Sunday, December 13, 2009

Sign at homeless camp: 'Welcome to Obamaville'

'I've had 100 calls today and not a single 1 of them was negative'


Residents of Colorado Springs, Colo., have a mystery on their hands: Who came up with the idea to erect a sign reading "Welcome to Obamaville" on the site of a homeless tent camp in the city?

The sign, which was visible from the Cimarron Street ramp to Interstate 25, clearly conveyed a political jab at rising unemployment under President Barack Obama, for it read in full, "Welcome to Obamaville – Colorado's fastest growing community."

Tell lawmakers in Washington that if they insist on spending more, they'll join the ranks of the unemployed, too. For just $29.95 you can send an individualized notice to every member of Congress in the form of a "pink slip."

Colorado television station KRDO first reported on the sign earlier this week, but without any identifying logos or clues to the sign's origin, the station launched a public appeal for information on the sign's author.

KRDO got its first clue when Spencer Swann of Colorado Canyon Signs confessed to constructing the sign, though he denied it was his idea and still refuses to divulge for whom he built it. He did, however, explain that there was more to the sign's intent than criticizing the sitting president:

"You mention his name, you get some attention – I think that was the whole idea behind it," Swann told KRDO. "I didn't dream it up, but I thought it was a good idea. I thought that it would help some of these guys down here."


Public reaction on the KRDO website has been mixed over the sign's message:

"Lay the blame where you will, I think it is a hoot and a great historical throwback to Hooverville," wrote a reader named daman in an online comment. "These are the worst times I've seen in my 40-plus years, and I am glad my kids get to see it early. Maybe they'll learn to grow and be compassionate, yet personally fiscal conservatives."

A poster named Nick, however, was critical: "That is pretty low to use a right-wing political agenda and attack the homeless during the worst recession in a generation and especially during the holidays."

Swann, however, says he's received nothing but support:

"I've had 100 calls today," Swann told the station, "and not a single one of them was negative."

Nonetheless, Swann has since replaced the "Obamaville" sign with another, which reads, "Please help. We need firewood, propane and canned food."

In response to some criticism that the money used to build the signs should have been used to help the homeless instead, Swann told KRDO that though the original "Obamaville" sign cost around $150, he didn't charge the unknown creator for either sign. Furthermore, he said, the instigator of the "Obamaville" sign is already involved with helping the homeless:

"He gives them money, he gives them food, he gives them support," said Swann.

As for his own motivations for building the sign, and doing so without charge, Swann told KRDO, "I thought it was just something to draw attention and help those folks."

For feds, more get 6-figure salaries

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.

"There's no way to justify this to the American people. It's ridiculous," says Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a first-term lawmaker who is on the House's federal workforce subcommittee.

Jessica Klement, government affairs director for the Federal Managers Association, says the federal workforce is highly paid because the government employs skilled people such as scientists, physicians and lawyers. She says federal employees make 26% less than private workers for comparable jobs.

USA TODAY analyzed the Office of Personnel Management's database that tracks salaries of more than 2 million federal workers. Excluded from OPM's data: the White House, Congress, the Postal Service, intelligence agencies and uniformed military personnel.

The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker's pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.

Key reasons for the boom in six-figure salaries:

•Pay hikes. Then-president Bush recommended — and Congress approved — across-the-board raises of 3% in January 2008 and 3.9% in January 2009. President Obama has recommended 2% pay raises in January 2010, the smallest since 1975. Most federal workers also get longevity pay hikes — called steps — that average 1.5% per year.

New pay system. Congress created a new National Security Personnel System for the Defense Department to reward merit, in addition to the across-the-board increases. The merit raises, which started in January 2008, were larger than expected and rewarded high-ranking employees. In October, Congress voted to end the new pay scale by 2012.

•Pay caps eased. Many top civil servants are prohibited from making more than an agency's leader. But if Congress lifts the boss' salary, others get raises, too. When the Federal Aviation Administration chief's salary rose, nearly 1,700 employees' had their salaries lifted above $170,000, too.

By Dennis Cauchon
USA TODAY

Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor

Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

"Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way." Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.

"That was the moment [last year] when the system was basically paralysed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another. The progressive liquidisation to the system and the progressive improvement by some banks of their share values [has meant that] the problem [of illegal money] has become much less serious than it was," he said.

The IMF estimated that large US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets and from bad loans from January 2007 to September 2009 and more than 200 mortgage lenders went bankrupt. Many major institutions either failed, were acquired under duress, or were subject to government takeover.

Gangs are now believed to make most of their profits from the drugs trade and are estimated to be worth £352bn, the UN says. They have traditionally kept proceeds in cash or moved it offshore to hide it from the authorities. It is understood that evidence that drug money has flowed into banks came from officials in Britain, Switzerland, Italy and the US.

British bankers would want to see any evidence that Costa has to back his claims. A British Bankers' Association spokesman said: "We have not been party to any regulatory dialogue that would support a theory of this kind. There was clearly a lack of liquidity in the system and to a large degree this was filled by the intervention of central banks."

Ice at the North Pole in 1958 and 1959 – not so thick

What would NSIDC and our media make of a photo like this if released by the NAVY today? Would we see headlines like “NORTH POLE NOW OPEN WATER”? Or maybe “Global warming melts North Pole”? Perhaps we would. sensationalism is all the rage these days. If it melts it makes headlines.

Skate (SSN-578), surfaced at the North Pole, 17 March 1959.

Skate (SSN-578), surfaced at the North Pole, 17 March 1959. Image from NAVSOURCE

Some additional captures from the newsreel below show that the ice was pretty thin then, thin enough to assign deckhands to chip it off after surfacing.The newsreel is interesting, here is the transcript.

1958 Newsreel: USS Skate, Nuclear Sub, Is First to Surface at North Pole

ED HERLIHY, reporting:

USS Skate heads north on another epic cruise into the strange underseas realm first opened up by our nuclear submarines. Last year, the Skate and her sister-sub Nautilus both cruised under the Arctic ice to the Pole. Then, conditions were most favorable. The Skate’s job is to see if it can be done when the Arctic winter is at its worst, with high winds pushing the floes into motion and the ice as thick as twenty-five feet.

Ten times she is able to surface. Once, at the North Pole, where crewmen performed a mission of sentiment, scattering the ashes of polar explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins. In 1931, he was the first to attempt a submarine cruise to the Pole. Now, the Skate’s twelve-day three thousand mile voyage under the ice, shown in Defense Department films, demonstrates that missile-carrying nuclear subs could lurk under the Polar Ice Cap, safe from attack, to emerge at will, and fire off H-bomb missiles to any target on Earth.

A powerful, retaliatory weapon for America’s defense.

USS Skate during an Arctic surfacing in 1959. (US Navy Photo)

USS Skate during an Arctic surfacing in 1959. (US Navy Photo)

From John Daly:

For example, one crew member aboard the USS Skate which surfaced at the North Pole in 1959 and numerous other locations during Arctic cruises in 1958 and 1959 said:

“the Skate found open water both in the summer and following winter. We surfaced near the North Pole in the winter through thin ice less than 2 feet thick. The ice moves from Alaska to Iceland and the wind and tides causes open water as the ice breaks up. The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick, but with the wind and tides the ice will crack and open into large polynyas (areas of open water), these areas will refreeze over with thin ice. We had sonar equipment that would find these open or thin areas to come up through, thus limiting any damage to the submarine. The ice would also close in and cover these areas crushing together making large ice ridges both above and below the water. We came up through a very large opening in 1958 that was 1/2 mile long and 200 yards wide. The wind came up and closed the opening within 2 hours. On both trips we were able to find open water. We were not able to surface through ice thicker than 3 feet.”

- Hester, James E., Personal email communication, December 2000

Here are some screencaps from the newsreel:

uss-skate-ice2

Note the feet of the deckhand for thickness perspective

uss-skate-ice1

Ice going over the side after chipping

It was that way again in 1962:

Seadragon (SSN-584), foreground, and her sister Skate (SSN-578) during a rendezvous at the North Pole in August 1962

Seadragon (SSN-584), foreground, and her sister Skate (SSN-578) during a rendezvous at the North Pole in August 1962

And of course then there’s this famous photo:

3-subs-north-pole-1987

But contrast that to 1999, just 12 years later, lots of ice:

USS Hawkbill at the North Pole, Spring 1999. (US Navy Photo)

USS Hawkbill at the North Pole, Spring 1999. (US Navy Photo)

But in 1993, it’s back to thin ice again:

USS Pargo at the North Pole in 1993. (US Navy Photo)

USS Pargo at the North Pole in 1993. (US Navy Photo)

The point illustrated here: the North Pole is not static, ice varies significantly. The Arctic is not static either. Variance is the norm.

There’s quite an interesting read at John Daly’s website, including a description of “the Gore Box”. Everybody should have one of those.

h/t to WUWT commenters Stephen Skinner, Crosspatch, and Glenn.

See the Skate image archive at NAVSOURCE

Homeless increase even in affluent area

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 11 (UPI) -- Even in California's affluent Orange County, the recession has spawned more homeless -- people who once had jobs and mortgages, officials say.

In an area where the median family income tops $80,000, the homeless figure tops 20,000, The Orange County Register reported Friday.

A local Salvation Army shelter reports housing more than 100 people a month who have never stayed in a shelter before, the newspaper said.

Existing shelters and homeless programs have been overwhelmed, officials say. There are no emergency shelters where families can stay together; men are separated from women and children, the Register reported.

Homeless needs have always strained county resources, said Larry Haynes, executive director of a non-profit group running shelters and programs in the county.

"A lot more people were living on the edge than we ever even anticipated," Haynes said. "So many people were just barely making it. It's absolutely shocking."

