Bombshell: Bin Laden worked for US till 9/11

COMMENT  : This proof is as big as the WTC itself. so what we have seen from the day it happened is only  MOVIE SHOW.

from  Against All Enemies blog

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”

These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.

As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.

Control of Central Asia
The goals of the American ’statesmen’ directing these activities included control of Central Asia’s vast energy supplies and new markets for military products.

The Americans had a problem, though. They needed to keep their fingerprints off these operations to avoid a) popular revolt in Central Asia ( Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and b) serious repercussions from China and Russia. They found an ingenious solution: Use their puppet-state Turkey as a proxy, and appeal to both pan-Turkic and pan-Islam sensibilities.

Turkey, a NATO ally, has a lot more credibility in the region than the US and, with the history of the Ottoman Empire, could appeal to pan-Turkic dreams of a wider sphere of influence. The majority of the Central Asian population shares the same heritage, language and religion as the Turks.

In turn, the Turks used the Taliban and al Qaeda, appealing to their dreams of a pan-Islamic caliphate (Presumably. Or maybe the Turks/US just paid very well.)

According to Sibel:

This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.

Uighurs
Sibel was recently asked to write about the recent situation with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, but she declined, apart from saying that “our fingerprint is all over it.”

Of course, Sibel isn’t the first or only person to recognize any of this. Eric Margolis, one of the best reporters in the West on matters of Central Asia, stated that the Uighurs in the training camps in Afghanistan up to 2001:

“were being trained by Bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang, and this was not only with the knowledge, but with the support of the CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China.”

And also that:

“Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, these were commando groups, guerrilla groups, being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia.”

In a separate interview, Margolis said:

“That illustrates Henry Kissinger’s bon mot that the only thing more dangerous than being America’s enemy is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the US, these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, the most-Western province.

The CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China, or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama Bin Laden’s collaboration. The Americans were up to their ears with this.”

Rogues Gallery
Last year, Sibel came up with a brilliant idea to expose some of the criminal activity that she is forbidden to speak about: she published eighteen photos, titled “Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,” of people involved the operations that she has been trying to expose. One of those people is Anwar Yusuf Turani, the so-called ‘President-in-exile’ of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). This so-called ‘government-in-exile’ was ‘established‘ on Capitol Hill in September, 2004, drawing a sharp rebuke from China.

Also featured in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery was ‘former’ spook Graham Fuller, who was instrumental in the establishment of Turani’s ‘government-in-exile’ of East Turkistan. Fuller has written extensively on Xinjiang, and his “Xinjiang Project” for Rand Corp is apparently the blueprint for Turani’s government-in-exile. Sibel has openly stated her contempt for Mr. Fuller.

Susurluk
The Turkish establishment has a long history of mingling matters of state with terrorism, drug trafficking and other criminal activity, best exemplified by the 1996 Susurluk incident which exposed the so-called Deep State.

Sibel states that “a few main Susurluk actors also ended up in Chicago where they centered ‘certain’ aspects of their operations (Especially East Turkistan-Uighurs).”

One of the main Deep State actors, Mehmet Eymur, former Chief of Counter-Terrorism for Turkey’s intelligence agency, the MIT, features in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery. Eymur was given exile in the US. Another member of Sibel’s gallery, Marc Grossman was Ambassador to Turkey at the time that the Susurluk incident exposed the Deep State. He was recalled shortly after, prior to the end of his assignment, as was Grossman’s underling, Major Douglas Dickerson, who later tried to recruit Sibel into the spying ring.

The modus operandi of the Susurluk gang is the same as the activities that Sibel describes as taking place in Central Asia, the only difference is that this activity was exposed in Turkey a decade ago, whereas the organs of the state in the US, including the corporate media, have successfully suppressed this story.

Chechnya, Albania & Kosovo
Central Asia is not the only place where American foreign policy makers have shared interests with Bin Laden. Consider the war in Chechnya. As I documented here, Richard Perle and Stephen Solarz (both in Sibel’s gallery) joined other leading neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, and Morton Abramowitz in a group called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). For his part, Bin Laden donated $25 million to the cause, as well as numerous fighters, and technical expertise, establishing training camps.

US interests also converged with those of al-Qaeda in Kosovo and Albania.

Of course, it is not uncommon for circumstances to arise where ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ On the other hand, in a transparent democracy, we expect a full accounting of the circumstances leading up to a tragic event like 9/11. The 9/11 Commission was supposed to provide exactly that.

State Secrets
Sibel has famously been dubbed the most gagged woman in America, having the State Secrets Privilege imposed on her twice. Her 3.5 hour testimony to the 9/11 Commission has been entirely suppressed, reduced to a single footnote which refers readers to her classified testimony.

In the interview, she says that the information that was classified in her case specifically identifies that the US was using Bin Laden and the Taliban in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. In the interview, Sibel reiterates that when invoking the gag orders, the US government claims that it is protecting ” ’sensitive diplomatic relations,’ protecting Turkey, protecting Israel, protecting Pakistan, protecting Saudi Arabia…” This is no doubt partially true, but it is also true that they are protecting themselves too, and it is a crime in the US to use classification and secrecy to cover up crimes.

As Sibel says in the interview:

I have information about things that our government has lied to us about… those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.

Summary
The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.

It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.

The silence by the US government on these matters is deafening. So, too, is the blowback.

The First Corporation – The Origin of Genocide

From  Think or Be Eaten Blog

Thousands of years ago people lived in close knit clans and the population of the world was only a tiny fraction of what it is now. People could go an entire life time without ever encountering a stranger. Unfortunately, sometimes strangers purposely encountered them.

One particular day at one particular village a very long time ago, such an encounter took place. It was just after dawn on a foggy morning that the village clan was going about its normal morning routine. Firewood was gathered, fires were lit, and food preparation was underway. Mothers breast fed their babies, children played and elders sat waiting to be fed.

The comforting sounds of fire crackling and children laughing were interrupted by the muffled rumbling of hoof beats and the sharp clatter of scraping metal coming from somewhere beyond the fog. The sounds grew louder and more distinct by the second, and so, sensing danger, the people of the clan quickly gathered together in the center of the camp.

Moments later, emerging from the haze came a terrifying vision: men on horseback draped in animal skins and headpieces with long pointed horns, their faces painted, some wearing masks with menacing non-human expressions. The villagers had never seen anything like this before. Not knowing if these beings were humans, spirits or even monsters their hearts thumped hard in their chests as they stood paralyzed, watching the creatures growing nearer.

As was intended, the strangers had caught the village inhabitants completely by surprise. They rode into the camp then viciously slew every man in the village with razor-sharp flesh-cutting blades. Throats were slashed and skulls were crushed; innocent blood flowed in hot rivers and soaked the ground. Violence like this had never been seen there before.

The women and children were shocked and traumatized, and they tried to run, but they could not escape. They were all rounded up and brought back to the center of the camp, then separated into two groups, women on this side, and children on that side. Some of the horrifying creatures searched through every dwelling and looked up every tree to make certain they’d found every last member of the clan.

When all of the women and children had been found and separated the strangers dismounted their horses and killed every child one by one. Babies, toddlers, everyone under the age of 12 was slain with swift deliberation. They then turned their attention to the women. Any who were old, sick, or pregnant were also killed. The rest would be taken to be their slaves and wives. They took whatever pillage they found desirable from the camp, then pulled the women onto their horses in front of them and began the journey home.

Behind them lay a sickening scene of incomprehensible carnage. Bloody, dismembered dead bodies of children, women and men were the last thing the surviving women saw before being dragged onto the horses and taken away. The innocent dead were the silent remnants of a story that no one would ever hear.

The brutal strangers whipped their horses with leather straps and rode them hard, desiring to get home before nightfall. They made good time and when they arrived they beat the women, raped some of them, humiliated them, and began to break them. Over the following days they forced them to cook and clean for them, sew their garments and make their living spaces comfortable. The women gathered wood, tended the fires, brought water for their households and slowly accepted the imposed routines of their new unasked for lives. They also wept for their murdered children and husbands, and mothers and fathers and other family members, but they did so only when they would not be caught and punished for their tears. Within a year the women began giving birth to the children of their rapist captors.

Things being as they may, some of the women came to accept the men who took them as wives, but others were not so lucky. For the unlucky ones no love was in the man they lived with. No kindness existed in his heart, and no interest existed in him for her. He wanted progeny and he wanted a slave, and he got both through brutality and violence; not because brutality and violence were necessary, but because brutality and violence gave him total control.

These men devoid of love or kindness were single minded and driven by a simple fact: they could exponentially increase their power and wealth through the use of organized mass murder carried out on defenseless people who were taken by surprise.

They perfected the art of this psychopathic behavior over the course of many years and countless attacks on villages and settlements none of which were ever prepared to defend themselves against the slaughter and brutality these men wrought. This became their stock in trade and within two generations an entire ideology developed wherein the practitioners of organized mass murder deified and worshipped themselves and each other, with the greatest respect going to the most brutal, most psychopathic and most murderous among them. These were the first CEO’s, commonly referred to as kings. They deified themselves before the people to become the church, and the combination of king and church became the state.

The rest is history. It is also the present for little has changed in the ways of men who to this day continue to profit through the mass slaughtering of innocents and the plundering of their lands. Today it has become more sophisticated only in that they have been able to convince others to go and do the slaughtering for them and bring the plunder back to the CEOs. The weapons have evolved with the development of technology, but in the end they do the same as their earliest counterparts, they kill innocent people as quickly as they can be wielded. They kill more people with increasingly less effort every passing decade.

The expense of creating these modern weapons to stock the armed forces that use them is far beyond need or justification because the CEOs long ago knew how to profit from that too. They own the vast enterprises that build the war camps, and which manufacture and sell the weapons that are used to perpetrate the genocide and theft of resources all over the world. They don’t fund a penny of it and they never have to get their own hands dirty. Their own lives are never in danger. It is all done for them, at no cost to them and at no risk to them whatsoever. It is we they convince to do their slaughter for them, pay for it all, and take every risk and loss unto ourselves.

Today’s most powerful CEOs aren’t much different from their earliest embodiment. They are no less dangerous. Their attire has changed from animal skins and fearsome masks, to tailored suits and silk ties. No longer on horseback they now ride in limousines to boardrooms and back rooms to claim their victories, engaging in brutal tactics that continue to decimate millions of lives in their endless drive for more wealth and more power. Today they are able to walk among us unrecognized for they have mastered the fine arts of subterfuge and psychological manipulation to the point of gaining and maintaining total control over the minds of people everywhere.

Are they to be commended for their achievements? They would contend that their superior ability to kill, deceive and enslave mankind deserves high recognition and that because of their brutality and dishonesty they are the superiors of all men. But today, just like thousands of years ago they would be wrong to make such a claim, and they know that. That is why they dare not speak such things where others could hear them and recognize them for who and what they are. What they are is the greatest evolution of human evil this world has ever known. They embody and inspire every vile potential of mankind.

It takes no talent whatsoever, no thought, higher or otherwise, no particular intellect and no effort to be driven by greed and lusts and to live without compassion for others. Blunt force murder is the failure of mankind, not its apex. The CEOs, the state, are deceiving themselves as much as they are deceiving this world. They are Earth’s slow children, retarded in moral development, the most truly disabled among us, for these men have no souls and so they can never be whole. They would be pitiable but the nature of their disease makes them singularly difficult to feel any pity for.

FORCED IDEOLOGY IS TOTAL CONTROL

The propaganda of war mongers has bled deeply into the fabric of our culture and has for hundreds of years been successfully used to bring citizens to their feet and willing to go off to fight their desired wars. The looting and plundering is the primary goal, the theft of the wealth of others. But this is never told to the people they lie into blind cooperation. Other stories are told, often complex and compelling stories that instill fear in the public. Fear is the primary motivating tool behind war, the most effective tool in the propaganda arsenal.

Depictions of foreign strangers as monstrous enemies with inhuman traits and offensive belief systems are the meat of the feast of successful war propaganda, and no substantial evidence to support the claims of imminent doom is asked for or provided. The claims usually defy logic and facts but are crafted with such great expertise, the tellers are able to mix opposing ideas into good sounding excuses for war. The Holy War is an example of this mixing of opposites, and patriotism is a concept used to manipulate the emotions of the masses. Propaganda is profoundly effective and that is why it is the first step to waging any war. Without it, there would be no chance that people anywhere would be moved to kill anyone.

If you doubt that modern wars are fought for the purpose of gaining wealth and power for the few at the expense of the many, then answer these questions. Why is war the most profitable business there is? Why isn’t profiting from war held in utter disregard? Why isn’t it illegal? If the reasons for war are so very pure and noble then why do the same ranks of individuals always become so incredibly wealthy war after war after war? If there was not a penny to be made in war, would we still go off to fight them?

It is after all you and I who pays for war with our money and our lives. Our hard earned dollars are directly transferred from our pockets to the pockets of wealthy men with our government serving as the enforcing agent. We have no choice but to pay. It is the high level officials who call for war, and who more and more are the very same men who head up the major corporate entities, including the corporate media, that profit so abundantly from war. Take the money away, take the profits away, take the media’s relentless war propagandizing away, make war profiteering illegal and reduce profits from war to mere pennies and just see how much war would be waged.

The greed and brutality of a small class of people make up the foundation the rest of society is built on. They are always at the top, and we are always at the bottom. They are always in the position to make and enforce all of the rules, and we are not allowed to break them. They take our money at gunpoint and we are not allowed to refuse to fund their endless capital ventures. We do all of the work, pay for everything, they get rich, and we get a paycheck that is only a bare fraction of our fair share of the wealth we create. They keep it. And they keep taking more, getting stronger, and we keep losing our just share of power, wealth and prosperity.

Unless and until we can see this, it will continue. It will keep getting worse and we will keep suffering as they keep gaining what they so endlessly desire. All of the money, all of the power, all of the control over all of us, that is, those of us they decide to let live.

A DIFFERENT WORLD

Without these violent greedy war mongers deciding our fates, we could have a completely different world. If it were up to us to determine our own fate, to design our own world and future, would we do it as they have? Would we poison our own air and water and destroy our own environments?

Would we have so much need for money when the fact is that our birthright on this earth includes our entitlement to take whatever we need for our lives from earth’s abundant natural resources? We don’t have to destroy it to use it. We know perfectly well that destroying our world is suicide.

There is no justifiable reason and no need for a small group of men to lay claim to and hoard the massive natural wealth that belongs to everybody, including future generations. There is no right for those who are obsessed with greed and control to deprive us and coming generations of our birthright, our share of a pristine healthy natural environment that we all need to sustain our lives; or to preempt our ability to prosper and justly participate in the shaping of our society and our own private lives.

The combination of arrogant indifference to others, limitless greed and the use of overpowering violence is the most serious underlying disease of mankind.

Sadly, even today there is no known cure for this cancerous disease of the mind and soul. Other than forcing strict constraints and strong regulations on those infected and watching them like hawks every moment of the day, there is little we can do to prevent their addictive penchant for death and destruction. That is, unless we finally as a whole wake up to the simple reality that we’ve all been deprived of our rightful lives, our rightful chance to experience our own potential, and to define that potential for ourselves. We are captive and bound by laws that force us to comply with the desires of the greedy and the violent. The propaganda they spew keeps our minds entrapped. Freeing ourselves from their relentless tactics and strategies that seek to frame our thoughts for us is essential. Our thoughts must be our own or we will remain entrapped forever.

A world of peace, prosperity and plenty could exist without the dark, powerful influences and manipulations of greedy, violent men, and that thing we mindlessly refer to as war would never have come into existence without them. They would have us thank them for that as if it were some great gift to the world. It is not a gift, it is the greatest curse that ever was.

The recognition they truly deserve, should it ever come, will not be gratitude. It will take the form of full exposure to the public of their deceit, betrayal, manipulation and unfettered disdain for mankind. It would be their complete undoing.

But that time will never come on its own, nor will it come by force. It can only come about because we the people have changed ourselves, changed the way we see the world, literally changed our old ways and habits that lead us into mindless conformity and unwavering support for people and systems that exist only to undermine us and cheat us, even to kill us. It will come when we individually disconnect ourselves from the raging rivers of propaganda and the many and various glittering cult stars and personalities who talk up thundering storms about freedom while in fact they are working to deprive us of that freedom, and are doing so right before our unseeing eyes. It is we who have to wise up to bring the insanity to an end. We cannot change them and we cannot hope to change the systems that control our lives unless we change ourselves first.

We must regain the ability to see ourselves as worthy and deserving of full equity with the wealthy self-promoting cannibalistic classes that see us as lesser beings. To the extent we accept their judgments of us is the extent that we will continue to live life on our knees and on their selfish terms. We are their equals and they are not above any one of us. They are no wiser, no better, and no more deserving than the least of us. There should not even be a ‘least of us’. That we cannot understand that speaks to the depth of our own brainwashing and the acceptance of the value systems that deprive us of what is our rightful fair share of everything life has to offer.

When we hold the clear knowledge that power, greed and the desire to control others is the eternal ongoing battle that always has and continues to define our world, profoundly affecting everything and everyone in it, then we can hope to bring about the changes we need. When we all comprehend that this power struggle will never end, that the desire to bring about systems that give the few all of the wealth and power at the expense of everyone else will never go away, only then can we hope to bring a genuine end to the repeating foundational theme of self-destruction on which everything else is built. The wars, injustice and suffering that keeps our country stuck in self-defeating systems of mass belief, mass consumption and mass indifference to the truth are the product of our refusal to see ourselves and the systems that control us for what they really are.

Since that first attack on horseback to slaughter and control others the world has never been free and it is not free now. We believe we are free, but we are not and never were. Our ignorance of everything real and factual keeps us believing something that simply is not true. We are more tightly controlled than ever and that control is becoming ever more brutal. Our choices are dwindling and the system itself is becoming impenetrable, making itself our eternal master. The system seeks only to protect and perpetuate itself, it is not interested in freedom or justice and if you simply break any of their rules, even the most unjust of them you’ll quickly find that out. Freedom will not come until the corporate/state monopoly of control and the artifice of righteous violence in the name of good is understood and finally rejected. That is what is meant by “Knowledge is Power”. Our knowledge of the truth is what will reduce the corrupt controllers to irrelevance, powerlessness and shame.

It is a choice. We can choose to know the truth and once we know the truth we must live it and speak it. We must rock the boat in order to break free of the powerful grip of false beliefs that control the majority of our minds. We must be willing to offend and disrupt in order to speak the truth, if that’s what it takes. The truth must never be subordinate to disapproving opinions, which in themselves are a potent tool of social control. We must value real peace more than the instant gratification, the false peace that comes from choosing to conform specifically to avoid the necessary confrontations required to bring the truth back into public discourse. We must fearlessly, unapologetically question everything, question authority and demand justice for the least of us until there is no such thing as a least of us.

Our official overriding and controlling philosophy of depraved indifference, vengeful self-superiority and criminality is sheer evil, and the seed of that evil is something inside all of us. That must be recognized and we must consciously choose to reject it. When we teach our children to recognize and to remember what true evil really is and where it really comes from, then and only then, can we hope to make this a country that is honestly committed to making our highest principles a reality. A world of justice, peace and freedom will come about as soon as we start living in it. We can do that anytime. We can even do it now.

Iranian envoy: CIA involved in Neda’s shooting? – CNN.com

COMMENT :  Another example  of our reality where democracy  , murder of innocent people in the name of democracy , freedom  is just only a cover story for dominance and unelected  power  for  certain people.  We know that for 3 to4 yrs US is behind Iran  and wants to go to war with Iran  and what ever the cover stories the  US Govt. and its Zionist masters in CIA and across the globe,   build got busted  in the public opinion of the  Internet news world .

This  Time they got through the  Iranian people , though they haven’t achieved  shameful complete take over  of regime (  with in days  )  they expected  in another independent,  sovereign nation, they already seeded  the poison in the  unwitting public  Iranian mind and media will be lurking for every possible oppurtunity.

Remember India,   rocked by bomb blast  after bomb blast, when India allowed CIA and Mossad to help WAR on TERROR in November, All the bomb blasts stopped?.  Why?. Who benefits?.  The same Psychopathic Elite.  Despite the low death in that fateful November 2008 incident when the entire world media which doesn’t give  damn to India’s news  suddenly decided  focused on India’s terrorism news which created a embrassing situation for Indian Government. suddenly India was regarded as a terrorist prone country as if India never had terror.  A wonderful example of how public can be manipulated by media with mere days of propaganda and black operations.

They benefited in the past and they will benifit in the future , unless enough people  are educated and ready to sacrifice cozy narcissistic comfort  of societal approval which psychopathic elite imparts on the  people  and raise up.

Iranian envoy: CIA involved in Neda’s shooting?

The United States may have been behind the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old Iranian woman whose fatal videotaped shooting Saturday made her a symbol of opposition to the June 12 presidential election results, the country’s ambassador to Mexico said Thursday.

Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, was shot to death in Tehran on Saturday.

“This death of Neda is very suspicious,” Ambassador Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri said. “My question is, how is it that this Miss Neda is shot from behind, got shot in front of several cameras, and is shot in an area where no significant demonstration was behind held?”

He suggested that the CIA or another intelligence service may have been responsible.

“Well, if the CIA wants to kill some people and attribute that to the government elements, then choosing women is an appropriate choice, because the death of a woman draws more sympathy,” Ghadiri said.

In response, CIA spokesman George Little said, “Any suggestion that the CIA was responsible for the death of this young woman is wrong, absurd and offensive.”

Though the video appeared to show that she had been shot in the chest, Ghadiri said that the bullet was found in her head and that it was not of a type used in Iran.

“These are the methods that terrorists, the CIA and spy agencies employ,” he said. “Naturally, they would like to see blood spilled in these demonstrations, so that they can use it against the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is of the common methods that the CIA employs in various countries.”

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But, he added, “I am not saying that now the CIA has done this. There are different groups. It could be the [work of another] intelligence service; it could be the CIA; it could be the terrorists. Anyway, there are people who employ these types of methods.”

Asked about his government’s imposition of restrictions on reporting by international journalists, Ghadiri blamed the reporters themselves.

“Some of the reporters and mass media do not reflect the truth,” he said.

For example, he said, international news organizations have lavished coverage on demonstrations by supporters of Mir Hossein Moussavi, whom the government has said lost to the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by a landslide.

But those same news organizations have not shown “many, many demonstrations in favor of the winner,” he said.

Further, he said, members of the international news media have failed to report on people setting banks and buses afire or attacking other people. “The only things they show are the reactions of the police,” he said.

Because of restrictions on reporting in Iran, CNN has been unable to confirm many of the reports and claims relating to protests.

Ghadiri said it is only fair that security forces protect the lives and property of the Iranian people.

“If in America supporters of Mr. McCain had gotten out on the street and tried to burn the banks during the last election, do you think the police would just sit idly by and be a spectator?” he asked, referring to the GOP presidential candidate who lost the presidential vote in November to Barack Obama.

Ghadiri called on backers of Moussavi to “accept the majority’s victory.”

Ahmadinejad’s overwhelming victory was no surprise, Ghadiri said, noting that a poll published in the United States three weeks before the June 12 elections showed Ahmadinejad with a commanding lead. “Why don’t you show that?” he asked.

Ghadiri also addressed questions about the rapid reporting of the election results, which the opposition has cited as evidence that the ballots were not properly counted.

“It wasn’t said that only four people counted the 40 million votes,” he said. “There were tens of thousands of people in Iran who counted these votes. They declared that this is very simple.”

Journalist Files Charges against WHO and UN for Bioterrorism and Intent to Commit Mass Murder

Fromhttp://www.naturalnews.com/026503_pandemic_swine_flu_bioterrorism.html

Thursday, June 25, 2009 by: Barbara Minton, Natural Health Editor

(NaturalNews) As the anticipated July release date for Baxter’s A/H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of humanity is underway. Jane Burgermeister has recently filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit mass murder. She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination which is being filed in America. These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a deliberate act to cause and profit from a pandemic.

Summary of claims and allegations filed with FBI in Austria on June 10, 2009

In her charges, Burgermeister presents evidence of acts of bioterrorism that is in violation of U.S. law by a group operating within the U.S. under the direction of international bankers who control the Federal Reserve, as well as WHO, UN and NATO. This bioterrorism is for the purpose of carrying out a mass genocide against the U.S. population by use of a genetically engineered flu pandemic virus with the intent of causing death. This group has annexed high government offices in the U.S.

Specifically, evidence is presented that the defendants, Barack Obama, President of the U.S, David Nabarro, UN System Coordinator for Influenza, Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, David de Rotschild, banker, David Rockefeller, banker, George Soros, banker, Werner Faymann, Chancellor of Austria, and Alois Stoger, Austrian Health Minister, among others, are part of this international corporate criminal syndicate which has developed, produced, stockpiled and employed biological weapons to eliminate the population of the U.S. and other countries for financial and political gain.

The charges contend that these defendants conspired with each other and others to devise, fund and participate in the final phase of the implementation of a covert international bioweapons program involving the pharmaceutical companies Baxter and Novartis. They did this by bioengineering and then releasing lethal biological agents, specifically the “bird flu” virus and the “swine flu virus” in order to have a pretext to implement a forced mass vaccination program which would be the means of administering a toxic biological agent to cause death and injury to the people of the U.S. This action is in direct violation of the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act.

Burgermeister’s charges include evidence that Baxter AG, Austrian subsidiary of Baxter International, deliberately sent out 72 kilos of live bird flu virus, supplied by the WHO in the winter of 2009 to 16 laboratories in four counties. She claims this evidence offers clear proof that the pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies themselves are actively engaged in producing, developing, manufacturing and distributing biological agents classified as the most deadly bioweapons on earth in order to trigger a pandemic and cause mass death.

In her April charges, she noted that Baxter’s lab in Austria, one of the supposedly most secure biosecurity labs in the world, did not adhere to the most basic and essential steps to keep 72 kilos of a pathogen classified as a bioweapon secure and separate from all other substances under stringent biosecurity level regulations, but it allowed it to be mixed with the ordinary human flu virus and sent from its facilities in Orth in the Donau.

In February, when a staff member at BioTest in the Czech Republic tested the material meant for candidate vaccines on ferrets, the ferrets died. This incident was not followed up by any investigation from the WHO, EU, or Austrian health authorities. There was no investigation of the content of the virus material, and there is no data on the genetic sequence of the virus released.

In answer to parliamentary questions on May 20th, the Austrian Health Minister, Alois Stoger, revealed that the incident had been handled not as a biosecurity lapse, as it should have been, but as an offence against the veterinary code. A veterinary doctor was sent to the lab for a brief inspection.

Burgermeister’s dossier reveals that the release of the virus was to be an essential step for triggering a pandemic that would allow the WHO to declare a Level 6 Pandemic. She lists the laws and decrees that would allow the UN and WHO to take over the United States in the event of pandemic. In addition, legislation requiring compliance with mandatory vaccinations would be put into force in the U.S. under conditions of pandemic declaration.

She charges that the entire “swine flu” pandemic business is premised on a massive lie that there is no natural virus out there that poses a threat to the population. She presents evidence leading to the belief that the bird flu and swine flu viruses have, in fact, been bioengineered in laboratories using funding supplied by the WHO and other government agencies, among others. This “swine flu” is a hybrid of part swine flu, part human flu and part bird flu, something that can only come from laboratories according to many experts.

WHO’s claim that this “swine flu” is spreading and a pandemic must be declared ignores the fundamental causes. The viruses that were released were created and released with the help of WHO, and WHO is overwhelmingly responsible for the pandemic in the first place. In addition, the symptoms of the supposed “swine flu” are indistinguishable from regular flu or from the common cold. The “swine flu” does not cause death anymore often than the regular flu causes death.

Burgermeister notes that the figures for deaths reported for the “swine flu” are inconsistent and there is no clarity as to how the number of “deaths” has been documented.

There is no pandemic potential unless mass vaccinations are carried out to weaponize the flu under the guise of protecting the population. There are reasonable grounds for believing that the mandatory vaccines will be purposely contaminated with diseases that are specifically designed to cause death.

Reference is made to a licensed Novartis bird flu vaccine that killed 21 homeless people in Poland in the summer of 2008 and had as its “primary outcome measure” an “adverse events rate”, thereby meeting the U.S. government’s own definition of a bioweapon (a biological agent designed to cause an adverse events rate, i.e death or injury) with a delivery system (injection).

She alleges that the same complex of international pharmaceutical companies and international government agencies that have developed and released pandemic material have positioned themselves to profit from triggering the pandemic with contracts to supply vaccines. Media controlled by the group that is engineering the “swine flu” agenda is spreading misinformation to lull the people of the U.S. into taking the dangerous vaccine.

The people of the U.S. will suffer substantial and irreparable harm and injury if they are forced to take this unproven vaccine without their consent in accordance with the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, National Emergency Act, National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, and the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza.

In the U.S. since 2008, Burgermeister charges that those named in her allegations have implemented new and/or accelerated the implementation of laws and regulations designed to strip the citizens of the U.S. of their lawful constitutional rights to refuse an injection. These people have created or allowed provisions to remain in place that make it a criminal act to refuse to take an injection against pandemic viruses. They have imposed other excessive and cruel penalties such as imprisonment and/or quarantine in FEMA camps while barring the citizens of the U.S. from claiming compensation from injury or death from the forced injections. This is in violation of the laws governing federal corruption and the abuse of office as well as of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Through these actions, the named defendants have laid the groundwork for mass genocide.

Using the “swine flu” as a pretext, the defendants have preplanned the mass murder of the U.S. population by means of forced vaccination. They have installed an extensive network of FEMA concentration camps and identified mass grave sites, and they have been involved in devising and implementing a scheme to hand power over the U.S. to an international crime syndicate that uses the UN and WHO as a front for illegal racketeering influenced organized crime activities, in violation of the laws that govern treason.

She further charges that the complex of pharmaceutical companies consisting of Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi Aventis are part of a foreign-based dual purpose bioweapons program, financed by this international criminal syndicate and designed to implement mass murder to reduce the world’s population by more than 5 billion people in the next ten years. Their plan is to spread terror to justify forcing people to give up their rights, and to force mass quarantine in FEMA camps. The houses, companies and farms and lands of those who are killed will be up for grabs by this syndicate.

By eliminating the population of North America, the international elite gain access to the region’s natural resources such as water and undeveloped oil lands. And by eliminating the U.S. and its democratic constitution by subsuming it under a North American Union, the international crime group will have total control over North America.

Highlights from the complete dossier

The complete dossier of the June 10th action is a 69 page document presenting evidence to substantiate all charges. This includes:

Factual background that delineates time lines and facts that establish probable cause, UN and WHO definitions and roles, and history and incidents from the April, 2009 “swine flu” outbreak.

Evidence the “swine flu” vaccines are defined as bioweapons as delineates in government agencies and regulations classifying and restricting vaccines, and the fear of foreign countries that “swine flu” vaccines will be used for biological warfare.

Scientific evidence the “swine flu” virus is an artificial (genetic) virus.

Scientific evidence the “swine flu” was bioengineered to resemble the Spanish flu virus of 1918 including quotes from Swine Flu 2009 is Weaponized 1918 Spanish Flu by A. True Ott, Ph.D., N.D., and a Science Magazine report from Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger et.al.

