer, as have criminals in the social and institutional context. Drugs and money laundering are the best known aspects of today's criminal activities, but the most devastitating is probably the connection between politics and crime. This mixture between illegal and legal, criminal and institutional, is the heart of the mafia's historical model, but it has grown and spread indipendent of the presence of Sicilian mafiosos or Sicilian-Americans. It is not the mafia that has invaded the world, it is the world that has produced more and more groups and organizations of the mafia type.

In light of all this, the actual judicial system, both national and international are greatly inadequate. Not only are they behind the times but the repressive measures are often counteractions that can not debilitate phenomenons that proliferate due to the system's contradictions.


The laws regarding organized crime in Italy

1.1. 114 laws in ten years

Only in the last few years has Italian legislation prepared itself to deal with the great increase in the mafia's activities and with other forms of organized crime. In ten years, from 1982-1992, 114 laws regarding organized crime, directly or indirectly, were introduced. All of these laws are connected with terrible crimes that shocked both local and international public opinion, and are considered the offspring of the emergency situation, that is, they are answers to the criminal challenge and not part of a coherent law enforcement program.

The first general Italian law, the so called Rognoni-La Torre Law (named after the backers of two proposals that were later unified, the Christian-democrat Minister Virginio Rognoni and the Comunist leader Pio La Torre, assassinated April 30, 1982) or "Antimafia law", was approved September 13, 1982, after the assassination of General-Prefect Dalla Chiesa, and for the first time defined mafia as a specific type of organized crime. According to article 416 bis, introduced by the new law,

The organization is of the mafia type when its components use intimidation, subjection and, consequencially, silence (omertà), to commit crimes, directly or indirectly acquire the management or the control of businesses, concessions, authorizations, public contracts and public services to obtain either unjust profits or advantages for themselves or others.

Article 416 of the Italian Penal Code that has its origins in the fascist period (1930), defines simple organized crime on the basis of the presence of three elements: the associative bond, the organized structure, the criminal program. Organized crime of the mafia type presents additional specific characteristics: the associative bond has such an intimidating capacity to cause subjection and omertà. It is at such a level that it may be considered a system, an absolute rule of obedience and a law of silence, that first of all demands, from the entire population, the refusal to collaborate with law enforcement. An actual submission to the power of the mafia.

Besides the creation of this type of crime, the most important and original points of the new antimafia law are the measures taken to control the origins of patrimonies, that allow the confiscation of possessions of illecit origin, and the explicit authorization to subcontract public works.

The role of Alto Commissario (High Commissioner) was also created in September 1982 to fight the mafia, giving a government official the power to coordinate the fight, that Prefect Dalla Chiesa so vainly requested. The High Commissioner's first headquarters was Palermo, and later Rome, and was substantially useless and canceled in 1992.

During the last few years other provisions intervened. The most significant are: the measures taken against the money laundering, the provisions for those mafiosos that collaborate with law enforcement officials, the so called "pentiti" (repenters), the revision of the procedure code for the treatment of mafiosos, the creation of the DIA (Direzione Investigativa Antimafia: Antimafia Investigative Administration) and the DNA (Direzione Nazionale Antimafia or Superprocura: National Antimafia Administration) and the integration of criminal association of the mafia type, that includes those that interfere with the right to vote.

The crime of laundering money of illecit origin was introduced in Italian legal system in 1978 with article 648 bis of the Penal Code, limited to the profits obtained from aggravated robbery, aggravated extortion and kidnapping for extortion. Article 23 of the law n° 55 of March 19, 1990, extended the crime to the capital obtained from the production and sale of drugs. Later, the law by decree of May 3, 1991 n° 143, converted into law n° 197 of July 5, 1991, introduced "emergency actions to limit the use of cash and bearer securities in transactions and prevent the utilization of the financial system in money laundering". These measures decree that sums above 20,000,000 lire must be transfered either in cash or through approved mediators or by means explicitly indicated, dictate rules that regulate finance companies and in exception of the right to secrecy, allow the exchange of information between control organizations.

Law n° 328, published August 28, 1993 in the "Gazzetta Ufficiale", repealed in part the European convention concerning money laundering. With this new regulation, the crime money laundering regards any case of reinvestment of profits obtained from any type of crime and therefore, not only the four crimes covered by the previous laws (that is, drug dealing, kidnapping, aggravated robbery and extortion). There are still a few problems to be resolved. A central data bank to keep track of all the financial operations is lacking, so sums can be kept under 20,000,000 lire and therefore, avoid controls. The companies registry is lacking, eventhough it was established by law in 1942, so it is impossible to follow transactions between firms.

