Crimes of the State

OUTRIGHT INSANITY: Bio-weapons research endangers the planet.

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:45:00 +0000

[ Editor's Note: Plead with them to stop this madness. Lock up all samples of potentially catastrophic flu. Prosecute those who have been illegally engaging in biological weapons production. These bugs can kill BILLIONS of human beings.]

The history of the synthetic H1N1 flu virus and a not-so-rosy future
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

May 21, 2009, 00:20

(WMR) -- The history of the extraction of the genetic material from the corpses of victims of the 1918 Spanish influenza virus who were buried in Arctic permafrost is part �X-Files� and part �Jurassic Park.�

After an unsuccessful 1951 mission, that involved U.S. biological warfare specialists, to extract 1918 Spanish flu genetic material in 1951 from a cemetery in the Inupiat Eskimo village of Brevig Mission, Alaska, scientists made another attempt, a successful one it turns out, in 1997.

Dr. Johan Hultin, from the State University of Iowa, successfully extracted genetic material from the corpse of an obese 30-something female who died from the Spanish flu in 1918, along with 85 percent of Brevig Mission�s (called Teller Mission in 1918) villagers in a single week. The pandemic killed at least 50 million people around the world.

Once the Spanish flu genetic material was obtained from the lungs, spleen, liver, and heart of the Eskimo woman�s corpse, scientists, in a scene reminiscent of the fictional movie �Jurassic Park,� in which genetic material from extinct dinosaurs is used to bring the creatures back to life, recreated the long-since dead 1918 Spanish flu in a U.S. government-funded laboratory. The woman�s organs were cut into one-inch cubes and shipped to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland, where the virus�s genetic RNA material was identified and the 1918 Spanish flu was successfully brought back to life.

The search for the frozen bodies of 1918 flu victims was not limited to Alaska. Another team of scientists, acting like Dr. Frankenstein�s �Igor,� set out to dig up the graves of miners who died from the flu in the remote Norwegian mining village of Longyearbyen in Spitsbergen, which lies north of the Arctic Circle.

WMR has learned from a research scientist who has been working on the recreation of the 1918 flu that the genetic material has been re-engineered to synthetically create what is now known as the A/H1N1 virus, or as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calls it, the �novel flu.�

The A/H1N1 influenza, which contains genetic material from two strains of swine flu, two strains of human flu, and a single strain of avian flu, has, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), infected, as of May 13, a total of 4,880 people in North America: 2,059 in Mexico; 2,535 in the United States, and 286 in Canada. There have been 56 reported deaths from the flu in Mexico, three in the United States, and one in Canada.

WMR has learned from an A/H1N1 researcher that the current �novel� flu strain is mutating rapidly in humans but no animals have contracted the virus. The enzyme in A/H1N1, as with all influenza A viruses, is called a polymerase. Scientists have calculated the molecular clock of A/H1N1 form the virus�s polymerase rate. Because of the rapid mutation of the virus and the fact that, unlike 1918, rapid global transportation is now the norm, scientists are predicting that the molecular clock of the A/H1N1 virus, coupled with modern transportation, means that almost all the countries of the world will experience an A/H1N1 outbreak within the next few months.

What is different about A/H1N1 is that, unlike other new strains of viruses that rapidly mutate upon emerging and then slow down mutation and then stop entirely, the �novel� or incorrectly-named �swine flu� is showing no signs yet of slowing down its mutation rate and that, according to scientists who worry about A/H1N1 being synthetically-generated, does not happen in nature.

In 2006, at a summit meeting in Cancun, Mexico, President George W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Mexican President Vicente Fox agreed for their nations to coordinate their response to avian flu, which was spreading in Asia. National Public Radio, on April 2, 2006, ran a segment on how bird flu wreaked havoc in 1918 in Brevig Mission. NPR�s Weekend Edition ran a report from Brevig Mission by Lori Townsend of Alaska Public Radio: �The grave has been opened twice by the same pathologist. In 1951, Johann Hultin convinced village elders to allow him to take tissue samples from bodies buried in permafrost. His lab attempts to map the virus were unsuccessful, but he returned in 1997, and when he did, he was once again given permission to re-open the grave.�

WMR has learned from a journalist from Anchorage who covered the 1997 grave exhumation that there was CIA personnel with the team of scientists. Inuit elders of Brevig Mission argued that digging up the graves of the flu victims would release evil spirits. However, money allegedly changed hands between the U.S. government research team and some of the elders, so permission to dig up the graves was granted.

NPR and Alaska Public Radio was reporting what was extracted from the 1918 flu victim�s corpse was the H5N1 avian flu virus, but that was erroneous. Or was it? If what was extracted from the dead woman�s body in Brevig Mission was used to synthetically create the current A/H1N1 virus, there is a strain of avian flu in the virus. But the current A/H1N1 virus also contains swine and human flu strains.

What has been relayed by the researcher is that the original 1918 virus was the H1N1 virus. In Bio-safety level 3 (BSL-s) laboratory work that was largely classified, the virus was artificially combined with common H3N2 and a minor gene splice from the H5N1 Eurasian avian flu strain.

The avian flu or H5N1 virus that struck Asia in 2006 contained some genetic mutations of the 1918 virus. And scientists researching pandemic flu strains have, since the recreation of the 1918 flu, been playing fast and loose with flu samples. On April 17, 2005, The Washington Post reported that Meridian Bioscience, which was under contract to the College of American Pathologists, accidentally distributed the pandemic H2N2/Japan flu strain, as part of a flu testing kit, to influenza laboratories around the world. WHO ordered the labs to immediately destroy the flu sample because it was worried about an accidental release of the pandemic virus, resulting in a global health crisis. In 1957, H2N2 killed a million people around the world.

The Post�s article, by Wendy Orent, states that scientists were working to create an artificial strain of the 1918 virus: �[Scientists] can combine some 1918 genes either with laboratory strains that have been adapted to grow in mice, which don�t normally catch human flu, or with ordinary human flu strains to yield new artificial strains. Then the researcher infects mice with his new strain. Strains using three of the 1918 genes are already known to kill mice.�

The same Post article quotes Peter B. Jahrling, the chief scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about the danger of the virus recreation research. Jahrling stated the research was like �looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.� The article continues: �What concerns Jahrling and Brown, among others, is that experiments involving 1918 genes are not being carried out under the highest biosafety level, BSL-4. While most of the scientists use what is known as BSL-3 plus, or enhanced, conditions, they do not use space suits, chemical showers or gas-tight cabinets in their work.�

Lastly, the article has a stark warning regarding the 1918 flu reconstruction at the military laboratory in Rockville, research led by Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger. The article states: �Even more disturbing is what may happen when Taubenberger publishes the remaining three gene sequences. Then the entire 1918 flu could be built from scratch by anyone, anywhere, who has sufficient resources and skill. It is quite conceivable that resurrected 1918 flu could someday be used as a bioterrorist agent.�

In a January 29, 2006, New York Times article by Jamie Shreeve, titled �Why Revive a Deadly Flu Virus?,� it is reported that the 1918 flu had been successfully revived. The article states: �In October, a team of scientists, [CDC�s Terrence] Tumpey among them, announced that they had recreated the extinct organism from its genetic code -- essentially the scenario played out in the movie ��Jurassic Park,�� albeit on a microbial scale. In the movie, the scientists� self-serving revivification of dinosaurs leads to mayhem and death . . . How dangerous is the 1918 virus to today�s population? Its genetic code is now in public databases, where other researchers can download it to conduct experiments. Scientists from the University of Wisconsin and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada have already collaborated to reconstruct the virus from the publicly available sequence. How easy would it be for a bioterrorist to exploit the same information for malevolent ends?�

The article details how the 1918 genetic material was extracted and who worked on the project: �The resurrection of the 1918 influenza virus was a team effort engaging the resources of the C.D.C. in Atlanta, an obscure military pathology lab outside Washington, D.C., an esteemed group of influenza experts at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and one elderly Swede. Though the story has been told before, it is impossible not to begin with the Swede. In 1950, Johan Hultin, then a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of Iowa, was searching for a Ph.D. topic when he heard a visiting virologist say that the only way to solve the mystery of the 1918 pandemic would be to recover the virus from a victim who had been buried in permafrost.�

There has been yet another secretive U.S. government group involved in researching bio-warfare agents like influenza. Known simply as JASON, the group consists of civilian scientists, the top experts in their fields and a number of Nobel laureates, who meet periodically and issue reports, many of which are classified. JASON has been in existence for 40 years and is thought to be a follow-on to the Manhattan Project, the top secret scientific group that created the atomic bomb during World War II. In fact, some of JASON�s earliest members helped to design both the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Its first three members were scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the home of the Manhattan Project.

Operating under the aegis of the MITRE Corporation, a federally-funded contracting entity, JASON scientists primarily met in the highly-secured Building 29 at 3550 General Atomics Court in San Diego. The location is the address of the Torrey Pines Institute. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), JASON also has links, according to distribution lists on JASON reports, to the CIA. The CIA maintains an element called the IC [Intelligence Community] JASON Program under the Chief Technical Officer. Traditionally, JASON self-selects its members from a number of academic disciplines. However, JASON almost lost its funding a few years ago, when, after issuing a report critical of the Bush administration�s ballistic missile defense program, DARPA attempted to force three new members, obviously political overseers, on to the JASON membership rolls. DARPA�s chief, Tony Tether, pulled funding for JASON, forcing the group for the first time since its inception in 1959 to look for another Pentagon sponsor. The ballistic missile defense program, also called Star Wars II, was a personal pet project of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

JASON survived when DARPA�s parent orgzniation, the Pentagon�s Directorate for Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E), provided JASON with direct funding, an indication of the power enjoyed by the secretive JASON organization. JASON also has other federal government sponsors, including the Department of Energy.

JASON is also very much involved in issues of biological warfare. JASON produced a report on Civilian Biodefense in January 2000, which was highly redacted when released. Even the names of the report�s authors and the information on four bio-warfare scenarios is completely blacked out, except for a discussion of a 1947 smallpox incident in Scenario Two. The report also states that the CIA�s Clandestine Measurement and Signatures Intelligence (MASINT) Operations Center and Counter-Proliferation Center were interested in biological weapons intelligence collection and signatures. A section of the report on �Managing Civilian Response� to a bio-war attack is also completely redacted, as is a section on domestic intelligence. A page on the anthrax threat references �psychological BW [biological weapons] warfare.� The JASON report was completed almost two years before anthrax attacks all but suspended the work of Congress after 9/11 and saw the quick passage of the USAPATRIOT Act.

The JASON report also discusses the mining of medical data, including patient billing records, to find out if a disease outbreak has occurred and how far and what direction it is spreading by examining �spatiotemporal patterns,� including �averaging statistics for humans traveling globally.�

In fact, the JASON Civilian Biodefense report mirrors, in many respects, the analysis being currently conducted by medical intelligence (MEDINT) agencies around the world on the outbreak and spread of A/H1N1. And that begs the question: is A/H1N1, artificially-developed by U.S. government scientists, the real thing or a test run for something much worse?

SIDEBAR:

The JASON report on bio-war discusses �managing civilian response.� That also appears be a major concern of the CDC on A/H1N1 at the present time judging from the following internal CDC memo obtained by WMR (note that �swine flu� is being referred to as the �novel H1N1 flu�):

From: CDC Announcements
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2009 10:31 AM
To: CDC All - [REDACTED]

Subject: Public Inquires Regarding Novel H1N1 Flu � CDC-INFO

Public Inquires Regarding Novel H1N1 Flu � CDC-INFO

The CDC National Contact Center, CDC-INFO, is available to assist CDC programs in responding to calls and emails related to the novel H1N1 flu. CDC-INFO maintains current content for phone and email responses; maintains records of calls/emails; collects and analyzes quality assurance and customer satisfaction data; and provides on-demand reports for program partners.

If the general public is contacting you with questions related to the novel H1N1 outbreak, we encourage you to direct those inquires you receive to CDC-INFO. CDC-INFO representatives are available to respond to inquiries 24 hours, 7 days a week via email and phone, in English and Spanish. Emails should be forwarded to cdcinfo@cdc.gov. Telephone inquiries may be routed to 1-800-CDC-INFO (1-800-232-4636).

If you have any questions regarding this email, or for assistance in routing public inquiries, please contact eocjiccdcinfo@cdc.gov.

CDC-INFO�s Novel H1N1 Flu Response

Since April 22, 2009, CDC-INFO has answered more than 29,000 phone and email inquiries from the general public and health care professionals in support of CDC�s novel H1N1 flu response. As of Friday, May 8, 2009, the average hold time for phone calls related to novel H1N1 flu was less than 5 seconds. To date, the states with the highest number of phone inquiries are: California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Georgia.

On Thursday, April 30, 2009, CDC-INFO answered the highest number of inquiries on a single topic in its 4-year history, with 3,127 calls and emails answered related to the novel H1N1 outbreak.

As of May 5, 2009, 75 percent of survey respondents gave CDC-INFO their highest satisfaction rating for the novel H1N1 flu-related services they received.

Supporting CDC�s Mission

The CDC-INFO National Contact Center (1800-CDC-INFO or cdcinfo@cdc.gov) supports CDC�s mission by providing a single trusted source of accurate, timely, consistent, and science-based information for the general public, healthcare providers and public health partners. Information is available on more than 400 CDC health and safety topics, disease prevention, and health promotion information through phone, TTY, and email. CDC-INFO provides critical health information to vulnerable populations, including those without access to CDC�s internet resources or those with low health literacy.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

...a ‘war on terrorism’ red herring

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:07:00 +0000

‘What Pelosi knew’ is a ‘war on terrorism’ red herring

By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor

May 20, 2009, 00:19

A red herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is used to divert attention from the original issue. The furor over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s knowledge of the Bush/Cheney administration’s use of torture is the latest Washington noise that conveniently diverts attention from the illegitimate “war on terrorism” that continues to serve as the justification for torture, murder and war.

Nancy’s clumsy tap dance

In a series of bumbling statements, Pelosi has denied her knowledge of the extent of the Bush/Cheney administration’s use of torture and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Pelosi admits that she was aware, as early as September 2002, that “enhanced interrogation” techniques were being explored by the Bush/Cheney’s Office of Legal Counsel as legal options, but that she was not told that they were being used. A timeline from the CIA and statements from well-placed (but unnamed) Democratic Party sources refute Pelosi’s claim.

In response, Pelosi accused the CIA of lying about the degree of her knowledge, and covering up the fact that torture was already being used without congressional input. She admitted that, as House speaker, she learned in February 2003 that “certain techniques,” including waterboarding, were being used, and that Congresswoman Jane Harman, Pelosi’s replacement as senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee sent, a letter to the CIA’s general counsel with her support.

Essentially, Pelosi passed the buck to Harman, who was the “appropriate person to register a protest,” but did nothing else.

The Harman letter

But Harman’s letter to CIA General Counsel Scott Muller contains no language calling on Bush/Cheney/CIA to cease and desist using torture. It is not a protest, but more of a fawning caress that underscores the full support she and fellow Democrats have continuously lavished upon Bush/Cheney and the CIA.