© 2009 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

WMD LIES - Bush Cheney Rumsfeld etc. - THE ULTIMATE CLIP

Click this link ...... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYI7JXGqd0o

US pay tsar Ken Feinberg limits company salaries to $500,000

The US Treasury's pay tsar has limited the amount hundreds of employees at major American companies including Citigroup and General Motors can be paid in cash to $500,000 (£300,000) a year as part of a series of new clampdowns.

Ken Feinberg, who was appointed by President Barack Obama to oversee compensation, yesterday set out a series of new limits for senior employees at the six companies most indebted to the US Treasury.

Having already imposed limits on the 25 highest paid employees at each company, he has now set out limits for the 26th to 100th best-paid staff at the six. Under the new rules, cash can only make up 45pc of a person's pay and at least half of total compensation has to be considered "long term" and taken in the form of long-dated shares and share options.

Mr Feinberg looked at dozens of requests from companies requesting staff should get more than $500,000 in cash, but he granted permission for only 12. The pay tzar admitted that some of these exemptions were granted to staff at AIG – following reports earlier this week that five senior staff were unhappy with their allotted compensation – but stressed that "it was not only AIG" that wanted its staff to get more.

Lawrence Solomon: The gas of life

Western carbon dioxide emissions increase plant yields in the Third World. So why are they asking for reparations?

A

t Copenhagen, Third World countries are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations from the West for the consequences of the West’s fossil fuel burning, among them droughts and crop failures.

Third World countries have it backwards. The West’s CO2 emissions have been increasing crop yields while helping to ease the Third World’s water shortages. Rather than plead for reparations, Third World governments should offer a paean to Providence.

The bureaucrats at Copenhagen dread high CO2 levels. The biosphere craves them. Plants evolved when CO2 levels in the atmosphere stood at a healthy 1000 parts per million, two-to-three times today’s paltry level of about 380 parts per million.

Network - Money speech

Click this link ...... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5hrcwU7Dk&feature=youtube_gdata

Missing more than a meal

Child hunger, called the 'silent epidemic,' is an increasingly complex problem


Since his inauguration, Obama has seldom broached the subject. His aides brainstorm weekly with several agencies, but their internal conversations so far have not produced fundamentally new approaches. The president's goal could prove daunting: Childhood hunger is more complex than previously understood, new research suggests, and is unlikely to be solved simply by spending more money for food programs.

If Obama intends to erase childhood hunger, the government will need to reach even further into the rowhouse kitchen where Anajyha Wright Mitchell sometimes takes tiny portions so her mother will have more food. "I tell her to eat, eat, eat, because she is real skinny," Anajyha, 12, said of her mother, Andrea Mitchell.

Anajyha, a serious girl with two younger brothers and a mother who has lost two of her three part-time jobs, is growing up with an ebb and flow of food typical of a growing number of families. In her home, in a scuffed neighborhood called Strawberry Mansion a few miles north of the Liberty Bell, food stamps arrive but never last the month. There can be cereal but no milk. Pancake mix and butter but no eggs.

The intricacy of the problem -- and of the Obama administration's task -- plays out here, where Anajyha could have enough to eat but shortchanges herself.

Philadelphia offers a particularly vivid ground-level view of what researchers call a "silent epidemic" of hungry and undernourished youngsters. For years, local civic activists, health experts and politicians have tried some of the nation's most innovative experiments -- and learned how intractable hunger can be. Researchers here have also been at the leading edge in trying to fathom the effects of a scarcity of food.

Even when children are not hungry, studies have found that slight shortages of food in their homes are associated with serious problems. Babies and toddlers in those homes are far more likely to be hospitalized than children in families with similar incomes but adequate food. School-age children tend to learn and grow more slowly, and to get into trouble more often. Teenage girls are more prone to be depressed or even flirt with thoughts of suicide.

Solving the problem is further complicated by its subtle nature. "Most people who are hungry are not clinically manifesting what we consider hunger. It doesn't even affect body weight," said Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University medical anthropologist who is part of Children's HealthWatch, a network of pediatricians and public health researchers in Philadelphia and four other cities. Hunger cannot be solved by food alone, their work shows, because it is one strand in a web of pressures that trap families, including housing and energy costs.

A nuanced problem

This more nuanced picture is emerging as the problem has become more widespread. With the economy faltering, the number of youngsters living in homes without enough food soared in 2008 from 13 million to nearly 17 million, the Agriculture Department reported last month.


In Philadelphia, researchers found that, during the first half of this year, one in five homes with a baby or toddler did not have enough food. And one of every dozen young children was outright hungry, a rate twice that of the same period the year before.

Although the problem has deepened, White House and Agriculture Department officials say the president's goal remains, as one put it, "something that seems manageable." Congress increased food stamp benefits this year by $20 billion and, more recently, set aside money to test ways to feed children when school is out for the summer. The president's aides are focusing on a congressional debate, deferred from this year to next, on how to renew the nation's main child nutrition law.

Although ideas in Washington have not fully crystallized, an unlikely lobbying force is at work. A group of Philadelphia women has begun appearing on Capitol Hill and at national conferences as part of a "Witnesses to Hunger" project, organized by Chilton, who handed video cameras to 42 mothers to document their efforts to feed their children.

But learning to dress for success at news conferences, these women are discovering, does not solve the food problem at home. One of the "witnesses" is Christina Koch, whose younger son Jesus, 2, wakes up at night thirsty for milk or juice. "If I don't have it," she said, "I take him into bed and try to rock him to sleep."

Running out of drinks for her toddler is part of a tangle of obstacles that shape Koch's days. At 26, she lives in North Philadelphia with her son, Dale, 5, a picky eater, as well as Jesus and her fiance, Jesus Nieves, who has had as much trouble finding and keeping jobs as she has.

Not long ago, when she had the money, Koch bought more than 20 boxes of macaroni and cheese and stored them under her kitchen sink. The sink leaked. Every box was ruined. For the past few months, the gas and electricity have been cut off because she hadn't paid the bills.

She has been cooking on a hot plate, borrowing electricity from the neighbor in the rowhouse next door, who let her thread a jumbo extension cord through the kitchen window. But when the neighbor was evicted last month, she was down to using candles until her family chipped in to pay her bill.

She is bad, she knows, at budgeting. In early November, when $650 in food stamps came, she splurged on $18 in Chinese takeout. When the food stamps run out, she buys on credit from Indio's Mini Market, a few blocks away. In October, she ended up with a $300 tab.

Making a difference

Koch met Chilton, the anthropologist, in the emergency room at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, where Chilton and her co-workers spend hours on questionnaires to measure the food shortage. Across the hospital parking lot is the GROW clinic, which provides more evidence of the effort it takes to make a difference, even a few children at a time.

Inside the clinic -- similar to Children's HealthWatch clinics in Baltimore, Boston, Little Rock and Minneapolis -- pediatrician Hans Kersten and a team see about a dozen young children and their parents each week. Four in five children here and at the other sites are not getting adequate food. The team checks head circumference as a clue to brain growth, motor skills, toddlers' vocabulary.

"Hi, beautiful," nutritionist Kristen Roscioli says as the team walks into the examining room where 14-month-old Joeanna, the first child of Sherita Parks and Joseph Mouzon, is waiting in a diaper and pink barrettes.

"She has managed to gain about two pounds, which is great," Kersten tells Joeanna's parents.

"But she still is underweight?" Parks asks.

"She is a tiny girl," he replies. "We just want her to be healthy."

The main problem, her parents say, is that Joeanna doesn't like to eat. But Parks also says, "It would be great if we could get food stamps." Mouzon's pay from working in a pharmaceutical warehouse means they just miss qualifying.

Long before the GROW clinic existed, Philadelphia's school officials and anti-poverty activists began a novel experiment whose future the Obama administration, in one of its first decisions about children and food, has put in doubt.

Instead of requiring people to fill out paperwork for their children to get free lunch and breakfast at school, Philadelphia officials persuaded the government 19 years ago to let every child qualify automatically in neighborhoods with enough poor families. The number of students getting the meals soared. Last year, the Bush administration decided that the experiment was too old and must end soon.

After Obama arrived, the local congressional delegation and others appealed. Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, upheld the Bush administration's decision. Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell (D) fired off a letter, saying that "hundreds if not thousands of eligible students" would lose meals. Vilsack relented, for now.

Administration officials say they want families nationally to have easier access to food programs. But they want to leave the question of Philadelphia's approach for the congressional debate on childhood nutrition.

Though safe for the moment, the program has never been a complete solution. At W.G. Smith Elementary School in South Philadelphia, 155 of the school's 380 students came for a free breakfast on a recent Monday. Many parents simply bring their children to school too late.

Cuerethea Travis, Smith's school nurse for 13 years, stockpiles graham crackers, yogurt and fruit for the trickle of children who come to her every morning, drooping and with stomachaches. "You feel like you are Dick Tracy," she said. "Is it the kind of pain you feel like you need to go to the bathroom? Or is it the kind you feel like you want to put something in your stomach?"

Often, she asks children to look at the clock on her wall, then count back, telling her how many hours it has been since they had something to eat.


China's Hu kicks off tour of energy-rich Central Asia

Chinese President Hu Jintao opened the Kazakh section of a gas pipeline from Central Asia on Saturday, as he kicked off a tour highlighting Beijing's growing influence over the region's energy resources.

Hu attended a ceremony at the headquarters of Kazakh state energy firm KazMunaiGaz, smiling broadly as he pressed a button symbolically opening the Kazakh section of a pipeline that will deliver Turkmen natural gas to China's western Xinjiang province.

"With the launch of this pipeline, it is like the ancient Silk Road has been restored," said Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, referring to a mediaeval trading route linking East and West.

Addressing workers, who were putting in place the final weld on the pipeline in the steppes on the Kazakh border, via video link, he added:

"This pipeline will be beneficial for all of our countries. It is a promising, strategic project."

