Newsletter: July, 02

Table of Contents:

[Guard the Scientists] [On Fighting Islam’s Ideologues ] [Taking a Hard Look at the Jury System] [Voices of Freedom]

Editor’s Remarks

In our April newsletter, we took a swing at some common attitudes towards Westerners (Americans, Canadians, Europeans, and so on) that were overhead by Mandarin-speaking travelers inside China. Some of our readers were concerned about these remarks, as they should be. Some were offended that we would lift the lid off such an explosive issue, although lifting a lid on such matters has been our stock in trade for, lo, these many years.

There has been no criticism of the article on its contents — so far. Nor have we been raked over the coals by witch-hunters, er, human rights Gestapo officials. In all fairness, and this was mentioned in the article, we did say that these attitudes were ‘by no means universal’ among mainland Chinese inside the People’s Republic of China. However, insofar as our correspondents could tell, they are very common. Nor are they uniquely held inside the PRC. The same remarks heard inside China have also been heard inside Canada and some acquaintances of the editor have encountered hostility from Chinese who now reside here.

This shouldn’t be shocking. The poisonous attitudes of European fascists in the 1930s had their followers in Canada — Some of our German and Italian communities assembled under the icons of homeland groups; and both Franco and the Vichy French had open sympathizers in Quebec. Moreover, we have had ample proof in the last year that not everyone in the West is Western at heart.

Infrastructure Protection is another of the new Post September 11^th buzzwords in wide circulation. After all, attacks on power, water, food and transport can cripple our society, cause immense economic damage, potentially kill tens of thousands of our citizens and leave us helpless. There are people who should be included under the list of critical infrastructure to protect, and they are not politicians. We really should be guarding top scientists.

The May 4^th 2002 edition of the Globe and Mail carried an article on the deaths of some 11 leading microbiologists between November 2001 and March 2002. The deaths included:

• Benito Que, 52, on November 12^th of either a beating or a stroke as four men carjacked his vehicle at his medical school parking lot in Miami. Que was an expert in infectious diseases and cellular biology at the Miami Medical School.
• Don Wiley, 57, of the Howard Hughes Medical School at Harvard, fell off a bridge into the Mississippi River on November 16^th (investigators do not believe this was a suicide). He was an expert on immune system responses to viral epidemics.
• On November 21^st, Valdimar Pasechnik, who had defected to Great Britain in 1988 after playing a leading role in Soviet biological warfare projects (including delivery systems). He was also the author of a recent paper on using viruses to cure diseases, and the cause of his death is officially considered to be a stroke.
• On December 10^th, Robert Schwartz, 57, was stabbed and slashed to death in Virginia; his daughter and some of her friends (who identify themselves as a pagan cult) have been charged in his death. He was an expert on DNA sequencing and pathogenic micro-organisms.
• On December 14^th, Nguyen Van Set, 44, died in a bizarre laboratory accident in Geelong Australia — he entered an airlock which was flooded with nitrogen. His facility had just discovered a virulent strain of mousepox which can be used to affect smallpox.
• In Moscow, on February 9^th, Victor Korshunov, 56, was fatally struck with a blunt object near his home. He was an expert on intestinal bacteria in children.
• Ian Langford, 40, was found dead in his home in Norwich England, naked from the waist down and wedged under a chair on February 14th. His field of expertise lay with environmental risks and disease.
• Guyang Huang, 38 shot his colleague Tanya Holzmayer, 46 in a seeming murder-suicide (though Police were hard-put to find anything other than a professional relationship between the two) in San Francisco on February 28^th. Both were prominent in their profession and specialized on identifying portions of human molecular structures for precise applications of medicine.
• David Wynn Williams, 55, was struck by a car while jogging near his home in Cambridge England on March 24^th. His particular expertise lay with the survival of microbes in extreme environments.
• On March 25^th, Steven Mostow, 63, a noted expert in bio-terrorism and influenza, died piloting an airplane near Denver, Colorado.

The research community in microbiology numbers some 20,000 in the US and a similar number can be found elsewhere in the Western World. For 11 members of a community of 40,000 specialists to die in such unusual ways over a five month period is, at least, disturbing. Moreover, most of the deceased were in the upper echelons of this field. There has been an orgy of speculation on these deaths, not least because it is difficult to find a common thread beyond their common occupations.

This sort of thing, however, has been seen before and was written about in the Mackenzie Institute’s 1987 study Terrorism, "Active Measures", and SDI by Randall Heather. In the paper, Heather mentioned the following deaths:

• Dr. Karl-Heinz Beckurts, the director of Research at Siemens Electronics and an advisor to the West German government on physics, was killed (along with his driver) by a command detonated bomb set off by the terrorist group Red Army Faction, on July 9^th, 1986.
• Another unusual killing for the Red Army Faction was the shooting death of Dr. Ernst Zimmerman, head of the West German firm Motor-und-Turbinen (which produced tank and aircraft engines). He was shot to death in his home on February 1^st 1985.
• General Licio Giorgieri was the Director General of Italy’s Department of Space and Armaments Procurement, and was assassinated by a pair of Red Brigades gunmen on March 20^th, 1987.
• Gerold von Braunmuhl, a policy director of West Germany’s Foreign Ministry concerned with arms control issues, was shot by members of Red Army Faction on October 10^th, 1986. He was the first government official killed by the group in nine years.
• Georges Besse was the head of Renault, which had many defence contracts, and was assassinated on November 17^th 1986 by Action Direct.

This series of killings were all committed with conventional terrorist weapons by known groups (although the sudden resurgence of the Red Army Faction was a bit surprising). A parallel series of deaths and disappearances was even stranger.

• Dr. Svante Oden had been an internationally known Swedish expert on underwater acoustics. He vanished from his ten metre research boat (along with all his gear) on July 30^th, 1986 inside Swedish territorial waters.
• Vimal Dajibhai was a software engineer for Marconi Underwater systems and was working on torpedo guidance systems and an SDI related simulation system. On August 5^th, 1986, he told his wife he would be working late — then he drove 170 kilometres to Bristol (a city with which he had no known connection) and fell 260 feet off a bridge over the Avon River. No motive for suicide was ever established.
• Ashad Sharif was a 26 year old computer analyst working for Marconi Space and Defence systems near London, and was working on underwater acoustics for the Ministry of Defence. On the night of October 28^th, 1986 he died when a cable was wrapped around his neck and around a tree and he then hit the accelerator — a very unusual method of suicide.
• On January 4^th, 1987, Richard Pugh, a computer hardware designer and consultant to the British Ministry of Defence was found in his home with a plastic bag over his head. The police ruled that this was an accidental death.
• On January 8th, 1987, Avtar Singh Gida disappeared while conducting acoustical tests (he was a doctoral student working under contract to the Ministry of Defence and Marconi Space and Defence Systems). However, on May 8^th 1987, he was found under an assumed name working in a Paris "Sweat Shop" for illegal migrants. No charges were laid and police considered the case closed.
• Sometime in January 1987, Dr. John Brittan, an computer expert with the Royal Armaments Research Establishment, died as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning in his home. The death was ruled to be an accident.
• In February 1987, Victor Moore, a design engineer for Marconi Space and Defence Systems died as the result of drug overdose after spiraling into a bout of depression, familial breakup and heavy drinking in 1986.
• Peter Peapell, was a senior lecturer at the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham and a consultant with the Ministry of Defence on -- among other things -- beryllium metallurgy (useful in nuclear weapons design). He died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage on February 22^nd, 1987. The Coroner’s inquest returned an open verdict as there was no apparent reason for suicide.
• David Sands was a project manager and computer researcher working for Marconi contracts and on confidential projects with the Ministry of Defence on SDI and air defence related projects. On March 27^th, 1987, he drove his car at 130km an hour into a disused café — and the resulting explosion was heightened by two five gallon cans of gasoline in the trunk. Again, an open verdict was returned as no grounds for suicide could be ascertained.
• Robert Greenhalgh had been a computer defence system salesman working on a contract for the Royal Navy’s new Command and Control Centre. In mid-April 1987, he was found with slashed wrists after having fallen 20 metres from a railway bridge, and died a few days later in hospital.

