There really isn’t much to say about this week’s crop of saints and holy men because their lives are pretty much self-explanatory. Some few of them are very much a part of our culture whilst some of the others were brave in the face of the enemy – the devil-inspired Mohammedans. The remainder were simply good men – and, heaven knows, there have always been few enough of them.

Those who were, and are, part of our culture demonstrate exactly why I am writing this series. You may be a believer, an agnostic or an atheist, but the one thing that you have to acknowledge, no matter what your position may be, is that the saints helped to make our world. They, just like the Christianity that they believed in, were instrumental in pushing us along the path of history that has inexorably led us to the free societies that we live in today, and some of them made contributions to the way that we thought and lived that influence us profoundly as we go about our daily round.

Those who fought, often hand to hand, to expel the Mohammedan mad dogs from Europe, and, unsuccessfully, from all the other lands that they have occupied illegally, deserve our endless thanks. Had it not been for them then we would be living in an unbelievably dark and horrendous world dominated by the satanic belief system of Mohammedanism – a system that places evil, and the worship of evil, at its very centre, and a system that is devoid of all the virtues and that doesn’t know the love of G-d.

In what follows you will find soldiers who fought bravely to free their lands, and priests who laid down their lives in their attempts to bring the pagan Mohammedan hordes to G-d. Tens of thousands of others who did the same things are unknown to us, so let those we do know about stand for all.

The first saint for the week – for the nineteenth of May – is the Blessed Alcuin of York, who sometimes gets called Albinus, Alrinus, Flaccus, or even Ealhwine. He was born circa AD730, probably at York, or somewhere near York (perhaps even in Northumbria), in England. We know next to nothing about his childhood and our records of him start when he went to School at York, to the school that had been founded by Saint Paulinus in AD627 and that operated out of the Cathedral, and that we know today as Saint Peter's School. He studied under Bishop Ecgbert and Saint Colgan during a very peaceful time when York was part of the territory of King Eadberht of Northumbria.

Bishop Ecgberht had been a disciple of The Venerable Bede, whom I’ve mentioned often in this series, and he had a great respect for learning and the ways of peace and Alcuin thrived there. It was at York that he developed his love of poetry of the Classical era. The York school was renowned as a centre of learning in the liberal arts, literature, and science, as well as in religious matters. He revived the school with the trivium and quadrivium disciplines, writing a codex on the trivium, while his student Hraban wrote one on the quadrivium. Eventually Alcuin became the headmaster of the school and a much-respected figure for his learning as well as his religious observance – he became a deacon of the Cathedral sometime around AD767.

In AD781 King Ælfwald I of Northumbria sent Alcuin to Rome bearing a petition to the Pope asking for the elevation of the Metropolitan Diocese of York to an Archdiocese and also asking for the recognition of the election of the new Archbishop, Eanbald I. This proved to be a turning point in Alcuin’s life for he met the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne at the small Italian city of Parma. He was persuaded to join Charlemagne’s court as a member of a group of scholars that the Emperor had gathered around himself and that he used as expert advisors. These scholars were the driving force behind the Carolingian Renaissance and such luminaries as Peter of Pisa, Paulinus of Aquileia, Rado and Abbot Fulrad were counted amongst their number.

He was welcomed to the Palace School of Charlemagne in Aachen (Urbs Regale) in AD782. It had been founded by the Emperor's ancestors as a place for the education of the royal children (mostly in manners and the ways of the court). However, Charlemagne wanted to include the liberal arts and, most importantly, the study of the religion that meant so much to him, and to Alcuin, and from which he derived some of his authority as Emperor.

All that’s left of the Palace at Aachen that now serves as the Town Hall.

Alcuin obliged and from AD782 to AD790, he taught Charlemagne himself, his sons Pepin and Louis, the young men sent to be educated at court and the young clerics attached to the palace chapel. He brought from York his assistants Pyttel, Sigewulf and Joseph, and he revolutionised the educational standards of the Palace School, introduced the liberal arts that the Emperor wanted, and he created his own personalised atmosphere of scholarship and learning, to such an extent that the institution came to be known as the 'School of Master Albinus'.

In AD790 Alcuin went back to York. He stayed there for some time, but Charlemagne then invited him back to help in the fight against the Adoptionist heresy, which is too complicated to go into here. At the Council of Frankfurt in AD794, Alcuin upheld the orthodox doctrine and obtained the condemnation of the heresiarch Felix of Urgel. It seems also that he disapproved of the conduct of King Æthelred and so he never went home again.

He was back at Charlemagne's court by at least the middle of AD792, and he wrote a series of letters to Æthelred, to Hygbald, the Bishop of Lindisfarne, and to Æthelhard, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that dealt with the Viking attack on Lindisfarne in the July of AD793. These letters and Alcuin's poem on the subject, ‘De clade Lindisfarnensis monasterii’, provide the only significant contemporary account of these events. In his description of the Viking attack, he wrote: "Never before has such terror appeared in Britain. Behold the church of Saint Cuthbert, splattered with the blood of God's priests, robbed of its ornaments."

 In AD796 Alcuin was in his sixties. He hoped to be free from court duties and he was given the chance, upon the death of Abbot Itherius, when Charlemagne put Marmoutier Abbey at Tours into Alcuin's care - with the understanding that he should be available if the Emperor ever needed his counsel.

Alcuin died at Tours on the nineteenth of May in AD804, some ten years before the Emperor, and he was buried at Saint Martin's Church in Marmoutier Abbey at Tours under an epitaph that partly read:

Alcuin, needless to say, made the Abbey school into a model of excellence and many students flocked to it. He had many manuscripts copied using outstandingly beautiful calligraphy, usually the Carolingian minuscule based on round and legible uncial letters. Had it not been for the scribes at Marmoutier under Alcuin's close supervision much of the writings of Classical Rome, and earlier, would not have come down to us. Also, he and his scribes invented the cursive script – joined up writing – which made writing less time consuming.

He wrote many letters to his English friends as well as to people such as Arno, the Bishop of Salzburg, but above all he wrote to Charlemagne. These letters, of which three hundred-and-eleven have survived, are filled mainly with pious meditations, but they form an important source of information as to the literary and social conditions of the time. Alcuin was the most prominent figure of the Carolingian Renaissance, and he also developed manuals used in his educational work including a grammar and works on rhetoric and dialectics. These are written in the form of dialogues, and in two of them the interlocutors are Charlemagne and Alcuin himself. He wrote several theological treatises: a De fide Trinitatis, commentaries on the Bible and much else besides. He is renowned for having invented the first known question mark, although it didn't look much like the symbol that we use today.

Alcuin transmitted to the Franks the knowledge of Latin culture which had existed in Anglo-Saxon England. A number of his works still exist. His letters and his poetry are equally interesting. Besides some graceful epistles in the style of Venantius Fortunatus, he wrote some long poems, and notably he is the author of a history (in verse) of the church at York, ‘Versus de patribus, regibus et sanctis Eboracensis ecclesiae’.

The collection of mathematical and logical word problems entitled ‘Propositiones ad acuendos juvenes’ (‘Problems to Sharpen Youths’) is attributed to Alcuin. In a letter to Charlemagne in AD799 Alcuin said that he had sent "certain figures of arithmetic for the joy of cleverness," which some scholars have identified with the ‘Propositiones’. The text contains about fifty-three mathematical word problems, with solutions, in no particular pedagogical order. Among the most famous of these problems are: four that involve river crossings, including the problem of three anxious brothers, each of whom has an unmarried sister whom he cannot leave alone with either of the other men lest she be defiled (Problem 17); the problem of the wolf, goat, and cabbage (Problem 18); and the problem of "the two adults and two children where the children weigh half as much as the adults" (Problem 19). Alcuin's sequence, a mathematical discovery, is the solution to one of the problems of that book.

All in all, Alcuin was an all-round scholar who progressed the culture of his times and influenced an Emperor to kinder ways – he persuaded Charlemagne to get rid of the death penalty for paganism by force of reason - Alcuins argument was that Faith is a free act of the will, not a forced act and that one must appeal to the conscience, not compel it by violence, since one can force people to be baptised, but one cannot force them to believe. Contrast that with what the disgusting Mohammedans practice today.

He was buried in the church of Saint Martin at Tours but his grave – along with those of many others – did not survive the French Revolution when the Abbey and its church were razed to the ground in a misguided attempt by the revolutionary idiots to stamp out the cultus of Saint Martin. Saint Martin’s tomb was found again later on, and a new church to house it was built on part of the original site, but Alcuin’s tomb has yet to be recovered.

By the way, Alcuin College, one of the colleges of the University of York in England, is named after him. Alcuin also revised and reorganised the Latin liturgy, preserved many of the ancient prayers, and helped develop the plain chant that many of us know and love today. It’s amazing to think that the scholarship that the Church in England had carefully protected for generations was exported back to Europe and propagated by people like Alcuin. It’s easy to see why many of his contemporaries, and subsequent generations of scholars, thought him to be truly blessed. Their judgements are the ones that we accept today and we call him, rightly, The Blessed Alcuin of York.

Also on this day I am going to memorialise the Blessed Peter de Duenas. He was born in AD1378 at Valencia in Spain. He was a Franciscan, but we don’t know very much about his early years but we do know that in AD1396, along with his fellow Franciscan the Blessed John de Cetina, he very bravely began to preach the good news to the occupying Mohammedans in Granada. Naturally, they were both seized and imprisoned and tortured for the fun of it by their gaolers.

In AD1397 they were both beheaded at Granada and Peter is remembered to this day for his courage in trying to tell the truth to the devil’s minions called Mohammedans. He is, today, are rightly regarded as Blessed and a Martyr. John is remembered on the twenty-second of this month (below).

I am also going to remember on this day Saint Pudens of Rome. He was a layman of the Church at Rome and his father is the Pudens mentioned in 2 Timothy 4:21, “Do thy diligence to come before winter. Eubulus greeteth thee, and Pudens, and Linus, and Claudia, and all the brethren” – KJV. According to tradition, Saint Peter the Apostle stayed in the family house at Rome and Pudens senior was baptised by him. His father was called Quintus Cornelius Pudens and he was a Roman Senator, and our Saint Pudens, his son, had two sons of his own, Novatus and Timotheus, and two daughters, Praxedes and Pudentiana, who all became saints.

