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Some NYTimes articles
A Lives article by an author whose kid was born at the same time as a terrorist attack
Suddenly, the Same Thing
By ETGAR KERET
"I just hate terrorist attacks," the thin nurse says to the older one. "Want some gum?"
The older one takes a piece and nods. "What can you do?" she says. "I hate emergencies, too."
"It's not the emergencies," the thin one insists. "I have no problem with accidents and things. It's the terrorist attacks, I'm telling you. They put a damper on everything."
Sitting on the bench outside the maternity ward, I think to myself, She has a point. I just got here an hour ago, all excited, with my wife and a neat-freak taxi driver who, when my wife's water broke, was afraid it would ruin his upholstery. And now I'm sitting in the hallway feeling glum, waiting for the staff to come back from the E.R. Everyone but the two nurses has gone to help treat the people injured in the attack. My wife's contractions have slowed down, too. Probably even the baby feels this whole getting-born thing isn't that urgent anymore. A few of the injured roll past me on squeaking gurneys. In the taxi on the way to the hospital, my wife screamed like a madwoman, but these people are all quiet.
"Are you Etgar Keret?" a guy wearing a checked shirt asks me. "The writer?" I nod reluctantly. "Well, what do you know?" he says, pulling a tiny tape recorder out of his bag. "Where were you when it happened?" he asks. When I hesitate for a second, he says in a show of empathy: "Take your time. Don't feel pressured. You've been through a trauma."
"I wasn't in the attack." I explain. "I just happen to be here today. My wife's giving birth."
"Oh," he says, not trying to hide his disappointment, and presses the stop button on his tape recorder. "Mazel tov." Now he sits down next to me and lights himself a cigarette.
"Maybe you should try talking to someone else," I suggest in an attempt to get the Lucky Strike smoke out of my face. "A minute ago, I saw them take two people into neurology."
"Russians," he says with a sigh, "don't know a word of Hebrew. Besides, they don't let you into neurology anyway. This is my seventh attack in this hospital, and I know all their shtick by now." We sit there for a minute without talking. He's about 10 years younger than I am but starting to go bald. When he catches me looking at him, he smiles and says: "Too bad you weren't there. A reaction from a writer would've been good for my article. Someone original, someone with a little vision. After every attack, I always get the same reactions: 'Suddenly, I heard a boom'; 'I don't know what happened'; 'Everything was covered in blood.' How much of that can you take?"
"It's not their fault," I say. "It's just that the attacks are always the same. What kind of original thing can you say about an explosion and senseless death?"
"Beats me," he says with a shrug. "You're the writer."
Some people in white jackets are starting to come back from the E.R. on their way to the maternity ward. "You're from Tel Aviv," the reporter says to me, "so why'd you come all the way to this dump to give birth?"
"We wanted a natural birth; their department here — "
"Natural?" he interrupts, sniggering. "What's natural about a midget with a cable hanging from his bellybutton popping out of your wife's vagina?" I don't even try to respond. "I told my wife," he continues, " 'If you ever give birth, only by Caesarean section, like in America. I don't want some baby stretching you out of shape for me.' Nowadays, it's only in primitive countries like this that women give birth like animals. Yallah, I'm going to work." Starting to get up, he tries one more time. "Maybe you have something to say about the attack anyway?" he asks. "Did it change anything for you? Like what you're going to name the baby or something, I don't know." I smile apologetically. "Never mind," he says with a wink. "I hope it goes easy, man."
Six hours later, a midget with a cable hanging from his bellybutton comes popping out of my wife's vagina and immediately starts to cry. I try to calm him down, to convince him that there's nothing to worry about. That by the time he grows up, everything here in the Middle East will be settled: peace will come, there won't be any more terrorist attacks and even if once in a blue moon there is one, there will always be someone original, someone with a little vision around to describe it perfectly. He quiets down for a minute and then considers his next move. He's supposed to be naïve — seeing as how he's a newborn — but even he doesn't buy it, and after a second's hesitation and a small hiccup, he goes back to crying.
"Thinning the milk doesn't mean thinning the child"
Thinning the Milk Does Not Mean Thinning the Child
By GINA KOLATA
FIRST, New York City schools replaced soft drinks with Snapple. Now they're banning whole milk. In 2000, Los Angeles also banished whole milk from its schools; some states are considering similar proposals. And across the country, there are anguished pleas for more nutrition education, more physical education, more anything to get children to eat less and exercise more.
And why not? Children are fatter than ever. Rates of childhood obesity started rising in the 1980's, when adults' weights also began to soar. From 1976 to 1980, 5 percent of children were overweight, says Katherine Flegal, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics. Today, she says, 15.8 percent are overweight.
Just about everyone can list ways to fight childhood obesity: schools should alter lunch menus, teach nutrition and hold more physical education classes. At home, parents should be more diligent and the Xbox less available.
Here's the problem: as logical as these suggestions might sound, when many of them have been subjected to the cold light of rigorous scientific study, they have fallen short. If nothing else, when it comes to fighting obesity, science teaches humility.
A major study published last week, for example, gave some researchers pause. Nearly 49,000 women were randomly assigned to follow a low fat diet or their regular diet for eight years while researchers kept track of their rates of breast cancer, colon cancer and heart disease. Not only did the diets have no effect on these diseases, they also had no effect on the women's weights.
So, some ask, why expect that a small change, like replacing whole milk with skim, would affect children's weights?
"I don't want to say there is no such remedy that will ever work," said Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University. "But the burden should be on those who want to impose them to show they work. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this."
It's not that no one has tried. In the 1990's, the National Institutes of Health sponsored two large, rigorous studies asking whether weight gain in children could be prevented by doing everything that obesity fighters say should be done in schools — greatly expand physical education, make cafeteria meals more nutritious and less fattening, teach students about proper nutrition and the need to exercise, and involve the parents. One study, an eight-year, $20 million project sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, followed 1,704 third graders in 41 elementary schools in the Southwest, where students were mostly Native Americans, a group that is at high risk for obesity. The schools were randomly divided into two groups, one subject to intensive intervention, the other left alone. Researchers determined, beginning at grade five, if the children in the intervention schools were thinner than those in the schools that served as a control group.
They were not. The students could, however, recite chapter and verse on the importance of activity and proper nutrition. They also ate less fat, going from 34 percent to 27 percent fat in their total diet. Alas, said the study's principal investigator, Benjamin Caballero, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "it was not enough to change body weight."
The paper appeared in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003 to no acclaim, Dr. Caballero said. No press release, no media coverage, no invitations to speak about the results at scientific meetings. On the journal's Web page, a search of articles that refer to the study comes up empty. It has not been cited anywhere.
The second study, of 5,106 children in 96 schools in California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas, had a similar design and the same results: all that help made no difference in the children's weights.
The principal investigators of both studies think they know the problem. In interviews, both Dr. Caballero and Philip R. Nader, who directed the study of 96 schools and is an emeritus research professor at the University of California at San Diego, came to the same conclusion: the intervention was not enough. It is necessary to change the children's total experience, not just what happens at school. "Not only the school, but the family, the community, the grocery store," Dr. Caballero said.
Others researchers are not so sure.
No one knows why children got fatter, says Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University. It is clear, of course, that they must be eating more or exercising less, but the difference may be tiny — a few dozen extra calories a day will, over the years, pile on pounds and a change like that is "unmeasurable," Dr. Leibel said. And no one has any good evidence that proposed solutions will make any difference.
He understands the concern. "There is a sense of fear and desperation and concern that spills over into calls for various interventions that look sensible but may not be," he said. And, he added, those interventions should not be imposed without first showing they have an effect.
Dr. Leibel and other skeptics say they are not surprised that, even with two studies showing the ineffectiveness of intervention in schools, communities continue to mandate those same changes. Scientists and the public, said David Freedman, a statistician at the University of California at Berkeley, "have this wonderful capacity for ignoring negative evidence."
Dr. Freedman, who has written books on the science and history of clinical trials, says he is reminded of a story about a pioneer in the medical application of statistics, Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis.
In the 1830's, Dr. Louis studied the effect of bloodletting, or bleeding — the standard treatment of the time — on pneumonia.
"The data showed that bleeding didn't work," Dr. Freedman said. But, he said, "Dr. Louis rejected this as terrifying and absurd."
So, he made a recommendation: bleed earlier and bleed harder.
Advice in case of pandemic....
Greetings Kill: Primer for a Pandemic
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
TO the pantheon of social arbiters who came up with the firm handshake, the formal bow and the air kiss, get ready to add a new fashion god: the World Health Organization, chief advocate of the "elbow bump."
If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is "social distancing," which is the new politically correct way of saying "quarantine."
But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators — and the bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us.
It has happened before, and not just in medieval Europe, where plague killed a third of the continent's serfs, creating labor shortages that shook the social order. In the United States, the norms of casual sex, which loosened considerably in the 1960's with penicillin and the pill, tightened up again in the 1980's after AIDS raised the penalty.
But influenza is more easily transmitted than AIDS, SARS or even bubonic plague, so the social revolution is likely to focus on the most basic goal of all: keeping other people's cooties at arm's length. The bump, a simple touching of elbows, is a substitute for the filthy practice of shaking hands, in which a person who has politely sneezed into a palm then passes a virus to other hands, whose owners then put a finger in an eye or a pen in a mouth. The bump breaks that chain. Only a contortionist can sneeze on his elbow.
Dr. Michael Bell, associate director for infection control at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has done the bump a few times already. When Ebola breaks out in Africa, he's usually on the team sent to fight it.
"I'll arrive on the tarmac and stick out a hand to say hello," Dr. Bell said, "and someone from the W.H.O. team will say: 'No, no, no, we don't do that. We do the elbow bump now.' "
In truth, he said, they do it mostly to set a good example. To stop an Ebola outbreak, visiting doctors must persuade villagers in Angola or the Congo basin to refrain from washing dead bodies and using their bare hands when nursing family members dying of hemorrhagic bleeding.
Those distancing measures would be easy to enforce in a pandemic in New York City. But other likely steps will strike at things New Yorkers are loath to give up. Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, the deputy city health commissioner in charge of avian flu preparation, said his first move would probably be to ban Major League Baseball games, Broadway shows, movies, parades and other large gatherings.
Closing schools or shutting the subways might be even more effective, because children are much more efficient than adults at spreading flu, and subways are enclosed spaces where sneezes linger in the air — but doing that would be harder to pull off, Dr. Weisfuse said. "People talk about 'flu days' like snow days," he said, "and if it was just days or a week, that would be simple. But if it's weeks or months, that becomes another matter." Without mass transit, no one gets to work and the economy collapses, he pointed out, and many poor children depend on the free breakfasts and lunches they get at school.
An alternative is to limit people to necessary travel and to have them wear masks — a tricky thing.
Getting people to don masks in Asia is relatively simple, Dr. Bell said. Particularly in Japan, it is considered polite for anyone going to work with a cold to wear one. And in Asian cities full of soot and diesel exhaust, people often wear gauze masks on the street.
But in the United States, "we don't have a culture of courtesy mask use," he said, and people may feel foolish wearing them.
The government of Taiwan faced that problem three years ago during the SARS epidemic. It ordered everyone who had a cough or fever, or who cared for a family member or patients who did, to wear a mask if they ventured outdoors. The head of Taiwan's version of the Centers for Disease Control correctly noted that studies showed that masks do much more good if the sick wear them, keeping sneeze droplets in, than if the healthy do.
