‘Everything to live for’: school student Hannah Bond hanged herself not long after showing her father the cuts on her wrists as part of her ‘emo initiation’
A girl of 13 killed herself after becoming obsessed with a fashion which links death with glamour, an inquest heard.
Hannah Bond hanged herself from her bunk bed with a tie after becoming an ‘Emo’.
Emo fans wear dark clothes, practise self-harm and listen to “suicide cult” rock bands.
Two weeks before her death, she started following U.S. band My Chemical Romance.
One of their songs contains the lyrics: “Although you’re dead and gone, believe me your memory will go on.”
Hannah, described as a model pupil, had started cutting her wrists but told her father it was part of an initiation into the Emo fashion.
Coroner Roger Sykes said yesterday that Hannah’s death was “not glamorous, just simply a tragic loss of a young life”.
Hannah’s mother Heather told the inquest she had researched the trend since her daughter’s death.
“There are websites that show pink teddies hanging themselves,” she said.
“She called Emo a fashion and I thought it was normal.”
She added: “Hannah was a normal girl. She had loads of friends. She could be a bit moody but I thought it was just because she was a teenager.”
Hannah’s father Ray, a karate teacher, said: “Two weeks before, I saw the cuts. I asked her about them and she said it was an Emo initiation.
“She promised me she would never do it again.”
Hannah gave her name as Living Disaster on her page on social networking website Bebo.
The page is decorated with a picture of an Emo girl with bloody wrists after slashing herself.
Another picture shows a child’s exercise book scrawled with the words: “Dear Diary, today I give up. . .”
The inquest in Maidstone, Kent, heard Hannah had been with her boyfriend at a friend’s house on the evening of September 22 last year.
She had been angry when she was told she was not allowed to sleep over and when she got home in East Peckham she went straight to her room, saying: “I want to kill myself.”
The inquest was told Hannah had not used drugs or alcohol before her death but Vanessa Everett, her head teacher at Mascalls School, said self-harm had become commonplace among other Emo fans.
Recording a verdict of suicide, Mr Sykes said: “The Emo overtones concerning death and associating it with glamour I find very disturbing.”
•The Emo phenomenon began in the U.S. in the 1980s. It is a largely teenage trend and is characterised by depression, self-injury and suicide.
Followers wear tight jeans with studded belts and wristbands. Their hair is dyed black and worn in long fringes to obscure their faces.
Emo - from the word emotional - is a reference to the angst-filled lyrics and melancholy themes of the rock music central to the culture.
One of the foremost of these “suicide cult” bands is My Chemical Romance, from New Jersey.
Their first single, Welcome to the Black Parade, from the album The Black Parade, was released in 2006 and became a huge hit, going to number one in Britain.
The concept album follows the story of a character called The Patient, who dies of cancer.
The Black Parade is a nickname for the place where Emo fans believe they will go when they die.
The prizewinning artist Gregor Schneider, enfant terrible of the German cultural scene, is looking for a volunteer who is willing to die for his — that is, Schneider’s — art.
He wants someone whose dying hours will be spent in an art gallery with the public admiring the way the light plays on the flesh of a person gasping for the last breath.
Politicians and curators are in a state of uproar about Schneider’s plans. The 39-year-old artist has been concerned with death for much of his career. He gained critical acclaim for a sculpture, “Hannelore Reuen,” of a dead woman. He has been hatching his current idea since 1996, and now has a sympathetic pathologist and art collector to help to find a candidate who wants to become a work of art in the final days of his or her life.
“The dying person would determine everything in advance, he would be the absolute center of attention,” Schneider said. “Everything will be done in consultation with the relatives, and the public will watch the death in an appropriately private atmosphere.”
Death is commonly seen as the last taboo, but artists have been trying hard to demystify it. Gunther von Hagens, nicknamed Doctor Death, has been traveling the world with an exhibition of plastinated corpses, showing genuine human bodies in living poses, playing chess or on horseback. The Wellcome Collection in London has an exhibition of portraits of people pictured before and after death by two German photographers.
