truth

2005-03-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

U.S. wants Agent Orange suit dismissed
By William Glaberson The New York Times 03/01/05

"IHT" - - NEW YORK The U.S. Justice Department is urging a federal judge in New York to dismiss a lawsuit involving one of the most contentious issues of the Vietnam War: the use of the defoliant, Agent Orange.The civil suit, filed last year on behalf of millions of Vietnamese, claimed that American chemical companies had committed war crimes by supplying the military with Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, a highly toxic substance.
The suit seeks what could be billions of dollars of damages from the companies and the environmental cleanup of Vietnam.In preparation for legal arguments scheduled for Monday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, Justice Department lawyers filed a brief in January that described the suit as a threat to the president's power to wage war and an effort at a "breathtaking expansion" of the powers of federal courts.
Though the case drew little attention when it was first filed, it has become an important test of the reach of American courts - drawing worldwide interest and setting off a fierce debate among international law experts.
The government's filing said that, if the claims were accepted, they would "open the courthouse doors of the American legal system for former enemy nationals and soldiers claiming to have been harmed by the United States Armed Forces" during war.
One of the plaintiffs' lawyers, Constantine Kokkoris, said that the Justice Department's argument was misplaced because the government had not been sued in the case. He said the lawsuit raised questions about the conduct of the corporations that were limited to their supplying what he called contaminated herbicide.The chemical companies argued that they had produced Agent Orange following government specifications and that its use in Vietnam was necessary to protect American soldiers. They also argued that there is no clear link between exposure to Agent Orange and the health problems attributed to it.
During a hearing last March, Judge Jack Weinstein of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn said the case raised important issues and "has to go forward seriously," suggesting that it might eventually need to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
He asked whether precedents concerning the treatment of makers of Zyklon B, the hydrogen cyanide gas used in Nazi death camps, might be applicable.

After World War II, two manufacturers of Zyklon B were convicted of war crimes and executed.

Agent Orange was widely used in Vietnam. Its use was discontinued in 1971; but it has survived as a confounding legal issue. In 1984, after years of court battles, seven American chemical companies paid $180 million to settle a class action suit by American Vietnam War veterans, who claimed that Agent Orange caused cancer, birth defects and other health problems.
Weinstein, who also presided over those cases, said at the time that the veterans would have difficulty proving a link between their health problems and Agent Orange. Some scientists say the link would be easier to prove today.Because of the federal government's legal immunity, it was not part of the 1984 settlement and was not named as a defendant in the new suit on behalf of the Vietnamese.Thousands of pages of legal arguments have been filed in preparation for the arguments on Monday. International law experts have argued on both sides on the central issue: whether Agent Orange should be considered a "poison" that was barred during warfare by international law.
George Fletcher, an international law professor at Columbia University wrote that:
"in warfare it is permissible 'to stand and deliver' - to look the enemy squarely in the eye and shoot him - but not to look the other way and then use dioxin" to poison his food, land and water.
Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/02/28/news/orange.html
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

2005-03-01T11:31:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 31, 2005
CASPIAN UNCOVERS U.S. GOVERNMENT RFID PROMOTION SCHEME
Heads of Federal Agencies encouraged to "advance the industry"Have you wondered why the U.S. Government seems so keen on RFID lately? CASPIAN (Consumers Against RFID Privacy Invasion and Numbering) may have found the answer in the form of a General Services Administration (GSA) bulletin issued last month. The GSA is a federal agency that manages purchasing administration for other federal agencies. In Bulletin "B-7 Radio Frequency Identification," heads of federal agencies are "encouraged to consider action that can be taken to advance the [RFID] industry by demonstrating the long-term intent of the agencyto adopt RFID technological solutions." In addition, the document specifies that "agencies need to determine how to best implement RFID technology on current or proposed contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements."The directive was signed by G. Martin Wagner, Associate Administrator for the Office of Governmentwide Policy, on December 4, 2004. Coincidently, since that time, major RFID initiatives have been publicized by a number of government agencies, including Social Security, NASA, the Postal Service, and the Department of HomelandSecurity, among others."Buying needed equipment is one thing. Finding excuses to purchase and promote controversial technology at taxpayer expense is another," said Katherine Albrecht, Founder and Director of CASPIAN. "The RFID industryhas planned to use 'top tier' government officials to advance their agenda since 2002. Apparently those efforts are now paying off." “Albrecht points to a cache of confidential documents that her group discovered in 2003. These included a strategy document prepared for a prominent RFID industry consortium by public relations firmFleischman-Hillard. The document recommended identifying "key government, regulatory, and interest group leaders" to bring into the "inner circle" of support for the RFID industry (see pages 28-29). In one of the confidential documents, Fleischman-Hillard indicated thatthere had even been a "successful meeting with Office of HomelandSecurity Director Tom Ridge.""We have no evidence that any specific public official was co-opted,"said Albrecht, "but it's curious how many well-publicized RFIDdeployments have been announced since that bulletin was released."

The Spychips website is a project of CASPIAN, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering. © CASPIAN 2003-2004.

2005-02-27T06:50:00.002-08:00

New Book on Bottled Water Shows How the Public is Being Defrauded
Posted 2/23/05

Polaris Institute publishes new book:
Inside the Bottle: An exposé of thebottled water industry
Across North America, the bottled water industry is exploding. Bottled watersales are now the fastest growing segment of the entire beverage industry.Over the past decade, the consumption of bottled water has more than doubledin the U.S. alone, in Canada; bottled water consumption now outpaces that ofcoffee, tea, apple juice or milk.
Inside the Bottle provides a vivid and disturbing portrayal of how four bigcompanies Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Danone --- dominate the bottledwater industry today. It examines key issues of public concern about theiroperations, including how they:
- pay little or next to nothing for the water they take from rural springsor public water systems;- turn "water" into "water" through elaborate treatment processes;- produce a product that is not necessarily safer than, nor as regulated as,tap water; - package it in plastic bottles made of toxic chemicals that areenvironmentally destructive;- market it to an unsuspecting public as "pure, healthy, safe drinkingwater."- sell it at prices that are hundreds and even thousands of times morecostly than ordinary tap water.
This book also identifies what people can do in their communities to:
- stimulate public awareness and debate about these issues.- challenge and resist the more exploitive practices of the big-4 bottledwater companies. - promote the rebuilding of public tap water systems and services.- develop alternative models of bottled water production that are locallycontrolled and ecologically sustainable.
To view a preview of the book check out www.polarisinstitute.org
Cost $15 CDN ($13 USD) plus shipping.
Bulk orders of the book are also available for groups, at cost pricing!Activists are encouraged to place a bulk order and use the book as aneducational and fund-raising tool for local water campaigns. The book can besold at events, put on school reading lists or hosted by independent bookstores --- interested groups keep the sales income to support local waterstruggles!
Assistance in promoting the book to your constituency via website links ornotices in your newsletters is appreciated and we can provide copy andgraphics.

Contact insidethebottle@polarisinstitute.org for order details.

Polaris Institute 312 Cooper St Ottawa, ON Canada K2P 0G7 Tel. 613.237.1717

2005-02-27T06:50:00.001-08:00

EPA Sued for Backroom Deals with Pesticide Manufacturers
From: Environmental News Service <www.ens-newswire.com> 2/21/05

EPA Sued for Backroom Deals With Pesticide Makers
By J.R. Pegg

WASHINGTON, DC, February 21, 2005 (ENS) The U.S. EnvironmentalProtection Agency (EPA) is illegally negotiating and brokering regulatoryagreements with pesticide manufacturers that are friendly to the industry,according a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
The suit targets private deals the agency allegedly made over theregulation of atrazine, a widely used weed killer, and the highly toxicinsecticide dichlorvos (DDVP).
"The EPA's secret, backroom deals with pesticide makers are clearly againstthe law, and they are a threat to our health," said Aaron Colangelo, anattorney with NRDC.
Hooded sprayers direct herbicide just to areas between rows of grainsorghum. (Photo by Jack Dykinga courtesy USDA)Documents obtained by NRDC through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)show that the EPA negotiated outcomes of pesticide reviews and committed totaking specific actions with industry, Colangelo said.
The suit, filed Thursday in federal court in Washington, DC, alleges thesenegotiations violated agency rules as well as federal laws that govern howregulations of harmful chemicals are developed and reported to the public.
The EPA¹s press office said the agency is currently reviewing the specificsof the complaint and rejects the broad allegations outlined by the NRDC inits complaint.
In a statement sent to reporters, an EPA spokesperson said the agency¹sevaluation of atrazine and DDVP is "based on a thorough review of anextensive body of the best available scientific data and studies andindependent peer review."
The agency¹s approach "to decision-making for older pesticides is widelyconsidered to be a model for transparency and openness," according to thestatement.
The lawsuit continues a long running legal battle NRDC has waged with thefederal agency over its pesticide regulations.
In 1983 NRDC sued the agency for similar widespread violations committedunder then EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch.
The EPA settled NRDC¹s case in 1984 and agreed to strict pesticideregulations that forbid secret meetings and private dealmaking.
But the agency is not following those regulations, said NRDC seniorattorney Erik Olson said, and "apparently is back to its old bad habits."
"These deals are bad for public health, bad for the environment, and badfor democracy," Olson said.
This latest legal challenge comes from NRDC¹s particular concern over theagency¹s oversight of atrazine one of the most widely used pesticides inthe United States. Atrazine¹s main manufacturer is the Swiss companySyngenta, based in Basel.
Atrazine is mainly applied to corn and soybean crops, but is also used onsorghum, sugarcane, pineapple, turf grass, and Christmas tree farms.
Damage to cultivars of St. Augustine grass from summer application ofatrazine on a sod farm. Atrazine is water soluble and has been discovered ingroundwater, mainly in the Midwest. (Photo courtesy Turf Science)Some 70 million pounds of atrazine are applied annually to fields, lawnsand golf courses across the United States and the EPA has found widespreadatrazine contamination in U.S. waterways.
Recent data indicates more than one million Americans drink from watersupplies contaminated with atrazine at potentially harmful levels.
Studies of people exposed to atrazine indicate that the chemical may belinked to a number of cancers, including prostate cancer and nonHodgkin'slymphoma.
Animal lab studies also have linked it to certain cancers and hormonalproblems that could disrupt reproductive and developmental processes - thereis particular concern that the chemical is seriously disrupting amphibianhormone and reproductive systems.
In 2003, scientists at the University of California-Berkeley, showed thatatrazine exposure caused reproductive abnormalities in frogs, and said, The"current data raise concern about the effects of atrazine on amphibians ingeneral and the potential role of atrazine and other endocrine-disruptingpesticides in amphibian declines."
The European Union recently banned atrazine because of pervasive drinkingwater contamination, but in October 2003 the EPA decided to reregisteratrazine without holding manufacturers to any new restrictions.
Michael Pragnell is Syngenta's CEO, a director and member of the Chairman¹sCommittee. Pragnell also serves as president of CropLife International, theglobal association for the plant science industry. The agreement announced by the EPA called on atrazine manufacturers tomonitor streams and drinking water supplies for contamination.
The NRDC says internal agency documents obtained through a FOIA lawsuitshow that the EPA negotiated the industry-friendly deal in private andwithout following the law.
EPA officials met secretly more than 40 times with representatives fromatrazine¹s main manufacturer, Syngenta, while the agency was evaluating thetoxicity of the pesticide, Olson said.
The EPA allowed industry to negotiate the terms of the agreement, Olsonsaid, and "essentially decided to do nothing."
Syngenta will monitor less than four percent of streams considered atgreatest risk from atrazine contamination, Olson told reporters, and the EPAhas not committed to making those results public.
The suit alleges similar private negotiations with the chemical companyAmvac over the status of the insecticide DDVP.
Based in Newport Beach, California, Eric Wintemute has been Amvac'sPresident and American Vanguard Corporation's CEO since mid-1994. (Photocourtesy Environmental Health Perspectives)DDVP is used in pest strips as well as crack and crevice fillers within thehome.
It is a highly toxic organophosphate similar to nerve gas that causespermanent nervous system damage in young test animals, and may cause relatedabnormalities in exposed infants and children.
DDVP is classified by the World Health Organization as a Class IB, "highlyhazardous" chemical. Dichlorvos is sold under many trade names includingVapona®, Atgard®, Nuvan®, and Task®.
The EPA has also designated dichlorvos as a hazardous substance andspecific regulations regarding its disposal are in effect.
According to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry(ASTDR), the main uses of DDVP are for insect control in food storage areas,greenhouses, and barns, and for parasite control in livestock. It isgenerally not used on outdoor crops. It is sometimes used for insect controlin workplaces and the home. Veterinarians also use it to control parasitesin pets.
The lawsuit alleges that the EPA is privately negotiating with Amvac,DDVP¹s manufacturer, to allow the company to continue to sell theinsecticide for many home and agricultural uses.
DDVP evaporates easily into the air, which is why it is usually used inenclosed areas, the ASTDR states. Once in the air, it can react with watervapor and be broken down.
Experiments in greenhouses and food storage areas show that 90 percent ofthe applied dichlorvos disappeared in three to six hours. The products ofthis breakdown are two chemicals called dimethyl phosphate anddichloroacetaldehyde. The ASTDR says, "These chemicals are less harmful thandichlorvos and are not believed to cause health effects in people."Quote of Note
"Basically, every human individual carries responsibility for the benefit orwelfare of humanity and for the planet itself, because this planet is ouronly home. We have no alternative refuge. Therefore, everyone has theresponsibility to care not only for our fellow human beings but also forinsects, plants, animals and this very planet."-- His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.
Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2005. All Rights Reserved

2005-02-27T06:50:00.000-08:00

Thom Hartman--When Democracy Fails
Published on Tuesday, February 22, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
When Democracy Failed - 2005 The Warnings of History
by Thom Hartmann

This weekend - February 27th - is the 72nd anniversary, but the corporatemedia most likely won't cover it. The generation that experienced thishistory firsthand is now largely dead, and only a few of us dare hear their ghosts.
It started when the government, in the midst of an economic crisis,received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue hadlaunched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largelyignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew,however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians arestill arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence servicehelped the terrorist. Some, like Sefton Delmer - a London Daily Expressreporter on the scene - say they certainly did not, while others, likeWilliam Shirer, suggest they did.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, inpart because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be thenation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority ofcitizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.
He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw thingsin black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand thesubtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.
His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in asouthernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalisticrhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educatedelite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secretsociety with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals thatinvolved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn'tknow where or when), and he had already considered his response. When anaide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building wasablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed tothe scene and called a press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," heproclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded bynational media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "isthe beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - todeclare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people,he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivationfor their evil deeds in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built inOranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. Ina national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, evenprinted large in newspapers suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leaderhad pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism andfighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutionalguarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could nowintercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisonedwithout specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police couldsneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passedover the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, heagreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergencyprovoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rightswould be returned to the people, and the police agencies would bere-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read thebill before voting on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal policeagencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons andholding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only afew hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored bythe mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to aleader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leaderin public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting thenewly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off inprotest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In themeantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning tocontrol his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a verycompetent orator.)
Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of apolitical advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. Hewanted to stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so, instead ofreferring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "TheHomeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speechrecorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of TheWill." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of anus-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizensthought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," hesuggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall onothers, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our livesbetter, it's of little concern to us.
Playing on this new implicitly racial nationalism, and exploiting adisagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued thatany international body that didn't act first and foremost in the bestinterest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrewhis country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiateda separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdomto create a worldwide military ruling elite.
His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people thathe was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted inChristianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christianfaith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man inhis rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" -God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined thatthe various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lackingthe clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary todeal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly thosecitizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist andcommunist sympathizers, and various troublesome "intellectuals" and"liberals." He proposed a single new national agency to protect the securityof the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previouslyindependent police, border, and investigative agencies under a singleleader.
He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this newagency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role inthe government equal to the other major departments.
His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terroristattack, "Radio and press are at out disposal." Those voices questioning thelegitimacy of their nation's leader, or raising questions about hischeckered past, had by now faded from the public's recollection as hiscentral security office began advertising a program encouraging people tophone in tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so successfulthat the names of some of the people "denounced" were soon being broadcaston radio stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians andnews reporters who dared speak out - a favorite target of his regime and themedia he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by corporateallies.
To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't enough.He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing formerexecutives of the nation's largest corporations into high governmentpositions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers tofight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking withinthe homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged largecorporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrialconcerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned bysuspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful allianceswith industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millionsto build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state.Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.
He also reached out to the churches, declaring that the nation had clearChristian roots, that any nation that didn't openly support religion wasmorally bankrupt, and that his administration would openly and proudlyprovide both moral and financial support to initiatives based on faith toprovide social services.
In this, he was reaching back to his own embrace of Christianity, which henoted in an April 12, 1922 speech:
"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. Itpoints me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a fewfollowers ... was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.
"In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passagewhich tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourgeto drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders...
"As a Christian ... I have the duty to be a fighter for truth andjustice..."
When he later survived an assassination attempt, he said, "Now I amcompletely content. The fact that I left the Burgerbraukeller earlier thanusual is a corroboration of Providence's intention to let me reach my goal."
Many government functions started with prayer. Every school day startedwith prayer and every child heard the wonders of Christianity and -especially - the Ten Commandments in school. The leader even ended many ofhis speeches with a prayer, as he did in a February 20, 1938 speech beforeParliament:
"In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past,so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and ouraction, to our judgment and our resolution, that He will safeguard us fromall false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us tofind the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the Germanpeople, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never tofalter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger."
But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices ofdissent again arose within and without the government. Students had startedan active program opposing him (later known as the White Rose Society), andleaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric.He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporatecronyism being exposed in his own government, questions of his possiblyillegitimate rise to power, his corruption of religious leaders, and theoft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians about the people being held indetention without due process or access to attorneys or family.
With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media - he began acampaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war wasnecessary. Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious MiddleEastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who hadset afire the nation's most important building was tenuous at best, it heldresources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live andmaintain their prosperity.
He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to theleader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimedthe right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe- at first - denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine onlyclaimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar's Romeor Alexander's Greece.
It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying withEuropean nations, but, after he personally met with the leader of the UnitedKingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the military action began, PrimeMinister Neville Chamberlain told the nervous British people that giving into this leader's new first-strike doctrine would bring "peace for our time."Thus Hitler annexed Austria in a lightning move, riding a wave of popularsupport as leaders so often do in times of war. The Austrian government wasunseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany, and Germancorporations began to take over Austrian resources.
In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said, "Certainforeign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. Ican only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course ofmy political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed theformer frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I havenever experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."
To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of hispolitically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began acampaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nationitself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that theterrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting thenation or weakening its will.
Rather than the government being run by multiple parties in a pluralistic,democratic fashion, one single party sought total control. Emulating atechnique also used by Stalin, but as ancient as Rome, the Party used thepower of its influence on the government to take over all governmentfunctions, hand out government favors, and reward Party contributors withgovernment positions and contracts.
In times of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation,and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so hisadvocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics ofhis policies were attacking the nation itself. You were either with us, oryou were with the terrorists.
It was a simplistic perspective, but that was what would work, he was toldby his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels: "The most brilliantpropagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamentalprinciple is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a fewpoints and repeat them over and over."
Those questioning him were labeled "anti-German" or "not good Germans," andit was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in thepatriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform. Itwas one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earningpeople (from whom most of the army came) against the "intellectuals andliberals" who were critical of his policies.
Another technique was to "manufacture news," through the use of paid shillsposing as reporters, seducing real reporters with promises of access to theleader in exchange for favorable coverage, and thinly veiled threats tothose who exposed his lies. As his Propaganda Minister said, "It is theabsolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
Nonetheless, once the "small war" annexation of Austria was successfullyand quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of opposition were againraised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news bulletins about thedangers of terrorist communist cells wasn't enough to rouse the populace andtotally suppress dissent. A full-out war was necessary to divert publicattention from the growing rumbles within the country about disappearingdissidents; violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and theepidemic of crony capitalism that was producing empires of wealth in thecorporate sector but threatening the middle class's way of life.
A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
In the months after that, he claimed that Poland had weapons of massdestruction (poison gas) and was supporting terrorists against Germany.Those who doubted that Poland represented a threat were shouted down orbranded as ignorant. Elections were rigged, run by party hacks. Only loyalParty members were given passes for admission to public events with theleader, so there would never be a single newsreel of a heckler, and no doubtin the minds of the people that the leader enjoyed vast support.
And his support did grow, as Propaganda Minister Goebbels' dictum bore fruit:
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventuallycome to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as theState can shield the people from the political, economic and/or militaryconsequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State touse all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemyof the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of theState."
Within a few months Poland, too, was invaded in a "defensive, pre-emptive"action. The nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent wassuppressed in the name of national security; it was the end of Germany'sfirst experiment with democracy.
As we conclude this review of history, there are a few milestones worthremembering.
February 27, 2005, is the 72nd anniversary of Dutch terrorist Marinus vander Lubbe's successful firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag)building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy andreshaped the German constitution. By the time of his successful and briefaction to seize Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitlerwas the most beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation. Hailedaround the world, he was later Time magazine's "Man Of The Year."
Most Americans remember his office for the security of the homeland, knownas the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, simply by its mostfamous agency's initials: the SS.
We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly violentwarfare they named "lightning war" or blitzkrieg, which, while generatingdevastating civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable "shock andawe" among the nation's leadership according to the authors of the 1996 book"Shock And Awe" published by the National Defense University Press.
Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton MifflinCompany, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the Germandemocracy had become through Hitler's close alliance with the largest Germancorporations and his policy of using religion and war as tools to keeppower: "fas-cism (fâsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises adictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of stateand business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to rememberthat the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United Statesalike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very differentcourses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.
Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and rewardthe society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifledissent, strip people of constitutional rights, bust up unions, and createan illusion of prosperity through government debt and continual andever-expanding war spending.
America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforcedanti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes oncorporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, andbecame the employer of last resort through programs to build nationalinfrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.
To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.

Thom Hartmann (www.thomhartmann.com) lived and worked in Germany during the1980s, is the Project Censored Award-winning, best-selling author of over adozen books, and is the host of a nationally syndicated daily progressivetalk radio program. This article, in slightly altered form, was firstpublished in 2003 by CommonDreams.org and is now also a chapter in Thom'sbook What Would Jefferson Do?, published in 2004 by Random House/Harmony.
###
© Copyrighted 1997-2005www.commondreams.org

2005-02-26T22:34:00.000-08:00

This is your President's brain on drugs
By DOUG THOMPSON
Feb 25, 2005,
08:25

Screw it. I’m not waiting until March 1. Too much crap out there. Too much malfeasance. Too many scum suckers living large off the backs of taxpayers.
So many scandals, screwups, corruption and FUBAR. Where to start?
Oh, what the hell. Let’s start with Dubya. Seems a slimeball named Doug Wead secretly taped his phone conversations with George W. and then let reporters listen to the tapes. In one, the Prez admits he was a doper but swore he would never admit smoking grass because it would set a bad example for kids.
Stoned cold Prez"I wouldn't answer the marijuana question. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried," Bush says on the tape. “But you got to understand, I want to be president. I want to lead. Do you want your little kid say, 'Hey, Daddy, President Bush tried marijuana, I think I will?”
Now that’s a man with major league delusions of grandeur. No kid with an IQ over that of an average plant gives a fuck what Bush says, thinks or does. Kids don’t look up to political shitheads. Kids are smarter than that. The only cretins who admire Bush are the brain-dead Republicans who sold their souls to the Devil to get, and remain in, power. Bush might wow some Midwestern housewife or some toothless redneck who plasters his pickup truck with American flags, but you could take what both know about politics and real leadership and stick it in your eye without feeling it, so Bush should stop fretting about how kids or anyone with a nose sees him. They know shit when they smell it.
But it took another bottom feeder to catch Dubya on tape finally telling the truth about his drug-soaked past (or at least part of it). That’s no biggie. All you have to do is listen to Bush mangle the English language to realize too much alcohol and drugs fried his gray matter a long, long time ago.
The question is not whether Bush was a druggie. Hell, intelligent folk know that. What we don’t know is whether or not he’s still using. If he is, it would explain a lot. Only a hophead would pull some of the dumb ass stunts we’ve seen come out of the White House since January 20, 2001.
Dr. Justin Frank, the prominent Washington shrink who wrote Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, says the Prez is, at the very least, a dry drunk – someone who no longer drinks but still pulls all the bonehead stunts of a drunk.
"I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote, and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed," Dr. Frank says. Bush, he said, "fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated.”
Dr. Frank diagnoses Bush as a “paranoid megalomaniac” and points to a “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions ... [and] pumping his fist gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad."
“The President's years of heavy drinking may have affected his brain function - and his decision to quit drinking without the help of a 12-step program [puts] him at far higher risk of relapse,” Dr. Frank adds.
That’s what America gets when it puts a doper and a drunk in the White House.

© Copyright 2004 by Capitol Hill Blue

2005-02-26T22:30:00.000-08:00

For Immediate Release:
February 23, 2005 Contact: Chas Offutt (202) 265-7337

MORE THAN A THOUSAND WHISTLEBLOWER CASES DUMPED —
Special Counsel Dismisses Hundreds of Disclosures and Complaints in Past Year
Washington, DC —

The U.S. Special Counsel has dismissed more than 1,000 whistleblower cases in the past year, according to a letter from the Bush-appointed Special Counsel released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The Special Counsel appears to have taken action in very few, if any, of these cases and has yet to represent a single whistleblower in an employment case.
In a letter dated February 14, 2005 and addressed to U.S. Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), Special Counsel Scott Bloch defends his stormy 13 months in office by pointing to a sharp drop in backlogged whistleblower cases.
“Everyone agrees that backlogs and delays are bad but they are not as bad as simply dumping the cases altogether,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that this letter is the first account that Bloch has released of his tenure and that his office’s report for FY 2004, which ended in October, is overdue. “If the Office of Special Counsel under Scott Bloch is not helping whistleblowers then there is no reason for the office to continue to exist.”
According to the figures released by Bloch, in the past year the Office of Special Counsel—
Dismissed or otherwise disposed of 600 whistleblower disclosures where civil servants have reported waste, fraud, threats to public safety and violations of law. Bloch has yet to announce a single case where he has ordered an investigation into the employee’s charges. Bloch says that 100 disclosures are still pending; and
Made 470 claims of retaliation disappear. In not one of these cases did Bloch’s office affirmatively represent a whistleblower to obtain relief before the civil service court system, called the Merit Systems Protection Board. Bloch says that another 30 retaliation cases remain in the backlog.
In order to speed dismissals, Bloch instituted a rule forbidding his staff from contacting a whistleblower if their disclosure was deemed incomplete or ambiguous. Instead, OSC would simply dismiss the matter. As a result, hundreds of whistleblowers never had a chance to justify why their cases had merit.
“According to Scott Bloch there is no waste, fraud or abuse in the federal government that deserves investigation,” stated Ruch, noting that there may be even more dismissals than Bloch reported because the numbers cited above are limited to what was defined as a backlog and do not include new cases.
Rep. Waxman and Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL), the ranking minority party members of the House Government Reform Committee and its Civil Service Subcommittee, respectively, had originally written to ask for an investigation by the Government Accountability Office into Bloch’s forced removal of OSC staff, hiring of cronies and failure to answer Freedom of Information Act requests.
###
Read the letter from Scott Bloch to Rep. Henry Waxman
See the original letter from Rep. Waxman and Rep. Davis
Look at the last full status report on OSC’s backlog
Find out more about Scott Bloch’s tenure at OSC

From:
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=483

2005-02-26T22:24:00.000-08:00

New Homeland Security Czar Is An Israeli Citizen By Christopher Bollyn 2-23-5

On February 15, 2005, Judge Michael Chertoff, a "de jure" Israeli citizen, was sworn in as the second Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security for the United States.

While his official biographies carefully omit the essentials of his parents' citizenship, this much can be deduced.

Michael Chertoff, was born on November 28, 1953 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to an Israeli mother, Livia Chertoff, and Rabbi Gershon Chertoff (citizenship unknown).

His mother Livia was the first airline hostess for Israel's El Al Airlines, and participated in Operation Magic Carpet, the airlift of 45,000 Yemenite to Israeli-occupied Palestine in May 1949.

It is simply not possible that Livia could have even become a U.S. citizen by November 1953, due to the 5-year residency requirement. She could have only have been an Israeli citizen (and perhaps Polish if she retained the citizenship of her birth nation).

Here is Livia Chertoff's obituary:

Source: The Star-Ledger Newark, NJ
Published: December 21, 1998

Livia Chertoff, 73, El Al flight attendant

21 December 1998
The Star-Ledger Newark, NJ

OBITUARY Services for Mrs. Livia Chertoff, 73, of Delray Beach, Fla., mother of former U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Michael Chertoff, will be held at 1 p.m. today in the Kreitzman's Memorial Home, 1500 Morris Ave., Union.

Mrs. Chertoff died Saturday in the Ashbrook Nursing Home, Scotch Plains.

She was the first airline hostess for El Al Airlines and participated in Operation Magic Carpet, the famous airlift of Yemenite Jews to Israel.

Mrs. Chertoff also operated L'Artigue, an art gallery in Elizabeth.

Her son, Michael, served as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983 through 1987 and as First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1987 through 1990. He was U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1990 through 1994 and during the Whitewater investigation in 1995 and 1996, he was counsel for the Senate Banking Committee.

Born in Poland, Mrs. Chertoff lived in Palestine and Elizabeth before moving to Florida several years ago.

Also surviving are three sisters, a brother and two grandchildren.

Below are Israel's citizenship laws, which clearly show that Michael Chertoff was an automatic Israeli citizen at birth, despite the fact that he was born in New Jersey.

The operative law for Michael Chertoff is this one:

By Descent:

Child born on or after July 14, 1952, at least one of whose parents is a citizen of Israel, regardless of the child's country of birth.

ISRAEL CITIZENSHIP LAWS

CITIZENSHIP: Citizenship is based upon the Citizenship Law of 1952 and amended in 1968.

Any Jew who immigrated to Israel before July 14, 1952, was granted citizenship after declaring a desire to reside permanently in Israel.

Any former citizen of Palestine, present in Israel before July 14, 1952, was granted citizenship upon fulfillment of certain (unspecified) conditions.

Any Jew or a member of a family of a Jew who immigrates to Israel after expressing their intention to settle in Israel, if from the date of their arrival as an immigrant, unless, being abovethe age of eighteen and a foreign citizen, they declare within three months from the date of arrival, that they do not wish to become an Israeli citizen. A "member of a family" of a Jewincludes a spouse, a grandchild, and spouses of the child or grandchild of a Jew.

BY BIRTH: Birth within the territory of Israel does not automatically confer citizenship.*

Being born in Israel to a citizen of Israel.

Stateless person, born in Israel after May 14, 1948, is able to apply for citizenship between their 18th and 21st birthdays, provided they have resided in Israel for at least five years before application.*

BY DESCENT:

Child born on or after July 14, 1952, at least one of whose parents is a citizen of Israel, regardless of the child's country of birth.

A person born outside Israel while a parent was an Israeli citizen by Return (a'renaturalized' Jew), Residence, or Naturalization.

PHOTO: THE ISRAELI CITIZEN WHO IS OUR NEW HOMELAND SECURITY CZAR, MICHAEL CHERTOFF.

The son of El Al's first hostess is keeping our "homeland" safe.

Don't you feel more secure already?

2005-02-26T22:21:00.001-08:00

Freedoms Lost Under G.W. BushBy Chuck Baldwin2-23-5

Supporters and apologists for President G.W. Bush will often assail my assertion that the Bush administration has done more to dismantle constitutional protections of our liberties than any president in modern memory. It seems that these people believe that until federal Storm Troopers knock down the doors of their homes and drag them off to the gulags, they have lost no freedoms. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If history is any teacher, it instructs us in the incremental process that elitists use to implement their totalitarian agenda. The first step is to use an incessant, highly orchestrated propaganda. For all practical purposes, the major media in the United States is providing that propaganda. At the national level, there is hardly any investigative journalism going on. Instead, the national press corps has become little more than lazy lackeys for the White House.

The second step is to lay the foundation for totalitarianism by passing legislation that may later be used against the citizenry. And that is exactly what the Bush administration has very successfully accomplished. It very adroitly succeeded where the Clinton administration failed.

For example, most conservatives would be surprised to learn that the Patriot Act and Department of Homeland Security was the brainchild of one William Jefferson Clinton. However, a recalcitrant Republican Congress denied Clinton the opportunity to implement these plans. Of course, with the Republican, G.W. Bush, serving as President, that same Republican Congress was all too eager to pass these bills into law.

The third step is to demonize and marginalize anyone and everyone who opposes the government's plans and ambitions. Such opponents are characterized as "unpatriotic," "obstructionist," "uncompassionate," or even "ungodly." Once again, the Bush minions have very skillfully done just that. Anyone who dares to oppose or even question Bush must be regarded as enemies of America or even as enemies of God.

Of course, the last step is to begin using the power and force of government to physically silence or remove those who are determined to require such treatment. And, as Germany's National Socialists proved, by the time this happens, there is no one around who is capable of coming to the assistance of such people.

For those who are willing to objectively analyze Bush's actions and policies, the truth is clearly seen: this President has systematically put in place laws, policies, and bureaucracies that can, are, and will continue to strip the American citizenry of the constitutional protections of their liberties.

Following are examples of freedoms which President Bush and his fellow Republicans in Congress have already expunged (as reported by the Associated Press):

FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity to assist terror investigations.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records questions.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.

RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.

FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation.

RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.

RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.

These rights have already been lost! Whether individual Americans have been personally subjected to the resultant tyranny or not doesn't change the fact that they have already lost these freedoms! This fact, alone, should be enough for any studious lover-of-liberty to be outraged.

That good citizens are compliant and unconcerned regarding G.W. Bush's propensity to trample constitutional freedoms bespeaks a great ignorance or a great apathy, or both.

2005-02-26T22:21:00.000-08:00

Aspartame Interacts With ALL Drugs Vaccines And Toxins
FDA Put On NoticeFrom Dr. Betty Martini, D.Hum.Bettym19@mindspring.com2-23-5

Who knows more about the toxicity of aspartame than the FDA. Their toxicologists, Doctors Adrian Gross and Jacqueline Verrett strenuously objected to aspartame approval for 16 years. It wasn't just that aspartame is not safe and in original studies triggered brain tumors, seizures and all sorts of other tumors, it was that the manufacturer filtered out what they didn't want FDA to see.

(January 10, l977 in a 33 page letter, FDA Chief Counsel Richard Merrill recommended to U.S. Attorney Sam Skinner that a grand jury investigate Searle for "apparent violations of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, 21 U.S.C.331(e), Act 18 USC 1001, for "their willful and knowing failure to make reports to the Food and Drug Administration required by the Act 21, U.S.C. 355 (i) and for concealing material facts and making false statements in reports of animal studies conducted to establish the safety of (aspartame)," The FDA called special attention to studies investigating the effect of NutraSweet on monkeys and hamsters. ) Both U.S. Prosecutors hired on with the defense team and the statute of limitations expired. Still the FDA kept saying loudly no - no - no!

FDA's Jerome Bressler wrote the brilliant FDA audit, the Bressler Report on http://www.dorway.com in regard to Searle's testing. In speaking with Bressler he told me personally the studies were so bad the worst 20% was removed by FDA when retyped. He also told this to Doctors H. J. Roberts and Dr. Russell Blaylock. Dr. Roberts asked his congressman to get the rest of the report from the FDA who promptly refused.

In the incredible aspartame documentary, Sweet Misery, A Poisoned World, from the very mouth of Attorney James Turner who assisted the famed Dr. John Olney in trying to prevent approval came mind boggling facts! Don Rumsfeld, currently Secretary of Defense, was CEO of Searle and said he would call in his markers and get aspartame approved. To Rumsfeld the fact the FDA said "no" meant only he would have to use politics instead of science to get this neurotoxin approved, knowing full well it would poison the public, causing in humans the injuries seen in lab animals, brain tumors and seizures. He was on Reagan's transition team and the day after Reagan took office Arthur Hull Hayes was appointed to approve this toxin, since no former FDA Commissioner had been willing to do so.

ASPARTAME WAS APPROVED BY PRESIDENTIAL ORDER

President Reagan knew it would take 30 days to get Hayes to FDA so he wrote an executive order making the outgoing FDA Commissioner powerless to oppose aspartame. From the congressional record, Senate, page S5497, May 7, l985:

"Two FDA officials have told Common Cause Magazine that Hayes was determined to push aspartame forward, in part as a signal that the Reagan administration was ushering in a new regulatory era. One official privy to some of the deliberations made at Hayes' level says the "people at the top" were not receptive to important concerns raised about the quality and validity of some of the key tests submitted in support of aspartame."

"There were real questions" about the reliability and interpretation of the data "that were glossed over" at the commissioner's level, this official says, adding that Hayes and his close associates wanted FDA scientists to concentrate on providing rationales for overturning the l980 Public Board of Inquiry instead of focusing on the fact that there were unresolved issues about a number of key tests."

John Hoey, M.D. in reviewing Marcia Angell's book, "The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It" (10/7/2004) says:

"By Angell's account, the current slide toward the commercialization and corruption of clinical research coincided with the election of President Ronald Reagan in l980 and the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, a new set of laws that permitted and encouraged universities and small businesses to patent discoveries from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Research paid for by the public to serve the public instantly became a private and salable, good, one that is producing drug sales of more than $200 billion a year."

Further, Dr. Hoey in discussing research commercialization said: "The broader effects are felt in the commercialization of universities, medical faculties, and our profession. In 2000, in a letter written in response to Angell's Journal editorial, Is Academic Medicine for Sale?" a reader supplied the answer: No. The current owner is very happy with it. The increasing intrusion of industry into medical education and the almost complete domination of continuing medical education (especially regarding drugs) by the marketing departments of large pharmaceutical companies are a scandal."

When Arthur Hull Hayes got to the FDA a Board of Inquiry was set up with the finest scientists FDA had. They declared: " ..the Board concludes that approval of aspartame for use in foods should be withheld at least until the question concerning its possible oncogenic potential has been resolved by further experiments. The Board has not been presented with proof of a reasonable certainty that aspartame is safe for use as a food additive under its intended conditions of use. "

"ORDER: The foregoing constitutes the Board's findings of fact and conclusions of law. Therefore, it is ORDERED that: (1) Approval of the food additive petition for aspartame (FAP 3A2885) be and it is hereby withdrawn. (2) The stay of the effectiveness of the regulation for aspartame, 21 CFR 172.804, is hereby vacated and the regulation revoked."

--- This PBOI report on 9/3/80 was signed by Walle J. H. Nauta, M.D., Ph.D., Chairman, Peter W. Lampert, M.D., and Vernon R. Young, Ph.D., Member

Dr. Hayes wouldn't take "no" because he was there to get aspartame approved. As the Congressional Record continues, Senate, S5497, May 7, l985: "Hayes decisions to approve aspartame for use in dry foods such as cereals in l981 and soft drinks in l983 does not square with the role of the FDA is supposed to play. The FDA is the government agency that reviews and approves all tests submitted by companies before allowing food additives on the market. The law requires a manufacturer - in this case Searle - to prove to the satisfaction of the FDA that there is a "reasonable certainty" that a food additive is safe. The government does not have to prove that it is harmful - an important distinction. If tests are inconclusive, an additive is not suppose to be approved by the FDA."

When Hayes finished his job to get a neurotoxic drug on the market he hired on with the public relations firm, Burston Marsteller, who represented NutraSweet, for $1000.00 per day as a consultant. Hayes refused to talk to the press since. He had no excuse for approving a toxic drug whose petition was revoked by FDA scientists. Hayes had full knowledge that its a carcinogen in violation of the Delaney Amendment which forbid adding carcinogens to food and drugs.

WHEN FDA WAS PUSHED OFF ITS PEDESTAL: Imagine an intact FDA which tried to do its job of protecting the public, having to proclaim that a horrendous neurotoxic drug is safe. Would could FDA say when asked if aspartame was safe? Could they say "we approved it but its poison"? Probably the only thing they could say was "Ask us no questions and we will tell you no lies." Even today when journalists ask the FDA to comment on aspartame they say: "No comment. See our web site." The web site is just lying industry propaganda. Beginning with Reagan and Hayes the pharmaceutical cartel had the power to get approved the worst drugs. FDA seemed to care not. Their bulletin, the FDA Consumer continued to tout the safety of aspartame and letters to victims whose lives were destroyed said aspartame was the most tested additive in history. Even letters to congressmen lied and lied.

Dr. John Olney knew what aspartame would do to the brains of our children. and discussed it in his report to the Board of Inquiry. In l999 Parents Magazine asked "What's Happening to our Children", announcing that families all over America were experiencing so much depression it was estimated that 1 out of 4 had contemplated suicide. The 50% phenylalanine in aspartame lowers the seizure threshold and depletes serotonin,and can trigger bipolar or manic depression, mood swings, paranoia, hallucination and suicidal tendencies. So our children are medicated instead of educated. Seventy per cent of consumers use aspartame and 40% of the children. Dr. Olney's prophecy is fulfilled.

To get a copy of the congressional record, Board of Inquiry Report and Dr. Olney's Report to the Board of Inquiry on CD you can contact Bob Flint at bobflint@greatfallspro.com. The web site would be www.greatfallspro.com

Three congressional hearings were held by Senator Howard Metzenbaum who wrote a bill to have independent studies done on the problems from aspartame, effect on the fetus, behavioral problems in children, seizures and drug interactions. The producers saw to it that the bill never got out of committee. The last of the heros of FDA toxicologists Adrian Gross and Jacqueline Verrett testified to no avail. Dr. Adrian Gross said without a shadow of a doubt aspartame causes brain tumors and brain cancer, and violates the Delaney Amendment. His last words were : "And if the FDA violates its own laws who is left to protect the public?"

We are now taking case histories on brain tumors and seizures starting in New York and New Jersey. Dr. Verrett said: "All studies were built on a foundation of sand and should be thrown out." Today's FDA is the handmaiden of the pharmaceutical/chemical cartel. The revolving door is so busy they need a bridge for the traffic. I told all this to Acting Commissioner Dr. Michael Friedman. He defended Monsanto on 60 Minutes when Dr. Olney made world news about the aspartame brain tumor association. Then Friedman hired as Vice President of Searle for big bucks - crime pays well.

In l986 the Community Nutrition Institute in Washington, D.C. petitioned FDA to ban aspartame because so many were having seizures and going blind from the free methyl alcohol in the drug. Aspartame is sold as an additive but it's a neurotoxic drug. FDA law requires an additive be inert or non-reactive. The medical text on aspartame disease lists countless diseases and symptoms and drug interactions by the toxin.

ASPARTAME DISEASE RAGES, INTERACTS WITH ALL DRUGS, VACCINES AND TOXINS.

When aspartame was news, Dr. H. J. Roberts in a press conference foretold that in 5 or 10 years we would have a global plague. And it was Dr. Roberts who declared Aspartame Disease to be a global plague and published the medical text in 2001, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic, www.sunsentpress.com or 1 800 827 7991.
His chapter on drug interaction goes into Coumadin, Dilantin, antidepressants and other psychotropic agents, Inderal, Aldomet, hormones and insulin. He says aspartame interacts with all cardiac medication and even discusses drug reactions after the cessation of aspartame.

In his general considerations he discusses that aspartame may either reduce or potentiate drug action by various mechanisms. He lists a few of the possibilities.

* Alteration of the blood proteins to which drugs attach.
* Alteration of drug receptors on cell membranes.
* Changes in the sites at which impulses are transmitted along nerves and to muscle.
* Metabolic abnormalities in the elderly that are known to enhance their vulnerability to drug reactions (Weber l986). This problem increases in the case of persons taking multiple drugs ("polypharmacy") prescribed by several physicians.
* Interference with drug action by amino acids and protein. An example is the erratic therapeutic effects when patients with parkinsonism who were controlled on levodopa began to use aspartame products. The antagonism of levodopa by dietary protein presumably reflects impaired transport from serum across the blood brain barrier by neutral amino acids (Pincus l986).

Dr. Roberts also discusses Lidocaine (Xylocaine) which he says is an important drug used for local anesthesia and the treatment of ventricular arrhythmias in intensive care units. Alterations of its pharmacology by aspartame require study. He says: "Kim et al (l987) reported that the intraperitoneal administration of aspartame significantly reduced the 50% convulsion dose of lidocaine. They indicated that PKU patients and asymptomatic PKU heterozygotes may be more sensitive to the toxic effects of this and related local anesthetics."

Today Dr. Roberts explained: "An interaction should be suspect with virtually every drug if the patient is using aspartame."

This goes along with conversations with Dr. James Bowen who says because aspartame damages the mitocondria of the cell it will interact with all drugs and as a chemical hypersensitization agent will interact with vaccines, unsafe sweeteners like Splenda or sucralose ( chlorinated hydrocarbon) and toxins.

Dr. Bowen wrote about the biochemical interactions between aspartame and other poisons including many pharmaceuticals illustrated in Dr. Roberts medical text and said Dr. Mercola's web site has them as well. Further he wrote: "Because aspartame in the processes of digestion and metabolism, forms about ten other known severe poisonings, and intermediate metabolites, it's potential for drug related interactions is immeasurable. To top that off, the aspartame molecule is so heinously poisonous in different ways that it never passed a single FDA standard toxicity test! So Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of aspartame manufacturer Searle employed political power to get it approved, after the FDA for 16 years refused to allow it on the market because of aspartame toxicity. Then Reagan took direct executive measures to paralyze FDA from further action against aspartame.

Our FDA has never been the same since. Deadly chemicals now being blessed by FDA are marketed as wholesome pharmaceuticals, are just the tip of the iceberg, and result of Rumsfeld's damage to FDA. If any concern whatsoever for human welfare still existed, aspartame would be immediately pulled from the market! The reasonable FDA lawful standard is that a chemical must pass all toxicity tests at one hundred times the "maximum human dose," in order to pass as a food additive. What the original tests showed is that at a dose of three cans of pop per day, scaled to the weight of the animal, aspartame releases DKP, a recognized virulent brain carcinogen. No other chemical causes the brain cancer rate to jump as much."

Dr. Bowen continues, "Aspartame is a known destroyer of DNA. The mitocondrial DNA (MtDNA) is especially damaged, yielding the present epidemic of diseases aspartame consuming mothers pass on to all future generations. Aspartame also directly damages the mitochondria, thus having a "double whammy" effect on mitochondrial function! The summation of these many known severe toxicities and its immune, genetic, mitochondrial, and metabolic damages, make clear that aspartame will not only cause many diseases, which the FDA and CDC have already noted but it has pathways of approach to interact adversely with every conceivable pharmaceutical. My forth coming book: "Sweet Mystery in The Present Darkness: Whatever Happened to We Scientists Who First Spoke Out Against Aspartame?" will delve into all of this in greater detail and more specificity."

The Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste wrote in the spring of l996 the article: "The Rising Rates of Health Problems - Is There A Toxic Connection? Stephen Lester.
It might as well have been written about aspartame because the diseases it lists are all ones that have been written about as triggered by aspartame, from birth defects to chemical sensitives. Under the title Cancer Lester says:

"When has gone wrong with our way of thinking when it is considered "normal" that 1 in 3 people get cancer? IT IS NOT NORMAL.. Cancer is not a natural disease and even if it were, it wouldn't be "normal" for cancer to claim the lives of 25% of the population. " Again, one can only think of aspartame when in original studies it triggered brain, mammary, uterine, ovarian, testicular, thyroid and pancreatic tumors and violated the Delaney Amendment. The Pharmaceutical and Chemical cartel know aspartame violates the law, so one would ask is that why the Delaney Amendment was repealed? When a law for the safety of the public gets in their way of marking poison they simply do away with the law.

In June it will be 3 years since I petitioned the FDA to ban aspartame because I have the FDA records and they lie to the public. The law states they have 180 days to answer. Their letter to me states they have more important things to do. So the FDA continues to recall drugs that interact and leave the poison aspartame on the market. Aspartame triggers an irregular heart rhythm and interacts with all cardiac Rx. It damages the cardiac conduction system and causes sudden death. With people dropping dead so fast that defibrillators are now sold over the counter, they took the opportunity to pull ephedra (Chinese MaHaung )off the market when an athlete died who was using Diet coke. Dr. John Olney reviewed the FDA records on ephedra and found it to be safe. One attorney said, "it wasn't Chinese Mahaung at all, but the drug that caused some problems." So what does the FDA do, leave the drug on the market causing the problems and snatches a safe supplement in their continuing loyalty to the pharmaceutical cartel.

MSG has an additive and synergistic effect with aspartame. Is that why the glutamate industry used aspartame as their placebo, so they could show that one excitotoxin does not react more than the placebo when, in fact, the aspartic acid in aspartame is also an excitotoxin. They started doing this before aspartame was approved, so it was well known in the industry that aspartame would react. The records found in the FDA files by Jack Samuels (www.truthinlabeling.org) who filed suit against the FDA on labeling of MSG, showed the FDA had known all along and the industry had been doing this for 25 years against the law. While the FDA had to admit it was wrong they did nothing, again giving their loyalty the glutamate industry.

One can only remember the words of Dr. James Bowen to the FDA over 18 years ago: "Aspartame is mass poisoning of the American public and over 70+ countries of the world". What does it take to save the people from this poison when government lies?

Dr. John Hoey, writing about the book The Truth About the Drug Companies says according to Angell, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the pharmaceutical industry's U.S. trade association has "the largest lobby in Washington," which in 2002 employed 675 lobbyists (including 26 former members of Congress) at a cost of more than $91 million. The result has been above-average growth in corporate profits during both Republican and Democratic administrations.

The most recent and perplexing lobbying effort caused Congress explicitly to prohibit Medicare from using its huge purchasing power to get lower prices for drugs, thus opening up a dollar pipeline, in the form of higher drug prices, directly from taxpayers to corporate coffers. These changes, along with the cave-in by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in l997 that permitted direct-to-consumer advertising to bypass mention in their ads of all but the most serious side effects, have further augmented profits. The overall effect has been a corruption not only of science but also of the dissemination of Science." No wonder new books keep being published like Dr. Carolyn Dean's "Death of Medicine".

Dr. Betty Martini
Founder, Mission Possible Intl
9270 River Club Parkway
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Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World

2005-02-26T22:20:00.000-08:00

DU - A Crime Against All Living Species What Happened To The Test Tube Paradigm?
By Dennis Kyne 2-22-5

These members of the 369th transportation battalion from New York City fought in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. They walked into the "test tube" - they were the "experiment" - that tested the effects, including the genetic effects, of the 300 tons of uranium used by the U.S. military on that battlefield. Now half a million of them are sick, and many of their babies have birth defects. Far more uranium is being used in Iraq.

When I was in eighth grade science class, Mr. Wadley, who reminded us more of an ice cream truck driver than a teacher, taught the pupils one thing with an incredible amount of emphasis: If the test tube paradigm does not reflect the real world paradigm, then there is absolutely no reason to ever do scientific experiments. Wadley further explained that if you monitor the results of a laboratory experiment and allow this information to be a basis for your intelligence in real world applications, you should see results that are nearly identical.

If the results are not nearly identical, then your departure point was faulty. That is the only safe conclusion. Again, if the results are not similar in scope or comparable in nature, then the departure point was wrong and the test tube lacked something that the real world provides to the equation.

This makes my inquiry most important: "Why does the United States Army violate the very simplest of scientific requirements when it determines the validity of using uranium weapons on the battlefield? What test tube did the military explode hundreds of tons of uranium in and then walk hundreds of thousands of humans into?" We live in a real world result of the use of uranium that you could never put into a test tube to study.

Recently, while in New York, I had the opportunity to discuss the implications of uranium use with Dr. Thomas Fasy, associate professor of pathology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Fasy casually informed GNN's Anthony Lappe and me that the most damaging research regarding uranium is coming out of government laboratories in Bethesda, Md.

Lappe, author of the recent "True Lies," with an entire chapter dedicated to uranium, was on the lookout for this evidence. Not only does it prove uranium is horrific to the human experience, it illustrates the military knows just how pathetic it is to denounce us who have been exposed to this microwave wasteland.

In 1994, Lt. Gen. Calvin Waller said in a "Dateline" television interview with Storm Phillips that he had never been informed this uranium could be deadly. He appeared disgusted by memorandums which stated exposure to uranium used in weaponry could leave a residual effect which might cause death, sickness and, worst of all, genetic mutations.

Calvin Waller was the second in command, behind Norman Schwarzkopf, during Operation Desert Storm. Waller has since passed away, and over a decade after his interview, Bethesda is busy burning through test tubes to come up with conclusions that are late by any standard of science.

Tests should have been done before the military dumped a minimum of 300 tons of uranium in the Middle East in 1991. One ton is equal to 2,600 pounds. Studies should have been conclusive after they stuffed returning veterans into a slew of study groups.

I was in one that tested for ionizing radiation, and in 1995 I was compensated for undiagnosed illnesses. The results should have been solid by the time they dumped bombs in Somalia and Yugoslavia.

What are they going to tell the people living in Vieques, Puerto Rico? Sorry, they didn't have a test tube that resembled your city, so we will just go with the studies from Bethesda. Whatever happened to the test tube paradigm? Maybe Vieques is the test tube.

Pandora's box was opened by the mining of uranium from the cradle it rested passively in. It has killed millions of indigenous humans and altered millions of others genetically.

Modern medicine calls it cancer; I call it radiation exposure. Both express themselves as ruptured cells and altered organs.

With hundreds of thousands of veterans from Operation Desert Storm filing for disability compensation, it is alarming how many of us cannot be diagnosed. How many years will it be before they can diagnose a human being with radiation sickness? Sounds like the half million veterans who stood on the front line of Desert Storm got tossed in the test tube as well.

While we know the test tube was broken, we are sure that other problems were ignored. There was no test tube that included the results of uranium's 21 phases of oxidation, all deathly. There was no test tube that had metallurgical particles cooking down to become smaller than bacteria and viruses.

There was no study of the implications of walking into these gaseous oxides or these particulates so small that even a standard military issue protective mask could not keep them from lodging in lungs. There was no study of the short term, long term or genetic effects of walking into low level radioactive particulate.

I say was, and now there is us. Us being the 500,000 men and women sent to the front who walked into this madness remembered as Operation Desert Storm. Sadly, the 10,000 dead troops and half a million sick and dying veterans are left wondering what happened.

What happened to the daughter of Sgt. Daryl Clark, who was on the front line and drowned in uranium dust from the tank buster rounds that were pelted at his feet? In the same "Dateline" episode, Phillips asks Clark how he feels. Clark responds, "When America called, we were there. Now that we are calling, America isn't answering."

This cry has been echoed in the hospitals, psych wards, prison cells and gutters of America for the past decade, and it is an indicator of what the returning veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom can expect.

Later in this same "Dateline" episode, a goofy looking general by the name of Blank admits to the viewers that the Army dropped the ball. Storm asks him, "Who dropped the ball?" Blank can't provide a name. This is the military way: field grade officers promise to take care of the soldiers and can't seem to figure out who is dropping the ball.

A general sat in the television monitor and said the buck stops somewhere else, but I can't tell you where. The ball dropped so hard that Clark's daughter Kennedy was born without a thyroid and with expressions of radiation exposure. Looks like Kennedy got stuffed down the test tube also.

Middle East experts state that there is an incredible amount of pesticides and herbicides being used in the current war, and this is confirmed by the Department of Defense as well. What does that do in the test tube of 25 million Iraqi citizens? Pesticides, uranium, herbicides, fires, plastics, gases and a list of potential hazards, from rifle cleaner fluid to brake fluid, are being spilled all over the place by gallons.

Science hijacked the battlefield, and supporters say the uranium is necessary because we can pierce the armor of a tank with it. They did the studies, it is conclusive, the stuff pierced armor. Testing officers would fire uranium tipped rounds and watch them pierce tanks.

While we can't dispute these occurrences, surely we would never call it science. Surely it isn't scientific enough to base conclusions that put life as we know it in jeopardy.

Mr. Wadley, my science teacher, would have failed the experiment. He'd have stamped a big "F" on the report entitled "Saving the Middle East with a history of good solid scientific research." He'd say, "There is not one bit of scientific support to substantiate the use of uranium. First of all, everyone knows that most military troops couldn't hit the broad side of a barn when firing any weapon. So, how many of these rounds hit innocent people? Churches, tin shacks, people on motor scooters?"

Wadley was sharp. I know this is where he would lead us: "To fire a round in a piece of steal such as a tank that contains the explosion and say it is safe to fire at a wedding somewhere off the battlefield in Afghanistan is ridiculous."

His style was such he might throw in: "You won't be getting out of junior high school bringing projects like this in. Do you know why?"

"Class, do you know why this fails?" Wadley wasn't afraid of a little embarrassment for the kids either. The class loved it when they spotted one as easy as this, though, and got to yell as loud as their voices could bellow, "It doesn't meet the test tube paradigm."

If the test tube paradigm does not reflect the real world paradigm, then there is absolutely no reason to ever do scientific experiments. It doesn't matter if you are an ice cream truck driver or a teacher, an eighth grade student or a four star general; firing a round into a tank as the test tube paradigm is not even close to the real world paradigm.

We have been tossed in the tube together on this one. Are you going to rely on Gen. Blank telling the world someone dropped the ball here, and we don't know who?

We can slip back into junior high with Wadley for a moment, though, and accept the fact that this is not science they provide us. It is a military misdirection, one that has cost thousands of lives and untold environmental consequences. It is a crime against all living species. Worst of all, it doesn't meet the test tube paradigm.

Dennis Kyne is a combat veteran with 15 years in the U.S. Army. He holds a degree in political science cum laude from San Jose State University with an emphasis on nuclear proliferation. Email him at d_kyne@hotmail.com and visit his website, http://www.denniskyne.com.

Originally published in SF Bayview
http://www.sfbayview.com/020905/whathappened020905.shtml

2005-02-26T22:16:00.000-08:00

Alzheimer's, CJD & BSE -Losing Your Mind For A Burger
Thinking The Unthinkable From Colm A Kelleher PhD Author Brain Trust 2-15-5

Med Hypotheses. 2005;64(4):699-705.
Thinking the unthinkable: Alzheimer's, Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Mad Cow disease: the age-related reemergence of virulent, foodborne, bovine tuberculosis or losing your mind for the sake of a shake or burger.

Broxmeyer L.
Med-America Research, 148-14A 11th Avenue, Whitestone, NY 11357, USA.

The possibility of the age-related reemergence of foodborne Mycobacterium bovis (bovine tuberculosis) as a vector for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD or human Mad Cow Disease) and Mad Cow disease itself is real. The CDC reported last May of an outbreak of CJD linked to the consumption of meat contaminated "with the agent causing" bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in a New Jersey racetrack between the time frame 1995-2004.

In the opinion of experts, ample justification exists for considering a similar pathogenesis for Alzheimer's, Creutzfeldt-Jakob and the other spongiform encephalopathies such as Mad Cow disease. In fact, Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Alzheimer's often coexist and at this point are thought to differ merely by time-dependent physical changes.

A recent study links up to 13% of all "Alzheimer's" victims as really having Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Bovine tuberculosis, which includes Mycobacterium bovis and M. avium-intracellulare or paratuberculosis, is and has always been the most prevalent threat to the cattle industry, and the USDA reports that between 20% and 40% of US dairy herds are infected with paratuberculosis alone.

The health risk for milk tainted with M. bovis has been known for decades and there was a time not so long ago when "tuberculin-tested" was printed on every milk container. Schliesser stated that meat from tuberculous animals may also constitute a significant risk of infection. At the turn of the 20th century 25% of the many US deaths from TB in adults were caused by M. bovis. Dairy products aside, when past and present meat consumption are factored in, there is three times the risk of developing Alzheimer's in meat eaters as opposed to vegetarians.

The investigation into the causal trail for Creutzfeldt-Jakob, indistinguishable from Alzheimer's except for its shorter, lethal course might have grown cold where it not for Roel's and others who linked mad cow in cattle with M. bovis and related paratuberculosis on clinical, pathologic and epidemiological grounds. The southwest of the UK, the very cradle of British BSE and CJD outbreaks, saw an exponential increase in bovine tuberculosis just prior to it's spongiform outbreaks.

All of this brings up the unthinkable: that Alzheimer's, Cruetzfeldt-Jackob, and Mad Cow Disease might just be caused by eating the meat or dairy in consumer products or feed. It is only appropriate therefore to explore the role of bovine TB and the atypical mycobacteria in Alzheimer's, JCD and Mad Cow disease and develop better serological surveillance for these pathogens.

http://www.colmkelleher.com

2005-02-26T22:14:00.000-08:00

Entire US Column Wiped Out By Iraqi Resistance The Seventh Fire News
Editor - Allen Aslan Heart
Translator - Abu Nasr2-21-5

A US military column was completely wiped out in fierce fighting with Resistance forces according to the Mafkarat al-Islam correspondent in the town of al-Mundhiriyah, near the Iranian border, east of Ba'qubah.

The correspondent, who was at the scene of the battle, wrote that a US column made up of eight vehicles came under Iraqi Resistance attack in the Jalabiyah area, known as the at-Tilal or hilly area, at 10pm Friday night. The Resistance fighters holed up in strongholds in the hills unleashed a sweeping attack on the US column, using missiles, pipe rockets, bazookas, and land mines that they had planted in the path of the American forces before their arrival.

Four US tanks, three Humvees, and one armored vehicle were destroyed in the fighting that lasted two hours, the correspondent reported. He said that US dead were in excess of 60 men. An adjutant commander of the Iraqi border guards confirmed that the entire US column was wiped out.

The correspondent wrote that the smell of blood and burning flesh pervaded the smoldering wreckage of the US vehicles and all the other remains of the large column.

US helicopters arrived on the scene 20 minutes after the battle and began revenge attacks on the local people. The US aircraft rocketed four houses, killing 19 Iraqi civilians, including 11 women and children, according to the account of al-Mundhiriyah General Hospital.

The Squadrons of Abu Dajjanah al-Ansari announced its responsibility for the attack that it called "the Battle of 'Khaybar is Ruined'."

When the correspondent filed his report posted at 11:10am Saturday morning Mecca time, US forces had imposed curfew on al-Mundhiriyah since the early hours of the morning. The Americans arrested the local puppet police commander, charging him with helping what they referred to as "terrorists" - meaning the Iraqi Resistance. They have also prevented journalists from coming from the Provincial capital Ba'qubah to al-Mundhiriyah.

Read the Full Report
http://www.the7thfire.com/Iraq_War/resistance_report/feb_19_2005.htm

2005-02-26T22:10:00.000-08:00

Are Most Americans Really Concerned About Iraqis And Iraq?By Michael Shore - Israelm3636s@yahoo.com2-20-5

If most Americans do not even know where Iraq is and could not find Iraq on a world map, why would you think that hundreds of millions of Americans would "bond" with their Iraqi "brothers and sisters" and "sacrifice" hundreds of billions of their hard earned tax dollars so Iraq can have what Bush/Cheney would have you believe is "liberty and freedom?"

http://www.reason.com/hod/cp021605.shtml

Like how do Americans know what is REALLY going on in Iraq, when all the news is censored by the US government and all they get is a steady dose of what Bush/Cheney tell them and what the corporate controlled mass media report? Considering the fact that over 100,000 innocent Iraqi children, women and men have been killed and maimed by the Bush gang of killers and thieves, Bush's latest ridiculous "liberty/freedom" excuse of why US troops are still in Iraq goes over the edge of insanity. And the American people are sitting in front of their TV"s buying this ridiculous line of crap and allowing the Bush/Cheney Mafia crime family and the Illuminati bankers to continue their elaborate con game and theft of hundreds of billions of dollars for connected war corporations and TRILLIONS of dollars for the connected oil corporations, who now control the trillions of dollars of Iraqi and Caspian Sea OIL! The world is being run by an "elite" group of "brilliant" sick, insane killers and thieves, who traded in their PIRATE outfits for suits and ties.They created the "paper money" scam, the stock market scams and the Nation/State "government to rule the People and tax them" scam. On top of all this they control illegal drugs, prostitution and gambling. Just follow the money, if you find this hard to believe.

So let's take a look at this sordid picture and show how horrible this whole sick insane "killing spree"going on in Iraq is. For starters has anyone taken a poll in Iraq to see what the average man or woman on the streets of Iraq really think of the US presence in their country for almost two years now? Would the Bush regime even let an independent company POLL Iraqis to find out what they're TRULY thinking about the actions of the USA? Maybe we could start and ask the men and women in Falluja what they think about the US occupation of Iraq? What would Americans expect the citizens of Falluja to say about America, now that their city of 300,000 human beings was completely destroyed and thousands of their relatives and friends were brutally killed or wounded by the sadistic, sick, insane, brainwashed, mind controlled members of the American military, who did the killing and destroyed Falluja?

http://www.rense.com/general59/being.htm

http://rense.com/general61/eewnb.htm

Are the citizens of Falluja "happy" about what the American "liberator" troops did? Do you think they participated in the rigged farce of what Bush is calling a "Democratic" election in Iraq? Nah, they're not happy, they're sad and angry and would like to see the American troops leave already! Does anyone really believe that any "real" candidates could get elected in Iraq, who OPPOSED Bush and what the US occupation forces are doing in Iraq, or who would want ALL US forces to leave immediately and give all those TRILLIONS of dollars of Iraqi OIL back to the Iraqi people? Of course NOT!

Do you think that unemployed Iraqis are seeing those multi-billions of dollars that is supposed to be used to "rebuild" Iraq, a country that Bush/Cheney destroyed so that Cheney's Haliburton Corp., Bush's father's Carlyle Corp.and Rumsfeld's Bechtel Corp.and other corrupted connected US corporations could get all those multi-billions of dollars of no-bid, re-building contracts? How sick can Bush/Cheney and their corrupted money and power addicted gang of thieves be, when they could do something like this to make billions of dollars for themselves? What do you think the millions of unemployed Iraqis would say in a legitimate poll about what they currently think about the US occupation of their country?

To bottom line it, WHAT DOES THE AVERAGE IRAQI HONESTLY THINK ABOUT AMERICAN POLICIES IN IRAQ? Do you think Iraqis "love" Bush/Cheney, whose military has killed and maimed over a hundred thousand of their children, relatives and friends and destroyed their country, and whose military continues to kill, maim and destroy with no end in sight? Maybe Bush and Cheney should take a visit to Iraq and walk ALONE on the Iraqi streets, while the world watches the kind of reception these two killers and thieves would get for their supposed "liberation" of Iraq.

Shouldn't Americans hear the VOICES of the Iraqi People and know what they think and how they feel about what is going on in Iraq? After all it IS their country! All Americans hear is what Bush/Cheney and the corrupted US government think and pretty much what the Bush/Cheney regime says is LIES LIES LIES! Just ask yourself the question: "Would Americans "love" a military occupier of the U.S.A., who killed and maimed over a hundred thousand of their family, relatives and friends and destroyed their country?"

The most amazing extreme LIE was Bush exclaiming how successful the Iraqi elections were. The corporate controlled media was showing America and the world the millions of Iraqis who were voting for the first time in Iraq in over fifty years. Bush/Cheney would have you believe that these millions of Iraqis were voting pro-America for their "love" of their American occupier. Bush/Cheney would have you believe that the Iraqis "love" the Americans who have killed and maimed so many of their family, relatives and friend and destroyed their country. But the Iraqi voters went to the polls because they were MISLED to believe that their vote would RID THEIR COUNTRY OF THE AMERICAN OCCUPIERS!!! That's why you saw so many millions of Iraqi voters lining up to vote. This whole Iraqi bogus Illuminati controlled election was a photo-op to fraudulently show the Iraqi voters showing up to "vote" for what they were misled to believe was their "OPPORTUNITY" to "truly" vote to get rid of the American occupiers. But because the Bush junta put out the propaganda LIES to Iraqis, that "showing up and voting would rid themselves of the American occupiers", this LIE got the Iraqi voter out to vote and the American media LIED and said that the Iraqis were voting for supposed "freedom" and pro-America, when nothing could be further from the TRUTH! Have you seen the movie "Wag The Dog"? Well this is a perfect example of how the media is used to mislead the People and TELL THE LIES of their government!
http://www.rense.com/general62/whats.htm

Now let's take a look at some Americans, who Bush/Cheney would lead you to believe that what they "think" is taking place in Iraq is just fine and dandy. Why don't we take a poll of millions of young black Americans, who have a challenging time just finding a job. What would you think they would say when asked about Bush/Cheney taking hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars just so the Iraqis can have a so-called "free" election? Shit, many black Americans are prevented from voting in so-called "free" elections in the USA, so what do you think black Americans would say about the Bush's LIES about Iraqi's having so-called "free" elections. Seems like there's plenty of BILLIONS of dollars for an Iraqi "war for profit", but there ain't shit for creating JOBS for black and white Americans who are unemployed and cannot get extensions on their unemployment benefits because social programs had to be cut back in the US, since there was NO MONEY for these kind of social programs in the Bush/Cheney budget. You know it would be really interesting if Bush/Cheney went into the streets of Harlem and told Black Americans that line!

And what about white unemployed Americans, who have lost their jobs too because Reagan/Bush1/Clinton/Bush2 have allowed American corporations to "outsource" and literally move every American manufacturing job to cheap labor markets in China, India, Mexico etc, so the multi-national corporations could make more billions of dollars in PROFITS, while millions of Americans can't find decent paying jobs. Now even higher paying jobs like computer programming, accounting, tele-service jobs, silicon chip and telecommunication manufacturing jobs etc. etc. are being moved to these cheap labor markets.Can somebody please tell us WHAT JOBS ARE LEFT IN AMERICA FOR THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS TO DO? So what do you think these unemployed Americans would say in a poll asking how they felt that their President, Congress and Senate could find hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars for wars, but can't seem to find ONE CENT for unemployment compensation to be extended, or to create incentives for manufacturers to create new jobs? Oh that's right, there ain't that many manufacturing plants left in the US to make the things that Americans consume, so there ain't NO JOBS.

Do you really think that these millions of black and white unemployed workers in America, who don't know where Iraq is on a map, do you think they can relate to hundreds of billions of dollars being spent {STOLEN} in Iraq so Iraqis can vote in a rigged election FARCE that Bush/Cheney call "freedom", while Constitutional freedoms in America are being scrapped with Patriot Acts 1 & 2? Do unemployed Americans want a job and food on their table and a decent place to live or do they want hundreds of billions of their tax dollars to be "sacrificed"{STOLEN} so Iraqis can vote in an election that is rigged by the American occupiers? Many tens of millions of Americans are prevented from voting or do not exercise their right to vote in the rigged elections in the USA. So why would they ever approve of hundreds of billions of their tax dollars being spent so Iraqis can "vote" in rigged elections in Iraq?

And if you can't see and believe how the Bush/Cheney Illuminati gang steal your tax dollars right in front of every naive American's face, check this out. The US claims now that $9 billion dollars is unaccounted for in Iraq because of inefficiencies and bad management. $9 billion dollars folks, that's NINE BILLION DOLLARS that is missing and NO ONE in the US government seems to know where it is. Who was in charge of the money? Somebody had the responsibility to handle the $9 billion dollars. What was his/her NAME? Doesn't anyone in the US government know who they gave $9 billion dollars to? We're talking about nine billion dollars here!. Somebody STOLE all that money. Why isn't the FBI, CIA and every other multi-billion dollar US policing agency tracking down who STOLE $9 billion tax payer dollars? Get out those red white and blue flags "patriots" and cheer your thievin killer leaders who just ripped you off for $9 billion. Do you think someone will be found GUILTY of a crime here? Probably not and the headline will disappear and Americans will continue sending in their tax dollars to be ripped off again and again, while they support this UNNECESSARY WAR FOR PROFIT!!! It's so pathetic to watch these thieves get away with so many billions of dollars, when millions of children and adults are starving all over the world.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/01/30/iraq.audit/index.html

And this theft of tax payer dollars is only small potatoes to what the Bush gang and the Illuminati have already stolen. Over a TRILLION DOLLARS is missing from the Department of Defense, which is a whole other amazing story, which Americans are unaware of and even if they were aware of it, they probably wouldn't do anything about it. They'd continue to wave their flags and cheer the Bush/Cheney gang of crooks and killers, who keep screwing them more and more each day! Is this insane or what?

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/DODtrillions.html

http://whereisthemoney.org/

To bottom line it, both the Iraqis and Americans are being conned and LIED to by the Bush/Cheney junta, who work for the benefit of the extremely wealthy Illuminati "elitists". What is going on in Iraq and America is that the People are "buying into" the total "INSANITY" of the sick insane wealthy "elitists" at the top of the pyramid. If the People could somehow get over the powerful brainwashing and mind control techniques that are constantly being used against them on a daily basis, then they may be able to see the insane killing taking place all over the planet for the benefit of the Illuminati "rulers" at the top of the pyramid.

The insane Illuminati would have you believe that human beings who DO NOT WANT TO KILL other human beings in wars are "insane", and that people in the military who KILL innocent children, women and men in wars are "sane". Until we see the TRUE insanity of this whole extremely sordid picture and recognize that we're buying into the INSANITY of the "rulers" at the top of the pyramid, then the killing of human beings in wars will unfortunately continue. Do the People really want to be "ruled" by a group of insane killer Satanists, which currently appears to be the case? In our civilian societies, if someone is killing, maiming and torturing innocent children, women and men, we recognize that person's insanity and if that person kills many human beings, we call him/her a "serial killer.". When are we finally going to recognize that leaders of Nations or terrorist groups, who kill millions of human beings in "unnecessary wars for profit", are TOTALLY INSANE TOO!!!

STOP THE INSANITY CALLED WAR

PEACE

Michael Shore

2005-02-26T22:08:00.000-08:00

US Troops Slaughter Afghan Villagers
'Death To America' Chants Follow
Pakistan Tribune 2-19-5

U.S. soldiers investigated in deaths of Afghan villagers

* U.S. troops have had a base at the old Soviet airfield at Shindand since August, and the district chief said the deaths could stir up animosity in the area, a strategic region that borders Iran.

"We told the Americans: 'You Americans are always insisting on human rights in the world. But in war, when your enemy is injured, you do not have the right to shoot him, and you shot him with three pistol shots.' "

SHINDAND - Several American soldiers are under investigation in the shooting deaths of two Afghan villagers last Friday afternoon outside a U.S. base in western Afghanistan, the commander of the base, Lt. Col. Ashton Hayes, said yesterday.

Witnesses and local officials said the two villagers were shot Feb. 11 while they fled across a field. Two witnesses said in an interview that two American soldiers then approached one of the Afghans, who was wounded, and shot him dead at close range.

"They did it on purpose, I think," said Muhammad Ismail, 30, the brother of Naib, 22, whom friends said they saw being shot as he lay on the ground. "I am really angry about the Americans." The witnesses said the Americans were Special Forces soldiers, but that could not be confirmed.

The incident has angered residents of Moghalan, a village nearby where the two men lived, and prompted a demonstration Saturday where young men shouted, "Death to America."

U.S. troops have had a base at the old Soviet airfield at Shindand since August, and the district chief said the deaths could stir up animosity in the area, a strategic region that borders Iran.

Hayes said the military was taking the case "very seriously." He said investigators were on their way from Kabul and that the battalion would work to make amends to the villagers. The soldiers under investigation were still at the base, he said but would not give further details.

The men who were killed, Naib, and Rasul, also 22, were cutting firewood beside the road at 5 p.m. when a car of Afghan National Army soldiers drove past, followed by Special Forces soldiers in a black sport utility vehicle. At the sight of the SUV, the two men dropped their work and fled across the field toward the village, said two witnesses, Taj Muhammad, 22, and Hamidullah, 22, both friends of the dead men who were sitting nearby chatting with a third friend as they watched over a flock of sheep.

They said they saw four American soldiers with weapons get out of the vehicle. Two of them fired on the fleeing men, cutting them down, the witnesses said. The two friends said they watched as the Americans approached Rasul, picked him up and then dropped him. "He fell down, and then we realized he was dead," Muhammad said.

The Americans then approached Naib who was still moving. "He was lying face down, and his hand was out to the side," Muhammad said. "When they approached, he moved it and tried to put weight on it. The Americans came and shot him." The two said one American fired three shots into the chest of Naib.

The first reports in the local media said American forces had killed two members of al-Qaida, and that three more had escaped. But Hayes said it was clear that the victims were just villagers, and he confirmed that the military had given each of the families $2,000 to help with their immediate difficulties.

"We have no reason to say there were Taliban or al-Qaida," Hayes said, adding that in the few weeks he had been based in Shindand, he had seen no evidence of Taliban or al-Qaida activity in the area.

"I can only say it was a mistake," the district chief, Kamin, said. "They had no weapons; they are from a poor family."

Rasul's father, Nasrullah, said, "We are hurting inside," as women at his home began wailing and weeping.

But it was the suspicion that a wounded man had been killed that most angered local residents.

Muhammad Karim, an elder of the village, met with Hayes on behalf of the families.

"We told the Americans: 'You Americans are always insisting on human rights in the world. But in war, when your enemy is injured, you do not have the right to shoot him, and you shot him with three pistol shots.' " The Americans denied shooting the wounded man, Karim said.

2005-02-26T22:04:00.000-08:00

Death Squad Chief Now Director Of Intelligence
Negroponte Draws Criticism South Of Border
By Lisa J. Adams AP Writer 2-19-5

MEXICO CITY - Central American politicians and human rights activists issued stinging criticism Thursday of John Negroponte, nominated to become America's first intelligence director, citing the career diplomat's active backing for the Contra rebels and support for a government involved in human rights abuses.

John Negroponte, now U.S. ambassador to Iraq, served as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, a time of intense conflict in Central America in which the United States played a central role. The Reagan administration feared that leftist rebels were leading Central American countries toward totalitarian regimes.

Negroponte assisted the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in their attempt to overthrow Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista government. In the process, activists claim, he ignored human rights abuses by the rebels and their Honduran hosts.

The effort to oust Daniel Ortega's Moscow-leaning Sandinista regime produced a huge scandal in the United States when it was learned the United States secretly sold arms to Iran and used the money to fund the Contra operation.

"What an outrage!" said Bertha Oliva, the coordinator of the Committee for Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras, an independent group representing civilians believed to have vanished while in government custody. "The United States has invented a position to reward someone who was a dangerous person."

In Nicaragua, Tomas Borge, former interior minister for the Sandinista regime and a current leader of the Sandinista opposition party, said Negroponte "is the most efficient and ideal representative for the Bush administration's primitive international security policy."

"He is faithful to Bush's excessive and ultra-right policy in Iraq and other parts of the world," he said.

Borge is the only surviving founder of the Sandinista movement, and was in charge of domestic political control as the Sandinistas battled U.S.-backed opponents.

The new U.S. intelligence chief has denied accusations that his reports to Washington dramatically underplayed human rights problems in Honduras.

During 2001 confirmation hearings for his U.N. ambassadorship - an appointment that was delayed for six months because of the controversy over his tenure in Honduras - Negroponte testified that he did not believe death squads were operating in Honduras.

However, a 1993 Honduran government human rights report said 184 suspected leftists had disappeared in government custody, many of them at the hands of a U.S. trained Honduran army battalion.

"It was obvious that he knew what was happening," said Leo Valladeres, a law professor in Honduras who wrote the report. "They used outlaw methods to kill ... and it is absolutely impossible to believe that a diplomatic mission such as that of the United States was unaware of the situation faced by Honduras and Central America."

In neighboring Guatemala, a U.S.-supported government that was engaged in battle with left-wing rebels trained paramilitary squads that were found later to have committed large-scale civilian massacres.

In El Salvador, U.S.-trained army squads hunted down leftist rebels in offensives fraught with human rights abuses.

Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archives in Washington, said declassified documents on the Iran-Contra scandal also showed that Negroponte was involved in seeking more guns for the Contras - "the role that normally would be reserved for the (CIA station chief."

Kornbluh also said the documents he cited showed that Negroponte helped clear the way for a secret agreement under which the United States would provide more CIA money to Honduran army generals and additional military and economic aid to the country. In exchange, he said, Honduras agreed to allow the Contras to continue operating on Honduran soil.

Ironically, Kornbluh said, the controversy surrounding Negroponte's past helps qualify him for the job.

"Someone who is a career diplomat ... on paper doesn't seem to have the intelligence background needed," he said. "The fact that he certainly departed from his diplomatic role and was involved in paramilitary operations against Nicaragua ... means he has had a relationship with covert operations in the past."

Reporters Freddy Cuevas and Filadelfo Aleman contributed to this story from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Managua, Nicaragua.

2005-02-26T21:54:00.000-08:00

Pentagon Accused Of Lying About US Casualties
Puerto Rican Facilities To Start Receiving Overflow Of Wounded Soldiers
Prensa Latina - Havana Cuba 2-18-5

NEW YORK (Prensa Latina) - The US Pentagon has failed to make public all the human cost of its war against Iraq, especially regarding soldiers with mental disorders, according to an article in Wednesday's El Diario/La Prensa.

The newspaper noted that the international press is reporting the total number of US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan between 42,000 and 142,000 -- including all those killed in action, wounded, or suffering illnesses.

It added that Puerto Rico is about to start to receiving wounded and sick soldiers as part of a program to ease cramming in regular medical installations.

The decision to use Puerto Rican facilities coincides with an international controversy that threatens to reveal the disastrous situation the Pentagon would rather not make public, the newspaper said.

Puerto Rican authorities stated they do not know if the Pentagon has delivered complete data on Puerto Rican injured or sick soldiers, which it was calculated it could be over 200.

A study made by the US Army said the real number (close to 100,000 soldiers with mental disorders) due to the war has not been revealed yet.

The US Army said the program would start at the first three-month period of 2005, because an increase in casualties was anticipated.

The official number of US military casualties in Iraq is over 1,400 killed, more than 10,900 injured and an undetermined number of medical casualties of all kinds.

http://www.plenglish.com/

2005-02-26T21:44:00.000-08:00

Flame Retardants Building Up Within Us
By Andre PicardThe Globe and Mail 2-17-5

Those dust bunnies lurking under the bed may not be as innocuous as you think.

New Canadian research shows that household dust is the principal source of exposure to flame retardants, a class of chemicals that has sparked a heated debate among scientists, some of whom believe regular exposure may lead to serious learning and developmental problems.

Toddlers in particular are ingesting significant amounts of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), according to a study to be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

"Dust is the greatest route of exposure to brominated flame retardants," said Miriam Diamond, a professor in the department of geography at the University of Toronto. "It makes a lot of sense. Toddlers are close to the ground, which is where many of those flame retardants are - in carpets, in furniture. The chemicals accumulate in the dust."

In her paper, Dr. Diamond estimates that the average urban Canadian ingests 155 to 1,965 nanograms daily of PBDEs, with the highest levels found in babies but decreasing as people age. (A nanogram is one-billionth of a gram.)

But breast-feeding infants have much higher exposures, from 24 to 28,680 nanograms daily. Earlier research found that flame retardants are commonplace in the breast milk of Canadians but concluded that despite high levels, women should continue to breastfeed because the known benefits outweigh the known risks.

Dr. Diamond said she wondered how pregnant women accumulated these chemicals in their bodies.

She found that household dust is the principal source of exposure for adults, followed by food. (Research commissioned by The Globe and Mail and CTV News found PBDEs in almost all common foods tested.)

Flame retardants are used in the manufacture of a broad range of materials, including foams, textiles and plastics. As a result, most household products, including sofas, carpets, hair dryers, televisions and computers, give off PBDEs.

These invisible chemicals turn into dust that sticks to windows, gathers in small balls under the bed and snuggles in with the lint in the dryer.

A study published last month found PBDEs in the dust of every home tested. The research, done in the Washington area, found concentrations of 780 to 30,100 nanograms of PBDEs per gram of dust. Scientists estimate that as a result, toddlers in these homes ingest 120 to 6,000 nanograms daily.

Erin McAllister, a Vancouver mother of a toddler, heard of PBDEs when she participated in a study of breast milk. Now she has just learned that daughter Jessica, 17 months, probably ingests flame retardants in household dust, as well.

"That's just lovely. Yuck, yuck," she said in disgust. "I feel kind of helpless. I don't want these poisons in my body, but I'm breathing it every day and my children are breathing it and eating it every day."

Barbara Thorpe of Clean Production Action, a Montreal-based consumer group, said that if Canadians were more informed about the levels of PBDEs in their home environments - from dust to food - they would be angry.The problem is, nobody knows the impact on human health.

All the research on PBDEs has been conducted on laboratory animals. When animals are exposed to high levels of PBDEs, they develop memory problems and disruptions to the thyroid hormone.

Some scientists believe that in humans, that could translate into learning disabilities and stunted growth.

Some postulate that the stunning rise in attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder is due, in part, to children's exposure to flame retardants.

Linda Birnbaum, associate director for the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said the concerns are justified, even if it is hard to nail down the impact of PBDEs on health.

"These are not chemicals you are going to get a dose of and immediately die. They are chemicals that are present in very low levels in our bodies . . . but they build up. And part of the concern is, they will continue to build up to a level that they will cause problems."Dr. Birnbaum said the EPA is trying to develop standards for safe levels of exposure to PBDEs, but establishing a cut-off is not easy.

For scientists and environmentalists, however, the solution is to aim for the lowest exposure possible by finding alternative forms of flame retardants and making consumers aware of these chemicals' origins and where they accumulate.

Although individuals must wait for governments to regulate PBDEs, they can take a few simple steps to reduce their exposure, beginning with improving ventilation in their homes, getting rid of carpets and vacuuming a little more often.

- With reports from Avis Favaro, CTV News medical reporter and Elizabeth St. Philip, a CTV News producer

© Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl

2005-02-26T21:34:00.006-08:00

New Documentary Blasts US News 'Journalism' In Iraq Embedded In The Spin Cycle...
By Isaac Backer 2-16-5

NEW YORK (IPS) - An incisive new documentary is taking aim at the U.S. media's one-sided coverage of the war in Iraq, arguing that its collective complicity deceived the populace and made the war possible.

"WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception", which cost just 200,000 dollars to produce, points to a wide array of failures in the accuracy of the reporting, as well as an unwillingness to question the George W. Bush administration's claims and actions.

It was produced by Danny Schechter, a self-proclaimed "network refugee" who worked for CNN and as a producer for a prominent television news show.

"This is the central problem of our democracy," he told IPS in an interview. "This isn't a sidebar issue. You can't have a democracy when people aren't being informed."

The film documents the U.S. media's near-unanimous acceptance of the George W. Bush administration's claim that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed nefarious weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and therefore must be removed from power by unilateral U.S. military action.

The film also attacks the media's credulity of alleged links between Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist network -- claims that were unsupported by any actual evidence.

"The fact that they [the media] allowed the Bush administration to manipulate the truth so grossly and so nakedly in the run-up to the war made the war possible," Eric Alterman, media critic and writer for the Nation magazine, says in the film.

Schechter told IPS he was disturbed at the adherence to the government's line and lack of journalistic questioning among U.S. news outlets before and during the Iraq war, a time he calls "a really shameful period for journalism."

"It hints at the emergence of a state media system in our country," he said.

The film references a study by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of on-camera sources used in television news in the run-up to the war. Out of 1,167 experts brought on camera during news broadcasts, the study shows, only three percent opposed the U.S.-led invasion.

"You had this incredible imbalance where people who were critical couldn't be heard," he said.

The film argues that this marginalisation of dissent and the media's refusal to question the war in Iraq was in part due to journalists and networks fear of being seen as "unpatriotic."

"In the post 9/11 media there was a lot of patriotic political correctness," Schechter said. "You have a president who says, 'You're either with us or with the terrorists,' so if you criticise him you're with the terrorists. This created an intimidating environment."

One aspect of the "media war" the film deals with in detail is the vast number of "embedded" reporters in Iraq, a policy that Schechter says led to jingoistic coverage.

An embedded reporter eats, sleeps, and lives every day with a specific group of U.S. troops. The policy was championed by the Pentagon media chief Victoria Clarke and other public relations experts in the Defence Department, who had been planning it before the war started.

The film argues that since an embedded reporter's life is essentially in the hands of the soldiers, and they spend so much time together under extreme circumstances, the reporter grows attached to the troops. The bond that is formed jeopardises the reporter's ability to be accurate and objective and leads to cheerleading instead of critical journalism, Schechter says.

In the film, several embedded journalists talk about their experiences on the front.

"We got to know these soldiers and we wanted them to be successful," says Gwendolen Cates, a reporter for People magazine who was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. "How will I be able to handle it if one of my soldiers dies?"

Schechter believes that the problem of media irresponsibility goes deeper than just a few journalists or networks who reported the war in a biased manner.

"It's hard to get people to see this as an institutional problem," Schechter told IPS. "They focus first on policy failure, second on intelligence failure. I'm saying no, it's a media failure."

"WMD" has already received international acclaim and is being screened at theatres from Scotland to Australia. It won the Austin Film Festival and Denver Film Festival Awards for best documentary.

However, the documentary has also seen its share of criticism, much of it from the very U.S. media corporations and outlets the film targets.

Some critics have argued that Schechter's film is a poor spin-off of Michael Moore's 2004 high-grossing documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11." Vanity Fair magazine said Schechter was merely trying to "out Michael Moore Michael Moore."

Schechter, however, was quick to point out to IPS that he made his first documentary in 1968, years before Moore's debut.

The film is scheduled to come out on DVD in March to coincide with the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

2005-02-26T21:34:00.005-08:00

US engineers provocation following assassination in Lebanon
By Joseph Kay16 February 2005

The provocative steps taken by the American government following the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri are an ominous indication that Washington is preparing for a military intervention in Syria and Lebanon.

It is not yet known who is behind the assassination of Hariri, who was killed along with at least 11 others in an explosion in Beirut. What can be said for certain is that the US government has seized on the killing as a pretext for advancing its own interests in the region.

Washington’s belligerent response began only hours after the killing. At a noon press conference on Monday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan warned that the US would consult with members of the United Nations Security Council “about measures that can be taken to punish those responsible for this terrorist attack, to end the use of violence and intimidation against the Lebanese people, and to restore Lebanon’s independence, sovereignty and democracy by freeing it from foreign occupation.”

By foreign occupation, McClellan was referring to the 15,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon. Later, McClellan was more specific, declaring that the Lebanese people must be “free from Syrian occupation.”

The American media by Monday evening was full of unfounded speculation that Syria was responsible for the attack, along with discussion about the possible retribution that would be meted out by the American government.

On Tuesday, the New York Times published an article under the headline, “US Seems Sure of the Hand of Syria, Hinting at Penalties,” by Seven Weisman. The article acknowledged that “Mr. McClellan and other administration spokesman said they had no concrete evidence of Syria’s involvement in the killing of Mr. Hariri.” Nevertheless, it quoted an unnamed senior State Department official as declaring, “We’re going to turn up the heat on Syria, that’s for sure.... Syria has, by negligence or design, allowed Lebanon to become destabilized.”

On Tuesday afternoon, the day after the assassination, the US State Department announced that it was recalling the American ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey, for “urgent consultations.” Scobey issued a protest to the Syrian government expressing the US government’s “deep concern” and “profound outrage” over the killing.

The American response is striking in its speed and extreme bellicosity. Hardly before the wreckage was cleared from the streets, the American government was making inflammatory threats regarding the killing. It has warned of further economic sanctions and a UN Security Council resolution against Syria’s occupation of Lebanon, which could then be used as a rationale for military actions.

Washington has justified pointing the finger at Syria because over the past several months Hariri has moved closer to the anti-Syrian opposition in Lebanon, joining a call for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country before elections that are expected in April. Hariri resigned his position as prime minister four months ago, after coming into conflict with the Syrian-backed president, Emile Lahud.

Officials in the Syrian Baathist government have vehemently denied that the country was involved and denounced the killing as a “terrorist act.” They have suggested that Al Qaeda may be responsible for the attack because of Hariri’s well-known ties to the Saudi monarchy.
While in the past the US has been quick to link Al Qaeda to any terrorist attack, now the government has not stopped to even consider that possibility. In the course of his career as a politician in the Levant, Hariri no doubt acquired many enemies, any one of whom could be behind his assassination. The Syrian government is among the least likely sources of the attack. It has little to gain from the assassination, which will only strengthen the Lebanese opposition and provide a pretext for the United States to intervene in the area, something Syria has been desperately seeking to avoid.

No one in the US media bothers to raise questions about the line so quickly set down by Washington.
If the response of the American government seems extraordinarily well prepared, this is because it has long been searching for excuses to ratchet up pressure on Syria. There are many signs that the Bush administration is planning on extending its war for control of the entire Middle East. After invading both Afghanistan and Iraq, the US has now set its sights on other countries, particularly Iran and Syria.

Of the two, Syria is perhaps the more tempting target. The New York Times article by Weisman said as much when it noted, “Western diplomats have sometimes suggested that Syria is ‘low-hanging fruit’ in the campaign against terrorists: a nation that could be punished by further isolation and sanctions because its economy is in poor shape. Iran, by contrast, is awash in oil revenues, and the difficulties of mounting an international campaign against it are becoming increasingly obvious as Europeans call for engagement with Iran rather than confrontation.”
A US invasion of Iran is still a very real possibility; however, it also poses enormous problems. In addition to opposition from Europe, an attack on Iran would also generate enormous outrage amongst the Shiite population in Iraq, undermining the deal that the US is seeking to arrange with the Shiite clergy in the wake of the elections. Iran is a predominantly Shiite Muslim country.

On the other hand, Europe, and particularly France, has displayed a greater willingness to participate with Washington in taking a hard line against Syria. The United States and France co-sponsored a UN Security Resolution passed in September 2004 condemning the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. France has long-standing interests in the region, where it was once the principal colonial power.

France has echoed the US in responding to the assassination of Hariri. President Jacques Chirac, who had close ties with Hariri, called for an international investigation and said that Hariri—a multibillionaire construction magnate—represented “the indefatigable will of independence, freedom and democracy” for Lebanon. On Tuesday, France joined with the United States in voting for another Security Council resolution that again condemned Syria’s occupation of Lebanon and called for an investigation of the killing.

The US has a long history of intervention in Lebanon, including in 1958 under the Eisenhower administration and in 1982 under Reagan. However, since the end of the civil war in Lebanon in 1990, Syria has dominated the country and has maintained a constant military presence.
Ending Syrian control of Lebanon, as part of an effort to foment regime change in Syria itself, is something long desired by neo-conservatives in Washington, who are closely aligned with Israel. In 1996, future Bush administration officials Richard Perle and Douglas Feith joined with others in the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in drafting a document for the Israeli government that, in addition to advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein, called for “weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria.”

The move against Syria and its control of Lebanon is part of an attempt to strengthen American and Israeli control in the region. This includes the deal that has been worked out between the Sharon government in Israel and the new PLO leader, Mahmoud Abbas, who has vowed to crack down on Palestinian resistance, including Syrian-backed groups such as Hamas.

The Bush administration, with the support of the Democratic Party, has been steadily escalating its rhetoric against Syria since the end of the initial invasion of Iraq in April 2003. At the time, Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed that top Iraqi leaders had fled to Syria, where they were being given refuge. He threatened diplomatic and economic sanctions against the country. Bush also made unfounded statements that Syria possessed chemical weapons.

In November 2003, the US Congress passed the bipartisan Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, which threatened a series of sanctions. In May 2004, Bush implemented these sanctions, cutting off all exports to the country other than food and medicine, on the absurd grounds that Syria posed “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and the economy of the United States.”

In early January 2005, shortly before the inauguration of the second Bush administration, the US threatened Syria with further sanctions on the grounds that Syria was aiding the resistance in Iraq to the American occupation. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, traveled to Syria with threats against the country for allegedly providing a haven to former leaders of the Hussein regime, who are supposedly helping to finance the resistance.

During her confirmation hearings for secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice included Syria among the “outposts of tyranny” that the United States was determined to confront.

See Also:US uses Israel as its proxy to threaten Syria[7 October 2004]Washington imposes punitive sanctions on Syria[13 May 2004]

2005-02-26T21:34:00.004-08:00

Mossad Behind Hariri Assassination
By Hassan Hanizadeh Tehran Times 2-15-5

Former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri was killed in a massive bomb blast in central Beirut on Monday.

The explosion destroyed a number of public buildings and vehicles, showing that the complicated terrorist act was carried out by a well equipped organization.

The situation in Lebanon and the region is now so critical that any discord could cause a new crisis for this small but strategic country.

Lebanon, which has been the cradle of peaceful coexistence among different religious and ethnic groups, experienced a 15-year civil war due to a series of domestic, regional, and international factors in the 1970s and 1980s.

The war left thousands of Muslim and Christian civilians dead, causing Lebanon huge financial losses.

In 1990, the various groups finally put aside their differences and calm and national unity ruled the country again.

Then, following the Zionist army's defeat in south Lebanon in 2000, Lebanon was once more put into the worldwide spotlight.

Lebanon eventually regained its regional economic position thanks to reconstruction and economic restoration, partly due to the efforts of the late Hariri.

However, regional and trans-regional powers such as the United States and the Zionist regime are trying to steer Lebanon toward a crisis, aiming to extend their military and political presence in some parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

The United States? strong support of UN Resolution 1559, which requires Syria to withdraw its forces from Lebanese soil, is part of Washington?s plan to politically influence Lebanon and the region once again.

Israel and the U.S. seek to sever the spiritual and physical contacts between Syria and Lebanon in order to isolate Syria in the Middle East and check its political sway in the region.

Neither the Lebanese government nor the majority of its citizens want Syrian troops to quit their country.

However, if Syrian forces withdraw from Lebanese territory, it would surely pave the way for the political and military machinations of the United States and Israel.

The Lebanese and Syrian nations, due to their historical, ideological, and ethnic affinities, are in fact one nation in two separate lands. The regional and trans-regional powers must understand this and must realize that the two nations cannot be separated spiritually.

Now, the question is: Who benefited from the assassination of Hariri, a man who played a constructive role in the reestablishment of security in Lebanon?

All the evidence indicates that the Israeli intelligence service Mossad killed Hariri, since it had previously plotted to assassinate important Lebanese politicians.

The Mossad is trying to help the Zionist army claw its way back into Lebanon, since history has shown that the stability of Lebanon is not to the advantage of Israel.

Lebanon now faces a more complicated situation and should stay alert in order to thwart the Zionist regime's plots to dominate the country once again.

http://www.tehrantimes.com/

2005-02-26T21:34:00.003-08:00

It Is Absurd To Say Israel Is Not A Racist State
By Charley Reese King Features Syndicate 2-14-5

It was no surprise that the United States and Israel walked out of a United Nations conference on racism as soon as Israel came in for criticism. It is, however, a disgrace.

Israel certainly is a racist state. Its own human-rights advocates call it that. The claim that Israel doesn't discriminate against non-Jews is absurd on its face.

Suppose, for example, the U.S. Congress passed a law that said the United States is a Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation and that any Christian, Anglo-Saxon person anywhere in the world is automatically eligible to become a citizen. Do you seriously think the Anti-Defamation League would not have a conniption fit and scream racism? Well, Israel has such a law for Jews.

Thus a Russian Jew, for example, can become a citizen, but a Palestinian driven out of his own country in 1948 cannot return.

Suppose, for another example, a group of wealthy people established the Christian National Fund. This fund would be used to purchase property. Once purchased, the property could never be sold to, rented to or leased to a non-Christian. Would that not be called discrimination? Well, there is such a fund called the Jewish National Fund, which has all of those restrictions on the property it owns. It played a great part in establishing Israel.

And, of course, if American officials routinely issued building permits to Christian Anglo-Saxons while denying them to Jews or other groups, that would be considered racist. And neighborhoods that denied non-Christians an opportunity to buy or rent would likewise be considered racist. All of these forms of discrimination are practiced in Israel against Palestinians.

The language that caused the United States to leave the conference was in a resolution passed by 3,000 nongovernmental organizations in 44 regional and interest-based caucuses, according to the Indian Express. Some American news reports have made it seem like it was an Arab-only move. I'd say the United States is definitely in a minority, as it usually is when it defends Israel " not on the basis of facts, but on the basis of the power of the Zionist lobby in the United States.

Fortunately, a growing number of American Jews are beginning to defy the slanders of the Zionist lobby and speak out against the human-rights abuses Israel inflicts on the Palestinians.

That indeed is the duty of all people of conscience. Acts that would be unacceptable in the United States cannot be condoned simply because they are done by Israelis to Palestinians. That in itself is a racist attitude.

In the meantime, much of the American press is allowing the Israeli government to dictate its language for propaganda purposes. If the Israelis wish to refer to assassinations as "targeted killing," that's their business, but American journalism should call them what they are " assassinations.

Assassination of political opponents, collective punishments inflicted on innocent people, confiscation of property, restriction of movements and employing military engines of destruction against an unarmed population are all considered crimes against humanity. Employing tanks against unarmed demonstrators in the West Bank and Gaza is no different than employing tanks against unarmed demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. You might want to meditate on why the American reaction is different even though the circumstances are similar.

It is also useful to keep George Washington's warning constantly in mind: "Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence " I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens " the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government."

Zionism is foreign influence.

http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20050202/index.php

2005-02-26T21:34:00.002-08:00

History Channel DisinformationFrom Archie in Austin2-14-5

Dear Jeff -

Thank you for your great website. I like the way you post essays by just common folk like me.
I know what a "limited hangout" is, and I also know that when you bury one or two big whoppen lies in the middle of a one-hour video documentary that is 90 percent facts and truth, that those lies will be most efficacious in the war against the minds of the citizens.

The History Channel televised a one hour documentary called "Modern Marvels: Metal". about one week ago. I only saw the last half hour of it, but that is where I encountered the two whopper lies.

First I heard them talking about the glories of aluminum. In that segment, they made the statement that "aluminum is inert in the human body. There is aluminum in tooth paste but it caused no harm to the body." Dr. Russel Blaylock, neurosurgeon, nutrition researcher and author of "Health and Nutrition Secrets That Can Save Your Life" says, on the contrary, with complete citation of probably over 100 scientific/medical studies on just this one subject within this big book, that aluminum is a neurotoxin and causes many many neurological and endocrine assaults on the human body and that it is not inert and that it is very deleterious. That was Whopper # 1.

Then the video documentary went on to a segment about the strength of the metal beams used to build huge skycrapers. Keep in mind the entire video had metal scientists and researchers and professors each speaking and telling their part of the story on metals. The video said that the rubble and beams from the 9-11 World Trade Centers had been studied carefully so that a stronger metal could be made for beams for tall skyscrapers. They said they wanted metal beams that would not melt quickly at high temperatures as did the beams in the fallen towers. They said if they could invent a metal alloy that melted at higher temperatures and melted more slowly, then the people would have much more time to get out of the buildings and many more lives would be saved. That Wopper # 2 Lie was to reiterate in a subtle sly way the government's official story of why the towers fell.

History Channel seems to be very sophisticated in its government disinformation plants. I consider them to be very very evil. I really would like to read and essay or a book that explains the terms used for the different kinds of propaganda techniques being used on the American populace these days, and explaining which have proven to be most effective.

God bless you and thank you again for your website.

Archie
Austin, TX

Comment
From Daniel Natal
2-14-5

Jeff,

I just read one email you posted from a reader about the History Channel. It spurred me to write too because--about two years ago--the History Channel had a documentary on the history of counterfeiting. In the course of narrating the story of one 19th century counterfeiter who happened to be deaf, they illustrated the point with a photo they claimed was the counterfeiter.

Imagine my shock when, instead, they put up the photo of 19th Century French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire! --I guess, the director of the documentary assumed that no one would know that the photo he produced was a fake. Sadly, I--as a fan of Baudelaire--recognized the famous picture. My wife, who sat beside me was astonished when I turned to the internet and produced the exact photo from a Baudelaire webiste.

My response was to email the channel and tell them of the shoddy documentary-maker. I mean, if they were inaccurate about THAT what else were they inaccurate about?

Ever since then I can't watch the network--which routinely rants about Hitler. How can I trust anything they say about "Hitler" when I myself have caught them in a fabrication?

2005-02-26T21:34:00.001-08:00

HAARP To Install 516 More Antennas 2-13-5

Note - That's over and above the 132 that were just installed last year. And that's over and above the original 48 antennas that were perfectly adequate to fry the earth many times over.

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/
Antenna Products Corporation Awarded Contract

Feb. 7, 2005

FORT WORTH, Tx (BUSINESS WIRE) -- PHAZAR CORP announced today that Antenna Products Corporation in Mineral Wells, Texas, a wholly owned subsidiary, was recently awarded a $3,723,531 firm fixed price subcontract from BAE SYSTEMS ATI for the production of 270 Low Band Antenna Matching Unit Assemblies and 346 High Band Antenna Matching Unit Assemblies. This equipment will be manufactured at Antenna Product Corporation's plant in Mineral Wells, Texas, and deliveries are scheduled to begin in June, 2005 and continue monthly through September, 2005. The equipment will be shipped to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) ionospheric research site near Gokona, Alaska, the site of the recently completed installation of an array of 132 crossed dipole antennas built and installed by Antenna Products Corporation in 2004.

As the result of this order, Antenna Products Corporation's backlog of orders as of Feb. 4, 2005 was approximately $5.9 million.

Information on PHAZAR CORP is available on the Internet web page at www.phazar.com and at www.antennaproducts.com.

The common stock of PHAZAR CORP is listed on the Nasdaq SmallCap Market under the trading symbol "ANTP." This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 29A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events or performances and underlying assumption and other statements, which are other than statements of historical facts. Certain statements contained herein are forward-looking statements and, accordingly, involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results, or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. The Company's expectations, beliefs and projections are expressed in good faith and are believed by the Company to have a reasonable basis, including without limitations, management's examination of historical operating trends, data contained in the Company's records and other data available from third parties, but there can be no assurance that management's expectations, beliefs or projections will result, or be achieved, or accomplished.

Contacts
Antenna Products Corporation
Kathy Kindle, 940-325-3301
Fax: 940-325-0716
kindle@antennaproducts.com

2005-02-26T21:34:00.000-08:00

See video at: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7363.htm

Video: Israeli Soldiers Going In For The Kill:
A 13 year old Palestinian school girl is about to die.
BBC News - Broadcast 11/23/04
A documentary showing the killing last month of a Palestinian schoolgirl by Israeli troops has caused outrage in Israel. The footage - based on army video recordings - shows shots being fired at a teenage girl. Alan Johnston reports from Jerusalem.

Israelis fired on girl 'having identified her as a 10-year-old', military tape shows
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
24 November 2004

Israeli soldiers continued firing at a Palestinian girl killed in Gaza last month well after she had been identified as a frightened child, a military communications tape has revealed.
The tape is likely to be crucial in the prosecution case against the men's company commander, who faces five charges arising from the killing of Iman al-Hams, 13, in the southern border town of Rafah on 6 October.
It shows that troops firing with light weapons and machine guns on a figure moving in a "no entry zone" close to an army outpost near the border with Egypt had swiftly discovered that she was a girl.
In the recorded exchanges someone in the operations room asks: "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?" The observation post, housed in a watchtower, replies: "It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastwards, a girl of about 10. She's behind the embankment, scared to death."
Not until four minutes later was it reported that the girl had been hit and had fallen. The observation post reports: "Receive, I think that one of the positions took her out." ... Operations room: "What, she fell?" Observation post: "She's not moving right now."
The tape records the commander as telling his men, after firing at the girl with an automatic weapon and declaring he has "confirmed" the killing: "Anyone who's mobile, moving in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."
The tape, broadcast on Israel's Channel Two TV, gives the most graphic account of the killing after which soldiers in the company, part of the Givati Brigade, complained that they had been "besmirched" by the company commander's insistence on "confirming the kill".
The army admitted shortly after the shooting near the Girit outpost that it had been a mistake. The girl was carrying a bag which the army said that the soldiers had thought contained explosives, but which was found to contain schoolbooks. Although the family is at a loss to explain why she had wandered into a dangerous prohibited zone, they say she was on her way to school at the time.
The soldiers said that the commander had fired two shots at the girl from close range as she lay on the ground before withdrawing, turning and "emptying his magazine" by firing some 10 bullets at her body.
This account is broadly confirmed by the terms of the indictment issued this week. Although the family's Israeli lawyer believes - and Palestinian witnesses said last month - that she was wounded but alive when the commander fired his first two shots, he has not been charged with manslaughter, apparently on the grounds that there is no evidence that the two bullets killed the girl.
After the report that she has been hit, the tape records the company commander as saying: "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ..." After a pause he adds: "Receive a situation report - we fired and killed her. She was wearing pants, jeans, an undershirt, a shirt. Also, she was wearing a keffiyah on her head. I also confirmed the kill. Over."
The charges include obstruction of justice because of a false explanation - which was accepted by senior commanders until soldiers came forward with their version of events to the newspaper Yedhiot Ahronot - that he came under fire from Palestinian gunmen 300 yards away as he approached the girl and shot at the ground to deter the fire.
Because "confirmation of the killing" is not dealt with under military regulations the commander - who has been named only as Captain R - has been charged with "illegal use of a weapon" and overstepping his authority to the extent of jeopardising human life. He has been remanded in custody.
The al-Hams family's lawyer, Leah Tsemel, said that she was angered by what she said was the relative lightness of the charges. "I believe that the commanders and the soldiers who fired should all have been charged with murder."
The family have declined an army request to exhume the body for a post-mortem examination, because of the pain it would cause relatives.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

2005-02-26T21:28:00.000-08:00

Category: News & Opinion (Specific) Topic: Warfare and Conflict: Israel-Palestine

Synopsis:

Source: http://www.wrmea.com/

Published: February 10, 2005 Author: Mohammed Omer

For Education and Discussion Only. Not for Commercial Use.TO THIS DAY, the family and friends of 13-year-old Iman al-Hams are at a loss to explain how or why she wandered into the “closed military zone” in Tal al Sultan in Rafah on her way to school on the morning of Oct. 6, 2004. Early wire service reports speculated that she might have been late for school and was taking a shortcut. The actual geography, however, makes that unlikely. But Iman never made it to school, because she was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers, who riddled her body with bullets. As often happens when the Israeli army kills or injures Palestinians, the IDF delayed the ambulance from al Najjar Hospital trying to reach her. But with five bullets in her head—of the “at least 15” the Dr. Ali Musa, the hospital’s director, reported finding—Iman was dead long before she ever reached the hospital. Indeed, so much blood had soaked into her UNRWA school uniform and into the ground where she fell that her body was nearly bloodless when it finally reached the hospital. Israeli army spokespersons quickly reported that the soldiers in the watchtower surveillance post thought the child was a courier for militants and concealing a bomb in her book bag—a claim most Palestinians found absurd. Not only is it virtually inconceivable that any militant group would allow a young girl to undertake a combat mission, there were many witnesses to the fact that Iman was never closer than 100 meters to any soldier in the fortified watchtower when the first shots were fired. And the IDF had to concede that a search of her book bag proved it contained only books. Muddying the waters further were the next actions of “Captain R,” the company commander, who approached Iman—wounded, according to Palestinian witnesses, but alive and lying on the ground helpless—and first fired two shots into her at close range to “confirm the kill.” Then, according to IDF witnesses, he walked a short distance away, turned back, approached the child again and emptied the magazine of his automatic weapon into her body. Although the IDF did admit fairly promptly that Iman’s shooting had been “a mistake,” “Captain R’s” initial explanation was that as he approached the child, he came under fire from militants some 300 yards away, and fired into the ground to deter fire. His superiors at first accepted his version of events, despite some notable lapses of logic. (How does firing at the ground “deter fire”? And since when, many asked, had the IDF been hesitant about returning Palestinian fire? And if the soldiers feared that Iman’s book bag held explosives, why risk detonation by spraying automatic fire near it?) Still, as needless as Iman’s death seemed, the case might have ended there—as has happened with the deaths of so many other Palestinian children—had not soldiers in the Givati brigade anonymously approached the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot with a very different version of the events. It was they who testified to “Captain R’s” approaching the fallen child and “confirming the kill” with a hail of automatic fire. They expressed outrage that their own reputations as honorable soldiers had been “besmirched” by the commander’s insistence on “confirming the kill” of an unarmed schoolgirl. There are many unofficial stories of IDF soldiers “confirming a kill”—i.e., firing a lethal shot, usually to the head, into an apparently mortally wounded enemy. Frequently, it is alleged, this is a misnomer: the victim has been wounded and is immobilized, but obviously is alive, and death is not confirmed, but inflicted. In any event, Israeli army regulations never mention the practice. Allegations that the soldiers who spoke out were disgruntled because “Captain R” was a strict disciplinarian received little credence, and “Captain R”—whose name has never been revealed—was removed from active duty as the army continued its investigation. In November, the soldiers’ veracity was confirmed when Israel’s Channel Two television broadcast a military communications tape of a conversation among some of the soldiers involved. Troops firing with light weapons and machine guns on a figure moving in the “no entry zone” quickly realized their target was a young girl. Someone in the operations room asked: “Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?” Replied a soldier in the surveillance watchtower, “It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastward, a girl of about 10. She’s behind the embankment, scared to death.” Four minutes later, it was reported the girl had been hit and fallen. The surveillance tower reported, “Receive, I think that one of the positions took her out.” Operations asked, “What, she fell?” and the soldier in the tower replied, “She’s not moving right now.” The tape records the company commander as saying: “I and another soldier…are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill...” After a pause, he added: “Receive a situation report—we fired and killed her. She was wearing pants, jeans, an undershirt, a shirt. Also, she was wearing a keffiyeh on her head. I also confirmed the kill. Over.” Then “Captain R” added: “Anyone who’s mobile, moving in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed.” “Captain R” has been indicted on five relatively light charges, including “illegal use of a weapon,” exceeding his authority to the extent of jeopardizing human life, and “obstructing justice” as a result of his initial false report. As reported [last week] in the UK newspaper The Independent, Lea Tsemel, the Israeli lawyer representing Iman’s family, was angered by the charges, saying, “I believe that the commander and the soldiers who fired should all have been charged with murder.” The prosecution, however, decided against even a manslaughter charge, apparently due to a lack of evidence as to which bullets actually killed the child. Based on the accounts of Palestinian witnesses, however, Iman’s parents believe their daughter was alive until “Captain R” approached and “confirmed the kill.” Asked just how lenient the charges against “Captain R” really are, Tsemel explained that even if found guilty on all counts, “the Israeli court could sentence him to as little as three years.” According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz,“Captain R’s” lawyer, Shamuel Shenfeld, called the accusations unfounded and said his client will plead innocent. This may make for a longer trial, but for a more thorough exploration of the evidence. There will, however, be no forensic evidence from the victim’s body. Not only do many devout Muslims consider post-mortem examinations to be shameful, but Samier al-Hams, Iman’s father, also considers it completely unnecessary. “It was clear from the TV interviews with the other soldiers who were with the Israeli officer they’re calling ‘R,’” he said, “that this ‘R’ is the killer of my daughter. I guess my daughter’s case will test the Israeli law,” he added. To many Palestinians, it will test more than the technicalities of Israeli jurisprudence. When one mentions Iman al-Hams to people in Rafah, their questions have little to do with legal procedures. Why, you hear from person after person, were shots fired at all, when at least one soldier identified the small figure 100 yards from his fortified tower as a ‘little girl…running defensively…scared to death?’” “Why did they have to shoot?” asked one neighbor. “She was running away from the prohibited zone.” Captain R’s indictment has done little to protect Rafah’s children. In one week alone, several small children were injured by aerial shelling in the center of town, while on Sunday, Nov. 28, four-year-old Shaimaa Abu Shammala was shot in the neck while playing outside her home in Block O, and later died of her injuries. Whether on the street, inside their homes, or in their classrooms, there seems to be no real safety anywhere for the children of Rafah—not to mention the tens of thousands of other civilians here. As one mother in Block O put it, “It is open season on our children every day.”—M.O.

2005-02-26T21:26:00.000-08:00

Zakheim And Clues To The Murderers Of 911
The 7th Fire.com2-13-5

The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and on the Pentagon in Washington, DC were crimes that have impacted the character of the United States since they occurred on September 11, 2001. Solving them is an imperative if the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is to survive with its ideals intact.

The possible scenarios include a false flag operation in which a criminal tries to place blame for a criminal act on an innocent individual or group. Given the nefarious activities of Zionist covert operations revealed by former Mossad operative, Victor Ostrovsky, and others, the patterns of history show us the Zionist capacity to murder, torture, lie, and deceive in order to place blame on their enemies. A clear example of this false flag operation is the 1967 use of unmarked Israeli naval and aircraft in an attempt to sink the USS Liberty to blame Egypt. The motto of the Mossad is "By deception shall you do war." This was confirmed one day before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon when the Washington Times reported on a paper issued from the Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) that:

Of the MOSSAD, the Israeli intelligence service, the SAMS officers say: "Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."

Three elements of a criminal investigation are motivation, means, and opportunity. Evidence is being gathered to fill in the details in each of these categories.

Motivation: There are many possible ways that implementing 9-11 would motivate Israel to shift attention from Zionist atrocities in Palestine and to further exacerbate peace and tranquility in the region. With a track record of "Mission Impossible" successes and their willingness to even sacrifice their own people for the cause of furthering the State, Zionists have succeeded over the centuries in demonstrating their cold cruelty and efficiency at murder, massacre and manipulation.

Means: With the backing of the US Treasury, funding from Zionist International Financiers, and Zionist collusion in drug running, arms sales, child prostitution, pornography, and money laundering world wide, Zionist Israel has acquired the means to carry out any operation anywhere in the world.

Opportunity: They have access to US communications, consumer data, and business transactions, control of most of the US media, banks, courts, politicians, military, industry, commerce, shipping, and education.

Hijackers on board unproven: As evidence that Arabs were involved in 9-11, the Nidal-Atta connection is not very convincing since there is as yet no incontrovertible evidence that any Arab hijackers were on board or piloted the planes to their target. There is, on the other hand significant evidence to show that

* no human could have piloted Flights 175 and 77 in accordance with the Official Conspiracy Theory, (at 575 mph, the controls of a Boeing 767 become almost impossible for a human pilot to handle because of built in flight computer program)
* no way for Mohammed Atta or any Arab to trick the USAF to stand down for an hour while they flew around the Northeast,
* no way for a carbon nose cone to slam through a foot thick reinforced wall and not leave debris outside the exit point at the Pentagon,
* no way for cellphones to function at that altitude and speed,
* no way for a building to fall at the rate of free fall and still encounter masses on the way down and so on.

There was no stand down on 9-11. The USAF performed exactly as it should when a Field Training Exercise (FTX) is planned. On September 11th, 2001 several War Games were being staged. War Games included (a) Northern Guardian and (b) Vigilant Guardian (NORAD), (c) CIA/NRO, (d)MASCAL (Pentagon). The security of the United States was at its peak on 9/11-Threatcon Delta. There was absolutely no doubt regarding the readiness of NORAD, NRO, FAA, Military, CIA and FBI on that day. But the line staff did not know that the activity on their screens was real instead of the mock exercise. War Games were used to trick the line staff into inaction.

But how would Osama bin Laden obtain access to the Pentagon to ascertain the dates and missions of the Field Training Exercises and to issue orders to hide a terrorist attack within an ongoing FTX? And how would the precision of the attack be managed with the resources of the Mujahideen? The only way that bin Laden would know the details of these exercises would be if someone in the government or Pentagon told him. Unless he had the means and opportunity to discover, manage, and take over these field exercises we must look elsewhere for the 9-11 perpetrators.

System Planning Corporation has the technology and has worked with the Pentagon for 25 years. Their Flight Termination System has the capability to take over control of up to 10 flights and terminate their mission. FTS can obtain control and navigate aircraft hundreds of miles apart from a central location. On their website they describe their Flight Termination System:

The FTS consists of SPC's Command Transmitter System (CTS) and custom control, interface, and monitoring subsystems. The system is fully programmable and is flexible enough to meet the changing and challenging requirements of today's modern test ranges.

According to System Planning Corporation:

Dr. Zakheim served the Reagan Administration in a variety of other senior Department of Defense posts from 1981 through 1985. He had served previously as Principal Analyst with the National Security and International Affairs Division of the Congressional Budget Office....from 1985 until March 1987, Dr. Zakheim was Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Planning and Resources. In that capacity, he played an active role in the Department's system acquisition and strategic planning processes and guided Department of Defense policy in a number of international economic fora.

In 1997 he was appointed by Secretary of Defense Cohen to the Task Force on Defense Reform. By the time he was appointed by President George W. Bush as Undersecretary of Defense and Comptroller of the Pentagon its budget showed a one trillion dollar shortfall, expenditures for which there was no explanation. Before returning to the Pentagon Dov S. Zakheim was

Corporate Vice President of System Planning Corporation (SPC), a high-technology, research, analysis, and manufacturing firm based in Arlington, Virginia. He is [[was] also Chief Executive Officer of SPC International Corporation, a subsidiary of SPC that specializes in political, military, and economic consulting, and international sales and analysis. In addition, Dr. Zakheim serves as Consultant to the Secretary of Defense and the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He is an Adjunct Senior Fellow for Asian Studies of the Council on Foreign Relations, Adjunct Scholar of the Heritage Foundation, and a Senior Advisor at the Center for International and Strategic Studies.

42ND ANNIVERSARY NATIONAL DINNER
The noted author, lecturer and commentator on national defense and foreign policy issues Hon Dr. Dov Zakheim, United States Under Secretary of Defense was the keynote speaker at the 42nd Anniversary National Dinner of Yeshivat Sha'alvim on March 12, at the New York Marriott Marquis. The scion of a prominent rabbinic family, himself an ordained rabbi and the parent of Sha'alvim alumni, Reuven and Sadya, he and his wife Deborah were recipients of the coveted Joseph K. Miller Achdut Yisrael Award. The announcement was made by Dinner Chairman Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, spiritual leader of Teaneck's Congregation Bnai Yeshurun. http://www.shaalvim.org/alumninews.htm

Dov Zakheim is an ordained rabbi. According to the Yeshivat Sha'alvim:

Not long before According to their website introduction, "Sha'alvim is a dynamic and comprehensive educational community where over 2500 on-campus students are imbued with an unwavering dedication to Torah and an abiding commitment to the People and the State of Israel."

Stephen St. John (APFN June 10, 2004) writes, "Rabbi Zakheim rose to power over the Pentagon's labyrinthine, bottomless accounts, he co-authored an article entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century" which was published by the neo-conservative think tank, The Project for a New American Century, in September 2000, exactly a year before 9/11; in this article, on page 51, it is stated that 'the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor'!"

With other neoconservatives in government and the Pentagon, Zakheim had motive, means and opportunity. It remains to find the further evidence that supports this hypothesis. However, the evidence for "Arab hijackers" has never been provided by the Bush Administration and the photographs of the so-called perpetrators have proved to have been fraudulent, showing only innocent people whose identities had been stolen. There is no other way to explain them still alive after 9-11.

http://www.the7thfire.com/

2005-02-26T20:42:00.000-08:00

New Stories Emerge From Fallujah
By Dahr Jamail 2-9-5

These are the stories that will continue to emerge from the rubble of Fallujah for years. No, for generations

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the doctor sits with me in a hotel room in Amman, where he is now a refugee. He'd spoken about what he saw in Fallujah in the UK, and now is under threat by the US military if he returns to Iraq.

"I started speaking about what happened in Fallujah during both sieges in order to raise awareness, and the Americans raided my house three times," he says, talking so fast I can barely keep up. He is driven to tell what he's witnessed, and as a doctor working inside Fallujah, he has video and photographic proof of all that he tells me.

"I entered Fallujah with a British medical and humanitarian convoy at the end of December, and stayed until the end of January," he explains, "But I was in Fallujah before that to work with people and see what their needs were, so I was in there since the beginning of December."

When I ask him to explain what he saw when he first entered Fallujah in December he says it was like a tsunami struck the city.

"Fallujah is surrounded by refugee camps where people are living in tents and old cars," he explains, "It reminded me of Palestinian refugees. I saw children coughing because of the cold, and there are no medicines. Most everyone left their houses with nothing, and no money, so how can they live depending only on humanitarian aid?"

The doctors says that in one refugee camp in the northern area of Fallujah there were 1,200 students living in seven tents.

"The disaster caused by this siege is so much worse than the first one, which I witnessed first hand," he says, and then tells me he'll use one story as an example.

"One story is of a young girl who is 16 years old," he says of one of the testimonies he video taped recently, "She stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were killed in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home with her father, mother, 12 year-old brother and two sisters. She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father directly, without saying anything."

The girl managed to hide behind the refrigerator with her brother and witnessed the war crimes first-hand.

"They beat her two sisters, then shot them in the head," he said. After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead.

"She continued hiding after the soldiers left and stayed with her sisters because they were bleeding, but still alive. She was too afraid to call for help because she feared the soldiers would come back and kill her as well. She stayed for three days, with no water and no food. Eventually one of the American snipers saw her and took her to the hospital," he added before reminding me again that he had all of her testimony documented on film.

He briefly told me of another story he documented of a mother who was in her home during the siege. "On the fifth day of the siege her home was bombed, and the roof fell on her son, cutting his legs off," he says while using his hands to make cutting motions on his legs, "For hours she couldn't go outside because they announced that anyone going in the street would be shot. So all she could do was wrap his legs and watch him die before her eyes."

He pauses for a few deep breaths, then continues, "All I can say is that Fallujah is like it was struck by a tsunami. There weren't many families in there after the siege, but they had absolutely nothing. The suffering was beyond what you can imagine. When the Americans finally let us in people were fighting just for a blanket."

"One of my colleagues, Dr. Saleh Alsawi, he was speaking so angrily about them. He was in the main hospital when they raided it at the beginning of the seige. They entered the theater room when they were working on a patienthe was there because he's an anesthesiologist. They entered with their boots on, beat the doctors and took them out, leaving the patient on the table to die."

This story has already been reported in the Arab media.

The doctor tells me of the bombing of the Hay Nazal clinic during the first week of the siege.

"This contained all the foreign aid and medical instruments we had. All the US military commanders knew this, because we told them about it so they wouldn't bomb it. But this was one of the clinics bombed, and in the first week of the siege they bombed it two times."

He then adds, "Of course they targeted all our ambulances and doctors. Everyone knows this."

The doctor tells me he and some other doctors are trying to sue the US military for the following incident, for which he has the testimonial evidence on tape.

It is a story I was told by several refugees in Baghdad as wellat the end of last November while the siege was still in progress.

"During the second week of the siege they entered and announced that all the families have to leave their homes and meet at an intersection in the street while carrying a white flag. They gave them 72 hours to leave and after that they would be considered an enemy," he says.

"We documented this story with video-a family of 12, including a relative and his oldest child who was 7 years old. They heard this instruction, so they left with all their food and money they could carry, and white flags. When they reached the intersection where the families were accumulating, they heard someone shouting 'Now!' in English, and shooting started everywhere."

The family was all carrying white flags, as instructed, according to the young man who gave his testimony. Yet he watched his mother and father shot by snipers-his mother in the head and his father shot in the heart. His two aunts were shot, then his brother was shot in the neck. The man stated that when he raised himself from the ground to shout for help, he was shot in the side.

"After some hours he raised his arm for help and they shot his arm," continues the doctor, "So after awhile he raised his hand and they shot his hand."

A six year-old boy of the family was standing over the bodies of his parents, crying, and he too was then shot.

"Anyone who raised up was shot," adds the doctor, then added again that he had photographs of the dead as well as photos of the gunshot wounds of the survivors.

"Once it grew dark some of them along with this man who spoke with me, with his child and sister-in-law and sister managed to crawl away after it got dark. They crawled to a building and stayed for 8 days. They had one cup of water and gave it to the child. They used cooking oil to put on their wounds which were of course infected, and found some roots and dates to eat."

He stops here. His eyes look around the room as cars pass by outside on wet streetswater hissing under their tires.

He left Fallujah at the end of January, so I ask him what it was like when he left recently.

"Now maybe 25% of the people have returned, but there are still no doctors. The hatred now of Fallujans against every American is incredible, and you cannot blame them. The humiliation at the checkpoints is only making people even angrier," he tells me.

"I've been there, and I saw that anyone who even turns their head is threatened and hit by both American and Iraqi soldiers alikeone man did this, and when the Iraqi soldier tried to humiliate him, the man took a gun of a nearby soldier and killed two ING, so then of course he was shot."

The doctor tells me they are keeping people in the line for several hours at a time, in addition to the US military making propaganda films of the situation.

"And I've seen them use the media-and on January 2nd at the north checkpoint in the north part of Fallujah, they were giving people $200 per family to return to Fallujah so they can film them in the linewhen actually, at that time, nobody was returning to Fallujah," he says. It reminds me of the story my colleague told me of what he saw in January. At that time a CNN crew was escorted in by the military to film street cleaners that were brought in as props, and soldiers handing out candy to children.

"You must understand the hatred that has been causedit has gotten more difficult for Iraqis, including myself, to make the distinction between the American government and the American people," he tells me.

His story is like countless others.

"My cousin was a poor man in Fallujah," he explains, "He walked from his house to work and back, while living with his wife and five daughters. In July of 2003, American soldiers entered his house and woke them all up. They drug them into the main room of the house, and executed my cousin in front of his family. Then they simply left."

He pauses then holds up his hands and asks, "Now, how are these people going to feel about Americans?"

(c)2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.
All images and text are protected by United States and international copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.

2005-02-26T20:36:00.000-08:00

NATIONAL ID II: THE DRIVE CONTINUES
The Conservative Voice Feb 07 2005
Rep. James Sensenbrenner, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is intent on pushing a measure through that would all but make the driver’s license a national ID.The language employed by the proponents of his proposal may be appealing to some conservatives. “The states are free to issue driver’s licenses and ID cards to whomever they wish to issue them to, but if they wish to use the ID for federal purposes, then it does have to meet certain standards, including the standard of legal presence in the United States,” said Sensenbrenner.
The implication is that states have the freedom to chose to comply with Federal regulations or not, but those that choose the latter course will find themselves under pressure from their own citizens who must use the license as a de facto national ID. The hand of the national ID proponents was tipped when Tom Ridge, Secretary of Homeland Security, told The Washington Times that requesting the “states to buy into a baseline set of national standards” made sense. Conservatives and libertarians may disagree over whether only legal immigrants should be issued driver’s licenses, but here are some reasons why, according to James Plummer of Consumer Alert, that the Sensenbrenner bill will all but mandate a national ID:Both the Sensenbrenner bill and last year’s Intelligence Reform bill have essentially the same minimum standards, requiring a name, address, gender, ID number, digital photo, etc. Sensenbrenner’s bill, like the Intelligence Reform bill last year, required the licenses to be reads by common machine-readable technology. The Sensenbrenner bill essentially mandates for the states what documents may be used to verify identity. Most importantly, the Secretary of Homeland Security is granted the unilateral power by the Sensenbrenner bill to strengthen standards for licenses. Sensenbrenner’s bill states that “The Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion – may[…] prescribe one of more design formats for driver’s license and identification cards that…protect the national security interests of the United States.” The Secretary of DHS is thus a blank check to set further policy regarding driver’s licenses leaves open the possibility that RFID technology will one day be used in driver’s licenses. Nor is there any specific prohibition of other sorts of Federal information from eventually being placed on the card or from having the Secretary of DHS order states to place information on the card. Another danger of the legislation is that it requires linking state databases. Plus it says “to be eligible to receive any grant or other type of financial assistance made available under this title, a State shall participate in the interstate compact regarding sharing of driver license data, known as the `Driver License Agreement’, in order to provide electronic access by a State to information contained in the motor vehicle databases of all other States.”Given that Canadian provinces and Mexican states can be party to this agreement sponsored by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators the opening is created for what Plummer calls a “tri-national ID card.” Should Mexican officials have ready-access to your state’s database of driver’s licenses? Does this weaken or strengthen protection against fake driver’s licenses. Certainly, Department of Motor Vehicle officials can be corrupt too. For instance, is it possible that information could be obtained from obituaries of recently deceased drivers and counterfeit licenses be issued in their names on common machine-readable cards? Moreover, the databases of States are supposed to include “All data fields printed on driver’s licenses and identification cards issued by the State” and their driving history thus potentially handing over to hackers everything they need to know about drivers. The Secretary of DHS has the power to order even more information to be included in the database. Washington needs once more to hear from concerned citizens to keep their mitts off an issue that should be a state matter. The reality is that under the Sensenbrenner legislation the states must accede to national standards or risk losing money and inconveniencing citizens. The states should say: “Leave the driver’s licenses to us” while seeking to ensure their own standards of issuing licenses are raised so simply not anyone can obtain a card. In fact, most states are indeed doing that. They can do the job better themselves. They do not need help from the Secretary of DHS. At a CATO forum on the issue last fall, the idea was suggested that it would be sensible not to not leave ID cards for the Federal Government’s purposes come down to two cards: the driver’s license and the Social Security card. Why not allow companies to verify identifies? Is it time to thoroughly reshuffle the cards in the identification deck?

2005-02-26T20:32:00.000-08:00

Fraud And Corruption US Occupation Regime Helped Itself To $8.8 Bn Of Mostly Iraqi MoneyBy George MonbiotThe Guardian - UK2-8-5

The Republican senators who have devoted their careers to mauling the United Nations are seldom accused of shyness. But they went strangely quiet on Thursday. Henry Hyde became Henry Jekyll. Norm Coleman's mustard turned to honey. Convinced that the UN is a conspiracy against the sovereignty of the United States, they had been ready to launch the attack which would have toppled the hated Kofi Annan and destroyed his organisation. A report by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US federal reserve, was meant to have proved that, as a result of corruption within the UN's oil-for-food programme, Saddam Hussein was able to sustain his regime by diverting oil revenues into his own hands. But Volcker came up with something else.

"The major source of external financial resources to the Iraqi regime," he reported, "resulted from sanctions violations outside the [oil-for-food] programme's framework." These violations consisted of "illicit sales" of oil by the Iraqi regime to Turkey and Jordan. The members of the UN security council, including the United States, knew about them but did nothing. "United States law requires that assistance programmes to countries in violation of UN sanctions be ended unless continuation is determined to be in the national interest. Such determinations were provided by successive United States administrations."

The government of the US, in other words, though it had been informed about a smuggling operation which brought Saddam Hussein's regime some $4.6bn, decided to let it continue. It did so because it deemed the smuggling to be in its national interest, as it helped friendly countries (Turkey and Jordan) evade the sanctions on Iraq. The biggest source of illegal funds to Saddam Hussein was approved not by officials of the UN but by officials in the US. Strange to relate, neither Mr Hyde nor Mr Coleman have yet been bellyaching about it. But this isn't the half of it.

It is true that the UN's auditing should have been better. Some of the oil-for-food money found its way into Saddam Hussein's hands. One of its officials, with the help of a British diplomat, helped to ensure that a contract went to a British firm, rather than a French one. The most serious case involves an official called Benon Sevan, who is alleged to have channelled Iraqi oil into a company he favoured, and who might have received $160,000 in return. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, has taken disciplinary action against both men, and promised to strip them of diplomatic immunity if they are charged. There could scarcely be a starker contrast to the way the US has handled the far graver allegations against its own officials.

Four days before Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The inspector general's job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn't. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave. This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire. It is 55,000 times as much as Mr Sevan is alleged to have been paid.

The authority, the inspector general found, was "burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management". This is kind. Other investigations suggest that it was also burdened by false accounting, fraud and corruption.

Last week a British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC's File on Four programme that officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts. Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800m was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. A further $1.4bn was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil, and has not been seen since.

Contracts to US companies were awarded by the CPA without any financial safeguards. They were issued without competition, in the form of "cost-plus" deals. This means that the companies were paid for the expenses they incurred, plus a percentage of those expenses in the form of profit. They had a powerful incentive, in other words, to spend as much money as possible. As a result, the authority appears to have obtained appalling value for money. Auditors at the Pentagon, for example, allege that, in the course of just one contract, a subsidiary of Halliburton overcharged it for imported fuel by $61m. This appears to have been officially sanctioned. In November, the New York Times obtained a letter from an officer in the US Army Corps of Engineers insisting that she would not "succumb to the political pressures from the ... US embassy to go against my integrity and pay a higher price for fuel than necessary". She was overruled by her superiors, who issued a memo insisting that the prices the company was charging were "fair and reasonable", and that it wouldn't be asked to provide the figures required to justify them.

Other companies appear to have charged the authority for work they never did, or to have paid subcontractors to do it for them for a fraction of what they were paid by the CPA. Yet, even when confronted by cast-iron evidence of malfeasance, the authority kept employing them. When the inspector general recommended that the US army withhold payments from companies which appear to have overcharged it, it ignored him. No one has been charged or punished. The US department of justice refuses to assist the whistle-blowers who are taking these companies to court.

What makes all this so serious is that more than half the money the CPA was giving away did not belong to the US government but to the people of Iraq. Most of it was generated by the coalition's sales of oil. If you think the UN's oil-for-food programme was leaky, take a look at the CPA's oil-for-reconstruction scheme. Throughout the entire period of CPA rule, there was no metering of the oil passing through Iraq's pipelines, which means that there was no way of telling how much of the country's wealth the authority was extracting, or whether it was paying a fair price for it. The CPA, according to the international monitoring body charged with auditing it, was also "unable to estimate the amount of petroleum ... that was smuggled".

The authority was plainly breaching UN resolutions. As Christian Aid points out, the CPA's distribution of Iraq's money was supposed to have been subject to international oversight from the beginning. But no auditors were appointed until April 2004 - just two months before the CPA's mandate ran out. Even then, they had no power to hold it to account or even to ask it to cooperate. But enough information leaked out to suggest that $500m of Iraqi oil money might have been "diverted" (a polite word for nicked) to help pay for the military occupation.

I hope that Messrs Hyde and Coleman won't stop asking whether Iraqi oil money has been properly spent. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if their agreeable silence persists.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1407964,00.html

2005-02-26T20:28:00.000-08:00

War on Plastic: Rejecting the Toxic Plague By Jan Lundberg
t r u t h o u t Perspective

Sunday 07 February 2005

Plastic as toxic trash is barely an issue with health advocates, environmentalists, and even those of us looking toward the post-petroleum world. Instead, "recycling" and future "bioplastics" distract people from keeping plastic out of their lives. As the evidence from our trashed oceans and damage to human health mounts, plastic can no longer be conveniently ignored. The days of naive trust and denial need to be put behind us, and a war on plastics declared now.
Fortunately, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has before it a first-in-the-nation bag-fee ordinance; the vote is this Tuesday. All major grocery stores would charge customers 17 cents for every shopping bag, plastic as well as paper. Although the logic and the follow through seem well designed, much pressure is being put on the Supervisors to reject the ordinance. (An action alert is at the end of this article.)
Litter bothers all of us, and a smaller number of us worry about petroleum used for dubious purposes in an age of war for oil and global warming caused by fossil fuels. Some of us have learned how the plastic disaster in the middle of the Pacific, for example, has resulted in death for millions of creatures who confuse the toxin-laden plastic particles with krill and plankton. But the cost to humans in general is maybe the bigger story yet to hit.
One recently discovered principle about exposure to toxic chemicals is that very low concentrations can trigger worse damage in many individuals than larger exposures, in part due to the sensitivity of our genes. Also, potency is not possible to predict when various plastics' chemicals combine in our bodies and cause synergistic reactions later on.
Today's extreme dependence on plastics can easily be acknowledged. They are pervasive, cheap, effective, and even "essential." The list of plastic types goes far beyond what we can start listing off the top of our heads. If a product or solid synthetic material is not clearly wood or metal, chances are it is plastic - almost entirely from petroleum. Computers, telephones, cars, boats, teflon cookery, toys, packaging, kitchen appliances and tools, and imitations of a multitude of natural items, are but part of the world of plastics. Living without them would seem unthinkable. However, these plastics are essential to what? Answer: essential to a lifestyle that is fleeting - historically speaking.
There are people who say they cannot live without something, and those who yearn to do so. People think it is a matter of choice. However, when the coming petroleum supply crunch hits and cannot be alleviated by more production - world extraction is soon passing its peak - a combination of factors will deprive global consumers of the constant flow of new products now taken for granted. Therefore, we will not have a choice when we must suddenly start doing without. The supply of petroleum products such as plastics will dry up thanks to the extreme market response that we can anticipate as soon as geologic reality triggers panic. The peak of oil extraction is imminent, with natural gas to follow soon after. Most plastic bags are made from natural gas (methane).
The ongoing use and "disposal" of plastics is a health disaster because we are never rid of the stuff. All the plastic that's ever been produced is still with us today ... unless, of course, it has been incinerated, which spews a plethora of toxic substances into the air. But wait, hasn't there been progress? Plastic grocery sacks are 40 per cent lighter today than they were in 1976, and plastic trash bags are 50 per cent lighter today than in the 1970s. However, growth of the market cancels out any gains, and plastic's pollution just accumulates, whether in the air, water or soil - or our bodies. On many a tropical island beach where plastic junk outnumbers shells, paradise is clearly trashed by modern "convenience." What is unseen is the bioaccumulation of the inherent and hydrophobic toxins adhering to plastics that goes up the food chain to us, even in Kansas eventually.
Most North Americans urinate plastics. Sperm counts are at an historic per capita low. Cancer is an epidemic. Birth deformities, sex organ abnormalities and eventual cancers are becoming more common - all traceable to certain chemical exposures to the fetus. If the human race is not driven extinct by nuclear holocaust or complete distortion of the climate, it may happen through wonderful plastic and other petrochemicals. The latter is an "unscientific" assertion, but later in this report we provide some evidence to give everyone pause.
A movement to spearhead the fight against plastics is forming now. While there have been municipal bans of polystyrene (styrofoam), the plastics/petroleum industry has had a free ride at the expense of the health of the planet and our bodies. While endocrine disruptors and estrogen imitators have been targeted by researchers and public-spirited writers and health organizations, government has done next to nothing as it bows down to industry interests. The War on Plastic will encompass not just a few "problem chemicals" or "the worst plastics," because they are all bad in at least some single way. We must reject the entire toxic petroleum plague to our fullest capability, beginning now.
In California, to complement the Campaign Against the Plastic Plague formed this year in southern California, we at Culture Change have joined this effort with a northern California emphasis. One of our first projects is to support the San Francisco bag fee. We are visiting more Californian communities to promote bag fees and bans on certain plastics. Next, the whole state. We will face increasing opposition. (Once again the petroleum industry will be unhappy with Jan Lundberg, formerly called "the Oracle" by Chevron's vice chairman). But when our rationale and data are considered, almost no one will be able to turn away and ignore the issues.
Waiting for technology to save the lifestyle of using unlimited plastics, by having bioplastics replace the petroleum, is no help. We find that after studying the problems with plant-based replacements (see section above the action alert), and seeing the examples of other environmental problems saddled with non-solutions, fundamental change is the only reasonable approach. Such change will address the whole - our social system, the ecosystem and the economy - instead of spinning our wheels on the ineffectual reforms of mere symptoms of our extremely wasteful society.
Science Misleads in the Cancer Game
The ubiquitous presence of plastics is already killing us. Exactly "how" is never going to be completely isolated. Eighty per cent of cancers are environmentally derived. When we wonder where the epidemic of cancer is coming from, can we say that plastics gave Ms. Jane Doe cancer? Perhaps, but cancer is coming from not only plastics and their associated toxins but also from radiation sources, smog, the modern chemically tainted diet, household and workplace chemicals, etc. To say cancer is "genetic" is to put the onus on our intrinsic humanity, so as to ignore the 80% environmental-source principle.
Migration and release of plastics' chemicals into our food, water, and skin is of little interest to the government and its corporate friends. But certain principles won't go away: for example, polymerizing does not perfectly bind the petroleum chemicals together, especially when substances such as carcinogenic plasticizers are added after polymerization. Did you think that cute "rubber" duckie in the bath tub was harmless? Think again.
The U.S. public is thus treated every bit as shabbily as the Third World victims of plastic pollution. In India, where much of Americans' plastic "recycling" (mostly trash) is sent, the authorities dismiss the sad public health impact there by asking, "How can you prove that these plastic and lead recycling factories are causing these problems?" [source: Plastic Task Force, Berkeley Ecology Center] In a land like India, where biotech crops and corporate fast-food outlets have been sabotaged, it is possible that folks may intensify their destroying of whatever is destroying them. When the environmental movement holds back forthright judgment, and the environment and our health are not protected, people do need to take on plastics and other threats personally. This is because the mainstream movement to protect the environment and public health is going practically nowhere. This is exactly what industry and its scientists want. It's as if industry is funding the environmental movement; in large part it is.
Your War on Plastics
The prevailing attitude by those already concerned about plastics is that we must just focus on reducing the use of one or two key plastics while continuing to push recycling. This philosophy of compromise, without stating the whole truth that plastics must be eliminated as much and as fast as possible, is a deadly mistake. The funded environmental movement and public health officials are needlessly resigned to accepting a plastic world just because ignorant consumers have habits. The approach of promoting only the bringing of one's own bag for shopping, along with the recycling con game and waiting for bioplastics, has failed and needs to be abandoned publicly.
Paul Goettlich, of Mindfully.org, concludes "There are no safe plastics. All plastics migrate toxins into whatever they contact at all times. It does not matter if it is water- or oil-based; hot or cold; solid or liquid."
Analogy: When war is used as a solution in reacting to an alleged threat or terror, etc., (Saddam, Noriega, ad infinitum) we fail to focus on the real problem - the cause of the war, which is usually corporate America. We are distracted by one alarm after another, while war profiteers and jingoistic politicians bleed us dry. It's the same with plastics - the chemicals are the battles but the war is really about plastic and petroleum dependence. The focus of environmental organizations is often the individual chemical, rather than real solutions such as reusable nontoxic, nonplastic replacement of containers and bags. Instead of wondering what plastic might be safer to microwave, those of us in the know say, "None. And don't microwave anyway."
A host of poisonous chemicals are imbedded in plastic that are unstable, causing genetic damage and resultant disease. Here are a few of the critical, insurmountable challenges from plastic's production and disposal:
Clear plastic food wrap contains up to 30% DEHP [di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate]. This substance is also in intravenous blood bags. This poison was identified by the State of California for its Proposition 65 list of carcinogens and mutagens, but industry pressure got the listing weakened.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it was found that 1,000,000 times more toxins are concentrated on the plastic debris and plastic particles than in ambient sea water.
Six times as much plastic per weight than zooplankton is in any given amount of sea water taken from the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Triclosan, in plastics as well as antibacterial soaps, deodorants, toothpastes, cosmetics, and fabrics, is shown to cause health and environmental effects and compound antibiotic resistance. Researchers found that when sunlight is shined on triclosan in water and on fabric, a portion of triclosan is transformed into dioxin.
Migration from all seven categories of plastic designated with numerals on packaging, including the recyclable types 1 and 2, are (partial list): Acetaldehde, antioxidants, BHT, Chimassorb 81, Irganox (PS 800, 1076, 1010), lead, cadmium, mercury, phthatlates, and the acknowledged carcinogen diethyl hexyphosphate.
Many more such additives are often present, creating in our bodies synergisms that can be 1,600 times as strong as an estrogen imitator/endocrine disruptor/single chemical may be.
The main issue surrounding the use of polyvinylchloride (PVC) is the impact of toxic pollutants generated throughout its life cycle. A Greenpeace (UK) study from October 2001 stated in its headline, "UK Government report on PVC misses the point, but still condemns PVC windows and floors." Nowadays, the "green" building code in the U.S. ducks the issue of PVC content.
Bioplastics?
Bioplastics have started to appear, but they often contain petroleum plastic as well, and even if non-petroleum, when "compostable" they are not guaranteed to be properly composted. Brown paper bags do not break down in landfills.
We have faith in "human ingenuity" and "science" that will "solve our problems" some day, as "they" will "think of something." They sure will:
Dupont is marketing "Greenpla." When you check their website about biodegradable plastics and see Dupont's "Biomax," we see its generic name is "Polybutylenesuccinate/terephthalate" [Note that the last phrase, phthalate, is in a class of highly toxic compounds. - ed.]
I would predict that plant-based plastics will be niche products and used very locally, similar to alcohol fuels which are only realistic for meeting very local, limited needs possibly, in certain parts of the world. Meanwhile, it is time to fight petroleum addiction by concentrating on plastics.
Action Alert: The Movement's First U.S. Battle
The current, high-profile battleground is San Francisco. Following the example of Ireland and other countries that have put a fee on plastic bags, the grocery shoppers of San Francisco may soon start paying a fee of 17 cents per bag. That figure is the cost that the citizenry is already paying in general taxes for some of the costs of plastic-bag trash, such as cleaning up the litter and unclogging the waste system.
The American Plastics Council claims that the bag fee is a crazy idea, saying in the San Francisco Chronicle that "this will hurt those who can least afford it." Just the opposite is true. Northern Californians Against Plastic presented figures to show that if each of the 347,000+ households in San Francisco were to purchase a couple of cotton or canvas bags, over the approximate 10-year life of those bags the total amount saved by consumers - compared to everyone using eight bags each week at 17 cents each - would collectively be over $300 million. And the bag fee would mean revenue to fund programs for the poor, such as free reusable natural-fiber bags. The Chronicle and the Commission on Environment (the San Francisco body putting the bag fee proposal to the Supervisors for an ordinance) have this new information.
If you want to see the 17-cent bag fee on supermarket shopping bags implemented in San Francisco, now is the time to contact the Board of Supervisors. (It's okay if you don't live there.) Before the elected officials might be swayed by the current backlash of negative reaction about the first-in-the-nation ordinance up for consideration by the city, concerned citizens everywhere are urged to email, call, fax, and mail the President of the Board of Supervisors, immediately:
Aaron Peskin - District 3 City Hall 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 244 San Francisco, CA 94102-4689 (415) 554-7450 - voice (415) 554-7454 - fax Aaron.Peskin@sfgov.org
Suggested comment (it's good if many of you reword or rearrange the text):
I support the bag fee at San Francisco grocery stores that would help clean up the environment. Society can easily work out the adjustment to reusing bags and cutting down costs. People are already paying more than the 17-cent cost, because on top of the waste problem the city deals with, there are health problems from plastics, damaged tourism from both the trash and the harm to sea life, and petroleum used for plastics is a strategic commodity that wars are fought over. So please pass the ordinance and be the first city in the U.S. to follow excellent examples such as Ireland which passed a 15-cent fee on plastic bags. The revenue collected would, at a minimum, be good for ensuring San Francisco's success with the program. Thank you, ________.
Let's not get left holding the bag.
Jan Lundberg formerly ran Lundberg Survey Incorporated, which published the once "bible of the oil industry," the Lundberg Letter. He now writes essays and songs, and publishes CultureChange.org.
Resource Links:
Jan Lundberg's first report on the subject: Plastics: Your Formidable Enemy - Culture Change Letter #70.
Campaign Against the Plastic Plague: http://www.culturechange.org/e-letter-plastics.html.
Algalita Marine Research Foundation, maker of the award-winning movie, "Our Synthetic Sea," available for purchase: http://earthresource.org/campaigns/capp/capp-overview.html.
Paul Goettlich's mindfully.org has almost everything on plastics: http://www.mindfully.org./Plastic/plastic.htm.
http://beyondpesticides.org/news/daily.htm.
www.ourstolenfuture.org.
Scientific American article on "green plastics".
Sustainable business: www.reuseablebags.com.
Plastic Oceans news article.
"78 Reasonable Questions to Ask about Any Technology" by Stephanie Mills/Clamor, i.18, Jan/Feb03. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

2005-02-26T18:17:00.000-08:00

CNN Executive Quits Over Iraq Remarks
ABC News Online - Australia2-12-5

(Reuters) -- CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan has quit over remarks he made in Switzerland last month about journalists killed in Iraq, possibly by US forces.

CNN said on its website that Mr Jordan conceded his remarks at last month's World Economic Forum in Davos were "not as clear as they should have been."

Several participants at the event said Mr Jordan told the audience US forces had deliberately targeted journalists - a charge he denied.

Mr Jordan quickly explained that some journalists were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were struck by a bomb, while others died because American forces who mistook them for the enemy.

But his comments erupted into a controversy that he said threatened to tarnish the network he helped build, according to CNN.

"After 23 years at CNN, I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq," Mr Jordan said in a letter to colleagues.

The controversy gained steam last week, with Internet bloggers posting their accounts of what transpired at the Switzerland forum, an event attended by political, economic, academic and media figures from around the world, the CNN site said.

The Davos organisers have said the session, like most at the forum, was off-the-record, and they have refused to release a transcript to preserve their commitment.

The resignation sent shockwaves through CNN, the network said, because Mr Jordan has been long admired by his peers, from executives to the rank-and-file.

Mr Jordan joined CNN as an assistant assignment editor in 1982 and rose through the ranks to become CNN's chief news executive.

© 2005 ABC

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200502/s1301482.htm

2005-02-26T18:12:00.000-08:00

U.S. Offers Judge Secret Evidence To Decide Case
Virginia Man Held in Saudi Prison
By Carol D. Leonnig Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, February 12, 2005; Page B02

The U.S. government asked a judge yesterday to dismiss a Falls Church couple's challenge of their son's imprisonment based on reasons and evidence that would be kept secret from the family and the public.
Justice Department lawyer Ori Levi, while acknowledging that such a ruling would be unprecedented, told the judge "there's very little risk" that Ahmed Abu Ali, a U.S. citizen detained in a Saudi prison for 20 months, has been wrongly deprived of his freedom.
Start of rightcontent.inc

"But the government's interest here in protecting national security is extraordinarily high," Levi said.
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates said at the hearing, however, that he had serious reservations about making such a critical decision based on information that would be presented to him privately in chambers. He said that although he was mindful of the government's concerns about national security, he would be reluctant to dismiss the family's claims of unjust imprisonment without a public explanation.
"This is about as close to a state-secrets shutdown as you can get," Bates said. Then he asked Levi, "How able is the court to resolve a matter fairly when it's only able to hear from you?"
Levi acknowledged that this was a "unique case" and that the government knew of no others in which a U.S. court had agreed to keep secret the reasons for rejecting someone's claim for liberty.
The judge did not indicate when he would make a decision about the government's request.
Abu Ali, 23, who was raised in Northern Virginia, has been detained in Saudi Arabia since he was arrested in June 2003 while studying at the University of Medina. He has not been publicly charged with any crime by Saudi or U.S. authorities.
His parents, originally from Jordan, sued the U.S. government last summer, alleging that the United States had arranged for their son to be held by the Saudi government on suspicion of terrorist acts and that U.S. authorities expected he would be tortured there.
Bates ruled in December that the parents could seek government documents to try to prove their allegation of a U.S. role in their son's imprisonment.
At yesterday's hearing, Bates noted that the federal appeals court in Washington has ruled that courts can use secret information to make some decisions. But he questioned Levi about whether any of those cases involved an interest as compelling as Abu Ali's, and Levi said no. In those other cases, courts have used secret evidence to bar someone from employment and deny someone a pilot's license.
"We're talking about freedom here," Bates said.
David Cole, one of the family's attorneys, told the judge he should not even consider secret evidence because the stakes are so high.
"The notion that the government can litigate a case involving a U.S. citizen's liberty entirely behind closed doors is unprecedented and totally contrary to the basic principles upon which this country was founded," Cole said.
Cole and the family said yesterday that the U.S. government is trying to shut down the case to avoid embarrassing disclosures that it was complicit in Abu Ali's imprisonment. They noted a Washington Post article last week reporting that the State Department had issued a formal request to the Saudi government asking it to indict Abu Ali or turn him over to U.S. custody.
"If any other U.S. citizen was held in this way, our government would be raising hell," Cole added. "Here our government has tried to keep it all secret."
The family alleges that Abu Ali is a victim of "rendition," a U.S. government practice of arranging for suspected terrorists to be interrogated and detained in other countries, beyond the reach of U.S. legal protections.
Levi told Bates that the judge can fairly, without input from Abu Ali's lawyers, sort out the proper course after seeing the secret information.
"One of the great things about America is we have an independent judiciary," Levi said. "This is not a black box where we're asking you to sign off on what we say."

2005-02-26T18:02:00.000-08:00

U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings
By Julie Cart The Los Angeles Times
Friday 10 February 2005

More than 200 Fish and Wildlife researchers cite cases where conclusions were reversed to weaken protections and favor business, a survey finds.
More than 200 scientists employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they have been directed to alter official findings to lessen protections for plants and animals, a survey released Wednesday says.
The survey of the agency's scientific staff of 1,400 had a 30% response rate and was conducted jointly by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
A division of the Department of the Interior, the Fish and Wildlife Service is charged with determining which animals and plants should be placed on the endangered species list and designating areas where such species need to be protected.
More than half of the biologists and other researchers who responded to the survey said they knew of cases in which commercial interests, including timber, grazing, development and energy companies, had applied political pressure to reverse scientific conclusions deemed harmful to their business.
Bush administration officials, including Craig Manson, an assistant secretary of the Interior who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, have been critical of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, contending that its implementation has imposed hardships on developers and others while failing to restore healthy populations of wildlife.
Along with Republican leaders in Congress, the administration is pushing to revamp the act. The president's proposed budget calls for a $3-million reduction in funding of Fish and Wildlife's endangered species programs.
"The pressure to alter scientific reports for political reasons has become pervasive at Fish and Wildlife offices around the country," said Lexi Shultz of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Mitch Snow, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the agency had no comment on the survey, except to say "some of the basic premises just aren't so."
The two groups that circulated the survey also made available memos from Fish and Wildlife officials that instructed employees not to respond to the survey, even if they did so on their own time. Snow said that agency employees could not use work time to respond to outside surveys.
Fish and Wildlife scientists in 90 national offices were asked 42 questions and given space to respond in essay form in the mail-in survey sent in November.
One scientist working in the Pacific region, which includes California, wrote: "I have been through the reversal of two listing decisions due to political pressure. Science was ignored and worse, manipulated, to build a bogus rationale for reversal of these listing decisions."
More than 20% of survey responders reported they had been "directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information."
However, 69% said they had never been given such a directive. And, although more than half of the respondents said they had been ordered to alter findings to lessen protection of species, nearly 40% said they had never been required to do so.
Sally Stefferud, a biologist who retired in 2002 after 20 years with the agency, said Wednesday she was not surprised by the survey results, saying she had been ordered to change a finding on a biological opinion.
"Political pressures influence the outcome of almost all the cases," she said. "As a scientist, I would probably say you really can't trust the science coming out of the agency."
A biologist in Alaska wrote in response to the survey: "It is one thing for the department to dismiss our recommendations, it is quite another to be forced (under veiled threat of removal) to say something that is counter to our best professional judgment."
Don Lindburg, head of the office of giant panda conservation at the Zoological Society of San Diego, said it was unrealistic to expect federal scientists to be exempt from politics or pressure.
"I've not stood in the shoes of any of those scientists," he said. "But it is not difficult for me to believe that there are pressures from those who are not happy with conservation objectives, and here I am referring to development interest and others.
"But when it comes to altering data, that is a serious matter. I am really sorry to hear that scientists working for the service feel they have to do that. Changing facts to fit the politics that is a very unhealthy thing. If I were a scientist in that position I would just refuse to do it."
The Union of Concerned Scientists and the public employee group provided copies of the survey and excerpts from essay-style responses.
One biologist based in California, who responded to the survey, said in an interview with The Times that the Fish and Wildlife Service was not interested in adding any species to the endangered species list.
"For biologists who do endangered species analysis, my experience is that the majority of them are ordered to reverse their conclusions [if they favor listing]. There are other biologists who will do it if you won't," said the biologist, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

2005-02-26T17:51:00.000-08:00

Warning To The World About The New America
[ Also 'playing in a theatre near you' in Canada ! ]
By Baldknobber 11-7-3

For years I have told Americans to wake up and see what was happening to their country before it was too late for America. Now it is time for me to tell the world to wake up about America before it is too late for them.
I have been aware of a disturbing change in the US government for the last 12 years. It seems that the world has slept through this change and does not realize what America has become. I will outline some major problems, go into specific subjects and cite examples of how America has changed, yes, we are indeed no longer free. Much of what is written in this report is from my own personal experience.
This is a warning to the world to watch out for the new America. America is no longer the moral guardian you knew it to be, in recent years America has become a tyrant unprecedented.

Control Of Media
The American press can no longer be trusted. When the Government passed the Telecommunications act of 1996, it allowed consolidation of the media and control of all information received by the people to a small group of sources. This showed itself as large media mergers and virtually all information was soon controlled by the same small group of people. In June of 2003 additional legislation was passed which now allows all the news to be controlled from a single source.
The day I typed this I called CN8 live, a national cable news program to speak on the air. They took my personal information including name, address and phone number. They then hung up and called me back to verify that I really was at that address. They then said something that scared me half to death, They said that if I did not stay on subject and say what I told them I would say that they would 'notify the authorities'. I am someone who has called news programs frequently in the past, and that never happened before. It's obviously a new policy. So much for a free press.

Police Brutality
I know a man who manages a store close to where I live. His brother has a sixteen year old boy and seven year old girl. Outside his brother's house some police were beating a man who was laying down on the road and not fighting back. The sixteen year old opened the window and shouted at the police, telling them that they were doing too much and that they did not need to beat the man so hard.
They did not let up, instead they kicked in the door to the house and assaulted the boy. So now they were beating up the man on the street and beating up the kid in the house. The seven year old girl ran to the officer who kicked in the door and tried pulling him off her brother. The officer pushed her away so hard that she hit the wall and broke her arm. It never made the news. This is not an isolated incident, it is the new America. Contrast this with the glossy happy-go-lucky 'police are great and accountable for their actions' media coverage on shows like Real TV and 'Cops', there is much more to the truth than we are allowed to see.
In the past I had heard stories like this from strangers but did not believe them until I heard it from someone I knew well. Indeed the foreign governments who have started to call the US a police state are much more correct than they realize. I am waiting for them to have the courage to say it without retracting comment.

Asset Forfeiture
America has a new policy towards personal property called 'asset forfeiture'. This is the act of confiscating property without a trial. The way it works is this: The police accuse you of a crime and take whatever they say you had in your possession when the alleged crime was committed. This could be a vehicle such as a boat or car, or a computer, or even your house. You have to go to court to prove your innocence to get it back, and if you win your case you have to pay a return fee which is usually 50% of the property value. If they take a car that was worth 12,000 you will have to pay 6,000 to get it back. If you cannot afford the 6,000 they will sell it at auction to 'recover' their 'funds'. If you have a loan or mortgage on the property they sell at auction, you are still obligated to pay the bank for what you no longer have.
This happens frequently and the evidence is easy to find. Go to Google and type the search term "US government auctions" or "asset forfeiture auction" or pick any state and add the word auction. The auctions are everywhere, selling property seized from people who were often judged by the courts innocent.
If you are a property owner with tenants in a 200 room apartment complex and one of the tenants gets arrested in an apartment for possession of drugs or stolen property, or committing a crime such as calling a prostitute to his room, the city or state can take the apartment building away from the owner who was not involved in any way and say that the property committed the crime and therefore needed to be taken. Confiscation of large complexes has happened more than once, confiscation of single family rental houses and private homes is frequent. EXAMPLE

Forcing A Crime
It has become common for a judge to force a crime. The way this is done is to issue a civil judgement that cannot possibly be implemented by the person the judgement is against. When the person the judgement is issued against fails to implement the judgement, a civil matter becomes criminal due to 'contempt of court'. This is commonplace in family law when a man is forced to pay ìchild supportî Child support judgements often leave a man with less than 20 percent of his income after taxes, despite the 50% rule. This forces the person the judgement is against to make a decision - pay 'child support' as ordered and suffer severe hardship, often including dependence on friends or being homeless or living in a car or camper, or get behind on "child support" and become a "criminal" due to contempt of court.

Violation Of Ex Post Facto
In the constitutional republic the United States used to be, there was a rule of ex post fato which prevented any government, be it federal state or local from writing retroactive laws. But since 1987 there has been a new and disturbing trend.
The federal government along with many states and municipalities has started to write and enact retroactive laws. As an example, let's say that in 1998 you painted your house and at that time it was legal to paint your house without a permit. If in 2003 your municipality writes a retroactive law that states that you now needed a permit to paint your house, and makes it retroactive to 1995, you will be in violation and guilty of breaking the law in 1998.
Retroactive laws are commonplace now and are usually enacted in the areas of taxes, family policy, and land usage. It is a frequent event now to have people suddenly discover they owe huge sums of money or are now subject to punishment for doing things that were legal when they did them.
The public tolerance of the now commonplace violations of ex post facto has opened an avenue through which governmental bodies are prosecuting people for violations they did not commit, collecting taxes that were never owed and seizing properties which were 'improperly used' in the past.

Legislation Without Representation
Starting in the late 1980's, most states authorized the practice of legislation without representation. It is standard practice now for un-elected people in state agencies to enact policy and write laws that were never voted on, approved, or asked for by the public. Legislation without representation often takes place in secret, with the public unaware of what is happening until the new law is put in place and enforced. This has removed accountability from government and allowed serious abusive practices to be implemented without the presence of any individual or group to be held accountable.
My own personal experience with legislation without representation occurred when I calculated that over 80 percent of my income was being taken in taxes and 'child support' for two children. I called the child support agency and asked them who wrote the laws that made such a thing possible. I wanted to know which senator, representative or other elected official was responsible for enacting such a draconian policy.
The state agent replied: "The child support statutes were enacted by this child support agency and have nothing to do with elected officials. As for the individuals who write the policy, you are not permitted to know who is involved".
This most serious practice, probably the one that has destroyed our freedom the most, is occurring everywhere through many avenues, not only 'child support'. Legislation without representation allows a corrupt government to thrive because the people who write the legislation are employees of the government who work in secret, will never be held accountable and cannot be voted out of office.
In a democracy, the people can effect change by voting the people who are going against their will out of power. Legislation without representation circumvents the democratic process and takes the will of the people out of government. Due to the now common practice of legislation without representation, America can no longer be considered a true democracy.

Road Closures
In the back country they are closing down the roads to limit access. If you get caught riding even a bicycle on the road beyond the barrier, having left you car at the barrier, they will confiscate the bike, the car, and throw you in prison, and you will lose everything 100%. I was familiar with the back country of the intermountain west and noticed that around 1996 the road closures began to happen. I believe the closures are an attempt to de-familiarize the public with alternate routes of escape in the event of a police lockdown or martial law.
They also closed down any road that led to safe water in remote regions. In High School, I had a German teacher who was alive during Hitler's reign and she said that Hitler closed down access to the wilderness areas after the Reichstag was burned which proved to be an effective method of eliminating resistance from the portion of the population which did not agree with him. She warned us to never let it happen here.
Road closures are usually done with very large immovable barriers such as boulders or trenches and signs warning of what will happen if you get caught attempting to travel beyond them.

Citizen Spies
In the name of fighting terrorism, the so-called 'department of homeland security' has employed a network of citizen spies who may have in reality been hired to identify people who are upset with the new government policies. When the Reichstag was burned, Hitler also set up his network of citizen spies. Was Sep11 a Reichstag? One thing is certain, the videos you can download now are not the same as the ones I downloaded on Sep12. Immediately after Sep11 they clearly showed explosives going off in sequence, bringing the buildings down in a perfect demolition wave. Most of the ones you can find now no longer show the explosions, they have been 'photoshopped' out.
Terror is a common tactic or excuse used by oppressive governments to get the people to give up their freedoms for a little bit of security. Hitler used this tactic after the burning of the Reichstag to justify the military actions he took in the opening days of World War II. To keep the population safe from terror, Hitler also employed his network of citizen spies who did little but turn their neighbors in for expressing dissenting views.

Common Police Searches
It has become commonplace now for police to stop people for no reason and search them. This began long before Sep11. This has happened to me personally three times, once at a roadblock, once when I was walking on my way to work, and once when I was sleeping in my van due to homelessness caused by a divorce. It would have happened many times, but I got good at spotting the roadblocks - just look for a traffic jam with evenly timed cars coming toward you in the opposite lane. Normally, the traffic jam would be long enough to allow me to pull a u-turn without being seen. I never did anything wrong, but I hate those road blocks. EXAMPLE

Anonymous Accusation
In recent years, Federal, state and local law enforcement bodies have started arresting and punishing people due to anonymous accusations. Now when you show up in court you have no right to know who has accused you of a crime. Without any chance of any repercussions, individuals, groups and organizations now commonly issue accusations to get revenge, gain unfair advantage, or simply because they were going on assumption rather than actually being witness.
The right to know your accuser was a cornerstone of American justice; it created an environment which brought accountability to legal prosecution. Without it, people are now going to jail, being fined, and losing their children in civil disputes without ever knowing why.

http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_ government&Number=1013010#Post1013010 [No longer available on Libertyforum website]

2005-02-26T17:45:00.000-08:00

Bush Pays Halliburton For Services Never Rendered
Monday, 7 February 2005, 2:16 pm
Opinion: Evelyn Pringle

Bush Pays Halliburton For Services Never RenderedBy Evelyn Pringle Miamisburg Ohio

As of June 2004, the Government Accounting Office estimated that more than $1 billion in taxpayer money had been wasted due to illegal overcharges by contractors in Iraq, since the onset of the war. Furthermore, experts say that once the total is calculated correctly, the losses could very well add up to billions more.
According to GAO Comptroller General, David Walker, the $1 billion represents about 2% of the $60 billion spent in Iraq between March 2003 and June 2004. To no one's surprise I'm sure, Walker listed Halliburton's overbilling for meals as the kind of typical overcharging that is occurring.
Whistleblowers Ignored
Last summer, 5 whistleblowers, who were past employees of Halliburton, came forward to tell tax payers what was really going on in Iraq. They specifically described how the company was robbing tax payers blind with apparently not a care in the world about discovery or punishment.
Marie deYoung, is a former Army chaplain who worked for Halliburton, and then spent 5 months inside its Kuwaiti operation, said the Iraq operation: "it’s just a gravy train." She claims there is no effort to hold down costs because the company knows that all costs will be passed down to taxpayers. When she complained to her higher ups, they told her, "We can be as dumb and stupid as we want in the first year of a war, nobody’s going to care."
And they were half-right. Republicans don’t care but none of Democrats who do care have been able to do one thing about it. A Vice President in the back pocket is seemingly priceless.
DeYoung revealed documents that proved that Halliburton had billed tax payers $50,000 a month for pop, and $1 million a month to clean clothes at $100 per bag.
Her allegations were validated on June 30, 2004, with the release of a report from an investigation of the US controlled Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq, that found the CPA had failed to adequately control over $9 billion in international aid, including Halliburton's hotel costs in Kuwait.
The CPA Inspector General, Stuart Bowen, claimed the CPA had participated in Halliburton's overcharging by failing to stop unauthorized personnel from staying at the $700 per night Hilton in Kuwait City, which was only authorized to house senior government officials.
Billing documents showed that over a 3 month period, Halliburton had billed tax payers $1 million to house 100 employees at a the Kuwaiti hotel. However, by the time the Inspector General’s report was released, Halliburton had charged $2.85 million for hotel costs, the report noted.
The CPA, and its leader Paul Bemmer, controlled the governing processes in Iraq from May 2003 to June 29, 2004. So how’s this for a coincidence? Bowen released the report on June 30, 2004, one day after the CPA was disbanded, and its authority was turned over to Iraqi citizens.
Americans Forced To Risk Death To Boost Halliburton Profits
Twelve former truckers who made the 300 mile resupply run from Camp Cedar in southern Iraq to Camp Anaconda near Baghdad told Knight Ridder that they risked their lives driving empty trucks while Halliburton billed the government for hauling what they sarcastically called "sailboat fuel."
At the time of the disclosure by the truckers, Knight Ridder found Defense Department records that showed Halliburton had been paid $327 million for "theater transportation" of war materiel and supplies and was earmarked to be paid $230 million more.
In addition to interviewing the drivers, Knight Ridder viewed records of the empty trips, dozens of photographs of empty flatbeds and a videotape that showed 15 empty trucks in one convoy.
"There was one time we ran 28 trucks, one trailer had one pallet (a trailer can hold as many as 26 pallets) and the rest of them were empty," David Wilson, who was the convoy commander on more than 100 runs, told Knight Ridder. Four other drivers who were with Wilson confirmed his account, Ridder added.
The lives of the National Guard and Army escorts who provided security for the truckers were also put in danger during these trips. So why would Halliburton risk the lives of American soldiers and truckers by forcing them to drive empty trucks 300 miles in a war zones? $$$ Halliburton's contract allowed the company to pass on the cost of the transportation and to also tack on a 1 to 3% for profit. According to Knight Riddeer, trucking "experts estimate that each round trip costs taxpayers thousands of dollars."
Peter Singer, author of "Corporate Warrior," a book on privatization of the military, says the use of empty trucks to boost profits demostrates how the contracting system is broken. The government gives out large cost-plus contracts in which "essentially it rewards firms when they add to costs rather than rewarding them for cost savings," Singer said.
Other whistleblowers came forward to describe how employees were instructed to abandon or torch new trucks, worth $80,000, if they got a flat tire or had some other minor problems, so that Halliburton could then purchase new trucks with taxpayer dollars, according to a letter penned by Congressman Henry Waxman.
NBC News obtained Pentagon documents that support these charges. They showed where Halliburton was buying hundreds of high-end SUVs and pickup trucks with options like CD players that employees don‘t need, and duplication in purchases of computers and other high-tech equipment.
DeYoung said employees were paid even if they didn‘t work. Her charge was verified by Mike West, another ex-Halliburton employee, who was paid $82,000 a year to be a labor foreman, although he had no workers to supervise, "They said just log 12 hours a day and walk around and look busy," West said.
Just think what we could have done in this country with the billions of dollars that Halliburton has ripped off. According to the Feb 4, 2005 Houston Chronicle, as of Dec 31, 2004, the Army has paid Halliburton ... $5.9 billion for the operations in Iraq and Kuwait, Army officials said.
$5.9 billion went right down the drain.
Halliburton Does Not Discriminate
Halliburton does not discriminate when it comes to robbing people. As it turns out, American tax dollars were not the company’s only source of fraudulent income.
According to the May 21, 2004, the Sidney Morning Herald, "One of Australia's largest postwar contracts in Iraq has collapsed, with the partners embroiled in a multi-million-dollar legal battle and allegations of corruption in the awarding of contracts by a leading Pentagon supplier," it reported.
The Herald revealed the "Morris Corporation, a catering company was dumped last year by the US contractor Halliburton, losing a $100 million contract to supply meals to US troops in Iraq."
Morris was awarded a contract in partnership with KCPC, a Kuwaiti company, to feed 18,000 troops. But Halliburton cancelled the deal 6 weeks later, claiming Morris and its Kuwaiti partner had not met their obligations.
However, according to the Herald, an insider involved in the deal alleged that the companies involved were approached by a Halliburton employee seeking kickbacks worth up to $3 million during contract negotiations. "We're not talking about a paper bag. This guy was after a percentage of your sales every month," the insider said. "They wanted kickbacks of 3 per cent to 4 per cent, which pushed up the prices because then the sub-contractors would add the price of the kickbacks to their costs."
Confidential Halliburton documents leaked to the Herald showed the employee who was accused of soliciting the bribe was involved in awarding millions of dollars worth of Halliburton work in Kuwait to supply the military with services.
The Herald maintained that it had been told that the same employee had made similar propositions to other contractors. In fact, the insider claimed the demand for kickbacks was widely known. "It was too blatant, the corruption that was going on, not to be caught," he said.
The problems with the contract first became public when a report by Pentagon auditors was released to a congressional committee in March, 2004, after Rep Henry Waxman called for hearings to investigate the over-billing in Iraq. The report accused Halliburton of massive over-billing for the meals it served to troops in Iraq and Kuwait.
The investigation determined that not only had Halliburton failed to inform the military that it had cancelled the Morris-KCPC contract in July, 2003, it had continued to use the contract to estimate costs of more than $1 billion for meal facilities in Iraq and Kuwait.
At about the same time, Halliburton was forced to admit that two employees were under criminal investigation for accepting over $6 million in bribes related to those contracts.
Halliburton Fraud - No End In Sight
In addition to the stonewalling of investigations in this country, the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, established by the UN to monitor US control of Iraq's oil revenue, is complaining because the administration refuses to release documents relating to the money paid to Halliburton from the Iraq oil revenue fund under the no-bid contracts.
The IAMB includes representatives from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development.
According to a letter from Rep Waxman, "the [Bush] Administration has failed to comply with numerous IAMB requests for U.S. government reports about the payment of approximately $1.5 billion in DFI funds to Halliburton," who is the "single largest private recipient of Iraqi oil proceeds."
Waxman also quoted minutes from an IAMB meeting which said "some contracts using DFI funds were awarded to Halliburton without competitive bidding." As a result of this discovery, the IAMB instructed the KPMG accounting firm "to pay special attention" to this issue during its audit of CPA documents.
However, the Bush administration and Halliburton have stonewalled this investigation as well, as the company remains open for business.
Despite the massive increase in contracts due to the war in Iraq, Bush as not increased the number of officials who supervise contractors at all. Only 180 Army officials monitor defense contracts and only a little more than a handful of them are in Iraq, Peter Singer told Knight Ridder.
Halliburton Gets Away With Grand Theft
On Feb 4, 2005, the Washington Post reported that “the Army said yesterday it will not withhold future payments to Halliburton Co., despite audit reports last summer that said the giant logistical contractor had not properly accounted for a wide variety of work in Iraq and Kuwait.”
“The decision comes months after Army auditors recommended withholding 15 percent of payments, about $60 million a month, from Halliburton ... the largest government contractor in Iraq,” the Post noted.
Democrats were outraged and said “senior Pentagon officials have ignored audit reports documenting allegations that Halliburton overcharged the government and mismanaged tax dollars,” the Post reported. “Critics complained the Pentagon has given the company special treatment by twice waiving deadlines for imposing the 15 percent withholding,” it noted.
Rep Waxman, who has spent years investigating the fraud, was furious. "This action is incomprehensible," he said. "Once again, the Bush Administration is putting Halliburton's interests above those of the taxpayers," Waxman said in a written statement. "Halliburton is busting the Army's budget, yet Administration officials continue to ignore rampant overcharging and the recommendations of their own auditors," he added.
When is somebody going to say enough already? Halliburton has been caught ripping off tax payers time and time again. Which begs the question of how many more billions of dollars has this corrupt company made off with for all the times it wasn‘t caught?
Halliburton has proven one fact beyond any doubt. If a company is engaged in the war profiteering business, having an American Vice President to cover your ass is priceless.
*************
(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent Media TV and an investigative journalist focused on exposing government corruption.)

2005-02-26T17:25:00.000-08:00

Zero Doubt - WTC Towers Brought Down By Explosives2-7-5

"The flashlight led us into Borders bookstore, up an escalator, and out to Church Street. The explosions were going off everywhere. I was convinced that there were bombs planted all over the place and someone was sitting at a control panel pushing detonator buttons. I was afraid to go down Church Street towards Broadway, but I had to do it. I ended up on Vesey Street. There was another explosion. And another. I didn't know which way to run." --Teresa Veliz, Survivor

Read the full report by Webster G. Tarpley here http://www.reopen911.org/Tarpley_ch_6.pdf

From: http://www.rense.com/general62/zxero.htm

2005-02-26T17:20:00.000-08:00

9-11: Holes in the Radar
Frank Levi and Team 8+ (Feb 2005)
www.the-movement.com
They cunningly exploited vulnerabilities in the radar that only the US Military and the FAA should have been aware of.

Read more about:
Flight 77 Did it reappear to the West?
Flight 11 Was it in two places at once?
Flight 175 (COMING SOON)
Flight 93 (COMING SOON)

US Military please note: this text is not intended to offend the good people in the US Military. The implications of the article are that 9-11 was staged by elements of the US Government/Military but it is very unlikely that it involved the normal people in the military whose only intention is to protect their country.
Since 9-11, many people have wondered how it was possible that the four hijacked planes on 9-11 were able to cause such confusion and chaos without any significant response from America's air defences (NORAD). Even more amazing is the fact that a hijacked plane was able to both penetrate and attack within the protected air space around Washington DC.
It is already well established that the planners of 9-11 were aware of and possibly taking advantage of the military exercises and terror drills taking place on and around that day. (See War Games and Terror Drills under additional reading)
What we have discovered is that whoever planned and implemented 9-11 must have had detailed knowledge of both the NORAD and FAA radar coverage. They cunningly exploited vulnerabilities in the radar that only the US Military and the FAA should have been aware of. The 9-11 commission only skimmed the surface of these issues, using them as a means to draw blame away from the FAA and NORAD.
Another important question is why the hijackers took such long illogical routes to get to their targets. Why, for example, was Flight 93 not crashed into the World Trade Centre, which was in sight of the airport?
Analysis of the flight paths reveals the possibility that the planes were switched for substitute "drone" planes, operated by remote control and loaded with explosives to cause maximum damage. Although this is somewhat speculative, it is important to point out the anomalies in the flight paths that might lead us to consider this scenario. If you are unfamiliar with "plane-swapping" and "remote controlled plane" theories, please refer to Appendix C (Operation Northwoods and Remote Controlled Planes)
Before reading on, you may wish to review the appendices for an explanation of technical terms and some notes on the graphical techniques used throughout this piece.
It is also well worth reading the following article from the Washington Post. They explain in detail about why Flight 77 disappeared from the radar screen, leading the air traffic controller to believe that this flight had crashed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node&contentId=A32597-2001Nov2
Sources showing radar sites and coverage
(Click thumbnails for a larger image)

Surveillance Implications of 9/11 is an FAA analysis of the radar coverage on 9-11 and ways of dealing with future potential threats. The document contains a map of the United States showing internal ATC primary radar coverage (orange) and NORAD radar coverage (maroon)

Flight Explorer Personal Edition. A demo version of this flight tracking software is available to download from the Flight Explorer site. It allows you to view various map overlays including the locations of radar sites, ATC centre and sector boundaries and the locations of airports. Notice the different types of radar site e.g. ALB-T is an Airport Surveillance Radar (ASR) used for Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON). Sites starting with Q are Air Route Surveillance Radar (ARSR). Some of these ARSR sites do not appear on the FAA map above. These are low power secondary only (or beacon only) sites that depend on a plane's transponder signal to show its location.
Sources of Flight Path data

Chapter one of the 9-11 Commission Report gives some diagrams showing the reconstructed radar data from the hijacked planes.

Flight Explorer is a publicly available program for tracking commercial flights. The data comes directly from the FAA and shows any commercial flight being tracked by Air Traffic Control as it progresses. The paths of the hijacked flights were automatically archived and the results made available to the mainstream media. (USAToday - animated Flight paths)

Flytecomm is another flight tracker. They also released archived footage of the hijacked planes but this time in the form of AVI video clips. Read the press release. These video clips show an EST clock in the bottom right hand corner. They feature some radar footage ignored by the other sources. We originally discovered the AVI clips here:
http://irvingshapiro.tripod.com/cgi-bin/Flight_93/crashother.avi.
http://irvingshapiro.tripod.com/cgi-bin/Flight_93/crashnyc.avi
Jack Locutus of letsroll911.org recently confirmed their authenticity by contacting Flytecomm support. They forwarded the same video clips back to him.
The Scenario
This map shows the 9-11 flight paths copied onto part of the FAA radar map (see above). The orange areas are FAA primary radar coverage, the maroon areas are NORAD radar (also used by FAA).
The areas with no primary radar coverage are emphasised in white. The "hijackers" clearly knew where the vulnerabilities in the radar system were. How?
Unless otherwise specified, the times and events in this sequence are taken from the 9-11 Commission Report or directly from the Flight Explorer/ Flytecomm data.
7: 59 Flight 11 takes off from Logan airport
8:14 United Airlines Flight 175 takes off from Logan airport
8:14 Hijacking of Flight 11 apparently begins. It may have been a staged hijacking or part of a terror drill.
8:21 Flight 11 switches off its transponder at the edge of an area that just happens to have no primary radar coverage. Two "drone" flights (remote controlled plane bombs) fly in from this no-radar zone and creep into the radar shadow above Flight 11. These drone flights may have been using Operation Vigilant Guardian as additional cover. Operation Vigilant Guardian was a huge military exercise taking place that week featuring Russian planes flying over the Arctic Circle to attack America. Meanwhile, Flight 11 begins to reduce its altitude.
8:27 Flight 11 appears to turn very close to Schenectady county airport. What really happens is that Flight 11 flies down towards the Mohawk river valley towards Griffiss Air Base (6) and the two drones, still flying in formation, continue down the Hudson river towards New York City.
Flight 11 either lands at Griffiss Air Base (home of NEADS, the North Eastern base for NORAD) or flies on to be shot down or destroyed over the great lakes.
8:39-8:43 At this point, Drone Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 come very close together. The remaining drone peels off from formation to rendezvous with Flight 175 over Stewart International airport.
8:46:40 Flight 11(drone) crashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
8:42 Just before the crash, Flight 93 is taking off from Newark, around 42 minutes late.
8:47 Flight 175 switches off its transponder, right at the same time that Flight 93 makes a little unexplained detour to meet it. Both these planes are in the same place at the same time and Flight 175 disappears. Coincidence? No, Flight 175 flies West in Flight 93's radar shadow. Flight 175 goes on to land, possibly at Cleveland or Pittsburgh airport under cover of diversion. 8:51 Flight 175 deviates from its assigned cruising altitude.
(Time not available) Air traffic controllers spot an "intruder over Allentown" (Washington Post, Sept 17th 2001). This is a plane flying with an unidentified transponder code and is later assumed to be Flight 175.
9:03 It is, in fact, a drone flight that goes on to crash into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
9:41 Flight 93, also in the midst of a staged hijacking or terror drill turns off its transponder and drops down low. A drone plane flying in through another hole in the primary radar coverage slips in to take its place on the radar.
10:03 Just before it is shot down, flight 93 is approaching Johnstown Airport. Coincidentally there was a meeting of the Local Emergency Planning Agency (LEPA) in the control tower of Johnstown Airport the day before (See The Johnstown "Terror Team" Cover-up). Was this plane supposed to be part of a terrorist attack drill? The drone, a white unmarked plane, is seen by numerous witnesses circling the crash site. Its presence is never properly explained
8:20 Flight 77 takes off from Dulles Airport (Washington D.C.)
8:39 Flight 77 makes a small detour to the north in an area with no primary radar coverage. At this point it meets the drone, which has flown down from the north through an area with no radar coverage.
8:51 Flight 77 makes its last radio contact. 8:56 It then switches off its transponder and disappears from ATC radar scopes. This is due to the fact that the radar tracking it at the time is a "Secondary only" radar site that depends on responses from the plane's transponder to give a location for the plane. The plane also turns at the weak centre-point between the two primary radars.
9:07 The Flytecomm video shows Flight 77 reappearing again and flying onwards to the west. The presence of this plane was confirmed by Col. Alan Scott at the 2nd hearing of the Commission (9-11 commission hearing, 23rd May 2003). It still appears to be in the air after 10:00.
(Time not available) Once again the plane exploits vulnerabilities in the radar coverage to avoid being shot down as it enters restricted D.C. air space. Dulles controllers raise the alarm that an unidentified plane is approaching Washington at about 9:29 (Washington Post, Nov 3, 2001)
9:37 The official time that Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon
Notice the precision timing involved. We frequently see two or more events happening at the same time, like a magician distracting the audience.
8:14 Flight 11 is hijacked; Flight 175 takes off.
8:39 Flight 11 and Flight 175 nearly meet; Flight 77 deviates from its path.
8:46/47 Flight 11 crashes; Flights 175 and 93 meet each other
8:51 Flight 77 makes last radio contact; Flight 175 deviates from its assigned altitude
The Witness
http://www.timesreporter.com/archive/printable.php?ID=1490
Did Bolivar man spot Flight 93?
By RENEE BROWN, T-R Staff Writer A Bolivar man thinks he saw the ill-fated fourth hijacked airliner Tuesday morning shortly before it crashed south of Pittsburgh.
Tim Hacquard, who lives in the Hunter’s Green allotment off county Rd. 92, said he was watching the television coverage of the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. and stepped outside.
“I witnessed a large plane that seemed to be flying low, very loud and not level,” Hacquard said. “I didn’t think there were supposed to be any planes in the air and I couldn’t understand why this plane was flying.
“There is not a plane in sight and then there’s a big old plane over my house. On an average day you don’t see those types of planes near Bolivar.
“If it’s a large plane, you can’t hear it or make it out because it’s too high. If it’s a normal plane, it would have stayed at a local airport.”
According to aviation officials, United Airlines Flight 93 was a Boeing 757 that left Newark, N.J., at 8:01 a.m. en route to San Francisco.
It crashed about 10 a.m. southeast of Pittsburgh, presumably killing all 45 aboard. Flight 93 was the fourth plane to crash Tuesday.
“Now I am wondering if this was the plane,” Hacquard said. He said he has some experience with planes, having served in the Air Force – but not as a pilot - for several years.
“It was way too low for that size plane,” he continued. “I was scratching my head. It wasn’t level and was flying somewhat erratic.
“I was thinking maybe it was a plane that had been directed to land, but then I found out a plane crashed in Pennsylvania and I saw the flight plan on the news. How far south did he come?”
Hacquard admitted he didn’t look at his watch to check the time, but he said he watched the large, commercial jet for 15 to 20 seconds.
“I just couldn’t tell if it was a United plane,” he said. “I was thinking, why would it be over Bolivar, why would it be in Ohio? Someone else had to see that plane.”
An FBI spokesperson in Washington D.C. said Wednesday she could not confirm or deny what Hacquard saw.
“I have no specific information on specific flight patterns,” she said.
However Fred Krum, director of aviation at Akron-Canton Regional Airport, acknowledged that the plane could have been close to the area at that time but he doesn’t think it was Flight 93 that Hacquard saw since “it would have been fairly high at that time.”
Another representative of the airport said Hacquard may have seen a military plane or a commercial plane ordered to land at the nearest airport.
Hacquard said the plane seemed to be flying away from the Akron-Canton airport, heading in a more easterly direction. He now also wonders whether the plane was being tracked by government officials.

What happened to the passengers?
Now the tricky part, if plane swapping took place, what happened to the real planes and the passengers? Unfortunately this is where we currently have to resort to educated speculation.
In Operation Northwoods we saw the original "plane swapping" scenario. In this case, the military planners at the pentagon were confident that they could fabricate passengers by creating non-existent IDs for the people on the plane. They were also noticeably confident that no-one would blow the whistle.
However, you can be sure that the 9-11 passengers are not on a desert island somewhere.
Perhaps a number of planes were shot down that day. This is where you get "layers within layers" of the cover-up. Picture this fictional officer speaking: "Listen guys, we accidentally shot down another plane that was conducting an emergency drill today. What really hit the North Tower was a jet that the hijackers chartered from Schenectady County Airport. You understand that the public don't need to know about this, right?"
There are many other possibilities, perhaps the passengers were killed before the plane landed at some remote location.
Conclusions and Summary
These are absolute facts that cannot be ignored:
Within the area that the hijackings took place, there are two areas with no primary radar coverage that stretch up towards Canada.
Flight 11 switched off its transponder right next to an area with no primary radar coverage.
Flight 77 switched off its transponder right next to an area with no primary radar coverage.
Flight 93 switched off its transponder right next to an area with no primary radar coverage.
United Flight 175 switched off its transponder next to United Flight 93.
We have two incidences where a hijacked plane came very close to a non-hijacked plane. (What are the odds?) Flight 11(hijacked) meets Flight 175 (not hijacked). Flight 175 (hijacked) meets Flight 93 (Not Hijacked)
Question 1: How did the "hijackers" know exactly where these huge breaches in air defence were located?
Question 2: Why go to all that trouble when you can take off from nearby airports (Dulles/Newark), hijack the plane and crash it straight away?

Appendix A: Technical Information
What are Primary and Secondary Radar? What is a transponder?
Read a detailed technical explanation
A primary radar site simply detects the location of a plane. Air traffic control systems can calculate the direction and speed by measuring its movement over time.
Commercial flights (and most others) use a device called a transponder that relays back detailed information about the flight when it detects a radar sweep. The transponder provides the controllers with additional information such as altitude and flight number. If the transponder is switched off, the flight effectively becomes an unidentified blip on the radar, although ATC can place a data tag (or block) on the blip for easier identification.
How do Flight Trackers work?
Microsoft provide a simple explanation:
Several years ago, the FAA made radar feeds available to commercial users. These feeds track the status of all aircraft under positive control from FAA Air Traffic Control (ATC) centers throughout the United States—including both scheduled airline flights and business jets.
Simply put, the radar data received by Air Traffic Control can be seen in a slightly more visually pleasing format on a flight tracker.
Appendix B: Graphical techniques
Macromedia Fireworks was used to convert flight path graphics into transparent gif format. All background colours were changed to transparent leaving only the state boundaries and plane icons as opaque.
These transparent gifs can then be pasted as a new layer onto another map. The transparent layer is stretched, rotated and skewed as necessary to align the state boundaries. This gives a very accurate representation of a flight path on top of an alternative backdrop.
Appendix C: Operation Northwoods and Remote Controlled Planes
Operation Northwoods is a document discovered through the Freedom of Information Act which proved conclusively that high ranking members of the US military have planned in the past to use fake terror attacks to justify war. This particular plan was to justify an invasion of Cuba by carrying out numerous acts of violence and trickery.
A full scanned copy of Operation Northwoods can be seen at:
http://emperors-clothes.com/images/north-i.htm
The matter-of-fact way in which this memo is presented is quite shocking.
"We could blow up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba"
"We could develop a communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities or even in Washington".
For the purpose of this article we will be focusing on one particular section:
http://emperors-clothes.com/images/north-10.htm
This section deals with a mock shoot-down of a passenger plane with the intention of blaming Cuba. The basic points follow:
A plane at Eglin Air Force base would be painted up to be an exact replica of a registered plane belonging to a "CIA proprietary organisation" in Miami.
This painted plane would be secretly swapped with the real aircraft and loaded with passengers using fake identities. The real craft would be converted into a remote controlled drone. During the flight, the real aircraft (drone) would rendezvous with the fake aircraft. The plane with the fake passengers on board would fly very low and land in the base.
Passengers and plane would then return to normal and the drone flight would continue on its way
As the plane flew over Cuba a fake distress message would be broadcast indicating an attack by a Cuban MIG fighter. This would be interrupted by the remote detonation of explosives on board the plane.
A few other points to note:
http://emperors-clothes.com/images/north-8.htm casualty lists in the US papers would create a wave of righteous indignation
http://emperors-clothes.com/images/north-8.htm "(10) Sabotage ships in harbour; large fires--naphthalene." Naphthalene is used by Hollywood special effects people to create enormous "fuel-tank explosion" effects. Frequently used for plane crashes.
http://emperors-clothes.com/images/north-11.htm deals with a fake shoot down of USAF plane and the distribution of fake plane parts in that location
Modifying planes to be flown by remote control is not a new idea. Read about Operation Aphrodite which goes right back to WWII.
NASA have also test-crashed remotely controlled passenger planes
Appendix D: The BTS data
www.bts.gov is the website for the "Bureau of Traffic Statistics". There is a searchable database which shows, for example, the departure times of all major passenger planes in USA. You will see listed below the conflicts between the official story and the data on this site.
7: 59 Flight 11 officially takes off from Loganairport, though BTS database notes that it didn'tdepart at all. (no wheels-off time)2. 8:14 United Airlines Flight 175 officially takes offfrom Logan airport, though BTS notes it departed at8:23 (wheels-off time)9. 8:42 Just before the crash, Flight 93 is officiallytaking off from Newark, around 42 minutes late, thoughBTS notes that it actually already departed at 08:28(wheels-off)
15.8:20 Flight 77 officially takes off from DullesAirport (Washington D.C.), though BTS notes that theflight didn't exist at all on that day.
Further Reading
Some very interesting reading about radar and Air Traffic Control by Tom Lusch.
http://home.columbus.rr.com/lusch/rtudslide01.html
This will give you a better understanding of why Flight 77 disappeared from the radar screen.
War Games and Terror Drills
Here are some sample articles on this subject
The lost "terror drill"? Pt.11 (A) (Nico Haupt)
The lost terror drill- Pt.11 B
Additional notes by Nico Haupt
Michael Kane: "9/11 War Games – No Coincidence"
Wargames Were Cover For the Operational Execution of 9/11
THE GREAT 9/11 COINCIDENCE
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060704_tripod_fema.html

2005-02-26T17:14:00.000-08:00

The 9/11 WTC Collapses:An Audio-Video Analysis
9-14-2001 CNN explanation of the collapses(2.5 MB ASF video)
"The collapse, when it came, was caused by fire.
The fire was very, very intense and burned for a long time. The fire weakened that portion of the structure which remained after the impact. It was weakened by the fire to the point where it could no longer sustain the load.
When the World Trade Center Towers did fall they pancaked onto themselves minimizing damage to adjacent structures, just like the Center's designers had intended, should disaster ever strike."

The above CNN report demontrates the feeble nature of the mainstream media's investigation into the WTC collapses. The circumstances surrounding the 2,749 World Trade Center deaths on 9/11 should be scrutinized, not fantasized. Below are aspects of the WTC collapses which are routinely dismissed as 'conspiracy theories' because they go against the official line, even though they're based on fact, not fantasy.
How was it known thatthe WTC was going to collapse?
Rudolph Giuliani, the police commissioner, the fire commissioner, and the head of emergency management were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. How was this known, and why was no-one else warned?
There Were No 800ºC Infernos in the Twin Towers
We are told that the twin towers collapsed due to infernos initiated by the plane impacts, yet eyewitness testimony and firefighters broadcasts from the impact area of WTC 2 prove there was no inferno in this building, so why did it collapse after only 56 minutes?
The 'Truss Theory':A Fantasy Concocted to Conceal a Demolition
We are told that the twin towers perimeter walls were connected to the inner core by weak trusses. We are also told that the truss connection bolts were weak. If that's the case then why didn't WTC 1 collapse when Flight 11 hit the building?
WTC 1: An Impossible Collapse
Two seconds of a WTC collapse video graphically demonstrate the 'truss theory' is a fantasy.
Video cameras positioned atop the World Trade Center which were used to feed daily images to local television stations were inexplicably inoperative that morning. [WingTV]
Live video cameras on the WTC would have graphically registered the following...
Abruptly, there was an ear-splitting noise. The south tower shook... [ASNE]
Reports of a Ground Shake Preceding the Collapse of WTC 2
Video Evidence of a Ground LevelExplosion Prior to WTC 1's Collapse
Seismic recordings, eyewitness testimony, and two videos of WTC 1 indicate a large detonation occurred at the base of the building fourteen seconds before its collapse.
...the probable cause of the above: thermite detonations in the basements of the buildings.
9/11 Firefighters:Bombs and Explosions in the WTC
"Tower two has had major explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse", "...those involved in the secondary explosion at tower 1, 'kay, I've got five patients...", "We have got numerous people covered in dust from the secondary explosion...", "We've got another explosion at the tower..."
"It [WTC 2] started exploding," said Ross Milanytch, 57, who works at nearby Chase Manhattan Bank. "It was about the 70th floor. And each second another floor exploded out for about eight floors, before the cloud obscured it all." [ASNE] "I saw small explosions on each floor." [Wing TV]
One eyewitness whose office is near the World Trade Center told AFP that he was standing among a crowd of people on Church Street, about two-and-a-half blocks from the South tower, when he saw "a number of brief light sources being emitted from inside the building between floors 10 and 15." He saw about six of these brief flashes, accompanied by "a crackling sound" before the tower collapsed. Each tower had six central support columns. [American Free Press]
The above accounts indicate cutter charges were used to bring down WTC 2. See the Oklahoma City Bombing for an explanation of the "crackling sound".
The Strange Collapse of the "Spire"

MPEG video download of collapse (4.8 MB)To download video right click link and select 'Save Target As'
The "spire" in the above images is a portion WTC 1's service core.
The core was designed to support the entire weight of the buildings several times over. Far more than a mere "service core", it comprised of 47 steel box columns tied together at each floor by steel plates, similar to the 52" deep spandrel plates that tied the perimeter columns together. The largest of these core columns were 18"x36", with steel walls 4" thick near the base and tapering in thickness toward the top, and was anchored directly to the bedrock.
Photograph showing WTC 1 inner core during construction:
The lower part of the core was the most solid piece of WTC 1, but the above video shows it comes down several seconds after the building's collapse. This structural failure cannot be attributed to the fires which were in the building - this part of the core survived the collapse so it should have remained standing.
The collapse of the "spire" is consistent with a thermite reaction pooling molten iron into the central area of the WTC basement, this subsequently melted the core columns and caused the structural failure several seconds later.
WTC 7 provides more evidence that the World Trade Center was demolished
We are told that WTC 7 collapsed through fire, yet Larry Silverstein says the building was "pulled" (i.e. demolished). Videos of the collapse and other evidence shows that the building was indeed demolished. Evidence also shows that WTCs 1 & 2 came down in the exactly the same way.
If the twin towers had remained standing on 9/11 (as they were supposed to) they would have been monuments to the inaction of the US government and military. These monuments would have rapidly become a huge embarrassment to many people, and would have required a costly demolition.
Incredibly these two quarter mile high buildings both suffered 'unthinkable' catastrophic structural failures and collapsed straight into their own footprints. The people who should have been red faced bankrupts as a result of 9/11 are now swimming in money and power thanks to the perfect collapse of the twin towers.
Think about it.
“When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains--however improbable--must be the truth.”Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
See also:
The 9/11 Reichstag FireMuslims Suspend the Laws of Physics - Part I - Part II Who Signed Sakher Hammad's WTC Basement Level Pass?WTC Owner May Make a Huge Profit off of 9/11 WTC Attacks
What Really Happened

2005-02-26T17:12:00.000-08:00

US Aerial Attack on Iran Planned for June

www.globalresearch.ca 20 February 2005
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/JEN502A.html
Scott Ritter Says US Attack on Iran Planned for June
By Mark Jensen
Saturday, 19 February 2005 United for Peace of Pierce County (WA)

Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia's Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
Olympians like to call the Capitol Theater "historic," but it's doubtful whether the eighty-year-old edifice has ever been the scene of more portentous revelations.
The principal theme of Scott Ritter's talk was Americans' duty to protect the U.S. Constitution by taking action to bring an end to the illegal war in Iraq. But in passing, the former UNSCOM weapons inspector stunned his listeners with two pronouncements. Ritter said plans for a June attack on Iran have been submitted to President George W. Bush, and that the president has approved them. He also asserted that knowledgeable sources say U.S. officials "cooked" the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran's alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million -- a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism.
The former Marine also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called "a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom," were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.
Asked by UFPPC's Ted Nation about this shocker, Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.
On Jan. 17, the New Yorker posted an article by Hersh entitled The Coming Wars (New Yorker, January 24-31, 2005). In it, the well-known investigative journalist claimed that for the Bush administration, "The next strategic target [is] Iran." Hersh also reported that "The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer." According to Hersh, "Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. . . . Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military's war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. . . . The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans' negotiated approach [to Iran] cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act."
Scott Ritter said that although the peace movement failed to stop the war in Iraq, it had a chance to stop the expansion of the war to other nations like Iran and Syria. He held up the specter of a day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration.
Scott Ritter's talk was the culmination of a long evening devoted to discussion of Iraq and U.S. foreign policy. Before Ritter spoke, Dahr Jamail narrated a slide show on Iraq focusing on Fallujah. He showed more than a hundred vivid photographs taken in Iraq, mostly by himself. Many of them showed the horrific slaughter of civilians.
Dahr Jamail argued that U.S. mainstream media sources are complicit in the war and help sustain support for it by deliberately downplaying the truth about the devastation and death it is causing.
Jamail was, until recently, one of the few unembedded journalists in Iraq and one of the only independent ones. His reports have gained a substantial following and are available online at dahrjamailiraq.com .
Friday evening's event in Olympia was sponsored by South Puget Sound Community College's Student Activities Board, Veterans for Peace, 100 Thousand and Counting, Olympia Movement for Justice & Peace, and United for Peace of Pierce County.

2005-02-26T16:59:00.000-08:00

Is the Annexation of Canada part of Bush's Military Agenda?
by Michel Chossudovsky
www.globalresearch.ca 23 November 2004
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO411C.html
Territorial control over Canada is part of Washington's geopolitical and military agenda as formulated in April 2002 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Binational integration" of military command structures is also contemplated alongside a major revamping in the areas of immigration, law enforcement and intelligence.
At this critical juncture in our history and in anticipation of the visit of George W. Bush to Canada on November 30th, an understanding of these issues is central to the articulation of a coherent anti-war and civil rights movement.
The purpose of this detailed report is to encourage discussion and debate in Canada and Quebec, as well as in the US. Kindly circulate this article widely. The Summary can be forwarded by email with a hyperlink to the complete text.
SUMMARY
For nearly two years now, Ottawa has been quietly negotiating a far-reaching military cooperation agreement, which allows the US Military to cross the border and deploy troops anywhere in Canada, in our provinces, as well station American warships in Canadian territorial waters. This redesign of Canada's defense system is being discussed behind closed doors, not in Canada, but at the Peterson Air Force base in Colorado, at the headquarters of US Northern Command (NORTHCOM).
The creation of NORTHCOM announced in April 2002, constitutes a blatant violation of both Canadian and Mexican territorial sovereignty. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced unilaterally that US Northern Command would have jurisdiction over the entire North American region. Canada and Mexico were presented with a fait accompli. US Northern Command's jurisdiction as outlined by the US DoD includes, in addition to the continental US, all of Canada, Mexico, as well as portions of the Caribbean, contiguous waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans up to 500 miles off the Mexican, US and Canadian coastlines as well as the Canadian Arctic.
NorthCom's stated mandate is to "provide a necessary focus for [continental] aerospace, land and sea defenses, and critical support for [the] nation’s civil authorities in times of national need."
(Canada-US Relations - Defense Partnership – July 2003, Canadian American Strategic Review (CASR), http://www.sfu.ca/casr/ft-lagasse1.htm
Rumsfeld is said to have boasted that "the NORTHCOM – with all of North America as its geographic command – 'is part of the greatest transformation of the Unified Command Plan [UCP] since its inception in 1947.'" (Ibid)
Following Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's refusal to join NORTHCOM, a high-level so-called "consultative" Binational Planning Group (BPG), operating out of the Peterson Air Force base, was set up in late 2002, with a mandate to "prepare contingency plans to respond to [land and sea] threats and attacks, and other major emergencies in Canada or the United States".
The BPG's mandate goes far beyond the jurisdiction of a consultative military body making "recommendations" to government. In practice, it is neither accountable to the US Congress nor to the Canadian House of Commons.
The BPG has a staff of fifty US and Canadian "military planners", who have been working diligently for the last two years in laying the groundwork for the integration of Canada-US military command structures. The BPG works in close coordination with the Canada-U.S. Military Cooperation Committee at the Pentagon, a so-called " panel responsible for detailed joint military planning".
Broadly speaking, its activities consist of two main building blocks: the Combined Defense Plan (CDP) and The Civil Assistance Plan (CAP).
The Militarisation of Civilian Institutions
As part of its Civil Assistance Plan (CAP), the BPG is involved in supporting the ongoing militarisation of civilian law enforcement and judicial functions in both the US and Canada. The BPG has established "military contingency plans" which would be activated "on both sides of the Canada-US border" in the case of a terror attack or "threat". Under the BPG's Civil Assistance Plan (CAP), these so-called "threat scenarios" would involve:
"coordinated response to national requests for military assistance [from civil authorities] in the event of a threat, attack, or civil emergency in the US or Canada."
In December 2001, in response to the 9/11 attacks, the Canadian government reached an agreement with the Head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, entitled the "Canada-US Smart Border Declaration." Shrouded in secrecy, this agreement essentially hands over to the Homeland Security Department, confidential information on Canadian citizens and residents. It also provides US authorities with access to the tax records of Canadians.
What these developments suggest is that the process of "binational integration" is not only occurring in the military command structures but also in the areas of immigration, police and intelligence. The question is what will be left over within Canada's jurisdiction as a sovereign nation, once this ongoing process of binational integration, including the sharing and/or merger of data banks, is completed?
Canada and NORTHCOM
Canada is slated to become a member of NORTHCOM at the end of the BPG's two years mandate.
No doubt, the issue will be presented in Parliament as being "in the national interest". It "will create jobs for Canadians" and "will make Canada more secure".
Meanwhile, the important debate on Canada's participation in the US Ballistic Missile Shield, when viewed out of the broader context, may serve to divert public attention away from the more fundamental issue of North American military integration which implies Canada's acceptance not only of the Ballistic Missile Shield, but of the entire US war agenda, including significant hikes in defense spending which will be allocated to a North American defense program controlled by the Pentagon.
And ultimately what is at stake is that beneath the rhetoric, Canada will cease to function as a Nation:
Its borders will be controlled by US officials and confidential information on Canadians will be shared with Homeland Security.
US troops and Special Forces will be able to enter Canada as a result of a binational arrangement.
Canadian citizens can be arrested by US officials, acting on behalf of their Canadian counterparts and vice versa.
But there is something perhaps even more fundamental in defining and understanding where Canada and Canadians stand as a Nation.
The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. It has formulated the contours of an imperial project of World domination. Canada is contiguous to "the center of the empire". Territorial control over Canada is part of the US geopolitical and military agenda.
The Liberals as well as the opposition Conservative party have endorsed embraced the US war agenda. By endorsing a Canada-US "integration" in the spheres of defense, homeland security, police and intelligence, Canada not only becomes a full fledged member of George W. Bush's "Coalition of the Willing", it will directly participate, through integrated military command structures, in the US war agenda in Central Asia and the Middle East, including the massacre of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture of POWs, the establishment of concentration camps, etc.
Under an integrated North American Command, a North American national security doctrine would be formulated. Canada would be obliged to embrace Washington's pre-emptive military doctrine, including the use of nuclear warheads as a means of self defense, which was ratified by the US Senate in December 2003. (See Michel Chossudovsky, The US Nuclear Option and the "War on Terrorism" http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO405A.html May 2004)
Moreover, binational integration in the areas of Homeland security, immigration, policing of the US-Canada border, not to mention the anti-terrorist legislation, would imply pari passu acceptance of the US sponsored police State, its racist policies, its "ethnic profiling" directed against Muslims, the arbitrary arrest of anti-war activists.
FULL TEXT OF ARTICLE

Introduction
For nearly two years now, Ottawa has been quietly negotiating a far-reaching military cooperation agreement, which allows the US Military to cross the border and deploy troops anywhere in Canada, in our provinces, as well station American warships in Canadian territorial waters. This redesign of Canada's defense system is being discussed behind closed doors, not in Canada, but at the Peterson Air Force base in Colorado, at the headquarters of US Northern Command (NORTHCOM).
The creation of NORTHCOM announced in April 2002, constitutes a blatant violation of both Canadian and Mexican territorial sovereignty. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced unilaterally that US Northern Command would have jurisdiction over the entire North American region. Canada and Mexico were presented with a fait accompli. US Northern Command's jurisdiction as outlined by the US DoD includes, in addition to the continental US, all of Canada, Mexico, as well as portions of the Caribbean, contiguous waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans up to 500 miles off the Mexican, US and Canadian coastlines as well as the Canadian Arctic.
NorthCom's stated mandate is to "provide a necessary focus for [continental] aerospace, land and sea defenses, and critical support for [the] nation’s civil authorities in times of national need."
(Canada-US Relations - Defense Partnership – July 2003, Canadian American Strategic Review (CASR), http://www.sfu.ca/casr/ft-lagasse1.htm
Rumsfeld is said to have boasted that "the NORTHCOM – with all of North America as its geographic command – 'is part of the greatest transformation of the Unified Command Plan [UCP] since its inception in 1947.'" (Ibid)
Following Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's refusal to join NORTHCOM, a high-level so-called "consultative" Binational Planning Group (BPG), operating out of the Peterson Airforce base, was set up in late 2002, with a mandate to "prepare contingency plans to respond to [land and sea] threats and attacks, and other major emergencies in Canada or the United States".
The Liberals under Prime Minister Paul Martin as well as Canada's Defense establishment at DND are fully supportive of this initiative, which essentially consists in integrating the military command structures of the two countries:
"The DND/CF in Canada and the US DoD recognize that a neighborhood watch or collective security arrangement is essential. But, we need to take it slowly and understand all the ramifications… To that end, the BPG allows some Canadians and Americans to work together in Colorado Springs to explore that collective security arrangement."
(statement by L. Gen. Findley http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/community/mapleleaf/html_files/html_view_e.asp?page=vol7-29p6-7 )
No debate in Parliament. In fact, with some exceptions, backbench MPs do not even know about these procedures, which have a direct bearing on Canada's sovereignty as a nation. An atmosphere of secrecy prevails. The tendency in Ottawa is "hush-hush". No government pronouncements: public opinion has been held in the dark. Moreover, the issue has barely been mentioned in the Canadian press.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Paul Martin has been busy restraining potential anti-Bush sentiment within the Liberal Caucus as well as in the ranks of the opposition parties, in the months leading up to president George W. Bush's address to Canada's parliament on December 1st.
The Binational Planning Group (BPG)
Removed from the public eye, the "Group" is more than an ad hoc consultative body. It was set up as an interim military authority in December 2002, following the refusal of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to join the new regional command: US Northern Command (NORTHCOM). The latter was established in April 2002 to "Defend the Homeland" against presumed terrorist attacks.
Canadian membership in NORTHCOM would have implied the integration of Canada's military command structures with those of the US. That option was temporarily deferred by the Chrétien government, through the creation of the so-called Binational Planning Group (BPG).
The Binational Planning Group's (BPG) formal mandate was to:
"improve current Canada–United States arrangements to defend against primarily maritime threats to the continent and respond to land-based attacks, should they occur."
The BPG extends the jurisdiction of the US-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to cover land and sea.
The "Group" is described as an "independent" military authority which is "not integrated into either command [NORAD or NORTHCOM] – it simply shares the same headquarters [at the Paterson Air Force base]". Yet this statement blatantly contradicts the original dispatch following the creation of the BPG (9 December 2002):
"The head of the Planning Group will be the Deputy Commander, who will operate under the authority of the Commander of North American Aerospace Defense." ( See US State Department http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2002/15783.htm
NORAD has become and Appendage of NORTHCOM
In practice, the "Group" functions under the jurisdiction of US Northern Command, which is controlled by US DoD. Moreover, the existing bilateral agreement under NORAD is virtually defunct. NORAD has become an appendage of NORTHCOM.
In fact, the command structures of NORAD, NORTHCOM and the BPG are fully integrated: the commanding officer of NORAD, Lt. General Ralph E. "Ed" Eberhardt, is the commander of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM). In turn, the (Canadian) Commander of NORAD, Lt. General Rick "Eric" Findley, heads the Binational Planning Group (BPG).
And, Lt. General Eberhardt, who is commander of both NORTHCOM and NORAD, has the mandate to ensure "liaison" between the binational "Group" and the US government, including, of course, the DoD and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), headed by Tom Ridge.
In turn, both the "Group" and the DHS are in permanent liaison with Canada's new Ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, which is a Canadian "copy and paste" version of Tom Ridge's Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In other words, the integration of Canadian and US military command structures is being achieved in close coordination with the binational integration of civilian police, judicial and intelligence structures. The integration of US, Canadian and Mexican intelligence structures is part of a parallel initiative under the same broad military agenda.
What this integration means in practice is that Canada's military command structures would in practice be subordinated to those of the Pentagon and the US DoD. Operating under a "North American" emblem (i.e. NORTHCOM), the US military would have jurisdiction over Canadian territory from coast to coast; extending from the St Laurence Valley to the Parry Islands in the Canadian Arctic. It would allow for the establishment of "North American" military bases on Canadian territory. From a military standpoint, it would integrate the Canadian North, with its vast resources in raw materials with Alaska.
Bearing in mind that similar binational negotiations are being conducted between US and with Mexico, the US military would exert strategic control over an area (air space, land mass and contiguous territorial waters) extending from the Yucatan peninsula in southern Mexico to the Canadian Arctic, representing 12 percent of the World's land mass.
In fact, a "continental" military command structure (based on a 1999 US Army College Blueprint) which has been under discussion for several years, "would use the North American Free Trade Agreement as a basis… link[ing] U.S., Mexican and Canadian forces against terrorism in a way that NAFTA has linked North America's economies. (See http://www.fpa.org/newsletter_info2498/newsletter_info.htm )
Needless to say, this initiative is consistent with the broader objective of "integrating" defense structures in The Western Hemisphere under US military dominance, which is being implemented in parallel with the Free Trade Area of the Americas Initiative (FTAA). Although not officially on the FTAA agenda, the militarization of South America under "Plan Colombia" renamed "The Andean Initiative" as well as the signing of a "parallel" military cooperation protocol by 27 countries of the Americas (the so-called Declaration of Manaus) is an integral part of the process of hemispheric integration. In it worth noting that FTAA Trade Negotiator Richard Zoellnick is a member of Bush's National Security Council.
Washington's "Military Road Map"
The BPG Agreement has a direct bearing on Canada's role in the US led war in the Middle East. "The Group" was created barely four months before the invasion of Iraq. While Canada is not officially part of the Anglo-American military axis, its command structures are in the process (under the BPG) of being integrated into those of the US.
While it has no troops in Iraq, Canada has a significant military presence in Afghanistan, where Canadian troops are, in practice, operating under US Command. Canadian warships were sent to the Persian Gulf in October 2001 and have from the outset collaborated with the US led military operation in Afghanistan and Iraq.
(See Michel Chossudovsky, Extending the War to Iraq? Canada sends "Gun Boats" to the Persian Gulf http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO111B.html ). (See http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1044964458943_10/ See also Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/Research/MiddleEast/wm225.cfm )
Canadian military planners were actively "involved in contingency planning for war on Iraq", operating out Central Command in Tampa, Florida. When CENTCOM headquarters were transferred to Qatar in the months prior to the invasion, the senior Canadian military planners (under US Command) joined their US counterparts at the new headquarters. Canada was also involved in a Naval Task Force Command in the Persian Gulf coordinating the entry of coalition war ships into the Persian Gulf.
This "integration of Canada" must be seen as part of Washington's broader military agenda, in different parts of the World, its so-called "global leadership" in military affairs, as defined by the Project of the New American Century (PNAC). (See http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf )
The Mandate of the "Group"
The BPG's mandate goes far beyond the jurisdiction of a consultative military body making "recommendations" to government. In practice, it is neither accountable to the US Congress nor to the Canadian House of Commons. According to the defense policy journal Canadian American Strategic Review, the BPG is "more than 'just an informal discussion group' … it seems to show some signs of evolving into a formal command in its own right."
(quoted in DND CF at http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/focus/canada-us/pentagon2_e.asp )
The BPG has a staff of fifty US and Canadian "military planners", who have been working diligently for the last two years in laying the groundwork for the integration of Canada-US military command structures. The BPG works in close coordination with the Canada-U.S. Military Cooperation Committee at the Pentagon, a so-called " panel responsible for detailed joint military planning".
Broadly speaking, its activities consist of two main building blocks: the Combined Defense Plan (CDP) and The Civil Assistance Plan (CAP).
The Militarisation of Civilian Institutions
As part of the Civil Assistance Plan (CAP), the BPG is also involved in supporting the ongoing militarisation of civilian law enforcement and judicial functions in both the US and Canada. This process is consistent with the "Big Brother initiatives" already carried out under Homeland Security and the Patriot Acts in the US.
In Canada, similar activities have been launched under the Anti-Terrorist Legislation (Bills C-36, C-22, C-35, C-42 and C-7). The new Ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness was set up in close consultation with the Us Department of Homeland Security.
(See Canada Department of Justice http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/news/nr/2001/doc_28217.html , See Rocco Galati, http://www.911review.org/Wget/scienceforpeace.sa.utoronto.ca/Special_Activities/Galati_Page.html
The BPG's has established "military contingency plans" which would be activated "on both sides of the Canada-US border" in the case of a terror attack or "threat". Under the BPG's Civil Assistance Plan (CAP), these so-called "threat scenarios" would involve:
"coordinated response to national requests for military assistance [from civil authorities] in the event of a threat, attack, or civil emergency in the US or Canada."
In other words, the Military would "support" and "assist" civilian organizations including government bodies and agencies such as municipalities, etc. This process implies the militarisation of civilian functions.
The BPG does not mince its words: military commanders would:
"provide binational military assistance to civil authorities."
In the case of a Red Code alert, these so-called "requests" (e.g. from a Canadian municipality) could result in the deployment of US troops or Special Forces inside Canadian territory. In fact, with an integrated command structure, Canadian and US servicemen would operate in the same military operations.
Moreover, the BPG has been actively involved in joint exercises with civilian police and intelligence, involving the participation of State and city governments. It has developed a system of "eight threat scenarios, focused on weapons of mass destruction, terrorists and natural disasters that are being used as planning tools"
(See http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/community/mapleleaf/html_files/html_view_e.asp?page=vol7-29p6-7 )
Northrop Grumman Information Technology, a subsidiary of one of America's largest defense conglomerates, is on contract with the BPG, providing it support services in "strategic and operational planning, research, analysis, information technology and coordination to meet current and evolving mission requirements." (See http://www.tasc.com/ )
Northrop`s mandate is to provide expertise to the BPG in support of
"coordination and implementation of comprehensive enhanced military cooperation and interagency products, including detailed contingency plans, consultation/decision-making protocol recommendations, aerospace, maritime and land defense plans, and Consequence Management guidance."
(See: https://www.ditco.disa.mil/public/discms/ENCORE/00323_01.doc )
Martial Law
The circumstances under which martial law can be declared in the US are clearly enunciated by the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA)
(See http://www.fema.gov/pdf/areyouready/security.pdf , See also Michel Chossudovsky, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO402A.html , on Militarization see Frank Morales, September 2003http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR309A.html ).
In the case of a Red Code Terror Alert, US Northern Command would take over. Several functions of civilian administration would be suspended, others could be transferred to the jurisdiction of the military. More generally, the procedure would disrupt government offices, businesses, schools, public services, transportation, etc.
Under the present BPG arrangement, Canada is a de facto member of NORTHCOM. In other words, some of these martial law procedures could be applied in Canada. Under an integrated North American military command structure --with Canada part of NORTHCOM--, martial law procedures in Canada would conform to those applied in the US.
In May 2003 a major "anti-terrorist exercise" entitled TOPOFF 2 was conducted under the auspices of US Homeland Security. Canada fully participated in this initiative. In fact, the exercise was conducted with the support of NORTHCOM and NORAD, with the BPG playing a key role.
TOPOFF 2 was described as "the largest and most comprehensive terrorism response and homeland security exercise ever conducted in the United States." It was a military style exercise involving federal, State and local level governments including Canadian participants.
TOPOFF 2 was carried out on the same assumptions as military exercises in anticipation of an actual theater war, in this case, to be waged by foreign terrorists, examining various WMD attack scenarios and the institutional response of State and local governments. The simulations of "what was happening in Seattle" were carried out in the Situational Awareness Center (SAC) at Peterson Air force Base in Colorado. (For further details See Aviation Week & Space Technology, June 23, 2003)
Towards a North American Big Brother
In December 2001, in response to the 9/11 attacks, the Canadian government reached an agreement with the Head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, entitled the "Canada-US Smart Border Declaration." Shrouded in secrecy, this agreement essentially hands over to the Homeland Security Department, confidential information on Canadian citizens and residents. It also provides US authorities with access to tax records of Canadians.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration established its controversial Total Information Awareness Program (TIAP), headed by former National Security Adviser ret. Admiral John Poindexter, who was indicted on criminal charges in the Iran Contra scandal during the Reagan Administration.
TIAP operated in the offices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the Pentagon in Northern Virginia. The Information Awareness Office (IAO), was to oversee a giant Big Brother data bank. (See Washington Post, 11 Nov 2002 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40942-2002Nov11 )
Under pressure, Pointedexter subsequently resigned from TIAP and the program was "officially" discontinued.
(See Pointedexter's PowerPoint presentation at http://www.darpa.mil/darpatech2002/presentations/iao_pdf/slides/poindexteriao.pdf .
IAO's stated mission was "to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government." This would include medical records, credit card and banking information, educational and employment data, records concerning travel and the use of internet, email, telephone and fax.
While the IAO no longer exists, at least officially, the initiative of creating a giant data bank has by no means been abandoned. At present, several US government bodies including Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI already operate "Big Brother" data banks. The controversial Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange ( MATRIX), for instance is defined as "a crime-fighting database" used by law enforcement agencies, the US Justice Department and Homeland Security. More recently in the context of The National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 -- currently debated in the US Senate, discussion has centered on a so-called 'Information Sharing Network' to coordinate data from 'all available sources.'" The proposed network would bring together the data banks of various government agencies under a single governmental umbrella. (Deseret Morning News, 29, 2004).
Under the ongoing US-Canada integration in military command structures, "Homeland Security" and intelligence, Canadian data banks would eventually be integrated into those of the US. Canada Customs and Revenue has already assembled confidential information on travelers, which it shares with its US counterparts. In early 2004, Ottawa announced under the pretext of combating terrorism that "U.S. border agents will soon have access to the immigration and tax records of Canadian residents".
This merger of tax and immigration data banks is consistent with the process of binational integration occurring at the level of military command structures. It suggests that the Canadian border is controlled under a binational US-Canada arrangement, where US officials have access to Canadian immigration files on Canadian residents.
Moreover, under Canada's Bill C-7, the Public Safety Act of 2004, Canadian police, intelligence and immigration authorities are not only authorized to collect personal data, they also have the authority to share it with their US counterparts
(Text of the C-7 Public Safety Act at http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/3/parlbus/chambus/house/bills/government/C-7/C-7_3/C-7TOCE.html , see also http://www.parl.gc.ca/common/bills_ls.asp?Parl=37&Ses=3&ls=c7 and http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1074294906470 )
What these developments suggest is the process of binational integration is not only occurring in the military command structures but also in the areas of immigration, police and intelligence. The question is what will be left over within Canada's jurisdiction as a sovereign nation, once this ongoing process of binational integration, including the sharing and/or merger of data banks, is completed?
What Next? Canadian Membership of NORTHCOM
The two year mandate of the BPG expires on the 9th of December 2004. Coinciding with president Bush's November visit to Canada, a decision to renew the BPG arrangement until Spring of 2005 has already been announced, at which time a decision pertaining to the formal integration of Canada into NORTHCOM will be made. This decision would essentially formalize a fait accompli.
In this regard, the BPG has already prepared a comprehensive report,
"recommending how the two countries' militaries can work together more effectively to counter these [terrorist] threats. In many cases, … the recommendations will involve formalizing cooperation already taking place on an informal basis." (Statement of BPG spokesman, US Department of Defense Information, November 3, 2004)
Whether this report will be debated in the House of Commons remains to be seen. What is absolutely essential at this critical juncture in our history is that Canadians mobilize from coast to coast against the militarisation of Canada.
The Canadian Prime Minister is anxious to avoid public debate and discussion on what constitutes the most significant encroachment on Canada's sovereignty since Confederation.
The Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute among others are pressuring Ottawa to:
"bring all land, sea and air forces devoted to such defense under one new bi-national command system that will operate in tandem with the United States’ NORTHCOM." (http://www.cdfai.org/PDF/CCCE%20Report.pdf )
The Bush administration has its supporters in Canada, in the Liberal government as well as in the ranks of the Conservative party and of course within the Canadian business establishment. Washington is lobbying for a consensus on Canada's entry into NORTHCOM.
Canadian companies are vying for lucrative multimillion dollar "reconstruction" contracts in war torn Iraq. Canada's defense contractors, which constitute an appendage of the US-military industrial complex, are of course part of this consensus building. Their lobby group, which favors the integration of military command structures, is the Canadian Defense Industries Association. (http://www.cdia.ca/ ). In the words of General Dynamics (Canada):
"The combination of heavy U.S. spending on the war in Iraq and against terrorism and a new Liberal prime minister apparently ready to spend more on defense equipment is improving business optimism." (See http://www.gdcanada.com/company_info/articles/body_art2004apr22jm2.html
Canadian weapons producers, many of which are affiliates of US defense conglomerates expect to be granted lucrative contracts upon Canada joining NORTHCOM. Among major players in Canada's defense industry are General Dynamics (Canada), Bell Helicopter Textron (Canada), General Motors Defense, CAE Inc, Bombardier, SNC-Lavalin Group, etc.
(For further details see http://www.cdia.ca/public/index.asp?action=profiles , see also Project Loughshares at http://www.ploughshares.ca/CONTENT/MONITOR/mond02i.html#Table%201
"Integration" or the "Annexation" of Canada?
The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. It has formulated the contours of an imperial project of World domination. This is not a rhetorical issue. This project is confirmed by official military and national security documents. The military blueprint for global US domination is outlined in the Project of the New American Century (PNAC).
(see http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf )
Canada is contiguous to "the center of the empire". Territorial control over Canada is part of the US geopolitical and military agenda. It is worth recalling in this regard, that throughout history, the "conquering nation" has expanded on its immediate borders, acquiring control over contiguous territories.
Military integration is intimately related to the ongoing process of integration in the spheres of trade, finance and investment. Needless to say, a large part of the Canadian economy is already in the hands of US corporate interests. In turn, the interests of big business in Canada tend to coincide with those of the US.
Canada is already a de facto economic protectorate of the USA. The US-Canada FTA and NAFTA has not only opened up new avenues for US corporate expansion, it has laid the groundwork under the existing North American umbrella for the post 9/11 integration of military command structures, public security, intelligence and law enforcement.
No doubt, Canada's entry into US Northern Command will be presented to public opinion as part of Canada-US "cooperation", as something which is "in the national interest", which "will create jobs for Canadians", and "will make Canada more secure".
Meanwhile, the important debate on Canada's participation in the US Ballistic Missile Shield, when viewed out of the broader context, may serve to divert public attention away from the more fundamental issue of North American military integration which implies Canada's acceptance not only of the Ballistic Missile Shield, but of the entire US war agenda, including significant hikes in defense spending which will be allocated to a North American defense program controlled by the Pentagon.
And ultimately what is at stake is that beneath the rhetoric, Canada will cease to function as a Nation:
Its borders will be controlled by US officials and confidential information on Canadians will be shared with Homeland Security.
US troops and Special Forces will be able to enter Canada as a result of a binational arrangement.
Canadian citizens can be arrested by US officials, acting on behalf of their Canadian counterparts and vice versa.
But there is something perhaps even more fundamental in defining and understanding where Canada and Canadians stand as nation.
The Liberals as well as the opposition Conservative party have embraced the US war agenda. By endorsing a Canada-US "integration" in the spheres of defense, homeland security, police and intelligence, Canada not only becomes a full fledged member of George W. Bush's "Coalition of the Willing", it will directly participate, through integrated military command structures, in the US war agenda in Central Asia and the Middle East, including the massacre of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture of POWs, the establishment of concentration camps, etc.
Under an integrated North American Command, a North American national security doctrine would be formulated. Canada would be obliged to embrace Washington's pre-emptive military doctrine, including the use of nuclear warheads as a means of self defense, which was ratified by the US Senate in December 2003.
(See Michel Chossudovsky, The US Nuclear Option and the "War on Terrorism" http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO405A.html May 2004)
Moreover, binational integration in the areas of Homeland security, immigration, policing of the US-Canada border, not to mention the anti-terrorist legislation, would imply pari passu acceptance of the US sponsored police State, its racist policies, its "ethnic profiling" directed against Muslims, the arbitrary arrest of anti-war activists.
Note
The purpose of this report is to encourage discussion and debate in Canada and Quebec on the implications of military integration with the US at this critical juncture in our history.
The notion of "sovereignty" presented in this article does not constitute an endorsement of any particular constitutional arrangement or political platform.
"Sovereignty" is meant in the broadest sense, in relation to the aspirations of Canadians, Quebecois and First Nations. It is associated with a broad commitment to peace, justice and social equality. Moreover, it is understood that any meaningful nationalism and sovereignty in Quebec is out of question under the militarisation of North America.
This report is also presented in solidarity with the ongoing efforts by the American people, who are fighting within the US for their own sovereignty, against their government and the US led war agenda.
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© Copyright MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY CRG 2004.

2005-02-26T16:12:00.000-08:00

From: http://www.rense.com/general63/spoke.htm

They Spoke The Truth
About The Lapdog Media...From Walter Burien2-25-5

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world (think this might have carried through to other forms as communications expanded, such as TV etc? Hmmmm, could be ) and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States.

These 12 men worked the problem ( Problem? What problem? Whose got a problem? JP Morgan and "interests"? Hmmmm ) out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interest of the ( ...citizens? Nope! The US? No, not even our country BUT the ) PURCHASERS. ( emphasis mine. Well, all for freedom of the press. Wonder why the founders thought that was so important anyway. But who cares about those guys, they are just a bunch of outdated old fogies anyway, right? )

This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country."

--Congressional Record of 1917, page 2949.

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history in America, as an independent press You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my' paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

--John Swinton, former chief of staff, The New York Times, in a 1953 speech before the New York Press Club

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promise of discretion for almost forty years... It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto determination practiced in past centuries."

-- David Rockefeller, in an address given to Catherine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post and other media luminaries in attendance in Baden Baden, Germany at the June 1991 annual meeting of the world elite Bilderberg Group.

"We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing with issues and subjects that we choose to deal with."

-- Richard M. Cohen, former Senior Producer of CBS political news

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."

-- Richard Salant, former President of CBS News

About The New World Order...

"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."

-- J. Edgar Hoover, former head of the FBI

"Every child in American who enters school with an allegiance toward our elected officials, toward our founding fathers, toward our institutions, toward the preservation of this form of government. all of this proves the children are sick, because the truly well individual is one who has rejected all of those things and is what I would call the true international child of the future."

-- Chester M. Pierce, Harvard University psychiatrist, at a 1973 International Education Seminar, as quoted in "Educating For The New World Order" by B.K. Eakman

"The CFR [Council On Foreign Relations, New York City] is the American Branch of a society which originated in England and believes national directives should be obliterated and one-world rule established. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years, and was permitted in the early 1960's to examine its papers and secret records... I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."

--Dr. Carroll Quigley, Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University Foreign Service School, Washington, D.C., author of the epic "Tragedy & Hope", advocate of one-world government and personal mentor of President William Clinton (who acknowledged Professor Quigley during his 1992 presidential inauguration speech)

"We shall have world government whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World government will be achieved by conquest or consent."

--James Paul Warburg, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1921 - 1932, before the U.S. Senate, February 17, 1950

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas."

-- Brock Chisolm, former Director of the World Health Organization

"The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of US. sovereignty and national independence and submergence into an all powerful, one world government".

-- Chester Ward, Rear Admiral and former Navy Judge Advocate 1956 - 1960 and CFR member for 15 years

Who's Who in the CFR?! Click here!

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes."

-- Felix Frankfurter, United States Supreme Court Justice

"We operate here under directives from the White House.. [to] use our grant making power to alter life in the US. so that we can comfortably be merged with the Soviet Union."

-- Rowan Gaither, former president of the Ford Foundation, in a 1954 statement to Norman Dodd regarding Congressional investigations of the un-American activities of tax-exempt foundations operating in the U.S.

"Gentlemen, Comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about glasnost and perestroika and democracy in the coming years These are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal change within the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep."

-- Mikhial Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union, to the Politburo in November of 1987

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, it was planned that way."

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over past forty-nine years, they would move on Washington. It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States."

-- Senator George Malone of Nevada, speaking before Congress in 1957

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of "liberalism", they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."

-- Norman Thomas, for many years the U.S. Socialist Party presidential candidate

"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within."

-- Joseph Stalin, former dictator of the Soviet Union

About a Republic vs. a Democracy...

"I pledge allegiance to the flag, and to the Republic for which it stands..."

-- United States Pledge of Allegiance

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

-- James Madison

"Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation."

-- Karl Marx, 1848 author of "The Communist Manifesto"

"Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism."

-- Fisher Ames (1758 - 1808)

About Citizens, Politicians And Government...

"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin."

--Samuel Adams

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

-- United States Supreme Court - American Communications Association v. Douds

"Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself."

-- Louis D. Brandeis, former Supreme Court Justice

"It is inherent in government's right, if necessary, to lie... that seems to me basic - basic."

-- Arthur Sylvester, former Assistant Secretary of Defense

About liberty, Slavery, Truth, Rights And Courage...

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

--Johann W. Von Goethe

"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"He who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

-- Benjamin Franklin

"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man; brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."

--Samuel Clemens...author Mark Twain

"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

-- Edmund Burke

"The right to freedom being the gift of God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave."

-- Samuel Adams

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day. But a series of oppressions, pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"I have never seen more Senators express discontent with their jobs ... we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country... we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected."

-- John Danforth, Republican Senator from Missouri, in an interview in The Arizona Republic on April 22, 1992

"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe."

-- John Adams

"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"Any truth is better than make-believe... rather than love, than money than fame, give me truth."

-- Henry David Thoreau

'Most people, sometime in their lives, stumble across truth. Most jump up, brush themselves off, and hurry on about their business as if nothing had happened."

-- Winston Churchill

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is... legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay ....... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system."

-- Frederic Bastiat, French author of "The Law" (1848)

2005-02-26T15:18:00.000-08:00

Cadre grows to rein in message
Ranks of federal public affairs officials have swelled under Bush to help tighten control on communiques to media, access to information

WASHINGTON -- The ranks of federal public affairs officials swelled during the Bush administration's first term, but that hasn't meant that government information is easier to get.The staffs that handle public relations for government agencies grew even faster than the federal work force, personnel records show, yet at the same time the White House tightened its control over messages to the news media and restricted access to public information.

"The role of public affairs officers is not to make information available to the public, as one would naively assume," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the nonpartisan Federation of American Scientists."Rather," he said, "it is to regulate public access to information, which is something quite different."The White House declined to comment on the trend. Staffing changes are up to the agencies, not the White House, spokeswoman Erin Healy said.According to one expert, however, the White House appoints the departments' communications directors and talks with them daily.

And records indicate that agencies with the biggest growth in PR staff also deal with urgent or controversial issues, such as war or the environment.

Between September 2000 and September 2004, the number of public affairs officials rose 9 percent, from 4,327 to 4,703, in executive-branch agencies, according to U.S. Office of Personnel Management statistics. Meanwhile, the federal work force grew 6 percent.The cost of public affairs staffing has grown by more than $50 million, records show, from $279 million in 2000 to $332 million in 2003, the last year for which figures are available.The increase did not occur evenly across agencies.

The agencies adding staff include Defense, State, Agriculture, Interior and the Social Security Administration, while Health and Human Services and Labor shed PR officers, the figures show.The Pentagon, fighting two wars and mired in a prolonged occupation, added the greatest number of PR officials, 173 for a total of 1,812. But it still accounted for less than half the total.

The new Department of Homeland Security added only a few members to its 139 public affairs specialists since most transferred from other departments.Representatives for the agencies offered a variety of reasons for the changes in their PR staffs, from routine promotions to handling a surge of interest in the plight of Florida's manatees.

And in the case of the Social Security Administration - where PR staffing jumped a third, up 45 to a total of 173 - the increase resulted from a plan created by the Clinton administration.Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University professor who talked to top Bush aides about administration-news media relations, said the White House may not dictate staff size, but it has exerted control by selecting each agency's communications director and by holding daily telephone conferences with them."With the interest the administration has shown in the departments and in coordinating what they say, it is not surprising to see such a growth in public affairs officers," Kumar said.

"They operate as an echo to what the president has said."But the control over information goes beyond its dealings with the news media.Citing terrorism concerns, the administration also has removed reports from federal Web sites and public libraries, classified more documents as secret and made it more difficult than before to get material under the Freedom of Information Act, advocates and experts say.

Most recently, both sides in Congress and even the president condemned the departments of Education and Health and Human Services for covertly contracting with columnists Armstrong Williams and Maggie Daly to promote Bush policies on schools and marriage.Federal public affairs officials defend their activities. "We're not focused on just being the mouthpiece of the organization for information that is good," said George Lennon, an 18-year veteran and communications director of the Forest Service.He said they serve as the public's advocates with government officials and handle a variety of tasks, including speech and technical writing, event logistics and working with advisory panels.He requires his staff to be responsive to the news media but tells them to first serve the public. "I remind them the press is a tool," he said.

Nearly half the jump at Agriculture came at its Forest Service, which oversees the vast tracts of national forests and now has 306 public affairs staff.Lennon said his staff grew, in part, because of a growing number of advisory panels required by Congress and a controversial program that opens some forests to logging over environmentalists objections.Lennon said he also believes more information is available now than before but concedes changes have occurred under Bush.

President Bill Clinton's staff did little to track contacts with the news media, he said. But now, he said, after talking with Newsday for this story, he would have to call his boss to report the interview.Mixed messageIncreases in the number of federal public affairs officers have not necessarily made it easier to get information out of the government.

Below are agencies that have gained and lost public affairs officers in the first four years of the Bush administration.
These departments gained public affairs personnel from September 2000 to September 2004.
Employees Sept. 2000, Sept. 2004
State 102, 140
Social Security 128, 173
Interior 216, 266
Agriculture 536, 619
Defense 1,639, 1,812Percent gain (rounded)State 37.3%
Social Security 35.2
Interior 23.1
Agriculture 15.5
Defense 10.6. . .

And downThese departments lost public affairs personnel from September 2000 to September 2004.
Employees Sept. 2000, Sept. 2004
Labor 49, 28
Health and Human Services 356, 231
Justice* 152, 116
Energy 106, 96
Commerce 113, 103Percent loss (rounded)
Labor -42.8%
Health/Human Services -35.1
Justice* -23.1
Energy -9.4
Commerce -8.8

Rate of growthThe rate of increase in public affairs employment has been greater than the rate of increase of total federal employment in the period in question.

Employment September 2000, 2004
All officials 1,752,357, 1,853,744
Public affairs 4,327, 4,703
Officials Percent changeAll officials 5.8%
Public affairs officials 8.7

NOTE: Data include only comparable agencies with the exception of the Department of Homeland Security,whose 139 public affairs officers include 128 transfers in from other agencies.*
Transferred staff to new Department of Homeland Security
SOURCE: OFFICE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT