U.S. Approved Business With Blacklisted Nations
- By Jo Becker - December 23, 2010 - The New York Times
Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has allowed American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found.
At the behest of a host of companies — from Kraft Food and Pepsi to some of the nation’s largest banks — a little-known office of the Treasury Department has granted nearly 10,000 licenses for deals involving countries that have been cast into economic purgatory, beyond the reach of American business.
Most of the licenses were approved under a decade-old law mandating that agricultural and medical humanitarian aid be exempted from sanctions. But the law, pushed by the farm lobby and other industry groups, was written so broadly that allowable humanitarian aid has included cigarettes, Wrigley’s gum, Louisiana hot sauce, weight-loss remedies, body-building supplements and sports rehabilitation equipment sold to the institute that trains Iran’s Olympic athletes.
Hundreds of other licenses were approved because they passed a litmus test: They were deemed to serve American foreign policy goals. And many clearly do, among them deals to provide famine relief in North Korea or to improve Internet connections — and nurture democracy — in Iran. But the examination also found cases in which the foreign-policy benefits were considerably less clear.
In one instance, an American company was permitted to bid on a pipeline job that would have helped Iran sell natural gas to Europe, even though the United States opposes such projects. Several other American businesses were permitted to deal with foreign companies believed to be involved in terrorism or weapons proliferation. In one such case, involving equipment bought by a medical waste disposal plant in Hawaii, the government was preparing to deny the license until an influential politician intervened.
In an interview, the Obama administration’s point man on sanctions, Stuart A. Levey, said that focusing on the exceptions “misses the forest for the trees.” Indeed, the exceptions represent only a small counterweight to the overall force of America’s trade sanctions, which are among the toughest in the world. Now they are particularly focused on Iran, where on top of a broad embargo that prohibits most trade, the United States and its allies this year adopted a new round of sanctions that have effectively shut Iran off from much of the international financial system.
“No one can doubt that we are serious about this,” Mr. Levey said.
But as the administration tries to press Iran even harder to abandon its nuclear program — officials this week announced several new sanctions measures — some diplomats and foreign affairs experts worry that by allowing the sale of even small-ticket items with no military application, the United States muddies its moral and diplomatic authority.
“It’s not a bad thing to grant exceptions if it represents a conscious policy decision to give countries an incentive,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who oversaw sanctions policy for the Clinton administration when the humanitarian-aid law was passed. “But when you create loopholes like this that you can drive a Mack truck through, you are giving countries something for nothing, and they just laugh in their teeth. I think there have been abuses.”
What’s more, in countries like Iran where elements of the government have assumed control over large portions of the economy, it is increasingly difficult to separate exceptions that help the people from those that enrich the state. Indeed, records show that the United States has approved the sale of luxury food items to chain stores owned by blacklisted banks, despite requirements that potential purchasers be scrutinized for just such connections.
Enforcement of America’s sanctions rests with Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which can make exceptions with guidance from the State Department. The Treasury office resisted disclosing information about the licenses, but after The Times filed a federal Freedom of Information lawsuit, the government agreed to turn over a list of companies granted exceptions and, in a little more than 100 cases, underlying files explaining the nature and details of the deals. The process took three years, and the government heavily redacted many documents, saying they contained trade secrets and personal information. Still, the files offer a snapshot — albeit a piecemeal one — of a system that at times appears out of sync with its own licensing policies and America’s goals abroad.
In some cases, licensing rules failed to keep pace with changing diplomatic circumstances. For instance, American companies were able to import cheap blouses and raw material for steel from North Korea because restrictions loosened when that government promised to renounce its nuclear weapons program and were not recalibrated after the agreement fell apart.
Mr. Levey, a Treasury under secretary who held the same job in the Bush administration, pointed out that the United States did far less business with Iran than did China or Europe; in the first quarter of this year, 0.02 percent of American exports went to Iran. And while it is “a fair policy question” to ask whether Congress’s definition of humanitarian aid is overly broad, he said, the exception has helped the United States argue that it opposes Iran’s government, not its people. That, in turn, has helped build international support for the tightly focused financial sanctions.
Beyond that, he and the licensing office’s director, Adam Szubin, said the agency’s other, case-by-case, determinations often reflected a desire to balance sanctions policy against the realities of the business world, where companies may unwittingly find themselves in transactions involving blacklisted entities.