The Schneider project, however, seems to have gone too far. It is being compared with watching executions in the United States. The influential gallery owner Beatrix Kalwa spoke for many German curators who rule out the idea of giving space to Schneider’s artistic endeavor.
“Existential matters like death, birth or the act of reproduction do not belong in a museum,” she said. “There is a fundamental difference between portraying these acts in an art form, and showing them in actuality.”
The head of the German hospice foundation that provides care for the terminally ill, Eugen Brysch, said: “This is pure voyeurism and makes a mockery of those who are dying.” But Schneider, who feigned his own death as part of an exhibition in Germany in 2000, argues that death is already undignified and that his aim is to restore its grace.
While artists have always explored aspects of mortality, there has been a recent surge in exhibitions – from starving dogs to photographs of terminally ill people – that dare to examine the subject as never before. Andrew Johnson reports
It was, perhaps, only a matter of time before contemporary art’s obsession with death led to its natural conclusion: an exhibit featuring the act of dying.
The German artist Gregor Schneider is looking for volunteers who are willing to die in an art gallery for his latest work, according to the Art Newspaper. And in Nicaragua, a Costa Rican artist has created a storm of hostility by apparently tying up a dog in a gallery and leaving it to starve to death as a work of art. Schneider, who is known for his macabre sculptures of dark, foreboding houses and bodies lying prone with plastic bags on their heads, and who has represented Germany at the Venice Biennale, said: “I want to display a person dying naturally in the piece or somebody who has just died. My aim is to show the beauty of death. I am confident we will find people to take part.”
The modern public’s appetite for real death can be seen in the runaway success of Günther von Hagens’s Body World’s exhibition – in which real cadavers are preserved in varying states of dissection and which has been seen by 25 million people globally. It is currently showing in Manchester where it has already pulled in 100,000 visitors since February.
At the Wellcome Collection in London there is currently a moving display of portraits of ordinary people pictured before and after death by the German photographers Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta.
Meanwhile, animal rights activists have been in uproar over the fate of Natividad, a street dog captured by the artist Guillermo Vargas, otherwise known as Habacuc. Natividad was allegedly tied to a piece of string in a Nicaraguan gallery without food or water and left to starve to death late last year in a work called Eres lo que lees (You are what you read). The artist said the work was a comment on the thousands of street dogs that starve to death in Central America each year, but the US animal rights group the Humane Society said, as far as it could establish, the animal was fed and watered, and displayed for just three hours before it escaped.
Artists’ interest in mortality can be seen in work from Hans Holbein’s 16th-century The Ambassadors, in which a skewed skull comments on the vanity of the sitters, to Damien Hirst’s recent diamond encrusted skull.
The art critic Brian Sewell said: “Schneider’s idea is part of a new examination of death, following on from Günther von Hagens, which has popularised the macabre and bizarre. There is no doubt that the photographs at the Wellcome are based on sculpture, however. People say that death is the last taboo, and we talk about it in euphemism. It has very long roots in art, but is not as celebrated as the examination of beauty or youth.”
And writing this week about Schneider’s planned art work, Sewell wrote: “Can such a disquieting thing be art? Should it, indeed, be done in a civilised society? Perhaps so.”
Detectives fear a bizarre suicide craze is sweeping through teenagers in a small town fuelled by chat on social networking sites after seven friends took their own lives.
As well as the deaths during the last 12 months, several more have attempted suicide and police fear they are being driven by a desire to achieve prestige by having a memorial website set up in their name.
Many of the victims had their own web pages on the social networking site Bebo, which they spent hours on each day. After their deaths a special site is set up where friends can leave messages, photographs and videos.
Police have visited the parents of every member of a 20-strong group who they are most worried about warning them to keep a close eye on their children.
