e-telescope online magazine

"Honest and idealist ... enjoys good food and wine ... unprejudiced mind ..."

That's how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg's SS unit performed "special duties," a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other "undesirables" during the Second World War. Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.

President Eisenhower is well-remembered for warning the public in his final address to the nation to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence . . . by the military-industrial complex.” But it is little known that Eisenhower, in that same speech further cautioned that “we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Anyone who has played in the ocean surf or experienced the current of a river, felt the tug of outgoing or incoming surf, recognizes that there is energy contained in moving bodies of water. Harnessing that energy to create electricity has been in third position, behind solar and wind, as a source of alternative energy. But now, advances in technology are changing that situation. Commercially viable prototypes and active production models operating in wave farms are currently producing electricity successfully. The World Energy Council has described wave energy as a concentrated form of solar energy. With three quarters of the earth covered in water, wave power is an inexhaustible source of clean energy.