Federal Judge Orders CIA to Release Records on Secret Experiments on Soldiers
By David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | November 19, 2010
The CIA is being forced to produce specific information regarding secret tests conducted on thousands of soldiers over a 25-year period.
In response to a lawsuit filed by three veterans groups and six individual veterans, a federal judge, James Larson, ordered the CIA and other government agencies to turn over documents about testing programs and the substances used on soldiers from 1950 through 1975. The plaintiffs allege that the government used about 7,800 military personnel as human guinea pigs to research biological, chemical and psychological weapons at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick in Maryland.
The soldiers volunteered for the testing, but were not told at the time to what they were being exposed. They also were required to sign an oath of secrecy about their participation.
The CIA has put forth a variety of arguments to avoid revealing information about the 35-year-old experiments, including privacy protections, state-secrets privilege, the fact that the Department of Defense is conducting its own investigation, the passage of time, the fact that witnesses no longer work for the government, that the gathering of relevant information would take too much time, and the questionable claim that it never funded or conducted research on military personnel.
Judge Larson has insisted that the CIA must produce evidence relating to a 1963 CIA Inspector General report on an experiment called MKUltra; the basis for each redaction in that report; the doses and effects of certain substances administered to test subjects; any payments made to contractors or university researchers, any outside-party proposals concerning the experiments; a confidential Army memo about the use of volunteers in research; all government-led human experiments from 1975 to date involving specific drugs; and whether the government secretly administered MKUltra materials to “the patrons of prostitutes” in safe houses in New York and San Francisco, as the veterans allege.
Rape Story – Phillip D. Zelikow… 911 Myth Maker
By Andrew | Rense | 10-12-7
When you ask people to revisit the events of 9/11 and reconsider what really happened, you enter the twilight zone of public mythology where people don’t want to rethink unhappy events and where you challenge their personal egos. Did you know that for the same reason that 2/3 of the women raped never report it, 2/3 of the victims of fraud never seek redress either? They find themselves at odds with their own egos; they simply don’t want to admit that they have been so violated or duped. I believe that the story of Philip Zelikow is important to help people beyond their own egos and see how America is being raped.
Most people have never heard of Philip D. Zelikow, but he is best known as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. He basically wrote the 9/11 Commission Report. Immediately prior to Bush appointing him to head the 9/11 Commission, Zelikow was the executive director of the little known Aspen Strategy Group whose members include Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rica, and Paul Wolfowitz. Although most people don’t know anything about Zelikow, they recognize Cheney, Rice and Wolfowitz as the Neoconservatives most responsible for stampeding America into the current unfortunate conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Strategy_Group#Group_Members
Zelikow’s record gets really interesting when we consider that he went on to write the 9/11 Commission Report. He earned a law degree from the University of Houston Law School and a Ph. D. from Tufts University. He wrote books too. He wrote a book on The Kennedy Tapes, and another on Why People Don’t Trust Government. One of his areas of expertise is PUBLIC MYTHOLOGY. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_D._Zelikow
While at Harvard he actually wrote about the use, and misuse, of history in policymaking. As he noted in his own words, “contemporary” history is “defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public’s presumptions about its immediate past. The idea of ‘public presumption’,” he explained, “is akin to [the] notion of ‘public myth’ but without the negative implication sometimes invoked by the word ‘myth.’ Such presumptions are beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.” So Zelikow, the guy who wrote The 9/11 Commission Report, was an expert in how to misuse public trust and create PUBLIC MYTHS.
If 9/11 was nothing but a huge HOAX, you would naturally expect that the event itself would have to be perfectly scripted.
In 1998, Zelikow actually wrote Catastrophic Terrorism about imagining “the transformative event” three years before 9/11. Here are Zelikow’s 1998 words; Readers should imagine the possibilities for themselves, because the most serious constraint on current policy [nonaggression] is lack of imagination. An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great “success” or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a “before” and “after.” The effort and resources we devote to averting or containing this threat now, in the “before” period, will seem woeful, even pathetic, when compared to what will happen “after.” Our leaders will be judged negligent for not addressing catastrophic terrorism more urgently.
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/visions/publication/terrorism.htm
If we can get people to see that the guy who wrote The 9/11 Commission Report got his Ph.D. in PUBLIC MYTHS and actually had his hand in scripting the 9/11 event itself in 1998, they might be more receptive to the idea that the official story of 9/11 should be revisited.
