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Paris, Dec. 12, 2004


Dear Readers, Cousins and Friends:

We've updated the homepages with Friday's essay, Revolution of the Willing. We're using a graphic of a galaxy to illustrate the article as this week, the Earth and Sun align with the core of the Milky Way galaxy. This happens once a year, when the Sun is in late Sagittarius.

Two revelations showed up with this morning's Sagittarius New Moon conjunct Pluto and Arachne, each chilling in its implications and inviting the sane and loving people of the world to stay awake, alert and faithful in the midst of so much change and turmoil.

The first was news that Victor Yuschenko, the opposition leader and presidential candidate in the Ukraine, was intentionally poisoned with dioxin in September. This accounts for the severe disfigurement of his face, a condition called chloracne, which was discovered by electrical equipment manufacturers in the United States, including General Electric. In 1937, Harvard scientist Cecil K Drinker determined that chrloracne was not the result of skin irritation but rather of systemic poisoning that was killing the livers of the workers.

The other story is that paramedics who attended to Dr. David Kelly, the weapons expert who spoke out against the war in Iraq, and who was found in the woods early last year in what was claimed to be a suicide, say that based on the crime scene Kelly could not possibly have killed himself.

Planet Waves coverage of that issue is here:

http://www.ericfrancis.com/issues/0308/kelly_astro.html

Back to the dioxin situation, I spent part of the evening last night corresponding with Carol van Strum, the Oregon-based author and activist who taught me this issue (related to my work on PCBs). Here is what she wrote to me. Compare what she has said to newspaper and Internet accounts of Yuschenko's poisoning. Dioxin is known in the scientific community as TCDD, or tetrachlorinated dibenzo-para-dioxin. It is the most toxic chemical substance known, close to plutonium in its power to cause or accelerate cancer and many other diseases.

"The part of the story that I find most bizarre is the claim that within a few weeks of supposedly massive exposure, Yuschenko's levels were back to 'normal'. With TCDD, this is inconceivable.  Vietnam veterans who were exposed decades ago still have elevated, toxic levels of TCDD in their tissues, ditto for those exposed at Seveso and every other industrial accident to sudden, massive doses; this stuff doesn't go away, it isn't excreted, it lodges in lipids in blood, cells, and tissue and is not broken down by any known process; i.e., there is no antidote, and the body does not process it.

"So how could someone with 1000 times some unknown "background" level of TCDD in their system suddenly within weeks have almost none? It doesn't compute, and this is the part of the story that casts doubt on all of it. There's no question looking at the photos that his face mirrors exactly the grotesque photos of Nitro workers and other massive exposures, and since TCDD is odorless and colorless, it's possible to administer it without someone knowing.  But that raises other huge questions -- why dioxin?  It's not a poison that kills quickly, for one thing; so was it not so much an attempt to kill as a cruel way to disfigure and degrade a handsome, apparently vibrant person? And another question: where did the dioxin come from?  It is not a substance you can produce in the kitchen, it requires sophisticated laboratory equipment and extremely competent chemists to isolate it.  

"I'd like to know Arnold Schecter's response to this; I suspect he'd say there's no way to judge without a lot more data. Meanwhile, I just hope to god Mr. Y. & his wife aren't intending to have any children."

Schecter was the truth-obsessed health commissioner in Broome County, New York, who dealt with the dioxin-tainted Binghamgon State Office Building -- the 1981 precursor to the disaster 100 miles away in New Paltz, New York.

For more on chloracne, see these two links:

Dioxin Critic Sued
http://www.planetwaves.net/dioxin_critic.html

Conspiracy of Silence
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200103/conspiracy.asp