The genome sequence of the “swine flu”

Evidence of the deliberate release of the “swine flu” in Mexico

Evidence as to the involvement of President Obama that delineates his trip to Mexico which coincided with the recent “swine flu” outbreak and the death of several officials involved in his trip. Contention is made that the President was never tested for “swine flu” because he had been previously vaccinated.

Evidence as to the role of Baxter and WHO in producing and releasing pandemic virus material in Austria includes a statement from a Baxter official stating the accidentally distributed H5N1 in the Czech Republic was received from a WHO reference center. This includes delineation of evidence and allegations from Burgermeister’s charges filed in April in Austria that are currently under investigation.

Evidence Baxter is an element in a covert bioweapons network

Evidence Baxter has deliberately contaminated vaccine material.

Evidence Novartis is using vaccines as bioweapons

Evidence as to WHO’s role in the bioweapons program

Evidence as to WHO’s manipulation of disease data in order to justify declaring a Pandemic Level 6 in order to seize control of the USA.

Evidence as to the FDA’s role in covering up the bioweapons program

Evidence as to Canada’s National Microbiology Lab’s role in the bioweapons program.

Evidence of the involvement of scientists working for the UK’s NIBSC, and the CDC in engineering the “swine flu”.

Evidence vaccinations caused the Spanish killer flu of 1918 including belief of Dr. Jerry Tennant that the widespread use of aspirin during the winter that followed the end of World War I could have been a key factor contributing to the earlier pandemic by suppressing the immune system and lowering body temperatures, allowing the flu virus to multiply. Tamiflu and Relenza also lower body temperatures, and therefore can also be expected to contribute to the spread of a pandemic.

Evidence as to manipulation of the legal framework to allow mass murder with impunity.

Constitutional issues: the legality vs. illegality of jeopardizing the life, health and public good by mass vaccinations.

The issue of immunity and compensation as evidence of intent to commit a crime.

Evidence as to the existence of an international corporate crime syndicate.

Evidence of the existence of the “Illuminati”.

Evidence as to the depopulation agenda of the Illuminati/Bilderbergs and their involvement in the engineering and release of the artificial “swine flu” virus.

Evidence that weaponized flu was discussed at the annual Bilderberg meeting in Athens from May 14-17, 2009, as part of their agenda of genocide, including a list of attendees who, according to a statement once made by Pierre Trudeau, view themselves as genetically superior to the rest of humanity.

Media is keeping Americans clueless about the threat they are under

Jane Burgermeister is a dual Irish/Austrian who has written for Nature, the British Medical Journal, and American Prospect. She is the European Correspondent of the Renewable Energy World website. She has written extensively about climate change, biotechnology, and the ecology.

In addition to the charges currently under investigation that she filed against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology in April, she has filed charges against WHO and Baxter among others concerning a case of exploding “swine flu” vials meant for a research lab on a busy IC train in Switzerland.

In her view, control of the media by the ruling elite has allowed the world crime syndicate to further its agenda unabated while the rest of the people remain in the dark about what is really going on. Her charges are an attempt to get around this media control and bring the truth to light.

Her greatest concern is that “in spite of the fact Baxter has been caught red handed nearly triggering pandemic, they are also moving ahead, together with allied pharma companies, with supplying the vaccine for pandemics.” Baxter is hurrying to get this vaccine to market some time in July.

For more information:
http://www.naturalnews.com/025760.html
http://birdflu666.wordpress.com/200…
http://in.news.yahoo.com/137/200906…
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/…

What are they hiding? Flight 447 and Tunguska Type Events

COMMENT : Another Tragedy and another mystery  and the entire mainstream media talk of all possibilities except the obvious. In between out of blue , a new law emerges saying that all meteroite news is CLASSIFIED. and we were asked to believe all these events are independent interrelated events. Words like Classified, National Security, security of people, nation etc. used by psychopaths for centuries for their ulterior motives.

so what is the basis of this possibility   of meterorite explosion as the cause of the Fligh 447 crash and demise of around 200 people . read the well documented events on from www.sott.net

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What are they hiding? Flight 447 and Tunguska Type Events

Air France Flight 447 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared over the Mid-Atlantic (just north of the equator) at approximately 1.33UTC on June 1st 2009.

No mayday signal was received from the aircraft and almost two weeks later, aviation officials have yet to give a coherent explanation as to what could have caused the sudden demise of a high tech Airbus 330-200 passenger plane.

As usual, the media are missing (or concealing) some very obvious yet understandably disturbing data about the nature of the threats to life on planet earth, and as usual, it is left to Sott.net to spell out the details.

One of the first official comments on the incident came from French Prime Minister Francois Fillon who said

“Our only certainty is that the plane did not send out any distress call but regular automatic alerts for three minutes indicating the failure of all systems.”

Aviation experts were also said to be puzzled that there were no radio reports from the Airbus and stated that such a modern aircraft would have had to suffer multiple traumas to plunge into the sea.

Commercial aircraft pitot tube

Initial theorizing focused on the Pitot tube, part of the aircraft’s system of pressure-sensitive instruments which determine airspeed, Mach number, altitude, and vertical speed. An Air France spokesperson stated on 3 June that “the aircraft sent a series of electronic messages over a three-minute period, which represented about a minute of information. Exactly what that data means hasn’t been sorted out, yet.”[17]

An aviation safety expert explained a few days later that “complete failure would require 100% failure of the electrical system,” which “did not happen early in the flight, because the system was up linking data to the maintenance facility, indicating there was some electricity on the airplane.

The messages, sent from an onboard maintenance system, Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), indicated that between 02:10 UTC and 02:14 UTC – four minutes or less – 5 failure reports and 19 warnings were transmitted.The messages resulted from equipment failure data, captured by a built-in system for testing and reporting, and cockpit warnings also posted to ACARS. The failures and warnings in the 5 minutes of transmission concerned navigation auto-flight, flight controls, and cabin air-handling.

approximate last location of AF 447

Among the ACARS transmissions in the first minute is one message that indicates a fault in the pitot-static system. Sources close to the investigation have confirmed that “the first automated system-failure message in a string of radio alerts from the crashed jet explicitly indicated that the airspeed sensors were faulty”. The twelve warning messages with the same time code indicate that the autopilot and auto-thrust system had disengaged, that the aircraft collision avoidance system was in fault mode. Additionally the flight mode went from ‘normal law’ to ‘alternate law’. The remainder of the messages occurred from 02:11 UTC to 02:14 UTC, containing a fault message for an Air Data Inertial Reference Unit (which sends air speed data to the pilots display as well as other systems such as the engines, autopilot, flight control and landing gear systems. At 02:12 UTC, a warning message indicated that there was a disagreement between the independent air data systems. At 02:13 UTC, a fault message for the flight management guidance and envelope computer was sent. One of the two final messages, transmitted at 02:14 UTC was a warning referring to the air data reference system, the other was a “cabin vertical speed warning”.

All of the above would seem to bear out the aforementioned aviation expert’s conclusion that the plane did indeed suffer multiple traumas before it plunged into the sea. Yet such a series of traumas would be unprecedented in modern aviation history, particularly given that the Airbus 330 is one of the most advanced and and safest commercial planes available. It has an excellent safety record, with more than 550 planes built and no passenger fatalities since it went into service in 1993. It is almost inconceivable then that such a plane with no history of technical issues could have experienced such complete technical failure so quickly that the pilot did not even have time to send a distress call (“Mayday”) on the aircraft emergency frequency.

Unsurprisingly then, on June 11th the French Investigation and Analysis Office For Civilian Security discounted the idea then that the “air speed sensor” could have been the main cause of the crash.

Severe weather has also been proposed as a possible cause. This theory is based on the report that at about 1am UTC the pilots reported that they had encountered “stormy weather with strong turbulence”. Daniel G. Kottlowski, a senior meteorologist with Accuweather.com calculated that thunderstorms in the region of the crash could have generated updrafts in the range of 100 miles per hour, although he conceded that this was not unusual weather for the region. According to commercial transport pilots familiar with the route, it is likely that the flight crew of the Air France aircraft was aware of the intensity of the storm in the flight path at that altitude long before actually encountering the thunderstorms. Using the on board radar pilots can see and fairly easily navigate around particular storm cells.

Lightning is also unlikely to have caused any serious problems because modern aircraft are designed to take lightning strikes without significant damage.

The most compelling evidence against the weather theory however is the fact that two Lufthansa jets flew through the same area both before and after Flight 447 without incident.

The United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday it had preliminary information indicating the two aircraft recorded data on prevailing temperatures and winds. But they were not equipped to automatically transmit information on turbulence.

On Monday, a source with access to the data transmitted to the World Meteorological Organisation told Reuters in Paris that the two jets passed through turbulence before and after the plane without incident, leaving experts scrambling to assess the weather’s role in the disaster.

Indeed, no less than 12 other flights shared more or less the same route with Flight 447 around the time of the accident. No weather problems were reported by any of the planes.

Recent reports that passengers bodies have been found 54kms apart strongly suggest that the plane broke apart high in the air.

When faced with the problem of the loss of a commercial jet in mid-air with no obvious explanation, the mainstream media generally resorts to storytelling, with a little Hollywood movie-style emotional string pulling for good measure, as evidenced by this UK Times article:

Had AF447 suffered a structural failure? Did a window break or wing shear off? Whatever it was, the passengers must have been terrified. It was night over the Atlantic, lightning splitting the sky, the aircraft jolting in the turbulence, systems failing. Then massive decompression, cabin air gone and, outside, the temperature -30C or below. Mercifully they may not have suffered long.

Interestingly, in the same article the authors state:

Though no one yet knows for sure what destroyed the plane, investigators are concerned that it was not caused, as first suggested, by a lightning strike or a bomb or a meteorite. Instead they fear it was a fatal collision of high technology and the brute force of nature.

Ah yes, the “brute force of nature”! Now that is getting close, but even closer was the reference to a meteorite. Even though this idea received scant attention in the mainstream press, with only Discover magazine blog allowing one of their editors to speculate on the statistical possibility of an errant bolide sealing the fate of AF 447, it cannot be discounted. As the saying goes, when all other theories have been tried and found wanting, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the answer.

Readers of Sott.net will be familiar with the data we have compiled on the alarming increase in frequency of meteorite sightings and impacts over the past 10 years. Laura Knight-Jadczyk’s article Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls presents a list of impact events dating from 10,000 BC to the present day. It was this and other data, studiously ignored by the mainstream media, that led us to quickly consider a more logical explanation to the sudden disappearance of AF 447.

Within a few days of the crash the first piece of evidence that something other than high technology and weather destroyed AF 447 came in.

A Spanish pilot with Air Comet (which flies from South and Central American countries to Madrid) flying the Lima to Madrid route reported a bright descending light in the region of AF 447’s last position:

“Suddenly we saw in the distance a bright intense flash of white light that fell straight down and disappeared in six seconds”.

At the time of the sighting, (the copilot and a passenger who was in the front kitchen area of the airplane also saw it), the Air Comet aircraft was located at seven degrees north of the equator and at the 49th meridian West. The estimated location for the A-330-203 until the moment of its disappearance is at the equator and around the 30th meridian West

It seems reasonable to suggest that an aircraft would not produce a bright and intense white light for six seconds as it fell from the sky. The many dozens of meteorite and fireball sightings over the past few years however are often seen as bright white flashes of descending light.

A Sott.net reader later sent us the following report:

Early in the morning today (8th June 2009) I saw here in Brazil, an interview (on Record television network) with a native from the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha who stated that he saw strange lights in the night of the disaster with the Air France Jet.

He declared seeing a light (bright white) and later it changed directions several times and changed to red color.

So are we saying that a meteorite hit AF 447? Not exactly. The chances of a single smallish, (or even largish) rock falling from the sky and hitting a plane travelling at 500mph are surely too remote to be plausible. But meteorites and comets often do not simply fall to earth intact. Remember Tunguska?

The Tunguska Event, or Tunguska explosion, was a powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, at around 7:14 a.m. on June 30, 1908

Although the cause of the explosion is the subject of debate, it is commonly believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5 – 10 kilometres (3 – 6 miles) above the Earth’s surface. Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the object’s size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of metres across

The Tunguska shock wave levelled 2000 sq kms of trees

Although the meteor or comet burst in the air rather than directly hitting the surface, this event is still referred to as an impact. Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 megatons to as high as 30 megatons of TNT, with 10 – 15 megatons the most likely – roughly equal to the United States’ Castle Bravo thermonuclear explosion set off in late February 1954, about 1,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan and about one-third the power of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.The explosion knocked over an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometres (830 square miles). It is estimated that the shockwave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale. An explosion of this magnitude is capable of destroying a large metropolitan area.

Although the Tunguska event is believed to be the largest impact event on land in Earth’s recent history, impacts of similar size in remote ocean areas would have gone unnoticed before the advent of global satellite monitoring in the 1960s and 1970s.

© Don Davis
How the Tunguska blast might have looked from the windows of a nearby airliner. The expanding shock wave would have knocked the plane from the sky moments later

The Tunguska meteorite probably was visible as it exploded and broke up, appearing as a bright white light descending in the sky. Six to ten miles up is within the height range of commercial aircraft. And AF flight 447 was indeed located in a remote ocean area. So if, as we suspect, the blast from a Tunguska-like comet – though a significantly smaller one than that which exploded over Tunguska – destroyed AF447, it would have produced something similar to an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) which explains the complete failure of the air craft’s electronic systems. It is also likely that modern satellite monitoring systems would have picked up such an event. Indeed, Brigadier General S. Pete Worden’s article NEOS, Planetary Defense and Government – A View From the Pentagon confirms this likelihood:

I can show people evidence of real strikes inflicting local and regional damage less than a century ago. Even more compelling are the frequent kiloton-level detonations our early warning satellites see in the earth’s atmosphere.

Within the United States space community there is a growing concern over “space situational awareness.” We are beginning to understand that it is essential to identify and track virtually everything in earth orbit. Some of these objects, down to a few centimeters in size, present a potential threat to commercial and civil space operations such as the International Space Station.

So, what are the chances that civilian, or even government/military satellite imagery will be available to either confirm or deny this “wild speculation” of ours?

Well, up until a few days ago the chances seemed good. But then, for some unknown reason, and very coincidentally, this happened:

Military Hush-Up: Incoming Space Rocks Now Classified

Space.com

10 June 2009

For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth’s atmosphere – but no longer.

A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com had learned.

The satellites’ main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists.

The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified.

“It’s baffling to us why this would suddenly change,” said one scientist familiar with the work. “It’s unfortunate because there was this great synergy…a very good cooperative arrangement. Systems were put into dual-use mode where a lot of science was getting done that couldn’t be done any other way. It’s a regrettable change in policy.”

Scientists say not only will research into the threat from space be hampered, but public understanding of sometimes dramatic sky explosions will be diminished, perhaps leading to hype and fear of the unknown.

Commenting last year on the significance of the Tunguska event, former Apollo astronaut and chairman of the Board of Directors of the B612 Foundation, Rusty Schweickart, stated:

Tunguska is a great reminder of what we will likely have to deal with in the next 10 years or so. We now know statistically that there are some 600,000 or more “Tunguskas” out there of which we have to date discovered less than 1%! While for those of us who have been working this issue it is clear that we can deflect such impact threats … the primary prerequisite is that we know one is coming! We can’t protect ourselves against something we don’t know about.

So the primary “message” of Tunguska is that it happened, it will happen again, and we can prevent it. but we have to find and track these smaller NEOs. Congress has spoken. They’ve told NASA to crank up a more powerful search program. NASA, however, has refused to act – or even to comply with Congress’s request to recommend a search strategy and to estimate the budget needed to support it.

Their excuse? They don’t have the budget to support it!

Thanks, NASA.

If a high-altitude cometary explosion did indeed destroy AF 447, then the decision by the US military (and government), just a few days later, to impose a black out on all information about earth-bound space rocks is extremely worrying. It suggests that members of the US government know that a cometary explosion destroyed the Air France flight and that they suspect that more such events, perhaps over populated areas, are likely in the near future. More horrifying however is the callous disregard for human life displayed by such a cavalier attitude to the withholding of information pertaining to what is clearly the greatest existential threat facing humanity today.

the 25 ton doors leading to the Cheyenne complex

Of course, while you and I are to be denied this information and left to our fate, tens of thousands of these self-styled elite members of government and society have at their disposal several massive underground bunker installations such as Mount Weather or Cheyenne Mountain and no doubt many others. With their 25 ton blast doors, fitness suites, air filters, mini power stations and fresh water reservoirs, tax payer’s money has not be spared in ensuring the comfortable survival of the least eligible.

Bin Laden says Obama planted “hatred seeds”

COMMENT :   There is very big controversy whether bin laden is till alive or not.  but bin laden surely comes back from grave, if some thing my all knowing  Rulers wants to push on to the heads of the common man. who benefitted from bin laden comments . For sure it is not muslims or muslim countries, it is the western worlds ruling elite. It is interesting to see what is in pipeline.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090603/pl_nm/us_obama_binladen_2

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said U.S. President Barack Obama had planted the seeds of “revenge and hatred” toward the United States in the Muslim world and warned Americans to prepare for the consequences.

Bin Laden’s remarks were aired on Wednesday by Al Jazeera television, one day after his deputy described Obama as a criminal and warned Muslims not to fall for his polished words.

The comments appeared to be a drive by al Qaeda to pre-empt a major speech to the Muslim world that Obama is due to deliver in Egypt on Thursday.

“Obama and his administration have planted seeds for hatred and revenge against America,” the Saudi-born bin Laden said in the audio recording, adding that Obama was treading in the footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush.

Obama’s policies in Pakistan had raised “animosity” among Muslims, bin Laden said, adding that the U.S. president had “ordered” Pakistan to fight the Taliban Islamists, al Qaeda’s allies, in the Swat region.

“Obama ordered (Pakistani President Asif) Zardari and his army to prevent the Swat people from implementing sharia through killing and bombing and destruction,” he said.

“This has led to the displacement of about a million Muslims — elderly, women and children — from their villages and homes to become refugees in tents.”

Pakistan’s army began battling the Taliban in Swat in April, after a militant thrust into a district 100 km (60 miles) northwest of the capital raised fears at home and abroad that the nuclear-armed country could slowly slip into militant hands.

“Let the American people prepare to continue to reap what has been planted by the heads of the White House in the coming years and decades,” bin Laden said.

In a separate development on Wednesday, al Qaeda’s North African wing said it had carried out its threat to kill a British hostage it was holding in the Sahara.

Algerian security expert Hamid Ghomrassa said the network was telling Obama he “must understand that al Qaeda is a force in the region that cannot be ignored.”

Bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, said in an audio tape posted on an Islamist website on Tuesday that Muslims had already received Obama’s “bloody messages,” which were pre-empting the U.S. president’s charm offensive.

Obama has chosen Egypt to make an address to the Islamic world, in which he will try to dispel resentment inflamed by U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan following al Qaeda’s September 11 attacks. He arrived in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday on the first leg of his trip.

The success of Obama’s diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East may hinge on how well he is able to improve broader U.S. relations with the Islamic world.

(Additional reporting by Jason Benham)

Terror in Iran: Is it American backed campaign ?

COMMENT : It is amazing how  the suicide bombers  start killing people people at a very convenient places and convenient  time to the american and Isreali EMPIRE.  During the current decade , a new era started with 911 and its propaganda, under the name of WAR on TERROR , with intimidation tactic of ‘ You are with us or you are against us’ , the entire US government is privatised to the  select pockets of lords  of Military Industrial complex, so many industrial complexes like Military Intelligence complex.  When ever a new fascist law has to be passed, suicide bombers are ready. It doesn’t matter , whether it is US , Uk, Spain, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza strip , India or Iran.

Thanks to the internet, truth is coming out  and truth is alwaying showing the finger at  pentagon and their  conscious and unconscious minion in power. Look at India , It had tens of terrorism activities and all of a sudden every thing stopped after india allowed Israeli and pentagon authorities are allowed to help India. the cost of it  Israel 12 billion dollars worth of military contracts from India.  The MEdia that cried of terrorism  simply slept once foreign experts are allowed into the country.

Now it is the turn of Iran.    As Chris Floyd argues it is the same formula that has been used over and over over. You have convenient blind corruptable poor people ready to blew themselves up for the sake of  some body’s greed.

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Convergence and Continuity: The American-Backed Terror Campaign in Iran Written by Chris Floyd

The American-Backed Terror Campaign in Iran

On Thursday, a suicide bomber walked into a mosque, detonated his explosives and killed and wounded almost 140 people. In the wreckage and confusion afterward, a final death count has not yet been established, but the latest available information puts it at 23.

It is unlikely that you heard about this terrorist attack — because it took place in Iran. For years, Iran has endured a series of terrorist actions — suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, open assaults by fanatical gunmen, sabotage, and “targeted assassinations” of government officials, scientists and others. Multitudes have been slaughtered in these operations, whose ferocity and frequency are surpassed only by the atrocities that have been unleashed in the four countries that have been on the forefront of America’s Terror War: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. One shudders to think what Washington’s response would be to such a sustained campaign on American soil.

Of course, it is no mystery why the attack on the mosque in Zahedan — a city situated at the strategic point where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan converge — attracted so little attention in the Western press. Every day, we are schooled relentlessly by our political and media classes to regard the Iranians — heirs to one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilizations — as demons and subhumans, whose lives are of little account. This can be seen in the long-running debate over an attack on Iran, which focuses almost entirely on the advantages or disadvantages such an assault would pose for American and Israeli interests — and not at all on the thousands of human beings living in Iran who would be killed in the operation.

But There is another reason why the terrorist attack in Zahedan has not been greeted with commiserations from the White House or excited coverage from our government-spoonfed media: because it is highly likely that the United States played a role in fomenting the attack, either by direct or by collateral hand.

As AFP notes, Zahedan is the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, with “a large ethnic Sunni Baluch minority,” which is often at odds with the Shiite-dominated central government. The region — which is also a prime conduit for arms and drug trafficking across the volatile borders — has been roiled for years by the militant Sunni extremist group, Jundullah (Soldiers of God). This group, aligned philosophically if not operationally with al Qaeda, has openly boasted of killing hundreds of people in its campaigns, and, as Chris Hedges notes, “has a habit of beheading Iranians it captures, including a recent group of 16 Iranian police officials, and filming and distributing the executions.”

You would think that such violent, frenzied zealots — fellow travellers of Osama bin Laden! — would be taken up by our Terror Warriors as poster boys for the evils of “Islamofascism.” But as we noted here a few months ago, “bombings and beheadings and deathporn videos are not inherently evil; they can also be a force for good — as long as they put to the service of America’s ever-noble, ever-lofty foreign policy ideals.”

For Jundullah is one of the several armed insurgent groups inside Iran being supported by the United States. As Andrew Cockburn reported last year:

Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, “unprecedented in its scope.”

Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials.  This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups.

Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or “army of god,” the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border — whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother-in-law’s throat.

Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi Arabs of south west Iran.  Further afield, operations against Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon will be stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.

Thus the attack this week in Zahedan is an integral part of a wide-ranging campaign of American-supported terrorism inside Iran — even if the “darksiders” in the U.S. security organs had no direct involvement or knowledge of this particular attack. When you are in the business of fomenting terror (see here and here), there’s no need for micro-management. You co-opt the armed extremists who best serve your political agenda of the moment; you slip them guns, money, intelligence, guidance — and then you turn them loose on the local populace.

We have seen this over and over; in Iraq, for example, where American death squads — such as the ones led by Stanley McChrystal, recently appointed by Barack Obama to work his “dirty war” magic in Afghanistan — joined with mostly Shiite militias to carry out massive “ethnic cleansing” campaigns and individual assassinations. We saw it years ago, in the American-led construction of an international army of mostly Sunni extremists raised to hot-foot the Soviets in Afghanistan — then turned loose upon the world. And of course this lineage of terror-breeding as an instrument of American foreign policy goes back for many decades. with one of the earliest, most spectacular successes being the use of religious extremists to help bring down the secular republic in Iran in 1953.

And as we noted here last year:

Bush’s directive represents an intensification of the drive for open war with Iran, but it is not a new development; rather, it is a major “surge” in a state terror campaign the Administration has been waging against Iran (among others) for years. As I wrote as along ago as August 2004, the Bushists have openly sought, and received, big budgets and bipartisan support for terrorist groups and extremist militias all over the world. Here’s an excerpt from that 2004 report:

If you would know the hell that awaits us – and not far off – there’s no need to consult ancient prophecies, or the intricate coils of hidden conspiracies, or the tortured arcana of high-credentialed experts. You need only read the public words, sworn before God, of top public officials, the great lords of state, the defenders of civilization, as they explain – clearly, openly, with confidence and pride – their plans to foment terror, rape, war and repression across the face of the earth.

Last month, in little-noticed testimony before Congress, the Bush Regime unveiled its plans to raise a host of warlord armies in the most volatile areas in the world, Agence France-Presse reports. Bush wants $500 million in seed money to arm and train non-governmental “local militias” – i.e., bands of lawless freebooters – to serve as Washington’s proxy killers in the so-called “arc of crisis” that just happens to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and South America.

Flanked by a gaggle of military brass, Pentagon deputy honcho Paul Wolfowitz told a rapt panel of Congressional rubber-stamps that Bush wants big bucks to run “counter-insurgency” and “counter-terrorist” operations in “ungoverned areas” of the world – and in the hinterlands of nations providing “sanctuary” for terrorists. Making copious citations from Bush’s 2002 “National Security Strategy” of unprovoked aggressive war against “potential” enemies, Howlin’ Wolf proposed expanding the definition of “terrorist sanctuary” to any nation that allows clerics and other rabble-rousers to offer even verbal encouragement to America’s designated enemies du jour….

There’s nothing really new in Bush’s murder-by-proxy scheme, of course; America has a long, bipartisan tradition of paying local thugs to do Washington’s bloodwork. For example, late last month, Guatemala was forced to pay $420 million in extortion to veterans of the U.S.-backed “paramilitaries” who helped Ronald Reagan’s favorite dictator, right-wing Christian coupster Efrain Rios Montt, kill 100,000 innocent people during his reign, the BBC reports. The paramilitaries, whose well-documented war crimes include rape, murder and torture, had threatened to shut down the country if they weren’t given some belated booty for their yeoman service in the Reagan-Bush cause.

But Wolfowitz did reveal one original twist in Bush’s plan: targeting the Homeland itself as a “terrorist sanctuary.” In addition to loosing his own personal Janjaweed on global hotspots, Bush is also seeking new powers to prevent anyone he designates a “terrorist” from “abusing the freedom of democratic societies” or “exploiting the technologies of communication” – i.e., defending themselves in court or logging on to the Internet. As AFP notes, Wolfowitz tactfully refrained from detailing just how the Regime intends to curb the dangerous use of American freedom, but he did allow that “difficult decisions” would be required.

[Perhaps some of those measures to prevent people from "exploiting the technologies of communication" to spread discontent with the Imperium are being formalized right now in the new Administration's plans for a "cyberspace command," where "the armed forces [will]  conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare,” as the NY Times reports. And since “cyberwar” — like the Terror War — “knows no borders” (as the usual anonymous “senior intelligence official” told the Times), the Obama White House is now busying trying to figure out just how you can aim its cyberwar offensives at the Homeland itself. After all, said the official, “how do you fight them if you can’t act both inside and outside the United States?” How indeed? Better start training your carrier pigeons for any private messages you might want to send.]

II.
In any case, whatever its provenance, the attack on the Zahedan mosque serves a confluence of interests. For it comes not only at a strategic location but also at a strategic time: just two weeks before the Iranian presidential election, with the hardline incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, facing a strong challenge from two reformist candidates.

Of course, the very last thing that the militarists in Washington and Israel want to see is the election of a moderate in Iran. They want — and need — Ahmadinejad, or someone just like him, so they can keep stoking the fires for war. A moderate president, more open to genuine negotiations, and much cooler in rhetoric than the loose-lipped Ahmadinejad, would be yet another blow to their long-term plans. Because the ultimate aim — the only aim, really — of the militarists’ policy toward Iran is regime change. They don’t care about “national security” or the “threat” from Iran’s non-existent nuclear arsenal; they know that there is no threat whatsoever that Iran will attack Israel — or even more ludicrously, the United States — even if Tehran did have nukes. They don’t care about the suffering of the Iranian people under a draconian, repressive and corrupt regime. They are not worried about Iran’s “sponsorship of terrorism,” for, as we’ve seen, the militarists thrive on — when they are not actively fomenting — the fear and anguish caused by terrorism. This fear is the grease that drives the ever-expanding war machine and ‘justifies’ its own ever-increasing draconian powers and corruption.

No, in the end, the sole aim of the militarist policy is to overthrow Iran’s current political system and replace it with a regime that will bow to the hegemony of the United States and its regional deputy, Israel. There is no essential difference in aim or method between today’s policy and that of 1953. (Except that the regional deputy in those days was Britain, not Israel.) What they want is compliance, access to resources and another strategic stronghold in the heart of the oil lands — precisely what they wanted, and got, with the installation of the Shah and his corruption-ridden police state more than a half-century ago.

They play the long game, our militarists. For example, they agitated openly — and  plotted covertly — for the invasion of Iraq for almost 10 years before they finally got their way. They have worked for 30 years now to restore a client regime in Iran, and today, with the relentless bipartisan demonizing of the Iranians — and the “mushroom cloud” fearmongering over a non-existent nuclear weapons program — they are as close as they have ever been to their goal. To lose a fear-raising (and fundraising!) asset like Ahmadinejad now would be a bitter disappointment.

And what better way for an incumbent president to stand tall before the voters than to rally the nation around him in the face of a horrible terrorist attack? A mosque full of Shiite worshippers, blown to pieces, with photos showing the blood of the innocent martyrs splattered on the ruined walls? This serves the interests of all the major players in the great geopolitical game: the Iranian hardliners, the American and Israeli militarists, the Jundullah extremists. Of course, it doesn’t serve the interests of the murdered dead, or the Iranian people — or the American people, for that matter. But this too is nothing new. As we noted here in 2007, in a piece about an earlier escalation of state terror by the American government:

There are really no words to describe how morally depraved and monumentally stupid this policy is. It is of course not all that surprising that it springs from a family whose political fortunes are founded, at least in part, from the financial fortunes it reaped from helping build the Nazi military-industrial complex; a family that continued trading with the Nazis even after Americans were in battle against Hitler’s forces. The Bushes and their outriders have always been attuned to the kind of brutal realpolitik that is willing — at times eager — to see American blood shed in order to advance their elitist agenda. (Which they have of course internalized as being identical with the “national interest.”)

But as we’ve also noted many times, this political “philosophy” is by no means unique to the Bush Family faction. It is resolutely bipartisan, and deeply embedded in the mindset of the American Establishment. The Bushes are nothing but second-rate camp followers, empty shells and non-entities, originating nothing, ignorant and cynical in equal measure, their only unusual trait being how open they are in their scorn for the worthless rabble and the bullshit Constitution that the crypto-Commies like Madison and Jefferson foisted on the proper rulers of the country. Otherwise, they simply regurgitate the unprocessed prejudices, unexamined assumptions and vulgar ambitions of the clique that spawned them.

