http://www.newsmakingnews.com

ARCHIVE 10/22/00 TO 10/31/00

PAGE CONTENTS

Click. CHEMTRAIL EQUIPMENT PICTURES AND CIA LINK AND MORE by Joe 6pac.

Click.  WALL STREET MEETS PORNOGRAPHY.  Mainstream corporations and churches invest in the fastest growing business in America.

Click. U.S. TROOPS ARRIVE IN EL SALVADOR FOR DRUG WAR.

Click. THE MOLE TALKS....THE USS COLE AND INTELINK.

Click. MAE BRUSSELL RETURNS.
World Watchers International Tape 495, May 31, 1981. Side 1

TO PURCHASE COPIES OF AUDIO TAPES OF MAE BRUSSELL'S BROADCASTS OF HER WEEKLY SERIES, EMAIL WILL ROBINSON CLICK. lhradio@redshift.com FOR MORE INFORMATION, ABOUT THE LIGHTHOUSE
 REPORT, Click.

Click. THE BIGGEST BIOWARFARE TRIAL SINCE NUREMBERG, ARRIVES IN JACKSONVILLE FLORIDA. 
(Dr. Woutter Basson will not appear at his hearing in America regarding witness Webster, because Basson will be arrested.  Where is the indictment?  Sealed?  Unsealed?  What charges?  Inquiring minds want to know what possible American charges exist!)

Click.  FROM THE FILES OF RABBI EDGAR F. MAGNIN - IN THE YEARS BEFORE WW II (Parts One and Two) by VIRGINIA LEE McCULLOUGH, THE BAYCITIES OBSERVER.

CHEMTRAIL EQUIPMENT PICTURES AND CIA LINK AND MORE by "joe 6pk"
From: "Joe Burton" <rmbrwaco@hotmail.com
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 10:04:47 EDT

Dear NewsMakingNews:

The following information was gathered by me on 10/24/00 beginning at 4 am when the good Lord woke me from a sound sleep. There is massive info contained here re: this obnoxious and sickening spraying. You better believe your local TV meteorologist/ weatherman knows much about these activities (per my conversation with a friend who is a TV news director). However they are ordered by the government agencies, not to report on it. Please take the time to review this material and pictures. Feel free to
repost and forward far and wide. Many people globally have been made very ill or died from the effects of these diabolical programs. You may have noticed in your area increases in the following illnesses: Multiple  Sclerosis, Lupus, Flu like illnesses, Bronchial/Asthma, Allergy/Respiratory illness, Sore throat, Mouth abscesses and much more. Infants and elderly especially affected.

From, Joe Burton AKA Citizen "joe 6pk" Amer I CAN / make a difference

PS. This work should draw me yet another black chopper visit or another hard drive wiped clean like last month.

See the Chemtrail Equipment pictures here: http://www.wmi.cban.com/

I excerpted the following paragraph * from this CIA info. DO NOT confuse the CIA's weather modification program with the Corporate and University's programs or UN/NGO's (i.e., National Institute for Global Environmental Change) * Excerpted from " For Your Eyes Only" http://cryptome.org/cia-price.htm

"I'll tell you, the kind of clearance most of us get doesn't give us enough access, but it gives us great stories," Volgy begins. "And I tell my story in my class all the time. I walked past an office called the 'Office of Weather and Climate Modification.' And I knocked on the door, I walked in, and there was this guy sitting behind the desk, but there was nothing on the desk. And I said, 'What do you do?' and he said, 'I can't tell you.' And I said, 'I've got security clearance,' and he said, 'Not for me, you don't.' " Volgy laughs."

Many of my list members will recall, an article I wrote a couple of years ago, wherein I described a toxic fog which made my wife, myself and our dog very ill. The article was titled: " Say Chicken Little the Sky IS Falling" See the flares used for this below:
http://www.iceflares.com/

Additional info. Here you will find the US & USSR "partnership":
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/tlh/wxhwy.html

*Caveat Lecter on this one since it's from an anonymous source, BUT from what I have researched in the past I tend to believe a major portion of it. Source:
Project Habitat http://www.contrailconnection.com/articles/projecthabit.htm

Chemtrails

So, you haven't yet figured out the airborne conditioning-agent release program that is being operated by the government.  I'll give you some hints, but first I'll give you a little information about myself.  I'm a retired government scientist with an advanced degree in one of the health-related disciplines.  I do not use my real name for fear of retaliation, either against me, or against members of my family.  I always try to route my e-mail communications so that they appear to come from another source, usually from one somewhere within the government.  Sometimes I use the internet resources of the public library - whatever it takes to hide my true identity and confuse those who don't want the sort of information I possess to fall into the public's hands.

