From 11 August 2002 New York Times Sunday Magazine:

The Odds of That

By LISA BELKIN

When the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side street, near the empty spot where he had habitually parked his Ford Explorer. At about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a white rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of Memphis, where he had just had a jovial dinner with friends. The following week, Vladimir Pasechnik collapsed in London, apparently of a stroke.

The list would grow to nearly a dozen in the space of four nerve-jangling months. Stabbed in Leesburg, Va. Suffocated in an air-locked lab in Geelong, Australia. Found wedged under a chair, naked from the waist down, in a blood-splattered apartment in Norwich, England. Hit by a car while jogging. Killed in a private plane crash. Shot dead while a pizza delivery man served as a decoy. What joined these men was
their proximity to the world of bioterror and germ warfare. Que, the one who was car-jacked, was a researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Wiley, the most famous, knew as much as anyone about how the immune system responds to attacks from viruses like Ebola. Pasechnik was
Russian, and before he defected, he helped the Soviets transform cruise missiles
into biological weapons.

The chain of deaths — these three men and eight others like them — began last fall, back when emergency teams in moonsuits were scouring the Capitol, when postal workers were dying, when news agencies were on high alert and the entire nation was afraid to open its mail.

In more ordinary times, this cluster of deaths might not have been noticed, but these are not ordinary times. Neighbors report neighbors to the F.B.I.; passengers are escorted off planes because they make other passengers nervous; medical journals debate what to publish, for fear the articles will be read by
evil eyes. Now we are spooked and startled by stories like these — all these scientists dying within
months of one another, at the precise moment when tiny organisms loom as a gargantuan threat. The stories of these dozen or so deaths started out as a curiosity and were transformed rumor by rumor into the specter of conspiracy as they circulated first on the Internet and then in the mainstream media. What are the odds, after all?

What are the odds, indeed?

For this is not about conspiracy but about coincidence — unexpected connections
that are both riveting and
rattling. Much religious faith is based on the idea
that almost nothing is coincidence;
science is an exercise in eliminating the
taint of coincidence; police
work is often a feint and parry between those
trying to prove coincidence
and those trying to prove complicity. Without
coincidence, there would
be few movies worth watching (”Of all the gin joints
in all the towns in all
the world, she walks into mine”), and literary plots

would come grinding to a
disappointing halt. (What if Oedipus had not happened
to marry his mother? If
Javert had not happened to arrive in the town where
Valjean was mayor?)

The true meaning of the word
is ”a surprising concurrence of events, perceived
as meaningfully related,
with no apparent causal connection.” In other words,
pure happenstance. Yet by
merely noticing a coincidence, we elevate it to

something that transcends
its definition as pure chance. We are discomforted by

the idea of a random universe.
Like Mel Gibson’s character Graham Hess in M.

Night Shyamalan’s new movie
”Signs,” we want to feel that our lives are

governed by a grand plan.

The need is especially strong
in an age when paranoia runs rampant.

”Coincidence feels like
a loss of control perhaps,” says John Allen Paulos, a

professor of mathematics
at Temple University and the author of ”Innumeracy,”

the improbable best seller
about how Americans don’t understand numbers. Finding

a reason or a pattern where
none actually exists ”makes it less frightening,”

he says, because events
get placed in the realm of the logical. ”Believing in

fate, or even conspiracy,
can sometimes be more comforting than facing the fact

that sometimes things just
happen.”

In the past year there has
been plenty of conspiracy, of course, but also a lot

of things have ”just happened.”
And while our leaders are out there warning us

to be vigilant, the statisticians
are out there warning that patterns are not

always what they seem. We
need to be reminded, Paulos and others say, that most

of the time patterns that
seem stunning to us aren’t even there. For instance,

although the numbers 9/11
(9 plus 1 plus 1) equal 11, and American Airlines

Flight 11 was the first
to hit the twin towers, and there were 92 people on

board (9 plus 2), and Sept.
11 is the 254th day of the year (2 plus 5 plus 4),

and there are 11 letters
each in ”Afghanistan,” ”New York City” and ”the

Pentagon” (and while we’re
counting, in George W. Bush), and the World Trade

towers themselves took the
form of the number 11, this seeming numerical message

is not actually a pattern
that exists but merely a pattern we have found. (After

all, the second flight to
hit the towers was United Airlines Flight 175, and the

one that hit the Pentagon
was American Airlines Flight 77, and the one that

crashed in a Pennsylvania
field was United Flight 93, and the Pentagon is

shaped, well, like a pentagon.)

The same goes for the way
we think of miraculous intervention. We need to be

told that those lucky last-minute
stops for an Egg McMuffin at McDonald’s or to

pick up a watch at the repair
shop or to vote in the mayoral primary — stops

that saved lives of people
who would otherwise have been in the towers when the

first plane hit — certainly
looked like miracles but could have been predicted

by statistics. So, too,
can the most breathtaking of happenings — like the

sparrow that happened to
appear at one memorial service just as a teenage boy,

at the lectern eulogizing
his mom, said the word ”mother.” The tiny bird

lighted on the boy’s head;
then he took it in his hand and set it free.

Something like that has to
be more than coincidence, we protest. What are the

odds? The mathematician
will answer that even in the most unbelievable

situations, the odds are
actually very good. The law of large numbers says that

with a large enough denominator
— in other words, in a big wide world — stuff

will happen, even very weird
stuff. ”The really unusual day would be one where

nothing unusual happens,”
explains Persi Diaconis, a Stanford statistician who

has spent his career collecting
and studying examples of coincidence. Given that

there are 280 million people
in the United States, he says, ”280 times a day, a

one-in-a-million shot is
going to occur.”

Throw your best story at
him — the one about running into your childhood

playmate on a street corner
in Azerbaijan or marrying a woman who has a

birthmark shaped like a
shooting star that is a perfect match for your own or

dreaming that your great-aunt
Lucy would break her collarbone hours before she

actually does — and he
will nod politely and answer that such things happen all

the time. In fact, he and
his colleagues also warn me that although I pulled all

examples in the prior sentence
from thin air, I will probably get letters from

readers saying one of those
things actually happened to them.

And what of the deaths of
nearly a dozen scientists? Is it really possible that

they all just happened to
die, most in such peculiar, jarring ways, within so

short a time? ”We can never
say for a fact that something isn’t a conspiracy,”

says Bradley Efron, a professor
of statistics at Stanford. ”We can just point

out the odds that it isn’t.”

 

I first found myself wondering
about coincidence last spring when I read a small

news item out of the tiny
Finnish town of Raahe, which is 370 miles north of

Helsinki. On the morning
of March 5, two elderly twin brothers were riding their

bicycles, as was their habit,
completing their separate errands. At 9:30, one

brother was struck by a
truck along coastal Highway 8 and killed instantly.

About two hours later and
one mile down the same highway, the other brother was

struck by a second truck
and killed.

”It was hard to believe
this could happen just by chance,” says Marko Salo,

the senior constable who
investigated both deaths for the Raahe Police

Department. Instead, the
department looked for a cause, thinking initially that

the second death was really
a suicide.

”Almost all Raahe thought
he did it knowing that his brother was dead,” Salo

says of the second brother’s
death. ”They thought he tried on purpose. That

would have explained things.”
But the investigation showed that the older

brother was off cheerfully
getting his hair cut just before his own death.

The family could not immediately
accept that this was random coincidence,

either. ”It was their destiny,”
offers their nephew, who spoke with me on

behalf of the family. It
is his opinion that his uncles shared a psychic bond

throughout their lives.
When one brother became ill, the other one fell ill

shortly thereafter. When
one reached to scratch his nose, the other would often

do the same. Several years
ago, one brother was hit and injured by a car (also

while biking), and the other
one developed pain in the same leg.

The men’s sister had still
another theory entirely. ”She worried that it was a

plot to kill both of them,”
the nephew says, describing his aunt’s concerns

that terrorists might have
made their way to Raahe. ”She was angry. She wanted

to blame someone. So she
said the chances of this happening by accident are

impossible.”

Not true, the statisticians
say. But before we can see the likelihood for what

it is, we have to eliminate
the distracting details. We are far too taken, Efron

says, with superfluous facts
and findings that have no bearing on the statistics

of coincidence. After our
initial surprise, Efron says that the real yardstick

for measuring probability
is ”How surprised should we be?” How surprising is

it, to use this example,
that two 70-year-old men in the same town should die

within two hours of each
other? Certainly not common, but not unimaginable. But

the fact that they were
brothers would seem to make the odds more astronomical.

This, however, is a superfluous
fact. What is significant in their case is that

two older men were riding
bicycles along a busy highway in a snowstorm, which

greatly increases the probability
that they would be hit by trucks.

Statisticians like Efron
emphasize that when something striking happens, it only

incidentally happens to
us. When the numbers are large enough, and the

distracting details are
removed, the chance of anything is fairly high. Imagine

a meadow, he says, and then
imagine placing your finger on a blade of grass. The

chance of choosing exactly
that blade of grass would be one in a million or even

higher, but because it is
a certainty that you will choose a blade of grass, the

odds of one particular one
being chosen are no more or less than the one to

either side.

Robert J. Tibshirani, a statistician
at Stanford University who proved that it

was probably not coincidence
that accident rates increase when people

simultaneously drive and
talk on a cellphone, leading some states to ban the

practice, uses the example
of a hand of poker. ”The chance of getting a royal

flush is very low,” he
says, ”and if you were to get a royal flush, you would

be surprised. But the chance
of any hand in poker is low. You just don’t notice

when you get all the others;
you notice when you get the royal flush.”