Of course, at times the idiot George W. Bush and the criminally ignorant crew that surrounds him have brought the inherent lawlessness, greed, brutality and incompetence of the American elite to what seem like new heights — although even the sick-making murder of the Iraq campaign has still not approached the genocidal fury of, say, the bipartisan bombing of Indochina, and the millions of dead that the “best and the brightest” left behind there. Nor have Bush’s domestic repression and flagrant abuse of authority — as bad as they are — yet approached the toxic and all-pervasive level of the “Red Scares” launched by Democratic icons Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman. (Joe McCarthy merely took the ball that Truman put into play and ran with it.)  But sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof; the crimes of the Bush Administration are not any less heinous — and the people they have murdered are not any less dead — just because these crimes are not some aberration of the idiot and his crew but are instead continuations and at times accelerations of long-standing Establishment thinking and policy.

But with each passing decade, the technological tools of repression and militarism grow more overpowering and far-reaching. With each passing decade, the pernicious after-effects and blowback from past depredations build up and compound, breeding new evils. With each passing decade, the societal rot engendered by the rapacity of the elite spreads deeper, eating away at the foundation of the Republic and the fabric of our communities, and weakening or destroying the social and institutional counterbalances to unchecked greed and ambition.

Thus in one sense it doesn’t matter if the Bush Faction is any more or less criminal and destructive than other administrations. The world in which they are blundering around killing people is far more unstable and dangerous than before, because it is filled with the compounded evil and folly of previous times.

Of course, that was written a long time ago, back in those dark days when Bush Family factotum Robert Gates was still running the Pentagon and operators of death squads and torture shops like Stanley McChrystal were given high commands; back when the government was going to court to protect warantless spying on Americans and seeking to strip all rights from Terror War captives held indefinitely at the arbitrary will of the president, and devising “legal” justifications for these exercises of authoritarian power; back when the Pentagon and CIA were expanding their operations in Pakistan and intensifying the civilian-shredding air war in Afghanistan; back when we had militarist leaders who considered the mass-murdering war crime in Iraq to be “an extraordinary achievement;” back when cynical and hypocritical presidents would travel to harsh dictatorships in the Middle East to deliver “major speeches” on America’s great commitment to freedom and democracy in Muslim lands; and back when the president and his secretary of state routinely ignored all contrary evidence to insist that the Iranians were developing a nuclear arsenal that would soon threaten the whole world with destruction, while U.S. covert agencies were funding and fueling the death and suffering of Iranian civilians in terrorist operations.

Thank god everything is different now, in our glorious new era of Progressive Continuity. Too bad those people in Zahedan can’t tell the difference.

Obama’s fake-Hope : 250,000 More mercenary army in Iraq and Afghanistan

COMMENT : For what ? -  MURDER in the name of war .  Where did the HOPE slogan has gone ?. He couldn’t choose his own people for the post. It is done by his vice president.   He couldn’t  even allow the photo’s of torture and rape pictures from the  torture sites. he couldn’t stop looting of  trillions of dollars tax dollars  by wall street mafia masters like  Goldman Sachs  and others.

From Alternet

Obama Has 250,000 ‘Contractors’ Deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and is Increasing the Use of Mercenaries

Posted by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports at 8:22 AM on June 1, 2009.

A couple of years ago, Blackwater executive Joseph Schmitz seemed to see a silver lining for mercenary companies with the prospect of US forces being withdrawn or reduced in Iraq. “There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint,” Schmitz said. “And there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in.”

When it comes to armed contractors, it seems that Schmitz was right.

According to new statistics released by the Pentagon, with Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan, which “correlates to the build up of forces” in the country. These numbers relate explicitly to DoD security contractors. Companies like Blackwater and its successor Triple Canopy work on State Department contracts and it is unclear if these contractors are included in the over-all statistics. This means, the number of individual “security” contractors could be quite higher, as could the scope of their expansion.

Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of  the “total force in Centcom AOR [Area of Responsibility].” This means there are a whopping 242,657 contractors working on these two U.S. wars. These statistics come from two reports just released by Gary J. Motsek, the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Program Support): “Contractor Support of U.S. Operations in USCENTCOM AOR, IRAQ, and Afghanistan and “Operational Contract Support, ‘State of the Union.’”

“We expect similar dependence on contractors in future contingency operations,” according to the contractor “State of the Union.” It notes that the deployment size of both military personnel and DoD civilians are “fixed by law,” but points out that the number of contractors is “size unfixed,” meaning there is virtually no limit (other than funds) to the number of contractors that can be deployed in the war zone.

At present there are 132,610 in Iraq and 68,197 in Afghanistan. The report notes that while the deployment of security contractors in Iraq is increasing, there was an 11% decrease in overall contractors in Iraq from the first quarter of 2009 due to the “ongoing efforts to reduce the contractor footprint in Iraq.”

Both Pentagon reports can be downloaded here.

Tagged as: iraq, pentagon, afghanistan, barack obama, blackwater, department of defense, security contractors

Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

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Is Cheney’s baby “Halliburton” Forgiven and Forgotten?

From the Huffington Post and comments from From TomDispatch

It might be terrible times for so many companies suffering through a global economic meltdown, but in the war zone, there seems to be no recession in sight. In fact, with “Obama’s war” in the expanding Afghanistan/Pakistan theater of operations revving up, there’s likely to be money to the horizon, bases to build, and ever more troops to supply. As it happens, the management of KBR, formerly a part of Halliburton and the main builder and supplier of American bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, is feeling in the pink.

KBR is, of course, little short of notorious. The darling of the neocons and Dick Cheney’s baby — in his pre-Vice Presidential days he was the CEO of its then-parent corporation, Halliburton — it was one of the prime winners of the Bush administration’s privatization sweepstakes. Think of it as the Blackwater of construction companies. But somehow, despite hatfuls of charges against the company for a laundry list of alleged misdeeds as well as for war profiteering, it recently announced that revenues in the first quarter of 2009 were actually up 27% — to a hefty $3.2 billion. Moreover, according to the Financial Times, “KBR’s backlog of projects grew 8% last year and sales rose 33%. KBR has $1 [billion] in cash, no debt, and is looking for acquisitions.” Its stock is doing swimmingly; it’s managing to make the transfer from Republican to Democratic Washington; and its CEO William Utt states confidently, “We know we can withstand any length of this crisis — or depth.”

Journalist Pratap Chatterjee knows KBR intimately. He’s checked out its military dining halls, spent time with some of its 50,000 workers, and interviewed its officials. He’s also written a remarkable book on KBR and its former parent, Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. Now he follows both companies into a strangely cleansed future of oil and war. Tom

Is Halliburton Forgiven and Forgotten?

Or How to Stay Out of Sight While Profiting From the War in Iraq
By Pratap ChatterjeeThe Houstonian Hotel is an elegant, secluded resort set on an 18-acre wooded oasis in the heart of downtown Houston. Two weeks ago, David Lesar, CEO of the once notorious energy services corporation Halliburton, spoke to some 100 shareholders and members of senior management gathered there at the company’s annual meeting. All was remarkably staid as they celebrated Halliburton’s $4 billion in operating profits in 2008, a striking 22% return at a time when many companies are announcing record losses. Analysts remain bullish on Halliburton’s stock, reflecting a more general view that any company in the oil business is likely to have a profitable future in store.

There were no protestors outside the meeting this year, nor the kind of national media stakeouts commonplace when Lesar addressed the same crew at the posh Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Houston in May 2004. Then, dozens of mounted police faced off against 300 protestors in the streets outside, while a San Francisco group that dubbed itself the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane fielded activists in Bush and Cheney masks, offering fake $100 bills to passers-by in a mock protest against war profiteering. And don’t forget the 25-foot inflatable pig there to mock shareholders. Local TV crews swarmed, a national crew from NBC flew in from New York, and reporters from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal eagerly scribbled notes.

Now the 25-foot pigs are gone and all is quiet on the western front. How did Halliburton, once branded the ugly stepchild of Dick Cheney — the company’s former CEO — and a poster child of war profiteering, receive such absolution from anti-war activists and the media? Of course, the defeat of the Republicans in the 2008 election, the departure of the Bush administration, and a general apathy towards the ongoing, but lower-level war in Iraq are part of the answer, but don’t ignore a potentially brilliant financial sleight of hand by Halliburton either. That move played a crucial role in the cleansing of the company.

“Burn & Loot”

Halliburton has been doing work in war zones since the early 1960s, when it acquired the construction company Brown & Root and was tasked by the Pentagon with building the infrastructure for the Vietnam War. Back in those days, it was vilified as “Burn & Loot.” After more than three decades in news obscurity, in March 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, it suddenly returned to national attention. After all, not only had its former CEO been beating the public drums for an invasion, but its subsidiary KBR (the old Brown & Root) had been given a vast, open-ended, multi-billion dollar contract to build and maintain the new infrastructure of bases that the U.S. military was rushing to construct in that country.

More than six years later, KBR has taken in over $31 billion for a variety of services to the U.S. military, notably in the field of logistics, and the money continues to flow in. As of April 2008, under a renewed contract, the company estimated that it had served more than 720 million meals, driven more than 400 million miles on various convoy missions, treated 12 billion gallons of potable water, and produced more than 267 million tons of ice. While these numbers may be impressive, so are the multiple claims from Pentagon investigators of Godzilla-like overcharges and waste, not to speak of spiraling claims of workplace negligence, including faulty electrical wiring that led to deaths and injuries on bases KBR built, and a failure to provide adequately clean water supplies to the troops; and then there are those allegations of war profiteering made by activist groups and politicians.

In September 2004, Lesar announced that Halliburton was considering spinning off KBR as a separate company, in part he claimed because it was bearing the brunt of a “vicious campaign” of political attacks and its employees didn’t “deserve to have their jobs threatened for political gain.” It took three years, but in April 2007 the spin-off of KBR was completed. It is now officially on its own, and the results for both companies seem little short of miraculous. No protestors even attended the three annual shareholder meetings that KBR has since held, though its activities in the war zones have hardly changed, and only five made it to Halliburton’s in 2008. This year, of course, the protesting larder was bare.

Five shareholder activists did manage to attend Halliburton’s annual meeting, including me. (I own a single share of Halliburton stock.) When I asked Lesar about the company’s links to KBR, he responded unequivocally, “First of all, let’s be very clear, KBR and Halliburton are legally separated.”

Just three months ago, however, Halliburton didn’t hesitate to pay off $382 million in fines to the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the settlement of a controversial KBR gas project in Nigeria in which the company admitted to paying a $180 million bribe to government officials. Halliburton, Lesar assured us, had been willing to pony up such a sum to ensure that KBR could survive on its own. He painted the payment as an act of corporate generosity. I asked Albert Cornelison and Mark McCollum, Halliburton’s top lawyer and chief financial officer, if the company had similarly agreed to pay off any future judgments against the company on its monster military logistics contracts in Iraq. Cornelison responded that he doubted the company had financial obligations for KBR’s work in Iraq.

Military Investigations Continue

In reality, Halliburton’s decision to spin the company off was surely tied to hopes that it might indeed escape a number of pending Iraq investigations and lawsuits, as well as tamp down the bad publicity KBR was generating. Still, those investigations are ongoing. At Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the headquarters of the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the office in charge of reviewing the Pentagon’s payments to KBR, a small group of investigators continue to pursue that company’s failures.

In early May, at a hearing on Capitol Hill, DCAA director April G. Stephenson told the independent, bipartisan, congressionally-mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan that, since 2004, her staff had sent 32 cases of suspected over-billing, bribery, and other possible violations of the law to the Pentagon inspector general. The “vast majority” of these cases, she testified, were linked to KBR, which accounts for a staggering 43% of the dollars the Pentagon has spent in Iraq. “I don’t think we’re aware of a program, contract, or contractor that has had this number of suspensions or referrals,” she told the hearing. (In the allied area of overpricing services, DCAA also recommended $4.3 billion worth of reductions to proposed or billed costs and pointed to another $3.3 billion worth of costs under the KBR contract that they believed were simply not supported.)

Stephenson’s staff, she indicated, recommended not paying the costs KBR had billed to the Pentagon on more than 100 occasions, among other things suspending or blocking some $553 million in payments. In but one example of typical KBR practices revealed at the hearing, the company allegedly billed the Pentagon for 4,100 prefabricated living units for military bases in Iraq at an average price of $38,000, even though another contractor offered to provide similar units for $18,000 each.

None of this may, however, matter, if the Pentagon continues to follow the precedents it has recently set. As Stephenson notes, the Pentagon has already agreed to pay out at least $439 million of the $553 million the DCAA questioned, after accepting the company’s explanations for each incident.

“I’m struck by the fact [that] the military doesn’t seem to care about the cost as long as they get the service,” said Commissioner Christopher Shays, former Republican congressman from Connecticut. “Is part of the problem that, in essence with this one contractor, we’ve basically said, ‘KBR is too big to fail?’”

Shocking Revelations

The Pentagon even appears willing to pay KBR for contracts that may have resulted in the deaths of military personnel in Iraq, allegedly electrocuted due to shoddy work by the company’s electricians.

Just as Lesar was addressing Halliburton’s shareholders in Houston, Senator Byron Dorgan’s Senate Democratic Policy Committee was holding a hearing on Capitol Hill focused on KBR. Testifying was Jim Childs, a master electrician hired by the U.S. Army to help review military facilities in Iraq.

Childs claims that as many as 70,000 KBR-maintained buildings where troops lived and worked were unsafe because of faulty electrical wiring. “When I began inspecting the electrical work performed by KBR, my co-workers and I found improper electrical work in every building we inspected,” Childs said. Hundreds of soldiers are believed to have received electrical shocks in showers and elsewhere as a result. There have been four documented fatalities, including Staff Sergeant Ryan Maseth of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a Green Beret, who died of electrocution while showering in his barracks in Iraq on January 2, 2008. (Maseth’s family has sued KBR, alleging wrongful death.)

According to Senator Dorgan, documents show that KBR was paid huge bonuses by the Pentagon for this work, much of it after the allegations became public. If accurate, this gives “shocking” a new meaning. “How could it be that, given these obviously widespread problems with KBR’s electrical work, the Pentagon decided to give KBR bonuses totaling $83.4 million for such work?” he wondered.

KBR, of course, denies everything. “We believe the standards that we did employ were standards that were known and thought to be acceptable in an expeditionary environment,” KBR’s William P. Utt told the Associated Press in response. “We don’t think the wiring that we installed was potentially dangerous.” In a brief statement about the deaths, the company wrote: “Based on our current knowledge and the information we have gathered to date, KBR has found no evidence of a link between the work the military tasked KBR to perform and the reported deaths that have resulted from electrocution.”

Who Is Responsible?

One of the biggest problems with the sprawling 2008 KBR mega-contract appears to be that not enough people are watching the store (and evidently, some of those who do regularly doze off when payment issues arise).

In early May, Michael Thibault, co-chair of the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, highlighted a simple, if disturbing statistic at the second hearing of his newly established commission. Out of 504 oversight officials that, by Pentagon estimate, are needed to keep an eye on KBR’s contract in Afghanistan alone, just 166 were actually in the field in April 2009. As Thibault added:

“After more than six years of fighting, this is just one example of serious and persistent shortfalls in staffing and training. In military parlance, no one is pulling guard duty on contractor performance. This example, an issue by itself, points to another broader question. Who is responsible? Who’s going to fix these types of issues?”

At the Democratic Policy Committee hearing in late May, Charles M. Smith, a 31-year veteran of contract management in the U.S. Army, testified that Pentagon officials were deliberately ignoring criticism in deciding to reward KBR. Smith was in charge of KBR contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as of the award-fee or bonus-payment process that went with them. He refused to allow any bonuses to be paid out, however, because the company was not able to provide proper documentation of its costs. This was one reason, he believes, that he was taken off the contract in August 2004. Smith became a whistleblower after he retired a year ago. Here is a sample of his testimony:

“The award-fee process is supposed to evaluate a contractor’s performance level and provide a ‘bonus’ or award fee for superior performance. Failure to perform satisfactorily should result in a significantly lower or no award fee. [The award system] appears to me to have failed to work as it was intended and to have led to poor service for American troops, wasted taxpayer money, and possibly the deaths of soldiers in KBR operated facilities…”The problems for operating in the environment of Iraq and Afghanistan are not insignificant. However, the major failure appears to me to have been a culture that decided KBR was too big to fail and too important to be held to account. The Army was aware of KBR’s poor performance in Iraq. There have been numerous government inspections and reports. The Army, however, continued to give KBR high award fees. Those high award fees appear to have sent a message to KBR that performance did not really matter. Award-fee boards and decisions are a communications tool between the government and the contractor. The contractor learns what is important to the government and will respond accordingly.”

And the record shows that KBR did “respond accordingly.”

Remembering Halliburton

In the meantime, Halliburton, which provided so many years of corporate “oversight” for KBR, has been cleansed of all charges in the court of public opinion and has essentially dropped from view. It has also done its best to ignore a shareholder resolution brought by Patrick Doherty, the comptroller of the city of New York, that raises the obvious issue of war profiteering in Iraq, based on the Pentagon dollars it raked in while its former CEO helped oversee the war that was making it so much money.

Some shareholder activists continue to pursue the company by other means. For instance, the pension fund of the Policemen and Firemen Retirement System of the City of Detroit filed a lawsuit in mid-May against David Lesar and other executives of KBR and Halliburton, accusing them of a “reign of terror.” The lawsuit listed a number of complaints including bribes in Nigeria, overcharging the Pentagon for services rendered, accepting kickbacks, engaging in human trafficking, and concealing the rape of an employee.

“Under defendants’ watch, and supposedly under their control and supervision, the companies were permitted to engage in conduct so notorious that the name ‘Halliburton’ has become virtually synonymous with ‘corruption,’” the pension fund said in a complaint filed at the Harris County District Court in Houston. “Defendants’ failures have caused the Companies to suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and to be exposed to substantial additional judgments in the future.”

Heather Browne, a company spokeswoman, responded: “It appears that the lawsuit is based on unfounded allegations. We intend to vigorously defend ourselves.”

Another shareholder activist, John Harrington, a socially responsible investment manager in California, used his KBR shares to file a protest resolution against the company this May. According to Harrington’s press release:

“KBR’s management is obviously not taking their human rights footprint very seriously. The board of directors is accountable to shareholders, but only if we assert ourselves as the real owners of the company. Understandably, shareholders don’t like being associated with atrocities. If ever there was a need for responsible fiduciary human rights oversight within a company, it is with KBR. This company has been castigated in the press, sued, and accused of bribery, rape, murder, political corruption, tax avoidance, and who knows what else.”

KBR nonetheless took in another $5.7 billion from the U.S. taxpayer in 2008, up 15% from the $4.8 billion it received in 2007. With the planned drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq, KBR expects its revenue to fall this year. But shareholders need not worry: its contract with the Pentagon, signed in April 2008, potentially sets it up to make more than triple the maximum profits allowed in the previous six years.

Recently, the Financial Times ran an interview with KBR’s Utt, aptly headlined “KBR believes it is ready to construct a new image.” The same day stock analyst Will Gabrielski raised his profit estimate for KBR, causing company shares to jump.

If forgiving and forgetting are now the norm when it comes to the records of Halliburton and KBR in the Bush years, the question remains: Will the Pentagon complete this cleansing ritual or engage in the serious task of investigating both companies?

Pratap Chatterjee is the author of Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. He is the former executive director of CorpWatch and a shareholder of both Halliburton and KBR.

Secret Behind the Israel’s power : A must see video

Have you ever wondered about the power behind the Israel’s power. you must see this video and see how the most power ful people in this greatest country on this blue planet , stand in line parrot the same pre chosen words like a obedient kid repeats alphabet A,B,C
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from JTA News with sott.net comments

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency website (8 May) carries a just short of 5-minute film of the recent Aipac Conference called Aipac 2009: the Movie. It is worth viewing to see the self-presentation of a section of the American Jewish community, proud of its power and influence in the American political system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Fs73XZqm8

Narrated by Ben Harris reporting from Washington for JTA.org, it opens with the words: “With more than 6000 delegates and nearly half the members of the United States Congress in attendance the 2009 AIPAC Policy conference is an enormous display of American Jewish power…”

After clips saying that Iran was on everyone’s mind, the question is posed: “How big a danger?” There is then an extraordinary further sequence of clips showing different contributors saying the following: “Irreparable harm”, “existential threat”, “the holocaust”, “the holocaust”, “the holocaust”, “the holocaust”, “Hitler’s work”, “it was Hitler”, “the gas chamber”, “holocaust”, “shivering naked victims”, “gassed”, “the six-and-a-half million souls”, “burnt alive”, “Auschwitz”, “Treblinka”, “Buchenwald”, “killing camps”, “the Nazis”, “Yad Vashem”, “Never again”, “Shindler’s list”, “genocide of Israel”..

All this within the first minute of a just short of 5-minute film…

Seeing the unseen: News in Review for May 2009

COMMENT : Another month has passed , with more places burned. More irresponsible excuses were invented and bombarded to murder more children , helpless woman who doesn’t have basic needs of Food, cloth and house met by leaders in suits in air conditioned press conferences across the globe, where the world detachedly , uninterested public listened in unison. Sri Lanka , Pakistan, US , afghanistan, North Korea, swine flue, UFO’s , earth qaakes and more torture promotion from our Darth Wader, our former vice president overshadowing the Obama ’s . Now obama is more or less sounds like meek bush.
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from sott.net

Connecting the Dots: Psychopaths Push Forward With Engineered Chaos, Conquest, War, Famine, and Death

As an introduction to the current installment of Connecting the Dots, we would like to share something private with you.

It isn’t easy to spend several hours in front of the computer every day researching, posting, writing and editing. While it may come as a surprise to some, all Sott editors have lives and other interests that we would gladly attend to if it were not for the time and effort that we choose to dedicate to Sott.net. Certainly it is an often thankless task but we are not looking for praise or adulation. The really heart breaking part of getting up close and personal on a daily basis with the reality of life on planet earth is the realization that, despite our efforts, in the end it will not be enough. At least, it will not be enough until more people choose to make an effort to see the truth of our current world situation (a web of pernicious lies) and make true conscience their guiding light. As one great man said: Humanity neither progresses nor evolves by Nature. One can evolve; humanity cannot, for evolution proceeds only consciously.

And today, as you will see as you read on, we are in desperate need of more people to stand up and make a conscious choice. Because our world is on fire literally and figuratively, and while the fire has burned for many centuries, it is very likely that we will soon reach, and surpass, ‘boiling point’. To be brutally honest, there are precious few ‘fire exits’ left, and if radical action is not taken, and soon, there will be nothing left but ashes and perhaps a few bones for future archeologists to dig up.

We know that, as regular readers, you are aware of how dire the situation is. The problem is that the rest of the population is still sound asleep and largely oblivious of the threat that confronts them. Despite the angst and understanding that we may never reach a wider audience, we still choose to try, because the alternative – to watch the unfolding chaos and do nothing – is too horrifying to contemplate for any person with even half a conscience.

There is a saying that, in order to help others, one must first learn to help oneself. Working on SOTT has had and continues to have profound effects on us, the editors, on many levels. We can only hope that the fruits of our effort are helpful to you the reader also and may assist you to reach a deeper understanding of our reality and the problems we face, and perhaps make a conscious choice to do something to safeguard your own future and that of your children.

For our part, we promise that we will do everything in our power to continue to be the lighthouse.

And so, without further ado;

Yet another human tragedy

Another month of human chaos and we must find a way to make sense of it. In doing so, we have to decide how to prioritize events. This is often tricky, as the mainstream media will often pick the least newsworthy items for their headlines. We have heard much from Dick Cheney and Barack Obama in the last few days of May. Certainly, that is something that we need to talk about, for it reveals how corrupt the U.S. political system really is, how bad we had it during the Bush days, and how bad it still is. Something similar can be said about the MP scandals in the UK. But we are concerned that in focusing on such issues we fail to pay enough attention to the suffering of masses of human beings elsewhere, such as in Sri-Lanka, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Palestine. So lets start with these issues, always bearing in mind that the lives and suffering of innocents anywhere in the globe – whether they are trapped in a war in Sri Lanka, or in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib – are equally important.

© Agence France-Presse
The war zone is now a wasteland

Hundreds of thousands of people stranded on a coastal strip – turned concentration camp – are now prisoners and victims of the 25-year old war in Sri Lanka between the government military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebel movement, which came to an end in the final days of May, with the military declaring victory over the Tamil Tigers. But at what cost? The numbers depicting the human loss and suffering are staggering: 80,000 to 100,000 civilian deaths since the beginning of the war in 1983.

What the mainstream media reported following the visiting UN delegation in Sri Lanka were the inhumane stories of 200,000 Tamil civilians being held against their will by the government military in a displacement camp, which has been compared by a visiting priest to the World War II concentration camps; that the battlefield where 7,000 unarmed people have lost their lives is now a wasteland; and that the civilians were shelled by both the military and the Tamil fighters.

What the UN knew before the revelations but did not report, allegedly due to personal relations of UN staff to persons of the government in Sri Lanka, is that the Tamil civilians death toll by government military fire might surpass the 20, 000 in these final weeks of the fighting alone, an account released by Amnesty International, which the UN “chews on”, and the government of Sri Lanka refuses. This same government received weaponry and training from the experts at genocide: Israel. Reports reveal that Israel was “also providing weapons and training to Tamil guerrillas in order to maintain a ‘market’ for Israeli arms suppliers in the civil war-wracked island nation” and that in the 1990’s, Sri Lankan president Premadasa, ordered an investigation into charges that the Israeli “Mossad was training both Sri Lankan and Tamil guerrilla forces”; who in turn receive constant artillery shipments from the US; who have population reduction as their foreign policy. And so the chain of obliteration spreads all over the world…

Af-Pak Attack

The article: “Obama: From Anti-war Law Professor to Warmonger in 100 Days” poses the question:

“How long does it take a mild-mannered, anti-war, black professor of constitutional law, trained as a community organiser on the South Side of Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, ‘decapitation’ strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses at the far end of the globe?”

Of course, Sott readers can easily answer this question. The answer is: “Obama has been an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, ‘decapitation’ strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses at the far end of the globe for several years, as Joe Quinn outlined in his editorial Barack Obama – Judas Goat of August 2007.

While the MSM was celebrating Obama’s first 100 days in office, those not blind to the actions behind the slick rhetoric can now see that the ‘war on al-Qaeda’ has merely been renamed “overseas contingency operations” (OCO) and transformed into an expansion of the war in Afghanistan. “OCO” now includes Pakistan’s “Taliban” population and the displacement of hundreds of thousands fleeing the fighting from the Swat Valley.

Obama vowed to keep US military dominance and is adopting the use of covert tactics to carry on where Bush and Cheney left off. He has the full support of the MSM to ‘roll out’ this new strategy. The New York Times had a big spread with the single clear message: You cannot defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan without going deep into Pakistan. Of course, the complicit American media completely ignore the truthful announcement of Zardari telling NBC News that Osama is dead and he was a US government operator.

As we discuss in more detail below, the appointment of General McChrystal to run the Afghan war is a clear indication of the change in strategy. Tom Englehart writes about the six ways the Af-Pak war is expanding

;

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an “executive assassination wing” out of Vice President Cheney’s office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: “I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.”)

To further convince US citizens that it’s military is less involved than it seems, a theatrical meeting was staged on US soil. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan President Zardari visited Washington where they were given their scripts: ‘The Operation to continue till mission accomplished’. Sure enough, after the visit to the US the Pakistan military rapidly expanded their operations creating a tragic humanitarian crisis.

This all occurred in the aftermath of US “precision” strikes that killed 100, mostly civilians. Further reports showed that 140 Afghan villagers were killed by the attack of which 93 were children. In Afghanistan the massacre brought rioting in villages over the air-strike atrocity. Predictably the Americans blame the Taliban and refuse to accept responsibility:

The protest in Farah City is the latest sign of a strong Afghan reaction against US air attacks in which explosions inflict massive damage on mud-brick houses that provide little protection against bomb blasts. A claim by American officials, which was repeated by the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates yesterday in Kabul, that the Taliban might have killed people with grenades because they did not pay an opium tax is not supported by any eyewitnesses and is disproved by pictures of deep bomb craters, one of which is filled with water. Mr Gates expressed regret for the incident but did not go so far as to accept blame.

© David Guttenfelder/AP
Zachary Boyd from the US Army First Battalion, 26th Infantry takes a defensive position at firebase Restrepo after receiving fire from Taliban positions in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan’s Kunar Province

As it becomes ever more difficult to justify the deaths of innocent people in the interest of US imperialism, and the fires of hope ignited by Obama’s election begin to fizzle out, the US military command and the fawning mainstream media resort to what they do best – distraction using crass banalities. Someone should remind the embedded journalist who took this photo that murder in pink boxer shorts and flip-flops is still murder, regardless of how eccentric or even ‘cute’ it may appear (or be made to appear).

US soldier takes on Afghan militants – in pink underpants

U.S. defense chief lauds soldier in pink boxers

“U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Thursday praised an Army soldier in eastern Afghanistan who drew media attention this month after rushing to defend his post from attack while wearing pink boxer shorts and flip-flops.”

This particular story with full size photo, was front page headline news in the New York Times on May 12th.

In short, the ongoing massacring of Pastun Afghan and Pakistani villagers is a “necessary evil” in the Obama government’s unchanged war of Imperial expansion. The agendas that are fulfilled by the US presence in this area are numerous and varied. There is the agenda to thwart the building of the Iran-Pakistan-India oil pipeline which would pass through Balochistan in South Western Pakistan (on the Afghan border) and give Iran a welcome financial boost. There is the agenda to maintain control over the Pakistani government in order to ensure that, as climate change and the ensuing global chaos take hold, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal does not fall into the hands of anyone who does not serve US interests. There is the simple agenda of justifying the presence of thousands of US troops in Afghanistan – there must be ‘evidence’ of an enemy to fight in order to convince congress to keep the money flowing. And there is the agenda to maintain a complete encirclement of that persistent threat to US imperial designs in the region – Iran.

For further details on these agendas read this Asia Times article.

Fascisraeli news

© Unknown

Behind the scenes of the widely broadcast red carpet welcome for his unholiness the Pope in Israel, the psychopathic governing elite of Israel has been really busy this May, both within their illegal borders and outside.

The Israeli war against the Palestinian people continued during May with the Israeli occupation forces inventing preposterously cruel ways to lock down and eradicate the Palestinians by:

• burning their crops
• kidnapping Palestinian males with no pretext whatsoever
• arresting women and boys accused of the “grave offense” of carrying knives
• shooting 12-year old girls who merely stand by the window of their house and unarmed teenage demonstrators
• killing truck drivers attempting to deliver humanitarian aid in Gaza
• murdering infants and toddlers by refusing them the right to medical care when they desperately need it
• forcing Gaza Strip residents out of their homes by issuing warnings to those living barely 10 meters from the occupation wall to stay 300 meters away, or else…
• secretly planning to steal Jerusalem from the Palestinians.

In a drive to establish Jerusalem as the Jewish capital of the world, (a fulfillment of part of the delusional Zionist dream of ‘Eretz Israel), plans are being drawn to build parks, pathways and new settler’s housing units on the land where 100 Palestinian homes currently stand. The UN warns that 60,000 Palestinians are at risk of losing their houses in Jerusalem, after they were “deemed illegal by the Israeli officialdom”.