I have a small circle of friends who are, or were, in key positions within our military and several government agencies.  These are not the very top level personnel, but mid to upper mid-level people, scientists and analysts, who are in positions where they can see the day-to-day activities of what's going on, who are charged with implementing the details, but who are never quite privy to the schemes behind the work they do.  Each of my contacts has been able to supply me with a portion of the puzzle, but
separately, none of them understands the whole story.  I'll tell you what I've pieced together so far.  But I have to admit that this information frightens me because there is no place I can go with it.  What am I supposed to do - write my congressman?  I believe that would be like signing my own death warrant.

This whole chemtrail issue is related to the plan for decreasing the world population to around 450-500 million -- and starting with the US first.  Why?  The people of the US are the only ones with even the remotest chance of stopping this.  That is, if they knew about it.  That's why the US has to be the first to go.  You have to understand that the world's elite covet the US for its geographic diversity - and they would love to return this country to its condition as it existed prior to Columbus setting foot here, but without the Native Americans this time of course.  20 You may have already heard how several national parks have been designated as world biospheres - that's the plan for all of North America, a giant nature park and playground that will be devoid of annoying human beings (that would be us).  And the people actually involved in doing the spraying, as well as those who will take part in the rest of the plans, are being duped into believing they will be spared, that is, permitted to live and remain on this continent as administrators and caretakers of this vast nature preserve.  I understand that about 150 to 200 thousand people are projected as necessary for maintenance purposes.  But it's likely these people will not be Americans.  Those in charge wouldn't want to risk the possibility of some sort of revolt, so the workers will probably be brought in from Europe and Asia.

There are rumors floating about the internet that the chemtrails are part of some sort of secret program the government is doing to protect the US from future biological attacks.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The plan is to sensitize, or condition, the US population to being wiped out by influenza A.  Over the past few years, people have been encouraged to get flu shots to protect them against the generally non-lethal strains that circulate through the population during flu season.  Each year the US government has guessed which strains were most likely to spread.  They seem to always guess right - don't they?  This flu season, the government protected people with a trivalent vaccine that included the A/Beijing/262/95-like (H1N1) and the A/Sydney/5/97-like (H3N2).  It also contained the B/Beijing/184/93-like hemagglutinin antigens.  For those not familiar with virology, the H and N refer to proteins on the outside of the virus, the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, which are responsible for the virus attaching to, and then invading, a host cell.  The public has been quite pleased with the success of the vaccines offered so far. But that will change in the future.

Researchers at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (or USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Frederick MD have deconstructed and modified the H1N1 Spanish Flu virus, making it far more deadly than it ever was back when it was responsible for the 1918-1919 flu pandemic that killed over 20 million worldwide and over 500,000 here in the US. Consider that it could have killed many more, but back then, people couldn't hop on a jet and travel from New York to L.A.  in five hours.  Now, our ability to travel will increase the spread and will be our downfall.

The flu vaccines contain killed virus and protect the body well against challenge by that particular strain, but work poorly against other strains not included in the inoculation.  At some point, the vaccine stockpile will include the more lethal modification of the 1918 H1N1 in its live form.  

Most people receiving this vaccine will simply be renewing their annual flu shot, and the vaccine will still include the inactivated version of the more benign form of H1N1 (as was included in this year's vaccine).  The presence of the milder strain in the inoculum will slow down the progression of the more lethal H1N1 form, so people will become sick more slowly - but they will still eventually die.  It will just take a few weeks longer.

In the meantime, they will be carriers for the lethal form of the virus, passing it on to everyone with whom they make contact.  And as people hear that others are dropping dead from the flu, they will flock to get their own vaccination.  And the entire population will be more receptive to infection because their lungs will have been pre-conditioned to guarantee it.

If you will remember back to 1968 and '69, the Hong Kong flu, which was influenza A type H3N2, killed over 30,000 people in the U.S. alone.  That was a fortuitous learning event for some because it taught them that the flu could still conceivably be used to wipe out a population.  But at the same time, it pointed out the need to precondition
the populace so that those who might normally be resistant could be rendered susceptible.  Hence the development of the vaccine program and the aerial spraying procedures to condition the population. The purpose of the chemicals in the chemtrails is to help the viral envelope fuse with lung cells, permitting easier penetration and infection.

