From Huffinton Post / Aug. 6, 2009
One of the country's largest unions has been hit by a wave of hostile calls and even death threats from people upset with its involvement in town-hall health care debates.
The Service Employers International Union was, as one aide put it, "deluged" with calls on Friday after several conservative media outlets accused the organization of trying to assault demonstrators who had showed up to protest Obama's health care agenda. Making it even scarier for union employees, the address of the union's St. Louis headquarters was mentioned on air by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
Callers who reached both the front desk and the communications department compared the union officials to Nazis, union aides say. On Twitter, organizers of the town hall protest urged people to take pictures and write down the license plate numbers of attending SEIU officials. More alarming than anything else, angry callers and protesters pledged to take up arms against the union.
"If ACORN/SEIU attends these meetings for disruptive purposes, and you have a license to carry....carry," read one tweet.
"I suggest you tell your people to calm down, act like American citizens, and stop trying to repress people's First Amendment rights," one caller warned. "That, or you all are gonna come up against the Second Amendment."
The union had actually put up a petition on Thursday for its organizers and members to attend these town hall events and "honor the long-standing American tradition of town hall meetings and public forums to allow citizens to participate in our democracy." Things got a bit hairy during the evening, however, when the SEIU helped turn away people at a forum in Tampa Bay, Florida, and a near riot ensued. Similarly, in St. Louis, an SEIU staffer was arrested after a scuffle ensued with protesters at a town hall event with Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.).
The SEIU wasn't the only Obama ally receiving threats on Friday. An official of the AFL-CIO, which has pledged to counter conservative protests at these town hall events across the country, said that union received angry emails throughout the day as well -- mostly accusations that it was promoting communism and socialism.
Click on title above to go to original article and to see vid;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/07/obama-allied-unions-threa_n_254204.html
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Pentagon EHR contract award under investigation
As appeared in "FierceMedicine.Com"
August 5, 2009
By Neil Versel
The Pentagon is investigating allegations by a Military Health System employee that the MHS improperly awarded a contract to a small but well-connected IT firm to help build an EHR system that is interoperable with VistA at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
NextGov reports that Maj. Frank Tucker, chief of product development for the Defense Health Information Management System, was instructed last month by a superior to give software and related documentation to San Jose, CA-based Adara Networks several days before the company won a sole-source contract to provide hardware and software for the Defense Health Information Management System program. Adara was the beneficiary of earmarks inserted into Department of Defense appropriation bills for fiscal years 2008 and 2009 by Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), and Cochran is attempting to put another Adara earmark into the 2010 funding legislation, according to NextGov. One earmark last year was a $4 million appropriation for a "next-generation networking electronic medical records project."
Adara reportedly has revenue of just $8 million a year and fewer than 50 employees, but it won Department of Defense contracts worth $7.2 million in 2007 and $13.7 million in 2008. The company reportedly paid $240,000 in lobbying fees to a firm with ties to former Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT), a level of spending usually associated with much larger companies.
And the possible Cochran-Mississippi connection? NextGov reporter/columnist Bob Brewin found that Adara and Sun Microsystems were to install telecommunications infrastructure for an upscale housing development just outside Jackson, MS, the state capital. A predecessor company also won a contract in 2003 to provide a broadband network to the University of Mississippi with the same routers Adara plans to use in the MHS system.
To learn more about this investigation:
- see Tucker's accusations in this NextGov story
- read about the earmarks in this follow-up piece
- learn the Mississippi connection in Brewin's blog post
- find out what Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) thinks of the revelations in this post
August 5, 2009
By Neil Versel
The Pentagon is investigating allegations by a Military Health System employee that the MHS improperly awarded a contract to a small but well-connected IT firm to help build an EHR system that is interoperable with VistA at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
NextGov reports that Maj. Frank Tucker, chief of product development for the Defense Health Information Management System, was instructed last month by a superior to give software and related documentation to San Jose, CA-based Adara Networks several days before the company won a sole-source contract to provide hardware and software for the Defense Health Information Management System program. Adara was the beneficiary of earmarks inserted into Department of Defense appropriation bills for fiscal years 2008 and 2009 by Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), and Cochran is attempting to put another Adara earmark into the 2010 funding legislation, according to NextGov. One earmark last year was a $4 million appropriation for a "next-generation networking electronic medical records project."
Adara reportedly has revenue of just $8 million a year and fewer than 50 employees, but it won Department of Defense contracts worth $7.2 million in 2007 and $13.7 million in 2008. The company reportedly paid $240,000 in lobbying fees to a firm with ties to former Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT), a level of spending usually associated with much larger companies.
And the possible Cochran-Mississippi connection? NextGov reporter/columnist Bob Brewin found that Adara and Sun Microsystems were to install telecommunications infrastructure for an upscale housing development just outside Jackson, MS, the state capital. A predecessor company also won a contract in 2003 to provide a broadband network to the University of Mississippi with the same routers Adara plans to use in the MHS system.
To learn more about this investigation:
- see Tucker's accusations in this NextGov story
- read about the earmarks in this follow-up piece
- learn the Mississippi connection in Brewin's blog post
- find out what Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) thinks of the revelations in this post
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Town on Lockdown as Citizens Flee Plague Quarantine
PLAGUE, PNEUMONIC - CHINA (03): (QINGHAI)
*****************************************
A ProMED-mail post
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
[1]
Date: Wed 5 Aug 2009
Source: Xinhua News Agency [edited]
As of late Tuesday [4 Aug 2009], 12 cases of pneumonic plague have
been confirmed in Xinghai County in the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous
Prefecture of northwest China's Qinghai Province. The cases include 3
deaths, 1 near death, and 1 in serious condition. The others are stable.
Local government has sealed off and quarantined the town of Ziketan,
the source of the outbreak and provincial health authorities have
deployed a team of experts to the area. There has been no report of
new infections.
At present, 218 people are quarantined in hospital, and 115 of them
had been in close contact with those infected. Local authorities have
handed out more than 40 000 leaflets and disks on plague prevention.
--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail
******
[2]
Date: Tue 4 Aug 2009
Source: The Associated Press (AP) [edited]
Residents of a remote farming town in western China said Tuesday [4
Aug 2009] people were seeking to flee in defiance a lockdown by
authorities to prevent the spread of highly infectious pneumonic
plague, which has claimed 3 lives in the area.
Police have set up checkpoints around Ziketan in Qinghai province, a
town of 10 000 people, which has been put under quarantine after at
least a dozen people caught the lung infection, which can kill within
24 hours if untreated.
Some people tried to leave the quarantined area Monday evening [3 Aug
2009], mostly by foot, after the 3rd death was reported, 2 residents
reached by The Associated Press said. Most of the town's residents
are Tibetan herders of yaks, sheep, and pigs.
"A lot of people ran off last night when they heard that another
person died of this plague. They are mostly from other provinces,"
said a food seller who runs a stall at the Crystal Alley Market.