The latest victim is Natasha Randall, 17, who was found hanged at her family home last Thursday. Within 24 hours two of her friends had tried to kill themselves. One 15-year-old girl was on a life support machine yesterday while the other, also 15, was recovering after slitting her wrists.
Police, who are investigating a possible suicide chain, fear the teenagers think it is “cool” to have an internet memorial site and are killing themselves to achieve kudos among their peer group.
Within hours of Miss Randall’s death, a tribute site called “R.I.P. Tasha” had sprung up with photos, videos and messages. It has 345 members been viewed more than 2,100 times.
Her death follows those of Gareth Morgan, 27, Liam Clarke, 20, Thomas Davies, 20, David Dilling, 19, Dale Crole, 18, and Zachary Barnes, 17. Like Miss Randall, all lived in and around Bridgend in south Wales and all are being linked.
Miss Randall was in her first year on a Care and Childhood Studies course at Bridgend College. Her stepmother, Katrina, said the teenager spent hours every day on her computer using the name “Wildchild”.
She said: “The police have been and taken Natasha’s computer away to help with their investigation. This has come as a shock to all of us. We’re just too upset to speak about it, her dad especially.”
Thomas Davies’ mother, Melanie, 38, said: “It’s like a craze - a stupid sort of fad. They all seem to be copying each other by wanting to die.
“I think the problem is they do not know how to speak like adults about serious issues like this. They can speak to each other on the computer but do not know how to express their emotions in other ways.
“He did go on Bebo and apparently he had a page on there. He must have discussed his other friends dying on there because it had upset him.
“Like most parents, I have no idea how to get on these sites or what other kids are talking about. But I would warn other parents to beware and to keep a close eye on their children.”
A police source said: “Parents should keep a close watch on what their children are doing on the internet and what they are talking about.
“It’s often easier for them to disclose their real feelings on a computer rather than face to face with an adult or even their friends, and social networking sites are the ideal way to do that.”
Madeleine Moon, Bridgend MP, has met with senior police officers to discuss Bridgend’s alarmingly high suicide rate. The Bridgend and Glamorgan Valleys Coroner, Phillip Walters, has also raised his concerns and a special “task force” has been set up in the town to investigate the problem.
Consultant psychiatrist Tegwyn Williams, director of mental health services for the NHS Trust, said: “Unfortunately there’s a culture where men don’t tend to talk about how they feel. It comes to the point where they can’t see any way out.
“The key is to break down the stigma attached to suicide in the community so that people aren’t afraid to talk to someone of they feel depressed.”
It comes after the deaths of three teenagers in a suicide pact in a small village in Northern Ireland in the summer.
Exactly one year ago today, the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq signed off on an “urgent operational need” for an airborne tactical laser that could, in the words of the formal request, create “instantaneous burst-combustion of insurgent clothing, a rapid death through violent trauma, and more probably a morbid combination of both.”
Although the request is based on the technology of the Advanced Tactical Laser, a chemical laser integrated on an AC-130 gunship, the request suggests that a laser weapon could eventually be put on other aircraft, such as drones or, as the picture shows, the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor craft. (Photoshop can quickly solve all engineering challenges.)
According to the Marines’ laser request, obtained by DANGER ROOM, this so-called Precision Airborne Standoff Directed Energy Weapon (PASDEW) wouldn’t just be an improved killed machine. It would also have particularly devastating psychological effects. Such weapons, when used against people, “can be compared to long range blow torches or precision flame throwers, with corresponding psychological advantages for [Coalition Forces] CF.”
In other words, the lasers don’t just kill people, but they kill people in really gruesome, frightening ways — particularly because the beam from such weapons, like the Advanced Tactical Laser, is invisible to the human eye. That means you could have three guys standing around, and one of them suddenly burst into flames.
For context, this is one of a multitude of requests for high-tech (and sometimes sci-fi tech) that came out of 1 MEF. Other requests included exoskeletons, self-aware robots, and, of course, the now popular Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Marines don’t yet have this incredible capability.
If the Marines could have such a weapon, however, what would be the big deal? In other words, why not just use an old-fashioned gunship to take them out? Well, for one, lasers are more precise. And as this request notes, the sort of sudden, nasty death that a laser would cause has certain advantages for the U.S. military:
A precision engagement of a PID insurgent by a DEW will be a highly surgical and impressively violent event. Target effects will include instantaneous burst-combustion of insurgent clothing, a rapid death through violent trauma, and more probably a morbid combination of both. It is estimated that the aftermath of a sub-second engagement by PASDEW will also be an observable event leaving an impression of of terrifyingly precise CF attribution in the minds of all witnesses.The PASDEW capability will give CF an asymmetric psychological edge over the insurgency. It is a lethal capability they cannot readily counter and will not fully comprehend, particularly as the DEW is invisible to the unaided eye and the aircraft can engage from significant stand off. For all witnesses, it will be perceived that overt insurgency participation in the MNF-W AOR is less attractive due to the terrifying potential consequences.
Sounds nasty, right? But, I doubt there’s going to be videos of laser-induced exploding insurgents anytime soon. The Advanced Tactical laser, on which this request is based, hadn’t even reached battlefield-strength threshold of 100 kilowatts as of this summer (the exact number is considered classified). As one senior Air Force official told me earlier this year: “The laser’s not powerful enough to do very much. It’s not powerful enough to deliver the effects you need.”
Right now, the service regards it as a testbed. A good testbed, but still just a testbed.
When I interviewed a Boeing official earlier this year, I was told that the company wasn’t going to have the actual chemical laser integrated on the plane till the end of the year (they had been using a low-power proxy laser during beam control tests). Moreover, Boeing at the time noted that the military was concerned about forward basing a chemical laser. In other words, sending the laser to Iraq integrated on a C-130 (let alone the V-22 pictured above) is not likely to happen anytime soon.
Self-loathing has been around for a long time. There have always been individuals who have acted on feelings of disgust for themselves and for others.
by Frank Furedi
However, today self-loathing is underwritten by a powerful cultural script of misanthrophy; by a cultural outlook which sees humanity as a polluter rather than a problem-solver. It strikes me that Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who has been named as the Finnish school shooter who yesterday killed his headmistress, seven fellow pupils and then himself, may have been acting out this cultural script.
Online, Auvinen went by the name Sturmgeist89. In the various YouTube videos and the 1,000-word manifesto that have been credited to him, he sent out a straightforward message. He declared that ‘not all human lives are important or worth saving’.
In one video he wore a t-shirt that said ‘Humanity is overrated’. This chilling slogan does not come from some violent Hollywood movie or gangsta rap track - which are usually blamed for sending young people off the rails - but rather from the critically-acclaimed US drama House, in which British actor Hugh Laurie plays a cynical doctor who works in the field of infectious diseases. Indeed, you can buy ‘Humanity is overrated’ t-shirts from the House website here.
A frame taken from YouTube footage shows student Pekka-Eric Auvinen who opened fire at Jokela High School school in Finland November 7, 2007. Auvinen admired Hitler, counted Plato and Nietzsche among his favourite writers and called the handgun he used to end eight lives in Finland’s deadliest peacetime shooting rampage “Catherine”.
TUUSULA (Reuters) - Pekka-Eric Auvinen admired Adolf Hitler, counted Plato and Nietzsche among his favourite writers and called the handgun he used to end eight lives in Finland’s deadliest peacetime shooting rampage “Catherine”.
The exact reason 18-year-old Auvinen chose on Wednesday to open fire at Jokela High School — killing six fellow pupils, the principal and the school nurse — may never be known.
But the clearest clues lie in the words he wrote online.