But what about those few individuals who don't succumb to the flu?  Probability alone demands that there will be some who survive - pockets of the population that are either not reached or somehow (and this is less likely) are resistant to the lethal H1N1 strain.  At this point you must also remember that our military personnel have been immunized against a variety of pathogens, including the anthrax bacillus.  For those geographically isolated areas where the flu doesn't do its job, it's a fairly simple matter to lay down anthrax spores and then send in what's left of the military to take care of anyone still breathing.  The anthrax spraying will probably come under the guise of a flu protection program to save those still alive after the epidemic.  And the military, having been
exposed to civilians with the flu, will eagerly await their own flu shots.  I should emphasize that this is a last resort scenario.  Those orchestrating the plan will not want to use anthrax until all other possibilities are exhausted - this because of the long-term viability of anthrax spores.  To scatter them over the countryside would mean the area
would be dangerous for use by humans, at least those not vaccinated against the bacteria.

And think about this for a moment.  Why do you suppose agencies like Fish and Wildlife are so eager to reintroduce wolves and other species into areas of the country which haven't seen these animals for generations.  It's all part of the plan to restore this land to what the elite envision as its early paradise-like state, with wild animals freely
roaming the uninhabited plains and forests.  Granted, it will take some time to clean up the place and to maybe destroy a lot of small towns that might otherwise be considered a blight on the landscape.  But for the global elite it will be a small price for us to pay for their enjoyment.

WALL STREET MEETS PORNOGRAPHY 
New York Times 10/23/00 Author: Timothy Egan

PROVO, Utah - The video-store chain that Larry W. Peterman owned in this valley of wide streets and ubiquitous churches carried the kind of rentals found anywhere in the country - from Disney classics to films about the sexual adventures of nurses. Mr. Peterman built a thriving  business until he was charged last year with selling obscene material and faced the prospect of bankruptcy and jail.

Just before the trial, Mr. Peterman's lawyer, Randy Spencer, came up with an idea while looking out the window of the courtroom at the Provo Marriott. He sent an investigator to the hotel to record all the sex films that a guest could obtain through the hotel's pay-per-view channels. He then obtained records on how much erotic fare people here were buying from their cable and satellite television providers.

As it turned out, people in Utah County, a place that often boasts of being the most conservative area in the nation, were disproportionately large consumers of the very videos that prosecutors had labeled obscene and illegal. And far more Utah County residents were getting their adult movies from the sky or cable than they were from the stores owned by Larry Peterman.

Why file criminal charges against a lone video retailer, Mr. Spencer argued, when some of the biggest corporations in America, including a hotel chain whose board of directors includes W. Mitt Romney, president of the Salt Lake City Olympics organizing committee, and a satellite broadcaster heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corporation, were selling the same product?

"I despise this stuff - some of it is really raunchy," said Mr. Spencer, a public defender who described himself as a devout Mormon. "But the fact is that an awful lot of people here in Utah County are paying to look at porn. What that says to me is that we're normal."

It took only a few minutes for the jury to find Mr. Peterman not guilty on all charges. His case illustrates what has happened to an industry that used to be confined to the margins of commerce, in the seedy parts of most towns, run by people who never dreamed of taking their companies to Wall Street.

Spurred by changes in technology that make pornography easier to order into the home than pizza, and court decisions that offer broad legal protection, the business of selling sexual desire through images has become a $10 billion annual industry in the United States, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., and the industry's own Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Whatever the phenomenon may say about the nature of American society, the financial rewards are so great that some of the biggest distributors of explicit sex on film and online include the country's most recognizable corporate names.

The General Motors Corporation, the world's largest company, now sells more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire. The 8.7 million Americans who subscribe to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, buy nearly $200 million a year in pay-per-view sex films from satellite, according to estimates provided
by distributors of the films, estimates the company did not dispute.

EchoStar Communications Corporation, the No. 2 satellite provider, whose chief financial backers include Mr. Murdoch, makes more money selling graphic adult films through its satellite subsidiary than Playboy, the oldest and best-known company in the sex business, does with its magazine, cable and Internet businesses combined, according to public and private revenue accounts by the companies.

AT&T Corporation, the nation's biggest communications company, offers a hard- core sex channel called the Hot Network to subscribers to its broadband cable service. It also owns a company that sells sex videos to nearly a million hotel rooms. Nearly one in five of AT&T's broadband cable customers pays an average of $10 a film to see what the distributor calls "real, live all-American sex - not simulated by actors."

For all the money being made on sex - legally - by mainstream corporations, the topic remains taboo outside the boardroom. The major satellite and cable companies do very little marketing of their X-rated products, and they are not mentioned in annual reports except in the vaguest of euphemisms.

None of the corporate leaders of AT&T, Time Warner, General Motors, EchoStar, Liberty Media, Marriott International, Hilton, On Command, LodgeNet Entertainment or the News Corporation - all companies that have a big financial stake in adult films and that are held by millions of shareholders - were willing to speak publicly about the sex side of their businesses.