These two strains of deaths, the one overtly caused by terrorists and the other suggestive of more covert means (for those unwilling to accept that these were just a very strange chain of coincidences) came at a time when the Soviet Union was struggling to find a way out of the trap it had set for itself through unconstrained defence spending to back an ideological psycho-political assault on the Western World. The Soviets were finding that they could not sustain their military in the face of dramatic improvements in Western military technology, and faced the prospect of economic collapse if they could not find some way of reform aside from the unthinkable step of dismantling the USSR and declaring that the whole arrangement had been a mistake.

In the late 1980s, the Strategic Defence Initiative and the realm of underwater warfare were the two leading areas of strategic defence for the Western World, and the threat that the US might actually start an SDI program resulted in numerous concessions from an increasingly nervous (and unstable USSR).

Heather’s paper did point out the linkages between the Soviet Union’s determined opposition to SDI and the terrorist attacks that were made on both scientists and against buildings associated with aerospace research at that time. The connections between the deaths of British (and the one Swede) who were experts on computers and underwater systems seem harder to make but it appears reasonable to point an accusatory finger at the USSR -- although proving a case about some of these strange apparent suicides would be impossible. The recent series of deaths of leading microbiologists seems to be in something of the same pattern, but at least one of the murdered scientists was a Russian (and two had been Russian citizens). Moreover, Russia has no real motive for behaving this way anymore.

Biowarfare is the leading threat to the Western World for the next few decades, particularly since we refuse to engage in the offensive side of that coin and only envision defensive responses. Perhaps someone (and it would be easy to speculate who, but I’d bet they read Sun Tze’s The Art of War frequently) is copying a leaf from the despairing Soviet playbook — and might wish to damage our defences before we are even aware that a threat exists. If we spend tens or hundreds of billions on infrastructure protection and civil defence, perhaps it might be a good idea to guard those specialists who are, by the nature of their education and experience, priceless strategic assets in a world where biological warfare is becoming an increasing threat.

Ideologues are always a challenge — regardless of the origin of the belief system they have adopted. They are impervious to any reason or logic that does not fit within the construct that has substituted for original thought. The armor of their conviction resists the blows of the heaviest arguments. What is cognitive dissonance to most of us is sweet music to them.

If ordinary ideologues are impossible to debate and remain unmoved by fact and experience that contradicts their world view, it is much harder to shift those who have allowed an ideology to justify their use of violence. This makes the threat posed by Islamic Fundamentalism a difficult one to challenge.

Look at the most persistent ideologues of the 20^th Century -- members of Communist Parties. That elderly hard core that withstood the shocks of the purges; stuck their fingers in the ears when told of the famines; and coped with the turnabout of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact, the revelations of the abuses of the Stalin Era, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, seem unconvinced of the failure of their beliefs by anything so trivial as the collapse of the Soviet Union. A graying procession of Stalinophile octogenarians is heading off to their graves with unshaken beliefs.

Inside the Soviet Union, even in the mid-1950s, it was apparent that the system was going to fail — something that became increasingly obvious with every passing year. Yet Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko (and even Khruschev) remained impervious to demands for real reform.

It is perhaps worth remembering that Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader without bloodstained hands… Brezhnev had been a political officer in the Red Army in the Second World War, and had survived the purges before that — it is a virtual certainty that he had personally supervised executions. Andropov had overseen deportations in annexed Finnish Karelian territories and had assisted in the suppression of Hungary after 1956. Chernenko’s biography mentions service as an NCO in the NKVD during the 1930s -- which implies that he had probably had a hand in execution or deportation squads during the Purges. It is interesting to note that of this trio, Andropov — who probably only ordered deaths rather than participating in them — was regarded as the "reformer" of the lot and Gorbachev was his protégé in the 1960s and ‘70s.

The same sort of impressions can be drawn from the Nazis — most of who were faithful enough until their ideology was soundly discredited by defeat. German soldiers were normally known to die hard during the conduct of the Second World War, but for absolute stubbornness it was usually hard to beat the Waffen SS — particularly those members who were not German, but had abandoned their own people to join the German cause, and those divisions that drew their personnel from Concentration Camp Guards and Police.

If ideologues are difficult to sway with argument, ideologues who have fought for their cause or, worse still, murdered for it are next to impossible to deal with.