But masks were rare on the streets, and the mayor of Taipei, the capital city, decided to ignore the data and pay more attention to the psychology. The sick and exposed would never wear masks, he reasoned, if it marked them as disease carriers. So he simply issued a mayoral order: no one without a mask could ride the subway. The next day, everyone in Taipei was wearing them. Within a week, they had become a fashion item, printed with logos like the Nike swoosh, the Burberry plaid and the Paul Frank monkey.
Pictures of the 1918 flu epidemic include much evidence of that sort of mass psychology. In a photograph of ranks of Seattle police officers, all are wearing masks; in one of 45 Philadelphia gravediggers digging trenches for the dead, none wear them. In a photograph of dozens of beds in a military field hospital, almost all of the patients, doctors and nurses seem to have masks — but most in the foreground have pulled them down for the photographers. People act as the group acts.
When a disease seems far away, as avian flu still does, notions like mask fashion and elbow bumping sound like jokes. But when people start dying, panic ensues, and nothing seems too far-fetched to try. In the 1918 epidemic, Prescott, Ariz., outlawed handshaking. Some small towns tried to close themselves off, barricading their streets against outsiders and telling any citizen who left not to plan on coming back. In factories, common drinking cups gave way to a new invention: the paper cup.
Under pressure, people don't adopt only sensible precautions, they overreact, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. During the anthrax scare of 2001, he said, nervous citizens submitted 600,000 specimens of white powder to public laboratories. The samples included brownies with powdered sugar. Dr. Osterholm said he feared that public reactions would be out of sync with any epidemic; that people would get scared too early, then say the fear was overblown and dismiss it. Then, if a pandemic lasts for weeks, fatigue will set in. "We tend to be a just-in-time, crisis-oriented population," he said.
It is all in the timing, said Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of the National Academy of Sciences. "In the middle of a major pandemic, with people dying, we're likely to see people hungry for clear instructions," he said. "What would backfire would be for you to say, 'Start bumping elbows now.' People would look at you as if you were from Mars."
At Churches Nationwide, Good Words for Evolution
At Churches Nationwide, Good Words for Evolution
By NEELA BANERJEE and ANNE BERRYMAN
On the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin, ministers at several hundred churches around the country preached yesterday against recent efforts to undermine the theory of evolution, asserting that the opposition many Christians say exists between science and faith is false.
At St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church, a small contemporary structure among the pricey homes of north Atlanta, the Rev. Patricia Templeton told the 85 worshipers gathered yesterday, "A faith that requires you to close your mind in order to believe is not much of a faith at all."
In the basement of an apartment building in Evanston, Ill., the Rev. Mitchell Brown said to the 21 people who came to services at the Evanston Mennonite Church that Darwin's theories in fact had compelled people to have faith rather than look for "special effects" to confirm the existence of God.
"He forced religion to grow up, to become, really, faith for the first time," Mr. Brown said. "The life of community, that is where we know God today."
The event, called Evolution Sunday, is an outgrowth of the Clergy Letter Project, started by academics and ministers in Wisconsin in early 2005 as a response to efforts, most notably in Dover, Pa., to discredit the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools.
"There was a growing need to demonstrate that the loud, shrill voices of fundamentalists claiming that Christians had to choose between modern science and religion were presenting a false dichotomy," said Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the major organizer of the letter project.
Mr. Zimmerman said more than 10,000 ministers had signed the letter, which states, in part, that the theory of evolution is "a foundational scientific truth." To reject it, the letter continues, "is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children."
"We believe that among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator," the letter says.
Most of the signatories to the project and those preaching on Sunday were from the mainline Protestant denominations. Their congregations have shrunk sharply over the last 30 years. At the same time, the number of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians has risen considerably, and many of them, because of their literalist view of the Bible, doubt evolutionary theory.
The Clergy Letter Project said that 441 congregations in 48 states and the District of Columbia were taking part in Evolution Sunday, but that was impossible to verify independently. Around Chicago, two churches that were listed on the project's Web site as participants in the event said they were in fact not planning to deliver sermons on the subject.
Still, those who did attend sermons welcomed what they heard. After the service at St. Dunstan's, Brett Lowe, a 41-year-old computer engineer, sat in a pew as his son Ian, 2, and daughter, Paige, 6, played at his side. "Sermons like this are exactly the reason we came to this church," Mr. Lowe said.
"Observation, hypothesis and testing — that's what science is," he said. "It's not religion. Evolution is a fact. It's not a theory. An example is antibiotics. If we don't use antibiotics appropriately, bacteria become resistant. That's evolution, and evolution is a fact. To not acknowledge that is to not acknowledge the world around you."
Jeanne Taylor, 65, a recently retired registered nurse attending services at St. Dunstan's, said the Bible was based on oral tradition and today "science is a part of our lives."
At the Evanston Mennonite Church, Susan Fisher Miller, 48, an editor and English professor, said, "I completely accept and affirm the view of God as creator, but I accommodate evolution within that."
To Ms. Fisher Miller, alternatives to evolutionary theory proposed by its critics, such as intelligent design, seem an artificial way to use science to explain the holy. "It's arrogant to say that either religion or science can answer all our questions," she said. "I don't see the need either to banish one or the other or to artificially unite them."
An interesting editorial on the Mohammed-comic tempest
The Islam the Riots Drowned Out
By EMRAN QURESHI
Cambridge, Mass.
IN a world of wrenching change, the Danish cartoon affair has widened a growing fissure between Islam and the West. The controversy comes at a time when many in the Islamic world view the war on terrorism as a war on Islam. They draw on memories of colonization and of the Crusades, when Western invaders ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad as an imposter.
Sadly, the recent polarization obscures a rich humanistic tradition within Islam — one in which cosmopolitanism, pluralism and a spirit of open-minded inquiry once constituted a dominant ethos.
European Muslims for the most part have protested the Danish cartoons but kept their protests peaceful. That is good. Stigmatized European Muslims are often the targets of right-wing attacks and feel increasingly beleaguered. But the lesson many have learned from this affair has not been the utility of freedom of speech so much as that their continued presence is an affront to European identity.
Within the Muslim world, the cartoon imbroglio has given ammunition to the two entrenched forces for censorship — namely, authoritarian regimes and their Islamic fundamentalist opposition. Both would prefer to silence their critics. By evincing outrage over the Danish cartoons, authoritarian regimes seek to divert attention from their own manifold failures and to bolster their religious credentials against the Islamists who seek to unseat them.
Ironies abound. Saudi Arabia leads the protests, yet is systematically destroying its Islamic heritage. The Wahhabis who dominate Saudi Arabia do not believe in honoring Islam's holy men and women or the Prophet Muhammad (they've proscribed the celebration of his birthday). Driven by sectarian zeal, the Saudi authorities have razed and dug up virtually every site in Mecca and Medina linked to Muhammad, members of his family and his companions.
But these acts of disrespect and desecration have failed to arouse any protest from those who now take to the streets to condemn the Danish cartoons.
Elsewhere, Sunni Muslim fundamentalist leaders express anger over the Danish cartoons, but no comparable indignation over suicide bombers who attacked Shiite Muslim mosques during Ramadan in Iraq. In Pakistan, blasphemy laws have been used by fundamentalists to attack Christians and Hindus.
All this is a far cry from the Islamic humanism of Ibn al-Arabi, the Andalusian philosopher and mystic, or of Rumi, the Persian Sufi poet.
Muslim societies have paid a dear price for the militants in their midst. Many of the best and brightest within the Muslim world have had to flee to the West to avoid being silenced or killed. Fazlur Rahman, a brilliant and deeply religious Pakistani scholar of Islam, had to flee his native land for the University of Chicago. Similarly, the Islamic studies scholar Nasr Abu Zayd fled Egyptian Islamists for the Netherlands. Naguib Mahfouz, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was stabbed in the neck in Cairo and barely survived; the Egyptian writer Faraj Foda was not so lucky.
In some Western Muslim quarters, the proposed solution is more censorship — that these cartoons and similar expressions should be banned as hate speech. By that logic, shouldn't Salafist diatribes against Shiites also be banned? Shouldn't the writings of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi and his Jamaat-e-Islami, which were instrumental in persecuting the Ahmadis, a Muslim minority in Pakistan, be banned as well? Maududi's religious writings, best sellers among Muslims in the West, are suffused with an intolerant and anti-Western hue.
No, the answer is not more censorship. But it would be nice if Western champions of freedom of speech didn't trivialize it by deriving pleasure from their ability to gratuitously offend Muslims. They view freedom of speech much as Islamic fundamentalists do — simply as the ability to offend — rather than as the cornerstone of a liberal democratic polity that uses such freedoms wisely and responsibly. Worse, these advocates insist on handing Muslim radicals a platform from which to pose as defenders of the faith against an alleged Western assault on Islam.
Today's Muslim leaders, for their part, seem unable to formulate an ethical response to the challenges of the modern world. Moreover, their actions lead to the stereotyping of Islam. What else is one to conclude from this episode?
The loudest and most murderous forces have chosen to forget the spirit of the Koran, which opens with an invocation of God's mercy and compassion and which repeatedly urges believers to practice patience and kindness. There is something very ugly about the power of the radicals, their recourse to violence, their anti-intellectualism and their ability to trample and blaspheme a more humanistic Islamic tradition.
It is right and proper for Muslims to be offended, to be hurt, to protest. But we should be wary of the authoritarian voices that claim to speak and act in the name of Islam. The answer is not more violence and censorship, but rather peace, mercy and compassion.
A salon article about "puppy terrorists"
Thugs for puppies
The militant animal rights group SHAC has one goal: Cripple a lab that tests (and kills) dogs and monkeys. They say they're activists; the government calls them terrorists.
By John Cook
Feb. 06, 2006 | It starts with a telephone call.
The young man on the other end of the line will sound nice enough. He will be polite, but firm. He will give his name as Kevin Kjonaas, and he will want to talk about a company called Life Sciences Research, also known as Huntingdon Life Sciences. You may never have heard of Huntingdon, he will say, but you do business with them in some way. Maybe you are a senior executive for Huntingdon's insurance company. Maybe you work for its bank. Maybe you trade its stock.
The young man will tell you that Huntingdon kills puppies, among other animals -- 500 of them every day. "Do you know what sort of company you're dealing with?" he will ask. He will offer to send you some literature and videotapes documenting Huntingdon's cruelty. He will tell you to stop dealing with Huntingdon.
Stephan Boruchin, a 61-year-old NASDAQ trader based in Edmond, Okla., got the call in June 2002. It was the last ordinary day of his life.
Boruchin, who likes to be called Skip, trades in about 180 stocks through his firm Legacy Trading, and he didn't know too much about Huntingdon. He didn't think much of the call -- everyone's entitled to an opinion. He didn't heed the young man's advice. He doesn't remember which incident came first, and when he recounts his next three years the story tumbles out in a jumble of violence, exasperation and fear. There was the hammer hurled through his office window one night, followed by a military smoke bomb. There was the firebomb placed in the same office, which failed to detonate. There was the call to his 90-year-old mother, who passed away last year, at her nursing home at 2 a.m., demanding his cellphone number. (The caller insisted it was an emergency.) There was the time, back when his mother was still alive, that someone called an undertaker to come pick up her body. There were the things she started receiving in the mail: subscriptions to pornographic magazines, various sex toys, an envelope filled with white powder. There were the letters -- 19 of them -- warning his neighbors that he would trade in child pornography if it were legal and urging them to run him out of town. There was the night they splashed red paint all over his brother-in-law's home in Nebraska. There were the solid black sheets of paper sent to his fax machine, jamming it for hours at a time. There were the phone calls -- "Fucking puppy killer! [click]" -- 2,000 of them in a row on bad days.
