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May 29, 2002
Bill Christison
Disastrous US Foreign Policy:
Part 2, Globalization
May 28, 2002
Michael Leon
Lincoln
Brigades Memorial
Scott Lucas
Christopher Hitchens:
No Longer an Authentic
Voice of Dissent
Nelson P. Valdes
Castro,
Bioterrorism and
the State Department
Harvey Wasserman
What Does the White House Know
About Atomic Terror?
Norman Madarasz
France,
Brazil, the Politics
of the World Cup
May 27, 2002
Dave Marsh
Why I Voted for Nader:
Ticketmaster's Stranglehold
on Music and Politics
Robert Fisk
The Coming
Firestorm:
Bush's Crazed Remarks
May 26, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Diary of a Northwest Trip:
Why Reds Live Longer
May 25, 2002
Chris Floyd
General
Principles:
Unmasking Colin Powell
Gavin Keeney
All Politics is Local? The Unbearable
Lightness of NGO's
Jeffrey St. Clair
A Hero
of Our Time:
Stephen Jay Gould
May 24, 2002
Edward Hammond
Documents Prove Pentagon Violated
Bioweapons Act
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Scandals:
Beginning of the End?
Feingold / Corzine
Halt Executions Nationwide
Bill Christison
Former
CIA Analyst:
Big Changes Needed in
US Intelligence Agencies
May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
The Real Bush is Back
Susan Abulhawa
Israel
and South Africa:
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy
Uri Avnery
Sharon the Great Reformer?
Behzad Yaghmaian
Travails
of a Middle Eastern Migrant: Accosted at the Border
May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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May
30, 2002
Corporate Phantoms:
The Web of
Deceit on FrankenFoods
by George Monbiot
The Guardian
Tony Blair's speech to the Royal Society last
Thursday was a wonderful jumble of misconceptions and logical
elisions. He managed to confuse science with its technological
products. GM crops are no more "science" than cars,
computers or washing machines, and those opposing them are no
more "anti-science" than people who don't like the
Millennium Dome are "anti-architecture".
He suggested that in the poor world people
welcome genetic engineering. It was unfortunate that the example
he chose was the biotech industry in Bangalore in south-west
India. Bangalore happens to be the center of the world's most
effective protests against GM crops, the capital of a state
in which anti-GM campaigners outnumber those in the UK by 1,000
to one. Like most biotech enthusiasts, he ignored the key concern
of the activists: the corporate takeover of the food chain,
and its devastating consequences for food security.
But it would be wrong to blame Blair
alone for these misconstructions. The prime minister was simply
repeating a suite of arguments formulated elsewhere. Over the
past month, activists have slowly been discovering where that
"elsewhere" may be.
Two weeks ago, this column showed how
the Bivings Group, a PR company contracted to Monsanto, had
invented fake citizens to post messages on internet listservers.
These phantoms had launched a campaign to force Nature magazine
to retract a paper it had published, alleging that native corn
in Mexico had been contaminated with GM pollen. But this, it
now seems, is just one of hundreds of critical interventions
with which PR companies hired by big business have secretly
guided the biotech debate over the past few years.
While I was writing the last piece, Bivings
sent me an e-mail fiercely denying that it had anything to do
with the fake correspondents "Mary Murphy" and "Andura
Smetacek", who started the smear campaign against the Nature
paper. Last week I checked the e-mail's technical properties.
They contained the identity tag "bw6.bivwood.com".
The message came from the same computer terminal that "Mary
Murphy" has used. New research coordinated by the campaigner
Jonathan Matthews appears to have unmasked the fake persuaders:
"Mary Murphy" is being posted by a Bivings web designer,
writing from both the office and his home computer in Hyattsville,
Maryland; while "Andura Smetacek" appears to be the
company's chief internet marketer.
Not long ago, the website
slashdot.com organized a competition for hackers: if they
could successfully break into a particular server, they got
to keep it. Several experienced hackers tested their skills.
One of them was one using a computer identified as bw6.bivwood.com.
Though someone in the Bivings office
appears to possess hacking skills, there is no evidence that
Bivings has ever made use of them. But other biotech lobbyists
do appear to have launched hacker attacks. Just before the paper
in Nature was publicly challenged, the server hosting the accounts
used by its authors was disabled by a particularly effective
attack which crippled their capacity to fight back. The culprit
has yet to be identified.
Bivings is the secret author of several
of the websites and bogus citizens' movements which have been
coordinating campaigns against environmentalists. One is a fake
scientific institute called the "Center for Food and Agricultural
Research". Bivings has also set up the "Alliance for
Environmental Technology", a chlorine industry lobby group.
Most importantly, Bivings appears to be connected with AgBioWorld,
the genuine website run by CS Prakash, a plant geneticist at
Tuskegee University, Alabama.
AgBioWorld is perhaps the most influential
biotech site on the web. Every day it carries new postings about
how GM crops will feed the world, new denunciations of the science
which casts doubt on them and new attacks on environmentalists.
It was here that the fake persuaders invented by Bivings launched
their assault on the Nature paper. AgBioWorld then drew up a
petition to have the paper retracted.
Prakash claims to have no links with
Bivings but, as the previous article showed, an error message
on his site suggests that it is or was using the main server
of the Bivings Group. Jonathan Matthews, who found the message,
commissioned a full technical audit of AgBioWorld. His web
expert has now found 11 distinctive technical fingerprints shared
by AgBioWorld and Bivings' Alliance for Environmental Technology
site. The sites appear, he concludes, to have been created by
the same programmer.
Though he lives and works in the United
States, CS Prakash claims to represent the people of the third
world. He set up AgBioWorld with Greg Conko of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, the far-right libertarian lobby group
funded by such companies as Philip Morris, Pfizer and Dow Chemical.
Conko has collaborated with Matthew Metz, one of the authors
of the scientific letters to Nature seeking to demolish the
maize paper, to produce a highly partisan guide to biotechnology
on the AgBioWorld site. The Competitive Enterprise Institute
boasts that it "played a key role in the creation"
of a petition of scientists supporting biotech (ostensibly to
feed the third world) launched by Prakash. Unaware that it had
been devised by a corporate lobby group, 3,000 scientists, three
Nobel laureates among them, signed up.
Bivings is just one of several public
relations agencies secretly building a parallel world on the
web. Another US company, Berman & Co, runs a fake public
interest site called <ActivistCash.com>, which seeks to
persuade the foundations giving money to campaigners to desist.
Berman also runs the "Center for Consumer Freedom",
which looks like a citizens' group but lobbies against smoking
bans, alcohol restrictions and health warnings on behalf of
tobacco, drinks and fast food companies. The marketing firm
Nichols Dezenhall set up a site called StopEcoViolence, another
"citizens' initiative", demonizing activists. In March,
Nichols Dezenhall linked up with Prakash's collaborator, the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, to sponsor a conference for
journalists and corporate executives on "eco-extremism".
What is fascinating about these websites,
fake groups and phantom citizens is that they have either smelted
or honed all the key weapons currently used by the world's biotech
enthusiasts: the conflation of activists with terrorists, the
attempts to undermine hostile research, the ever more nuanced
claims that those who resist GM crops are anti-science and opposed
to the interests of the poor. The hatred directed at activists
over the past few years is, in other words, nothing of the kind.
In truth, we have been confronted by the crafted response of
an industry without emotional attachment.
Tony Blair was correct when he observed
on Thursday that "there is only a small band of people...
who genuinely want to stifle informed debate". But he was
wrong to identify this small group as those opposed to GM crops.
Though he didn't know it, the people seeking to stifle the debate
are the ones who wrote his speech; not in the days before he
delivered it, but in the years in which the arguments he used
were incubated.
George Monbiot
is a columnist for the Guardian. He can be reached at http://www.monbiot.com
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