“I haven’t seen any licenses that I thought we should have done differently,” Mr. Szubin said.
Behind a 2000 Law
For all the speechifying about humanitarian aid that attended its passage, the 2000 law allowing agricultural and medical exceptions to sanctions was ultimately the product of economic stress and political pressure. American farmers, facing sharp declines in commodity prices and exports, hoped to offset their losses with sales to blacklisted countries.
The law defined allowable agricultural exports as any product on a list maintained by the Agriculture Department, which went beyond traditional humanitarian aid like seed and grain and included products like beer, soda, utility poles and more loosely defined categories of “food commodities” and “food additives.”
Even before the law’s final passage, companies and their lobbyists inundated the licensing office with claims that their products fit the bill.
Take, for instance, chewing gum, sold in a number of blacklisted countries by Mars Inc., which owns Wrigley’s. “We debated that one for a month. Was it food? Did it have nutritional value? We concluded it did,” Hal Eren, a former senior sanctions adviser at the licensing office, recalled before pausing and conceding, “We were probably rolled on that issue by outside forces.”
While Cuba was the primary focus of the initial legislative push, Iran, with its relative wealth and large population, was also a promising prospect. American exports, virtually nonexistent before the law’s passage, have totaled more than $1.7 billion since.
In response to questions for this article, companies argued that they were operating in full accordance with American law.
Henry Lapidos, export manager for the American Pop Corn Company, acknowledged that calling the Jolly Time popcorn he sold in Sudan and Iran a humanitarian good was “pushing the envelope,” though he did give it a try. “It depends on how you look at it — popcorn has fibers, which are helpful to the digestive system,” he explained, before switching to a different tack. “What’s the harm?” he asked, adding that he didn’t think Iranian soldiers “would be taking microwavable popcorn” to war.
Even the sale of benign goods can benefit bad actors, though, which is why the licensing office and State Department are required to check the purchasers of humanitarian aid products for links to terrorism. But that does not always happen.
In its application to sell salt substitutes, marinades, food colorings and cake sprinkles in Iran, McCormick & Co. listed a number of chain stores that planned to buy its products. A quick check of the Web site of one store, Refah, revealed that its major investors were banks on an American blacklist. The government of Tehran owns Shahrvand, another store listed in the license. A third chain store, Ghods, draws many top officials from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States considers a terrorist organization.
The licensing office’s director, Mr. Szubin, said that given his limited resources, they were better spent on stopping weapons technology from reaching Iran. Even if the connections in the McCormick case had come to light, he said, he still might have had to approve the license: the law requires him to do so unless he can prove that the investors engaged in terrorist activities own more than half of a company.
“Are we checking end users? Yes,” he said. “But are we doing corporate due diligence on every Iranian importer? No.”
A McCormick spokesman, Jim Lynn, said, “We were not aware of the information you shared with us and are looking into it.”
Political Influence
Beyond the humanitarian umbrella, the agency has wide discretion to make case-by-case exceptions. Sometimes, political influence plays a role in those deliberations, as in a case involving Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and a medical-waste disposal plant in Honolulu.
On July 28, 2003, the plant’s owner, Samuel Liu, ordered 200 graphite electrodes from a Chinese government-owned company, China Precision Machinery Import Export Corporation. In an interview, Mr. Liu said he had chosen the company because the electrodes available in the United States were harder to find and more expensive. Two days later, the Bush administration barred American citizens from doing business with the Chinese company, which had already been penalized repeatedly for providing missile technology to Pakistan and Iran.
By the time Customs seized the electrodes on Nov. 5, waste was piling up in the sun. Nor did prospects look good for Mr. Liu’s application to the licensing office seeking to do an end run around the sanctions. On Nov. 21, a State Department official, Ralph Palmiero, recommended that the agency deny the request since the sanctions explicitly mandated the “termination of existing contracts” like Mr. Liu’s.
That is when Senator Inouye’s office stepped in. While his electrodes were at sea, Mr. Liu had made his first ever political contribution, giving the senator’s campaign $2,000. Mr. Liu says the timing was coincidental, that he was simply feeling more politically inclined. Records show that an Inouye aide called the licensing office on Mr. Liu’s behalf the same day that Mr. Palmiero recommended denying the application. The senator himself wrote two days later.