Not that the Israeli government gives a damn about UN warnings. Unaffected by guilt or remorse, they appear unperturbed by the UN investigation into Israel’s crimes during the Gaza bloodbath last January, which they rushed to reject, using their favorite tactic of accusing Hamas of influencing public opinion. A member of the American delegation at the UN was quoted as saying that the report is “unprecedented in its gravity towards Israel,” which “will have to lick the wounds of the report for many years, if the current wording is accepted as it is.”

Note that the UN investigation only covered the bombings at the UN controlled centres in Gaza, and not the full scale of the slaughter, including the cold-blooded murder of 131 children. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he would “pressure Israel to pay compensation in excess of the $11 million in damages caused to UN property” and “rejected the board’s recommendation to expand the investigation into other examples of war crimes during the conflict and to hold perpetrators accountable.”

Notice that when confronted with Israeli aggression, the U.N., supposedly an international organization whose stated aims are to “facilitate cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achieving world peace”, has been reduced to little more than a private institution as it attempts to recoup damage to its own buildings. What about Palestinian human rights, homes, land and lives?! and what about international law?!

Perhaps because Israeli leaders know that they can commit war crimes with impunity, and make it clear to all that Israel is a fascist state, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party proposed a bill that would force Israeli Arabs to swear allegiance to Israel as a ‘Jewish, Zionist and democratic state’ or lose their citizenship. The bill would also allow the government to revoke the citizenship of anyone who does not comply or perform some form of military or national service.

© Unknown
Nakba – “The Calamity”

The same party introduced another bill that would outlaw Arab demonstrations mourning the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that led to the establishment of Israel in 1948 with three years in prison for anyone who participates in public protests or commemorations of the Nakba (Catastrophe). It is a cruel move, striking directly at the core symbol of the Palestinian spirit of resistance. Is it just hubris on the part of Lieberman’ party, or is something more concrete in the works? (another wall perhaps) We will continue observing.

There was one news item, though, published in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper, that made clear that Lieberman’s plans for a ‘pure Jewish and Zionist state’ is more than the mere Utopian dream of a schizoidal psychopath. In fact, it seems that plans are afoot to impose even tighter controls over the Israeli Arab population and even labeling them as potential “enemies of the state”.

In the article Shin Bet has warned Israeli citizens to beware of attempts by terrorist groups to recruit them as agents via Facebook and other social networking sites on the Internet. According to Shin Bet, in a recent incident, a man who called himself “a Lebanese agent” offered an Israeli Facebook user money in exchange for classified information. Strangely enough, on the same date, theJerusalem Post published a story that Lebanese citizens suspected of spying for Israel have fled the country and crossed the border into Israel.

As it turns out, in recent years Shin Bet has interrogated and sent to trial a number of Israelis (Israeli Arabs, to be exact) who were allegedly recruited to participate in terrorist activities inside Israel via the Internet, while in reality they were duped or manipulated and used to ‘create the reality‘ of an enemy that does not exist. Considering the above, it might be safe to assume that recent ‘recruitment attempts’ are also part of the continuous plan on Israel’s behalf to present the Israeli Arab population as a clear danger and strip them of the minimal rights they have left.

But not only is the Israeli government attempting to erase the past and manipulate the future, the present is under fire too, as the government has rejected the testimony of its own soldiers regarding Gaza atrocities committed by the IDF:

For the first time in its history, the Israeli Military College has published very damaging statements and accounts by its own soldiers, describing their killing of innocent and mostly unarmed civilians and their wanton vandalism during Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip.

[...]

The Israeli military, however, quickly closed the investigation into the soldiers’ testimonies, calling the accounts inaccurate and stating: “The military police investigation found that the crucial components of their descriptions were based on hearsay and not supported by specific personal knowledge.”

The audacity and mendacity shown here is rather breathtaking considering the amount of evidence gathered by the UN, the Red Cross, numerous eyewitness accounts, and video reportage from hospitals and other targets in Gaza. But then, Israel has always exhibited a robust Orwellian spirit and to the Zionists, Palestine was “a land without a people, for a people without a land”. Just ignore the 750,000 people who had been living there for centuries…

War on the Middle Eastern horizon. As usual.

To divert attention from their fascist domestic policies and the crimes they commit daily, the blood thirsty hawks of the Israeli government have been busy once more, trying to manipulate the international opinion about the fictional Iranian threat, whilst keeping a deaf ear in the demands for halting the settlement process and implementing the Two State solution.

At the beginning of May, the extremist foreign minister Lieberman presented his delusional ideologies in soft tones during a stroll through Rome, Paris, Berlin and Prague, which appears to have not delivered him the anticipated support.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Netanyahu seems to have found supporters for their future crimes in the Obama administration. Not a surprise, since it is known that Israel holds the US on a leash, the latter forced to cover the former’s illicit deeds, even if America tries to control the monster it helped create from time to time. Before their meeting, Obama warned Netanyahu against surprising him with an Iran strike, and even at the start of the month, Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, made a visit to Israel in order to receive assurances from both the Prime Minister and Defence Minister that their government will “not attack Iran without alerting Washington”. It is unclear though, what Middle East scenario the Obama administration has in mind, since the US president himself adds oil to the fire with statements of the likes of “I understand very clearly that Israel considers Iran an existential threat, and given some of the statements that have been made by President Ahmadinejad, you can understand why”.

Actually, no, we don’t understand why, since we are well aware that the Iranian president did not make any existential threats towards Israel, as the American president must also be aware of, if he has any inclination to know and two neurons firing to make the connection. But the voices coming from the Zionists in Israel have been louder and more aggressive than ever, when spewing the same old poisonous lies:

Israel to US: We reserve ‘right’ to bomb Iran

Netanyahu: ‘If Israel doesn’t remove Iranian threat, no one will’

Pity-me ploy: Israel ‘fears’ simultaneous missile attacks

Taking into account that top US military officer, Admiral Muller, after Netanyahu’s visit in Washington cautioned Israel that right now is not a good time to launch an Iran offensive, and the fact that the US is willing to supply the fascist regime with the “costly new-generation Israeli missile system despite recent cuts to the US defence budget” we can conclude that the US will be behind Israel when such decision materializes. Meanwhile, according to senior US officials in the Wall Street Journal, the “United States and its European allies have set a target of early October to determine whether engagement with Iran is making progress or should lead to sanctions”, and determined the specific steps for that progress to “include willingness by the Tehran government to let United Nations monitors make snap inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities, as well as a halt in uranium enrichment if new economic sanctions are put off ahead of formal negotiations.”

At the same time, the US and other nations, are joining hands on behalf of Israel to make sure that the popular party among Lebanese, Hezbollah, does not win the upcoming elections. American Vice President, Joe Biden, made a trip to Lebanon suspiciously close to the election date, while senior Hezbollah official, Nawaf al-Musawi, warns that Israel has been conspiring with “many states” to assassinate Nasrallah, a move that is likely to “set the region ablaze“.

No doubt, it was to influence the aforementioned elections that the German Der Spiegel, in a devoid-of-facts propaganda piece which we have every reason to believe was hand-delivered by the notorious Israeli secret agencies – has claimed connection of Hezbollah to the Hariri assassination. Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah answered the accusation by pointing out the obvious: “The Israelis are acting preemptively before it is discovered that their spying networks were involved in the assassinations in Lebanon“

© Getty
The Israeli army has shown the world that it is ready to follow the orders of their psychopathic leaders anywhere: be it Gaza, Lebanon, Iran…

Israel’s itch to attack Iran will not pass. The Israeli military is weighing ‘all options’ toward Iran. Among those options, it is safe to assume that they are considering the use of misinformation and propaganda, even if it smears third parties: Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained by The Associated Press. Further, the psychopaths in Israeli government are well aware that a without-provocation strike on Iran’s facilities will be met with condemnation. Thus, “setting the region ablaze” might be their only chance to fulfill their unholy hungers.

Is it a coincidence that Israel is setting up the stage for the wars it envisions with its current Turning Point 3 five-day drill? And what exactly will this drill include? Here’s the answer:

Representatives from 70 nations are participating as observers in the drill, which simulates a war with Hamas, Hizbullah, and Syria that also leads Arabs within Israel to riot and commit terrorist attacks.

Turning Point 3 involves the IDF, police, emergency medical services, government offices, and all of the nation’s civilians. Some Arab countries, nervously watching Israel prepare for the exercise, have claimed that the exercise is just a front for an Israeli attack.

The drill is intended to prepare the Jewish State for the worst possible scenario, beginning with a war that ignites in Gaza after a three-month escalation, bringing Israeli civilians in the Negev under rocket bombardment. The fighting then spreads to Israel’s northern border, where Hizbullah opens a second front and initiates rocket fire reaching all parts of the country.

The war next engulfs Syria, and at the same time authorities must deal with uprisings among the local Arab population, including terrorist attacks against Israeli targets. At the same time, emergency services will train for other disasters such as an earthquake, an epidemic outbreak, or a hazardous materials spill.

As far as the general population is concerned, Turning Point 3 reaches its peak on Tuesday, when a nationwide siren sounds at 11:00 a.m., sending civilians to the nearest bomb shelter. The Home Front Command recently released a map showing that every Israeli citizen has come under rocket threat from either Hamas or Hizbullah, and explaining how much time a person has to reach a shelter based on his location.

The Israeli residents are already reporting feeling the panic from the “drill”:

The action started very suddenly with a terrific bang around 12:30. A tremendous BOOM hit, so strong it shook the house, tipped over my water battle, set car alarms blaring, and made my dogs run to get under the bed [...] It hasn’t been that long since booms like that were actual bombs, so as usual, I listened for sirens. Then I remembered. This was just the war games we’d been warned about.

Turning Point 3 has been a success in terrorizing both the Israeli citizens and their neighbors… so far…

Barking dog

There is a war going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan; another one just ended in Sri Lanka, and another one is cooking in Israel’s kitchen. Yet we are asked to focus our panic and attention on North Korea. But who’s doing the asking? It seems that whenever there’s a real danger that the warmongers in Israel and the US start agitating for a regional Mideast war, somehow North Korea finds it convenient to ramp up the rhetoric, launch a few missiles and test a nuclear bomb.

So North Korea tested a nuclear weapon ‘as powerful as Hiroshima bomb’ and
threatened to attack US and S. Korea warships while Russia fears Korea conflict could go nuclear.

We are not saying that a war is not possible; but looking at the situation coldly, North Korea has everything to lose and nothing to win if it were to carry out its very outspoken threats. The strength of Kim Jong-Il’s regime – certainly megalomaniac and pathological – relies on the increasingly surreal propaganda directed at the North Korean people and as such North Korea appears to be little more than a useful distraction. In short, barking dogs seldom bite. Conversely, dogs which are notorious for attacking innocent bystanders are more likely to do it again. For this reason we should be much more concerned about that rogue nuclear state Israel with it’s at 200+ warheads than North Korea.

In this context, North Korea may well have a defense agreement with Iran and Syria and perhaps even Hezbollah. So any attack by Israel during their Total War “drill” beginning June 1st is likely to produce a few surprises from some far off ‘friends’ to occupy the US military while Hezbollah’s bombs rain down on Jewish settlers’ outposts.

Memo from the Board of Directors – not for the eyes of slaves… err, employees

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the actual and potential wars described above all fall within the sphere of governance of what we have been discerning throughout previous months as a ‘World Government’ of sorts. We recently had another possible clue. The Bilderberg Plan for 2009: Remaking the Global Political Economy, is a fascinating article in its speculative insight into how the wealthy elite will manipulate the orchestrated economic crisis to their advantage:

Apparently, the main topic of discussion at this years meeting was to address the economic crisis, in terms of undertaking, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”[...]“One of Bilderberg’s primary concerns according to Estulin is the danger that their zeal to reshape the world by engineering chaos in order to implement their long term agenda could cause the situation to spiral out of control and eventually lead to a scenario where Bilderberg and the global elite in general are overwhelmed by events and end up losing their control over the planet.”

Among other interesting proposals being considered by the Bilderberg gang, is the idea of turning the IMF into a World Treasury and the World Health Organization into a World Department of Health. Also, the G20’s decision to increase the usage of IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), a synthetic paper currency which would become a de facto world currency, is supposed to go “hand in hand with the Bilderberg discussion on the potential collapse of the US dollar“. As the dollar’s hegemony unlikely to be seriously undermined by market forces, the idea is to “create and allocate a massive amount of new SDRs to the IMF’s members.” Apparently Sub-Saharan Africa is already receiving $10 billion in SDRs from the IMF, and it plans to “issue $250 billion worth of SDRs, which can be used to boost foreign currency reserves.”

This brings us to the issue of those soon-to-be useless green pieces of paper. In the context of the world’s major economies announcing staggering first-quarter contractions in May (an indication of the real state of the economy), some are wondering if the dollar is heading for a “mighty crash” as a consequence of pumping newly printed cash into the markets, thus inducing inflation. Seeing the opportunity that will be created by the vacuum left by the dollar, it is no surprise that Moscow is aiming at making the ruble a leading regional reserve currency.

The Bilderberg article also discusses the Billionaire club which is sponsored by Bill Gates in bid to curb overpopulation.

America’s richest people meet to discuss ways of tackling a ‘disastrous’ environmental, social and industrial threat

Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said a guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”

Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.

“Alternative”? Were we ever given one? Interestingly, last week, just a day or two after the above meeting, Obama gave a speech on National security in which he referred to Sec. of Defense Robert Gates as “William Gates”. Now why would Bill have been on the president’s mind….

It is very probable that members of this club such as Oprah Winfrey are there simply to make it appear that the club’s agenda is altruistic in nature. After all, everyone knows that Oprah does such good work for charity! But Oprah et al are unlikely to be privy to the less charitable plans of people like Buffett, Soros, Gates and Rockefeller. And what is the group’s real agenda? In the above article we read:

“Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population”

This is ‘billionaire foundation’ speak for “let’s discuss the already well-developed plans to reduce the world’s population before the manufactured economic crisis and upcoming climate change cause massive food shortages and the population revolts and kicks us out on our asses, or worse.”

You see, these billionaires are very fond of their power and positions and would like to hold on to them. They are billionaires only because 99% of the population are, relatively speaking, on skid row. From their point of view they are rich and powerful because you and I are stupid. So you will excuse the likes of Gates and Buffet and Rockefeller if they do not adhere to the idea that every human being has inalienable rights to life and liberty. We’re just useless eaters don’t ya know.

So, population reduction before economic crisis and climate change and crop failure hit hard. How to do it? Well, it has already begun, and you couldn’t have missed it. It even has a name, albeit a misnomer: “Swine Flu”.

Yes indeedy, “swine flu” is set to make a comeback this winter, you can call it, “swine flu 2 – the revenge” if you like, but this is no Hollywood production, it’s more likely to be straight out of some secretive US military biowarfare laboratory. (More on that below)

The story so far is that swine flu and avian flu were mixed to create a new strain which was then released in Western America in April this year. That specifically bioengineered strain was not really deadly, but was disseminated in order to condition the public for a secondary release in the winter of 2009 and also to allow the strain to mutate after having ‘done battle’ with the human immune system. That mutated strain, with a few tweaks and additions in the lab, will debut later this year with devastating effect on the human population. In short, population reduction by way of deception.

This appears to be the plan that has been many years in the making. For this plan to work, an essential ingredient was to first severely compromise people’s immune systems by forcing them to ingest toxic chemicals in almost all of their food. This part of the plan has been very successful given that the average person, especially in Western societies, eats chemically laden, processed and nutrient deficient food at every meal.

So if you believe yourself to be eligible for exemption from the depopulation plan then you are advised to prove it by taking immediate action to detoxify your body and eat healthy food in order that you not succumb to a deadly flu strain this winter. No wheat, no refined sugar, no candy bars, no McDonalds, no hormone-chemical-laden meat, no chemical-laden fruit and vegetables, brown rice, not white and start to follow a detox program of the type outlined here.

So that is how the global management is taking place at the macro-level: initially through economic measures that involve taking money and options away from the masses to be followed by climate change. At the micro level however, the global ‘Chief Executive Officers’ are also quite skilled at implementing massive control that reaches right into your car…(which you won’t have for very long by the way)

Every breath you take, I’ll be watching you

The PTB are working hard on implementing their plans for Totalitarian control while at the same time trying to present to their citizens that the increasing clamp down on civil liberties is for our own protection. This trend is evident from the recent announcements and legal results on both sides of the Atlantic. The FBI use of Patriot Act authority increased dramatically in 2008. The British equivalent of these laws that were sold on the pretext of catching ‘terrorists’, is apparent with ridiculous abuses like a Council using terror laws to spy on it’s employees showering.

Even though Street CCTV has little effect on crime, Britain is increasing it’s use of surveillance technology and is well on it’s way to the Police State number one spot. Our suspicions that agent provocateurs would be used during the G20 riots were confirmed after a British MP saw undercover cops inciting the crowd of protesters.

A database of all children has been launched and the dangers of the move towards the complete centralisation of these databases is clearly visible with the announcement that the UK taxman will be allowed access to personal data from ID cards.

Citizens will have no privacy on their movements after the Government’s plans to have a fully-operational network of cameras fitted with license plate recognition software:

The new system will allow any vehicle in the United Kingdom to be tracked to its precise location.

How British citizens spend their evenings out is also being spied upon:

Pub owners across London have been warned that they must first install cameras if they want police approval on a license application – clubs are being asked to keep records of all revelers as well as fingerprints, owners also have to promise to hand over any footage the police want.

Stasi-style tactics are being employed: Town halls hire citizen snoopers as young as SEVEN to spy on neighbours and report wrongs and MI5 blackmails British Muslims: by telling them to ‘Work for us or we will say you are a terrorist’. Another example is the report of the State ’spying on Heathrow critics’ when dossiers compiled of legitimate objectors to third runway were handed to police.

Not to be outdone, France continues its campaign to pass the worst Internet-related laws around, and in the U.S. Homeland Security will scan citizens on their exit. If they stay, the FCC can search homes without a warrant.

Reports of Police Officers lying to protect colleagues in court highlight the ponerizaton of society creeping further down the social structure. Why would it be surprising that behaviour tolerated, even encouraged at the highest levels of government, is showing up at the local level? As Political Ponerology states:

“In a pathocracy, all leadership positions, (down to village headman and community cooperative managers, not to mention the directors of police units, and special services police personnel, and activists in the pathocratic party) must be filled by individuals with corresponding psychological deviations, which are inherited as a rule. However, such people constitute a very small percentage of the population and this makes them more valuable to the pathocrats. [...] After such a system has lasted several years, one hundred percent of all the cases of essential psychopathy are involved in pathocratic activity; they are considered the most loyal, even though some of them were formerly involved on the other side in some way.

Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally, whether in economics, culture, science, technology,administration, etc. Pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything.”

Unfortunately, the majority of the American people missed all the news items covered above, because those who do read the news spent their 15 minutes daily attention span on the remake of…

The Revenge of the Sith

© Unknown

Back from the political grave to haunt Obama, we saw more of Richard Bruce Cheney during May than throughout the eight years he spent in his Vice presidential bunker. His public remonstrations have exposed the pathological mindset of a man many had long suspected of being the true power in the White House.

“No regrets. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do. I’m convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives… I think it’s very, very important that we have a clear understanding that what happened here was an honourable approach to defending the nation, that there was nothing devious or deceitful or dishonest or illegal about what was done.”

“Bottom line is, we successfully defended the nation for seven-and-a-half years against a follow-on attack to 9/11,” Cheney said in an interview with Fox Business Network.

“That was a remarkable achievement. Nobody would have thought that was possible, but it was. I believe it was possible because of the policies we had in place, which they’re now dismantling.”

Remarkable hubris from somebody responsible for the deaths of millions.

His daughter Lizzy, herself a member of the Bush II administration, has been equally vocal – making no less than 12 media appearances in 9 days during May – defending her father’s policies at every turn and accusing Obama of “siding with the terrorists“:

“He certainly did not plan when he left office to be doing this,” Cheney’s daughter said. “But I think as we watched in those very first days and weeks after President Obama came into office when he released the memos that lay out for the terrorists – the techniques we used to question them. Then when he suggested in the Oval Office itself that he would be open to the prosecution of former Bush administration officials including many who weren’t political appointees potentially, you know really, I think, made my dad realize this was just fundamentally wrong. We had to speak out.”

There you have it: the Cheneys have taken this principled stand because they fear Obama will feed them to the lions. All month long we’ve heard their tortured logic in defence of reprehensible behaviour repeated ad nauseum. Despite evidence from every quarter contradicting the fantasy in which he plays America’s saviour, Cheney was on a roll:

Perhaps because he long ago renounced interest in seeking the presidency, he feels liberated now to man the party’s conservative barricades. He even defended right-wing polemicist Rush Limbaugh, who declared on the air that he hoped Barack Obama would fail, and said that retired Gen. Colin Powell would be better off leaving the GOP and becoming a Democrat, after having voted for Obama “purely and solely based on race.”

His antics prompted some to wonder if he was maneuvering himself into contention for the White House in 2012:

“I like Jeb. I think he’s a good man. I’d like to see him continue to stay involved politically. I’d probably support him for president,” Cheney said during an interview with Fox News.

Doesn’t bear thinking, does it? Surely history cannot repeat itself so soon! Pat Buchanan reckons Cheney might be have been put up to this by the CIA, but that angle doesn’t hold up as they refused his request to release supporting documents. Furthermore, Senator Carl Levin called Cheney’s bluff and said his claim that torture saved lives was an outright lie:

Levin noted that the two CIA documents that Cheney wants released “say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of abusive techniques.”

Obama is considering declassifying a report written in 2004 “as thick as two Manhattan phonebooks that was simply sickening” in its details of abuse carried out by soldiers who “have become frighteningly dehumanized”. The is-waterboarding-really-torture? charade of the previous month is dwarfed by the revelations that waterboarding is merely the tip of a sordid iceberg of sadistic government-approved violent sexual abuse.Significantly, Naomi Wolf has reported that original documents reveal how

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice were present in meetings where sexual humiliation was discussed as policy; the Defense Authorization Act of 2007 was written specifically to allow certain kinds of sexual abuse, such as forced nakedness, which is completely illegal and understood by domestic and international law to be a form of sexual assault; Rumsfeld is in print and on the record consulting with subordinates about the policy and practice of sexual humiliation, in a collection of documents obtained by the ACLU by a Freedom of Information Act filing, compiled in Jameel Jaffer’s important book, The Torture Administration.

[I]t is proof of the fact that the most senior leadership – Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, with Rice’s collusion – were running a global sex crime trafficking ring with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Baghram as the holding sites. The sexual nature of the torture also gives the lie to Cheney’s and others’ defense of torture as somehow functional: the sexual perversity mandated from the top reveals that it was just plain old sick sadism gratified by a very sick form of pleasure.

William Rivers Pitt reckons Cheney is making the ‘torture tour’ now because he knows that the cesspit of abuse yet to come is degrees worse than what we have been told already. He quotes investigative journalist Seymour Hersh from 2004:

Hersh gave a speech last week to the ACLU making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in the prison, and the Pentagon has tape of it.

“Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

Indeed, the London Telegraph reported that the photos Obama is refusing to release show, among other sexual tortures, an American soldier raping a female detainee and a male translator raping a male prisoner; as well as the rape of prisoners with foreign objects such as wires and lightsticks. Major General Antonio Taguba has called the images “horrific” and “indecent” – but thinks they should not be released. The guys at the Pentagon – not known for their loyalty to the truth – have denied this. Who knows, maybe next thing we’ll see is Cheney reassuring us that rape, like water-boarding, is not torture. And Obama will keep walking the non-existent and imaginary tight-rope that lies between justice and injustice.

While Cheney’s motivations to hold back the dam of widespread public knowledge of this are obvious, what to make of Obama’s reciprocation? Why did he flinch? Is this a case of ‘you show me your pictures, I’ll show you mine’? Does Cheney have a library of blackmail material from spying on just about everyone over the last decade? One thing is apparent: unconstrained by the pretense of playing second fiddle to W, this humanoid is freely exercising its power in a country that has internalised, thanks largely to the media, such copious quantities of paramoralistic gibberish that a psychopath can brazenly challenge the president safe in the knowledge that he will rally at least those amenable to his paranoid worldview.

Not only is Obama playing to Cheney’s tune by choosing not to release the evidence of sadistic torture, his administration is shielding Cheney from his other crimes by…

… Blocking the Plame appeal:

The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of a lawsuit brought by Mrs. Plame and her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, against several top Bush administration officials. The department’s move continued the Bush administration’s policy to fight the suit, which has already been dismissed by two lower courts.

… Defending the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program:

Obama has defended the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government’s legal argument that “sovereign immunity” protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate US law and constitutional protections of citizens. Obama’s Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.

…Upholding the Executive’s use of ’state secrets’ privilege:

Obama’s Department of Justice continues to rely on an alleged “state secrets” privilege. It has thus tried to block lawsuits by victims who alleged they were kidnapped and tortured by U.S. intelligence even though they were innocent of wrongdoing, on the grounds that such trials would reveal state secrets. The same state secrets doctrine was used by Obama’s DOJ in an attempt to block investigations of Bush-Cheney warrantless wiretaps. Likewise, the DOJ has attempted to block lawsuits seeking the release of Bush-era e-mails and to prevent prisoners held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan from appearing before a judge to challenge their imprisonment.

It was left to former military officials and interrogators to squarely flatten Cheney’s contention that torture ’saved’ American lives:

“At the prison where I conducted interrogations,” Maj. Alexander said, “we heard day in and day out, foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason that they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.”

… while Cheney’s chief of US Central Command in Iraq, General David Petraeus, came forward to admit that yes, the US had violated the Geneva Conventions.

Dave Lindorff naturally wonders if Obama is channelling Cheney:

In reversing himself and declaring that the US government will not release further photos in its possession of torture being practiced on captives held by the US military and the CIA, President Obama is sounding increasingly like the Bush/Cheney administration before him.

The illogic of Obama’s position on these photos is stunning. Since we know the photos exist, the refusal to make them public can only feed a sense that they must be worse than the horrific photos of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison which were already released.

The war in Afghanistan, which now must be called Obama’s War, thanks to his policy of escalation, is also becoming Cheneyesque, with the firing of Gen. David McKiernan, and his replacement as head of the Afghanistan War by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Gen. McChrystal hails from the Special Forces, and played a role in the torture that was integral to the US war and occupation in Iraq. Far from being put in charge of operations in Afghanistan, where public backing for the US military is virtually non-existent at this point, McChrystal should be facing investigation and possible prosecution here at home for his role in torture of captives.

This is the same McChrystal who Seymour Hersh fingered as Cheney’s henchman behind the assassinations of Benazir Bhutto and Rafiq Al Hariri. Hersh subsequently denied making these statements, but the cat was already out of the bag:

Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of the special death squad formed by former US vice-president Dick Cheney, which had already killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief of that country.

The squad was headed by General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed commander of US army in Afghanistan. It was disclosed by reputed US journalist Seymour Hersh while talking to an Arab TV in an interview.

Hersh said former US vice-president Cheney was the chief of the Joint Special Operation Command and he clear the way for the US by exterminating opponents through the unit and the CIA. General Stanley was the in-charge of the unit.

Seymour also said that Rafiq Al Hariri and the Lebanese army chief were murdered for not safeguarding the US interests and refusing US setting up military bases in Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, the then prime minister of Israel, was also a key man in the plot.

In ’speaking out’ Cheney is defending not only himself but the very basis on which his administration justified its invasion of Iraq. As events transpire, the source of the “solid evidence” Powell touted during his conceited sales-job the UN linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 is now dead: his name was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi. He was arrested in Afghanistan in 2001, ‘extraordinarily rendited’ to a dungeon in Libya and there subjected to endless rounds of brutal torture during which the requisite confession citing ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda was extracted. Buried amidst the avalanche of noise was the news that he was suicided at the end of April, just as US lawyers were seeking to interview him about the ‘alleged’ abuse he had suffered.

To seasoned sadists like Cheney and high level members of the CIA it was clear that far from being a reliable way to extract accurate information from a prisoner, torture was much better suited to forcing a prisoner to state something that was not true - prisoners like Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (who coincidentally appears to have been suicided recently in prison in Libya) and Abu Zubaydah who remains in Gitmo to this day.

The phony debate about the validity of information extracted under torture masks the fact that what was sought was not information that was true, but information that would support the reality which Cheney and friends sought to create. In truly psychopathic fashion, they would beat a man insane – or until he told them what they wanted to hear – document the “evidence”, then use it to form the legal basis for initiating wars of aggression; crimes for which the legal standard sets the punishment of death by hanging. Paul Craig Roberts:

We now know that the reason the Bush regime tortured its captives was to coerce false testimony that linked Iraq and Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and September 11. Without this “evidence,” the US invasion of Iraq remains a war crime under the Nuremberg standard.

Torture, then, was a second Bush regime crime used to produce an alibi for the illegal and unprovoked US invasion of Iraq.

Taken in this context, Cheney finds himself in the position of defending a much greater crime: the War against Humanity. Torture is incidental to his mind; while he knows that it is a useful tool for manipulating others to his advantage, he cannot understand the fuss those other people make about it. He imagines himself to be on the frontline in the war against ‘the others’ and their alien, fact-based reality. “If I don’t confront them, who will?”

“Everybody’s in a giant conspiracy to achieve a different objective than the one we want to achieve.”

Joe Quinn explains that

…the essence of the “war on terrorism” [is] fiction, albeit a fiction written in the very real blood and suffering of millions of innocent people. From CIA, MI6 and Shin Bet- tortured patsies like those mentioned here, to the multitudes of Iraqi, Afghan and Palestinian civilians, their lives snuffed out in an second by US, Israeli and British air force pilots or by the trigger-happy foot-soldiers of empire.

Perhaps now we understand what’s eating Dick Cheney; that the CIA tortured people on his orders? He cares not. That the CIA tortured people on his orders to make a case for the Iraq invasion? He shrugs indifferently. That he, as the most powerful US Vice President ever, used torture and assassination to manufacture evidence for the reality of the “war on terror”, which in turn was used to retrofit evidence that Islamic terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks which, in reality, were carried out by a cabal of Israeli and US psychopaths, among them Cheney himself? Well, that calls for a few public snarls and not-so-subtle hints to the Obama administration that, while he may be out of office, Cheney’s nobody’s patsy.

Whether Cheney’s crusade is a desperate attempt to save his own skin from the ghost of administrations past, influence policy to his liking in the present or rally the right-wing for a future presidential candidacy, it’s notable that his domination of the airwaves ultimately serves to deflect attention from Obama’s Fake-change agenda and buffers Americans from the deeper darker truth about the American myth. Arthur Silber frames it succinctly:

By seeking to localize the evil in only one aspect of the much broader and more fundamental evil involved and within a falsely delimited period of time, the torture obsessives would thus whitewash the American project as a whole.