In 1990, other measures were passed regarding the exclusion of those condemned of serious crimes (drug dealing, kidnapping, massacres, mafia member) from the benefits given to prisoners by the "Gozzini Law" (the benefits are home imprisonment and limited liberty), detention in prison while awaiting trial for those suspected of being guilty of serious crimes, regulations concerning wire tapping, reduction of the punishment for those that collaborate with justice, the prolongation of preliminary investigations from a period of six months to one year, the modification of the terms of the prescription of crimes.

The law by decree n° 345 of October 29, 1991 was converted into law n° 410 of December 30, 1991 and established the DIA, to coordinate the police forces and conform the organization of investigative services with the goal of preventing and repressing organized crime.

At the same time, law by decree n° 367 of November 20, 1991, converted into law n° 8 of January 20, 1992, established the district antimafia administrations and the DNA. One of the candidates for the position of Superprocuratore (General Attorney) was Giovanni Falcone, assassinated with his wife and three bodyguards, May 23, 1992, while driving on the highway that connects Palermo's airport Punta Raisi to Palermo (the Capaci massacre).

After the Capaci massacre and the massacre of Via D'Amelio, where Judge Paolo Borsellino and five of his bodyguards were assassinated July 19, 1992, new emergency measures entitled "Urgent modifications to the new Penal Proceedings Code and actions against organized crime of the mafia type" were taken. The decree n° 306 of June 8, 1992, converted into law n° 356 of August 7, 1992, introduces significant modifications to the Penal Proceedings Code approved in 1988, that replaced the investigative rite with a prosecutive rite. The modifications regard the way proof is acquired and constituted: for common criminals the proof is constituted during the debate, while for mafiosos, due to their capacity to intimidate, proof can be drawn from other proceedings.

The new law introduces further preventive measures for "pentiti", arranges severe prison terms for mafiosos, exasperates preventive measures regarding patrimonies and has two clauses regarding elections. The first, article 11 bis, that integrates article 416 bis, states that it is organized crime of the mafia type when intimidation is used: to hinder or deny the right to vote or to obtain votes. The second regulation is article 11 ter, that punishes the "political-mafia exchange": when a member of the mafia promises to obtain votes for a politician in exchange for money. The original form of the law included the promise to obtain concessions, authorizations, contracts, public financing, or any means of gaining illegal profits. Law n° 16 of January 18, 1992, that also deals with elections and limits the passive electorate, states that if a person undergoes penal proceedings for organized crime of the mafia type and/or other crimes related to organized crime, he must be suspended or removed from the position of regional, provincial or city counsellor, President of the regional, provincial or city council, and other administrative responsibilities.

The regulative framework that began taking shape during the last decade was fairly chaotic, nonetheless, a few fondamental principles were set up.

The first was the double track regime. The Penal Code Procedure was applied to common criminals and not to mafiosos, for which different prison treatment was expected.

The second principle regards the legislation that rewards mafiosos that collaborate with justice. It was introduced for terrorists but has been greatly expanded in the last few years.

The third principle was the reversal of the charges against the person investigated as a mafioso, that must prove the legitimate origin of goods and monies in his possession. But the Constitutional Court, with a sentence of February 1994, declared the latter unconstitutional.

Italian antimafia legislation, judged on the whole, is behind the times, was created as an emergency response, is inadequate in comprehending the mafia phenomenon and is characterized by the prevalence of symbolic-measures.

Organized crime of the mafia type has existed since the XIX century (1) but only with the law of 1982 was the crime of mafia association introduced. Since the second half of the 1950s the mafiosos, either directly or through their accomplices, became legitimate entrepreneurs, especially in construction, but only with the law of 1982 can these "mafia enterprises" be touched (2). Since the 1970's, the financial size of these mafia groups, both in terms of their capability of accumulating capital and utilization of the financial system for money laundering, is significant, but only with recent measures can they begin to be fought (3).

The responsive measures are almost always taken after the mafia has commited a terrible crime (murder of an important person, massacres) through laws by decree, that is, the due legal response to urgent situations, eventhough they have been greatly used in the last few years to escape the red tape of the parliamentary course. This is mainly due to the idea that mafia must be handled as an emergency. According to official government stereotypes, the mafia only exists when they murder someone, it is a problem only when they shoot someone influential, it's a national emergency when they murder an important government official and/or a famous person like Dalla Chiesa, Falcone and Borsellino. Instead, mafia has been a continuous part of our society for more than a century, an institution, and if for a certain period there aren't any murders that doesn't mean that the mafia doesn't exist anymore, it means that there is a "pax mafiosa" and things are going very well for organized crime.

