By Greg Mitchell

The Nation

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan sixty-six years ago this week, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included vivid color footage shot by U.S. military crews and black-and-white Japanese newsreel film.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for twenty-five years, and the shocking US military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. While the suppression of nuclear truths stretched over decades, Hiroshima sank into “a kind of hole in human history,” as the writer Mary McCarthy observed. The United States engaged in a costly and dangerous arms race. Thousands of nuclear warheads remain in the world, often under loose control; the United States retains its “first-strike” nuclear policy; and much of the world is partly or largely dependent on nuclear power plants, which pose their own hazards.

Our nuclear entrapment continues to this day—you might call it “From Hiroshima to Fukushima.”

The color US military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF. When that footage finally emerged, I spoke with and corresponded with the man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the US military film-makers in 1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades. I also interviewed one of his key assistants, Herbert Sussan, and some of the Japanese survivors they filmed.

“I always had the sense,” Dan McGovern told me, “that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force—it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child…. They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done—at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because…we were sorry for our sins.”

Sussan, meanwhile, struggled for years to get some of the American footage aired on national TV, taking his request as high as President Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow, to no avail.

The Japanese Newsreel Footage

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow. Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others. Within days, Japan had surrendered, and the US readied plans for occupying the defeated country—and documenting the first atomic catastrophe.

But the Japanese also wanted to study it. Within days of the second atomic attack, officials at the Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha discussed shooting film in the two stricken cities. At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda). Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored. Life magazine would later observe that for years “the world…knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction.”

Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.

Then, on October 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered to stop shooting by an American military policeman. His film, and then the rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was confiscated by the US General Headquarters (GHQ). An order soon arrived banning all further filming. It was at this point that Lt. Daniel McGovern took charge.

Shooting the US Military Footage

In early September, 1945, less than a month after the two bombs fell, Lt. McGovern—who as a member of Hollywood’s famed First Motion Picture Unit shot some of the footage for William Wyler’s “Memphis Belle”—had become one of the first Americans to arrive in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a director with the US Strategic Bombing Survey, organized by the Army the previous November to study the effects of the air campaign against Germany, and now Japan.

As he made plans to shoot the official American record, McGovern learned about the seizure of the Japanese footage. He felt it would be a waste to not take advantage of the newsreel footage, noting in a letter to his superiors that “the conditions under which it was taken will not be duplicated, until another atomic bomb is released under combat conditions.” McGovern proposed hiring some of the Japanese crew to edit and “caption” the material, so it would have “scientific value.” He took charge of this effort in early January 1946.

At the same time, McGovern was ordered by General Douglas MacArthur on January 1, 1946, to document the results of the US air campaign in more than twenty Japanese cities. His crew would shoot exclusively on color film, Kodachrome and Technicolor, rarely used at the time even in Hollywood. McGovern assembled a crew of eleven, including two civilians. Third in command was a young lieutenant from New York named Herbert Sussan.

The unit left Tokyo in a specially outfitted train, and made it to Nagasaki. “Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there,” Sussan later told me. “We were the only people with adequate ability and equipment to make a record of this holocaust…I felt that if we did not capture this horror on film, no one would ever really understand the dimensions of what had happened. At that time people back home had not seen anything but black and white pictures of blasted buildings or a mushroom cloud.”

Along with the rest of McGovern’s crew, Sussan documented the physical effects of the bomb, including the ghostly shadows of vaporized civilians burned into walls; and, most chillingly, dozens of people in hospitals who had survived (at least momentarily) and were asked to display their burns, scars, and other lingering effects for the camera as a warning to the world. At the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, a Japanese physician traced the hideous, bright red scars that covered several of the patients—and then took off his white doctor’s shirt and displayed his own burns and cuts.

After sticking a camera on a rail car and building their own tracks through the ruins, the Americans filmed hair-raising tracking shots that could have been lifted right from a Hollywood movie. Their chief cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot Sanshiro Sugata—the first feature film by a then-unknown director named Akira Kurosawa.

The Suppression Begins

While all this was going on, the Japanese newsreel team was completing its work of editing. Several of them took the courageous step of ordering from the lab a duplicate of the footage they had shot before the Americans took over the project—and hiding it in a ceiling at the lab.

The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the United States. He hauled the 90,000 feet of color footage to the Pentagon and turned it over to General Orvil Anderson. Locked up and declared top secret, it did not see the light of day for more than thirty years. McGovern would be charged with watching over it. Sussan would become obsessed with finding it and getting it aired.

Fearful that his film might get “buried,” McGovern stayed on at the Pentagon as an aide to Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by the footage and had no qualms about showing it to the American people. “He was that kind of man, he didn’t give a damn what people thought,” McGovern told me. “He just wanted the story told.”

Once they eyeballed the footage, however, most of the top brass didn’t want it widely shown and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also opposed, according to McGovern. It nixed a Warner Brothers feature film project based on the footage that Anderson had negotiated, while paying another studio about $80,000 to help make four training films.

In a March 3, 1947, memo, Francis E. Rundell, a major in the Air Corps, explained that the film would be classified “secret.” This was determined “after study of subject material, especially concerning footage taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

The color footage was shipped to the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio. McGovern went along after being told to put an I.D. number on the film “and not let anyone touch it—and that’s the way it stayed,” as he put it. After cataloging it, he placed it in a vault in the top secret area.

Sussan wrote a letter to President Truman, suggesting that a film based on the footage “would vividly and clearly reveal the implications and effects of the weapons that confront us at this serious moment in our history.” A reply from a Truman aide threw cold water on that idea, saying such a film would lack “wide public appeal.” (He also censored the first Hollywood movie, an MGM epic, about the bomb, a wild tale.)

McGovern, meanwhile, continued to “babysit” the film, now at Norton Air Force base in California.

The Japanese Footage Emerges

At the same time, McGovern was looking after the Japanese footage. The Japanese government repeatedly asked the US for the full footage of what was known in that country as “the film of illusion,” to no avail.

Despite rising nuclear fears in the 1960s, before and after the Cuban missile crisis, few in the United States challenged the consensus view that dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities was necessary. The United States maintained its “first-use” nuclear policy: under certain circumstances it would strike first with the bomb and ask questions later. In other words, there was no real taboo against using the bomb. This notion of acceptability had started with Hiroshima. A firm line against using nuclear weapons had been drawn—in the sand. The United States, in fact, had threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban missile crisis and on other occasions.