While the media paired Obama and Cheney up for a “Clash of the Titans,” Chomsky reminds us that the contrast between the carefully fostered myth of American benevolence and the sadistic abuse of reality perpetrated by successive American regimes through history belies the fact that the US is an empire and has been so for a long time. Torture is as old as conquest and America has been a-conquerin’ since way back when:

As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: “What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture, which is done by foreigners under U.S. patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.”

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but “merely repositioned it,” restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. “[H]is is a return to the status quo ante,” writes Nairn, “the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.”

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward – a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs.

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

License to steal

It’s such a pity that the British public didn’t notice any of the above either. Instead they were debating the pros and cons of Susan Boyle and the scandal of MPs‘ tax evasion and phantom mortgages. We politely decline to comment on the former but would like to insert a couple of brief observations about the MP scandal. Apart from the exposure of the corruption that is inherent in the UK political system, the scandal has caused a host of MPs to resign across all parties. What we may be seeing here is ‘housekeeping’, a useful justification to get rid of a whole lot of personnel who are not quite conspecific in order to create a power vacuum ready to be filled by ’something else’ – exactly what, we do not yet know – possibly David Cameron.

As leader of the opposition Conservative party Cameron has pledged to ‘devolve’ power back to the regions and away from the centralized Parliament as part of his election manifesto. The devolution of power in this way is actually the opposite of what it seems because the power will be moved towards these European Union new ‘regions’, areas within the UK who’s authority bypasses Westminster completely, and who report directly to Brussels, hence speeding up the creation of the EU superstate, and the disintegration of a UK-centered power.

Another move on the chessboard by the ‘World Government’.

European Commission under fire

One of the most famous lines in Mikhail Bulgakov’s infamous The Master and Margarita is: “manuscripts don’t burn”. But evidently some documents do burn, especially if some people would like certain details to be forever buried.

© BGNES
An exterior view shows smoke rising from the ‘Berlaymont’, after a fire broke out in the building that houses the European Commission, in downtown Brussels.

On May 18, a fire broke out in the European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of office workers from the 13-story building. A four-hour fire later triggered a mass evacuation of around 2000 bureaucrats and closure of the building for a week for reasons of safety. In addition to smoke and water damage, the fire seriously damaged wiring. The cause of the fire remains unclear. As for the store or the place where the fire started, this is when the things get really strange.

Some news items say that the fire started on the top (13) floor. While others say that it started in the print shop of the EC spokespersons, located near the main press conference hall. Another one identifiesa storeroom in the bowels of the building as a primary suspect and that the fire was confined to a vertical shaft housing cables.

Now, you may wonder why this story warrants any special attention. Fires, office fires in particular, are an unfortunate everyday occurrence all over the world. Some faulty wiring or a little human error and the rest is history and of interest only to insurance companies. At least this is true in most cases, but now and again an everyday office fire stands out as something more than ordinary and everyday. Take the fire in Cheney’s ceremonial office for example. Considering Cheney’s long and bloody history and actions during his term in the office, including the mysterious deletion of emails sent by the former VP between 2003 and 2005, we might assume that this time Cheney chose the old fashioned way of destroying evidence.

The missing emails, in case you missed it, covered a time frame that included the lead up to the Iraq war, a lawsuit involving the identities of individuals and corporations who advised Dick Cheney on energy policy and the leak by White House officials of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. Pretty heavy stuff, so to say.

The influenza of the media

© AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo

Officially, 11,168 people in 42 countries have contracted the swine flu on every continent except Africa. 86 have died, all of them in North and Central America, including 75 in Mexico.

A top virologist UK professor estimates that 30,000 people in the UK alone may be infected with the swine flu; as well as 100,000 in the US and another 30,000 in Japan. Although this was reported in a rather alarmist tone, the fact is that people are not dying massively, as you would expect with those numbers. Actually, the fact that it has spread so much (if it has) is a testimony of its mildness.

Considering the above, may we ask what is all the fuss about? There are many other causes of death killing more people on a daily basis. One possibility is sending a message to Mexico that it had better toe the line regarding the US border patrol/drug cartel policies. The massive losses Mexico suffered in tourism revenue is eerily reminiscent of the SARS scare in Canada.

The possibility of the swine flu being anything significantly more than a media event is that it will later (perhaps in autumn) come back with a vengeance. But that is yet to be seen. In the mean time, what do you do with 26 million doses of expired H5N1 vaccines?

© Reuters File Photo

With massive stockpiles of vaccinations crying to be sold, we would not be surprised to see a resurgence of this strain, consistent with the behaviour of the 1918 pandemic, which had some peculiar features. Better yet would be a “new” mutation given that the WHO was investigating the possibility that the swine flu outbreak was due to human error. Consider also, the fact that the CDC was working on combining flu viruses back in 2004. A “new” strain would necessitate another hugely expensive (and profitable) round of vaccine development and marketing. Therefore Big Pharma Must Be Ready:

• Sanofi Aventis Invests 100 Million Euros In New Facility In Mexico To Produce Seasonal and Pandemic Influenza Vaccine ( this was just before the Mexican outbreak. Coincidence?)
• CSL to Start Making Swine Flu Vaccine Next Week for Human Tests
• Australia orders 10 million H1N1 vaccines – step right up!
• Swine Flu Scare: Stock Market Bonanza for “Politically Connected” BioTech Companies

There are also long-term possibilities, biological weapons testing on an unwitting populace and population control being the most prominant. We refer you to these more in-depth studies: SOTT Special Report: The Flu Threat and Ethnic Specific Weapons.

Murdering Innocence

Stories about extreme cruelty toward children by their parents always leave us shocked and speechless. Those cases touch deep because we have a clear understanding on an instinctual level that there are things that shouldn’t be done under any circumstances, and this is perhaps most true of inflicting pain or harming the innocence and defenseless members of the human race. But apparently, not all of us share the same understanding. And it’s not surprising considering the current state of the world where pathological behavior is not only a norm but is being rewarded in some cases.

Here are but a few examples of the increasing insanity:

Georgia Father gets 100 years for poisoning kids’ soup
Update: New Mexico mom charged with killing son on the playground
Florida: Baby dies after being attacked, thrown from car
Russian boy kills 4-year old girl for crying too loud
UK: Baby P death – psychopathic mother and boyfriend jailed

Murder-suicides:

3 dead in apparent double murder-suicide in Texas
Three Found Dead in Suspected Murder-Suicide Near Los Angeles
Sheriff: Florida father kills wife, 2 sons, himself
Greece: Man kills wife, jumps off balcony with sons
Russian priest murders wife, son, commits suicide

Other examples of violent and cruel psychopathic behavior:

Gunman in wig kills Connecticut student at bookstore
Dad, pregnant mom killed in front of California boy, 9
Azeri mass shooter ‘killed for pleasure’
New Zealand: Police hunt ‘psychopaths’ over cattle cruelty
Russia: Police officer who started shooting massacre at supermarket doesn’t repent

Rattling and Rolling

The Merry Month of May has seen its share of odd earthquakes, including waiting till the end of the month for the largest:

A few odd ones for the US:

US: Rare 3.1 Earthquake Shakes Central Arizona
US: Four earthquakes in three days across East Tennessee
US: 7 Earthquakes hit Yorba Linda, California
Update: Earthquake Magnitude 4.7 in Greater Los Angeles Area

Several in Mexico:

Earthquake Magnitude 4.9 – Off Coast of Jalisco, Mexico
Earthquake Magnitude 5.7 – Puebla, Mexico

Several larger ones around the world:

Strong quake hits Macedonia near Greek border
6.1-magnitude earthquake hits New Zealand’s Kermadec Islands
6.7 Earthquake Shakes New Zealand
Earthquake Magnitude 6.1 Off Coast Of Ecuador
Guatemala: Earthquake Magnitude 6.1

And saving the largest for the end of the month:

7.1 earthquake topples homes, kills 2 in Honduras

Cosmic traffic

The number of UFO reports is skyrocketing (excuse the pun). Every day there are four or five eye-witness accounts, mostly (but not exclusively) from England and the U.S. – although that is just probably a consequence of the language barrier in the media. We should assume that sightings around the world have increased also.

Here is a sample:

England: Couple spot UFO over Luton
Belarus: UFO reported by villagers
US: Gustine, California – Star-Like Object
England: Saltburn-by-the-Sea, Cleveland, North Yorkshire – Speeding Green Neon-Type Light
Northern Ireland: North Coast of County Down – Two Orange Glowing Spheres
England: Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire – Trail of Lights All in a Line
England: Brixworth, Northampton – Six Orange Orbs
England: Lowestoft, Suffolk – UFO Illuminates and was Hard on the Eyes
Wales: Llantwit Fadre, Pontypridd, Mid Glamorgan – Ball of Flame (Light)
Canada: Brampton, Ontario – Green Lights with a Soft Noise Which Increased to Quite Loud
Australia: Perth, Western Australia – A Flashing Streak of Light
Australia: Murarrie, Brisbane, Queensland – An Object Traveling Fast, Vanishes, Turns to Stardust
Australia: Coomera, Gold Coast, Queensland – A Red Orange Light Changes Shape
Australia: Werribee, Victoria – Triangular object the size of a single-story house
Scotland: Kennoway, Fife – Bright Glowing Orange Ball Traveling Very Fast
England: Tattingstone, Ipswich – Orange Ball of Light Disappearing and Reappearing
England: Warwick – Red Dot Appeared Over the House
US: Dallas, Texas – Eleven to Fifteen Star-Sized Objects Flying in Formation
England: Sale, Manchester – Very Bright White Light
US: Multiple UFO sightings reported May 28th in the Phoenix, Arizona area

And this sample, dear friends, was from the last two or three days only. For a comprehensive view of the whole month, please visit Our Haunted Planet section.

Below are two more sightings caught on video. The most interesting aspect of these two is probably the reaction of the witnesses, which suggests that people knew they were seeing something quite extraordinary. The first of those videos shows a couple of helicopters having a closer look!

Of gooseberries and truth

To conclude May’s CTD, we would like to remind our readers (and ourselves) why we dedicate as much time and energy as possible towards the effort to to see and understand the objective reality of our planet – a reality which is often depressing and even painful to behold. This time, we would like to use a fragment of classical literature to illustrate the point. Anton Chekhov, considered one of the greatest short story writers of all times, had deep insights on human life and its complexities. As seen from the surface, his stories are rather unremarkable episodes – yet a careful look will reveal ironic and reflective subtexts that suggest moral and existential dilemmas.

In one such story, ‘Gooseberries‘, Ivan Ivanych is telling his friends about the life of his brother Nikolay, a man whose single objective in life was to own a countryside property with gooseberry bushes. To do so he sacrificed his life to austerity, saved all his money and married a rich widow. She died shortly afterward as a consequence of her husband’s obsession. When he was old, he finally got what he wanted, and enjoyed his status as a landlord as best as he could, even at the expense of the local farmers and villagers with whom he was in constant conflict. It is at this point that Ivan Ivanych pays him a visit after many years of not seeing each other. He describes the end of his first day at his brother’s house:

‘In the evening, while we were drinking tea, the cook brought a large plate of gooseberries to the table. They had not been bought, they were his own gooseberries, picked for the first time since the bushes had been planted. Nikolay Ivanych chuckled and looked at the gooseberries for a minute in silence, with tears running down his cheeks – he was so excited he could not speak, then he put a gooseberry into the mouth, looked at me triumphantly, like a child who has finally been handed a favourite toy, and said: “How delicious!”

‘He started eating greedily and saying over and over: “Ah, how delicious! You must try one!”

‘They were hard and sour, but as Pushkin said, “the lie which exalts us is dearer to us than a host of truths.” I was watching a contented person, whose cherished dream had so clearly become a reality, who had achieved his aim in life, who had got what he wanted, and who was happy with his lot and with himself. There has always been some sadness mixed in with my thoughts about human happiness, and now, seeing this contented person, I was overcome by a dreadful feeling which was close to despair. It was particularly awful during the night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my bedroom, and I could hear that he was still awake and was getting up and going over to the plate of gooseberries and taking one after the other.

I started thinking about how many contented, happy people there are in actual fact! What an oppressive force! Think about this life of ours: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak, unbelievable poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, deceit… Meanwhile all is quiet and peaceful in people’s homes and outside on the street; out of the fifty thousand people who live in the town, there is not one single person prepared to shout out about it or kick up a fuss. We see the people who go to the market for their groceries, travelling about in the daytime, sleeping at night, the kind of people who spout nonsense, get married, grow old, and dutifully cart their dead off to the cemetery; but we do not see or hear those who are suffering, and all the terrible things in life happen somewhere offstage.

Everything is quiet and peaceful, and the only protest is voiced by dumb statistics: so many people have gone mad, so many bottles of vodka have been drunk, so many children have died from malnutrition… And this arrangement is clearly necessary: it’s obvious that the contented person only feels good because those who are unhappy bear their burden in silence; without silence happiness would be inconceivable. It’s a collective hypnosis. There ought to be someone with a little hammer outside the door of every contented, happy person, constantly tapping away to remind him that there are unhappy people in the world, and that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show its claws; misfortune will strike – illness, poverty, loss – and no one will be there to see or hear it, just as they now cannot see or hear others. But there is no person with a little hammer; happy people are wrapped up in their own lives, and the minor problems of life affect them only slightly, like aspen leaves in a breeze, and everything is just fine.’

Through the voice of Ivan Ivanych, Chekhov has described one of the most important existential and moral dilemmas of human beings who have had the fortune of living relatively undisturbed lives, i.e. free from extreme poverty, the experience of surviving a war, or any other similar event of pronounced or prolonged suffering. Human beings in this position can, and most often do, aspire to extract as much happiness from life as possible. The dilemma is that in a world in which suffering, ignorance, lies, war, poverty and hypocrisy are all too common, such a ‘bourgeois’ happiness (using the term loosely) comes only by sacrificing truth and living in ‘collective hypnosis’. Like the gooseberries of Nikolay, which brought him great satisfaction in spite of being hard and sour, and only after sacrificing his life and selfishly sacrificing the lives of others.

Ivan Ivanych, on the other hand, is troubled at the realization that such happiness is phony, and filled with regret for having wasted his youth when he could have done something about the state of the world. But in spite of Nicolay’s contented life and Ivan’s distress, the fact is that by choosing the Truth, Ivan is on his way to freedom and a deeper and richer meaning of life, eventually opening the possibility to a genuine kind of happiness. More important, people like Ivan are the only ones who are in a position to restore some balance between light and darkness to this dark and unbalanced world, by waking up and helping those who are tired of the collective hypnosis; and combating hypocrisy and lies, which are the preconditions of evil and the suffering of the masses.

This ideal is what inspires SOTT.net. We have decided to choose Truth over a contented life, not because we do not value happiness – but because we believe there is a more genuine type of happiness available for us and everyone else who dares to face into the darkness that is threatening to engulf life on planet earth, and do something about it. But that potential for happiness is under severe threat at this point in time. Those that desire to enslave humanity and create a literal “hell on earth” have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and are closer than ever to achieving their goals. People must awaken from their slumber, before it is too late.

© Jack Turner
Crop circle at Windmill Hill, near Avebury Trusloe, Wiltshire; reported 25th May.

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The Secret Government Plan for 2009

If you  wonder why and how our government works and how evil continue to thrive systematically ,  despite the predominant  fear of expose, the only answer one can get is there is shadow govt. exist which makes american empire thrive with its corporatocry spreading across the globe controlling 6 billion people. so do you want to know what the plan of that shadow  global  government for year 2009.

Read this

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The Bilderberg Plan for 2009: Remaking the Global Political Economy

by by Andrew G. Marshall  at GlobalResearch

From May 14-17, the global elite met in secret in Greece for the yearly Bilderberg conference, amid scattered and limited global media attention. Roughly 130 of the world’s most powerful individuals came together to discuss the pressing issues of today, and to chart a course for the next year. The main topic of discussion at this years meeting was the global financial crisis, which is no surprise, considering the list of conference attendees includes many of the primary architects of the crisis, as well as those poised to “solve” it.

The Agenda: The Restructuring of the Global Political Economy

Before the meeting began, Bilderberg investigative journalist Daniel Estulin reported on the main item of the agenda, which was leaked to him by his sources inside. Though such reports cannot be verified, his sources, along with those of veteran Bilderberg tracker, Jim Tucker, have proven to be shockingly accurate in the past. Apparently, the main topic of discussion at this year’s meeting was to address the economic crisis, in terms of undertaking, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.” Other items on the agenda included a plan to “continue to deceive millions of savers and investors who believe the hype about the supposed up-turn in the economy. They are about to be set up for massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead,” and “There will be a final push for the enactment of Lisbon Treaty, pending on Irish voting YES on the treaty in Sept or October,”[1] which would give the European Union massive powers over its member nations, essentially making it a supranational regional government, with each country relegated to more of a provincial status.

Shortly after the meetings began, Bilderberg tracker Jim Tucker reported that his inside sources revealed that the group has on its agenda, “the plan for a global department of health, a global treasury and a shortened depression rather than a longer economic downturn.” Tucker reported that Swedish Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister, Carl Bildt, “Made a speech advocating turning the World Health Organization into a world department of health, advocating turning the IMF into a world department of treasury, both of course under the auspices of the United Nations.” Further, Tucker reported that, “Treasury Secretary Geithner and Carl Bildt touted a shorter recession not a 10-year recession … partly because a 10 year recession would damage Bilderberg industrialists themselves, as much as they want to have a global department of labor and a global department of treasury, they still like making money and such a long recession would cost them big bucks industrially because nobody is buying their toys…..the tilt is towards keeping it short.”[2]

After the meetings finished, Daniel Estulin reported that, “One of Bilderberg’s primary concerns according to Estulin is the danger that their zeal to reshape the world by engineering chaos in order to implement their long term agenda could cause the situation to spiral out of control and eventually lead to a scenario where Bilderberg and the global elite in general are overwhelmed by events and end up losing their control over the planet.”[3]

On May 21, the Macedonian International News Agency reported that, “A new Kremlin report on the shadowy Bilderberg Group, who this past week held their annual meeting in Greece, states that the West’s financial, political and corporate elite emerged from their conclave after coming to an agreement that in order to continue their drive towards a New World Order dominated by the Western Powers, the US Dollar has to be ‘totally’ destroyed.” Further, the same Kremlin report apparently stated that, “most of the West’s wealthiest elite convened at an unprecedented secret meeting in New York called for and led by” David Rockefeller, “to plot the demise of the US Dollar.”[4]

The Secret Meeting of Billionaires

The meeting being referred to was a secret meeting where, “A dozen of the richest people in the world met for an unprecedented private gathering at the invitation of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to talk about giving away money,” held at Rockefeller University, and included notable philanthropists such as Gates, Buffett, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Eli Broad, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller Sr. and Ted Turner. One attendee stated that, “It wasn’t secret,” but that, “It was meant to be a gathering among friends and colleagues. It was something folks have been discussing for a long time. Bill and Warren hoped to do this occasionally. They sent out an invite and people came.” Chronicle of Philanthropy editor Stacy Palmer said, “Given how serious these economic times are, I don’t think it’s surprising these philanthropists came together,” and that, “They don’t typically get together and ask each other for advice.” The three hosts of the meeting were Buffet, Gates and David Rockefeller.[5] [See: Appendix 2: Bilderberg Connections to the Billionaire’s Meeting].

At the meeting, “participants steadfastly refused to reveal the content of the discussion. Some cited an agreement to keep the meeting confidential. Spokesmen for Mr. Buffett, Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Gates, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Soros and Ms. Winfrey and others dutifully declined comment, though some confirmed attendance.”[6] Reports indicate that, “They discussed how to address the global slump and expand their charitable activities in the downturn.”[7]

The UK newspaper The Times reported that these “leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population,” and that they “discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.” Interestingly, “The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at ‘security briefings’.” Further, “The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an ‘umbrella cause’ that could harness their interests,” and what was decided upon was that, “they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.” Ultimately, “a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat,” and that, “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.” One guest at the meeting said that, “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government.”[8]

The Leaked Report

Bilderberg investigative reporter Daniel Estulin reportedly received from his inside sources a 73-page Bilderberg Group meeting wrap-up for participants, which revealed that there were some serious disagreements among the participants. “The hardliners are for dramatic decline and a severe, short-term depression, but there are those who think that things have gone too far and that the fallout from the global economic cataclysm cannot be accurately calculated if Henry Kissinger’s model is chosen. Among them is Richard Holbrooke. What is unknown at this point: if Holbrooke’s point of view is, in fact, Obama’s.” The consensus view was that the recession would get worse, and that recovery would be “relatively slow and protracted,” and to look for these terms in the press over the next weeks and months.

Estulin reported, “that some leading European bankers faced with the specter of their own financial mortality are extremely concerned, calling this high wire act “unsustainable,” and saying that US budget and trade deficits could result in the demise of the dollar.” One Bilderberger said that, “the banks themselves don’t know the answer to when (the bottom will be hit).” Everyone appeared to agree, “that the level of capital needed for the American banks may be considerably higher than the US government suggested through their recent stress tests.” Further, “someone from the IMF pointed out that its own study on historical recessions suggests that the US is only a third of the way through this current one; therefore economies expecting to recover with resurgence in demand from the US will have a long wait.” One attendee stated that, “Equity losses in 2008 were worse than those of 1929,” and that, “The next phase of the economic decline will also be worse than the ’30s, mostly because the US economy carries about $20 trillion of excess debt. Until that debt is eliminated, the idea of a healthy boom is a mirage.”[9]

According to Jim Tucker, Bilderberg is working on setting up a summit in Israel from June 8-11, where “the world’s leading regulatory experts” can “address the current economic situation in one forum.” In regards to the proposals put forward by Carl Bildt to create a world treasury department and world department of health under the United Nations, the IMF is said to become the World Treasury, while the World Health Organization is to become the world department of health. Bildt also reaffirmed using “climate change” as a key challenge to pursue Bilderberg goals, referring to the economic crisis as a “once-in-a-generation crisis while global warming is a once-in-a-millennium challenge.” Bildt also advocated expanding NAFTA through the Western hemisphere to create an American Union, using the EU as a “model of integration.”

The IMF reportedly sent a report to Bilderberg advocating its rise to becoming the World Treasury Department, and “U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner enthusiastically endorsed the plan for a World Treasury Department, although he received no assurance that he would become its leader.” Geithner further said, “Our hope is that we can work with Europe on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight.”[10]

Bilderberg’s Plan in Action?

Reorganizing the Federal Reserve

Following the Bilderberg meeting, there were several interesting announcements made by key participants, specifically in regards to reorganizing the Federal Reserve. On May 21, it was reported that US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner “is believed to be leaning heavily towards giving the Federal Reserve a central role in future regulation,” and “it is understood that the Fed would take on some of the work currently undertaken by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.”[11]

On Wednesday, May 20, Geithner spoke before the Senate Banking Committee, at which he stated that, “there are important indications that our financial system is starting to heal.” In regards to regulating the financial system, Geithner stated that, “we must ensure that international rules for financial regulation are consistent with the high standards we will be implementing in the United States.”[12]

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Bloomberg reported that, “The Obama administration may call for stripping the Securities and Exchange Commission of some of its powers under a regulatory reorganization,” and that, “The proposal, still being drafted, is likely to give the Federal Reserve more authority to supervise financial firms deemed too big to fail. The Fed may inherit some SEC functions, with others going to other agencies.” Interestingly, “SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro’s agency has been mostly absent from negotiations within the administration on the regulatory overhaul, and she has expressed frustration about not being consulted.”

It was reported that “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was set to discuss proposals to change financial regulations last night at a dinner with National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers [who was also present at Bilderberg], former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker [also at Bilderberg], ex-SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt and Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard University law professor who heads the congressional watchdog group for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.”[13] The Federal Reserve is a privately owned central bank, owned by its shareholders, consisting of the major banks the make up each regional Fed bank (the largest of which is JP Morgan Chase and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York). This plan would essentially give a privately owned bank, which has governmental authority, the ability to regulate the banks that own it. It’s the equivalent of getting a Colonel to guard a General to whom he is directly answerable. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. It is literally granting ownership over the financial regulator to the banks being regulated.

As Market Watch, an online publication of the Wall Street Journal, reported, “The Federal Reserve, created nearly 100 years ago in the aftermath of a financial panic, could be transformed into a different agency as the Obama administration reinvents the way government interacts with the financial system.” Referring to Geithner’s Senate appearance, it was reported that, “Geithner was also grilled on the cozy relationships that exist between the big banks and the regional Federal Reserve banks. Before Geithner joined the administration, he was president of the New York Fed, which is a strange public-private hybrid institution that is actually owned and run by the banks.” In response, “Geithner insisted that the private banks have no say over the policies of the New York Fed, but he acknowledged that the banks do have a say in hiring the president, who does make policy. The chairman of the New York Fed, Stephen Friedman, was forced to resign earlier this month because of perceived conflicts of interest due to his large holdings in Goldman Sachs.”[14]

The IMF as a Global Treasury

The Bilderberg agenda of creating a global treasury has already been started prior to the Bilderberg meeting, with decisions made during the G20 financial summit in April. Although the G20 seemed to frame it more in context of being formed into a global central bank, although it is likely the IMF could fill both roles.

Following the G20 meeting at the beginning of April, 2009, it was reported that, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity,” as the Communiqué released by the G20 leaders stated that, “We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,” and that, “SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.” Essentially, “they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body.”[15] [See Appendix 2: Creating a Central Bank of the World]

Following the Bilderberg meeting, “President Obama has asked Congress to authorize $100 billion in loans to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help create a $500 billion global bailout fund,” which would give the IMF the essential prerogative of a global treasury, providing bailouts for countries in need around the world. Further, “the bill would allow the IMF to borrow up to $100 billion from the U.S. and increase the U.S. fiscal contribution to the IMF by $8 billion.” Elaborating on the program, it was reported that, “World leaders began on the global bailout initiative, called the New Arrangement for Borrowing (NAB), at the G-20 summit in early April. The president agreed at that time to make the additional funds available.” Obama wrote that, “Treasury Secretary Geithner concluded that the size of the NAB is woefully inadequate to deal with the type of severe economic and financial crisis we are experiencing, and I agree with him.”[16]

With the G20 decision to increase the usage of IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), forming a de facto world currency, it was recently reported that, “Sub-Saharan Africa will receive around $10 billion from the IMF in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to help its economies weather the global financial crisis,” and that, “As part of a $1.1 trillion deal to combat the world economic downturn agreed at April’s G20 summit, the IMF will issue $250 billion worth of SDRs, which can be used to boost foreign currency reserves.”[17]

Recent reports have also indicated that the IMF’s role in issuing SDRs goes hand in hand with the Bilderberg discussion on the potential collapse of the US dollar, and, “Transforming the dollar standard into an SDR-based system would be a major break with a policy that has lasted more than 60 years.” It was reported that, “There are two ways in which the dollar’s role in the international monetary system can be reduced. One possibility is a gradual, market-determined erosion of the dollar as a reserve currency in favor of the euro. But, while the euro’s international role – especially its use in financial markets – has increased since its inception, it is hard to envisage it overtaking the dollar as the dominant reserve currency in the foreseeable future.” However, “With the dollar’s hegemony unlikely to be seriously undermined by market forces, at least in the short and medium-term, the only way to bring about a major reduction in its role as a reserve currency is by international agreement.” This is where the SDRs come into play, as “One way to make the SDR the major reserve currency relatively soon would be to create and allocate a massive amount of new SDRs to the IMF’s members.”[18] This is, interestingly, exactly what is happening with Africa and the IMF now.

Former IMF Managing Director Jacques de Larosière recently stated that the current financial crisis, “given its scope, presents a unique opening to improve institutions, and there is already a danger that the chance might be missed if the different actors cannot agree to changes by the time economic growth resumes.” He is now an adviser with BNP Paribas, a corporation highly represented at Bilderberg meetings, and he was head of the Treasury of France when Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was President of France, who is a regular of the Bilderberg Group.[19]

The Guardian Covers Bilderberg

The British paper, the Guardian, was the only major mainstream news publication to provide ongoing coverage of the Bilderberg meeting over the weekend. His first columns were satirical and slightly mocking, referring to it as, “A long weekend at a luxury hotel, where the world’s elite get to shake hands, clink glasses, fine-tune their global agenda and squabble over who gets the best sun loungers. I’m guessing that Henry Kissinger brings his own, has it helicoptered in and guarded 24/7 by a CIA special ops team.”[20] However, as the weekend dragged on, his reporting took a change of tone. He reported on the Saturday that, “I know that I’m being followed. I know because I’ve just been chatting to the plainclothes policemen I caught following me,” and he was arrested twice in the first day of the meetings for attempting to take photographs as the limousines entered the hotel.[21]

He later reported that he wasn’t sure what they were discussing inside the hotel, but that he has “a sense of something rotten in the state of Greece,” and he further stated, “Three days and I’ve been turned into a suspect, a troublemaker, unwanted, ill at ease, tired and a bit afraid.” He then went on to write that, “Bilderberg is all about control. It’s about “what shall we do next?” We run lots of stuff already, how about we run some more? How about we make it easier to run stuff? More efficient. Efficiency is good. It would be so much easier with a single bank, a single currency, a single market, a single government. How about a single army? That would be pretty cool. We wouldn’t have any wars then. This prawn cocktail is GOOD. How about a single way of thinking? How about a controlled internet?,” and then, “How about not.”

He makes a very astute point, countering the often postulated argument that Bilderberg is simply a forum where people can speak freely, writing: “I am so unbelievably backteeth sick of power being flexed by the few. I’ve had it flexed in my face for three days, and it’s up my nose like a wasp. I don’t care whether the Bilderberg Group is planning to save the world or shove it in a blender and drink the juice, I don’t think politics should be done like this,” and the author, Charlie Skelton, eloquently stated, “If they were trying to cure cancer they could do it with the lights on.” He further explained that, “Bilderberg is about positions of control. I get within half a mile of it, and suddenly I’m one of the controlled. I’m followed, watched, logged, detained, detained again. I’d been put in that position by the “power” that was up the road.”[22]

On Sunday, May 17, Skelton reported that when he asked the police chief why he was being followed, the chief responded asking, “Why you here?” to which Skelton said he was there to cover the Bilderberg conference, after which the chief stated, “Well, that is the reason! That is why! We are finished!”[23] Do reporters get followed around and stalked by police officers when they cover the World Economic Forum? No. So why does it happen with Bilderberg if all it is, is a conference to discuss ideas freely?

On the Monday following the conference, Skelton wrote that, “It isn’t just me who’s been hauled into police custody for daring to hang around half a mile from the hotel gates. The few journalists who’ve made the trip to Vouliagmeni this year have all been harassed and harried and felt the business end of a Greek walkie-talkie. Many have been arrested. Bernie, from the American Free Press, and Gerhard the documentarian (sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons character) chartered a boat from a nearby marina to try to get photos from the sea. They were stopped three miles from the resort. By the Greek navy.” As Skelton said himself, “My dispatches on the 2009 conference, if they mean anything at all, represent nothing more acutely than the absence of thorough mainstream reporting.”[24]

Skelton’s final report on Bilderberg from May 19, showed how far he had gone in his several days of reporting on the meeting. From writing jokingly about the meeting, to discovering that he was followed by the Greek State Security force. Skelton mused, “So who is the paranoid one? Me, hiding in stairwells, watching the pavement behind me in shop windows, staying in the open for safety? Or Bilderberg, with its two F-16s, circling helicopters, machine guns, navy commandos and policy of repeatedly detaining and harassing a handful of journalists? Who’s the nutter? Me or Baron Mandelson? Me or Paul Volker, the head of Obama’s economic advisory board? Me or the president of Coca-Cola?”

Skelton stated that, “Publicity is pure salt to the giant slug of Bilderberg. So I suggest next year we turn up with a few more tubs. If the mainstream press refuses to give proper coverage to this massive annual event, then interested citizens will have to: a people’s media.”

Amazingly, Skelton made the pronouncement that what he learned after the Bilderberg conference, was that, “we must fight, fight, fight, now – right now, this second, with every cubic inch of our souls – to stop identity cards,” as, “It’s all about the power to ask, the obligation to show, the justification of one’s existence, the power of the asker over the subservience of the asked.” He stated that he “learned this from the random searches, detentions, angry security goon proddings and thumped police desks without number that I’ve had to suffer on account of Bilderberg: I have spent the week living in a nightmare possible future and many different terrible pasts. I have had the very tiniest glimpse into a world of spot checks and unchecked security powers. And it has left me shaken. It has left me, literally, bruised.” Pointedly, he explains that, “The identity card turns you from a free citizen into a suspect.”[25]

Who was there?

Royalty

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, the largest shareholder in Royal Dutch Shell

Among the members of the Bilderberg Group are various European monarchs. At this years meeting, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was present, who happens to be the largest single shareholder in Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s largest corporations. She was joined by one of her three sons, Prince Constantijn, who also attended the meeting. Prince Constantijn has worked with the Dutch European Commissioner for the EU, as well as having been a strategic policy consultant with Booz Allen & Hamilton in London, a major strategy and technology consulting firm with expertise in Economic and Business Analysis, Intelligence and Operations Analysis and Information Technology, among many others. Prince Constantijn has also been a policy researcher for RAND Corporation in Europe. RAND was initially founded as a global policy think tank that was formed to offer research and analysis to the US Armed Forces, however, it now works with governments, foundations, international organizations and commercial organizations.[26] Also present among European Royalty was Prince Philippe of Belgium, and Queen Sofia of Spain.

Private Bankers

As usual, the list of attendees was also replete with names representing the largest banks in the world. Among them, David Rockefeller, former CEO and Chairman of Chase Manhattan, now JP Morgan Chase, of which he was, until recently, Chairman of the International Advisory Board; and still sits as Honourary Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chairman of the Board of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, Honourary Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, which he founded alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski; also a founding member of the Bilderberg Group, prominent philanthropist and is the current patriarch of one of the world’s richest and most powerful banking dynasties.

Also present was Josef Ackermann, a Swiss banker who is CEO of Deutsche Bank, also a non-executive director of Royal Dutch Shell; Deputy Chairman of Siemens AG, Europe’s largest engineering corporation; he is also a member of the International Advisory Council of Zurich Financial Services Group; Chairman of the Board of the Institute International of Finance, the world’s only global association of financial institutions; and Vice Chairman of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum.[27]

Roger Altman was also present at the Bilderberg meeting, an investment banker, private equity investor and former Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration. Other bankers at this years meeting include Ana Patricia Botin, Chairman of the Spanish bank, Banco Español de Crédito, formerly having worked with JP Morgan; Frederic Oudea, CEO and newly appointed Chairman of the Board of French bank Societe Generale; Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, an Italian banker and economist, formerly Italy’s Minister of Economy and Finance; Jacob Wallenberg, Chairman of Investor AB; Marcus Wallenberg, CEO of Investor AB; and George David, CEO of United Technologies Corporation, who also sits on the board of Citigroup, member of the Business Council, the Business Roundtable, and is Vice Chairman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. [For more on the Peterson Institute, see: Appendix 1]

Canadian bankers include W. Edmund Clark, President and CEO of TD Bank Financial Group, also a member of the board of directors of the C.D. Howe Institute, a prominent Canadian think tank; Frank McKenna, Deputy Chairman of TD Bank Financial Group, former Canadian Ambassador to the United States, former Premier of New Brunswick; and Indira Samarasekera, President of the University of Alberta, who is also on the board of Scotiabank, one of Canada’s largest banks.

Central Bankers

Of course, among the notable members of the Bilderberg Group, are the world’s major central bankers. Among this years members are the Governor of the National Bank of Greece, Governor of the Bank of Italy, President of the European Investment Bank, James Wolfensohn, former President of the World Bank, and Nout Wellink, on the board of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).[28] Jean-Claude Trichet, the President of the European Central Bank was also present.[29] There is no indication that the Governor of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke was present, which would be an odd turn of events, considering that the Federal Reserve Governor is always present at Bilderberg meetings, alongside the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William C. Dudley. I have contacted the New York Fed inquiring if Dudley visited Greece or went to any meetings in Greece between May 14-17, or if another senior representative from the New York Fed went in his stead. I have yet to get a response.

The Obama Administration at Bilderberg

National Security Adviser General James Jones

The Obama administration was heavily represented at this years Bilderberg meeting. Among the attendees were Keith B. Alexander, a Lieutenant General of U.S. Army and Director of the National Security Agency, the massive spying agency of the United States; Timothy Geithner, US Treasury Secretary and former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan; General James Jones, United States National Security Advisor; Henry Kissinger, Obama’s special envoy to Russia, longtime Bilderberg member and former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor; Dennis Ross, special advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; David Patraeus, Commander of CENTCOM, (U.S. Central Command, in the Middle East), Lawrence Summers, Director of the White House’s National Economic Council, former Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration, former President of Harvard University, former Chief Economist of the World Bank; Paul Volcker, former Governor of the Federal Reserve System and Chair of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board; Robert Zoellick, former Chairman of Goldman Sachs and current President of the World Bank;[30] and Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg.[31]

Other Notable Names

Among many others present at the meeting are Viscount Étienne Davignon, former Vice President of the European Commission, and Honourary Chairman of the Bilderberg Group; Francisco Pinto Balsemão, former Prime Minister of Portugal; Franco Bernabè, CEO of Telecom Italia and Vice Chairman of Rothschild Europe; Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister of Sweden; Kenneth Clarke, Shadow Business Secretary in the UK; Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Services (MI6); Donald Graham, CEO of the Washington Post Company; Jaap De Hoop Scheffer, Secretary-General of NATO; John Kerr, member of the British House of Lords and Deputy Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell; Jessica Matthews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute; Romano Prodi, former Italian Prime Minister; J. Robert S. Prichard, CEO of Torstar Corporation and President Emeritus of the University of Toronto; Peter Sutherland, former Director General of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), first Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and is currently Chairman of British Petroleum (BP) and Goldman Sachs International as well as being a board member of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, Vice Chairman of the European Roundtable of Industrialists, and longtime Bilderberg member; Peter Thiel, on the board of directors of Facebook; Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell; Martin Wolf, Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator of the Financial Times newspaper; and Fareed Zakaria, US journalist and board member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[32] There were also some reports that this years meeting would include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as Wall Street Journal Editor Paul Gigot,[33] both of whom attended last years meeting.[34]

Conclusion

Clearly, it was the prerogative of this year’s Bilderberg meeting to exploit the global financial crisis as much as possible to reach goals they have been striving toward for many years. These include the creation of a Global Treasury Department, likely in conjunction with or embodied in the same institution as a Global Central Bank, both of which seem to be in the process of being incorporated into the IMF.

Naturally, Bilderberg meetings serve the interests of the people and organizations that are represented there. Due to the large amount of representatives from the Obama administration that were present, US policies revolving around the financial crisis are likely to have emerged from and serve the interests of the Bilderberg Group. Given the heavy representation of Obama’s foreign policy establishment at the Bilderberg meeting, it seemed surprising to not have received any more information regarding US foreign policy from this year’s meeting, perhaps having to do with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

However, the US recently decided to fire the general who oversaw the Afghan war, being replaced with “Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a former Green Beret who recently commanded the military’s secretive special operations forces in Iraq.”[35] From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal “led the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which oversees the military’s most sensitive forces, including the Army’s Delta Force,” and who Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh singled out as the head of VP Cheney’s “executive assassination wing.”[36]

So, given these recent changes, as well as the high degree of representation Obama’s foreign policy establishment held at Bildebrerg this year, there were likely to have been some decisions or at least discussion of the escalation of the Afghan war and expansion into Pakistan. However, it is not surprising that the main item on the agenda was the global financial crisis. Without a doubt, the next year will be an interesting one, and the elite are surely hoping to make it a productive one.

Organic Vs. Conventional: Have You Been Robbed?

Guest post by Chelsea Green’s Makenna Goodman: from Huffington Post

It’s Saturday afternoon and you’re checking out at your local co-op. You’re behind another member of your community, lining up your organic eggs, organic pork chops, organic milk, organic lamb shank, and organic cheese. You feel pretty content. You’re eating right, in a world full of chaos. Your body loves you.

And probably best of all, your act of buying organic is part of a political movement; you’re supporting a population of small farmers, the precious few who have decided that animals are more than merely walking meat slabs, and that vegetables should be birthed from sunshine and good soil, not created in a lab.

But organic may not mean the food is better for you. Organic may not mean the animal was treated right. Organic may, in fact, be little more than a sweet notion and marketing campaign that rests easy the hearts of the eco-conscious consumer. Organic, in other words, is not always the right choice. Sorry, but it’s true.

In fact, if all of us knew exactly what “organic” means and the other available alternatives (fast corporate food never being one of them), it is possible we could actually save money and be better informed about the food we’re putting into our bodies. Joel Salatin, farmer and author of You Can Farm; Pastured Poultry Profits; and Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal—whom the New York Times refers to as the “high priest of the pasture” and is referred to at length in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma—has a lot of good points when it comes to the question of organic vs. conventional. First and foremost: it’s not that simple.

According to Salatin, “a broiler [meat chicken] can be fed certified organic feed in a confinement house, without fresh air and sunshine, without green salads, trucked for hours to a processing plant that electrocutes the bird and spills feces all over the carcass during evisceration, and be labeled ‘certified organic.’ In animal production, organic describes primarily diet, and everything else is either not mentioned at all or is secondary.”

I’d like to take this moment and say: Hello. My name is Makenna, and I farm non-organic eggs. Don’t stop reading! At first I was ashamed; I’m someone who spent years being obsessive about only buying organic, no matter what. If I didn’t have an extra buck, I went without eggs that week. I’m serious. My money, in copious amounts, was channeled into the sustainability of small farmers all across the country, or so I thought.

But recently, since moving to a Vermont farm, I’ve been confronted with the cold, hard reality of what organic really means. Not much. Sounds sweet. Feels nice. Connotes ideas of good.

//

Suffice it to say, for all these years…I’ve been robbed.

I have laying hens, and believe me when I tell you they have a good life. They’re free range to the point of too free, and spend warm days by the pond, eating bugs. They lay eggs with neon orange yolks, a sign they’re low in cholesterol and high in good protein. I feed them food scraps, and along with their “salad greens” of grass and plants, this cuts down on their grain consumption substantially. I’m considering getting scraps from the local elementary school, too. Use waste, be sustainable, cut down on fossil fuels, that kind of thing. I am 100% against hormones, large-scale corporate food production, caged livestock, and mistreatment of animals of any kind. But I don’t use organic grain, because it’s twice as expensive, and since the hens are so free-range they get most of their diet through food scraps and plants, and eat very little grain anyway (which, although not certified organic, is all-natural, hormone and antibiotic free.)

When I went to my local co-op and proposed I become one of their egg suppliers however, the grocery buyer asked me first off: “Are they organic?” “Well,” I told her, “they’re free-range! Almost to the point of too free!” But the buyer shook her head, and offered to pay me a dollar less per dozen. A hen with a good life doesn’t qualify as organic if the minimal grain they eat per day is not. Doesn’t matter if it’s one kernel of grain per day. “So,” I asked her, “if my birds were locked in cages but I stuffed them until they popped with organic grain, they’d be worth more?” She nodded. “Even though my hens have a better life, get sun and exercise, eat plants, roam free, and the eggs are lower in cholesterol and saturated fat as a result?” She nodded. Insane.

On the subject of “organic,” Salatin says:

Too often, especially in organic agriculture, we focus all the attention on the animal’s diet and miss the bigger picture… I am constantly amazed that people in Virginia pay exorbitant prices for certified organic broilers flown in refrigerated air freight from California, birds that do not receive green material and are raised basically in a conventional confinement factory house. From a world-view standpoint, it would probably be better for the environment to buy locally produced conventional chicken than to encourage the use of jet fuel and heavy metal to transport that chicken across the country. In the name of one cause, we sacrifice another equally worthy cause… the point is that organic feed is only a fraction of what is necessary to produce a truly dynamic bird. Certainly truly organic chickens are not necessarily bad. But neither are they necessarily good.

So, what do you — the consumer — do now? Most important is to keep in mind that organic certification is a label, and not a guarantee your meat had a good life, or is healthier than “conventional” brands. This is not a plug for corporate food. Of course you’ll still want all natural, hormone and antibiotic free meat, but…Organic? It’s so much more expensive, and who has extra cash for false promises these days? It’s in times like these when it’s especially good to know what’s behind the label. Which, in the worst cases, is nothing more than a big, fat, unhappy lie.

To read more of Joel Salatin, check out his books: You Can Farm, Pastured Poultry Profit$, Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal, Salad Bar Beef,, Family Friendly Farming, and Holy Cows and Hog Heaven.

Weapon of Mass Murder :Genetically Modified Food – Doctors Warn

By Jeffrey M. Smith from responsibletechnology

On May 19th, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) called on “Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community, and the public to avoid GM (genetically modified) foods when possible and provide educational materials concerning GM foods and health risks.”[1] They called for a moratorium on GM foods, long-term independent studies, and labeling. AAEM’s position paper stated, “Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food,” including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. They conclude, “There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation,” as defined by recognized scientific criteria. “The strength of association and consistency between GM foods and disease is confirmed in several animal studies.”

More and more doctors are already prescribing GM-free diets. Dr. Amy Dean, a Michigan internal medicine specialist, and board member of AAEM says, “I strongly recommend patients eat strictly non-genetically modified foods.” Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles says “I used to test for soy allergies all the time, but now that soy is genetically engineered, it is so dangerous that I tell people never to eat it.”

Dr. Jennifer Armstrong, President of AAEM, says, “Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions.” World renowned biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava goes one step further. After reviewing more than 600 scientific journals, he concludes that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a major contributor to the sharply deteriorating health of Americans.

Pregnant women and babies at great risk

Among the population, biologist David Schubert of the Salk Institute warns that “children are the most likely to be adversely effected by toxins and other dietary problems” related to GM foods. He says without adequate studies, the children become “the experimental animals.”[2]

The experience of actual GM-fed experimental animals is scary. When GM soy was fed to female rats, most of their babies died within three weeks—compared to a 10% death rate among the control group fed natural soy.[3] The GM-fed babies were also smaller, and later had problems getting pregnant.[4]

When male rats were fed GM soy, their testicles actually changed color—from the normal pink to dark blue.[5] Mice fed GM soy had altered young sperm.[6] Even the embryos of GM fed parent mice had significant changes in their DNA.[7] Mice fed GM corn in an Austrian government study had fewer babies, which were also smaller than normal.[8]

Reproductive problems also plague livestock. Investigations in the state of Haryana, India revealed that most buffalo that ate GM cottonseed had complications such as premature deliveries, abortions, infertility, and prolapsed uteruses. Many calves died. In the US, about two dozen farmers reported thousands of pigs became sterile after consuming certain GM corn varieties. Some had false pregnancies; others gave birth to bags of water. Cows and bulls also became infertile when fed the same corn.[9]

In the US population, the incidence of low birth weight babies, infertility, and infant mortality are all escalating.

Food designed to produce toxin

GM corn and cotton are engineered to produce their own built-in pesticide in every cell. When bugs bite the plant, the poison splits open their stomach and kills them. Biotech companies claim that the pesticide, called Bt—produced from soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis—has a history of safe use, since organic farmers and others use Bt bacteria spray for natural insect control. Genetic engineers insert Bt genes into corn and cotton, so the plants do the killing.

The Bt-toxin produced in GM plants, however, is thousands of times more concentrated than natural Bt spray, is designed to be more toxic,[10] has properties of an allergen, and unlike the spray, cannot be washed off the plant.

Moreover, studies confirm that even the less toxic natural bacterial spray is harmful. When dispersed by plane to kill gypsy moths in the Pacific Northwest, about 500 people reported allergy or flu-like symptoms. Some had to go to the emergency room.[11],[12]

The exact same symptoms are now being reported by farm workers throughout India, from handling Bt cotton.[13] In 2008, based on medical records, the Sunday India reported, “Victims of itching have increased massively this year . . . related to BT cotton farming.”[14]

GMOs provoke immune reactions

AAEM states, “Multiple animal studies show significant immune dysregulation,” including increase in cytokines, which are “associated with asthma, allergy, and inflammation”—all on the rise in the US.

According to GM food safety expert Dr. Arpad Pusztai, changes in the immune status of GM animals are “a consistent feature of all the studies.”[15] Even Monsanto’s own research showed significant immune system changes in rats fed Bt corn.[16] A November 2008 by the Italian government also found that mice have an immune reaction to Bt corn.[17]

GM soy and corn each contain two new proteins with allergenic properties,[18] GM soy has up to seven times more trypsin inhibitor—a known soy allergen,[19] and skin prick tests show some people react to GM, but not to non-GM soy.[20] Soon after GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50%. Perhaps the US epidemic of food allergies and asthma is a casualty of genetic manipulation.

Animals dying in large numbers

In India, animals graze on cotton plants after harvest. But when shepherds let sheep graze on Bt cotton plants, thousands died. Post mortems showed severe irritation and black patches in both intestines and liver (as well as enlarged bile ducts). Investigators said preliminary evidence “strongly suggests that the sheep mortality was due to a toxin. . . . most probably Bt-toxin.”[21] In a small follow-up feeding study by the Deccan Development Society, all sheep fed Bt cotton plants died within 30 days; those that grazed on natural cotton plants remained healthy.

In a small village in Andhra Pradesh, buffalo grazed on cotton plants for eight years without incident. On January 3rd, 2008, the buffalo grazed on Bt cotton plants for the first time. All 13 were sick the next day; all died within 3 days.[22]

Bt corn was also implicated in the deaths of cows in Germany, and horses, water buffaloes, and chickens in The Philippines.[23]

In lab studies, twice the number of chickens fed Liberty Link corn died; 7 of 20 rats fed a GM tomato developed bleeding stomachs; another 7 of 40 died within two weeks.[24] Monsanto’s own study showed evidence of poisoning in major organs of rats fed Bt corn, according to top French toxicologist G. E. Seralini.[25]

Worst finding of all—GMOs remain inside of us

The only published human feeding study revealed what may be the most dangerous problem from GM foods. The gene inserted into GM soy transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function.[26] This means that long after we stop eating GMOs, we may still have potentially harmful GM proteins produced continuously inside of us. Put more plainly, eating a corn chip produced from Bt corn might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories, possibly for the rest of our lives.

When evidence of gene transfer is reported at medical conferences around the US, doctors often respond by citing the huge increase of gastrointestinal problems among their patients over the last decade. GM foods might be colonizing the gut flora of North Americans.

Warnings by government scientists ignored and denied

Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had warned about all these problems even in the early 1990s. According to documents released from a lawsuit, the scientific consensus at the agency was that GM foods were inherently dangerous, and might create hard-to-detect allergies, poisons, gene transfer to gut bacteria, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged their superiors to require rigorous long-term tests.[27] But the White House had ordered the agency to promote biotechnology and the FDA responded by recruiting Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s former attorney, to head up the formation of GMO policy. That policy, which is in effect today, denies knowledge of scientists’ concerns and declares that no safety studies on GMOs are required. It is up to Monsanto and the other biotech companies to determine if their foods are safe. Mr. Taylor later became Monsanto’s vice president.

Dangerously few studies, untraceable diseases

AAEM states, “GM foods have not been properly tested” and “pose a serious health risk.” Not a single human clinical trial on GMOs has been published. A 2007 review of published scientific literature on the “potential toxic effects/health risks of GM plants” revealed “that experimental data are very scarce.” The author concludes his review by asking, “Where is the scientific evidence showing that GM plants/food are toxicologically safe, as assumed by the biotechnology companies?”[28]

Famed Canadian geneticist David Suzuki answers, “The experiments simply haven’t been done and we now have become the guinea pigs.” He adds, “Anyone that says, ‘Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,’ I say is either unbelievably stupid or deliberately lying.”[29]

Dr. Schubert points out, “If there are problems, we will probably never know because the cause will not be traceable and many diseases take a very long time to develop.” If GMOs happen to cause immediate and acute symptoms with a unique signature, perhaps then we might have a chance to trace the cause.

This is precisely what happened during a US epidemic in the late 1980s. The disease was fast acting, deadly, and caused a unique measurable change in the blood—but it still took more than four years to identify that an epidemic was even occurring. By then it had killed about 100 Americans and caused 5,000-10,000 people to fall sick or become permanently disabled. It was caused by a genetically engineered brand of a food supplement called L-tryptophan.

If other GM foods are contributing to the rise of autism, obesity, diabetes, asthma, cancer, heart disease, allergies, reproductive problems, or any other common health problem now plaguing Americans, we may never know. In fact, since animals fed GMOs had such a wide variety of problems, susceptible people may react to GM food with multiple symptoms. It is therefore telling that in the first nine years after the large scale introduction of GM crops in 1996, the incidence of people with three or more chronic diseases nearly doubled, from 7% to 13%.[30]

To help identify if GMOs are causing harm, the AAEM asks their “members, the medical community, and the independent scientific community to gather case studies potentially related to GM food consumption and health effects, begin epidemiological research to investigate the role of GM foods on human health, and conduct safe methods of determining the effect of GM foods on human health.”

Citizens need not wait for the results before taking the doctors advice to avoid GM foods. People can stay away from anything with soy or corn derivatives, cottonseed and canola oil, and sugar from GM sugar beets—unless it says organic or “non-GMO.” There is a pocket Non-GMO Shopping Guide, co-produced by the Institute for Responsible Technology and the Center for Food Safety, which is available as a download, as well as in natural food stores and in many doctors’ offices.

If even a small percentage of people choose non-GMO brands, the food industry will likely respond as they did in Europe—by removing all GM ingredients. Thus, AAEM’s non-GMO prescription may be a watershed for the US food supply.

International bestselling author and independent filmmaker Jeffrey M. Smith is the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology and the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of GMOs. His first book, Seeds of Deception is the world’s bestselling book on the subject. His second, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, identifies 65 risks of GMOs and demonstrates how superficial government approvals are not competent to find most of them. He invited the biotech industry to respond in writing with evidence to counter each risk, but correctly predicted that they would refuse, since they don’t have the data to show that their products are safe.
www.ResponsibleTechnology.org,
info@responsibletechnology.org

[1] http://www.aaemonline.org/gmopost.html
[2] David Schubert, personal communication to H. Penfound, Greenpeace Canada, October 25, 2002.

[3] Irina Ermakova, “Genetically modified soy leads to the decrease of weight and high mortality of rat pups of the first generation. Preliminary studies,” Ecosinform 1 (2006): 4–9.

[4] Irina Ermakova, “Experimental Evidence of GMO Hazards,” Presentation at Scientists for a GM Free Europe, EU Parliament, Brussels, June 12, 2007
[5] Irina Ermakova, “Experimental Evidence of GMO Hazards,” Presentation at Scientists for a GM Free Europe, EU Parliament, Brussels, June 12, 2007

[6] L. Vecchio et al, “Ultrastructural Analysis of Testes from Mice Fed on Genetically Modified Soybean,” European Journal of Histochemistry 48, no. 4 (Oct–Dec 2004):449–454.

[7] Oliveri et al., “Temporary Depression of Transcription in Mouse Pre-implantion Embryos from Mice Fed on Genetically Modified Soybean,” 48th Symposium of the Society for Histochemistry, Lake Maggiore (Italy), September 7–10, 2006.

[8] Alberta Velimirov and Claudia Binter, “Biological effects of transgenic maize NK603xMON810 fed in long term reproduction studies in mice,” Forschungsberichte der Sektion IV, Band 3/2008

[9] Jerry Rosman, personal communication, 2006

[10] See for example, A. Dutton, H. Klein, J. Romeis, and F. Bigler, “Uptake of Bt-toxin by herbivores feeding on transgenic maize and consequences for the predator Chrysoperia carnea,” Ecological Entomology 27 (2002): 441–7; and J. Romeis, A. Dutton, and F. Bigler, “Bacillus thuringiensis toxin (Cry1Ab) has no direct effect on larvae of the green lacewing Chrysoperla carnea (Stephens) (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae),” Journal of Insect Physiology 50, no. 2–3 (2004): 175–183.

[11] Washington State Department of Health, “Report of health surveillance activities: Asian gypsy moth control program,” (Olympia, WA: Washington State Dept. of Health, 1993).

[12] M. Green, et al., “Public health implications of the microbial pesticide Bacillus thuringiensis: An epidemiological study, Oregon, 1985-86,” Amer. J. Public Health 80, no. 7(1990): 848–852.

[13] Ashish Gupta et. al., “Impact of Bt Cotton on Farmers’ Health (in Barwani and Dhar District of Madhya Pradesh),” Investigation Report, Oct–Dec 2005.

[14] Sunday India, October, 26, 2008

[15] October 24, 2005 correspondence between Arpad Pusztai and Brian John

[16] John M. Burns, “13-Week Dietary Subchronic Comparison Study with MON 863 Corn in Rats Preceded by a 1-Week Baseline Food Consumption Determination with PMI Certified Rodent Diet #5002,” December 17, 2002 http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto/content/sci_tech/prod_safety/fullratstudy.pdf

[17] Alberto Finamore, et al, “Intestinal and Peripheral Immune Response to MON810 Maize Ingestion in Weaning and Old Mice,” J. Agric. Food Chem., 2008, 56 (23), pp 11533–11539, November 14, 2008

[18] See L Zolla, et al, “Proteomics as a complementary tool for identifying unintended side effects occurring in transgenic maize seeds as a result of genetic modifications,” J Proteome Res. 2008 May;7(5):1850-61; Hye-Yung Yum, Soo-Young Lee, Kyung-Eun Lee, Myung-Hyun Sohn, Kyu-Earn Kim, “Genetically Modified and Wild Soybeans: An immunologic comparison,” Allergy and Asthma Proceedings 26, no. 3 (May–June 2005): 210-216(7); and Gendel, “The use of amino acid sequence alignments to assess potential allergenicity of proteins used in genetically modified foods,” Advances in Food and Nutrition Research 42 (1998), 45–62.

[19] A. Pusztai and S. Bardocz, “GMO in animal nutrition: potential benefits and risks,” Chapter 17, Biology of Nutrition in Growing Animals, R. Mosenthin, J. Zentek and T. Zebrowska (Eds.) Elsevier, October 2005

[20] Hye-Yung Yum, Soo-Young Lee, Kyung-Eun Lee, Myung-Hyun Sohn, Kyu-Earn Kim, “Genetically Modified and Wild Soybeans: An immunologic comparison,” Allergy and Asthma Proceedings 26, no. 3 (May–June 2005): 210-216(7).

[21] “Mortality in Sheep Flocks after Grazing on Bt Cotton Fields—Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh” Report of the Preliminary Assessment, April 2006, http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp

[22] Personal communication and visit, January 2009.

[23] Jeffrey M. Smith, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, Yes! Books, Fairfield, IA USA 2007

[24] Arpad Pusztai, “Can Science Give Us the Tools for Recognizing Possible Health Risks for GM Food?” Nutrition and Health 16 (2002): 73–84.

[25] Stéphane Foucart, “Controversy Surrounds a GMO,” Le Monde, 14 December 2004; referencing, John M. Burns, “13-Week Dietary Subchronic Comparison Study with MON 863 Corn in Rats Preceded by a 1-Week Baseline Food Consumption Determination with PMI Certified Rodent Diet #5002,” December 17, 2002 http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto/content/sci_tech/prod_safety/fullratstudy.pdf

[26] Netherwood et al, “Assessing the survival of transgenic plant DNA in the human gastrointestinal tract,” Nature Biotechnology 22 (2004): 2.

[27] See memos at www.biointegrity.org

[28] José Domingo, “Toxicity Studies of Genetically Modified Plants : A Review of the Published Literature,” Critical reviews in food science and nutrition, 2007, vol. 47, no8, pp. 721-733

[29] Angela Hall, “Suzuki warns against hastily accepting GMOs”, The Leader-Post (Canada), 26 April 2005.

[30] Kathryn Anne Paez, et al, “Rising Out-Of-Pocket Spending For Chronic Conditions: A Ten-Year Trend,” Health Affairs, 28, no. 1 (2009): 15-25

© copyright Institute For Responsible Technology 2009.

Jeffrey M. Smith is the author of publication Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, which presents 65 risks in easy-to-read two-page spreads. His first book, Seeds of Deception, is the top rated and #1 selling book on GM foods in the world. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, www.responsibletechnology.org, which is spearheading the Campaign for Healthier Eating in America. Go to www.seedsofdeception.com to learn more about how to avoid GM foods.

Spilling the Beans is a monthly column available at www.responsibletechnology.org. The website also offers eater-friendly tips for avoiding GMOs at home and in restaurants.

Permission is granted to publishers and webmasters to reproduce issues of Spilling the Beans in whole or in part. Just email us at column@seedsofdeception.com to let us know who you are and what your circulation is, so we can keep track.

The Institute for Responsible Technology is working to end the genetic engineering of our food supply and the outdoor release of GM crops. We warmly welcome your donations and support.

Go to www.responsibletechnology.org or click here if you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation. Click here if you would like to become a member of the Institute.

Is Pakistan , Iraq in making ?

Very revealing and compelling piece of work by chris floyd depicting and comparing the signs in the pakistan’s current situation with that of  Iraq before invasion.  players are same , script is same , propaganda unit is same ,  even the blood is also same only  the location is different.  They tried  fghanistan and  Iraq with great success to the  war lords of Pentagon war machine  , then  they tried Iran, magically this didn’t happen despite 4 yrs of propaganda , now they are behind the Pakistan  with some analysis pointing that these guys wants to split pakistan into 3 parts and they want to split afghanistan too and merge some portions. whose sake are these things are done only God knows. probably God is enjoying this blood sacrifice. Probably he is that god our dubaya used to  quote for all this blood bath.

any way  Please read this article it is eye opener -Rolling Out the Product: A New Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

——————————

We asked for signs,
And signs were sent.
– Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

I.
We are now in the midst of a full-blown campaign to “roll out the product” for a new war: this time, in Pakistan. Anyone who lived through the run-up to the invasion of Iraq should be able to read the signs — anyone, that is, who is not blinded by partisan labels, or by the laid-back cool of a media-savvy leader far more presentable than his predecessor.

We noted some of these signs in a long post yesterday and won’t belabor them here. But today brings yet another bumper crop of panic buttons and alarm bells from the powers-that-be, with ever-increasing emphasis on the “Taliban kooks with Muslim nukes” theme: one more variation on the old “mushroom clouds rising in American cities” ploy that has worked like a charm for our militarists lo these 60 years or more.

Some of the war-pushing powers-that-be are public figures in the Obama Administration (including Obama himself, who has dutifully taken on the Bushian mantle of Fearmonger-in-Chief), and some of them are shadowy, unnamed eminences in the military-security apparat, clearly aiming to act for Obama as those daggers of the mind did for Macbeth: “Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going.”

The first story to greet America’s political class as they sat down to their prunes and Post Toasties this morning was a big New York Times spread with one loud, clanging message: You cannot defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan without going deep into Pakistan.

It seems the Times has discovered an unusually loquacious “Pakistani logistics tactician” who for some reason has spent the last six months spilling the beans on the Taliban’s strategy to the leading newspaper of the American establishment. The anonymous 28-year-old guy from somewhere in Pakistan’s tribal lands told a harrowing tale of the “workings and ambitions of the Taliban” as they prepare to defeat Obama’s Afghan surge from their safe havens in Pakistan, then seize Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal.

What’s more, the “logistics tactician” has provided his American enemies with a ready-made, pre-positioned “justification” for the mass civilian slaughter that will inevitably accompany Obama’s surge:

He acknowledged that the Americans would have far superior forces and power this year, but was confident that the Taliban could turn this advantage on its head. “The Americans cannot take control of the villages,” he said. “In order to expel us they will have to resort to aerial bombing, and then they will have more civilian casualties.”

This is of course the precise “reason” trotted out every time American-led occupation forces kill a group of civilians in Afghanistan: the Taliban made us do it. This happened just yesterday, in the village of Gerani, where village leaders tried to shield children, women and elderly men in housing compounds far away from fighting between Taliban forces and Afghan troops with American “advisors.” But the advisors called in an airstrike that destroyed the civilians’ safe haven, killing between 70 and 100 innocent people, as two of the New York Times’ non-stovepipe reporters, Taimoor Shah and Carlotta Gall, report.

Mohammad Nieem Qadderdan, the former top official in the district of Bala Baluk, said he had seen dozens of bodies when he visited the village of Gerani. “These houses that were full of children and women and elders were bombed by planes. It is very difficult to say how many were killed because nobody can count the number, it is too early,” Mr. Qadderdan, who no longer holds a government position, told The A.P. by telephone. “People are digging through rubble with shovels and hands.”

The outraged and grieving villagers gathered up at least 30 of the slain and took them to officials in the provincial capital as proof of the massacre: a grisly, desperate measure forced on them by the American’s constant denials and denigrations of reports of civilian casualties, as we saw last year, when an American air assault killed up to 90 civilians in Azizabad.

But now the great and good can turn from this disturbing story to the convenient divulgings of the unnamed 28-year-old guy from an unnamed place in Pakistan, and see that such slaughters are all just part of the Taliban’s fiendish plan. In fact, he provides grist for the PR mill of the great imperial blood libel of them all: There no “civilians.”

The tactician says he embeds his men in what he described as friendly Afghan villages, where they will spend the next four to six months with the residents, who provide the weapons and succor for the missions against American and NATO soldiers.

There, you see? Every villager is a two-faced sneak, working to kill Americans. If they die — then they deserve it. Boy, that makes the prunes and Post Toasties a little easier to digest, doesn’t it!

But Anonymous Guy is not done toting water for the militarists yet. Not only does provide cover for collateral damage, and red-flag the hot-button issues of the new roll-out — Pakistan as the true epicenter of the Good War in Afghanistan, and kooks with nukes — he also praises the effectiveness of their most beloved new toy: the robot drones that rain remote-control death on Pakistani villages:

The one thing that impressed him were the missile strikes by drones — virtually the only American military presence felt inside Pakistan. “The drones are very effective,” he said, acknowledging that they had thinned the top leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the area. He said 29 of his friends had been killed in the strikes.

Of course, they have also killed almost 700 Pakistani civilians (as of last month), according to the Pakistani government. But what of that, when the remarkably top-heavy leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has been pruned a bit — at least, according to some anonymous guy from somewhere in Pakistan. (Surely no organizations in history have ever had so many “top leaders” as America’s Terror War enemies, who, according to Washington, have been felled in their hundreds over the years in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan.)

In any case, the anonymous guy from somewhere or other could hardly have put the militarists’ case for war in Pakistan any better even if they had, you know, paid him to do it or something.

II.
But the New York Times is only one front in the new campaign. On the same day as Anonymous Guy was working his militarist mojo, McClatchy Newspapers fired off a resounding fusillade of largely unnamed “experts” from the military-security apparat, all of them, remarkably enough, with the same message: Pakistan is falling to the Muslim kooks who want them nukes.

It is an astounding performance. The story, by Jonathan Landy, marshall’st a multitude of nightmare scenarios now coming true before our very eyes. But this is not to say the story is unbalanced in any way: there are two short passages, buried in the middle and at the end of the story, that take a different view. Such as this one:

Many Pakistanis, however, dismiss such warnings as inflated. They think that the militants are open to dialogue and political accommodation to end the unrest, which many trace to the former military regime’s cooperation with the U.S. after 9/11.

But this nugget of genuine insight gleaned from, you know, the actual people who live in the actual country in question, is swamped by waves of heavy-duty doomsaying from anonymous Washington savants. Such as:

A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there’s little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan’s terrorist haven did before 9/11.

“It’s a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution,” said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly…

“Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al Qaida sitting in two-thirds of the country which the government does not control,” said David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer, a former State Department adviser and a counterinsurgency consultant to the Obama administration.

Significantly, one of the few people named in the article is directly connected to the White House, giving an official seal of approval to the other, anonymous alarmists.

The experts McClatchy interviewed said their views aren’t a worst case scenario but a realistic expectation based on the militants’ gains and the failure of Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership to respond.

“The place is beyond redemption,” said a Pentagon adviser who asked not to be further identified so he could speak freely. “I don’t see any plausible scenario under which the present government or its most likely successor will mobilize the economic, political and security resources to push back this rising tide of violence.

“I think Pakistan is moving toward a situation where the extremists control virtually all of the countryside and the government controls only the urban centers,” he continued. “If you look out 10 years, I think the government will be overrun by Islamic militants.”

Are you scared to death yet? Or even better: are you scared enough to give your approval to “whatever it takes” to save us? After all, the president himself says that the situation in Pakistan is a “mortal threat” to the sacred Homeland; a view reiterated by his special “Af-Pak” envoy, Richard Holbrooke, who told Congress yesterday (on yet another front in the roll-out campaign) that “our most vital national security interests are at stake,” in Pakistan. A mortal threat to our most vital interests — can there be a greater, more urgent, more noble casus belli?

Again, Pakistanis have a different view of their own country, which is large, diverse, cosmopolitan, and made up overwhelmingly of adherents of Sufi Islam, as well as non-violent, non-militant Sunnis and Shiites. These ordinary human beings enjoy the arts, popular entertainment, sports, technology eating out, running businesses, pursuing scientific research and intellectual studies, raising their families. As Ahsan Iqbal, a top aide to opposition leader and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, told McClatchy:

While militants will overrun small pockets, most Pakistanis embrace democracy and will resist living under the Taliban’s harsh interpretation of Islam, he said.

“The psychology, the temperament, the mood of the Pakistani nation does not subscribe to these extremist views,” Iqbal said.

But of course, the anonymous unipolar dominationists of the American power structure know better:

The U.S. intelligence official, however, said that Pakistan’s elite, dominated since the country’s independence in 1947 by politicians, bureaucrats and military officers from Punjab, have failed to recognize the seriousness of the situation.

“The Punjabi elite has already lost control of Pakistan, but neither they nor the Obama administration realize that,” the official said. “Pakistan will be an Islamist state — or maybe a collection of four Islamic states, probably within a few years. There’s no civilian leadership in Islamabad that can stop this, and so far, there hasn’t been any that’s been willing to try.”

We noted yesterday that Islamabad has been carrying out military operations against insurgents for many years, losing hundreds of soldiers in the campaigns. But this history is being erased and rewritten to accommodate the new narrative: The United States will be forced to intervene directly in Pakistan because the Pakistanis are too stupid to realize the danger posed by the militants, and too weak and cowardly to even try to stop them. The whole damned place was “beyond redemption,” so we have to step in.

We have been here before, and not so long ago either. The signs are there — for anyone who wants to see them.

UPDATE: The Red Cross confirms the civilian deaths in the airstrike on Gerani, the NY Times reports:

Dozens of civilians, including women and children, have been killed during bombing raids by United States forces in western Afghanistan as Afghan troops battled Taliban fighters in heavy fighting, the Red Cross said Wednesday, confirming earlier accounts by Afghan officials….

Jessica Barry, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, said the organization had sent a team to scene of the bombing on Tuesday. The team members saw houses destroyed and dozens of dead bodies. Some had died while trying to shelter in a house.

“What our team saw was dozens of bodies, graves and people preparing burials,” she said in a telephone interview. The dead included women and children. “It’s not the first time,” Ms. Barry said, but “really this is one of the very serious and biggest incidents for a very long time.”

In a statement on its Web site, the International Committee blamed the deaths squarely on the airstrikes.

“We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike,” the statement said, quoting Reto Stocker, the head of the Red Cross delegation in Kabul.

Researchers Question Nature, Cause and Treatment of “Swine Flu” Outbreak

From PRLog

It was stated by the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) that the first case of “Swine Flu” was diagnosed in Mexico on the 17th of April. In the last few weeks, several researchers have sent information to Andrew Johnson, an independent lay researcher who runs a free website called “Check the Evidence”.  Johnson explains “I was sent information that includes commentary provided by Alternative Health figures such as Dr Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, and Dr Leonard Horowitz, a Harvard Graduate of Dental Medicine. Their commentaries vigorously challenge  mainstream reports about the Swine Flu scares.”

On his website, Dr Mercola states “this isn’t the first time the public has been warned about swine flu. The last time was in 1976, right before I entered medical school and I remember it very clearly. It resulted in the massive swine flu vaccine campaign.  Do you happen to recall the result of this massive campaign? Within a few months, claims totalling $1.3 billion had been filed by victims who had suffered paralysis from the vaccine. The vaccine was also blamed for 25 deaths.”

Suspicions have also been raised about the actual nature of the virus itself , following comments by a WHO Official that the current strain contains both Avian and Swine Flu characteristics. Johnson states, “Some would say this was only possible if the virus had been genetically manipulated in a laboratory”.

Dr. Horowitz urges an investigation of Dr. James S. Robertson, England’s leading bioengineer of flu viruses for the vaccine industry, and avid promoter of U.S. Government funding for lucrative biodefense contracts, along with collaborators at the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). These suspects helped Novavax, Inc., in Bethesda, Maryland, produce genetically-

modified recombinants of the avian, swine, and Spanish flu viruses, H5N1 and H1N1, nearly identical to the unprecedented Mexican virus that is allegedly spreading to the United States at the time of this posting. The outbreak was precisely timed to promote the company’s new research and huge vaccine stockpiling contracts.

Johnson states, “Many researchers have witnessed again the extreme unreliability of mainstream sources, due to their repeated distortion of facts and failure to properly investigate the background of breaking stories. As with the events of 9/11 and 7/7, the media have rapidly created a myth which has been seared into the public psyche using a set of clichéd images and ubiquitous – and often baseless – fear tactics.”

Johnson explains that other readers and researchers have contacted him over the last few days and he points out the failure of the media to report some extremely suspicious facts. “One example is that on 19 Mar 2009, almost 1 month before the outbreak, ‘Medical News Today’ reported that a French Pharmaceutical Company, Sanofi Aventis ‘Invests 100 Million Euros In New Facility In Mexico To Produce Seasonaland Pandemic Influenza Vaccine’. Additionally, another researcher alerted me to a local paper’s story – dated 06 Apr 2009 – 11 days before the first Mexico case appeared – entitled ‘Flu pandemic could kill up to one in 80’. This article discusses the stock piling of surgical masks and gowns. It almost seems like someone knew this was coming!”

Other researchers have noted that Illinois-based company Baxter Pharmaceuticals placed live avian flu virus in vaccine materials sent to 18 countries! A number of websites reported this story and question whether the viral contamination was intentional.

In an article entitled “Swine Flu Propaganda Explained”, another researcher, Steve Collier, notes facts about the 1918 “Spanish Flu” epidemic, “Only a few died at first [these deaths are just normal occurrences]. However, they are still saying this could explode when winter comes. Therefore, governments will now suggest or enforce that the population are vaccinated – before winter comes – hence the large stockpiles of vaccines already in place.  You’ll see people dieing more and more as winter approaches – not because of some swine virus but because of the lethal cocktail of poisons in the vaccine!”

Researchers have also noted that the “shelf life” of Tamiflu – one of the so-called treatments for those who have supposedly succumbed to the Avian virus – is 3 years. This is about the length of time since the last significant “flu scare”.  Johnson states “Another problem with the mainstream media is that they do not make it clear that there are significant problems with the tamiflu drug. Numerous reports from Japan and other countries are showing that Tamiflu (and a related drug Relenza) can cause devastating, tragic side effects, such as hallucinations, delusional behavior, loss of contact with reality, convulsions, nausea and vomiting, psychosis, suicidal behaviour, death of both adults and children.

Johnson adds, “Another researcher advised me of a very troubling development in Paignton, Devon (UK) where, according to the UK Daily Telegraph, following reports of one child being infected, 230 children at the Community College were kept in their classrooms until they had been given a supply of Tamiflu antiviral drugs as a precautionary measure. The story states that parents gathered at the school gates after hearing Prime Minister Gordon Brown announce the new case in parliament, leading to angry scenes as police prevented them from picking up their children until the drugs had been distributed. This seems to be a case of forced vaccination – and parents are likely unaware of the risk of side effects of the type the FDA has listed.”

On the general attitude of the Health Profession towards vaccinations, Johnson explains, “Most doctors believe that vaccination is a good way to deal with diseases. However, what they don’t normally tell you is that most vaccines contain other toxic substances. The basic principle is, of course, that the virus fragments in the vaccine are injected into the blood to stimulate the production of anti-bodies. However, the alternative view is that it is better to ensure a fully functioning immune system so that it is ready to fight off all infective agents without the need to deliberately introduce toxicity. In the last few years, I have become much more aware of treatments such as Colloidal Silver, Oxygen Therapy and nutritional therapies. Some diets or foods aim, for example, to keep the body’s PH slightly alkaline, which helps to boost the immune response. None of these treatments are toxic and they encourage the body to heal itself.”

Sites such as Dr Mercola’s suggest “treating yourself” by optimizing your vitamin D levels, avoiding sugar and Processed Foods, getting enough rest, considering using an “energy psychology” tool such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), make sure you exercise, take a good source of animal based omega-3 fats like Krill, wash your hands and eat garlic regularly.

Johnson agrees, “These sorts of steps make far more sense to me – in following them, you will know much more clearly exactly what you have put into your body. With vaccinations, the ingredients are much less clear – although some of them are known to be toxic, in various ways.”

Johnson shares the concern of many other researchers, and concludes, “We are seeing a pattern – in what were once considered liberal, developed countries, the State tries to intervene and control our lives. With the engineered “Swine Flu” situation, quarantine measures are starting to be proposed and even forced vaccination being considered in some quarters. People will need to choose between putting their trust in the State, or putting trust in their own judgement and making their own health choices. Sadly, with a media that is itself ailing so badly, it is much harder for people to get access to all the information they need – and make the right choices.”

# # #

Buying Brand Obama

 100 days passed since obama’s Hope was given a chance. Words changed but not the deeds. People started to realise the same thing that they realised over the centuries , they are duped again

Buying the Brand Obama

Panic Stations! Are quarantines the next step in fight against swine flu?

 It doesn’t make sense to have panic stations when the world govt.’s are  retracting their dire consequences  of flu threat.  So we have to think that  decision to have panic stations is independent of  actual flu  issue it self. then who created these plans?.

 so who benefits in the pandamic?. Think folks,   instead of dumping poisonous  vaccines into your body and swelling the pharma companies stomach , see who benefits.

Are quarantines the next step in fight against the swine flu ?

The Flu Threat : The recent History of Flu and the Real cause of Deaths

 As the  propaganda of Main stream media of Flu threat seems to have been busted  ,  It is important to know history of -Flu Threat. With Trillions of Dollars went into pockets of bankers with Millions are looking for food, they need a diversion. Flu is good one , but didn’t work out well for the controllers. People like Mercola and others promptly busted the mainstream propaganda myth and saved millions of lifes in the process.

Here is a good collection of articles  from sott.net

SOTT.net Special Report : The Flue Threat

Swine Flu : the Facts , Benificiaries and How to protect your self

 This is a great article from one of my favourite doctor  blogger Dr. Mercola .  Read through it and most importantly use your feeling not the propaganda of the media which 6 billion people rely on ,  owned by mere  6 companies.

Read the facts and think who  benifits  and decide what to do and be careful  about  news  and take responsibility for your actions not the media or drug companies.

 Critical Alert: The Swine Flu Pandemic – Fact or Fiction?   By Dr. Mercola

—

 Folks, you can expect to see a lot of panic over this in the near future. But I wouldn’t be too hasty — this isn’t the first time the public has been warned about swine flu. The last time was in 1976, right before I entered medical school and I remember it very clearly. It resulted in the massive swine flu vaccine campaign.

Do you happen to recall the result of this massive campaign?

Within a few months, claims totaling $1.3 billion had been filed by victims who had suffered paralysis from the vaccine. The vaccine was also blamed for 25 deaths.

However, several hundred people developed crippling Guillain-Barré Syndrome after they were injected with the swine flu vaccine. Even healthy 20-year-olds ended up as paraplegics.

And the swine flu pandemic itself? It never materialized.

More People Died From the Swine Flu Vaccine than Swine Flu!

American health officials declared a public health emergency as cases of swine flu were confirmed in the U.S. Health officials across the world fear this could be the leading edge of a global pandemic emerging from Mexico, where seven people are confirmed dead as a result of the new virus.

On Monday April 27th, the World Health Organization (WHO) raised its pandemic alert level to four on its six-level threat scale,(1) which means they’ve determined that the virus is capable of human-to-human transmission. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

The number of fatalities, and suspected and confirmed cases across the world change depending on the source, so your best bet — if you want the latest numbers — is to use Google Maps’ Swine Flu Tracker.

Several nations have imposed travel bans, or made plans to quarantine air travelers (2) that present symptoms of the swine flu, such as:

Fever of more than 100
Coughing
Runny nose and/or sore throat
Joint aches
Severe headache
Vomiting and/or diarrhea
Lethargy
Lack of appetite

Top global flu experts are trying to predict how dangerous the new swine flu strain will be, as it became clear that they had little information about Mexico’s outbreak. It is as yet unclear how many cases occurred in the month or so before the outbreak was detected. It’s also unknown whether the virus was mutating to be more lethal, or less.

WHO and CDC Pandemic Preparedness Seriously Broken

The pandemic warning system has failed as it simply doesn’t exist, even in North America and Europe. To improve the system massive new investments in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health, and global access to common sense interventions like vitamin D optimization are required.

According to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. There should be no excuses. The paradox of this swine flu panic is that, while totally unexpected, it was accurately predicted. Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story to evidence that “after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fasttrack”.

However, maybe this is precisely what public health authorities desire.

This is NOT the First Swine Flu Panic

My guess is that you can expect to see a lot of panic over this issue in the near future. But the key is to remain calm — this isn’t the first time the public has been warned about swine flu. The last time was in 1976, right before I entered medical school and I remember it very clearly. It resulted in the massive swine flu vaccine campaign.

Do you happen to recall the result of this massive campaign?

Within a few months, claims totaling $1.3 billion had been filed by victims who had suffered paralysis from the vaccine. The vaccine was also blamed for 25 deaths.

However, several hundred people developed crippling Guillain-Barré Syndrome after they were injected with the swine flu vaccine. Even healthy 20-year-olds ended up as paraplegics.

And the swine flu pandemic itself? It never materialized.

More People Died From the Swine Flu Vaccine than Swine Flu!

It is very difficult to forecast a pandemic, and a rash response can be extremely damaging.

As of Monday April 27, the worldwide total number of confirmed cases was 82, according to WHO, which included 40 cases in the U.S., confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control. But does that truly warrant the feverish news headlines?

To put things into perspective, malaria kills 3,000 people EVERY DAY, and it’s considered “a health problem”… But of course, there are no fancy vaccines for malaria that can rake in billions of dollars in a short amount of time.

One Australian news source,(3) for example, states that even a mild swine flu epidemic could lead to the deaths of 1.4 million people and would reduce economic growth by nearly $5 trillion dollars.

Give me a break, if this doesn’t sound like the outlandish cries of the pandemic bird-flu I don’t know what does. Do you remember when President Bush said two million Americans would die as a result of the bird flu?

In 2005, in 2006, 2007, and again in 2008, those fears were exposed as little more than a cruel hoax, designed to instill fear, and line the pocketbooks of various individuals and industry. I became so convinced by the evidence AGAINST the possibility of a bird flu pandemic that I wrote a New York Times bestselling book, The Bird Flu Hoax, all about the massive fraud involved with the epidemic that never happened..

What is the Swine Flu?

Regular swine flu is a contagious respiratory disease, caused by a type-A influenza virus that affects pigs. The current strain, A(H1N1), is a new variation of an H1N1 virus — which causes seasonal flu outbreaks in humans — that also contains genetic material of bird and pig versions of the flu.

Interestingly enough, this version has never before been seen in neither human nor animal, which I will discuss a bit later.

This does sound bad. But not so fast. There are a few reasons to not rush to conclusions that this is the deadly pandemic we’ve been told would occur in the near future (as if anyone could predict it without having some sort of inside knowledge).

Why a True Bird- or Swine Flu Pandemic is HIGHLY Unlikely

While in my opinion it is highly likely factory farming is responsible for producing this viral strain, I believe there is still no cause for concern.

You may not know this, but all H1N1 flu’s are descendants of the 1918 pandemic strain. The reason why the flu shot may or may not work, however, from year to year, is due to mutations. Therefore, there’s no vaccine available for this current hybrid flu strain, and naturally, this is feeding the fear that millions of people will die before a vaccine can be made.

However, let me remind you of one very important fact here.

Just a couple of months ago, scientists concluded that the 1918 flu pandemic that killed between 50-100 million people worldwide in a matter of 18 months — which all these worst case scenarios are built upon — was NOT due to the flu itself! (4)

Instead, they discovered the real culprit was strep infections.

People with influenza often get what is known as a “superinfection” with a bacterial agent. In 1918 it appears to have been Streptococcus pneumoniae.

Since strep is much easier to treat than the flu using modern medicine, a new pandemic would likely be much less dire than it was in the early 20th century, the researchers concluded.

Others, such as evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald, (5) claim that a pandemic of this sort simply cannot happen, because in order for it to occur, the world has to change. Not the virus itself, but the world.

In a previous interview for Esquire magazine, in which he discusses the possibility of a bird flu pandemic, he states:

“They think that if a virus mutates, it’s an evolutionary event. Well, the virus is mutating because that is what viruses and other pathogens do. But evolution is not just random mutation. It is random mutation coupled with natural selection; it is a battle for competitive advantage among different strains generated by random mutation.

For bird flu to evolve into a human pandemic, the strain that finds a home in humanity has to be a strain that is both highly virulent and highly transmissible. Deadliness has to translate somehow into popularity; H5N1 has to find a way to kill or immobilize its human hosts, and still find other hosts to infect. Usually that doesn’t happen.”

Ewald goes on to explain that evolution in general is all about trade-offs, and in the evolution of infections the trade-off is between virulence and transmissibility.

What this means is that in order for a “bird flu” or “swine flu” to turn into a human pandemic, it has to find an environment that favors both deadly virulence and ease of transmission.

People living in squalor on the Western Front at the end of World War I generated such an environment, from which the epidemic of 1918 could arise.

Likewise, crowded chicken farms, slaughterhouses, and jam-packed markets of eastern Asia provide another such environment, and that environment gave rise to the bird flu — a pathogen that both kills and spreads, in birds, but not in humans.

Says Ewald:

“We know that H5N1 is well adapted to birds. We also know that it has a hard time becoming a virus that can move from person to person. It has a hard time without our doing anything. But we can make it harder. We can make sure it has no human population in which to evolve transmissibility. There is no need to rely on the mass extermination of chickens. There is no need to stockpile vaccines for everyone.

By vaccinating just the people most at risk — the people who work with chickens and the caregivers — we can prevent it from becoming transmissible among humans. Then it doesn’t matter what it does in chickens.”

Please remember that, despite the fantastic headlines and projections of MILLIONS of deaths, the H5N1 bird flu virus killed a mere 257 people worldwide since late 2003. As unfortunate as those deaths are, 257 deaths worldwide from any disease, over the course of five years, simply does not constitute an emergency worthy of much attention, let alone fear!

Honestly, your risk of being killed by a lightning strike in the last five years was about 2,300 percent higher than your risk of contracting and dying from the bird flu.(6) I’m not kidding! In just one year (2004), more than 1,170 people died from lighting strikes, worldwide.7

So please, as the numbers of confirmed swine flu cases are released, keep a level head and don’t let fear run away with your brains.

So is the Swine Flu Getting More or Less Dangerous?

On Sunday, April 26, The Independent reported that more than 1,000 people had contracted the swine flu virus in Mexico, (8) but by the afternoon that same day, Mexican President Calderon declared that more than two-thirds of the 1,300 thought to have contracted the disease had been given a clean bill of health and sent home.(9)

Additionally, the number of actual confirmed cases appears to be far lower than reported in many media outlets, leading me to believe that many reporters are interchanging the terms “suspected cases” and “confirmed cases.” According to the World Health Organization’s Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response site; as of April 27, there are:

40 laboratory confirmed cases of A(H1N1) in the U.S. — 0 deaths
26 confirmed cases in Mexico — 7 deaths
6 confirmed cases in Canada — 0 deaths
1 confirmed case in Spain — 0 deaths
Additionally, nearly all suspected new cases have been reported as mild.

Personally, I am highly skeptical. It simply doesn’t add up to a real pandemic.

But it does raise serious questions about where this brand new, never before seen virus came from, especially since it cannot be contracted from eating pork products, and has never before been seen in pigs, and contain traits from the bird flu — and which, so far, only seems to respond to Tamiflu. Are we just that lucky, or… what?

Your Fear Will Make Some People VERY Rich in Today’s Crumbling Economy

According to the Associated Press at least one financial analyst estimates up to $388 million worth of Tamiflu sales in the near future (10) — and that’s without a pandemic outbreak.

More than half a dozen pharmaceutical companies, including Gilead Sciences Inc., Roche, GlaxoSmithKline and other companies with a stake in flu treatments and detection, have seen a rise in their shares in a matter of days, and will likely see revenue boosts if the swine flu outbreak continues to spread.

As soon as Homeland Security declared a health emergency, 25 percent — about 12 million doses — of Tamiflu and Relenza treatment courses were released from the nation’s stockpile. However, beware that the declaration also allows unapproved tests and drugs to be administered to children. Many health- and government officials are more than willing to take that chance with your life, and the life of your child. But are you?

Remember, Tamiflu went through some rough times not too long ago, as the dangers of this drug came to light when, in 2007, the FDA finally began investigating some 1,800 adverse event reports related to the drug.

Common side effects of Tamiflu include:

Nausea
Vomiting
Diarrhea
Headache
Dizziness
Fatigue
Cough

All in all, the very symptoms you’re trying to avoid.

More serious symptoms included convulsions, delirium or delusions, and 14 deaths in children and teens as a result of neuropsychiatric problems and brain infections (which led Japan to ban Tamiflu for children in 2007). And that’s for a drug that, when used as directed, only reduces the duration of influenza symptoms by 1 to 1 ½ days, according to the official data.

But making matters worse, some patients with influenza are at HIGHER risk for secondary bacterial infections when on Tamiflu. And secondary bacterial infections, as I mentioned earlier, was likely the REAL cause of the mass fatalities during the 1918 pandemic!

Where did This Mysterious New Animal-Human Flu Strain Come From?

Alongside the fear-mongering headlines, I’ve also seen increasing numbers of reports questioning the true nature of this virus. And rightfully so.

Could a mixed animal-human mutant like this occur naturally? And if not, who made it, and how was it released?

Not one to dabble too deep in conspiracy theories, I don’t have to strain very hard to find actual facts to support the notion that this may not be a natural mutation, and that those who stand to gain have the wherewithal to pull off such a stunt.

Just last month I reported on the story that the American pharmaceutical company Baxter was under investigation for distributing the deadly avian flu virus to 18 different countries as part of a seasonal flu vaccine shipment. Czech reporters were probing to see if it may have been part of a deliberate attempt to start a pandemic; as such a “mistake” would be virtually impossible under the security protocols of that virus.

The H5N1 virus on its own is not very airborne. However, when combined with seasonal flu viruses, which are more easily spread, the effect could be a potent, airborne, deadly biological weapon. If this batch of live bird flu and seasonal flu viruses had reached the public, it could have resulted in dire consequences.

There is a name for this mixing of viruses; it’s called “reassortment,” and it is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created in the lab. Some scientists say the most recent global outbreak — the 1977 Russian flu — was started by a virus created and leaked from a laboratory.

Another example of the less sterling integrity of Big Pharma is the case of Bayer, who sold millions of dollars worth of an injectable blood-clotting medicine to Asian, Latin American, and some European countries in the mid-1980s, even though they knew it was tainted with the AIDS virus.

So while it is morally unthinkable that a drug company would knowingly contaminate flu vaccines with a deadly flu virus such as the bird- or swine flu, it is certainly not impossible. It has already happened more than once.

But there seems to be no repercussions or hard feelings when industry oversteps the boundaries of morality and integrity and enters the arena of obscenity. Because, lo and behold, which company has been chosen to head up efforts, along with WHO, to produce a vaccine against the Mexican swine flu?

Baxter! (11) Despite the fact that ink has barely dried on the investigative reports from their should-be-criminal “mistake” against humanity.

According to other sources,(12) a top scientist for the United Nations, who has examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS victims, has concluded that the current swine flu virus possesses certain transmission “vectors” that suggest the new strain has been genetically-manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon.

The UN expert believes that Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and the current A-H1N1 swine flu virus are biological warfare agents.

In addition, Army criminal investigators are looking into the possibility that disease samples are missing from biolabs at Fort Detrick — the same Army research lab from which the 2001 anthrax strain was released, according to a recent article in the Fredrick News Post.(13) In February, the top biodefense lab halted all its research into Ebola, anthrax, plague, and other diseases known as “select agents,” after they discovered virus samples that weren’t listed in its inventory and might have been switched with something else.

Factory Farming Maybe Source of Swine Flu

Another theory as to the cause of Swine Flu might be factory farming. In the United States, pigs travel coast to coast. They can be bred in North Carolina, fattened in the corn belt of Iowa, and slaughtered in California.

While this may reduce short-term costs for the pork industry, the highly contagious nature of diseases like influenza (perhaps made further infectious by the stresses of transport) needs to be considered when calculating the true cost of long-distance live animal transport.

The majority of U.S. pig farms now confine more than 5,000 animals each. With a group of 5,000 animals, if a novel virus shows up it will have more opportunity to replicate and potentially spread than in a group of 100 pigs on a small farm.

With massive concentrations of farm animals within which to mutate, these new swine flu viruses in North America seem to be on an evolutionary fast track, jumping and reassorting between species at an unprecedented rate.

Should You Accept a Flu Vaccine — Just to be Safe?

As stated in the New York Times(14) and elsewhere, flu experts have no idea whether the current seasonal flu vaccine would offer any protection whatsoever against this exotic mutant, and it will take months to create a new one.

But let me tell you, getting vaccinated now would not only offer no protection and potentially cause great harm, it would most likely be loaded with toxic mercury which is used as a preservative in most flu vaccines..

I’ve written extensively about the numerous dangers (and ineffectiveness) of flu vaccines, and why I do not recommend them to anyone. So no matter what you hear — even if it comes from your doctor — don’t get a regular flu shot. They rarely work against seasonal flu…and certainly can’t offer protection against a never-before- seen strain.

Currently, the antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza are the only drugs that appear effective against the (human flu) H1N1 virus, and I strongly believe taking Tamiflu to protect yourself against this new virus could be a serious mistake — for all the reasons I already mentioned above.

But in addition to the dangerous side effects of Tamiflu, there is also growing evidence of resistance against the drug. In February, the pre-publication and preliminary findings journal called Nature Precedings published a paper on this concern, stating (15):

The dramatic rise of oseltamivir [Tamiflu] resistance in the H1N1 serotype in the 2007/2008 season and the fixing of H274Y in the 2008/2009 season has raised concerns regarding individuals at risk for seasonal influenza, as well as development of similar resistance in the H5N1 serotype [bird flu].

Previously, oseltamivir resistance produced changes in H1N1 and H3N2 at multiple positions in treated patients. In contrast, the recently reported resistance involved patients who had not recently taken oseltamivir.

It’s one more reason not to bother with this potentially dangerous drug.

And, once a specific swine flu drug is created, you can be sure that it has not had the time to be tested in clinical trials to determine safety and effectiveness, which puts us right back where I started this article — with a potential repeat of the last dangerous swine flu vaccine, which destroyed the lives of hundreds of people.

Topping the whole mess off, of course, is the fact that if the new vaccine turns out to be a killer, the pharmaceutical companies responsible are immune from lawsuits — something I’ve also warned about before on numerous occasions.

Unfortunately, those prospects won’t stop the governments of the world from mandating the vaccine — a scenario I hope we can all avoid.

How to Protect Yourself Without Dangerous Drugs and Vaccinations

For now, my point is that there are always going to be threats of flu pandemics, real or created, and there will always be potentially toxic vaccines that are peddled as the solution. But you can break free of that whole drug-solution trap by following some natural health principles.

I have not caught a flu in over two decades, and you can avoid it too, without getting vaccinated, by following these simple guidelines, which will keep your immune system in optimal working order so that you’re far less likely to acquire the infection to begin with.

Optimize your vitamin D levels. As I’ve previously reported, optimizing your vitamin D levels is one of the absolute best strategies for avoiding infections of ALL kinds, and vitamin D deficiency is likely the TRUE culprit behind the seasonality of the flu — not the flu virus itself.

This is probably the single most important and least expensive action you can take. I would STRONGLY urge you to have your vitamin D level monitored to confirm your levels are therapeutic at 50-70 ng.ml and done by a reliable vitamin D lab like Lab Corp.

For those of you in the US we hope to launch a vitamin D testing service through Lab Corp that allows you to have your vitamin D levels checked inexpensively at your local blood drawing facility and relatively inexpensively. We hope to offer this service by June 2009.

If you are coming down with flu like symptoms and have not been on vitamin D you can take doses of 50,000 units a day for three days to treat the acute infection. Some researchers like Dr. Cannell, believe the dose could even be as high as 1000 units per pound of body weight for three days.

Avoid Sugar and Processed Foods. Sugar decreases the function of your immune system almost immediately, and as you likely know, a strong immune system is key to fighting off viruses and other illness. Be aware that sugar is present in foods you may not suspect, like ketchup and fruit juice.

Get Enough Rest. Just like it becomes harder for you to get your daily tasks done if you’re tired, if your body is overly fatigued it will be harder for it to fight the flu. Be sure to check out my article Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep for some great tips to help you get quality rest.

Have Effective Tools to Address Stress. We all face some stress every day, but if stress becomes overwhelming then your body will be less able to fight off the flu and other illness.

If you feel that stress is taking a toll on your health, consider using an energy psychology tool such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which is remarkably effective in relieving stress associated with all kinds of events, from work to family to trauma. You can check out my free, 25-page EFT manual for some guidelines on how to perform EFT.

Exercise. When you exercise, you increase your circulation and your blood flow throughout your body. The components of your immune system are also better circulated, which means your immune system has a better chance of finding an illness before it spreads. You can review my exercise guidelines for some great tips on how to get started.

Take a good source of animal based omega-3 fats like Krill Oil. Increase your intake of healthy and essential fats like the omega-3 found in krill oil, which is crucial for maintaining health. It is also vitally important to avoid damaged omega-6 oils that are trans fats and in processed foods as it will seriously damage your immune response.

Wash Your Hands. Washing your hands will decrease your likelihood of spreading a virus to your nose, mouth or other people. Be sure you don’t use antibacterial soap for this — antibacterial soaps are completely unnecessary, and they cause far more harm than good. Instead, identify a simple chemical-free soap that you can switch your family to.

Eat Garlic Regularly. Garlic works like a broad-spectrum antibiotic against bacteria, virus, and protozoa in the body. And unlike with antibiotics, no resistance can be built up so it is an absolutely safe product to use. However, if you are allergic or don’t enjoy garlic it would be best to avoid as it will likely cause more harm than good.

Avoid Hospitals and Vaccines. In this particular case, I’d also recommend you stay away from hospitals unless you’re having an emergency, as hospitals are prime breeding grounds for infections of all kinds, and could be one of the likeliest places you could be exposed to this new bug. Vaccines will not be available for six months at the minimum but when available they will be ineffective and can lead to crippling paralysis like Guillain-Barré Syndrome just as it did in the 70s.

References

(1) World Health Organization, Epidemic and Pandemic Alert Response, Current WHO Phase of Pandemic Alert

(2) Welt Online, April 28, 2009

(3) News.com.au, April 27, 2009

(4) Emerging Infectious Diseases, February 2009; 15(2): 346-7

(5) Esquire, April 26, 2009

(6) CDC, Lightning-Associated Deaths 1980-1995

(7) NationMaster.com, Mortality–Lighting

(8) The Independent, April 26, 2009

(9) Reuters, April 26, 2009

(10) Associated Press, April 27, 2009

(11) Infowars.net, April 27, 2009

(12) Online Journal, April 27, 2009

(13) FredrickNewsPost.com, April 22, 2009

(14) The New York Times, April 26, 2009

(15) Nature Precedings, hdl:10101/npre.2009.2832.1, Emergence and Fixing of Antiviral Resistance in Influenza A Via Recombination and Hitch Hiking, Henry L. Niman

Israeli Spying: The Mother of all Scandals

It is interesting to see the US mainstream media which worked like a lapdog to the Israeli interests  for decades slowly turning against it.  No doubt the horrors committed by of this small country are too many and even the toothless UN condemned this country more than any other country.  It is interesting to read this chronology of the exposed Israeli spying deeds.

From whatreallyhappened.com

Once again, Israel has been caught with spies at the highest levels of the US Government.

At the heart of the investigation are two people who work at The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington. The FBI investigation, headed up by Dave Szady, has involved wiretaps, undercover surveillance and photography that CBS News was told document the passing of classified information from the mole, to the men at AIPAC, and on to the Israelis. CBS sources say that last year the suspected spy, described as a trusted analyst at the Pentagon, turned over a presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran while it was, “in the draft phase when U.S. policy-makers were still debating the policy.” This put the Israelis, according to one source, “inside the decision-making loop” so they could “try to influence the outcome.” [CBS News]

Once again Israel denies wrongdoing, or faced with incontrovertible evidence (in this case one of the spies has reportedly cooperated with the FBI) dismisses the spying with the claim that such spying is harmless, because Israel and the United States are such good friends.

Well, let us take a closer look at that idea of “harmless espionage” by recalling Israel’s most famous failed spy, Jonathan Pollard.

Jonathan Pollard is an American of Jewish descent, born in Galveston Texas, who established a career as an intelligence analyst for the US Navy. There have been many theories offered as to why Pollard decided to betray his country of birth to the Jewish state, but that Pollard did betray his country of birth to Israel is beyond all doubt. Pollard’s defense was that he did not spy so much against the United States, only that he spied for Israel, sending them documents that in his opinion the US should have shared with Israel anyway.

That it was never Pollards job to decide what documents Israel should have was apparently irrelevant. Pollard arrogated that authority to himself. From his position of trust within the US Navy, Pollard delivered over 1000 classified documents to Israel for which he was well paid. Included in those documents were the names of over 150 US agents in the Mideast, who were eventually “turned” into agents for Israel.

But by far the most egregious damage done by Pollard was to steal classified documents relating to the US Nuclear Deterrent relative to the USSR and send them to Israel. According to sources in the US State Department, Israel then turned around and traded those stolen nuclear secrets to the USSR in exchange for increased emigration quotas from the USSR to Israel. Other information that found its way from the US to Israel to the USSR resulted in the loss of American agents operating inside the USSR. Casper Weinberger, in his affidavit opposing a reduced sentence for Pollard, described the damage done to the United States thus, “[It is] difficult to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by… Pollard’s treasonous behavior.”

This should end the suggestion that Israel’s spies are harmless. They are not. The United States’ nuclear deterrent cost an estimated five trillion taxpayer dollars during the 50s and 60s to build and maintain, and less than $100,000 for Pollard to undermine. Israel waited 13 years to admit Pollard had been spying for them, and now lobbies for his release, having granted him Israeli citizenship.

Pollard is hardly the only Israeli spy operating in the United States. He just had the misfortune to get caught. Here are just a few examples of the Israeli spy operations that have been detected.

1947. Information collected by the ADL in its spy operations on US citizens is used by the House Select Committee on Unamerican Activities. Subcommittee Chair Clare Hoffman dismisses the ADL’s reports on suspected communists as “hearsay.”

1950 John Davitt, former chief of the Justice Department’s internal security section notes that the Israeli intelligence service is the second most active in the United States after the Soviets.

1954 A hidden microphone planted by the Israelis is discovered in the Office of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv.

1956 Telephone taps are found connected to two telephones in the residence of the US military attaché in Tel Aviv.

1954 “The Lavon Affair”. Israeli agents recruit Egyptian citizens of Jewish descent to bomb Western targets in Egypt, and plant evidence to frame Arabs, in an apparent attempt to upset US-Egyptian relations. Israeli defense minister Pinchas Lavon is eventually removed from office, though many think real responsibility lay with David Ben-Gurion.

1965 Israel apparently illegally obtains enriched uranium from NUMEC Corporation. (Washington Post, 6/5/86, Charles R. Babcock, “US an Intelligence Target of the Israelis, Officials Say.”)

1967 Israel attacks the USS Liberty, an intelligence gathering vessel flying a US flag, killing 34 crew members. See “Assault on the Liberty,” by James M. Ennes, Jr. (Random House). In 2004, Captain Ward Boston, Senior Legal Counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the attack swears under oath that President Lyndon Johnson ordered the investigation to conclude accident, even though the evidence indicates the attack was deliberate. Given the use by Israel of unmarked boats and planes, and the machine-gunning of USS Liberty’s lifeboats, the most likely explanation is that USS Liberty was to be sunk with all hands, with evidence left to frame Egypt for the sinking. This would have dragged the US into the war on Israel’s side.

1970 While working for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Richard Perle is caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel. Nothing is done.

1978, Stephen Bryen, then a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, is overheard in a DC hotel offering confidential documents to top Israeli military officials. Bryen obtains a lawyer, Nathan Lewin, and the case heads for the grand jury, but is mysteriously dropped. Bryen later goes to work for Richard Perle.

1979 Shin Beth [the Israeli internal security agency] tries to penetrate the US Consulate General in Jerusalem through a “Honey Trap”, using a clerical employee who was having an affair with a Jerusalem girl.

1985 The New York Times reports the FBI is aware of at least a dozen incidents in which American officials transferred classified information to the Israelis, quoting [former Assistant Director of the F.B.I.] Mr. [Raymond] Wannal. The Justice Department does not prosecute.

1985 Richard Smyth, the owner of MILCO, is indicted on charges of smuggling nuclear timing devices to Israel (Washington Post, 10/31/86).

1987 April 24 Wall Street Journal headline: “Role of Israel in Iran-Contra Scandal Won’t be Explored in Detail by Panels”

1992 The Wall Street Journal reports that Israeli agents apparently tried to steal Recon Optical Inc’s top-secret airborne spy-camera system.

1992 Stephen Bryen, caught offering confidential documents to Israel in 1978, is serving on board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs while continuing as a paid consultant — with security clearance — on exports of sensitive US technology.

1992 “The Samson Option,” by Seymour M. Hersh reports, “Illicitly obtained intelligence was flying so voluminously from LAKAM into Israeli intelligence that a special code name, JUMBO, was added to the security markings already on the documents. There were strict orders, Ari Ben-Menashe recalled: “Anything marked JUMBO was not supposed to be discussed with your American counterparts.”

1993. The ADL is caught operating a massive spying operation on critics of Israel, Arab-Americans, the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, Oakland Educational Association, NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco police. Data collected was sent to Israel and in some cases to South Africa. Pressure from Jewish organizations forces the city to drop the criminal case, but the ADL settles a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum of cash.

1995 The Defense Investigative Service circulates a memo warning US military contractors that “Israel aggressively collects [US] military and industrial technology.” The report stated that Israel obtains information using “ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and identification and exploitation of individual frailties” of US citizens.

1996 A General Accounting Office report “Defense Industrial Security: Weaknesses in US Security Arrangements With Foreign-Owned Defense Contractors” found that according to intelligence sources “Country A” (identified by intelligence sources as Israel, Washington Times, 2/22/96) “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally.” The Jerusalem Post (8/30/96) quoted the report, “Classified military information and sensitive military technologies are high-priority targets for the intelligence agencies of this country.” The report described “An espionage operation run by the intelligence organization responsible for collecting scientific and technologic information for [Israel] paid a US government employee to obtain US classified military intelligence documents.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Shawn L. Twing, April 1996) noted that this was “a reference to the 1985 arrest of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian US naval intelligence analyst who provided Israel’s LAKAM [Office of Special Tasks] espionage agency an estimated 800,000 pages of classified US intelligence information.”

The GAO report also noted that “Several citizens of [Israel] were caught in the United States stealing sensitive technology used in manufacturing artillery gun tubes.”

1996 An Office of Naval Intelligence document, “Worldwide Challenges to Naval Strike Warfare” reported that “US technology has been acquired [by China] through Israel in the form of the Lavi fighter and possibly SAM [surface-to-air] missile technology.” Jane’s Defense Weekly (2/28/96) noted that “until now, the intelligence community has not openly confirmed the transfer of US technology [via Israel] to China.” The report noted that this “represents a dramatic step forward for Chinese military aviation.” (Flight International, 3/13/96)

1997 An Army mechanical engineer, David A. Tenenbaum, “inadvertently” gives classified military information on missile systems and armored vehicles to Israeli officials (New York Times, 2/20/97).

1997 The Washington Post reports US intelligence has intercepted a conversation in which two Israeli officials had discussed the possibility of getting a confidential letter that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher had written to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. One of the Israelis, identified only as “Dov”, had commented that they may get the letter from “Mega”, the code name for Israel’s top agent inside the United States.

1997 US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, complains privately to the Israeli government about heavy-handed surveillance by Israeli intelligence agents.

1997 Israeli agents place a tap on Monica Lewinsky’s phone at the Watergate and record phone sex sessions between her and President Bill Clinton. The Ken Starr report confirms that Clinton warned Lewinsky their conversations were being taped and ended the affair. At the same time, the FBI’s hunt for “Mega” is called off.

2001 It is discovered that US drug agents’ communications have been penetrated. Suspicion falls on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis. AMDOCS generates billing data for most US phone companies and is able to provide detailed logs of who is talking to whom. Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls, but suspicion forms that Comverse, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, has built a back door into the system that is being exploited by Israeli intelligence and that the information gleaned on US drug interdiction efforts is finding its way to drug smugglers. The investigation by the FBI leads to the exposure of the largest foreign spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, operated by Israel. Half of the suspected spies have been arrested when 9-11 happens. On 9-11, 5 Israelis are arrested for dancing and cheering while the World Trade Towers collapse. Supposedly employed by Urban Moving Systems, the Israelis are caught with multiple passports and a lot of cash. Two of them are later revealed to be Mossad. As witness reports track the activity of the Israelis, it emerges that they were seen at Liberty Park at the time of the first impact, suggesting a foreknowledge of what was to come. The Israelis are interrogated, and then eventually sent back to Israel. The owner of the moving company used as a cover by the Mossad agents abandons his business and flees to Israel. The United States Government then classifies all of the evidence related to the Israeli agents and their connections to 9-11. All of this is reported to the public via a four part story on Fox News by Carl Cameron. Pressure from Jewish groups, primarily AIPAC, forces Fox News to remove the story from their website. Two hours prior to the 9-11 attacks, Odigo, an Israeli company with offices just a few blocks from the World Trade Towers, receives an advance warning via the internet. The manager of the New York Office provides the FBI with the IP address of the sender of the message, but the FBI does not follow up.

2001 The FBI is investigating 5 Israeli moving companies as possible fronts for Israeli intelligence.

2001 JDL’s Irv Rubin arrested for planning to bomb a US Congressman. He dies before he can be brought to trial.

2002 The DEA issues a report that Israeli spies, posing as art students, have been trying to penetrate US Government offices.

2002 police near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in southern Washington State stop a suspicious truck and detain two Israelis, one of whom is illegally in the United States. The two men were driving at high speed in a Ryder rental truck, which they claimed had been used to “deliver furniture.” The next day, police discovered traces of TNT and RDX military-grade plastic explosives inside the passenger cabin and on the steering wheel of the vehicle. The FBI then announces that the tests that showed explosives were “false positived” by cigarette smoke, a claim test experts say is ridiculous. Based on an alibi provided by a woman, the case is closed and the Israelis are handed over to INS to be sent back to Israel. One week later, the woman who provided the alibi vanishes.

2003 The Police Chief of Cloudcroft stops a truck speeding through a school zone. The drivers turn out to be Israelis with expired passports. Claiming to be movers, the truck contains junk furniture and several boxes. The Israelis are handed over to immigration. The contents of the boxers are not revealed to the public.

2003 Israel deploys assassination squads into other countries, including the United States. The US Government does not protest.

2004 Police near the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Tennessee stop a truck after a three mile chase, during which the driver throws a bottle containing a strange liquid from the cab. The drivers turn out to be Israelis using fake Ids. The FBI refuses to investigate and the Israelis are released.

2004 Two Israelis try to enter Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, home to eight Trident submarines. The truck tests positive for explosives.

This brings us to the present scandal. Two years into an investigation of AIPAC’s possible role as a spy front for Israel, Larry Franklin, a mid-level Pentagon Analyst is observed by the FBI giving classified information to two officials of AIPAC suspected of being Israeli spies. AIPAC hires lawyer Nathan Lewin to handle their legal defense, the same lawyer who defended suspected Israeli spy Stephen Bryen in 1978.

Larry Franklin worked in the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, run by Richard Perle, at the time Perle (who was caught giving classified information to Israel back in 1970) was insisting that Iraq was crawling with weapons of mass destruction requiring the United States to invade and conquer Iraq. There were no WMDs, of course, and Perle has dumped the blame for the “bad intelligence” on George Tenet. But what is known is that the Pentagon Office of Special Plans was coordinating with a similar group in Israel, in Ariel Sharon’s office.

With two suspected Israeli spies (at least) inside the office from which the lies that launched the war in Iraq originated, it appears that the people of the United States are the victims of a deadly hoax, a hoax that started a war.

The leaking of the investigation of AIPAC to the media on August 28th, 2004 gave advance warning to other spies working with Franklin. The damage to the FBI’s investigation was completed when United States Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered the FBI to stop all arrests in the case. Like the Stephen Bryen case and the hunt for “Mega”, this latest spy scandal seems destined to be buried by officials who have their own secret allegiances to protect, barring a massive public outcry.

The organization at the heart of the latest spy investigation, AIPAC, wields tremendous influence over the US Congress. Through its members and affiliated PACs, AIPAC directs a huge flow of campaign cash in favor of, and occasionally against, Senators and Representatives solely on the basis of their willingness to support Israel. As an example, in 2002, U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham received so much help from pro-Israeli pacs that 76% of his campaign budget came from OUTSIDE the state of Alabama, mostly from New York.

Let me repeat that. A Congressman AIPAC wanted elected received more money from pro-Israel groups outside his state than from his own constituents inside his state. Who is that Congressman going to be thinking of when he votes in Congress?

So here is the mother of all scandals.

For two years, the FBI has suspected AIPAC of spying for a foreign country, and for those two years (and for decades before) that group suspected of spying for Israel has been reshaping the US Congress for the benefit of a foreign government.

And THAT is the mother of all scandals.

Think about that as billions of your tax dollars flow to Israel while your roads and schools crumble and decay and services are cut.

Think about that as the coffins come home with your loved ones inside.

Think about that when you and a million of your fellow citizens march down the streets of America opposing wars built on lies and deceptions and wonder why the government just doesn’t want to listen to you any more.

How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street.

Fascinating and Honest story of average american  called Michael Osinski  who wrote the software for packaging the mortgages to bonds. Great read

—

My Manhattan Project from new york magazine

I have been called the devil by strangers and “the Facilitator” by friends. It’s not uncommon for people, when I tell them what I used to do, to ask if I feel guilty. I do, somewhat, and it nags at me. When I put it out of mind, it inevitably resurfaces, like a shipwreck at low tide. It’s been eight years since I compiled a program, but the last one lived on, becoming the industry standard that seeded itself into every investment bank in the world.

I wrote the software that turned mortgages into bonds.
more ..

The mobile phone as self-inflicted surveillance

And if you don’t have one, what have you got to hide?

Like the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel, mobile phones leave a trail wherever they go. Practically everybody can be tracked via this trail, and the beauty of it all is, we’re effectively tracking ourselves.

By design, phones pass their location on to local base stations. You can gauge how effectively the networks can track you by requesting your personal information from your network provider using a data subject access under the Data Protection Act, or by just running Google Mobile Maps on your phone. The smaller 3G cells in central London give an even better location than on GSM.

Mobile phone penetration in Europe reached an average of 111.26 per cent in 2007 according to ITU estimates, while in the UK it was 118.47 per cent. We love them so much that we are more likely to leave our wallet at home than our mobile.

The location breadcrumbs from these, along with other communication traffic data, are kept as part of a mass surveillance operation affecting everyone. They are collected by the networks, retained for a year, and handed over to the police and other bodies on request.

Professor Steve Peers, of the University of Essex and Statewatch, points out that although the system is incredibly sweeping, it doesn’t stigmatise anyone because every phone call is going to be subject to this.
It’s no longer just the individuals who are suspect of, or connected to, or convicted of a crime who are subject to some sort of additional surveillance beyond which they would traditionally have been subjected to. As regards to data retention, as regards to fingerprints, as regards to passenger records, it’s everyone or a very large percentage of the population subject to the hoovering of that information.
This is cogent analysis. Mobile phones and email are used by everyone, including terrorists and other criminals. The data can be instrumental in tracking down criminals, with the caveat that having a bigger haystack does not make it easier to find a needle. But it misses one perverse effect – those who will be stigmatised in the future are those who don’t have traffic data retained.

Lack of traffic data is what becomes suspicious. There are already two documented cases in Europe where not carrying a mobile phone was considered one of the grounds for arrest.

On 31st July 2007, in Brandenburg and Berlin, Germany, the flats and workplaces of Dr. Andrej Holm and Dr. Matthias B., as well as of two other persons, were searched by the police. All four were charged with “membership of a terrorist association” and are alleged to be members of a so-called ‘militante gruppe’ (mg):

According to the arrest warrant against Andrej Holm, the charge against the four individuals was justified on the following grounds:
- Dr. Matthias B. is alleged to have used, in his academic publications, “phrases and key words” which are also used by the ‘militante gruppe’;

[...]

- The fact that he – allegedly intentionally – did not take his mobile phone with him to a meeting is considered as “conspiratorial behavior”.
On 11th November 2008, 150 French anti-terrorist police officers swooped on the 330-inhabitant village of Tarnac to arrest four men and five women aged 22 to 34, since nicknamed the ‘Tarnac Nine’. These ‘brilliant students’ were living in a farm and ran a grocery store. All but one have been released. They were accused of “criminal association connected to a terrorist enterprise”. French Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie (MAM) was in the news soon after:
The Interior Minister is convinced of having saved France by nipping a revolution in the bud. For MAM, the defendants are the seed of Action Directe.

“They have adopted the method of clandestinity. They never use a mobile phone. They managed to have, in the village of Tarnac, friendly relations with people who could warn them of the presence of strangers,” said the minister.

In the village, people laugh at this statement. One of the defendants rented an apartment above the town hall. “Is it a clandestine method?”, asks Jean-Michel, who goes on: “Can one be labelled terrorist because he does not have a mobile phone?”. Here, mobile reception is poor.
Mass surveillance of the rest of us is becoming even more pervasive. The UK started transposing the European directive on retaining data generated through electronic communications or public communications networks (European Directive 2006/24/EC) with the Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2007. These came into force on 1st October 2007 and require service providers to retain fixed and mobile telephony traffic data of everyone’s calls and SMS and MMS for one year and hand it over on request.

More than 650 public authorities can lawfully obtain communications data, including intelligence and law enforcement agencies, emergency services and other public authorities, such as the Financial Services Authority, local councils and the Home Office’s UK Border Agency.

These regulations were superseded this week (on 6th April 2009), by the 2009 Regulations eventually completing the implementation of the European directive by adding the requirement to retain Internet access, email and Internet telephony traffic data as well.

What has to be retained in all cases is data necessary to trace and identify the source and destination of a communication and to identify the date, time and duration, and the communication’s type. For mobile telephony and for Internet access, email and telephony, there’s also a requirement to retain data necessary to identify users’ communication equipment (or what purports to be their equipment) and the location of mobile communication equipment. The detail of exactly what needs to be retained has been regrouped in an easy to read list in a schedule to the Statutory Instrument (S.I.).

Earlier this year, Sir David Omand, a former Cabinet Office security and intelligence coordinator, gave a clear indication of what some in Whitehall have on their wish-list:
[A]pplication of modern data mining and processing techniques does involve examination of the innocent as well as the suspect to identify patterns of interest for further investigation.[...] Finding out other people’s secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules. So public trust in the essential reasonableness of UK police, security and intelligence agency activity will continue to be essential.
One extension to the traffic data retention guidelines that fits within this agenda is the building of a massive central silo for all UK communications data. Another is the e-Borders database (in pilot schemes, 0.0035 per cent of people screened were arrested); the location of your mobile phone had better match the country you declared you would be in.

Professor Steve Peers offers a glimmer of hope:
What is the relevance of [the European Court of Human Rights DNA database ruling] Marper to that? To what extent can it regulate or stop what is clearly an ongoing development?

Marper is very relevant if it rules out the sweeping collection of personal data regardless of the stigmatisation factor and regardless of the UK factor (the distinction between the UK and the rest of the Council of Europe countries). If we ignore these factors and say what is wrong here is purely sweeping collection of personal data, then this is a very significant judgement. Then it’s profoundly important. It really stands in the way of what we’re already doing across Europe, not just in the UK.
Of course the ruling may be interpreted to have no relevance outside its application to the retention of DNA and fingerprints. Then Sir David Omand’s national security strategy may be further implemented and carrying a mobile phone – an electronic tag – could become a necessity, if you don’t want people to think you have something to hide.

David Mery is a scribbler and technologist based in London. Two years ago he was one of 64 who asked the Metropolitan Police to have their DNA samples destroyed, and DNA profiles and associated records purged. His request was one of 18 that were deemed exceptional enough to be granted. His website is gizmonaut.net.

CDC: Rocket fuel chemical found in baby formula

from  Yahoo News

ATLANTA – Traces of a chemical used in rocket fuel were found in samples of powdered baby formula, and could exceed what’s considered a safe dose for adults if mixed with water also contaminated with the The study by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked for the chemical, perchlorate, in different brands of powdered baby formula. It was published last month, but the Environmental Working Group — a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization — issued a press release Thursday drawing attention to it.

The chemical has turned up in several cities’ drinking water supplies. It can occur naturally, but most perchlorate contamination has been tied to defense and aerospace sites.

No tests have ever shown the chemical caused health problems, but scientists have said significant amounts of perchlorate can affect thyroid function. The thyroid helps set the body’s metabolism. Thyroid problems can impact fetal and infant brain development.

However, the extent of the risk is hard to assess. The government requires that formula contain iodine, which counteracts perchlorate’s effects. The size of the infant and how much formula they consume are other factors that can influence risk.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, aware of the debate over perchlorate in food and water, has not recommended that people alter their diet or eating habits because of the chemical.

The study itself sheds little light on how dangerous the perchlorate in baby formula is. “This wasn’t a study of health effects,” said Dr. Joshua Schier, one of the authors.

The largest amounts of the chemical were in formulas derived from cow’s milk, the study said.

The researchers would not disclose the brands of formula they studied. Only a few samples were studied, so it’s hard to know if the perchlorate levels would be found in all containers of those brands, a CDC spokesman said.

“This study provides no data on potential health effects of perchlorate. Health authorities continue to emphasize that infant formula is safe,” said Haley Curtis Stevens of the International Formula Council, which represent formula manufacturers.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it was considering setting new limits on the amount of perchlorate that would be acceptable in drinking water. A few states have already set their own limits.

The EPA has checked nearly 4,000 public water supplies serving 10,000 people or more. About 160 of the water systems had detectable levels of perchlorate, and 31 had levels high enough to exceed a new safety level the EPA is considering.

March 2009 in Review: Connecting the Dots : Economy, Bailouts, New World Order, Weather

 So Many events , so much  BRAVE NEW  NAKED LOOTING  of the millions of americans and billions of people of this planet , Even the wealthy is not being spared by the top 1% of the wealthiest american.  even   FDIC is  now in  red Zone.   Obama’s Honey moon period seems to have   blinded the people to sleepy dream of hope that  some day some thing will happen  to change every thing.  “Tame the Beast until it becomes the All taking care , wealthy loving king “. is it not the message  that ingrained in our young minds from our all  loving the  disney  which is the one of the 6 companies that control the every form of information on this planet. 

         This is the only article that  connects all the events of  month , New world order , economy , New currency rumours,  weather, new drum beating against the Iran, Israel new govt. with decade’s old  brutal policies,  earth quakes,  volcanic erruptions,  asteroids, sun cycles,

 Read ..

Connecting the Dots: Come join the New World Order! Pull some strings for Israel! But ignore those lights in the sky!