"How can we?" said an official at AT&T. "It's the crazy aunt in the attic. Everyone knows she's there, but you can't say anything about it."

For hotels, the sex that can be piped through television generates far more money than the beer, wine and snacks sold from the rooms' mini-bars. Just under 1.5 million hotel rooms, or about 40 percent of all hotel rooms in the nation, are equipped with television boxes that sell the kind of films that used to be seen mostly in adults-only theaters, according to the two leading companies in the business. Based on estimates provided by the hotel industry, at least half of all guests buy these adult movies, which means that pay-per-view sex from television hotel rooms may generate about $190 million a year in sales.

At home, Americans buy or rent more than $4 billion a year worth of graphic sex videos from retail outlets and spend an additional $800 million on less explicit sexual films - all told, about 32 percent of the business for general-interest video retailers that carry adult topics, according to compilations done by two trade organizations that
track video rentals. Chains like Tower Records now stock nearly 500 titles in their so-called erotic category, far more than films about history or dinosaurs.

On the Internet, sex is one of the few things that prompts large numbers of people to disclose their credit card numbers. According to two Web ratings services, about one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visits one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least once a month - more people than go to sports or government sites.

Though estimates have been greatly inflated by some e-commerce sex merchants, analysts from Forrester Research say that sex sites on the Web generate at least $1 billion a year in revenue, providing a windfall for credit card companies, Internet search engines and people who build Web sites, among others in the commercial food chain.

Some of the most popular Web properties - which feature quick links to sites labeled "Virgin Sluts" and "See Teens Have Sex" - are owned by a publicly held company in Boulder, Colo. That company, New Frontier Media, has stock traded like any other, and it expects its video network to be in 25 million homes within a few years. It does business with several major companies, including EchoStar and In Demand, the nation's leading pay-per-view distributor, which is owned in part by AT&T, Time
Warner, Advance-Newhouse, Cox Communications and Comcast.

Another company, LodgeNet, whose chairman is Scott C. Petersen, does $180 million in annual business selling sex videos and other forms of room entertainment to hotels. LodgeNet is a major employer in Sioux Falls, S.D., its home base. It is a client of the accounting giant Arthur Andersen, and nearly a fifth of the company's public shares are
held by a Park Avenue investment firm, Red Coat Capital Management of New York.

"We feel good about what we do," said Ann Parker, a spokeswoman for LodgeNet, which trades on the Nasdaq market. "We're good corporate citizens. We contribute to local charities."

The biggest provider of hard-core sex videos and adult Web content, Vivid Entertainment Group of Van Nuys, Calif., whose founders and principal owners are Steven Hirsch and David James, has been making the rounds of investment bankers of late, preparing for an initial public stock offering next year that could ultimately lead to the first porn billionaire.

"The adult entertainment business is just exploding," said Bill Asher, the president of Vivid, whose offices are in a new granite and glass building that houses investment and venture capital firms. "Right now there are a lot of people making a lot of money. Somebody's got to take  control of it, and we figure it might as well be us. We see ourselves as the designated driver of this business."

To the astonishment of Mr. Flynt, who began in the pornography business by selling poor-quality pictures of naked girls as a way to build interest in his strip clubs, his competitors in the $10 billion annual adult market are mainstream corporations whose board members are among the American business elite.

"We're in the small leagues compared to some of those companies like General Motors or AT&T," Mr. Flynt said. "But it doesn't surprise me that they got into it. I've always said that other than the desire for survival, the strongest desire we have is sex."

The Technology Factor  Look, Ma, No Staples!

Thirty years ago, a federal study put the total retail value of hard-core pornography in the United States between $5 million and $10 million - or about the same amount that a single successful sex-related Web site brings in today. It seemed likely that the industry would remain where it had always been - largely out of sight, but profitable, and faced with consistent legal problems.

What kept the market relatively small, in the view of people in the industry, were the barriers between consumer and product. Typically, a person would have to go to a run- down part of town, among people considered less than savory, to find hard-core adult films or bookstores. These retail outlets frequently were raided by law enforcement authorities, further adding to the risk for a consumer - a risk of shame, or arrest.

In 1975, the Sony Corporation released the videocassette recorder to the broad market, and within 10 years, about 75 percent of all American households owned a VCR. Once the venue had moved from theater to the privacy of the home, the adult entertainment industry was never the same. For example, a single film, "Deep Throat," generated more than $100 million in sales, thanks in large part to the popularity of VCR's, Frederick S. Lane III writes in his book "Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age" (Routledge, 2000).

But even with most Americans owning VCR's, people still had to take a trip to the video store, risking some embarrassment. Pay-per-view television and the Internet removed the final barriers.

