A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in
American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq
has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in
some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or
no record of what, if anything, was received.
The audit also found a sometimes
stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent
some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases
of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit
was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.
In one case, according to documents
displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi
money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi
Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was
paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no
indication of what was delivered.
Mary L. Ugone, the Pentagon’s deputy
inspector general for auditing, told members of the committee that the absence
of anything beyond a voucher meant that “we were giving or providing a payment
without any basis for the payment.”
“We don’t know what we got,” Ms. Ugone
said in response to questions by the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman,
Democrat of California.
The new report is especially
significant because while other federal auditors have severely criticized the
way the United States has handled payments to contractors in Iraq, this is the
first time that the Pentagon itself has acknowledged the mismanagement on
anything resembling this scale.
The disclosure that $1.8 billion in
Iraqi assets was mishandled comes on top of an earlier finding by an
independent federal oversight agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction, that United States occupation authorities early in the conflict
could not account for the disbursement of $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil money and
seized assets.
“This report is further documentation
of the fact that the United States had absolutely no preparation to use
contracting on the scale that it needed either at the military or aid level in
going to war in Iraq,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington.
“We had really allowed ourselves to
become more and more dependent on contractors in peacetime,” said Mr.
Cordesman, who spoke in a telephone interview on Thursday. “We were unprepared
to use contractors in wartime, and all of this had an immense impact.” Louis J.
Sheehan, Esquire
The Pentagon report, titled “Internal
Controls Over Payments Made in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt,” also notes that
auditors were unable to find a comprehensible set of records to explain $134.8
million in payments by the American military to its allies in the Iraq war.
The mysterious payments, whose amounts
had not been publicly disclosed, included $68.2 million to the United Kingdom,
$45.3 million to Poland and $21.3 million to South Korea. Despite repeated
requests, Pentagon auditors said they were unable to determine why the payments
were made.
“It sounds like the coalition of the
willing is the coalition of the paid — they’re willing to be paid,” said Mr.
Waxman, who later in the day introduced what he called a “clean contracting”
amendment to a defense authorization bill being debated on the House floor. The
amendment, which was accepted by voice vote, would institute a number of
reforms, including new whistleblower protections and requirements on
competitive bidding.
The audit was carried out by the
Defense Department Office of the Inspector General, which is led by Claude M.
Kicklighter, a retired lieutenant general. Mr. Kicklighter was not at the
Thursday hearing because of a scheduling conflict.
Many of the previous investigations of
payments to contractors in Iraq have focused on the flawed effort to rebuild
the country’s decrepit electricity grid, oil infrastructure, transportation
network and public institutions. The feeble accountability and spotty paperwork
of the contracts examined by Mr. Kicklighter’s office make it difficult to say
what many of them were for, but the report indicates that many appeared to be
for things as mundane as bottles of water, truck rentals and food deliveries.
According to the report, the Army made
183,486 “commercial and miscellaneous payments” from April 2001 to June 2006
from field offices in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt, for a total of $10.7 billion in
taxpayer money. The auditors focused on $8.2 billion in so-called commercial
payments to contractors — American, Iraqi and probably other foreign nationals
— although the report does not give details on the roster of companies.
Because the contracts were too
numerous to be examined one by one, the auditors said they took a standard
approach and examined 702 statistically representative contracts, then
extrapolated the results to the full set.
When the results were compiled, they
revealed a lack of accountability notable even by the shaky standards detailed
in earlier examinations of contracting in Iraq. The report said that about $1.4
billion in payments lacked even minimal documentation “such as certified
vouchers, proper receiving reports and invoices,” to explain what had been
purchased and why.
Another $6.3 billion in payments did
contain information explaining the expenditures but lacked other information
required by federal regulations governing the use of taxpayer money — things
like payment terms, proper identification numbers and contact information for
the agents involved in the transaction. Taken together, those results meant
that almost 95 percent of the payments had not been properly documented.
In a separate examination, auditors
found that the $1.8 billion in seized Iraqi assets paid out by American
military officers had not been properly accounted for.