"They headed back home with food, water, and their donkeys."
Medical workers in Ziketan were disinfecting and killing rodents and
fleas that can be carriers for the bacteria that cause the plague,
according to a notice on the provincial health department website.
A Tibetan woman, a migrant construction worker from another village
in Qinghai, said there were very few people on the streets. "I've
heard the migrant workers who build projects went home last night [3
Aug 2009]," she said by telephone. "My boss told me that more than 50
of the 100 construction workers on our project left homes already."
It was unclear if the people who headed out of the town made it past
the police checkpoints, which residents say have been set up in
17-mile (28-kilometer) radius around Ziketan, which lies more than
300 miles (480 kilometers) west of Beijing.
The outbreak in Ziketan was first detected Thursday [30 Jul 2009],
although it isn't clear when the 1st victim died. The official Xinhua
News Agency said the latest victim was a 64-year-old man, a neighbor
of the first 2 fatalities, described in reports as a 32-year-old
herdsman and a 37-year-old man. The herdsman fell sick after burying
his dog, which had died suddenly, according to a report by the
official China National Radio, citing a hospital official. He died 4
days after the dog's burial and the relatives who handled his funeral
were showing symptoms within days, the report said.
Those relatives were among a further 9 people who are infected and in
a hospital, according to the local health bureau. One is in extremely
serious condition and another has developed symptoms of coughing and
chest pain, but the rest are in stable condition, Xinhua and the
health department said.
China has had cases of plague before. WHO said in a 2006 report that
most cases in China's northwest occur when hunters are contaminated
while skinning infected animals. In 2004, 8 villagers in Qinghai
province died of plague, most infected after killing or eating wild
marmots, creatures related to gophers and prairie dogs.
[Byline: Henry Sanderson]
--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail Rapporteur Mary Marshall
[It is now clearly stated that pneumonic plague has occurred in all
12 individuals, 11 of whom were exposed to the index case. It is not
stated how soon antimicrobial therapy was begun in the affected
persons. It is generally said (1) that treatment of primary plague
pneumonia (primary here means acquired via the respiratory route)
should be begun once of the diagnosis is suspected since a delay of
more than 18 hours produces a very high mortality rate. It is also
not stated whether antimicrobial prophylaxis is being used in the 115
individuals who had been in close contact with the cases.
Reference
---------
1. Oyston PCF, Titball RW: Plague. In, Beyond Anthrax. The
Weaponization of Infectious Diseases. (Lutwick LI, Lutwick SM, eds),
Humana Press, New York, 2009, 55-76. - Mod.LL]
[Ziketan town can be located on the HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map at
. - Sr.Tech.Ed.MJ]
[see also:
Plague, pneumonic - China (02): (QH) 20090803.2724
Plague, pneumonic - China: (QH), RFI 20090801.2702
Plague, human - Mongolia: (BO), RFI 20090612.2177
2007
----
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia (Gobisumber) 20070924.3163
Plague, human, fatal - Mongolia (Hovsgol) (03) 20070810.2602
Plague, human, fatal - Mongolia (Hovsgol) 20070807.2567
Plague, rodents - Russia (Volgograd, Astrakhan): susp. 20070128.0368
2005
----
Plague - China (Tibet) 20050626.1798
Plague, camels - Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan: susp. 20050212.0479
2004
----
Plague - Turkmenistan (Dashoguz): susp (02) 20040707.1820
Plague - Turkmenistan (Dashoguz): susp 20040706.1811
Plague warning - Russia: RFI 20040427.1178
2003
----
Plague - Mongolia 20030908.2255
Plague, bubonic - Kazakhstan (Kzyl-Orda) 20030822.2119
Plague - Kazakhstan (Mangistausk): suspected 20030801.1881
2002
----
Plague - Mongolia 20020919.5361
2001
----
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia (Central): correction 20010904.2115
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia (Central) 20010808.1871
2000
----
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia & China: background (03) 20000924.1645
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia & China: background (02) 20000920.1620
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia & China: Background 20000802.1290
Plague, bubonic, marmots - Mongolia: RFI 20000801.1274
1999
----
Plague, bubonic - Kazakhstan (05) 19990817.1418
Plague, bubonic - Kazakhstan 19990802.1322
1998
----
Plague, marmots - Kyrgyzstan (Dzhetyoguz) 19980811.1572]
...................................ll/mj/dk
*##########################################################*
************************************************************
ProMED-mail makes every effort to verify the reports that
are posted, but the accuracy and completeness of the
information, and of any statements or opinions based
thereon, are not guaranteed. The reader assumes all risks in
using information posted or archived by ProMED-mail. ISID
and its associated service providers shall not be held
responsible for errors or omissions or held liable for any
damages incurred as a result of use or reliance upon posted
or archived material.
************************************************************
Become a ProMED-mail Premium Subscriber at
************************************************************
Visit ProMED-mail's web site at.
Send all items for posting to: promed@promedmail.org
(NOT to an individual moderator). If you do not give your
full name and affiliation, it may not be posted. Send
commands to subscribe/unsubscribe, get archives, help,
etc. to: majordomo@promedmail.org. For assistance from a
human being send mail to: owner-promed@promedmail.org.
############################################################
###################################################
*****************************************
A ProMED-mail post
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
[1]
Date: Wed 5 Aug 2009
Source: Xinhua News Agency [edited]
As of late Tuesday [4 Aug 2009], 12 cases of pneumonic plague have
been confirmed in Xinghai County in the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous
Prefecture of northwest China's Qinghai Province. The cases include 3
deaths, 1 near death, and 1 in serious condition. The others are stable.
Local government has sealed off and quarantined the town of Ziketan,
the source of the outbreak and provincial health authorities have
deployed a team of experts to the area. There has been no report of
new infections.
At present, 218 people are quarantined in hospital, and 115 of them
had been in close contact with those infected. Local authorities have
handed out more than 40 000 leaflets and disks on plague prevention.
--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail
******
[2]
Date: Tue 4 Aug 2009
Source: The Associated Press (AP) [edited]
Residents of a remote farming town in western China said Tuesday [4
Aug 2009] people were seeking to flee in defiance a lockdown by
authorities to prevent the spread of highly infectious pneumonic
plague, which has claimed 3 lives in the area.
Police have set up checkpoints around Ziketan in Qinghai province, a
town of 10 000 people, which has been put under quarantine after at
least a dozen people caught the lung infection, which can kill within
24 hours if untreated.
Some people tried to leave the quarantined area Monday evening [3 Aug
2009], mostly by foot, after the 3rd death was reported, 2 residents
reached by The Associated Press said. Most of the town's residents
are Tibetan herders of yaks, sheep, and pigs.
"A lot of people ran off last night when they heard that another
person died of this plague. They are mostly from other provinces,"
said a food seller who runs a stall at the Crystal Alley Market.
