The climate debate we need to have - and alternative ways forward

I didn't assemble the list of quotations below - they appeared elsewhere -  but it shows that climate science has quite a way to go to achieve consensus on CO2 - and that those who rubbish the sceptics by simply insulting them  need to do much better.  I personally believe that we must urgently protect our forests and reforest the countries that have lost their trees..... this may well have more benefit than anything else.  We need to re-water and replant the Sahara as much as possible - it once supplied the Roman empire with grain ...We should also sharply cut the use of pesticides. There is much to do - but carbon trading I feel is not the answer.... .Janine

“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical…The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system.” – Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”

Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists.” – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

“So far, real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming.” – Scientist Dr. Jarl R. Ahlbeck, a chemical engineer at Abo Akademi University in Finland, author of 200 scientific publications and former Greenpeace member.

“Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time.” – Solar physicist Dr. Pal Brekke, senior advisor to the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo. Brekke has published more than 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles on the sun and solar interaction with the Earth.

“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” – Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.
“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.

“The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round…A large number of critical documents submitted at the 1995 U.N. conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the U.N. declared global warming to be a scientific fact,” Andrei Kapitsa, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher.

“I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken…Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science.” – Award Winning Physicist Dr. Will Happer, Professor at the Department of Physics at Princeton University and Former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy, who has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.

“Nature’s regulatory instrument is water vapor: more carbon dioxide leads to less moisture in the air, keeping the overall GHG content in accord with the necessary balance conditions.” – Prominent Hungarian Physicist and environmental researcher Dr. Miklós Zágoni reversed his view of man-made warming and is now a skeptic. Zágoni was once Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol.

“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” – Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

“The quantity of CO2 we produce is insignificant in terms of the natural circulation between air, water and soil… I am doing a detailed assessment of the UN IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science.” – South Afican Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer Dr. Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author who has authored over 150 refereed publications.

“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” – Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.

“All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.” – Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, served as staff physicist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” – Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.” – Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

“The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” – Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.

“Whatever the weather, it’s not being caused by global warming. If anything, the climate may be starting into a cooling period.” Atmospheric scientist Dr. Art V. Douglas, former Chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and is the author of numerous papers for peer-reviewed publications.

“But there is no falsifiable scientific basis whatever to assert this warming is caused by human-produced greenhouse gasses because current physical theory is too grossly inadequate to establish any cause at all.” – Chemist Dr. Patrick Frank, who has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.

“The ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society’s activities.” – Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist and Moonwalker Jack Schmitt who flew on the Apollo 17 mission and formerly of the Norwegian Geological Survey and for the U.S. Geological Survey.

“Earth has cooled since 1998 in defiance of the predictions by the UN-IPCC….The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millennium…which is why ‘global warming’ is now called ‘climate change.’” – Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.

“I have yet to see credible proof of carbon dioxide driving climate change, yet alone man-made CO2 driving it. The atmospheric hot-spot is missing and the ice core data refute this. When will we collectively awake from this deceptive delusion?” – Dr. G LeBlanc Smith, a retired Principal Research Scientist with Australia’s CSIRO.

The last decade the hottest? It depends on when you start the count.

I am puzzled by yesterday's announcement by the Met office at the Copenhagen conference that this decade looks like being the warmest ever... as no cautionary notes were added to it. Surely this was needed for scientific accuracy. The BBC is no scientist but it noted the increase was only 0.44 and noted that, if other years than 2000 were selected to start this decade, then other answers would have come up. If 2002 were picked - then no increase would have turned up - and if 1998 probably a decrease.

There is also this earlier article


Climate facts to warm to
Christopher Pearson From: The Australian March 22, 2008 12:00AM

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."

Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?"

Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."

Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?"

Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."

Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?"

Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."

Duffy: "From what you're saying, it sounds like the implications of this could beconsiderable ..."

Marohasy: "That's right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point."

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age.
...

clip from BBC interview on Climate Change and Email Leaks

The video is up to watch on

http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=25k4z6e&s=6

I did have it here to watch - but Utube has just rejected it as over 10 minutes long..

This is an extraordinary interview and well worth watching

Climate change earthquake - email leak BBC video

[URL=http://tinypic.com/r/25k4z6e/6]View My Video[/URL]

"Myth of Exile" - Justifying Slaughter in Gaza

The 'myth of an exile' is 'taught to members of the Israeli armed forces.'

By Janine Roberts (Published in the Palestinian Chronicle, January 31st)

Many have been appalled by the seemingly mindless orgy of destruction of families, children, homes, streets, shops and orchards in Gaza carried out by the Israeli armed forces. It left me wanting to know what has happened to make ordinary well-educated Israelis think that it is morally right to do this to their comparatively unarmed neighbors?

I perhaps stumbled on part of the answer in the bookstore at Tel Aviv airport on a recent visit to Israel. A map on display marked all the land from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea as Israel: there was no West Bank, no Gaza Strip. A travel book I admired for its photos of a beautiful land also described it all as Israel. Jericho was in Israel it stated, although deep inside the West Bank.

If this bookstore is as typical as I suspect, then most Israelis are convinced they already own the lands now occupied by Palestinians. It is as if they see them, not as a sovereign people, but as a host of unwelcome and unruly tenants squatting Jewish lands. If this is so, then I thought there is little hope for a “Two State” solution.

This view is deeply rooted in an Orthodox Judaism with increasing influence in the Israeli military. A booklet issued by the Jewish Rabbinate to the troops going to Gaza, "Daily Torah studies for the soldier and the commander in Operation Cast Lead," states there is "a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of it [Israel] to gentiles, though all sorts of impure distortions and foolishness of autonomy, enclaves and other national weaknesses. We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it."