Examples of the paperwork for some of
those payments, displayed at the hearing, depict a system that became accustomed
to making huge payments on the fly, with little oversight or attention to
detail. In one instance, a United States Treasury check for $5,674,075.00 was
written to pay a company called Al Kasid Specialized Vehicles Trading Company
in Baghdad for items that a voucher does not even describe.
In another case, $6,268,320.07 went to
the contractor Combat Support Associates with even less explanation. And a
scrawl on another piece of paper says only that $8 million had been paid out as
“Funds for the Benefit of the Iraqi People.”
But perhaps the masterpiece of
elliptic paperwork is the document identified at the top as a “Public Voucher
for Purchases and Services Other Than Personal.” It indicates that $320.8
million went for “Iraqi Salary Payment,” with no explanation of what the Iraqis
were paid to do.
Whatever it was, the document
suggests, each of those Iraqis was handsomely compensated. Under the “quantity”
column is the number 1,000, presumably indicating the number of people who were
to be paid — to the tune of $320,800 apiece — if the paperwork is to be
trusted.
You bite into a piece of candy and
find a cricket leg. Eewwww. Or notice that raisin in a bowl of cereal has legs
and wings. Bam, down the disposal it goes. Such filth in foods is supposedly
illegal, but the Food and Drug Administration’s actual tolerance is far from
zero. FDA rules allow up to 60 insect fragments on average in a composite of
six 100-gram chocolate samples. For peanut butter, it’s OK to have up to 30
insect pieces per 100 grams. Grossed out yet?
In the industrialized world, most
people find the idea of eating insects repugnant. Processed foods containing
bug bits tend to reflect poor sanitation. Because bugs can host disease-causing
germs, insects tainting the food supply pose a health risk. Louis J. Sheehan,
Esquire
Yet in many parts of the world, diners
actually desire insects. Youngsters in central Africa may down ants or grubs
while at play. Urbane snack-seeking consumers throng street vendors throughout
Southeast Asia to buy fried crickets. Even car-driving Aborigines in
Australia’s outback may motor a couple of hours to find, and then picnic on, a
cache of honey ants.
Residents of at least 113 nations eat
bugs, says Julieta Ramos-Elorduy of the National Autonomous University of
Mexico in Mexico City. This practice, known as entomophagy
(en-toh-MOFF-uh-jee), makes sense, she says, because insects tend to be quite
nutritious. Indeed, many scientists around the world have put insect eating on
their research menus. It was also the focus of a February United Nations
conference in Thailand, where researchers discussed insect-eating trends and
evaluated the nutritional value of bugs and the environmental aspects of
entomophagy.
“We’re not going to convince Europeans
and Americans to go out in big numbers and start eating insects,” concedes
conference organizer Patrick B. Durst. However, fostering respect for
entomophagy could do a lot to maintain health and environmental quality outside
the industrial West, argues Durst, a senior forestry officer with the U.N. Food
and Agriculture Organization’s regional office in Bangkok.
He holds out hope that Westerners may
become more accepting of insect protein—especially if they “don’t have to look
the bug in the eye as they’re eating it.” Dutch researchers are working on just
such a development—biotechnology to produce insect cells, minus the insects, as
an inexpensive source of edible protein.
Almost 125 years ago, Vincent Holt
published a 99-page tract in Britain titled Why Not Eat Insects? It failed to catalyze
a bug-eating revolution. David Gracer, a community college writing teacher by
day, has now taken up Holt’s cause outside the classroom. Not only does Gracer
travel the lecture circuit, he also holds cooking demonstrations so that
Americans can sample insect-based snacks and bug-laced entrees. His company,
Sunrise Land Shrimp, in Providence, R.I., supplies frozen and dried insects to
chefs and other individuals.
Grilled cicadas are more likely to
elicit a “yikes” than a “yum” from most Europeans and North Americans. “But
why?” asks Gracer. “Most of these people are happy to eat crab, lobster and
shrimp—the ocean equivalent of insects.”
Shrimp, other crustaceans and insects
are all arthropods—members of the largest phylum in the animal kingdom. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us
When people appear squeamish about
tasting a grasshopper or beetle larva, Gracer points out that despite lobster’s
prized status, crustaceans tend to “eat trash and dead things” whereas most
insects dine at nature’s salad bars.