Cable and satellite programmers allow people to buy a variety of sex-based programming, from Playboy, on the lighter side, to the Hot Network, owned by Vivid, and the Erotic Television Network, distributed by New Frontier, on the more explicit end of the spectrum. Consumers could watch movies of people having sex without ever leaving home.

What investors and bigger corporations soon discovered was the vast audience for pornography - once the privacy barrier was eliminated. Twenty percent of all American households with a VCR or cable access will pay to watch an explicit adult video - and 10 percent will pay frequently, according to the distributors New Frontier and Vivid. That interest explains, in part, why the production of pornographic films has grown tenfold in the last decade. There are now nearly 10,000 adult movies made every year, according to an annual survey of the films produced in the Los Angeles area.

Last year, there were 711 million rentals of hard-core sex films, according to Adult Video News, an industry magazine that is to pornographic films what the trade publication Billboard is to records. It even has its own film awards - modeled after the Oscars.

But video rentals have reached a plateau over the last two years. The future is pay- per-view at home - driven by the easy access and good technical quality of digital television - and pay-per-view from the Internet, driven by the technological innovations of new cable and phone lines that carry far more images, more quickly, to a computer screen.

"Videos changed the way people could view porn because they were able to watch in the privacy of their homes," said Barry Parr, an electronic commerce analyst with International Data Corporation. "Internet pornography takes that a step further - they can do it with absolute privacy."

The number of people visiting sex sites on the Web doubled over the last year, outpacing the number of new Internet users. Some of the more popular sex Web sites attract in excess of 50 million hits, or visits, a month, according to the ratings services Nielsen/ Net and Media Metrix. About one in a thousand people who visit a site will subscribe, for fees averaging $20 a month, according to some of the leading Web pornography providers and Flying Crocodile Inc., a company based in Seattle that
tracks and services the sexual-content market.

At the same time that technology was making it easier for people to view pornography, legal obstacles were falling. The 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California established a threshold for defining illegal pornography; a major test was that it had to be considered obscene to the "average person, applying contemporary community standards."

Initially, the case helped prosecutors clamp down on publications and movies. But that proved to be short-lived. If "Deep Throat" could sell $100 million worth of copies, then what was the community standard?

"The court may have handed off the determination of obscenity to the local community, but the standards of local communities had fundamentally changed," writes Mr. Lane in "Obscene Profits."

When Mr. Peterman was prosecuted for distributing obscene material in Utah last year, he became one of the few video retailers in the nation charged with such a crime in recent years. In a state long regarded as a bastion of family-values morality, more than 4,000 people signed petitions supporting his prosecution.

But Mr. Peterman showed that he had 4,000 regular customers for sex videos. His lawyer argued that Mr. Peterman was not violating community standards, because people in Utah County bought 20,000 adult sex videos from one satellite programmer alone in the period that Mr. Peterman was said to have broken the law; it was double the volume in most cities the size of Provo. And in the Provo Marriott, guests were paying for nearly 3,000 explicit adult videos every year, according to court testimony.
After the Peterman trial, that hotel dropped its adult movies.

"My client was just a little guy," Mr. Spencer said, "a mom-and-pop dealer in a very big business."

The Corporate Factor: It's the Demand, Companies Say

At a time when political campaigns from the presidential level down to that of the local school board have made an issue of sexual excess in broadcasting, the corporate entanglements in the pornography business have blurred the lines of the debate.

In Missouri this year, Senator John Ashcroft, a Republican, ran ads denouncing "Hollywood's decaying influence" on society, singling out his Democratic opponent, Gov. Mel Carnahan, for accepting donations from Christie Hefner, the Playboy executive.

Mr. Carnahan, who died last week in a plane crash, had countered by pointing to donations to Mr. Ashcroft from Charles W. Ergen, chief executive of EchoStar, which sells adult pay-per-view through its fast- growing DishNetwork satellite division.

"If he's going to start that, he's in greater trouble than I am," Mr. Carnahan had said.

Mr. Ashcroft's supporters had replied that there was still a distinction between the two companies: EchoStar did not produce pornography - it merely sold it, while Playboy created its own videos and pictures, they said.

"We added adult at the request of our customers," said Judiann Atencio, a spokeswoman for EchoStar. "We have something for everybody, from Irish hurling to cricket. Adult is there if you want it."

When AT&T announced that it would start offering the hard-core Hot Network to its 2.2 million digital cable subscribers beginning in August, they were castigated by critics and pressured by religious and civic groups that hold stock in the company.

A group of mutual-fund investors, which included the Sisters of Charity of New York, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and the Mennonite Church, told AT&T its members did not want their three million shares invested in a company that sold pornography.

