AP misquoted UN Sec’y Gen’l as praising Israel
By Philip Weiss | February 6, 2010 | Excerpt
Last night the New York Times printed an AP story about the United Nations’ followup to the Goldstone report, titled “UN Chief Praises Israel Probe of Its Gaza Actions.”
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in a 72-page report Thursday night to the General Assembly that ”Israel followed up on every allegation.”
It turns out the Secretary-General never said that. Israel said it.
In today’s briefing at the UN, the UN made the point that Ban Ki-moon said no such thing. It explained that the 72-page report was mostly Israel’s report. It included just three pages from the Sec’y Gen’l.
The Spokesperson noted that in the document submitted by the Secretary-General to the General Assembly on the Goldstone report, only the first three pages are written by the Secretary-General and the Secretariat.
The remainder of the document consists of annexes containing information provided, respectively, by the Government of Israel, the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine and the Permanent Mission of Switzerland.
Confused? Here is the 72-page UN report released yesterday. The Secy Gen’l’s judgment at the start is noncommital:
It is my sincere hope that General Assembly resolution 64/10 has served to encourage investigations by the Government of Israel and the Palestinian side that are independent, credible and in conformity with international standards. I note from the materials received that the processes initiated by the Government of Israel and the Government of Switzerland are ongoing… As such, no determination can be made on the implementation of the resolution by the parties concerned.
The long Israeli response follows (and is not clearly identified). In paragraph 185, Israel pats itself on the back:
Because Israel followed up on every allegation, regardless of whether the source was neutral, hostile, or friendly, it launched investigations into 150 separate incidents, including 36 criminal investigations opened thus far.
AP seems to have revised its coverage. But as Mark Twain said, a lie goes around the world in the time it takes the truth to tie its shoes.
This discovery was published at reddit, which says that the mistake demonstrates pro-Israel bias in the press.
Israeli hit squad that killed Hamas commander ‘had Irish passports’
The Belfast Telegraph | February 6, 2010
Members of a hit squad that assassinated a top Hamas military commander used Irish passports to enter and leave Dubai, it’s been claimed.
The suspected Israeli hit team, including at least one woman, entered the United Arab Emirates using Irish documents, police authorities said.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh (50), held responsible by Israel for the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers in 1989, died in mysterious circumstances on January 20 in a Dubai hotel room.
The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman said yesterday: “We are aware of the media reports and we are in contact with authorities locally to try and determine the truth of the reports.”
Al-Mabhouh was said to have been shocked with an electric weapon held to his legs and then suffocated or poisoned.
Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the killing, but Israeli news media claimed al-Mabhouh had many enemies and could have been killed by other Arab factions.
Up to seven people were said to have been involved in al-Mabhouh’s killing, four of whom used Irish passports to enter Dubai and who later fled to a “European country” after the killing, according to police sources in Dubai.
Declining to reveal their identities, an official said UAE security personnel were co-ordinating with Interpol to have them extradited.
Al-Mabhouh had been out for most of the day and returned to his room only after 9pm, police said.
Pathologists were said to have determined the cause of death as asphyxiation, probably with a pillow found near the body and stained with blood. A room cleaner found his body the next day.
He had travelled to Dubai under another name.
The victim was said to have been in charge of weapons procurement for Hamas and was on a mission in Dubai.
His brother said it was not the first attempt on his life. Six months ago, he was rushed to hospital in Dubai in a coma and treated for poisoning.
Mr Mabhouh’s funeral was held in Damascus, where he had lived for 20 years with his wife and children.
In 1986, US officials, including Oliver North, reportedly used Irish passports to travel to Iran to offer missiles for hostages.
Bribery, Indentured Science, PR & Toxic Sludge
By Ronnie Cummins & Alexis Baden-Mayer | Organic Consumers Association | February 4, 2010
Greg Kester, Natalie Sierra and Liz Ostoich, along with municipal governments across the U.S. in need desperately of getting rid of the noxious stuff called sewage sludge, want Americans to believe that that toxic brew is good for you. Specifically, these operators are waging a massive PR campaign to get farmers and gardeners, including school gardens, to “fertilize” their veggies with sewage sludge. Their campaign would have us believe that the chemicals in sewage sludge—thousands of them present in every degree of hazardous and toxic combination—are somehow magically gone from sewage sludge once you “apply” it to your garden.
Before you reach for the science on the practice of “land application” of sewage sludge (and you will not find any science in the hands of the purveyors of this practice), consider the elementary logic: the purpose of sewage treatment being to clean up the sewage that arrives without cease at its doors, sludge will by definition contain everything the sewage treatment plant did in fact take out of the sewage. This means, besides urine and feces from flush toilets, every chemical from every industry, every pharmaceutical, disinfectant, and pathogen from every hospital hooked into the municipal sewer system; it means all the chemicals—tens of thousands of them—produced in our society and flushed or washed into sewers at the industry end or the consumer end: heavy metals, flame retardants, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, pharmaceutical drugs and other hazardous chemicals coming from residential drains. It also means untold—and unpredictable— new chemicals created by the negative synergy in the toxic soup that sewage is and the toxic stew that sludge is. It means hosts of new pathogenic bacteria also created through horizontal gene transfer in the stress of this same toxic soup and this same toxic stew.
Keep these plain, incontrovertible facts in mind as you read on and when you hear the 1984 talk of “biosolids” (the PR word concocted by the sludge gang), of “land application” of “biosolids” (euphemism for disposal of sludge), of “class A biosolids,” or “EQ” (for “Exceptional Quality”) “biosolids.”
Greg Kester represents the California Association of Sanitation Agencies’ Biosolids Program, Natalie Sierra works for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and Liz Ostoich works for the corporate giant of toxic sludge, Synagro (recently bought by the infamous Carlyle Group). Their job is to make sure that “land application” of toxic sludge on American farmland—the cheapest way to dispose of toxic sludge since ocean dumping was stopped in 1992—remains legal.
Opposition so far comes from people who have been made very sick by sludge “applied” to farmland close to their homes, by those who have had their entire dairy herds wiped out after being fed with hay or silage grown on sludge, and those whose own guts warn them against allowing sewage sludge to be either processed or spread near their homes or their farms. Like Monsanto’s genetically modified organisms (GMOs) polluting the gene pool, once toxic sludge contaminates our farmland, parks, schoolyards, and backyard gardens there is long term—or really, for all intents and purposes, permanent—damage. Growing food organically won’t mean much if the soil is contaminated with the pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and heavy metals contained in sewage sludge. This is exactly why the organic community rose up in 1998 and forced the government to prohibit the spreading of sewage sludge on organic farms and gardens.
Sludge propagandists like Kester, Sierra and Ostoich are the front line troups for municipal governments trying to avoid their responsibility for this noxious product of wastewater treatment: convincing the public that toxic sludge is good for you to have on your land, in your backyard. All three spoke at an industry conference several of us attended last week in San Francisco, “Biosolids: Understanding Future Regulatory Trends and Impacts on Biosolids Management in California.”
Greg “Buy the Science” Kester, California Association of Sanitation Agencies’ Biosolids Program
Greg Kester pitched sewage professionals on a national strategy of getting ahead of the toxic sludge news cycle by “filling in the data gaps” with research funded with what he described as “Congressional funny money” and conducted by organizations like WERF, the Water Environment Research Foundation, a PR think tank and lobbyist for the toxic sludge industry.
What really upsets Kester are reporters who “overlook” what he sees as the “benefits” of toxic sludge. Case in point, the John Hopkins study in Baltimore that examined the possibilities of using toxic sludge “to reduce the impact of lead contamination” in poor black neighborhoods by “tying it up” in the sludge. The plan was to test the blood of the children living in this project—before and after the “application” of the “biosolids”—to see if the lead levels had gone up or down.
The researchers “applied” “sterilized Baltimore sewage sludge mixed and composted with wood chips and sawdust,” along with grass seed, to backyard soil contaminated with lead. After a year, the grass cover was shown to reduce the amount of lead-contaminated soil being tracked from people’s yards to their homes, making it less likely that the lead-contaminated soil would be ingested and absorbed into the blood stream. Kester believes this is really a positive story about how toxic sludge can improve the environment by producing “lush green grass.”
Kester says the industry should have gotten great PR out of this one, but this isn’t how the story played to the media. After all, even contaminated soils can grow grass. The trouble with toxic sludge is that it, too, contains hazardous levels of lead. The “exceptional quality,” “class A biosolids” that were used in the experiment are permitted to have up to 300 mg/kg of lead. The law allows land used to dispose of toxic sludge to cumulatively reach a load of 264 pounds of lead per acre.
The AP reporter who had suggested a comparison with this “study” and the Tuskeegee studies of the 1950s was removed from his post and sent to no man’s land at the United Nations.