It can be said that up until now, the Italian legal system deals with the mafia phenomenon inadequately, and lacks a concrete plan to contrast the mafia in all of its complex aspects. An example is the already mentioned article 416 bis that states, if the mafia member is armed, the punishment is greater; but the mafia is always armed and its characteristic is its use of private violence, that is, the non recognition of the State's monopoly on violence.

The measures taken to contrast the mafia are above all exclusively symbolic laws, that is, reactions to the most outstanding crimes. They want to demonstrate the institution's power because they are decreed almost immediately after a crime, without taking into consideration their real value and usefulness. After the 1992 massacres, in which Judges Falcone and Borsellino lost their lives, the army was sent to Sicily. Even this is a symbolic measure to contrast the mafia's territorial control. The mafia's territorial reign of Sicily is based on secular and widespread knowledge of the territory's reality while many of the drafted soldiers sent to Sicily are there for the first time.

1.2. From Palermo's maxi-trial to the arrest of mafia bosses

Even the repression carried out against the mafia phenomenon is based on a reaction to an emergency situation. Trials are conducted and concluded with convictions only after important crimes, while the mafia enjoys an absolute or almost absolute impunity. An example is Luciano Liggio, one of the bloodiest bosses: he received a series of acquittals for insufficiency of evidence and was sentenced to life imprisonment for only one murder (the murder of mafia boss, doctor and "Cavaliere al merito della Republica Italiana", Michele Navarra). This conviction came when Liggio's reputation was well known and his previous acquittals had become a national scandal.

Palermo's maxi-trial, the most important mafia trial in the history of Italy, was officiated after an enormous number of murders during the early 1980s and after the assassination of renowned persons like Vice-Questore Boris Giuliano, Magistrates Cesare Terranova and Gaetano Costa, President of the Sicilian Region Piersanti Mattarella, Regional Secretary of the Italian Comunist Party Pio La Torre and especially the Prefect Dalla Chiesa (4).

The first round of the maxi-trial ended with many convictions, but the Court of Appeals reduced many sentences and the mafiosos expected further reductions from the Corte di Cassazione (the Supreme Court) (5).

The foundation for the maxi-trial was already laid during the preliminary investigative phase done by Pal ermo's Antimafia Pool, created by Judge Rocco Chinnici, in which Judges Falcone and Borsellino worked, and was confirmed by the first degree conviction. Accordingly, mafia is identified with the Cosa Nostra organization, defined a unique, pyramidal and apex type organization, provincially directed by a "commissione" or "cupola" (commission or dome) and regionally by an interprovincial organism, in which the head of the Palermo commission has a hegemonic role. The leaders of Cosa Nostra are "Corleonesi", mafiosos from Corleone (a town in the province of Palermo, traditional stonghold of the mafia but also capital of the peasant's movement until the 1950s), long since working in Palermo.

According to this vision of the mafia, based on statements made by "pentiti", the most famous of which is Buscetta, the gravest crimes were decided by the cupola, the members of which are collectively responsible and therefore, the trials for mafia crimes must be tried as one and dealt with by the Court of Palermo, considered the capital of the mafia.

Other magistrates and the Cassazione, instead sustain, that mafia associations are autonomous groups, not connected amongst themselves, therefore, it is senseless to speak of collective responsibility for the cupola members, and consequentially, mafia trials must deal with the crime singly and they must be held where the crimes were commited. Only in February 1992 did the Cassazione agree with the theory of the Antimafia Pool of Palermo and the members of the cupola were considered responsible for most of the crimes commited in the 1980s in and around the mafia organization. In the meantime, the Antimafia Pool of Palermo was dismantled, Chinnici was murdered in 1983, Falcone and Borsellino in 1992.

Only after Falcone and Borsellino were assassinated were the most renowned mafia bosses, fugitives from justice for years, arrested. The so called boss of the bosses, Totò Riina, was fugitive for 23 years, and was finally arrested in downtown Palermo.

An important contribution to the understanding of the administrative structure of Cosa Nostra, its crimes, and the arrest of its bosses, is due to the "pentiti". The repenting phenomenon isn't completely a new one (significant cases are documented in the XIX century) (6). But only recently has it become so widespread, in fact, there are about 750 pentiti that collaborate with justice today.