"At the heart of our concern is the concept of mainstream companies getting into hard- core pornography," said Mark Regier, who manages a mutual fund for 800,000 members of the Mennonite faith. "For a company with AT&T's tradition and its charitable work to be involved with pornography at this level is unbelievable. And I don't think many people understand what it means to take away the barriers to this kind of
material, such as AT&T is doing."

For AT&T, there are sound business reasons to start carrying the highly profitable Hot Network. Unlike distributors of mainstream Hollywood pictures, sex-film distributors typically offer the programmers a split of 80 percent of the revenue, compared with 50 percent or less for routine features.

Impulse buys, in which customers tap a code into a remote and a movie follows, have also spurred in-home sales of pornographic films.

"Impulse technology - that's been just incredible," said Mr. Asher of Vivid Entertainment, which makes hundreds of adult films and claims that it sells a million copies a month to cable, satellite, home video and hotel retailers. "You have about 35 million homes with this kind of technology now," Mr. Asher said, "and it's growing enormously. It's easy and it's private - that's the key."

Although the companies that program explicit sex films will not give out their revenue figures for this category, a report by the Showtime Event Television company found that adult pay-per-view took in $367 million last year - a more than six fold increase from the $54 million of 1993, easily outpacing the growth of pay-per-view "events" like boxing and wrestling.

Time Warner, EchoStar, General Motors and AT&T all say they are simply responding to a growing American market that wants pornography in the home. At the same time, the companies say new technology makes it possible for parents to keep such programming away from children.

"We call it choice and control," said Tracy Hollingsworth, a spokeswoman for AT&T Broadband, the company's cable division. "Basically, you use your remote to block out any programming you don't want. But if you want it, we offer a wide range of programming that is available in the market we're in."

Hotel chains have made similar decisions when, this year, several groups urged them to get rid of the adult pay-per-view programs that are in nearly 60 percent of all middle- to high-end hotels. Only one chain, the relatively small Omni Hotels, chose to remove the sex films.

"What we noticed was that early on, the content was R-rated, but then it migrated rather quickly to really raunchy stuff - just hard-core porn," said Jim Caldwell, the president of Omni. "I thought: What are we doing? We don't have topless waitresses in the restaurant."

Mr. Caldwell said more than 50 percent of all guests were buying the sex films. "The anonymity is the big thing," he said.

Omni's decision to remove pay-per-view sex videos from the company's 15,000 rooms will cost the company more than $1.8 million a year, Mr. Caldwell said. But he said he had received phone calls and letters of thanks from 50,000 people - more than for any other corporate decision.

Much larger hotel chains, like Marriott, which calls itself the world's largest hotel management firm, with nearly 300,000 rooms in the United States, and Hilton, with 290,000 rooms under its control, have not made changes.

Some critics said Marriott, run by several prominent members of the Mormon Church, though not affiliated in any way with the church itself, should drop its adult movies, given the stand against explicit sexual materials that Mormons have long taken. But company officials said they were mostly franchisers, and could not make unilateral decisions for the hotel owners who paid to be a part of the Marriott chain.

The two companies that provide hotels with pornographic films are both traded on Wall Street and have enjoyed big run-ups in their stock prices over the last few years. The leader, On Command, based in Denver, is worth more than $400 million, and its principal owner is Liberty Media, controlled by John C. Malone, the cable and telecommunications magnate who sits on the board of AT&T and recently agreed to buy up to 15 percent of the shares of Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation.

The chairman and chief executive of On Command is Jerome H. Kern, a former New York corporate lawyer active in civic and volunteer causes, serving on the board of New York University and as a director of Volunteers of America in Colorado.

On Command would not discuss how much money it is making on adult films. But in its annual report, the company said it was generating $23 a room each month for the 835,000 hotel rooms it reaches. The company goal is to get into an additional one million hotel rooms. Analysts say at least half the revenue comes from adult films. The company recently began offering all-day erotic television to hotel customers, for a single price of $15.99.

"Talk about your captive audience," said Mr. Asher of Vivid. "I've heard that in some hotels, 85 to 90 percent of all profits from in- room spending comes from adult channels."

The Money Factor; Big Profits Now, Bigger Ones on Way

While the big companies that deliver sex films to homes and hotels will not talk about how popular explicit sexual materials are, the makers and distributors say the volume is enormous. And court testimony and documents that were made public in the Peterman case also offered some insight into the profit potential.

"Despite the fact that this material isn't marketed, revenue-wise, it's one of our biggest moneymakers," said Peggy Simons of TCI Cable, in court testimony in Mr. Peterman's case. TCI, controlled by Mr. Malone, has since been bought by AT&T.