The Nazis and the Communists were short-lived ideologies — both have their roots in the Romantic Era of the early 19^th Century, particularly with its notions of a heroic surrender of the individual into a collective to achieve a transformation. (Remember, both the Nazis and the Communists were pre-occupied with the creation of a new superman who would sweep away the old world and create an exciting new one). Times changed, particularly after the Nazis were disgraced by an unequivocal defeat, and the Soviet ideal became a stale vision in a new world with no place for it — and the clash between reality and ideology was leading into collapse. These ideologies did not survive history, but what of one that can claim centuries of successful history behind it?

Religions as codes for individual conduct do not usually attract or sustain ideologues, although there are examples enough in Christianity of ideological impulses at various times. Islam has developed enough aggressive ideological warriors in its history, but the naked political slant to today’s Islamic Fundamentalists is a comparatively new development that drew from both European nationalist and Marxist impulses as far back as the 1930s.

Dealing with Nazis and Marxists was the challenge of the 20^th Century; dealing with Islamic Fundamentalists will be the challenge of the early 21^st Century. The ideological wars of the 20^th Century cost tens of millions of lives and trillions of dollars. If we are not firm in purpose, strong in will, cunning in our strategems and precise in our responses, we might rack up similar costs against Al-Qaeda and their ilk.

Ideologues must proselytize. They have a vision of a different world or changed society, and must recruit supporters and followers. They have few scruples about actively engaging in propaganda and seek to gain exclusive control over all forms of media in the audience they hope to sway. In the Islamic world, it will be important for us to use their own symbols and themes to first establish a dissenting message to that of the Fundamentalists, and then to perpetuate a dominant one. We will need scholars and Muslim clergy in our effort. Fortunately, while an ideologue normally needs to either isolate his audience or dominate all forms of media, counter-propaganda need only use one or two forms to damage the ideologues’ messages.

It is important to remember, that the ideologue is already lost to reason, the point is to first keep him from persuading the undecided, and then to get the undecided to reject him.

The ideologue sells a simple message, and will usually lie when selling it. Bernard Lewis, one of the World’s most senior and talented scholars on Islamic history and culture, describes the Fundamentalists as those who ask "Who Did This to us?" rather than the more difficult question of "What did we do wrong?" when considering why the Islamic World has become so weak compared to the West. In asking and answering this question, Fundamentalists make a number of erroneous interpretations of history — and this could leave them vulnerable.

Ideologues also recruit among the disadvantaged — not the poor (although they can be useful), per se, but usually among the Middle Class who fear becoming poor or are frustrated at an inability to advance. Any reasonable measure (and not simple foreign aid) that encourages the development of a prosperous middle class in the Muslim world is worth taking. However, the main obstacle to this is, alas, the root of the problem. The Islamic world is poor and backwards largely because of its own internal cultural problems and the attendant behaviors of their governments. Cutting off the sources of the ideologues’ new recruits is going to require a lot of patience and careful selective support for positive change where it occurs.

Ideologues, particularly those of the Islamic World, enjoy clinging to a heroic myth. Stripping them of the shards of heroism in the eyes of their own community is always worthwhile. They do not like being portrayed as thugs and still less as incompetent fumblers -- as they so frequently are. Nazis grew furious when reminded that Horst Wessel (the song in his honor remains one of the most recognizable tunes of that era) had not just died as a result of street scuffle with Communists, but also because he was a pimp. Brutally stripping ideologues of their myths is useful at deterring the young and impressionable, while clinically dissecting the subjects of those myths is also useful in instilling doubt among the intellectuals.

Ideologues tend to rely on the common aspects of their belief system as a unifying element outside of the normal bounds of family, clan, class or culture. Communists talked endlessly of class solidarity, and the Nazis ranted on about the spirit of comradeship they were forming. Islam is an uber-society that overarches many different peoples and cultures, and makes a fuss about brotherhood within the faith. While poking fun at Islamic Brotherhood (always more of a myth than a fact) would be counterproductive in the broader Muslim world, providing examples of times where Fundamentalists have sold each other out would be beneficial. In a more direct sense, it is always worth any reasonable effort to erode trust within the ranks of any insurgent movement.