When these professors talk,
they do so slowly, aware that what they are saying

is deeply counterintuitive.
No sooner have they finished explaining that the

world is huge and that any
number of unlikely things are likely to happen than

they shift gears and explain
that the world is also quite small, which explains

an entire other type of
coincidence. One relatively simple example of this is

”the birthday problem.”
There are as many as 366 days in a year (accounting

for leap years), and so
you would have to assemble 367 people in a room to

absolutely guarantee that
two of them have the same birthday. But how many

people would you need in
that room to guarantee a 50 percent chance of at least

one birthday match?

Intuitively, you assume that
the answer should be a relatively large number. And

in fact, most people’s first
guess is 183, half of 366. But the actual answer is

23. In Paulos’s book, he
explains the math this way: ”[T]he number of ways in

which five dates can be
chosen (allowing for repetitions) is (365 x 365 x 365 x

365 x 365). Of all these
3655 ways, however, only (365 x 364 x 363 x 362 x 361)

are such that no two of
the dates are the same; any of the 365 days can be

chosen first, any of the
remaining 364 can be chosen second and so on. Thus, by

dividing this latter product
(365 x 364 x 363 x 362 x 361) by 3655, we get the

probability that five persons
chosen at random will have no birthday in common.

Now, if we subtract this
probability from 1 (or from 100 percent if we’re

dealing with percentages),
we get the complementary probability that at least

two of the five people do
have a birthday in common. A similar calculation using

23 rather than 5 yields
1/2, or 50 percent, as the probability that at least 2

of 23 people will have a
common birthday.”

Got that?

Using similar math, you can
calculate that if you want even odds of finding two

people born within one day
of each other, you only need 14 people, and if you

are looking for birthdays
a week apart, the magic number is seven.

(Incidentally, if you are
looking for an even chance that someone in the room

will have your exact birthday,
you will need 253 people.) And yet despite

numbers like these, we are
constantly surprised when we meet a stranger with

whom we share a birth date
or a hometown or a middle name. We are amazed by the

overlap — and we conveniently
ignore the countless things we do not have in

common.

Which brings us to the death
of Benito Que, who was not, despite reports to the

contrary, actually a microbiologist.
He was a researcher in a lab at the

University of Miami Sylvester
Cancer Center, where he was testing various agents

as potential cancer drugs.
He never worked with anthrax or any infectious

disease, according to Dr.
Bach Ardalan, a professor of medicine at the

University of Miami and
Que’s boss for the past three years. ”There is no truth

to the talk that Benito
was doing anything related to microbiology,” Ardalan

says. ”He certainly wasn’t
doing any sensitive kind of work that anyone would

want to hurt him for.”

But those facts got lost
amid the confusion — and the prevalence of very

distracting details — in
the days after he died. So did the fact that he had

hypertension. On the afternoon
of Monday, Nov. 19, Que attended a late-afternoon

lab meeting, and as it ended,
he mentioned that he hadn’t been feeling well. A

nurse took Que’s blood pressure,
which was 190/110. ”I wanted to admit him” to

the hospital, Ardalan says,
but Que insisted on going home.

Que had the habit of parking
his car on Northwest 10th Avenue, a side street

that Ardalan describes as
being ”beyond the area considered to be safe.” His

spot that day was in front
of a house where a young boy was playing outside.

Four youths approached Que
as he neared his car, the boy later told the police,

and there might have been
some baseball bats involved. When the police arrived,

they found Que unconscious.
His briefcase was at his side, but his wallet was

gone. His car was eventually
found abandoned several miles from the scene. He

was taken to the hospital,
the same one at which he worked, where he spent more

than a week in a coma before
dying without ever regaining consciousness.

The mystery, limited to small
items in local Florida papers at first, was ”What

killed Benito Que?” Could
it have been the mugging? A CAT scan showed no signs

of bony fracture. In fact,
there were no scrapes or bruises or other physical

signs of assault. Perhaps
he died of a stroke? His brain scan did show a ”huge

intracranial bleed,” Ardalan
says, which would have explained his earlier

headache, and his high blood
pressure would have made a stroke likely.

In other words, this man
just happened to be mugged when he was a stroke waiting

to be triggered. That is
a jarring coincidence, to be sure. But it is not one

that the world was likely
to have noticed if Don Wiley had not up and

disappeared.

on C. Wiley was a microbiologist.
He did some work with anthrax, and a lot of

work with H.I.V., and he
was also quite familiar with Ebola, smallpox, herpes

and influenza. At 57, he
was the father of four children and a professor of

biochemistry and biophysics
in the department of molecular and cellular biology

at Harvard.

On Nov. 15, four days before
the attack on Benito Que, Wiley was in Memphis to

visit his father and to
attend the annual meeting of the scientific advisory

board of St. Jude’s Research
Hospital, of which he was a member. At midnight, he

was seen leaving a banquet
at the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. Friends and

colleagues say he had a
little to drink but did not appear impaired, and they

remember him as being in
a fine mood, looking forward to seeing his wife and

children, who were about
to join him for a short vacation.

Wiley’s father lives in a
Memphis suburb, and that is where Wiley should have

been headed after the banquet.
Instead, his car was found facing in the opposite

direction on the Hernando
DeSoto Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River at

the border of Tennessee
and Arkansas. When the police found the car at 4 a.m.,

it was unlocked, the keys
were in the ignition and the gas tank was full. There

was a scrape of yellow paint
on the driver’s side, which appeared to come from a

construction sign on the
bridge, and a right hubcap was missing on the passenger

side, where the wheel rims
were also scraped. There was no sign, however, of Don

Wiley.

The police trawled the muddy
Mississippi, but they didn’t really expect to find

him. Currents run fast at
that part of the river, and a body would be quickly

swept away. At the start
of the search, they thought he might have committed

suicide; others had jumped
from the DeSoto Bridge over the years. Detectives

searched Wiley’s financial
records, his family relationships, his scientific

research — anything for
a hint that the man might have had cause to take his

own life.

Finding nothing, the investigation
turned medical. Wiley, they learned, had a

seizure disorder that he
had hidden from all but family and close friends. He

had a history of two or
three major episodes a year, his wife told

investigators, and the condition
was made worse when he was under stress or the

influence of alcohol. Had
Wiley, who could well have been tired, disoriented by

bridge construction and
under the influence of a few drinks, had a seizure that

sent him over the side of
the bridge?

That was the theory the police
spoke of in public, but they were also

considering something else.
The week that Wiley disappeared coincided with the

peak of anthrax fear throughout
the country. Tainted letters appeared the month

before at the Senate and
the House of Representatives. Two weeks earlier, a New

York City hospital worker
died of inhaled anthrax. Memphis was not untouched by

the scare; a federal judge
and two area congressmen each received hoax letters.

Could it be mere chance
that this particular scientist, who had profound

knowledge of these microbes,
had disappeared at this time?

”The circumstances were
peculiar,” says George Bolds, a spokesman for the

Memphis bureau of the F.B.I.,
which was called in to assist. ”There were

questions that had to be
asked. Could he have been kidnapped because his

scientific abilities would
have made him capable of creating anthrax? Or maybe

he’d had some involvement
in the mailing of the anthrax, and he’d disappeared to

cover his tracks? Did his
co-conspirators grab him and kill him?

”We were in new territory,”
Bolds continued. ”Just because something is

conceivable doesn’t mean
it’s actually happened, but at the same time, just

because it’s never happened
before doesn’t mean it can’t happen. People’s ideas

of what is possible definitely
changed on Sept. 11. People feel less secure and

less safe. I’m not sure
that they’re at greater risk than they were before.

Maybe they’re just more
aware of the risk they are actually at.”

As a species, we appear to
be biologically programmed to see patterns and

conspiracies, and this tendency
increases when we sense that we’re in danger.

”We are hard-wired to overreact
to coincidences,” says Persi Diaconis. ”It

goes back to primitive man.
You look in the bush, it looks like stripes, you’d

better get out of there
before you determine the odds that you’re looking at a

tiger. The cost of being
flattened by the tiger is high. Right now, people are

noticing any kind of odd
behavior and being nervous about it.”

Adds John Allen Paulos: ”Human
beings are pattern-seeking animals. It might

just be part of our biology
that conspires to make coincidences more meaningful

than they really are. Look
at the natural world of rocks and plants and rivers:

it doesn’t offer much evidence
for superfluous coincidences, but primitive man

had to be alert to all anomalies
and respond to them as if they were real.”

For decades, all academic
talk of coincidence has been in the context of the

mathematical. New work by
scientists like Joshua B. Tenenbaum, an assistant

professor in the department
of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T., is

bringing coincidence into
the realm of human cognition. Finding connections is

not only the way we react
to the extraordinary, Tenenbaum postulates, but also

the way we make sense of
our ordinary world. ”Coincidences are a window into

how we learn about things,”
he says. ”They show us how minds derive richly

textured knowledge from
limited situations.”

To put it another way, our
reaction to coincidence shows how our brains fill in

the factual blanks. In an
optical illusion, he explains, our brain fills the

gaps, and although people
take it for granted that seeing is believing, optical

illusions prove that’s not
true. ”Illusions also prove that our brain is

capable of imposing structure
on the world,” he says. ”One of the things our

brain is designed to do
is infer the causal structure of the world from limited

information.”

If not for this ability,
he says, a child could not learn to speak. A child sees

a conspiracy, he says, in
that others around him are obviously communicating and

it is up to the child to
decode the method. But these same mechanisms can

misfire, he warns. They
were well suited to a time of cavemen and tigers and can

be overloaded in our highly
complex world. ”It’s why we have the urge to work

everything into one big
grand scheme,” he says. ”We do like to weave things

together.

”But have we evolved
into fundamentally rational or fundamentally irrational

creatures? That is one
of the central questions.”

We pride ourselves on being
independent and original, and yet our reactions to

nearly everything can be
plotted along a predictable spectrum. When the grid is

coincidences, one end of
the scale is for those who believe that these are

entertaining events with
no meaning; at the other end are those who believe that

coincidence is never an
accident.

