|
[Local police departments are the feet of clay that will sink the whole police state concept. Trust me on this. Because if the federal government attempts to impose broader martial law, you’ll see cops pointing guns at cops. And every real cop I have ever known understands that this must never happen. That does not include cases of criminal behavior by rogue police. I’m talking about a fight between cops over what the law is. We who have carried badge and gun have all pondered this and understood that when that happens it’s all over for everything anyway. When the “revolution” gets to this point it will have won.
Police will even fight police within municipal departments if this happens, but only for a very, very short time. Then probably both factions will turn and fight the Feds or simply to protect their own communities; the places where they live. The places they don’t want to see destroyed. The reason all these other cops have gone to New Orleans is because they know that their city might be next. They don’t trust Uncle Sam and they’re going to want some back up when their turn comes. Unlike most of America, they’ll get it.
The two reported suicides of New Orleans Police may have done more to change the course of history than we will ever know. – MCR]
Duty Binds Officers Who Have Gone to Help After Storm
By Al Baker
September 11, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11police.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
NEW ORLEANS, La., Sept. 10 - On Toulouse and North Rampart Streets in the French Quarter, a Michigan police car nosed behind a New York City Police Department truck parked outside the New Orleans Police Department's First District.
"They're coming from Michigan and New York and everywhere," Aaron Wiltz, a patrolman with the New Orleans Police Department, said as he surveyed the scene. "It's just awesome. Just to see them sitting next to each other; if I had a word for it, I'd tell you, but it's just nice to see."
Almost two weeks after the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina, a hodgepodge army of law enforcement officers from around the country have converged on this city to help its besieged police force restore order. About 10,000 local, state and federal officers - from close-in locations in like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas and Georgia, and as far away as Illinois, New Mexico and California - are patrolling the streets and helping the search-and-rescue efforts.
"The men and women who are here know their jobs and do it very well," said Capt. Marlon A. Defillo, a spokesman for the New Orleans Police Department. "A robbery in New Orleans is the same as a robbery in Los Angeles. All you are doing is changing the name of the locale."
For days after Hurricane Katrina blew in and tore the city apart, communications for Officer Wiltz and his colleagues came undone. Cellular antennas bent like bows or fell, causing cellphones to sputter and go silent; and the roots of upended trees tore out underground wires, essentially reducing police radios to hunks of plastic.
Some in the city exploited the breakdowns by forming gangs that spread violence. New Orleans experienced a crime wave, with reports of looting, rapes, assaults and the theft of entire inventories from gun and ammunition shops.
The New Orleans police force can normally muster 1,500 officers. But scores of them were off duty or cut off by the storm and flood waters. Police officials also said that a number of officers resigned or simply walked off their posts in the days after the storm. Last weekend, two officers committed suicide.
Offers of help from other law enforcement agencies came within hours of the storm, but it took days in some cases for the waters to recede enough to allow the reinforcements to reach the city.
Visiting officers set up makeshift camps and emergency operations centers in the parishes around New Orleans and beyond.
The 303-member contingent from New York City, which includes an assistant chief of police and three inspectors, have based their operations in an abandoned nursing home in Harahan, La., about 10 miles west of New Orleans.
On Wednesday, 25 vanloads of New York officers drove from Harahan into New Orleans and took up patrolling the French Quarter.
They joined a law enforcement effort that not only includes the New Orleans police, officers from other in-state jurisdictions like Baton Rouge and thousands of out-of-state officers, but also members of the National Guard.
The Guard has had an increasingly heavy presence in the city, said Captain Defillo, the spokesman for the New Orleans Police Department. At night, the troops walk in small groups in the Garden District or the French Quarter, dressed in camouflage, carrying weapons, or driving Humvees, giving the feel of a militarized zone.
Sgt. Mark G. Mix, a spokesman for the Louisiana State Police, said that about 4,000 troops from Louisiana and Arkansas were doing search and rescue and "a lot of police work."
There is a natural camaraderie between the officers. "That also holds true for the military," New York City's police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
When their beats cross, police officers and soldiers usually communicate with a wave, a smile or a quick greeting, as when a police cruiser passes a military checkpoint and the officers say: "Stay safe," or "Good evening, gents."
But bringing separate police agencies into a single city under a unified command is not without its difficulties, several officials said. Early on, the task was like trying to join bits of naturally repelling mercury.
The officers' radio frequencies were incompatible. Their jargon was different, their cultures apart and the landscape foreign.
Ron Hernandez, a New York officer who usually works in Manhattan, said he had been taken aback when he arrived in Harahan to see so many civilians with guns casually strapped to their hips.
But slowly, small groups of officers linked up and traded information. Sheriffs joined with sheriffs. State police officers gravitated toward one another and fire department officials joined other fire officials, Sergeant Mix of the Louisiana State Police said.
To help coordinate, Officer Jim Byrne, of the New York police communications division, brought hundreds of the department's radios to Louisiana. Within hours of arriving, he and his crew had linked an antenna to a mast on their temporary headquarters, a Winnebago-like truck, and mounted another antenna on a building in nearby Westwego to expand the coverage area. Phone lines from a vacant pizzeria were commandeered. A Harahan police radio was placed inside the truck to get dispatches from the local officers.
The patchwork of agencies is being held together by New Orleans police commanders at Harrah's Casino, which has been turned into a temporary command post. The casino houses the top officials from several agencies who meet each morning to deploy people.
"All the key individuals are in the room," said Captain Defillo, including Michael Holt, the special agent in charge of immigration, customs and enforcement for the federal Department of Homeland Security. "The left hand knows what the right hand knows."
It is difficult to say how long each of the agencies will remain here, or whether others will arrive.
Police officials in New Orleans said the law enforcement agencies would have to make individual decisions about how long to stay and whether to rotate their officers in and out. But Captain Defillo said it appeared the agencies were here for an indefinite stay.
"We have got no word on them leaving, none," he said. "Everyone we have spoken with is prepared for the long haul."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company 
Japan 's Rivalry With China Is Stirring a Crowded Sea
By NORIMITSU ONISHI And HOWARD W. FRENCH
September 11, 2005
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/international/asia/11taiwan.html?th&emc=th
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
TOKYO, Sept. 10 - In a muscular display of its rising military and economic might, China deployed a fleet of five warships on Friday near a gas field in the East China Sea, a potentially resource-rich area that is disputed by China and Japan.
The ships, including a guided-missile destroyer, were spotted by a Japanese military patrol plane near the Chunxiao gas field, according to the Maritime Self-Defense Forces. It is believed to be the first time that Chinese warships have been seen in that area.
Although the fleet's mission was unclear, its timing suggested that it was no coincidence. The warships appeared two days before a general election in Japan, whose results could greatly influence relations between Asia's two great powers, and weeks before China is scheduled to start producing gas in the area, against strong Japanese protests.
In Japan, where the 12-day election campaign was exclusively focused on domestic issues and on what the media described as Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's theatrical politics, the warships were a sudden reminder of its most pressing outside challenge: China.
Until Mr. Koizumi diverted voters' attention from Japan's rapidly deteriorating relationship with China, the focus for several months had been trained on the increasing diplomatic, military and economic rivalry with China - much of it taking place in the waters between the countries, filled with potentially explosive issues like oil and gas and Taiwan.
Both Japan and China are determined to wield a strong hand in the oil-rich seas and strategic shipping lanes that lie between them.
"It is like the 1930's again, when the central Pacific became a vital concern to both the United States and Japan, whose navy was expanding," said Adm. Lang Ning-li, who until his recent retirement was Taiwan's director of naval intelligence. "That means there could be conflict between China and Japan, which both see these seas as vital, and can't share this space."
Security experts from China, Japan, Taiwan and the United States say all the elements are in place for a showdown over Taiwan between Beijing and Tokyo. No one is predicting war, but Taiwan poses a permanent and unpredictable potential crisis. Washington has a close alliance with Japan, security commitments with Taiwan and a complex relationship with China that mixes rivalry with extensive economic ties.
For America, whose support of either Japan or China has historically tipped the balance in the region, the implications are enormous. The recent comments by a Chinese general that his country would use nuclear weapons against the United States if the American military intervened in a conflict over Taiwan were a sharp reminder that Taiwan's fate remains one of the region's biggest flash points. Many analysts argue that such confrontation, verbal or otherwise, could lead to a regional arms race culminating in a nuclear Japan.
Japan imports all of its oil, and because much of it passes through the seas surrounding Taiwan, feels its survival is dependent on keeping those seas stable. Chinese control of Taiwan could hurt Japan's access to oil, Japan fears. And the United States, which has pledged to defend Taiwan if it is attacked by China, would like to count on Japan's help. During the cold war, Japan conducted joint operations with the United States to keep Soviet submarines out of the Sea of Japan. The submarines are now Chinese, but the policy toward them is pure containment.
"You can come out as much as you want, unless you do something wrong," said Adm. Koichi Furusho, who served as chief of staff of Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force until January.
This cold-war view of China emerged recently in Japan, but Japan's embrace of it is one of the reasons behind the worsening relations between the countries.
During the cold war, the United States was willing to let Japan remain militarily passive as long as it remained a loyal ally, continued to buy American arms and allowed tens of thousands of American troops to be stationed on Japanese soil.
The Bush administration, more suspicious of China than its predecessor, has pushed Japan to take a more assertive stance. It has called for closer ties between the countries' militaries and defense industries and has encouraged conservative Japanese politicians who have long wanted to change the Self-Defense Forces into a full-fledged military and revise the Constitution.
In short order, the Japanese government reinterpreted the Constitution to allow it to dispatch troops to Iraq and effectively abandoned the decades-old ban against arms exports by joining the American missile defense shield.
Then Japan assumed its familiar role of junior ally to the United States in containment. In a major readjustment of its defense policy late last year, Japan redeployed its forces away from northern Japan where they were involved in the cold-war containment of Russia and reinforced Okinawa, considered crucial in the containment of China in the East China Sea. Saying that " China, which has significant influence on the region's security, is pushing forward its nuclear and missile capabilities and modernization of its navy and air force," Japan's Defense Agency labeled China a "concern."
In recent months, Japan has joined the United States in aggressively lobbying the European Union not to lift its arms embargo on China. But the strongest signal yet was Japan's tougher public stance on defending Taiwan against China.
"The joint statement had less to do with Taiwan and more to do with the rise of China, and how Japan and the United States feel a threat from China," said David Huang, Taiwan's vice chairman of mainland affairs. He added, "The joint statement is a signal to China: 'Don't push too far.' "
The United States may see its future rivalry with China as playing out on a global stage. But for Japan, the stage is Asia and the epicenter is around Taiwan.
Japan, which has always seen its lack of natural resources as its Achilles' heel, attacked Pearl Harbor after the United States imposed an oil embargo on Japan.
Most of Japan's oil is shipped through two sea lanes: one directly south of Taiwan and another farther south, which increases the shipping length by a costly two days.
"If you assume conditions are balanced now," said Mr. Furusho, the former chief of staff of Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Forces, "they would collapse as soon as Taiwan unifies with China. The sea lanes would turn all red."
For a generation, asserting control over Taiwan has been the most deeply cherished dream of Beijing's politicians. The separation of China into two parts, in this view, is an unbearable insult to the very idea of being Chinese. Because so few Chinese still feel ideologically bound to the Communist Party, reuniting Taiwan with mainland China is one of the most important ways to bind the government to its public. Standing up to Japan is another, and the two thoughts are increasingly intertwined.
China's leaders have always felt the need to tread carefully in challenging Washington over its security commitments to Taiwan, preferring to bide their time as the economy grows and the military, particularly its air force and navy, develop into world-class fighting forces. Already, by some estimates, the country has deployed 40 to 60 submarines in the East China Sea, and China is rapidly modernizing this force, acquiring quieter models from Russia and developing increasingly sophisticated nuclear submarines of its own.
But lately, China has shown no such patience with Japan and has moved swiftly to warn its neighbor in unusually blunt terms that any interference with Beijing's designs over Taiwan will be dealt with forcefully. "I would like to say calmly to Japan, the Taiwan issue is a domestic affair and a matter of life or death to us," China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, told his Japanese counterpart recently. "It is dangerous to touch China's matter of life or death."
Indeed, a potentially explosive tussle is already being played out over large natural gas reserves and potentially important oil reserves beneath the East China Sea. The two rivals disagree over how to draw the maritime dividing line between them in those waters. China has offered to jointly exploit the energy resources in the area, but Japan has refused. Tokyo, meanwhile, has asked China to share seismic data and other information, and more recently has unsuccessfully urged Beijing to freeze its plans to begin pumping gas.
Chinese officials refused several requests for comment on the issue, but Chinese legal experts say they worry that the situation could get out of hand. " China has given out warnings many times, using tough words, telling Japan not to take any dangerous actions that could disturb stability in the region," said Xiu Bin, an expert in international maritime law at Ocean University in Qingdao.
Tokyo recently upped the ante by granting a Japanese company, Teikoku Oil, the rights to test-drill in disputed waters. China, which has gas projects near the test-drilling areas, immediately protested.
No one watches the face-off more closely than Taiwan, which also has maritime territorial disputes with Japan, but cooperates with Japan and the United States in policing the region's waters.
"They are going to be colliding for the foreseeable future, and I don't see how you can avoid that," said Andrew Nien-Dzu Yang, director of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, in Taipei.
Norimitsu Onishi reported from Tokyo and Taipei, Taiwan, for this article, and Howard W. French from Taipei and Shanghai.
Water crisis looms as Himalayan glaciers melt
NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) -- Imagine a world without drinking water
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/09/09/himalayan.glaciers.reut/index.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
It's a scary thought, but scientists say the 40 percent of humanity living in South Asia and China could well be living with little drinking water within 50 years as global warming melts Himalayan glaciers, the region's main water source.
The glaciers supply 303.6 million cubic feet every year to Asian rivers, including the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, the Ganga in India, the Indus in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh and Burma's Irrawaddy.
But as global warming increases, the glaciers have been rapidly retreating, with average temperatures in the Himalayas up 1 degree Celsius since the 1970s.
A World Wide Fund report published in March said a quarter of the world's glaciers could disappear by 2050 and half by 2100.
"If the current scenario continues, there will be very little water left in the Ganga and its tributaries," Prakash Rao, climate change and energy program coordinator with the fund in India told Reuters.
"The situation here is more critical because here they depend on glaciers for drinking water while in other areas there are other sources of drinking water, not just glacial."
Experts are alarmed.
About 67 percent of the nearly 12,124 square miles of Himalayan glaciers are receding and in the long run as the ice diminishes, glacial runoffs in summer and river flows will also go down, leading to severe water shortages in the region.
The Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganga, India's holiest river, is retreating 75 feet a year. And the Khumbu Glacier in Nepal, where Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent of Everest, has lost more than 3 miles since they climbed the mountain in 1953.
"The cry in the mountains is that water has gone down and springs have dried up," Jagdish Bahadur, an expert on Himalayan glaciers.
"Global climate change has had an effect, but water has also dried up because agriculture in the mountains has increased," he said.
In Nepal, there are more than 3,000 glaciers that work as reservoirs for fresh water and another 2,000 glacial lakes.
Experts estimate numerous rivers originating in Nepal's mountains contribute about 70 percent to the pre-monsoon flow of the Ganges that snakes through neighboring India and Bangladesh.
"The glaciers are shrinking due to global warming posing a risk to water availability not only in Nepal but also in parts of South Asia," said Arun Bhakta Shrestha, an expert on Himalayan glaciers at the government Hydrology and Meteorology Department.
"But how soon or to what extent this problem will arise is difficult to say now."
Tulsi Maya, a farmer on the outskirts of Kathmandu, has never heard of global warming or its impact on the rivers in the Himalayan kingdom, but she does know that the flow of water has gone down.
"It used to overflow its banks and spill into the fields," the 85-year-old farmer said standing in her emerald green rice field as she looked at the Bishnumati river, which has ceased to be a reliable source of drinking water and irrigation.
"Maybe God is unkind and sends less water in the river. The flow of water is decreasing every year," she said standing by her grandson, Milan Dangol, who weeds the crop.
In the Indian Himalayas, there are already signs of water shortages in the summer: Tourists in the rugged mountains of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh have to carry buckets of water while trekkers say temperatures are much warmer than a decade ago.
The effect can also be seen in the rest of the country.
During the summer, thousands of people in India's villages trek for miles in search of water and even in cities water is a precious commodity, sometimes leading to street fights.
Indian scientists studying Himalayan glaciers fear an acute shortage of natural drinking water in Himachal Pradesh state based on studies of the Beas and Baspa basins from 1962 to 2001.
Two scientists from India's Space and Research Organization using remote sensing satellites found a 23 percent drop in glacial water in 19 of 30 glaciers mapped in the region.
Already, the impact of climate change is evident in the soaring summer temperatures in South Asia, which go up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and the erratic nature of the monsoon, one of the world's most widely watched phenomena.
"Our research indicates the economy of the region may be affected due to these conditions and investigations suggest that all glaciers are reducing which could create an acute scarcity of water," said Anil Kulkarni, who headed the team studying the Himachal Pradesh glaciers.
Copyright 2005 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
|
Duty Binds Officers Who Have Gone to Help After Storm