Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Sathyu, I hope so. But how is it possible that these regulatory folks
didn't already know? How many years is it since Carbide was declared an
absconder from justice by the Indian court? Maybe the US media don't
like carrying stories that are hostile to big American companies --- I
rememeber Suketu (Mehta) telling me that when he wrote his definitive
article on Bhopal, he had huge difficulty getting it published in the
US. 
  

    
I wonder where he submitted it. It seems to me that it's exactly the kind
of thing that places like World Watch would publish.
  

    
suketu had sent it to new york times. it went right up to the top for
a decision and was then shot down. he had the same experience with
another newspaper that i cant remember. finally village voice published
it.it is definitely one of the best stories on bhopal. that was five
years back. mainstream us print and electronic media has consistently
kept bhopal out of public view. 
  

    
suketu had sent it to new york times. it went right up to the top for
a decision and was then shot down. he had the same experience with
another newspaper that i cant remember. finally village voice published
it.it is definitely one of the best stories on bhopal. that was five
years back. mainstream us print and electronic media has consistently
kept bhopal out of public view. 
  

    
I posted Neil Tangri's messages in the Current Events conf, in the
"evil people of the millenium topic". Among others, got this response
to which I wrote the following.

<arturner> wrote

>Wasn't Bhopal ultimately determined to be a case of sabotage?

The "sabotage" story was something cooked up by Carbide long after the
event and has been repeatedly demonstrated to have been a lie.

        Please consider the following:

a) Carbide say they know who the "disgruntled employee" is. But they 
have never named him. Why not? By failing to name someone who caused
the death of thousands of people, they are in effect conspiring to
help
him evade justice. Of course they can't name anyone, because there
wasn't a "disgruntled employee".

b) Carbide did at one time drop hints as to the supposed saboteur's
identity. The man in question lives peacefully in the middle of the
worst affected area of Bhopal. Had there the slightest truth in the
unofficial smear campaign, he would have been lynched.

c) Even were one to accept the sabotage theory, it doesn't absolve
Carbide of responsibility, either moral or legal. Whose employee? Who
was responsible for security?

d) Sabotage does not explain or excuse the following:
                
        - When the tank of poison gas ruptured, the fire hoses that could
have cooled it down had insufficient pressure to reach the tank.
        - The scrubber was out of action because they had run out of the
necessary chemical.
        - Cost cutting decisions taken in the US in the months before the
accident had reduced the safety training programme from six months to
two weeks.
        - The plant's cooling systems were compromised by attempts to
economise on freon gas.
        - There been small leaks of various chemicals before the big
accident, and outside experts had even warned of an impending
disaster.
The warnings were ignored.
        - On the night of the disaster the emergency siren did not sound. It
had gone off so many times in the past that they had switched it off
"to avoid false alarms".
        - The tank ruptured at 12:30am. Carbide staff knew immediately but
did not warn city officials until about 3:30am.
        - Carbide gave no help to doctors who, besieged with dying people,
did not know how to treat them because no-one knew what had leaked.
        - The following day, too late, Carbide's medical officer said that
the leaked gas was methyl-isocyanate - it was like tear gas, he said,
you just needed to rinse your eyes. Several thousand corpses said
otherwise.
        - When water mixes with MIC it creates an exothermic reaction,
generating massive heat (which is what ruptured the tank), and causing
further reactions, including producing cyanide. Many of the Bhopal
dead
showed symptoms of cyanide poisoning, but to this day, 15 years later,
Carbide has refused to reveal the composition of the leak.
        - In the weeks following the accident Carbide actively discouraged
the use of drugs used to treat cyanide poisoning, thus many died who
might have been saved.
        - To this day Carbide refuses to share the results of tests it 
carried out with MIC on animals in the US, prior to the Bhopal
accident.
        - Carbide successfully avoided facing a lawsuit in the US by arguing
that only the Indian courts had jurisdiction. It agreed to be bound by
orders and judgements of Indian courts. But Carbide and its chairman
failed to answer criminal charges before a court in Bhopal and were
declared "fugitives from justice". Still at large.
        - Around 150,000 people in Bhopal are still seriously ill, 15 years
after the leak. Seriously ill means too ill to work. These were already
among the poorest people on the planet. 90% of victims who got any
compensation at all, received $400, which equates over 15 years to
roughly 51 cents a week, not enough to sustain life, much less pay for
medicines, even in Bhopal.  
                
Tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster. The
neglect and arrogance of the years since 1984 are as monstrous a
scandal as the negligence that caused the original disaster.

The anniversary is news here in Britain, with Bhopal being the focus
of tomorrow night's important BBC TV Newsnight programme, on which I
will possibly be appearing. Somehow I doubt if there will be much
coverage in US media. I hope I'm wrong.