The other problem is getting them to look again at an unhappy event. Don’t show them the unhappy pictures or the long videos of planes crashing into the WTC Towers or of the Towers collapsing. Instead show them short videos of what the first reporters said immediately after the explosions at the Pentagon and at Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
and
On September 11, 2001, the immediate reports on the ground told the truth. I think most people can see that it was later that the myth-makers retold the myth the way Zelikow scripted it to be remembered. This may be 2007, but when we consider the power of mythology the psychology of the average man hasn’t changed in 4000 years. And when everyone in the political community believes the same myth, it becomes a parallel reality. With TV reinforcing the 9/11 myth every single day, it has become stronger than any belief system that I can remember, but we must explore ways to challenge it.
Middle East’s Only Democracy Crushes Dissent
By Tammy Obeidallah | Palestine Chronicle | November 16, 2010
Ever since becoming an activist on behalf of Palestine some ten years ago, I have found ironic humor in the label, ‘The Middle East’s Only Democracy’ used by American policymakers and media in describing the Jewish State. This statement is erroneous on two counts. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of a democracy knows that Israelis overwhelmingly shun the values associated with such a system; furthermore quite a few countries in the Middle East hold elections regularly. Most recently, Jordan elected a new parliament.
Of course there are those who argue that a democracy simply means “majority rule,” or that government leaders are elected, so technically Israel would qualify. “Democracy” is defined by http://www.thefreedictionary.com, “government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.” So in the purely political sense, as Israeli leaders are elected, they have democracy. However, the fifth definition of democracy reads “the principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community,” a concept diametrically opposed to Israel’s inherently racist establishment.
Not only is Israel content merely to expand settlements on stolen land and deny Arab citizens the basic rights of religious freedom, education, health care and mobility, any form of dissent is quashed. Arab Israeli Knesset member Haneen Zoabi was stripped of her parliamentary privileges for participating in the Gaza freedom flotilla. In addition to receiving numerous death threats, Zoabi was recently shot in the back and neck with rubber bullets during a protest against a march by militant settlers in the town of Umm al-Fahm. Under Zionism, there is no such thing as freedom of assembly or free speech.
Take for instance a recent haiku contest on Facebook sponsored by El Al Airlines. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry requiring three non-rhyming lines: the first and third line consisting of five syllables, the second line containing seven. I swallowed my pride and became a fan of the page; the possible temporary damage to my reputation seemed well worth it when considering the unwitting audience I would have. However, shortly after I began posting the haiku, a chorus of “she has to be banned” ensued.
I found out that indeed, I had been blocked from posting comments on the site after an hour or so. The El Al fan page administrator deleted all my haiku. I should not have been surprised.
This is the modus operandi of the Zionist machine. Dissent is not tolerated and must be completely obliterated, as in the case of Congressmen and women who dare try and stand up to it: Paul Findley (re-districted out), Cynthia McKinney (trumped up charge assaulting a guard who was harassing her; victim of a smear campaign and voted out), Dennis Kucinich (marginalized and belittled), Jim Traficant (jailed). Prominent figures in the media are silenced, most recently the legendary Helen Thomas and Rick Sanchez, formerly of CNN. Numerous Israeli youth sit in jails for refusing to military duty in the West Bank. The most sinister, however is the way activists Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall, Furkan Dogan and 8 other flotilla participants were silenced, along with the untold thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered since 1948 for the “crime” of resisting occupation or while merely trying to live out their daily lives in their homeland.
Yet the legacies of these brave individuals continue, and to honor them, I put forth the haiku again in a place where the hasbara machine cannot penetrate.
Ignorant tourists
Celebrate sixty-plus years
Of ethnic cleansing.
Bustling Tel Aviv
Welcoming occupiers
Atop Lydda’s graves.
Stealing Holy Land
As amid scorched olive trees
More settlements rise.
Arrogant squatters
Frolic on stolen beaches
Kids in Gaza die.
El Al transporting
Still more and more invaders
to dear Palestine.
Flight attendants’ thobes
Food service is falafel
Theft of a culture.
Big jet engines scream
Not unlike those that have rained
Hell upon Gaza.
And then there was my daughter’s contribution:
El Al carrying
“Israeli” stowaways to
Steal from Palestine
El Al’s jet engines
Cannot drown out the screams of
White phosphorus wounds.
Airline of the blind
You see touristy mudbaths
Not Gaza’s bloodbath.
Israeli media airs fraudulent arson allegations
Footage contradicts arson allegations
Ma’an – 16/11/2010
BETHLEHEM — International solidarity activists hit back this week at allegations broadcast in Israeli media that they and Palestinian farmers set fire to “state land” in the occupied West Bank.
Ynet news and Arutz Sheva, two Israeli media outlets, reported Sunday that “leftists” and “foreign anarchists” were caught in an arson attempt near an illegal settlement between Bethlehem and Hebron.
“Residents who witnessed the incident said they [believed] the group was planning to blame the arson attack on the Jews,” Arutz Sheva reported alongside video footage it and Ynet broadcast as evidence.