Jane Harman-letter to CIA General Counsel Scott Muller (February 10, 2003)

In the letter, Harman states that she “realizes” that “we are at a time when the balance between security and liberty must be constantly evaluated and recalibrated in order to protect our nation and its people from catastrophic terrorist attack.” Obviously here, Harman is an enthusiastic proponent of the fabricated pretext of 9/11, and the bogus “war on terrorism.”

Then Harman oozes that she “appreciates the obvious effort” that the CIA made to “address tough questions,” stating that Bush/Cheney lawyers had already assured those who attended the classified briefing (including Pelosi) that the torture methods were within the law, approved by the attorney general, and extensively reviewed by the appropriate lawyers at the CIA, the Justice Department and the National Security Council.

Harman merely asks the CIA general counsel if the senior levels of Bush/Cheney had determined that “the practices” are “consistent with the principles and policies of the United States,” and politely asks what “policy reviews” had taken place.

In fact, Harman’s letter suggests that she was more immediately concerned with how to stage-manage the CIA’s plan to destroy tapes of the capture of alleged terrorist Abu-Zubaydah than with torture. Harman urges the CIA to reconsider the destruction of the Abu-Zubaydah tapes, in order to prevent a political scandal: “The fact of destruction would reflect badly on the Agency.”

In other words, the Harman/Pelosi position, the overriding bipartisan consensus position shared by the majority of Washington’s functionaries, is that there was no problem with torture, as long as sufficient cover had been created for it, and the appropriate parties have concocted the appropriate legal opinions to justify it. As long as everyone’s rear ends were covered, torture gets the green light.

Pelosi’s own words at her recent news conference further bear this out: “We were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used. What they did tell us is that they had some . . . Office of Legal Counsel opinions, that they could be used, but not that they would.”

This fallback position itself is damning enough. Torture is the definition of barbarity, an atrocity that goes against moral and ethical laws stretching back to the beginning of human history. It is impossible for Nancy Pelosi, or any coherent human being on the planet, not to know this.

Yet, upon first learning that Bush/Cheney/CIA were “exploring” torture, Pelosi did nothing. She expressed no outrage, expended none of her extensive political power to oppose or stop any of it. Then, one full year later, she again did nothing, except pass the buck to Jane Harman, whose letter, in fact, adds to the evidence of their complicity.

And now, after years of silence, Pelosi supports a “truth commission,” and only because she is under fire.

Republicans and Bush/Cheney apologists, who are themselves directly responsible for all of the worst atrocities and war crimes, have accused Pelosi and other Democrats of only expressing outrage about torture when it became politically expedient to do so, while aggressively pushing “anti-terrorism” when mass fear makes it popular to do so. This accusation is politically on target, if transparently hypocritical.

It is also another crop of red herrings.

The ironclad bipartisan consensus

What must be realized, however, is that the political theater surrounding Pelosi distracts from the larger crime: the Washington “war on terrorism” consensus that continues to provide the pretext for the US government to commit torture, and other atrocities, within US borders and around the world.

The “war on terrorism” is a product of an elite bipartisan consensus deception, supported and nurtured equally by Republicans and Democrats. The “war on terrorism,” itself, is a massive fabrication and cover-up built entirely upon the false-flag operation of 9/11, resting squarely on the perpetual threat of an outside enemy.

The endless criminal abominations begun by Bush/Cheney -- from the USAPATRIOT Act to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and throughout the world, illegal surveillance, militarization, and torture -- continue under the management of the equally deceptive, equally criminal Obama administration, and Nancy Pelosi.

The Obama administration and the Democratic Party leadership continues to block torture investigations, while deepening and expanding the “war on terrorism” across Central Asia, continuing a host of other Bush/Cheney atrocities, such as military tribunals, illegal surveillance, and covert operations.

The “war on terrorism” continues unabated. Therefore, so will torture and the false confessions needed to keep it all going.

It is no surprise, then, that the same Nancy Pelosi who has almost singlehandedly prevented investigations and prosecutions of the Bush/Cheney administration (taking it “off the table” years ago), also goes along with the idea of “legal” torture.
Of course, Pelosi knows.

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PRESIDENT OF PAKISTAN: Osama bin Laden was US operator

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:18:00 +0000

ALSO: Bin Laden dead for "seven years."

"I've asked my counterparts in the American intelligence agencies and they have not heard of him [Osama bin Laden] since seven years."

Osama bin Laden was US operator: President Asif Ali Zardari

By Arun Kumar

May 11, 2009 "New Karala" -- Washington, May 11 : Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has alleged that elusive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was a US operator who had tried to destabilise his late wife Benazir Bhutto's government back in 1989.

In fact, as premier Bhutto had "warned America about Osama bin Laden in 1989 with a call to then US president George H. Bush", Zardari said on NBC's Meet the Press programme Sunday.

"She rang senior Bush and asked of him: 'Are you destabilizing my government?' because he (apparently referring to bin Laden) paid the then opposition $10 million to overthrow the first woman elected (prime minister) in an Islamic country," Zardari added.

"So, we knew that he was your operator," said Zardari responding to a question about bin Laden's whereabouts.

"You'll have been there (in Afghanistan) for eight years. (So) you tell me. You lost him in Tora Bora, I didn't, I was in prison," he countered when asked where bin Laden was before hurling the allegation at Washington.

Asked if Pakistan was actively looking for bin Laden, Zardari replied: "The world is looking for him and we are part of the world look-out brigade."

Zardari also reiterated his belief that bin Laden is dead. "I have a strong feeling and I have reason to believe that because I've asked my counterparts in the American intelligence agencies and they have not heard of him since seven years."

--- IANS

Argument: Propaganda Rising to a War Cirme

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:38:00 +0000

Well this seems to be in part a response to me...

"By Shenonymous, May 6 at 4:41 pm #

When an erosion of freedom of speech begins with any ban, unless it is sedition to overthrow a government, banning anyone for political sentiments will eventually erode your own freedoms, make no mistake about it."

So Thomas Jefferson should have been punished for saying that revolution is a good thing every twenty years or so?

"It is the slipperiest slope imaginable. It is pernicious. That is the nature of fascism. Fascism can occur on the right as well as the fanatical left."

Okay. I don't see how any of that is relevant to what I said.

What I was referring to, context, was incitement to violence: mass murder. This has been acknowledged as constituting war crimes, such as when the result is genocide.

"Savage was not in any way suppressing any one else’s freedom."

Wasn't he? That's a (mindless) blanket defense of a long and stained career. [And irrelevant to what I said, of course. Can you at least try and keep it on point?]

"You who call for limiting Savage’s speech, and travel rights, regardless of how despicable his opinions are, would not censure the Islamists who are calling for the UN via a resolution to outlaw criticism of violent practices in the name of their religion, would you?!"

First of all, I haven't "called" for whatever it is you are saying. That a distracting misrepresentation of what I said.

I said he should be INVESTIGATED FOR WAR CRIMES. War crimes, as we well know, are not actually prosecutable if the person committing them is American, or Israeli apparently. An American Zionist like Savage is in the most priviledged and protected category on earth at the present time.

My position is that people like Yoo, Cheney, Bush, Rummy, Gonzales, et al ad nauseum -- and Savage -- shouldn't be worried about travelling anywhere at all. Their travel arrangements should long ago have been made for them, and they should be sitting in a dock being read extensive lists of war crimes charges.

It's obvious that war crimes prosecutions are only meant for the losers in any given conflict. The victors are spared nuisances like following international law.

"One wonders just how many listen to Savage’s vitriolic broadcasts, and what kind of people they are anyway? Who exactly did Savage incite to violence against Muslims?"

That would be a matter for the court to present. The US has been at war with Muslims for eight years now. The bodies are piling up quite high. Did that elude you?

"This is a claim without any substance."

Propagandists call for people to join the military and go kill the selected enemy. People listening are influenced to do so. They go over and murder the enemy as instructed. There's a case to be examined.

"Free speech" does not protect gangsters who order hits on their rivals. Free speech has numerous limitations regarding "terroristic threats," "coercion," "blackmail" etc. Telling people to commit a crime could land you in prison for "conspiracy." These are standard, rock solid legal principles.

If the same standards were applied to monsters like Goebbels and Savage, there is a case to be made that inciting war is criminal. War is criminal. The Iraq War was clearly a crime (admitted by the head of the United Nations).

You may not agree with the rationale, but this is certainly not a "claim without any substance."

"In 1946, Julius Streicher, the Editor of Der Sturmer, an anti-Semitic paper, was sentenced to hang by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal for Nazi War Crimes. In sentencing him, the tribunal gave as cause the evidence that “with knowledge of the extermination of the Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territory, this defendant continued to write and publish his propaganda of death.” Streicher was convicted of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. His partner in media crimes, Joseph Goebbels, managed to avoid a similar sentence by committing suicide after first killing his wife and children. "-LINK

"According to prosecutors of the United Nations war crimes tribunal for Rwanda, the answer to both questions is a forceful yes. The three men in the dock, all former Rwandan news media executives, stand accused of genocide and incitement to genocide through their use of radio broadcasts and newspapers. " -LINK

Just because you've never thought about these matters before does not mean that others have not. That's a "permicious" variety of myopia.

http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/

FBI TRANSLATOR SIBEL EDMONDS: OPEN CRIMINALITY, STILL...

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:09:00 +0000

[SEE ALSO: Previously from Sibel Edmonds]

In Congress We Trust...Not

The former FBI translator and whistleblower suggests blackmail may be at the heart of Congressional refusal to bring accountability and oversight to its own members - such as both Hastert and Harman - in matters of espionage and national security

Guest Editorial by Sibel Edmonds
Exclusive to The BRAD BLOG...

May 05, 2009 "Brad Blog" -- -I have been known to quote long-dead men in my past writings. Whether eloquently expressed thoughts by our founding fathers, or those artfully expressed by ancient Greek thinkers, these quotes have always done a better job starting or ending my thoughts - that tend to be expressed in long winding sentences. For this piece I am going to break with tradition and start with an appropriate quote from a living current senator, John Kerry: "It's a sad day when you have members of Congress who are literally criminals go undisciplined by their colleagues. No wonder people look at Washington and know this city is broken."

The people do indeed look at Washington and know that this city is 'badly' broken, Senator Kerry. The public confidence in our Congress has been declining drastically. Recent poll results highlight how the American people's trust in their Congress has hit rock bottom. A survey of progressive blogs easily confirms the rage rightfully directed at our Congress for abdicating its role of oversight and accountability. Activists scream about promised hearings that never took place - without explanation. They express outrage when investigations are dropped without any justification. And they genuinely wonder out loud why, especially after they helped secure a major victory for the Democrats. The same Democrats who had for years pointed fingers at their big bad Republican majority colleagues as the main impediment preventing them from fulfilling what was expected of them.

The recent stunning but not unexpected revelations regarding Jane Harman (D-CA) by the Congressional Quarterly provide us with a little glimpse into one of the main reasons behind the steady decline in the integrity of Congress. But the story is almost dead - ready to bite the dust, thanks to our mainstream media's insistence on burying 'real' issues or stories that delve deep into the causes of our nation's continuous downward slide. In this particular case, the 'thank you' should also be extended to certain blogosphere propagandists who, blinded by their partisanship, myopic in their assessments, and ignorant in their knowledge of the inner workings of our late Congress and intelligence agencies, helped in the post-burial cremation of this case.

Ironically but understandably, the Harman case has become one of rare unequivocal bipartisanship, when no one from either side of the partisan aisle utters a word. How many House or Senate Republicans have you heard screaming, or even better, calling for an investigation? The right wing remains silent. Some may have their hand, directly or indirectly, in the same AIPAC cookie jar. Others may still feel the heavy baggage of their own party's tainted colleagues; after all, they have had their share of Abramoffs, Hasterts and the like, silently lurking in the background, albeit dimmer every day. Some on the left, after an initial silence that easily could have been mistaken for shock, are jumping from one foot to the other, like a cat on a hot tin roof, making one excuse after another; playing the 'victims of Executive Branch eavesdropping' card, the same very 'evil doing' they happened to support vehemently. Some have been dialing their trusted guardian angels within the mainstream media and certain fairly visible alternative outlets. They need no longer worry, since these guardian angels seem to have blacked out the story, and have done so without the apparent need for much arm twisting...

Hastert Redux

I am going to rewind and take you back to September 2005, when Vanity Fair published an article, which, in addition to my case and the plight of National Security Whistleblowers, exposed the dark side of the then Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert (R-IL), and the corroborated allegations of his illegal activities involving foreign agents and interests.

Vanity Fair printed the story only after they made certain they were on sure footing in the face of any possible libel by lining up more than five credible sources, and after triple pit-bull style fact-checking. They were vindicated; Hastert did not dare go after them, nor did he ever issue any true denial. Moreover, further vindication occurred only a month ago. On April 10, 2009, The Hill reported that the Former Speaker of the House was contracted to lobby for Turkey. The Justice Department record on this deal indicates that Hastert will now be "principally involved" on a $35,000-a-month contract providing representation for Turkish interests. That seems to be the current arrangement for those serving foreign interests while on the job in Congress --- to be paid at a later date, collecting on their IOU's when they secure their positions with 'the foreign lobby.'

In a recent article for American Conservative Magazine, Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer stationed in Turkey, made the following point: "Edmonds's claims have never been pursued, presumably because there are so many skeletons in both parties' closets. She has been served with a state-secrets gag order to make sure that what she knows is never revealed, a restriction that the new regime in Washington has not lifted."

And then, he hits the nail on its head: "In Hastert's case, it certainly should be a matter of public concern that a senior elected representative who may have received money from a foreign country is now officially lobbying on its behalf. How many other congressmen might have similar relationships with foreign countries and lobbying groups, providing them with golden parachutes for their retirement?"

Congress went mum on my case after the Vanity Fair story, with, of course, the mainstream media making it very easy for them. They turned bipartisan in not pursuing the case, with the same zeal as they have, so far, not pursued the Harman case. Similarly, the mainstream media is happily letting it all disappear.

I was not aware that during the publication of the Hastert story in Vanity Fair, Jane Harman's AIPAC case was already brewing in the background. Moreover, one of the very few people in Congress who was notified about Harman was none other than Hastert --- the man himself. The same Hastert, who in addition to being one of several high-ranking officials targeted by FBI counterintelligence and counterespionage investigations, was also known to be directly involved in several other high profile scandals: from his intimate involvement in the Abramoff scandal, to the Rep. William Jefferson scandal; from his 'Land Deal' scandal - where he cashed in millions off his position while "serving", to the 2006 House Page scandal.

All for One, One for All?

How does it work? How do these people escape the consequences of accountability? Are we talking about the possible use of blackmail by the Executive Branch against Congressional representatives, as if the days of J. Edgar Hoover were never over? Cases such as NSA illegal eavesdropping come to mind, when Congressional members were briefed long before it became public, yet none took any action or even uttered a word; members of both parties. Or is it more likely to be a case of secondhand blackmail, where members of Congress watch out for each other? Or, is it a combination of the above? Regardless, we see this 'all for one, one for all' kind of solidarity in Congress when it comes to criminal conduct and scandals such as those of Hastert and Harman.