Cornelius Pudens, the father, was martyred during the reign of the Emperor Nero (reigned AD54 to AD68), but his son, whom we commemorate today, was martyred later, but his daughters were probably not martyred until about AD150, at which time it is generally believed that their brothers were martyred also. We don’t know where the male Pudens are buried – probably in a family space in one of the catacombs, but we do know that Pudentiana and Praxedes, revered as pure maiden martyrs, are entombed in the very ancient eponymous churches of Saint Pudentia and Saint Praxedes (Santa Pudenziana and Santa Prassede) at Rome, and both churches have some of the finest early mosaics, dating from the third and fourth Christian centuries, in existence. The church of Saint Pudentia on the Via Urbana was built on the site of the Pudens’ family home and is the oldest church at Rome – it was originally the home of the Popes until, in AD313, the Emperor Constantine offered them the Lateran Palace.

This family is frequently mixed up with that of Aulus Pudens, the centurion friend of Martial the writer, whose wife, Claudia Rufina, was immortalised in several poems by Martial and described in his ‘Epigrams’ at IV:13 (and that Claudia is frequently mixed up with other ladies called Claudia whom Martial also knew and wrote about). However, such mix-ups do a great disservice to the family who all died as martyrs for the Faith and who are all, today, rightly remembered as saints.

On the twentieth of May let us remember the Blessed Anastazy Jakub Pankiewicz who was a Franciscan priest and who was born in AD1882 at Nagórzany near Podkarpackie, Sanok in Poland. He was the son of Thomas, a farmer, and Tekla Lenio, and he attended elementary school at Nowotaniec (which was the headquarters of his home parish), then he went to the high schools at Sanok and Lviv (up to AD1899).

He was ordained AD1906, and after completing his theological studies he worked in the monastery of Mine, as well as holding other church offices. Between AD1932 and AD1939, with the help of numerous sponsors, he supervised the construction of the monastery and High School at Lodz. In AD1937 he helped to found the Congregation of the Sisters of Christ the King, Antonianek (see here for information about the Congregation).

On the sixth of October in AD1941, during the mass arrests of priests in Lodz and the surrounding area, he was arrested and taken to a transit camp at Konstantynów Lodz. On October the thirtieth, along with other prisoners from Konstantynowskiego camp, he was transported to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. During his incarceration he continued to be a priest for those around him, carrying out his calling in a most courageous way.

He died on this day in AD1942, on the road leading to the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre near Linz in Austria. Hartheim was a Nazi killing centre that was part of their euthanasia programme that was referred to as 'Action T4'. It was housed in Hartheim Castle at Alkoven near Linz in Austria, and, apart from almost one hundred thousand other victims, mostly all either mentally or physically disabled, a total of three hundred and ten Polish, seven German, six Czech, four Luxemburg, three Dutch and two Belgian priests were murdered. The Nazi's referred to the programme carried out at Hartheim as 'disinfection'.

(I find the whole concept of the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre and what was done there to be completely unChristian, indeed anti-Christian, and very upsetting. Please go to this site for pictures, and an explanation, of the place, and to this site for an explanation of what was done there. Remember, Mohammedans to this day support these Nazi so-called ideals and treat their disabled in the most appalling way.)

Father Pankiewicz helped a fellow prisoner to board the collection vehicle and a German soldier deliberately closed the door of the ‘bus on him, almost cutting off both of his hands in the process. His body was burned and the ashes were scattered in the same manner as those of the other victims of the Hartheim facility. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw on the thirteenth of June in AD1999 along with one hundred and seven other Polish Martyrs. There is no doubt in my mind that today he is rightly remembered as Blessed.

On the twenty-first of May let us turn our attention to Saint Collen of Denbighshire, who is sometimes called Colan, or Gollen, of Denbigh and whose name means ‘hazel tree’ in Welsh. He was born sometime around AD600 in Wales and he is said to have died about sixty years later. His father was a Welshman but his mother, called Ethni, was of Irish extraction. The facts of his life are scant but the stories that have grown up around his memory are wonderful fairy tales in the allegorical model. What we know for certain is that he was a monk in Wales, in Brittany and in Cornwall. He made a pilgrimage to Rome in Italy and at one stage in his life he lived as a hermit in a small cave near Glastonbury Abbey. It seems certain that he was, at some time, the Abbot of a monastery in Wales. The Welsh town of Llangollen (Collen’s enclosure) in Clwyd (pronounced ‘Kloowid’) is named after him, and it generally reckoned that it formed around his hermitage and church.

The ruins of the enormous Abbey Church at Glastonbury.

The parish church of Saint Colan on the north coast of Cornwall, which was rebuilt in the time of Bishop Branscombe of Exeter, about AD1250, and that was given by him to the Canons of Glasney College which he had founded at Peryn, is dedicated to our Saint Collen. It is the only dedication to Saint Collen in England, but there is a church at Langolen near Briec in Brittany that is dedicated to him and he is, naturally, the patron of Llangollen in Clwyd, where he is buried.

From The New York Times:

Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust

By MICHAEL WINES

HASKELL COUNTY, Kan. — Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute.

Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from the earth, and pumping up sand in order to do it. By harvest time, the grit had robbed him of $20,000 worth of pumps and any hope of returning to the bumper harvests of years past.

“That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing from his pickup at the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said, “it’s over.”

The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.

On some farms, big center-pivot irrigators — the spindly rigs that create the emerald circles of cropland familiar to anyone flying over the region — now are watering only a half-circle. On others, they sit idle altogether.

Two years of extreme drought, during which farmers relied almost completely on groundwater, have brought the seriousness of the problem home. In 2011 and 2012, the Kansas Geological Survey reports, the average water level in the state’s portion of the aquifer dropped 4.25 feet — nearly a third of the total decline since 1996.

And that is merely the average. “I know my staff went out and re-measured a couple of wells because they couldn’t believe it,” said Lane Letourneau, a manager at the State Agriculture Department’s water resources division. “There was a 30-foot decline.”

Kansas agriculture will survive the slow draining of the aquifer — even now, less than a fifth of the state’s farmland is irrigated in any given year — but the economic impact nevertheless will be outsized. In the last federal agriculture census of Kansas, in 2007, an average acre of irrigated land produced nearly twice as many bushels of corn, two-thirds more soybeans and three-fifths more wheat than did dry land.

Farmers will take a hit as well. Raising crops without irrigation is far cheaper, but yields are far lower. Drought is a constant threat: the last two dry-land harvests were all but wiped out by poor rains.

In the end, most farmers will adapt to farming without water, said Bill Golden, an agriculture economist at Kansas State University. “The revenue losses are there,” he said. “But they’re not as tremendously significant as one might think.”

Some already are. A few miles west of Mr. Yost’s farm, Nathan Kells cut back on irrigation when his wells began faltering in the last decade, and shifted his focus to raising dairy heifers — 9,000 on that farm, and thousands more elsewhere. At about 12 gallons a day for a single cow, Mr. Kells can sustain his herd with less water than it takes to grow a single circle of corn.

“The water’s going to flow to where it’s most valuable, whether it be industry or cities or feed yards,” he said. “We said, ‘What’s the higher use of the water?’ and decided that it was the heifer operation.”

The problem, others say, is that when irrigation ends, so do the jobs and added income that sustain rural communities.

“Looking at areas of Texas where the groundwater has really dropped, those towns are just a shell of what they once were,” said Jim Butler, a hydrogeologist and senior scientist at the Kansas Geological Survey.

The villain in this story is in fact the farmers’ savior: the center-pivot irrigator, a quarter- or half-mile of pipe that traces a watery circle around a point in the middle of a field. The center pivots helped start a revolution that raised farming from hardscrabble work to a profitable business.

Since the pivots’ debut some six decades ago, the amount of irrigated cropland in Kansas has grown to nearly three million acres, from a mere 250,000 in 1950. But the pivot irrigators’ thirst for water — hundreds and sometimes thousands of gallons a minute — has sent much of the aquifer on a relentless decline. And while the big pivots have become much more efficient, a University of California study earlier this year concluded that Kansas farmers were using some of their water savings to expand irrigation or grow thirstier crops, not to reduce consumption.

A shift to growing corn, a much thirstier crop than most, has only worsened matters. Driven by demand, speculation and a government mandate to produce biofuels, the price of corn has tripled since 2002, and Kansas farmers have responded by increasing the acreage of irrigated cornfields by nearly a fifth.

At an average 14 inches per acre in a growing season, a corn crop soaks up groundwater like a sponge — in 2010, the State Agriculture Department said, enough to fill a space a mile square and nearly 2,100 feet high.

Sorghum, or milo, gets by on a third less water, Kansas State University researchers say — and it, too, is in demand by biofuel makers. As Kansas’ wells peter out, more farmers are switching to growing milo on dry land or with a comparative sprinkle of irrigation water.

But as long as there is enough water, most farmers will favor corn. “The issue that often drives this is economics,” said David W. Hyndman, who heads Michigan State University’s geological sciences department. “And as long as you’ve got corn that’s $7, then a lot of choices get made on that.”

Of the 800 acres that Ashley Yost farmed last year in Haskell County, about 70 percent was planted in corn, including roughly 125 acres in Section 35. Haskell County’s feedlots — the county is home to 415,000 head of cattle — and ethanol plants in nearby Liberal and Garden City have driven up the price of corn handsomely, he said.

But this year he will grow milo in that section, and hope that by ratcheting down the speed of his pump, he will draw less sand, even if that means less water, too. The economics of irrigation, he said, almost dictate it.

“You’ve got $20,000 of underground pipe,” he said. “You’ve got a $10,000 gas line. You’ve got a $10,000 irrigation motor. You’ve got an $89,000 pivot. And you’re going to let it sit there and rot?

“If you can pump 150 gallons, that’s 150 gallons Mother Nature is not giving us. And if you can keep a milo crop alive, you’re going to do it.”

Mr. Yost’s neighbors have met the prospect of dwindling water in starkly different ways. A brother is farming on pivot half-circles. A brother-in-law moved most of his operations to Iowa. Another farmer is suing his neighbors, accusing them of poaching water from his slice of the aquifer.