A dozen people “can be seen wandering around the field, stopping occasionally to bend over and set new fires. The group does not appear anxious, and does nothing to extinguish the flames,” the report continued.
Those present, however, have dismissed the reports as nonsensical and point to new footage, filmed on the ground rather than the hillside where settlers taped and later edited their “arson” evidence.
The group was assisting Palestinian farmers clearing weeds on farmland to prepare it for replanting, one international told Ma’an. Part of that work necessitated burning various piles of brush in bundles controlled by dirt and stones, he said noting that the method is typical among farmers across the West Bank.
The new footage from the incident in Saffa village, near the Beit Ummar village and illegal Bet Ayin settlement, shows mostly mundane labor, recorded as background for a series of interviews planned for the day, according to an international who asked not to be named due to fears of retribution from security services.
Faced with accusations of criminality, however, members of the group are releasing the videotape both to clear their names and to shine light on settler harassment against Palestinian farmers and an unquestioning news media across the Green Line.
The way an innocent farming initiative was edited to portray illegal activity “provides real insight into how Israeli media report news,” he said noting the timing, as settlers struggle to explain a recent wave of violence and vandalism against Palestinians.
Since the start of the olive harvest last month, there have been scores of complaints about settlers cutting down trees, stealing olives or preventing farmers from harvesting their crops, rights groups and police say.
A senior Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged that there had been acts of violence and vandalism by Jews in the West Bank, noting in particular recent attacks against mosques there.
“We are not happy about the situation connected with Jewish extremists in the West Bank,” he told a group of foreign journalists on Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
But the witness to the event in Saffa said his footage showed Israeli authorities working with settlers to target farmers. He spotted Bet Ayin settlers on a hilltop overlooking the scene, and he filmed them communicating with others including, according to locals, intelligence officials who routinely operate in the area.
Soldiers soon arrived, and they arrested six of the eight internationals. “None of us was provided an explanation of why we were arrested, but rather just told to get in the jeeps by aggressive soldiers,” the witness said. The internationals were interrogated and lectured, and their passports were photocopied.
Meanwhile, “They called for all of the land owners to come and, in the photos on the digital camera LCD, point out what they owned. The farmers also had their ownership deeds with them,” he added. The Palestinians were not detained; the authorities seemed satisfied with their ownership claims.
In other parts of the footage, an international can be heard asking a soldier why he was being detained. The soldiers never explained why, and none of the internationals was ever charged with a crime.
George Hale and AFP contributed to this report.
See also: Hasbara Lie Exposed: “Staged” Settler Violence is Actually Tree Pruning
US government offers Israel $3 billion weapons deal in exchange for 3-month settlement freeze
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – November 14, 2010
After US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the Israeli Prime Minister on Friday, the US set out an offer of additional military assistance to Israel in exchange for a 90-day moratorium on new settlement construction in the West Bank. Construction already in progress on hundreds of units of housing would be allowed to continue during the ‘moratorium’, which also does not include East Jerusalem.
Some Palestinian analysts say the US offer is weak, as it does not pressure Israel in any way to adhere to past signed agreements or international law, but merely forestalls the inevitable failure of ‘peace talks’ between two vastly unequal players. Some have even suggested that this is an attempt by the US to bribe Israel to do what it is required to do under international law.
Since the ‘moratorium’ would not include East Jerusalem, where the majority of current construction of Israeli-only homes and displacement of indigenous Palestinian residents is taking place, some Palestinians feel that it is only a token gesture that does not in any way address their concerns.
In exchange for the temporary, partial moratorium on construction, the Israeli military would receive a gift of 20 F35 fighter jets, worth $3 billion, from the US. The US-made jets that Israel already has have been used for aerial bombardment of Palestinian civilian areas in violation of international law, and to drop missiles on Palestinians that Israel claims are ‘wanted’ for crimes against Israelis – but instead of being tried and convicted, they are extrajudicially assassinated by missiles, in violation of international law.
The US government also promised Israel that after the 90-day moratorium, they would not seek an extension, and settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (all of which is illegal under international law) could continue unabated.
This offer is an attempt by the US to get Israel to return to the negotiating table, after their refusal to renew a moratorium on new settlement construction resulted in a breakdown of talks with the unelected branch of the Palestinian Authority led by the Fateh party.
All settlement construction by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory. The Convention prevents the transfer of civilian populations onto land that was seized by military force. The land in question is Palestinian land that was seized by Israel in 1967, and has been occupied by the Israeli military ever since.