If anyone reading this wants to help, by donating to the free clinic
we have set up in Bhopal, or with legal or medical expertise please
contact me via email, <indra@jamrach.com>

More information is available at http://www.bhopal.net
  

    
On the radio news here in Belgium they reported on the torch light
march in Bhopal.

See also :
<http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south%5Fasia/newsid%5F547000/5
47780.stm>

And :

"Greenpeace: Bhopal Site Contaminated 15 Years Later"  (Reuters)

<http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991203/sc/india_bhopal_2.html>

"Strategic Counsel on Corporate Accountability: 'No More Bhopals!'
Environmental Groups Charge Chemical Industry with Human Rights Violations"

<http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/991202/dc_hcwh_re_1.html>

"Beyond the Chemical Century: Restoring Human Rights and Preserving the
Fabric of Life
A Report to Commemorate the
15th Anniversary of the Bhopal Disaster
December 3, 1999"

<http://home.earthlink.net/~gnproject/chemcentury.rtf>

<http://home.earthlink.net/~gnproject/chemcentury.pdf>
  

    
Erik, brilliant, thanks! I'll pass the information and these links on
to Sathyu in Bhopal. He was an organiser of the torchlit march, so I
guess he'll be doubly interested in the coverage.
  

    <scribbled>
  

    


A strange coincidence, I think, ocurred the day, Nov. 15th, that
the suit was signed and I met Sathyu.

I was all wound-up emotionally as i mentioned before, having
been impacted, i think, by the stories i had read. Also the
incident regarding my son at his school affected me.
All these things together and i was feeling overwhelmed, as i
described.

I felt gratefull to have met Sathyu and ashamed of
my counrty's men and woman for ignoring the story of
Bhopal and the suffering there.

Bottom line is, on the way home i needed a drink.

I recently moved to a new place which is near a fancy bar
called the Oak Room. So when i got out of the subway
instead of going left to go home i went right to the
Oak Room bar. If i had known the drinks were $13 i wouldn't
have gone there. But it ended up OK since the men i met
and chatted with picked up the bill. :)

Any way, after i got my drink at the edge of the bar I
looked around at the people gathered around there. There
were two men watching me, one who looked like Daddy Warbucks,
who were smoking cigars.

Since they were watching me i went over.
Webantered and then i proceeded to share a bit
 with the men a bit about my day. The slighter
and younger one said to the Daddy Warbucks figure, "How
do they find you?" It turns out he works for:

http://www.uscib.org/

which is an organization that promotes international trade
from a point of view of business/industry/corporations.

I didn't know this until he gave me his card at the end
and said i should contact him if i ever needed "help."

I shared that if I had the money I would've shorted UK
stock that day (it actually immediate rose on the news of
the lawsuit but proceeded to fall to 57 on Nov 30
from a high of 65 on Nov. 16th). I knew something was up
because he ask me, "Why would you like to make money on
other people's misfortune?" (i assumed he meant the
stockholders of UK, who had already themselves made money
or kept it, on other people's misfortune). He seemed
genuinely uncomfortable and repeated that several times.
He strove not to appear angry but was obviously very angry
by what i was saying.

He said he thought it (the accident at Bhopal) was
the fault of employees. I replied that the little i
understood of business law (one college course many
years ago), from what i could remember, i believed
that an employer was reponsible for the acts of
an employee that were done in the service of an employer.

He asked me if it would solve anything if the company was
to go under from it. I replied that the company should
be made to assume their responsibility. If that caused
them to fail financially, it was still their responsibility
to take care of the thousands and thousands who suffered
and were suffering because of this accident.

I also mentioned that in the light of the impending
WTO talks in seattle that the issue of corporate responsibility
no doubt should and would be raised. And that if corporations
were seen not to care for their responsibilities, that it
should cause the Free trade agenda to come up against
lots of warranted resistence now and in the future.

Other than that we had a nice chat.
They taught me to smoke a cigar, which was very fun.
And, to me, significant.
(To me, the smoking of tobacco between people
represents a communion with the spirit world.
I learned that from a American native style
experience, when i shared a Sweatlodge experience)

And the "gentleman" generously paid for my drinks.

I am glad to have the link to the
United States Council for International Business site.
It's important to know what these people are up to. IMO.
  

    <scribbled by vasudha Wed 15 Dec 99 08:23>
  

    <scribbled by vasudha Wed 15 Dec 99 08:24>
  

    
Vasudha, I am not sure that Sathyu is reading this any more, so I will
copy your message to him via email. I hope some of the facts I posted
above may help disabuse people of Carbide's sabotage theory... anyway,
sounds like Warbucks was all shook up.

...all of which just leaves me wondering why strange women never seem
to pay for my drinks when I wander into a bar. Not fair.
  