The view of coincidence as
fate has lately become something of a minitrend in

the New Age section of bookstores.
Among the more popular authors is SQuire

Rushnell (who, in the interest
of marketing, spells his first name with a

capital Q). Rushnell spent
20 years producing such television programs as ”Good

Morning America” and ”Schoolhouse
Rock.” His fascination with coincidence

began when he learned that
both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same

July 4, 50 years after the
ratification of the Declaration of Independence.

”That stuck in my craw,”
Rushnell says, ”and I couldn’t stop wondering what

that means.” And so Rushnell
wrote ”When God Winks: How the Power of

Coincidence Guides Your
Life.” The book was published by a small press shortly

before Sept. 11 and sold
well without much publicity. It will be rereleased with

great fanfare by Simon &

Schuster next month. Its message, Rushnell says, is

that ”coincidences are
signposts along your universal pathway. They are hints

that you are going in the
right direction or that you should change course. It’s

like your grandmother sitting
across the Thanksgiving table from you and giving

you a wink. What does that
wink mean? ‘I’m here, I love you, stay the course.”’

During my interview with
Rushnell, I told him the following story: On a frigid

December night many years
ago, a friend dragged me out of my warm apartment,

where I planned to spend
the evening in my bathrobe nursing a cold. I had to

come with her to the movies,
she said, because she had made plans with a pal

from her office, and he
was bringing a friend for me to meet. Translation: I was

expected to show up for
a last-minute blind date. For some reason, I agreed to

go, knocking back a decongestant
as I left home. We arrived at the theater to

find that the friend who
was supposed to be my ”date” had canceled, but not to

worry, another friend had
been corralled as a replacement. The replacement and I

both fell asleep in the
movie (I was sedated by cold medicine; he was a medical

resident who had been awake
for 36 hours), but four months later we were

engaged, and we have been
married for nearly 15 years.

Rushnell was enthralled by
this tale, particularly by the mystical force that

seemed to have nudged me
out the door when I really wanted to stay home and

watch ”The Golden Girls.”
I know that those on the other end of the spectrum

— the scientists and mathematicians
— would have offered several overlapping

explanations of why it was
unremarkable.

There are, of course, the
laws of big numbers and small numbers — the fact that

the world is simultaneously
so large that anything can happen and so small that

weird things seem to happen
all the time. Add to that the work of the late Amos

Tversky, a giant in the
field of coincidence theory, who once described his role

in this world as ”debugging
human intuition.” Among other things, Tversky

disproved the ”hot hand”
theory of basketball, the belief that a player who

has made his last few baskets
will more likely than not make his next. After

examining thousands of shots
by the Philadelphia 76ers, he proved that the odds

of a successful shot cannot
be predicted by the shots that came before.

Tversky similarly proved
that arthritis sufferers cannot actually predict the

weather and are not in more
pain when there’s a storm brewing, a belief that

began with the ancient Greeks.
He followed 18 patients for 15 months, keeping

detailed records of their
reports of pain and joint swelling and matching them

with constantly updated
weather reports. There was no pattern, he concluded,

though he also conceded
that his data would not change many people’s beliefs.

We believe in such things
as hot hands and arthritic forecasting and predestined

blind dates because we notice
only the winning streaks, only the chance meetings

that lead to romance, only
the days that Grandma’s hands ache before it rains.

”We forget all the times
that nothing happens,” says Ruma Falk, a professor

emeritus of psychology at
the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who studied years

ago with Tversky. ”Dreams
are another example,” Falk says. ”We dream a lot.

Every night and every morning.
But it sometimes happens that the next day

something reminds you of
that dream. Then you think it was a premonition.”

Falk’s work is focused on
the question of why we are so entranced by coincidence

in the first place. Her
research itself began with a coincidence. She was on

sabbatical in New York from
her native Israel, and on the night before Rosh

Hashana she happened to
meet a friend from Jerusalem on a Manhattan street

corner. She and the friend
stood on that corner and marveled at the coincidence.

What is the probability
of this happening? she remembers wondering. What did

this mean?

”How stupid we were,” Falk
says now, ”to be so surprised. We related to all

the details that had converged
to create that moment. But the real question was

what was the probability
that at some time in some place I would meet one of my

circle of friends? And when
I told this story to others at work, they encoded

the events as two Israelis
meeting in New York, something that happens all the

time.”

Why was her experience so
resonant for her, Falk asked herself, but not for

those around her? One of
the many experiments she has conducted since then

proceeded as follows: she
visited several large university classes, with a total

of 200 students, and asked
each student to write his or her birth date on a

card. She then quietly sorted
the cards and found the handful of birthdays that

students had in common.
Falk wrote those dates on the blackboard. April 10, for

instance, Nov. 8, Dec. 16.
She then handed out a second card and asked all the

students to use a scale
to rate how surprised they were by these coincidences.

The cards were numbered,
so Falk could determine which answers came from

respondents who found their
own birth date written on the board. Those in that

subgroup were consistently
more surprised by the coincidence than the rest of

the students. ”It shows
the stupid power of personal involvement,” Falk says.

The more personal the event,
the more meaning we give it, which is why I am

quite taken with my story
of meeting my husband (because it is a pivotal moment

in my life), and why SQuire
Rushnell is also taken with it (because it fits into

the theme of his book),
but also why Falk is not impressed at all. She likes her

own story of the chance
meeting on a corner better than my story, while I think

her story is a yawn.

The fact that personal attachment
adds significance to an event is the reason we

tend to react so strongly
to the coincidences surrounding Sept. 11. In a deep

and lasting way, that tragedy
feels as if it happened to us all.

Falk’s findings also shed
light on the countless times that pockets of the

general public find themselves
at odds with authorities and statisticians. Her

results might explain, for
instance, why lupus patients are certain their breast

implants are the reason
for their illness, despite the fact that epidemiologists

conclude there is no link,
or why parents of autistic children are resolute in

their belief that childhood
immunizations or environmental toxins or a host of

other suspected pathogens
are the cause, even though experts are skeptical. They

might also explain the outrage
of all the patients who are certain they live in

a cancer cluster, but who
have been told otherwise by researchers.

Let’s be clear: this does
not mean that conspiracies do not sometimes exist or

that the environment never
causes clusters of death. And just as statistics are often

used to show us that we
should not be surprised, they can also prove what we

suspect, that something
is wrong out there.

”The fact that so many suspected
cancer clusters have turned out to be

statistically insupportable
does not mean the energy we spent looking for them

has been wasted,” says
Dr. James M. Robins, a professor of epidemiology and

biostatistics at Harvard
and an expert on cancer clusters. ”You’re never going

to find the real ones if
you don’t look at all the ones that don’t turn out to

be real ones.”

Most often, though, coincidence
is a sort of Rorschach test. We look into it and

find what we already believe.
”It’s like an archer shooting an arrow and then

drawing a circle around
it,” Falk says. ”We give it meaning because it does

mean something — to us.”

Vladimir Pasechnik was 64
when he died. His early career was spent in the Soviet

Union working at Biopreparat,
the site of that country’s biological weapons

program. He defected in
1989 and spilled what he knew to the British, revealing

for the first time the immense
scale of Soviet work with anthrax, plague,

tularemia and smallpox.

For the next 10 years, he
worked at the Center for Applied Microbiology and

Research, part of Britain’s
Department of Health. Two years ago, he left to form

Regma Biotechnologies, whose
goal was to develop treatment for tuberculosis and

other infectious disease.
In the weeks before he died, Pasechnik had reportedly

consulted with authorities
about the growing anthrax scare. Despite all these

intriguing details, there
is nothing to suggest that his death was caused by

anything other than a stroke.

Robert Schwartz’s death,
while far more dramatic and bizarre, also appears to

have nothing to do with
the fact that he was an expert on DNA sequencing and

analysis. On Dec. 10 he
was found dead on the kitchen floor of his isolated

log-and-fieldstone farmhouse
near Leesburg, Va., where he had lived alone since

losing his wife to cancer
four years ago and his children to college. Schwartz

had been stabbed to death
with a two-foot-long sword, and his killer had carved

an X on the back of his
neck.

Three friends of Schwartz’s
college-age daughter were soon arrested for what the

prosecutor called a ”planned
assassination”; two of the trials for

first-degree murder are
scheduled for this month. A few weeks later, police

arrested the daughter as
well. One suspect has a history of mental illness, and

their written statements
to police talk of devil worship and revenge. There is

no talk, however, of microbiology.

On the same day that Schwartz
died, Set Van Nguyen, 44, was found dead in an

air-locked storage chamber
at the Australian Commonwealth’s Scientific and

Industrial Research Organization’s
animal diseases facility in Geelong. A

months-long internal investigation
concluded that a string of equipment failures

had allowed nitrogen to
build up in the room, causing Nguyen to suffocate.

Although the center itself
dealt with microbes like mousepox, which is similar

to smallpox, Nguyen himself
did not. ”Nguyen was in no way involved in research

into mousepox,” says Stephen
Prowse, who was the acting director of the

Australian lab during the
investigation. ”He was a valued member of the

laboratory’s technical support
staff and not a research scientist.”

Word of all these deaths
(though not the specific details) found its way to Ian

Gurney, a British writer.
Gurney is the author of ”The Cassandra Prophecy:

Armageddon Approaches,”
a book that uses clues from the Bible to calculate that

Judgment Day will occur
in or about the year 2023. He is currently researching

his second book, which is
in part about the threat of nuclear and biological

weapons, and after Sept.
11 he entered a news alert request into Yahoo, asking

to be notified whenever
there was news with the key word ”microbiologist.”

