If you did not see Tuesday's NBC Nightly News, you might want to stop by the MSNBC website and read the transcript of Robert Bazell's interview with Dr. Rob Webster, the physician who discovered that human flu is related to bird flu. The discovery was in 1957 but few paid attention to the implications until was too late in the day to stop a pandemic.
One fact emerged from the interview that I'd not come across before:
Webster observed, "This [H5N1] virus spreads outside the lungs to the central nervous system ... This is the first influenza virus we've seen that does this in a mammal."
I knew that H5N1 is incredibly deadly -- if I correctly recall, one of the problems with making a vaccine from the virus is that it's so powerful it kills the embryos used to culture the virus. Vaccine developers had to work around that. But I had no idea until the Bazell interview that this strain of Avian flu spreads outside the lungs.
I note that Webster did not say that CNS paralysis has accompanied human cases of H5N1 virus; he was speaking about tests done on laboratory animals. But a flu virus jumping the lungs is very bad news.
Is there anything that can be done at this late stage to ward off the pandemic, or at least slow it down? Yeah, sure. First, every government watch everything Hong Kong does in the effort to catch a breakout of the virus in the human population and do the same, as baseline efforts.
For starters, install human temperature sensors at all international airports -- the kind Hong Kong set up when they battled SARS to a standstill on the island.
The sensor is hooked to a computer screen that gives an instant temperature readout of every passenger who walks by the sensor. If the passenger has a temperature, a big red light turns on.
Sound draconian? It's a fighting chance to stop a H2H (human-to-human transmissible) mutation of H5N1 from getting on a plane 10,000 miles away and a few hours later, sitting down next to you in a coffee shop.
On that grim note, I will be on leave for the rest of the week. Until Saturday, then. Best wishes to all.
Tuesday, October 11
America's amazing new military: getting it right all around the world
If you heard John Batchelor's Monday interview with Robert D. Kaplan, you'll get a good laugh from reading the skewed Eastern Establishment Amazon.com reviews of Kaplan's Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground.
If you didn't catch the interview, ignore the Washington Post and Publisher's Weekly reviews at Amazon and just buy the book -- then make sure to hide it from your kids if you don't want them running off to join the military.
Batchelor's interview with Kaplan reveals the silver lining to the terror masters' war on America: the State Department and the CIA and their paranoid Cold War scheming are no longer in charge of presenting America's face to the world. And neither is the Pentagon in charge. ("The Pentagon just moves the money around now," explained Kaplan.)
So who's in charge? Small military units working under the direction of theater-level, unified combatant command units or "Coms" built on the CENTCOM concept, which was originally conceived as a rapid deployment force.
The result? All over the world, branches of the US military are gathering intelligence and promoting American ideals in the best way possible: by first gaining confidence through the sane tactic of making themselves genuinely useful to the locals.
Today's grunt is "more likely to be killed helping a civilian dig a well," than during armed combat, Kaplan explains.
Of course, US soldiers are still trained to kill people and break things, but historically neither activity has been very successful at gathering actionable intelligence and inspiring cooperation. So the Coms favor specially trained units -- sometimes as small as 4 by typically 12 in number -- which are tasked with risking their lives to do an honest day's labor in places you never even heard of.
If this sounds like the Peace Corps with firepower, let's be cautious about carrying the analogy too far. But yes, the units reflect an integration of relief work with traditional military intelligence-gathering objectives.
Kaplan explained that the realities of the present era as much as the terrorists have driven the shift. Today, the US must operate in many countries that are, at least on paper, democracies -- places such as Yemen and the Philippines. Governments in such countries won't stand for Cold War CIA-type machinations against factions playing footsie with terrorist/ anti-democracy groups. But if the US military wants to make themselves useful, while at the same time coaching factions resisting the bad guys, they are welcome to set up camp.
Thus, the title of Kaplan's book is somewhat misleading. Today, America is not so much an imperial power as a hegemonic one. Hegemony is maintained not through flashy imperial displays of military force but through sheer hard work.
This approach is not glamorous but there's a romance about it that appeals to the missionary side of America's character and reflects the American work ethic. It's also very dangerous work, so it's not surprising to learn from Kaplan that the US soldiers he met with display nobility of character. "It seems a sense of danger builds character," he observed.
Kaplan told Batchelor that he was struck by the "selflessness" he found among unit members. He observed that his East Coast Literary Establishment world of obsessive self promotion is the antithesis of the one he found while embedded with special forces units. The individual doesn't really exist in the mind of unit members, Kaplan noted. "The unit exists."
Is this observation bad news for fans of Ayn Rand's philosophy of rugged individualism? I'd say no; the stories Kaplan told John Batchelor suggest that the high ethical standards, self-reliance and leadership qualities in Rand's fictional heroes are well represented in the soldiers Kaplan got to know. Kaplan's stories reveal that the new military has taken up the slack created by our educational institutions' failure to teach ethics to a generation of American schoolchildren.
Also, as Rand famously observed, before you can be a person who does things for others you must first be a person who knows how to get things done. Those serving in the new military are taught to get things done amidst tribal rivalries and clan alliances in regions that are centuries behind the times in developed countries.
And don't be fooled by one Amazon reviewer's depiction of what Kaplan has to say about where these new soldiers come from in America; i.e., from "...predominantly working- or lower-middle-class folk, the products (with the exception of West Point and Annapolis) of state schools and part-time degree programs."
Kaplan told Batchelor that the soldiers he met were predominately from families with a history of military service. They are Americans raised in a family tradition that American ideals are worth dying to defend.
So the new military reflects a cross-section of backgrounds: children of immigrants from around the globe, working class families from all across America, ethnic minorities from poor households as well as WASPs raised in privilege. The common thread in many backgrounds is service to America.
On a more abstract level, the value of the special units to the US military's intelligence gathering applies a dictum of the best-run business enterprises. "The better a system, the more decentralized it is," observed Kaplan.
The 9/11 attack tragically demonstrated the limits of the highly centralized, NATO-oriented command structure. That approach blinded a series of US presidential administrations and congressional committees to what was really happening in the world outside NATO's home base of Western Europe.
Of course the military objective is not the same as the profit-making goal of private enterprise, so decentralization of operations does have its downside when applied to the military. Yet in a world where accurate, timely observations are the key to winning against a highly decentralized enemy, the decentralized operations approach is vital to supplement electronic spying and correct wrong theories in Washington about how things are going in the world.
The interview ended with a few observations about America's failed quest in Iraq -- failed, to hear the Establishment media tell it. Kaplan observed with a chuckle that Iraq's Sunnis are signing up "in droves" to vote and that, "Iraq is no longer a military problem, it's a governance one." He added that the terrorist bombings are "statistically meaningless" to this big picture.
No matter how the vote on Iraq's Constitution goes, it's going to happen despite al Qaeda's best attempts to derail it. In a land that for millennia accepted despotism and oppression as an inevitable fact of life, the Iraqi voters, with help from America's grunts, are the dawn of a new day.
It's a new day for America as well. While there is still plenty of intrigue in intelligence gathering, the new military is following the adage that you get back what you put out. If the Cold War produced in many foreign quarters the view that America is full of tricks and can't be trusted, that was a reflection of the CIA-MI6 way of doing things so chillingly depicted in John Le Carre's novels.
The new approach to intelligence gathering is more in synch with the values that make the United States of America a beacon to the world's oppressed. More than all the propaganda, the approach will return many times to America in fond feelings and respect.
Lest you think Kaplan's account is only for military buffs, here I grudgingly allow Amazon.com a few words:
If you didn't catch the interview, ignore the Washington Post and Publisher's Weekly reviews at Amazon and just buy the book -- then make sure to hide it from your kids if you don't want them running off to join the military.
Batchelor's interview with Kaplan reveals the silver lining to the terror masters' war on America: the State Department and the CIA and their paranoid Cold War scheming are no longer in charge of presenting America's face to the world. And neither is the Pentagon in charge. ("The Pentagon just moves the money around now," explained Kaplan.)
So who's in charge? Small military units working under the direction of theater-level, unified combatant command units or "Coms" built on the CENTCOM concept, which was originally conceived as a rapid deployment force.
The result? All over the world, branches of the US military are gathering intelligence and promoting American ideals in the best way possible: by first gaining confidence through the sane tactic of making themselves genuinely useful to the locals.
Today's grunt is "more likely to be killed helping a civilian dig a well," than during armed combat, Kaplan explains.
Of course, US soldiers are still trained to kill people and break things, but historically neither activity has been very successful at gathering actionable intelligence and inspiring cooperation. So the Coms favor specially trained units -- sometimes as small as 4 by typically 12 in number -- which are tasked with risking their lives to do an honest day's labor in places you never even heard of.
If this sounds like the Peace Corps with firepower, let's be cautious about carrying the analogy too far. But yes, the units reflect an integration of relief work with traditional military intelligence-gathering objectives.
Kaplan explained that the realities of the present era as much as the terrorists have driven the shift. Today, the US must operate in many countries that are, at least on paper, democracies -- places such as Yemen and the Philippines. Governments in such countries won't stand for Cold War CIA-type machinations against factions playing footsie with terrorist/ anti-democracy groups. But if the US military wants to make themselves useful, while at the same time coaching factions resisting the bad guys, they are welcome to set up camp.
Thus, the title of Kaplan's book is somewhat misleading. Today, America is not so much an imperial power as a hegemonic one. Hegemony is maintained not through flashy imperial displays of military force but through sheer hard work.
This approach is not glamorous but there's a romance about it that appeals to the missionary side of America's character and reflects the American work ethic. It's also very dangerous work, so it's not surprising to learn from Kaplan that the US soldiers he met with display nobility of character. "It seems a sense of danger builds character," he observed.
Kaplan told Batchelor that he was struck by the "selflessness" he found among unit members. He observed that his East Coast Literary Establishment world of obsessive self promotion is the antithesis of the one he found while embedded with special forces units. The individual doesn't really exist in the mind of unit members, Kaplan noted. "The unit exists."
Is this observation bad news for fans of Ayn Rand's philosophy of rugged individualism? I'd say no; the stories Kaplan told John Batchelor suggest that the high ethical standards, self-reliance and leadership qualities in Rand's fictional heroes are well represented in the soldiers Kaplan got to know. Kaplan's stories reveal that the new military has taken up the slack created by our educational institutions' failure to teach ethics to a generation of American schoolchildren.
Also, as Rand famously observed, before you can be a person who does things for others you must first be a person who knows how to get things done. Those serving in the new military are taught to get things done amidst tribal rivalries and clan alliances in regions that are centuries behind the times in developed countries.
And don't be fooled by one Amazon reviewer's depiction of what Kaplan has to say about where these new soldiers come from in America; i.e., from "...predominantly working- or lower-middle-class folk, the products (with the exception of West Point and Annapolis) of state schools and part-time degree programs."
Kaplan told Batchelor that the soldiers he met were predominately from families with a history of military service. They are Americans raised in a family tradition that American ideals are worth dying to defend.
So the new military reflects a cross-section of backgrounds: children of immigrants from around the globe, working class families from all across America, ethnic minorities from poor households as well as WASPs raised in privilege. The common thread in many backgrounds is service to America.
On a more abstract level, the value of the special units to the US military's intelligence gathering applies a dictum of the best-run business enterprises. "The better a system, the more decentralized it is," observed Kaplan.
The 9/11 attack tragically demonstrated the limits of the highly centralized, NATO-oriented command structure. That approach blinded a series of US presidential administrations and congressional committees to what was really happening in the world outside NATO's home base of Western Europe.
Of course the military objective is not the same as the profit-making goal of private enterprise, so decentralization of operations does have its downside when applied to the military. Yet in a world where accurate, timely observations are the key to winning against a highly decentralized enemy, the decentralized operations approach is vital to supplement electronic spying and correct wrong theories in Washington about how things are going in the world.
The interview ended with a few observations about America's failed quest in Iraq -- failed, to hear the Establishment media tell it. Kaplan observed with a chuckle that Iraq's Sunnis are signing up "in droves" to vote and that, "Iraq is no longer a military problem, it's a governance one." He added that the terrorist bombings are "statistically meaningless" to this big picture.
No matter how the vote on Iraq's Constitution goes, it's going to happen despite al Qaeda's best attempts to derail it. In a land that for millennia accepted despotism and oppression as an inevitable fact of life, the Iraqi voters, with help from America's grunts, are the dawn of a new day.
It's a new day for America as well. While there is still plenty of intrigue in intelligence gathering, the new military is following the adage that you get back what you put out. If the Cold War produced in many foreign quarters the view that America is full of tricks and can't be trusted, that was a reflection of the CIA-MI6 way of doing things so chillingly depicted in John Le Carre's novels.
The new approach to intelligence gathering is more in synch with the values that make the United States of America a beacon to the world's oppressed. More than all the propaganda, the approach will return many times to America in fond feelings and respect.
Lest you think Kaplan's account is only for military buffs, here I grudgingly allow Amazon.com a few words:
He has now written a book about several years of visiting with the troops at the far corners of the American Empire ... As befits such a global tour, Kaplan is a very good travel writer indeed. He superbly describes bazaars and rainforests, brothels and junkyards, hootches and bases, M-4 carbines and M-240 machine guns, heat and dust. He captures in a few pages what it takes to train a moderately competent sergeant or plan an assault on Fallujah.Come to think of it, maybe it's not just the children running off you'd have to worry about. Better not read Imperial Grunts if you think you might kick yourself for being too old, or too saddled with civilian responsibility, to join the new military.
Sunday, October 9
The end of ignorance
Yesterday a grief-stricken man in Pakistan sorrowfully told a reporter, "I don't know why all these disasters are happening all around the world now."
But these disasters have always been going on; it's just that now many people in Pakistan and other developing countries can see them, thanks to 24/7 satellite TV news coverage. So while my heart goes out to that man I have to tell him: "Welcome to my world."
We here in the United States, the majority of us, were raised on televised images of suffering worldwide. Images of people the world over crushed by Nature's unfolding schedule of events and the cruelty of despotic regimes: drought and flood, earthquake and famine, genocide and mass executions.
Americans watched their TVs then opened their hearts and pocketbooks. Americans gave and gave and gave, regardless of the recipients' race, clan and religious creed. They gave to countless millions of complete strangers, and with no reason for giving other than to help. Most of the givers weren't rich.
That's how it's been for the majority of Americans for about four decades. It's been the same in West Europe. But for most of the world, it has not been that way.
Only very recently have people in the world's poorest countries had a chance to get a wide-angle view of the world -- and only in regions where there is enough freedom for citizens to be allowed satellite TV.
What has this meant? Well, it's meant that people in African and Asian villages knew before Michael Brown that Americans stuck in the Superdome were starving. They watched the horror unfold on their television sets along with Americans watching their TV sets in horror.
It's meant that people in villages in Latin America and the Middle East have sat through testimony of rape victims in Darfur.
It's meant that people throughout the developing world watched in sorrow and sympathy as survivors of the Bam earthquake wept for their dead, and as aid workers pleaded for help in flooded Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
It's meant that the world is watching in suspense and hope as Pakistanis and Indians, and aid workers from around the world, struggle to pull the living from collapsed buildings.
So it's not surprising, if many in the poorest countries are suddenly feeling that something new and horrible is at work in the world. Heck no; if you've been watching TV news for decades you know that killer floods and earthquakes are the normal course of Nature's business. You know that Nature's business is conducted with no attention to humanity's frailties and with no prejudice whatsoever toward our races, clans and creeds.
If you've been watching the nightly news for decades, you can recite chapter and verse one atrocity after another done by humans to other humans around the globe.
The world is not coming to an end. What is ending is humanity's ignorance of just how much suffering is spread around the world.
With the end of ignorance must come a more equitable shouldering of responsibility to pitch in and help during times of trouble. One can always give a little something, even if one can only fold hands in prayer. Many hearts and hands make light work.
But these disasters have always been going on; it's just that now many people in Pakistan and other developing countries can see them, thanks to 24/7 satellite TV news coverage. So while my heart goes out to that man I have to tell him: "Welcome to my world."
We here in the United States, the majority of us, were raised on televised images of suffering worldwide. Images of people the world over crushed by Nature's unfolding schedule of events and the cruelty of despotic regimes: drought and flood, earthquake and famine, genocide and mass executions.
Americans watched their TVs then opened their hearts and pocketbooks. Americans gave and gave and gave, regardless of the recipients' race, clan and religious creed. They gave to countless millions of complete strangers, and with no reason for giving other than to help. Most of the givers weren't rich.