They can’t contain themselves
By Peter Voskamp | Mondoweiss | November 13, 201
Dum Spiro Spero: “While I breathe I hope” is South Carolina’s state motto. With that in mind, it was unsettling to hear Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina call for military action against Iran from, of all places, the Canadian Maritimes.
“The last thing America wants is another military conflict, but the last thing the world needs is a nuclear-armed Iran… Containment is off the table,” the Agence France-Presse quoted Graham as saying in Halifax. This week’s calls for ratcheting up the military option with Iran have an odd geographic discordance to them.
While a senator of the south was in foggy Nova Scotia, Israeli’s Benyamin Netanyahu was in humid New Orleans.
“Containment against Iran won’t work,” Netanyahu told the Jewish Federations of North America, echoing his American friend.
In the wake of the mid-term elections, it feels like a pile on — a version of “when did you stop beating your wife?” When, President Obama, did you become soft on potentially nuclear-armed Holocaust denying sponsors of terrorism who want to obliterate Israel and the West?
These containment-dismissers follow veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder and his suggestion of an invigorating war with Iran to get the country into the swing of things and to raise Obama’s poll numbers for 2012.
Even the recent WikiLeaks document-drop on Iraq has been used to rationalize belligerence. The New York Times focused on Iran; Michael Gordon and Andrew Lehren filed a 2,267-word front-page piece detailing various border skirmishes and intelligence that suggested various Shiite insurgents were being trained and armed by elite Iranians.
Der Spiegel, meanwhile, in its English-language International on-line edition, devoted about a paragraph or two to Iran, of an entirely different flavor:
“The special attention the Americans were paying to weapons shipments from Iran reads more like a deliberate search for proof that Iran was one of the main supporters of the Shiite militias in Iraq, especially given the relatively sporadic discoveries of such weapons. The reports do show, however, that such weapons shipments existed. Nevertheless, the documents offer no evidence that the government in Tehran controlled the arms trade centrally.”
The Guardian had a similar response to how U.S. publications reacted to the WikiLeaks revelations:
“Much of the U.S. press also focused on the claim that the WikiLeaks papers supported the former president George Bush’s claim that the war in Iraq was severely complicated by Iran’s covert role. The Washington Times said the leaked documents showed ‘Iran was orchestrating one side of the Iraqi insurgency.’”
And, back in July when the first WikiLeaks material was published, the Weekly Standard made the most of reports in the Guardian of various alleged collaborations between al Qaeda and Iran.
“One of the more interesting aspects of the WikiLeaks document dump is the persistence of intelligence reports indicating collusion between al Qaeda, al Qaeda-affiliated parties, and Iran.”
The same Standard article went on to qualify that it could not vouch for the veracity of the reports.
Arthur Brisbane, the current Public Editor for the Times, offered an email from Executive Editor Bill Keller to explain in part the venerable paper’s choices with WikiLeaks:
“‘We chose the documents that struck us as most interesting,’ Mr. Keller said in an e-mail message. ‘We did our own analysis of the material. We decided what to write. We did not discuss any of those matters with WikiLeaks, or give them an advance look at our stories.’”
With all this impatience with containment, one must ask: what’s the rush? Iran is a country of 72 million people and not yet a single nuclear weapon. The world lived nearly a half a century with a Soviet Union armed with thousands of nuclear warheads. Not to mention China, India, Pakistan and Israel herself.
Stemming the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a noble aim, but the proliferation of heated exhortations that could needlessly spark another ill-starred cataclysm in the Middle East feels like the clearer, and more present, danger.
Monsanto and the big fat lie of food safety
By M. Gray | Food Freedom | November 7, 2010
Vandana Shiva doesn’t mince words. Food safety is food fascism:
“Risk Assessment in the hands of centralized corruptible agencies is no protection for consumers as the disease and health epidemic in the U.S. linked to over processed, industrial foods show. Even while the U.S. is at the epicenter of the food related public health crises, the U.S. government is trying to export its Food laws which deregulate the industry and over regulate ordinary citizens and small enterprise. This deregulation of the big and toxic and over regulation of the small and ecological is at the core of Food Fascism …”
The Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is equally straightforward:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
What’s the truth?
Michael Taylor, the Monsanto executive who gave this country rBGH, deregulated GMOs, and kept GMOs all unlabeled, thanks to Obama, is “The Food Safety Czar” at the FDA.
That Czar, “[t]he person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history,” has been using “food safety” as a weapon against small local farms and local food co-ops. (For any who missed the Rawesome Raid, here’s the video on youtube.)
The consequences of the lie can no longer be hidden. They are showing up in Missouri, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Georgia, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Vermont, California, Massachusetts, Maine, Wisconsin, and most recently in Washington.