Worst, perhaps, was the night they wrote "Skip is a murderer" in red paint all over Boruchin's home as he and his wife slept. The paint didn't bother him; that was easy enough to clean up. It was that they'd cut his phone lines. Just to let him know they could.
They are adherents of SHAC -- Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty -- and they are the new, balaclava-clad face of animal rights activism. Unlike People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or any number of other advocacy groups that use letter-writing campaigns or celebrity endorsements to oppose fur farms and city pounds, SHAC has a sole reason to exist: to put Huntingdon, a lab that earns about $157 million each year testing pharmaceuticals and other substances on animals, out of business. They do more than hold signs and chant rhyming slogans outside corporate headquarters. SHAC's supporters pursue their goal ferociously, relentlessly and often violently. They find out where the executives live. They go to their homes. They beat them with ax handles or pour paint stripper on their cars. And then they post taunting accounts on their Web site, which has a sophisticated design and an often wickedly funny tabloid sensibility. They are young, articulate and angry, and they take glee in hurting and frightening Huntingdon's employees and investors -- and anyone who does business with them.
Skip Boruchin has nothing against animals. He gives his pet bird, which has a skin condition, a special chemical bath so its feathers won't fall off. His crime was offering Huntingdon his services as a market maker, someone who keeps shares of a company on hand for potential buyers. Without market makers, stocks can't be readily traded. Boruchin is what the FBI calls a secondary or tertiary target. SHAC went after him because he was the last market maker willing to work with Huntingdon. Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, the Bank of New York, Goldman Sachs -- all have washed their hands of the company after becoming targets. SHAC and allied groups have also gone after Huntingdon's investors and suppliers, and even British Airways, an airline that transported monkeys from Africa for testing in Huntingdon's labs. It once carved the words "puppy killers" into a green at a golf course where a director of the parent company of Huntingdon's insurance brokerage was scheduled to play.
Last week, the animal liberation magazine Bite Back published an open letter from two anonymous SHAC supporters to Brian Guenard, an executive at Columbia Asset Management, a firm that SHAC says invests in Huntingdon. It reads in part: "We have 'bumped into you' at Genuardi's and watched you in and out of CVS -- but I guess you didn't notice [sic]. We followed when you took your little brat to the Gymboree and then to Chuck E Cheese's. We know you take that little brat to the doctor at Buckingham Pediatrics, and we made sure that they were sent information about HLS and how you and your husband make money off of animal cruelty." Bank of America, Columbia's parent company, has sought an injunction against SHAC.
SHAC's modus operandi is simple, elegant and shockingly effective: Publish the names, home addresses and telephone numbers of executives and employees of Huntingdon and any companies it does business with; identify these individuals as "targets"; urge people to let targets know how they feel about Huntingdon's treatment of puppies; and, of course, add a disclaimer disavowing illegal activity of any sort.
David Blekinsop, an activist affiliated with SHAC, apparently missed that last part. In 2001 he and two other men approached Huntingdon's managing director, Brian Cass, as he arrived home from work in England, where Huntingdon was based at the time, and beat him with wooden ax handles. When a neighbor tried to intervene, one of the men sprayed tear gas in his face. Cass was left with a three-inch gash in his head. Blekinsop pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison.
The combination of righteous violence, indignant mischief and sharp, witty Web dispatches has launched SHAC from the dowdy world of vegans into something approaching a global brand: "Thugs for Puppies," perhaps. Instead of mewling accounts of liberated cows or paeans to the Earth Goddess, the group offers cheery reports of "home demos," in which angry protesters use bullhorns to scream at targets' windows.
According to the FBI, the group is one of the top domestic terror threats in the United States. In May of last year, FBI officials told Congress, to the surprise of many, that animal and environmental rights extremism is now the most dangerous homegrown terror threat, specifically citing SHAC. One of the FBI's most wanted fugitives, Daniel Andreas San Diego, is being sought in connection with two firebombings at Chiron Corp., a California pharmaceutical firm targeted by SHAC. In October, at U.S. Senate hearings devoted solely to SHAC's activities in the U.S., John Lewis, the deputy assistant director of the FBI, testified that "SHAC has conducted a relentless campaign of terror and intimidation ... including bombings, death threats, vandalism, office invasions [and] phone blockades." In a November 2005 "60 Minutes" interview, Lewis said there were more than 150 current federal investigations into animal rights and environmental extremists. His fear, Lewis told correspondent Ed Bradley, was the emergence of a violent "lone wolf" in the mold of the Unabomber. Last month, federal prosecutors in Oregon indicted what they described as a "cell" of Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front operatives for a string of 17 arsons across the West.
The most aggressive legal action to date against SHAC culminated in May 2004, when, after a three-year federal investigation involving more than 100 FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents, a grand jury in New Jersey indicted SHAC USA; its president, Kevin Kjonaas; its campaign coordinator, Lauren Gazzola; and five others for conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, interstate stalking and telephone harassment. The investigation, which involved members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, generated the highest number of authorizations for telephone wiretaps and electronic surveillance of any case in 2003 -- more than 141,000. Even with this mountain of evidence, the indictment of the SHAC 7, as they've become known, cites almost no direct criminal acts. Instead the case is largely based on the group's Web site and what prosecutors call a "conspiracy of terror" to "incite [SHAC followers] to cause physical ... and emotional harm." The trial, for which jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday, has the potential to become a landmark First Amendment case.
"I love these court cases," says Pamelyn Ferdin, the current president of SHAC USA. (Kjonaas stepped down after his indictment.) "Because that is a whole other way to educate the public." Ferdin, 47, is positively chirpy. She has an easy laugh, and over the phone sounds enthusiastic and fun -- an extremist Katie Couric. Which makes it jarring to hear her declare, musing about the potential consequences of a conviction for the SHAC activists on trial, "People, I think, are going to get hurt. There's going to be a lot of violence."
Ferdin was a childhood actor. She traces her militancy on behalf of animals in part to her recurring role as a deaf girl on "Lassie," her voice-over work as Lucy on the classic "Charlie Brown" cartoons -- Snoopy was a beagle, the preferred breed for Huntingdon's experimentation, owing to its docile nature -- and her role as the voice of Fern in "Charlotte's Web."
"I saved Wilbur the pig," Ferdin says with pride. "When I said, 'Daddy, please don't kill Wilbur,' and he said, 'Well, I'm killing him because he's the runt.' And I said, 'If I had been born a runt, would you have killed me?' And, I don't know, I think at that time in my life I just started thinking about the oppressed and the underdog and the underpig and the underchicken." Ferdin's husband, Jerry Vlasak, is a trauma surgeon who also happens to co-run the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, an official liaison between the public and underground animal rights activists. Vlasak made waves recently, on "60 Minutes" and in congressional testimony, when he implied that he wouldn't mind if a few vivisectionists got knocked off, considering how many animals would be saved.
Ferdin is slightly more presentable. "I don't break the law," she says. "My role is to be a squeaky-clean representative for SHAC USA. I think this trial will prove that there were no laws broken." But Ferdin's not squeamish about civil disobedience: "Protesting against a corporation that does evil -- that shouldn't be illegal. That should be righteous. Look at the Boston Tea Party: talk about property damage. I'm sure the tea cost someone a lot of money."
As for tactics that harm people, Ferdin personally disavows violence. She believes, however, that it's SHAC's message, not its methods, that most troubles authorities. "Americans are totally in support of firebombing and killing and blowing little kids apart in Iraq. It's not the tactics. It's the belief that's controversial. The tactics -- Americans, they love that shit."
"Let's just say this," she adds. "SHAC USA supports what all Americans would support if their children were locked up, being experimented on, with their limbs being severed, with their eyes being burned out. That's what SHAC USA supports."
Evidently, that's what Charles Schulz would have supported, too. "Schulz loved beagles. He would have done whatever he could have done to stop these poor beagles, these Snoopys, from being slaughtered needlessly inside these death camps. Charles Schulz, God rest his soul, would be very proud of me. If he were alive today, he would be calling me up and saying, 'You go, girl!'"
Ferdin's sense of pride is somewhat understandable, given how effectively the group has pursued its mission. SHAC was founded in Worcestershire, England, in November 1999 by Greg Avery, a former tailor and longtime animal rights activist who cut his teeth by hectoring breeders who sold dogs and cats to research labs. His efforts were an immediate, astonishing success. Within two years, following a campaign of smearing superglue on ATMs belonging to any banks that dealt with Huntingdon, every commercial bank in England cut ties with the company. The British government was forced to take the extraordinary step of providing Huntingdon a special account at the Bank of England. Two years later the British government again stepped in, this time by floating an insurance policy to Huntingdon after its insurer, Marsh Corp., bowed to pressure.
Last September SHAC claimed its biggest victory thus far when, at the eleventh hour, the New York Stock Exchange chose to delay Huntingdon's listing for unspecified reasons, following what SHAC claims were 10,000 e-mails sent in protest. Huntingdon executives had already arrived at the exchange for the listing ceremony when they got the bad news.
Late last month, SHAC struck another blow when Boruchin, who had insisted on continuing to trade in Huntingdon's stock on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board for years in the face of nearly constant harassment, was forced to abandon the company. SHAC supporters had targeted Sterne, Agee, and Leach, an Alabama-based clearing firm that Boruchin used for back-end administrative support for his stock trades -- making sure that stock certificates get sent to the right parties for each trade, etc. In early January, SHAC sent out an e-mail containing the names and e-mail addresses of dozens of Sterne, Agee, and Leach employees and urging activists to "ask [them] not to unwittingly keep [Huntingdon] in business by supporting Legacy in any way, shape or form." Sterne, Agee, and Leach, Boruchin says, wanted nothing to do with it. "They said to us, 'If you continue with that stock, we will not do business with you,'" Boruchin says. He reluctantly stopped making a market for Huntingdon last week.
Sterne, Agee, and Leach executives did not return multiple phone calls. Although Huntingdon executives did not comment for this story, in Senate testimony last October, Huntingdon general counsel Mark Bibi described Legacy Trading as the only market maker consistently making a market in Huntingdon's stock. While Huntingdon's stock is still being traded on what is known as the Pink Sheets, a fourth-tier penny stock market, there are no more market makers for it on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board, a more exclusive stock market considered just below the NASDAQ. The upshot of all this, Boruchin says, is that Huntingdon's stock can no longer be purchased by many institutional investors and hedge funds, whose regulations often forbid them from trading in volatile Pink Sheet stocks.
There is nothing illegal, or even necessarily distasteful, about activists pressuring a firm through e-mails and phone calls. But much of SHAC's success hinges on the fact that firms like Sterne, Agee, and Leach are often aware that hammers and ax handles might come next. Avery disavows violence, and blames the dozens of criminal acts attributed to SHAC in England on the Animal Liberation Front, an underground affiliation of violent activists who act as the unofficial muscle behind SHAC's campaign. The distinction between "the SHAC campaign" and "the SHAC organization" is important to Avery. The former is a worldwide network of people who want to shut down Huntingdon, some of whom will do whatever it takes. The latter is a legitimate, above-ground protest group that identifies Huntingdon executives and other companies that do business with Huntingdon as targets for legal protest. If those targets get hurt by anonymous elements in the SHAC campaign, well, that's not Avery's fault. "I'm against all violence, whether it be against animals or human beings," he says. If he did support illegal violence, Avery says, he certainly wouldn't spend his time talking to reporters.