A fourth grows corn with an underground irrigation system that does not match the yields of water-wasting center-pivot rigs, but is far thriftier in terms of water use and operating costs.

For his part, Mr. Yost continues to pump. But he also allowed that the day may come when sustaining what is left of the aquifer is preferable to pumping as much as possible.

Sitting in his Ford pickup next to Section 35, he unfolded a sheet of white paper that tracked the decline of his grandfather’s well: from 1,600 gallons a minute in 1964, to 1,200 in 1975, to 750 in 1976.

When the well slumped to 500 gallons in 1991, the Yosts capped it and drilled another nearby. Its output sank, too, from 1,352 gallons to 300 today.

This year, Mr. Yost spent more than $15,000 to drill four test wells in Section 35. The best of them produced 195 gallons a minute — a warning, he said, that looking further for an isolated pocket of water would be costly and probably futile.

“We’re on the last kick,” he said. “The bulk water is gone.”

________________________________

Comments:

1. • Elaine Meinel Supkis
   • Berlin, N.Y.

   NYT Pick

   I grew up in the Arid West. I remember rivers like the Santa Rita that ran nearly year round. The Tanque Verde named after the big cotton wood trees ran so high when I was a child, I used to go boating on it in a flat boat.
   
   Now, all are bone dry! The population of Tucson, Arizona was only 36,000 when I was a child. Today, it is over half a million. My parent's well on the ranch is dry.
   
   My granddaddy told me back in the 1950's that when he was born, the grass grew so high, it 'brushed the belly of the horses' in parts of Tucson. Now, scrub cacti are overwhelming the remaining saguaros and last time I visited I was in despair seeing how bone dry things are now.
   
   The mighty trees shading the shallow streams in the desert are dead and long gone. Only Bear Canyon and the mountain pass behind my parent's former ranch have a trickle of water in the dry season.

   • May 20, 2013 at 7:33 a.m.
   • Recommended323
2. 

   • Jennifer
   • Brooklyn

   NYT Pick

   A disaster decades in the making. When farmers began pumping water from the Ogallala aquifer it was known that it wouldn't last. The best thing would be to let the high plains return to being semi-arid grasslands. The land is not suited to growing crops like corn or even wheat. We have known since the days of the Dust Bowl that this would happen. Now we are depleting a water source that took centuries to build up. Perhaps if we would remove the high fructose corn syrup in our packaged foods we could reduce both obesity and an over reliance on valuable water to grow corn.

   • May 20, 2013 at 8:40 a.m.
   • Recommended476
3. 

   • David S.
   • Illinois

   NYT Pick

   I'd be curious to know - and this piece does not explicitly say - whether this problem has been exacerbated by the odious practice of large corporate farming that has been the bane of many small family farmers. If the small farmers eventually need our help that is one thing, but I think no large corporate farmer should be deemed "too big to fail."

   • May 20, 2013 at 8:43 a.m.
   • Recommended194
4. 

   • Carol H
   • Leonia NJ

   NYT Pick

   While I accept the validity of climate change, my take on this article is that growing thirstier crops and wasteful watering practices are to blame, not global warming.

   • In reply to Chris
   • May 20, 2013 at 8:50 a.m.
   • Recommended80
5. 

   • Scott
   • Sydney, Australia

   NYT Pick

   Wow, according to article it took thousands of years of rain to fill the aquifer, and we have depleted it in less than a hundred years. There has to be a more sustainable way of making a living, and living a life.

   • May 20, 2013 at 8:52 a.m.
   • Recommended179
6. 

   • tenstring
   • Lawrence, KS

   NYT Pick

   I grew up in western Kansas and watched the death knell of the small farmer. Local big irrigators usurped control of the irrigation districts to maximize water production for their own operations in a very short-sighted way. Cargill's beef production is ultimately the engine that pumps the water out. This is been coming and predicted since the '70s at least. There are those who tried to stop it, but they were brushed aside by Big Money -- surprise, surprise. SW Kansas is also now home to a majority Latino population, but their livelihood will be gone as soon as Cargill pulls out, which they will when the water is gone. All of this was avoidable and could have been mitigated with a little clear-headed thinking and consideration for the future. But no, it's a case of plunder -- mining the water as fast as possible until the water's gone.

   • May 20, 2013 at 8:54 a.m.
   • Recommended338
7. 

   • JoeB
   • Sacramento, Ca

   NYT Pick

   Before, or while, you are criticizing these farmers for their foolishness, how much non renewable energy will you use today? We need to steer policy so it is responsible to environmental and not just economic concerns. Eat, consume, and vote carefully.

   • May 20, 2013 at 9:52 a.m.
   • Recommended117
8. 

   • Jan Bone
   • Palatine IL

   NYT Pick

   And we're about to say yes to the Canadian pipeline that has the potential of wrecking the aquifer over this way to the east? Are our legislators nuts?
   
   Jan Bone,
   suburban Chicago -

   • May 20, 2013 at 9:56 a.m.
   • Recommended225
9. 

   • McS
   • portland, me

   NYT Pick

   It's just the beginning of the water wars. We who have plenty of water (I'm in Maine) better get our own acts together: we can sell our excess water at a tidy profit.

   • May 20, 2013 at 10:00 a.m.
   • Recommended35
10. 

    • 25-year resident
    • Westfield

    NYT Pick

    Many of us watched Ken Burns' "Dust Bowl" on PBS this year: where do we think draining the aquifers will lead? Mr. Burns ended his program with scenes of spray irrigation from the Ogallala aquifer, known to be finite because of slow recharge rate. Did you notice the comment about a single neighbor using underground irrigation? This country is extraordinarily backward on irrigation technology: it should all and only be underground (as practiced in Israel, another hot, dry climate) because of the need to conserve water. Years ago I drove past spray irrigation at mid-day in Utah just one day before a total irrigation ban because of extreme water shortage: fires burned in all directions, and helicopters had to scoop water from (low) rivers. The idea that, on top of the known depletion of aquifers, we allow frackers to both consume massive amounts of water and pump toxic waste water into the ground (or let it seep in from open pits) at clear risk of contaminating aquifers is beyond belief short-sighted and suicidal. I recently heard a report about record-keeping for waste water injected into the ground: records are sketchy, but some have the right to inject into aquifers. And aquifers flow: contaminating on part spreads.

    • May 20, 2013 at 10:02 a.m.
    • Recommended260
11. 

    • Aaron
    • Houston, TX

    NYT Pick

    This article provides yet another instance for recalling other articles written in the early 1990's, when T. Boone Pickens was buying up water rights all over Texas. He forthrightly said that water would become more precious than oil; we are well on the way to seeing that happen.
    
    The irony of using insane amounts of water for fracking to get more oil would be laughable if it were not so sad. Literally hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day are being used for this process, poisoned by who knows what chemicals and with a fraction, if any, of that water being recovered.

    • May 20, 2013 at 10:03 a.m.
    • Recommended367
12. 

    • JH
    • NYS

    NYT Pick

    Some commenters here make it sound like the problem would be solved if farmers would just get over their character flaws and stop trying to farm land with dwindling water resources.
    
    What are these farmers/ranchers supposed to do? Move to the big city and sell insurance? They are invested in their situation, farming is what they know how to do, and they have families to feed. We demand they produce 300 bu/acre corn to satisfy our insatiable needs at low cost.
    
    When we pay farmers a price for their products that reflects the true impact cost of their activities, then maybe they can afford to farm at a scale more in line with the capabilities of the land. Until then, stop blaming the farmer for trying to deal with a situation that has its origins in a far larger and more complex reality.

    • May 20, 2013 at 10:05 a.m.
    • Recommended86
13. 

    • Kevin Emmons
    • South Portland, Maine

    NYT Pick

    The only viable solution I have seen is permaculture. It is the future of our food supply chain.
    
    All food production must be local. Sure we can have minor trade but we cannot continue relying on food shipped from "away". Here in Maine we catch fish and lobster. It is shipped to Japan for canning. All the lamb sold here comes from Australia. In England apples are shipped to 3000 miles for polishing and labels. This is insane and it must stop. The average food in the supermarket travels 1500 miles. That is a fact. Food needs to be local, 50 mile radius.
    
    All living must be local. If the land cannot support people, people should not live there. Trucking everything from elsewhere to support living in an inhospitable environment is never going to work in the long run. And no, there will not be technological solutions to the end of cheap fossil fuels and fresh local water. There is nothing to replace these. We simple must reinvent our food production systems and economic model. We must lower our population by a huge percentage (not sure of the number but I can guess around 90%). Local living, local food, local economies. We must learn to live as part of the ecosystem, not as its master (what an illusion that is!). Finally, the only way I have found to live in a self-perpetuating sustainable manner is by using permaculture principles. Please read up on this and begin transforming where you live and how you live. Government will fail. Determined local communities will not.

    • May 20, 2013 at 11:23 a.m.
    • Recommended90
14. 

    • Donald
    • Wisconsin

    NYT Pick

    As usual, reading the comments is, many times, as informative as the original article. Being a geologist, the truth of our water problems is revealed time and time again. Having been a youthful resident of New Mexico, I know the angst of water deprivation. Nothing short of a revolution in our agricultural policies and practices will suffice to mitigate this problem, and even then, we may not be successful.

    • May 20, 2013 at 11:25 a.m.
    • Recommended130
15. 

    • Doug
    • Hartford, CT

    NYT Pick

    This is horrible, but maybe with a silver lining. Our current over-production, mono-cropping too big to fail ag system is bound to collapse, and the writing for this was long on the wall. Maybe this will open some eyes, and we will start the necessary return to local, organic, healthy soil farming. Industrial agriculture has got to go, and here's a good reason why - irresponsible and glutonous consumption of our most precious resource - water.
    
    And of course, climate change is just a myth. Amazing to see Sen Inhofe from Okalhoma, one of the biggest victims of climate change, still burn calories trying to deny reality while his state sizzles.

    • May 20, 2013 at 11:27 a.m.
    • Recommended85
16. 

    • Richard Schachner
    • Alachua, Fl.

    NYT Pick

    I have to wonder why Mr. Yost did not change his ways when he saw that the water table was producing as much. It seems he had enough information to know what was happening. Do you think Mr. Yost might drive a new truck and his family might have much more than they need to have a nice life? I cannot feel too much sympathy for a Mr. Yost knowing as he did what was coming down the pike.