"They headed back home with food, water, and their donkeys."
Medical workers in Ziketan were disinfecting and killing rodents and
fleas that can be carriers for the bacteria that cause the plague,
according to a notice on the provincial health department website.
A Tibetan woman, a migrant construction worker from another village
in Qinghai, said there were very few people on the streets. "I've
heard the migrant workers who build projects went home last night [3
Aug 2009]," she said by telephone. "My boss told me that more than 50
of the 100 construction workers on our project left homes already."
It was unclear if the people who headed out of the town made it past
the police checkpoints, which residents say have been set up in
17-mile (28-kilometer) radius around Ziketan, which lies more than
300 miles (480 kilometers) west of Beijing.
The outbreak in Ziketan was first detected Thursday [30 Jul 2009],
although it isn't clear when the 1st victim died. The official Xinhua
News Agency said the latest victim was a 64-year-old man, a neighbor
of the first 2 fatalities, described in reports as a 32-year-old
herdsman and a 37-year-old man. The herdsman fell sick after burying
his dog, which had died suddenly, according to a report by the
official China National Radio, citing a hospital official. He died 4
days after the dog's burial and the relatives who handled his funeral
were showing symptoms within days, the report said.
Those relatives were among a further 9 people who are infected and in
a hospital, according to the local health bureau. One is in extremely
serious condition and another has developed symptoms of coughing and
chest pain, but the rest are in stable condition, Xinhua and the
health department said.
China has had cases of plague before. WHO said in a 2006 report that
most cases in China's northwest occur when hunters are contaminated
while skinning infected animals. In 2004, 8 villagers in Qinghai
province died of plague, most infected after killing or eating wild
marmots, creatures related to gophers and prairie dogs.
[Byline: Henry Sanderson]
--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail Rapporteur Mary Marshall
[It is now clearly stated that pneumonic plague has occurred in all
12 individuals, 11 of whom were exposed to the index case. It is not
stated how soon antimicrobial therapy was begun in the affected
persons. It is generally said (1) that treatment of primary plague
pneumonia (primary here means acquired via the respiratory route)
should be begun once of the diagnosis is suspected since a delay of
more than 18 hours produces a very high mortality rate. It is also
not stated whether antimicrobial prophylaxis is being used in the 115
individuals who had been in close contact with the cases.
Reference
---------
1. Oyston PCF, Titball RW: Plague. In, Beyond Anthrax. The
Weaponization of Infectious Diseases. (Lutwick LI, Lutwick SM, eds),
Humana Press, New York, 2009, 55-76. - Mod.LL]
[Ziketan town can be located on the HealthMap/ProMED-mail interactive map at
[see also:
Plague, pneumonic - China (02): (QH) 20090803.2724
Plague, pneumonic - China: (QH), RFI 20090801.2702
Plague, human - Mongolia: (BO), RFI 20090612.2177
2007
----
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia (Gobisumber) 20070924.3163
Plague, human, fatal - Mongolia (Hovsgol) (03) 20070810.2602
Plague, human, fatal - Mongolia (Hovsgol) 20070807.2567
Plague, rodents - Russia (Volgograd, Astrakhan): susp. 20070128.0368
2005
----
Plague - China (Tibet) 20050626.1798
Plague, camels - Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan: susp. 20050212.0479
2004
----
Plague - Turkmenistan (Dashoguz): susp (02) 20040707.1820
Plague - Turkmenistan (Dashoguz): susp 20040706.1811
Plague warning - Russia: RFI 20040427.1178
2003
----
Plague - Mongolia 20030908.2255
Plague, bubonic - Kazakhstan (Kzyl-Orda) 20030822.2119
Plague - Kazakhstan (Mangistausk): suspected 20030801.1881
2002
----
Plague - Mongolia 20020919.5361
2001
----
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia (Central): correction 20010904.2115
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia (Central) 20010808.1871
2000
----
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia & China: background (03) 20000924.1645
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia & China: background (02) 20000920.1620
Plague, bubonic - Mongolia & China: Background 20000802.1290
Plague, bubonic, marmots - Mongolia: RFI 20000801.1274
1999
----
Plague, bubonic - Kazakhstan (05) 19990817.1418
Plague, bubonic - Kazakhstan 19990802.1322
1998
----
Plague, marmots - Kyrgyzstan (Dzhetyoguz) 19980811.1572]
...................................ll/mj/dk
*##########################################################*
************************************************************
ProMED-mail makes every effort to verify the reports that
are posted, but the accuracy and completeness of the
information, and of any statements or opinions based
thereon, are not guaranteed. The reader assumes all risks in
using information posted or archived by ProMED-mail. ISID
and its associated service providers shall not be held
responsible for errors or omissions or held liable for any
damages incurred as a result of use or reliance upon posted
or archived material.
************************************************************
Become a ProMED-mail Premium Subscriber at
************************************************************
Visit ProMED-mail's web site at
Send all items for posting to: promed@promedmail.org
(NOT to an individual moderator). If you do not give your
full name and affiliation, it may not be posted. Send
commands to subscribe/unsubscribe, get archives, help,
etc. to: majordomo@promedmail.org. For assistance from a
human being send mail to: owner-promed@promedmail.org.
############################################################
###################################################
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Meat & Technology or......
"Of Sausage And Servers"
Aug 1, 2009
By KevinDickens, P.E.
In which the author isn’t trying to stir up trouble, really. As a society, we may not like to know exactly how the demands of modern technology get supported. But as designers, we have a duty to hone in on the physics of the data center situation, avoiding prefab filler and delivering answers that cut the mustard.
As I write this from my laptop at O’Hare International in Chicago, I’m thinking about meat.
As I survey the waiting area, I see a scene that takes place in all the nation’s airports. The guy across from me is working on his laptop. The gal next to him pounds away on her BlackBerry’s ridiculously small keyboard. The kid next to her yaks away on his cell phone. And the guy I don’t see is the poor schlub in the parking lot who will miss the plane because he depended too much on his rental car’s GPS.
And I’m musing on meat?
My Kind of Town …
I live in St. Louis, and it’s a great town, but Chicago is a real city. Back in the 1800s, St. Louis bet it all on steamboats while Chicago put its marker on railroads, and I don’t have to tell you who won that bet.
Tied to Chicago’s railroad legacy are the Union Stock Yards and the reinvention of meat packing.
Up until the mid-1800s, meat processing was provided by the local butcher, and what he butchered depended largely on the time of year and his proximity to the game and his customers. But the large centralized stockyards of Chicago — and the “R” in ASHRAE — led to technological breakthroughs that dramatically altered the industry.
In 1872, packers began using ice cooled units to preserve meat. With this technology, meatpacking was no longer limited to cold weather months and could continue year-round. In 1882, the first refrigerated railroad car showed up, thus making it possible to ship processed meat to far away markets. And decades before Henry Ford churned out a Tin Lizzy, meat packers had pioneered and perfected assembly line production.