Mr. Inouye’s spokesman, Peter Boylan, said the contribution had “no impact whatsoever” on the senator’s actions, which he said were motivated solely by concern for the community’s health and welfare.
The pressure appears to have worked. The following day, the licensing office’s director at the time asked the State Department to reconsider in an e-mail that prominently noted the senator’s interest. A few days later, the State Department found that the purchase qualified for a special “medical and humanitarian” exception.
The license was issued Dec. 10. Two months later, Mr. Liu sent the senator another $2,000 contribution, the maximum allowable. Mr. Levey said he could not comment on the details of a decision predating his tenure. But he noted that sanctions against the Chinese company had since been toughened, and added, “Certainly this transaction wouldn’t be authorized today.”
Curious Exemptions
Mr. Liu’s license is hardly the only one to raise questions about how the government determines that a license serves American foreign policy.
There is also, for instance, the case of Irisl, an Iranian government-owned shipping line that the United States blacklisted in 2008, charging that because it routinely used front companies and misleading terms to shroud shipments of banned arms and other technology with military uses, it was impossible to tell whether its shipments were “licit or illicit.”
Less than nine months earlier, the licensing office had permitted a Japanese subsidiary of Citibank to carry out the very type of transaction it was now warning against. Records show that the bank had agreed to confirm a letter of credit guaranteeing payment to a Malaysian exporter upon delivery of what were described as split-system air-conditioners to a Turkish importer. Though the government had yet to blacklist Irisl, sanctions rules already prohibited dealings with Iranian companies. So when the bank learned that the goods were to be shipped aboard the Irisl-owned Iran Ilam, it sought a license.
The license was granted, even though the Treasury Department’s investigation of Irisl was well under way and the United States had reason to be suspicious of the Iran Ilam in particular; that summer, the ship had attracted the attention of the intelligence community when it delivered a lathe used to make nuclear centrifuge parts from China to Iran, according to government officials who requested anonymity to speak about a previously unpublicized intelligence matter.
Mr. Szubin said that since the blacklisting of Irisl, his agency had forced banks to extricate themselves from such transactions. But at the time the Citibank license was issued, his agency regularly issued licenses in cases like this one, where at the time of the transaction, the bank had no way of knowing that Irisl was involved and where the shipping line would be paid by a foreign third party anyway. To depart from the norm, he said, risked facing a lawsuit charging unfair treatment and tipping Irisl off that it was under investigation.
But if the government has sometimes been willing to grant American businesses a break, some companies have recently decided that the cost to their reputations outweighs the potential profit.
General Electric, which has been one of the leading recipients of licenses, says it has stopped all but humanitarian business in countries listed as sponsors of terrorism and has promised to donate its profits from Iran to charity.
As Joshua Kamens, the head of a company called Anndorll, put it, he knew from almost the minute he applied for a license to sell sugar in Iran that “it would come back to haunt me.” Although he received the go-ahead, he decided to back out of the deal.
“I’m an American,” he said. “Even though it’s legal to sell that type of product, I didn’t want to have any trade with a country like Iran.”
Ron Nixon contributed reporting from Washington, and William Yong from Tehran.
Iran Uses Force Against Protests as Region Erupts
- By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ALAN COWELL - February 14, 2011 - The New York Times
Hundreds of riot police officers in Iran beat protesters and fired tear gas Monday to contain the most significant street protests since the end of the 2009 uprising there, as security forces around the region moved — sometimes brutally — to prevent new unrest in sympathy with the opposition victory in Egypt.
The size of the protests in Iran was unclear. Witness accounts and news reports from inside the country suggested that perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 demonstrators in several cities defied strong warnings and took to the streets.
The unrest was an acute embarrassment for Iranian leaders, who had sought to portray the toppling of two secular rulers, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, as a triumph of popular support for Islam in the Arab world. They had refused permission to Iranian opposition groups seeking to march in solidarity with the Egyptians, and warned journalists and photographers based in the country, with success, not to report on the protests.