    • May 20, 2013 at 11:55 a.m.
    • Recommended21
17. 

    • William Neil
    • Rockville, Maryland

    NYT Pick

    Well thank you, I didn't see the comment option upon first reading.
    
    A good and important story, but it is missing something very important, and I don't know how Michael Wines could have left it out: Donald Worster won the Bancroft Prize for history in 1979 for his book "The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930's," and the maps enclosed in the book show a nearly one-to-one overlap with the one published with this article. Worster's Epilogue and Afterword also spend a good deal of time documenting the mining of the water from the same aquifer in recent decades, and the agri-fertilizer-fuel industrial complex that has grown up to make Haskell County in Kansas one of the richest ag regions in the world.
    
    But the amazing thing about Worster's book is his tale of how this naturally dry region came to be farmed, against good and early scientific advice from the mid 19th century on, symbolized in the cry "rain will follow the plough."
    
    If Americans want to know how the science of global warming can be ignored by such a large part of the American public and huge stretches of our business "leaders," then they can learn from how farming very inhospitable land led to the first dust bowl, and how a second one may be in formation. It is also a tale about how the existing ideas about farming and capitalism - for these farmers were above all business people - can turn into myths which can powerfully deny stubborn dissenting facts and evidence.

    • May 20, 2013 at 12:15 p.m.
    • Recommended105
18. 

    • drdonovan
    • san francisco, ca

    NYT Pick

    Calling the farmers greedy and stupid is neither accurate nor helpful. Shortsighted, doubtless, but with short-sided choices in abundance every step of the way from farm to table. We have met the enemy and he is us. Let us try to be friends and work together to solve this, if it isn't too late already.

    • In reply to Mtnman1963
    • May 20, 2013 at 12:18 p.m.
    • Recommended29
19. 

    • Mary Francis
    • Oklahoma

    NYT Pick

    It takes approximately 500 gallons of our aquifer's precious water to grow enough irrigated corn in KS for 1 gallon of ethanol. This ethanol subsidy hurts everyone, including the farmer.

    • May 20, 2013 at 12:21 p.m.
    • Recommended109
20. 

    • George U.
    • Parsippany, NJ

    NYT Pick

    The problem is not new, nor is it related to climate change, although that has only exacerbated the situation. Back in 1986 -- more than a quarter-century ago -- Marc Reisner published his seminal work, "Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water". In it, he spoke of the wastage of irreplaceable resources like the Ogllala aquifer, and the futile attempt to make an arid part of the country look like the states of the rain-blessed Eastern U.S. The water, he predicted, would inexorably disappear, and it is going. Still we continue to pump away at the little that is left. And the water continues to leap from hotel fountains in Las Vegas, in the desert.

    • May 20, 2013 at 12:28 p.m.
    • Recommended54
21. 

    • kat
    • Tucson

    NYT Pick

    I live alongside the now dry Santa Cruz. It was lush and provided the small farming breadbasket for the Tucson settlements and missions for a continuous 4000 years. Some old people still remember it. The powers that be don't care. Despite all the evidence of destructive effects in our own lifetimes, they are seeking to destroy the last wild river habitats in the state in the name of more development and mining. I am talking about the Verde River and the San Pedro. People can readily find info regarding the fights to save these rivers online.

    • In reply to Elaine Meinel Supkis
    • May 20, 2013 at 12:35 p.m.
    • Recommended47
22. 

    • Margaret
    • NYC

    NYT Pick

    Isn't it amazing that many of man's problems come down to the lack of a sustainable energy source. Fight wars in the Middle East to preserve oil resources. Use precious water supplies in the high plains to produce corn to replace oil. Until we finance research to develop sustainable energy we are doomed.

    • May 20, 2013 at 12:36 p.m.
    • Recommended44
23. 

    • paul
    • lincoln neb

    NYT Pick

    This country has plenty of water. I am thinking that diverting water from the mouth of the Mississippi River at New Orleans, or from the Columbia River in Washington State etc. is not only possible but feasable. We have the technology to construct pipelines and aquaducts to get the water where it is needed most. It would provide jobs for thousands of construction workers, and relieve the pressure on the aquifer which contains drinking water for millions in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado etc. This prime farmland would yield the food needed to feed a hungry world. The pipelines could follow the riverbeds of the RioGrande, the Arkansas etc. so right of way issues could be minimized, and gradients would be slight.
    
    Several years ago a pipeline was proposed to ship coal slurry to the gulf. Why not just reverse the flo, and ship water to the arrid western farmlands that are so productive?

    • May 20, 2013 at 12:41 p.m.
    • Recommended9
24. 

    • DLS
    • Auburn, WA

    NYT Pick

    Free market capitalism isn't the answer to everything. The over-fishing of the sea and the depletion of the Ogllala aquifer, not to mention the decimation of the Colorado River, are examples of the failures when profits drive environmental destruction. As an educated society we knew better, we had the scientific evidence, but a religious adherence to the free-market ideology and denial of science because it cautions against human impact on the environment has the consequence of depleting natural resources. Privatization only works when you restrict greed. Environmental change had decimated the Mayan civilization, drought had decimated many others, and the shortage of water plays a major role in start of the Syrian conflict as once fertile lands became destitute.

    • May 20, 2013 at 1:00 p.m.
    • Recommended52
25. 

    • Allen Manzano
    • Carlsbad, CA

    NYT Pick

    The mining of water is like the mining of oil. The reserves that took eons to establish and even those that were replenished by rain, have been pumped down everywhere.
    
    In the aftermath of the oil crisis, we boasted about how we had the wheat and those Arabs could lump it if they didn't want to sell us oil. Saudi Arabia heard us and began pumping into the deepest aquifers under its desert and soon you could see as you flew over the country the same crop circles that you found in Kansas, and Kansas farmers had come to show the Saudis how to do it. They were growing wheat with wells just as we did and at one point, like us, exported it.
    
    Hubris is always punished. And fresh water is not unlimited as the West is learning.
    
    The water crisis is now worldwide and it is not even a blip in our national debates. They focus on the short term known as the next election and an absurd, primitive war of what we think of as 'values'.
    
    When nature calls in her tab, the price will be paid, but the current crop of political warriors will be long gone.

Ralph Peters steadily supported, to the hilt, and up until yesterday, the fantastic American effort in Iraq, an effort based on a goal both unattainable and unwise -- that of creating a unified and prosperous Iraqi state. It was untattainable, because the violence, aggression, conspiracy theories, and inability to compromise fo those raised in societies suffused with Islam will not come to terms, and it was not possible for the Sunnis to acquiesce in their loss of power to the despised Shi'a, and not possible for the Shi'a to truly share their newly-gained -- thanks to the American military -- power over Iraq's government with the Sunnis whose rule they had rejected back in the 1920s, with a revolt by Shi'a tribesman, and had never really accepted, and had been murdered by Saddam Hussein's Sunni-officered army by the hundreds of thousands after the Gulf War.

And that goal -- of a unified and prosperous Iraqi state -- was unwise because it was exactly the wrong goal. The Americans, and all non-Muslims, should be thinking of ways to exploit the pre-existing fissures -- sectarian, ethnic, and economic -- within the Camp of Islam, instead of trying at great cost to narrow those fissures, as they did with Sunnis and Shi'a in Iraq. It was a policy that makes no sense.

Ralph Peters continues to be unable to be admit that the Iraq venture, a decade of squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale, was folly. I have put in bold, below, in an otherwise perfectly reasonable article the sentence that shows his inability to admit that the Iraq business was wrong -- much less be able to detail the two reasons (given above) as to why the Iraq business did not make sense.

Here's his article:

The Arab collapse

By RALPH PETERS

Arabs attack non-Arab Muslims -- Kurds, Berbers, black Africans in Darfur -- as they are now attacking Tuaregs in northern Mali. In Afghanistan, the Arabs of Al-Qaeda treated the Afghans with contempt, which caused great resentment. For the Arabs, it is not Muslims but the Arabs themselves who are the best of peoples, and it is the non-Arab Muslims who must turn toward Arabia to pray five times a day, must read (and memorize) the Qur'an in Arabic, must take Arab names and, ideally, adopt the manners and customs of the Ansar, the 7th-century Arabs who were Muhammad's supporters.

These Arab attitudes, and this Arab behavior, cannot be denied by any non-Arab Muslim who has been on the receiving end. And that is a wedge between Arabs and non-Arabs that deserves to be exploited. If the Western world were better run, its leaders would be talking openly, loudly, about all the ways that Islam has been, is, and always will be a vehicle for Arab supremacism.It's a useful way to shake the faith of non-Arabs in Islam, a way to make them reconsider their devotion, often fanatical and unshakable, to Islam, the "gift of the Arabs."

The report. from Reuters, of Tuareg-Arab clashes in northern Mali:

Armed Tuareg and Arab groups clash in northern Mali

By David Lewis

BAMAKO (Reuters) - Fighting has broken out in northern Mali between Tuareg separatists and local Arab-led gunmen, only days after the African country won a $4.2 billion aid pledge to help it recover from a conflict with Islamists affiliated to al Qaeda.

Rebel and military sources both confirmed the clashes, although they differed over precisely which groups were involved.

The violence highlights how pockets of fighters who escaped a four-month French-led offensive against the al Qaeda-linked militants in the north are undermining efforts to restore state authority ahead of a presidential election set for July 28. France said this week the 'terrorists' had been defeated.

The MNLA, a Tuareg rebel group, said its forces were attacked in the town of Anefis by a column of Islamist fighters on Friday. Its Paris-based spokesman, Moussa Ag Acharatoumane, said fighting continued on Saturday morning, with two of the group's fighters and at least seven Islamists killed so far.

The MNLA said it was fighting MUJWA, an Islamist group that occupied the town of Gao for months until earlier this year and has launched a series of guerrilla-style counter-attacks on the town since it was retaken in the French offensive.

A Malian army officer, who asked not to be named, confirmed there had been heavy fighting, likely stemming from long-standing rivalries between Tuareg and Arab communities that make up northern Mali's array of armed groups.

However he said the clashes were between the MNLA and the MAA, a group made up of Malian Arabs based north of Timbuktu. It was not possible to independently confirm the information.