On September 12, 1967, the Air Force transferred the Japanese footage to the National Archives Audio Visual Branch in Washington, with the film “not to be released without approval of DOD (Department of Defense).”

Then, in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, discovered a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It indicated that the US had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return. From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look.

Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, even poetic, black and white film, he and his associates cut it from 160 to sixteen minutes, with a montage of human effects clustered near the end for impact. “Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945” proved to be a sketchy but quite moving document of the aftermath of the bombing, captured in grainy but often startling black and white images: shadows of objects or people burned into walls, ruins of schools, miles of razed landscape viewed from the roof of a building.

In the weeks ahead, however, none of the (then) three TV networks expressed interest in airing it. “Only NBC thought it might use the film,” Barnouw later wrote, “if it could find a ‘news hook.’ We dared not speculate what kind of event this might call for.” But then an editorial in the Boston Globe blasted the networks, saying that everyone in the country should see this film: This at last pushed public television into the void. What was then called National Educational Television (NET) agreed to show the documentary on August 3, 1970, to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb.

The American Footage Comes Out

About a decade later, by pure chance, Herb Sussan would spark the emergence of the American footage, ending its decades in the dark.

In the mid-1970s, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by Tsutomu Iwakura, discovered that few pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombings existed in their country. Many had been seized by the US military after the war, they learned, and taken out of Japan. The Japanese had as little visual exposure to the true effects of the bomb as most Americans. Activists managed to track down hundreds of pictures in archives and private collections and published them in a popular book. In 1979 they mounted an exhibit at the United Nations in New York.

There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, who told him about the US military footage.

Iwakura found that the color footage, recently declassified, might be at the National Archives. A trip to Washington, DC, verified this. He found eighty reels of film. About one-fifth of the footage covered the atomic cities. According to a shot list, reel #11010 included, for example: “School, deaf and dumb, blast effect, damaged Commercial school demolished School, engineering, demolished.School, Shirayama elementary, demolished, blast effect Tenements, demolished.”

The film had been quietly declassified a few years earlier, but no one in the outside world knew it. An archivist there told me later, “If no one knows about the film to ask for it, it’s as closed as when it was classified.”

Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy the film. He then traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for Sussan and McGovern in 1946. Iwakura quickly completed a documentary called Prophecy and in late spring 1982 arranged for a New York premiere.

Later a small part of the McGovern/Sussan footage turned up for the first time in an American film, one of the sensations of the New York Film Festival, called Dark Circle. Its co-director, Chris Beaver, told me, “No wonder the government didn’t want us to see it. I think they didn’t want Americans to see themselves in that picture. It’s one thing to know about that and another thing to see it.”

Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release. And Sussan was now ill with a form of lymphoma doctors had found in soldiers exposed to radiation in atomic tests during the 1950s—or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Still, the question of precisely why the footage remained secret for so long lingered. But McGovern told me, “The main reason it was classified was because of the horror, the devastation. The medical effects were pretty gory. The attitude was: do not show any medical effects. Don’t make people sick.”

But who was behind this? “I always had the sense,” McGovern answered, “that people in the AEC were sorry they had dropped the bomb. The Air Force—it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody. If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first US nuclear tests after the war.”

As Dark Circle director Chris Beaver had said, “With the government trying to sell the public on a new civil defense program and Reagan arguing that a nuclear war is survivable, this footage could be awfully bad publicity.”

Today

In the summer of 1984, I made my own pilgrimage to the atomic cities, to walk in the footsteps of Dan McGovern and Herb Sussan, and meet some of the people they filmed in 1946. (The month-long grant was arranged by the current mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba. My new book and e-book has a lengthy chapter describing what it’s like to be in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to interview survivors.) By then, the McGovern/ Sussan footage had turned up in several new documentaries. On September 2, 1985, however, Herb Sussan passed away. His final request to his children: Would they scatter his ashes at ground zero in Hiroshima?

In the mid-1990s, researching Hiroshima in America, a book I would write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for suppression of the US Army film: it was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, newspaper reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood movie.

Then, in 2003, as chief adviser to a documentary film, Original Child Bomb, I urged director Carey Schonegevel to draw on the atomic footage as much as possible. Original Child Bomb went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, win the top Silverdocs award, and debut on the Sundance cable channel. After sixty years at least a small portion of that footage reached part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended. Now i’ve written the first book and e-book about all of this, one of the last little told stories of World War II.

Americans who saw were finally able to fully judge for themselves what McGovern and Sussan were trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race—and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today. But only small parts of the movie have been used (see the video below), only a small number of Americans have seen any of it. A major documentary on the footage, and the suppression, should still be made.

More on the new book Atomic Cover-Up can be found here.  Also available as an e-book. Greg Mitchell’s e-mail is: epic1934@aol.com

As government faces increasing criticism over its controversial deal with ConnocoPhillips and pressure mounts to force the government to reveal the contract, an oil spill in China lends weight to the protesters claims that the company has a poor safety record.

ConocoPhillips Halts Oil Operations In Bohai Bay, China

China said Wednesday it had ordered ConocoPhillips to immediately stop operations at several rigs in an area off the nation’s eastern coast polluted by a huge slick.

The 336-square-mile slick emanating from the oil field in Bohai Bay — which ConocoPhillips operates with China’s state-run oil giant CNOOC – has sparked outrage amid allegations of a cover-up.

On Wednesday, the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said operations would not be allowed to resume before the source of the spill was fully plugged and “risks eliminated,” as fears over the long-term impact on the environment grow.

“There has been oil seeping continuously into the sea for days from platforms B and C in the Penglai 19-3 oil field and there is still a slick in the surrounding marine areas,” the SOA said in a statement.

“Another spill could happen at any time, which has posed a huge threat to the oceanic ecological environment,” it said, adding it had ordered Houston-based ConocoPhillips to stop operations at those platforms.

Spill ‘Basically Under Control’

CNOOC last week said the spill — which was detected on June 4 but only made public at the beginning of July — was “basically under control” while ConocoPhillips told reporters the leaks had been plugged.

The official China Daily newspaper last week said that dead seaweed and rotting fish could be seen in waters around Nanhuangcheng Island near the site of the slick.

It quoted a local fisheries association official as saying the oil leak would have a “long-term” impact on the environment.