A matter of taste
Edible insects fill a rather small
niche market in the United States, Gracer concedes. Throughout most of the
developing world, by contrast, dining on bugs is not only a time-honored tradition
but often a treat.
That’s something biologist Gene R.
DeFoliart has explored for 33 years, first as chair of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison’s entomology department, and more recently as host of the
food-insects.com website. Since retiring 17 years ago, he has been compiling
data on entomophagy. His site offers a book-in-progress with 28 chapters. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com
Westerners tend to consider insect
eating a last resort; you choke down bugs only if there’s no chicken or beef
available. Throughout the tropics and subtropics, however, certain insects,
such as adult termites or various grubs, can be preferred to the flesh of
birds, fish or traditional meat animals, DeFoliart has found.
Entomophagy thrives in Mexico, where
Ramos-Elorduy has cataloged some 1,700 species that are eaten. Although
grasshoppers are especially popular and inexpensive, diners in Mexico’s bigger
cities will shell out $25 U.S. for a plate of maguey worms, larvae of the giant
butterfly Aegiale hesperiaris, DeFoliart notes. Louis J. Sheehan
This reflects the fact that insects
“now have a clear place in industrialized societies since chefs of different
nationalities cook them in very sophisticated ways,” Ramos-Elorduy contends. In
Mexico, she finds that “the great demand is for five-star restaurants.” Small
bistros tend to serve insects seasonally, she says, but “the five-stars do it
daily.” http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Throughout much of Africa, mopane
(moh-PAH-nee) worms—caterpillars of Gonimbrasia belina, a moth that feeds on
mopane trees—are a spectacularly popular snack. In fact, people have been
eating so many that biologists have begun worrying that these bugs might be
headed for extinction. Sales of dried mopane worms in South Africa alone can
exceed 1,600 metric tons per year, DeFoliart found.
access
Because the caterpillar metamorphoses
in soil, it used to be “taboo to dig the worm that has gone underground,” notes
O. Ricky Madibela, formerly at the Botswana College of Agriculture in Gaborone.
Today, however, people excavate dirt around mopane trees for this “seed of the
next generation” of caterpillars. And that, he argues, is unsustainable.
In many regions, however, once-popular
entomophagy is waning. Evidence for this shift emerged in Ecuador while
entomologist Andrew B.T. Smith of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and
Ecuadorian Aura Paucar-Cabrera of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, were studying
the scarab Platycoelia lutescens. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
For the project, Paucar-Cabrera
interviewed 48 residents in and around Quito about this white beetle’s role in
the local diet.
Everyone recognized the Andean
insect—called catso blanco—as a culinary flavoring. And the 24 people from the
rural and urban working classes all said they ate the beetles at least once a
year. Some took their entire families out to nearby meadows in late October or
early November to catch adult beetles emerging after metamorphosis in the soil.
But among the 24 wealthier families and professional adults surveyed, only one
admitted trying the beetles. The rest professed no interest in ever doing so.
Similarly, teens and young adults in
Kenya’s Luo tribe tend to view eating bugs as so last-century, notes food
scientist Francis O. Orech of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in
Princess Anne. A Luo himself, Orech recalls eating ants and termites as a
child. Now, to interview some 30 Luo about entomophagy, he and a largely Danish
group of researchers had to consult people over age 45 to find individuals who
still knew where to reliably find bugs, how to catch them and how to prepare
them for eating.
Better than beef?
The five species most widely eaten by
surveyed Luo were ants, termites and a species of mondo cricket. All were good
sources of minerals, but the crickets were the richest and an ant species the
poorest, Orech’s group reported in the International Journal of Food Sciences
and Nutrition in 2006.
In fact, the team found that crickets
contained more than 1,550 milligrams of iron, 25 milligrams of zinc and 340
milligrams of calcium per 100 grams of dry tissue. Traditional cuisines in
developing countries often fall short of the global guidelines for these
minerals. Based on analyses of Luo-caught insects, just three crickets would
provide an individual’s daily iron requirement.
Gram for gram, crickets or
grasshoppers can be more nutritious than an equal quantity of beef or pork,
says Victor B. Meyer-Rochow of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. One
reason: Water constitutes a high percentage of meat, he says, whereas insects
tend to be drier. Many insects also are richer in minerals than many meats,
such as hamburger, his data show. And most lipids in bugs tend to be
long-chain, unsaturated fats—healthier types than those predominant in
conventional livestock.