That's how it's been for the majority of Americans for about four decades. It's been the same in West Europe. But for most of the world, it has not been that way.
Only very recently have people in the world's poorest countries had a chance to get a wide-angle view of the world -- and only in regions where there is enough freedom for citizens to be allowed satellite TV.
What has this meant? Well, it's meant that people in African and Asian villages knew before Michael Brown that Americans stuck in the Superdome were starving. They watched the horror unfold on their television sets along with Americans watching their TV sets in horror.
It's meant that people in villages in Latin America and the Middle East have sat through testimony of rape victims in Darfur.
It's meant that people throughout the developing world watched in sorrow and sympathy as survivors of the Bam earthquake wept for their dead, and as aid workers pleaded for help in flooded Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
It's meant that the world is watching in suspense and hope as Pakistanis and Indians, and aid workers from around the world, struggle to pull the living from collapsed buildings.
So it's not surprising, if many in the poorest countries are suddenly feeling that something new and horrible is at work in the world. Heck no; if you've been watching TV news for decades you know that killer floods and earthquakes are the normal course of Nature's business. You know that Nature's business is conducted with no attention to humanity's frailties and with no prejudice whatsoever toward our races, clans and creeds.
If you've been watching the nightly news for decades, you can recite chapter and verse one atrocity after another done by humans to other humans around the globe.
The world is not coming to an end. What is ending is humanity's ignorance of just how much suffering is spread around the world.
With the end of ignorance must come a more equitable shouldering of responsibility to pitch in and help during times of trouble. One can always give a little something, even if one can only fold hands in prayer. Many hearts and hands make light work.
What Dammam turned up about al Qaeda's plans for global conquest, and Saudi Arabia's psychic police force
Those who pooh-poohed President Bush's October 6 words about the scope of the threat posed by Islamic terror organizations have not followed the news closely. And Americans who have made a career out of downplaying al Qaeda's threat will have a hard time explaining away the Ad Dammam cell.
However, wall-to-wall US news coverage of Katrina meant that very few Americans learned of the Saudi strike against an al Qaeda cell in the town of Ad Dammam, and the evidence the strike turned up.
The September 6 strike, which ended a two-day standoff, killed all five cell members inside the seaside villa. But it was what the police found in addition to the bodies and weapons cache ("enough weapons for a couple of platoons of guerrilla fighters") that alarmed governments around the world. And would have sent oil traders into a fresh panic if they hadn't been distracted by hurricanes in the US Gulf. Christopher Dickey reports for the October 3 issue of NEWSWEEK:
But that is not surprising given the history of Saudi police interrogation of al Qaeda suspects. So many al Qaeda suspects have been killed resisting arrest that it's a running joke among Western intelligence agents.
Consider the Dammam cell. After 48 hours of the police force's "light" artillery shelling of the seaside villa, the roof collapsed, which ended the standoff. But the people inside were dead before the roof came down. The remains were so charred and reduced to jell by artillery fire that it took DNA tests to establish exactly how many people were inside the house. This is no way to extract intelligence on al Qaeda activities in Saudi Arabia.
Cynics would observe that's just the point: dead men tell no tales. True, there are opposing factions inside the House of Saud, which means that despite the threat to the Saudi government from al Qaeda, the terror organization still has their uses to factions that want Abdullah off the Saudi throne.
So one can understand the reluctance at the highest levels of government to adopt negotiation tactics favored by American big city police when they face a standoff.
However, given the scary evidence turned up by the Dammam raid, Pundita wonders whether the ruling faction might want to consider the kind of tactics that are dear to American district attorneys going after Mafia bosses.
They might want to adopt a policy of trying to capture al Qaeda suspects -- or rather "deviants," as the Saudi royals prefer to call them -- and offer amnesty or at least leniency if a suspect is willing to make a deal. And put out the word that they'll be offering milk and cookies to suspects instead of torture.
Even if captured suspects sit with arms folded after munching their cookies and say, "Nope, I won't rat" -- al Qaeda commanders couldn't be sure of that. There is great tactical value in the enemy having to make alterations based on his concern that an operative is talking.
Those who would point out that the Dammam operatives had enough firepower to make it unlikely they'd agree to negotiate would be ignoring the history of police action in Saudi Arabia. And they would ignore the vast, generously paid network of spies working for the Saudi government.
Darn tootin the Dammam cell wouldn't negotiate. They knew they'd be killed resisting arrest, even if they came out with their hands up and waving a white flag.
These things keep happening in Saudi Arabia. A police battalion armed to the teeth with "light" artillery happens to be out for a stroll in a certain neighborhood. Suddenly a cop's eyes roll in his head and he shrieks, "I'm having a vision of deviants holed up in that house we just passed!"
Knock! Knock! "Who's there?" The Saudi police coming to check on a vision.
Gimme a break. The police had that seaside villa, and the deviants inside, under observation for days or weeks, if not months. The police could have picked off those five men outside the villa -- away from the arms cache. But unlike the dead, the living do tell tales.
Here is one of the biggest obstacles to putting al Qaeda out of business: the Saudi government is so sure that the United States military will come to rushing to their aid in the event of a big strike on their oil wells, they know they can clown around with impunity.
Washington is very much aware of this. But a Mexican standoff is in effect: every time the White House asks the Saudis to interrogate al Qaeda suspects instead of killing them, the Saudis retaliate. One way they do this by spreading stories that the US presence in Iraq is keeping al Qaeda going. This is despite the fact that the last thing Saudi King Abdullah wants is to see the US quit Iraq. At the bottom of it all is struggles for power within the House of Saud.
Is there a way to end the standoff? Well, President Bush, with backing from the Congress, could order the US Department of State to tell the Saudis, "Hey listen, if the oil wells fall into al Qaeda's hands, we'll just have to open diplomatic negotiations with those deviants. Maybe they won't be so much trouble once they're running your country."
That would get things moving in Riyadh. As to whether State would obey the order: yeah sure, if you went into Foggy Bottom with a tank division to deliver the order. Otherwise, the hired help in the White House and Congress do not instruct the mandarins who run America's foreign affairs. And the hired help in the Pentagon and US soldiers can clean up whatever messes the mandarins make in the process.
If you tell me I'm proposing a game of Chicken in place of a standoff -- I am proposing that Washington finally confront palace politics in a polygamous kingdom.
Those oil wells so precious to the democratic world are owned by one big family of half-brothers who do not hesitate to murder each other in a bid for power. The only thing that will force cooperation in such a family is if they think the "Blue-eyed genie," as King Fahd once referred to American troops, won't play the maid.
However, wall-to-wall US news coverage of Katrina meant that very few Americans learned of the Saudi strike against an al Qaeda cell in the town of Ad Dammam, and the evidence the strike turned up.
The September 6 strike, which ended a two-day standoff, killed all five cell members inside the seaside villa. But it was what the police found in addition to the bodies and weapons cache ("enough weapons for a couple of platoons of guerrilla fighters") that alarmed governments around the world. And would have sent oil traders into a fresh panic if they hadn't been distracted by hurricanes in the US Gulf. Christopher Dickey reports for the October 3 issue of NEWSWEEK:
According to a Saudi Interior Ministry statement [the evidence] included forged passes to enter "important locations."Precisely what the Dammam cell intended to hit, if known, has not been revealed in any detail. But as NEWSEEK sources pointed out, Saudi Arabia is a target-rich environment.
The Saudi daily Okaz quoted the minister, Prince Nayef, saying the cell -- which was linked directly to Al Qaeda -- had planned major attacks on some of Saudi Arabia's key oil and gas facilities.
"There isn't a place that they could reach that they didn't think about," said Nayef.
And their ultimate target was the global economy. Saudi Arabia is the greatest source of oil on earth, with a quarter of known reserves and a proven policy of trying to stabilize prices even in today's volatile markets. [...]
Certain critical nodes in the general vicinity of Ad Dammam have worried American strategists for years. Past studies suggest a moderate-to-severe attack on the Abqaiq oil-processing facilities, for instance, could cut Saudi output (now about 9.6 million barrels a day) by more than 4 million barrels for two months or more.Lest you think closing down the Ad Dammam cell represents a lasting victory for the Saudi police, new cells seem to spring up almost as soon as the old ones are closed down.
Al Qaeda has used suicide boats before. A successful hit against a major offshore loading facility at either Ras Tanura or Juaymah would knock millions of barrels off the market.
[Former CIA agent Robert] Baer wrote in 2003 that "a single jumbo jet with a suicide bomber at the controls ... crashed into the heart of Ras Tanura, would be enough to bring the world's oil-addicted economies to their knees." [...]
But that is not surprising given the history of Saudi police interrogation of al Qaeda suspects. So many al Qaeda suspects have been killed resisting arrest that it's a running joke among Western intelligence agents.
Consider the Dammam cell. After 48 hours of the police force's "light" artillery shelling of the seaside villa, the roof collapsed, which ended the standoff. But the people inside were dead before the roof came down. The remains were so charred and reduced to jell by artillery fire that it took DNA tests to establish exactly how many people were inside the house. This is no way to extract intelligence on al Qaeda activities in Saudi Arabia.
Cynics would observe that's just the point: dead men tell no tales. True, there are opposing factions inside the House of Saud, which means that despite the threat to the Saudi government from al Qaeda, the terror organization still has their uses to factions that want Abdullah off the Saudi throne.
So one can understand the reluctance at the highest levels of government to adopt negotiation tactics favored by American big city police when they face a standoff.
However, given the scary evidence turned up by the Dammam raid, Pundita wonders whether the ruling faction might want to consider the kind of tactics that are dear to American district attorneys going after Mafia bosses.
They might want to adopt a policy of trying to capture al Qaeda suspects -- or rather "deviants," as the Saudi royals prefer to call them -- and offer amnesty or at least leniency if a suspect is willing to make a deal. And put out the word that they'll be offering milk and cookies to suspects instead of torture.
Even if captured suspects sit with arms folded after munching their cookies and say, "Nope, I won't rat" -- al Qaeda commanders couldn't be sure of that. There is great tactical value in the enemy having to make alterations based on his concern that an operative is talking.
Those who would point out that the Dammam operatives had enough firepower to make it unlikely they'd agree to negotiate would be ignoring the history of police action in Saudi Arabia. And they would ignore the vast, generously paid network of spies working for the Saudi government.
Darn tootin the Dammam cell wouldn't negotiate. They knew they'd be killed resisting arrest, even if they came out with their hands up and waving a white flag.
These things keep happening in Saudi Arabia. A police battalion armed to the teeth with "light" artillery happens to be out for a stroll in a certain neighborhood. Suddenly a cop's eyes roll in his head and he shrieks, "I'm having a vision of deviants holed up in that house we just passed!"
Knock! Knock! "Who's there?" The Saudi police coming to check on a vision.
Gimme a break. The police had that seaside villa, and the deviants inside, under observation for days or weeks, if not months. The police could have picked off those five men outside the villa -- away from the arms cache. But unlike the dead, the living do tell tales.
Here is one of the biggest obstacles to putting al Qaeda out of business: the Saudi government is so sure that the United States military will come to rushing to their aid in the event of a big strike on their oil wells, they know they can clown around with impunity.
Washington is very much aware of this. But a Mexican standoff is in effect: every time the White House asks the Saudis to interrogate al Qaeda suspects instead of killing them, the Saudis retaliate. One way they do this by spreading stories that the US presence in Iraq is keeping al Qaeda going. This is despite the fact that the last thing Saudi King Abdullah wants is to see the US quit Iraq. At the bottom of it all is struggles for power within the House of Saud.
Is there a way to end the standoff? Well, President Bush, with backing from the Congress, could order the US Department of State to tell the Saudis, "Hey listen, if the oil wells fall into al Qaeda's hands, we'll just have to open diplomatic negotiations with those deviants. Maybe they won't be so much trouble once they're running your country."
That would get things moving in Riyadh. As to whether State would obey the order: yeah sure, if you went into Foggy Bottom with a tank division to deliver the order. Otherwise, the hired help in the White House and Congress do not instruct the mandarins who run America's foreign affairs. And the hired help in the Pentagon and US soldiers can clean up whatever messes the mandarins make in the process.
If you tell me I'm proposing a game of Chicken in place of a standoff -- I am proposing that Washington finally confront palace politics in a polygamous kingdom.
Those oil wells so precious to the democratic world are owned by one big family of half-brothers who do not hesitate to murder each other in a bid for power. The only thing that will force cooperation in such a family is if they think the "Blue-eyed genie," as King Fahd once referred to American troops, won't play the maid.
Friday, October 7
President Bush debates the terror masters: But why now?
In the longest speech he has ever given, yesterday President George W. Bush made specific retorts to arguments that cite Islamic principles as justification for terrorism. That is a first for an American president.
The extraordinary speech, given before the National Endowment for Democracy, represents other firsts as well. The speech:
> revealed the number of major al Qaeda plots that have been foiled since 9/11;
> clarified that US troops would not voluntarily withdraw from Iraq even if limited military objectives in the country were met; and
> restated the limited US "War on Terror" on al Qaeda's terms; i.e., publicly recognized al Qaeda's stated plans to establish a global caliphate via armed conquest of the West and framed the US response accordingly.
If that last sounds terribly ominous -- a de facto declaration of World War Three -- on the contrary. Bush's speech was simply a bow to the Arab Street, which has been buzzing with rumors that the US is planning to cut and run from Iraq -- and which has long held that the United States won't stay in the Middle East to see the larger job through and that the Bush administration is clueless about what al Qaeda is really up to in Iraq.
So the speech was to set the rumors to rest, to give assurance that the United States is in for the long haul, and to demonstrate that the United States government is abreast of al Qaeda's plans.
The game is up in Iraq for al Qaeda and they know it. They made two critical miscalcuations:
> They didn't predict that His Honorable Eminence Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini Sistani would emerge as Iraq's George Washington. (No one could have predicted that.)
> They didn't factor in that the vast majority of Iraqi people, whose patience had been honed under Saddam's long brutal rule, would show such tenacity under the onslaughts of terrorist bombs.
All that's left now for the terror masters is to throw what's left of their bombs at innocent Muslims and stoke the rumor that the US is quitting Iraq at the first opportunity.
President Bush's ringing words yesterday will go a long way to quashing the rumor. And the US military working alongside Iraq's will run the varmits out of Iraq.
As for al Qaeda's talk about a global caliphate: on her "listening mission" in the Middle East, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Karen Hughes, listened very carefully with fresh ears (and her long experience as a professional reporter) to the many Muslims who advised her about their concerns. And she very carefully reported to President Bush all she was told. Pundita doubts she reported that what the world's Muslims want is to establish a global caliphate.
So I'd say the puppetmasters in Tehran have also miscalculated. They definitely got it wrong, if they assumed that no US President would ever dare confront the totalitarian cant in Wahabist dogma for fear of bringing on the wrath of the Muslim world. Americans, it's to be remembered, practically invented war against totalitarian regimes.
The extraordinary speech, given before the National Endowment for Democracy, represents other firsts as well. The speech:
> revealed the number of major al Qaeda plots that have been foiled since 9/11;
> clarified that US troops would not voluntarily withdraw from Iraq even if limited military objectives in the country were met; and
> restated the limited US "War on Terror" on al Qaeda's terms; i.e., publicly recognized al Qaeda's stated plans to establish a global caliphate via armed conquest of the West and framed the US response accordingly.
If that last sounds terribly ominous -- a de facto declaration of World War Three -- on the contrary. Bush's speech was simply a bow to the Arab Street, which has been buzzing with rumors that the US is planning to cut and run from Iraq -- and which has long held that the United States won't stay in the Middle East to see the larger job through and that the Bush administration is clueless about what al Qaeda is really up to in Iraq.
So the speech was to set the rumors to rest, to give assurance that the United States is in for the long haul, and to demonstrate that the United States government is abreast of al Qaeda's plans.
The game is up in Iraq for al Qaeda and they know it. They made two critical miscalcuations:
> They didn't predict that His Honorable Eminence Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini Sistani would emerge as Iraq's George Washington. (No one could have predicted that.)
> They didn't factor in that the vast majority of Iraqi people, whose patience had been honed under Saddam's long brutal rule, would show such tenacity under the onslaughts of terrorist bombs.
All that's left now for the terror masters is to throw what's left of their bombs at innocent Muslims and stoke the rumor that the US is quitting Iraq at the first opportunity.