CNOOC has been slammed by state media and green groups over the spill, and it emerged on Tuesday that the firm was cleaning up another slick after a breakdown at a rig off the northeast coast.

The state-run giant said the leak was “minor”.

In a separate incident, a CNOOC refinery in the southern province of Guangdong caught fire Monday but there were no casualties, the company said, adding that the cause of the blaze was still under investigation.

The refinery is located about 25 miles from the Daya Bay nuclear power plant, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2011

The world’s largest image shows a 360 degree view of Vienna. Taken by photographer Julian Kalmar in July of this year and assembled from 3600 shots, the image would need 25,000 television sets to be viewed in full HD.

Europe’s Open-face Democracy

By Rahnuma Ahmed

France bans full-face veils in public. Women wearing the niqab cannot enter government buildings, public transport, streets and markets. Burkas are not “welcome” on French soil, says Sarkozy. It is a sign of women’s “subservience,” it undermines France’s secular tradition. The Spanish parliament is debating a proposal. Burkas are hardly compatible with “human dignity,” says the justice minister. Barcelona bans burkas and niqabs from government buildings. They hinder personal identification. Full-face veil banned in Belgium. Streets, gardens, all buildings accessed by members of the public are no-go areas for women wearing the niqab.

It’s now or never, everything on hold till I finish my manuscript, no columns, no calls, no visitors, I thought as I furiously tapped away at the keyboard, barely scanned newspaper headlines, refused to download e-zines and newsletters, felt embarassed at repeatedly telling Zaman (deputy editor, New Age) as he nabbed me on g-chat, rahnuma’pa, how much longer? hmm, maybe a few more weeks?…but still, somehow, news of the burka ban gathering momentum in European countries seeped through, into my self-enforced confinement.

Less than a week after Belgium passed its law, an Italian woman was fined $650 for wearing a burka under a 1975 law, which prohibits people from covering their faces in public. Amsterdam and Utrecht propose cutting social security benefits to unemployed women who wear the burka. A German lawmaker calls for a complete ban on full-face burkas all over Europe. Veiled women irritate her, she says; she cannot judge them for who they are, what their intentions are. It’s a “massive attack on the rights of women. It is a mobile prison.” Eight out of 16 federal states in Germany have already banned female schoolteachers from wearing the headscarf. If the burka is not banned, threatens the Freedom Party of Netherlands, it’ll not join the minority coalition government. The burqa and the niqab have no place in our society, says the Danish prime minister. Denmark is an “open, democratic society where we look at the person to whom we are talking.”

There is talk of banning the burqa beyond Europe’s borders too, in what were once white-settler colonies, and now, sovereign states. Quebec’s immigration minister says, “If you want to integrate into Quebec society, here are our values. We want to see your face,” as its premier pushes a bill banning any sort of full-face veil. If passed, women will be denied receiving or applying for government services, including non-emergency medicine and day care. An Australian blogger, appreciative of senator Cory Bernardi’s recent call for an Aussie ban on full-face veiling writes, if the burqa and niqab are accepted, if they are normalised and legitimised, what do we teach Australian girls? That they shouldn’t be proud to show their face and have a voice in society? “That women’s rights are [not] inalienable and worth fighting for, except where gender oppression is religiously or culturally endorsed?”

The mind works in curious ways. For some reason I am reminded of Laura Bush and Cherie Blair. Of Mrs Bush’s unprecedented radio broadcast to rally support against the Taliban; she was the first wife of a US president to deliver the whole of the weekly address (November 1, 2001), expressing profound sorrow and deepest sympathies for the women of Afghanistan. “Life under the Taliban is so hard and repressive, even small displays of joy are outlawed—children aren’t allowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud. Women cannot work outside the home, or even leave their homes by themselves.” Two days later, the wife of the former British prime minister joined in the commiseration. The Taliban regime, Mrs Blair informed us, is repressive, cruel and joyless. The human rights of women and girls within Afghanistan “have been denied, people have been executed in football stadiums in front of cheering crowds, girls have had to be educated in secret.” Britain needs to “help them free that spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see.”

Twenty-two months after the US-led invasion there were no signs of an Afghanistan that was less hard and less repressive for its women and children. Linda S Heard wrote, millions of Afghan women and children continue to face major health and nutrition problems with maternal and infant mortality among “the worst in the world.” Gunmen commit human rights abuses and warlords have been “propelled into power by the US and its coalition partners after the Taliban fell in 2001.”

But surely a decade on, the spirits of Afghan women are now free? Girls are now receiving education? A better Afghanistan is being created? Malalai Joya, the youngest Afghan to be elected member of parliament (2005-2007) says, the current situation is a disaster. People suffer from extreme insecurity, many have stopped sending their children to school, especially girls for fear that they might be raped or killed. The most pressing problems are cultivation and trafficking of drugs and narcotics (the opium industry is “solely designed by the US,” its annual production during the Taliban regime was 185 metric tons, it has now magnified to 8,500 tons annually), 50% unemployment and severe poverty which forces some parents to sell their children for $10 for a piece of bread, appalling corruption (the present Afghan government is “the most corrupt in our whole history”), and the installation of war criminals and terrorists into power through fraudulent elections (a “dirty game” played by the US and NATO). Needless to add, Joya is hardly sighted in the mainstream western media.

In some cities women’s conditions have slightly improved since the Taliban regime. But the situation was far better in the 1960s, says Joya, when Afghan women had more rights. Rapes, abductions, murders, violence, and forced marriages are increasing at an alarming rate. Women’s suicide rate is climbing in many provinces. “Afghanistan still faces a women’s rights catastrophe. Every aspect of life in Afghanistan today is tragic.” We are sandwiched between two enemies, the Taliban on one side and the US/NATO forces and their warlord friends on the other. The policy of the US government and its allies is to foster warlords and criminals, to marginalise and put pressure on progressive and democratic movements and individuals “out of fear that the latter will mobilise Afghan people against the occupation forces.”

And who were among America’s coalition partners in Operation Enduring Freedom, in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 2001? Among NATO countries, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain. Among non-NATO ones, Australia and Sweden.

They are still there (NATO update Oct 2010).

Do the rulers of these European nations—visionaries of open-faced democracy—have the courage to face up to the facts, as enumerated by Malalai Joya? Hardly. They’d have to face up to other facts then: that the invasion was an obvious breach of international law, having not been authorised by the UN Security Council. That Afghanistan was not involved in the events of 9/11. That if the US government’s account is to be believed, 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, so why invade Afghanistan? That the Afghan government did not refuse to extradite Osama bin Laden, their offer was subject to conditions, which was unacceptable to the US administration. That the latter had not only supported the “Islamic terror network,” it was instrumental in installing the Taliban government (1995-96). That the politicians who arranged it, supported it, are liable to be tried as war criminals. And that, is quite a lot of facing up to do.

President Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan by sending 34,000 more troops; he has extended it to Pakistan by expanding the CIA-led killer drone campaign, because al-Qaeda—who had, according to Bush, committed “faceless” and “cowardly” acts—now operates in the border areas. But drone pilots do not `show’ their face. They are `hidden’ tens of thousands of miles away from the so-called battlefield, `concealed’ behind computer screens and remote audio-feed. There are no means of `identifying’ them personally.

But we too, would like to see their faces. We would like to see the face that’s doing the killing. Occupying forces are not `welcome’ either. Not on Afghan soil, nor on Iraq’s soil. For they bring with them a `massive attack’ on the rights of women, they make women and children prisoners in their own land. Their veil of rhetoric hides their `intentions.’

But may be `concealment’ is essential so that they can’t prosecuted for murder under the domestic law of the country in which they conduct targeted killings? May be they need to `hide’ their faces to avoid being prosecuted for violations of applicable US law? According to a news report, The Year of the Drone Strike, 2009, netted 5 actual militant leaders, killed 700 innocent civilians. What do these faceless killers teach us, the global public? That no face-saving gestures of European rulers can conceal their complicity in war crimes in Afghanistan (and Iraq)?

Ernest Hemingway had said, We must take away their planes, their automatic weapons, their tanks, their artillery and teach them dignity (For Whom the Bell Tolls). Dignity? Do those who are `subservient’ to America’s military and economic interests, have any?

concluding instalment next week..

Other articles on burqa ban

this one is funny

serious

detailed

By Gita L. Vygodskaya

Translated from the Russian language by Ilya Gindis

Published in School Psychology International, Vol.16

Nobody in our family studied or took up religion. I only knew from the nanny, who took care of us, that there was a God, whom she, according to her words, feared and respected. On several occasions, unknown to my parents, she even took me to a church. When my father found out, he, to much to nanny’s surprise, did not get angry. Upon finding from me that I liked church, and from the nanny that I did not disturb anyone there, he decided that in the future we could go to church whenever we wanted. I remember well how proud I was when we walked openly to church, wearing our best bonnets.

Later the nanny told me that every girl should know a prayer, and I learned one from her by ear, without understanding a single word. To all my questions she always answered: “I am illiterate, when you get educated you will understand everything”. But I did not want to wait until I grew up and was educated, and so I went to my father to clear things up. He seemed to be surprised when I recited the prayer from memory, and asked where I learned it. He did not express any feelings towards the whole matter, but simply explained that the prayer thanked the Virgin Mary for giving birth to the Lord Jesus Christ. This however did not yet mean anything to me, and I went about my business as before. One day Leonid, my older cousin, who lived with us, did something that was strictly forbidden. The nanny then warned him to never do it again or “God will punish you”. To this the boy quickly replied: “God does not exist”. The nanny was horrified, and began to tell him how you can’t say things like that. Leonid was unimpressed and stubbornly stuck by his comment.

Meanwhile I was completely confused by the whole matter and had no idea where the truth lay. I began to get upset and to get a straight answer I went to my father, as I always did in difficult situations. I remember well how he was sitting at the table working. I could not hold back the worrying question, and so I came up close, so he would notice me, a favorite tactic of mine. He put down the pen, turned and hugged me by the shoulders, asking what happened. “Dad, is there a God?” – I burst out. “Why do you ask me?” – he replied. I told him of the “discussion” between the nanny and Leonid. He suddenly become very serious. “You see,” – he said, “some people, like our nanny, believe that God exists while others reject the idea. Everyone must decide this for themselves, when you grow up you too will decide”.

He never forced his opinions on us, unless of course we were doing something really wrong. In most cases he preferred for us to work things out on our own. Often when we asked a question, he did not give a complete answer but rather drew us into discussions that resulted in a commonly agreed on answer or decision.

A few years before his death, my father began to smoke. No one was really bothered by this as he did not smoke often, and it seemed to make him happy. I liked to watch him as he smoked, he had a special sort of smile at these times. One day Leonid told me how unfair he thought it was that we weren’t allowed to smoke. He said he tried it himself but only succeeded in burning his eyebrow, therefore we should do it together. He even found a perfect place: between bookshelves, and suggested we go and try it immediately. But I was not used to doing things secretly, and I was always sure of my father’s understanding and support in this. I asked Leonid to wait until the night, when he came home. Leonid agreed, but only until the night. I impatiently waited my father came home and, barely letting him take his coat off, came up to him under pretense of injustice: “You smoke, but don’t let us!” He paused for a moment and asked: “Have you tried already?” I said no, but that Leonid had. Father said: “You are right, we’ll smoke together tonight, just wait until I finish dinner”. He went to eat in my grandmother’s room, where by now the whole family gathered, and I ran with the shocking news to Leonid. When the two of us burst into the room, my father was drinking tea, while everyone else was sitting by the table or stove, discussing, as usual, the days events. Me and Leonid sat down on either side of Lev Semenovich, and began to wait. He soon finished his tea, and took out the cigarettes giving one to me and one to Leonid. Suddenly everyone in the room went quiet and began to watch us intensely.

He was in no hurry, packing the cigarettes, all the while showing how its done and why its necessary. He then demonstrated how to hold the cigarette in the hand and in the mouth. Finally he lit his, took a drag and brought the lighter to ours. Everyone around us was watching his actions, but not interfere with what was going on. “And now, take a deep breath” – said father. I don’t remember much of what happened then, as I almost passed out and got sick. I think Leonid experienced the same reaction. I guess I should add that I never tried smoking again, and Leonid did not try again until he was over 18.