Speaking to reporters after the talks with his host, China's Hu said the two leaders pledged to deepen cooperation in the energy sphere.

Hu said one of the key priorities for the two nations was "to support close ties at the high and highest levels (and) deepen mutual understanding and trust."

On Monday, Hu, Nazarbayev, Uzbek President Islam Karimov and Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov will attend the official opening of the 7,000 kilometre (4,350 mile) pipeline in Turkmenistan.

The pipeline, the first major export route for Central Asian natural gas to China, is seen as the culmination of years of quiet diplomacy by Beijing to gain access to the region's vast energy supplies.

Central Asia, a vast resource-rich region wedged between Afghanistan, China Russia and Iran, has been dominated by Moscow since the Kremlin's imperial expansion in the 19th century.

But Moscow has struggled to maintain its influence over the region in recent years, especially as its coffers have been depleted by the global financial crisis, which has buffeted Russia's commodities-driven economy.

China has taken advantage of recent Russian foreign policy stumbles in Central Asia to boost its own influence, said Sarah Michaels, senior editor for the ex-Soviet Union at Oxford Analytica, a Britain-based think tank.

"China's increasing presence in Central Asia is more the result of Russia's foreign policy missteps than a directed strategy by Beijing for engaging with its neighbours," she said.

Beijing has spent heavily across Central Asia this year, including a 10 billion dollar (6.78 billion euros) loan to Astana as part of a deal that saw it take an increasingly prominent stake in Kazakhstan's vital energy sector.

But the soon-to-open natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan, which represents years of quiet lobbying and public spending, is the crown jewel in Beijing's Central Asia policy.

Turkmenistan, an energy-rich but isolated ex-Soviet nation, is believed to have some of the biggest gas reserves in the world, nearly all of which is currently exported to Russia via a network of ageing Soviet-era pipelines.

A pipeline explosion earlier this year sparked a row with Russian energy giant Gazprom that saw exports of Turkmen natural gas almost completely cut off, prompting Ashgabat to accelerate efforts to secure alternative routes.

The EU has been anxious to exploit the rift to secure Ashgabat's cooperation in a direct export pipeline to help ease Europe's reliance on Russian natural gas supplies, but has struggled to win concessions.

China has been quick to act in its stead, lending Ashgabat four billion dollars (2.71 billion euros) earlier this year and moving ahead on the new pipeline.

The China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) will eventually import up to 40 billion cubic metres of gas per year through the pipeline, the Turkmen government has said.

cracking building

Click this link ...... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6zEHYQiJW4

The dark side of Dubai

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.


I. An Adult Disneyland

Karen Andrews can't speak. Every time she starts to tell her story, she puts her head down and crumples. She is slim and angular and has the faded radiance of the once-rich, even though her clothes are as creased as her forehead. I find her in the car park of one of Dubai's finest international hotels, where she is living, in her Range Rover. She has been sleeping here for months, thanks to the kindness of the Bangladeshi car park attendants who don't have the heart to move her on. This is not where she thought her Dubai dream would end.

Her story comes out in stutters, over four hours. At times, her old voice – witty and warm – breaks through. Karen came here from Canada when her husband was offered a job in the senior division of a famous multinational. "When he said Dubai, I said – if you want me to wear black and quit booze, baby, you've got the wrong girl. But he asked me to give it a chance. And I loved him."

All her worries melted when she touched down in Dubai in 2005. "It was an adult Disneyland, where Sheikh Mohammed is the mouse," she says. "Life was fantastic. You had these amazing big apartments, you had a whole army of your own staff, you pay no taxes at all. It seemed like everyone was a CEO. We were partying the whole time."

Her husband, Daniel, bought two properties. "We were drunk on Dubai," she says. But for the first time in his life, he was beginning to mismanage their finances. "We're not talking huge sums, but he was getting confused. It was so unlike Daniel, I was surprised. We got into a little bit of debt." After a year, she found out why: Daniel was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

One doctor told him he had a year to live; another said it was benign and he'd be okay. But the debts were growing. "Before I came here, I didn't know anything about Dubai law. I assumed if all these big companies come here, it must be pretty like Canada's or any other liberal democracy's," she says. Nobody told her there is no concept of bankruptcy. If you get into debt and you can't pay, you go to prison.

"When we realised that, I sat Daniel down and told him: listen, we need to get out of here. He knew he was guaranteed a pay-off when he resigned, so we said – right, let's take the pay-off, clear the debt, and go." So Daniel resigned – but he was given a lower pay-off than his contract suggested. The debt remained. As soon as you quit your job in Dubai, your employer has to inform your bank. If you have any outstanding debts that aren't covered by your savings, then all your accounts are frozen, and you are forbidden to leave the country.

"Suddenly our cards stopped working. We had nothing. We were thrown out of our apartment." Karen can't speak about what happened next for a long time; she is shaking.

Daniel was arrested and taken away on the day of their eviction. It was six days before she could talk to him. "He told me he was put in a cell with another debtor, a Sri Lankan guy who was only 27, who said he couldn't face the shame to his family. Daniel woke up and the boy had swallowed razor-blades. He banged for help, but nobody came, and the boy died in front of him."

Karen managed to beg from her friends for a few weeks, "but it was so humiliating. I've never lived like this. I worked in the fashion industry. I had my own shops. I've never..." She peters out.

Daniel was sentenced to six months' imprisonment at a trial he couldn't understand. It was in Arabic, and there was no translation. "Now I'm here illegally, too," Karen says I've got no money, nothing. I have to last nine months until he's out, somehow." Looking away, almost paralysed with embarrassment, she asks if I could buy her a meal.

She is not alone. All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars.

"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship."

II. Tumbleweed

Thirty years ago, almost all of contemporary Dubai was desert, inhabited only by cactuses and tumbleweed and scorpions. But downtown there are traces of the town that once was, buried amidst the metal and glass. In the dusty fort of the Dubai Museum, a sanitised version of this story is told.

In the mid-18th century, a small village was built here, in the lower Persian Gulf, where people would dive for pearls off the coast. It soon began to accumulate a cosmopolitan population washing up from Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and other Arab countries, all hoping to make their fortune. They named it after a local locust, the daba, who consumed everything before it. The town was soon seized by the gunships of the British Empire, who held it by the throat as late as 1971. As they scuttled away, Dubai decided to ally with the six surrounding states and make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The British quit, exhausted, just as oil was being discovered, and the sheikhs who suddenly found themselves in charge faced a remarkable dilemma. They were largely illiterate nomads who spent their lives driving camels through the desert – yet now they had a vast pot of gold. What should they do with it?

Dubai only had a dribble of oil compared to neighbouring Abu Dhabi – so Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the revenues to build something that would last. Israel used to boast it made the desert bloom; Sheikh Maktoum resolved to make the desert boom. He would build a city to be a centre of tourism and financial services, sucking up cash and talent from across the globe. He invited the world to come tax-free – and they came in their millions, swamping the local population, who now make up just 5 per cent of Dubai. A city seemed to fall from the sky in just three decades, whole and complete and swelling. They fast-forwarded from the 18th century to the 21st in a single generation.

If you take the Big Bus Tour of Dubai – the passport to a pre-processed experience of every major city on earth – you are fed the propaganda-vision of how this happened. "Dubai's motto is 'Open doors, open minds'," the tour guide tells you in clipped tones, before depositing you at the souks to buy camel tea-cosies. "Here you are free. To purchase fabrics," he adds. As you pass each new monumental building, he tells you: "The World Trade Centre was built by His Highness..."

But this is a lie. The sheikh did not build this city. It was built by slaves. They are building it now.

III. Hidden in plain view

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says.

The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows their anger. You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.

The "ringleaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets..." He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."

Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."

This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.

Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.

At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stands, oblivious.

IV. Mauled by the mall

I find myself stumbling in a daze from the camps into the sprawling marble malls that seem to stand on every street in Dubai. It is so hot there is no point building pavements; people gather in these cathedrals of consumerism to bask in the air conditioning. So within a ten minute taxi-ride, I have left Sohinal and I am standing in the middle of Harvey Nichols, being shown a £20,000 taffeta dress by a bored salesgirl. "As you can see, it is cut on the bias..." she says, and I stop writing.

Time doesn't seem to pass in the malls. Days blur with the same electric light, the same shined floors, the same brands I know from home. Here, Dubai is reduced to its component sounds: do-buy. In the most expensive malls I am almost alone, the shops empty and echoing. On the record, everybody tells me business is going fine. Off the record, they look panicky. There is a hat exhibition ahead of the Dubai races, selling elaborate headgear for £1,000 a pop. "Last year, we were packed. Now look," a hat designer tells me. She swoops her arm over a vacant space.

I approach a blonde 17-year-old Dutch girl wandering around in hotpants, oblivious to the swarms of men gaping at her. "I love it here!" she says. "The heat, the malls, the beach!" Does it ever bother you that it's a slave society? She puts her head down, just as Sohinal did. "I try not to see," she says. Even at 17, she has learned not to look, and not to ask; that, she senses, is a transgression too far.

Between the malls, there is nothing but the connecting tissue of asphalt. Every road has at least four lanes; Dubai feels like a motorway punctuated by shopping centres. You only walk anywhere if you are suicidal. The residents of Dubai flit from mall to mall by car or taxis.

How does it feel if this is your country, filled with foreigners? Unlike the expats and the slave class, I can't just approach the native Emiratis to ask questions when I see them wandering around – the men in cool white robes, the women in sweltering black. If you try, the women blank you, and the men look affronted, and tell you brusquely that Dubai is "fine". So I browse through the Emirati blog-scene and found some typical-sounding young Emiratis. We meet – where else? – in the mall.