"When we talk to the companies one-on- one, they tell us we're great, that we're a huge moneymaker for them," said Mr. Asher, whose company owns the Hot Network, which is available in 16 million homes. "And by the way, I tell my biggest customers - don't say you ever met me."

In trying to take public his company, which now does about $80 million a year in sales, Mr. Asher said, "The biggest problem I have is the image of the adult business. People think it's run by the mob, or a bunch of guys with gold chains. I grew up in Paris, Illinois. I have a master's of business administration degree."

The Hot Network portrays people having sex in a variety of methods - what the company calls "widely accepted sexual activity" - and prohibits scenes of violence, nonconsensual sex, drug use, forced bondage and sex with minors.

Analysts of electronic commerce and telecommunications say the mainstream sex market might be leveling off, but new technology is likely to bring in even more consumers.

"The novelty of it has not worn off yet, and I don't believe it will wear off," said Sean Calder, a vice president for e-commerce at Nielsen/Net Ratings, which gauges the popularity of Web sites. "The numbers point to a huge personal need. We see lots of people logging on at 3 in the morning."

The $30 billion project to rewire the cable industry with lines capable of bringing more material, and allowing people to buy on impulse, will play a big part in the emerging home pornography market.

"These companies like AT&T, they're thinking ahead to a time, perhaps in 10 years, when 50 million Americans will have broadband capability and all their television and Internet will be interactive through one big box," said Bryn Pryor, technology editor for Adult Video News, the trade magazine.

"But it's not just technology that made the big boys get into it," Mr. Pryor said. "This just happens to be a business where you can't lose money."

U.S. TROOPS ARRIVE IN EL SALVADOR FOR DRUG WAR.
By GARY MacEOIN © 2000, Special to the National Catholic Reporter 10/25/00
 
U.S. armed forces, withdrawn from El Salvador under the 1992 Peace Accords, are active again in that country under a controversial agreement that opponents say violates the peace accord..
 
The new arrangement derives from an agreement between the Salvadoran and U.S. governments. Signed last March with information provided to neither the National Assembly nor the press, according to Salvadoran news reports, it is intended to beef up anti-drug activities in the region.
 
The troops will use Comalapa, El Salvador's principal airport 45 kilometers from San Salvador, as a "forward operating location," according to news reports in El Salvador. Comalapa is the same airport from which Maryknoll Srs. Ita Ford and Maura Clark, Ursuline Sr. Dorothy Kazel and lay missioner Jean Donovan were kidnapped 29 years ago, to be subsequently raped and killed.
 
Forward operating locations are a key element in the restructuring of the U.S. military presence in Latin America after the 1997 Torrijos-Carter treaty ended U.S. control of the Panama Canal and forced the closure of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, according to experts familiar with military operations in the region.
 
The main U.S. Southern Command bases are now in Florida and Puerto Rico, with forward operating locations in Aruba and Curaao off Venezuela in the Netherlands Antilles, and at the Manta air base in Ecuador. These locations are all controlled by the air force. Comalapa, however, is under the Navy, and will be available for land, sea and air operations.
 
Drugs provide rationale
 
The smoldering embers of the recent civil war flared in July when the agreement was submitted to the Salvadoran National Assembly for approval, according to reports in San Salvador's El Diario de Hoy. ARENA, the party of the oligarchy that owes its survival in that war to massive U.S. economic and military support, has fewer seats than the FMLN, the former guerrillas (29 and 31 in a House of 84). ARENA governs, however, with the backing of three minor parties.
 
FMLN leader Jorge Schafik Handal denounced the agreement as a violation both of the Constitution and of the Peace Accords in an El Diario story. He insisted that this is a treaty requiring approval by a three-fourths assembly vote. When the government passed it by a simple majority, the FMLN initiated a challenge in the Supreme Court.
 
Although the court has not yet ruled, the United States is implementing the agreement. Construction of installations, estimated to cost $10.4 million, had already begun when, on Sept. 21, the first U.S. Coast Guard plane arrived at Comalapa for 10-hour surveillance flights. The military may wear uniforms and carry arms. There is no limit on the number of U.S. personnel or the type of arms or armament they use.
 
The estimates for annual operating costs of $17 million for the four forward operating locations assume a permanent staff at Comalapa of 10 to 15 on one-to- two-year assignments, according to press reports and information gathered by Jesuit Fr. Dean Brackley of the Jesuit University of Central America in San Salvador, the capital city.
 
Narcotics control is a part of the U.S. strategic plan to expand its military presence in Central and South America, according to Dana Priest, writing in The Washington Post Sept. 28. "Opening the FOL [forward operating location] will make El Salvador the focal point of the counter-drug activities in Central America," Gen. Charles Wilhelm, commander-in-chief U.S. Southcom, was quoted as telling three Salvadoran generals during a briefing session. "We realize in a diplomatic sense this plan is counter-drug only. As a practical matter, all of us know this agreement will give us a superb opportunity to increase the contact with all our armed forces in a variety of ways."
 