The places being shut down are providing the most wholesome and nutritious food available and their tests come back clean, but the places are closed down regardless, often with no means of reopening. The problem is they are not within a just or even rational legal framework but one run by Monsanto, a company which devised a means to sue farmers for labeling their milk honestly, as rBGH-free.
Requirements farmers are being asked to meet include such violations of civil and human rights as keeping the names, addresses and phone numbers of customers and limits of on how much milk they can produce (If the milk is safe, on what basis does the state limit how much can be produced? And what other food has limits on production?). They face closings over missing a single page of pasteurization information, and shutting down of a food club with demands for paper work and names of customers even without charges being filed.
There are no “food safety” violations here, only the violation of a corporation shutting people down who are providing safe food and cutting off people depending on them for that food.
The list of raids since Obama came in is incomplete. It comes on top of SWAT team raids that occurred under Bush – also without reasonable cause, and repeatedly against a single farmer, and sometimes without any cause.
Food (especially milk products), equipment and personal computers are seized by state agents without a warrant and destroyed (sometimes running into hundreds of thousands of dollars of losses) which is followed by destruction of the farmers’ own food, stored for the family for the year. None is replaced and the farmer is not compensated.
Under such an FDA regime, “food safety” has lost all meaning. It is a farce of paperwork and a complex, irrelevant (to true safety of food) regulations which allow for governmental discretion in how standards must be met or maliciously assuring they can never be met, and in how penalties are applied. It is an arrangement that keeps doors wide open to willful government injustices. Lost in this complicated, pretense-filled, science-sounding bureaucratic system is the fact that “food safety” has nothing whatever to do with the actual safety of the food.
When it comes to literal food safety, the FDA, tasked to protect food, has illegally allowed antibiotics, hormones and slaughterhouse waste (all banned for years in Europe) to enter the food supply, along with pesticides and GMOs, with none ever having been tested for safety in humans. And those toxic items remain there today despite decades of studies (by scientists outside the FDA) proving their danger conclusively. How many people have died from this exposure, and not from acute infections but from chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and more?
Those toxic substances are all corporate products and the bases of the immense profits to Monsanto, agribusiness in general, the food industry, and especially to the pharmaceutical industry which both sells the toxins and many of the food “additives” and then, after the food is consumed, swoops in like a vulture to pick the bones clean from perhaps the most profitable aspect of all – the steadily increasing diseases it and its brother corporations are assuring.
America does produce safe food but it is produced outside of the industrial [model] based on drugs chemicals, animal confinement, and GMOs. It comes only from the farms Monsanto is working to shut down.
That the FDA is concerned with “food safety” is a fiction propped [up] by propaganda. This is perhaps best exemplified by the raids occurring now, most of them involving raw milk.
The “food safety” stage was set by a long standing government smear campaign around raw milk’s alleged threat to health, giving the public the impression that the FDA was on the job protecting them from dangerous pathogens on farms. The public was unaware of how often the government accused farmers of producing milk with salmonella or another pathogen, shut the farmer down for a few weeks, and put that scare-mongering news in the media. But when the tests came back clean, that did not make the news. In the meantime, the farmer’s reputation was damaged and weeks of income were lost. Farmers, to defend themselves, began taking samples at the same time the government did, and having independent labs quickly confirm the milk was safe, undermining the government ruse.
In any case, the false accusations did not dampen the rapidly growing demand for raw milk. Perhaps because the milk is clean and the rigmarole of testing wasn’t offering a means to shut down dairy farmers Monsanto is now shutting them and food buying clubs down anyway, dropping all pretense of cause.
This becomes yet more absurd and unjust since the reality is that raw milk is the cleanest milk in the country whereas pasteurized milk in supermarkets contains pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, pus and GMOs. And pathogens. For while the FDA is accusing raw milk of being unsafe, in truth, the FDA is ignoring 5 to 20% of pasteurized milk in supermarkets, coming from the dairy industry, can be cultured for the Crohn’s bacterium. It is contaminated with a disease bacterium. The FDA has known this for more than a decade and done nothing about it, not even informing researchers and doctors searching for the cause that pasteurized milk is a likely source.
And to make the FDA’s actions more ludicrous in terms of “food safety,” the raw milk they are trying to get rid of is sought after by many in order to treat Crohn’s disease.
“Food safety” under Monsanto is Orwellian regulations enlarged to the specter of a Howitzer, easy to swing around and aim at small farms and food co-ops providing incontrovertibly safe, nutritious food, in order to shut them down. But somehow the big gun is permanently jammed when it comes pointing at giant corporate facilities sending out contaminated food to millions, sickening and even killing people. Those facilities, despite deaths, have not been closed for a single day.
The FDA (Monsanto) claims it can’t deal with the big corporate offenders without more fire power, so it wants a much, much bigger weapon and total discretion to act whenever and however it decides. The farmers and local food producers, wide-eyed, call out to the country, “Look who their target has been! Look who their target is now!” Given Monsanto overriding existing legal constraints to shut down people doing everything right, their intent is clear as is their drive. With the force and scope of what the “food safety” bills contain, Monsanto would be freed up to obliterate small farming and all local food systems in the US.
Colbert has done a show on the armed FBI raid in LA, and Olbermann did a show on a proposed Miami law that would use “food safety” to criminalize donating to the homeless. Word is starting to get out that something serious is occurring around food and Americans’ rights to produce it and use it freely. Monsanto would probably agree, since it has been appearing in court (as FDA’s “food safety” division) to try to remove human rights around food and health.
Realizing that who is behind FDA “food safety” (Monsanto of documentary fame) begins to lift the veil from the FDA’s claims that it must have more power to go after corporate violators, to reveal the Howitzer beneath, one which Monsanto is using only against hard-working people providing exactly what the country says it wants – a local food economy, safe food, local jobs, food security, and little carbon footprint.
Vandana Shiva says this partnership between the state and corporations is corporate rule. Is that the truth about “food safety”?
Missile mirth
American Goy | 11-11-10
You are looking at an airplane (of course! duh! right?!):
Jon Stewart is just soooooooo hilarious, as he mocks the whole missile launch controversy:
Huffington Post article and video of the man himself.
NYPost weighs in here.
Science lesson from a hack:
Time magazine blog.
Physics, it turns out, can get in the way of a good story. After all, the earth is round, which can make horizontal contrails look vertical on the horizon. For an explanation of what actually appears to have happened, see here. This so-called “missile” was likely a flight from Honolulu to Phoenix, or a UPS cargo flight.
I notice one innocuous word, likely.
As in we don’t know still what the hell it was.
But wait, we now have official word from the Pentagon, hot off the presses.
Lets go there now and finally get the clarification we need on what it was, and to be able to act smug and laugh at the conspiracy idiots.
UPI: Military: California contrail not missile.
“There is no evidence to suggest that this is anything else other than a condensation trail from an aircraft,” said the statement from Col. Dave Lapan, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense. “As stated yesterday, NORAD and USNORTHCOM determined that there was no threat to the U.S. homeland.”
The statement does not say whether the plume came from a military, commercial, government or private aircraft.
Right.
Having a conspiracy addled brain, I am seeing here a non denial denial.
Of course there is no evidence (physical) other than the video, which can, indeed, be a contrail of a plane (or a missile).
After all, we did not get clarification on what the hell it was from the Pentagon.
But don’t fret, there was no threat, from most probably a plane – nothing to see here, go away already.
The Pentagon has spoken, TV has lampooned it, move along, move along.
…
Meanwhile, in the UK, much more saner coverage, and quoting of actual experts and not paid hack “journalists” paid to push a story:
The Telegraph, UK: Mystery ‘missile’ launch in US: the theories.
Doug Richardson, the editor of Jane’s Missiles and Rockets, said it might have been a Standard interceptor, the anti-missile weapon which is fitted to the US Navy’s Aegis guided-missile cruisers as part of the American missile defence programme.
He said: “It’s a solid propellant missile, you can tell from the efflux [smoke] but they’re not showing enough of the tape to show whether it’s staging [jettisoning its sections].”
Doug Richardson, the editor of Jane’s Missiles and Rockets.
Verdict: missile.
Robert Ellsworth, the former US Deputy Secretary of Defence, said it was “pretty big” but “not a Tomahawk” cruise missile.
He said: “It could be a test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile from a submarine to demonstrate to Asia that we can do that.”
Robert Ellsworth, the former US Deputy Secretary of Defence.
Verdict: missile.
We have one naysayer in the article, for balance:
A more down-to-earth – and non-military – explanation was given by John Pike, director of the US-based security analyst firm globalsecurity.org.
He said: “The local station chopped up the video and so it’s hard to watch it continuously but at one place you can see it has changed course – rockets don’t do that.”
He added it was most likely to be a normal aircraft contrail which appears different in the sun: “It’s an airplane that is heading toward the camera and the contrail is illuminated by the setting sun.”
John Pike, director of the US-based security analyst firm globalsecurity.org.
Verdict: airplane.
Let me jump in and state that modern missiles, such as tomahawk (and many others) of course CAN change course, depending on their programming.
And the tomahawk is a really old technology.
One more article for good measure, the Pentagon version: our friends from the north,
The Canadian Press;
The Pentagon and NASA experts have determined that a billowing contrail seen streaking into the skies above Southern California was likely caused by an airliner and not a missile.