Avery has been in prison nine times, including one stint for "threatening behavior." According to a 2004 Sunday Guardian story, he admitted in court in 2001 to bullying a Huntingdon executive, telling him, "We've got your car number. We missed you last night. The police don't want to protect scum like you." (The same Guardian story also reported Avery's nickname, "Greedy Greg," so called because he lives with his current and former wives under the same roof.) When asked if he hates Brian Cass and the other Huntingdon executives he has monitored for years -- many of whom he refers to by first name, as if he were talking about his neighbors -- this is how he responds: "Oh, definitely. Definitely. I really hate him. Zero respect for him. Hate him. Hate can be a good thing if it's channeled correctly."
In March 2003 the U.K. arm of SHAC succeeded in literally running Huntingdon out of the country. Figuring that looser financial reporting standards in the United States would make it harder for SHAC to identify and target shareholders, Huntingdon reincorporated as a Maryland company and moved its headquarters to a facility it had maintained in New Jersey since 1995.
Founded in 1952, Huntingdon tests pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, food additives and other substances on animals. This research, conducted on behalf of companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, is often a legal requirement for bringing the drugs and chemicals to market. Generally speaking, each toxicology report involves a control group and three test groups of animals, which receive doses orally, topically or by injection. After the experiments the animals are killed and dissected. In some cases the animals are anesthetized and dissected while they are still alive -- vivisected.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates conditions in animal labs, there are more than 2,000 facilities registered to conduct research on lab animals in the U.S. -- though that doesn't include facilities that experiment on rats, mice or birds, which are beyond the USDA's legal grasp. The USDA doesn't tally the number of animals killed in the course of research, but the Research Defense Society, a British advocacy group that supports animal experimentation, estimates that animals undergo roughly 15 million "procedures" a year in the United States. Many, if not all, of them are killed.
Right or wrong, animal testing currently plays an integral role in the development of new drugs in America. The Food and Drug Administration requires that all new drugs be tested on animals for toxicity prior to being tested in humans. "We ask for results of animal tests to protect public health," says David Jacobson-Kram, associate director for pharmacology and toxicology in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. There is virtually no new drug -- from Viagra to Prozac to Claritin -- that has been brought to market in recent decades without a large number of animals dying in the process. Animal rights activists argue that animal testing is anachronistic -- that better information about how a drug will affect humans can be gleaned from computer models and cell cultures than by injecting it into a beagle. Jacobson-Kram agrees that science is moving in that direction, but says that, in the meantime, animals are essential. "It would be near impossible to develop new drugs without experimental models," he says. If animals were removed from the picture, "it would bring drug development either to a complete stop, or make it such a slow progression as to be almost useless."
In 2000, the latest year for which figures are available, Huntingdon killed 71,507 animals in its two British labs. Although the vast majority of these were rats, the company also tests and kills fish, birds, rabbits, sheep, cows, pigs, cats, monkeys and dogs. Huntingdon's three labs account for a tiny percentage of all test animals killed worldwide.
In 1997, after a British television program aired undercover footage (warning: graphic content) of Huntingdon employees punching a beagle in the face, shouting at the dogs, and holding them by the legs and shaking them violently as the dogs yowled, the firm's operating license was suspended for six months. In 1998, after PETA released undercover video (warning: graphic content) of monkeys being thrown around by their arms and what appeared to be the dissection of a conscious monkey in Huntingdon's New Jersey lab, the USDA fined the company $50,000 for 28 alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act.
Last month, the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a quasi-governmental agency empowered to sue to enforce state animal protection laws, filed a suit against Huntingdon for violations based largely, according to the Associated Press, on the same footage.
SHAC's campaign has done more than just frighten and humiliate Huntingdon employees; it has put the entire enterprise on shaky financial footing. Earnings were down 38 percent for the third quarter of 2005, and company stock, which traded at $15 in 1999, dropped to as low as $1 in 2004. Though it currently trades at around $11, in September 2006, as Avery delights in pointing out, a $41.1 million loan the company took out in 2001 is comes due for repayment. As of September, Huntingdon had $12 million in cash on hand. Huntingdon executives did not return repeated phone calls for comment.
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At around 6 a.m. on May 26, 2004, Lauren Gazzola awoke to the sound of a ringing telephone. She was living with Kevin Kjonaas and Jacob Conroy in a house in Pinole, a quiet suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area. The three had moved there a few months before from a house in Somerset, N.J. -- just a few miles from Huntingdon's New Jersey lab -- that prosecutors describe as the headquarters of SHAC USA. Kjonaas, a University of Minnesota political science graduate whose activism stems from fond memories of a beloved childhood pet (a beagle named Barney), founded SHAC's American arm in 2004 after spending two years working alongside Greg Avery in England.
The phone call was from a friend warning that a fellow activist had been arrested. Before Gazzola could fall asleep again, she heard a helicopter overhead. Moments later, FBI agents in riot gear, guns drawn, burst through the front door, arrested the three housemates and began searching the house. In separate raids that morning agents swept up "SHAC associates," as the indictment refers to them, Joshua Harper, Andrew Stepanian, Darius Fullmer and John McGee. The arrests came just nine days before Gazzola, a graduate of New York University, was scheduled to take the LSAT.
The indictment of the SHAC 7 provides a detailed account of what prosecutors call "attacks" on a variety of targets: Huntingdon; its insurance brokerage Marsh Corp.; investors Stephens Inc. and Quilcap; the Bank of New York and Wein Securities, which traded Huntingdon stock; and a client, Chiron Corp. It quotes liberally from the SHAC USA Web site ("Let Marsh know that we are about to raise the premium on pain") and meticulously attempts to link specific posts to subsequent acts: "On or about February 10, 2002, the SHAC Website listed M. Corp. [Marsh Corp.] as a target ... On or about March, 2002, the SHAC Website listed the names and addresses of various M. Corp. employees around the United States ... On or about March 9, 2002, the home of SD, an employee of M. Corp., was vandalized." The indictment's pièce de résistance is a lengthy quote from the "Top 20 terror tactics" posted on the SHAC USA site, which, in addition to listing several perfectly lawful practices, suggests "physical assault including spraying cleaning fluid into one's eyes"; "smashing the windows of one's house while the individual's family was at home"; and "threats to kill or injure one's partner or children."
Apart from the main charge against SHAC, conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 (a law specifically aimed at animal rights activists that makes it a crime to physically disrupt lawful businesses that rely on animals, from circuses to pet stores to labs), the group stands accused of conspiracy to stalk and conspiracy to make abusive phone calls. The defendants face up to 23 years in federal prison and upward of $1.25 million in fines. The prosecution's case rests on the theory that, via its Web site, SHAC USA urged people to commit violent "direct actions," provided the information (addresses, phone numbers) needed to commit them, and then wrote after-action wrap-ups that were "designed to spur similar action against other targets and to warn other targets that they, too, would be subjected to direct action."
That's certainly the message received by Skip Boruchin. "I consider everybody whom I've come into contact with from SHAC to be very bright," he says. "Initially, they're like anybody else -- you get more done with carrots than sticks. But their soft, nice approach lasted about 20 minutes. And then it's, 'Look at the actions we've taken. Look at what we've done to other people. Look at our Web site.'"
Upon close inspection, however, the indictment turns out to be a masterwork of the passive voice. E-mails "were sent," "rocks were thrown," "a smoke bomb was set off." Only one of the named defendants, John McGee, was directly accused of a discrete criminal act (slashing the tires of a Huntingdon employee's car) and charges against him have since been dropped. The government, unable to identify the perpetrators of crimes detailed in the indictment -- none of which, defense lawyers point out, are federal offenses taken individually -- can only claim that in the context of the direct-action campaigns, SHAC's Web postings constituted a criminal conspiracy.
"Conspiracies are agreements to commit an illegal act," says Gazzola. "They are alleging that we conspired to speak through a Web site, and that the speech on that Web site disrupted these companies." Gazzola, a 26-year-old from Connecticut, is anxious to get the trial behind her so she can get on with applying to law school. She rescheduled her LSAT, and scored in the 97th percentile.
"I was exposed to SHAC through the music scene," Gazzola says when asked how she found herself screaming at people's homes through a bullhorn at dawn. "We'd go to shows and people would have tables set up." She lets out a girlish "Oh, God" when asked what bands she was into, recalling with embarrassment her high school days. "Hardcore bands. Earth Crisis" -- a strait-laced, vegan, heavy-metal band devoted to animal liberation. "At the time, in the late 1990s, the hardcore scene was very political." But, she says, sounding more like someone eager to distance herself from teenage awkwardness than, say, a domestic terrorist, "I'm not really about that anymore."
The supreme irony of her case, Gazzola says, is that most of the words the government finds so incendiary weren't written by the SHAC 7. The after-action reports, she says, were all e-mails sent in by anonymous correspondents. And the "Top 20 terror tactics"? They were written and published by the Research Defense Society, the British think tank devoted to combating animal rights extremism; they were written by SHAC's enemies to make SHAC look bad. SHAC posted them on its own site with ironic intent -- as a snide "Fuck you"-- with the further ironic admonition, "Don't get any ideas."
"Basically," she says, "we've been alleged to have conspired to cut and paste other people's words onto a Web site."
"Any commonsense approach to the facts of this case would suggest that this isn't about the First Amendment," said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office. "It's about stopping criminal behavior. My favorite is how they say the SHAC Web site only reports how these things happen. Quote my ironic laugh. We'll have to leave it to a jury to decide where the excuses end."
Supporters of SHAC tread on uneasy ground when it comes to the question whether their activities can properly be called terrorism. On the one hand, they scoff at the conflation of what they regard as legitimate, if muscular, protest with the actions of someone like Osama bin Laden. "Civil disobedience doesn't mean I'm an international terrorist," says H. Louis Sirkin, Gazzola's lawyer. "Where's the intimidation? They're not intimidating anybody. They're laying out facts."
On the other hand, the entire SHAC campaign would be useless if people weren't fearful of doing business with Huntingdon. Intimidation is the point. "I'm not saying that there aren't some companies who fear that the ALF is going to come around and smash their house up," Greg Avery says. "We don't live in a naive dream world where we think everybody stops dealing with Huntingdon because they like lovely bunnies and want to save all the beagles. Of course they don't."
The convenient firewall between the above-ground campaign leaders of SHAC and the underground, uncontrollable activists of ALF is not always clear-cut. Kevin Kjonaas (who declined through his attorney to comment for this story) was, according to a 2002 Philadelphia Inquirer story, an acquaintance of David Blenkinsop's, Brian Cass' ax-handle attacker, during his time in London. Kjonaas told the Inquirer, "David is a very passionate person, and what he did was done with the best intentions." Kjonaas was also apparently familiar with Daniel Andreas San Diego, the firebomber at large: According to court documents filed in the SHAC case, wiretaps of Kjonaas' telephone show San Diego calling him on the day of the Chiron bombings.
Boruchin has no doubt that it's terrorism. "Fear is part of their motivation," he says. "How do you go to bed at night knowing that these people have been within three feet of my bedroom window? They bragged about it."
Pamelyn Ferdin has already moved beyond worrying about guys like Boruchin. "I think the SHAC campaign has already been won, and closing Huntingdon is just a formality. Because for five years this international effort has gripped the animal rights movement. Of course the primary objective is closing Huntingdon. But by no stretch of the imagination is this where our goals stop." So, should senior executives at, say, KFC, be worried? "I would think so."
Ferdin cackles raucously when asked about the FBI's fear of a "lone wolf" extremist setting sights on SHAC targets. "It's not the lone wolf they should be afraid of. It's thousands of, not wolves, but thousands of humans they should be afraid of. Wolves can't do nearly the damage that thousands of irate, pissed-off animal rights activists can do. If things continue the way they are, it's just a matter of time."