Although at an initial glance, based on the wiretapping angle, the Harman case may appear to involve blackmailing --- or a milder version, exploitation of Congress by the Executive Branch --- deeper analysis would suggest even further implications, where Congressional members themselves use the incriminating information against each other to prevent pursuit or investigation of cases that they may be directly or indirectly involved in. Let me give you an example based on the Hastert case mentioned earlier:

In 2004 and 2005 I had several meetings with Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) investigative and legal staff. Two of these meetings took place inside a high-security SCIF, where details and classified information pertaining to my case and those involved could be discussed.

I was told, and at the time I believed it to be the case, that the Republican majority was preventing further action - such as holding a public hearing on my whistleblower revelations. Once the Democrats took over in 2006, that barrier was removed, or so I thought.

In March 2007, I was contacted by one of Rep. Waxman's staff people who felt responsible and conscientious enough to at least let me know that there would never be a hearing into my case by their office, or for that matter, any Democratic office in the House. Based on his/her account, in February 2007 Waxman's office was preparing the necessary ingredients for their promised hearing, but in mid-March the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, called Waxman into a meeting on the case, and after Waxman came out of that twenty-minute meeting, he told his staff 'we are no longer involved in Edmonds' case.' And so they became 'uninvolved.'

What was discussed during that meeting? The facts regarding the FBI's pursuit of Hastert, and certain other representatives, were bound to come out in any Congressional hearing into my case. Now we know that Hastert and Pelosi were both informed of Harman's role in a related case involving counterespionage investigation of AIPAC. Is it possible that Pelosi asked Waxman to lay off my case in order to protect a few of their own in an equally scandalous case? Was there a deal made between the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House to keep this and other related scandals hushed? Will we ever know the answer to these questions? Most likely not, considering the current state of our mainstream media.

And the victims remain the same: The American people who have entrusted their Congress with the role of ensuring oversight and accountability.

This kind of infestation touches everyone in Congress; one need not have a skeleton of his own to get sucked into the swamp of those infested. Does Waxman have to be a sinner to take part in the sin committed by the Hasterts and Harmans of Congress? Certainly not. On the other hand, he and others like him will abide by the un-pledged oath of 'solidarity with your party members' and 'loyalty to your dear colleagues.'

Rotten at its Core

Back to the enablers: How can we explain the continued blackout by the mainstream media, and/or, the logic-free defenses of the Harmans and Hasterts alike by the apologist spinners --- some of whom pass as the 'alternative' media? Some are committing what they rightfully accused the previous administration and their pawns of doing: cherry picking the facts, then, spin, spin, and spin until the real issue becomes blurry and unrecognizable. The conspiracy angle aimed at the timing; Porter Goss' possible beef with Jane Harman; accusing the truth divulgers, CQ sources, of being 'conspirators' with ulterior motives; portraying Harman as an outspoken vigilante on torture. And if those sound too lame to swallow, they throw in a few evil names from the foggy past of Dusty the Foggo man! If the issue and its implications weren't so serious, these spins of reality would certainly make a Pulitzer-worthy satire.

Let's take the issue of timing. First of all, the story was reported, albeit not comprehensively, by TIME magazine years ago. It took a tenacious journalist, more importantly a journalist that could have been trusted by the Intel sources to give it real coverage. It is also possible that the sources who leaked in the Harman case got fed up and disillusioned by the absence of a real investigation and decided to 'really' talk. After all, the AIPAC espionage case was dropped by the Justice Department's prosecutors within two weeks of the Harman revelations.

Same could be said about the Hastert story. At the time, many asked why the story was not told during the earlier stages of my case. It took three years for me and other FBI and DOJ sources to exhaust all channels; Congressional inquiry, IG investigation, and the courts. Those who initially were not willing to come forward and corroborate the details opened up to the Vanity Fair journalist, David Rose, in 2005.

We all can picture one of the President's men in the White House pulling an opposing Congressional member aside and whispering 'if I were you, Congressman, I'd stop pushing. I understand, as we speak, my Justice Department is looking into certain activities you've been engaged in.'

Now let's look at the 'blackmail' and 'Goss Plot' angles. Of course the 'blackmail' scenario is possible; in fact, highly possible. We all can picture one of the President's men in the White House pulling an opposing Congressional member aside and whispering 'if I were you, Congressman, I'd stop pushing. I understand, as we speak, my Justice Department is looking into certain activities you've been engaged in.'

We all can imagine, easily, a high-ranking Justice Department official having a 'discreet' meeting with a member of Congress who's been pushing for a certain investigation of certain department officials for criminal deeds, and saying, 'dear Congresswoman, we are aware of your role in a certain scandal, and are still pondering whether we should turn this into a direct investigation of you and appoint a special prosecutor…'

But, let's not forget, the misuse of incriminating information, for the purpose of blackmail, does not turn the practitioner of the wrongful deed into a victim, nor does it make the wrongful criminal deed less wrong. Instead of spinning the story, taking away attention from the facts in hand, and making Harman a victim, we must focus on this case, on Harman, as an example of a very serious disease that has infected our Congress for far too long. Those who have been entrusted with the oversight and accountability of our government cannot do so if they are vulnerable to such blackmail from the very same people they are overseeing…Period.

Those who have been elected to represent the people and their interests cannot pursue their own greed and ambitions by engaging in criminal or unethical activities against the interests of the same people they've sworn to represent, and then be given a pass.

As for far-reaching ties such as Harman's stand on torture, or a specific beef with former CIA Director Porter Goss, or wild shots from the hip in bringing up mafia-like characters such as Dusty Foggo; please don't make us laugh! Are we talking about the same Hawkish Pro-Secrecy Jane Harman here?! Harman's staunch support of NSA Wiretapping of Americans, the FISA Amendment of 2008, the Patriot ACT, the War on Iraq, and many other activities on the Civil Liberties' No-No list, is widely recognized by almost everyone, apparently, but the authors of the recent apologist spin.

And, let's not forget to add her own long-term cozy relationship with AIPAC, and the large donations she's received from various other AIPAC-related pro-Israeli PACs. To these certain 'wannabe' journalists, driven by far from pure agenda(s), shame on you; as for honor-worthy vigilant activists out there: watch out for these impostors with their newly gained popularity among those tainted in Washington, and take a hard look at whose agendas they are serving as a mouthpiece for.

Despite a certain degree of exposure, cases such as Harman's and Hastert's, involving corruption of public officials, seem to meet the same dead-end. Criminal conduct, by powerful foreign entities, against our national interest, is given a pass, as was recently proven by the abandonment of the AIPAC spy case. The absence of real investigative journalism and the pattern of blackout by our mainstream media seem now to have been almost universally accepted as a fact of life.

Pursuit of cases such as mine, via cosmetically available channels, has been, and continues to be proven futile for whistleblowers.

Therefore, you may want to ask, why in the world am I writing this piece? Because more and more people --- although not nearly enough --- are coming to the realization that our system is rotten at it's core; that in many cases we have been trying to deal with the symptoms rather than the cause.

I, like many others, believed that changing the Congressional majority in 2006 was going to bring about some of the needed changes; the pursuit of accountability being one. We were proven wrong. In 2008, many genuinely bought in to the promise of change, and thus far, they've been let down.

These experiences are disheartening, surely, but they are also eye-opening. I do see many vigilant activists who continue the fight. As long as that's the case, there is hope. More people realize that real change will require not replacing one or two or three, but many more. More people are coming to understand that the road to achieving government of the people passes through a Congress, but not the one currently occupied by the many crusty charlatans who represent only self-interest --- achieved by representing the interests of the few, rather than the majority of the people of this nation. And so I write.

Here I go again, rather than ending this in a long paragraph or two, I will let another long-gone man do it shortly and effectively: "If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can't protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don't need to change our lobbies, we need to change our representatives." - Will Rogers

Sibel Edmonds is a former FBI translator and noted whistleblower who has been under a years-long "gag order", prohibiting her from discussing many details of her allegations of corruption and espionage gleaned during her time at the FBI, due to the continuing "States Secrets privilege" assertions by the Executive Branch. Her own story has been partially documented over the last several years in several different media outlets, including a lead story on CBS' 60 Minutes, a detailed feature in Vanity Fair and, over the years, in a number of exclusive articles here at The BRAD BLOG. She is the Founder and President of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

Israeli Spying OK'd: Obama's Injustice Department Exposed

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:25:00 +0000

[Editor's Note: Protecting the guilty is job one for Obama's "Justice" Department. Obama is a puppet of certain entrenched interests. Such as this one.

The AIPAC spying case is not the most egregious or most dangerous case of Israeli spying that has gone unpunished. Look out for more aggressive Israeli activity on US soil now that it is officially sanctioned by the white house.]

New York Times

U.S. to Drop Spy Case Against Pro-Israel Lobbyists

By NEIL A. LEWIS and DAVID JOHNSTON

Published: May 1, 2009

WASHINGTON — A case that began four years ago with the tantalizing and volatile premise that officials of a major pro-Israel lobbying organization were illegally trafficking in sensitive national security information collapsed on Friday as prosecutors asked that all charges be withdrawn.

Skip to next paragraph

Kevin Wolf/Associated Press

Keith Weissman during his arraignment in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., in August 2005.

Ken Wolf/Associated Press

Steven J. Rosen, left, with his attorney Abbe Lowell at U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., in August 2005.

From the beginning, the case against the lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was highly unusual. The two, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were charged under the World War I-era Espionage Act, accused of improperly providing to their colleagues, journalists and Israeli diplomats sensitive information they had acquired by speaking with American policy makers.

Some lawyers at the Justice Department had always had significant reservations about the case, some current and former officials said. They believed that Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman had acted imprudently, but doubted that either man should be criminally prosecuted. Nevertheless, F.B.I. agents poured substantial resources into the case, and the decision to seek a dismissal infuriated many within the law enforcement agency.

But several current and former officials said the decision to abandon the case was no surprise. With adverse judicial rulings making the prosecution increasingly risky, lawyers in the United States Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Va., and at Justice Department headquarters met on several occasions in recent weeks, agonizing over whether to go forward with the trial, which was scheduled to begin June 2.

Last week, officials from the F.B.I.’s Washington office who investigated the case made their final pleas to keep the case alive, arguing that there was enough evidence to persuade a jury to find the two men guilty. But prosecutors — including some who had worked on the case for years — disagreed.

Joseph Persichini Jr., the top official at the F.B.I.’s Washington office, praised the work of the F.B.I. agents on the case, and said he was “disappointed” in the decision to drop the charges.

The case had raised delicate political issues about the role played by American Jewish supporters of Israel and their close, behind-the-scenes relationships with top government officials. Advocates of civil liberties and of open government asserted that the defendants were being singled out for activities that were part of the accepted and routine way that American policy on Israel and the Middle East had been formulated for years, with people exchanging information.

The decision to drop the case comes just days before Aipac is scheduled to begin its annual policy conference in Washington, which has often served as an advertisement of its influence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is scheduled to address the event via satellite.

Lawyers for Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman said in a statement that while they were pleased at the decision, the government had erred in bringing the case in the first place and had caused great damage to their clients. Aipac dismissed the men early in 2004 after prosecutors presented some of their evidence to an Aipac lawyer. The group later agreed to subsidize their legal costs.

The Justice Department said that the decision to drop the case had been made solely by career prosecutors in Alexandria, and that senior officials of the Obama administration had acted only to approve the recommendation.

Several other officials said, however, that while senior political appointees at the Justice Department did not direct subordinates to drop the case, they were heavily involved in the deliberations. These officials said David S. Kris, the newly appointed chief of the department’s national security division, and Dana J. Boente, the interim United States attorney in Alexandria, had conferred regularly with prosecutors and ultimately decided to accept the recommendation to abandon the case. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was informed and raised no objections.

The case would have been the first prosecution under the espionage law in which no documents were involved and in which the defendants were not officials who provided the information, but the private citizens who received it from them in conversations.

While Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman trafficked in facts, ideas and rumor, they had done so with the full awareness of officials in the United States and Israel, who found they often helped lubricate the wheels of decision-making between two close, but sometimes quarrelsome, friends.

The move by the government to end the case came in a motion filed with the Federal Court in Alexandria.

In pretrial maneuvering, the prosecution suffered several setbacks in rulings from the trial judge, T. S. Ellis III, that were upheld by a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va. Judge Ellis rejected several government efforts to conceal classified information if the case went to trial. Moreover, he ruled that the government could prevail only if it met a high standard; he said prosecutors would have to demonstrate that Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman knew that their distribution of the information would harm United States national security.

The investigation of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman also surfaced recently in news reports that Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat long involved in intelligence matters, was overheard on a government wiretap discussing the case. As reported by Congressional Quarterly, which covers Capitol Hill, and The New York Times, Ms. Harman was overheard agreeing with an Israeli intelligence operative to try to intercede with Bush administration officials to obtain leniency for Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman in exchange for help in persuading Democratic leaders to make her chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Ms. Harman has denied interceding for Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman, and has expressed anger that she was wiretapped. She is to be among the featured speakers at the Aipac conference next week.

Over government objections, Judge Ellis had also ruled that the defense could call as witnesses several senior Bush administration foreign policy officials to demonstrate that what occurred was part of the continuing process of information trading and did not involve anything nefarious. The defense lawyers were planning to call as witnesses former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Stephen J. Hadley, the former national security adviser; and several others. Government policy makers indicated they were clearly uncomfortable with senior officials’ testifying in open court over policy deliberations.

The government’s motion to dismiss said the government was obliged take a final review of the case to consider “the likelihood that classified information will be revealed at trial, any damage to the national security that might result from a disclosure of classified information and the likelihood the government would prevail at trial.”

More Articles in US » A version of this article appeared in print on May 2, 2009, on page A11 of the New York edition.

REUTERS CONFIRMS: "New flu strain is a genetic mix"

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:50:00 +0000

"The new flu virus contains DNA typical to avian, swine and human viruses, including elements from European and Asian swine viruses."

[Editor's Note: This makes it highly unlikely to occur in nature and highly likely (certain) to have originated in a laboratory as some kind of bio-weapon. Who will investigate and prosecute those responsible for this murderous bio-weapon, and its release into the populations of the world?

FACTBOX: New flu strain is a genetic mix

Fri Apr 24, 2009 1:31pm EDT

(Reuters) - A deadly swine flu never seen before has broken out in Mexico, killing at least 16 people and raising fears of a possible pandemic. World Health Organization officials said the flu has killed about 60 Mexicans.

Here are some facts about the virus and flu viruses in general:

* The World Health Organization has confirmed at least some of the cases are a never-before-seen strain of influenza A virus, carrying the designation H1N1.

* Although it's called swine flu, this new strain is not infecting pigs and has never been seen in pigs. The threat is person to person transmission.

* It is genetically different from the fully human H1N1 seasonal influenza virus that has been circulating globally for the past few years. The new flu virus contains DNA typical to avian, swine and human viruses, including elements from European and Asian swine viruses.

* The World Health Organization is concerned but says it is too soon to change the threat level warning for a pandemic-- a global epidemic of a new and dangerous flu.