    
Something very horrible happened here last week as explained by the
following, which is an article I wrote for an Indian magazine called
Outlook. It's about 2,000 words, so I'll hide it.
  

    <hidden>
  

    
Indra. I'm so sorry for you, for your friend. The internet is life, but
maybe more stretched in some places, more concentrated in others. Some
times innocents walk into dark corners and don't walk out. Sometimes
not-so-innocents walk into sunny clearings and see the light. It goes all
the ways life goes. I'm so sorry for your friend. I'm so sorry she
couldn't get herself to stop in time.
  

    

Oh dear lord.
  

    
So sorry to hear of your loss, Indra.

The account is disturbing.  It is an extreme example of something 
which has been experienced by many people in a more dilute and subdued 
version, a gut wrenching shifting of boundaries in a new world where
assumptions of privacy and publicity are stretched, deformed and broken.  
Malicious or callous intent would make things much worse.  Even benign or
friendly 'messing with' expectations can be tough in a new environment.
What a sad example of the possibilites of escalating to tragedy.

My heart goes out to you and to her family.
  

    
(My minimal fact-check research on this is mostly in reading 
     http://www.nsclean.com/psc-mp.html
describing the trojan horse.  windows users note if you are concerned about
this, that the name of the file may vary from sysedit.exe and that the
virus has been around for a while, according to that page.  In case this
is helpful for someone.)
  

    
and from another alert page:

C:windowssysedit.exe

Please be aware that c:windowssystemsysedit.exe is a REAL
windows system file.  This should not be deleted.
However this program also should not run on startup.


That's at:  http://split.netset.com/netbusfix/fix-1.2.shtml
  

    
I should've given the Master's Paradise resources. We contacted Alexey
Podrezov of Datafellows and sent him a copy of the infected stuff, he
wrote a patch for it for the FSAV program. All this was right at the
beginning of this year, early January. We ran it and cleaned her system
out, found traces of the MP trojan in two other places. Anyway, this
is the page on Datafellows that deals with it:

http://www.Europe.F-Secure.com/v-descs/paradise.htm

Datafellows used to make F-Prot which was the antivirus tool of choice
among virus writers, who were always infecting themselves with this
and that, and really needed a good clean-up program.

Thanks for the well wishes, which I can pass on to my friend's
husband, poor guy. My own feelings, apart from shock, sorrow, anger are
overwhelmingly shame that, having been approached for help, I was not
able to prevent what happened.
  

    
The following is part of an email from Martha (9 Jan 99) in which she
speculates as to how they managed to slip her Master's Paradise.

I was sent email attachements (jokey visuals) which had 'suspicious'
aspects to them (logged as such) and 'possibly trojan' type warnings. I
saved anyhting which connects with the name of the circulars
'hangover.exe' and 'whinger.exe'. I remember them both because they
were interesting. For 'hangover' the whole screen appeared to shake
including the cursor as if an earth quake was taking place inside the
puter. 'Winger'was an animated speaking-tube/whistle character, that
whinged in a continuous animated cycle. It was funny but annoying.
We have recieved quite a few attachments of this nature though. All
the
usual ones and some additional due to the pple we're talking to at the
moment who work in digital media.  These were the only two suspects of
note i can remember, Holiday Lights was a bit wobbley too.

The who why aspect we can talk about. It's narrowed down... but proof
is hard to come by as you may realise..
  

    
One Thomas Pohlski (probably from Lexington, Kentucky) who calls
himself Ratbreath (he should know), describes how to use Master's
Paradise. Nuke40.exe in this case is the "trojan", ie the program
masquerading as benign:

ok, your target has to have the file nuke40.exe open and running on
their comp, I use the explanation that Nuke40.exe is a nuke protection
program and to keep it running at all times to save from being nuked,
works pretty well.  Once they have nuke40.exe opened, you only have to
get their Ip address and then create a new group(name it something)
then once the group is created, click the little plus sign next to
remote groups, this shows you the group you just made.  Ok select this
group and go below to ad to group. right click and then click on add. 
it will bring up a screen asking for their IP, place their IP there. 
Once there click on the add button at the bottom.  this will bring up
the properties of the new group in the bottom window, right click on
their IP address and then goto connect.  then you will have full access
to their computer from that point on.  You can do whatever you wish.
  

    
Master's Paradise is comparitively rare in the wild. Back Orifice,
from the Cult of the Dead Cow is much more common. BO seems to be being
used by cDc to spearhead a propaganda war against Microsoft. They call
it a network administration tool and are challenging Microsoft to
withdraw its Systems Management Server, which contains the same sneaky
feature that qualifies BO2K as malicious, according to Microsoft's
definition. 

http://www.cultdeadcow.com 
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/news/pr19990719.html
  

    <scribbled by vasudha>