Suddenly, the Same Thing
By ETGAR KERET
"I just hate terrorist attacks," the thin nurse says to the older one. "Want some gum?"
The older one takes a piece and nods. "What can you do?" she says. "I hate emergencies, too."
"It's not the emergencies," the thin one insists. "I have no problem with accidents and things. It's the terrorist attacks, I'm telling you. They put a damper on everything."
Sitting on the bench outside the maternity ward, I think to myself, She has a point. I just got here an hour ago, all excited, with my wife and a neat-freak taxi driver who, when my wife's water broke, was afraid it would ruin his upholstery. And now I'm sitting in the hallway feeling glum, waiting for the staff to come back from the E.R. Everyone but the two nurses has gone to help treat the people injured in the attack. My wife's contractions have slowed down, too. Probably even the baby feels this whole getting-born thing isn't that urgent anymore. A few of the injured roll past me on squeaking gurneys. In the taxi on the way to the hospital, my wife screamed like a madwoman, but these people are all quiet.
"Are you Etgar Keret?" a guy wearing a checked shirt asks me. "The writer?" I nod reluctantly. "Well, what do you know?" he says, pulling a tiny tape recorder out of his bag. "Where were you when it happened?" he asks. When I hesitate for a second, he says in a show of empathy: "Take your time. Don't feel pressured. You've been through a trauma."
"I wasn't in the attack." I explain. "I just happen to be here today. My wife's giving birth."
"Oh," he says, not trying to hide his disappointment, and presses the stop button on his tape recorder. "Mazel tov." Now he sits down next to me and lights himself a cigarette.
"Maybe you should try talking to someone else," I suggest in an attempt to get the Lucky Strike smoke out of my face. "A minute ago, I saw them take two people into neurology."
"Russians," he says with a sigh, "don't know a word of Hebrew. Besides, they don't let you into neurology anyway. This is my seventh attack in this hospital, and I know all their shtick by now." We sit there for a minute without talking. He's about 10 years younger than I am but starting to go bald. When he catches me looking at him, he smiles and says: "Too bad you weren't there. A reaction from a writer would've been good for my article. Someone original, someone with a little vision. After every attack, I always get the same reactions: 'Suddenly, I heard a boom'; 'I don't know what happened'; 'Everything was covered in blood.' How much of that can you take?"
"It's not their fault," I say. "It's just that the attacks are always the same. What kind of original thing can you say about an explosion and senseless death?"
"Beats me," he says with a shrug. "You're the writer."
Some people in white jackets are starting to come back from the E.R. on their way to the maternity ward. "You're from Tel Aviv," the reporter says to me, "so why'd you come all the way to this dump to give birth?"
"We wanted a natural birth; their department here — "
"Natural?" he interrupts, sniggering. "What's natural about a midget with a cable hanging from his bellybutton popping out of your wife's vagina?" I don't even try to respond. "I told my wife," he continues, " 'If you ever give birth, only by Caesarean section, like in America. I don't want some baby stretching you out of shape for me.' Nowadays, it's only in primitive countries like this that women give birth like animals. Yallah, I'm going to work." Starting to get up, he tries one more time. "Maybe you have something to say about the attack anyway?" he asks. "Did it change anything for you? Like what you're going to name the baby or something, I don't know." I smile apologetically. "Never mind," he says with a wink. "I hope it goes easy, man."
Six hours later, a midget with a cable hanging from his bellybutton comes popping out of my wife's vagina and immediately starts to cry. I try to calm him down, to convince him that there's nothing to worry about. That by the time he grows up, everything here in the Middle East will be settled: peace will come, there won't be any more terrorist attacks and even if once in a blue moon there is one, there will always be someone original, someone with a little vision around to describe it perfectly. He quiets down for a minute and then considers his next move. He's supposed to be naïve — seeing as how he's a newborn — but even he doesn't buy it, and after a second's hesitation and a small hiccup, he goes back to crying.
"Thinning the milk doesn't mean thinning the child"
Thinning the Milk Does Not Mean Thinning the Child
By GINA KOLATA
FIRST, New York City schools replaced soft drinks with Snapple. Now they're banning whole milk. In 2000, Los Angeles also banished whole milk from its schools; some states are considering similar proposals. And across the country, there are anguished pleas for more nutrition education, more physical education, more anything to get children to eat less and exercise more.
And why not? Children are fatter than ever. Rates of childhood obesity started rising in the 1980's, when adults' weights also began to soar. From 1976 to 1980, 5 percent of children were overweight, says Katherine Flegal, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics. Today, she says, 15.8 percent are overweight.
Just about everyone can list ways to fight childhood obesity: schools should alter lunch menus, teach nutrition and hold more physical education classes. At home, parents should be more diligent and the Xbox less available.
Here's the problem: as logical as these suggestions might sound, when many of them have been subjected to the cold light of rigorous scientific study, they have fallen short. If nothing else, when it comes to fighting obesity, science teaches humility.
A major study published last week, for example, gave some researchers pause. Nearly 49,000 women were randomly assigned to follow a low fat diet or their regular diet for eight years while researchers kept track of their rates of breast cancer, colon cancer and heart disease. Not only did the diets have no effect on these diseases, they also had no effect on the women's weights.
So, some ask, why expect that a small change, like replacing whole milk with skim, would affect children's weights?
"I don't want to say there is no such remedy that will ever work," said Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University. "But the burden should be on those who want to impose them to show they work. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this."
It's not that no one has tried. In the 1990's, the National Institutes of Health sponsored two large, rigorous studies asking whether weight gain in children could be prevented by doing everything that obesity fighters say should be done in schools — greatly expand physical education, make cafeteria meals more nutritious and less fattening, teach students about proper nutrition and the need to exercise, and involve the parents. One study, an eight-year, $20 million project sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, followed 1,704 third graders in 41 elementary schools in the Southwest, where students were mostly Native Americans, a group that is at high risk for obesity. The schools were randomly divided into two groups, one subject to intensive intervention, the other left alone. Researchers determined, beginning at grade five, if the children in the intervention schools were thinner than those in the schools that served as a control group.
They were not. The students could, however, recite chapter and verse on the importance of activity and proper nutrition. They also ate less fat, going from 34 percent to 27 percent fat in their total diet. Alas, said the study's principal investigator, Benjamin Caballero, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "it was not enough to change body weight."
The paper appeared in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003 to no acclaim, Dr. Caballero said. No press release, no media coverage, no invitations to speak about the results at scientific meetings. On the journal's Web page, a search of articles that refer to the study comes up empty. It has not been cited anywhere.
The second study, of 5,106 children in 96 schools in California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas, had a similar design and the same results: all that help made no difference in the children's weights.
The principal investigators of both studies think they know the problem. In interviews, both Dr. Caballero and Philip R. Nader, who directed the study of 96 schools and is an emeritus research professor at the University of California at San Diego, came to the same conclusion: the intervention was not enough. It is necessary to change the children's total experience, not just what happens at school. "Not only the school, but the family, the community, the grocery store," Dr. Caballero said.
Others researchers are not so sure.
No one knows why children got fatter, says Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University. It is clear, of course, that they must be eating more or exercising less, but the difference may be tiny — a few dozen extra calories a day will, over the years, pile on pounds and a change like that is "unmeasurable," Dr. Leibel said. And no one has any good evidence that proposed solutions will make any difference.
He understands the concern. "There is a sense of fear and desperation and concern that spills over into calls for various interventions that look sensible but may not be," he said. And, he added, those interventions should not be imposed without first showing they have an effect.
Dr. Leibel and other skeptics say they are not surprised that, even with two studies showing the ineffectiveness of intervention in schools, communities continue to mandate those same changes. Scientists and the public, said David Freedman, a statistician at the University of California at Berkeley, "have this wonderful capacity for ignoring negative evidence."
Dr. Freedman, who has written books on the science and history of clinical trials, says he is reminded of a story about a pioneer in the medical application of statistics, Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis.
In the 1830's, Dr. Louis studied the effect of bloodletting, or bleeding — the standard treatment of the time — on pneumonia.
"The data showed that bleeding didn't work," Dr. Freedman said. But, he said, "Dr. Louis rejected this as terrifying and absurd."
So, he made a recommendation: bleed earlier and bleed harder.
Advice in case of pandemic....
Greetings Kill: Primer for a Pandemic
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
TO the pantheon of social arbiters who came up with the firm handshake, the formal bow and the air kiss, get ready to add a new fashion god: the World Health Organization, chief advocate of the "elbow bump."
If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is "social distancing," which is the new politically correct way of saying "quarantine."
But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators — and the bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us.
It has happened before, and not just in medieval Europe, where plague killed a third of the continent's serfs, creating labor shortages that shook the social order. In the United States, the norms of casual sex, which loosened considerably in the 1960's with penicillin and the pill, tightened up again in the 1980's after AIDS raised the penalty.
But influenza is more easily transmitted than AIDS, SARS or even bubonic plague, so the social revolution is likely to focus on the most basic goal of all: keeping other people's cooties at arm's length. The bump, a simple touching of elbows, is a substitute for the filthy practice of shaking hands, in which a person who has politely sneezed into a palm then passes a virus to other hands, whose owners then put a finger in an eye or a pen in a mouth. The bump breaks that chain. Only a contortionist can sneeze on his elbow.
Dr. Michael Bell, associate director for infection control at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has done the bump a few times already. When Ebola breaks out in Africa, he's usually on the team sent to fight it.
"I'll arrive on the tarmac and stick out a hand to say hello," Dr. Bell said, "and someone from the W.H.O. team will say: 'No, no, no, we don't do that. We do the elbow bump now.' "
In truth, he said, they do it mostly to set a good example. To stop an Ebola outbreak, visiting doctors must persuade villagers in Angola or the Congo basin to refrain from washing dead bodies and using their bare hands when nursing family members dying of hemorrhagic bleeding.
Those distancing measures would be easy to enforce in a pandemic in New York City. But other likely steps will strike at things New Yorkers are loath to give up. Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, the deputy city health commissioner in charge of avian flu preparation, said his first move would probably be to ban Major League Baseball games, Broadway shows, movies, parades and other large gatherings.
Closing schools or shutting the subways might be even more effective, because children are much more efficient than adults at spreading flu, and subways are enclosed spaces where sneezes linger in the air — but doing that would be harder to pull off, Dr. Weisfuse said. "People talk about 'flu days' like snow days," he said, "and if it was just days or a week, that would be simple. But if it's weeks or months, that becomes another matter." Without mass transit, no one gets to work and the economy collapses, he pointed out, and many poor children depend on the free breakfasts and lunches they get at school.
An alternative is to limit people to necessary travel and to have them wear masks — a tricky thing.
Getting people to don masks in Asia is relatively simple, Dr. Bell said. Particularly in Japan, it is considered polite for anyone going to work with a cold to wear one. And in Asian cities full of soot and diesel exhaust, people often wear gauze masks on the street.
But in the United States, "we don't have a culture of courtesy mask use," he said, and people may feel foolish wearing them.
The government of Taiwan faced that problem three years ago during the SARS epidemic. It ordered everyone who had a cough or fever, or who cared for a family member or patients who did, to wear a mask if they ventured outdoors. The head of Taiwan's version of the Centers for Disease Control correctly noted that studies showed that masks do much more good if the sick wear them, keeping sneeze droplets in, than if the healthy do.