* When a new strain of flu starts infecting people, and when it acquires the ability to pass from person to person, it can spark a pandemic. The last pandemic was in 1968 and killed about a million people.

* Seven people in the United States have been diagnosed with the new strain. All have recovered, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects more cases.

* Flu viruses mutate constantly, which is why the flu vaccine is changed every year, and they can swap DNA in a process called reassortment. Most animals can get flu, but viruses rarely pass from one species to another.

* From December 2005 through February 2009, 12 cases of human infection with swine influenza were confirmed. All but one person had contact with pigs. There was no evidence of human-to-human transmission in those cases.

* Symptoms of swine flu in people are similar to those of seasonal influenza -- sudden onset of fever, coughing, muscle aches and extreme tiredness. Swine flu appears to cause more diarrhea and vomiting than normal flu.

* Seasonal flu kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people globally in an average year.

* In 1976 a new strain of swine flu started infecting people and worried U.S. health officials started widespread vaccination. More than 40 million people were vaccinated. But several cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a severe and sometime fatal condition that can be linked to some vaccines, caused the U.S. government to stop the program. The incident led to widespread distrust of vaccines in general.

(Reporting by Maggie Fox)

New swine flu feared to be weaponized strain -Wayne Madsen

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:48:00 +0000

New swine flu feared to be weaponized strain
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Apr 27, 2009

According to two mainstream media journalists, one in Mexico City and the other in Jakarta, who spoke to WMR on background, they are convinced that the current outbreak of a new strain of swine flu in Mexico and some parts of the United States is the result of the introduction of a human-engineered pathogen that could result in a widespread global pandemic, with potentially catastrophic consequences for domestic and international travel and commerce.

The journalists have been told by top officials of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) about the grave dangers posed by the new and deadly swine flu strain, known as A-H1N1. This flu, never before seen by scientists, has already killed up to 68 people in Mexico and has forced the cancellation of public events, including sports matches and concerts, and the closure of schools, libraries, and museums. Eight cases have been reported in Texas and California. Doctors are examining several students at a Queens high school in New York who displayed symptoms similar to those experienced by swine flu patients in Mexico.

Our Mexico City source said 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, concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission “vectors” that suggest that the new flu 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.

Past swine flu outbreaks have been spread from pigs to humans, who then passed the flu on to other humans. However, with A-H1N1, there have been no reported infections of pigs. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), A-H1N1 has gene segments from North American swine, bird and human flu strains and a segment from Eurasian swine flu. Costa Rica, Brazil, and Peru have issued alerts to check all incoming passengers from Mexico at border crossings, airports, and seaports for symptoms of the swine flu.

WHO is convening an emergency session of its top medical experts in Geneva and is set to declare H1N1 a “public health event of international concern.” It is reported that WHO will recommend travel restrictions to and from areas where the flu has been reported, including Mexico City and the states of Mexico, Hidalgo, San Luis PotosÃ and Oaxaca.

Our Jakarta source said WHO officials are afraid that the presence of gene segments from dreaded H5N1 bird flu in the A-H1N1 swine flu strain could mean that the new swine flu strain was engineered to “jump species.”

WMR has been informed that the CDC and U.S. Army dug up the body of an Inuit woman who died in 1918 in Brevig Mission, Alaska from an outbreak of Spanish flu. The influenza pandemic that year killed up to 100 million people worldwide in an 18-month period. Brevig Mission saw 72 of its 80 residents die within five days, the worst case recorded anywhere in the world. WMR has been told the genetic material recovered by the U.S. government from the corpse of the Inuit woman provided the basis for the development of the H5N1, or bird (avian), flu strain at the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the point of origin for the Ames strain of anthrax used in the 2001 bio-war attacks against the U.S. Congress and the media.

The fear in Asia is that if the A-H1N1 pandemic spreads to the United States, travel to and from the country will be all but shut down.

The following are the symptoms associated with A-H1N1:

· cough

· fever

· sore throat

· shortness of breath

· muscle and joint pain

The drugs Tamiflu and Relenza are seen as the most effective against A-H1N1.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

NARCONEWS: More Than $1 billion In Private-Sector Weapons Exports Approved For Mexico Since 2004

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:32:00 +0000

Legal U.S. Arms Exports May Be Source of Narco Syndicates Rising Firepower

Posted by Bill Conroy - March 29, 2009

[Editor's Note, Cut to the chase:
Mexican authorities in Reynosa across the border from McAllen, seized the country’s single largest stash of cartel weapons — nearly 300 assault rifles, shoulder-fired grenade launchers and a half million rounds of ammunition.

But weeks later, Mexican authorities still have not allowed the ATF access to serial numbers that would help them track down the buyers and traffickers on the U.S. side.

Support NarcoNews, which does outstanding independent journalism that's conspicuously missing from both mainstream and a lot of "alternative" publications.]

Mainstream media and Beltway pundits and politicians in recent months have unleashed a wave of panic in the nation linking the escalading violence in Mexico, and its projected spread into the U.S., to illegal weapons smuggling.

The smokescreen being spread by these official mouthpieces of manufactured consensus is that a host of criminal operators are engaging in straw (or fraudulent) gun purchases, making clandestine purchases at U.S. gun shows or otherwise assembling small caches of weapons here in the states in order to smuggle them south of the border to the “drug cartels.”

The Obama administration is now sending hundreds of additional federal agents to the border in an effort to interdict this illegal arms smuggling to reassure an agitated middle-America that Uncle Sam will get these bad guys. The cascade of headlines from mainstream media outlets printing drug-war pornography assures us in paragraphs inserted between the titillation that the ATF’s Operation Gunrunner and other similar get-tough on gun-seller programs will save America from the banditos of Mexico.

To be sure, some criminal actors in the U.S. are smuggling small arms across the border. But the drug war in Mexico is not being fought with Saturday night specials, hobby rifles and hunting shotguns. The drug trafficking organizations are now in possession of high-powered munitions in vast quantities that can’t be explained by the gun-show loophole.

At least one report in a mainstream media outlet deserves credit for recognizing that trend.

“[Mexican] traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals,” states a recent story in the Los Angeles Times. “The proliferation of heavier armaments points to a menacing new stage in the Mexican government's 2-year-old war against drug organizations. …”

Narco News, in a report last December [“Juarez murders shine a light on an emerging Military Cartel”] also examined the increasing militarization of narco-trafficking groups in Mexico and pointed out that U.S. military-issued ammunition popped up in an arms cache seized in Reynosa, Mexico, in November 2008 that was linked to the Zetas, a mercenary group that provides enforcement services to Mexican narco-trafficking organizations.

So where are these military-grade weapons really coming from?

Rather than address that valid question head on, the mainstream media, and now even the Obama administration, have been attempting to paint lipstick on the pig, trumpeting, in the words of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the “courageous efforts undertaken by [Mexican] President Calderon.”

And the “courageous” Mexican President Felipe Calderon, for his part, redirects the blame for the Mexican narco-organization’s increasing firepower back to the U.S.

In a story published by the Associated Press in late February of this year, Mexican President Calderon is quoted alleging the following:

We need to stop the flow of guns and weapons towards Mexico. Let me express to you that we've seized in this two years more than 25,000 weapons and guns, and more than 90 percent of them came from United States, and I'm talking from missiles launchers to machine guns and grenades.

But no matter how hard Calderon and U.S. officials try to disguise the pig, it still oinks.

A Narco News investigation into the flow of arms across the U.S. border appears to lead right back to the systemic corruption that afflicts a vast swath of the Mexican government under President Felipe Calderon and this nation’s own embrace of market-driven free-trade policies.

The deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars, and sanctioned by our own State Department. These deadly trade commodities — grenade launchers, explosives and “assault” weapons —are then, in quantities that can fill warehouses, being corruptly transferred to drug trafficking organizations via their reach into the Mexican military and law enforcement agencies, the evidence indicates.

“As in other criminal enterprises in Mexico, such as drug smuggling or kidnapping, it is not unusual to find police officers and military personnel involved in the illegal arms trade,” states an October 2007 report by the for-profit global intelligence group Stratfor, which Barron’s magazine once dubbed the Shadow CIA. “… Over the past few years, several Mexican government officials have been arrested on both sides of the border for participating in the arms trade.”

Counting Commerce

The U.S. State Department oversees a program that requires private companies in the United States to obtain an export license in order to sell defense hardware or services to foreign purchasers — which include both government units and private buyers in other countries. These arms deals are known as Direct Commercial Sales [DCS]. Each year, the State Department issues a report tallying the volume and dollar amount of DCS items approved for export.

The reports do not provide details on who the weapons or defense services were exported to specifically, but do provide an accounting of the destination countries. Although it is possible that some of the deals authorized under the DCS program were altered or even canceled after the export licenses were issued, the data compiled by State does provide a broad snapshot of the extensive volume of U.S. private-sector arms shipments to both Mexico and Latin America in general.

According to an analysis of the DCS reports, some $1 billion in defense hardware was approved for export to Mexico via private U.S. companies between fiscal year 2004 and fiscal year 2007 — the most recent year for which data was available. Overall, during the same period, a total of some $3.7 billion in weapons and other military hardware was approved for export under the DCS program to all of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In addition to the military hardware exports approved for Mexico, some $3.8 billion in defense-related “services” [technical assistance and training via private U.S. contractors] also were approved for “export” to Mexico over the same four-year period, according to the DCS reports.

That means the total value of defense-related hardware and service exports by private U.S. companies to Mexico tallied nearly $5 billion over the four-year window. And that figure doesn’t even count the $700 million in assistance already authorized under the Merida Initiative [Plan Mexico] or any new DCS exports approved for fiscal years 2008 and 2009 [which ends Sept. 30].

Following is a sample of the types of arms shipments approved for export to Mexico through the DCS program during fiscal years 2006 and 2007 alone:

• $3.3 million worth of ammunition and explosives, including ammunition-manufacturing equipment;

• 13,000 nonautomatic and semiautomatic firearms, pistols and revolvers at a total value of $11.6 million;

• 42 grenade launchers valued at $518,531;

• 3,578 explosive projectiles, including grenades, valued at $78,251;

• Various night-vision equipment valued at $963,201.

A troubling revelation about the DCS program, which has direct relevance to the drug war in Mexico, is contained in a fiscal 2007 report issued by the State Department. That report summarizes the results of the State Department’s Blue Lantern end-use monitoring program for DCS exports.

That Blue Lantern report found that "the Western Hemisphere (especially Latin America and the Caribbean) continues to be a region with a high incidence of unfavorable cases involving firearms and ammunition." The unfavorable finding indicates that fraud may have occurred and those cases "may be subject to civil enforcement actions or referred to law enforcement for criminal investigation."

For the entire DCS program, and this is a disturbing figure, of the 634 Blue Lantern cases closed in fiscal year 2007, a total of 143, or 23 percent, were deemed “unfavorable."

The Blue Lantern report does not mention specific transactions in detail, but does provide case-study examples. One included in the report indicated that a Latin American firearms dealer acted as a “front company for another Latin American company.”

“[The] owner admits that [the] company exists only on paper…,” the fiscal year 2007 Blue Lantern report states. “[The] host country authorities had temporarily suspended the firearms import licenses to [the] parent company because of its link with small arms smuggling to gangs in [a] third country.”

Given Mexico’s strict gun laws with respect to private individuals, it is likely most of the DCS program defense hardware approved for export to that nation was directed toward the military or law enforcement agencies. But it is precisely that fact which should be raising some alarm in Washington.

Mexico, by Calderon’s own admission, is dealing with a serious corruption problem within the ranks of Mexican law enforcement.

From a December 2008 report in the Los Angeles Times:

Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Tuesday said his government was making strides against corruption but warned that graft remained a threat to the nation's efforts against crime.

Calderon’s rival in the 2006 Mexican presidential race, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, in recent open letter published in the Mexican newspaper Por Esto! and addressed to U.S. Secretary of State Clinton, is even more blunt in his assessment of the extent of corruption within the Calderon regime.

You surely know that all of this began when a group of about 30 traffickers of influence and corrupt politicians, using the cover of so-called neoliberal economic policies, took control of the Mexican State, as well as a good part of national and so-called public goods. And these policies of pillaging that has enriched a minority in an exaggerated and obscene manner, in a way that has not occurred in any other part of the world, has condemned the Mexican people to exile and survival.

And that corruption is not limited to Mexican law enforcement. Sources provided Narco News with a PowerPoint presentation prepared for the DEA that indicates the following:

Between Jan 2000-Dec 2006: More than 163,000 military members were criminally processed during former president Vicente Fox’s 6 years term of office. The majority of the crimes were: [the list includes abuse of power, homicide, embezzlement, kidnapping, bank robbery, illegal possession of firearms and health crimes [essentially organized crime].

Another slide in that same DEA PowerPoint presentation states that the Mexican military reported an average of 1,200 desertions per month in 2006.

And it should not be ignored that the Zetas, one of the most violent drug-organization groups in Mexico right now, was founded by former elite Mexican special-operations troops — many of whom received some training in the United States.

[The two most recent DCS reports can be found at these links: FY2006 and FY2007.]

The Elephant in the Room

A former senior U.S. Customs Inspector, who asked that his name not be used, provided the following reaction when presented with the DCS data:

I would agree entirely [that] DCS (and DoD gifted, as opposed to DCS sold) weapons are obviously the simplest explanation for the massive rise in the number of fully automatic weapons, grenades, rockets, etc., obtained by the narcotics gangs. … That is to say, they are obtaining their weapons from their own, Mexican, government, by various illegal means.

… The Mexican government has a long and well-documented history of corruption at all levels, from city to federal. Most of the weapons being "displayed" [in the media] are simply not available for sale to American civilians, particularly including the grenades — both 40mm and hand types. …

… The source of these weapons can be easily traced by ATF. … All foreign sales must be reported to ATF prior to shipment, just in case the government wishes to hold up a shipment to a particular country, etc. Tracing the serial numbers would be easy, with US government assistance, of course.

But that assumes the Mexican government, and our own government, really want to trace those weapons. A November 2008 report in the San Antonio Express News, which includes details of the major weapons seizure in Reynosa, Mexico, that same month involving the Zetas, reveals the following:

Another example of coordination problems occurred this month. Mexican authorities in Reynosa across the border from McAllen, seized the country’s single largest stash of cartel weapons — nearly 300 assault rifles, shoulder-fired grenade launchers and a half million rounds of ammunition.

But weeks later, Mexican authorities still have not allowed the ATF access to serial numbers that would help them track down the buyers and traffickers on the U.S. side.

To be sure, cartel corruption and intimidation of Mexican law enforcement at every level and in every agency has caused some dysfunction.

A former DEA agent, who also asked not to be named, says the shipment of military-grade weapons to the Mexican government under the DCS program, given the extent of corruption within that government, is essentially like “shipping weapons to a crime syndicate.”

At least one individual with long connections to U.S. intelligence agencies is convinced that the corrupt transfer of arms between the Mexican military and narco-criminals in Mexico is more than theory.

Tosh Plumlee is a former CIA contract pilot who flew numerous missions delivering arms to Latin America and returning drugs to the United States as part of the covert Iran/Contra operations in the 1980s, according to public records. After becoming troubled by those government-sanctioned missions, Plumlee decided to take his concerns to Congress.