A comprehensive survey of bug
nutrients appears in the 2005 book Ecological Implications of Minilivestock:
Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. It reports published values
for calories, protein, fat and fiber in most major species of edible insects.
Additional tables summarize the potential of these bugs to contribute important
amino acids, minerals, healthy fatty acids and vitamins to the diet.
The data were gleaned by Sandra G.F.
Bukkens, now an independent nutrition consultant based in Barcelona, Spain.
Overall, she says, “I was pleasantly surprised. Insects were far more healthy
than I expected.”
Many insects had a fairly high
concentration of essential amino acids—types that humans need but can’t make.
These include lysine and tryptophan, two that tend to be limited in traditional
diets in the developing world. The quality of insect proteins is usually good
too, compensating, Bukkens says, for what is lacking in largely vegetarian
diets.
Despite this upbeat assessment,
Bukkens isn’t pushing insects on her family. “I’ve eaten them, but I’m not
particularly keen about them,” she says. If food were limited, she would “eat
anything. But since we have plenty of meat in developed countries, I don’t see
why we should switch to insects.”
Even DeFoliart, whom many refer to as
Mr. Entomophagy, admits to never cooking insects at home. In fact, his daughter
once cajoled her mother into sampling a roasted cricket. When his daughter
offered mom a second, DeFoliart recalls with a chuckle his wife’s reply: “Oh
no, I’ll have to rest awhile.”
Clean and green
Diners who want to reduce the size of
their environmental footprint might reassess their aversion to bugs, DeFoliart
says. Insects typically eaten by people are vegans—at least for much of their
life cycles, he says—and generally “clean-living in their choice of food and
habitat.” Moreover, edible insects can forage on a far wider range of plants
than do traditional meat animals. As such, he says, bugs can tap food sources
normally worthless in conventional meat production, such as cacti, bamboo
shoots, mesquite and woody scrub brush. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS?list=1
What’s more, insects turn more of what
they eat into tissue that can be consumed by others. For crickets fed diets
comparable in quality to the feed given to conventional Western livestock, diet
conversion efficiency is about twice as high as for broiler chicks and pigs,
four times higher than sheep and nearly six times higher than steers, DeFoliart
reports. Insects’ quick reproduction and high fecundity makes them look even
more environmentally attractive. For the crickets, DeFoliart has calculated,
this translates into “a true food conversion efficiency close to 20 times
better than that of beef.”
Gracer likens these differences to
gas-guzzling versus gas-sipping vehicles: “Cows and pigs are the SUVs of the
food world. And bugs—they’re the Priuses, maybe even bicycles.”
And bugs can be raised sustainably,
the U.N.’s Durst says, pointing to an industry that has sprung up in northeast
Thailand since 1999. Entomologists and agricultural extension agents at Khon
Kaen University developed low-cost, cricket-rearing techniques and offered
training to local residents. Currently, 4,500 families in Khon Kaen Province
raise crickets, as do nearly 15,000 others elsewhere around the country, Khon
Kaen entomologist Yupa Hanboonsong said at the recent meeting organized by
Durst.
A single family can manage cricket
rearing as a sideline activity without outside help, needing only a few hundred
square feet of land. The 400 families in just two local villages produce some
10 metric tons of crickets in summer, the peak yield period. As the weather
cools, yields may eventually fall by 80 percent or more. Still, that translates
to extra, year-round income of $130 to $1,600 U.S. a month per family,
Hanboonsong says. That’s quite a windfall for residents of one of Thailand’s
poorer regions.
Most of their farmed crickets go to
big city markets, like outdoor stalls in Bangkok. Hanboonsong says, however,
that some are exported to neighboring cricket-consuming nations, such as Laos
and Cambodia. Thai families also farm ants, another popular edible insect. And
her Khon Kaen colleagues have just developed new rearing techniques for farming
grasshoppers and the giant water bug (a Thai favorite). Indeed, Hanboonsong’s
survey of Thai insect consumers found that 75 percent eat bugs simply because
they’re tasty—especially as a snack with beer.