STABILITY WORRIES

In a sign of the outside world's concern about stability in Mali, international donors promised 3.25 billion euros ($4.22 billion) on Wednesday to help the country recover and prevent a resurgence by the Islamist rebels.

French President Francois Hollande dismissed comparisons between Mali and Afghanistan, which provided safe haven to al Qaeda when it was preparing the September 11 attacks and is still fighting a Taliban insurgency 12 years later.

"In Mali, the terrorists have been beaten. I don't say there are none left, I don't say there is no risk, but there is no longer any fighting," Hollande said.

The Tuareg MNLA launched a rebellion in January last year, citing years of marginalization by the government as justification for carving out an independent desert state from Mali's north.

It initially fought alongside a mix of al Qaeda-linked Islamist forces seeking to impose Islamic law on Mali's north, and the uneasy coalition swept aside government troops in March 2012.

The MNLA was later sidelined by the better armed Islamists, but has now taken advantage of the French offensive to re-occupy several northern towns it had lost to them. Having watered down independence claims, it is demanding talks with the government over a degree of autonomy.

French forces are reducing their numbers and are due to hand over security responsibilities to a United Nations peacekeeping mission that will be rolled out in July.

Hezbollah’s Role in Syria War Shakes the Lebanese

By ANNE BARNARD

NABI CHIT, Lebanon — At the entrance to this village in Hezbollah’s Bekaa Valley heartland, under a sign welcoming visitors to “The Citadel of Resistance,” workers on Monday hoisted a freshly printed banner honoring a young man the group called one of Hezbollah’s latest martyrs — killed in battle not with Israel, the foe the group’s guerrillas train to fight, but with Syrian rebels.

Down the road, another dead fighter’s uncle, Fayez Shukor, welcomed mourners under a tent overlooking the valley as the sun set on a day that had seen Hezbollah’s death toll rise to unexpected heights as the group joined Syrian forces trying to storm the rebel-held Syrian city of Qusayr. His nephew, he had said earlier, died on Sunday alongside 11 other Hezbollah fighters killed in a single rebel attack.

Lebanon reeled Monday from the twin realizations that Hezbollah, the nation’s most powerful military and political organization, was plunging deeper into a war the country has tried to stay out of, and that the group was taking unaccustomed losses. Mr. Shukor, a former government minister from Lebanon’s Arab Socialist Baath Party, walked a careful line between supporting Hezbollah’s declaration that Syria’s fight is its fight and acknowledging the contradiction of fighting fellow Arab Muslims instead of Israelis.

“I wish all this blood had been shed in the south, fighting Israel,” he said, but added that the rebels battling Hezbollah’s ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, were “infidels and garbage” serving Israel; the West, he said, should recognize that they are Al Qaeda-linked extremists and help wipe them out.

He then repeated the charge that extremists among the Sunni Muslim rebels have flung at Hezbollah’s Shiites. “They are not Muslims,” he said.

Lebanon and the region have been electrified by the fierce fighting in Qusayr and the role of Hezbollah. Fighters on both sides said rebels continued to hold the north of the city against Hezbollah, the Syrian Army and pro-government militias.

Ali, a Lebanese Shiite with ties to Hezbollah, said that a relative and other fighters, updating him by text message from the battlefield, were struck by the rebels’ tenacity. One Hezbollah fighter, he said, told him that even after being shot, rebels “got up and attacked in a brutal way.”

The growing stream of funerals suggests that in Qusayr, Hezbollah is asking followers for their deepest sacrifice in Syria yet, one that it has no choice but to embrace and explain. The exact toll is unclear, as Hezbollah does not always announce deaths right away or specify dates and locations.

At least 14 Hezbollah fighters were killed over the weekend, according to Hezbollah Web sites and relatives of fighters. Phillip C. Smyth, a University of Maryland researcher who studies Hezbollah, listed on the Jihadology Web site 20 fighters whose deaths were announced by official and unofficial Hezbollah sites, a number he said could grow. Syrian opposition activists, eager to claim an underdog victory, say more than 40 have died.

Either way, the numbers stand out. In its 34-day war with a stronger foe, Israel, in 2006, Hezbollah acknowledged losing 250 fighters, about 8 a day. (Outside estimates hover around 500 total.) Hezbollah supporters explain the toll in Syria by noting that Hezbollah trains to defend its own territory, not to attack opponents who are defending their own turf.

The scale of the fighting — among the most intense ground battles in Syria’s war — has forced Lebanon to contend anew with a perennial problem. Hezbollah, stronger than the Lebanese Army, has the power to drag the country into war without a government decision, as in 2006, when it set off the war by capturing three Israeli soldiers.

Hezbollah’s critics also complained that the Lebanese Army’s seeming complicity in allowing a large Hezbollah force to cross the border could be viewed as Lebanon’s entering the war — a charge that Hezbollah and Mr. Assad’s supporters have leveled for the opposite reason, as Lebanese Sunnis flow into Syria to join the rebels.

An official with the March 14 movement, Hezbollah’s main political rival, said that with Hezbollah’s help Mr. Assad could probably take Qusayr, a crucial area because it lies near the border and links Damascus with the rebel-held north and the government-held coast. But, the official said, it could cost Hezbollah hundreds of fighters.

He questioned why Hezbollah would want to sink itself into “Dien Bien Phu,” a barbed suggestion that the group would endure the fate of French troops defeated by Vietnamese insurgents in 1954 in a decisive blow to French colonial power.

The Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit rebel umbrella group backed by the United States, issued a statement bound to fuel its frontal battle with Hezbollah, attacking the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. “We are today calling Nasrallah a killer of the Syrian people,” a spokesman, Louay Mekdad, told the Al-Arabiya channel.

The battle also increasingly seemed to pit Hezbollah, the region’s most battle-hardened Shiite force, head-on against Sunni jihadis, some accused of affiliation with Al Qaeda. Rebels flying the black banner often used by Al Nusra Front, the extremist rebel group — listed, like Hezbollah, as a terrorist group by the United States — filmed themselves attacking armored vehicles at close range with machine guns and taking deadly fire.

The heat of the fighting brought into sharp relief the danger of a regional nightmare, all-out war between Shiites and Sunnis. [why would an "all out war between Shiites and Sunnis" be a "nightmare"? It wouldn't be a nightmare for America, Europe, Israel, or for non-Muslims anywhere. Why use such a word? Why not write: "The heat of the fighting brought into sharp relief the possibility -- or likelihood -- of all-out war bertween Shiites and Sunnis." Doesn't that make better sense for American readers?]Some rebel supporters urged on the fighters against the “impurity” of Hezbollah, a phrase that resonates as a slur against Shiites.

Echoes of the fight rippled across Lebanon, divided between supporters and opponents of Mr. Assad roughly, though not entirely, along sectarian lines. In the northern city of Tripoli, which supplies Sunni fighters to rebel ranks, three Lebanese soldiers were killed Monday in clashes with rebels.

In Shiite areas, people prayed for relatives fighting with Hezbollah, and for victory in a battle the group has framed as both a proxy fight with Israel and an intervention to defend Lebanese and Syrian Shiites and other minorities from an uprising they view as driven by Sunni extremists.

In the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah’s normally airtight public-relations machine seemed momentarily off balance. The party has vowed never to “hide our martyrs,” and Mr. Shukor proudly invited reporters to his nephew’s funeral. But Hezbollah operatives politely barred them and escorted them out of town. They were allowed back only after Mr. Shukor raised a fuss.

Bouquets of roses lined the marble banisters leading to a terrace where a dirge played quietly for the fighter, Hassan Faisal Shukor, 23. Mr. Shukor said he was the son of his favorite sister, “like a son to me.”

Credit New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly with busting mega million cigarette smuggling ring.  Tagged Operation Tobacco Road, the operation captured 16 Palestinians including the king pins in the network arrested in New York and Maryland, with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood Blind Sheik Omar Abdel- Rahman and Hamas. One of those ensnared in the raid may have been an accomplice after the fact who supplied the weapon in the 1994 attack on a van crossing the Brooklyn Bridge sprayed with automatic fire. That attack resulted in the death of 16 year old Ari Halberstam   All but two of the Palestinians ensnared in the scheme entered the US illegally.

  The ring had purchased more than $55 million in cigarettes in both Virginia and Maryland and wholesaled the contraband cigarettes to bodegas in the outer boroughs of New York City avoiding more than $80 million in state taxes.  A significant portion of the profits may have been funneled to Hamas, to further Jihad.  The NYPD counterterrorism program may have trumped the FBI on this bust of Hamas funding.  The DOJ and the ACLU have defended   Muslim Charities. See the NER story:  “Zakat and Terrorism”.

The New York Daily News, (NY Daily News) The Jewish Press, Refugee Resettlement Watch (RRW) and the Baltimore Sun have the story.  The New York Daily News report noted this comment from NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly:

Some of those arrested in the bust have links to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheik, and Rashid Baz, who opened fire on a van of Yeshiva students on the Brooklyn Bridge, killing Ari Halberstam. “We're concerned because similar schemes have been used in the past to help fund terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah”.

Note this from the NY Daily News Story about the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas connections of the network:

All 16 of those charged are Palestinian and all but two were living illegally in the U.S. One managed to flee to Jordan before the arrests late Wednesday.

Kelly said the group included several “individuals on our radar with links to known terrorists,” starting with Mohammad Seif, 39, a cigarette reseller from Brooklyn.

Kelly said Seif lived in the same three-story walkup with the personal secretary of Hamas’ main fund-raiser in the U.S., Mousa Abu Marzouk, who was deported from the U.S. in 1997. Marzouk continues to raise money for Hamas in Egypt.

 
Note this about the extent of illegal profits made in the cigarette smuggling scheme:

Investigators in the case, dubbed Operation Tobacco Road have so far found evidence the group pocketed $22 million in profits, of which authorities have found only $7.8 million in cash and bank accounts.

The Jewish Press had details on the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge Van attack that resulting in four injuries  including the death of Yeshiva Student, Ari Halberstam:

On March 1, 1994, Lebanese-born immigrant Rashid Baz shot many rounds of automatic fire at a van carrying 15 Lubavitch students on the Brooklyn Bridge. Four students were hit, two were very seriously injured. Ari Halberstam, 16, died four days later from a shot to the head. Another student, also shot in the head, suffered permanent major speech impediments. Muaffaq Askar, Baz’s “Palestinian uncle,” has long been suspected of supplying the weapon to convicted killer, according to the NY Daily News.