Plumlee was eventually called to testify before Congress on a number of occasions, only to find that the Congressional committees hearing his testimony ordered it classified — which meant if Plumlee later spoke about it publicly, he would be violating the law.

Plumlee, however, still has deep contacts in the spook world, some of whom, it seems, want him to bring some information forward concerning the nature of the drug war in Juarez, Mexico. As a result, Plumlee says he recently made a journey with individuals he described as “sensitive sources” to a small warehouse in Juarez — located just across border from El Paso, Texas. Plumlee says he agreed to accompany the sources because he is currently doing research for a book he is writing about the drug war.

Plumlee says it was clear to him that the warehouse was not part of a Mexican military operation, yet it was packed with U.S. military weapons — including grenades, grenade launchers, LAW anti-tank weapons [essentially high-tech bazookas], M16 rifles and night-vision equipment.

Plumlee says his sources indicated that the U.S. weapons in that warehouse — as well as another warehouse located elsewhere in Juarez that he did not visit — were now under the control of a narco-trafficking organization, which had obtained the munitions from corrupt elements of the Mexican military.

Plumlee concedes he does not know why he was allowed to step inside that warehouse and later walk out alive. All he can say for sure is that he was being used to get the information out and suspects that those weapons have since been relocated.

As incredible as Plumlee’s story sounds, it cannot really be surprising that there would be stores of weapons in clandestine warehouses in a city like Juarez, which, since the beginning of 2008, has produced about 2,000 of the estimated 7,000 murders in Mexico’s bloody drug war. And whether anyone chooses to believe Plumlee’s information or not, it is clear he has a long history of being a player in the netherworld of black operations, and might well be trusted by some players who still engaged in that dark art.

Mike Levine, a former DEA agent who has years of experience participating in dangerous undercover operations overseas, says Plumlee is who he claims to be. Levine now hosts a radio show in New York City on a Pacifica Radio station [the Expert Witness Radio Show] and Plumlee has appeared on that show several times over the years.

Here’s what Levine has to say about Plumlee’s credibility:

Before I invited Tosh to come on the air, because his story was so incredible, I vetted him through government agents, all of whom said he is the real thing. I have a copy of the air map he turned over to a San Diego Weekly newspaper, bearing notations of all his drug flights, which first sold me on the guy.

After he had made many revelations on-air in New York, and mainstream media continued to ignore him, Congress was apparently listening. I had been told by my own sources that agencies like CIA were regularly recording our show. (I used to remind them, on air, to make sure they pressed the red button to record.)

So Tosh calls me one day in around 1997 and says that Congress had asked him to testify about his experiences, in closed-door session. I told him, "If you do that, they are going to do nothing but classify your testimony making it illegal for you to tell your own story."

And that, indeed, is what did happen, according to Tosh.

Could it be that Plumlee was used as a type of message in a bottle because, like has happened so many times in the past history of this nation, the normal chain of command and our politicians in Washington, D.C., simply don’t want to hear the truth, don’t want to risk rocking the boat of international relations with Mexico or interrupting the free-trade flow of a multi-billion dollar “legal” arms business?

After all, if our government had to concede that the Mexican military is so wracked with corruption and beyond the control of Mexican President Calderon that it cannot be trusted to control its own weapons, then how can U.S. cooperation with Calderon’s government have any hope for success in what many would argue is an already ill-conceived drug war?

In fact, if that is what we are now confronting in Mexico, it is likely that U.S. cooperation with Calderon’s government, when it takes the form of U.S. weapon shipments, is likely only going to fuel further bloodshed and put U.S. agents and operatives now in the field assisting in those efforts at grave risk.

Narco News did seek to get comment from officials at both the Department of Justice and the Department of State about the issues raised in this story. To date, those queries — both by phone and e-mail — have been met with dead silence.

Stay tuned ….

GREATEST THEFT IN WORLD HISTORY?

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:33:00 +0000

Bloomberg News spins as follows:

"The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s. "

"The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. "

This is theft. This is debt servitude. This is not much different than selling your grandchildren into slavery in order to give money to multi-millionaire gamblers today.

Obama has continued egregiously fraudulent "bailout" practices started by Bush. Previously they bailed out the Savings and Loans which were raided back in the late 80's under poppy Bush, with brother Neil Bush profiting handsomely from that looting spree.

This is as blatantly immoral as it is criminal and destructive to the nation. They are using the cover of a "rescue" to dump shiploads of our tax money on the lawns of billionaires. There is no kind, innocent way of spinning this, unless one is willing to turn off all powers of critical thought and become the mindless drones who believe whatever is told to them on their televisions.

This is pure madness, and by design, will enrich the vulture class oligarchs while destroying the lives of most of the population, already under siege for decades since Nafta, the stagnation of wages, the crushing of unions, the rotting of the education system, etc.

It's last call for America. What happens from here on out will be unrecognizable.

More "war on terror" blather

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:51:00 +0000

Response to: A Progressive, Twenty-First Century Approach for Pakistan, by Arun Krishnan

There is no "war on terror," and this ridiculous phrase should never be used without quotation marks.

There will NEVER, EVER be solutions to this problem until the masses understand that terrorist networks in Asia have been created, sponsored, trained, armed, protected by covert intelligence agencies with the full knowledge and support of US leaders and US CIA. This is established in numerous ways, but hard research is needed to piece the puzzle together.

Top of the list: ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency has been playing with fire at least since the late 1970s. The Islamic militant networks were championed with ISI personnel and US and Saudi money. The Saudis have long supported Taliban and Al Qaeda. This was perfectly acceptable to Washington who longed for a new international enemy to replace the collapsed "communist threat."

It's like bashing one's head against the wall because so much ignorance and partial truth is printed in mainstream journals, and supposedly "alternative" journals regarding this BOGUS "war on terror." The "war on terror" was engineered with full US complicity to provide the "war that won't end in our lifetimes."

Both major US parties are on board the farce. And the corpses continue to pile up.

If one can never hold accountable the puppet masters in western intelligence who with treasonous intent support terrorism one can never even begin to solve the issue. It is as simple as that. Conspiracies exist, despite the mindless bleating of the dittoheaded press. Justice and accountability are the real myths.

http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/

Raw Story: Libel the Opposition on "Climate Change?"

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:21:00 +0000

"Climate change deniers" is a slanderous misrepresentation, in a completely biased propaganda article.

The sizable contingent of SKEPTICS to the hystrionics and computer-generated hysteria of the "global warming" and "carbon tax" lobby are rarely given the media coverage that the official line is given. This is obvious even in this article, which implies skeptics should be censored since they have "media outlets everywhere," taken to be a bad thing that the opposition voice is heard at all.

This "deniers" libel is a clear misrepresentation. Nobody "denies" that the climate changes. It has always changed, throughout history.

The main criticism is twofold:

1) The THEORY that man made releases of emissions is the cause of the changes is not proven, in the slightest, but is taken for granted. It is assumed by the "hysteria lobby."

2) Data presented by Gore, Mann, et al. at the IPCC/UN has been shown to be faked, fraudulent, cooked, on more than one occasion. See "hockey stick" for some info on that fiasco.

Add to that several other notable realities:

A) Other planets had also warmed recently, as a result of abnormally active SUN.

B) The temperature has been COOLING for the past several years, despite the ever present addition of small amounts of carbon to the air.

C) The total amount of carbon in the air is a fraction of one percent, dwarfed by other factors.

D) Temperatures were hotter than today during the middle ages, and previous to that several thousand years ago -- this is NOT the "hottest" period on record, and that is a blatant lie.

E) Normal seasonal activity is taken out of context and blown out of proportion. Every time an iceberg appears, or the ice melts on the ocean, we are reminded to be hysterical again. Only, the North ice came back recently, covering over a huge patch of ocean, restoring levels to 1979 (thus erasing all that hysterical chicken little evidence that catastrophe was around the corner).

F) Carbon taxes will be placed on YOU, your family, your food, your transportation, and will drastically alter the balance of taxation IN THE WORLD. This will be quite a regressive tax plan that will damage real people, and will create new money flows from bottom (us) to top (them). Perhaps a few minutes thought would be in order?

G) Al Gore's "ice core record" in An Inconvenient Truth was presented misleadingly. Gore never said that the carbon changes FOLLOW the temperature changes, which they actually do, but presented (with his big expensive video monitor) that carbon changes were the CAUSE of the temperature changes. This has never happened in that entire millions year history he presented. This was misleading, at the least. Carbon follows temperature, not vice-versa. This NEW theory assumes the reverse, that the carbon is the cause, not the effect.

There are other reasons to be SKEPTICAL of the pronouncements of political leaders and their hired gun scientists. There is another side to the story, and should in no way be censored. This is after all a political fight more than a scientific debate. I don't think I've EVER seen the global warming lobby big wigs ever debate a skeptical scientist in a fair discussion of the facts.

As a matter of fact, skeptical scientists are routinely denied a place at the IPCC, and their views literally censored out of reports there. Fact.

The scientific method, for those of you unfamiliar, posits a theory, and then attempts to FALSIFY (or disprove) it. If it cannot be falsified, it is accepted as tentative "truth." What the IPCC does is essentially unscientific. It is a political forum.

http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/

Letter to Paid Journalists Covering "harsh interrogation techniques"

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:28:00 +0000

Mr. or Ms. "Journalist,"

You realize that you're part of a propaganda effort, don't you? Why doesn't the phrase, "torture, a felony punishable by twenty years imprisonment and the death penalty if the victim dies, as several detainees have done..." ever appear anywhere in the mainstream media?

Where's General Taguba's report? And General Taguba as a source?

Where's General Karpinsky, and the memo written in Donald Rumsfeld's handwriting, "MAKE SURE THIS HAPPENS?"

Where's the long history of torture and the CIA going back to its creation? The studies of CIA torture practices in Viet Nam, in Central America and their support of death squads and torture "manuals" for decades?

You are not a journalist, my friend. You are a low level tool of mind washing.

______________________________________________
John Doraemi publishes Crimes of the State at:
http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/

MUST SEE: THE OBAMA DECEPTION

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:57:00 +0000

Jones vs. Obama

Ten trillion dollars looted in a matter of months, the imminent collapse of the US economy, mandatory compulsory "national security" paramilitary "service" openly demanded... Is it worth 2 hours of your time to investigate these matters critically?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7718996325782443244&ei=Upe5SbScI6L-qAOJnOG1AQ&q=obama+deception&hl=en

Alex Jones' new documentary is out, online for free. Jones tends to be hyperbolic and acerbic.

If, however, even ten percent of what he says is true, we are fucked.

Congressman Ron Paul on US Foreign Policy Assumptions

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:57:00 +0000

Imagine

By Ron Paul

March 10, 2009 -- Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of “keeping us safe” or “promoting democracy” or “protecting their strategic interests.”

Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up check points on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.

Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers’ attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, ten more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed. Imagine if most of the citizens of the foreign land also wanted these troops to return home. Imagine if they elected a leader who promised to bring them home and put an end to this horror.

Imagine if that leader changed his mind once he took office.

The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here, but we have had a globe straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hatred and resentment towards us.

According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it. We had a right to go after those responsible for 9/11, to be sure, but why do so many Americans feel as if we have a right to a military presence in some 160 countries when we wouldn’t stand for even one foreign base on our soil, for any reason? These are not embassies, mind you, these are military installations. The new administration is not materially changing anything about this. Shuffling troops around and playing with semantics does not accomplish the goals of the American people, who simply want our men and women to come home. 50,000 troops left behind in Iraq is not conducive to peace any more than 50,000 Russian soldiers would be in the United States.

Shutting down military bases and ceasing to deal with other nations with threats and violence is not isolationism. It is the opposite. Opening ourselves up to friendship, honest trade and diplomacy is the foreign policy of peace and prosperity. It is the only foreign policy that will not bankrupt us in short order, as our current actions most definitely will. I share the disappointment of the American people in the foreign policy rhetoric coming from the administration. The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome’s did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

by Ron Paul

Congressman Ron Paul of Texas enjoys a national reputation as the premier advocate for liberty in politics today.

Is Counterpunch doing covert CIA propaganda now?

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:58:00 +0000

"Peter Lee is a business man who has spent thirty years observing, analyzing, and writing on Asian affairs."

Is he really? Is that all he's doing?

Mr. Lee invites us to:

Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar

Pretty condescending, yes, as some of us have been acquainted for 10-20 years with the name. But, see, the thing that stands out most in Hekmatyar's history is something that Lee doesn't mention at all. Hekmatyar was the biggest DRUG SMUGGLER in Afghanistan and he was also working closely with CIA/ISI.

Drugs/CIA, drugs/CIA. Pretty hard meme to forget. Pretty hard to write 2800 words on Hekmatyar and omit such a meaty fact -- unless one is motivated to do so for some reason.

Mr. Lee goes so far as to put the drug issue squarely on the shoulders of the Taliban (omitting the puppet president's own role which is public). He blames drugs on the "old Khalq government" and even on "Al Qaeda."

But not one word acknowledging that Hekmatyar was a huge drug lord with intelligence agency connections for many years. It's apparently okay to call Hekmatyar "a brutal, capricious and violently anti-American warlord," but CounterPunch and Mr. Peter Lee can't seem to get around to the narcotics activity. Now, why is that?

There's quite an overt agenda at work here.

"The Worst-Best Hope in Afghanistan?"

Mr. Lee is trying to sell Hekmatyar to an American audience as the next Afghan leader.

"Then, in a November 2008 article entitled Afghan Rebel Positioned for Key Role, the Washington Post gave a hint that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar might be the kind of guy we can do business with:"

"We?" Who the fuck is "we" Mr. Peter Lee? And what is the extent of this "business" which you have conventiently omitted from your propaganda?

"As the Taliban grows in strength, Hekmatyar fades, and the hopes for a native Afghan government able to dictate terms to Mullah Omar fades with him."

The CIA's old drug lord client appears to be losing steam. We are to side with CIA elements who see Hekmatyar as the sort of drug lord, murderer whom they "can do business with." We are to forget all about the heroin (as Peter Lee and CounterPunch have explicitly done for us), and which the CIA would like to have disappear down the memory hole. The CIA's interests and this article would seem to be in perfect synchronization.

Given Counterpunch's previous absurd positions (see 9/11, Cockburn) this isn't all too surprising to me. It may come as a shocker to some of Cockburn's loyal readers.

See Hekmatyar in An Unholy Alliance, part 2 I believe. When Counterpunch brings up the CIA/drug connections I may change my opinion of them. Not until.

ABS. MUST SEE: CIA/ISI US ALLIES AND THE DRUG TRADE

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:14:00 +0000

An Unholy Alliance

"This 1996 documentary examines the CIA's connection to the global drug trade, with a focus on opium and heroin. Posted on YouTube with the permission of Director Chris Hilton, who now makes his home at Essential Media and Entertainment: http://www.essential-media.com/index.php More info on the documentary here: http://www.oneworldmagazine.org/seek/deamon/epis2.html"

SIX PART SERIES

Examines China, Laos, Burma, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Implicates "allied" governments, intelligence services and high level US officials in the international drug trade.

Does NOT include South and Central America, or events after 1996 such as Taliban, 9/11, the US war in support of the "Northern Alliance" etc.

PART 1:

Sen. Leahy's "Truth Commission" a response to criticism

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:03:00 +0000

We should support Senator Leahy's proposal for a "Truth Commission" despite its toothless appearance. I will respond to Jesse Richard's (TVNewsLies) accusation that such a commission would be a "sham."

I agree with Richard that it has all the potential of being a "white wash" and ineffectual, but we must pursue this and support it anyway.

This is the only game in town
It is politically acceptable to a majority
It will expose further the criminal nature of the state
It will meet with intense opposition from the perps, as it puts them on the defensive. They may commit perjury, obstruction of justice, or other new crimes which are indicted.
Those who refuse to testify would be open to prosecution
Exposed crimes will lead to evidence of other crimes
Exposed crimes will destroy the credibility of the perps
Exposing their crimes will turn the public and Congress further against them
As knowledge of crimes snowballs, a sea change may occur, as with Richard Nixon. Nixon was elected in one of the most sweeping majorities in history in 1972. Two years later he ran away from the white house to avoid impeachment.
Leahy himself may get on board more serious crimes like the anthrax attacks and 9/11. He was personally targeted for assassination by anthrax, and he knows full well that some lone-nut scientist with no motive was not behind it.
It is necessary to convince the apathetic public how egregious the situation is before anything substantial can be done. A result of this commission would be to educate the ignorant and apathetic about some truths they are blissfully unaware. As 9/11 was at its core a psy-op to manipulate the public toward aggressive war, such a truth commission could counter this previous programming.
Inspiring millions to complain to the Justice Department and demand "justice" is what is needed. This has not occurred on a massive scale (I couldn't even get my blog urging this posted as a sticky on the 911blogger homepage).
Simultaneous criminal prosecutions are not precluded, and they may force more disclosures and more testimony so that the full extent of the covert crimes is exposed. Rats turning on one another is exactly what is needed.
And most importantly: THE US CONGRESS CANNOT GRANT IMMUNITY FROM PROSECUTION IN INTERNATIONAL COURTS. Exposing evidence of Crimes Against the Peace and Crimes Against Humanity will aid international jurors in forming legal cases against the high criminals from the former US regime, as well as send a clear warning to the current US regime and future US regimes. This in and of itself is the most compelling reason to support the politically tenable investigations of the Bush regime, despite some token grants of immunity by the Senate.

TRUTHOUT (SIC)

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:42:00 +0000

TruthOut Isn't

Crimes of the State

For years the editors of Truthout.org have fallen far short of their audacious name. The September 11th controversies have been censored ruthlessly, despite the merit of the facts presented which dispute official government claims.

Similarly, evidence of US government protected drug trafficking is summarily deleted there, and no links to sources such as Daniel Hopsicker or NarcoNews are allowed.

But now, with the rise of Obama, Truthout has retreated to a position of demagogic hero worship. Fawning pieces attempting to portray Obama as some kind of "progressive" visionary (like this one) are followed by endless praise and gushing public displays of affection. Why wouldn't they be? Opposing views are censored out.

I'm not going to bog down in minutia critical of Obama, but Paul Craig Roberts does a pretty decent job in this piece whose link was censored over at the Truthout thread.

I'd rather focus on the narrow blinkered philosophy that censors opposing views NOT BECAUSE THEY LACK MERIT, but because they have merit. Such a disservice to readers and to the truth itself should be called out. Hypocrisy of this nature must be acknowledged, and it sure won't be acknowledged on Truthout.org's servers. So I mention it here.

What "Truthout" (sic) has done is replace critical analysis with blind, ignorant partisanship. Partisan mindlessness is the number one problem with the US political system, in my opinion. It allows for the information complex to weed out opposing parties, opposing leaders, opposing voices. If they don't carry a card from the Democrats or the Republicans then they are censored out.

We see, daily, how this formula has performed in the real world. We see the dire condition of the American Republic. We see the lawlessness, the abuses of power, the overt ongoing criminality, the protection of high official felons. We see it all, as it is so blunt, so egregious, that it can't be completely hushed up.

Yet "change" the empty rhetoric of the latest puppet leader is all we are permitted to "hope" for. Real change, sans quotations, is "off the table."

"I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." -Barack H. Obama, The Audacity of Hope

The Current Betrayals

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:17:00 +0000

A Banana Republic By 2012?

Change for the Worse

By Paul Craig Roberts

March 02, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- -President Obama has presented the most irresponsible budget in US history. His fiscal year 2010 budget projects federal spending of $3.5 trillion and a federal deficit of $1.75 trillion. In other words, 50 percent of the government’s budget consists of red ink.

And Americans are angry that sub-prime borrowers took mortgages they couldn’t afford.

The bald fact is that the US government is going to have to borrow--or print--half of the money it intends to spend in Obama’s first budget. This fact has fallen through the cracks as New York Times headlines proclaim “A Bold Plan Sweeps Away Reagan Ideas.” It certainly does sweep away Reagan ideas. No Reagan budget ever presumed that the federal government could borrow half of its annual expenditures. Indeed, Obama’s budget deficit for 2010 alone exceeds the totality of “Reagan Deficits” for Reagan’s two terms of office.

As presidential budgets are marketing devices rather than financial statements, they are imbued with optimistic assumptions. Obama’s budget is based on optimistic assumptions about the extent of decline in GDP. A more realistic projection of GDP decline would reveal that Obama’s budget is the first since World War II in which more than half of the government’s expenditures must be financed by red ink. I suspect that the red ink component of the FY 2010 budget will surpass World War II budgets.

To whom can the US government turn for $1.75 trillion for FY 2010, on top of $1.2 trillion for FY 2009?

Not to taxpayers. Obama’s net tax increase comes to $170 billion over 10 years, or $17 billion a year, a drop in the bucket. A supply-side economist could have told him that not even these paltry revenues will be realized.

Not to private savers. Americans are over their heads in debts.

Not to foreigners. Thanks to Clinton/Bush financial deregulation and Wall Street and bankster greed, the rest of the world is in financial turmoil and hasn’t $1.75 trillion in savings to lend. Possibly, the stock market will collapse further, and whatever remaining wealth Americans have will flow into “safe” US Treasuries.

The only other alternative is the printing press. Printing press finance would destroy the dollar as reserve currency and ignite high inflation. The US would be unable to pay for its imports, and Americans whose incomes do not rise with the rate of inflation would be plowed under.

This prospect is not a “war on terror” scare tactic like “anthrax,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “al Qaeda connections,” and “Iranian nukes.”

The economic catastrophe that the US faces is very real. But there is no awareness of this reality in Obama’s budget. The crux of Obamanomics is the assumption that the economy can run forever on consumer loans, if we can just get the banks to lend, and the federal government can run forever on loans from China, Japan,and Saudi Arabia.

Obama is requesting $130 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during 2010 plus a $75 billion supplemental request for the wars during 2009. This $205 billion is on top of $534 billion for the Pentagon in 2010, for total military spending of $739 billion.

The Chinese government’s budget shows China’s military spending at $59 billion in 2008. (The Pentagon claims Chinese military spending is between $97 billion and $139 billion.) Russia’s military spending in 2009 is projected to be about $50 billion.

In the midst of the greatest economic crisis in US history when trillions of dollars are being added to US national debt, Obama’s budget spends more on two pointless wars than the total military spending of China and Russia combined. Obama’s wars serve only the profits of the military/security complex and the promotion rate of military officers. The longer the wars continue, the larger the number of officers who can retire at higher ranks, thus further swelling future annual deficits and the national debt.

Moreover, as is becoming apparent, the Bush/Obama war in Afghanistan cannot be fought without fighting a war in Pakistan.

As if this isn’t enough war, Obama parrots Dick Cheney’s charge, totally unsupported by any evidence, that Iran is making nuclear weapons. The chances are high that the new White House Moron will have us at war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq. As Obama’s wars expand, the $205 billion for war in Iraq and Afghanistan will become $400 billion annually and then $600 billion annually.

Obama’s “troop withdrawal” from Iraq has proved to be just another con job. Obama has announced that the withdrawal doesn’t include the 50,000 US soldiers who will remain in Iraq indefinitely--like the US troops that have been kept in Japan and Germany for 64 years and in Korea since the early 1950s,

Meanwhile Medicare is on the ropes. The latest Medicare trustees report says that Medicare’s funds for hospital payments will be exhausted in 10 years. To make ends meet, Obama proposes cutting payments to Medicare providers.

Obama’s plan is to make doctors and patients pay for Medicare. One way to get National Health is to make it uneconomic for private health care to service Medicare patients. Already many doctors will not accept Medicare patients because of the low payments, endless paperwork, and risk of prosecution for “over-billing.” Looking at one recent Medicare patient medical bill, Medicare and supplemental insurance paid 29 percent of the billed amount, requiring the doctor to eat 58.5 percent of his charges and the patient to pay 12.5 percent. The doctor was paid $93.16 on a $320.89 bill. And Obama wants to reduce payments to providers?

What is Obama thinking? A country that can’t afford Medicare can’t afford National Health. Medicare provides only for the elderly, and it provides very little. A person pays the Medicare tax as long as he earns and on the totality of earnings. For the rich the Medicare tax can exceed the cost of a gold-plated private insurance policy.

Basic Medicare leaves a person unprotected. To provide better coverage, it is necessary to enroll in Medicare Part B for which the premium is $308.30 per month or $3,699.60 per year. On top of this, a person needs a privately supplied supplemental policy to complete Medicare coverage. AARP’s policy, which, after deductibles are met, covers half of drug costs, cost the “Medicare protected” elderly $ 273.50 per month or $3,282 per year. The drug prescription plan passed by Congress costs the individual yet more.

The two supplements to Medicare cost the Medicare patient $6,981.60 per year. In addition, if the Medicare patient has much retirement income besides Social Security, he pays income tax on 85% of the $3,699.60 Medicare Part B premium as it is part of taxable Social Security, which for someone in the 25% bracket is another $925 dollars.

In the late 1970s, Democratic Senator Russell Long, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told me that as Social Security was collected as a tax on wages and salaries, the US government had promised never to tax the benefits. So much for any commitment that the US government makes to the American people.

A top Social Security income, net of Medicare Part B premium, is $23,220 per year. Deduct the AARP policy, and the elderly who have paid in maximum Social Security taxes, get $20,000 per year. Of course, few Social Security retirees receive the maximum payment. AARP’s Public Policy Institute reports that in 2006 the average annual Social Security benefit for a retired worker was $12,372. Such a worker would have little left after paying the Medicare Part B premium and an additional premium for a supplement.

Offshoring and “free trade” have destroyed employer-provided health coverage for millions of employees. Private health care coverage can cost as much as one-third and even one-half of a person’s earned income, and some people are not insurable. National Health seems to be in the cards--only there is no money for it. All the money is being spent in pointless wars and on bailouts of financial fraud. The Obama budget puts bankster bailouts and pointless wars ahead of the health of the American people.

National Health advocates emphasize that a single-payer system is less expensive because it eliminates layers of profits. It is also less expensive for a less promising reason. Unless there is a parallel private health care system, National Health systems limit health spending to what is provided in the government budget. Over time, health care has to compete with everything else in the budget. Every part of the budget has its partisans and special interests. It is fantasy to assume that National Health will always be well funded. Just look at the state of the National Health Service in the UK.

Obama’s plan to tax the rich is another con job. Obama’s budget defines the rich as a person with a $250,000 before tax income. This is a rotten joke. The rich are the banksters, such as Hank Paulson with his $160 million annual bonus, and heads of hedge funds with their $1,000 million annual incomes. To confuse the struggling middle class with the real rich is criminal. A person with a $250,000 income before tax does not come close to being rich. Obama’s “tax the rich” scheme will devastate the upper middle class and leave the super rich undamaged.

The only change we have from Obama and the Democrats is for the worse. Bush’s FY 2008 budget deficit was $450 billion. The FY 2009 deficit is projected at $1.2 trillion. The budget deficit in Obama’s first budget is $1.75 trillion, a fourfold increase in two years.

Obama’s projected budget deficits are an understatement. For example, Obama’s budget assumes a less steep economic decline than the economy is experiencing, and it projects that war costs will drop to $50 billion annually beginning in 2011--this despite Obama sending more troops to Afghanistan and recent congressional testimony of Lt. General David Barno, former head of US forces in Afghanistan, who said the war in Afghanistan could last until 2025.

The “war on terror” will never end, because the moronic US government has defined everyone who resists US hegemony as a “terrorist.” The great danger to American civil liberty is that the US government regards as terrorists American citizens who realize that the neoconservative dream of American hegemony is a fantasy. As the Obama regime has not repealed the Bush regime rule-- “you are with us or against us”--Americans who oppose hegemonic war are lumped into the “against us” category.

There seems little chance that civil liberties will be restored. Obama and his “liberal” Justice (sic) Department have sided with Bush/Cheney on every important civil liberties issue. Yet, the ACLU sees “hope” in Obama’s rhetoric!

On February 21 Yahoo News reported: “President Barack Obama's administration has sided with predecessor George W. Bush on the rights of detainees at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, saying they cannot challenge their detention in US courts. In a two-sentence court filing Friday, the US Justice Department said "the government adheres to its previously articulated position" of denying habeas corpus rights to Bagram detainees, backing a similar decision by the Bush administration.”

“Earlier this month,” Yahoo News reports, “the Obama administration backed another Bush anti-terror policy when it urged a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing Boeing Company of helping fly suspects to secret CIA detention centers overseas. The Justice Department said the case should be thrown out to protect state secrets.”

Do you remember the illegal spying? The US telecom industry succumbed to Bush regime pressure and broke the law together with President Bush. The illegal act made the US telecom industry subject to lawsuits, but the Bush regime placed its co-conspirators above the law.

Now Obama has sided with the Bush regime. On February 26, therawstory.com reported: “The Obama Justice Department continues to stand behind a Bush era law meant to prevent lawsuits against telecommunications companies accused of illegally sharing private customer information with intelligence agencies. In a brief filed late Wednesday obtained by Raw Story, the Department of Justice provided its views to Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, after the San Francisco federal judge questioned the constitutionality of the wide-sweeping law and whether it gives the U.S. Attorney General too much power in deciding whether a company is immune from lawsuits after it has shared information with federal agents.”

On February 26 antiwar.com reported that the “new CIA director (Leon Panetta) declares nothing has changed, nothing will change.” Panetta declared that the US policy of conducting war on Pakistan’s sovereign territory “would continue.” The attacks, Panetta claimed, “have been successful.” For the CIA, claims of success equal legality. Did the Bush regime ever express greater arrogance and hubris?

With Rahm Israel Emanuel, an Israeli dual citizen, in charge of the White House and Obama’s schedule, Obama will have an even less independent foreign policy in the Middle East than Bush. Somehow someone among the Obamacons managed to put forward an appointment that could challenge the Israel Lobby’s stranglehold. Charles Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, former top Pentagon official, and president of the Middle East Policy Council, was chosen by Admiral Denis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, to head the National Intelligence Council.

The neocons went berserk. Steve Rosen, formerly of AIPAC, currently indicted as an Israeli spy, Gabriel Schoenfeld, who wants the New York Times indicted for allegedly violating the Espionage Act for reporting the Bush regime’s illegal spying, Daniel Pipes, who sees Muslim terrorists under every bed, Michael Rubin of the warmonger American Enterprise Institute, and Frank Gaffney, possibly the goofiest person in America, damned Freeman’s appointment as “deeply troubling,” because Freeman has an open mind on the Middle East situation.

In other words, if you are not on Israel’s side, you are disqualified.

There is no more certain indication of continuing war in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf than for Freeman’s appointment to be blocked.

Pay close attention to this one. If Obama succumbs to the Israel Lobby and nixes Blair’s appointment of Freeman, the US will have to finance interminable wars on top of trillion dollar bailouts and massive unemployment.

The US might not even make it to 2012 before it is a banana republic.

Dr. Roberts was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and William E, Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University.

6 Million Dead in Congo. Who is responsible?

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:14:00 +0000

The conflict in the Congo is a resource war waged by U.S. and British allies
By Kambale Musavuli
Online Journal Guest Writer

Feb 19, 2009, 00:17

Since Rwanda and Uganda invaded the Congo in 1996, they have pursued a plan to appropriate the wealth of Eastern Congo either directly or through proxy forces. The December 2008 United Nations report is the latest in a series of U.N. reports dating from 2001 that clearly documents the systematic looting and appropriation of Congolese resources by Rwanda and Uganda, two of Washington and London�s staunchest allies in Africa.

However, in the wake of the December 2008 report, which clearly documents Rwanda�s support of destabilizing proxy forces inside the Congo, a series of stunning proposals and actions have been presented which all appear to be an attempt to cover up or bury the damning U.N. report on the latest expression of Rwanda�s aggression against the Congolese people.

The earliest proposal came from Herman Cohen, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs under George Herbert Walker Bush. He proposed that Rwanda be rewarded for its well documented looting of Congo�s wealth by being a part of a Central and/or East African free trade zone whereby Rwanda would keep its ill-gotten gains.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy would not be outdone; he also brought his proposal off the shelf, which argues for essentially the same scheme of rewarding Rwanda for its 12-year war booty from the Congo. Two elements are at the core of both proposals.

One is the legitimization of the economic annexation of the Congo by Rwanda, which for all intents and purposes represents the status quo. And two is basically the laying of the foundation for the balkanization of the Congo or the outright political annexation of Eastern Congo by Rwanda. Both Sarkozy and Cohen have moved with lightning speed past the Dec. 12, 2008, United Nations report to make proposals that avoid the core issues revealed in the report.

The U.N. report reaffirms what Congolese intellectuals, scholars and victims have been saying for over a decade in regard to Rwanda�s role as the main catalyst for the biblical scale death and misery in the Congo. The Ugandan and Rwandan invasions of 1996 and 1998 have triggered the deaths of nearly 6 million Congolese. The United Nations says it is the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II.

The report �found evidence that the Rwandan authorities have been complicit in the recruitment of soldiers, including children, have facilitated the supply of military equipment, and have sent officers and units from the Rwandan Defense Forces� to the DRC. The support is for the National Congress for the Defense of the People, or CNDP, formerly led by self-proclaimed Gen. Laurent Nkunda.

The report also shows that the CNDP is sheltering a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court, Gen. Jean Bosco Ntaganda. The CNDP has used Rwanda as a rear base for fundraising meetings and bank accounts, and Uganda is once more implicated as Nkunda has met regularly with embassies in both Kigali and Kampala.

Also, Uganda is accepting illegal CNDP immigration papers. Earlier U.N. reports said that Kagame and Museveni are the mafia dons of Congo�s exploitation. This has not changed in any substantive way.

The report implicates Tribert Rujugiro Ayabatwa, a close advisor to Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. Rujugiro is the founder of the Rwandan Investment Group. This is not the first time he has been named by the United Nations as one of the individuals contributing to the conflict in the Congo.

In April 2001, he was identified as Tibere Rujigiro in the U.N. Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as one of the figures illegally exploiting Congo�s wealth. His implication this time comes in financial contributions to CNDP and appropriation of land.

This brings to light the organizations he is a part of, which include but are not limited to the Rwanda Development Board, the Rwandan Investment Group, of which he is the founder, and Kagame�s Presidential Advisory Council. They have members as notable as Rev. Rick Warren, business tycoon Joe Ritchie, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Scott Ford of Alltell, Dr. Clet Niyikiza of GlaxoSmithKline, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and many more.

These connections provide some insight into why Rwanda has been able to commit and support remarkable atrocities in the Congo without receiving even a reprimand in spite of the fact that two European courts have charged their top leadership with war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is only recently that two European nations, Sweden and the Netherlands, have decided to withhold aid from Rwanda as a result of its aggression against the Congolese people.

The report shows that the Congolese soldiers have also given support to the FDLR and other armed groups to fight against the aggression of Rwanda�s CNDP proxy. One important distinction must be made in this regard. It appears that the FDLR support comes more from individual Congolese soldiers as opposed to overall government support.

The Congolese government is not supporting the FDLR in incursions into Rwanda; however, the Rwandan government is in fact supporting rebel groups inside Congo. The Congolese population is the victim of the CNDP, FDLR and the Congolese military.

The United Nations report is a predictable outgrowth of previous reports produced by the U.N. since 2001. It reflects the continued appropriation of the land, theft of Congo�s resources, and continuous human rights abuses caused by Rwanda and Uganda. An apparent aim of these spasms is to create facts on the ground -- land expropriation, theft of cattle and other assets -- to consolidate CNDP/Rwandan economic integration into Rwanda.

Herman Cohen�s �Can Africa Trade Its Way to Peace?� in the New York Times reflects the disastrous policies that favor profits over people. In his article, the former lobbyist for Mobutu and Kabila�s government in the United States and former assistant secretary of state for Africa from 1989 to 1993 argues, �Having controlled the Kivu provinces for 12 years, Rwanda will not relinquish access to resources that constitute a significant percentage of its gross national product.�

He adds, �The normal flow of trade from eastern Congo is to Indian Ocean ports rather than the Atlantic Ocean, which is more than a thousand miles away.� Continuing his argument, he believes that �the free movement of people would empty the refugee camps and would allow the densely populated countries of Rwanda and Burundi to supply needed labor to Congo and Tanzania.�

Cohen�s first mistake in providing solutions to the conflict is to look at the conflict as a humanitarian crisis that can be solved by economic means. Uganda and Rwanda are the aggressors. Aggressors should not define for the Congo what is best, but rather it is for the Congo to define what it has to offer to its neighbor.

A lasting solution is to stop the silent annexation of Eastern Congo. The International Court of Justice has already weighed in on this matter when it ruled in 2005 that Congo is entitled to $10 billion in reparations due to Uganda�s looting of Congo�s natural resources and the commission of human rights abuses in the Congo. It would have in all likelihood ruled in the same fashion against Rwanda; however, Rwanda claimed to be outside the jurisdiction of the court.

The United States and Great Britain�s implication is becoming very clear. These two great powers consider Rwanda and Uganda their staunch allies and, some would argue, client states. These two countries have received millions of dollars of military aid, which, in turn, they use in Congo to cause destruction and death.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame is a former student at the U.S. military training base Fort Leavenworth and Yoweri Museveni�s son, Lt. Gen. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, graduated from the same U.S. military college in the summer of 2008. Both the United States and Great Britain should follow the lead of the Dutch and Swedish governments, which have suspended their financial support to Rwanda.

With U.S. and British taxpayers� support, we now see an estimated 6 million people dead in Congo, hundreds of thousands of women systematically raped as an instrument of war and millions displaced.

A political solution will resolve the crisis, and part of that requires pressure on Rwanda in spite of Rwanda�s recent so-called �house arrest� of Laurent Nkunda. African institutions such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union are primed to be more engaged in the Congo issue. Considering Congo�s importance to Africa, it is remarkable that they have been so anemic in regard to the Congo crisis for so long.

Rwanda�s leader, Paul Kagame, cannot feel as secure or be as arrogant as he has been in the past. One of his top aides was arrested in Germany as a result of warrants issued by a French court and there is almost global consensus that pressure must be put on him to cease his support of the destabilization of the Congo and its resultant humanitarian catastrophe.

In addition to pressure on Kagame, the global community should support the following policies:

1. Initiate an international tribunal on the Congo.

2. Work with the Congolese to implement a national reconciliation process; this could be a part of the international tribunal.

3. Work with the Congolese to assure that those who have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity are brought to justice.

4. Hold accountable corporations that are benefiting from the suffering and deaths in the Congo.

5. Make the resolution of the Congo crisis a top international priority.

Living is a right, not a privilege, and Congolese deaths must be honored by due process of the law. As the implication of the many parties in this conflict becomes clear, we should start firmly acknowledging that the conflict is a resource war waged by U.S. and British allies.

We call upon people of good will once again to advocate for the Congolese by following the prescriptions we have been outlining to end the conflict and start the new path to peace, harmony and an end to the exploitation of Congo�s wealth and devastation of its peoples.

Kambale Musavuli is spokesperson and student coordinator for Friends of the Congo. He can be reached at Kambale@friendsofthecongo.org.

Online Journal: NSA’s meta-data email surveillance program exposed

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:51:00 +0000

NSA’s meta-data email surveillance program exposed
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

WMR has learned details of one of the most important components of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program code named “STELLAR WIND.” The highly-classified STELLAR WIND program was initiated by the George W. Bush administration with the cooperation of major U.S. telecommunications carriers, including AT&T and Verizon.

The interception of text communications by STELLAR WIND was a major priority of the NSA program.

The major NSA system for intercepting text communications is called PINWALE. On September 15, 2008, WMR first reported on how PINWALE was used to target Russian e-mails: “Code-named PINWALE, the NSA e-mail surveillance system targets Russian government, military, diplomatic, and commercial email traffic and burrows into the text portions of the email to search for particular words and phrases of interest to NSA eavesdroppers.”

WMR has learned additional details of PINWALE. The system is linked to a number of meta-databases that contain e-mail, faxes, and text messages of hundreds of millions of people around the world and in the United States.

Informed sources have revealed to WMR that PINWALE can search these meta-databases using various parameters like date-time, group, natural language, IP address, sender and receipients, operating system, and other information embedded in the header. When an NSA analyst is looking for Persian or Arabic e-mails, the sender and recipients are normally foreign nationals, who are not covered by restrictions on eavesdropping on U.S. “persons” once imposed on NSA by United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18). However, STELLAR WIND and PINWALE negated both USSID 18 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 by permitting NSA analysts to read the e-mails, faxes, and text messages of U.S. persons when PINWALE search parameters included searches of e-mails in English. When English language text communications are retrieved, analysts read the text message content to determine whether it contains anything to do with terrorism. However, rather than being deleted, the messages are returned to the meta-databases.

Text message records in PINWALE, a system developed by NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, are contained in three major meta-databases code-named LION HEART, LION ROAR, and LION FUSION.

Not only are text communications between U.S. persons in the United States and recipients abroad contained in the PINWALE meta-databases but text messages between U.S. persons within the United States are also held in the databases.

WMR reported on May 10, 2005, that Booz Allen is also the major contractor for an NSA database code named “FIRSTFRUITS” that tracked not only the articles of journalists but contained intercepts of their communications, “ . . . part of the upkeep of the [FIRSTFRUITS] system has been outsourced to outside contractors such as Booz Allen.”

The involvement of the telecommunications companies in STELLAR WIND and PINWALE was revealed when former AT&T technician Mark Klein leaked AT&T documents on the program in 2006. AT&T’s interception entailed NSA snooping equipment being placed within AT&T centers in San Francisco; Bridgeton, Missouri; San Diego; San Jose; Atlanta; Seattle; and Los Angeles.

The Obama administration recently appealed a decision by U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. Court for the Northern District of California who ruled that a lawsuit brought by the Al Haramain Islamic charity (Al Haramain v. Bush), in which the charity charges that it was the subject of illegal warrantless wiretapping under STELLAR WIND, could proceed.

WMR has previously reported that STELLAR WIND may have been used to prosecute Democratic governors and other Democratic officials around the country. WMR has received confirmation that when NSA analysts monitoring e-mails and other text messages, encountered information from PINWALE meta-databases that did not involve terrorism or foreign counterintelligence issues but did involve other possible criminal matters, NSA lawyers would determine whether such information should be turned over to Department of Justice criminal prosecutors. However, with information passed to WMR that NSA directors Michael Hayden and Keith Alexander were in total lockstep with the Bush-Cheney political agenda, with Alexander once boasting to a group of NSA employees that “I am a Rumsfeld man,” there is the real possibility that PINWALE data ended up in the hands of U.S. attorneys like Patrick Fitzgerald in his vendetta against deposed Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, and Alice Martin and Leura Canary in their Bush White House-directed political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.

If Fitzgerald’s legal brief against Blagojevich contains PINWALE-derived wiretap information it would explain why he has been unsuccessful in finding a grand jury in Chicago to indict Blagojevich. WMR was specifically told that e-mails between Washington and Chicago would be contained in PINWALE and that is something that could pose a problem for Fitzgerald in explaining where all his intercepts of Blagojevich originated. It may also explain why the Obama administration does not want details of STELLAR WIND to be exposed in Al Haramain v. Bush.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

9/11 Bush Treason: Contact the Justice Department& W.H. Right Now!

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:18:00 +0000

COMPLAINT

Notice of High Treason perpetrated by former President George Walker Bush and other members of his Administration relating to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11th, 2001 ("9/11").

[Now is the time to press our case for justice and the full disclosure of 9/11. Demand that Obama's Justice Department act on the known high treason perpetrated by Bush et. al. Keep pressure on by spreading the word and encouraging thousands (millions) of like-minded people to do the same.

Contacts:
White House
202-456-1111, 202-456-1414
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

Attorney General
202-353-1555,
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov

Inspector General
oig.hotline@usdoj.gov,
inspector.general@usdoj.gov

National Security Division
nsd.public@usdoj.gov

Additional contacts at end.]

1. Applicable law: US Code Title 18, Chapter 115, § 2382. Misprision of treason.

"Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same to the President or to some judge of the United States, or to the governor or to some judge or justice of a particular State, is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both."

2. The "classification" by the former President, George W. Bush, of the activities of "certain foreign governments" which assisted and sponsored the 9/11 hijackers while they lived in the United States, amounts to "aid and comfort" to the "enemy," and therefore treason under the U.S. Constitution.

Evidence:

A) Statements by former Senator Bob Graham (FL), the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, made on PBS Newshour, December 11, 2002:

"I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States.

I am stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing that to determine if other terrorists received similar support and, even more important, if the infrastructure of a foreign government assisting terrorists still exists for the current generation of terrorists who are here planning the next plots.

To me that is an extremely significant issue and most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified. I believe the American people should know the extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government involvement. That would motivate the government to take action."