President Bush's ringing words yesterday will go a long way to quashing the rumor. And the US military working alongside Iraq's will run the varmits out of Iraq.
As for al Qaeda's talk about a global caliphate: on her "listening mission" in the Middle East, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Karen Hughes, listened very carefully with fresh ears (and her long experience as a professional reporter) to the many Muslims who advised her about their concerns. And she very carefully reported to President Bush all she was told. Pundita doubts she reported that what the world's Muslims want is to establish a global caliphate.
So I'd say the puppetmasters in Tehran have also miscalculated. They definitely got it wrong, if they assumed that no US President would ever dare confront the totalitarian cant in Wahabist dogma for fear of bringing on the wrath of the Muslim world. Americans, it's to be remembered, practically invented war against totalitarian regimes.
Thursday, October 6
A few words in praise of incompetence and its arch enemies
"Pundita:
Regarding your "Force vs Power" essay: a very concise analysis. I'm sure that you have also considered one of the minor theme variants on this 'exhaustion of civilization' text, and that is merit vs connections. I keep wondering when the auction of general staff positions at the Pentagon will start. But they may not need an auction, when the currency of power seems to be swaggering bluster and dogma over reason. I can see the future now, a glittering technological society where nothing works right....
E"
Dear E:
Yes, but I comfort myself by thinking thusly: If competence triumphed we might attain heaven on earth. So the tradition of putting well-connected dolts in charge serves a divine purpose.
And consider: When it comes time to ring down the curtain on the human race, we might hope that a dolt is charged with overseeing the termination sequence.
However, the #1 reason to be philosophical about incompetents is that they make the perfect scapegoat when ordinarily competent people screw up.
If that's too much philosophizing for you, Pundita stands by the thesis I laid down in How do you run a government when the voters are smarter than you? and the series of essays titled Stuck at the intersection of government and the Mass Age:
For the first time in history large numbers of people are smarter and better educated than the elites in government. That translates to far less tolerance for incompetence and the traditions of promoting according to tenure and connections.
Any doubt that reason is making headway against bluster, consider how long Michael Brown stayed in his top post at FEMA once his job history was made public.
Also consider Bruce Kesler's October 6 report for Democracy Project (emphasis mine):
Finally, consider the impact of the Internet. Before he was a moral coward and a man of no business ethics, Eason Jordan was simply incompetent. He couldn't think of any way to protect his CNN reporters in Iraq, other than collaborating with Saddam Hussein's regime.
Set aside Dan Rather's sacrifice of journalistic ethics to partisan politics. He didn't even do the most basic research on the 'evidence' brought to him about Bush's National Guard Record.
In fact, Rather didn't even need to do the research himself to do his job; all he needed was to turn the data over to a firm that specializes in examining forensic evidence and say, "Check it out."
As to how quick the turnaround would have been: the scariest aspect of Rathergate is that Rather's defenders didn't understand at first just why the blogosphere was so quick at calling out CBS over the evidence presented:
The bloggers who were quickest to catch the discrepancies were people who worked for firms that examine such evidence daily. It only took them moments to spot discrepanies!
So before he was a Democrat party hack who abused his position at CBS, Dan Rather was also getting paid megabucks to sleep on the job.
When Jordan and Rather were challenged by blogosphere researchers, their initial response to probing questions was the same one that didn't endear Marie Antoinette to the French masses. Well, Jordan and Rather were soon gone from their posts.
I note that more recently the patient efforts of one blogger, Dan at Riehl World View, have exposed incompetence at Fox cable and CNN in their reporting on the Natalie Holloway case.
To argue that Fox and CNN were simply intent on titillating the public is to imply that they were capable of doing thorough research on the Holloway story. There is nothing in the reporting to support that argument.
The above are but three examples from a long and fast-growing list of incidents that illustrate why the Internet makes it harder by the hour to get away with incompetence, whether it exists in the private or public sector.
So it's no wonder that incompetents the world over are calling for regulation of the Internet. But being incompetents, they have greatly miscalculated.
Too many people the world over who cherish competence are now working too hard to keep carrying the career incompetents on their back. And now those hard-working people have the means to investigate and quickly communicate on the patterns that give evidence of entrenched incompetence and the stonewalling that goes with it.
I know it can be hard to keep the faith that reason ultimately triumphs over dogma. But the defense of reason, as with the defense of freedom and civilization, is a process not a goal.
There is no impregnable fortress. There is no winning. There is just unending watchfulness and effort. Because in this uncertain world you can be certain of one thing: Dogma will never sign the terms of surrender.
Regarding your "Force vs Power" essay: a very concise analysis. I'm sure that you have also considered one of the minor theme variants on this 'exhaustion of civilization' text, and that is merit vs connections. I keep wondering when the auction of general staff positions at the Pentagon will start. But they may not need an auction, when the currency of power seems to be swaggering bluster and dogma over reason. I can see the future now, a glittering technological society where nothing works right....
E"
Dear E:
Yes, but I comfort myself by thinking thusly: If competence triumphed we might attain heaven on earth. So the tradition of putting well-connected dolts in charge serves a divine purpose.
And consider: When it comes time to ring down the curtain on the human race, we might hope that a dolt is charged with overseeing the termination sequence.
However, the #1 reason to be philosophical about incompetents is that they make the perfect scapegoat when ordinarily competent people screw up.
If that's too much philosophizing for you, Pundita stands by the thesis I laid down in How do you run a government when the voters are smarter than you? and the series of essays titled Stuck at the intersection of government and the Mass Age:
For the first time in history large numbers of people are smarter and better educated than the elites in government. That translates to far less tolerance for incompetence and the traditions of promoting according to tenure and connections.
Any doubt that reason is making headway against bluster, consider how long Michael Brown stayed in his top post at FEMA once his job history was made public.
Also consider Bruce Kesler's October 6 report for Democracy Project (emphasis mine):
SurveyUSA just released a poll taken between September 30 and October 2. Not only does Proposition 75 now lead with 60% of likely voters, but the other Propositions have surged. Proposition 75 requires that public employees give annual permission for dues or fees to be payroll deducted for political campaigns, which will seriously dent liberal power in California and national electionsBruce closes with the grim warning that the unions still have a month and many millions to fight the propositions. However, what happens in California politics is a bellwether for the rest of the country and from there, the rest of the world. Slowly but just as surely, American voters are making gains against institutionalized tolerance for incompetence.
Proposition 74 is now supported by 55% of likely voters, to extend the probationary period for new teachers from 2 years to 5 years, and makes it easier to dismiss teachers with unsatisfactory performance evaluations.
Proposition 76 is now supported by 58% of likely voters. It limits the growth in state spending to not exceed recent growth in state revenues.
Proposition 77 is now supported by 59% of likely voters. It takes redistricting of Congressional and state legislative districts away from the Democrat-packed legislature and turns it over to a panel of retired judges. Common Cause today, also, came out in favor.
Finally, consider the impact of the Internet. Before he was a moral coward and a man of no business ethics, Eason Jordan was simply incompetent. He couldn't think of any way to protect his CNN reporters in Iraq, other than collaborating with Saddam Hussein's regime.
Set aside Dan Rather's sacrifice of journalistic ethics to partisan politics. He didn't even do the most basic research on the 'evidence' brought to him about Bush's National Guard Record.
In fact, Rather didn't even need to do the research himself to do his job; all he needed was to turn the data over to a firm that specializes in examining forensic evidence and say, "Check it out."
As to how quick the turnaround would have been: the scariest aspect of Rathergate is that Rather's defenders didn't understand at first just why the blogosphere was so quick at calling out CBS over the evidence presented:
The bloggers who were quickest to catch the discrepancies were people who worked for firms that examine such evidence daily. It only took them moments to spot discrepanies!
So before he was a Democrat party hack who abused his position at CBS, Dan Rather was also getting paid megabucks to sleep on the job.
When Jordan and Rather were challenged by blogosphere researchers, their initial response to probing questions was the same one that didn't endear Marie Antoinette to the French masses. Well, Jordan and Rather were soon gone from their posts.
I note that more recently the patient efforts of one blogger, Dan at Riehl World View, have exposed incompetence at Fox cable and CNN in their reporting on the Natalie Holloway case.
To argue that Fox and CNN were simply intent on titillating the public is to imply that they were capable of doing thorough research on the Holloway story. There is nothing in the reporting to support that argument.
The above are but three examples from a long and fast-growing list of incidents that illustrate why the Internet makes it harder by the hour to get away with incompetence, whether it exists in the private or public sector.
So it's no wonder that incompetents the world over are calling for regulation of the Internet. But being incompetents, they have greatly miscalculated.
Too many people the world over who cherish competence are now working too hard to keep carrying the career incompetents on their back. And now those hard-working people have the means to investigate and quickly communicate on the patterns that give evidence of entrenched incompetence and the stonewalling that goes with it.
I know it can be hard to keep the faith that reason ultimately triumphs over dogma. But the defense of reason, as with the defense of freedom and civilization, is a process not a goal.
There is no impregnable fortress. There is no winning. There is just unending watchfulness and effort. Because in this uncertain world you can be certain of one thing: Dogma will never sign the terms of surrender.
Wednesday, October 5
Force vs Power and Beijing's costly cyberwar
"Pundita, regarding your post yesterday, it seems you think the Chinese leaders are still following Mao Zedong's dictum that "All political power comes from the barrel of a gun." If that's how they're thinking, I wonder when it will occur to them that the greatest political power comes from the people.
Margaret in Tulsa"
Dear Margaret:
Good observation, provided you're not confusing power with force; because many do confuse the two concepts this seems a good opportunity to review the differences.
Do you recall seeing the news footage of an attorney who provoked an assailant intent on shooting him to death at close range into emptying the gun in wild shots? The attorney was wounded and of course he was lucky but if ever there was an illustration of the inherent limitation of force, that situation was textbook.
Force can rather easily exhaust itself because its energy source can be very limited, and because so much energy must be expended in the process of applying force.
Power, on the other hand, comes from the ability to do work; it is quite literally predicated on how much energy is available for an activity.
Those who govern by force are actually in a very weak position because so much of their energy goes into applying force, which only returns the need to apply more force.
Those who govern by ability are powerful because their accomplishments replenish and return their energy expenditures.
Mao mistook force for power. He and his cadre expended so much energy using force that they could not effectively govern, and so the Chinese people starved. They were saved by intervention of Western governments and notably America.
Laws and treaties are necessarily backed by force of arms. However, politics is dictated by the society's survival issues. Such are rarely treated effectively by force.
Saddam Hussein was an incompetent administrator; the model of governing he used was inherited from European colonial times, which saw administration to relatively small human populations under simple conditions. That model of governing isn't fit for administering to a large, highly complex society.
The situation represented by Hussein's goverment has occurred, to greater or lessor extent, in virtually all regions that inherited the colonial model of administration, and where the human population skyrocketed due to vaccines and antibiotics.
During the 20th Century the knee-jerk response of many who inherited the colonial model was to manage the problems of a burgeoning complex society through massacres, thereby winnowing the population to more manageable size, or through the application of force.
That set in motion a cycle whereby more and more force had to be used, which diverted more and more energy from the task of finding and implementing effective governing solutions. The massive power drain inevitably led to the collapse of the government unless there was a significant external factor in play.
In Saddam's case, he controlled large oil resources coveted by foreign governments. So the governments found ways to help prop up his government, even during the UN embargo.
The overthrow of Saddam's regime opened the door for Iraqis to modernize their government administrations and supplant force with competence in government. So what's going on in Iraq is symbolic of the closing of an old chapter in humanity's history and the opening of a new one. Fitting that this should occur in one of the cradles of civilization. And fitting that a land peopled by immigrants from all over the world should have acted as midwife to the rebirth.
An October 4 Epoch Times article, China's Cyber War, succinctly illustrates how government by force drains massive amounts of energy and thus, power from government:
By conservative estimates Beijing has spent $800 million on their "Golden Shield Project," manned by 50,000 cyber cops, which has the express purpose of forcing China's Internet users to conform to Beijing's dictates on proper use of the Net.
That expenditure and marshaling of manpower is a drop in the bucket next to what will be needed to force compliance in coming years because China needs the Internet. As millions and millions more Chinese come online, Beijing will be forced to spend trillions of USD and divert much more manpower to the deployment of force!
Seen from the long view the situation has a slapstick quality; it's akin to the problems faced by emperors who were forced to retain guards to watch the guards and spies to watch the guards who watched the guards and spies to watch the spies!
Then schoolchildren ask, "Why did so many ancient civilizations collapse?"
Through sheer exhaustion, in many cases. The principle of force in governing drains the very power needed to keep a society rising to new challenges.
Governing by force is coming to the end of the line in human affairs simply because it wastes so much energy. We've raised up societies of such complexity and scale that tremendous power is needed to manage them -- a power that comes from ability, not the force of a gun.
Margaret in Tulsa"
Dear Margaret:
Good observation, provided you're not confusing power with force; because many do confuse the two concepts this seems a good opportunity to review the differences.
Do you recall seeing the news footage of an attorney who provoked an assailant intent on shooting him to death at close range into emptying the gun in wild shots? The attorney was wounded and of course he was lucky but if ever there was an illustration of the inherent limitation of force, that situation was textbook.
Force can rather easily exhaust itself because its energy source can be very limited, and because so much energy must be expended in the process of applying force.
Power, on the other hand, comes from the ability to do work; it is quite literally predicated on how much energy is available for an activity.
Those who govern by force are actually in a very weak position because so much of their energy goes into applying force, which only returns the need to apply more force.
Those who govern by ability are powerful because their accomplishments replenish and return their energy expenditures.
Mao mistook force for power. He and his cadre expended so much energy using force that they could not effectively govern, and so the Chinese people starved. They were saved by intervention of Western governments and notably America.
Laws and treaties are necessarily backed by force of arms. However, politics is dictated by the society's survival issues. Such are rarely treated effectively by force.
Saddam Hussein was an incompetent administrator; the model of governing he used was inherited from European colonial times, which saw administration to relatively small human populations under simple conditions. That model of governing isn't fit for administering to a large, highly complex society.
The situation represented by Hussein's goverment has occurred, to greater or lessor extent, in virtually all regions that inherited the colonial model of administration, and where the human population skyrocketed due to vaccines and antibiotics.
During the 20th Century the knee-jerk response of many who inherited the colonial model was to manage the problems of a burgeoning complex society through massacres, thereby winnowing the population to more manageable size, or through the application of force.
That set in motion a cycle whereby more and more force had to be used, which diverted more and more energy from the task of finding and implementing effective governing solutions. The massive power drain inevitably led to the collapse of the government unless there was a significant external factor in play.
In Saddam's case, he controlled large oil resources coveted by foreign governments. So the governments found ways to help prop up his government, even during the UN embargo.
The overthrow of Saddam's regime opened the door for Iraqis to modernize their government administrations and supplant force with competence in government. So what's going on in Iraq is symbolic of the closing of an old chapter in humanity's history and the opening of a new one. Fitting that this should occur in one of the cradles of civilization. And fitting that a land peopled by immigrants from all over the world should have acted as midwife to the rebirth.
An October 4 Epoch Times article, China's Cyber War, succinctly illustrates how government by force drains massive amounts of energy and thus, power from government:
By conservative estimates Beijing has spent $800 million on their "Golden Shield Project," manned by 50,000 cyber cops, which has the express purpose of forcing China's Internet users to conform to Beijing's dictates on proper use of the Net.
That expenditure and marshaling of manpower is a drop in the bucket next to what will be needed to force compliance in coming years because China needs the Internet. As millions and millions more Chinese come online, Beijing will be forced to spend trillions of USD and divert much more manpower to the deployment of force!
Seen from the long view the situation has a slapstick quality; it's akin to the problems faced by emperors who were forced to retain guards to watch the guards and spies to watch the guards who watched the guards and spies to watch the spies!
Then schoolchildren ask, "Why did so many ancient civilizations collapse?"
Through sheer exhaustion, in many cases. The principle of force in governing drains the very power needed to keep a society rising to new challenges.
Governing by force is coming to the end of the line in human affairs simply because it wastes so much energy. We've raised up societies of such complexity and scale that tremendous power is needed to manage them -- a power that comes from ability, not the force of a gun.
Tuesday, October 4
Yahoo! awarded Pundita's Neville Chamberlain Prize for 2005
With so many appeasers in the running it was a tough choice, but Yahoo.com finally nosed ahead of the pack.