There is one more thing that happened that I will recount. It’s still unpleasant to talk about it, but it happened and it taught me a lesson for life. By now I was in school. I remember it was late May. In class we had an important final coming up. I had a very serious attitude toward it, and was rather anxious. It so happened that I did well on the exam and got a high mark. I returned home in high spirit and was doubly over joyed: my father was home! When he asked me what was new in school, I proudly told him of my success, and added with ill-concealed pleasure that the girl sitting next to me could not copy from me as I had turned the page of the notebook, and because of this got a poorer grade than me. I was beaming and expecting praise, looked at father. I was surprised at the expression on his face: he looked very disappointed. I could not understand what was wrong. May be he did not realize I passed? After a short silence he began to speak, slowly and deliberately so I would remember everything he said. He told me that it was not nice to be happy of others misfortunes, that only selfish people enjoyed it. He went on saying that I should always try to help those who need it, and its only for those who help others that the life is rewarding and brings true joy. I remember I was very upset from his words and asked what I should do now. As always in these situations he offered me a solution: he did not want me to feel like once I did something wrong I was now incapable of doing good. He suggested to me that I go and ask my classmate about what she didn’t understand, and try to patiently explain it to her, and if I couldn’t do it so she would understand perfectly, then he would be glad to help me. “But here is the most important thing”, he added, “you must do all this so your friend be sure you really want to help her, and really mean her well, and so it would not be unpleasant for her to accept your help”. More than 60 years have passed since this incident and I still remember all of his words and try to follow them as best I can in life.

* * *

I don’t believe that “after death there is nothing else”. After his death, the person continues his life in memories of those who loved him and in his works. And so Lev S. Vygotsky lives in the memories of those few, still alive, who know him, and most of all, in his writings that, thanks God, are finally available to everyone. As far as his students go…, well, many of them became famous scientists. Luckily, many were granted a long life. But despite their graying heads and elevated scientific status each has reached, they all still consider the 37 year old researcher their teacher. This was something they never got tired of talking about, and always with great love. Now many are gone, but their students, and now even their students’ students go on. And so science develops. Even though so many years have passed, Vygotsky’s thoughts, ideas, and works not only belong to history, but they still interest people. In one of his articles, A. Leontiev wrote of Vygotsky as a man decades ahead of his time. Probably that is why that he is for us not a historic figure but a living contemporary.

Full Article

The Bangla New Year celebrations for the year 1417 by Chhayanut will be broadcast live through Drik ICT from the following sites.

The broadcast from Ramna Botomool in Dhaka is being done jointly by Drik ICT, Telnet Communications and Channel-i and will be available live from 06:15 am (Dhaka time) on the 14^th April 2010.

DrikTV

Chhayanut

Telnet

Related Links:

Boishakh for Poonam

Happy’s New Year

`Owning’ the weather? PART IX

By Rahnuma Ahmed

Does something lie behind the global warming agenda, behind the UN Summit at Copenhagen where world leaders had met to agree on how to tackle global climate change? Has weather warfare, as Michel Chossudovsky, director, Global Research (Canada), asks us, already started?

Some observers think, climate wars, caused by uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions, are the future. That the world will be ravaged by wars over land, food and water, forcing countries to use the military to barricade borders.

This scenario—climate wars caused by global warming—is distinct from the weather warfare one, which is related to planned projections of `owning’ the weather, of developing technologies which `weaponise’ the weather (`Weather as a Force Multiplier. Owning the Weather in 2025,’ US Air Force commissioned study, 1996). This is real, admittedly so, by top-ranking US policy makers. By Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor, “techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm” (1970). By William Cohen, former US secretary of defence, “alter[ing] the climate, set[ting] off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electro-magnetic waves…It’s real” (1997). By US Admiral Pier Saint-Armand, “We regard the weather as a weapon” (US Senate, 1972).

A reality further attested to by the ratification of an international Convention by the UN General Assembly, the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (Geneva: 18 May 1977), one to which both the US and Soviet Union were signatories.

I find it interesting that both global warming and ENMOD are assumed to lead to similar environmental disasters—droughts, storms, hurricanes, earthquakes—and thereby, to untold human suffering, but that global summits and international meetings express an orchestrated alarm over only set of anthropogenic activities, i.e., CO2 emissions. No mention of warfare. Of depleted uranium. Or CO2 emissions caused by warfare in Iraq. The Pentagon’s daily fuel consumption. Or, for that matter, HAARP.

Many scientists and climatologists have repeatedly pointed out that climate change is a misnomer because climates do change. Should change. That change, for God’s sake, is natural. Climate science, they say, is in its infancy. We know very little. In such a situation, to commit the whole planet to policies that are extensive and far-reaching—and in reality, are based on shaky scientific findings, the result of computer modelling, simulation exercises, anecdotal evidence, and worse still, what we now know post-CRU, that the data was forced to fit a pre-determined theory, that the raw data of temperature records was not stored but (horror of horrors) deleted—is downright stupid.

And close on the heels of Climategate were a series of other `gates,’ Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pachaurigate. Okay, we should have learnt our lesson, no rush. Calm down. Go slow.

But, as Andrew Orlowski points out, Climategate raises far more questions than it answers. How did such a small group of scientists, backing a new theory, in an infant field, come to have such a huge effect on global policy making? Why is the climate debate beset with “a sense of crisis and urgency, and the ascendancy of a quite specific and narrow set of policy options”? Why has it become the “Rosetta stone” of a whole political and business movement? Does the answer lie (only) in the billions to be made from carbon trading, predicted to become the world’s largest commodity market 5 years from now, worth $10 trillion?

There was another leak at Copenhagen in December 2009, the Danish text leak. Taken together with the CRU e-mail, close watchers are more convinced than ever that these are the acts of whistle-blowers, of dissident insiders. An idea difficult to stomach for those who think that dissidence belongs to the Cold War era. To people yearning to be free of the Iron Curtain. To flock to the `free world.’

Developing countries reacted furiously to the leaked draft agreement. It proposed to hand more power to rich nations. To sideline the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations. To abandon the Kyoto protocol, the only legally binding treaty on emissions reductions. It “force[d] developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement.” It proposed a green fund, to be run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (a partnership of 10 agencies including the WB and the UN Environmental Programme). It sought to put “constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.”  According to a diplomat, “being done in secret” it is effectively “the end of the UN process” (Guardian, December 8, 2010).