The first pentiti, during the 1980s, were mostly drug traffickers working with mafiosos, and it can be explained by the expansion of the mafia's activities and the involvement of criminals foreign to the mafia tradition, that have no regard for omertà. The ensuing pentiti statements, beginning with Buscetta and Contorno, involve the declining mafiosos in a mafia war from 1981-3, and is explained by the internal violence caused by the tentative to take complete control by the Corleonesi. The boomerang effect involved the Corleonesi and their allies due to their continuous use of violence and even the most recent massacres, that caused a profound effect on public opinion and government reaction. This reaction can be outlined as follows: a very strong reaction after the gravest crimes (which lasted about two years or slightly more) followed by a weakening period, prelude to an actual reverse tendency demonstrated by the dismantling of the Antimafia Pool of Palermo and the isolation of Giovanni Falcone that rendered his work at the Court of Palermo almost impossible. Even now, two years after the 1992 massacres, after the latest "urgent" laws and the arrest of the mafia bosses, the reverse tendency has begun again, with doubts arising as to the legitimacy of using pentiti's testimonies, the attack against some magistrates particularly active by those close to the winners of the last election that brought to government those associated with the "Polo delle libertà" (Liberty Pole) (7).

Another important aspect of the battle against organized crime that was dealt with using the logic of an emergency situation: the seizure (a temporary measure) and the confiscation (a final measure) of all the possessions belonging to a person suspected of being a member of organized crime of the mafia type. The main difference, and it is a great difference, between seizing and confiscating is that possessions are often seized in too much of a hurry, always from the point of view of a responsive measure against the gravest mafia crimes and therefore, most of the possessions (real estate, automobiles, etc.) seized are then returned to the owner. From 1992 to 1993, just over 160 billion lire (about 100 million dollars) in possessions were confiscated. This sum is only 12% of the amount seized (1,334 billion lire).

The delays, uncertainties and about faces in the battle against organized crime in Italy have a deep rooted explanation: the mafia, as other Italian forms of organized crime are not only criminal organizations dedicated to various criminal activities, but are intertwined in the social context, especially economy and institutions. Without these intricate relationships, their growth and strength is uncomprenhensive.

Tariq Aziz guilty of Iraq murders

Tariq Aziz, for many years the public face of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, has been jailed for 15 years for his role in the execution of 42 merchants.

Aziz had denied any role in the summary trials of the men accused in 1992 of profiteering during economic sanctions.

Two of Saddam Hussein's half-brothers were also found guilty and sentenced to death by a court in Baghdad.

Another top official, Ali Hassan al-Majid - commonly known as Chemical Ali - was jailed for 15 years.

Two other Iraqi officials were jailed for six and 15 years, while a former governor of the Iraqi central bank was acquitted.

Although Aziz was a world-renowned politician in his time, the BBC's Mike Sergeant in Baghdad says this trial is not viewed by Iraqis as a big political event

'Poor health'


TARIQ AZIZ
Born in 1936, near Mosul, northern Iraq
Studied English literature and became a journalist
The most senior Christian in the toppled regime
Enlisted US support for war on Iran
Met US President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1984
In US custody since April 2003

Profile: Tariq Aziz
This is Tariq Aziz's first conviction in the controversial Iraqi High Tribunal process, which has been criticised by human rights groups on a number of counts.

He could also have received a death penalty. Last week he was acquitted in a separate trial over the killings of Shia Muslim protesters in 1999.

Aziz, a Christian, was Iraq's foreign minister during the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, later becoming the deputy prime minister.

He had argued that his work was political and he bore no responsibility for the deaths of the flour merchants.

Aziz surrendered to US troops on 24 April 2003, shortly after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and has been in custody ever since.

In recent years, he has reportedly suffered from poor health in prison awaiting trial.

His Amman-based lawyer Badea Aref told AFP news agency that he had expected his client would be acquitted for a second time as he had not been in Iraq at the time of the killings.

Mr Aref said he would appeal within the statutory 30-day period, and added that Aziz is awaiting verdicts in two further trials.

'Flawed' process

Sabawi Ibrahim giving evidence in court 13 June 2006
Sabawi Ibrahim said he would be proud to die a martyr
On Wednesday, two of Saddam Hussein's half-brothers - former presidential adviser Watban Ibrahim and former intelligence chief Sabawi Ibrahim - were sentenced to death by hanging.

As his death sentence was read out, reports say Sabaawi Ibrahim stood up and proclaimed "God is great" and that he was proud to be a martyr. The judge told him to sit down.

Co-defendant Majid was jailed for 15 years. Majid had faced his fourth capital conviction in the merchants' case, having already been sentenced in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, the crushing of a Shia uprising in 1991 and the 1999 killings.

Saddam Hussein himself was hanged in December 2006 in a separate case.

Human Rights Watch issued a report into the trial of Saddam Hussein, concluding that the process was flawed and its verdict unsound because of "serious administrative, procedural and substantive legal defects".