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The Regime’s Heroic Border Guards in Action

By William Grigg on December 11, 2009

Crossing the border of a totalitarian state — in either direction — is an experience fraught with visceral anxiety.

Finding himself in the unwanted company of humorless, heavily armed goons of dubious competence and abysmal intelligence, the traveler is vividly aware that he can be arrested, imprisoned, beaten, or even shot at whim.

The best thing to do in such circumstances, travelers are told, is to assume a posture of utter servility, meekly and quietly enduring whatever indignity inflicted on them until they are safely through the border checkpoint.

Judging by the recent behavior of the valiant cadres of the  heroic Border Guards Directorate, it becomes clear that the U.S. is rapidly descending into undisguised totalitarianism.

Last Tuesday (December 8), Dr. Peter Watts, a Hugo-nominated science fiction author from Toronto, was severely beaten, pepper-sprayed, arrested, interrogated, and otherwise abused by Border Patrol agents.

“If you buy into the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canadian border without incident last Tuesday,” writes Dr. Watts. “In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car like army ants for no apparent reason; or perhaps they did, and I simply kept my eyes downcast and refrained from asking questions.”

“Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on,” Dr. Watts continues:

“I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, sh*t-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three f*****g hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my f****g paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.”

“In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face,” he concludes. “But that is not this universe.”

In the universe we’re sentenced to live in, Dr. Watts, like many, many other innocent people, has been charged with “assaulting” the sacred personage of a federal officer for the offense of being on the receiving end of a criminal assault by that officer and his cohorts (remember, the bold and brave “men” in law enforcement always operate in packs).

This kind of arbitrary, lawless violence can occur anytime anyone — including a U.S. citizen — encounters the Border Patrol. And the danger is not limited to the border: Witness the experience of Pastor Steven Anderson of Tempe, Arizona, who was tased, beaten, and arrested by Border Patrol agents at a checkpoint set up dozens of miles inside the southern border with Mexico.

Iris Cooper of Patagonia, Arizona recently had an unpleasant — if less violent — run-in with the Border Patrol. While driving to school at the Pima Medical Institute in Tucson, she realized that she had forgotten her books. Spying a Border Patrol checkpoint in the near distance, Cooper decided to take the risk of turning around to retrieve her books, knowing that this action might provoke suspicion.

Stop and think about what it says about our circumstances that avoiding a warrantless checkpoint is considered “probable cause” for the purpose of conducting a search.

Sure enough, Border Patrol agents and police pursued and stopped Cooper. She was pulled from her car, handcuffed, and detained for a half an hour while a K-9 unit conducted a warrantless search of her vehicle.

Despite being handcuffed and forbidden to leave, Cooper was told that she wasn’t under arrest. The handcuffs, she was told, were “part of the procedure.” This was a lie, of course: An arrest occurs any time a citizen is detained by any law enforcement officer. This includes traffic stops.

According to the Border Patrol, the increasingly theoretical protections offered by the Fourth Amendment are subject to “exceptions” for the purpose of border enforcement. This creates what some have called a “Constitution-free zone” within a 100-mile-wide strip surrounding the continental U.S. As the ACLU has pointed out, two-thirds of the U.S. population resides within that formal “Constitution-free zone.”

As I’ve noted before, the border enforcement regime supposedly intended to keep foreigners out can also be used to  pen us in. Many conservatives — including some who apparently despise foreigners more than they cherish freedom — forgot that principle during the reign of Bush the Dumber. Perhaps their perspective will change now that Barack the Blessed is on the throne, and the walls are closing in.

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December 19, 2009 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , | 11 Comments

Turning Tricks, Cashing In on Fear

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
December 18, 2009

In the early 1970s the UN spearheaded the progressive notion of a new world economic order, one that would try to level the playing field between the First World and the Third. The neoliberal onslaughts gathering strength from the mid-1970s on destroyed that project. Eventually the UN, desperate to reassert some semblance of moral leadership, regrouped behind the supposed crisis of climate change as concocted by the AGW lobby, behind which lurk huge corporate interests such as the nuclear power companies. Radicals from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, putting forward proposals for upping the Third World’s income from its primary commodities, were displaced by climate shills in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the IPCC. The end consequence, as represented by Copenhagen’s money-grubbing power plays over “carbon mitigation” funding, has been a hideous travesty of that earlier vision of a global redistribution of resources.

Such is the downward swoop of our neoliberal era. In Oslo Obama went one better than Carter who, you may recall , proclaimed in 1977 that his crusade for energy conservation was “the moral equivalent of war.” Obama trumped this with his claim that war is the moral equivalent of peace. As he was proffering this absurdity, Copenhagen was hosting its global warming jamboree, surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled for the Council of Nicaea in 325AD to debate whether God the father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and with the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic – human-caused – global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistle-blower who put on the web over a thousand emails either sent from or received at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia headed by Dr Phil Jones, who has since stepped down from his post – whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. At that time the supposed menace to the planet and to mankind was global cooling, a source of interest to oil companies for obvious reasons.

Coolers transmuted into warmers in the early 80s and the CRU became one of the climate modeling grant mills supplying the tainted data from which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC ) has concocted its reports which have been since their inception – particularly the executive summaries — carefully contrived political initiatives disguised as objective science. Soon persuaded of the potential of AGW theories for their bottom line, the energy giants effortlessly re-calibrated their stance, and as of 2008 the CRU included among its financial supporters Shell and BP, also the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and UK Nirex Ltd, a company in the nuclear waste business.

After some initial dismay at what has been called, somewhat unoriginally, “Climategate” the reaction amid progressive circles – 99 per cent inhabited by True Believers in anthropogenic global warming – has been to take up defensive positions around the proposition that deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate and, although embarrassing, the CRU emails in no way compromise the core pretensions of their cause.

Scientific research is indeed saturated with exactly this sort of chicanery. But the CRU emails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers – always absurd to those who have studied the debate in any detail – that they commanded the moral high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as intellectual whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate modeling enterprises. There’s now a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia, with a huge vested interest in defending the AGW model. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

By the same token magazines and newspapers, reeling amidst the deadly challenge of the internet to their circulation and advertising base have seen proselytizing for the menace of man-made global warming, as a circulation enhancer – a vital ingredient in alluring a younger audience. Hence the advocacy of AGW by Scientific American, the New Scientist, Nature, Science, not to mention the New York Times (whose lead reporter on this topic has been Andrew Revkin, who has a personal literary investment in the AGW thesis, as a glance at his publications on Amazon will attest.)

Many of the landmines in the CRU emails tend to buttress long-standing charges by skeptics that statistical chicanery by Prof Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the twentieth century, a historical fact which made nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the twentieth century. Here’s Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an email written on September 22, 1999: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple…I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

Now, in the fall of 1999 the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important “Summary for Policy-Makers” – essentially a press release – one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into non-existence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in twentieth century temperatures. Briffa’s reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-twentieth-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a September 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a “problem and a potential distraction/detraction.” So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa’s reconstruction. The CRU’s Jones happily applauded Mann’s deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over “Mike’s Nature trick.” Like politicians trying to recover from a racist outburst, AGW apologists say the “trick” was taken out of context. It wasn’t.

Other landmines include particularly telling emails from Kenneth Trenberth, a senior scientist and the head of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On October 14, 2009, he wrote to the CRU’s Tom: “How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

In other words, only a few weeks before the Copenhagen summit, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that “we are not close to knowing” whether the supposedly proven agw model of the earth’s climate actually works, and that therefore “geo-engineering” – global carbon-mitigation, for example — is “hopeless”.

This admission edges close to acknowledgment of a huge core problem – that “greenhouse” theory and the vaunted greenhouse models violate the second law of thermodynamics which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body XX. Greenhouse gasses in the cold upper atmosphere, even when warmed a bit by absorbed infrared, cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. Readers interested in the science can read mathematical physicist Gerhard Gerlich’s and Ralf Tscheuchner’s detailed paper published in The International Journal of Modern Physics, updated in January , 2009, “Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics”.

“For the last eleven years,” as Paul Hudson, climate correspondent of the BBC said on October 9, “we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.” In fact recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly for the last 8 years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras, long before the advent of man made emissions, at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with those emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance of carbon.

As for the nightmare of vanishing ice caps and inundating seas, the average Arctic ice coverage has essentially remained unchanged for the last 20 years, and has actually increased slightly over the last 3 years. The rate of rise of sea level has declined significantly over the last 3 years, and its average rate of rise for the last 20 years is about the same as it has been for the last 15,000 years, that is, since the last glacial cooling ended and the earth, without help from mankind, entered the current interglacial warming period. The sea rise of that still on-going interglacial warm spell, among other things, flooded the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska to form the Bering Straits—without which we might be a province of Russia today. So much for the terrors of sea rise.

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith-based, with no relation to science or reason. seventeen centuries later, so were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by a man-made CO2 build-up and that human intervention – geo-engineering– could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, the Copenhagen dogmatism is a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, they are a terrible tragedy.

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December 19, 2009 Posted by | Deception, Nuclear Power, Science and Pseudo-Science | 2 Comments

The World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco

The World Bank and Climate Change: Sustainability or Exploitation?

By Mary Tharin
Upside Down World
February 11, 2009

In the name of environmental protection, the World Bank is brokering carbon emission trading arrangements that destroy indigenous farmlands around the world.

The effort to coordinate global action to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions began with the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1997 and now has been ratified by 183 nations…

In accordance with the Kyoto Protocol, many governments have established “caps,” or limits, on the greenhouse gas emissions that can be produced in their countries. Industries can respond to these government-imposed limits by responsibly reducing their emissions, or they can bypass this process entirely by purchasing “carbon credits” from other industries in other parts of the world who, through Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) investment brokered by the World Bank, trade emission reduction “credits” in order to “offset” excessive emissions.  Joris den Blanken, a climate change specialist with Greenpeace, says, “Offsetting means exporting responsibilities to the developing world and removes the incentive for industry to improve efficiency or to invest in renewable energy.”

While the World Bank claims that this system “supports sustainable development . . . and benefits the poorer communities of the developing world,” the program in reality has become little more than a corporate profit-boosting enterprise. In fact, many transnational corporations are using cap and trade programs not only to avoid emissions responsibility, but to further profit by developing environmentally and socially destructive industries in less developed countries.

In Latin America, where a long history of corporate exploitation has already taken a steep toll, environmentalists and indigenous communities are beginning to speak out about the dangers of the CDM. Because of a myopic focus on greenhouse gas reduction only, and a lack of accountability to local communities, many projects are producing other environmental and social ills that are diametrically opposed to the program’s stated objectives.

Nevertheless, the United Nations Environmental Program reports that, to date, 4,364 projects have been approved for CDM funding, and the movement continues to gain momentum. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the number of new project proposals has risen drastically in just a few years, from less than ten per month in early 2005 to about 100 per month in 2007.

Wood and pulp industries have shown great interest in harnessing the carbon market to justify and finance projects that involve expropriating indigenous farm and grazing land for planting of enormous monospecific plantations. These plantations threaten the area’s biodiversity and can severely deplete water resources.  Author Mary Tharin warns, “From an ecological standpoint, planting large-scale plantations of non-native species in this area is clearly a step in the wrong direction. From a societal standpoint, this could spell cultural genocide.”

According to a 2008 report by Japan Overseas Plantation for Pulpwood (JOPP), entitled “Feasibility Study of Afforestation CDM for Community Development in Extensive Grazing Lands in Uruguay,” the land that would be used for the JOPP’s “afforestation projects,” is currently used for “extensive grazing” of cattle and sheep. The report, which elaborates on “land eligibility,” makes no mention of the people who own, live on, or make a living from the use of the land in question. The only allusion to this issue is the brief assurance that all displaced cattle would be “sold on the open market.” Despite the fact that “cattle and sheep production has been the traditional rural activity in the project area and all the surrounding regions since the17th Century,” the report contends that the establishment of plantations would be a more cost-effective use for the land than pasture. The question then becomes: cost-effective for whom? [Carbon offsets are just another method of separating people from the land, a modern version of the Enclosure Act of the 18th century]

The World Bank touts the CDM as an “integral part of the Bank’s mission to reduce poverty through its environment and energy strategies.” However, in Latin America as in other parts of the developing world, the global carbon market is proving to be largely detrimental to the indigenous and the poor. With little or no input on how a project is conducted, local communities have virtually no control over how their land, water, and resources will be affected.