Defence Department spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said Wednesday that officials were satisfied it was an airplane contrail distorted by camera angle, winds and other environmental factors including a setting sun.
Military experts studied the video and talked to all government agencies that might have been involved in a missile launch and none reported having launched one, Lapan said.
The conclusion was independently supported by Al Bowers, associate director of research at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert, and Patrick Minnis, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, who studies remote sensing of the atmosphere and Earth’s surface.
“A missile would look like that,” said Bowers, whose 27-year career has included stints as chief or lead engineer on such programs as the SR-71 spyplanes turned over to NASA by the Air Force.
“It could potentially have a contrail that shape,” he told The Associated Press. “(But) the motion looks a little suspect to me, and my conclusion would be that, yeah, it’s most probably an aircraft.”
A missile would look like that… indeed.
But it was not moving like a 1950’s missile, it was making corrections to its flight.
Like, for example (pure speculation on my part) a Tomahawk missile, or an anti-missile missile defense guided missile.
Again, despite hundreds of satellites in the sky, despite NASA monitoring, despite NORAD monitoring, despite air traffic controllers monitoring, we still do not know what it was.
If it was an airplane, kindly tell us what flight it was – civilian or military.
If civilian, please list the type, the flight number, the destination and its origination.
Otherwise, Jon Stewart, Time bloggers, Pentagon officials, NASA officials, americangoy are all just speculating.
A complete coincidence over this quote unquote missile launch (of course it’s a plane, just look at the picture, it’s so painfully obvious!) is that there happens to be a nearby American military complex.
globalsecurity.org (yes, John Pike’s site, quoted in this article).
The Naval Air Weapons Station, Point Mugu, operates and maintains station facilities and provides support services for Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division and assigned tenants and activities.
Point Mugu is part of the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWPNS), the Navy’s full spectrum research, development, test evaluation, and in-service engineering center for weapons systems associated with air warfare (except for anti-submarine warfare systems), missiles and missile subsystems, aircraft weapons integration and assigned airborne electronic warfare systems. NAWCWPNS also maintains and operates the air, land, and sea Naval Western Test Range Complex (NWTRC).
Readers of UNCOVERAGE.net in the “national defense arena (shall we say?)” say the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered carrier, is involved in exercises off San Diego, California right now.
A caller to the Rush Limbaugh show Wednesday morning said that he believes it was a missile launch that was likely made from the high-security “Point Mugu” Naval Base off the coast of California.
Elaine Grossman at Global Security Newswire confirms the obscure San Nicolas Island, which is part of the Naval Base Ventura County (NBVC) Point Mugu facility, is used for clandestine testing of missiles from other countries.
Of course, when you accept the government version, you must also accept the fact that the authorities have no idea what flies where over our heads in our national airspace, that NORAD, NASA, air traffic controllers, satellites, anti missile radars searching the skies for Russian, Chinese, Iranian, terrorist missiles and planes do not track objects in the sky nor do they keep records of those objects (civilian planes, missiles, military jets, etc).
Do you feel better now?
…
Look at the picture.
Isn’t it obvious it is just a plane?
If you question this official narrative, that would make you a conspiracy theorist – one of those nutters lampooned in the news media.
I mean look at the picture.
It’s obvious.
Detention at Kandahar, Bagram and Guantánamo
By Andy Worthington | November 8, 2010
On September 18, I was delighted to be asked to attend “Eid Without Aafia,” and to conduct a live interview with former Guantánamo prisoners Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed…
In the first of the three videos, I asked Shafiq and Ruhal about the brutal conditions in the US prison at Kandahar airport, where they were taken following their capture in Afghanistan in November 2001, after they had survived a notorious massacre of prisoners in container trucks and a stay in the Northern Alliance’s brutal and overcrowded Sheberghan prison. I also asked them what they knew about the US prison at Bagram airbase, where Aafia Siddiqui was held, and asked them about the isolating effect of not only being prohibited from receiving any visitors, but of not even receiving letters from their family — or only receiving letters that were heavily censored.
In the second video, Shafiq and Ruhal talked about the despair they felt in Guantánamo when it became clear that the British government had no intention of helping them. I also spoke about how torture is both illegal and counter-productive, and asked Shafiq and Ruhal to explain how the use of torture can lead to false confessions, which allowed them to explain how, in Guantánamo, they eventually made false confessions after being subjected to the “frequent flier program,” a program of prolonged sleep deprivation that involved being moved from cell to cell every few hours, being held in isolation for five months, where they were given very little food, being short-shackled in painful stress position for two to three days at a time, when they were obliged to urinate and defecate on themselves, and being subjected to extremely loud music.