With assistance from Yahoo's Hong Kong office, Beijing secured an email from Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, which proved he'd posted information about the Tianamen Square massacre on an overseas website. Yahoo's help netted, if you'll pardon the expression, a 10-year prison sentence for Shi Tao.
The Neville Chamberlain Prize is a potbellied urn painted a tasteful yellow color with ashes of copies of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights sealed inside.
"Way cool! We're thrilled and proud to receive this recognition of our efforts to further America's cooperation with China's government," commented a spokesperson for Yahoo! Holdings Ltd. in Hong Hong who asked not to be named. "But which ISP does Neville Chamberlain work for?"
Yahoo's part in Shi Tao's arrest and April 30 conviction is old news to Internet watchdogs, democracy/human rights supporters and defenders of press freedoms. However, Yahoo's willing -- I emphasize willing -- collaboration with China's police state takes on new urgency in light of the rout of democracy in Taishi Village and Beijing's forcible closing of a Chinese website that reported on the situation.
What's striking about the Yahoo! situation is that they were not under legal obligation to cooperate with China's police in the Shi Tao matter. According to Reporters Without Borders (emphasis mine):
Yet clearly, they were under some kind of pressure from China's authorities to comply with custom. However, the pressure was just as clearly not spelled out. The reported custom was not committed to writing, much less a legally binding document. So what is China really up to? Watch carefully, don't blink:
If you study the pattern of China's actions regarding Internet restrictions, it jumps out that China's government is not spending mega-yuan to go after postings to websites that the vast majority of Chinese citizens never see. They are using the cooperation of foreign computer companies to help them establish a body of legal precedents, which shore their case for government control of the Internet.
To what end? China's government is cleverly using the rule of law against the very countries that govern according to the rule of law. They are using the rule of law in the same way Hitler did: to help them legitimize a rule by military force.
In the years during the runup to Germany's invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler took pains to provide other European governments with numerous opportunities to lodge formal protests that had clout behind them.
Each time an opportunity was not taken, this only emboldened Hitler's forces. The same pattern is in evidence with the People's Republic of China. They find no resistance whenever they push against the Western democracies even though China always provides clear openings for the democracies to push back.
How to respond to China's version of Hitler's ploy? Well, today's Western transnational corporations don't have the kind of management that fits them to stand up to anything bigger than a stiff breeze. So at least in America, it's past time for the US Department of State and the Congress to step up to the plate.
The Congress needs to summon Yahoo! and their American corporate fellow travelers before a commission and tell them, "You don't have to volunteer be a collaborator. Ring up the Congress, the next time you get the idea that to keep doing business in China you have to abide by every Chinese custom."
Congress also needs to summon Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before a closed-door hearing and explain that no matter how many careers she has to destroy at State, America's foreign office needs to stop playing China's door mat.
Also, US senators who keep abreast of doings in China by relying on expert opinion from US policy institutes that are apologists for China's dictatorship need to instruct their aides to cross those sources off their list.
1) From a Reporters Without Borders report on the verdict in Shi Tao's case. According to the report:
With assistance from Yahoo's Hong Kong office, Beijing secured an email from Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, which proved he'd posted information about the Tianamen Square massacre on an overseas website. Yahoo's help netted, if you'll pardon the expression, a 10-year prison sentence for Shi Tao.
The Neville Chamberlain Prize is a potbellied urn painted a tasteful yellow color with ashes of copies of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights sealed inside.
"Way cool! We're thrilled and proud to receive this recognition of our efforts to further America's cooperation with China's government," commented a spokesperson for Yahoo! Holdings Ltd. in Hong Hong who asked not to be named. "But which ISP does Neville Chamberlain work for?"
Yahoo's part in Shi Tao's arrest and April 30 conviction is old news to Internet watchdogs, democracy/human rights supporters and defenders of press freedoms. However, Yahoo's willing -- I emphasize willing -- collaboration with China's police state takes on new urgency in light of the rout of democracy in Taishi Village and Beijing's forcible closing of a Chinese website that reported on the situation.
What's striking about the Yahoo! situation is that they were not under legal obligation to cooperate with China's police in the Shi Tao matter. According to Reporters Without Borders (emphasis mine):
[...] the verdict reveals that Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. provided the Chinese investigating organs with detailed information that apparently enabled them to link Shi’s personal e-mail account [...] and the specific message containing information treated as a “state secret” to the IP address of his computer.So the wording of the documents Yahoo! signed gave them plenty of wiggle room to not cooperate with the "custom" of foreign companies complying with a police order claiming jurisdiction over the Internet.
Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) is subject to Hong Kong legislation, which does not spell out the responsibilities in this kind of situation of companies that provide e-mail services.
Nonetheless, it is reportedly customary for e-mail service and Internet access providers to transmit information to the police about their clients when shown a court order. [...]
For years Yahoo! has allowed the Chinese version of its search engine to be censored. In 2002, Yahoo! voluntarily signed the "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry", agreeing to abide by PRC censorship regulations. [...](1)
Yet clearly, they were under some kind of pressure from China's authorities to comply with custom. However, the pressure was just as clearly not spelled out. The reported custom was not committed to writing, much less a legally binding document. So what is China really up to? Watch carefully, don't blink:
If you study the pattern of China's actions regarding Internet restrictions, it jumps out that China's government is not spending mega-yuan to go after postings to websites that the vast majority of Chinese citizens never see. They are using the cooperation of foreign computer companies to help them establish a body of legal precedents, which shore their case for government control of the Internet.
To what end? China's government is cleverly using the rule of law against the very countries that govern according to the rule of law. They are using the rule of law in the same way Hitler did: to help them legitimize a rule by military force.
In the years during the runup to Germany's invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler took pains to provide other European governments with numerous opportunities to lodge formal protests that had clout behind them.
Each time an opportunity was not taken, this only emboldened Hitler's forces. The same pattern is in evidence with the People's Republic of China. They find no resistance whenever they push against the Western democracies even though China always provides clear openings for the democracies to push back.
How to respond to China's version of Hitler's ploy? Well, today's Western transnational corporations don't have the kind of management that fits them to stand up to anything bigger than a stiff breeze. So at least in America, it's past time for the US Department of State and the Congress to step up to the plate.
The Congress needs to summon Yahoo! and their American corporate fellow travelers before a commission and tell them, "You don't have to volunteer be a collaborator. Ring up the Congress, the next time you get the idea that to keep doing business in China you have to abide by every Chinese custom."
Congress also needs to summon Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before a closed-door hearing and explain that no matter how many careers she has to destroy at State, America's foreign office needs to stop playing China's door mat.
Also, US senators who keep abreast of doings in China by relying on expert opinion from US policy institutes that are apologists for China's dictatorship need to instruct their aides to cross those sources off their list.
1) From a Reporters Without Borders report on the verdict in Shi Tao's case. According to the report:
Shi Tao worked for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News). He was convicted on 30 April of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal message which [China's] authorities had sent to his newspaper warning journalists of the dangers of social destabilisation and risks resulting from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.For more information on the Yahoo-Shi Tao situation, click on the above link.
Monday, October 3
China Closes Web Site That Reported Taishi Village Standoff
“It really was one of the last resources left to us -- one of the last bastions of justice and social conscience for academics and rights activists alike,” Hou said. “A forum like that is really very rare in China. This really is a very big attack by the government on rights campaigners.”
The following is an October 3 report posted on the Radio Free Asia website. (This is a site to bookmark.)
For background on the importance of one small village in China, read It's really over for Taishi at Simon World.
HONG KONG: The Chinese authorities have shut down a popular online news and discussion forum that gave prominent coverage to a campaign by villagers in the southern province of Guangdong to remove their elected chief amid corruption allegations, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.
The Yannan forum, known in China as a BBS, carried an announcement dated Sept. 30, 2005, announcing that the Web site had now closed. The site, popular among academics, journalists, and rights activists, had previously had all Taishi-related news reports and discussions removed from public view.
“Yannan will be undergoing a complete clean-up and rectification, and its relaunch will be notified at a later date. We are deeply sorry for any inconvenience,” the announcement said.
An employee at Yannan confirmed the closure to RFA Cantonese service reporter Mei Kin-kwan. “Yes, we are closed,” he said. “Sorry, I can’t give any interviews to the media. I won’t say anything else. Just wait for our statement, ok?
A major blow
Beijing-based rights activist Hou Wenzhuo, whose non-governmental group has been following events in Taishi village closely, said Yannan’s closure came as a major blow.
“It really was one of the last resources left to us—one of the last bastions of justice and social conscience for academics and rights activists alike,” Hou said. “A forum like that is really very rare in China. This really is a very big attack by the government on rights campaigners.”
China issued a revised set of regulations governing Internet news content last week, which observers said were aimed at tightening controls on information related to demonstrations and street protests on Web sites, bulletin boards and Web logs, or blogs.
The regulations target sites that publish fabricated information or pornography and forbid content that “harms national security, reveals state secrets, subverts political power, (and) undermines national unity.”
They also ban posts that “instigate illegal gatherings, formation of associations, marches, demonstrations, or disturb social order,” indicating a lesson learned from anti-Japanese protests that swept China last April and spread in part due to postings on Internet bulletin boards and chat rooms.
Test of grass-roots democracy
The Taishi standoff, widely seen by Chinese scholars and the legal profession as a test of local governments’ commitment to village democracy and rule of law, began in July after a 100 million yuan (U.S. $12 million) land deal involving more than 2,000 mu (133 hectares) of village land.
Villagers and their lawyers said accounting procedures around the sale were not transparent, and they suspected Chen of embezzling public funds. In clashes earlier this month, riot police ended a hunger strike and fired water cannon on protesters, many of them elderly, prompting widespread outrage among ordinary Chinese with access to news reports of the incident.
Last month, villagers fought against government attempts to stack the re-election committee in its favor, electing seven of their own candidates ahead of a key vote slated for Oct. 7 on whether village chief Chen Jinling should remain in office.
But a concerted pressure campaign by local officials from the next two levels of government above Taishi has resulted in the resignation of all seven representatives to date, residents told RFA. Unconfirmed reports say detained villagers were released in return for signatures on a petition supporting Chen.
“They mobilized more than 100 people,” one male villager, who asked not to be named, told RFA Mandarin service reporter Yan Ming. “Each production team enlisted the relatives of each team member to beg, cheat, and frighten people. They used every possible method. The result was that more than 390 people agreed to withdraw from the campaign to remove the village chief, although we really don't know the true figure.”
Hou, in an earlier RFA panel discussion on rural rights campaigns, said any optimism that the Taishi standoff would result in better protection from rights abuses for rural communities was misguided.
Call for power-sharing
“Without even the tiniest amount of power-sharing, there is no hope at all that ordinary citizens will have their basic rights protected. China’s rural communities make up 80 percent of the population, but in terms of political power, it’s really less than 10 percent,” she told RFA’s Mandarin service.
“Why has a tiny village election in Taishi escalated to this stage? Because the authorities have remained implacable in the face of support from academics, from journalists and the legal profession,” said Hou, an activist with the Beijing-based Empowerment and Rights Institute.
“They won’t budge an inch, because there has been no change, not even a small adjustment, in the structures of power,” she said.
Replying to Hou, Beijing Institute of Technology economics professor Hu Xingdou said central government had to tread a delicate path with local officials: “I think the government has its own problems. For example, local governments are the grassroots of the Party, and it can’t afford to alienate them entirely.”
“But in the case of such obvious violence and wrongdoing as we saw in Taishi village, I think the central government should use its power to intervene,” Hu said."
Original reporting in Cantonese by Mei Kin-kwan, and in Mandarin by Shi Shan and Yan Ming. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie, and edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
The following is an October 3 report posted on the Radio Free Asia website. (This is a site to bookmark.)
For background on the importance of one small village in China, read It's really over for Taishi at Simon World.
HONG KONG: The Chinese authorities have shut down a popular online news and discussion forum that gave prominent coverage to a campaign by villagers in the southern province of Guangdong to remove their elected chief amid corruption allegations, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.
The Yannan forum, known in China as a BBS, carried an announcement dated Sept. 30, 2005, announcing that the Web site had now closed. The site, popular among academics, journalists, and rights activists, had previously had all Taishi-related news reports and discussions removed from public view.
“Yannan will be undergoing a complete clean-up and rectification, and its relaunch will be notified at a later date. We are deeply sorry for any inconvenience,” the announcement said.
An employee at Yannan confirmed the closure to RFA Cantonese service reporter Mei Kin-kwan. “Yes, we are closed,” he said. “Sorry, I can’t give any interviews to the media. I won’t say anything else. Just wait for our statement, ok?
A major blow
Beijing-based rights activist Hou Wenzhuo, whose non-governmental group has been following events in Taishi village closely, said Yannan’s closure came as a major blow.
“It really was one of the last resources left to us—one of the last bastions of justice and social conscience for academics and rights activists alike,” Hou said. “A forum like that is really very rare in China. This really is a very big attack by the government on rights campaigners.”
China issued a revised set of regulations governing Internet news content last week, which observers said were aimed at tightening controls on information related to demonstrations and street protests on Web sites, bulletin boards and Web logs, or blogs.
The regulations target sites that publish fabricated information or pornography and forbid content that “harms national security, reveals state secrets, subverts political power, (and) undermines national unity.”
They also ban posts that “instigate illegal gatherings, formation of associations, marches, demonstrations, or disturb social order,” indicating a lesson learned from anti-Japanese protests that swept China last April and spread in part due to postings on Internet bulletin boards and chat rooms.
Test of grass-roots democracy
The Taishi standoff, widely seen by Chinese scholars and the legal profession as a test of local governments’ commitment to village democracy and rule of law, began in July after a 100 million yuan (U.S. $12 million) land deal involving more than 2,000 mu (133 hectares) of village land.
Villagers and their lawyers said accounting procedures around the sale were not transparent, and they suspected Chen of embezzling public funds. In clashes earlier this month, riot police ended a hunger strike and fired water cannon on protesters, many of them elderly, prompting widespread outrage among ordinary Chinese with access to news reports of the incident.
Last month, villagers fought against government attempts to stack the re-election committee in its favor, electing seven of their own candidates ahead of a key vote slated for Oct. 7 on whether village chief Chen Jinling should remain in office.
But a concerted pressure campaign by local officials from the next two levels of government above Taishi has resulted in the resignation of all seven representatives to date, residents told RFA. Unconfirmed reports say detained villagers were released in return for signatures on a petition supporting Chen.
“They mobilized more than 100 people,” one male villager, who asked not to be named, told RFA Mandarin service reporter Yan Ming. “Each production team enlisted the relatives of each team member to beg, cheat, and frighten people. They used every possible method. The result was that more than 390 people agreed to withdraw from the campaign to remove the village chief, although we really don't know the true figure.”
Hou, in an earlier RFA panel discussion on rural rights campaigns, said any optimism that the Taishi standoff would result in better protection from rights abuses for rural communities was misguided.
Call for power-sharing
“Without even the tiniest amount of power-sharing, there is no hope at all that ordinary citizens will have their basic rights protected. China’s rural communities make up 80 percent of the population, but in terms of political power, it’s really less than 10 percent,” she told RFA’s Mandarin service.
“Why has a tiny village election in Taishi escalated to this stage? Because the authorities have remained implacable in the face of support from academics, from journalists and the legal profession,” said Hou, an activist with the Beijing-based Empowerment and Rights Institute.
“They won’t budge an inch, because there has been no change, not even a small adjustment, in the structures of power,” she said.
Replying to Hou, Beijing Institute of Technology economics professor Hu Xingdou said central government had to tread a delicate path with local officials: “I think the government has its own problems. For example, local governments are the grassroots of the Party, and it can’t afford to alienate them entirely.”
“But in the case of such obvious violence and wrongdoing as we saw in Taishi village, I think the central government should use its power to intervene,” Hu said."
Original reporting in Cantonese by Mei Kin-kwan, and in Mandarin by Shi Shan and Yan Ming. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie, and edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
Europe by the numbers
Eric T. Miller, one of Pundita's favorite WOMS,* reports in his latest column at Tom Brown's Bankstocks about two recent lectures given by experts on Europe and European foreign relations.
The speakers were Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of Die Zeit, the German weekly, and Dennis Bark, author of several books on Europe and its relations with the United States.
Mr. Miller's summary ranges over discussions about deteriorated US-European relations (and reminds of some bright spots in those relations) and looks at how the experts view the German election.