Ahmed al-Atar is a handsome 23-year-old with a neat, trimmed beard, tailored white robes, and rectangular wire-glasses. He speaks perfect American-English, and quickly shows that he knows London, Los Angeles and Paris better than most westerners. Sitting back in his chair in an identikit Starbucks, he announces: "This is the best place in the world to be young! The government pays for your education up to PhD level. You get given a free house when you get married. You get free healthcare, and if it's not good enough here, they pay for you to go abroad. You don't even have to pay for your phone calls. Almost everyone has a maid, a nanny, and a driver. And we never pay any taxes. Don't you wish you were Emirati?"

I try to raise potential objections to this Panglossian summary, but he leans forward and says: "Look – my grandfather woke up every day and he would have to fight to get to the well first to get water. When the wells ran dry, they had to have water delivered by camel. They were always hungry and thirsty and desperate for jobs. He limped all his life, because he there was no medical treatment available when he broke his leg. Now look at us!"

For Emiratis, this is a Santa Claus state, handing out goodies while it makes its money elsewhere: through renting out land to foreigners, soft taxes on them like business and airport charges, and the remaining dribble of oil. Most Emiratis, like Ahmed, work for the government, so they're cushioned from the credit crunch. "I haven't felt any effect at all, and nor have my friends," he says. "Your employment is secure. You will only be fired if you do something incredibly bad." The laws are currently being tightened, to make it even more impossible to sack an Emirati.

Sure, the flooding-in of expats can sometimes be "an eyesore", Ahmed says. "But we see the expats as the price we had to pay for this development. How else could we do it? Nobody wants to go back to the days of the desert, the days before everyone came. We went from being like an African country to having an average income per head of $120,000 a year. And we're supposed to complain?"

He says the lack of political freedom is fine by him. "You'll find it very hard to find an Emirati who doesn't support Sheikh Mohammed." Because they're scared? "No, because we really all support him. He's a great leader. Just look!" He smiles and says: "I'm sure my life is very much like yours. We hang out, have a coffee, go to the movies. You'll be in a Pizza Hut or Nando's in London, and at the same time I'll be in one in Dubai," he says, ordering another latte.

But do all young Emiratis see it this way? Can it really be so sunny in the political sands? In the sleek Emirates Tower Hotel, I meet Sultan al-Qassemi. He's a 31-year-old Emirati columnist for the Dubai press and private art collector, with a reputation for being a contrarian liberal, advocating gradual reform. He is wearing Western clothes – blue jeans and a Ralph Lauren shirt – and speaks incredibly fast, turning himself into a manic whirr of arguments.

"People here are turning into lazy, overweight babies!" he exclaims. "The nanny state has gone too far. We don't do anything for ourselves! Why don't any of us work for the private sector? Why can't a mother and father look after their own child?" And yet, when I try to bring up the system of slavery that built Dubai, he looks angry. "People should give us credit," he insists. "We are the most tolerant people in the world. Dubai is the only truly international city in the world. Everyone who comes here is treated with respect."

I pause, and think of the vast camps in Sonapur, just a few miles away. Does he even know they exist? He looks irritated. "You know, if there are 30 or 40 cases [of worker abuse] a year, that sounds like a lot but when you think about how many people are here..." Thirty or 40? This abuse is endemic to the system, I say. We're talking about hundreds of thousands.

Sultan is furious. He splutters: "You don't think Mexicans are treated badly in New York City? And how long did it take Britain to treat people well? I could come to London and write about the homeless people on Oxford Street and make your city sound like a terrible place, too! The workers here can leave any time they want! Any Indian can leave, any Asian can leave!"

But they can't, I point out. Their passports are taken away, and their wages are withheld. "Well, I feel bad if that happens, and anybody who does that should be punished. But their embassies should help them." They try. But why do you forbid the workers – with force – from going on strike against lousy employers? "Thank God we don't allow that!" he exclaims. "Strikes are in-convenient! They go on the street – we're not having that. We won't be like France. Imagine a country where they the workers can just stop whenever they want!" So what should the workers do when they are cheated and lied to? "Quit. Leave the country."

I sigh. Sultan is seething now. "People in the West are always complaining about us," he says. Suddenly, he adopts a mock-whiny voice and says, in imitation of these disgusting critics: "Why don't you treat animals better? Why don't you have better shampoo advertising? Why don't you treat labourers better?" It's a revealing order: animals, shampoo, then workers. He becomes more heated, shifting in his seat, jabbing his finger at me. "I gave workers who worked for me safety goggles and special boots, and they didn't want to wear them! It slows them down!"

And then he smiles, coming up with what he sees as his killer argument. "When I see Western journalists criticise us – don't you realise you're shooting yourself in the foot? The Middle East will be far more dangerous if Dubai fails. Our export isn't oil, it's hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians grow up saying – I want to go to Dubai. We're very important to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don't have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn't gloat at our demise. You should be very worried.... Do you know what will happen if this model fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path."

Sultan sits back. My arguments have clearly disturbed him; he says in a softer, conciliatory tone, almost pleading: "Listen. My mother used to go to the well and get a bucket of water every morning. On her wedding day, she was given an orange as a gift because she had never eaten one. Two of my brothers died when they were babies because the healthcare system hadn't developed yet. Don't judge us." He says it again, his eyes filled with intensity: "Don't judge us."

V. The Dunkin' Donuts Dissidents

But there is another face to the Emirati minority – a small huddle of dissidents, trying to shake the Sheikhs out of abusive laws. Next to a Virgin Megastore and a Dunkin' Donuts, with James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" blaring behind me, I meet the Dubai dictatorship's Public Enemy Number One. By way of introduction, Mohammed al-Mansoori says from within his white robes and sinewy face: "Westerners come her and see the malls and the tall buildings and they think that means we are free. But these businesses, these buildings – who are they for? This is a dictatorship. The royal family think they own the country, and the people are their servants. There is no freedom here."

We snuffle out the only Arabic restaurant in this mall, and he says everything you are banned – under threat of prison – from saying in Dubai. Mohammed tells me he was born in Dubai to a fisherman father who taught him one enduring lesson: Never follow the herd. Think for yourself. In the sudden surge of development, Mohammed trained as a lawyer. By the Noughties, he had climbed to the head of the Jurists' Association, an organisation set up to press for Dubai's laws to be consistent with international human rights legislation.

And then – suddenly – Mohammed thwacked into the limits of Sheikh Mohammed's tolerance. Horrified by the "system of slavery" his country was being built on, he spoke out to Human Rights Watch and the BBC. "So I was hauled in by the secret police and told: shut up, or you will lose you job, and your children will be unemployable," he says. "But how could I be silent?"

He was stripped of his lawyer's licence and his passport – becoming yet another person imprisoned in this country. "I have been blacklisted and so have my children. The newspapers are not allowed to write about me."

Why is the state so keen to defend this system of slavery? He offers a prosaic explanation. "Most companies are owned by the government, so they oppose human rights laws because it will reduce their profit margins. It's in their interests that the workers are slaves."

Last time there was a depression, there was a starbust of democracy in Dubai, seized by force from the sheikhs. In the 1930s, the city's merchants banded together against Sheikh Said bin Maktum al-Maktum – the absolute ruler of his day – and insisted they be given control over the state finances. It lasted only a few years, before the Sheikh – with the enthusiastic support of the British – snuffed them out.

And today? Sheikh Mohammed turned Dubai into Creditopolis, a city built entirely on debt. Dubai owes 107 percent of its entire GDP. It would be bust already, if the neighbouring oil-soaked state of Abu Dhabi hadn't pulled out its chequebook. Mohammed says this will constrict freedom even further. "Now Abu Dhabi calls the tunes – and they are much more conservative and restrictive than even Dubai. Freedom here will diminish every day." Already, new media laws have been drafted forbidding the press to report on anything that could "damage" Dubai or "its economy". Is this why the newspapers are giving away glossy supplements talking about "encouraging economic indicators"?

Everybody here waves Islamism as the threat somewhere over the horizon, sure to swell if their advice is not followed. Today, every imam is appointed by the government, and every sermon is tightly controlled to keep it moderate. But Mohammed says anxiously: "We don't have Islamism here now, but I think that if you control people and give them no way to express anger, it could rise. People who are told to shut up all the time can just explode."

Later that day, against another identikit-corporate backdrop, I meet another dissident – Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, Professor of Political Science at Emirates University. His anger focuses not on political reform, but the erosion of Emirati identity. He is famous among the locals, a rare outspoken conductor for their anger. He says somberly: "There has been a rupture here. This is a totally different city to the one I was born in 50 years ago."

He looks around at the shiny floors and Western tourists and says: "What we see now didn't occur in our wildest dreams. We never thought we could be such a success, a trendsetter, a model for other Arab countries. The people of Dubai are mighty proud of their city, and rightly so. And yet..." He shakes his head. "In our hearts, we fear we have built a modern city but we are losing it to all these expats."

Adbulkhaleq says every Emirati of his generation lives with a "psychological trauma." Their hearts are divided – "between pride on one side, and fear on the other." Just after he says this, a smiling waitress approaches, and asks us what we would like to drink. He orders a Coke.

VI. Dubai Pride

There is one group in Dubai for whom the rhetoric of sudden freedom and liberation rings true – but it is the very group the government wanted to liberate least: gays.

Beneath a famous international hotel, I clamber down into possibly the only gay club on the Saudi Arabian peninsula. I find a United Nations of tank-tops and bulging biceps, dancing to Kylie, dropping ecstasy, and partying like it's Soho. "Dubai is the best place in the Muslim world for gays!" a 25-year old Emirati with spiked hair says, his arms wrapped around his 31-year old "husband". "We are alive. We can meet. That is more than most Arab gays."

It is illegal to be gay in Dubai, and punishable by 10 years in prison. But the locations of the latest unofficial gay clubs circulate online, and men flock there, seemingly unafraid of the police. "They might bust the club, but they will just disperse us," one of them says. "The police have other things to do."