One result of these innovations was that demand for meat increased. In a relatively short period of time, folks who may not have been able to afford or get access to beef or pork could. Meat was available. Meat was fresh. Meat was cheap. Mmmmm ... more meat.
So here we are in 2009. You can buy fresh meat at any grocery store and have a bratwurst at Wrigley and never think twice. In fact, if meat couldn’t be found at these places, then you would notice. In spite of PETA’s best efforts, we eat chickens, pigs, and cows at an ever-increasing rate. And processing facilities have become so efficient that it takes less than two minutes for the cow at the front door to become the packaged steaks out back.
Big Macs to Macs
By now you see where I’m going, right? That iPod in your hand is the proverbial hamburger of the 21st century. We have come to depend on technology to such an extent that we often don’t appreciate it until it is interrupted. We are consumers of the red meat that is technology, and just like the bovine variety, we are mostly (and in many cases consciously) oblivious to the incredible apparatus and infrastructure required to satiate our appetites.
The conventional wisdom says if the average American saw the machinations in a packing plant, they would likely reconsider that hot dog. And similarly, most in the U.S. probably don’t know, nor do they want to know, the impact their Google fix has on the planet. It’s more likely they would rather just boot up blindly every morning, answer their e-mail, twitter their life’s banal details to the universe, and then talk on their cell phone while driving home.
They harangue the auto industry for making SUVs and righteously buy a hybrid. They swap their incandescent bulbs for CFLs and pat themselves on the back. They mount overpriced solar panels on roofs and plant obtrusive windmills in fields and crow about how sustainable they have become. But at the same time, we are using and escalating our use of technology, which in turn demands more and more power and more and more infrastructure.
And just to peg the irony meter, how many “green” websites are out there? How many online calculators are there for carbon foot prints calculations, mpg comparisons, waterless urinal payback analysis, and the like? How many watts do we burn at data centers just so we can figure out how many watts we might save if we applied some sustainable strategy?
Moore, Page, and Madden
In 2007 it was estimated that approximately 1.5% of the total energy consumed in the U.S could be attributed to data centers, and the raw power required was expected to double by 2011.1 These dramatic figures can partly be attributed to Moore’s Law (named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore), which portends that computing power doubles every two years or so (Figure 1). At the same time, the less precise Page’s Law (named for Google co-founder Larry Page) contends that software gets twice as slow about every 18 months due to complexity.
So about every year and a half our computing speed doubles, but we consume that capacity with more sophisticated programs and applications and in turn, no efficiencies are realized. In the meantime, consumers are exposed to more and more applications, which in turn drives demand for even more applications.
This phenomenon can be seen in the far too familiar realm of video games. As an example, in the early ’80s in the vestibule of a Woolworth in St. Ann, MO, a lonely dork (me) played the now classic arcade game Space Invaders on a console the size of a refrigerator. Today my three boys (dorks as well), play incredibly life-like games (like Madden Football in our basement on a gaming system about the size of a small brief case, which puts out as much heat as an inefficient toaster.
But unlike their old man who toiled alone, they are playing online and in real time with other lazy bums from around the world. Thirty years have passed, and the standalone video game has become a quasi-portable networked marvel requiring an enterprise data center somewhere to support it. Makes me wonder what Elroy Jetson will be playing and what resources will be required to support him.
So what’s my point? Am I saying technology will consume us all and in so doing advocating anarchy? Have I painted a dire picture of techno-dependency as a set up to some Mad Max scenario? No. My intention is to convey that we are increasingly dependent on technology and the requisite energy it consumes, and this calls for a great deal of awareness, foresight, and innovation on the part of HVAC professionals.
What Now?
Like the humble butcher of yesteryear who couldn’t have visualized a modern packing plant, so, too, are we. I don’t believe that any of us can conceive of what the data processing enterprise of tomorrow will look like. So it begs the question: How do we design today in anticipation of tomorrow?
For starters, I think we are at a crossroads when it comes to data center design. The data center of yesterday, with its sole dependence on computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units and underfloor air distribution (UFAD), seems remarkably awkward and inefficient. On the other hand, some of the modern air-based designs being posited, which incorporate hot or cold air containment, feel rigid and inflexible with their roots firmly planted in the regimented hot aisle/cold aisle layout. Water-based cooling is coming, but I know of no one who has (or should have) committed 100%.
On top of that, manufacturers of servers, mainframes, racks, and cabinets are not standardized on any configuration or cooling medium. Because of this, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see water-based mainframes, open racks, and enclosed chimney cabinets in the same facility. Unlike the big guys (Intel, HP, Google, Microsoft, et al.) who can build around a particular brand or concept, most data center owners can’t and frankly shouldn’t lock into anything proprietary.
So here we are at that fork in the road. The past is prologue, the present is in flux, and the future is unknown. What now?
Avoid the Shelf
A very wise man once told me,
“In design engineering there are two resources available: The laws of physics and the products of the market. The designer of excellence works with the former and the designer of mediocrity works with the latter.”2
What that means to us as data center designers is that we have to throw away the marketing hype of the equipment manufacturers and shun off-the-shelf solutions.
Note, I’m not denigrating the many firms dedicated to our industry. They provide valuable tools, research, insights, and products and are an integral part of what we do. But as designers, we are system synthesizers, and we have the ability (and arguably the obligation) to assemble the pieces and parts necessary to meet the requirements that the physics demand.
Unfortunately, many system designers begin with the knowledge of the products available, and when faced with a design quandary, they assemble a solution using those established components like a kid with a Tinker Toy set. But the problem with trying to accomplish a design with a fixed equipment rubric is that it inevitably introduces more complexity. An example of this is the legacy CRAC and UFAD concept.
Most of us would never design a comfort conditioning system using an open supply plenum extending across a broad floor plate. The idea of dumping air into a plenum and then banking on diffusers strategically placed over workstations to provide adequate environmental control in an open office environment is counterintuitive, if not down right nuts. But that is basically what we do in the legacy data center.
Starting with this paradigm, we work to solve the inevitable problems it creates. First we try to establish order with hot aisles and cold aisles. Then to avoid mixing, we introduce means of separation and isolation. Because we cannot figure out underfloor air distribution intuitively, and it’s too complicated to calculate manually, an entire industry is built around computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling.
Just think of all of the band-aid products that are out there, designed in good faith and sold honestly, but which are band-aids none the less. But have we just overcomplicated our designs when perhaps the underlying premise may be fatally flawed … especially as we approach higher watt densities?
Now, I’m not trashing CRACs and UFAD. In some situations, they are the right solution. And I recognize that all systems cannot be custom and that we must use the technologies and equipment available to us. But I would suggest that in your design calculus you think of all of these “givens” like CRACs, UFAD, and hot aisle/cold aisle as outcomes instead of inputs.
Problemetrics
As long as I’m on a roll, I will drop another nugget from my mentor,
“If you can write an equation for a problem, you will have the solution” Every month in at least one of the four primary industry journals (ES, ASHRAE Journal, HPAC, and Consulting-Specifying Engineer), there is an article on data center design. And almost everyone has a green spin. One of the best, by some of the best, was in a recent issue of HPAC.3 In the article, the high-performance building experts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) discussed a number of key metrics for quantifying efficiency in data centers.
One of the problemsolving metrics that I found useful was the return temperature index (RTI), which is the ratio of the airside Delta-T at the AHU or CRAC over the Delta-T across the IT equipment:
RTI = ((T2 – T1)/ (T4– T3)) × 100
where:
T1: Supply air temperature
T2: Return air temperature
T3: Rack inlet mean temperature
T4: Rack outlet mean temperature
An RTI less than 100% indicates that the air at the AHU is lower than at the equipment, and in turn some supply air must be bypassing the racks, while a value greater than 100% indicates the recirculation of hot air (Figure 2).4
This simple ratio may seem too simple, especially since I told you what the values indicate. But think of the solutions that fall out of understanding the product of the equation.
The equation tells us that we want to minimize, and ideally eliminate, bypass, and recirculation at the racks. Assume you have never seen a data center before but you understand the equation. You walk into a room full of distributed IT racks. Intuitively, do you really think you would choose to put CRACS around the perimeter of the room, provide uncontrolled supply air in front of the cabinets, and then return the hot air back over the racks to the CRACS with no separation? And yet, that’s a textbook legacy design (Figure 3)!5
How could that be? The early data center designers weren’t idiots. How did such a counterintuitive approach become the norm? Well, it isn’t necessarily because they didn’t understand the physics. They probably did. But they were working in a raised floor environment which was a product of the IT infrastructure, not of the HVAC infrastructure. So voila, necessity births invention, and we find we can cool relatively low watt densities using a supply plenum approach — albeit inefficiently, but no one cared about energy … until now.
Conclusion
Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit ornery, I choose to irritate my wife. She is apt to look at me sternly and ask in disbelief, “Why do you want to poke the bear?” As I wrote this, I worried that I might come off like I was poking the bear. But annoying admonishment is not my intent.
Like ham steaks, hot dogs, and hamburgers, technology is everywhere and taken for granted. Demand for new and better gadgets and applications increases exponentially, and the infrastructure required to support it merely keeps pace. The current state–of-the-art for data centers is anything but static, but designers still have to design today with only a glimpse of tomorrow.
The key to success, then, is to avoid designing around existing products and rote strategies and instead understand the physics so that you can identify and apply the appropriate tools. And to understand a problem, you must first boil it down to its equational essence.
As we look forward, we may not know the answers, but we should understand the challenge. It’s the same test we always face, just on a grander scale: To meet the environmental demand using the least amount of energy. But in the end, we have to recognize that in the arena of data center design, design evolution without innovation is merely change. And change alone just isn’t good enough. ES
Cited Works
1. EPA. Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law 109-431, August 2, 2007.
2. Coad, William. “The Engineering Design Process,” in Energy Engineering and Management for Building Systems, New York: Van Norstrand Reinhold Company, 1982.
3 Mathew, Greenberg, Ganguly, Sartor and Tschudi. “How Does Your Data Center Measure Up?” HPAC Magazine, May, 2009: 16-21.
4. Image courtesy of LBNL. http://hightech.lbl.gov/benchmarking-guides/data.html.
5. Image courtesy of HP. Technology Brief TC040202TB, “Optimizing Data Centers for High-Density Computing.” February, 2004.
Aug 1, 2009
By KevinDickens, P.E.
In which the author isn’t trying to stir up trouble, really. As a society, we may not like to know exactly how the demands of modern technology get supported. But as designers, we have a duty to hone in on the physics of the data center situation, avoiding prefab filler and delivering answers that cut the mustard.
As I write this from my laptop at O’Hare International in Chicago, I’m thinking about meat.
As I survey the waiting area, I see a scene that takes place in all the nation’s airports. The guy across from me is working on his laptop. The gal next to him pounds away on her BlackBerry’s ridiculously small keyboard. The kid next to her yaks away on his cell phone. And the guy I don’t see is the poor schlub in the parking lot who will miss the plane because he depended too much on his rental car’s GPS.
And I’m musing on meat?
My Kind of Town …
I live in St. Louis, and it’s a great town, but Chicago is a real city. Back in the 1800s, St. Louis bet it all on steamboats while Chicago put its marker on railroads, and I don’t have to tell you who won that bet.
Tied to Chicago’s railroad legacy are the Union Stock Yards and the reinvention of meat packing.
Up until the mid-1800s, meat processing was provided by the local butcher, and what he butchered depended largely on the time of year and his proximity to the game and his customers. But the large centralized stockyards of Chicago — and the “R” in ASHRAE — led to technological breakthroughs that dramatically altered the industry.
In 1872, packers began using ice cooled units to preserve meat. With this technology, meatpacking was no longer limited to cold weather months and could continue year-round. In 1882, the first refrigerated railroad car showed up, thus making it possible to ship processed meat to far away markets. And decades before Henry Ford churned out a Tin Lizzy, meat packers had pioneered and perfected assembly line production.
One result of these innovations was that demand for meat increased. In a relatively short period of time, folks who may not have been able to afford or get access to beef or pork could. Meat was available. Meat was fresh. Meat was cheap. Mmmmm ... more meat.
So here we are in 2009. You can buy fresh meat at any grocery store and have a bratwurst at Wrigley and never think twice. In fact, if meat couldn’t be found at these places, then you would notice. In spite of PETA’s best efforts, we eat chickens, pigs, and cows at an ever-increasing rate. And processing facilities have become so efficient that it takes less than two minutes for the cow at the front door to become the packaged steaks out back.
Big Macs to Macs
By now you see where I’m going, right? That iPod in your hand is the proverbial hamburger of the 21st century. We have come to depend on technology to such an extent that we often don’t appreciate it until it is interrupted. We are consumers of the red meat that is technology, and just like the bovine variety, we are mostly (and in many cases consciously) oblivious to the incredible apparatus and infrastructure required to satiate our appetites.
The conventional wisdom says if the average American saw the machinations in a packing plant, they would likely reconsider that hot dog. And similarly, most in the U.S. probably don’t know, nor do they want to know, the impact their Google fix has on the planet. It’s more likely they would rather just boot up blindly every morning, answer their e-mail, twitter their life’s banal details to the universe, and then talk on their cell phone while driving home.
They harangue the auto industry for making SUVs and righteously buy a hybrid. They swap their incandescent bulbs for CFLs and pat themselves on the back. They mount overpriced solar panels on roofs and plant obtrusive windmills in fields and crow about how sustainable they have become. But at the same time, we are using and escalating our use of technology, which in turn demands more and more power and more and more infrastructure.