“I am a cynical existentialist, anti-human humanist, anti-social socialdarwinist, realistic idealist and god-like atheist,” he wrote in English in a posting on YouTube.
“Don’t blame my parents or my friends. I told nobody about my plans and I always kept them inside my mind only.”
Auvinen called himself a “natural selector” and said he would “eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.”
So on Wednesday, he wrote a suicide message, took a gun he’d received a permit for three weeks before and 500 rounds of ammunition and walked through the school firing.
Police said each of his victims was shot several times and that some bodies were riddled with close to 20 bullets.
“He was always a little odd,” said classmate Roope Parviainen, trying to come to grips with the tragedy by walking with friends at a cemetery in Tuusula, a municipality 60 km south of Helsinki.
“A few months ago some of his close friends had noticed some videos and strange behaviour, I do not know whether he was already thinking about this.”
Auvinen telegraphed his intent on YouTube with a video clip called “Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007″ set to the song “Stray Bullet” by industrial rock band KMFDM.
ECHOES OF COLUMBINE
Lyrics to various KMFDM songs, including “Stray Bullet” were also posted on a Web site maintained by Eric Harris, one of the gunmen in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in America. The two gunmen killed 12 other students and a teacher before killing themselves.
The clip shows a still photo of the Jokela school complex beside a pond. This breaks apart to reveal a red-tinted image of Auvinen aiming a gun at the camera — an image eerily similar to that on tapes made by Virginia Tech university shooter Seung-Hui Cho who killed 32 people in April this year.
“Sturmgeist89″ — Auvinen’s user name on YouTube — means storm spirit in German.
“You might ask yourselves, why did I do this and what do I want. Well, most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand,” he wrote.
The “human race is not worth fighting for or saving … only worth killing.”
Kim Kiuru, a history and psychology teacher at Jokela school who had taught Auvinen, said Auvinen was a good student with unusual interests.
“He was interested in war history and extremist movements, national socialism,” Kiuru said.
Police said he came from a “normal family” and lived with his parents and little brother.
Auvinen also wrote online about his admiration for Hitler and said Plato and Nietzsche were among his favourite writers. He said he wished for an end to democracy.
“When intelligent people are finally free and rule the society instead of the idiocratic rule of majority,” he wrote. “In that great day of deliverance, you will know what I want.”
Susanna Hyttinen, 17, a fellow pupil who had taken a class with Auvinen said he was “never aggressive”.
She said he had showed a great deal of interest in a documentary the class watched in May about the Columbine school shootings in the United States.
“We wrote an essay on gun use, and he wrote a long and thorough one,” she said. “He was a good student, but very quiet, not many people knew him well.”
Stalin, who succeeded Vladimir Lenin, started a series of purges in the 1930s that became known as the Great Terror. Historians estimate that between 20 million and 40 million died during Stalin’s rule, tearing families apart and creating a climate of fear that haunted the Soviet Union.
BUTOVO, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin paid his respects on Tuesday to millions of people killed under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and called for the country to unite to prevent a repeat of its tragic past.
Putin, a former KGB spy, marked Russia’s annual day of remembrance for the victims of Stalin’s purges with a visit to Butovo, a military training ground near Moscow where tens of thousands of people were executed by firing squads.
Millions of people were executed under Stalin and many more perished from abuse and disease in a vast network of prison camps, known as the Gulags.
The victims included priests and royalists but also huge numbers of people who were simply caught up in an indiscriminate spiral of killing. This year Russia marks the 70th anniversary of the bloodiest period of the purges.
Putin attended a memorial service with Patriarch Alexiy II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, after passing a field criss-crossed with mass graves.
“We know very well that 1937 was the peak of the purges but this year was well prepared by years of cruelty,” Putin said beside a mass grave after laying flowers at a memorial.
Putin said such tragedies “happen when ostensibly attractive but empty ideas are put above fundamental values, values of human life, of rights and freedom.”