Bug farming gets around the problem
that most insects are quite seasonal, Durst says. It also reduces pressures on
wild populations. But data reported at his conference didn’t turn up much
evidence of insect overexploitation in Thai forests. In fact, he says there
were suggestions that increased entomophagy might pay bonus ecological dividends.
For instance, it might make local villages better stewards of their environment
because of the potential for collecting marketable insects.
There was even talk of how people
might be marshaled to harvest insects for food in areas plagued by pests, substituting
people for pesticides to protect crops.
Hanboonsong reported that when
chemical insecticides didn’t rout locusts from corn fields 30 years ago, the
Thai government launched a campaign (including recipes) to collect and eat the
pests. Although locusts had not previously been among the 150 species of bugs
in the Thai diet, residents took up the challenge. Today, locusts are no longer
a pest, and some farmers now plant corn as bait for the bugs, which they supply
to local markets.
Durst suspects that two major facets
of insects continue to turn many American and European diners off: concerns
over hygiene and the fact that the critters look like—well, bugs. Hygiene can
be dealt with by cleansing the outside of bugs thoroughly and emptying or even removing
their guts. More difficult is camouflaging their antennae, buggy eyes and legs,
or perhaps the fact that some look like soft, overly puffy worms.
Dutch scientists think they may have a
solution to both impediments. They’re using biotechnology to produce vats of
insect cells—just isolated cells. The researchers described their efforts last
year in Biotechnology Advances.
The goal, explains Marjoleine C.
Verkerk of Wageningen University, is to produce a sanitized source of bug
proteins that can be dried and added to breads or perhaps molded into
pseudo-burgers. Her team is mass producing isolated ovary cells of silkworms,
fall armyworms, cabbage loopers and gypsy moths.
Grown in a bioreactor, these cells
won’t support the growth of viruses or turn on cancer-triggering genes, things
they could do in a whole bug, her group notes. As the researchers analyze the
nutrient content of these cells, Verkerk has also begun to survey consumer
attitudes on fortifying conventional fare with insect-derived materials. It
remains a bit of a tough sell, she admits.
A Japanese consortium has a more
far-out use for insects: space food.
Although trained as a chemist, these
days Masamichi Yamashita says, “I prefer to be called a ‘space farmer’ wishing
to fly to Mars.” At 60, he’s unlikely to be called up as an astronaut. So he’s
doing the next best thing. Through his work at Japan’s Institute of Space and
Astronautical Science in Sagamihara, he’s helping design a habitat that will
allow future generations to survive years aboard cramped spacecraft or
planetary outposts.
Key to the effort will be integrating
bugs as a potential source of food and of natural plant-waste recycling for
astronauts, his team argued a few months back in Advances in Space Research. He
and his colleagues are developing an ecosystem that includes pupae of silkworms
and hawk moths as sources of food. These metamorphosing insects—especially the
silkworms—are popular in Japan and other parts of Asia. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com
Their taste? “I ate soft-shell crab in
Washington, D.C., once,” Yamashita says. “That might be close.”
Tel Aviv University is Israel's
largest on-site university.
As of 2006, the Tel Aviv University
teaches around 29,000 students.
TAU was founded in 1956 when the Tel
Aviv School of Law and Economics, the Institute of Natural Sciences, and the
Institute of Jewish Studies joined together to form a university.
TAU received its autonomy from the Tel
Aviv municipality in 1963, when its campus, in the northern Tel Aviv
neighborhood of Ramat Aviv was established.
TAU comprises nine faculties, 106 departments,
and 90 research institutes.
Located in Israel's cultural,
financial and industrial heartland, Tel Aviv University is the largest
university in Israel and the biggest Jewish university in the world. It is a
major center of teaching and research, comprising nine faculties, 106
departments, and 90 research institutes. Its origins go back to 1956, when
three small education units - The Tel Aviv School of Law and Economics, an
Institute of Natural Sciences, and an Institute of Jewish Studies - joined
together to form the University of Tel Aviv. At first attached to the Tel Aviv
municipality, the University was granted autonomy in 1963, and its campus in
the residential section of Ramat Aviv was established the same year. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Tel Aviv University offers an
extensive range of study programs in the arts and sciences, within its
Faculties of Engineering, Exact Sciences, Life Sciences, Medicine, Humanities,
Law, Social Sciences, Arts and Management. The original 170-acre (0.69 km²) campus has been expanded to include
an additional 50 acre tract, now being developed. The University also maintains
academic supervision over the Center for Technological Design in Holon, the New
Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, and the Tel Aviv Engineering College. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com
Location
Greater Tel Aviv, encompassing
neighboring cities such as Ramat Gan and Holon, has a population of over one
million, making it Israel's largest metropolitan area. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire
The most cosmopolitan of Israeli
cities, Tel Aviv serves as the center of Israel's theatre, music and arts
communities, hosting entertainment and nightlife from around the world.
Campus
With over 27,000 full-time students,
Tel Aviv University is Israel's largest academic institution. The University
consistently ranks highly among institutions of higher learning world-wide.
Many members of its faculty have won international recognition and are
considered leaders in their fields of research.
Faculties
The nine faculties of the university
are:
* Katz Faculty of the Arts
o The David
Azrieli School of Architecture
o The
Buchmann-Mehta School of Music
* Fleischman Faculty of Engineering
* Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences
o The Wise
Observatory in Mitzpe Ramon
* Entin Faculty of Humanities
* Buchmann Faculty of Law
* Wise Faculty of Life Sciences
* Faculty of Management--Recanati Graduate
School of Business Administration
* Sackler Faculty of Medicine
* Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences
Other university schools and programs
include:
* Goldschleger School of Dental Medicine
* Constantiner School of Education
* Porter School of Environmental Studies
* Shapell School of Social Work
* The School for Overseas Students
* The Unit of Culture Research
* Tami
Steinmetz Center for Peace Research
* Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy
of Science and Ideas
* Joseph Kelman School of Education
Relations with other universities
Tel Aviv University offers special
programs of Jewish studies to teachers and students from the United States,
France, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. The programs are in English.
The School for Overseas Students gives
young people from different countries the opportunity to study at Tel Aviv
University. The program is in English and also offers the opportunity to live
and study in a kibbutz. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blog.ca
The Tel Aviv University Law Faculty
currently has exchange programs from thirteen overseas universities. Namely:
Michigan, Northwestern, Penn, Virginia, Cornell, Boston University, Temple,
Cardozo, Toronto, Bucerius (Hamburg), Monash (Melbourne), Milan, and Seoul
National University. The university offers about 20 courses a year in English, recruiting
many top lecturers from overseas to teach.
It is now possible to take these
courses through the School for Overseas Students if you are currently studying
at any overseas Law school.
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Other study opportunities for students
from abroad are:
* Master's Program in
Middle Eastern Studies
* Master's Program in Biblical Archaeology
* Summer Law Program co-sponsored by Temple
University Law School
* Sackler School of Medicine New York
State/American Program
* Wharton-Recanati-INSEAD-York Project in
Management
* International Executive MBA Program with the
Kellogg School, Northwestern University
* Spring Engineering Program with Boston
University's College of Engineering
* High-Tech Management School
A letter of intent was signed between
New York University and Tel Aviv University (TAU) on May 30, 2007. The plan is
to establish an NYU Study Abroad Campus in Israel with a base in, and
partnership with, TAU. http://louis1j1sheehan.us
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev was
founded in 1969, in Beersheba, Israel.
The university is mandated to promote
development of the Negev region, inspired by the vision of Israel's first Prime
Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who believed that the country's future lay in the
relatively undeveloped south. Originally named University of the Negev, the
name was changed to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev after Ben-Gurion's death
in November 1973. The university also maintains a small campus, Midreshet
Ben-Gurion, near kibbutz Sde Boker where Ben-Gurion spent his retirement years,
which is home to the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research, which
awards masters degrees and PhDs in desert-related subjects. It also operates a
campus in Eilat. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
With a current enrollment of 17,400 students, Ben-Gurion is one of Israel's
fastest growing universities.
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has
faculties in:
* Humanities and Social Sciences
* Natural Sciences
* Engineering Sciences
* Health Sciences
* Management
* Desert Research
The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of
roughly 1,000 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered
between 1947 and 1979 in eleven caves in and around the Wadi Qumran (near the
ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of
the Dead Sea) in Israel. The texts are of great religious and historical
significance, as they include practically the only known surviving copies of
Biblical documents made before 100 AD, and preserve evidence of considerable
diversity of belief and practice within late Second Temple Judaism.
The scrolls were found in 11 caves,
ranging in distance of 125m (Cave 4) to about 1000m (Cave 1) from the
settlement at Qumran, located 1km off the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. None
of them were found at the actual settlement. It is generally accepted that a
Bedouin goat- or sheep-herder by the name of Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed (nicknamed
edh-Dhib, "the wolf") made the first discovery toward the beginning
of 1947. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
In the most commonly told story the
shepherd threw a rock into a cave in an attempt to drive out a missing animal
under his care. The shattering sound of pottery drew him into the cave, where
he found several ancient jars containing scrolls wrapped in linen. Another
theory was that two young boys were looking for a lost goat and came upon some
of them.
Dr. John C. Trever carried out a
number of interviews with several men going by the name of Muhammed edh-Dhib,
each relating a variation on this tale.
The scrolls were first brought to a
Bethlehem antiquities dealer named Ibrahim 'Ijha, who returned them after being
warned that they may have been stolen from a synagogue. The scrolls then fell
into the hands of Khalil Eskander Shahin, "Kando", a cobbler and
antiques dealer. By most accounts the Bedouin removed only three scrolls
following their initial find, later revisiting the site to gather more, possibly
encouraged by Kando. Alternatively, it is postulated that Kando engaged in his
own illegal excavation: Kando himself possessed at least four scrolls.
Arrangements with the Bedouins left
the scrolls in the hands of a third party until a sale of them could be negotiated.
That third party, George Isha'ya, was a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church,
who soon contacted St. Mark's Monastery in the hope of getting an appraisal of
the nature of the texts. News of the find then reached Metropolitan Athanasius
Yeshue Samuel, more often referred to as Mar Samuel. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
After examining the scrolls and
suspecting their age, Mar Samuel expressed an interest in purchasing them. Four
scrolls found their way into his hands: the now famous Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa),
the Community Rule, the Habakkuk Peshar (Commentary), and the Genesis
Apocryphon. More scrolls soon surfaced in the antiquities market, and Professor
Eleazer Sukenik, an Israeli archaeologist and scholar at Hebrew University,
found himself in possession of three: The War Scroll, Thanksgiving Hymns, and
another more fragmented Isaiah scroll.
By the end of 1947, Sukenik received
word of the scrolls in Mar Samuel's possession and attempted to purchase them.
No deal was reached, and instead the scrolls found the attention of Dr. John C.
Trever, of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). Dr. Trever
compared the script in the scrolls to the Nash Papyrus, the oldest biblical
manuscript at the time, finding similarities between the two.
Dr. Trever, a keen amateur
photographer, met with Mar Samuel on February 21, 1948, when he photographed
the scrolls. The quality of his photographs often exceeded that of the scrolls
themselves over the years, as the texts quickly eroded once removed from their
linen wraps.
In March of that year, the 1948
Arab-Israeli War prompted the removal of the scrolls from the country for
safekeeping. The scrolls were removed to Beirut.
In early September 1948, Mar Samuel
brought Professor Ovid R. Sellers, the new Director of ASOR, some additional
scroll fragments that he had acquired. By the end of 1948, nearly two years
after the discovery of the scrolls, scholars had yet to locate the cave where
the fragments had been found. With the unrest in the country, no large scale
search could be undertaken. Sellers attempted to get the Syrians to help locate
the cave, but they demanded more money than Sellers could offer. Cave 1 was
finally discovered on January 28, 1949 by a United Nations observer.
After some time, the Dead Sea Scrolls
went up for sale in a June 1, 1954 advertisement in the Wall Street Journal.
“ MISCELLANEOUS
FOR SALE
THE Four DEAD SEA SCROLLS
Biblical manuscripts dating back to at
least 200 B.C.
are for sale. This would be and ideal
gift to an educational
or religious institution by an
individual or group.
Box F 206 WALL STREET JOURNAL
”
On July 1, after some delicate
negotiations, the scrolls, accompanied by the Metropolitan and two others, came
to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. They were purchased for 250,000 US
dollars. Only some of this Mar Samuel actually got: due to a mix up in
paperwork, the US government received most of the money, due to taxes.