In every large city, gay people find a way to find each other – but Dubai has become the clearing-house for the region's homosexuals, a place where they can live in relative safety. Saleh, a lean private in the Saudi Arabian army, has come here for the Coldplay concert, and tells me Dubai is "great" for gays: "In Saudi, it's hard to be straight when you're young. The women are shut away so everyone has gay sex. But they only want to have sex with boys – 15- to 21-year-olds. I'm 27, so I'm too old now. I need to find real gays, so this is the best place. All Arab gays want to live in Dubai."

With that, Saleh dances off across the dancefloor, towards a Dutch guy with big biceps and a big smile.

VII. The Lifestyle

All the guidebooks call Dubai a "melting pot", but as I trawl across the city, I find that every group here huddles together in its own little ethnic enclave – and becomes a caricature of itself. One night – in the heart of this homesick city, tired of the malls and the camps – I go to Double Decker, a hang-out for British expats. At the entrance there is a red telephone box, and London bus-stop signs. Its wooden interior looks like a cross between a colonial clubhouse in the Raj and an Eighties school disco, with blinking coloured lights and cheese blaring out. As I enter, a girl in a short skirt collapses out of the door onto her back. A guy wearing a pirate hat helps her to her feet, dropping his beer bottle with a paralytic laugh.

I start to talk to two sun-dried women in their sixties who have been getting gently sozzled since midday. "You stay here for The Lifestyle," they say, telling me to take a seat and order some more drinks. All the expats talk about The Lifestyle, but when you ask what it is, they become vague. Ann Wark tries to summarise it: "Here, you go out every night. You'd never do that back home. You see people all the time. It's great. You have lots of free time. You have maids and staff so you don't have to do all that stuff. You party!"

They have been in Dubai for 20 years, and they are happy to explain how the city works. "You've got a hierarchy, haven't you?" Ann says. "It's the Emiratis at the top, then I'd say the British and other Westerners. Then I suppose it's the Filipinos, because they've got a bit more brains than the Indians. Then at the bottom you've got the Indians and all them lot."

They admit, however, they have "never" spoken to an Emirati. Never? "No. They keep themselves to themselves." Yet Dubai has disappointed them. Jules Taylor tells me: "If you have an accident here it's a nightmare. There was a British woman we knew who ran over an Indian guy, and she was locked up for four days! If you have a tiny bit of alcohol on your breath they're all over you. These Indians throw themselves in front of cars, because then their family has to be given blood money – you know, compensation. But the police just blame us. That poor woman."

A 24-year-old British woman called Hannah Gamble takes a break from the dancefloor to talk to me. "I love the sun and the beach! It's great out here!" she says. Is there anything bad? "Oh yes!" she says. Ah: one of them has noticed, I think with relief. "The banks! When you want to make a transfer you have to fax them. You can't do it online." Anything else? She thinks hard. "The traffic's not very good."

When I ask the British expats how they feel to not be in a democracy, their reaction is always the same. First, they look bemused. Then they look affronted. "It's the Arab way!" an Essex boy shouts at me in response, as he tries to put a pair of comedy antlers on his head while pouring some beer into the mouth of his friend, who is lying on his back on the floor, gurning.

Later, in a hotel bar, I start chatting to a dyspeptic expat American who works in the cosmetics industry and is desperate to get away from these people. She says: "All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world." She adds: "It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month."

With the exception of her, one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid. The maids used to be predominantly Filipino, but with the recession, Filipinos have been judged to be too expensive, so a nice Ethiopian servant girl is the latest fashionable accessory.

It is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape.

In a Burger King, a Filipino girl tells me it is "terrifying" for her to wander the malls in Dubai because Filipino maids or nannies always sneak away from the family they are with and beg her for help. "They say – 'Please, I am being held prisoner, they don't let me call home, they make me work every waking hour seven days a week.' At first I would say – my God, I will tell the consulate, where are you staying? But they never know their address, and the consulate isn't interested. I avoid them now. I keep thinking about a woman who told me she hadn't eaten any fruit in four years. They think I have power because I can walk around on my own, but I'm powerless."

The only hostel for women in Dubai – a filthy private villa on the brink of being repossessed – is filled with escaped maids. Mela Matari, a 25-year-old Ethiopian woman with a drooping smile, tells me what happened to her – and thousands like her. She was promised a paradise in the sands by an agency, so she left her four year-old daughter at home and headed here to earn money for a better future. "But they paid me half what they promised. I was put with an Australian family – four children – and Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. My ear still hurts. They wouldn't give me my wages: they said they'd pay me at the end of the two years. What could I do? I didn't know anybody here. I was terrified."

One day, after yet another beating, Mela ran out onto the streets, and asked – in broken English – how to find the Ethiopian consulate. After walking for two days, she found it, but they told her she had to get her passport back from Madam. "Well, how could I?" she asks. She has been in this hostel for six months. She has spoken to her daughter twice. "I lost my country, I lost my daughter, I lost everything," she says.

As she says this, I remember a stray sentence I heard back at Double Decker. I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best thing about Dubai was. "Oh, the servant class!" she trilled. "You do nothing. They'll do anything!"

VIII. The End of The World

The World is empty. It has been abandoned, its continents unfinished. Through binoculars, I think I can glimpse Britain; this sceptred isle barren in the salt-breeze.

Here, off the coast of Dubai, developers have been rebuilding the world. They have constructed artificial islands in the shape of all planet Earth's land masses, and they plan to sell each continent off to be built on. There were rumours that the Beckhams would bid for Britain. But the people who work at the nearby coast say they haven't seen anybody there for months now. "The World is over," a South African suggests.

All over Dubai, crazy projects that were Under Construction are now Under Collapse. They were building an air-conditioned beach here, with cooling pipes running below the sand, so the super-rich didn't singe their toes on their way from towel to sea.

The projects completed just before the global economy crashed look empty and tattered. The Atlantis Hotel was launched last winter in a $20m fin-de-siecle party attended by Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan and Lily Allen. Sitting on its own fake island – shaped, of course, like a palm tree – it looks like an immense upturned tooth in a faintly decaying mouth. It is pink and turreted – the architecture of the pharaohs, as reimagined by Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Its Grand Lobby is a monumental dome covered in glitterballs, held up by eight monumental concrete palm trees. Standing in the middle, there is a giant shining glass structure that looks like the intestines of every guest who has ever stayed at the Atlantis. It is unexpectedly raining; water is leaking from the roof, and tiles are falling off.

A South African PR girl shows me around its most coveted rooms, explaining that this is "the greatest luxury offered in the world". We stroll past shops selling £24m diamond rings around a hotel themed on the lost and sunken continent of, yes, Atlantis. There are huge water tanks filled with sharks, which poke around mock-abandoned castles and dumped submarines. There are more than 1,500 rooms here, each with a sea view. The Neptune suite has three floors, and – I gasp as I see it – it looks out directly on to the vast shark tank. You lie on the bed, and the sharks stare in at you. In Dubai, you can sleep with the fishes, and survive.

But even the luxury – reminiscent of a Bond villain's lair – is also being abandoned. I check myself in for a few nights to the classiest hotel in town, the Park Hyatt. It is the fashionistas' favourite hotel, where Elle Macpherson and Tommy Hilfiger stay, a gorgeous, understated palace. It feels empty. Whenever I eat, I am one of the only people in the restaurant. A staff member tells me in a whisper: "It used to be full here. Now there's hardly anyone." Rattling around, I feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, the last man in an abandoned, haunted home.

The most famous hotel in Dubai – the proud icon of the city – is the Burj al Arab hotel, sitting on the shore, shaped like a giant glass sailing boat. In the lobby, I start chatting to a couple from London who work in the City. They have been coming to Dubai for 10 years now, and they say they love it. "You never know what you'll find here," he says. "On our last trip, at the beginning of the holiday, our window looked out on the sea. By the end, they'd built an entire island there."

My patience frayed by all this excess, I find myself snapping: doesn't the omnipresent slave class bother you? I hope they misunderstood me, because the woman replied: "That's what we come for! It's great, you can't do anything for yourself!" Her husband chimes in: "When you go to the toilet, they open the door, they turn on the tap – the only thing they don't do is take it out for you when you have a piss!" And they both fall about laughing.

IX. Taking on the Desert

Dubai is not just a city living beyond its financial means; it is living beyond its ecological means. You stand on a manicured Dubai lawn and watch the sprinklers spray water all around you. You see tourists flocking to swim with dolphins. You wander into a mountain-sized freezer where they have built a ski slope with real snow. And a voice at the back of your head squeaks: this is the desert. This is the most water-stressed place on the planet. How can this be happening? How is it possible?

The very earth is trying to repel Dubai, to dry it up and blow it away. The new Tiger Woods Gold Course needs four million gallons of water to be pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and disappear on the winds. The city is regularly washed over with dust-storms that fog up the skies and turn the skyline into a blur. When the dust parts, heat burns through. It cooks anything that is not kept constantly, artificially wet.

Dr Mohammed Raouf, the environmental director of the Gulf Research Centre, sounds sombre as he sits in his Dubai office and warns: "This is a desert area, and we are trying to defy its environment. It is very unwise. If you take on the desert, you will lose."

Sheikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American.

If a recession turns into depression, Dr Raouf believes Dubai could run out of water. "At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues – if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil..." he shakes his head. "We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive."

Global warming, he adds, makes the problem even worse. "We are building all these artificial islands, but if the sea level rises, they will be gone, and we will lose a lot. Developers keep saying it's all fine, they've taken it into consideration, but I'm not so sure."

Is the Dubai government concerned about any of this? "There isn't much interest in these problems," he says sadly. But just to stand still, the average resident of Dubai needs three times more water than the average human. In the looming century of water stresses and a transition away from fossil fuels, Dubai is uniquely vulnerable.