We have some powerful communications tools in the Western World which have a global impact, and it would be most useful if they could be quickly harnessed against the Muslim Fundamentalists. The alternative to effective counter-propaganda against Islamic Fundamentalists would be to either wage another ineffectual war of fumbling counter-insurgency, or risk a WWIII with the entire Islamic World.

Reprinted with the kind permission of the author, Morely Lymburner, editor of Blue Line Magazine, whose commentary from the June-July 2002 edition of Canada’s national law enforcement magazine is reprinted here.

Maurice (Mom) Boucher is finally behind bars. This is expected to be his home until well past his CPP eligibility and at best he will never see the other side of the pipes for the rest of his life. This person has shown a cunning ruthlessness seldom seen anywhere in the world, let alone Canada. I am sure he will be a model inmate and sadly missed by the Hell’s Angels.

Now that the trial is over perhaps it is time for legislators to take a long serious look at the rules of court procedure. Exceptional times require exceptional laws and in this day of intimidation and terror it should not mean putting up a blind to hide the juror’s identity. Under these circumstances there should be zero risk of contaminating the court room. One manner in which such matters could be dealt with would be by eliminating the right to a jury trial under certain circumstances.

In the Boucher matter there is no way a jury should be put under this amount of stress. They were trying a ruthless criminal in charge of a terrorist organization with almost unlimited resources to seek revenge. The court and police officers went to extreme measures to protect these jurors by putting up blinds so courtroom spectators could not see them. The jury was sequestered with very high security throughout the trial and during their deliberations. But what about now? Who is taking care of the citizens who were burdened with this task?

It is time new laws were introduced that strip away the right to a jury trial under certain circumstances. Cases in which jurors could be exposed to a high level of danger or even anxiety would include biker trials and those accused of terrorist acts. As a mater of note, there are no greater terrorists in contemporary society than outlaw motorcycle gangs. Their entire existence relies heavily on intimidation of average citizens and authority figures alike. Two dead federal corrections officers attest to this.

Parliament should draft legislation immediately that would address this problem. At a preliminary hearing the Crown should be permitted to make application to have the trial by Judge or Judges alone. The Italian justice system found that it was far easier to protect one judge for the rest of his life than hundreds of average citizens from which a jury is drawn.

For years the need for jury trials has been brought into question. In the year 1215, when the Magna Carta granted trial by jury, it was an age when almost everyone spent their entire life in one village. It made the jury trial process manageable. Almost every person in the community had skills that did not exceed ten professions or occupations. Almost every person knew everyone else and knew how their friends and families could be accommodated within that community. If terror and organized crime existed at all it was at the government level and had to be tolerated at best.

Today’s society has become much more complex than the era in which the jury trial process was first created. We are much more mobile, far more communicative and of course far deadlier than at any time in history. How can we expect to be assured that jury trials are free from intimidation in this day and age?

Arguments in favour of the jury system point out that juries can find someone not guilty by virtue of bad law even if they agree the person violated the law. The bad law doctrine, however, should not be the issue in trying members of organized crime groups.

Organized crime groups thrive on intimidation on the streets and in the headlines to help back up the threat of reprisals for those who would try to stop or even interfere with their activities. A big part of the Hell’s Angels success is the ruthless business of "taking care of business." This means an intention to never let anyone get away with impeding their activity. If even one is left ignored or unpunished then their business fails. In such matters, and if left unchecked, every citizen in this country is simply a pawn that lives or dies at their whim. Society can not tolerate this attitude nor permit an environment that supports it.

When dealing with individual criminal trials, jury trials can still work. But not so for organized crime groups. The organizations that come part and parcel with the individual criminal is far more problematic than the pawns they sacrifice. It is the organization that the public must be protected from. It is the organization that is the square root of all fears. Long after an individual is squeezed between the pipes [police slang for being jailed — ed.] the organization can busy itself "taking care of business" to ensure any one of the twelve jurors are gotten to as an example for the rest of the society. If they don’t hesitate to kill correctional officers I am sure they won’t hesitate to intimidate a stock broker, store merchant or housewife.

Society can no longer afford the luxury of jury trials in these situations. Italy has proved it… Canada should adopt it.

Morley Lymburner, editor of Blue Line

Voices of Freedom