Pray, to be replaced by what? The UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon spoke of a global governance structure.  The new EU president Herman van Rompuy said, it was another step towards the global management of our planet. Global governance and global agreements, said Al Gore. at 1:14 mts

Billed by the UN as possibly the most important meeting in the history of the world, the leaks, says Alex Jones (an American talk radio host and filmmaker, violently anti-communist he describes himself as an “aggressive constitutionalist”) discredited the globalists. It exposed the conspiracy of the international elite, a group of industrialists and bankers, to secretly institute a regime of global authority and global rule by an unelected bureaucracy. To scare the “world population into relinquishing their rights and turning it over to an IMF-World Bank elected government that taxes the West, then takes that money, and turns it back to third world and first world nations and then makes those nations agree to a list of demands to destroy their industrial capacity which will result in a death sentence.” To institute a system of climate colonialism. To conceal the fact that while the World Bank chief revels in biofuels having boosted food prices, ethanol production in the US took a third of grain production out, causing an additional 10 million people to starve to death in 2008. The Copenhagen summit, says Jones, was undoubtedly a massive failure. The conspiracy to coopt national sovereignty and elected governments, to force the people of the world to live under structures like the European Union which has forced Europeans to lose their sovereignty to “unelected bureaucrats in Brussels” was successfully resisted. But these elites will try again, this year. In Mexico. The fight against the usurpation of civil liberties and sovereignty, says Jones, must go on.

Has weather warfare really started? Some HAARP-watchers think that the earthquake in Sichuan province in China, which killed 68,000 people, was not natural. They cite the observance of luminous, glowing cloud-like phenomena in the sky 30 minutes before the earthquake took place on May 12, 2008 (recorded by cellphone in Gansu province 450 km northeast of epicenter). According to Epoch Times, several weeks after the quake, high-level Chinese military sources secretly disclosed that it had destroyed the Chinese army’s largest armory, new weapons test bases, and part of nuclear facilities including several nuclear warheads. Initial calls for help were reportedly ignored by the Chinese authorities for the first 72 hours because they did not want “potential spies from the outside world” snooping around. The presence of concrete debris, including concrete slabs and blocks, reported by witnesses, have led some experts to think that a nuclear explosion had occurred near the epicenter, that the concrete belonged to the concrete cover of underground military bases. News of nuclear explosion has raised questions about cause-and-effect: whether a nuclear explosion caused the earthquake or the earthquake caused the explosion. A nuclear accident was also said to have occurred, 2,700 chemical workers were sent to parts of the earthquake-hit area to help cleanup.

Picture showing how the mountain area in the earthquake region [May 12, 2008 Sichuan province looks like after a big explosion. Local villagers said the explosion was so huge that the big mountain seemed to be cut in the middle. (Photo provided by mainland Chinese Internet Users) "

Benjamin Fulford, a Japan-based journalist, claimed in early 2007 that while interviewing Heizo Takenaka, a former finance minister in Japan, he confronted Takenaka, and accused him of “having sold the Japanese financial system over to the Rockefellers and Rothschilds.” According to Fulford, Takenaka’s response had been that a group representing “American and European oligarchs” had used the threat of manmade earthquakes in an attempt to pressure the Japanese government to “hand over control of the Japanese financial system.” Japan had intially refused, only to relent after the July 17, 2007 Niigata earthquakes. I have not come across any refutation or rejoinder of Fulford’s claims/allegations by any Japanese government spokesperson. Fulford further says, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake had coincided with the BRIC meeting [Brazil-Russia-India-China]. Two days before it took place, a Taiwanese satellite had reportedly “detected a 50% drop in the amount of electric energy in the ionosphere above the earthquake zone.”

Working on the Weather series, and writing it has not been easy. Least of all, because as I explained to Anu Mohammed, who had called to tell me that he was eagerly reading each instalment, But Anu, I am not into weather and climate and such stuff. I’d only thought of writing about the earthquake in Haiti. But what I don’t understand is what on earth are our climate activists doing? The people on whom we rely to inform and educate us, to tell us what the score is, so that we can create well-informed demands in our struggle for social justice. I will skip what Anu replied. Shireen Huq, another friend said, I’m sure our climate activists have contacted you… No Shireen, I replied, no one has. I don’t expect anyone to, either.

I think they are too busy regurgitating what’s said at international conferences and seminars. But I want to be proven wrong. There’s too much at stake.

Published in New Age 29 March 2009

`Owning’ the weather? PART VIII

By Rahnuma Ahmed

Ten years from now, no, five years from now, you’ll feel ashamed for having written this. Definitely. He hung up.

This was last Monday, the day `Global Warming, Or The Greatest Scientific Fraud’ was published (New Age, 15 March 2010).

It had been an early morning call. Speak to my son, said my friend. Oh, so he’s in Dhaka now, I thought, since I know he lives and works in the US. Do you know what you’ve written? Do you know that 90% scientists agree on global warming? Do you know that you’re writing absolutely reactionary stuff, that you’re speaking in the interests of the oil industry, in the interests of the powers-that-be?

Hey, hold on, what about the suppression of data? What about the lies, the fraudulent methods employed by global warming scientists?

I’m more concerned about your journalistic methods, sensationalising… I’m shocked. You should look at the bigger picture. There’s no need to blow these e-mails out of proportion.

I invited him to write a rebuttal. He refused. I was being condescending, he said.

I’d thought of concluding the weather series today, but I’ve changed my mind.

First, a quick look at some of the headlines of the last few months, to recap how Climategate has been unfolding:

- ClimateGate: Phil Jones, UK climate scientist, temporarily steps down, The Huffington Post, 1 December 2009-

‘Climategate’ professor Phil Jones awarded £13 million in research grants, Global Research, 5 December 2009

- Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after ‘Danish text’ leak, The Guardian, 8 December 2009

- IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri to face independent inquiry, The Telegraph, 26 February 2010

- Climategate scientist questioned in Parliament, New Scientist, 2 March 2010

- UK government rebuked on climate change ads, Miami Herald, 15 March 2010

That the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory (AGW, caused by humans) was based on, if nothing else, bad science, is pretty clear. A matter of concern, if not, downright alarm, for scientific associations. The Institute of Physics (IP, 36,000 physicists) in its response to a House of Commons inquiry has said, the Climate Research Unit’s (CRU) leaked e-mails, if not forged, “provide prima facie evidence” of refusing to comply with honourable scientific traditions and the freedom of information law. The Royal Society of Chemistry (46,000 members) says, a “lack of willingness” to make scientific data available implies that the results are not sufficiently “robust.” The IP had added, a “wider inquiry” is needed. Hadn’t other scientists, at other leading institutions helped CRU formulate IPCC’s conclusions on climate change? If so, the “circle of complicity” was bigger.