Cave 2
Bedouins discovered 300 fragments of
other scrolls in Cave 2, including Jubilees & Ben Sirach in the original
Hebrew.
Cave 3
One of the most curious scrolls is the
Copper Scroll. Discovered in Cave 3, this scroll records a list of 67
underground hiding places throughout the land of Israel. According to the
scroll, the deposits contain certain amounts of gold, silver, aromatics, and
manuscripts. These are believed to be treasures from the Temple at Jerusalem
that were hidden away for safekeeping.
The Copper Scroll is currently being
translated and the first two sections reveal the location of gold ingots and
silver in the form of Sheckels (a coin used in Israel in ancient times).
According to Biblical Currency is equal to .364 oz. (troy). In a value of
silver, it is equal to $7.28. As for gold, it is equal to $364.
Cave 4
80% of all the scrolls were found here
and 90% was published. Cave 4 had 15,000 fragments with 500 different texts.
Caves 5 and 6 were discovered shortly
after cave 4. Caves 5 and 6 yielded a modest find.
Archaeologists discovered caves 7
through 10 in 1955, but did not find many fragments. Cave 7 contained seventeen
Greek documents (including 7Q5, which would be the subject of controversy in
the succeeding decades). Cave 8 only had five fragments and cave 9 held 18.
Cave 10 contained nothing but an ostracon.
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(February 2008).
The Temple Scroll (so called because
more than half of it pertains to the building of the Temple of Jerusalem) was
found in Cave 11, and is the longest scroll. Its present length is 26.7 feet
(8.148 meters), and the total length of the original scroll must have been over
28 feet (8.75m). This document, sectarian in nature, was regarded by the Yigael
Yadin as the Torah according to the Essenes. However, that conflicts with a
theory presented by Hartmann Steggemann, a good friend of Yaden, who believed
that the Temple Scroll was not considered to be the Torah of the Essenes, but
was just another record or document without any special significance.
Steggemann's theory is based on numerous points, for instance, that the Temple
Scroll is not once mentioned or referred to in other Essene writings.
Some of the documents were published
in a prompt manner: all of the writings found in Cave 1 appeared in print
between 1950 and 1956; the finds from 8 other caves were released in a single
volume in 1963; and 1965 saw the publication of the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11.
Translation of these materials quickly followed.
The exception to this was the
documents from Cave 4, which represent 40% of the total finds. The publication
of these had been entrusted to an international team led by Father Roland de
Vaux, a member of the Dominican Order in Jerusalem. This group published the
first volume of the material entrusted to them in 1968, but spent much of their
energies defending their theories regarding the materials, instead of
publishing them. Geza Vermes, who had been involved from the start in the
editing and publication of these documents, blamed the delay—and eventual
failure—on de Vaux's selection of a team unsuited to the quality of work he had
planned, as well as relying on "his personal, quasi-patriarchal
authority" to control the completion of the work.
As a result, a large part of the finds
from Cave 4 were not made public for many years. Access to the scrolls was
governed by a "secrecy rule" that allowed only the original
International Team or their designates to view the original materials. After de
Vaux's death in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused even to allow the
publication of photographs of these materials, preventing other scholars from
making their own judgments. This rule was eventually broken: first by Ben Zion
Wacholder's publication in the fall of 1991 of 17 documents reconstructed from
a concordance that had been made in 1988 and had come into the hands of
scholars outside of the International Team; next, in the same month, by the
discovery and publication of a complete set of photographs of the Cave 4
materials at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, that were not
covered by the "secrecy rule". After some delays these photographs
were published by Robert Eisenman and James Robinson (A Facsimile Edition of
the Dead Sea Scrolls, two volumes, Washington, D.C., 1991). As a result, the
"secrecy rule" was lifted.
Publication accelerated with the
appointment of the respected Dutch-Israeli textual scholar Emanuel Tov as
editor-in-chief in 1990. Publication of the Cave 4 documents soon commenced,
with five volumes in print by 1995. As of 2007 two volumes remain to be
completed, with the whole series, Discoveries in the Judean Desert, running to
thirty nine volumes in total.
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