In a recent documentary by Carbon Trade Watch, villagers explained that the massive plantations—which cover about 100,000 acres—are diverting water from local streams, causing a sharp decrease in fishing and killing off medicinal plants. In an interview, one local woman lamented that corporate plantations “continue destroying our community, destroying our citizens, destroying our fauna, destroying our flora, and nobody does anything [to stop it].”

Lack of accountability to local populations is a fundamental flaw in the way CDM projects are presented, evaluated and implemented. The official “Project Design Document Form”—which the CDM Executive Board uses to approve or deny funding—largely disregards the impact of projects on local communities. The document contains no binding legal language, asking only for a “report on how due account was taken of any comments received” by local stakeholders. In their assessment of four CDM projects carried out in Brazil and Bolivia, the EEP found that “participation of local community members was found to be limited.”

While the World Bank pays constant lip service to the importance of sustainability and poverty alleviation in the CDM, it continually fails to deliver positive results for either the environment or disadvantaged communities in the developing world. The global carbon market is proving to be simply another weapon used by multinational corporations to accelerate their incursion on the rights of indigenous peoples and small-scale landholders in Latin America.

The irony of this situation takes on an especially tragic hue since many of the communities at risk have been living in a sustainable manner for centuries and thus should be seen as models in the fight against environmental degradation…

Janet Redman at the Institute for Policy Studies says, “Farmers [in the global south] are trading communal land rights and their ability to feed themselves for the whims and price fluctuations of the international carbon market.”

Update by Mary Therin

As governments, environmentalists, and industry leaders gear up for UN Climate Change Conference this December in Copenhagen, the debate over carbon offsets has taken center stage. Groups including the European Commission have acknowledged the many shortcomings of the Clean Development Mechanism and are calling for reform. In late April 2009, delegates from all over the world attended the Indigenous People’s Global Summit on Climate Change, producing a declaration which called on governments to abandon “false solutions to climate change that negatively impact Indigenous Peoples’ rights . . . such as carbon trading, the Clean Development Mechanism, and forest offsets.”

Unfortunately, the CDM Executive Board, instead of addressing issues of transparency and accountability, has proposed an expansion of some of the carbon offset scheme’s most problematic aspects. The board has put forth plans to expand its forestry mechanism and ease the funding application process. According to Oscar Reyes of Carbon Trade Watch, these reforms would drastically expand CDM while “lowering the already inadequate checks on environmental sustainability and social justice.”

Meanwhile, the Clean Development Mechanism continues to expand. In May 2009 alone, 132 new CDM projects were submitted for approval, marking an all-time high in the application process. At the same time, more evidence is cropping up all over the globe that many “emissions reduction” projects in the developing world are doing more harm than good. In June 2009, the UK-based Daily Mail published an exposé on a UN-funded chemical plant that has poisoned the local water supply in Gujarat, India. According to Eva Filzmoser of CDM Watch, large hyrdo and gas projects are the most damaging receivers of CDM funding. These projects, she argues, rarely save additional [GHG]emissions and in fact provide perverse incentives to expand environmentally degrading industries.

In the United States, debate over carbon offsets and cap and trade schemes has erupted since the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, was passed by the House Energy Committee in May 2009. While many environmentalist groups are heralding the bill as a huge step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, others point to the prominence of carbon offsetting in the bill… According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), up to 2 billion tons of carbon (about 30 percent of current US emissions) could be purchased as offsets under the legislation, half of which would come from developing countries through programs like the Clean Development Mechanism.

While most of the mainstream media and many environmental groups have jumped on the cap and trade bandwagon, organizations such as the Institute for Public Studies, Carbon Trade Watch, and CDM Watch continue to boost public awareness on the dangers of cap and trade.

From – Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010

December 19, 2009 Posted by | Deception, Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular | 6 Comments

Israeli soldiers assault Hebron family; detain members

19/12/2009 16:15
Hebron – Ma’an – Israeli forces raided the home of the Abu Heikal family in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron on Friday afternoon, detaining five of the men, one family member said.