First Que, then Wiley, then
Pasechnik, Schwartz and Nguyen popped up on Gurney’s

computer. ”I’m not a conspiracy
theorist,” says the man who has predicted the

end of the world, ”but
it certainly did look suspicious.” Gurney compiled what

he had learned from these
scattered accounts into an article that

he sent to a number of Web
sites, including Rense.com, which tracks U.F.O.

sightings worldwide. ”Over
the past few weeks,” Gurney wrote, ”several

world-acclaimed scientific
researchers specializing in infectious diseases and

biological agents such as
anthrax, as well as DNA sequencing, have been found

dead or have gone missing.”

The article went on to call
Benito Que, the cancer lab technician, ”a cell

biologist working on infectious
diseases like H.I.V.,” and said that he had

been attacked by four men
with a baseball bat but did not mention that he

suffered from high blood
pressure. It then described the disappearance of Wiley

without mentioning his seizure
disorder and the death of Pasechnik without

saying that he had suffered
a stroke. It gave the grisly details of Schwartz’s

murder, but said nothing
of the arrests of his daughter’s friends. Nguyen, in

turn, was described as ”a
skilled microbiologist,” and it was noted that he

shared a last name with
Kathy Nguyen, the 61-year-old hospital worker who just

happened to be the one New
Yorker to die of anthrax.

Of course, there have always
been rumors based on skewed historical fact.

Recall, for example, the
list of coincidences that supposedly linked the deaths

of Presidents Lincoln and
Kennedy. It goes, in part, like this: The two men were

elected 100 years apart;
their assassins were born 100 years apart (in fact, 101

years apart); they were
both succeeded by men named Johnson; and the two

Johnsons were born 100 years
apart. Their names each contain seven letters;

their successors’ names
each contain 13 letters; and their assassins’ names each

contain 15 letters. Lincoln
was shot in a theater and his assassin ran to a

warehouse, while Kennedy
was shot from a warehouse and his assassin ran to a

theater. Lincoln, or so
the story goes, had a secretary named Kennedy who warned

him not to go to the theater
the night he was killed (for the record, Lincoln’s

White House secretaries
were named John Nicolay and John Hay, and Lincoln

regularly rejected warnings
not to attend public events out of fear for his

safety, including his own
inauguration); Kennedy, in turn, had a secretary named

Lincoln (true, Evelyn Lincoln)
who warned him not to go to Dallas (he, too, was

regularly warned not to
go places, including San Antonio the day before his trip

to Dallas).

I first read about these
connections five years after the Kennedy assassination,

when I was 8, which says
something about how conspiracy theory speaks to the

child in all of us. But
it also says something about the technology of the time.

The numerological coincidences
from the World Trade Center that I mentioned at

the start of this article
made their way onto my computer screen by Sept. 15,

from a friend of a friend
of a friend of an acquaintance, ad infinitum and ad

nauseam.

Professor Robins of Harvard
points out that ”the Web has changed the scale of

these things.” Had there
been a string of dead scientists back in 1992 rather

than 2002, he says, it is
possible that no one would have ever known. ”Back

then, you would not have
had the technical ability to gather all these bits and

pieces of information, while
today you’d be able to pull it off. It’s well known

that if you take a lot of
random noise, you can find chance patterns in it, and

the Net makes it easier
to collect random noise.”

The Gurney article traveled
from one Web site to the next and caught the

attention of Paul Sieveking,
a co-editor of Fortean Times, a magazine that

describes itself as ”the
Journal of Strange Phenomena.”

”People send me stuff all
the time,” Sieveking says. ”This was really

interesting.” Wearing his
second hat as a columnist for the The Sunday

Telegraph in London, he
wrote a column on the subject for that paper titled

”Strange but True — The
Deadly Curse of the Bioresearchers.” His version

began with the link between
the two Nguyens and concluded, ”It is possible that

nothing connects this string
of events, but . . . it offers ample fodder for the

conspiracy theorist or thriller
writer.”

Commenting on the story months
later, Sieveking says: ”It’s probably just a

random clumping, but it
just happens to look significant. We’re all natural

storytellers, and conspiracy
theorists are just frustrated novelists. We like to

make up a good story out
of random facts.”

Over the months, Gurney added
names to his list and continued to send it to

virtual and actual publications
around the U.S. Mainstream newspapers started

taking up the story, including
an alternative weekly in Memphis, where interest

in the Wiley case was particularly
strong, and most recently The Toronto Globe

and Mail. The tally of ”microbiologists”
is now at 11, give or take, depending

on the story you read. In
addition to the men already discussed, the names that

appear most often are these:
Victor Korshunov, a Russian expert in intestinal

bacteria, who was bashed
over the head near his home in Moscow; Ian Langford, a

British expert in environmental
risk and disease, who was found dead in his home

near Norwich, England, naked
from the waist down and wedged under a chair; Tanya

Holzmayer, who worked as
a microbiologist near San Jose and was shot seven times

by a former colleague when
she opened the door to a pizza delivery man; David

Wynn-Williams, who studied
microbes in the Antarctic and was hit by a car while

jogging near his home in
Cambridge, England; and Steven Mostow, an expert in

influenza, who died when
the plane he was piloting crashed near Denver.

The stories have also made
their way into the e-mail in-boxes of countless

microbiologists. Janet Shoemaker,
director of public and scientific affairs for

the American Society for
Microbiology, heard the tales and points out that her

organization alone has 41,000
members, meaning that the deaths of 11 worldwide,

most of whom were not technically
microbiologists at all, is not statistically

surprising. ”We’re saddened
by anyone’s death,” she says. ”But this is just a

coincidence. In another
political climate I don’t think anyone would have

noticed.”

Ken Alibek heard them, too,
and dismissed them. Alibek is one of the country’s

best-known microbiologists.
He was the No. 2 man at Biopreparrat (where Victor

Pasechnik also worked) before
he defected and now works with the U.S. government

seeking antidotes for the
very weapons he developed. Those who have died, he

says, did not really know
anything about biological weapons, and if there were a

conspiracy to kill scientists
with such knowledge, he would be dead. ”I

considered all this a little
artificial, because a number of them couldn’t have

been considered B.W. experts,”
he says with a hint of disdain. ”I got an

e-mail from Pasechnik before
he died, and he was working on a field completely

different from this. People
say to me, ‘Ken, you could be a target,’ but if you

start thinking about this,
then your life is over. I’m not saying I’m not

worried, but I’m not paying
much attention. I’m opening my mail as usual. If I

see something suspicious,
I know what to do.”

Others are not quite as sanguine.
Phyllis Della-Latta is the director of

clinical microbiology services
at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Medical

Center. She found an article
on the deaths circulating in the most erudite place

— an Internet discussion
group of directors of clinical microbiology labs

around the world. These
are the people who, when a patient develops suspicious

symptoms, are brought in
to rule out things like anthrax.

Della-Latta, whom I know
from past medical reporting, forwarded the article to

me with a note: ”See attached.
FYI. Should I be concerned??? I’m off on a

business trip to Italy tomorrow
& next week. If I don’t return, write my

obituary.”

She now says she doesn’t
really believe there is any connection between the

deaths. ”It’s probably
only coincidence,” she says, then adds: ”But if we

traced back a lot of things
that we once dismissed as coincidence — foreigners

taking flying lessons —
we would have found they weren’t coincidence at all.

You become paranoid. You
have to be.”

Don Wiley’s body was finally
found on Dec. 20, near Vidalia, La., about 300

miles south of where he
disappeared.

The Memphis medical examiner,
O.C. Smith, concluded that yellow paint marks on

Wiley’s car suggest that
he hit a construction sign on the Hernando DeSoto

Bridge, as does the fact
that a hubcap was missing from the right front tire.

Smith’s theory is that heavy
truck traffic on the bridge can set off wind gusts

and create ”roadway bounce,”
which might have been enough to cause Wiley to

lose his balance after getting
out of the car to inspect the scrapes. He was

6-foot-3, and the bridge
railing would have only come up to mid-thigh.

”If Dr. Wiley were on the
curb trying to assess damage to his car, all of these

factors may have played
a role in his going over the rail,” Smith said when he

issued his report. Bone
fractures found on the body support this theory. Wiley

suffered fractures to his
neck and spine, and his chest was crushed, injuries

that are consistent with
Wiley’s hitting a support beam before he landed in the

water.

The Wiley family considers
this case closed. ”These kinds of theories are

something that’s always
there,” says Wiley’s wife, Katrin Valgeirsdottir, who

has heard all the rumors.
”People who want to believe it will believe it, and

there’s nothing anyone can
say.”

The Memphis Police also consider
the case closed, and the local office of the

F.B.I. has turned its attention
to other odd happenings. The talk of Memphis at

the moment is the bizarre
ambush of the city’s coroner last month. He was

wrapped in barbed wire and
left lying in a stairwell of the medical examiner’s

building with a live bomb
strapped to his chest.

Coincidentally, that coroner,
O.C. Smith, was also the coroner who did the

much-awaited, somewhat controversial
autopsy on Don Wiley.

What are the odds of that?

From an old BBC news report:

Monkeys invade Delhi government

Tuesday, 9 January, 2001,
14:38 GMT

Thousands of monkeys are invading government buildings in Delhi, forcing employees to arm themselves
with sticks and stones in case they are attacked.

    At least 10,000 monkeys are creating havoc in the Indian capital by barging into government offices, stealing food, threatening bureaucrats and even ripping apart valuable documents.

    The increasingly aggressive animals swing effortlessly between the offices of the defence, finance and external affairs ministries and some have even been spotted in the prime minister’s office.

    “They are moving in very high security areas,” says Defence Ministry officer, IK Jha.

    Officials say there is little that can be done.

    Killing the animals is not an option because monkeys are a sacred symbol in Hinduism, India’s main religion.

    The authorities used to capture the monkeys and ship them to neighbouring states, but this is no longer possible because other areas are now being over populated with monkeys.

    The government held a high-level meeting two years ago to solve the problem permanently.

    Suggestions ranged from setting up a separate park for captured monkeys to “monkey contraception.”

    Nothing has been done since then and employees still walk to work in fear of attack.
    