But masks were rare on the streets, and the mayor of Taipei, the capital city, decided to ignore the data and pay more attention to the psychology. The sick and exposed would never wear masks, he reasoned, if it marked them as disease carriers. So he simply issued a mayoral order: no one without a mask could ride the subway. The next day, everyone in Taipei was wearing them. Within a week, they had become a fashion item, printed with logos like the Nike swoosh, the Burberry plaid and the Paul Frank monkey.
Pictures of the 1918 flu epidemic include much evidence of that sort of mass psychology. In a photograph of ranks of Seattle police officers, all are wearing masks; in one of 45 Philadelphia gravediggers digging trenches for the dead, none wear them. In a photograph of dozens of beds in a military field hospital, almost all of the patients, doctors and nurses seem to have masks — but most in the foreground have pulled them down for the photographers. People act as the group acts.
When a disease seems far away, as avian flu still does, notions like mask fashion and elbow bumping sound like jokes. But when people start dying, panic ensues, and nothing seems too far-fetched to try. In the 1918 epidemic, Prescott, Ariz., outlawed handshaking. Some small towns tried to close themselves off, barricading their streets against outsiders and telling any citizen who left not to plan on coming back. In factories, common drinking cups gave way to a new invention: the paper cup.
Under pressure, people don't adopt only sensible precautions, they overreact, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. During the anthrax scare of 2001, he said, nervous citizens submitted 600,000 specimens of white powder to public laboratories. The samples included brownies with powdered sugar. Dr. Osterholm said he feared that public reactions would be out of sync with any epidemic; that people would get scared too early, then say the fear was overblown and dismiss it. Then, if a pandemic lasts for weeks, fatigue will set in. "We tend to be a just-in-time, crisis-oriented population," he said.
It is all in the timing, said Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of the National Academy of Sciences. "In the middle of a major pandemic, with people dying, we're likely to see people hungry for clear instructions," he said. "What would backfire would be for you to say, 'Start bumping elbows now.' People would look at you as if you were from Mars."
At Churches Nationwide, Good Words for Evolution
At Churches Nationwide, Good Words for Evolution
By NEELA BANERJEE and ANNE BERRYMAN
On the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin, ministers at several hundred churches around the country preached yesterday against recent efforts to undermine the theory of evolution, asserting that the opposition many Christians say exists between science and faith is false.
At St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church, a small contemporary structure among the pricey homes of north Atlanta, the Rev. Patricia Templeton told the 85 worshipers gathered yesterday, "A faith that requires you to close your mind in order to believe is not much of a faith at all."
In the basement of an apartment building in Evanston, Ill., the Rev. Mitchell Brown said to the 21 people who came to services at the Evanston Mennonite Church that Darwin's theories in fact had compelled people to have faith rather than look for "special effects" to confirm the existence of God.
"He forced religion to grow up, to become, really, faith for the first time," Mr. Brown said. "The life of community, that is where we know God today."
The event, called Evolution Sunday, is an outgrowth of the Clergy Letter Project, started by academics and ministers in Wisconsin in early 2005 as a response to efforts, most notably in Dover, Pa., to discredit the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools.
"There was a growing need to demonstrate that the loud, shrill voices of fundamentalists claiming that Christians had to choose between modern science and religion were presenting a false dichotomy," said Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the major organizer of the letter project.
Mr. Zimmerman said more than 10,000 ministers had signed the letter, which states, in part, that the theory of evolution is "a foundational scientific truth." To reject it, the letter continues, "is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children."
"We believe that among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator," the letter says.
Most of the signatories to the project and those preaching on Sunday were from the mainline Protestant denominations. Their congregations have shrunk sharply over the last 30 years. At the same time, the number of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians has risen considerably, and many of them, because of their literalist view of the Bible, doubt evolutionary theory.
The Clergy Letter Project said that 441 congregations in 48 states and the District of Columbia were taking part in Evolution Sunday, but that was impossible to verify independently. Around Chicago, two churches that were listed on the project's Web site as participants in the event said they were in fact not planning to deliver sermons on the subject.
Still, those who did attend sermons welcomed what they heard. After the service at St. Dunstan's, Brett Lowe, a 41-year-old computer engineer, sat in a pew as his son Ian, 2, and daughter, Paige, 6, played at his side. "Sermons like this are exactly the reason we came to this church," Mr. Lowe said.
"Observation, hypothesis and testing — that's what science is," he said. "It's not religion. Evolution is a fact. It's not a theory. An example is antibiotics. If we don't use antibiotics appropriately, bacteria become resistant. That's evolution, and evolution is a fact. To not acknowledge that is to not acknowledge the world around you."
Jeanne Taylor, 65, a recently retired registered nurse attending services at St. Dunstan's, said the Bible was based on oral tradition and today "science is a part of our lives."
At the Evanston Mennonite Church, Susan Fisher Miller, 48, an editor and English professor, said, "I completely accept and affirm the view of God as creator, but I accommodate evolution within that."
To Ms. Fisher Miller, alternatives to evolutionary theory proposed by its critics, such as intelligent design, seem an artificial way to use science to explain the holy. "It's arrogant to say that either religion or science can answer all our questions," she said. "I don't see the need either to banish one or the other or to artificially unite them."
An interesting editorial on the Mohammed-comic tempest
The Islam the Riots Drowned Out
By EMRAN QURESHI
Cambridge, Mass.
IN a world of wrenching change, the Danish cartoon affair has widened a growing fissure between Islam and the West. The controversy comes at a time when many in the Islamic world view the war on terrorism as a war on Islam. They draw on memories of colonization and of the Crusades, when Western invaders ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad as an imposter.
Sadly, the recent polarization obscures a rich humanistic tradition within Islam — one in which cosmopolitanism, pluralism and a spirit of open-minded inquiry once constituted a dominant ethos.
European Muslims for the most part have protested the Danish cartoons but kept their protests peaceful. That is good. Stigmatized European Muslims are often the targets of right-wing attacks and feel increasingly beleaguered. But the lesson many have learned from this affair has not been the utility of freedom of speech so much as that their continued presence is an affront to European identity.
Within the Muslim world, the cartoon imbroglio has given ammunition to the two entrenched forces for censorship — namely, authoritarian regimes and their Islamic fundamentalist opposition. Both would prefer to silence their critics. By evincing outrage over the Danish cartoons, authoritarian regimes seek to divert attention from their own manifold failures and to bolster their religious credentials against the Islamists who seek to unseat them.
Ironies abound. Saudi Arabia leads the protests, yet is systematically destroying its Islamic heritage. The Wahhabis who dominate Saudi Arabia do not believe in honoring Islam's holy men and women or the Prophet Muhammad (they've proscribed the celebration of his birthday). Driven by sectarian zeal, the Saudi authorities have razed and dug up virtually every site in Mecca and Medina linked to Muhammad, members of his family and his companions.
But these acts of disrespect and desecration have failed to arouse any protest from those who now take to the streets to condemn the Danish cartoons.
Elsewhere, Sunni Muslim fundamentalist leaders express anger over the Danish cartoons, but no comparable indignation over suicide bombers who attacked Shiite Muslim mosques during Ramadan in Iraq. In Pakistan, blasphemy laws have been used by fundamentalists to attack Christians and Hindus.
All this is a far cry from the Islamic humanism of Ibn al-Arabi, the Andalusian philosopher and mystic, or of Rumi, the Persian Sufi poet.
Muslim societies have paid a dear price for the militants in their midst. Many of the best and brightest within the Muslim world have had to flee to the West to avoid being silenced or killed. Fazlur Rahman, a brilliant and deeply religious Pakistani scholar of Islam, had to flee his native land for the University of Chicago. Similarly, the Islamic studies scholar Nasr Abu Zayd fled Egyptian Islamists for the Netherlands. Naguib Mahfouz, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was stabbed in the neck in Cairo and barely survived; the Egyptian writer Faraj Foda was not so lucky.
In some Western Muslim quarters, the proposed solution is more censorship — that these cartoons and similar expressions should be banned as hate speech. By that logic, shouldn't Salafist diatribes against Shiites also be banned? Shouldn't the writings of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi and his Jamaat-e-Islami, which were instrumental in persecuting the Ahmadis, a Muslim minority in Pakistan, be banned as well? Maududi's religious writings, best sellers among Muslims in the West, are suffused with an intolerant and anti-Western hue.
No, the answer is not more censorship. But it would be nice if Western champions of freedom of speech didn't trivialize it by deriving pleasure from their ability to gratuitously offend Muslims. They view freedom of speech much as Islamic fundamentalists do — simply as the ability to offend — rather than as the cornerstone of a liberal democratic polity that uses such freedoms wisely and responsibly. Worse, these advocates insist on handing Muslim radicals a platform from which to pose as defenders of the faith against an alleged Western assault on Islam.
Today's Muslim leaders, for their part, seem unable to formulate an ethical response to the challenges of the modern world. Moreover, their actions lead to the stereotyping of Islam. What else is one to conclude from this episode?
The loudest and most murderous forces have chosen to forget the spirit of the Koran, which opens with an invocation of God's mercy and compassion and which repeatedly urges believers to practice patience and kindness. There is something very ugly about the power of the radicals, their recourse to violence, their anti-intellectualism and their ability to trample and blaspheme a more humanistic Islamic tradition.
It is right and proper for Muslims to be offended, to be hurt, to protest. But we should be wary of the authoritarian voices that claim to speak and act in the name of Islam. The answer is not more violence and censorship, but rather peace, mercy and compassion.
A salon article about "puppy terrorists"
Thugs for puppies
The militant animal rights group SHAC has one goal: Cripple a lab that tests (and kills) dogs and monkeys. They say they're activists; the government calls them terrorists.
By John Cook
Feb. 06, 2006 | It starts with a telephone call.
The young man on the other end of the line will sound nice enough. He will be polite, but firm. He will give his name as Kevin Kjonaas, and he will want to talk about a company called Life Sciences Research, also known as Huntingdon Life Sciences. You may never have heard of Huntingdon, he will say, but you do business with them in some way. Maybe you are a senior executive for Huntingdon's insurance company. Maybe you work for its bank. Maybe you trade its stock.
The young man will tell you that Huntingdon kills puppies, among other animals -- 500 of them every day. "Do you know what sort of company you're dealing with?" he will ask. He will offer to send you some literature and videotapes documenting Huntingdon's cruelty. He will tell you to stop dealing with Huntingdon.
Stephan Boruchin, a 61-year-old NASDAQ trader based in Edmond, Okla., got the call in June 2002. It was the last ordinary day of his life.
Boruchin, who likes to be called Skip, trades in about 180 stocks through his firm Legacy Trading, and he didn't know too much about Huntingdon. He didn't think much of the call -- everyone's entitled to an opinion. He didn't heed the young man's advice. He doesn't remember which incident came first, and when he recounts his next three years the story tumbles out in a jumble of violence, exasperation and fear. There was the hammer hurled through his office window one night, followed by a military smoke bomb. There was the firebomb placed in the same office, which failed to detonate. There was the call to his 90-year-old mother, who passed away last year, at her nursing home at 2 a.m., demanding his cellphone number. (The caller insisted it was an emergency.) There was the time, back when his mother was still alive, that someone called an undertaker to come pick up her body. There were the things she started receiving in the mail: subscriptions to pornographic magazines, various sex toys, an envelope filled with white powder. There were the letters -- 19 of them -- warning his neighbors that he would trade in child pornography if it were legal and urging them to run him out of town. There was the night they splashed red paint all over his brother-in-law's home in Nebraska. There were the solid black sheets of paper sent to his fax machine, jamming it for hours at a time. There were the phone calls -- "Fucking puppy killer! [click]" -- 2,000 of them in a row on bad days.
Worst, perhaps, was the night they wrote "Skip is a murderer" in red paint all over Boruchin's home as he and his wife slept. The paint didn't bother him; that was easy enough to clean up. It was that they'd cut his phone lines. Just to let him know they could.
They are adherents of SHAC -- Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty -- and they are the new, balaclava-clad face of animal rights activism. Unlike People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or any number of other advocacy groups that use letter-writing campaigns or celebrity endorsements to oppose fur farms and city pounds, SHAC has a sole reason to exist: to put Huntingdon, a lab that earns about $157 million each year testing pharmaceuticals and other substances on animals, out of business. They do more than hold signs and chant rhyming slogans outside corporate headquarters. SHAC's supporters pursue their goal ferociously, relentlessly and often violently. They find out where the executives live. They go to their homes. They beat them with ax handles or pour paint stripper on their cars. And then they post taunting accounts on their Web site, which has a sophisticated design and an often wickedly funny tabloid sensibility. They are young, articulate and angry, and they take glee in hurting and frightening Huntingdon's employees and investors -- and anyone who does business with them.
Skip Boruchin has nothing against animals. He gives his pet bird, which has a skin condition, a special chemical bath so its feathers won't fall off. His crime was offering Huntingdon his services as a market maker, someone who keeps shares of a company on hand for potential buyers. Without market makers, stocks can't be readily traded. Boruchin is what the FBI calls a secondary or tertiary target. SHAC went after him because he was the last market maker willing to work with Huntingdon. Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, the Bank of New York, Goldman Sachs -- all have washed their hands of the company after becoming targets. SHAC and allied groups have also gone after Huntingdon's investors and suppliers, and even British Airways, an airline that transported monkeys from Africa for testing in Huntingdon's labs. It once carved the words "puppy killers" into a green at a golf course where a director of the parent company of Huntingdon's insurance brokerage was scheduled to play.
Last week, the animal liberation magazine Bite Back published an open letter from two anonymous SHAC supporters to Brian Guenard, an executive at Columbia Asset Management, a firm that SHAC says invests in Huntingdon. It reads in part: "We have 'bumped into you' at Genuardi's and watched you in and out of CVS -- but I guess you didn't notice [sic]. We followed when you took your little brat to the Gymboree and then to Chuck E Cheese's. We know you take that little brat to the doctor at Buckingham Pediatrics, and we made sure that they were sent information about HLS and how you and your husband make money off of animal cruelty." Bank of America, Columbia's parent company, has sought an injunction against SHAC.
SHAC's modus operandi is simple, elegant and shockingly effective: Publish the names, home addresses and telephone numbers of executives and employees of Huntingdon and any companies it does business with; identify these individuals as "targets"; urge people to let targets know how they feel about Huntingdon's treatment of puppies; and, of course, add a disclaimer disavowing illegal activity of any sort.
David Blekinsop, an activist affiliated with SHAC, apparently missed that last part. In 2001 he and two other men approached Huntingdon's managing director, Brian Cass, as he arrived home from work in England, where Huntingdon was based at the time, and beat him with wooden ax handles. When a neighbor tried to intervene, one of the men sprayed tear gas in his face. Cass was left with a three-inch gash in his head. Blekinsop pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison.
The combination of righteous violence, indignant mischief and sharp, witty Web dispatches has launched SHAC from the dowdy world of vegans into something approaching a global brand: "Thugs for Puppies," perhaps. Instead of mewling accounts of liberated cows or paeans to the Earth Goddess, the group offers cheery reports of "home demos," in which angry protesters use bullhorns to scream at targets' windows.
According to the FBI, the group is one of the top domestic terror threats in the United States. In May of last year, FBI officials told Congress, to the surprise of many, that animal and environmental rights extremism is now the most dangerous homegrown terror threat, specifically citing SHAC. One of the FBI's most wanted fugitives, Daniel Andreas San Diego, is being sought in connection with two firebombings at Chiron Corp., a California pharmaceutical firm targeted by SHAC. In October, at U.S. Senate hearings devoted solely to SHAC's activities in the U.S., John Lewis, the deputy assistant director of the FBI, testified that "SHAC has conducted a relentless campaign of terror and intimidation ... including bombings, death threats, vandalism, office invasions [and] phone blockades." In a November 2005 "60 Minutes" interview, Lewis said there were more than 150 current federal investigations into animal rights and environmental extremists. His fear, Lewis told correspondent Ed Bradley, was the emergence of a violent "lone wolf" in the mold of the Unabomber. Last month, federal prosecutors in Oregon indicted what they described as a "cell" of Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front operatives for a string of 17 arsons across the West.
The most aggressive legal action to date against SHAC culminated in May 2004, when, after a three-year federal investigation involving more than 100 FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents, a grand jury in New Jersey indicted SHAC USA; its president, Kevin Kjonaas; its campaign coordinator, Lauren Gazzola; and five others for conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, interstate stalking and telephone harassment. The investigation, which involved members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, generated the highest number of authorizations for telephone wiretaps and electronic surveillance of any case in 2003 -- more than 141,000. Even with this mountain of evidence, the indictment of the SHAC 7, as they've become known, cites almost no direct criminal acts. Instead the case is largely based on the group's Web site and what prosecutors call a "conspiracy of terror" to "incite [SHAC followers] to cause physical ... and emotional harm." The trial, for which jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday, has the potential to become a landmark First Amendment case.
"I love these court cases," says Pamelyn Ferdin, the current president of SHAC USA. (Kjonaas stepped down after his indictment.) "Because that is a whole other way to educate the public." Ferdin, 47, is positively chirpy. She has an easy laugh, and over the phone sounds enthusiastic and fun -- an extremist Katie Couric. Which makes it jarring to hear her declare, musing about the potential consequences of a conviction for the SHAC activists on trial, "People, I think, are going to get hurt. There's going to be a lot of violence."
Ferdin was a childhood actor. She traces her militancy on behalf of animals in part to her recurring role as a deaf girl on "Lassie," her voice-over work as Lucy on the classic "Charlie Brown" cartoons -- Snoopy was a beagle, the preferred breed for Huntingdon's experimentation, owing to its docile nature -- and her role as the voice of Fern in "Charlotte's Web."
"I saved Wilbur the pig," Ferdin says with pride. "When I said, 'Daddy, please don't kill Wilbur,' and he said, 'Well, I'm killing him because he's the runt.' And I said, 'If I had been born a runt, would you have killed me?' And, I don't know, I think at that time in my life I just started thinking about the oppressed and the underdog and the underpig and the underchicken." Ferdin's husband, Jerry Vlasak, is a trauma surgeon who also happens to co-run the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, an official liaison between the public and underground animal rights activists. Vlasak made waves recently, on "60 Minutes" and in congressional testimony, when he implied that he wouldn't mind if a few vivisectionists got knocked off, considering how many animals would be saved.
Ferdin is slightly more presentable. "I don't break the law," she says. "My role is to be a squeaky-clean representative for SHAC USA. I think this trial will prove that there were no laws broken." But Ferdin's not squeamish about civil disobedience: "Protesting against a corporation that does evil -- that shouldn't be illegal. That should be righteous. Look at the Boston Tea Party: talk about property damage. I'm sure the tea cost someone a lot of money."
As for tactics that harm people, Ferdin personally disavows violence. She believes, however, that it's SHAC's message, not its methods, that most troubles authorities. "Americans are totally in support of firebombing and killing and blowing little kids apart in Iraq. It's not the tactics. It's the belief that's controversial. The tactics -- Americans, they love that shit."
"Let's just say this," she adds. "SHAC USA supports what all Americans would support if their children were locked up, being experimented on, with their limbs being severed, with their eyes being burned out. That's what SHAC USA supports."
Evidently, that's what Charles Schulz would have supported, too. "Schulz loved beagles. He would have done whatever he could have done to stop these poor beagles, these Snoopys, from being slaughtered needlessly inside these death camps. Charles Schulz, God rest his soul, would be very proud of me. If he were alive today, he would be calling me up and saying, 'You go, girl!'"
Ferdin's sense of pride is somewhat understandable, given how effectively the group has pursued its mission. SHAC was founded in Worcestershire, England, in November 1999 by Greg Avery, a former tailor and longtime animal rights activist who cut his teeth by hectoring breeders who sold dogs and cats to research labs. His efforts were an immediate, astonishing success. Within two years, following a campaign of smearing superglue on ATMs belonging to any banks that dealt with Huntingdon, every commercial bank in England cut ties with the company. The British government was forced to take the extraordinary step of providing Huntingdon a special account at the Bank of England. Two years later the British government again stepped in, this time by floating an insurance policy to Huntingdon after its insurer, Marsh Corp., bowed to pressure.
Last September SHAC claimed its biggest victory thus far when, at the eleventh hour, the New York Stock Exchange chose to delay Huntingdon's listing for unspecified reasons, following what SHAC claims were 10,000 e-mails sent in protest. Huntingdon executives had already arrived at the exchange for the listing ceremony when they got the bad news.
Late last month, SHAC struck another blow when Boruchin, who had insisted on continuing to trade in Huntingdon's stock on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board for years in the face of nearly constant harassment, was forced to abandon the company. SHAC supporters had targeted Sterne, Agee, and Leach, an Alabama-based clearing firm that Boruchin used for back-end administrative support for his stock trades -- making sure that stock certificates get sent to the right parties for each trade, etc. In early January, SHAC sent out an e-mail containing the names and e-mail addresses of dozens of Sterne, Agee, and Leach employees and urging activists to "ask [them] not to unwittingly keep [Huntingdon] in business by supporting Legacy in any way, shape or form." Sterne, Agee, and Leach, Boruchin says, wanted nothing to do with it. "They said to us, 'If you continue with that stock, we will not do business with you,'" Boruchin says. He reluctantly stopped making a market for Huntingdon last week.
Sterne, Agee, and Leach executives did not return multiple phone calls. Although Huntingdon executives did not comment for this story, in Senate testimony last October, Huntingdon general counsel Mark Bibi described Legacy Trading as the only market maker consistently making a market in Huntingdon's stock. While Huntingdon's stock is still being traded on what is known as the Pink Sheets, a fourth-tier penny stock market, there are no more market makers for it on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board, a more exclusive stock market considered just below the NASDAQ. The upshot of all this, Boruchin says, is that Huntingdon's stock can no longer be purchased by many institutional investors and hedge funds, whose regulations often forbid them from trading in volatile Pink Sheet stocks.
There is nothing illegal, or even necessarily distasteful, about activists pressuring a firm through e-mails and phone calls. But much of SHAC's success hinges on the fact that firms like Sterne, Agee, and Leach are often aware that hammers and ax handles might come next. Avery disavows violence, and blames the dozens of criminal acts attributed to SHAC in England on the Animal Liberation Front, an underground affiliation of violent activists who act as the unofficial muscle behind SHAC's campaign. The distinction between "the SHAC campaign" and "the SHAC organization" is important to Avery. The former is a worldwide network of people who want to shut down Huntingdon, some of whom will do whatever it takes. The latter is a legitimate, above-ground protest group that identifies Huntingdon executives and other companies that do business with Huntingdon as targets for legal protest. If those targets get hurt by anonymous elements in the SHAC campaign, well, that's not Avery's fault. "I'm against all violence, whether it be against animals or human beings," he says. If he did support illegal violence, Avery says, he certainly wouldn't spend his time talking to reporters.
