Old Warriors and Cold Wars

The heyday of the Argentine Página 12 came in the early 1980s, revealing the atrocities of the Last Argentine Dictatorship while supporting the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The notable leftist publication has since receded into a more glib, lefty position on local as well as global events.

Here the notable Argentine poet and early 1970s guerrillero Juán Gelman comments on the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and the environment. Or, more accurately, attempts to defrock a secret Pentagon research project. Yet in English he sounds more like the narrator of The Outer Limits. The interesting part is the way this theme--the U.S. as an omnipotent superpower--develops itself into a mystical fear of U.S. aggression abroad: one with no real solution or response. This is coming from a man who briefly dedicated his life to overthrowing pax americana.

La Prensa
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/index-2007-12-20.html


On the Climate War
Juán Gelman

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was shared, as is well-known, between Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is remarkable that neither the former vice-president’s speech nor the report of the IPCC prizewinners mention weapons designed to manipulate the climate, which the U.S. has developed for more than half a century. Russia and Europe have also started down that path.

This is a topic that rarely appears in discussions and/or research concerning global warming or the greenhouse effect that the planet suffers. In the most recent report concerning alternative defense methods, the U.S. Air Force remarked that at the end of the 1940s, with the Cold War hotter than ever, the Pentagon was already researching ways to produce “unimaginable forms of climate war.” This entailed a technology Washington continues to perfect through the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) established in 1992. This is not a joke.

The aims declared by HAARP are innocent enough--science--yet the primary goal seems to be a weapon of mass destruction, capable of destabilizing the global ecological balance. The press release even states this, “Climate modification will form part of national and international security, which this technology could achieve unilaterally. Modifying the climate allows us to defeat or slow down an adversary. This will be relevant in offensive as well as defensive scenarios, including use as a deterrent. The (military) technology is capable of generating rain, snow and storms on land as well as producing an artificial climate.”

In Gakona, Alaska, the Air Force, the Marines and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have installed 180 antennas that function like one giant antenna, capable of emitting up to one billion high frequency radio waves. These waves introduce an enormous mass of energy into the ionosphere, or uppermost part of the atmosphere, which return to the surface causing the temperature to increase. In this way, it is possible to induce a change in the ionosphere, altering the climate of a selected region with disastrous consequences: excessive rain, flooding, a multiplication of hurricanes, prolonged droughts, earthquakes, disruptions in the electric and communication grids, accidents in the gas and oil pipelines, etc. Will this be a geophysical weapon? The official website reads “HAARP is a scientific endeavor designed to study the properties and behavior of the ionosphere with particular attention to how this region may improve communication and surveillance systems. These include civil ends, such as those regarding defense.” [Apologies, this is a re-translation as Gelman took liberties interpreting the website, http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/prpeis.html]

The Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky indicates climate manipulation would allow the U.S. to dominate entire regions, “It would be the preventative weapon par excellence. The U.S. could deploy the weapon against enemy countries or “enemy nations” without their knowledge. This would destabilize their economies, ecosystems and agriculture as well as devastate the financial and commercial markets. A destabilized agriculture creates a greater dependency on food subsidies and importing U.S. and Western grain. What is more: the effects may be serious for the brain as well as human behavior.

The Pentagon made public for the first time the use of climate warfare in 1974: for seven years this technology concentrated clouds over Vietnam and Cambodia, increasing rains in selected regions, provoking mudslides and making the roadways used by Hanoi to send provisions to the Vietcong impassable. By 1977, these developments drove the General Assembly of the UN to approve a convention prohibiting “the military use of weather altering techniques causing extreme, general and prolonged effects.” This premise was later incorporated into the 1992 UN convention on climactic change held in Rio de Janeiro. However, the topic has converted into a type of taboo. Although the existence of these weapons is tacitly accepted, the debates in the UN focus on the Tokyo Protocol that the U.S. rejected. [In English] The rest is silence.


All errors and interpretations are mine. Please comment.