“I am sometimes faced with groups of monkeys, big huge looking fellows,” says government employee Surekha Rao. “What I do is make some noise with my shoes so the monkey moves away.”

    Animal rights activists say the main problem is not the rising number of monkeys but the growing population of humans.

    “We have encroached on their homelands, we have taken away their fruits, we have reduced their water sources and we are trapping them from their home range, from their forests, so they are coming to urban areas,” says rights activist Iqbal Malik.

A monkey that is sitting atop the statue of Lord Hanuman for the past twenty-two days is attracting streams of people.

FROM LOCAL NEWS REPORT:

BANGALORE-AUG 23: This is the story of a male adult monkey that has metamorphosised as God Hanuman. No joke. A monkey sitting atop the statue of God Hanuman for the past twenty-two days is attracting streams of people to this unbelievable happening.

It all happened at Thimmaganapalli. A monkey just came inside the Altar or sanctum to the surprise of the priest and other on lookers. They bet the monkey with the stick and many have even threw stones. In the melee the monkey bore all this and came out with a new avatar as monkey God. The effort of the villagers to chase the monkey did not yield any results. The monkey doesn’t eat anything, not even a delicious banana.

       “This is the reincarnation of God. This monkey is no ordinary monkey. It has come here twenty two days back and sitting here day and night. I come in the morning and perform pooja till late night. Thousands of people across are coming to see this wonder. For the people of this village this is for
good. For the first five days we tried to chase this monkey away from the temple but it did not budge and inch. Then the elders decided that it is God and we are performing pooja,” said Krishnamurthy, priest of the Hanuman temple.
      
The word spread across attracting thousands of people to see this ardent devotee. “I have come from Hindupur to see this wonder. This is really God coming in new avatar and reincarnation. For me this is God and for Good, said Nirmala, a visitor.

     Even now the monkey is sitting atop the statue like a rock. People are thronging and performing pooja. (ANI)

=====

from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2224025.stm

Court orders release for ‘monkey god’

By Omer Farooq

BBC reporter in Hyderabad

Aug 29: A court in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh has ordered the state authorities to help
free a monkey that has been confined inside a temple for the last month.
    
The monkey has been kept within the temple’s inner-most chambers in the belief that it is the reincarnation of a much loved Hindu monkey god – Hanuman. The court issued the orders in response to a writ petition filed by an animal rights group, Karuna, based in Anantapur.

    The bench directed the Anantapur district superintendent of police to send a team of veterinary doctors to examine the condition of the monkey and treat it as necessary.
    
The court also asked the police to extend all necessary help in securing the monkey’s freedom.
    
A spokesperson from the animal rights group, Gangi Reddy, said the monkey was locked up after local people spotted it perched atop an idol of Hanuman in a deserted temple on 1 August.

Devotees mistook the monkey to be a reincarnation of Hanuman and the animal has been forcibly confined within the temple’s inner sanctum ever since.

  Local officials say hundreds of devotees throng the temple every day to pay their respects to the monkey.

  But the court has directed local authorities to examine the entire episode and investigate allegations that the monkey is being used to exploit religious sentiments and make money.

   Meanwhile, a veterinary doctor who examined the monkey says the animal is in good health – and seems unwilling to leave the temple premises.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/26/international/americas/26WATE.html

As Multinationals Run the Taps, Anger Rises Over Water for Profit

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

SAN ISIDRO DE LULES, Argentina
˜ When Jorge Abdala’s water bill jumped to 59 pesos a month from 24 a few
years ago, he went looking for someone to blame. He soon found his villain:
a French multinational company at the forefront of a global effort to privatize
government-run water systems.

    Mr. Abdala,
a soft-spoken 54-year-old, scarcely seems the revolutionary. Scrambling
for a living like most of his neighbors in this sprawling town tucked up
under the Andes, he runs a meager catering business out of his kitchen.

    But the
protests Mr. Abdala organized here forced the company, now known as Vivendi
Environnement, to abandon its long-term contract to overhaul and manage
the waterworks of the Tucumán Province, where Mr. Abdala and roughly
one million other Argentines live.

    “Our
main demand was, simply, `Go home!’ ” he said, shifting to the edge of
his seat in the living room of his simple one-story home. “We kept presenting
facts showing that they were not making any investments, just raising the
price of water. And any investments they made were with government money.”

    Vast
numbers of people have also demonstrated in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Panama,
in South Africa and elsewhere in a vivid illustration of how highly charged
the economics of water have become. At issue is this question: should water,
a substance close to life itself, be a profit-making business?

    The backlash
in Tucumán continues today as the province struggles to find a new
company to operate its aging water system. The reaction is still being
felt by the big European concerns that dominate the world water business
and the Western aid institutions that support privatization.

    Already,
corporations own or operate water systems across the globe that bring in
about $200 billion a year. Yet they serve only about 7 percent of the world’s
population, leaving a potentially vast market untapped. Protesters are
determined to limit that market.

    The protests
have heartened the companies’ critics, mainly environmentalists who oppose
globalization, but also consumer groups and labor unions. They all object
to private enterprise making a profit on water.

    “Water
is a resource essential to life,” said Hannah Griffiths, of Friends of
the Earth, an environmentalist group based in Britain. “Decisions about
allocation and distribution should be democratic and based on everyone’s
fundamental right to a clean, healthy supply.”

    Not all
agree. Some argue that unless water is treated as an increasingly precious
commodity and priced to reflect its value ˜ particularly for heavy users
like farmers and factories ˜ much of it will be wasted.

    It also
often takes more money than some governments are willing or able to spend
to improve the systems that deliver fresh water to cities and towns around
the world, especially to the poor.

    But will
allowing private enterprise to manage or own many of the world’s water
systems help overcome those problems? And will it expose the poor to impossibly
high water bills?

    The widespread
inability of public utilities in the developing world to provide clean
water is one of the strongest arguments in favor of privatization.

    “As a
general rule, they’re heavily overstaffed, provide poor quality, are unwilling
or unable to invest, with not enough money to serve everybody,” said John
Briscoe, senior water adviser at the World Bank in Washington, referring
to public utilities.

    But private
enterprise appears to be no panacea. Here in Tucumán, Vivendi’s
critics say that the company recklessly pursued the contract in order to
break into the market and that most of the problems it encountered were
of its own making.

    To Gilda
Pedinoce de Valls, a former state’s attorney in Tucumán, Vivendi
failed to recognize how strongly people feel about tampering with the substance
essential to sustaining what has long been a dusty region noted for its
citrus fruit crop.

    Water,
she said, “is a gift from God.”

    Olivier
Barbaroux, the president of Vivendi’s water business, agreed ˜ but only
up to a point.

    “Yes,”
Mr. Barbaroux said, “but he forgot to lay the pipes.”

More Water, but No Sewers

When water filled the cellar
under Basilio Sajnik’s pizzeria in downtown Lomas de Zamora, a sprawling
suburb of Buenos Aires, he, too, looked for a culprit.

    Like
Mr. Abdala, he found a leading French multinational. That company, Suez,
along with Vivendi has led the push to privatize water management.

    In 1992,
Suez signed a 30-year contract to manage the water around Buenos Aires.
Lomas, a sprawling low-slung city of 600,000 on the capital’s southern
edge, is home to many of the 2 million people that Suez provided with water
for the first time.

    But the
company was slower to install sewers. Now the cellar under the three-family
building that houses Mr. Sajnik’s pizzeria is permanently flooded. A pump
runs seven days a week.

    “It’s
the third pump I’ve purchased, yet nobody pays me for the electricity”
Mr. Sajnik, 58, said recently as he waded in dirty water almost to the
top of his knee-high boots.

    The water
Suez brought to the neighborhood produced so much runoff that the water
table rose, causing streams of sewage to trickle along curbs and flood
cellars, even in the driest of seasons. In summer, the stench is overwhelming.
So far there have been no outbreaks of sickness, but the threat to public
health is constant.

    “I could
go to court, but it is too slow, and the powerful always win,” Mr. Sajnik
said. “They say it’s nature, and what can you do about nature?”

    Suez
executives blame Argentina’s financial crisis instead of nature. Jacques
Petry, chief executive of Ondeo, the water division of Suez, explained
in Paris that Suez’s original investment plan foresaw the installation
of sewers. But the collapse of the Argentine peso has frozen the work.
Suez, he said, supports a program to provide 1,500 pumps to the area.

    For the
time being, said Jean Bernard Lemire, the new chief executive of Suez’s
Argentine affiliate, spending has been reduced to the essentials: paying
wages, buying chemicals and energy, and basic maintenance.

    He acknowledges
that renegotiating the original contract, which has already been modified
dozens of times, mocks the original agreement.

    “Of course,
our competitors can say, `Under those conditions, we could have won the
contracts, too,”‘ he said. But he added, “We cannot forecast on a 30-year
basis; we have to be flexible.”

    Overall,
Suez says it is proud of its accomplishments in Buenos Aires. It modernized
treatment plants that were once on the verge of collapse, and efficiently
runs a fleet of more than 1,000 repair trucks. Billings are now computerized.
And except for the first eight months, when Suez lost $23 million, it has
been highly profitable.

    Daniel
Azpiazu, director of research at the Latin American School of Social Sciences
in Buenos Aires, accuses Argentina’s political leadership of cynically
permitting the public utilities to deteriorate so that voters would embrace
privatization.

    In a
1992 survey, he said, 82 percent of Argentines questioned had favored privatization.
In the haste to privatize, however, regulatory bodies and oversight authorities
were rarely installed.

    “In the
early phase, a regulatory agency was not in place,” said Abel Fatala, the
engineer in charge of public services in the municipal government of Buenos
Aires. “When it did start up, it was made in the image of the water company.
The concrete result was that there was no control at all.”