'Trying to help them decide'
 
The Salvadoran constitution, using language mandated by the 1992 Peace Accords, excludes the military from internal security functions, limiting it to defending national sovereignty. Claiming, however, that crime constitutes a national emergency, the government has for several years been using the army to patrol the countryside. Now the Pentagon, following its longstanding policy of encouraging Latin American militaries to involve themselves in what are strictly police functions, is encouraging the Salvadoran army to expand activities forbidden by the constitution. "We're trying to help them decide what role the military should have in anti-crime or anti-narcotics activities," an embassy spokesperson, Greg Phillips, told a visiting group in June.
 
Under the agreement with El Salvador, the United States also provides training and financial support to El Salvador's National Civilian Police, a unit established under the Peace Accords both to incorporate former guerrillas and to purge the militarized police force of corrupt elements.  Since early July, the police are being trained by U.S. Defense Department personnel, using ships and aircraft. They are also being ferried by U.S.  military helicopters to assignments in the countryside.
 
According to El Espectador, a major Colombian newspaper, the forward operating locations are being used to monitor the Colombian guerrillas. Tom Blickan of the Transnational Institute told NCR that the purpose is to create "a cordon sanitaire around Colombia." Based in Amsterdam, Holland, the institute describes itself as "an international network of activist scholars concerned with analyzing and finding viable solutions to such global problems as militarism and conflict, poverty and marginalization, social injustice and environmental degradation." It has 26 partners worldwide. They include, in the United States, the Institute for Policy Studies, Bank Information Center, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, and Washington Office on Latin America.
 
"The United States," Blickman said in a phone interview, "is trying to involve Colombia's neighbors in taking part in containing the conflict in Colombia, but meets with resistance -- especially from Brazil and Venezuela.  The United States is also trying to avoid a direct intervention with American troops, but is basically training and financing the Colombia army to do the job and trying to involve Colombia's neighbors in one way or another."
 
The establishment of a permanent U.S. military base at Comalapa and the introduction of U.S. personnel to train and ferry the Salvadoran National Police thus emerge as part of a growing Pentagon presence in the region.  Although Costa Rica and Peru have both rejected a U.S. request to establish a forward operating location, Costa Rica recently agreed to joint anti-drug patrols both on its territory and in its coastal waters. Honduras made a similar arrangement last March, followed by Guatemala in April.
 
Drug war replaces Cold War
 
Nicaragua has authorized a U.S. drug authority office in Managua to conduct counter-narcotics operations, and it is engaged in talks with the Pentagon for joint military operations. According to experts in the region, including the Transnational Institute's Blickman, drugs have replaced the Cold War to justify U.S. SouthCom's continuing oversight of the region.
 
Margaret Swedish, editor of Central America/Mexico Report, a publication of the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico, makes the same point. Critics wonder, she said, if the real intention behind the Pentagon strategy is "to find a way to redefine, and rejustify, the historic presence of the U.S. military throughout Latin America."
 
MacEoin's e-mail address is mailto:gmaceoin@cs.com

THE TALK OF THE MOLE!

Your top secret classified mole heard NSA possibly failed to tell Navy targets in Yemen about terrorist threats it knew about before the explosion on the USS Cole. 

THE SURFACE MILIEU REPORTS: Gertz reports that the National Security Administration knew of a terrorist threat in Yemen, yet this information was not filtered down to the Navy command in charge of the Cole. "Despite worldwide instantaneous communications, the agency usually requires 24 to 48 hours to gather, translate and disseminate the highly classified reports. The information contained in the report could have been known before the attack, the officials said. The final report was not distributed until several hours after the bombing, which took place in the early morning hours of Oct. 12, Washington time. The blast killed 17 sailors and wounded 39, and ripped a 40-foot hole in the hull of the Cole." Click to read entire article.

THE BELOW THE SURFACE MOLE REPORTS:  Intelink failed one way or the other. "Switched on in late 1994, the network  (Intelink)  is now used regularly by 50,000 analysts, operatives, military officers and policymakers with top-secret security clearances at 100 different sites. They can click on the latest satellite imagery from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), search the network for communications intercepts from the National Security Agency (NSA) and chat electronically with analysts of various stripes about the latest terrorist threats and military maneuvers." Click to read.

Bye bye surface freaks. I return to the real world -- my beautiful austere tunnels through dirt, rock and mother earth!  I remain affectionately yours......"The Mole."