“Hundreds of thousands, millions of people were killed and sent to camps, shot and tortured,” he said. “These were people with their own ideas which they were unafraid of speaking out about. They were the cream of the nation.”
In an appeal for national unity, Putin said: “To develop the country and choose the right path, we need political debates and even battles but to make this process creative they should not be conducted outside the cultural framework,” Putin said.
Historians estimate that between 20 million and 40 million died during Stalin’s rule, tearing families apart and creating a climate of fear that haunted the Soviet Union.
Also on Tuesday, dozens of mainly older Russians laid flowers at a stone memorial outside the headquarters of the former KGB — now known as the Federal Security Service — to remember Stalin’s victims.
GREAT TERROR
Stalin, who succeeded Vladimir Lenin, started a series of purges in the 1930s that became known as the Great Terror. The NKVD security service, the predecessor to the KGB, killed hundreds of thousands of people on trumped up charges.
Butovo was just one of hundreds of killing grounds. More than 20,000 people are known to have been executed there between August 1937 and October 1938 alone, though local priests say the figure could be as high as 60,000.
“According to documents we have seen, most of the people shot here were peasants and workers, but there were many dignitaries as well,” said Deacon Dmitry, a priest at the site.
“There was even a complete theatrical troupe from the Baltics massacred here,” he said.
4 million Square feet of new biodefense research facilities coming online in the next few years.
The Bush administration and federal agencies have given a green light to construction of 90 more acres of lab space, experts say – equivalent to about 36 Wal-Mart stores – to experiment with pathogens such as Ebola (see ‘Related’ below - PW)
WASHINGTON – Since Sept. 11, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on research to protect the public from an invisible but devastating threat: biological attack.
But a lack of supervision over the hundreds of labs and thousands of scientists now handling deadly germs – as demonstrated by recent problems at Texas A&M University – has put the country at higher risk for dangerous disease outbreaks than before 2001, federal investigators say.
“The labs are pretty much overseeing themselves at this point,” Keith Rhodes, an investigator with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, said this month. “I would have to say we are at greater risk today” of an infectious disease epidemic.
Biological weapons watchdogs say there’s no end in sight to the biodefense research spree.
The Bush administration and federal agencies have given a green light to construction of 90 more acres of lab space, experts say – equivalent to about 36 Wal-Mart stores – to experiment with pathogens such as Ebola, anthrax and the avian flu.
With more researchers, more private labs and more university campuses across the country authorized to handle these diseases, they say, the chance of an epidemic, by mistake or by a rogue insider, is higher than that of a terrorist attack.
“It’s like we’re building labs and hoping the germs will come,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who chaired a congressional hearing this month on biodefense labs and the disease exposures at Texas A&M that helped bring national attention to the issue.
Homeland Security officials, who lawmakers say turned down an invitation to testify at the congressional hearing, vehemently disagree.
They acknowledge the federal program is growing fast and is divided among many agencies, but they say these layers provide greater oversight, not less. They and supportive lawmakers say the research, which rarely leads to accidental illness, is essential to protect the U.S. from real biological threats – those created by terrorists, and those existing naturally in the environment.
The A&M breaches uncovered this spring – including the university’s failure to report one illness and several infections in its labs for more than a year – are unfortunate but isolated, officials say. A&M has had its research suspended pending safety upgrades.
“What you do is, you balance the risk,” said Dr. John Vitko, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s chemical and biological division. “It is, in my mind, much more prudent to be prepared.”
The lab building boom kicked off in 2001, when mail-based anthrax attacks highlighted the government’s limited research on biological agents. In response, Congress raised funding for biodefense research, and in particular, for high-security labs. Millions were authorized for construction in federal facilities, college campuses and the private sector.
The goal was for these federal partners to develop vaccines and medical treatments for defense purposes, government officials vowed, not to create biological weapons. But they never specified how many labs were necessary.
The result today is a cottage industry bankrolled by federal dollars. Opponents say it has become too easy to get money to study infectious agents.