He also passes along observations about demographics and work habits in Germany, which I found striking in light of the demographics-based analysis of China and Iran I highlighted in yesterday's posts:
That observation holds as true for European socialist philosophy as for Chinese communism and Islamic theories of government. It holds true for philosophizing, in general.
(For those who argue that the revealed word of the divine is the best philosophy to guide human affairs: when the well dries up, there is Revealed Word that can't get lost in translation.)
During periods when Nature allows for stability in human affairs, people have great latitude in choosing what they wish to believe, and often without undue penalty. It's when Nature presents a reality check that the penalties can pile up fast if people are unwilling to make adjustments in their philosophy.
The advice from Bark and Joffe that the Germans must work harder to compensate for the decline in their population is a good reminder about bottom-line issues for humanity.
Societies might have the means to rise to a challenge from natural forces, if they choose to deploy them. This is provided they deploy the means within the window of opportunity time permits. The window generally does not stay open long.
To read the rest of Mr. Miller's report titled Old Europe click here.
* Wise Old Men of Wall Street
The speakers were Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of Die Zeit, the German weekly, and Dennis Bark, author of several books on Europe and its relations with the United States.
Mr. Miller's summary ranges over discussions about deteriorated US-European relations (and reminds of some bright spots in those relations) and looks at how the experts view the German election.
He also passes along observations about demographics and work habits in Germany, which I found striking in light of the demographics-based analysis of China and Iran I highlighted in yesterday's posts:
Josef Joffe asserted that Europe is dying because of its demographics. No European country has a birth rate that’s above the replacement rate -- which means that the population of Europe is headed toward long-term decline. Italy has the lowest birth rate. If Russia were to be included in the overall picture, the aging of Europe is even more dramatic.Here we find another example of Nature trumping ideology. Political, social and economic philosophies tend not to give much attention to climate changes that force large migrations and the social upheavals that accompany a steep decline in a settled population.
In the past, there has been a close correlation between growth in the labor force and overall economic growth; Europe thus seems condemned to slow growth at best unless there’s some amazing breakthrough in productivity. Considering European labor intransigence and work attitudes, that doesn’t seem likely.
Both Joffe and Bark said that the one necessary ingredient for Europe to thrive again economically is for it to work much harder, which would mean wholesale changes in work habits and rules. If the Social Democrats retain an important almost role in the next German government, the opportunity for change in that country seems limited.
Joffe said that the Social Democratic mindset is entrenched, and that Social Democrats are intolerant of ideas other than their own. They remain determined to maintain the social welfare system in its entirety. Their central emphasis is on equality; they give short shrift to incentives that might spur growth.
To date, any assault on the Europeans’ welfare systems has come about as a result of the outside forces of globalization and Europeanization, but those assaults haven’t made any difference. If anything, Germany has moved further to the left, according to Joffe. And the country is further handicapped by the drag of the former East Germany, which, because so many people are on the dole there, is costing the country 4% of GDP. Joffe observed that the country is hooked on the welfare system; people are like junkies dependent on government assistance.
That observation holds as true for European socialist philosophy as for Chinese communism and Islamic theories of government. It holds true for philosophizing, in general.
(For those who argue that the revealed word of the divine is the best philosophy to guide human affairs: when the well dries up, there is Revealed Word that can't get lost in translation.)
During periods when Nature allows for stability in human affairs, people have great latitude in choosing what they wish to believe, and often without undue penalty. It's when Nature presents a reality check that the penalties can pile up fast if people are unwilling to make adjustments in their philosophy.
The advice from Bark and Joffe that the Germans must work harder to compensate for the decline in their population is a good reminder about bottom-line issues for humanity.
Societies might have the means to rise to a challenge from natural forces, if they choose to deploy them. This is provided they deploy the means within the window of opportunity time permits. The window generally does not stay open long.
To read the rest of Mr. Miller's report titled Old Europe click here.
* Wise Old Men of Wall Street
Sunday, October 2
China: Taishi and an echo of the Bridge on the River Kwai
Pundita:
Regarding your China by the numbers post. On the idea of "grass roots" or village democracy, there has just been an attempt at it in a small village called Taishi. Naturally, the idea of the villagers electing their own outside the authorised channels was squashed. Even more surprisingly, this wasn't really reported in the Western media. Here's some links to give you the background:
Taishi and China loses
It's really over for Taishi
Simon in Hong Kong"
Dear Simon:
While visiting the second link I noted your comment about the Hong Kong meeting to discuss Mainland politics that was canceled. To read that the mere acts of advertising a meeting and reporting on its cancellation are acts of courage in China is frightening.
Pundita finds nothing surprising in the Western media's reluctance to report on the rout of an attempt at democracy in China and the implications. If the Western media face the truth about China they must also face the truth about Western democracy.
The Western democratic nations didn't create repression in China but by acting as apologists and fellow travelers they did what the Chinese Communist Party could not: vetted China's repressive regime in the eyes of the world.
I wonder what the so-called advanced democracies thought they accomplished by that act? What did they accomplish in Burma? Iran? Saddam's Iraq? In Africa? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? North Korea? The list goes on and on.
Those who would argue that betraying their most fundamental principles was the only way to open China to the rest of the world -- did they try any other way? Because it was never an either-or proposition.
Now the world is faced with a China who boasts of its economic success to poorer countries and touts repressive government as the way to success. So what can the bastions of democracy say in answer? After they spent decades aiding and abetting China's insistence on anti-democratic government?
One cannot survey the accomplishment of the democratic nations without feeling the horror voiced by the doctor at the end of the Bridge on the River Kwai. Madness. Absolute madness.
Regarding your China by the numbers post. On the idea of "grass roots" or village democracy, there has just been an attempt at it in a small village called Taishi. Naturally, the idea of the villagers electing their own outside the authorised channels was squashed. Even more surprisingly, this wasn't really reported in the Western media. Here's some links to give you the background:
Taishi and China loses
It's really over for Taishi
Simon in Hong Kong"
Dear Simon:
While visiting the second link I noted your comment about the Hong Kong meeting to discuss Mainland politics that was canceled. To read that the mere acts of advertising a meeting and reporting on its cancellation are acts of courage in China is frightening.
Pundita finds nothing surprising in the Western media's reluctance to report on the rout of an attempt at democracy in China and the implications. If the Western media face the truth about China they must also face the truth about Western democracy.
The Western democratic nations didn't create repression in China but by acting as apologists and fellow travelers they did what the Chinese Communist Party could not: vetted China's repressive regime in the eyes of the world.
I wonder what the so-called advanced democracies thought they accomplished by that act? What did they accomplish in Burma? Iran? Saddam's Iraq? In Africa? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? North Korea? The list goes on and on.
Those who would argue that betraying their most fundamental principles was the only way to open China to the rest of the world -- did they try any other way? Because it was never an either-or proposition.
Now the world is faced with a China who boasts of its economic success to poorer countries and touts repressive government as the way to success. So what can the bastions of democracy say in answer? After they spent decades aiding and abetting China's insistence on anti-democratic government?
One cannot survey the accomplishment of the democratic nations without feeling the horror voiced by the doctor at the end of the Bridge on the River Kwai. Madness. Absolute madness.
China by the numbers
A reader sent me a link to an essay that analyzes China's chance for democracy by taking an extensive look at China's changing demographics. The essayist, who goes by the pen name of Spengler and writes for the Asia Times, starts with the observation:
He also points out that American faith in constitutional ideals has always been shored by a cushion of capital. From there he advises that America should offer China "practical suggestions, such as how to develop internal capital markets, rather than grandiose and self-serving advice."
Granted, the US should tone down the grandiose rhetoric. But the problem with Spengler's advice is that it ignores screamingly obvious facts. China's rulers are not bumpkins. They are people loath to share power. They've spent more than a half century coming up with every excuse in the book for not sharing.
So I venture it is naive for Washington to assume that offering Beijing the same good economic advice they've gotten for years from the IMF and bankers in Taipei, Hong Kong, London and Singapore is the best help the US can give China.
The US Department of State can't force democracy on the Chinese but they can stop fawning over Beijing's endless prevarication. How to do this? By loudly and repeatedly reminding Beijing that China's economic progress was achieved on the back of democratic governments.
That, I submit, is the most practical course for American diplomacy with regard to China. It's practical because it treats China's leaders for what they are: adults fully possessed of their faculties. By continuing to nod in agreement with Beijing's excuses the US foreign office treats the Chinese as if they're idiots. Don't think Beijing is unaware that they're being patronized.
As to the mountain of problems that a half billion rural Chinese will face in coming to the big city, and the challenge this poses for establishing democracy in China: how does Spengler think America was built up? Was it done by a bunch a big-city PhDs speaking the King's English? No. It was built from waves of illiterate village hicks babbling every dialect you can think of, including Chinese ones.
Spengler's pessimism ignores the native intelligence of all peoples everywhere, including villagers. Many millions of immigrants to this country quickly learned the drill: you learn to speaka da English a little, you learn to read a little, and you get the general idea of democracy -- enough to vote.
Landing a man on the moon was hard; getting the basic drill of living in a democratic country is never hard. But first the drill has to be in place.
(1) China must wait for democracy.
Whenever the government of the People's Republic of China agrees with the US State Department about China's internal affairs, it is a good bet that either both are wrong or that the matter is irrelevant.Spengler goes on to explain why he thinks State shouldn't put stock in Beijing's promise of direct elections at the township level within a few years:
Rural self-rule has no bearing at all upon the problem of Chinese governance. If Chinese villagers have the opportunity to elect their own leaders, the main issue about which they will quarrel will be who is allowed to leave first.Spengler closes with a wonderful summary of why the US has the world's best government and why Samuel Huntington's Confucian-babble is babble.
Instead, China must learn to rule cities that are mushrooming into the largest urban concentrations the world has ever known, populated by poor migrants speaking various dialects.
By far the largest popular migration in history is in flow tide between the Chinese countryside and coastal cities. In the mere span of five years between 1996 and 2000, China's urban-rural population ratio rose to 36%-64% from 29%-71%, and the UN Population Division projects that by 2050, the ratio will shift to 67%-33% urban. Chinese cities, the UN forecasts, will contain 800 million people by mid-century. By 2015, the population of cities will reach 220 million, compared to the 1995 level of 134 million.
Well over half a billion souls will migrate from farm to city over the space of half a century. All of them will be quite poor. China claims 80% literacy, but as countryside reads less than the city, it is a fair guess that a third of the migrants will be illiterate, and many of them, again perhaps a third, will not be able to understand a political speech in Mandarin, the largest dialect.
No historical precedent exists for a population transfer on this scale, and to conduct it peacefully would be a virtuoso act of statecraft. To require China to adopt a Western parliamentary regime in the process is utopian. [...] (1)
He also points out that American faith in constitutional ideals has always been shored by a cushion of capital. From there he advises that America should offer China "practical suggestions, such as how to develop internal capital markets, rather than grandiose and self-serving advice."
Granted, the US should tone down the grandiose rhetoric. But the problem with Spengler's advice is that it ignores screamingly obvious facts. China's rulers are not bumpkins. They are people loath to share power. They've spent more than a half century coming up with every excuse in the book for not sharing.
So I venture it is naive for Washington to assume that offering Beijing the same good economic advice they've gotten for years from the IMF and bankers in Taipei, Hong Kong, London and Singapore is the best help the US can give China.
The US Department of State can't force democracy on the Chinese but they can stop fawning over Beijing's endless prevarication. How to do this? By loudly and repeatedly reminding Beijing that China's economic progress was achieved on the back of democratic governments.
That, I submit, is the most practical course for American diplomacy with regard to China. It's practical because it treats China's leaders for what they are: adults fully possessed of their faculties. By continuing to nod in agreement with Beijing's excuses the US foreign office treats the Chinese as if they're idiots. Don't think Beijing is unaware that they're being patronized.
As to the mountain of problems that a half billion rural Chinese will face in coming to the big city, and the challenge this poses for establishing democracy in China: how does Spengler think America was built up? Was it done by a bunch a big-city PhDs speaking the King's English? No. It was built from waves of illiterate village hicks babbling every dialect you can think of, including Chinese ones.
Spengler's pessimism ignores the native intelligence of all peoples everywhere, including villagers. Many millions of immigrants to this country quickly learned the drill: you learn to speaka da English a little, you learn to read a little, and you get the general idea of democracy -- enough to vote.
Landing a man on the moon was hard; getting the basic drill of living in a democratic country is never hard. But first the drill has to be in place.
(1) China must wait for democracy.
Iran by the numbers
Pundita discovered by following a link in Spengler's China essay (see previous post) that his demographics-based analysis of Iran is the most informative to come down the pike recently about Tehran's plans. Here I am afraid the news is worse than Spengler's statistics delivered about China's problems; it is alarming.
As a regular listener to the John Batchelor show, Pundita has had it drummed into her that Iran's rulers want to take a page from Hitler's Mein Kampf. But the military based analysis supporting this view has never caused Pundita lost sleep. After all, the gang in Tehran is not the first in modern times with dreams of conquering a large swath. Indeed, that was Saddam Hussein's dream.
However, the statistics that Spengler marshals show why Iran's rulers are integrating their totalitarian government with plans for conquest. It's either that or face a total collapse of their power. The demographics combined with the looming decline in their oil revenue dictate the stark reality for Iran's rulers:
After emerging from centuries of subjugation to the Sunni majority in the Middle East, Iraq's Shiites would be fools to subjugate themselves to a clique in Iran and they know this. Or rather, they learned this the hard way. The silver lining to US stumbles in post-Saddam Iraq is that Iraq's Shiites experienced the consequences of Tehran's support of the so-called Sunni insurgency, which has claimed so many Iraqi Shia lives.
Yet Spengler's analysis does not fall short in conveying the threat Iran poses. Looking past the rap about a grand coalition of Muslims, Iran's military has practical reasons to view conquest as the only viable means to retain power. Spengler observes:
After hemming and hawing the guest always replies, "No."
Demographics and Iran's imperial design (By Spengler for the Asia Times, September 13.)
As a regular listener to the John Batchelor show, Pundita has had it drummed into her that Iran's rulers want to take a page from Hitler's Mein Kampf. But the military based analysis supporting this view has never caused Pundita lost sleep. After all, the gang in Tehran is not the first in modern times with dreams of conquering a large swath. Indeed, that was Saddam Hussein's dream.
However, the statistics that Spengler marshals show why Iran's rulers are integrating their totalitarian government with plans for conquest. It's either that or face a total collapse of their power. The demographics combined with the looming decline in their oil revenue dictate the stark reality for Iran's rulers:
By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of some Muslim nations, notably Iran -- converging on America's dependency ratio at mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it with Iran's per capita GDP of $7,000 -- especially given that Iran will stop exporting oil before the population crisis hits.Call me a cockeyed optimist but Pundita finds herself in disagreement with how Spengler applies his analysis to Tehran's designs on Iraq's Shia population.
The industrial nations face the prospective failure of their pension systems. But what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it is traditional society that will break down, horribly and irretrievably so. Below, I will review the relevant numbers. [...]
Muslim birth rates are collapsing as literacy rises, that is, as the modern world intrudes upon traditional society. Islamic traditional society is so fragile that it crumbles as soon as women learn to read.
But the Islamists will not wait for traditional society to unravel [...] In programs made public on August 15, [Mahmud] Ahmadinejad revealed a response worthy of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin to the inevitable unraveling of Iran's traditional society. He proposes to reduce the number of villages from 66,000 to only 10,000, relocating 30 million Iranians. That is a preemptive response to the inevitable depopulation of rural Iran, in keeping with a totalitarian program for all aspects of Iranian society. [...]
Reengineering the shape of Iran's population, the central plank of the new government's domestic program, should be understood as the flip side of Iran's nuclear coin. Aggressive relocation of Iranians and an aggressive foreign policy both constitute a response to the coming crisis.
Iran claims that it must develop nuclear power to replace diminishing oil exports. It seems clear that Iranian exports will fall sharply, perhaps to zero by 2020, according to Iranian estimates. But Iran's motives for acquiring nuclear power are not only economic but strategic. Like Hitler and Stalin, Ahmadinejad looks to imperial expansion as a solution for economic crisis at home. [...] (1)
After emerging from centuries of subjugation to the Sunni majority in the Middle East, Iraq's Shiites would be fools to subjugate themselves to a clique in Iran and they know this. Or rather, they learned this the hard way. The silver lining to US stumbles in post-Saddam Iraq is that Iraq's Shiites experienced the consequences of Tehran's support of the so-called Sunni insurgency, which has claimed so many Iraqi Shia lives.