And just to peg the irony meter, how many “green” websites are out there? How many online calculators are there for carbon foot prints calculations, mpg comparisons, waterless urinal payback analysis, and the like? How many watts do we burn at data centers just so we can figure out how many watts we might save if we applied some sustainable strategy?
Moore, Page, and Madden
In 2007 it was estimated that approximately 1.5% of the total energy consumed in the U.S could be attributed to data centers, and the raw power required was expected to double by 2011.1 These dramatic figures can partly be attributed to Moore’s Law (named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore), which portends that computing power doubles every two years or so (Figure 1). At the same time, the less precise Page’s Law (named for Google co-founder Larry Page) contends that software gets twice as slow about every 18 months due to complexity.
So about every year and a half our computing speed doubles, but we consume that capacity with more sophisticated programs and applications and in turn, no efficiencies are realized. In the meantime, consumers are exposed to more and more applications, which in turn drives demand for even more applications.
This phenomenon can be seen in the far too familiar realm of video games. As an example, in the early ’80s in the vestibule of a Woolworth in St. Ann, MO, a lonely dork (me) played the now classic arcade game Space Invaders on a console the size of a refrigerator. Today my three boys (dorks as well), play incredibly life-like games (like Madden Football in our basement on a gaming system about the size of a small brief case, which puts out as much heat as an inefficient toaster.
But unlike their old man who toiled alone, they are playing online and in real time with other lazy bums from around the world. Thirty years have passed, and the standalone video game has become a quasi-portable networked marvel requiring an enterprise data center somewhere to support it. Makes me wonder what Elroy Jetson will be playing and what resources will be required to support him.
So what’s my point? Am I saying technology will consume us all and in so doing advocating anarchy? Have I painted a dire picture of techno-dependency as a set up to some Mad Max scenario? No. My intention is to convey that we are increasingly dependent on technology and the requisite energy it consumes, and this calls for a great deal of awareness, foresight, and innovation on the part of HVAC professionals.
What Now?
Like the humble butcher of yesteryear who couldn’t have visualized a modern packing plant, so, too, are we. I don’t believe that any of us can conceive of what the data processing enterprise of tomorrow will look like. So it begs the question: How do we design today in anticipation of tomorrow?
For starters, I think we are at a crossroads when it comes to data center design. The data center of yesterday, with its sole dependence on computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units and underfloor air distribution (UFAD), seems remarkably awkward and inefficient. On the other hand, some of the modern air-based designs being posited, which incorporate hot or cold air containment, feel rigid and inflexible with their roots firmly planted in the regimented hot aisle/cold aisle layout. Water-based cooling is coming, but I know of no one who has (or should have) committed 100%.
On top of that, manufacturers of servers, mainframes, racks, and cabinets are not standardized on any configuration or cooling medium. Because of this, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see water-based mainframes, open racks, and enclosed chimney cabinets in the same facility. Unlike the big guys (Intel, HP, Google, Microsoft, et al.) who can build around a particular brand or concept, most data center owners can’t and frankly shouldn’t lock into anything proprietary.
So here we are at that fork in the road. The past is prologue, the present is in flux, and the future is unknown. What now?
Avoid the Shelf
A very wise man once told me,
“In design engineering there are two resources available: The laws of physics and the products of the market. The designer of excellence works with the former and the designer of mediocrity works with the latter.”2
What that means to us as data center designers is that we have to throw away the marketing hype of the equipment manufacturers and shun off-the-shelf solutions.
Note, I’m not denigrating the many firms dedicated to our industry. They provide valuable tools, research, insights, and products and are an integral part of what we do. But as designers, we are system synthesizers, and we have the ability (and arguably the obligation) to assemble the pieces and parts necessary to meet the requirements that the physics demand.
Unfortunately, many system designers begin with the knowledge of the products available, and when faced with a design quandary, they assemble a solution using those established components like a kid with a Tinker Toy set. But the problem with trying to accomplish a design with a fixed equipment rubric is that it inevitably introduces more complexity. An example of this is the legacy CRAC and UFAD concept.
Most of us would never design a comfort conditioning system using an open supply plenum extending across a broad floor plate. The idea of dumping air into a plenum and then banking on diffusers strategically placed over workstations to provide adequate environmental control in an open office environment is counterintuitive, if not down right nuts. But that is basically what we do in the legacy data center.
Starting with this paradigm, we work to solve the inevitable problems it creates. First we try to establish order with hot aisles and cold aisles. Then to avoid mixing, we introduce means of separation and isolation. Because we cannot figure out underfloor air distribution intuitively, and it’s too complicated to calculate manually, an entire industry is built around computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling.
Just think of all of the band-aid products that are out there, designed in good faith and sold honestly, but which are band-aids none the less. But have we just overcomplicated our designs when perhaps the underlying premise may be fatally flawed … especially as we approach higher watt densities?
Now, I’m not trashing CRACs and UFAD. In some situations, they are the right solution. And I recognize that all systems cannot be custom and that we must use the technologies and equipment available to us. But I would suggest that in your design calculus you think of all of these “givens” like CRACs, UFAD, and hot aisle/cold aisle as outcomes instead of inputs.
Problemetrics
As long as I’m on a roll, I will drop another nugget from my mentor,
“If you can write an equation for a problem, you will have the solution” Every month in at least one of the four primary industry journals (ES, ASHRAE Journal, HPAC, and Consulting-Specifying Engineer), there is an article on data center design. And almost everyone has a green spin. One of the best, by some of the best, was in a recent issue of HPAC.3 In the article, the high-performance building experts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) discussed a number of key metrics for quantifying efficiency in data centers.
One of the problemsolving metrics that I found useful was the return temperature index (RTI), which is the ratio of the airside Delta-T at the AHU or CRAC over the Delta-T across the IT equipment:
RTI = ((T2 – T1)/ (T4– T3)) × 100
where:
T1: Supply air temperature
T2: Return air temperature
T3: Rack inlet mean temperature
T4: Rack outlet mean temperature
An RTI less than 100% indicates that the air at the AHU is lower than at the equipment, and in turn some supply air must be bypassing the racks, while a value greater than 100% indicates the recirculation of hot air (Figure 2).4
This simple ratio may seem too simple, especially since I told you what the values indicate. But think of the solutions that fall out of understanding the product of the equation.
The equation tells us that we want to minimize, and ideally eliminate, bypass, and recirculation at the racks. Assume you have never seen a data center before but you understand the equation. You walk into a room full of distributed IT racks. Intuitively, do you really think you would choose to put CRACS around the perimeter of the room, provide uncontrolled supply air in front of the cabinets, and then return the hot air back over the racks to the CRACS with no separation? And yet, that’s a textbook legacy design (Figure 3)!5
How could that be? The early data center designers weren’t idiots. How did such a counterintuitive approach become the norm? Well, it isn’t necessarily because they didn’t understand the physics. They probably did. But they were working in a raised floor environment which was a product of the IT infrastructure, not of the HVAC infrastructure. So voila, necessity births invention, and we find we can cool relatively low watt densities using a supply plenum approach — albeit inefficiently, but no one cared about energy … until now.