Since 2001, analysts say, the federal government has spent more than $16 billion on biodefense research and development – a tenth of it for construction of new labs. Though no official count exists, federal investigators estimate there are between 400 and 1,200 high-security labs operating in private and academic settings, many of them in or around major urban centers.
Fifteen of those labs are Bio-Safety Level 4, or “BSL-4″ – the facilities equipped to handle the world’s most dangerous pathogens. That’s up from just five BSL-4 labs operating in 2001. A&M’s lab is a BSL-3, the next step down. In Dallas, UT Southwestern Medical Center has a BSL-3 lab.
ENDGAME - Blueprint for Global Enslavement
Elite Eugenics Plan to Exterminate 80% of Humanity
Critics’ concerns
Currently, nearly 15,000 people in the U.S. are authorized to work with “select agents” – the most infectious pathogens overseen by the Centers for Disease Control. But they make up just a fraction of the researchers and lab workers studying other biological agents across the country.
“After 2001, some increase in the U.S. biodefense program was merited,” said Edward Hammond, whose anti-weapons Sunshine Project uncovered the problems at A&M. “But we have gone way too far, to the point that I believe that the most likely source of a bioterrorist event in the U.S. is a U.S. biodefense lab.”
In a report prepared for lawmakers this month by the GAO, Congress’ investigative arm, officials questioned 12 federal agencies involved with biodefense research – from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Defense – to find out whether they tracked the growing number of infectious disease labs in the U.S.
None did, the report said.
Nor were any of the agencies solely responsible for determining how many more labs were necessary, monitoring the research performed there, or analyzing the risks associated with the burgeoning biodefense program. The findings have been confirmed by independent researchers.
University of Maryland security studies expert John Steinbruner and his colleagues, who have pushed since 2003 for stronger oversight of biodefense research, say serious safety measures haven’t been a priority in this results-driven national program. The current system gives scientists virtually free rein with their experiments, they say, with few guidelines and even fewer consequences for their mistakes.
“Congress poured a lot of money at the problem without thinking this out in much detail,” Dr. Steinbruner said. “And people responded to that money on the table.”
Defending the labs
Federal officials say while there may not be a single government body that oversees the country’s biodefense research, each of the 12 agencies plays a specific, designated role – whether it’s reviewing grant proposals, overseeing experiments and results or reporting lab accidents.
“We actually have a very formal process,” said Dr. Vitko, the Homeland Security official. “We do it in an interagency community … so that it is coordinated in a scientific sense.”
Dr. Vitko said every research proposal is reviewed at the front end to ensure that it is necessary and complies with international weapons treaties. Every experiment is monitored for safety and efficiency. And every individual handling the nation’s most dangerous agents is subject to criminal background checks and strict CDC supervision.
“If I come and say I want to do an experiment, it gets exposed to a lot of people – it’s not like you just go ahead and do something,” Dr. Vitko said.
The CDC has conducted more than 600 lab inspections since 2003 and referred nearly 40 lab operators to federal investigators for violating “select agent” regulations, said Dr. Richard Besser, the agency’s director of terrorism preparedness.
Officials with the National Institutes of Health, who are funding construction of new labs in the next few years, offer dramatically expanded biosecurity training, they say.
And despite the fears surrounding biodefense research, U.S. biosafety experts say, public health risks are remarkably low. Of the 105 biosecurity breaches involving select agents reported to the CDC since 2003, only three involved lab worker illnesses.
“In spite of these things that you’re seeing [at A&M] … the public and the environment have been protected,” Dr. Vitko said.
Austin bureau staffer Amy Rosen contributed to this report.
BIODEFENSE LABS AT A GLANCE
5 Top-security (BSL-4) U.S. biodefense labs before 2001
15 BSL-4 labs today
4 million Square feet of new biodefense research facilities coming online in the next few years
16 Federal agencies that play a role in biodefense research or operate labs
0 Federal agencies that keep track of how many U.S. biodefense labs there are
14,400 Number of people in the U.S. authorized to work with CDC-protected “select agents,” the world’s most infectious diseases
Professor’s “Kill 90% of Population” Comments Echo UN, Elite NGO policies
Alex Jones yesterday interviewed Dr Forrest M. Mims, III, the Editor of Citizen Scientist Magazine and Chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science. The discussion centered around the controversial University of Texas professor who advocates the mass death of 90% of the world’s human population. Dr. Eric R. Pianka gave a speech to the Texas Academy of Science last month in which he advocated the need to exterminate 90% of the population through the airborne ebola virus. Pianka’s chilling comments, and their enthusiastic reception again underscore the elite’s agenda to enact horrifying measures of population control.
Dr. Death & The Religion Of Genocide
Disciple of Pianka goes further, wants 100% of humans dead
The elite have created a religion of genocide and the nation’s universities are the churches for the communication of an environmental jihad that threatens to decimate the human species as we know it. The furore surrounding the comments of Professor Eric R. Pianka, who told a crowd at Arlington UT that 90% of the world population need to be culled to solve overpopulation, have been characterized on the one hand by an expected outrage but on the other by a sycophantic mainstream media who have collaborated to spin the story and obfuscate the real issues.
Burma is a “land of prisons” with thousands of human rights activists being sent off to brutal “new life” camps after being arrested during night raids and convicted in secret trials, a senior British diplomatic source has said.
Monks who led the pro-democracy campaign are among the disappeared. Some are believed to have been beaten close to death in custody, while the fate of many others remain unknown. Roads to the monasteries have been cut and very few monks are now seen in public.
The account of retribution which has followed last month’s violence came from the official who is closely acquainted with the unfolding situation in Burma. The “new life” camps, echoes of “re-education centres” set up by Pol Pot in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, are away from the capital, Rangoon, and surrounded by tales of savage punishment, he said.
Those considered by the regime to be leaders of the protest are believed to have received sentences of up to 20 years imprisonment.
And tales have begun to emerge of mistreatment in the jails and “new life” camps, with the monks in particular being targeted for severe abuse. They are being held in rooms where there are no toilets and where the walls are covered in excrement. They have been routinely beaten and soaked in ice cold water, with the interrogators often stripping robes from the clerics because this supposedly expiates them of any sins over what they had done.
The diplomat said yesterday that the regime is trying to portray a scene of normality, but “very serious abuses” are going on behind the scenes. “There are huge night-time sweeps. They have scooped up hundreds of people. There is heavy security in the parts of town where many of the dissidents come from. A hundred activists have been tried this week in closed courts in Mandalay, while another thousand have been brought before special courts in Rangoon.”
Figures released by the regime regarding the number of dead and incarcerated cannot be believed, the official said. According to official numbers, of the 3,000 people arrested during the protests only 500 remain in custody, but the real total of those in detention was likely to be up to 2,500. The official death toll is 10; the real figure, was “many, many multiples” of that, the diplomat added.
Living conditions for the population continue to be dire in a part of Asia which is going through an economic boom. Fifty per cent of children do not have access to primary school education, while 30 per cent live below the poverty line. Communication with the outside world has been curtailed by closing down of internet services and sheer practical difficulties in a country where a mobile phone costs $2,000 (£975).
While British officials do not believe there is any immediate prospect of a repeat of last month’s mass protests, the diplomat said signs of unrest have continued. There have been reports of rocks and bricks being thrown at police, while in Rangoon there has been booing at what was supposed to be a pro-government rally, even though the crowd had been surrounded by armed police.
There was deep outrage, said the diplomat, at the way the monks had been treated, which even extended to parts of the army and the government.
“The population is traumatised and for the moment, they are licking their wounds, but they are determined to carry on showing their resistance,” the official said.