Yet Spengler's analysis does not fall short in conveying the threat Iran poses. Looking past the rap about a grand coalition of Muslims, Iran's military has practical reasons to view conquest as the only viable means to retain power. Spengler observes:
Ahmadinejad is not a throwback, as I wrote with a dismissiveness [in an earlier essay] that seems painful in hindsight. He has taken the measure of his country's crisis, and determined to meet it head-on. Washington, from what I can tell, has no idea what sort of opponent it confronts.Support for the latter observation has come over the years from John Batchelor. Every once in a while, in the manner of Diogenes, John inquires of learned guests, "Does Washington have a plan yet for dealing with Iran?"
After hemming and hawing the guest always replies, "No."
Demographics and Iran's imperial design (By Spengler for the Asia Times, September 13.)
Saturday, October 1
Mystery disease outbreak in Shenzhen: the Casablanca Factor and bolts of lightning out of the blue
"Dear Pundita:
[Re yesterday's post] You wrote, "So, what type of disease presents with a symptom of a "dissolving" body along with symptoms that include vomiting, stomachache (and after death) a "large area hemorrhage inside the body?" (Para. 5) A blood-borne disease so highly infectious and lethal that within short order it killed two doctors who were exposed to the patient's blood? (Para. 7)"
Well, necrotizing fasciitis comes to mind:
http://www.nnff.org/nnff_factsheet.htm
It has the symptoms described, can be blood-borne or airborne, and can be very fast and lethal.
Could it be transmitted to the doctors? I have no idea about what procedures and sterile conditions are in Chinese hospitals but I can guess.
Dave Schuler
The Glittering Eye"
Dear Dave:
That's interesting, particularly with regard to some accounts of "very fast" death in Sichuan in relation to the mystery "pig disease" and which (if my memory serves) mentioned a "melted" or dissolved body in some cases.
However, with regard to the accounts relating to the outbreak in Shenzhen, Guangdong I think we can rule out necrotizing fasciitis (NF). I might have made this clearer if I had qualified the statement you quote by adding, "and which fits with the timeline of symptom onset and patient death mentioned in the translation of the March 25 Epoch Times article."
If untreated NF certainly kills fast; it kills too fast to make it a likely candidate for the illness described in the translation.
However, for the benefit of the readers I'll examine the NF angle as it might apply to the victims discussed in the translation. First let's review two timelines of the symptoms for necrotizing fasciitis (early and advanced stage) from the link you sent (emphasis throughout mine):
EARLY SYMPTOMS (usually within 24 hours):
> [...] The pain is usually disproportionate to the injury and may start as something akin to a muscle pull, but becomes more and more painful.
> Flu like symptoms begin to occur, such as diarrhea, nausea, fever, confusion, dizziness, weakness, and general malaise.
> Intense thirst occurs as the body becomes dehydrated.
> The biggest symptom is all of these symptoms combined. In general you will probably feel worse than you've ever felt and not understand why.
CRITICAL SYMPTOMS (usually within 4-5 days):
> Blood pressure will drop severely.
> The body begins to go into toxic shock from the toxins the bacteria are giving off.
> Unconsciousness will occur as the body becomes too weak to fight off this infection.
Now to the account of the "Ebola-like" outbreak in Shenzhen:
"2. According to this insider, in early January 2005, when conducting a suppressing smuggling campaign in Daya Bay, custom officials of Shenzhen City encountered a ship with unknown nationality.
3. The officials boarded the ship to investigate and the black sailors on the ship physically assaulted the Chinese officials, injuring two of them. One of the injured officials, Mr. Yang, died mysteriously in late February."
So, exposure is in early January and death occurs in late February. Yet if not properly treated, necrotizing fasciitis presents with critical symptoms (followed by death) within 4-5 days after infection! So Mr. Yang would have needed to be a superman to have lasted as long as he did, if he had contracted NF.
To return to the account:
"4. The other injured official, Mr. Jiang, is also missing after being forcibly taken away from Tianmian Garden located in the center of Shenzhen City.
5. It was revealed that the reason for their quarantine was that Mr. Yang's inamorata [*] vomited and had stomachache among with other symptoms in her residence in Buji district in early February. Two weeks after she was sent to a hospital in Buji district for treatment, she died mysteriously inside the hospital. Upon death, she had large area hemorrhage inside her body."
Here we find another superman -- superwoman, in this case. Mr. Yang's mistress managed to survive at least a week longer than a diagnosis of necrotizing fasciitis would warrant.
Now we turn to the sailors who presumably started it all. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we don't know how long the "black" sailors were on the smuggling ship in Daya Bay before it was boarded by the unfortunate Messrs. Yang and Jiang.
But because there is no mention of the Ebola-like outbreak occurring in Shenzhen prior to the custom officials' encounter with the sailors on board the mystery ship, we can tentatively assume that if the illness they carried was NF, they must have contracted it a very few hours prior to the Chinese custom officials boarding their ship.
(If they'd had NF longer than a few hours, we must also credit the sailors with superhuman powers, which is what it would take to put up a vigorous fist fight while experiencing "diarrhea, nausea, fever, confusion, dizziness, weakness, and general malaise.")
So if we want to consider NF, there is a tiny window of opportunity before the story of the black sailors collapses into a Fish Tale. And there is no window of opportunity for the account of how Mr. Yang and his fancy woman met their death. If they were not properly treated for NF (and clearly they were not) they couldn't have lasted more than week.
On the other hand if they were infected with a strain of Ebola, the story also becomes hard to swallow when we consider that the doctor's eyewitness account of a "melted body" does not square with the symptoms of Ebola.
Also, we must consider that a doctor with "many years' experience," as he is described in the account, would recognize a gangrenous condition, which is what NF produces if untreated.
"Gangrene is necrosis and subsequent decay of body tissues caused by infection or thrombosis or lack of blood flow. It is usually the result of critically insufficient blood supply sometimes caused by injury and subsequent contamination with bacteria. This condition is most common in the extremities." From Wikipedia article on gangrene.)
NF presents with a gangrenous condition in the advanced or middle stage of infection (from the link you sent):
ADVANCED SYMPTOMS (usually within 3-4 days):
> The limb, or area of body experiencing pain begins to swell, and may show a purplish rash.
> The limb may begin to have large, dark marks, that will become blisters filled with blackish fluid.
> The wound may actually begin to appear necrotic with a bluish, white, or dark, mottled, flaky appearance.
Again, any doctor with long experience in a big city hospital would be familiar with gangrene. Unless we want to consider the theory that reader "Liz" put forward in August, which is that doctors in communist countries can have such specialized training that they can fail to recognize even the most elementary medical condition outside the specialization!
However, I think Liz was referring to communism's Cold War era. In any case, Shenzhen is a 'special business/free trade' zone, which means the city has many non-Chinese (Western, Singaporean, etc.) businesspeople in residence.
That doesn't mean state-of-the-art hospitals exist in Shenzhen but it's likely that hospitals in the city have a staff that could at least recognize a gangrenous condition, and that they'd treated instances of such. Yet the doctor of "many years' experience" who provided the account said that he'd never seen anything like the illness he treated.
If we rule out Ebola virus and flesh-eating bacteria, what are we left with? Was there any kind of disease outbreak in Shenzhen city in January 2005? I dunno, Dave. One thing I know with certainty: Pundita is getting tired of doing the kind of homework that US intelligence agencies find beneath them.
They had us off and running with the reports about an Ebola disease outbreak in Sichuan. Before sounding the alarm, the intel agencies needed to consider that without a shred of evidence in hand, they should have immdiately switched to a wide-angle lens when examining the situation.
For example, they needed to look at China's pork industry and look into the possibility of an industrial accident. Or even deliberate poisoning by big pork producers trying to put the Mom & Pop pig breeders in Sichuan out of business.
All that is baseline considerations when analyzing reports of a lethal, mysterious, highly infectious disease -- and reports of mass deaths in a province in China (Sichuan) that was rendered off-limits to foreign reporters, the CDC and WHO.
There doesn't seem to have been much progress since 9/11 with our intelligence analysis capabilities. Doesn't our government understand that they can't leave it up to bloggers and private intel companies such as Statfor to do the background digging for them?
In this era the US needs intelligence analysts who are aces at integrating a broad spectrum of data. The technology for collecting and massaging such data is, of course, already here. What seems to be lacking is the generalist viewpoint, which is needed for analyzing broad-spectrum data.
Without a strong representation of the generalist viewpoint, intel agencies are doing threat assessment in purely military terms, which cuts out many key factors. The upshot is US defense/foreign policy based on a skewed viewpoint.
With that off my chest, we'll buckle down to a little homework. It's time to take a closer look at the people who reportedly caught the disease mentioned in the March 25 Epoch Times article.
And ask whether there might have been anything else going on in Shenzhen city in the period from early January to March 25 -- anything other than a smuggling ship found in Daya Bay and a reported outbreak of Ebola virus infection.
So here we return to Pundita's "You're telling me this because?" rule of thumb for Americans (to include intelligence analysts) trying to make sense out of foreign policy/defense news -- in particular news relating to China.
Whatever the nature of the illness that reportedly broke out in Shenzhen city, there was also an outbreak of the Casablanca Factor. ("Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.")
I note that Yang and Jiang (reportedly stricken with an Ebola-like illness after a scuffle with "black" sailors in Daya Bay) were customs officials.
Not to speak ill of the dead and/or missing, but we can assume they were particularly corrupt officials. (From close reading of Epoch Times you'll note that keeping "fancy women" seems to be code in China for CCP officials widely known to be especially corrupt.)
So it might be worthwhile to take a look at Daya Bay and the Shenzhen free trade/'special' business zone, and recall the struggle between China's central authority and local authorities regarding who controls customs.
What is Daya Bay?:
The free trade zones have cut hugely into profits for customs officials who spent generations slapping extra duties on imports as a means to pad their meager salary.
And as with Sichuan's stick-in-the-mud pig farmers, if you'll pardon the expression, local time-honored ways of doing business in China have run smack-dab into the central government's rush to modernize China's business and trade practices.
Such a rush anywhere can be very hard on the people long settled in the old ways. In China, however, standing in the way of progress can be very dangerous to your life. Reference bao jia. When the central authority in China orders a local boss to remove obstructionists, they mean -- remove by any means whatsoever.
In other words, it might not be coincidental that out of all the towns in China and all Chinese in China, it happened to be two Daya Bay customs officials who caught a mysterious Ebola-like aliment and died or were never heard from again along with their families and fancy women.
In the final wash, the Epoch Times article threw more light on the situation with China's customs officials than a mystery disease. Messrs. Yang and Jiang were conveniently out of the way by the time an important American trade delegation showed up in Shenzhen city. Pundita doesn't need to consult her crystal ball to know that the untimely disappearance of customs officials, their families and fancy women was not lost on the rest of China's customs officials.
How important was the visiting delegation? It received press coverage from the China Daily, Bloomberg Asia, the Shenzhen Daily, and the Yangcheng Evening News.
FTASA and GKDA TRIP REPORT
Guangdong Province, China
March 12-20, 2005
Free Trade Alliance San Antonio (FTASA)
Greater Kelly Development Authority (GKDA)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Representatives of the GKDA (Bruce Miller, CEO and Jorge Canavati, Director of Marketing) and FTASA (Blake Hastings, Executive Director) traveled to the region Guangdong Province the week of March 12-20, 2005. The visit was conducted in coordination with the annual Asia Pacific American Chambers of Commerce held in Guangzhou, Guangdong. In addition, Tom Loeffler and Jose Martinez of the San Antonio-based Loeffler Group also participated in the conference.
During the visit, the San Antonio team met with officials from trade promotion and ecnomic development entities, provincial and local governments, and manufacturing and logistics companies. Special thanks go to the First Washington Asia (Holdings) ... in Guangzhou and their two principals Mr. Harley Seyedin and Mrs. Sun Hui for their tremendous support and help in arranging a very productive agenda for the FTASA and GKDA. In addition, thanks also go to the American Chamber of Commerce in Guangdong for their support and conference arrangements.
Trip Goals
There were four primary objectives of the trip:
1) Research – to provide the GKDA and the FTASA with a clearer
understanding of the trade and investment potential for KellyUSA and San
Antonio within the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of Guangdong Province;
2) San Antonio and KellyUSA Awareness - to begin creating an awareness of San Antonio and KellyUSA as competitive alternatives for Chinese export manufacturers seeking to establish new sales and distribution channels/ locations in the United States;
3) Strategic Relationships - to develop collaborative relationships with trade promotion entities in the Guangdong region which can facilitate further trade
and investment development efforts of the GKDA and FTASA;
4) Representation Feasibility [...]
Before plowing through the rest of the above report, you might want to glance through this history of Free Trade Zones in China from a 2001 China Daily article. This will help us understand the problems faced by customs officials just trying to make extra dough and pay the bills for their fancy women:
"China's entry into the World Trade Organization will not mean the end of its 15 free trade zones but a chance for their improvement and perfection, according to an official with the administration of Tianjin Port Free Trade Zone.
Feng Zhijiang, deputy director of the administrative committee of the free trade zone, said, "Free trade zone is still a popular thing in the world, and it will play a more important role in China as the country completely opens up to the outside world."
About 50 kilometers from the city of Tianjin and 170 kilometers from Beijing, the seven-square-kilometer Tianjin Port Free Trade Zone has developed from a bleak sea shore to a lucrative home to about 4,000 domestic and overseas enterprises in 10 years.
By the end of 2000, the trade zone had attracted about US$5 billion investments, ranking after only Shanghai Waigaoqiao in the country. About 80 percent of the investments were foreign investments.
After opening Shenzhen and other three coastal cities in South China as special economic regions and then dozens of economic and technological development zones in the 1980s, the country introduced free trade zones in the early 1990s in 15 coast cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Tianjin.
These specially carved out cities and zones served as the country's centers to embrace foreign investments and international way of economic and trade practice.
Often located around major seaports, free trade zones are said to be "inside the territory but outside customs," -- companies registered here are exempt from complex customs regulation and tariffs and value-added taxes; they also enjoy a series of preferential treatment as in other special economic areas.
Since the local governments spent about 40 billion yuan (US$4.8 billion) to build the free trade zones in areas totaling 22 kilometers, a large number of domestic and overseas companies have settled down there.
By now, the contractual investments have amounted to more than US$16 billion. But people were worrying that when China enters WTO and gradually lowers the high tariffs to a moderate level, the free trade zone's duty-free policies may lose their edge.
"The zones are facing challenges when the country gradually lifts quotas of various imported goods and brings the tariff to a relatively low level," said Zhong Weilin, deputy director of the administrative committee of Shanghai Free Trade Zone.
He was attending a seminar last month with representatives from other 14 free trade zones, who gathered in Shenzhen to discuss the future of the free trade zones after China's admission into WTO. The companies might reconsider where their investment should go when preferential policies on duties or taxies are no longer too much different, Zhang said.
But Feng Zhijiang, who was also present at the Shenzhen seminar last month, said the tariffs are not the major element for free trade zones to attract foreign investments. The meaning of free trade zones' existence lies in their efficiency in processing goods, the speed to finish the customs procedures, the capability of cargo flow distributions, Feng said.
The free trade zones, which often have convenient geographic advantages and long been good at cargo processing and distribution, will develop themselves into distribution and trade centers for imports and exports.
He said it was true that the decade-old free trade zones in China still had much to do as the country lacks experience and a set of laws were still not in place. In the developed countries the free trade zones are directly administrated by the national governments, and all activities are governed by law.
While in China, the zones are watched by local governments, and what can be referred to are only some policies and regulations. It is urgent for the central government to draft a law regarding free trade zones so as to adjust the domestic trade zones onto the international track when the country joins WTO, Feng said."
The background reports in this post just scratch the surface. How about if the DIA and the CIA and Department of State's intelligence branch start earning their paychecks by doing a little more digging?
What worries me is that many Americans (including those in the news media) still talk about 9/11 as happening "out of the blue." Yet the only thing al Qaeda didn't do to warn of an impending attack was take out an advertisement in The New York Times.
I recall a weatherman observing that there is no such thing as a lightning bolt "out of the blue." If lighting appears, there is a cloud -- maybe high up, but lightning doesn't fall from a clear blue sky.
I do not know how the US can formulate intelligent defense/foreign policy for this era, if we continue to wear blinders while analyzing threats to US security, which includes the present instability in China.
China's central goverment is pushing their people too hard, too fast, in the effort to accommodate foreign business and the WTO. This has resulted in one disaster after another, which has led to widescale riots. Washington needs to take all this into account.
None of the above means that there wasn't a mysterious lethal disease outbreak in Shenzhen followed by an equally mysterious outbreak in Sichuan province. Indeed, none of it means Patricia Doyle's speculation is wrong; i.e., that there wasn't a biowar experiment in China that somehow jumped the lab. It means that the Pentagon, DOS and CIA need to get their act together. Else Americans will be sitting ducks for another bolt "out of the blue."
[Re yesterday's post] You wrote, "So, what type of disease presents with a symptom of a "dissolving" body along with symptoms that include vomiting, stomachache (and after death) a "large area hemorrhage inside the body?" (Para. 5) A blood-borne disease so highly infectious and lethal that within short order it killed two doctors who were exposed to the patient's blood? (Para. 7)"
Well, necrotizing fasciitis comes to mind:
http://www.nnff.org/nnff_factsheet.htm
It has the symptoms described, can be blood-borne or airborne, and can be very fast and lethal.
Could it be transmitted to the doctors? I have no idea about what procedures and sterile conditions are in Chinese hospitals but I can guess.
Dave Schuler
The Glittering Eye"
Dear Dave:
That's interesting, particularly with regard to some accounts of "very fast" death in Sichuan in relation to the mystery "pig disease" and which (if my memory serves) mentioned a "melted" or dissolved body in some cases.
However, with regard to the accounts relating to the outbreak in Shenzhen, Guangdong I think we can rule out necrotizing fasciitis (NF). I might have made this clearer if I had qualified the statement you quote by adding, "and which fits with the timeline of symptom onset and patient death mentioned in the translation of the March 25 Epoch Times article."
If untreated NF certainly kills fast; it kills too fast to make it a likely candidate for the illness described in the translation.
However, for the benefit of the readers I'll examine the NF angle as it might apply to the victims discussed in the translation. First let's review two timelines of the symptoms for necrotizing fasciitis (early and advanced stage) from the link you sent (emphasis throughout mine):
EARLY SYMPTOMS (usually within 24 hours):
> [...] The pain is usually disproportionate to the injury and may start as something akin to a muscle pull, but becomes more and more painful.
> Flu like symptoms begin to occur, such as diarrhea, nausea, fever, confusion, dizziness, weakness, and general malaise.
> Intense thirst occurs as the body becomes dehydrated.
> The biggest symptom is all of these symptoms combined. In general you will probably feel worse than you've ever felt and not understand why.
CRITICAL SYMPTOMS (usually within 4-5 days):
> Blood pressure will drop severely.
> The body begins to go into toxic shock from the toxins the bacteria are giving off.
> Unconsciousness will occur as the body becomes too weak to fight off this infection.
Now to the account of the "Ebola-like" outbreak in Shenzhen:
"2. According to this insider, in early January 2005, when conducting a suppressing smuggling campaign in Daya Bay, custom officials of Shenzhen City encountered a ship with unknown nationality.
3. The officials boarded the ship to investigate and the black sailors on the ship physically assaulted the Chinese officials, injuring two of them. One of the injured officials, Mr. Yang, died mysteriously in late February."
So, exposure is in early January and death occurs in late February. Yet if not properly treated, necrotizing fasciitis presents with critical symptoms (followed by death) within 4-5 days after infection! So Mr. Yang would have needed to be a superman to have lasted as long as he did, if he had contracted NF.
To return to the account:
"4. The other injured official, Mr. Jiang, is also missing after being forcibly taken away from Tianmian Garden located in the center of Shenzhen City.
5. It was revealed that the reason for their quarantine was that Mr. Yang's inamorata [*] vomited and had stomachache among with other symptoms in her residence in Buji district in early February. Two weeks after she was sent to a hospital in Buji district for treatment, she died mysteriously inside the hospital. Upon death, she had large area hemorrhage inside her body."
Here we find another superman -- superwoman, in this case. Mr. Yang's mistress managed to survive at least a week longer than a diagnosis of necrotizing fasciitis would warrant.
Now we turn to the sailors who presumably started it all. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we don't know how long the "black" sailors were on the smuggling ship in Daya Bay before it was boarded by the unfortunate Messrs. Yang and Jiang.
But because there is no mention of the Ebola-like outbreak occurring in Shenzhen prior to the custom officials' encounter with the sailors on board the mystery ship, we can tentatively assume that if the illness they carried was NF, they must have contracted it a very few hours prior to the Chinese custom officials boarding their ship.
(If they'd had NF longer than a few hours, we must also credit the sailors with superhuman powers, which is what it would take to put up a vigorous fist fight while experiencing "diarrhea, nausea, fever, confusion, dizziness, weakness, and general malaise.")
So if we want to consider NF, there is a tiny window of opportunity before the story of the black sailors collapses into a Fish Tale. And there is no window of opportunity for the account of how Mr. Yang and his fancy woman met their death. If they were not properly treated for NF (and clearly they were not) they couldn't have lasted more than week.
On the other hand if they were infected with a strain of Ebola, the story also becomes hard to swallow when we consider that the doctor's eyewitness account of a "melted body" does not square with the symptoms of Ebola.
Also, we must consider that a doctor with "many years' experience," as he is described in the account, would recognize a gangrenous condition, which is what NF produces if untreated.
"Gangrene is necrosis and subsequent decay of body tissues caused by infection or thrombosis or lack of blood flow. It is usually the result of critically insufficient blood supply sometimes caused by injury and subsequent contamination with bacteria. This condition is most common in the extremities." From Wikipedia article on gangrene.)
NF presents with a gangrenous condition in the advanced or middle stage of infection (from the link you sent):
ADVANCED SYMPTOMS (usually within 3-4 days):
> The limb, or area of body experiencing pain begins to swell, and may show a purplish rash.
> The limb may begin to have large, dark marks, that will become blisters filled with blackish fluid.
> The wound may actually begin to appear necrotic with a bluish, white, or dark, mottled, flaky appearance.
Again, any doctor with long experience in a big city hospital would be familiar with gangrene. Unless we want to consider the theory that reader "Liz" put forward in August, which is that doctors in communist countries can have such specialized training that they can fail to recognize even the most elementary medical condition outside the specialization!
However, I think Liz was referring to communism's Cold War era. In any case, Shenzhen is a 'special business/free trade' zone, which means the city has many non-Chinese (Western, Singaporean, etc.) businesspeople in residence.
That doesn't mean state-of-the-art hospitals exist in Shenzhen but it's likely that hospitals in the city have a staff that could at least recognize a gangrenous condition, and that they'd treated instances of such. Yet the doctor of "many years' experience" who provided the account said that he'd never seen anything like the illness he treated.
If we rule out Ebola virus and flesh-eating bacteria, what are we left with? Was there any kind of disease outbreak in Shenzhen city in January 2005? I dunno, Dave. One thing I know with certainty: Pundita is getting tired of doing the kind of homework that US intelligence agencies find beneath them.
They had us off and running with the reports about an Ebola disease outbreak in Sichuan. Before sounding the alarm, the intel agencies needed to consider that without a shred of evidence in hand, they should have immdiately switched to a wide-angle lens when examining the situation.
For example, they needed to look at China's pork industry and look into the possibility of an industrial accident. Or even deliberate poisoning by big pork producers trying to put the Mom & Pop pig breeders in Sichuan out of business.
All that is baseline considerations when analyzing reports of a lethal, mysterious, highly infectious disease -- and reports of mass deaths in a province in China (Sichuan) that was rendered off-limits to foreign reporters, the CDC and WHO.
There doesn't seem to have been much progress since 9/11 with our intelligence analysis capabilities. Doesn't our government understand that they can't leave it up to bloggers and private intel companies such as Statfor to do the background digging for them?
In this era the US needs intelligence analysts who are aces at integrating a broad spectrum of data. The technology for collecting and massaging such data is, of course, already here. What seems to be lacking is the generalist viewpoint, which is needed for analyzing broad-spectrum data.
Without a strong representation of the generalist viewpoint, intel agencies are doing threat assessment in purely military terms, which cuts out many key factors. The upshot is US defense/foreign policy based on a skewed viewpoint.
With that off my chest, we'll buckle down to a little homework. It's time to take a closer look at the people who reportedly caught the disease mentioned in the March 25 Epoch Times article.
And ask whether there might have been anything else going on in Shenzhen city in the period from early January to March 25 -- anything other than a smuggling ship found in Daya Bay and a reported outbreak of Ebola virus infection.
So here we return to Pundita's "You're telling me this because?" rule of thumb for Americans (to include intelligence analysts) trying to make sense out of foreign policy/defense news -- in particular news relating to China.
Whatever the nature of the illness that reportedly broke out in Shenzhen city, there was also an outbreak of the Casablanca Factor. ("Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.")
I note that Yang and Jiang (reportedly stricken with an Ebola-like illness after a scuffle with "black" sailors in Daya Bay) were customs officials.
Not to speak ill of the dead and/or missing, but we can assume they were particularly corrupt officials. (From close reading of Epoch Times you'll note that keeping "fancy women" seems to be code in China for CCP officials widely known to be especially corrupt.)
So it might be worthwhile to take a look at Daya Bay and the Shenzhen free trade/'special' business zone, and recall the struggle between China's central authority and local authorities regarding who controls customs.
What is Daya Bay?:
Huizhou Daya Bay Economic and Technological Development Zone was approved as state-level development zone in May 1993. The zone has a developed area of 6.98 square kilometers.The March 25 Epoch Times article on an outbreak of Ebola virus in Shenzhen appeared just five days after a trade meeting ended in Shenzhen.
Geographical Location
Huizhou Daya Bay Economic & Technological Development Area is situated in the southern part of Huizhou, Guangdong, facing the South Sea, neighboring Shantou on its east and connected to Shenzhen on its west. It is 60 kilometers away from Hong Kong by land, 47 nautical miles away from Zhonghuan wharf of Hong Kong.
It will be only 36 kilometers away from the downtown of Shenzhen after the class 1 highway is finished along the coastline between Macau and Shenzhen. The Zone is situated within the economic belt along the line of Beijing-Kowloon Railway and the center of the developed Pearl River Delta economic circle. [...]
The free trade zones have cut hugely into profits for customs officials who spent generations slapping extra duties on imports as a means to pad their meager salary.
And as with Sichuan's stick-in-the-mud pig farmers, if you'll pardon the expression, local time-honored ways of doing business in China have run smack-dab into the central government's rush to modernize China's business and trade practices.
Such a rush anywhere can be very hard on the people long settled in the old ways. In China, however, standing in the way of progress can be very dangerous to your life. Reference bao jia. When the central authority in China orders a local boss to remove obstructionists, they mean -- remove by any means whatsoever.
In other words, it might not be coincidental that out of all the towns in China and all Chinese in China, it happened to be two Daya Bay customs officials who caught a mysterious Ebola-like aliment and died or were never heard from again along with their families and fancy women.
In the final wash, the Epoch Times article threw more light on the situation with China's customs officials than a mystery disease. Messrs. Yang and Jiang were conveniently out of the way by the time an important American trade delegation showed up in Shenzhen city. Pundita doesn't need to consult her crystal ball to know that the untimely disappearance of customs officials, their families and fancy women was not lost on the rest of China's customs officials.
How important was the visiting delegation? It received press coverage from the China Daily, Bloomberg Asia, the Shenzhen Daily, and the Yangcheng Evening News.
FTASA and GKDA TRIP REPORT
Guangdong Province, China
March 12-20, 2005
Free Trade Alliance San Antonio (FTASA)
Greater Kelly Development Authority (GKDA)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Representatives of the GKDA (Bruce Miller, CEO and Jorge Canavati, Director of Marketing) and FTASA (Blake Hastings, Executive Director) traveled to the region Guangdong Province the week of March 12-20, 2005. The visit was conducted in coordination with the annual Asia Pacific American Chambers of Commerce held in Guangzhou, Guangdong. In addition, Tom Loeffler and Jose Martinez of the San Antonio-based Loeffler Group also participated in the conference.
During the visit, the San Antonio team met with officials from trade promotion and ecnomic development entities, provincial and local governments, and manufacturing and logistics companies. Special thanks go to the First Washington Asia (Holdings) ... in Guangzhou and their two principals Mr. Harley Seyedin and Mrs. Sun Hui for their tremendous support and help in arranging a very productive agenda for the FTASA and GKDA. In addition, thanks also go to the American Chamber of Commerce in Guangdong for their support and conference arrangements.
Trip Goals
There were four primary objectives of the trip:
1) Research – to provide the GKDA and the FTASA with a clearer
understanding of the trade and investment potential for KellyUSA and San
Antonio within the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of Guangdong Province;
2) San Antonio and KellyUSA Awareness - to begin creating an awareness of San Antonio and KellyUSA as competitive alternatives for Chinese export manufacturers seeking to establish new sales and distribution channels/ locations in the United States;
3) Strategic Relationships - to develop collaborative relationships with trade promotion entities in the Guangdong region which can facilitate further trade
and investment development efforts of the GKDA and FTASA;
4) Representation Feasibility [...]
Before plowing through the rest of the above report, you might want to glance through this history of Free Trade Zones in China from a 2001 China Daily article. This will help us understand the problems faced by customs officials just trying to make extra dough and pay the bills for their fancy women:
"China's entry into the World Trade Organization will not mean the end of its 15 free trade zones but a chance for their improvement and perfection, according to an official with the administration of Tianjin Port Free Trade Zone.
Feng Zhijiang, deputy director of the administrative committee of the free trade zone, said, "Free trade zone is still a popular thing in the world, and it will play a more important role in China as the country completely opens up to the outside world."
About 50 kilometers from the city of Tianjin and 170 kilometers from Beijing, the seven-square-kilometer Tianjin Port Free Trade Zone has developed from a bleak sea shore to a lucrative home to about 4,000 domestic and overseas enterprises in 10 years.
By the end of 2000, the trade zone had attracted about US$5 billion investments, ranking after only Shanghai Waigaoqiao in the country. About 80 percent of the investments were foreign investments.
After opening Shenzhen and other three coastal cities in South China as special economic regions and then dozens of economic and technological development zones in the 1980s, the country introduced free trade zones in the early 1990s in 15 coast cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Tianjin.
These specially carved out cities and zones served as the country's centers to embrace foreign investments and international way of economic and trade practice.
Often located around major seaports, free trade zones are said to be "inside the territory but outside customs," -- companies registered here are exempt from complex customs regulation and tariffs and value-added taxes; they also enjoy a series of preferential treatment as in other special economic areas.
Since the local governments spent about 40 billion yuan (US$4.8 billion) to build the free trade zones in areas totaling 22 kilometers, a large number of domestic and overseas companies have settled down there.
By now, the contractual investments have amounted to more than US$16 billion. But people were worrying that when China enters WTO and gradually lowers the high tariffs to a moderate level, the free trade zone's duty-free policies may lose their edge.
"The zones are facing challenges when the country gradually lifts quotas of various imported goods and brings the tariff to a relatively low level," said Zhong Weilin, deputy director of the administrative committee of Shanghai Free Trade Zone.
He was attending a seminar last month with representatives from other 14 free trade zones, who gathered in Shenzhen to discuss the future of the free trade zones after China's admission into WTO. The companies might reconsider where their investment should go when preferential policies on duties or taxies are no longer too much different, Zhang said.
But Feng Zhijiang, who was also present at the Shenzhen seminar last month, said the tariffs are not the major element for free trade zones to attract foreign investments. The meaning of free trade zones' existence lies in their efficiency in processing goods, the speed to finish the customs procedures, the capability of cargo flow distributions, Feng said.
The free trade zones, which often have convenient geographic advantages and long been good at cargo processing and distribution, will develop themselves into distribution and trade centers for imports and exports.
He said it was true that the decade-old free trade zones in China still had much to do as the country lacks experience and a set of laws were still not in place. In the developed countries the free trade zones are directly administrated by the national governments, and all activities are governed by law.
While in China, the zones are watched by local governments, and what can be referred to are only some policies and regulations. It is urgent for the central government to draft a law regarding free trade zones so as to adjust the domestic trade zones onto the international track when the country joins WTO, Feng said."
The background reports in this post just scratch the surface. How about if the DIA and the CIA and Department of State's intelligence branch start earning their paychecks by doing a little more digging?
What worries me is that many Americans (including those in the news media) still talk about 9/11 as happening "out of the blue." Yet the only thing al Qaeda didn't do to warn of an impending attack was take out an advertisement in The New York Times.
I recall a weatherman observing that there is no such thing as a lightning bolt "out of the blue." If lighting appears, there is a cloud -- maybe high up, but lightning doesn't fall from a clear blue sky.
I do not know how the US can formulate intelligent defense/foreign policy for this era, if we continue to wear blinders while analyzing threats to US security, which includes the present instability in China.
China's central goverment is pushing their people too hard, too fast, in the effort to accommodate foreign business and the WTO. This has resulted in one disaster after another, which has led to widescale riots. Washington needs to take all this into account.
None of the above means that there wasn't a mysterious lethal disease outbreak in Shenzhen followed by an equally mysterious outbreak in Sichuan province. Indeed, none of it means Patricia Doyle's speculation is wrong; i.e., that there wasn't a biowar experiment in China that somehow jumped the lab. It means that the Pentagon, DOS and CIA need to get their act together. Else Americans will be sitting ducks for another bolt "out of the blue."
Friday, September 30
China's Ebola virus reports: finally, a break in the case
On September 24, after more than a month of reasonably patient waiting (and with a little prodding) I met with success. An Epoch Times employee sent an English translation of their Chinese-language March 25 report about an Ebola outbreak in Shenzen, in China's Guangdong Province.
Readers who slogged through the August Pundita essays on the Mystery Illness/Pig Disease outbreak in China would not require explanation about why I considered the March 25 article a key piece of the puzzle. Without further introduction here is the translation; I invite new readers to follow along as best they can. (Paragraph numbering is my addition.)
"Ebola Emerged in China, the Authority Tightly Blockaded the Flow of Information
March 25, 2005
The Epoch Times
[Translated from original text found at:
http://www.dajiyuan.com/gb/5/3/25/n865227.htm ]
1. According to an insider from China's customhouse in Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province, Ebola virus (African hemorrhagic fever) caused several people's deaths. The authority tried very hard to blockade the flow of information.
2. According to this insider, in early January 2005, when conducting a suppressing smuggling campaign in Daya Bay, custom officials of Shenzhen City encountered a ship with unknown nationality.
3. The officials boarded the ship to investigate and the black sailors on the ship physically assaulted the Chinese officials, injuring two of them. One of the injured officials, Mr. Yang, died mysteriously in late February; his wife and son were put under quarantine immediately after his death. To date, their whereabouts are still unknown.
4. The other injured official, Mr. Jiang, is also missing after being forcibly taken away from Tianmian Garden located in the center of Shenzhen City.
5. It was revealed that the reason for their quarantine was that Mr. Yang's inamorata [*] vomited and had stomachache among with other symptoms in her residence in Buji district in early February. Two weeks after she was sent to a hospital in Buji district for treatment, she died mysteriously inside the hospital. Upon death, she had large area hemorrhage inside her body.
6. Two doctors involved in resuing [sic] her later developed same symptoms and died afterwards. Shenzhen authority immediately sealed off the hospital and took measures to prevent the outside world as well as customhouse related departments from knowing the truth.
7. According to an insider from the hospital, as a doctor with many years' experience, he had never seen such diseases [sic] before. When the patient developed this disease, her body was just like being dissolved. It was very similar to Ebola disease which recently emerged in Africa. Moreover, the route of infection is mostly through blood contact. The two doctors who died after treating the patient had had blood contacts with the patient.
8. As far as the insider knows, the other officials involved in that specific suppressing smuggling campaign don't have any symptoms yet, but they are forcibly put under quarantine.
9. Shenzhen authority had conducted a disinfection for Mr. Jiang's residence and forcibly taken away several people who had close connections with Mr. Jiang. Police had arrested and detained several inamoratas of Mr. Jiang, which might be only a partial list of his fancy women.
10. To date, several death cases have emerged and numerous people are missing as a result of this disease. Authority in Shenzhen City has issued orders to seal off the flow of information about this disease and demanded that when being asked, it should be described as AIDS. However, the authority did an investigation on epidemic prevention in several districts such as Buji, Tianmian, Gangxia, Shabutou, Xiabumiao and Badengjie. Patients who show abnormal symptoms are strictly monitored.
11. During this round of infection, the route of infection is completely via blood contacts. No cases have been seen as a result of infection via respiratory tract. However, because of the complexity of Shenzhen region and the mutability of viruses, once a variety of virus appears as contagious via respiratory tract, an outbreak of Ebola is very likely to occur.
12. A public health expert said the irresponsible approach adopted by the authority may well cause the outbreak of Ebola just like the outbreak of SARS in 2003; however, the harm brought by Ebola can be much more detrimental."
* From the report's second reference to "inamorata" it seems the translator is referring to Yang's mistress.
* * * * * * * * *
So we have another bunch of anecdotal reports related by unnamed sources to add to the pile. Is there anything of substance we can glean from the article? Yes, there is, if we study a detailed medical discussion about human symptoms of Ebola virus infection found in the Ebola article at Answers.com.
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Philippe Calain, MD, Chief Epidemiologist, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Special Pathogens Branch, Kikwit 1995:
"At the end of the [Ebola virus] disease the patient does not look, from the outside, as horrible as you can read in some books. They are not melting. They are not full of blood. They're in shock, muscular shock.
"They are not unconscious, but you would say 'obtunded', dull, quiet, very tired. Very few were hemorrhaging. Hemorrhage is not the main symptom. Less than half of the patients had some kind of hemorrhage. But the ones that bled, died."
Now let's return to Paragraph 7 of the March 25 article (emphasis mine):
7. "According to an insider from the hospital, as a doctor with many years' experience, he had never seen such diseases [sic] before. When the patient developed this disease, her body was just like being dissolved. It was very similar to Ebola disease which recently emerged in Africa. [...]"
So we arrive at a glaring discrepancy. According to a MD who is very knowledgeable about Ebola virus symptoms, there is no melting of the patient's body -- "melting" a term that can be used interchangeably with "dissolving."
According to a MD "with many years' experience," his reported eyewitness account is that a patient's body was "just like being dissolved" in a fashion "very similar to Ebola disease..."
According to Dr. Calain's medical opinion, the Chinese doctor could not have witnessed a symptom in the patient that was akin to Ebola virus infection.
It's possible there is an illness that causes clearly perceivable melting or dissolution of the victim's body, but this would not be Ebola. Yet why would a learned doctor deliver a misdiagnosis? For insights we return to Answers.com:
The Ebola virus was first popularized by novelist Richard Preston in his medical thriller, The Hot Zone, an exciting novel based on the Ebola outbreaks in Reston, Virginia and Central Africa.
The novel is significant because it is very dramatic and yet attempts to portray itself as a factual account of events, which has led to much misunderstanding about this virus from the general public and popular press.
It is important to note that ... Preston's novel was placed in the non-fiction section at many bookstores. [...]
Unfortunately, due to exaggerations in The Hot Zone and probably Hollywood films like Outbreak, it can be difficult for non-virologists to separate fact from fiction. Especially when the popular press compounds the problem by treating a highly dramatized story as if it were real.
Among certain biologists/virologists Mr. Preston is not highly regarded. A fifth strain of Ebola known as 'Ebola Preston' has been reported, "which attacks via print and visual media" (Ed Regis), and where "Bricks of bad information and fear-mongering set up a highly-efficient, deadly cycle of hysteria replication in the populace. The public hemorrhages, spilling hysteria to the next unwitting victim. Fear gushes from every media orifice. No one is safe from the hype." (Brian Hjelle)"
From all the above, we're left to puzzle over the Chinese doctor's account, which is not actually a description of Ebola virus symptoms. So, what type of disease presents with a symptom of a "dissolving" body along with symptoms that include vomiting, stomachache (and after death) a "large area hemorrhage inside the body?" (Para. 5) A blood-borne disease so highly infectious and lethal that within short order it killed two doctors who were exposed to the patient's blood? (Para. 7)
We also have to wonder about the sailors on the smuggler's ship -- a ship of unknown embarkation point, but manned by sailors of seemingly African origin; men who were hale enough to put up a fight with Chinese officials who boarded the ship. We don't know how long the ship was at sea before the officials boarded. Yet given the 2-21 day incubation period of Ebola, it's within the realm of possibility that a sailor in the early stage of Ebola virus infection would have enough energy to put up a vigorous fight.
However, my credulity is finally strained to the limit with a review of Dr. Wang's account. He said with certainty that the virus samples from Sichuan he analyzed in early June evidenced an Ebola strain.
So here we have an extremely rare African disease (just how rare, see the Answers.com article) but reportedly it appears in China -- first in Guangdong then in short order in Sichuan province.
One can see how those who look for biowar lab explanations for unusual disease outbreaks would seize on the Ebola virus story. But it does not seem there was an Ebola virus outbreak in Guangdong province. It seems there was an outbreak of Preston virus.
Readers who slogged through the August Pundita essays on the Mystery Illness/Pig Disease outbreak in China would not require explanation about why I considered the March 25 article a key piece of the puzzle. Without further introduction here is the translation; I invite new readers to follow along as best they can. (Paragraph numbering is my addition.)
"Ebola Emerged in China, the Authority Tightly Blockaded the Flow of Information
March 25, 2005
The Epoch Times
[Translated from original text found at:
http://www.dajiyuan.com/gb/5/3/25/n865227.htm ]
1. According to an insider from China's customhouse in Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province, Ebola virus (African hemorrhagic fever) caused several people's deaths. The authority tried very hard to blockade the flow of information.
2. According to this insider, in early January 2005, when conducting a suppressing smuggling campaign in Daya Bay, custom officials of Shenzhen City encountered a ship with unknown nationality.
3. The officials boarded the ship to investigate and the black sailors on the ship physically assaulted the Chinese officials, injuring two of them. One of the injured officials, Mr. Yang, died mysteriously in late February; his wife and son were put under quarantine immediately after his death. To date, their whereabouts are still unknown.
4. The other injured official, Mr. Jiang, is also missing after being forcibly taken away from Tianmian Garden located in the center of Shenzhen City.
5. It was revealed that the reason for their quarantine was that Mr. Yang's inamorata [*] vomited and had stomachache among with other symptoms in her residence in Buji district in early February. Two weeks after she was sent to a hospital in Buji district for treatment, she died mysteriously inside the hospital. Upon death, she had large area hemorrhage inside her body.
6. Two doctors involved in resuing [sic] her later developed same symptoms and died afterwards. Shenzhen authority immediately sealed off the hospital and took measures to prevent the outside world as well as customhouse related departments from knowing the truth.
7. According to an insider from the hospital, as a doctor with many years' experience, he had never seen such diseases [sic] before. When the patient developed this disease, her body was just like being dissolved. It was very similar to Ebola disease which recently emerged in Africa. Moreover, the route of infection is mostly through blood contact. The two doctors who died after treating the patient had had blood contacts with the patient.
8. As far as the insider knows, the other officials involved in that specific suppressing smuggling campaign don't have any symptoms yet, but they are forcibly put under quarantine.
9. Shenzhen authority had conducted a disinfection for Mr. Jiang's residence and forcibly taken away several people who had close connections with Mr. Jiang. Police had arrested and detained several inamoratas of Mr. Jiang, which might be only a partial list of his fancy women.
10. To date, several death cases have emerged and numerous people are missing as a result of this disease. Authority in Shenzhen City has issued orders to seal off the flow of information about this disease and demanded that when being asked, it should be described as AIDS. However, the authority did an investigation on epidemic prevention in several districts such as Buji, Tianmian, Gangxia, Shabutou, Xiabumiao and Badengjie. Patients who show abnormal symptoms are strictly monitored.
11. During this round of infection, the route of infection is completely via blood contacts. No cases have been seen as a result of infection via respiratory tract. However, because of the complexity of Shenzhen region and the mutability of viruses, once a variety of virus appears as contagious via respiratory tract, an outbreak of Ebola is very likely to occur.
12. A public health expert said the irresponsible approach adopted by the authority may well cause the outbreak of Ebola just like the outbreak of SARS in 2003; however, the harm brought by Ebola can be much more detrimental."
* From the report's second reference to "inamorata" it seems the translator is referring to Yang's mistress.
* * * * * * * * *
So we have another bunch of anecdotal reports related by unnamed sources to add to the pile. Is there anything of substance we can glean from the article? Yes, there is, if we study a detailed medical discussion about human symptoms of Ebola virus infection found in the Ebola article at Answers.com.
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Philippe Calain, MD, Chief Epidemiologist, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Special Pathogens Branch, Kikwit 1995:
"At the end of the [Ebola virus] disease the patient does not look, from the outside, as horrible as you can read in some books. They are not melting. They are not full of blood. They're in shock, muscular shock.
"They are not unconscious, but you would say 'obtunded', dull, quiet, very tired. Very few were hemorrhaging. Hemorrhage is not the main symptom. Less than half of the patients had some kind of hemorrhage. But the ones that bled, died."
Now let's return to Paragraph 7 of the March 25 article (emphasis mine):
7. "According to an insider from the hospital, as a doctor with many years' experience, he had never seen such diseases [sic] before. When the patient developed this disease, her body was just like being dissolved. It was very similar to Ebola disease which recently emerged in Africa. [...]"
So we arrive at a glaring discrepancy. According to a MD who is very knowledgeable about Ebola virus symptoms, there is no melting of the patient's body -- "melting" a term that can be used interchangeably with "dissolving."
According to a MD "with many years' experience," his reported eyewitness account is that a patient's body was "just like being dissolved" in a fashion "very similar to Ebola disease..."
According to Dr. Calain's medical opinion, the Chinese doctor could not have witnessed a symptom in the patient that was akin to Ebola virus infection.
It's possible there is an illness that causes clearly perceivable melting or dissolution of the victim's body, but this would not be Ebola. Yet why would a learned doctor deliver a misdiagnosis? For insights we return to Answers.com:
The Ebola virus was first popularized by novelist Richard Preston in his medical thriller, The Hot Zone, an exciting novel based on the Ebola outbreaks in Reston, Virginia and Central Africa.
The novel is significant because it is very dramatic and yet attempts to portray itself as a factual account of events, which has led to much misunderstanding about this virus from the general public and popular press.
It is important to note that ... Preston's novel was placed in the non-fiction section at many bookstores. [...]
Unfortunately, due to exaggerations in The Hot Zone and probably Hollywood films like Outbreak, it can be difficult for non-virologists to separate fact from fiction. Especially when the popular press compounds the problem by treating a highly dramatized story as if it were real.
Among certain biologists/virologists Mr. Preston is not highly regarded. A fifth strain of Ebola known as 'Ebola Preston' has been reported, "which attacks via print and visual media" (Ed Regis), and where "Bricks of bad information and fear-mongering set up a highly-efficient, deadly cycle of hysteria replication in the populace. The public hemorrhages, spilling hysteria to the next unwitting victim. Fear gushes from every media orifice. No one is safe from the hype." (Brian Hjelle)"
From all the above, we're left to puzzle over the Chinese doctor's account, which is not actually a description of Ebola virus symptoms. So, what type of disease presents with a symptom of a "dissolving" body along with symptoms that include vomiting, stomachache (and after death) a "large area hemorrhage inside the body?" (Para. 5) A blood-borne disease so highly infectious and lethal that within short order it killed two doctors who were exposed to the patient's blood? (Para. 7)
We also have to wonder about the sailors on the smuggler's ship -- a ship of unknown embarkation point, but manned by sailors of seemingly African origin; men who were hale enough to put up a fight with Chinese officials who boarded the ship. We don't know how long the ship was at sea before the officials boarded. Yet given the 2-21 day incubation period of Ebola, it's within the realm of possibility that a sailor in the early stage of Ebola virus infection would have enough energy to put up a vigorous fight.
However, my credulity is finally strained to the limit with a review of Dr. Wang's account. He said with certainty that the virus samples from Sichuan he analyzed in early June evidenced an Ebola strain.
So here we have an extremely rare African disease (just how rare, see the Answers.com article) but reportedly it appears in China -- first in Guangdong then in short order in Sichuan province.
One can see how those who look for biowar lab explanations for unusual disease outbreaks would seize on the Ebola virus story. But it does not seem there was an Ebola virus outbreak in Guangdong province. It seems there was an outbreak of Preston virus.
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