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Merlin Tuttle is founder and president of Bat Conservation International (BCI), an organization dedicated to preserving bats and their habitats. He earned his Ph.D. in mammalogy from the University of Kansas in 1974 and conducted research full-time for 11 years before founding BCI in 1982. Tuttle is also an award-winning wildlife photographer whose pictures of bats have appeared in National Geographic and many other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas.
I started a top-down approach in Austin, getting to leading media people and community leaders and talking about the fact that these bats moving in to their renovated Congress Avenue Bridge were far more allies than enemies. I made bats relevant to human interest, and was very diplomatic in my approach. That's how I built BCI — not by saying that bats had rights. A lot of people now agree with me that they're incredibly fascinating animals, but we started with like 'em or not, you need 'em. They're just as essential ecologically and economically by night as birds are by day. For example, about 70% of all tropical fruits eaten by humans come from plants that in the wild rely on bats as their primary pollinators or seed dispersers. Think where the developing world would be without bananas, breadfruit, plantain, avocados, papayas, peaches, cashews, jackfruit, dates, mangos — those are all bat dependent.When you travel around the world seeing all these crazy things long enough, it affects you. I got my start by getting the gray bats federally listed as endangered. I convinced the federal government to preserve several of their key hibernating and nursery caves. But even then, nobody wanted to do anything about them. It's one thing to get an animal listed as endangered, but if it's not popular, nobody puts any money or effort into it. So, I had to get more and more involved. It was kind of a nuisance side thing to what I really wanted to do, which was research. But I just couldn't sit back and ignore all this outrageous killing of beneficial animals. I'm not an animal rightist — I hunt and fish — but I don't like seeing people destroy the natural order of the world around them. So I started speaking out more and more.
In about 1978, the National Geographic Society asked me to write a chapter in their book WILD ANIMALS OF NORTH AMERICA. I went to Washington to help their photo editors go over bat pictures. I was horrified. All the pictures they were going to put with my chapter were close-ups of tormented, snarling bats. In those days no one knew how to photograph bats. They'd just grab one, the bat would close his eyes and hunker down, thinking he was going to die, then they'd torment him until he snarled, then they'd take a picture. Then they'd blow the picture up to page size. No wonder everybody feared bats.
I said, "One of those pictures is going to completely undo everything I said in my chapter." So they agreed to send one of their staff photographers, Bates Littlehales, out in the field with me for six weeks to see if he could get better pictures. I asked him lots of photography questions. He got some good pictures. At the end he gave me the rest of his film and said, "Why don't you try taking some pictures now?" I ended up being the second most-used photographer in the book.
I used those pictures in talks to show the public what bats are really like. I found that they had a really big impact. One day, a little old lady came up after one of my talks and said, "You know, Dr. Tuttle, if you just founded a non-profit we could get a tax-deduction for donating to, some of us would like to try to help bats." So, with a grand design no bigger than I was going to hire a half-time secretary to help answer questions and produce educational brochures, I founded Bat Conservation International.
Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina
It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Experts who have studied the US navy’s cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying ‘toxic dart’ guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet’s smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.
THE TOP TEN JERKS IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, GIVE OR TAKE
Rob Anders – Conservative MP who, problematically, still exists. Called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Unfit to clean out the toilets in the cell Mandela occupied for decades.
Free trade agreement
It's not easy looking bad in a year when you hoist the Grey Cup, but Eskimos management found a way. A team that pocketed about $6 million for selling the Trappers out from under Edmonton started the season by letting Sean Fleming pay $15,000 out of his own pocket to keep Ed Hervey in town. Classy. They did win a title, but only after a "trade'' that wouldn't have passed the BS test in a weekend pickup league. Unable to find a running back on their own, or protect their quarterback, the Esks got a 1,000-yard rusher and a starting Canadian O-lineman for free (since Hamilton wasn't making the playoffs, they let Edmonton keep Jason Maas and Edmonton's side of the package as insurance for the Cup run). It's like the Leafs trading Mats Sundin and Bryan McCabe to Calgary for Jarome Iginla, then letting Calgary keep Iginla until after the playoffs. CFL commissioner Tom Wright, reading from Green and Gold cue cards, approves the deal. The Esks, with Maas, bolstered pass protection and a new running back, win a Grey Cup. The league loses a little dignity.
Daschle: Congress Denied Bush War Powers in U.S.
By Barton GellmanWashington Post Staff WriterThe Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority "in the United States" in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in today's Washington Post.
Daschle's disclosure challenges a central legal argument offered by the White House in defense of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. It suggests that Congress refused explicitly to grant authority that the Bush administration now asserts is implicit in the resolution.
The Justice Department acknowledged yesterday, in a letter to Congress, that the president's October 2001 eavesdropping order did not comply with "the 'procedures' of" the law that has regulated domestic espionage since 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, established a secret intelligence court and made it a criminal offense to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant from that court, "except as authorized by statute."
EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants
In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest
Jurist Concerned Bush Order Tainted Work of Secret Pane
A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.