Firyal Abu Heikal, who was in the home during the Israeli raid, said soldiers beat the men and women of the family. She identified those beaten as sisters Samah and Majd, noting that their aunt Ghadir was also beaten. Male relatives Mohamed and Murad were also injured, she said.

After several rooms were ransacked, Firyal said soldiers took 66-year-old Abdul-Aziz, 48-year-old Imad, 48-year-old Ratib, 24-year-old Fahd, and 19-year-old Sami. They were also beaten and removed from the home without explanation as to their alleged crimes or notification as to where they were being taken.

The Abu Heikal home is in an area of Hebron blocked off from the main street by several settler trailers housing large families of aggressive youth. The trailer-homes are guarded by dozens of Israeli soldiers, who have in many instances protected the settlers as they attacked the Abu Heikal family.

The neighborhood can only be accessed by the few Palestinian families who have not been driven out by settler violence, and members face constant harassment from soldiers as well as settlers.

December 19, 2009 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Comments Off on Israeli soldiers assault Hebron family; detain members

Copenhagen climate summit: confusion as ‘historic deal’ descends into chaos

The “historic” climate change deal at the Copenhagen climate summit has descended into chaos after some developing nations rejected the plan for fighting global warming championed by US President Barack Obama.

By David Barrett and Louise Gray, in Copenhagen
The Telegraph | December 19, 2009

Copenhagen climate summit: confusion as 'historic deal' descends into chaos

(From Left) European Commission President Barroso, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, US President Barack Obama and British PM Gordon Brown Photo: STEFFEN KUGLER/AFP/Getty Images

An agreement to limit global warming to a 3.6F (2C) temperature rise, alongside a $100 billion (£62bn) a year in aid from 2020, were condemned as inadequate by some delegates and appeared to be in danger of unravelling.

Developing nations, including Venezuela, said they could not accept a text originally agreed by the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa as the blueprint of a wider United Nations plan to fight climate change.

Tempers flared during an all-night plenary session, held after most of 120 visiting world leaders had left.

Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese negotiator, said the draft text asked “Africa to sign a suicide pact”.

One Saudi delegate said it was without doubt “the worst plenary I have ever attended.”

Ed Miliband, the Environment Secretary, warned delegates that the plan would have to be endorsed to unlock funds outlined in the deal, including $30 billion in “quick-start” aid from 2010-12, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020.

Apart from the original five nations supporting the scheme, European Union states, Japan and groups representing small island states, least developed nations and African countries spoke in favour of the plan during the overnight session.

The two-week summit ended late on Friday night after a row between the US and China overshadowed negotiations, yet its conclusions were initially hailed as a significant deal.

[…]

The accord declared that “deep cuts in emissions are required”. But instead of a detailed pledge to halve carbon emissions by 2050, leaders agreed only to the vague promise to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2C, with no specifics on how to achieve that.

The leaders also put off setting emissions targets for 2020, saying they would attempt to agree them by February… Full article

December 19, 2009 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | Comments Off on Copenhagen climate summit: confusion as ‘historic deal’ descends into chaos

WHO ADVISER CONCEALS A DONATION OF MILLIONS FROM A PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY

By Louise Voller & Kristian Villesen for the Danish daily newspaper, “Information”
10.12. 2009

A Finnish member of the WHO board, an advisor on vaccines, has received 46 million crowns (6 million euros) for his research centre from the vaccine manufactures, GlaxoSmithKline. WHO promises transparency, but this conflict of interests is not available for the public to see at WHO’s homepage.

Another  ‘WHO’ vaccine advisor is withholding information concerning financial support from the pharmaceutical industry.

Professor Juhani Eskola is the director of the Finnish research vaccine programme (THL) and a new member of the WHO group, ‘Strategic Advisory Group of Experts’ (SAGE), which gives advice to the WHO Director-General, Margaret Chan. ‘SAGE’ also recommend which vaccines – and how many – member countries should purchase for the pandemic.

According to documents acquired through the Danish ‘Freedom of Information Act,’ Professor Juhani Eskola’s Finnish institute, THL, received almost 6.3 million Euro from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for research on vaccines during 2009.