I wanted to understand how the government of Dubai will react, so I decided to look at how it has dealt with an environmental problem that already exists – the pollution of its beaches. One woman – an American, working at one of the big hotels – had written in a lot of online forums arguing that it was bad and getting worse, so I called her to arrange a meeting. "I can't talk to you," she said sternly. Not even if it's off the record? "I can't talk to you." But I don't have to disclose your name... "You're not listening. This phone is bugged. I can't talk to you," she snapped, and hung up.

The next day I turned up at her office. "If you reveal my identity, I'll be sent on the first plane out of this city," she said, before beginning to nervously pace the shore with me. "It started like this. We began to get complaints from people using the beach. The water looked and smelled odd, and they were starting to get sick after going into it. So I wrote to the ministers of health and tourism and expected to hear back immediately – but there was nothing. Silence. I hand-delivered the letters. Still nothing."

The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. "They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria 'too numerous to count'. I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off." She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea.

Suddenly, it was an open secret – and the municipal authorities finally acknowledged the problem. They said they would fine the truckers. But the water quality didn't improve: it became black and stank. "It's got chemicals in it. I don't know what they are. But this stuff is toxic."

She continued to complain – and started to receive anonymous phone calls. "Stop embarassing Dubai, or your visa will be cancelled and you're out," they said. She says: "The expats are terrified to talk about anything. One critical comment in the newspapers and they deport you. So what am I supposed to do? Now the water is worse than ever. People are getting really sick. Eye infections, ear infections, stomach infections, rashes. Look at it!" There is faeces floating on the beach, in the shadow of one of Dubai's most famous hotels.

"What I learnt about Dubai is that the authorities don't give a toss about the environment," she says, standing in the stench. "They're pumping toxins into the sea, their main tourist attraction, for God's sake. If there are environmental problems in the future, I can tell you now how they will deal with them – deny it's happening, cover it up, and carry on until it's a total disaster." As she speaks, a dust-storm blows around us, as the desert tries, slowly, insistently, to take back its land.

X. Fake Plastic Trees

On my final night in the Dubai Disneyland, I stop off on my way to the airport, at a Pizza Hut that sits at the side of one of the city's endless, wide, gaping roads. It is identical to the one near my apartment in London in every respect, even the vomit-coloured decor. My mind is whirring and distracted. Perhaps Dubai disturbed me so much, I am thinking, because here, the entire global supply chain is condensed. Many of my goods are made by semi-enslaved populations desperate for a chance 2,000 miles away; is the only difference that here, they are merely two miles away, and you sometimes get to glimpse their faces? Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City.

I ask the Filipino girl behind the counter if she likes it here. "It's OK," she says cautiously. Really? I say. I can't stand it. She sighs with relief and says: "This is the most terrible place! I hate it! I was here for months before I realised – everything in Dubai is fake. Everything you see. The trees are fake, the workers' contracts are fake, the islands are fake, the smiles are fake – even the water is fake!" But she is trapped, she says. She got into debt to come here, and she is stuck for three years: an old story now. "I think Dubai is like an oasis. It is an illusion, not real. You think you have seen water in the distance, but you get close and you only get a mouthful of sand."

As she says this, another customer enters. She forces her face into the broad, empty Dubai smile and says: "And how may I help you tonight, sir?"

Some names in this article have been changed.

The Alex Jones Show:The Eugenicists Are Taking Over!!!

Click this link ...... http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=8875

Jim Rogers-World Wide Depression

Click this link .... http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=8876

An Inconvenient Debt

Click this link ..... http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=8859

Lord Monckton adresses a Greenpeace-campaigner on global warming

Click this link .... http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=8907

Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton: A 9/11 Convergence

Careful investigation leads one to notice that a number of intriguing groups of people and organizations converged on the events of September 11th, 2001. An example is the group of men who were members of Cornell University’s Quill & Dagger society. This included Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Advisors Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley, Marsh & McLennan executive Stephen Friedman, and the founder of Kroll Associates, Jules Kroll. Another interconnected group of organizations is linked to these Cornell comrades, and is even more interesting in terms of its members being integral to the events of 9/11, and having benefited from those events.

After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (WTC), a company called Stratesec (or Securacom) was responsible for the overall integration of the new security system designed by Kroll Associates. Stratesec had a small board of directors that included retired Air Force General James Abrahamson, Marvin Bush (the brother of George W. Bush) and Wirt Walker III, a cousin of the Bush brothers. Other directors included Charles Archer, former Assistant Director in charge of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, and Yousef Saud Al Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.[1]

Yousef Saud Al Sabah was also chairman of the Kuwait-American Corporation (KuwAm), which between 1993 and 1999 held a controlling share of Stratesec. The other owners of Stratesec were Walker and an entity controlled by Walker and Al Sabah, called Special Situation Investment Holdings (SSIH).[2] SSIH was said to form a group with KuwAm, and the group owned several other companies, including Commander Aircraft and Aviation General. In any case, the Kuwaiti royal family can be said to have benefited from 9/11 due to “The War on Terror” that removed Saddam Hussein from power. Of course, that was the second consecutive US war that Kuwait benefited from, the first being the 1991 Gulf War led by President George H.W. Bush.

Stratesec director James Abrahamson was President of Hughes Aircraft from 1989 to 1992, when Prescott Bush Jr. was helping Hughes lobby Bush’s brother, the US President, to lift sanctions on the Chinese government. Abrahamson became a director of Stratesec in December 1997.[3] He also co-founded a company called Crescent Investment Management (Crescent) with the Pakistani-American, Mansoor Ijaz. Crescent’s board of advisors included James Woolsey, the CIA Director for President Clinton who became a PNAC signatory and Booz Allen Hamilton executive.[4]

Mansoor Ijaz is the CEO of Crescent, and is a rare individual in that he claimed to have the ability to persuade several governments to extradite Osama bin Laden. After meetings with Clinton and his National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (who first introduced Woolsey to Clinton), Ijaz said that he could not convince them to work toward the extradition.[5] Additionally, Ijaz introduced the journalist Daniel Pearl, by way of a personal letter, to those in Pakistan who are believed to have been involved in his death.[6] Ijaz went on to become a Fox News correspondent, and he was a strong promoter of false claims leading up to the Iraq War, including WMDs and ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.[7]

Stratesec had contracts to provide security services for United Airlines, and Dulles Airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off on 9/11. Another client was Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where scientists were working on the development of nanothermite, a type of explosive material that has since been discovered in the WTC dust.[8,9]

The Carlyle Group

In 1998, Barry McDaniel came to Stratesec to become its Chief Operating Officer. McDaniel was therefore in charge of the security operation at the WTC in terms of what he called a “completion contract,” to provide services “up to the day the buildings fell down.”[10] McDaniel had previously worked for the United States Army Materiel Command (AMC), located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. But McDaniel came to Stratesec directly from BDM International, where he had been Vice President for nine years. BDM was a major subsidiary of The Carlyle Group for most of that time. When Barry McDaniel started at BDM, the company began getting a large amount of government business “in an area the Navy called Black Projects,” or budgets that were kept secret.[11]

BDM has had an interesting history. In 1990 it was a subsidiary of Loral Corporation, a company owned by Bernard Schwartz that was related to WTC security company Ensec, and Ensec director Terry McAuliffe.[12] Loral sold BDM to The Carlyle Group in 1992, at which time Frank Carlucci became chairman of BDM. Carlucci was a covert operative in his early career, and got his start in national politics through his old college roommate, Donald Rumsfeld, becoming Rumsfeld’s assistant at the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969. Carlucci went on to be named Deputy Director of the CIA and Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense.

During his first few years at Carlyle, Carlucci asked his friend Norman Augustine, later CEO of Lockheed Martin, if Carlyle could be included in a deal to buy the defense contractor LTV Corp.[13] That deal did not happen, but LTV was among the companies whose stocks were flagged for insider trading related to 9/11.[14,15] The FBI also briefly considered investigating Stratesec for insider trading related to 9/11, due to an SEC referral of suspicious accounts. But since the people involved were considered to not have any “ties to terrorism or other negative information,” an investigation into Stratesec was not pursued.[16] Putnam Investments, a subsidiary of WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan, was one of Stratesec’s investors.

During the time that Stratesec executive McDaniel worked for them, the Caryle Group began to add some very powerful people to their leadership group. One such figure was James Baker, who went to Princeton with Rumsfeld and Carlucci, and who was White House Chief of Staff, and Secretary of the Treasury, for Reagan. Baker was also George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager and Secretary of State, and Bush’s White House Chief of Staff again in his last government position. Baker became a partner at Carlyle just two weeks after the February 1993 bombing of the WTC.

Earlier in his career, Baker had worked in President Ford’s department of Commerce, along with WTC impact zone tenant Joseph Kasputys. And Baker was a longtime, close friend of Raymond Hill, an elite Texan who owned the mafia and CIA-connected Mainland Savings. American taxpayers shelled out approximately $500 million when Mainland failed in 1986. Investigators have since discovered that Mainland, like a number of other savings and loans that failed in the late 1980s, was a vehicle for CIA and mafia activities.[17]

Baker is also remembered as the one person most responsible for changing the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, in favor of George W. Bush. As Congressman John Conyers wrote: “Mr. Baker will be forever remembered for his ultimately successful efforts to shut down the counting of votes in the 2000 Florida election.”[18]

On September 11, 2001, Baker was at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington DC, for the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group. Also present with Baker was Carlucci, "representatives of the bin Laden family,” and George H. W. Bush.[19] Carlyle had been doing business with the bin Laden family since the early 1990s.