Conclusion
Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit ornery, I choose to irritate my wife. She is apt to look at me sternly and ask in disbelief, “Why do you want to poke the bear?” As I wrote this, I worried that I might come off like I was poking the bear. But annoying admonishment is not my intent.
Like ham steaks, hot dogs, and hamburgers, technology is everywhere and taken for granted. Demand for new and better gadgets and applications increases exponentially, and the infrastructure required to support it merely keeps pace. The current state–of-the-art for data centers is anything but static, but designers still have to design today with only a glimpse of tomorrow.
The key to success, then, is to avoid designing around existing products and rote strategies and instead understand the physics so that you can identify and apply the appropriate tools. And to understand a problem, you must first boil it down to its equational essence.
As we look forward, we may not know the answers, but we should understand the challenge. It’s the same test we always face, just on a grander scale: To meet the environmental demand using the least amount of energy. But in the end, we have to recognize that in the arena of data center design, design evolution without innovation is merely change. And change alone just isn’t good enough. ES
Cited Works
1. EPA. Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law 109-431, August 2, 2007.
2. Coad, William. “The Engineering Design Process,” in Energy Engineering and Management for Building Systems, New York: Van Norstrand Reinhold Company, 1982.
3 Mathew, Greenberg, Ganguly, Sartor and Tschudi. “How Does Your Data Center Measure Up?” HPAC Magazine, May, 2009: 16-21.
4. Image courtesy of LBNL. http://hightech.lbl.gov/benchmarking-guides/data.html.
5. Image courtesy of HP. Technology Brief TC040202TB, “Optimizing Data Centers for High-Density Computing.” February, 2004.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Tracing Our Stimulus $$$: 3.5M to North Shore Yacht Club
Stephen Crowder takes a road trip cross-country attempting to track down where some of our stimulus money went. Be sure to click on title above to see his hilarious vid and to see all the wonderful comments. People are "FED-up" with the Federal Spending Spree to Big Corporations and just about everything and everone else except to those working class and poor famlies struggling to stay in their homes and make ends meet. Indeed people ARE Fed-Up and beginning to wize up to the way things really are in this country....stacked deck against the hard working middle class and poor.
Where’s My Stimulus Money?!
by Steven Crowder
It seems that a lot of people have completely forgotten about the billions of tax-payer dollars that have already been spent. Don’t you worry folks, I’ve got you covered. Steve the P.A. from Iowa and I hightailed it across the country to see if our money was truly being put into a legitimate recovery program… Or being spent on frivolities. Take a guess!
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/scrowder/2009/07/31/wheres-my-stimulus-money/
Where’s My Stimulus Money?!
by Steven Crowder
It seems that a lot of people have completely forgotten about the billions of tax-payer dollars that have already been spent. Don’t you worry folks, I’ve got you covered. Steve the P.A. from Iowa and I hightailed it across the country to see if our money was truly being put into a legitimate recovery program… Or being spent on frivolities. Take a guess!
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/scrowder/2009/07/31/wheres-my-stimulus-money/
FBI Whistleblower Tells All: Bin Laden a U.S. Operative!
Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman
Former FBI translator and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, Sibel Edmonds.
In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”
These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.
As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.
Control of Central Asia
The goals of the American ’statesmen’ directing these activities included control of Central Asia’s vast energy supplies and new markets for military products.
The Americans had a problem, though. They needed to keep their fingerprints off these operations to avoid a) popular revolt in Central Asia ( Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and b) serious repercussions from China and Russia. They found an ingenious solution: Use their puppet-state Turkey as a proxy, and appeal to both pan-Turkic and pan-Islam sensibilities.
Turkey, a NATO ally, has a lot more credibility in the region than the US and, with the history of the Ottoman Empire, could appeal to pan-Turkic dreams of a wider sphere of influence. The majority of the Central Asian population shares the same heritage, language and religion as the Turks.
In turn, the Turks used the Taliban and al Qaeda, appealing to their dreams of a pan-Islamic caliphate (Presumably. Or maybe the Turks/US just paid very well.)
According to Sibel:
This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.
Uighurs
Sibel was recently asked to write about the recent situation with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, but she declined, apart from saying that “our fingerprint is all over it.”
Of course, Sibel isn’t the first or only person to recognize any of this. Eric Margolis, one of the best reporters in the West on matters of Central Asia, stated that the Uighurs in the training camps in Afghanistan up to 2001:
“were being trained by Bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang, and this was not only with the knowledge, but with the support of the CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China.”
And also that:
“Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, these were commando groups, guerrilla groups, being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia.”
In a separate interview, Margolis said:
“That illustrates Henry Kissinger’s bon mot that the only thing more dangerous than being America’s enemy is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the US, these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, the most-Western province.
The CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China, or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama Bin Laden’s collaboration. The Americans were up to their ears with this.”
Rogues Gallery
Last year, Sibel came up with a brilliant idea to expose some of the criminal activity that she is forbidden to speak about: she published eighteen photos, titled “Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,” of people involved the operations that she has been trying to expose. One of those people is Anwar Yusuf Turani, the so-called ‘President-in-exile’ of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). This so-called ‘government-in-exile’ was ‘established‘ on Capitol Hill in September, 2004, drawing a sharp rebuke from China.
Also featured in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery was ‘former’ spook Graham Fuller, who was instrumental in the establishment of Turani’s ‘government-in-exile’ of East Turkistan. Fuller has written extensively on Xinjiang, and his “ Xinjiang Project” for Rand Corp is apparently the blueprint for Turani’s government-in-exile. Sibel has openly stated her contempt for Mr. Fuller.
Susurluk
The Turkish establishment has a long history of mingling matters of state with terrorism, drug trafficking and other criminal activity, best exemplified by the 1996 Susurluk incident which exposed the so-called Deep State.
Sibel states that “a few main Susurluk actors also ended up in Chicago where they centered ‘certain’ aspects of their operations (Especially East Turkistan-Uighurs).”One of the main Deep State actors, Mehmet Eymur, former Chief of Counter-Terrorism for Turkey’s intelligence agency, the MIT, features in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery.
Eymur was given exile in the US. Another member of Sibel’s gallery, Marc Grossman was Ambassador to Turkey at the time that the Susurluk incident exposed the Deep State. He was recalled shortly after, prior to the end of his assignment, as was Grossman’s underling, Major Douglas Dickerson, who later tried to recruit Sibel
into the spying ring.
The modus operandi of the Susurluk gang is the same as the activities that Sibel describes as taking place in Central Asia, the only difference is that this activity was exposed in Turkey a decade ago, whereas the organs of the state in the US, including the corporate media, have successfully suppressed this story.
Chechnya, Albania & Kosovo
Central Asia is not the only place where American foreign policy makers have shared interests with Bin Laden. Consider the war in Chechnya. As I documented here, Richard Perle and Stephen Solarz (both in Sibel’s gallery) joined other leading neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, and Morton Abramowitz in a group called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). For his part, Bin Laden donated $25 million to the cause, as well as numerous fighters, and technical expertise, establishing training camps.
US interests also converged with those of al-Qaeda in Kosovo and Albania.
Of course, it is not uncommon for circumstances to arise where ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ On the other hand, in a transparent democracy, we expect a full accounting of the circumstances leading up to a tragic event like 9/11. The 9/11 Commission was supposed to provide exactly that.
State Secrets
Sibel has famously been dubbed the most gagged woman in America, having the State Secrets Privilege imposed on her twice. Her 3.5 hour testimony to the 9/11 Commission has been entirely suppressed, reduced to a single footnote which refers readers to her classified testimony.
In the interview, she says that the information that was classified in her case specifically identifies that the US was using Bin Laden and the Taliban in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. In the interview, Sibel reiterates that when invoking the gag orders, the US government claims that it is protecting ” ’sensitive diplomatic relations,’ protecting Turkey, protecting Israel, protecting Pakistan, protecting Saudi Arabia…” This is no doubt partially true, but it is also true that they are protecting themselves too, and it is a crime in the US to use classification and secrecy to cover up crimes.
As Sibel says in the interview:
I have information about things that our government has lied to us about… those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.
Summary
The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.
It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.
The silence by the US government on these matters is deafening. So, too, is the blowback.
http://blacklistednews.com/news-5056-0-20-20--.html
Former FBI translator and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, Sibel Edmonds.
In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”
These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.
As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.
Control of Central Asia
The goals of the American ’statesmen’ directing these activities included control of Central Asia’s vast energy supplies and new markets for military products.
The Americans had a problem, though. They needed to keep their fingerprints off these operations to avoid a) popular revolt in Central Asia ( Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and b) serious repercussions from China and Russia. They found an ingenious solution: Use their puppet-state Turkey as a proxy, and appeal to both pan-Turkic and pan-Islam sensibilities.
Turkey, a NATO ally, has a lot more credibility in the region than the US and, with the history of the Ottoman Empire, could appeal to pan-Turkic dreams of a wider sphere of influence. The majority of the Central Asian population shares the same heritage, language and religion as the Turks.
In turn, the Turks used the Taliban and al Qaeda, appealing to their dreams of a pan-Islamic caliphate (Presumably. Or maybe the Turks/US just paid very well.)
According to Sibel:
This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.
Uighurs
Sibel was recently asked to write about the recent situation with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, but she declined, apart from saying that “our fingerprint is all over it.”
Of course, Sibel isn’t the first or only person to recognize any of this. Eric Margolis, one of the best reporters in the West on matters of Central Asia, stated that the Uighurs in the training camps in Afghanistan up to 2001:
“were being trained by Bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang, and this was not only with the knowledge, but with the support of the CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China.”
And also that:
“Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, these were commando groups, guerrilla groups, being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia.”
In a separate interview, Margolis said:
“That illustrates Henry Kissinger’s bon mot that the only thing more dangerous than being America’s enemy is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the US, these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, the most-Western province.
The CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China, or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama Bin Laden’s collaboration. The Americans were up to their ears with this.”
Rogues Gallery
Last year, Sibel came up with a brilliant idea to expose some of the criminal activity that she is forbidden to speak about: she published eighteen photos, titled “Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,” of people involved the operations that she has been trying to expose. One of those people is Anwar Yusuf Turani, the so-called ‘President-in-exile’ of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). This so-called ‘government-in-exile’ was ‘established‘ on Capitol Hill in September, 2004, drawing a sharp rebuke from China.
Also featured in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery was ‘former’ spook Graham Fuller, who was instrumental in the establishment of Turani’s ‘government-in-exile’ of East Turkistan. Fuller has written extensively on Xinjiang, and his “ Xinjiang Project” for Rand Corp is apparently the blueprint for Turani’s government-in-exile. Sibel has openly stated her contempt for Mr. Fuller.
Susurluk
The Turkish establishment has a long history of mingling matters of state with terrorism, drug trafficking and other criminal activity, best exemplified by the 1996 Susurluk incident which exposed the so-called Deep State.
Sibel states that “a few main Susurluk actors also ended up in Chicago where they centered ‘certain’ aspects of their operations (Especially East Turkistan-Uighurs).”One of the main Deep State actors, Mehmet Eymur, former Chief of Counter-Terrorism for Turkey’s intelligence agency, the MIT, features in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery.
Eymur was given exile in the US. Another member of Sibel’s gallery, Marc Grossman was Ambassador to Turkey at the time that the Susurluk incident exposed the Deep State. He was recalled shortly after, prior to the end of his assignment, as was Grossman’s underling, Major Douglas Dickerson, who later tried to recruit Sibel
into the spying ring.
The modus operandi of the Susurluk gang is the same as the activities that Sibel describes as taking place in Central Asia, the only difference is that this activity was exposed in Turkey a decade ago, whereas the organs of the state in the US, including the corporate media, have successfully suppressed this story.
Chechnya, Albania & Kosovo
Central Asia is not the only place where American foreign policy makers have shared interests with Bin Laden. Consider the war in Chechnya. As I documented here, Richard Perle and Stephen Solarz (both in Sibel’s gallery) joined other leading neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, and Morton Abramowitz in a group called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). For his part, Bin Laden donated $25 million to the cause, as well as numerous fighters, and technical expertise, establishing training camps.
US interests also converged with those of al-Qaeda in Kosovo and Albania.
Of course, it is not uncommon for circumstances to arise where ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ On the other hand, in a transparent democracy, we expect a full accounting of the circumstances leading up to a tragic event like 9/11. The 9/11 Commission was supposed to provide exactly that.
State Secrets
Sibel has famously been dubbed the most gagged woman in America, having the State Secrets Privilege imposed on her twice. Her 3.5 hour testimony to the 9/11 Commission has been entirely suppressed, reduced to a single footnote which refers readers to her classified testimony.
In the interview, she says that the information that was classified in her case specifically identifies that the US was using Bin Laden and the Taliban in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. In the interview, Sibel reiterates that when invoking the gag orders, the US government claims that it is protecting ” ’sensitive diplomatic relations,’ protecting Turkey, protecting Israel, protecting Pakistan, protecting Saudi Arabia…” This is no doubt partially true, but it is also true that they are protecting themselves too, and it is a crime in the US to use classification and secrecy to cover up crimes.
As Sibel says in the interview:
I have information about things that our government has lied to us about… those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.
Summary
The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.
It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.
The silence by the US government on these matters is deafening. So, too, is the blowback.
http://blacklistednews.com/news-5056-0-20-20--.html
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