This amount of money qualifies GlaxoSmithKline as THL’s main source of income.

GlaxoSmithKline produces the H1N1-vaccine ‘Pandemrix,’ which the Finnish government following recommendations from THL and WHO  purchased for a national pandemic reserve stockpile.

These facts bring Professor Juhani Eskola in line with several other ‘WHO ’experts who play a double role by having financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry – a double role which notably is not published by WHO.

During November, the Danish daily, ‘Information’ has informed the public that several members of WHO’s expert group have also been secretly working for the pharmaceutical industry. Since revealing this information, a record of meetings and the conflict of interests of some of the experts have become accessible, but not all, including Juhani Eskola.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

In Finland, Professor Juhani Eskola is at the centre of a national conflict of interest. The Finnish Minister of Health has become involved in this case and has asked for transparency concerning the researcher’s financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. However, Professor Eskola doesn’t agree that there is a problem. He secures and protects his ‘WHO’ status, by offering a minor ‘consultative payment’ to the pharmaceutical company, ‘Novartis.’

“Why haven’t you informed the public about a research grant of six million Euros from GlaxoSmithKline?” Professor Eskola comments, “It is a contract my chief and GSK have made, and I am not a part of the study, which receives the money.”

Regarding ‘WHO’s declaration on conflicts of interest, ‘SAGE’ experts are obliged to inform on all kinds of financial research support, scholarships, payment for collaboration and sponsor support for the research unit, during the past three years. “We have 1,400 researchers at ‘THL’ and if I  declare every economic transaction I am a involved in then it gets complicated.

My interpretation of the WHO-declaration was that I didn’t have to declare the agreement of collaboration with GSK, as I neither receive the money personally nor do my research team. ‘WHO’ has asked me, and now I wait to be informed, whether they agree with my interpretation. If they don’t, they should make their declaration more clear.”

You are chair of the department and during 2009, GSK is your greatest contributor. Don’t you see a conflict of interests in this matter?

“It is a discussion we have had with the Finnish Minister of Health during the past few weeks but it is the ministry, who has bought the vaccines, not our institute. Pandemrix was chosen as the best vaccine and could be available soon at the Finnish market. The decision had to be made at the beginning of June and in my mind, the ministry of health chose the right solution, namely Pandemrix.”

But do you recognize a conflict of interest?   – “We are aware that there appears to be a conflict of interest” he says.

“VERY SERIOUS”

According to WHO, all SAGE-members are obliged to inform about all financial interests, inclusive financing from the pharmaceutical industry, consulting payments and other forms of professional employment. Meanwhile, WHO has rejected an invitation to be interviewed about why not all  financial interests of the WH -experts has been declared.

But in a mail WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl writes as follows:

“WHO has recently learned, that the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare has a research contract with GSK. The contract concerns a research project about pneumococcal-vaccine in the Finnish vaccination programme. WHO will take suitable action according to everything, which must be considered as conflicts of interests in this case.”

The Danish journalists have reported on other cases involving  SAGE experts with financial links to pharmaceutical companies, many of which have not been declared…  – details

December 19, 2009 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | 1 Comment

Nuoviso: “9/11 False Flag”

Purchase DVD: http://www.nuoviso.com

The world has changed after September 11th. Its changed because were no longer safe.

These words were used by the George W. Bush, elected President of the United States in 2000, to dictate the political direction for the 21st Century.

Whereas Americans launch attacks relatively quickly, first on Afghanistan and later on Iraq, using falsified evidence, doubts about the official version of the events of September 11th grows.

The speculations that surfaced on the internet directly after the attacks were considered to be just wild conspiracy theories until this now. Yet the circumstantial evidence and even the substantial evidence itself paints a clear picture. The responsibility for the terrible attacks seems to lie not with Islamic Terrorists but with several high-ranking members of the military and administration of the U.S. Government.

This documentary focuses on the inconsistencies in the official version of the events as well as on the evidence which has been suppressed regarding September 11th. In addition, it answers the questions of why we still know nothing about it to this day and why we are being deceived also in european countries.

December 19, 2009 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism, Video, War Crimes | Comments Off on Nuoviso: “9/11 False Flag”