B) The FOREIGN OPERATIONS, EXPORT FINANCING, AND RELATED PROGRAMS
APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2004, Amendment No. 1994, from the Congressional Record, October 28, 2003:

"The amendment is as follows:

(Purpose: To urge the President to release information regarding
sources of foreign support for the 9-11 hijackers)

At the appropriate place, insert the following:
Sec. . Sense of the Senate on declassifying portions of
the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 2001.
(a) Findings.--The Senate finds that--
(1) The President has prevented the release to the American public of 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence
Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 2001.
(2) The contents of the redacted pages discuss sources of foreign support for some of the September 11th hijackers while they were in the United States.
(3) The Administration's decision to classify this
information prevents the American people from having access to information about the involvement of certain foreign governments in the terrorist attacks of September 2001.
(...)
(b) Sense of the Senate.--It is the sense of the Senate
that in light of these findings the President should declassify the 28-page section of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the
Terrorist Attacks of September 2001 that deals with foreign sources of support for the 9-11 hijackers, and that only
those portions of the report that would directly compromise ongoing investigations or reveal intelligence sources and
methods should remain classified."

C) FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and published by INTELWIRE.COM, reveal that Omar Al Bayoumi, who lived with two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers and supported them financially, was an agent for the government of Saudi Arabia.

"An FBI memo details the phone records of Omar Al Bayoumi, a Saudi citizen who assisted hijackers Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi in relocating to San Diego in early 2000. Bayoumi helped them find an apartment and pay their rent and introduced them to people in the local community.

Bayoumi also kept in close contact with his apparent employer, the Saudi government. The exact nature of Bayoumi's employment has remained unclear, but numerous associates suspected him of being a Saudi intelligence officer.

Read the document: 2002-04-15: FBI Letterhead Memorandum, Omar Al Bayoumi Contacts With Saudi Government
http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2002-04-15-FBI-LHM-omar-al-bayoumi2.pdf

(...)
Bayoumi was "employed by the Saudi government to monitor the activities of Saudi dissidents that resided in the U.S.," the memo states, according to "a prominent Islamic leader in San Diego."

Other FBI interviewees said Bayoumi was "an employee of the Saudi Arabian Government (who) traveled to mosques throughout the world to monitor and observe Saudi citizens for signs of dissident behavior."

Another source said Bayoumi "was connected with a Saudi Arabian company that is equivalent to the Federal Aviation Administration," and said he was paid $5,000 a month to be a student.

The memo below details Bayoumi's phone contacts with the Saudi government over slightly less than two months in 2000, around the time the hijackers arrived in San Diego. Phone records revealed Bayoumi called local Saudi officials, including the consulate in San Diego, 34 times. He called Saudi officials in Washington D.C. 141 times in the same period, according to the memo -- more than twice a day on average.

Calls appear to be directed to the Saudi Cultural Mission, the Saudi Education Mission, the Saudi Embassy in Washington, the Saudi Consulate in San Diego, the Saudi National Guard, and the Saudi Islamic Affairs Department.

Although the notation is unclear due to FBI redactions, it also appears Bayoumi called a U.S. Department of State diplomat."

D) The intelligence service of Pakistan, Inter-Services Intelligence, was accused in the Times of India newspaper, October 9, 2001, ("India helped FBI trace ISI-terrorist links") of ordering wire transfers in excess of $100,000 from their agent in Dubai UAE to Mohammad Atta in Florida. The chief of the Pakistani ISI resigned immediately as these revelations were made public in the press. This information has also been made "classified" by the former President, and no full accounting of these activities has been made available to the citizens of the United States.

"...top sources confirmed here on tuesday, that the [ISI chief] general lost his job because of the "evidence" india produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the world trade centre. the us authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to wtc hijacker mohammed atta from pakistan by ahmad umar sheikh at the instance of gen mahumd. senior government sources have confirmed that india contributed significantly to establishing the link between the money transfer and the role played by the dismissed isi chief. while they did not provide details, they said that indian inputs, including sheikh’s mobile phone number, helped the fbi in tracing and establishing the link. a direct link between the isi and the wtc attack could have enormous repercussions. the us cannot but suspect whether or not there were other senior pakistani army commanders who were in the know of things. evidence of a larger conspiracy could shake us confidence in pakistan’s ability to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition. indian officials say they are vitally interested in the unravelling of the case since it could link the isi directly to the hijacking of the indian airlines kathmandu-delhi flight to kandahar last december. ahmad umar sayeed sheikh is a british national and a london school of economics graduate who was arrested by the police in delhi following a bungled 1994 kidnapping of four westerners, including an american citizen."

3) Treason is defined in the U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 3:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort..."

CONCLUSION

The overt actions of the former President of the United States to make "classified" the participation of "foreign governments" in the attacks of 9/11 2001 clearly amount to "aid and comfort" to the "enemy" as per the Constitutional definition of treason. Specifically, the governments of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and potentially others, have been implicated by credible evidence and by the statements of high-ranking US officials.

This hiding of the facts by the former President and his Administration amounts to a cover-up after the fact of the identities of the true sponsors of the September 11th attacks on America.

Therefore, former president George Walker Bush and other responsible members of his Administration are guilty of high treason according to the laws of this land. This most serious matter deserves a full investigation and prosecution immediately. In the words of former Senator Bob Graham:

"I believe the American people should know the extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government involvement."

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The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:07:00 +0000

Seeing Through the Lies
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

The record is fairly clear. You can find it on the Israeli website, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. Israel broke the ceasefire by going into the Gaza and killing six or seven Palestinian militants. At that point—and now I’m quoting the official Israeli website—Hamas retaliated or, in retaliation for the Israeli attack, then launched the missiles.

Now, as to the reason why, the record is fairly clear as well. According to Ha’aretz, Defense Minister Barak began plans for this invasion before the ceasefire even began. In fact, according to yesterday’s Ha’aretz, the plans for the invasion began in March. And the main reasons for the invasion, I think, are twofold. Number one; to enhance what Israel calls its deterrence capacity, which in layman’s language basically means Israel’s capacity to terrorize the region into submission. After their defeat in July 2006 in Lebanon, they felt it important to transmit the message that Israel is still a fighting force, still capable of terrorizing those who dare defy its word.

And the second main reason for the attack is because Hamas was signaling that it wanted a diplomatic settlement of the conflict along the June 1967 border. That is to say, Hamas was signaling they had joined the international consensus, they had joined most of the international community, overwhelmingly the international community, in seeking a diplomatic settlement. And at that point, Israel was faced with what Israelis call a Palestinian peace offensive. And in order to defeat the peace offensive, they sought to dismantle Hamas.

As was documented in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair by the writer David Rose, basing himself on internal US documents, it was the United States in cahoots with the Palestinian Authority and Israel which were attempting a putsch on Hamas, and Hamas preempted the putsch. That, too, is no longer debatable or no longer a controversial claim.

The issue is can it rule in Gaza if Israel maintains a blockade and prevents economic activity among the Palestinians. The blockade, incidentally, was implemented before Hamas came to power. The blockade doesn’t even have anything to do with Hamas. The blockade came to—there were Americans who were sent over, in particular James Wolfensohn, to try to break the blockade after Israel redeployed its troops in Gaza.

The problem all along has been that Israel doesn’t want Gaza to develop, and Israel doesn’t want to resolve diplomatically the conflict, both the leadership in Damascus and the leadership in the Gaza have repeatedly made statements they’re willing to settle the conflict in the June 1967 border. The record is fairly clear. In fact, it’s unambiguously clear.

Every year, the United Nations General Assembly votes on a resolution entitled “Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question.” And every year the vote is the same: it’s the whole world on one side; Israel, the United States and some South Sea atolls and Australia on the other side. The vote this past year was 164-to-7. Every year since 1989—in 1989, the vote was 151-to-3, the whole world on one side, the United States, Israel and the island state of Dominica on the other side.

We have the Arab League, all twenty-two members of the Arab League, favoring a two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. We have the Palestinian Authority favoring that two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. We now have Hamas favoring that two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. The one and only obstacle is Israel, backed by the United States. That’s the problem.

Well, the record shows that Hamas wanted to continue the ceasefire, but only on condition that Israel eases the blockade. Long before Hamas began the retaliatory rocket attacks on Israel, Palestinians were facing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza because of the blockade. The former High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, described what was going on in Gaza as a destruction of a civilization. This was during the ceasefire period.

What does the record show? The record shows for the past twenty or more years, the entire international community has sought to settle the conflict in the June 1967 border with a just resolution of the refugee question. Are all 164 nations of the United Nations the rejectionists? And are the only people in favor of peace the United States, Israel, Nauru, Palau, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Australia? Who are the rejectionists? Who’s opposing a peace?

The record shows that in every crucial issue raised at Camp David, then under the Clinton parameters, and then in Taba, at every single point, all the concessions came from the Palestinians. Israel didn’t make any concessions. Every concession came from the Palestinians. The Palestinians have repeatedly expressed a willingness to settle the conflict in accordance with international law.

The law is very clear. July 2004, the highest judicial body in the world, the International Court of Justice, ruled Israel has no title to any of the West Bank and any of Gaza. They have no title to Jerusalem. Arab East Jerusalem, according to the highest judicial body in the world, is occupied Palestinian territory. The International Court of Justice ruled all the settlements, all the settlements in the West Bank, are illegal under international law.

Now, the important point is, on all those questions, the Palestinians were willing to make concessions. They made all the concessions. Israel didn’t make any concessions.

I think it’s fairly clear what needs to happen. Number one, the United States and Israel have to join the rest of the international community, have to abide by international law. I don’t think international law should be trivialized. I think it’s a serious issue. If Israel is in defiance of international law, it should be called into account, just like any other state in the world.

Mr. Obama has to level with the American people. He has to be honest about what is the main obstacle to resolving the conflict. It’s not Palestinian rejectionism. It’s the refusal of Israel, backed by the United States government, to abide by international law, to abide by the opinion of the international community.

And the main challenge for all of us as Americans is to see through the lies.
Norman Finkelstein is author of five books, including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Beyond Chutzpah and The Holocaust Industry, which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions. He is the son of Holocaust survivors. This article is an edited extract of the views of Finkelstein given at DemocracyNow.org. His website is www.NormanFinkelstein.com

International Law is Clear: Genocide

noreply@blogger.com (John Doraemi) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:15:00 +0000

The United States Promotes Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians

Prof. Francis A. Boyle
Global Research,
Saturday, Jan 11, 2008

(from “Tackling America’s Toughest Questions,” now at Amazon.com)

As long ago as October 19, 2000, the then United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council) condemned Israel for inflicting “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” upon the Palestinian people, most of whom are Muslims. The reader has a general idea of what a war crime is, so I am not going to elaborate upon that term here. But there are different degrees of heinousness for war crimes. In particular are the more serious war crimes denominated “grave breaches” of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987, the world has seen those heinous war crimes inflicted every day by Israel against the Palestinian people living in occupied Palestine: e.g., willful killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army and by Israel’s illegal paramilitary settlers. These Israeli “grave breaches” of the Fourth Geneva Convention mandate universal prosecution for the perpetrators and their commanders, whether military or civilian, including and especially Israel’s political leaders.

But I want to focus for a moment on Israel’s “crimes against humanity” against the Palestinian people—as determined by the U.N. Human Rights Commission itself, set up pursuant to the requirements of the United Nations Charter. What are “crimes against humanity”? This concept goes all the way back to the Nuremberg Charter of 1945 for the trial of the major Nazi war criminals in Europe. In the Nuremberg Charter of 1945, drafted by the United States Government, there was created and inserted a new type of international crime specifically intended to deal with the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people:

Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The paradigmatic example of “crimes against humanity” is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people. This is where the concept of “crimes against humanity” came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights Commission determined that Israel is currently doing to the Palestinian people: crimes against humanity. Expressed in legal terms, this is just like what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews. That is the significance of the formal determination by the U.N. Human Rights Commission that Israel has inflicted “crimes against humanity” upon the Palestinian people. The Commission chose this well-known and long-standing legal term of art quite carefully and deliberately based upon the evidence it had compiled.

Furthermore, the Nuremberg “crimes against humanity” are the historical and legal precursor to the international crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The theory here was that what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people was so horrific that it required a special international treaty that would codify and universalize the Nuremberg concept of “crimes against humanity.” And that treaty ultimately became the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the international crime of genocide in relevant part as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

….

As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his seminal book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israel’s genocidal policy against the Palestinians has been unremitting, extending from before the very foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, and is ongoing and even intensifying against the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza. Zionism’s “final solution” to Israel’s much touted “demographic threat” allegedly posed by the very existence of the Palestinians has always been genocide.

Certainly, Israel and its predecessors-in-law—the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs—have committed genocide against the Palestinian people that actually started on or about 1948 and has continued apace until today in violation of Genocide Convention Articles II(a), (b), and (c). For at least the past six decades, the Israeli government and its predecessors-in-law—the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs—have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive military, political, and economic campaign with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and different religious (Jews versus Muslims and Christians) group constituting the Palestinian people. This Zionist/Israeli campaign has consisted of killing members of the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(a). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(b). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also deliberately inflicted on the Palestinian people conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in substantial part in violation of Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention.

Article I of the Genocide Convention requires all contracting parties such as the United States “to prevent and to punish” genocide. Yet to the contrary, historically the “Jewish” state’s criminal conduct against the Palestinians has been financed, armed, equipped, supplied and politically supported by the “Christian” United States. Although the United States is a founding sponsor of, and a contracting party to, both the Nuremberg Charter and the Genocide Convention, as well as the United Nations Charter, these legal facts have never made any difference to the United States when it comes to its blank-check support for Israel and their joint and severable criminal mistreatment of the Palestinians—truly the wretched of the earth!

The world has not yet heard even one word uttered by the United States and its NATO allies in favor of “humanitarian intervention” against Israel in order to protect the Palestinian people, let alone a “responsibility to protect” the Palestinians from Zionist/Israeli genocide. The United States, its NATO allies, and the Great Powers on the U.N. Security Council would not even dispatch a U.N. Charter Chapter 6 monitoring force to help protect the Palestinians, let alone even contemplate any type of U.N. Charter Chapter 7 enforcement actions against Israel – shudder the thought!. The doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” so readily espoused elsewhere when U.S. foreign policy goals are allegedly at stake has been clearly proved to be a joke and a fraud when it comes to stopping the ongoing and accelerating Israeli campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people.

Rather than rein in the Israelis—which would be possible just by turning off the funding pipeline—the United States government, the U.S. Congress, and U.S. taxpayers instead support the “Jewish” state to the tune of about 4 billion dollars per year, without whose munificence this instance of genocide – and indeed conceivably the State of Israel itself – would not be possible. What the world witnesses here is (yet another) case of “dishumanitarian intervention” or “humanitarian extermination” by the United States and Israel against the Palestinians and Palestine. In today’s world genocide pays so long as it is done at the behest of the United States and its de jure or de facto allies such as Israel.

Of course miracles can always happen. But I anticipate no fundamental change in America’s support for the Israeli campaign of genocide against the Palestinians during the tenure of the Obama/Clinton administration.