Iranian demonstrators portrayed the Arab insurrections as a different kind of triumph. “Mubarak, Ben Ali, now it’s time for Sayyid Ali!” Iranian protesters chanted in Persian on videos posted online that appeared to be from Tehran, referring to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Iranian authorities have shown that they will not hesitate to crush demonstrations with deadly force. Other governments across the Middle East and the Persian Gulf also moved aggressively to stamp out protests on Monday.
In Egypt, the army stuck to its promise not to attack demonstrators, but the death toll during the protests leading to Mr. Mubarak’s downfall reached about 300 people, according to the United Nations and human rights organizations. Most fatalities appeared to have occurred when pro-government thugs attacked demonstrators.
On Monday, the police in Bahrain fired rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds of peaceful protesters from the Shiite majority population. So much tear gas was fired that the officers themselves vomited. In Yemen, hundreds of student protesters clashed with pro-government forces in the fourth straight day of protests.
In the central Iranian city of Isfahan, many demonstrators were arrested after security forces clashed with them, reports said, and sporadic messages from inside Iran indicated that there had also been protests in Shiraz, Mashhad and Rasht.
Numbers were hard to assess, given government threats against journalists who tried to cover the protests. Aliakbar Mousavi Khoeini, a former member of Parliament now living in exile in the United States, said that 20,000 to 30,000 people had taken part across the country.
Ayatollah Khamenei and the Iranian establishment have tried to depict the Arab movements as a long-awaited echo of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, though Islamist parties had a low profile in both the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings. The Iranian opposition has painted the Arab protests as an echo of its own anti-government movement in 2009, when citizens demanded basic rights like freedom of assembly and freedom of speech after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Mehdi Karroubi, an opposition leader, said in an interview last week that the opposition had decided to organize a day of demonstrations to underscore the double standard of the government in lauding protesters in Arab countries while suppressing those at home. Mr. Karroubi has been put under house arrest, with outside communication links severed, opposition reports said, as has Mir Hussein Moussavi, the other main opposition leader.
The Fars news agency, a semiofficial service linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, indirectly confirmed the protests by saying an unspecified number of demonstrators had been arrested. It called participants “hypocrites, monarchists, ruffians and seditionists” and ridiculed them for not chanting slogans about Egypt, the nominal reason for the protests.
The authorities’ tactics on Monday indicated that they were resolved to stifle unrest — starting with the refusal to issue a permit for a nationwide demonstration. Reports that did emerge suggested that security forces had tried to prevent people from gathering by blocking the access routes to main squares in major cities and closing train stations in Tehran.
The crackdown came as the protests flared in Yemen and Bahrain. While those outbreaks were reported in some official Iranian state news media, which had also covered the 18-day Egyptian uprising selectively, there was no immediate mention of the clashes in Tehran and elsewhere on such state broadcasters as the English-language Press TV in Tehran.
Iran’s Islamic government gradually stamped out the 2009 protests through the shooting of demonstrators, mass trials, torture, lengthy jail sentences and even executions of those taking part.
Reports from inside Iran on Monday were harvested from a special Facebook page set up for the day called 25 Bahman, Twitter feeds, telephone calls and opposition Web sites.
They indicated that one tactic for sympathizers hoping to avoid a beating at the hands of the police was to drive to the demonstrations, with huge traffic jams reported in Tehran. Security forces on motorcycles tried to run down protesters, witnesses said.
Callers to the BBC Persian service television program called “Your Turn” said demonstrators had tried to gather in small knots until the police turned up in force, at which point they would run into traffic to seek refuge with strangers who opened their car doors.
“It has not turned into a big demonstration mostly because they never managed to arrive at the main squares,” said Pooneh Ghoddosi, the program’s host.
Cellular telephone service was shut off around the main squares and the Internet slowed to a crawl, activists said. Echoing tactics in Egypt and Tunisia, sympathizers outside Iran set up the 25 Bahman Facebook page — named for Monday’s date on the Iranian calendar — to collect videos, eyewitness accounts and any information.
Twitter feeds informed demonstrators to gather quickly at a certain intersection, then disperse rapidly. One video showed them burning a government poster as the chant against Ayatollah Khamenei rang out.
The authorities had made no secret of their resolve to stop the demonstrators. “The conspirators are nothing but corpses,” Hossein Hamadani, a top commander of the Revolutionary Guards, said last week in comments published by the official IRNA news agency. “Any incitement will be dealt with severely.”
Monday’s clashes erupted as the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, was in Iran. Speaking at a news conference alongside President Ahmadinejad, he said, “We see that sometimes when the leaders and heads of countries do not pay attention to the nations’ demands, the people themselves take action to achieve their demands.”
A Reuters report said he did not refer directly to Iran. “In this age of communication, in an age where everybody is aware of each other, the demands and desires of the people are very realistic,” he said in a response to a question about events in the Middle East.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “We wish the opposition and the brave people in the streets across cities in Iran the same opportunity that they saw their Egyptian counterparts seize in the last week.”
Artin Afkhami contributed reporting.
The Parent Trapped
By Katherine Ellison - February 11, 2011 - The New York Times
San Anselmo, Calif.
I WANT to believe I have little in common with Julie Schenecker, who the police say confessed to killing her two “mouthy” teenagers.
Ms. Schenecker, who was indicted on charges of first-degree murder on Thursday, lives in Tampa, and is married to an Army colonel. I live near San Francisco, and am married to a newspaper editor.
She, blond and tanned, drove her children, Calyx, 16, and Beau, 13, to soccer and track meets. I’m brunette and sun-deprived, and drag two sons to violin lessons and Hebrew school.
We most likely never would have been pals, even on Facebook, where, poignantly, Ms. Schenecker has 394 “friends.” And yet what haunts me even more than the terrible photos of her being led off by the police, her eyes rolled back like those of a spooked horse, is what we’ve shared: a frightening record of anger toward our children.
What strange evolutionary quirk makes adolescents evoke such powerful rage in their mothers? Alone, like Ms. Schenecker, night after night with my argumentative sons while my husband was working away from home, I’ve felt that fury rising from the soles of my feet, at the sight of a carefully made meal thoughtlessly dumped in the sink or, worse, a little brother scratched and bruised.
While my older son, who has both attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder, is something more than the usual adolescent provocateur, let me be clear that not even in my wildest dreams have I ever imagined shooting him. Still, pushed to my limits, I’ve done things that I know full well have been dangerous and harmful — mostly yelling, but also, during a few explosive fights, pushing and slapping. And abundant research on family violence shows that I’m far from alone.
Uniquely awful as the killings of the Schenecker children were, the all too familiar themes in this story make it urgent that the hectic debate about their mother moves off the pages of social network sites and into our places of worship, doctors’ offices and city halls.
It chilled me to read that the police questioned Ms. Schenecker for slapping her daughter three months before the killings — behavior that I’ve unfortunately shared with millions of other American parents. In a 2007 study of 141 adolescents, published in the journal Development and Psychopathology, 85 percent reported that they’d been slapped or spanked. Moreover, the latest government records show that more than 121,000 cases of physical abuse against minors were reported in 2008.
Even as corporal punishment is declining in social acceptability, about 7 in 10 Americans agreed, in a 2004 survey, that children sometimes need “a good, hard spanking.” This came despite mountains of studies establishing that such tactics do children much more harm than good, increasing the risk of anxiety, depression and addiction. Moreover, it’s easy for spanking, slapping and swatting to escalate — sometimes even to the point of deadly violence.
My husband and I passionately oppose corporal punishment, which helps explain why my blunders alerted me that I needed help. I ended up devoting a year and thousands of dollars to getting such help, from therapists and honest friends.
I spent much of the year learning about A.D.H.D., a condition I soon realized that I shared with my then 12-year-old son. Among its classic symptoms are conflict-seeking and hot-headedness. Humbling as it was, I ultimately heeded friends and professionals who encouraged me to shed my fantasy of being the victim of a raging, impossible child, and own up to the ways I was contributing to our fights.
There were other therapies as well, including neurofeedback and medication for me and my son, financed in part by an ever-expanding equity loan. Today, while we still argue, we’re out of the danger zone, though I can’t stop worrying about how many other parents lack the rare advantages I’ve had to get us there.
The mad housewife is a reliable comic icon, her trials trivialized as boredom and cabin fever. It’s hard for most people to accept that mothers — even maybe their own mothers! — can be unloving, and sometimes unsafe. Which helps explain why killings like those ascribed to Ms. Schenecker, among some 200 American mothers who kill their children every year, always seem so surprising.
It’s easy to write these cases off as freak results of severe mental illness. But most of these women’s stories also include a lot of ordinary stress and social isolation, the fallout from divorce and the dispersal of extended families. Increasingly cut off from real-time conversations, mad housewives find solace in e-communities, where “life” is so much more soothing and predictable than dealing with teenagers. While news reports say Ms. Schenecker was seeking help from real-life counselors in the weeks before the killings, her Facebook page, with its pretty family photographs and homilies, is a portrait of polished denial.
Amid the debate about whether social networks are depriving us of healthier, non-virtual encounters, a University of Texas study last fall claimed that Facebook was not supplanting such interactions. Perhaps that’s true, but one thing I’m sure of, from my own lucky odyssey, is that all the poking and tagging in the world can’t compete with a pair of real-time eyes when it comes to noticing that someone needs more help than she’s getting.
Katherine Ellison is the author of “Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention.”
The United State's Mythical Trip To The Moon.!
- By Bahram Maskanian - December 19, 2005
The so-called U.S. putting man on the moon, or trip to the moon, is the most absurd and dimwitted misleading TV show ever produced. Full of so many obvious mistakes easily detectable proving this was just a myth, without even trying too hard.
The most indisputable reason, fact, which makes this whole endeavor impossible and a huge lie, is the existence of what is known as: “Van Allen Radiation Belt”. Even though just mentioning that major obstacle should be sufficient enough to prove the trip to the moon was a fiction, I like to go over a couple of more facts, just for giggles.!
Below are some simple common sense and scientific facts, which will prove clearly, without any doubts, whatsoever, that NASA and U.S. government deliberately deceived the American people and the people of the world, in order to create a phony prestige for boasting on the world stage and to plunder billions of dollars for space research, which obviously ended up in the pockets of the so-called mass-murderers, or defense contractors and warmongering weapon manufacturers, deceitful egotistic scientists and astronauts, nation-less corporations for supposedly building the necessary contraptions to produce the trip to the moon television show.
Some might think, wait a minute, what about the abundance of UFO visitation of planet Earth by the extraterrestrial folks from outer space in the past thousands of years, how do they get through Van Allen Radiation Belt when entering Earth atmosphere and exiting.?
The UFO spacecraft, do not fly, they levitate from point to point, capable of traveling far faster than the speed of light between galaxies, and throughout the universe, utilizing their on board “Magnetic Levitation, or Maglev Propulsion” system, which as it propels the craft it also creates a protective magnetic shield around the spaceship, protecting it from out of space harmful radiation, just like planet Earth’s gravitational force does, protecting the inhabitants of Earth. Even today we do not have such capabilities.
There has been some pictures showing geometric infrastructure, tall towers, buildings and roads, similar looking to a base on top of the moon, built by the extraterrestrial folks on the moon’s north pole, supposedly.! Those pictures were taken by telescope from various locations from planet Earth beginning from 1954 as part of a covert, highly secret operation by U.S. government, way before the fictitious moon landing. Or perhaps manufactured by NASA to lend credibility to their mythical trip to the moon.
A few major unsolvable problems for conventional travel to anywhere in out of space, which requires passing through Van Allen Radiation Belt, even today:
Van Allen Radiation Belt is a large outer radiation belt around planet Earth, generated by the highly charged solar radioactive particles and plasma released from the upper atmosphere of our star, the Sun. Extending from an altitude of about 13,000 to 60,000 kilometers, or 8,100 to 37,300 miles above and all around planet Earth's surface. No living creature from Earth using 1960’s primitive, or even today’s technologies could possibly get through the belt and survive. This highly charged radioactive emission of ionizing radiation or particles would vaporize any living creature traveling through it. In order to get to the moon over 221,567 miles, or 374,448 kilometers from planet Earth, Apollo astronauts had to pass through Van Allen Radiation Belt and would have been vaporized instantly.!
In 1960s and even today, we do not have an adequate fuel source, or propulsion system sufficient enough to travel over 443,134 miles, or 748,896 kilometers round-trip to the moon and back. Furthermore, we did not and we do not have a protective radiation shield to travel safely through Van Allen Radiation Belt even today.