Avery has been in prison nine times, including one stint for "threatening behavior." According to a 2004 Sunday Guardian story, he admitted in court in 2001 to bullying a Huntingdon executive, telling him, "We've got your car number. We missed you last night. The police don't want to protect scum like you." (The same Guardian story also reported Avery's nickname, "Greedy Greg," so called because he lives with his current and former wives under the same roof.) When asked if he hates Brian Cass and the other Huntingdon executives he has monitored for years -- many of whom he refers to by first name, as if he were talking about his neighbors -- this is how he responds: "Oh, definitely. Definitely. I really hate him. Zero respect for him. Hate him. Hate can be a good thing if it's channeled correctly."
In March 2003 the U.K. arm of SHAC succeeded in literally running Huntingdon out of the country. Figuring that looser financial reporting standards in the United States would make it harder for SHAC to identify and target shareholders, Huntingdon reincorporated as a Maryland company and moved its headquarters to a facility it had maintained in New Jersey since 1995.
Founded in 1952, Huntingdon tests pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, food additives and other substances on animals. This research, conducted on behalf of companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, is often a legal requirement for bringing the drugs and chemicals to market. Generally speaking, each toxicology report involves a control group and three test groups of animals, which receive doses orally, topically or by injection. After the experiments the animals are killed and dissected. In some cases the animals are anesthetized and dissected while they are still alive -- vivisected.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates conditions in animal labs, there are more than 2,000 facilities registered to conduct research on lab animals in the U.S. -- though that doesn't include facilities that experiment on rats, mice or birds, which are beyond the USDA's legal grasp. The USDA doesn't tally the number of animals killed in the course of research, but the Research Defense Society, a British advocacy group that supports animal experimentation, estimates that animals undergo roughly 15 million "procedures" a year in the United States. Many, if not all, of them are killed.
Right or wrong, animal testing currently plays an integral role in the development of new drugs in America. The Food and Drug Administration requires that all new drugs be tested on animals for toxicity prior to being tested in humans. "We ask for results of animal tests to protect public health," says David Jacobson-Kram, associate director for pharmacology and toxicology in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. There is virtually no new drug -- from Viagra to Prozac to Claritin -- that has been brought to market in recent decades without a large number of animals dying in the process. Animal rights activists argue that animal testing is anachronistic -- that better information about how a drug will affect humans can be gleaned from computer models and cell cultures than by injecting it into a beagle. Jacobson-Kram agrees that science is moving in that direction, but says that, in the meantime, animals are essential. "It would be near impossible to develop new drugs without experimental models," he says. If animals were removed from the picture, "it would bring drug development either to a complete stop, or make it such a slow progression as to be almost useless."
In 2000, the latest year for which figures are available, Huntingdon killed 71,507 animals in its two British labs. Although the vast majority of these were rats, the company also tests and kills fish, birds, rabbits, sheep, cows, pigs, cats, monkeys and dogs. Huntingdon's three labs account for a tiny percentage of all test animals killed worldwide.
In 1997, after a British television program aired undercover footage (warning: graphic content) of Huntingdon employees punching a beagle in the face, shouting at the dogs, and holding them by the legs and shaking them violently as the dogs yowled, the firm's operating license was suspended for six months. In 1998, after PETA released undercover video (warning: graphic content) of monkeys being thrown around by their arms and what appeared to be the dissection of a conscious monkey in Huntingdon's New Jersey lab, the USDA fined the company $50,000 for 28 alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act.
Last month, the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a quasi-governmental agency empowered to sue to enforce state animal protection laws, filed a suit against Huntingdon for violations based largely, according to the Associated Press, on the same footage.
SHAC's campaign has done more than just frighten and humiliate Huntingdon employees; it has put the entire enterprise on shaky financial footing. Earnings were down 38 percent for the third quarter of 2005, and company stock, which traded at $15 in 1999, dropped to as low as $1 in 2004. Though it currently trades at around $11, in September 2006, as Avery delights in pointing out, a $41.1 million loan the company took out in 2001 is comes due for repayment. As of September, Huntingdon had $12 million in cash on hand. Huntingdon executives did not return repeated phone calls for comment.
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At around 6 a.m. on May 26, 2004, Lauren Gazzola awoke to the sound of a ringing telephone. She was living with Kevin Kjonaas and Jacob Conroy in a house in Pinole, a quiet suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area. The three had moved there a few months before from a house in Somerset, N.J. -- just a few miles from Huntingdon's New Jersey lab -- that prosecutors describe as the headquarters of SHAC USA. Kjonaas, a University of Minnesota political science graduate whose activism stems from fond memories of a beloved childhood pet (a beagle named Barney), founded SHAC's American arm in 2004 after spending two years working alongside Greg Avery in England.
The phone call was from a friend warning that a fellow activist had been arrested. Before Gazzola could fall asleep again, she heard a helicopter overhead. Moments later, FBI agents in riot gear, guns drawn, burst through the front door, arrested the three housemates and began searching the house. In separate raids that morning agents swept up "SHAC associates," as the indictment refers to them, Joshua Harper, Andrew Stepanian, Darius Fullmer and John McGee. The arrests came just nine days before Gazzola, a graduate of New York University, was scheduled to take the LSAT.
The indictment of the SHAC 7 provides a detailed account of what prosecutors call "attacks" on a variety of targets: Huntingdon; its insurance brokerage Marsh Corp.; investors Stephens Inc. and Quilcap; the Bank of New York and Wein Securities, which traded Huntingdon stock; and a client, Chiron Corp. It quotes liberally from the SHAC USA Web site ("Let Marsh know that we are about to raise the premium on pain") and meticulously attempts to link specific posts to subsequent acts: "On or about February 10, 2002, the SHAC Website listed M. Corp. [Marsh Corp.] as a target ... On or about March, 2002, the SHAC Website listed the names and addresses of various M. Corp. employees around the United States ... On or about March 9, 2002, the home of SD, an employee of M. Corp., was vandalized." The indictment's pièce de résistance is a lengthy quote from the "Top 20 terror tactics" posted on the SHAC USA site, which, in addition to listing several perfectly lawful practices, suggests "physical assault including spraying cleaning fluid into one's eyes"; "smashing the windows of one's house while the individual's family was at home"; and "threats to kill or injure one's partner or children."
Apart from the main charge against SHAC, conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 (a law specifically aimed at animal rights activists that makes it a crime to physically disrupt lawful businesses that rely on animals, from circuses to pet stores to labs), the group stands accused of conspiracy to stalk and conspiracy to make abusive phone calls. The defendants face up to 23 years in federal prison and upward of $1.25 million in fines. The prosecution's case rests on the theory that, via its Web site, SHAC USA urged people to commit violent "direct actions," provided the information (addresses, phone numbers) needed to commit them, and then wrote after-action wrap-ups that were "designed to spur similar action against other targets and to warn other targets that they, too, would be subjected to direct action."
That's certainly the message received by Skip Boruchin. "I consider everybody whom I've come into contact with from SHAC to be very bright," he says. "Initially, they're like anybody else -- you get more done with carrots than sticks. But their soft, nice approach lasted about 20 minutes. And then it's, 'Look at the actions we've taken. Look at what we've done to other people. Look at our Web site.'"
Upon close inspection, however, the indictment turns out to be a masterwork of the passive voice. E-mails "were sent," "rocks were thrown," "a smoke bomb was set off." Only one of the named defendants, John McGee, was directly accused of a discrete criminal act (slashing the tires of a Huntingdon employee's car) and charges against him have since been dropped. The government, unable to identify the perpetrators of crimes detailed in the indictment -- none of which, defense lawyers point out, are federal offenses taken individually -- can only claim that in the context of the direct-action campaigns, SHAC's Web postings constituted a criminal conspiracy.
"Conspiracies are agreements to commit an illegal act," says Gazzola. "They are alleging that we conspired to speak through a Web site, and that the speech on that Web site disrupted these companies." Gazzola, a 26-year-old from Connecticut, is anxious to get the trial behind her so she can get on with applying to law school. She rescheduled her LSAT, and scored in the 97th percentile.
"I was exposed to SHAC through the music scene," Gazzola says when asked how she found herself screaming at people's homes through a bullhorn at dawn. "We'd go to shows and people would have tables set up." She lets out a girlish "Oh, God" when asked what bands she was into, recalling with embarrassment her high school days. "Hardcore bands. Earth Crisis" -- a strait-laced, vegan, heavy-metal band devoted to animal liberation. "At the time, in the late 1990s, the hardcore scene was very political." But, she says, sounding more like someone eager to distance herself from teenage awkwardness than, say, a domestic terrorist, "I'm not really about that anymore."
The supreme irony of her case, Gazzola says, is that most of the words the government finds so incendiary weren't written by the SHAC 7. The after-action reports, she says, were all e-mails sent in by anonymous correspondents. And the "Top 20 terror tactics"? They were written and published by the Research Defense Society, the British think tank devoted to combating animal rights extremism; they were written by SHAC's enemies to make SHAC look bad. SHAC posted them on its own site with ironic intent -- as a snide "Fuck you"-- with the further ironic admonition, "Don't get any ideas."
"Basically," she says, "we've been alleged to have conspired to cut and paste other people's words onto a Web site."
"Any commonsense approach to the facts of this case would suggest that this isn't about the First Amendment," said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office. "It's about stopping criminal behavior. My favorite is how they say the SHAC Web site only reports how these things happen. Quote my ironic laugh. We'll have to leave it to a jury to decide where the excuses end."
Supporters of SHAC tread on uneasy ground when it comes to the question whether their activities can properly be called terrorism. On the one hand, they scoff at the conflation of what they regard as legitimate, if muscular, protest with the actions of someone like Osama bin Laden. "Civil disobedience doesn't mean I'm an international terrorist," says H. Louis Sirkin, Gazzola's lawyer. "Where's the intimidation? They're not intimidating anybody. They're laying out facts."
On the other hand, the entire SHAC campaign would be useless if people weren't fearful of doing business with Huntingdon. Intimidation is the point. "I'm not saying that there aren't some companies who fear that the ALF is going to come around and smash their house up," Greg Avery says. "We don't live in a naive dream world where we think everybody stops dealing with Huntingdon because they like lovely bunnies and want to save all the beagles. Of course they don't."
The convenient firewall between the above-ground campaign leaders of SHAC and the underground, uncontrollable activists of ALF is not always clear-cut. Kevin Kjonaas (who declined through his attorney to comment for this story) was, according to a 2002 Philadelphia Inquirer story, an acquaintance of David Blenkinsop's, Brian Cass' ax-handle attacker, during his time in London. Kjonaas told the Inquirer, "David is a very passionate person, and what he did was done with the best intentions." Kjonaas was also apparently familiar with Daniel Andreas San Diego, the firebomber at large: According to court documents filed in the SHAC case, wiretaps of Kjonaas' telephone show San Diego calling him on the day of the Chiron bombings.
Boruchin has no doubt that it's terrorism. "Fear is part of their motivation," he says. "How do you go to bed at night knowing that these people have been within three feet of my bedroom window? They bragged about it."
Pamelyn Ferdin has already moved beyond worrying about guys like Boruchin. "I think the SHAC campaign has already been won, and closing Huntingdon is just a formality. Because for five years this international effort has gripped the animal rights movement. Of course the primary objective is closing Huntingdon. But by no stretch of the imagination is this where our goals stop." So, should senior executives at, say, KFC, be worried? "I would think so."
Ferdin cackles raucously when asked about the FBI's fear of a "lone wolf" extremist setting sights on SHAC targets. "It's not the lone wolf they should be afraid of. It's thousands of, not wolves, but thousands of humans they should be afraid of. Wolves can't do nearly the damage that thousands of irate, pissed-off animal rights activists can do. If things continue the way they are, it's just a matter of time."