A Vast Market Gap to Fill

By 2025, as the world’s
population grows to eight billion, the United Nations expects the number
of people suffering from an inadequate supply of clean water to grow to
five billion from the current two billion.

    The vast
potential to make money by filling that gap has prompted several large
multinationals like Vivendi and Suez to target what they see as a lucrative
market for the future.

    The case
for privatization germinated decades ago after the World Bank unsuccessfully
tried to fix the public water supply system in Manila. Despite five repair
attempts over the years, water loss was as high as 64 percent.

    “Fundamentally
we realized that without a change in incentives ˜ some very logical, sensible
things ˜ this was not working,” said Mr. Briscoe, of the World Bank said.

    Critics
still say it is unrealistic to expect private companies, whose main responsibility
is to their shareholders, to assume the financial risk of supplying water
to portions of the world’s population that may not be able to afford it
in the first place.

    But investors
are betting that the business of water will boom in coming decades. “This
is a $200 billion market, growing at a 6 percent rate annually, in terms
of population,” said Hans Peter Portner, a fund manager at Banque Pictet
in Geneva who handles the bank’s Global Water Fund. He predicts that privatized
water systems will expand to serve about 17 percent of the world’s population
by 2015, up from 7 percent now.

    Compared
with the Europeans, the American company with the biggest international
business in the field, Bechtel, whose directors include former Secretary
of State George P. Shultz, is a novice. Another American company, Azurix,
a unit of Enron, collapsed before its parent did.

    That
leaves the field mostly to the French giants, Vivendi Environnement and
Suez. Last year, almost half of Vivendi Environnement’s $26 billion of
revenue came from water; roughly one quarter of Suez’s $38 billion in revenue
was generated by the water division, Ondeo.

    French
dominance is now challenged by a third global player, Thames Water P.L.C.
of Britain. Thames rose, after Margaret Thatcher privatized water services
in Britain in 1989, by swallowing up smaller British competitors. In 1999,
it agreed to a $9.8 billion takeover bid from the big German utility RWE
A.G.

    All three
European companies have spent lavishly expanding in the United States.
This year, Thames acquired American Water Works, the American market leader,
for $7.6 billion. It was playing catch-up to Suez, which spent $6 billion
in 1999 to buy United Water Resources and Nalco, a maker of chemicals for
water treatment. Earlier that year, Vivendi acquired the U.S. Filter Corporation
for almost $8 billion.

    Contracts
are pouring in. This year, both Suez and Vivendi signed long-term deals,
some for up to 50 years, to manage municipal water systems in China, which
faces huge water shortages. In Central Europe, cities like Warsaw and Budapest
are struggling to upgrade their water systems to meet the standards of
the European Union, which Poland and Hungary are expected to join within
the next few years.

    Industry
executives recognize the need for oversight. “It’s always a difficult decision
to ask a private water company to manage such an essential service,” said
Gérard Mestrallet, the chief executive of Suez, in his Paris office.
“It is your duty to demonstrate that the arrival of the private sector
brings something concrete.”

    But in
their hurry, the companies often underbid to get a foot in the door, with
prices that fail to take account of the full cost of upgrading old and
inefficient water systems. Contracts are therefore regularly renegotiated.

    Renegotiation
often means that parts of the contract, like obligations to provide sewers
to go with water distribution, are cut or scaled back, sometimes causing
environmental difficulties. The situation in Lomas de Zamora is a pungent
illustration of the point.

    Critics
charge that it is all part of corporate strategy. If the project doesn’t
make money, the critics say, the companies cry for renegotiation, threatening
to leave otherwise.

 
Moreover, there is an inherent contradiction
in many of the efforts to privatize water systems, particularly those in
developing countries.

   
Municipalities award those contracts in part to shift the investment risk
to the private sector. Often, however, the private contractors commit little
of their own capital, relying instead on the municipalities themselves,
private lenders like banks, and international development organizations
like the World Bank or regional development banks.

   
In South Africa, for example, 80 percent of the money for a recent water
development project came from the Development Bank of South Africa. In
Peru, 100 percent of the money for a similar project originated at the
Interamerican Development Bank.

   
Given those flaws, opponents, many representing nongovernmental organizations
that have becoming increasingly involved in development issues, contend
that the role of private companies in delivering water supplies should
be sharply limited, confined to simply building things like treatment plants
for public entities.

    “Water
has to be a public good,” said Mr. Azpiazu, of the School of Social Sciences.
“It cannot be a predator business, in which you stay for a few years, make
your money and leave.”

    In North
America, most water remains publicly managed. Yet many municipal systems
are old and inefficient, and competition to take them over is intense.
Indianapolis, Atlanta and Milwaukee are among the city water services licensed
for management and operation to the European giants. In March, Suez landed
a 10 year, $4 billion contract to mange the water system of Puerto Rico.

    Company
executives muse about the billions of dollars modernization of the old
and dilapidated water works of great metropolises like New York might one
day bring.

Uniting Against Vivendi

After Suez landed its lucrative
30-year contract to manage the water system in Buenos Aires, Vivendi decided
to jump in. It bid aggressively for the similar contract in Tucumán
Province, even after four other bidders dropped out.

    After
rates continued to rise, Mr. Abdala joined other consumer leaders from
all over the province in calling for a payment strike. Vivendi’s collection
rate in Tucumán, which rose to 70 percent after it reorganized bill
collecting, plummeted to 10 percent.

    When
Vivendi employees sought to shut off a nonpaying customer’s water, Mr.
Abdala and other protest organizers sent demonstrators who stood on manhole
covers and blocked access to the water mains.

    “We
lived in a permanent state of mobilization,” Mr. Abdala recalled.

    In early
1996, after manganese deposits, always present in the local water, became
so great that tap water ran the color of cola, popular anger translated
into large-scale demonstrations against Vivendi. Local officials blamed
the ineptitude of Vivendi’s French engineers; Vivendi suspected sabotage.

    By the
summer of 1998, Vivendi was losing almost $3 million a month in the province,
and it unilaterally canceled the contract. One month later, Tucumán
Province pulled out of the deal as well. Vivendi then sued Tucumán
before a World Bank tribunal, but lost.

    Now the
province is starting from scratch. Water engineers sent from a neighboring
province to run the system have cut jobs at the water utility, to 500 from
850. A regulatory agency is being established to prepare for a new contract
later this year.

    “We don’t
know what company will invest here,” said José Cuneo Verges, a former
government official who is working on the project. “Yet we want to show
that Tucumán is ready.”

    That
is why Mr. Abdala is still on the case.

    “Whoever
takes it over must have good ties to us,” he said. “We want the participation
of consumers.”

godspeed
you! black emperor

yanqui
u.x.o.

(cst024 )

2xLP/CD

release dates:

europe nov 04, 2002

n. america nov 11, 2002

u.x.o. is unexploded ordnance
is landmines is cluster bombs. yanqui is post-colonial imperialism is international
police state is multinational corporate oligarchy.  godspeed you!
black emperor is complicit is guilty is resisting.  the new album
is just music.

recorded by steve albini
at electrical audio in chicago.  mixed by howard bilerman and godspeed
you! black emperor at the hotel2tango in montreal.  available on single
compact disc and double phonograph record.

stubborn tiny lights vs.
clustering darkness forever ok?

 

===========

CONSTELLATION
MANIFESTO:

Independence is a much-invoked
term in the music world, and its co-optation by the industry all too often
corrupts and invalidates whatever real meaning the word possesses. Independence
is an empty pose to the extent it does not relate critically and stand
in opposition to the homogenising force of corporatism and culture commodification.
The capitalist system of exchange is at a certain level inescapable – it
takes money to make records and money to buy them – but the worst traits
and tendencies of this system must be resisted, not just in spirit, but
in practice. We understand our position as an independent record label
to be an ongoing attempt to define and enact such a practice.

Corporatism divides and
conquers and falsifies social participation in its pre-formed, group-tested,
hermetically-sealed cycle of marketed product, setting up a closed circle
of blind consumption. The corporation is inhuman, managerial, driven solely
by profit and “the sell”. It is incapable of actually caring about and
preserving the supposedly cultural objects it shills, for it can ascribe
no real content to them. The very concept of quality is anathema to it
– capitalism in its grossest form is a total reduction to quantity, to
moving units. Exceptions only prove the rule – if you’ve heard something
on a major label that you dig, this is purely accidental. To the degree
you have made this positive valuation in relative aesthetic freedom, you
are already approaching the corporate product in terms that are foreign
and threatening to it. The corporation would much prefer your docility
to your activity, and in fact does everything in its power to engender
that docility by creating the illusion of activity.

Independence is to our minds
the affirmation of real community, real conversation, and the real exchange
of artistic work. The urgent task is to build up and promote real dependency
through a network of dissemination and valuation of culture that strives
to address the truth of our human situation – a dependency based on freedom,
critique, and dialogue. Obviously putting out rock music, however experimental
and boundary-pushing, is only obliquely a political and social activity,
but we nevertheless hope to contribute in a tiny way to a meaningful model
of communication which takes its lead from art. We deal with bands face-to-face,
without formal contracts, on the basis of ongoing discussion and mutual
decision-making. A shared understanding of principles is crucial to the
process, the aim being to collectively define and set the terms of engagement.
Our foremost concern is to minimise the corrupting effect of bringing a
work to market, allowing it to preserve its own terrain, to speak for itself.
We are learning as we go, attempting to remain as critical as possible
about our methods of self-definition.

In most other respects, the
enemy lies without and is much easier to identify. We have no interest
in and make no effort towards the placing of our recordings in corporate
retail outlets. However, we do work with distributors we feel we can trust,
and relinquish control of certain commercial aspects to them. In a sense
there is more than a mundane convenience here, as it not only saves us
from much of the distasteful work involved in negotiating and penetrating
the marketplace, but allows us to deflect responsibility for the ultimate
placement of our records in shops. Guilty as charged – if we could afford
to work personally and directly with every Mom & Pop record store on
the planet, we would. At the very least, we are committed to a model of
expansion that seeks to minimise the role of corporate chains. The expectation
is that as our catalogue of releases and our understanding of distribution
networks increase, so too will our ability to expand and strengthen the
lines connecting points of independent exchange. Insofar as this possibility
exists and can be actualised, we have hope. The role of chain stores in
the pre-determination and warehousing of culture is to be resisted. Do
not shop at these temples of payola and product placement – they are zones
of domination. Seek out your local independent record shop, and if you
are amongst the unlucky many whose community has already been ravaged and
gutted by Wal-mart or HMV, please mail-order directly from us. This is
your least expensive option in any case.

Duplication is a cornerstone
of corporate capital – you too can be hand-fed your own identity as you
suckle the same fucking hamburger in the same fucking prefab environment
in the four corners of the world – but it can proceed by way of non-corporate
techniques. Avoidance of pre-formulated package design sets up the parameters
for localised multi-step reproduction. Our practice of record-making involves
local artisans, craftspeople and small businesses. You can read all about
this in the section on packaging. Sometimes we find ourselves with no choice
but to dirty our hands and do business with a behemoth. Paper producers
and suppliers are the foremost example, as they are almost without exception
directly tied to corporate harvesters of trees. We’re not about to forgo
the use of paper, so the best we can do is seek out those producers who
aren’t vertically-integrated from top to bottom, who don’t exist directly
as an arm of an odious multi-national. Reproduction of music on vinyl and
CD is also potentially dangerous terrain, though the former has mostly
become an independently-owned process by now. Our commitment to vinyl certainly
stems in part from its inherent resistance to the advent of compact discs
as the vehicle of mass duplication. We are neither absolute purists nor
luddites in this regard – while we do prefer vinyl both for sonics and
for its ability to create a larger canvas for art direction, we also recognise
the decentralising potential of digital duplication and transmission. It’s
clear that digital technology is increasingly empowering localised and
independent production, which for us mostly means the ability to press
our discs with small-scale companies. We are still wholly unconvinced of
the worth, aesthetic or otherwise, of displacing the tangible record-as-object
to the ephemeral realm of the internet. There may be limited applications
that we haven’t yet grasped, but until the technology is made both accessible
and refined enough to permit the exchange of music without compromising
either its inherent sonics or its contextualisation in a package, this
appears to us peripheral.

Mechanical reproduction,
whether digital or analogue with regard to the music itself, whether at
the local die-cutter or silkscreener with regard to packaging and printing,
is accessible technology and allows for the duplication and dissemination
of cultural work at the micro-level, even if the macroscopic potentials
of the technology machine, with respect to art no less than labour practice
or weaponry, are terrifying. It’s all about maintaining a human scale.
Fin-de-siecle capitalism both facilitates and threatens independent production,
and the key for us is to utilise those technologies that captialism itself
has marginalised and dispersed in order to create cultural objects that
are inherently critical of the system. To the extent this condemns us to
pursuing quality at the expense of quantity, it is a fate to which we willingly
submit.

 

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Owners of Malibu Mansions Cry, ‘This Sand Is My Sand’

By TIMOTHY EGAN

MALIBU, Calif., Aug. 23 ˜
It started as another golden California day, the shoreline aglow in the
haloed light of midmorning. Rob LeMond was teaching children in his surfing
camp, passing on nearly a half-century of knowledge about riding the waves
of the Pacific.

    Then
a nearby homeowner complained that Mr. LeMond’s surfing students had crossed
the line onto his beach property. The sheriff was called. A long argument
followed over which strip of sand belonged to the public and which was
private.

    “Finally,
this homeowner turned to me and said something I thought I’d never hear
on a California beach,” said Mr. LeMond, 54, of Malibu. “He
said he did not like to look out his window and see people swimming, because
it blocked his view.”

    Skirmishes
over surf and sand have become particularly intense up and down the Southern
California coast this summer.

    To some
people, the fight is about a California birthright: public access to every
inch of the state’s 1,160-mile shoreline. By law, there is no such thing
as private beach in California. In a state where 80 percent of the 34 million
people live within an hour of the coast, it is no small fight.

    Others
see a gold coast of hypocrisy. Some of Hollywood’s and the Democratic Party’s
biggest contributors to liberal causes, like David Geffen, have turned
into conservative property-rights advocates because the battle is taking
place in their sandy backyards.

    “The
real issue here is money,” said Steve Hoye, the leader of a nonprofit group,
Access for All, and an active Democrat.

    “These
people who live on the beach here think that the public cannot be trusted
to walk or swim in front of these million-dollar houses,” Mr. Hoye said.

    A court
fight, initiated by Mr. Geffen, the entertainment mogul, could take the
question of beach access well beyond the shores of Malibu. Last month,
he filed suit seeking to block public access to a narrow walkway that goes
by his Malibu compound.
He promised access 19
years ago, but the path has never been opened, and Mr. Geffen now says
it would be unsafe, dirty and impractical to allow people to walk by his
home to the beach.

    Mr. Geffen
contends in the lawsuit that the access way amounts to a “taking of property
without compensation,” an argument that conservatives have used in environmental
fights for years. If the suit is successful, it could make it much harder
for state and federal agencies to open paths to public beaches throughout
the United States, or even to acquire open space for wildlife or recreation,
some experts say.

    “This
could keep the public away from a lot of beaches,” said Robert Ritchie,
director of research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, who is writing
a book on beach culture. “And because a very significant percentage of
the United States population now lives in counties facing the ocean, the
pressure for public access has become enormous. At the same time, you have
these homeowners fighting to keep the hordes back.”

    The stand
taken by beachfront owners here in Malibu, long a Democratic Party stronghold,
has infuriated another sector of party supporters ˜ environmentalists.

    “Here
you have the superrich wanting to have a private beach in a state that
decided long ago it would not allow any private beaches,” said Carl Pope,
executive director of the Sierra Club. “It’s a huge land grab. By blocking
access, they want to lock up the coast.”

    Further
complicating the issue, a prominent environmental philanthropist, Wendy
McCaw, has vowed to take her lawsuit against beach access to the United
States Supreme Court, making many of the same arguments as Mr. Geffen.

    Ms. McCaw,
the billionaire owner of The Santa Barbara News-Press, is trying to block
access to a 500-foot strip of beach below her 25-acre estate on a bluff
in Santa Barbara County. The easement was granted by a previous owner,
and Ms. McCaw says it does not apply to her. She has already paid $460,000
in fines in her fight to prevent access. She says if the state is going
to require an access path from her private property, then she should be
compensated.

    “There
needs to be more effort toward protecting the embattled wildlife calling
our beaches home, rather than focusing on how to pack more humans with
their destructive ways into those sensitive habitats,” Ms. McCaw said.

    In most
states, beaches that are covered by water at high tide but are relatively
dry at low tide are public. The entire West Coast falls under this mean
high tide doctrine. But some states, notably New York, Massachusetts and
Maine, are more restrictive, allowing fences in the water and private ownership
of tidelands.

    California
voters, in a populist campaign 30 years ago, took the additional step of
guaranteeing “access” to beaches, and empowered the California Coastal
Commission to fight on the public’s behalf.

    Since
then, the state has reached more than 1,300 access deals with private property
owners, but many of those have a time limit and are set to expire within
a few years.

    “Development
shall not interfere with the public right of access to the sea,” reads
a section of the California Coastal Act.

    Beachfront
owners in Malibu have surveyed the tide lines and posted signs warning
people that it is trespassing to walk within a zone they have claimed from
their houses to the ocean. The coastal commission says these private surveys
are meaningless because the definition of what a public beach is changes
daily, with the tides.

    Still,
homeowners
in parts of Malibu have hired private security forces to roam the beach
on three-wheeled vehicles, herding people away from areas they consider
private property.

    A 1987
Supreme Court ruling, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, limited
the commission’s authority to insist on public access, saying it had power
only over new developments. Mr. Geffen and Ms. McCaw are trying to expand
the Nollan ruling.

    Mr. Geffen’s
spokesman, Andy Spahn, said the Nollan ruling should be applied retroactively
to Mr. Geffen. Mr. Spahn said the public access promise Mr. Geffen made
in 1983 was “extorted” from him as a condition to expand his beach property
with maid quarters and other improvements.

    Mr. Spahn
also said he wanted to start a debate about the “beachgoing experience”
of the public.

    “We think
this is the wrong place for access,” Mr. Spahn said, referring to the path
next to Mr. Geffen’s house. “People are looking for safety, for bathrooms,
for lifeguards. They’re not going to want to cross four lanes of highway,
carrying beach furniture.”

    But the
coastal commission says that it has granted hundreds of access points that
are no more than footpaths next to mansions, and that they operate without
lifeguards or bathrooms and have few problems.

   
The path by Mr. Geffen’s estate is blocked by a locked gate. In front of
the house is a 275-foot stretch of beach, which is open to the public at
low tide, but requires a 20-minute hike to reach now.

    “What
David Geffen is doing is simply breaking his promise,” said Sara Wan, chairwoman
of the coastal commission. “He has a very nice stretch of beach in front
of his house, and it belongs to the public.”

    The city
of Malibu, a 27-mile strip of beach castles and hillside homes along each
side of the Pacific Coast Highway with a population of 13,000, has joined
Mr. Geffen in his lawsuit.

    Jeff
Jennings, the mayor of Malibu, said the city was concerned about safety
and garbage pickup if the access point at Mr. Geffen’s house was not properly
maintained by Access for All, the group that has been granted the right
to manage the pathway should it ever be opened.

    “I have
no interest in keeping the public off public land,” Mr. Jennings said.
“But most people who come to the beaches are not experts in water safety.
It can be a highly dangerous situation.”

    Veteran
surfers, who rely on the narrow public paths to get to some of the best
waves of the Pacific, say they do not need lifeguards or bathrooms. But
they would like to bring back an earlier era.

    “In the
old days, it was live and let live,” said Kurt Lampson, a surfing instructor
who grew up on Malibu’s beaches. “Now you got these guards going around
saying sit here, don’t walk there. It’s depressing.”

http://www.msnbc.com/news/768925.asp

Malaria is spread to humans through the Anopheles mosquito. A new study in the journal Science expects global warming would extend the range of the mosquito and the disease.

From coral reefs to rainforests, diseases are spreading among marine and land animals ˜ including humans ˜ and global warming appears to be a major factor, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science. The study, said to be the first to analyze disease epidemics across entire plant and animal
systems, bolsters climate models that have factored in the possibility of a
warmer Earth creating a sicker planet.

 „WHAT IS MOST surprising
is the fact

that climate sensitive outbreaks
are happening with so many different types of

pathogens ˜ viruses, bacteria,
fungi, and parasites ˜ as well as in such a wide

range of hosts including
corals, oysters, terrestrial plants, birds and humans,‰

lead author Drew Harvell,
a Cornell University biologist, said in a statement.

      
The researchers said they felt that common traits are likely linked to

global warming. „Climate
change is disrupting natural ecosystems in a way that

is making life better for
infectious diseases,‰ stated Andrew Dobson, a

Princeton University epidemiologist.
„The accumulation of evidence has us

extremely worried. We share
diseases with some of these species. The risk for

humans is going up.‰

Human influences

Humans might be magnifying
warming by adding to the greenhouse gases naturally

present in the atmosphere.
Fuel use is the chief cause of rising carbon dioxide

levels. On the other hand,
humans create temporary, localized cooling effects

through the use of aerosols,
such as smoke and sulfates from industry, which

reflect sunlight away from
Earth.

         

The study tracked both causes and carriers of diseases that develop

more rapidly with slight
rises in temperature. It found that as temperatures

increase, carriers are likely
to spread into new areas where they could

devastate species that have
not been previously exposed.

      
In the statement accompanying the study, the scientists cited these

examples of disease outbreaks
tied to climate change:

 Expanding range of
disease carriers due to temperature. Honeycreepers, forest

songbirds that evolved only
in Hawaii, are being decimated by malaria from

mosquitoes that have been
able to range higher in elevation due to warmer

temperatures. „Today there
are no native birds below 4,500 feet,‰ said Dobson.

 Expanding range of
carriers due to moisture. Rift Valley Fever, a deadly viral

illness spread by mosquitoes,
is strongly linked to heavy rains, which trigger

mosquito explosions. „There
is clear evidence that Rift Valley Fever outbreaks

are linked to El Niño
years and we expect an increase in the frequency of El

Niños with climate
change,‰ stated coauthor Richard Ostfeld, a researcher at the

Institute of Ecosystem Studies
in Millbrook, N.Y.

 Increased susceptibility
to disease. Coral reefs have become susceptible to

disease once they are stressed
by warmer sea temperatures. The researchers

isolated one fungus threatening
Caribbean sea fans and found that it grows

fastest at exactly the temperature
at which many of the corals in the Florida

Keys start to bleach, a
stress-created condition that turns coral white and can

eventually lead to die-offs.

 Expanding range of
carriers in winter. Warmer winter temperatures can also

affect ranges of diseases
and carriers. A winter warming trend in the mid-1990s

allowed a parasite to spread
north to Maine‚s oysters, the researchers noted.

MORE STUDIES URGED

      
The researchers urged other experts to consider that diseases in their

specialty might share a
common link in global warming.

      
„This isn‚t just a question of coral bleaching for a few marine

ecologists, nor just a question
of malaria for a few health officials ˜ the

number of similar increases
in disease incidence is astonishing,‰ said Ostfeld.

„We don‚t want to be alarmist,
but we are alarmed.‰

       

The authors said they expect others to question their findings, in part
because

the issue of climate change
and diseases has had very little monitoring and few

long-term studies.

      
An immediate critic was Sherwood Idso, head of the Center for the Study

of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change. He said the Science paper was based largely

on speculation and presented
„no concrete examples that these things will happen

in the real world.‰

      
The authors urged the scientific community to tackle the issue head on

with more research and gathering
of statistics.

      
„We need to pay better attention to this issue in an increasingly

unnatural world,‰ stated
Dobson.

      
MSNBC.com‚s Miguel Llanos and The Associated Press contributed to this

report.

In the Killing Fields

Samantha Power documents a century of atrocities – and excoriates the policymakers who refuse to stop the mass murders

By John Leonard

John Leonard, a contributing editor to New York magazine and The Nation, is the
author of “Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures.”

July 7, 2002

A PROBLEM FROM HELL: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power.

Basic,
610 pp., $30.

Alexander Herzen, the gentleman-anarchist, once cautioned his bloodthirsty buddy, Mikhail Bakunin:
“We want to open men’s eyes, not tear them out.”

Samantha Power goes both ways. In one of her aspects – the journalist with the law degree who reported on ethnic cleansing in the Balkans for The Washington Post and then became executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government – she insists on our seeing the mass murders of the 20th century through her own wounded eyes, as scholars,
jurists and diplomats try to keep up with killers by establishing courts and naming crimes. But in another
aspect – angel of wrath – she would invade Cambodia or Rwanda all by herself: “When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable
risk, it has a duty to act.”

She is so furious at policymakers who turn their backs on that duty, who spin silky extenuations out of their bowels like managed-health-care spiders, that she would smoke or smite them where they
bystand.

Warren Christopher, for instance, the former secretary of state who gave Power the title for her book when he described Bosnia as “a problem from hell” – and thus beyond mere mortal agency. During Christopher’s twiddle, the heretofore unheard of happened: Junior officers actually resigned from the foreign service on principle. Nor was the president, at whose pleasure Christopher served, such
a bargain. Candidate Clinton may have rattled sabers on the 1992 campaign trail, but President Bill let Serbs behave like Hutus and Hutus behave like Serbs, until it cost him in the opinion polls.

If Clinton seems Power’s least favorite president, she is not much kinder to his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, on whose watch Yugoslavia disintegrated in the first place while his secretary of state, James Baker, so colorfully explained: “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” Or Ronald Reagan, who didn’t care if Saddam Hussein nerve-gassed Kurds in 1987 and 1988, so long as Iraq continued to buy a million tons of American wheat a year. Or Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who were not about to go back to Southeast Asia no matter what Pol Pot got up to, from 1975 to 1979, outside Phnom Penh. As negligent as Franklin Roosevelt might have been about European Jewry during the Nazi Holocaust, he had before him Woodrow Wilson’s example of choosing to ignore the very prototype of genocides to come –
Turkey’s massacre of a million Armenians in 1915.

“It is the smell of oil and the color of money that corrodes our principles,” said the Republican senator
from Maine, William Cohen, about our coddling of Iraq in 1990. Cohen, along with William Proxmire, Bob Dole and Claiborne Pell, is one of the few members of Congress to end up on Power’s list of valiant diplomats and journalists, troublemakers and whistleblowers who tried to stop a slaughter. Besides reminding us in searing detail just how it happened that 100,000 Kurds, 200,000 Bosnians,
800,000 Rwandans, 1 million Armenians, 2 million Cambodians and 6 million Jews were exterminated while we slumbered, she also wants us to honor those who couldn’t sleep, as well as men like Raphael
Lemkin, the refugee linguist who coined the word “genocide” and devoted his entire adult life to helping
get a law against it into a treaty among nations.

Still, the behavior of presidents
is what most infuriates her. From Dwight

Eisenhower on, they refused
even to sign the 1948 treaty against genocide till

Reagan did so in 1988 to
escape criticism for his visit to the Nazi cemetery at

Bitburg, Germany. Power
is convinced, from hundreds of interviews and thousands

of pages, that each administration
knew the dreadful worst and didn’t want to

talk about it. That each,
when it had to say something in public, cited

“national sovereignty” before
blaming “both sides,” “civil war” and “ancient

history” for what it called
a “tragedy” instead of an atrocity, a crime against

humanity or, of course,
a genocide. That each, for domestic political reasons,

chose to do nothing while
claiming that anything it might do would be “futile”

or counterproductive. “No
U.S. president,” she tells us, “has ever made genocide

prevention a priority, and
no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for

his indifference to its
occurrence.”

And she quotes the writer
David Rieff’s redefinition of the meaning of “Never

again” after his experience
in Bosnia: “Never again would Germans kill Jews in

Europe in the 1940s.”

As an anthology of horrors
from the equal-opportunity 20th century – Christians,

Muslims, Buddhists and Jews,
in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East – “A

Problem From Hell” has so
much ground to cover that it only nods in passing at

Pakistan and Bangladesh,
at Nigeria and Biafra, at Indonesia and East Timor. As

a pocket history of what
might be called the jurisprudence of the unthinkable –

how to get to Nuremberg
or The Hague – it might have wondered why the United

States

is so adamantly opposed to
the very idea of an international criminal court. And

as a fiery brief for our
intervention wherever there are killing fields, it

ought at least to mention
American meddlings in Latin America and

Southeast Asia that actually
upped the bloody ante.

But as an anguished reminder
that state violence is still the leading cause of

sudden death all over the
world, it is a much-needed corrective to our

generalized panic about
terrorism. However confounded and twitchy we’ve become,

looking over our shoulders
in fear of ambush by the lunatics of one idea and the

kamikazes of Kingdom Come,
we should never forget the worst thing about the

century just passed: What
we knew of war in 1900 was that 85 percent of its

casualties would be warriors
themselves – and only 15 percent civilians. But

according to the latest

United Nations figures, by
the end of the 20th century, that ratio had pretty

much reversed itself. More
than 80 percent of the damage is collateral. Which,

of course, is insane.