Baker’s grandfather started the law firm Baker Botts, which had offices in Saudi Arabia and which, after 9/11, represented the Saudi Arabian government in a lawsuit filed by families of those killed and injured in the attacks. The Saudi connection is interesting considering that Carlyle owned, through BDM International, the Vinnell Corporation, a mercenary operation that had extensive contracts in the Middle East since 1975, training the Saudi Arabian National Guard and also training Turkish security forces.

Vinnell was considered “by some experts to be a CIA front.”[20] Of course Frank Carlucci was Deputy Director of the CIA, and George H.W. Bush, who was Baker’s boss for many years, was in the CIA for a majority of his career.[21] Perhaps as a result, in 1995 Vinnell was reported to be one of the first targets of al Qaeda, in Saudi Arabia.

BDM, Vinnell’s parent company, was sold to TRW in 1997. Directors at BDM at the time included Carlyle Group executives and a former assistant to Henry Kissinger, Philip Odeen, who went on to become the CEO of TRW. Directors at TRW at the same time included Robert M. Gates, former Director of Central Intelligence and current Secretary of Defense. Arden Bement, who was appointed by George W. Bush to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) one month after the 9/11 attacks, had left his position as TRW Vice President in 1992, moving to Purdue University in the interim.

In 1998, at the time that Barry McDaniel moved to Stratesec, TRW merged with Lockheed Martin, the company that sub-contracted the WTC security job to Ensec.[22] Stratesec and Ensec, along with E.J. Electric and Electronic Systems Associates, worked to build the security system that was in place at the WTC when the buildings were destroyed. All four of these companies had done significant work in Saudi Arabia before working at the WTC.[23]

Marvin Bush was a director of Stratesec from 1993 to 2000. It was during that time that Kroll and Stratesec planned and executed the extensive rebuilding of the security systems at the WTC complex. As his stint with Stratesec ended, Marvin Bush became a principal in the company HCC Insurance, one of the insurance carriers for the World Trade Center.

SAIC

Marvin Bush was the cofounder of Winston Partners in 1993, a company that benefited greatly from the War on Terror. In 2000, Winston Partners invested heavily in a defense contractor called AMSEC that was 55% owned by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). It has been noted that SAIC was not only a major contributor to the NIST WTC report, it was also a company that had expertise in nanothermites, explosive materials which were found in the WTC dust as mentioned earlier.[24]

Founded by a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory, SAIC had a long history at the WTC, having evaluated the basement levels of the buildings as a potential terrorist target in 1986.[25] Interestingly, the company was hired to investigate the 1993 bombing of the WTC, an event that was “remarkably like the one which” they had foreseen in 1986.[26] In fact, SAIC later boasted that -- “After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, our blast analyses produced tangible results that helped identify those responsible.”[27]

After 9/11, SAIC supplied the largest contingent of non-governmental investigators to the WTC investigation conducted NIST. At the same time, “SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them.”[28]

SAIC was also a pioneer in the intelligence contracting business, as a founding member of the Security Affairs Support Association in 1979, along with companies like TRW, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed and Hughes Aircraft. A special taskforce of the Defense Science Board, which was led in 1993 by BDM’s Philip Odeen, recommended a vast increase in the outsourcing of intelligence, which all these companies ended up benefiting from greatly.

Today a majority of government intelligence work is outsourced, and SAIC is known first and foremost as an intelligence contractor. SAIC sells expertise about weapons, about homeland security, about surveillance, about computer systems, about “information dominance” and “information warfare,” and has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. In fact, the company was paid huge sums to rebuild the NSA and FBI systems that supposedly failed before 9/11.[29]

SAIC is integral to the operations of all the major intelligence collection agencies, particularly the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA. In fact, the CIA relies on SAIC to spy in its own workforce.[30] But SAIC has also played an integral role in the “War on Terror”, and was even responsible for capturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was SAIC staff and technology that “tease[ed] out crucial clues about Mohammed's activities from intercepted text messages that he sent to his al Qaeda operatives using as many as 20 different cell phones.”[31]

In an interesting coincidence, while the Carlyle/BDM subsidiary Vinnell Corp was training the Saudi Arabian National Guard, SAIC was training the Saudi Navy and bringing Saudi military personnel to company headquarters in San Diego for further study. Simultaneously, Booz Allen Hamilton was managing the Saudi Marine Corps and running the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College.[32] Vinnell now works with SAIC to train the Iraqi military.[33]

SAIC employees or board members have included Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former Deputy Director of CIA Bobby Ray Inman, former NYC OEM director Jerome Hauer, anthrax attack suspect Stephen Hatfill, former CIA Director John Deutch, and Lawrence B. Prior, a military intelligence officer and former TRW executive. Also formerly with SAIC, during the time of the planning and implementation of the 9/11 attacks, was Dick Cheney’s undersecretary of defense, Duane Andrews.

Duane Andrews considered Dick Cheney to be his personal, lifelong hero.[34] While he worked for Cheney, Andrews supervised Stephen Cambone, who went on to become Donald Rumsfeld’s “special assistant.” When Andrews left the Pentagon in 1993, he became chief operating officer for SAIC, where he supervised “much of the company's work on secret projects with defense and national security agencies.”[35] Andrews and Cambone both later hired on to the British intelligence firm Qinetiq, along with George Tenet. Coincidentally, The Carlyle Group was a major shareholder in Qinetiq as of February 2003.

Halliburton and BCCI

When we examine who had the greatest motive for the attacks of 9/11, we need to look at who most benefited from those events. Certainly SAIC and other companies like Maurice Greenberg’s American International Group (AIG) are among those who profited the most after 9/11. But The Carlyle Group and oil companies like Halliburton led the field in terms of profiting from 9/11.

Dick Cheney was hired as CEO of Halliburton in 1995, despite having no practical business leadership experience. He quickly went on to add new directors that shared his political convictions, including Lawrence Eagleburger, the former Secretary of State under the first President George Bush. Eagleburger also served as a director of Kissinger Associates, and on the board of Dresser Industries, where George H.W. Bush got his start. Others Cheney added to his team included Ray Hunt, of Dallas-based Hunt Oil, a longtime supporter of the Bush clan.

Cheney named Charles DiBona as one of his first appointees to the board of Halliburton. DiBona had been the Deputy Director of the White House Policy Office and Special Assistant to President Nixon in the early 1970s. DiBona was also an associate of WTC south tower impact zone tenant Joseph Kasputys, at the Logistics Management Institute, and DiBona and Kasputys had previously worked together during the Arab Oil Embargo as representatives of the emerging US Department of Energy (DOE). In fact, DiBona was one of the first US “Energy Czars.”

Like DiBona, Joseph Kasputys was in the US Navy for 20 years, and both of them retired as Commanders. They then both worked for the predecessor agencies of the DOE, and Kasputys worked for the Department of Defense as well. In 1975, Kasputys was appointed by President Ford to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce. As stated in the review of tenants in the towers, Kasptuys went on to run a large corporation called Primark that had offices in both towers on 9/11. One of the subsidiaries of Primark, The Analytical Sciences Corporation (TASC), worked with “so-called 'black' or top secret programs.” TASC also worked closely with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.[36]

After his government service, DiBona went on to lead the American Petroleum Institute, the petroleum industry's national trade association, in a position he held for nineteen years. During that time, DiBona was also a director of First American Bancshares, the American bank secretly owned by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

BCCI is significant relative to 9/11 because it was involved in funding terrorists in the late 1980s and was linked to the Pakistani intelligence network, from which several alleged 9/11 conspirators came, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In fact, Time magazine reported, relative to BCCI, that -- "You can't draw a line separating the bank's black operatives and Pakistan's intelligence services."[37]

BCCI was also clearly connected to the mafia. Munther Bilbeisi, a notorious BCCI representative who was finally indicted for tax fraud in 1991, was associated with several mafia families in New Jersey, including the DeCavalcante and Luchese crime families.[38]

More importantly, there were indications that the CIA was involved in the founding of BCCI.[39] There were also connections between George H. W. Bush, who was CIA director during BCCI’s heyday, and George W. Bush, through Harken Energy. But other US government representatives helped BCCI too, simply by not doing anything or allowing BCCI to make acquisitions in the US when they should have closed the operation down. For example, at the time that BCCI was first publicly suspected of wrongdoing, in 1988, both the US Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) were hesitant to investigate or prosecute, despite the fact that there were signs that both of these organizations already knew of BCCI’s fraud. When the Fed finally did take its first disciplinary action, it appeared that BCCI had a friend at the top, in that one member abstained from a critical vote. That member was the chairman, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan later explained that he had socialized with BCCI attorney and First American Bancshares President, Robert Altman.[40]

Kissinger and his associates

Henry Kissinger and his associates were also connected to BCCI in several ways, although he refused to share documents with the related Senate investigation. For example, Sergio Correa da Costa, who served as Brazil’s Ambassador to the US in the mid-1980s (note that Ensec was a Brazilian company), worked for Kissinger’s consulting company, Kissinger Associates, and was also a nominee shareholder for BCCI. And as early as 1971, Kissinger was linked to BCCI through the Pakistanis that arranged for his first visit to China.[41] At the time, Pakistrani agents who later became BCCI representatives were involved in fooling journalists into thinking Kissinger was in Pakistan instead of China. Kissinger returned to China many times and on occasion took very close friends and business associates along with him, most notably Maurice Greenberg of AIG, who traveled extensively with Kissinger.[42]

From 1985 to 1990, a client of Kissinger Associates, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) provided $4 billion in unreported loans to Saddam Hussein and his government in Iraq. Henry Kissinger was on the International Advisory Board of BNL during that same time period. Kissinger and his leading assistants Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger were investigated in this matter by the House Banking Committee just as the first Gulf War was ending.[43]

But the numerous connections between assistants and associates of Kissinger, and the most significant events of 9/11, are astounding. To begin with, Kissinger, who is considered by some to be an international terrorist due to his bombing of Cambodia, his role in the 1973 coup in Chile, and other atrocities, was the Bush Administration’s first choice to lead the 9/11 Commission. Although he later resigned from the Commission to avoid exposing his client list, Kissinger’s closest friends and aides played significant roles with regard to 9/11.

  • L. Paul Bremer, the managing director at Kissinger Associates from 1989 to 2000, left there to take a job with WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan, and then played a leading role in establishing the official myth of 9/11.
  • Peter Rodman, PNAC member and Assistant Secretary of Defense on 9/11, hosted meetings with Pakistani ISI General Ahmed the week before 9/11, and had previously been a Special Assistant to Kissinger for eight years.[44]
  • Joseph Kasputys, south tower impact zone tenant, worked with Kissinger in the Ford Administration (along with Cheney, Greenspan, DiBona, and Rumsfeld).[45]
  • Kissinger is also closely associated with several 9/11 Commissioners, including his long-time National Security Council assistant John Lehman, and his fellow Hollinger board member James R. Thompson.
  • And Phillip Odeen of BDM, who was Barry McDaniel’s boss until McDaniel left to lead WTC security company Stratesec, was a Kissinger assistant for several years.
  • There was also Renato Ruggiero of Kissinger Associates. Mr. Ruggiero was present on 9/11 in the sense that he was on the International Advisory Board for Salomon Smith Barney (SSB), the company that occupied all but ten of the 47 floors in WTC building 7.[46] SSB even shared the all-important 23rd floor with the New York City OEM. More striking is the fact that Donald Rumsfeld was the chairman of that SSB board, and Dick Cheney was a board member as well. Rumsfeld served as chairman of the SSB International Advisory Board since its inception in 1999, but had to resign in 2001 when he was confirmed as George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and Cheney resigned at the same time when he became Vice President.

    Another interesting coincidence is that Global Crossing was brought public in 1998 by SSB. Global Crossing was the company that Ensec director McAuliffe made a fortune on, when he purchased $100,000 in stock before the company went public and cashed out several years later for $18 million. Richard Perle was a lobbyist for Global Crossing.

    On 9/11/01, Salomon Smith Barney’s parent company was Citigroup. Citicorp was the nation’s largest bank in 1990, but dropped half of its value from the summer to the winter of that year due to the S&L scandal. The company was saved by Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia, who pumped an initial $590 MM into the company in a deal brokered by The Carlyle Group. It is believed that the money, and more, came from BCCI as it was dissolving.[47]

    Therefore, when Salomon Smith Barney was taken over by Citigroup in 1998, it was taken over in part by Saudi owners who were apparently redistributing the funding and networks of BCCI. Rumsfeld and Cheney entered the picture less than a year later, in May 1999. Jules Kroll, the founder of the WTC security design firm, and Rudy Giuliani, who was a former Department of Justice official, were responsible for investigating organized crime and BCCI, and were well aware of the extent of those networks ten years prior to that. Others like them, who brought the late indictments against BCCI, were leaders of the US Department of Justice.

    Stratesec was at the WTC, and therefore, through Barry McDaniel and the Bush family, the influence of The Carlyle Group was present as well. In a sense, Rumsfeld and Cheney were also present at the WTC, because both of them were on the advisory board of Salomon Smith Barney. And SAIC was at the WTC on 9/11 too, as it was one of the first companies to show up at Ground Zero on that day. That fact will be discussed in the third installment of the essay series entitled Demolition Access to the WTC.

    As for Kissinger, within hours of the events of 9/11 he was writing an opinion piece for the Washington Post. In it, he claimed to have thorough knowledge of what would be required to pull off such a coordinated set of attacks. Kissinger went on to inform the American public of what must happen next: “the destruction of the system that is responsible.”[48] No one can argue with that sentiment. But to this day, no one can accurately describe the terrorist system that was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, let alone destroy it.

    What we can say today, with certainty, is that if we are to believe that al Qaeda orchestrated the events of 9/11 then we do not know much about al Qaeda. Alternatively, there was a far more powerful and highly connected system of intelligence and financial networks, represented by organizations like Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton, that converged upon the events of 9/11. That other system continues to profit from the 9/11 attacks, and uses the fear and rage generated by al Qaeda-attributed terrorism to its own advantage. Understanding and destroying terrorism might simply be a matter of understanding and destroying the organizations that continue to profit from 9/11.

    Endnotes
    1. Stratesec Incorporated, Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders, December 23, 2002
    2. Securities and Exchange Commission document, Kuwam Corp · SC 13G · Stratesec Inc · On 2/19/98 http://www.secinfo.com/dS7kv.7v.htm
    3. Stratesec Incorporated, Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders, December 23, 2002
    4. Sourcewatch webpage for Crescent Investments, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Crescent_Technology_Ventures_...
    5. Sourcewatch webpage for Mansoor Ijaz/Sudan, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mansoor_Ijaz/Sudan
    6. Chaim Kupferberg, There’s Something About Omar: Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11, Centre for Research on Globalization, October 21, 2003, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/KUP310A.pdf
    7. Mansoor Ijaz, Hand in Glove: Iraq and al Qaeda, National Review Online, February 18, 2003, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzlhNDE4YTkyODA2NGE1ZjJlY2UwMjBmNWQ...
    8. Danen, W.C., Jorgensen, B.S., Busse, J.R., Ferris, M.J. and Smith, B.L. "Los Alamos Nanoenergetic Metastable Intermolecular Composite (Super Thermite) Program," 221st ACS National Meeting, San Diego, CA, 1-5 April 2001.
    9. Niels H. Harrit, et al, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Vol 2, 2009, doi: 10.2174/1874412500902010007, http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/000000...
    10. History Commons page for Stratesec, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=stratesec
    11. Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of The Carlyle Group, Wiley publishers, 2003, p35
    12. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two – Security, Scoop Independent News, August 13, 2009, found at 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090813150853871
    13. Dan Briody, The Iron Traingle
    14. FBI Memorandum released by 9/11 Commission, "FBI Briefing on Trading", Prepared by: Doug Greenburg, 8/18/03, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf
    15. Jim Hoffman, Insider Trading: Pre-9/11 Put Options on Companies Hurt by Attack Indicates Foreknowledge, 911Research.wtc7.net, http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/stockputs.html
    16. FBI Memorandum released by 9/11 Commission, “FBI Briefing on Trading”, Prepared by: Doug Greenburg, 8/18/03, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf
    17. Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA & George Bush: Corruption, Greed and abuse of power in the nation’s highest office, S.P.I. Books, 1992
    18. Letter from John Conyer to former President Jimmy Carter, April 11, 2005, http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/ltrtopotuscarter.pdf
    19. Sourcewatch page for James A. Baker III, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=James_Addison_Baker_III
    20 Ian Cobain, Firm was 'cover for CIA', Times Online, May 14, 2003 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1132056.ece
    21. George H.W. Bush’s exploits in the CIA, and his many connections to the most troubling events of American history, are described in Russ Baker's book Family of Secrets, Bloomsbury Press
    22. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition access to the World Trade Center towers: Part one – Tenants, 7-09-09, Distributed via the Unanswered Questions Wire and found at 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090713033854249
    23. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two – Security
    24. Kevin R. Ryan, The Top Ten Connections Between NIST and Nanothermites, Journal of 9/11 Studies, July 2008, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/Ryan_NIST_and_Nano-1.pdf
    25. History Commons, Context of '(Mid-1986): Report Rates Vulnerability of Public Areas of WTC to Terrorist Attack as ‘Very High’', http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a86saicreport
    26. New York State Law Reporting Bureau, In The Matter of World Trade Center Bombing Litigation, 2004 NY Slip Op 24030 [3 Misc 3d 440], January 20, 2004, http://www.courts.state.ny.us/reporter/3dseries/2004/2004_24030.htm
    27. Science Applications International Corporation, Annual Report 2004 http://www.saic.com/news/pdf/Annual-Report2004.pdf
    28. Charlie Cray, "Science Applications International Corporation," CorpWatch, http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17 ; cf. Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."
    29. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Washington's $8 Billion Shadow, Vanity Fair, March 2007, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703
    30. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire, Simon and Schuster, 2008
    31. Paul Kaihla, US: In The Company Of Spies, CorpWatch, May 1st, 2003, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=7892
    32. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire, Simon and Schuster, 2008
    33. The Center for Public Integrity, Winning Contractors: U.S. Contractors Reap the Windfalls of Post-war Reconstruction, October 30, 2003, http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow/report.aspx?aid=65
    34. Laura Rozen, The First Contract, The American Prospect, March 30, 2007, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=12612
    35. Bruce V. Bigelow, No. 2 executive at SAIC resigns after 13 years, The San Diego Union-Tribune, February 2, 2006, http://ww.uniontrib.com/uniontrib/20060202/news_1b2saic.html
    36. The Funding Universe web page for Analytic Sciences Corporation, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Analytic-Sciences-Corpo...
    37 Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, Scandals: Not Just a Bank, September 2, 1991, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973732-4,00.html
    38. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire, Houghton Mifflin, 1992, pp 181, 286, 359, 365, 432
    39. Ibid
    40. Ibid
    41. Ibid, p 141
    42. Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography, Simon & Schuster, 1992, p 739
    43. Kissinger Associates, BNL and Iraq, Pinknoiz, http://www.pinknoiz.com/covert/iraqgate04.html
    44. Kevin R. Ryan, Mahmud Ahmed's itinerary from his Washington DC visit the week of 9/11, 911blogger.com, 11/27/2009, http://www.911blogger.com/node/21978
    45. See the following daily diary of President Ford for typical meetings that all these people shared, http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/diary/pdd750718.pdf
    46. List of tenants in Seven World Trade Center, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tenants_in_Seven_World_Trade_Center
    47. Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle
    48. Henry Kissinger, Destroy the Network, The Washington Post, September 12, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentI...