Power Outage in Italy

After US/Canada, London, Mexico and Sweden/Denmark, Italy follows now with a Power Outage

Update: Wayne Madsen about oddities of Power Outages since 2002

Update: New Power Outage in Australia (10/11)

Massive power cut hits Italy

The grid failure appears to be similar to the problems that caused blackouts in the north-eastern United States and London last month.

PD-16 and the constant blackouts

Are the neocons in the Pentagon targeting electrical grids?

Online Journal -September 29

By Wayne Madsen

Online Journal Contributing Writer

September 29, 2003—In July 2002, George W. Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 16 (PD-16), a secret plan for the United States to wage cyber-warfare against other countries. Under the directive, the Pentagon—which is under the control of neoconservative zealots who make Dr. Strangelove seem relatively sane—is authorized to use electronic weaponry to bring down the electrical grids of enemy nations.

Since Bush's directive was signed, the world had witnessed more unexplained massive blackouts in the history of the modern age of electricity.

Considering that the Pentagon, through manipulative schemers like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and retired Admiral John Poindexter, has championed such ideas as a stock market betting parlor for future terrorist attacks and an Internet-based personal information surveillance program (both fortunately killed off by Congress), it is not far-fetched to consider the possibility that the recent spate of blackouts around the world are the result of another harebrained operation cooked up by the necons to demonstrate America's superiority in cyber-warfare.

After all, the Pentagon has a very bad track record when it comes to using civilian populations as guinea pigs for its experiments. Witness the awful effects of nuclear bomb testing on the peoples of the western United States and the Marshall Islands, depleted uranium-hardened shells on innocent civilians in war zones, and Agent Orange on American troops and civilians in Southeast Asia.

Since PD-16 was signed, blackouts affecting hundreds of millions of people are occurring on an unprecedented scale.

On September 23, 2002, a massive power failure disrupted central Chile, including the capital city of Santiago. Some 3,500 passengers had to be rescued from stalled Metro trains in Santiago. The official reason was said to be "faulty programming" and a "technical failure" at a power station. On April 29, 2003, a power failure hit the airport in Melbourne, Australia, disrupting operations for 90 minutes.

Buenos Aires and La Plata, Argentina, were hit by a huge power failure on November 24, 2002. January 31, 2003, saw an unusual power failure hit Cambridge, Ontario. Buenos Aires was hit again by another sudden blackout on August 6, 2003. Power company officials blamed that outage on the collapse of three power lines but Argentine President Nestor Kirchner said he believed private power companies were engaged in a conspiracy to pressure the government to increase utility rates.

The first major blackout in 2003 occurred in the northeastern United States and Canada on August 14. NewYork City, Detroit, Toronto, Ottawa, Cleveland and smaller cities and towns in between lost power for hours at the height of the evening rush hour.

Some 50 million people were affected. Canadian and U.S. officials pointed the finger at one another for causing the blackout but blame soon shifted to a power generation plant owned by Ohio's FirstEnergy Corp. President [sic] Bush, who was conveniently fundraising in California at the time, called the blackout a "wake-up call."

A few days later, the Republic of Georgia was plunged into darkness. On August 18, 4.5 million people in Georgia lost electricity; the Tblisi metro ground to a halt and the water supply was cut off. The Georgian energy minister blamed "sabotage" for the outage but he wasn't more specific.

During the evening of August 23, Finland's capital Helsinki and suburbs, including the international airport at Vantaa, were blacked out. Helsinki Energy was at a loss in explaining how a minor short-circuit in a Helsinki switching station resulted in such a widespread failure affecting over a half million people, especially in a country known for its first-rate electrical grid. Saturday evening's revelers at Helsinki's Linnanmäki amusement park had to be rescued when the blackout left them dangling in rides in midair.

Even Radio Suomi, which relies on emergency generators, went off the air when both its generators and backup battery power failed. After conducting an investigation, Helsinki Energy announced that no problems were found with its equipment.

On August 28, at the height of London's evening rush hour, a massive power outage struck the city and southeast England. The blackout was blamed on a "fault" in the national electrical grid. Eighteen-thousand trains stopped, including 60 percent of the London Underground, an event that Britain's Network Rail called "unprecedented."

Monday morning, September 1, started out as a normal business day for people in Malaysia's bustling capital of Kuala Lumpur. However, at 10 o'clock the city and five other Malaysian states were struck by a massive blackout. Workers in the Petronas Towers, the world's tallest buildings, were trapped in elevators and with signal lights out, traffic in downtown Kuala Lumpur ground to a virtual halt. What made the event all the more perplexing is that blackouts are very rare in the country.

The next day, September 2, Cancun, Mexico, which was swarming with tourists and advance teams for the following week's World Trade Organization meeting, also found itself plunged into a blackout. The power failure struck Quintana Roo state on the Yucatan peninsula and two neighboring states. Power was out for six hours and affected 3 million people.

Shortly after the lunch hour on September 23, eastern Denmark and southern Sweden, including the cities of Copenhagen and Malmo, lost power in what was described as a "very unusual" blackout. Four million people were affected, including passengers stranded on board trains and at Copenhagen's busy international airport. Factories on the island of Zealand and in southern Sweden stopped production and the Oresund Bridge linking Denmark to Sweden was closed to traffic.

On early Sunday morning, September 28, another massive power failure struck Italy, leaving 57 million people without electricity. A simultaneous blackout plunged Geneva, Switzerland, into darkness. A finger pointing game started among Italy, France, and Switzerland for the cause of the failure. The blackout cut off electricity to Vatican City and Pope John Paul II had to rely on emergency generators to power amplifiers in order to deliver his Sunday sermon. Thirty-thousand passengers were stranded on trains throughout the country. The blackout was later blamed on a tree hitting a high voltage transmission line in Switzerland.

It's clearly time for the U.S. Congress to demand to see PD-16 and what tasking for the Pentagon cyber-war planners may have arisen from it. A special focus should be on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the outfit that helped concoct Poindexter's cockamamie Policy Analysis Market and Total Information Awareness schemes. Congressional investigators should toss aside concerns about security, intelligence methods and sources, and similar Taurean excrement and demand full access to the cyber-warfare plans of DARPA and the Pentagon's equally culpable Office of Net Assessment and Directorate of Policy and Plans.

There is a reason why massive power failures are striking cities around the world and PD-16 may be a part of that reason. It is also noteworthy that the U.S. energy firm, AES Corporation of Arlington, Virginia, has a financial stake in the power companies involved in the blackouts in Chile and Georgia. AES's board of directors is jam packed with individuals with links to past Pentagon highjinks.

It includes Richard Darman of the Caryle Group who was Office of Management and Budget director under the first Bush and Philip Odeen, former Pentagon 21st century transformation task force chairman and a former president of the top Pentagon contractor, BDM. AES, too, should be investigated.

The necon wackos running the Pentagon may know those reasons and it's beyond time for our elected members of Congress to start cracking heads together to get at the truth of who and what lies behind the multiple blackouts of 2003.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based journalist and columnist and the co-author of "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush."

Yesterday's breakdown came just two months after Western Power warned of rolling blackouts after the crash of one of its key coal-fired generators and a two-week maintenance shutdown on the Dampier-Bunbury gas pipeline, which feeds many of its other stations.

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printed from Power Outage in Italy on 2004-06-03 14:24:07