In the third video, Shafiq and Rasul explained how their treatment in Guantánamo led them to think of committing suicide, and, following up on how they were forced into making false confessions, I noted how false confessions don’t necessarily lead to prisoners being released from Guantánamo. I also asked Shafiq and Ruhal to explain more about the circumstances that led to their release, and Shafiq explained how, on the date that they were supposedly filmed at a training camp with Osama bin Laden, he was attending university in the UK (although he also explained that British agents suggested that he might have traveled on a false passport).
I also asked Shafiq and Ruhal to discuss how receiving medical treatment at Guantánamo was entirely dependent on cooperation with the interrogators (in other words, making false confessions). This allowed them to explain how Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized (and who was recently convicted in a trial by Military Commission), was one of the many prisoners deprived of medical treatment because he would not make false confessions, even though his wounds were “horrific,” and they couldn’t understand how he was still alive. They explained that they regularly heard him crying in an isolation cell, and also explained that he had been subjected to the “frequent flier program,” adding that, although he is now 24 years old, he “still has that child mentality,” In a moving finale, Ruhal reflected on the barbarity of separating Aafia Siddiqui from her children, and on how they may have been used in an attempt to secure her compliance, as the authorities at Guantánamo had no qualms about abusing child prisoners.
Phantom Jobs
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | CounterPunch | November 8, 2010
If we cannot trust what the government tells us about weapons of mass destruction, terrorist events, and the reasons for its wars and bailouts, can we trust the government’s statement last Friday that the US economy gained 151,000 payroll jobs during October?
Apparently not. After examining the government’s report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that the jobs were “phantom jobs” created by “concurrent seasonal factor adjustments.” In other words, the 151,000 jobs cannot be found in the unadjusted underlying data. The jobs were the product of seasonal adjustments concocted by the BLS.
As usual, the financial press did no investigation and simply reported the number handed to the media by the government.
The relevant information, the information that you need to know, is that the level of payroll employment today is below the level of 10 years ago. A smaller number of Americans are employed right now than were employed a decade ago.
Think about what that means. We have had a decade of work force growth from youngsters reaching working age and from immigration, legal and illegal, but there are fewer jobs available to accommodate a decade of work force entrants than before the decade began.
During two years from December 2007 – December 2009, the US economy lost 8,363,000 jobs, according to the payroll jobs data. As of October 2010, payroll jobs purportedly have increased by 874,000, an insufficient amount to keep up with labor force growth. However, John Williams reports that 874,000 is an overestimate of jobs as a result of the faulty “birth-death model,” which overestimates new business start-ups during recessions and underestimates business failures. Williams says that the next benchmark revision due out next February will show a reduction in current employment by almost 600,000 jobs. This assumes, of course, that the BLS does not gimmick the benchmark revision. If Williams is correct, it is more evidence that the hyped recovery is non-existent.
Discounting the war production shutdown at the end of World War II, which was not a recession in the usual sense, Williams reports that “the current annual decline [in employment] remains the worst since the Great Depression, and should deepen further.”
In short, there is no employment data, and none in the works, unless gimmicked, that supports the recovery myth. The US rate of unemployment, if measured according to the methodology used in 1980, is 22.5%. Even the government’s broader measure of unemployment stands at 17%. The 9.6% reported rate is a concocted measure that does not include discouraged workers who have been unable to find a job after 6 months and workers who who want full time jobs but can only find part-time work.
Another fact that is seldom, if ever, reported, is that the payroll jobs data reports the number of jobs, not the number of people with jobs. Some people hold two jobs; thus, the payroll report does not give the number of employed people.
The BLS household survey measures the number of people with jobs. The same October that reported 151,000 new payroll jobs reported, according to the household survey, a loss of 330,000 jobs.
The American working class has been destroyed. The American middle class is in its final stages of destruction. Soon the bottom rungs of the rich themselves will be destroyed.
The entire way through this process the government will lie and the media will lie.
The United States of America has become the country of the Big Lie. Those who facilitate government and corporate lies are well rewarded, but anyone who tells any truth or expresses an impermissible opinion is excoriated and driven away.
But we “have freedom and democracy.” We are the virtuous, indispensable nation, the salt of the earth, the light unto the world.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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British weapons and personnel doing much of the killing in Yemen
Press TV – June 18, 2019
A detailed report published by the Guardian newspaper has shown how Britain is massively contributing to Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen as it suggests that London is not only supplying the bombs that fall on Yemenis, but it provides the personnel and expertise that keep the war going.
The comprehensive report by Arron Merat published on Tuesday showed that Britain was doing much of the killing in Yemen as the country continues to provide Saudi Arabia with everything it needs to turn its southern impoverished neighbor into a graveyard.
“Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors,” said Merat in the report. … continue
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