According to One Blog, The New York Times, quoting unnamed government sources: "The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged....As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications...."Wiretaps said to sift all overseas contacts
Vast US effort seen on eavesdropping
''Long before 9/11, the NSA gathered from the ether mountains of [overseas] phone calls and e-mail messages on a daily basis," said Columbia Law School professor Deborah Livingston. ''If you have such an extensive foreign operation, you'll gather a large amount of phone traffic and e-mails involving Americans. That's something we've lived with for a long time."
But Bush's order cleared the way for the NSA computers to sift through Americans' phone calls and e-mails.
According to a New York Times report last week, Bush authorized the NSA's human analysts to look at the international messages of up to 500 Americans at a time, with a changing list of targets.
Hayden, now the deputy director of national intelligence, told reporters this week that under Bush's order, a ''shift supervisor" instead of a judge signs off on deciding whether or not to search for an American's messages.
The general conceded that without the burden of obtaining warrants, the NSA has used ''a quicker trigger" and ''a subtly softer trigger" when deciding to track someone.
Justice Dept. to probe leak of spy program
Bush had called disclosure a ‘shameful act’; N.Y. Times reported NSA story
Bush Presses Editors on Security
President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics.
And the Right Wing is all indignant not over the authoritarian illegal actions of Bush but by their expose. So much for Freedom that these whingnutters proclaim they believe in.
FBI and Justice Department Finally Investigate a Real Leak
Jim Kouri, CPP
The US Department of Justice has directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct an in-depth investigation in order to determine who disclosed a secret National Security Agency intelligence operation to a reporter from the New York Times.
"We are opening an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified materials related to the NSA," said DOJ spokesperson Trent Duffy during a press conference earlier today.
When the New York Times suddenly broke the story about the NSA top secret operation Bush conceded that he indeed authorized the program. He called its disclosure to The New York Times "a shameful act." He said he expected a Justice Department leak investigation into who disclosed the National Security Agency eavesdropping operation would be conducted.
According to the Bush White House, the DOJ and FBI began the investigation without consulting with White House staff, but the President approved of their investigation to find the leaker whose actions are believed to have caused severe damage to national security and homeland security. Now with Republican and Democrat liberals poking their noses into the NSA program, some intelligence and law enforcement officials fear there will be even more leaks of classified information -- including information on methods and sources.
Syria: a concerted offensiveAll eyes are on Syria as it stands accused of being behind the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Even before the UN commission of inquiry was completed, the US was planning - with France - a concerted offensive against the Syrian regime. But destabilising President Bashar al-Assad could lead to regional chaos, given the fragility of Lebanon and near civil war in Iraq.
By Alain Gresh
“IN ORDER to facilitate the action of the liberation forces, to reduce the capabilities of the Syrian regime to organise and direct its military actions, to keep losses and destruction to a minimum, and to bring about the desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals. Their removal should be accomplished early in the course of the uprising and intervention.” For that, Damascus must be “made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments”.
The CIA and its British counterpart would “use their capabilities in both the psychological and the action fields to increase tension”. The overthrow of the regime would also mean the financing of a committee for a free Syria and the arming of different political factions to give them paramilitary capabilities.
All this comes from a document dating from autumn 1957 that was recently discovered by a researcher. The document was approved by the United States president, Dwight Eisenhower, and the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan.
At that time the Middle East was already regarded, simplistically, as a place for East-West confrontation. The US and British governments saw the Syrian regime - which was then genuinely liberal and democratic, if nationalist - as no more than a Soviet pawn. That meant it needed to be got rid of and its leaders killed. However, a few months later, in January 1958, the Syrians went to Gamal Abdel Nasser to ask for Syria’s unification with Egypt. From the moment the new United Arab Republic was established, its relations with Moscow grew strained, and so the West’s subversive plans were dropped.
The world has since changed. The war against terrorism has replaced the war against communism. But the US vision remains as simplistic as it was then: whoever is not with us is against us, says George Bush. At the time of a “third world war”, of US efforts to crush the Iraqi resistance and beat the Arab world into submission, the reluctance of the Syrian regime to bend to Washington’s will can no longer be tolerated.
Are we none the less heading for a racheting up of tension? A sanctions regime against Syria would penalise its population first, as it did in Iraq. Closing Syria’s borders would create problems with its neighbours, starting with Lebanon. And the fall of the Syrian regime would only extend the regional chaos created by the US military intervention in Iraq and the ensuing occupation.
The Washington Post had this to say: “The planning process, according to the internal documents, includes courses of action for cross-border operations to seal the Syria-Iraq border and destroy safe havens supporting the Iraqi insurgency, attacks on Syrian weapons of mass destruction infrastructure supporting the development of biological and chemical weapons, and attacks on the regime of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad”. The paper’s military commentator, who revealed these American plans, did not say whether, as in 1957, the assassination of Syrian leaders was part of the plans.
JAPANESE whalers operating in the Antarctic are fog-bound and unable to hunt whales for the fourth day running, Greenpeace activists tailing the fleet said today. The Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), which carries out Japan's research whaling in the Antarctic, today sought to debunk criticism of the project by New Zealand's Conservation Minister Chris Carter.Japan's JARPA II whaling program contained numerous flaws and was based on speculative and unsound science. It found that most of the data proposed to be collected in Japan's program was not required for the conservation of whale stocks, and that many of the identified objectives could be addressed through analysis of data from Japan's previous 18-year scientific program.