Most of us have seen the huge plume of dust and smoke when space shuttle or any rocket is fired up and shot out of the Earth’s gravitational pull, into space. If you watch the lunar landing, it is clear as day that a crane is assisting the landing of the so-called Lunar Module from the top. No dust, nothing, how could a rocket booster engine blasting at full trust descending to cushion its landing, in a sandy, dusty environment to land safely, does not make any smoke, nor raise any dust up in the air.? The very same thing is also true as the Lunar Module is shot out of moon’s gravitational pull.!
Furthermore, the tiny cone-shape Lunar Module, hardly had enough space for two men, where did they house the so-called Moon Rover, all other equipment and the fuel tanks necessary to take off from moon surface? Also it worth mentioning that traveling to the moon and back, one will be covering nearly half a million miles, which would require enormous amount of fuel. The gigantic advanced fuel tanks attached to the space shuttle can only take the shuttle out of the Earth’s atmosphere; which is about 62 miles, or (100 kilometers) straight up, and soon after all of the fuel burned up, the two fuel tanks separate and fall back onto the earth.
Another impossible aspect of this mythical trip is the direct live video images and audio transmission from moon to Earth. We all remember Neil Armstrong's infamous quote supposedly after landing: "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind". The very same video footage and pictures, the so-called hard evidence supposedly brought back by the astronauts to deceive and prove this mythical trip true, was all nothing but a load of you know what..?
We all have seen broadcast television programs coming to our TV sets from different corners of planet Earth “LIVE”. What most of us may not know however, is what would it take to make that broadcast possible.? To overcome the curvature of planet Earth, it would require a stationary satellite on Earth’s orbit, and broadcasting truck stationed at the location of the event to transmit the signal from the point of origin to a TV station equipped with satellite dish to receive and broadcast the signal to us, the viewing audience with time delay, caused by the signal traveling out of space and back. How did the so-called astronauts, while jumping up and down, or driving the moon rover, or walking around, could communicate instantaneously, nearly half a million miles away round-trip, with NASA, on planet Earth.?
Looking at the Lunar-Rover, and examining the picture NASA claims taken from the so called Lunar-Rover on the moon and looking at footage of Lunar-Rover driving around shows the rear combustion engine. Now I am not a astronaut, or a scientist, but can someone explain to me, how in the hell a big Lunar-Rover car could drive around on the moon using rear combustion engine where there is no atmosphere, no air and no oxygen? (Combustion engine will not work without oxygen in the air) . And no, Lunar-Rover was not an electric car, because if it was, it would weigh a ton and the many batteries on board would have been clearly visible. And again, where did NASA store the Moon-Rover, which evidently is bigger than the Lunar Module itself, to be delivered to the moon.?
Moreover, anybody knows that Radiation from the Sun is a mixture of electromagnetic waves ranging from infrared, to ultraviolet rays, high-energy gamma rays and X-rays radiation, which includes visible light between IR and UV in the electromagnetic spectrum. The outer-space and the sun’s massive lethal radiation would have vaporized the lying astronauts, camera and films leaving planet Earth on their way to the moon passing through Van Allen Radiation Belt. Furthermore, the same deadly forces would have the same vaporizing effect on the surface of the moon, the moon is irradiated by the sun’s deadly heat and radiation nonstop, plus cosmic radiation in addition to space micrometeorites, traveling at 60,000 miles an hour, would go through everything incinerating the cameras, films, astronauts and their flimsy joke of spaceship. Planet Earth’s atmosphere coupled with Earth’s powerful gravity, magnetic field protecting life from Sun’s lethal radiations and space micrometeorites and meteorites of all sizes. We all know, that moon has no atmosphere, with one sixth of Earth’s magnetic field gravity, thus the same fatal condition similar to Van Allen Radiation Belt also exist on the moon surface, which would incinerate the deceitful astronauts and their rickety ridiculous spaceship.
Real Science Proves NASA Faked The Moon Landings
Published: December 09, 2023
Did U.S. NASA faked Moon landing? Well, absolutely, United States lacked both the ability and technology required to put a man on the Moon in 1960s. Even today in the year 2020 U.S. and NASA do not have the propulsion system and protective technology to go anywhere out side of Earth's gravity pull.
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