Okay, admittedly, AGW science is a bit dodgy. But if it’s a good cause, a progressive cause, does it’s being a bad science really matter? And, it does have millions of supporters. Ranging from environment-conscious people at the grassroots level to influential proponents—both individuals and institutions. Al Gore, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Greenpeace, the New York Times, Washington Post, Times, Guardian, BBC, ABC (in Australia), Nature, Scientific American. Many many others. Even if it’s scientific basis is a bit unsound, surely, we should still support the movement? In the interests of saving our planet?

But rushing headlong into the issue in such a manner, pre-empts the possibility of raising critical questions. Of asking whether the AGW cause (or, climate change, as it later became known) best represents, in the sense of problematising, formulating, tabling—the environmental issue. I don’t think so, unlike my caller. And that, precisely, is where the problem lies.

As the extent of AGW scare-mongering becomes increasingly clear—the polar bear population has increased nearly-four times more instead of decreasing (22,000), the Himalayan glaciers are not melting, etc.,—questions centring around inequality and social justice, return centre-stage. Ever stronger.

For developing countries, to agree to carbon reduction means basically agreeing to remain poor. An examination of world energy statistics reveals that the combined energy consumption of 5 of the 6 most populous countries (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan) equals that of the 6th (US). In a situation characterised by stark wealth inequalities, would it be wise, asks Robert Bryce, for any of the Big Five leaders to agree to CO2 reduction? As Rajendra Prachauri, the now-disgraced IPCC chief had pointed out, 400 million Indians (40%) do not have a light bulb in their homes. “You cannot, in a democracy, ignore some of these realities.”

And neither can it be ignored that western leaders have recently dreamt up hoaxes to create a climate of fear, to scare their (complicit?) citizenry into consenting to military invasion, to the occupation of resource-rich developing countries. George Bush: Saddam Hussein had links with al-Qaeda. Tony Blair: Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Ring a bell? And no, it’s not over yet. Obama: Enriching uraniums. Iran. (According to a Haaretz news report, America is transporting 387 bunker-buster bombs to its Diego Garcia air base, for possible Iran strike, 18 March 2010). Progressive politics? Who, what, where? Did I miss something?

There are other aspects, too. Will international treaties—Kyoto Protocol, and the new one to replace it in 2012—reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? Help save the planet? Unlikely. The leaders of the rich world, write Johann Hari, are enacting a giant fraud (Independent, 11 December 2009). A rich country can “cut” its emissions while not actually reducing them. How? By paying a poor country to emit less. Well, since it’s the same atmosphere, that’s okay, isn’t it? Actually, no. A system which can sell emission cuts among countries becomes extremely complex, writes Hari. Very soon, and deliberately, it “becomes so technical that nobody can follow it—no concerned citizen, no journalist, and barely even full-time environmental groups.” Tricks abound. For instance: by storing carbon, forests mitigate global warming, right? But Canadian, Swedish and Finnish logging companies have pressurised their governments to agree to inserting the clause that “sustainable forest management” i.e., cutting down almost all trees—doesn’t lead to losing credit. The cap-and-trade system, says Hari, laced with Enron-style accounting tricks is Kafkaesque. No real cuts. Only tamasha cuts.

If Bart Chilton (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) is right, five years from now the carbon trading market will become the world’s largest commodity market, worth $2 trillion. Richard L. Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Climate Exchange Plc thinks it’ll be larger, $10 trillion. Bigger than oil. As billionaire hedge fund operator Soros puts it, carbon markets present “financial opportunities.” Al Gore is known as a carbon billionaire. Barack Obama’s name has popped up, too: as the board member of a Chicago-based charity, Obama had agreed to a proposal aimed at devising a carbon dioxide emissions trading market. This led to the setting-up of Climate Exchange, headed by Sandor, “one of the most successful investors trying to profit from rising environmental awareness” (Wall Street Journal). The initial idea behind granting Sandor the award in 2000 was to have “a carbon trading system ready to implement” with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol.

The oil industry doesn’t seem unduly worried either, having “effortlessly recalibrated” their stance:  CRU’s financial supporters in 2008 included Shell and British Petroleum (Alexander Cockburn). Recently, Rockefeller family shareholders of Exxon Mobil urged the board to adjust to the “changing world.” To focus on the “environmental crisis facing all of us.”

Can solutions proposed by Kyoto, Copenhagen based on global warming/climate change theory accomplish what Banyacya, the Hopi interpreter, had urged: “Its up to all of us, as children of Mother Earth, to clean up this mess before it’s too late.” The “mess” list is a long one. Deforestation. Desertification. Species extinction. The urgent need to preserve biodiversity. Develop sustainable agriculture. Dismantle corporate attempts to privatise water…

Can solutions that ignore the “worst polluter” of CO2 and other toxic emissions on the planet, work? Such as, the Pentagon. Such as, depleted uranium (DU).

During Kyoto negotiations, the US had demanded its own military operations, and those with UN and/or NATO, be completely “exempted” from all climate treaties and agreements. After the others agreed, Bush administration went ahead and refused to sign the accords. Obama has not revoked the blanket exemption either. Officially, the US military uses 320,000 barrels of oil per day, this excludes fuel consumed by contractors, or in leased and privatised facilities (Sara Flounders, Global Research). Since 1991, the U.S. has released radioactive atomicity equalling at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs or, 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, into the global atmosphere.

There is another, equally critical, silence: CO2 emissions caused by warfare. Total CO2 emissions from invading Iraq roughly equal UK’s total emission for a year. Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) say, the environmental effects of invading Iraq are major. Local air pollution. Climate change due to burning oil wells. Groundwater pollution from leaking oil wells.

Compounded by another silence: depleted uranium (radioactive) is used in the manufacture of armaments. Tank cartridges. Bombs. Rockets. Missiles. Both DU and white phosphorus munitions inflict long term damage to the environment. In a letter to the president of the UN General Assembly, Iraq’s minister for women’s affairs wrote, young women in Fallujah are now terrified of having children. No head. Two heads. A single eye in the forehead. Scaly bodies. Missing limbs. Cancer. Leukemia. Similar in Afghanistan. DU causes v-e-r-y long term damage, measured in billions of years. The global atmosphere, writes William Bowles, has been permanently contaminated by the US with radioactive pollution having a half-life of 2.5 billion years.

Naivete among Americans, of whatever colour, is inexcusable. I am ashamed. Already.

[concluding piece, next week]

Published in New Age 22 March 2010

By Rahnuma Ahmed

The theory of global warming, a `theory’ which we know to be `real,’ according to which the temperature of the Earth’s near-surface air and that of its oceans has been rising since the middle of the last century, an increase caused by human activity, by burning fossil fuel and deforestation, one which is likely to cause sea levels to rise, deserts to expand, glaciers to retreat, an impending disaster of such magnitude that world leaders were compelled to agree to stabilise the climate by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to draft and implement the Kyoto Protocol (2005), to meet yet again in Copenhagen last December to thrash out stricter emission controls, to try and resolve whether China and India should be given `a free ride’ as was enjoyed by the rich countries during their 150 years of industrialisation … well, serious doubts are now being raised about the scientific knowledge which underlies global warming theory. Scientists and researchers, it seems, have faked the data. It is a discovery that has led the unfolding scandal—dubbed Climategate a la Watergate by the western media—to be called `the greatest scientific fraud in human history’

The controversy is largely unknown in Bangladesh, except for scattered news items. I have not come across any commentary either, one which is both informative and reviews what is at stake. Given the significance for Bangladesh—on the `frontline’ of climate change, tops the list of `most vulnerable’ countries, and the predictions—one-third of Bangladesh likely to be inundated by a 3 feet rise in sea level in the next 50 years, 25 million-30 million people to be uprooted, surely, one would have assumed that news of Climategate, as it unfolded, would be one of the top public interest issues in Bangladesh? That researchers and activists working on climate change in Bangladesh would have felt obliged to inform the public?

On 19 November last year, thousands of emails and communications between some of the world’s leading climate scientists, over a 13-year period dating from 1996, totalling 61 MB, was stolen by hackers from servers at Britain’s University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The files were leaked, first on a Russian server, but soon enough these became viral, and spread worldwide. Climategate was quickly followed by a series of other gates: Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pachaurigate. According to intelligent guesses, the Russian secret service might well be behind the hacking.

The United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and world governments rely on four sets of temperature data of which the set maintained by professor Phil Jones, the director of CRU, at the University of East Anglia, is the most important . Climate scientists at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, and at CRU, maintain the global climate record for the World Meterological Organization (WMO). Professor Jones data set, as Christopher Booker points out, is the most important “not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it” (Telegraph, 28 November 2009).

What do the hacked e-mails reveal? First, that top scientists conspired to falsify data when faced with declining global temperatures (yes, it seems that the world is cooling) in order to insist that rising temperatures are caused by human activity (Anthropogenic Global Warming, AGW). Second, they coordinated a campaign of ostracising climate skeptics to prevent dissenting work from being published in peer-reviewed journals. Third, they avoided compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Instances of falsifying data: Professor Jones wrote, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Climate skeptics insist that `real’ temperatures mean what global warmers want them to be, that hiding the decline means evidence of cooling, whereas UEA authorities and “warmists” insist that `trick’ refers not to deception but to statistical measures to correct data divergence.

Another instance of data falsification, say climate skeptics, is provided by the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) controversy. One e-mail says, “We know the file starts at yr 440, but we want nothing till 1400.” This, say the skeptics, means that CRU has temperature data going back to 440 and 1070, but is using only the data after the Medieval Warm Period, so as not to undermine the global-warming-is-man-made hypothesis. Data fudging over the MWP gains credence when one looks at what Keith Briffa, deputy director, CRU wrote: “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

The requests of climate change skeptics, also reputable scientists and climatologists, to CRU data, was repeatedly denied. In one set of e-mail exchanges, Professors Jones and Mann discuss how to circumvent US and UK Freedom Of Information Act requests. Jones writes: [McIntyre and McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom Of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” In his reply, Mann hints that he’ll claim intellectual property rights. Mann, whose full name is Michael E Mann (at Penn State University and director, Earth System Science Center), is famous for the hockey stick graph, so called because it depicts a slow cooling trend from 1000 to 1900 which looks like a long handle, and an upward warming curve from 1900 to 1999, which looks like the blade of a hockey stick. Both the MWP, and the Little Ice Age (LIA) which occurred 300 years ago, are major problems for the man-made/warmists. Mann’s hockey stick graph, by eliminating these, became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

While warmists have attempted to brush aside emails that celebrate as “cheering news” the death of a climate change skeptic, that wants to “beat the crap out of” all skeptics, by saying that scientists too, in their everyday lives, are normal people with normal emotions, it is difficult to extend the same logic to those emails which talk of preventing dissenting opinion from being published in peer-reviewed journals. “I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?” And, another: “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”

Dissatisfaction with the peer review process does not seem to be confined to scientists at CRU only, but to extend to, and include, the IPCC. Dr Benjamin Santer, lead author of Chapter 8, 1995 IPCC Report, allegedly deleted the following passages which had been approved by the scientists, and should have been included in the supposedly peer-reviewed published version:

‘None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.’

‘No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes.’”

Since the email leak, other disturbing news has come to light. An essentially flat temperature chart in both Australia and New Zealand was turned into a graph to show “temperatures steadily rising.” The manipulation in both cases, as Booker points out, was carried out under the influence of CRU. Whereas Russian climate data, according to a report of the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis, were probably tampered with. The Hadley Centre for Climate Change, it seems, used temperature data from only those Russian metereological stations which highlighted the global warming process.

Other `gates’ have occurred too, since. Glaciergate: the 2007 IPCC report had warned that the Himalayan glaciers would, in all likelihood, disappear by 2035 due to global warming. When this was challenged in an Indian government report, Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, chairman IPCC, had dismissed it as “voodoo science”. However, it now turns out that the IPCC’s projection was based not on peer-reviewed evidence but on a speculative comment made a decade ago by a glaciologist, who later began working in an Indian research group led by Dr Pachauri. Amazongate: according to another IPCC scare story, climate change could endanger 40% of the Amazon rain forest. This was based on a publication of WWF, an environmentalist pressure group, but it turns out that the original article (published in Nature) had dealt not with global warming, but logging.

If global warming is a scam, the biggest scientific fraud ever, the big question of course, is, why? What lies behind it?

[Concluding instalment, next week]