Now Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has announced Askar’s arrest as part of a multi-state cigarette smuggling ring with terrorist ties.

The Baltimore Sun Crime Blog story, referred to by Corcoran in her RRW post, has more on the two Palestinian brothers living in Ocean City, Maryland:

The Palestinian immigrant and his brother lived next door to each other in homes in West Ocean City, over the years opening a number of businesses throughout the area — three pizza shops, a Mexican restaurant, a liquor store, gas stations, and development companies, court records show.

This week, however, authorities in New York alleged that Basel, 42, and Samir Ramadan, 39, were also at the top of a multimillion-dollar cigarette-smuggling ring and said they believe members of the organization may have funneled some of their proceeds to terrorist groups.

[. . .]

Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot said the case highlights that cigarette smuggling is a booming business. His office is working with New York authorities to track down additional Maryland businesses that may have been involved in the ring.

"Cigarette smuggling in the past has always been a mom-and-pop operation, but because it's so lucrative — more lucrative than smuggling heroin — and the penalties are so small, organized crime is moving into it," Franchot said Friday.

New York's Attorney General said that one Brooklyn distributor being listened to on a wiretap boasted to Basel Ramadan, "This business is better than selling drugs."

The Maryland brothers were being held without bond in Worcester County, awaiting extradition to New York. Attorneys were not listed, and phone numbers for their various businesses were disconnected.

Each of the 16 defendants faces charges of enterprise corruption, money laundering, and related tax crimes in New York, and if convicted could be sentenced to 25 years in prison.

How much of the $14.2 of missing cash found its way to Hamas is the obvious question? Moreover, which agency at the federal level should have been monitoring the cigarette smuggling operation.

The US Secret Service has been the spear point in investigation of similar Food Stamp scams as the US Department of Agriculture is involved. Note this recent report of the arrest of a Daytona, Florida convenience store owner and his son, Bassam Sale Abu Diab 55 and Matthew Bassam Abu Diab. Given the expansion of the Food Stamps program over the past several years, at issue is how much of that expansion could have been similarly used to coin illegal profits for funneling funds to Hamas and other terrorist Groups. 

The most disturbing element of this criminal enterprise is how 14 Palestinians could have entered this country illegally, without detection by the ICE over several years. The US Department of Home Land Security and the FBI may have to provide answers at a possible Hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee chaired by Rep. Michael T.  McCaul (R-TX).

Ann Corcoran noted this in her RRW post:

We don’t know how these Palestinians got into the US (the mainstream media is rarely curious about that), but readers here at RRW should know that the  US State Department and refugee contractors  are now taking some Palestinian “refugees” to your towns and cities (101 so far this fiscal year)

Note this graphic illustration on how the Palestinian cigarette smuggling scheme worked:

From Reuters:

Tensions over Syria convulse Lebanese city again, 5 killed

TRIPOLI, Lebanon (Reuters) - Five people have been killed and about 50 wounded in two days of fighting in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, security sources said on Monday, a spillover of violence from the civil war in Syria.

Rocket-propelled grenades and heavy gunfire shook the city on Sunday night but exchanges tapered off into sporadic sniper fire by daytime.

Syrian activists say the latest fighting in Tripoli, where an Alawite minority lives on a hill overlooking the mainly Sunni Muslim port city, was ignited by tension over an assault by Syrian troops backed by Lebanon's Shi'ite Hezbollah militia on the rebel-held Syrian border town of Qusair.

Three people were killed in the Sunni district of Bab Tabbaneh and another in the adjacent Alawite neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen, the security sources said. The fifth fatality was a Lebanese soldier.

Sunnis in Lebanon mostly sympathize with the Sunni-led revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose minority Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.

Lebanese militants are believed to be crossing the border to join fighting in Syria on both sides of a conflict which has sometimes bubbled over into Lebanon, especially in Tripoli.

The Syrian army offensive in Qusair is an attempt to recapture a town that straddles routes from Lebanon to the central crossroads city of Homs, which links Damascus to the north, as well as to Alawite strongholds on the coast.

Each side accuses the other of using Tripoli as a base for sending fighters and weapons in and out of Syria.

From the Belfast Telegraph

Radical cleric Abu Qatada must remain behind bars until he leaves Britain after an immigration judge heard "jihadist files" were found on digital devices in his home. Refusing the terror suspect bail, Mr Justice Irwin said a recent pledge by Qatada to voluntarily return to Jordan did not stop him from being a major flight risk. Qatada was locked up in Belmarsh prison in March after breaching a bail condition which restricts use of mobile phones and other communications devices.

The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) heard that a USB stick understood to belong to Qatada's oldest son contained videos made by the "media wing of al Qaida".

Handing down his ruling, Mr Justice Irwin said: "A serious matter relating to the breaches of bail was revealed during the hearing. In his witness statement, the appellant assured the commission that nothing would be found on any of these items other than school work or other innocent material. This assurance has proved untrue. Significant jihadist material has been found on a USB stick seized."

A total of 17 mobile phones, three USB sticks, one SD card, five digital media devices and 55 recordable CDs or DVDs were found. Mr Justice Irwin said: "This appellant has in the past fled in order to avoid a court order, equipping himself with a false passport. He is highly intelligent, has a range of sympathetic and supportive contacts, and his risk to national security is undiminished. We reject the submission that he can, even now, be relied on to comply with his legal obligations and not to attempt to abscond."

Qatada is also being investigated by Scotland Yard over suspected extremist material found during the search of his home. The Metropolitan Police passed on the material to Danish authorities to reportedly investigate a connection with a controversial Islamic publisher. Copenhagen police said they had subsequently arrested a man, who is understood to be Said Mansour, a Moroccan-born Dane who was jailed for three-and-a-half years in 2007 for promoting terrorism. Copenhagen's chief prosecutor Dorit Borgaard confirmed that the case concerns alleged encouragement of acts of terrorism.

From Russia Today

Russia’s FSB has foiled a terror attack in Moscow as they managed to kill two and detain one of the militants planning it, the National Anti-Terrorism Committee said.

"Our forceful actions prevented an attempted act of terror in the capital," the National Anti-Terror Committee said in a statement. “According to some information, the militants were under surveillance during the past month,” a source from  one of the intelligence agencies told RIA Novosti.

The three men are “Russian citizens, arrived from Afghani-Pakistani region, where they have been trained,” the committee said. All three are said to practice Islam.

Some reports suggest that the militants underwent training in Pakistan's Northern Waziristan, however, it is unknown which group they belong to.

“The information about their possible involvement in the ‘Islamic movement of Uzbekistan’ is being checked. Moreover, special forces are trying to find out if there were contacts and connection with militants among Moscow regions residents,” RIA Novosti reported, citing an intelligence agency source.

According to Russian special services, Waziristan is a hotbed of Taliban extremism.

It was not specified where the terror attack was planned to take place. But, a source in one of Russia’s intelligence agencies told RIA Novosti, it was to be in central Moscow.

I reported this yesterday as if it were a new trial. It isn't. Its the background to a television report scheduled for Thursday evening.

Channel Four Dispatches - The Hunt for Britain's Sex Gangs.

In 2010 Telford police allowed cameras to start filming what was to become one of the biggest child sex abuse cases in the UK.

The investigation, Operation Chalice, eventually encompassed over 100 victims, and around 200 suspected perpetrators.

The Hunt for Britain's Sex Gangs follows - with unprecedented access - a live police investigation, showing just how difficult it is to secure justice for victims of sexual abuse, especially when some girls were just 11 when they were first abused. 

As the police work with the victims, they begin to understand a vicious cycle of grooming, which starts with flattery and friendship, then moves on to a more overtly sexual relationship, and finally becomes exploitative as the groomers pass the girls around their networks of friends and family for sex.

Readers will recall the work that the Dispatches team did with previous programmes on Sharia Courts and most famously Undercover Mosque.  I am awaiting the beginning of the trial of the men arrested in High Wycombe under Operation Ribbon which is due soon, hence the mistake for which I apologise. Ciccio's comment and my reply remain valid.

From The Tablet:

When Berlin Meant Business

Berlin was once home to 50,000 Jewish-owned businesses. A historian is now obsessively reconstructing their demise.

Hezbollah Suffers Losses in Fierce Battle for Syrian City

By ANNE BARNARD

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Fighting raged on Monday in the strategic Syrian city of Qusayr, as the government unleashed new airstrikes and rebels resisted fiercely in parts of the city even as their makeshift hospitals overflowed with the wounded, Syrian opposition activists said.

The toll of dead and wounded also continued to rise for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which is fighting its biggest battle yet on the side of President Bashar al-Assad. Both sides have depicted the fighting in Qusayr as a turning point in the war that is raising regional tensions as Hezbollah plunges more deeply into the conflict.

Funerals for Hezbollah fighters were being planned in the group’s strongholds in the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon, relatives of the dead said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition watchdog group, reported that at least 23 Hezbollah guerrillas had died in the fighting. If confirmed, that would be by far the largest toll for Hezbollah in a single Syrian battle.

Echoes of the battle rippled across neighboring Lebanon, which is deeply divided between supporters and opponents of Mr. Assad. In the northern city of Tripoli, from which many Sunni Muslim militants have joined the Syrian rebels, residents held a candlelight vigil late Sunday in support of Qusayr’s rebels. In Shiite areas, residents worried about relatives fighting in Syria and prayed for victory in a battle Hezbollah has framed as a proxy fight against its main foe, Israel, and an intervention to defend Shiites in Syria, of both Lebanese and Syrian descent, and other minorities they say are threatened by the uprising led by Syria’s Sunni majority.

The Joint Command of the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit United States-backed rebel umbrella group, issued a rallying cry that supporters of Hezbollah were bound to see as inflammatory, calling the group “impure,” in a phrase that could resonate as a sectarian slur against Shiites.

It congratulated rebels holding out in Qusayr, calling them “brave heroes whose victories will be highlighted by history in letters made of light as they have defended their land and their honor from the impurity of the criminal terrorist members of Hezbollah.” It also taunted Hezbollah’s leadership, saying, “We know very well how their gang is constructed and we know how to take it apart and we will take it apart. We see heads that are ripe for the picking.”

In a dig at Lebanese families sending Hezbollah fighters to the battle, the Free Syrian Army said, “We can now say that every single family or neighborhood in Baalbek or Hermel has a dead family member among their sons who fought in Qusayr.”

One relative of a slain Hezbollah fighter spoke in equally strong terms about the battle, saying in an interview that it was as crucial for the party as the struggle against Israel.

Rebels said they destroyed seven armored vehicles and killed dozens more government and Hezbollah fighters, according to an activist in Qusayr.

The Observatory also said that at least six rebels had been killed on Monday, including a commander, but activists say the toll could be higher because not all bodies have been recovered. The joint command of the rebel forces also said that hospitals in Baalbek and the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut had accepted many Hezbollah wounded.

On Sunday, Syrian government troops backed by Hezbollah fighters pushed into parts of Qusayr, hammering the city with airstrikes and artillery, killing at least 52 people and wounding hundreds as civilians cowered, unable to flee, activists said. By the end of the day on Sunday, about 60 percent of the city, which is in Homs Province, was under the army’s control for the first time in months, one activist said.

Kerry, out far and in deep, busily busying himself in the manner of his much-travelled predecessor. He ought, rather,  to put to cease to rely on the frighteningly ill-informed and banal executive summaries prepared for him by young aides fresh out of Johns Hopkins or Yale, and stay in one place, and read in order to grasp the nature, scope, and duration of the threat that adherents of the ideology of Islam pose, and how best to weaken the Camp of Islam. But that would require a different mental makeup. That would require patience, and the habit of study. He doesn't have them. How, in his years of glad-handing as a politician, his eyes furtively glancing around to make sure he spent time only with those who could be of greatest value to him, rather than with those who might be the most informed or most interesting, or in his life on the town (as, for example, at the Hotel Carlyle's bobby-short bar), or putting on his furrowed-brow statesman act that apparently worked on Obama in order to obtain this coveted, career-capping position, could he have retained, if he ever had it, that necessary habit of study? He couldn't. He didn't.

Former lieutenant general Michael Barbero says "Boston is not an anomaly."

WASHINGTON — The threat from homemade bombs — the top killer of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq — will persist for decades and likely become a more prevalent menace domestically, according to the former top Pentagon officer charged with fighting improvised explosive devices.

Michael Barbero, an Army lieutenant general who retired Friday, talked about IEDs and the threat they pose to U.S. citizens and their toll in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere in a recent interview.

"This is here to stay," said Barbero, who led the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). "It's too cheap, too readily available, a whole generation of [MUSLIM] bombmakers. Boston is not an anomaly." -- The implied message is to just accept this new state of murderous affairs, and don't allow yourself to think of the obvious ways to diminish the threat, first by limiting the number of Muslims in the West, and second, by observing those already in the West so closely that they will want to leave, and third, by not treating these as isolated incidents for which only individuals are responsible, but treat them as acts of Jihad for which the Umma, the Community of Believers, should be made to suffer, so as to change the calculations of Muslim bombers.

Did you know that the North Bridge in Concord, the Battle Green in Lexington, Mark Twain's house in Hartford, were all 'hidden gems" of New England that only a real native and travel-site connoisseur, such as Ken Burns, could unearth for your profit and pleasure? See here.

Six days of sightseeing -- all of which you could do on your own, but then you wouldn't have the illusion - not I assume the actual numinous presence -- of being somehow blessed by Ken Burns himself -- costs a mere $3,000. Ten, twenty, thirty such visitors, paying $500 a day, of which $150 a day should pay for room and the meals indicated, thus leaving $350/day pure profit, per visitor. If 20 tourists come to bask in the reflected glory of Burns via the tour operator, that's $7000 of profit a day. 100 days of such tours per year, and that's $700,000.

Isn't something here infra dig?

“Our killer question is ‘How do you propose to defeat Islamism?’ Those who make all Islam their enemy not only succumb to a simplistic and essentialist illusion but they lack any mechanism to defeat it.”

This is what historian and Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes asks in his recent Washington Times article.

To support his argument, Pipes makes an unsubstantiated claim that a majority of Muslims are moderate and that Islamism is only, supported by 10-15 percent of Muslims…

So how and why did he come up with such numbers? Pipes uses different studies and surveys about which he himself confesses: “These ambiguous and contradictory percentages lead to no clear, specific count of Islamists.” Why then use such statistics? It is only to serve the major argument he made in my first paragraph.

And there are more “confessions.” Pipes writes: “Out of a quantitative mish-mash, I suggested just three days after 9/11 that some 10-15 percent of Muslims are determined Islamists.” This is in itself contradictory and is even absolutely nonsense mathematically as he clearly admits. To further support this conservative number, Pipes adds:

 Indonesian survey and election results led R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani in 2003 to conclude that the number of Islamists “is no more than 15 percent of the total Indonesian Muslim population.”

He did this while he ignored his other statement:

In contrast, a 2008 survey of 8,000 Indonesian Muslims by Roy Morgan Research found 40 percent of Indonesians favoring hadd criminal punishments (such as cutting off the hands of thieves) and 52 percent favoring some form of Islamic legal code.

So here we have 52% of Indonesians are extremists, not 15%.

Yet even that doesn’t determine the correct percentages to separate Muslims from Islamists. To say that “views on 9/11″ or “supporting Hadd” (Islamic punishment) is the yardstick to measure the percentages is also absurd and mathematically false. What if a Muslim doesn’t support 9/11 or Hadd but supports the idea that it takes two women in a court of law to equal the testimony of a man? Will Pipes count him as a moderate Muslim or an extremist Islamist? If he chooses “moderate,” then Pakistan got it right. No matter what Pipes chooses, it debunks all his unsubstantiated claims about moderate Islam.

What if a Muslim couldn’t care less about Sharia, jihad, and 9/11, yet he kills his sister for marrying a Jew? Is he a “Muslim” or is he an “Islamist”?

And what if we even use terrorism as a yardstick as Pipes prefers; in Saudi Arabia and across the Muslim world, you have many who do not support al-Qaeda. Are these then counted as moderates? In Pipes’ view the answer is “yes.” But this is false. Last week I had an exchange with Sheikh Faisal Al-Harbi, who chastised me on such issues,stating that his clan (Al-Harbi) would not support terrorism. Indeed, on his clan’s official website they denounce al-Qaeda, adding:

Jihad for the sake of Allah is to go to war with the infidels and the polytheists to remove these and enforce Unitarianism. That is after inviting them to Islam and they reject the invitation (Da’wa). This Jihad is then organized and supervised by the Imam.

That cannot be placed in the moderate Islam camp. In light of this and my other arguments, Pipes’ percentages are escalating dramatically.

The true number for Islamists is 100%. Here, let me add more beef to my claim. What if a Muslim denounces today’s jihad, sharia, Islamic state and all? Is he then moderate?

Hardly. The Muslims who take this position take it by claiming that only the Khalifa or the Mahdi can establish these. Take Hisham Kabbani, for example, a Sufi Muslim scholar whose photo Pipes posted.

Islam is the fourteen-century-old faith of a billion-plus believers that includes everyone from quietist Sufis to violent jihadis.

Nonsense. Kabbani is Sufi and is in fact a Mahdist as all Sufi Muslims are. In his work Approach of Armageddon (page 231), he writes of an entire invasion of Israel and believes as Ahmadinejad does:

Hadith indicate that black flags coming from the area of Khorasan [Iran] will signify [that] the appearance of the Mahdi is nigh.

The “black flags” from “Iran” mean the end of Pipes. Just name the Sufi scholar and I can usually find their Arabic writings and prove they are moderate for the time being. Sheikh Maulana Nazeem Kibrisi, another major Sufi scholar, was found in Turkish speaking with the fervor of Adolf Hitler (watch here). Kibrisi was no small-time Sufi either; in a speech given in Germany to Turkish students, with tens of thousands gathered – including then-prime minister-to-be Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Erbakan of the Refah Islamist party – Kibrisi is found saying:

Glory and blessing to the Lord of the two worlds who is the cause of these days. Definitely, the victory belongs to Islam. This flood of people here is a sign of the rise of the glorious Islam. Do they not think that this a great sign? When the great sign appears [Mahdi] the world will shake. Our forefathers made the earth tremble. This gathering is a memento from our forefathers… You are the grand sons of the Ottomans who will make the world tremble again. If the Ottomans do not come back the unbelievers will never be brought down to their knees…history is made of recurrences, certainly our glorious era has come, the day being born belongs to Islam…as long as we have Allah we do not need America, nor do we need the unbelievers in Europe, nor do we need the unbelievers nor will we go their path.

What about Al-Ghazali, the famous theologian, philosopher, and paragon of mystical Sufism whom the eminent W. M. Watt describes as “acclaimed in both the East and West as the greatest Muslim after Mohammed, and he is by no means unworthy of that dignity”? Scholars like Pipes know the truth, yet completely ignore it. Al-Ghazali said:

One must go on jihad (i.e., warlike razzias or raids) at least once a year… one may use a catapult against them when they are in a fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set fire to them and/or drown them…. If a person of the Ahl al-Kitab [People of The Book—Jews and Christians, typically] is enslaved, his marriage is [automatically] revoked.… One may cut down their trees/…One must destroy their useless books. Jihadists may take as booty whatever they decide…they may steal as much food as they need.

Pipes even went as low to claim that Muhammad was a “Muslim not an Islamist” and even distinguished him since, “Islamism represents the transformation of Islamic faith into a political ideology.”

By switching Muhammad from “Islamist” to “Muslim, Pipes must then answer a crucial question: is Islam defined by its founder or by Mr. Pipes? Muhammad defined Islam as “Al-Islamu deen wa dawla” (“Islam is a religion and a state”). Pipes then must remove the “and” to substantiate his false case.

Then Pipes makes even more blunders:

Islamism relies heavily on conspiracy theories to interpret the world, on the state to advance its ambitions, and on brutal means to attain its goals.

All this from an historian who ignores that much of Islam, including the Quran, the Hadith and Islamic history, is littered with “conspiracy theories” in order “to advance its ambitions” by “brutal means.”

So here is my answer to Mr. Pipes’ question: We will fight Islam with the bible, history, our Constitution, and our laws and even militarily if we must, while working with any Muslim to bring them on our side of the fence, including terrorists. I was one myself. We will not do this by creating an end that justifies the means. Pipes insists we provide a solution, which according to him is only done by mischaracterizing the problem at hand, which is: it’s Islam, stupid, and it’s 100% all the Muslims that believe in it. To add more from history — Mr. Pipes’ favorite subject — Islam was defeated when the Ottoman Empire was dismantled. And in those times, they didn’t use Pipes’ strategy of differentiating between Islam and Islamism. Sir Winston Churchill said:

Mohammedanism [Islam] is a militant and proselytizing faith.

Is Pipes wiser then Churchill?

I rest my case.

I have thought this for a long time, due to her subsequent activity in East Africa. This is Ted Jeory, better known for his knowledge of the politics of Tower Hamlets looking further afield.

Suspicions have grown that Muslim convert Samantha Lewthwaite, now known as the White Widow due to her fugitive status in East Africa, was actually one of the masterminds behind the killings in 2005. Immediately after the explosions which murdered 52 people on the London transport system, she said she "abhorred" the actions of her dead husband Jermaine Lindsay, whose bomb detonated near King's Cross on the Piccadilly Line.

However, the middle-class Muslim convert from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, has since risen to a senior status in the Al Shabaab movement in Kenya and Somalia, a terror group affiliated to Al Qaeda.

Believed to be behind its funding and propaganda, the 29-year-old has assumed cult status among her jihadi followers for her characteristic street-slang rants at non-Muslim "kuffar".

An arrest warrant was issued for her last May after she failed to appear in court in Kenya to face bomb-making charges.

The chemicals found in a raid on her home in Kenya in December 2010 included acetone and hydrogen peroxide, two of the key components of the terror attacks in London eight years ago. A security source said: "That raises the prospect that Lewthwaite may have been more closely involved in the 7/7 attacks than previously thought. It might also explain her seniority as a top-rank Al Qaeda leader and the suspected chief financier of Al Shabaab."

Lewthwaite is also a suspect for a grenade attack at a hotel bar in Mombasa, Kenya, in which three people were killed last June while watching an England football match on television during Euro 2012.

She is thought to be behind a "press office" Twitter account for the Muslim Youth Centre, which distributes announcements exhorting violent jihad . . . When confronted on Twitter last month by a journalist who suggested that the @MYC_Press account was being operated by Lewthwaite, the response was: "She's back in Luton :). In Bedford we take no prisoners."

Microscopic Cryptosporidium pathogens

Source:  US Communicable Disease Center, Atlanta

This week in the US, we had two revelations concerning possible threats to water supplies. We refer to the arrest and arraignment by federal prosecutors in Manhattan of Ahmed Abassi, a Tunisian national and chemical engineering graduate of Laval University in Quebec, on Asylum fraud and an alleged WMD attack on a municipal water system. See here.  Then there was the detention of seven Pakistani, Saudi, and Singaporean chemical engineering students and graduates caught trespassing on the grounds of the Quabbin reservoir in Massachusetts after closing hours.  The Quabbin Reservoir supplies the bulk of the City of Boston's and Western Massachusetts cities’ potable water. The Massachusetts State Police reported that the foreign group was not engaged in any reconnaissance for nefarious purposes at the Quabbin Reservoir.  Nonetheless the FBI local office in Springfield, Massachusetts will be periodically monitoring the situation. See here.

Watch this Channel 22 WWLP news story on the Quabbin Reservoir incident in Massachusetts,“Increased precautions after trespassing incident at the Quabbin Reservoir”.

Increased precautions after trespassing incident at the Quabbin Reservoir

One of the more disabling and emerging pathogens is the cryptosporidium parvum (this is the human infective species) (Crypto) parasite (oocysts) derived from animal and human fecal tissue that has a toughened cell cover which is impervious to chlorination, fluoridation and in some instances, can avoid filtration. Within the United States and other countries, Cryptosporidiosis is a notifiable illness caused by extremely chlorine-tolerant protozoa of the genus Crypto. The only way the parasite can be killed is by boiling water above 160 degree F.   Note in this article on the 20th anniversary of the Milwaukee Crypto outbreak that Milwaukeeans are still boiling water.  See here.  In the US we have had two mass Crypto outbreaks in water supply systems in Carrollton, Georgia in 1987 and in Milwaukee in 1993.  The Georgia outbreak affected 13,000 out of 16,000 residents.  Because the Milwaukee water supply system draws from Lake Michigan, Crypto pathogens might have entered from drainage or in ice breakup during the early spring.  In the Milwaukee case, the epidemiologists and public health specialists estimate that more than 400,000 succumbed to Crypto causing massive outbreaks of watery diarrhea over a period of two weeks or more.  108 deaths occurred involving those with immune deficiencies from cancer treatment, AIDS and other maladies. Within immunocompromised communities, exposure frequently leads to severe and permanent diarrhea, decreasing absorption of nutrients resulting in progressive dehydration and eventual death. See here.

When the Tunisian jihadi, Abassi, referred to placing bacteria sufficient to kill 100,000 in a municipal system that was a stretch. More likely using Crypto parasites, e.coli or other waterborne pathogens could be planted by terrorists in sources and reservoirs for municipal water systems.  Waterborne pathogens are more cost effective. Note this comparison:

One study maintains that four tons of the nerve agent VX would be required to cause several hundred thousand deaths if released in aerosol form in a crowded urban area, compared to only 50 kg of anthrax spores (Douglass and Livingstone 1987: 17).

Despite alleged means of attacking these microscopic pathogens as required by the US EPA, it is not fool proof. The number of reported cases and cost of Cryptosporidiosis in the United States continue to be substantial.  According to the US. Center for Desease Control in Atlanta, approximately 748,000 Cryptosporidiosis cases occur annually in the US. Cryptosporidiosis is widespread geographically in the United States, with all 50 states and two metropolitan jurisdictions reporting cryptosporidiosis cases during 2009–2010. The UK for example, has had several noted outbreaks, even with increased surveillance and preventative measures such as water treatment filtration. See here.  

Think of the use of such pathogens as a means of force reduction. One example in the Middle East might be the placement of Crypto in the source of the Israeli national water system in the Sea of Galilee and Jordan River. Having said that, we suspect that the Israelis may have already developed the means of monitoring to reduce this threat.  Such a disease surveillance level is not yet fully in place in the UK, EU and the US. 

Let’s address some questions to assess how vulnerable we could be to both state and  non-state terrorist actors like Iran, Syria, DPRK, Hezbollah, Hamas and al Qaida capable of cultivating and disseminating Crypto.

1.  How easily can the Crypto parasite be cultivated and stored for use as a BW?

Some emerging pathogens such as Crypto are resistant to chlorination and can appear even in high quality water supplies.  New regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will require water systems to monitor Crypto and adopt a range of treatment options based on source water Crypto concentrations. Most water systems are expected to meet EPA requirements while continuing to use chlorination to inactivate this sporazoa. See here.

 In conversations with a Crypto expert from the UK Health Protection Agency, their concern was indeed Crypto in their own water supplies. Crypto can be obtained relatively easily and introduced into shallow shelf water reservoirs, such as exist particularly in sections of Beirut.  Noting the new standards, which have been adopted in the US after the Milwaukee outbreak, a deliberate attack could be far more successful than a natural outbreak, in terms of introducing it into an unfiltered water supply or one with minimal surveillance and treatment.  

It is relatively easy to acquire Crypto.  Al Qaida and Hezbollah scientists certainly know how --as do scientific teams associated with the IRGC and the Quds Force. Again, deniability is the key. Parasites and spores, even anthrax in some geographic locations are naturally occurring and thus pose a challenge in terms of identification and response.

2.  Which BW threat groups; i.e., Syria, Iran, DPRK, etc. have engaged in development of such pathogens? All ---including China, Russia, Taiwan, Sudan, Algeria, ---the list goes on and on. Also Crypto is one of those parasitic diseases where very valid research is needed because it is a concern, particularly to nations with unfiltered water, high rates of immuno compromised persons, and primitive health care infrastructures. However, as with other Category B and C pathogens, agents, parasites, toxins, there are two things to consider:

First, working in this kind of dual -use area could provide cover for a black program or could enable genetic modification  in such a way, not by terrorists per say but by military laboratories, to evade current filtration and or inactivation.

Second, the deliberate introduction of any Category A, B, or C agent would likely produce casualties with high infection rates, possibly require triage and could overwhelm some nations’ laboratory capacity. As mentioned above if-- it is difficult to isolate, nations with inferior lab diagnostics could struggle with it, time is an issue in any outbreak of disease, particularly those which are transmissible.

3.  Can Crypto pathogens be developed by scientifically trained terrorists, whether Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaida, or individual jihadis like Abassi? Absolutely. They can be cultivated. Certainly scientists who are with Al Qaida, Hezbollah, and Hamas could easily work with Crypto (C.parvum).  There some pathogens that are very difficult to work with but would provide higher kill ratios, which is what you want if you are a terrorist, or you select a less invasive pathogen, agent, parasite and go for lower risks in other areas. Lower containment would be needed.  There are lists of both targets and pathogen selection depending on the target. Think of Crypto as a force reducer. Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb might hit sections of the water supply in Africa or the Middle East where your adversaries will be knocked out for a few weeks. Used as a force reducer, Crypto could well provide advantages after the initial infection, or BW/CW to weaken forces, civilians or even UN peacekeepers/NGO’s.

Crypto would appear to be a cheap means of entry for  bio-warfare terrorism with dramatic debilitating results if introduced into untreated and even treated water supplies. This is especially acute with vulnerable populations; i.e., cancer, AIDS and those with immuno deficiencies.  Moreover, the effects of a deliberate Crypto attack could be devastating to something like the Metropolitan Boston area dependent on the Quabbin Reservoir for its potable water supply and those municipalities that use rivers and lakes as their source water. That is evidenced by the 1987 Carrolton, Georgia, 1993 Milwaukee and recent UK outbreaks, especially as the latter have the same water purification standards as the US EPA.