Another publication distributed by the military Rabbinate asks: "Is it possible to compare today's Palestinians to the Philistines of the past?" It cites a Rabbi as answering: "A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land ... They invaded the Land of Israel, a land that did not belong to them and claimed political ownership over our country ... Today the problem is the same. The Palestinians claim they deserve a state here, when in reality there was never a Palestinian or Arab state within the borders of our country. Moreover, most of them are new and came here close to the time of the War of Independence."

Both of the above quotes are from the "Books of Rabbi Shlomo Aviner," the head of the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva in an Israeli occupied house within the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

The IDF rabbinate also quotes Rabbi Aviner’s advice to troops: "When you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers. This is terribly immoral. These are not games at the amusement park where sportsmanship teaches one to make concessions. This is a war on murderers.”

Such teachings are by no means confined to the military. A January issue of Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly publication distributed at Orthodox synagogues, cites the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Mordechai Eliyah as ruling that since the civilians of Gaza failed to stop the rocket attacks, they share responsibility for them and so must not be spared from attack.

When the Jerusalem Post asked the son of this Chief Rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, what further advice his father would have, he replied that his father would say no Israeli soldier should be put into danger but instead there should be “carpet bombing of the general area from which the Qassam rockets came.” “If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand.” Rabbi Eliyahu added: “And if they do not stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop, we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."

The distribution of such literature has been greatly expanded by the current IDF Chief Rabbi, Brigadier General Rabbi Avichai Ronski, through his Jewish Awareness Department headed by Lt. Col. Zadok Ben-Artzi, The slogan currently used is "Jewish awareness for a victorious IDF.” It is based on “understandings gleaned from the Bible and the heritage of Israel to enhance the army's ability to achieve victory." Formerly all troop educational work was done by the Army’s Education Corps but the Rabbinate services now dominate, with the aid of funding from Elad, a major Zionist group funded by Americans that has enabled the Jewish Awareness Department to give its services for free, unlike those of the Corps, and to include free study weekends in Jerusalem.

But there is a cool calculation in allowing this. The military needed to keep the number of Israeli deaths to the minimum if they were to retain popular Israeli support, and decided this demanded the use of highly destructive tactics. Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, explained: “During 2002's Operation Defensive Shield, in the Jenin refugee camp, disagreements developed among the different [army] units … a battalion of the 5th Reserve Infantry Brigade, which employed relatively humane operating methods, suffered 13 casualties in one single day from an ambush and roadside explosives. After those incidents, everyone took up the "Buchris method," named after the commander of the 51st Golani battalion, Lt. Col. Ofek Buchris (today a brigade commander in the reserves).” This, the paper concluded, has led to “the IDF proceeding in Gaza in a slow, orderly, efficient and very destructive manner.” Villages and suburbs were leveled in order to avoid the risk of ambush.

After the setting up of the International Criminal Court as the first permanent international tribunal for war crimes, the Israeli army has increasingly involved lawyers in its operations, in particular those of the international law division (ILD) of the Military Advocate General's Office. Daniel Reisner who headed the ILD for 10 years and now works for a major law firm in Tel Aviv, explained the “setting up of this court led to the commanders saying ‘I might find myself in that court; where is my lawyer?’ So it becomes natural for the military to put lawyers in places where they have never been before. This particularly started to happen, he added, 'when Israel started to assassinate Palestinians openly.”

“What we are seeing now is a revision of international law,” Reisner said. “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries… International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal moulds. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy."

The ILD staff at the military’s Southern Command was strengthened and legal advisers sent to the Gaza Division before the recent offensive commenced. Haaretz reported: “ILD staff regularly attend the 'operations and sorties' meetings held on Wednesdays under the head of the operations division or the operations directorate. The legal advisers receive the list of proposed targets and the relevant intelligence material ahead of the meeting, prepare a visual presentation of their remarks and voice them in the time allotted; usually between five minutes and a quarter of an hour.”

Months before the air force killed dozens of policemen on the first day of Operation Cast Lead, ILD debated how to justify this planned attack since it is normally illegal to attack a civilian police force. It was agreed that Gaza was an exception to the normal rule, since, according to a senior ILD figure, "the way Hamas operates is to use the entire governmental infrastructure for the organization's terrorist purpose.” Thus the Gaza police was ruled to be a legitimate target, as were all government buildings, including the now destroyed parliament.

The ILD also ruled: "The [civilian] people who go into a house despite a warning do not have to be taken into account in terms of injury to civilians, because they are voluntary human shields.’ A senior ILD officer explained: ‘From the legal point of view, I do not have to show consideration for them. In the case of people who return to their home in order to protect it, they are taking part in the fighting.’

A warning might consist of “a knock on the roof,” meaning a shell fired into the corner of a roof. The legal annex to the operational order for Operation Cast Lead states "as far as possible in the circumstances, the civilian population in the area of a legitimate target is to be warned" but it then adds, unless such a warning “is liable to endanger the action or the Forces.”

What about a civilian who positions himself in front of a tank? The chilling response came from the ILD: "If someone stands in front of a tank in order to block its progress, he is participating in warfare."

Reisner explained: "We defended policy that is on the edge: the "neighbor procedure" [making a neighbor knock on the door of a potentially dangerous house], house demolitions, deportation, targeted assassination; we defended all the magic formulas for dealing with terrorism."

The lawyers' advice in Gaza was sometimes marginalized. When they pressed for “a more orderly set of tools” to authorize the “flattening of large areas to flush out people in hiding,” the general in charge, Yoav Gallant, known by the ILD as a 'wild man,' a 'cowboy' because he attaches little importance to legal advice, disregarded their modest qualms. Consequently soldiers reported: “they were destroying whole streets and neighborhoods,”

However some risk attaches to the work of the lawyers. "I have no doubt that to a certain extent, everyone who takes part in making a decision, the lawyer included, is a partner to the decision," Reisner said. He tells of how when "Three years ago I gave a talk at Cambridge University … I got a phone call from the legal department of the Foreign Ministry. They said they just wanted to let me know that there were no threats to put me on trial in England.”

A group of former Israeli soldiers called “Breaking the Silence” is currently gathering evidence of unacceptable behavior during the latest attack but has already published evidence from earlier attacks on Gaza. An officer from an “elite unit” told them of what happened during “Operation Rainbow” that destroyed the homes of over a thousand Palestinians in May 2004.

When he was asked if the war was like “a computer game,” the reply came “Yes, [all the decisions were made] in two minutes.” He was then asked: “You, as squad commander, took down half a neighborhood?” He replied: “Yes … and generally it’s a 21-year-old boy [who makes these decisions].”

It was, he explained, “our first time in the Gaza strip” and “we had terrible fear” of the local Palestinians. To take over buildings, we went in with “D-9 (armored bulldozer) and armored personal carrier. You don’t enter without them. The D-9 arrives, surrounds the building 360 degrees [with a bulldozed trench] to check if there are no explosive charges, after that you punch out a hole in the wall…“We call that the knock on the door.” “We don’t tell the occupants we are coming in…and we don’t let them leave the building while we are in it (with our snipers on the roof)…” (Hamas were accused of doing the same – using civilians as human shields.)

He was then asked: “What were your firing orders? “To kill anyone armed, or anyone doing anything suspicious, like bending down or something, that could be for laying a booby trap… someone who looks as if he’s observing (our) tanks, stands and looks at any of our tanks, that could be from a window, from a roof top or from something like it. Fire to kill.”

The soldier continued: “The most striking thing I remember from operation “Rainbow’, was the feeling of lack of restraint. I don’t have a milder description for it: an indiscriminate use of force… There was tremendous pressure from the command post…to act and not to wait. Not to be derailed in decision making by all sort of nonsense.”

“What did the Operations Officer say at the end of the debriefing?” “Two things: (a) we showed them that the IDF can be brutal when necessary, and (b) we didn’t let these left-wingers screw up our operation.” (He was referring to the Israelis calling for peace.)

The New York Times reported of Operation Cast Lead on the 19th January: “The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: ‘baal habayit hishtageya,’ or ‘the boss has lost it.’ It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled…” It is meant to terrify.

Elad, the American-funded right wing organization that helps fund the military Rabbinate’s Zionist literature, is also involved in expanding Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem and in controversial archaeological digs near the Old City of Jerusalem that seek to establish the priority of Jewish claims. Israel may well be the only country where archaeology has a place on a governmental Foreign Affairs website, where it is used to justify the claim that Jews has a right to this land that predates and replaces that of the Palestinians.

Israel rarely cites half of the text of the UN resolution that gave it its legal legitimacy as a state, UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, for it also gave the same legitimacy to a Palestinian State – authorizing the Two State solution over 50 years ago, mapping out the territories that both states should hold, roughly half the land each.

It should be said that many Jewish people are opposed to the Orthodox fundamentalism. Henry Siegman, the former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America, holds that Hamas “is a religious nationalist movement akin to the Zionist movement during to its struggle for statehood” and asks: “Why then are Israel’s leaders so determined to destroy Hamas? Because they believe that its leadership, unlike that of Fatah, cannot be intimidated into accepting a peace accord that establishes a Palestinian ‘state’ made up of territorially disconnected entities over which Israel would be able to retain permanent control.”

"The state of Israel, and a government under me, will make it a strategic objective to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza," the Foreign Minister Livni has told members of her centrist Kadima party.

Yet Zionist historians recognize that the story of Israel’s expulsion from the land by the Romans and its destined return, the central doctrine underlying the Israeli denial of the claims of the Palestinians, is but a myth.

This has come out in a current extraordinary controversy over a new work of history that has appeared in Hebrew and will shortly be appearing in English. It is When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? by Shlomo Sand. (Resling, 358 pages, NIS 94.) After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, it is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.

According to this, the Romans did not expel the whole people from the land, as widely recounted. The ‘Diaspora’ of Judaism is instead mostly the consequence of the conversion of people from other nations, especially the Khazars of the Black Sea region, from whom most European Jews are descended. From his research, it seems that the Palestinians have more roots among the ancient peoples of the land of Israel than do most Israelis.

The book was greeted with a furious reaction from Professor Israel Bartal, the dean of the humanities faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but not for the reasons I expected. His review, published in Haaretz, did not attack the book’s thesis, but the book’s contention that Zionist historians have concealed the mythical origin of the story of the Diaspora.

Not at all, he angrily retorted, the story of the “conversion of the Khazars, a nation of Turkish origin, [is] in the Zionist Mikhlal Encyclopedia" as is the fact that Judaism was once “a missionary religion.”

Moreover, he added, the Zionist "Toldot am Yisrael" [History of the Jewish People] explains that the number of Jews in the Diaspora during the ancient period was as high as it was because of conversion, a “widespread phenomenon in the late Second Temple period.”

He then asks: "What is Sand trying to prove in this study? In his view, the homeland of the Jewish people is not Palestine, and most Jews are descendants of the members of different nations who converted to Judaism in ancient times and in the medieval period. He claims that the Jews of Yemen and Eastern Europe are descendants of pagans."

He makes no attempt to disprove this but retorts: "My response to Sand's arguments is that no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically "pure." "Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions."

I was astonished when I read this. Perhaps what he asserts is true in his academic circles, but entirely the opposite viewpoint dominates much of the popular discourse. The "myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland" is fervently believed in by most Jewish settlers in the West Bank, by Christian Zionists and is not questioned by most of the Western media. It is in the teachings of prominent Rabbis – and, as we have seen, it is taught to members of the Israeli armed forces.

From his testimony, the story that a Jewish nation once owned this land, was dispossessed and has now returned, is not nearly as well founded as I had once thought. It seems the term “Semitic” applies far better to the Palestinians than it does to the Israelis. Yet, this widespread myth, disowned by Zionist historians, is still being used to justify much ethnic cleaning and suffering. It is hard to think otherwise than that the Israeli authorities fervently hope that, through inflicting such dreadful ‘punishment,’ the remaining Palestinians will ultimately flee from their lands or become docile, allowing Jewish control in the name of a myth.

- Janine Roberts has written for many major Australian newspapers and both the Independent and Financial Times in the UK. Her investigative films have appeared on the PBS network in the USA and on the BBC and Australian television. She was invited to testify at a US Congressional Hearing on Human rights in Africa and the blood diamond trade. Her latest investigative books are “Glitter and Greed” and the “Fear of the Invisible.” She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact her at: jan@janineroberts.com, or visit her blog: www.speakingloudly.blogspot.com.

official - HIV scientific papers riddled with Errors

an extract from Fear of the Invisible

Senior Investigators - 'HIV scientific papers riddled with Errors'

The CDC, America's foremost disease control institution, currently acknowledges: ‘Four papers from Dr Gallo's laboratory, demonstrating that HTLV-III retrovirus was the cause of AIDS, were published in Science in May 1984'.

I needed to understand these key experiments - and this task would surely be made easier since, not only did I have the Science papers, but the related laboratory documents unearthed by the above scientific and Congressional investigations and by John Crewdson. These included original research notebooks, drafts of key papers, laboratory correspondence, all relating to the discovery of HIV. It was a priceless resource that would surely give me all I needed.

I soon discovered that there had been astonishingly five major investigations between 1990 and 1995 into possible fraud in Gallo's HIV research, several of these overlapping with the others. The first was the one that I have already mentioned, run by the NIH's Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI) and the Richard's Panel. Its goals, set in October 1990, were to focus ‘particularly' on the integrity of the first of the four papers published in Science in May 1984, the one on which Popovic was the lead author, since this paper described the key experiments cited in the application for a Patent on the HIV Test.

The second inquiry was under a powerful Congressional Investigative Sub-Committee headed by Rep. John Dingell. It would prevent key documents from being shredded by the NIH. The third was under the Inspector General of the Department of Health and examined criminal fraud in the ‘HIV Test' patent application. The fourth was under the Office of Research Integrity of the Department of Health and Human Resources and looked for fraud, deception and ‘scientific misconduct' in the Gallo Science papers. And the fifth and last was by the US Secret Service, the body normally charged with safeguarding the security of the US President. It would check the related laboratory documents in the finest forensic lab in Washington. If any were forged, it would find out.

All together, this was by far the most formidable governmental investigation into the honesty of scientific research ever undertaken. Clearly the issues at stake were considered extremely important. But Gallo was by now no little scientist. By 1990 he was the head of an NIH laboratory with an annual budget of around $12 million, and his annual salary was over $200,000. In a letter he sent around this time, he described himself as ‘the most cited scientist in the world for the decade of the 1980s.' He had in truth become enormously influential.

One of the first press reports on these inquiries was in the Chicago Tribune of February 25th, 1990. The headline was ‘U.S. agency probing AIDS virus discovery.' It said ‘The inquiry is examining much of the related research conducted in recent years by Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the nation's most prominent AIDS researcher.'

But, from contemporary press reports, Gallo's laboratory was not as upright as might be expected. A newspaper report of 29th April 1990 stated: ‘A 16-month congressional inquiry [by Dingell into Gallo's laboratory] has uncovered evidence suggesting that rare and valuable viruses, among them the AIDS virus, were appropriated' and sold privately. HTLV-3 [HIV] went on the black market for a price of around $1000 a milligram. The person suspected was Syed Zaki Salahuddin, ‘one of Gallo's long-time assistants.' He was also the lead author of one of the four Science papers of May 4th, 1984.

On May 1st 1990 this investigation further found that ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars in government equipment and supplies cannot be accounted for by scientists at the National Cancer Institute' and that a million dollars had been paid to a company partly owned by Salahuddin and his wife. He was later found guilty and sentenced to pay back $12,000 and do 1,750 hours of community service.

I soon learnt, from the OSI investigation records, that Gallo had confessed to it in 1990 that he had not found the AIDS virus in 1982, as reported in the Science papers. He admitted to it that he had only detected the enzyme RT in 1982, and had not found the virus itself. The investigators reported that he had lied when he claimed he did ‘more than fifty' detections and produced ‘ten true isolates' of the AIDS virus in 1982. They concluded that he did not find the virus before 1984.

But, in the apparent belief that people have forgotten this confession, Gallo is now astonishingly repeatedly making the same claim - that he found HIV in 1982 before anyone else. He did so in his recent bookand he did so, even most seriously, in sworn testimony in 2007 to an Australian court. (More on this below.) So for me, discovering his earlier confession was something of a shock.

In 1990-91 more evidence of wrongdoing in Gallo's lab surfaced in the OSI investigation into his HIV research. But at this point the new head of the NIH, Bernardine Healy, intervened. She hauled in Gallo, subjected him to a severe dressing down; laying down that in future he would not be able to absent himself from laboratory duties without permission, nor even publish a paper or give an interview without permission. Then, after hopefully silencing him, she turned her attention to the OSI.

The OSI chief, Suzanne Hadley, was then drafting the final OSI report and about to conclude that Gallo's chief investigative scientist, Mikulas Popovic, the primary author of the most significant of the four Science papers, had falsified the data in this paper - and to recommend that he be condemned for scientific misconduct.

But, when Popovic heard of this, in desperation he had produced long-hidden key evidence. He gave Hadley a 1984 typed draft of the key Science paper that he had kept hidden overseas. Among other things, this draft revealed that Robert Gallo had extensively changed this paper at the last moment to hide their use of the French virus.

With this it seemed the evidence was at hand to prove Gallo guilty of illegal use of the French virus and thus of scientific deceit. Hadley composed her OSI report accordingly. She concluded: ‘Dr. Gallo has claimed credit for the Popovic et al. paper and the other 1984 papers, so must he bear responsibility for the falsehoods in the Popovic et al. paper. Accordingly the OSI finds that Dr Robert Gallo engaged in scientific misconduct.'

This was a damning conclusion. This OSI report now should have gone to the Richards Panel for review - but at this point Healy intervened, removing Haley from her duties at the OSI. The indictment of Gallo was deleted from her report.

But the watered down report that was published after her departure was still highly critical of Gallo. It accused him of ‘an unhealthy disregard for accepted standards of professional and scientific ethics.' It included her findings that Dr. Gallo must share responsibility with Dr. Popovic for ‘imprecise and non-meticulous science', and that Gallo's alteration of a key 1983 Institut Pasteur paper prior to publication was a ‘gratuitous, self-serving, and improper act.' (Gallo had served as Peer Reviewer for a Pasteur Institute paper on the AIDS virus - and had unilaterally changed it prior to publication!) But the report then strangely concluded that none of this was ‘scientific misconduct!' This conclusion seems to have been added without any consideration of what the report actually documented. On the issue of whether Gallo stole the French virus, the report now came to no conclusion.

But the accusations would not go away. The Chicago Tribune was able to report on August 11, 1991: ‘Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the government's most prominent AIDS researcher ... made untrue and misleading statements in a sworn declaration defending the patent from a legal challenge by French scientists.'

into the 1984 article by Robert C. Gallo which reported the isolation of the AIDS virus concludes that this report is riddled with fabrication, falsification, misleading statements and errors.' This was astonishing. The report of which it spoke is the very scientific article that is cited today as establishing for all time that HIV causes AIDS - the first of the four published by Gallo et al in Science in May 1984. If eminent scientific bodies found it so riddled with errors, then why is it still cited?

Possibly because, when these investigations commenced, about a billion dollars had already been invested in ‘HIV infection' prevention and related research. There was thus much riding on the credibility of these foundation papers of HIV research.

A year after these investigations commenced, pressure had really started to mount on Gallo and Popovic. The NIH decision to remove Suzanne Hadley, the Head of the OSI inquiry, had proved so controversial that a new inquiry had to be set up independent of the NIH to complete the work. It was to be managed by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) of the Department of Health in the President George Bush Administration. The ORI asked the scientists previously working with the NIH inquiry to assist them- saying, if they found reason to present charges against Gallo or Popovic, these would be sent to a departmental legal committee for assessment and action.

The talk of an NIH cover-up to protect Gallo's AIDS research that year also reached Representative Dingell, the head of the powerful Congressional Investigative sub-committee that had previously indicted a scientist working in Gallo's lab for theft, as I mentioned above. Dingell now immediately ordered the OSI files on Gallo and Popovic moved to his office - and asked the NIH for the services of Hadley. It could not refuse him - so she resumed her investigation but now with considerably greater Congressional investigative powers. An aide to Dingell explained: 'Everything Hadley has told us has checked out 100% against documents the committee has received from NIH. She's obviously been treated very shabbily.'

That year Gallo also got into trouble in Africa. His laboratory had developed a vaccine based on transplanting into the shell of another virus a putative part of HIV. It seems this was easier than using HIV itself as it was difficult to find. This vaccine was injected into a few Congolese in Africa and Paris and three of them died. It was then discovered that his vaccine had only been approved for use on animals! But Gallo escaped with only a mild reprimand.

In May 1991, knowing what the OSI was about to deliver its report, Gallo wrote to Nature, confessing that he now realised that the French virus and his own were the same. He blamed his error on inadvertent laboratory contamination. Then a similar confession appeared in the UK from a leading British virologist and colleague of Robert Gallo, Dr. Robin Weiss, the scientist I had first met when he was chairing the NIH workshop on SV40, and again when he was chairing the Royal Society debate on the polio vaccine and HIV.

Weiss now confessed that the AIDS virus he claimed to isolate in 1985, a year after Gallo, was in fact the very same one that the Institut Pasteur had sent him earlier. Like Gallo, his explanation was inadvertent laboratory contamination. He also, like Gallo, had used the French virus to secure a UK patent for the HIV test.

By now Dingell was pushing for a criminal investigation into Gallo's AIDS research - and was angry at the ‘waffling by the Bush Administration' that his efforts met. Charges were justified, he maintained, since ‘a landmark 1984 article in which Gallo reported isolating the AIDS virus contains falsified data.'

Then another damning report appeared. The Richards Panel, set up to supervise the OSI investigation, had decided not to let the matter rest after NIH produced the watered-down OSI report. They were mindful that they had been appointed by two of the most important scientific bodies in the USA - and therefore had a duty to report honestly what they had discovered.

They issued their own report in January 1992. It stated there was ‘a pattern of behaviour on Dr. Gallo's part that repeatedly misrepresents, suppresses, and distorts data and their interpretation in such a way as to enhance Dr. Gallo's claim to priority.' They said his failure to acknowledge his use of the French virus represented ‘intellectual recklessness of a high degree' in the ‘intellectual appropriation of the French viral isolate...'

In February 1992 the Chicago Tribune reported a government investigation had discovered ‘a landmark 1984 article reporting Robert C. Gallo's isolation of the AIDS virus contains numerous falsifications of data and misrepresentations of the methods employed.'

In April 1992, a Prime Time television investigation stated: ‘It may be the greatest scientific fraud of the twentieth century.' It continued over a portrait of Gallo: ‘Eight years ago this man was hailed as the genius who discovered the AIDS virus.' But now it was a story ‘of how a fight for wealth and glory can interfere with the desperate attempt to conquer a deadly disease.'

In July that year, another member of Gallo's laboratory was found guilty of a federal crime. This time it was Prem Sarin, the second in charge of his laboratory for more than a decade. He had embezzled $25,000 that should have been spent on AIDS research.

When Dingell in late 1992 discovered he was missing some of the Gallo research documents, he sought to discover why. He wrote on 24th November 1992 to the Director of the NIH: ‘we have received reliable information that documents from the Gallo/Popovic investigation were being shredded at the NIH's Office of Scientific Integrity.' He continued ‘NIH's actions...show a clear pattern of obstruction and attempted deception ... particularly when juxtaposed with the curious diligence the NIH showed in its efforts to seek out and destroy the person or persons suspected of blowing the whistle on the shredding.'

A year later President Clinton gave the NIH a new director, Dr. Harold Varmus, a scientist of great repute who was not inclined to protect Gallo. In June 1993 the Chicago Tribune reported that ‘the government's long-running case against its star AIDS researcher, Dr. Robert C. Gallo, has been expanded to include a broader range of misconduct surrounding his decade-old claim to have discovered the cause of AIDS.'

The ORI by now had drawn up a powerful Indictment (‘Offer of Proof') against Gallo and Popovic. This it presented to the Department of Health's lawyer-based 'Research Integrity Adjudication Panel'. It was broad ranging and powerful. Here are some excerts:



§ 'Research process can proceed with confidence only if scientists can assume that the previously reported facts on which their work is based are correct. If the bricks are in fact false...then the scientific wall of truth may crumble...Such actions threaten the very integrity of the scientific process.'



§ 'In light of the groundbreaking nature of this research and its profound public health implications, ORI believes that the careless and unacceptable keeping of research records [for proving HIV the cause of AIDS by Gallo and his team] ...reflects irresponsible laboratory management that has permanently impaired the ability to retrace the important steps taken. '



§ [This] 'put the public health at risk and, at the minimum, severely undermined the ability of the scientific community to reproduce and/or verify the efforts of the LTCB [Gallo's 'Laboratory for Tumor Cell Biology'] in isolating and growing the AIDS virus.'



§ 'Gallo's failings as a Lab Chief are evidenced in the Popovic Science paper, a paper conspicuously lacking in significant primary data and fraught with false and erroneous statements.'



§ Gallo 'repeatedly misrepresents distorts and suppresses data in such a way as to enhance his own claim to priority and primacy in AIDS research.'



§ 'The [lead] Science paper contains numerous falsifications... the paper was replete with at least 22 incorrect statements concerning LTCB research, at least 11 of which were falsifications amounting to serious deviations from accepted standards for conducting and reporting evidence.' Some of the captions to micrographs, descriptions of experiments and enclosed tables were 'false and misleading'.



§ 'The absence of virtually any assay data for the parent cell line is simply unbelievable. [Especially since this was] used to develop and patent the HIV antibody blood test.'



§ Gallo, 'in violation of all research protocols, impeded scientists wanting to follow up on his research ... imposed on others the condition that they did not try to repeat his work.'



This is only a selection from an absolutely devastating indictment.

The Adjudication Panel, to which this indictment was submitted for action, was made up of lawyers not scientists. It decided to first consider the case of Popovic - and came to an amazing conclusion. They fully accepted that Popovic had published careless inaccurate and deceptive research, but still deemed him ‘innocent' since the 'intent to deceive' had not been proved. They finished by astonishingly praising Popovic's research as published in Science in May 1984 as important for all time.

This utterly shocked the scientists who had helped produce the ORI report. Their indictment had been supported with the testimony of over 100 scientists, and they had been expressly directed not to try to prove ‘intent' in their indictment. How could the Panel now absolve Popovic from blame on the grounds they had not tried to prove ‘intent'? How could they absolve him of responsibility while accepting their conclusion that the key research he did on HIV was deeply flawed, contained false statements, and might have sent AIDS research off in the wrong direction? Furthermore, how could an Adjudication Panel made up solely of lawyers conclude by praising this research, when they as scientists had condemned it? They wondered darkly just who had advised the lawyers?

The Panel was next to consider the case of Robert Gallo - but in face of the decision on Popovic, the ORI in disgust felt it had no choice but to drop its attempt to find Gallo guilty of scientific misconduct since they had been misdirected over the need to prove ‘intent'. They nevertheless declared their ‘fundamental disagreement' with the Panel's understanding of ‘the importance of clarity, accuracy and honesty in science,'

But Gallo was not yet clear. The Secret Service now presented the evidence they had unearthed to the Dingell Inquiry. They had been charged to examine for fraud the laboratory documents that Gallo had presented as legal evidence. They had discovered that many were ‘fixed' before being presented. Documents written on different dates were changed on the same day. They found incriminating overlapping imprints of the changes on the enclosing folders.

This was the clearest evidence of criminal fraud and was immediately presented to the State Attorney General in January 1994 in the expectation that a criminal prosecution would now be ordered, but he ruled it was ‘out of time'. Too long had elapsed under the Statute of Limitations since the fraud was carried out. Gallo thus may have escaped prosecution on a technicality.

But the investigators were not content to leave it there. Hadley and others went to see Varmus, the new Director of the NIH, to present the new damning evidence, including more now produced by the Inspector General's Inquiry on fraud in the Patent application for the HIV test. The Inspector General had even expressed doubts on whether the related experiments were ever done! The Patent Examiner also now acknowledged ‘had she been aware of (the French AIDS test research) at the time she examined the blood test application of Gallo, she would have suspended Gallo's application.'

Varmus was persuaded - and had to act. In June 1994 Gallo was given a choice: prepare to leave the NIH - or face a new investigation that might be harder to escape from unscathed. He decided to leave - in a year's time. It was then headlined on July 12th that: ‘US, France settle AIDS virus dispute. The NIH will give up millions in profit from Test Patent.' The Financial Times reported: ‘US climb down in feud with the French over AIDS research.' The NIH had at last acknowledged that there was justice in the French claim against them as the employer of Gallo.

However the Dingell Investigation never reached a formal conclusion. When the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives at the end of 1994, Dingell lost his chairmanship of the investigating sub-committee -and the Republicans promptly killed the investigation of the Reagan-endorsed Robert Gallo. However Dingell's staff would have none of this. They did not want their years of research wasted, so they issued an unofficial final 'Staff Report' of 267 pages, detailing their findings. Their report might not have been official, but it received a highly favourable review in the top UK medical journal, the Lancet.

The Chicago Tribune summarised the Staff Report's findings in two scathing pieces, one on 1st January 1995 entitled ‘In Gallo Case, Truth deemed a Casualty' and the other an editorial on 6th January entitled: ‘Defending the Indefensible Dr. Gallo'.



This Staff Report had reported:



§ 'The cover-up ... advanced to a more active phase in mid-March 1984, when Dr. Gallo systematically rewrote the manuscript for what would become a renowned LTCB paper (Popovic et al.; Science).' [LTCB stood for Gallo's Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology]



§ 'The evidence is compelling that the oft-repeated [HIV] isolate claim - ... dating from 1982/early 1983, are not true and were known to be untrue at the time the claims were made.'



§ 'Many of the samples allegedly used for the pool [the supposed HIV culture] were noted in the LTCB records to be contaminated with mould.'



§ 'The notion that Dr. Popovic used such samples in an effort to obtain a high-titre virus-producing cell line defies credulity.'



§ 'The [early] February 1984 experiment was so faulty and so many aspects of it so questionable, that little or no confidence can be placed in any of its claimed findings.'



§ 'Contrary to the claims of Gallo and Popovic, including claims in their patent applications [for the HIV Blood Test], several of the putative pool samples contained no HIV, while others did not even come from AIDS or pre-AIDS patients.'



The report then concluded:



'The result was a costly, prolonged defence of the indefensible in which the LTCB 'science' became an integral element of the US government's public relations/advocacy efforts. The consequences for HIV research were severely damaging, leading, in part, to a corpus of scientific papers polluted with systematic exaggerations and outright falsehoods of unprecedented proportions.'



The report presented detailed evidence that destroyed the central claim made by Gallo in these famed Science papers; to have isolated HIV in dozens of AIDS patients in experiments conducted in 1982 and 1983. They said he did not have the tools needed to do this - and consequently could not have isolated or identified a single AIDS virus!

The Staff report also recorded that when Gallo was asked ‘to substantiate this claim' [that he had found the AIDS virus in 1982] by his immediate boss Dr Samuel Broder, the National Cancer Institute director, he had ‘responded with a list of samples, only one of which dated from 1982.' ‘When that sample was checked against records, it was found to be marked ‘N.D.' meaning ‘Not Done' - or ‘Not Determinable.' Gallo then admitted under interrogation that he had only detected the enzyme RT, not the virus, at the time. The investigators concluded; ‘No evidence was supplied that any of these samples had ever been tested and found positive for HIV. In fact no such evidence existed.' It then added that the US Secret Service found many Gallo laboratory records were falsified prior to being presented as evidence.

On May 25th 1995 came the news that ‘Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the government's best-known and most controversial AIDS researcher, is departing the National Cancer Institute after a 30-year career that included the discovery of the first human leukaemia virus and a bitter international controversy over his contribution to finding the cause of AIDS. Gallo said he plans to set up his own Institute of Human Virology in a renovated warehouse in downtown Baltimore.'

But, the Science papers he authored, despite being found scandalously fraudulent, were never withdrawn, nor corrected, which to my mind is scandalous given the prestige of the institutions that had condemned them and the consequence of leaving them uncorrected. Thus thousands of researchers still consult them in all innocence. Today thousands of papers on HIV and AIDS refer back to them, and all medical authorities point to them too. The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) still state on their website that the key foundation papers in AIDS research are ‘four papers from Dr Gallo's laboratory, demonstrating that HTLV-III retrovirus [HIV] was the cause of AIDS.' It does not mention that they were found ‘polluted with systematic exaggerations and outright falsehoods of unprecedented proportions.'

The findings of all these high level investigations of the 1990s were thus swiftly and shockingly buried. Few AIDS scientists now know that these seminal AIDS papers were thoroughly discredited by scientists belonging to the most eminent of scientific bodies. This is an extraordinary state of affairs. It is totally amazing, almost unbelievable.

It is as if these highly prestigious top-level investigations never existed - yet they only completed their work in 1995. They are now not even mentioned in the AIDS research history assembled by AVERT and referenced on the UK government's AIDS website.


See AIDS Timeline, 1981-1988, on US government health website linked on www.cdc.gov

Quoted in John Crewdson: Science Fictions page 439 fn. 37 ch 21.

Joan Shenton, Positively False, p50

Gallo stated ‘we had more than 50 detections and more than 10 true isolates of HIV-I.' Emphasis added; 4/26/90 OSI interview; transcript p. 58.

Robert Gallo. In his book Virus Hunters

John Crewdson, Chicago Tribune, Ill.: Aug 11, 1991. pg. 1

Lies, Errors Cited in article by Crewdson, John. Chicago Tribune, Ill.: Sep 15, 1991. pg. 11

Chicago Tribune, Apr 14, 1991 3 Dead in AIDS Vaccine Test

Peter Duesberg. Inventing the AIDS virus. Page 164.

Chicago Tribune, November 6th, 1991

Chicago Times of May 27th, 1992.

John Crewdson, Criminal inquiry urged in AIDS lab scandal Chicago Tribune: Nov 6, 1991

Cited in John Crewdson. Page 443.

Chicago Tribune, July 8, 1992

Chicago Tribune June 6, 1993

The Office of Research Integrity - Offers of Proof Report 1993.

Chicago Tribune U.S. INQUIRY DISCREDITS GALLO ON AIDS PATENT DIAGNOSTIC TEST. CLAIMS WERE RIDDLED BY HOLES, PROBE SAYS. June 19, 1994.

He said ‘we had more than 50 detections and more than 10 true isolates of HIV-I.'Emphasis added; 4/26/90 OSI interview; transcript p. 58.

Gallo-to-Fischinger; August 14, 1985.

The fraud uncovered by the Secret Service is extensively described in Science Fictions by John Crewdson, published by Little Brown in 2002, pages 506-510

Chicago tribune, May 25th 1995

See the Timeline published in The Scientist in November 2006. It states the credit was equally shared between Gallo and the French in 1987 - and totally omits any mention of this later high level controversy. http://www.the-scientist.com/article/flash/23586/1/

new book "Fear of the Invisible"

Janine Roberts
isbn 0955917727, amazon.com
308 pages US$19.95 UK£12.99

An Investigative Journey into a reckless and contaminated Medical Industry

This book takes its readers on a journey into the very heart of the hunt for viruses – to the key experiments performed to prove that these invisibly small particles cause diseases that often were previously blamed on toxins or bacteria. It sheds light on the extraordinary assumptions underlying much of this research into viruses – and the resulting vaccines and antiviral medicines.

The author, an investigative journalist who researched and produced investigative films for the BBC, American and Australian television, was asked by parents with children severely ill after vaccination to discover if the medical authorities were hiding anything from them. (I should add this was Jabs!) She agreed, but had no idea how long this search would take or how it would change her ideas. She expected at best to uncover a small degree of contamination.

On the ensuing decade-long journey of discovery, she found top government scientists report alarmingly, at meetings between scientists, that it is impossible to purify vaccines. They stated that the childhood vaccines of today are contaminated with viruses from chickens, humans and monkeys, with RNA and DNA fragments, with "cellular degradation products," and possibly "oncogenes and prions."

A chapter called 'The impure nature of vaccines" draws heavily on official (but previously unseen ) transcripts of meetings between top UK and USA vaccine scientists... it is shocking to hear how they talk when no journalists are around. I had always imagined that vaccines were made of viruses put into a sterile fluid - with a few other chemicals added as preservatives - like mercury... and thought this was what one had to worry about...
Well - this is untrue... the liquid used is not sterile - it is the fluid in which the viruses are drawn out of the incubator of animal, human or chicken cells... it cannot be filtered as that would remove the viruses wanted in it... so everything of the same size or smaller remains in the vaccines. These scientists all expressed grave concerns.... one of them said that if the Greens in the UK knew what they were saying, they would demand the immediate withdrawal of all vaccines! The author reports a manufacturer of MMR says the vaccine as given to children is full of cellular degradation products they cannot remove from it ... She also cites also authorities saying the manufactures cannot meet the government purity standards - even after they lowered them by a hundred times. A major US court decision in 2008 has linked autism with vaccine contamination.

Thus it is not just mercury - there are a thousand things in the vaccines. Our children mostly do not fall ill from vaccination simply because nature gifts most of them with excellent immune systems...

This book, proof read for scientific accuracy by an eminent professor of pathology, gives not just detailed quotations but also names the scientists who are saying these things - giving web links where possible so people can read the original documents for themselves. The doctors cited said that they dare not tell the pubic about all this contamination - as they might demand a withdrawal of the vaccines. Thus we are still not told despite all the consequences for long-term public health.

There is much research here that has not been reported elsewhere. This chapter cites, for example, a World Health Organization (WHO) senior scientist who said that although they have found the MMR vaccine to be widely contaminated with chicken leukosis virus, they have decided not to tell the public and to continue to permit the vaccine to be made with contaminated eggs.

The author has doubts over the full accuracy of their research, as it is based on discovering an enzyme, RT, not a virus, but these are important scientists and they say the virus is present, is very dangerous to chickens and potentially to children. But, to admit this publicly, would reveal that they cannot purify the vaccines given to our children.

A senior professor is cited as writing the vaccine program was so contaminated and chimps were used in vaccine manufacturing so widely, that HIV could easily have spread in a vaccine.

The author tells how she disturbingly discovered that the key HIV research, that said to prove that HIV causes AIDS, was investigated for scientific fraud by very powerful US scientific institutions (supervised by the US Academy of Science) and by Congress over a four year period. Why is this not widely known? It seems there has been some sort of cover-up. The book cites their conclusions, showing that they reported over twenty major errors in this research, with some errors so serious that they made it impossible to repeat these experiments and verify them! I reproduce the key documents so the reader can assess them for themselves. This is explosive material.


The author takes us to the key experiments in virology - the ones cited most widely - the ones on which our vaccines are ultimately based, and could find none in which pure samples of viruses were produced and proved to cause particular human diseases. They cannot purify viruses for use in vaccines, and it seems without such pure cultures they cannot properly research the links between viruses and diseases. Frequently the effects of toxins are misdiagnosed as the effects of viruses.

The book discusses in detail how they produce today the flu and measles virus for vaccines. The author details how measles virus is produced according to the latest CDC guidelines. The way it is done raises many issues.

Part of the book also takes the readers on a journey through various aspects of HIV theory, such as sexual transmission, the different clinical definitions of AIDS, why AIDS is said to be c aused by HIV and at the same time is said by our governments to happen in the absence of HIV, and why the HIV test picks up on different diseases in the West from in Africa. It is all heavily scientifically referenced.

In the final part is reported recent research that is revolutionizing biology and offering much hope for the future. These new developments shed new light on the relationships between our cells and viruses. They are not necessarily enemies. Readers may find these new developments will radically change the ideas they have held about viruses all their lives.

The preface is contributed by Dr Roberto Giraldo. The book has hundreds of scientific references, a scientific glossary and an index.

Do hope you find it valuable...