A second story Kester thinks could have been played better by the toxic sludge industry is the “application” of toxic sludge to the White House lawn during past administrations. This story made the news again when the First Lady Michelle Obama began growing what she intended to be an organic garden in a piece of that lawn. Kester said the lead contamination caused by use of a toxic sludge product called OrGrow (incidentally, the same thing that was used in the Baltimore study) had left lead contamination of “only” 93 ppm, “lower than expected for urban soils and safe gardens.” Kester is technically, if deceptively, correct: our EPA says that soil with more than 56 parts per million of lead might not provide “adequate protection of terrestrial ecosystems,” but doesn’t suggest worrying about anything below 400 parts per million as a threat to human health. However, some soil scientists advise against feeding children produce grown on soil with more than 100 ppm of lead.
Of course, knowing as we do that that sludge itself contains unpredictable but high levels and thus certainly contributes to the lead contamination of soils, who in their right mind would continue to support the practice of disposing of it on land? And remember also, lead is only one of countless and unpredictable toxins to be found in sewage sludge.
Natalie “Sludge Giveaways” Sierra, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Natalie Sierra has helped the toxic sludge industry score a major victory in the green city of San Francisco, where they’ve actually been able to get city residents to take toxic sludge and dispose of it in their own yards and community gardens. As part of the SF Public Utilities Commission’s contract with Synagro to take its toxic sewage sludge, SF gets a little of it sent back to them in a form that’s very similar to what was used in the Baltimore study and at the White House: pelletized, composted, sanitized beyond recognition. This is given away to community, school and home gardeners as “organic compost.” Since May 2007, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has given away more than 125 tons of toxic sludge to the unsuspecting public at “free giveaway” events.
The sludge giveaways have been successful, either because the recipients think they’re getting real organic compost (how should they know otherwise when the city also gives away OMRI-certified organic, genuine compost made from composted food scraps collected in the green recycling bins), or they trustingly assume that the law regarding the use of toxic sewage sludge as fertilizer must be protective of human health. As Greg Kester emphasized in his talk, the toxic sludge industry is counting on the city to stand their ground against complaints from groups like the Center for Food Safety and RILES (ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems), which filed a legal petition with city in 2009 to stop the disposal of toxic sludge on city lands through the “giveaway” program. Precisely because of its reputation as a green city, San Francisco is the strategic battleground in a national dispute pitting the toxic sludge industry against localities that have decided they don’t want to be toxic sludge disposal sites anymore. In Kester and Sierra’s view, sludge “giveaways” are the best opportunity to convince the public that toxic sludge can be “beneficially reused” as “non-toxic, nutrient-rich organic biosolids compost.”
For the “biosolids” conference, which organizers assumed was attended only by industry insiders (admission to the one day event was $226 for people who aren’t members of the California Water Environment Association, a sewage industry trade association), Sierra gave a presentation on local ordinances in California that threatened to limit efforts to dispose of sludge on rural lands. When I questioned her after the conference as to why it was so important to give sludge away to San Francisco gardeners, she claimed that it was an issue of “social justice”—meaning you shouldn’t dump on someone else’s land what you don’t want on your own; that city dwellers shouldn’t be so cavalier about dumping their wastes on the farmland of rural counties. This was a shock to me, considering that, in her presentation about the “challenge” of anti-sludge rural counties, the only concern she had expressed was to “keep rate payers in mind” and “keep costs down.” But, in this “social justice” comment, it appeared for a moment that, in her view, rural communities should not be forced to receive of a city’s toxic sewage sludge for disposal on their farmland. She quickly disabused me of this illusion, assuring me that this was not what she meant. Perhaps she has not yet got her propaganda logic straight.
Liz “Bribery” Ostoich, Synagro
Liz Ostoich works as a project developer for the “land application”-of-toxic-sludge corporate giant, Synagro. Her presentation began with a cartoon image of a person who had gotten whacked very hard on the nose. She said she was going to teach us what she had learned in the school of hard knocks about how to gain local approval for toxic sludge processing. This is what she’s learned:
1. Poor Neighborhoods, Not Rich Neighborhoods
Ostoich advised us to pick the “right location,” not someplace that’s going to involve “taking trucks through a very exclusive neighborhood.”
2. Out of Sight, Out of Mind
A “remote location” is also key. Ostoich warned us to “be in an area where folks can’t really see you, they smell with their eyes.”
Ostoich gave two examples of projects she’d worked on, one Synagro’s Temescal Canyon facility in Corona, CA, “where it was done wrong,” and the other its South Kern County facility, which she told us was “unanimously supported.”
To hear Ostoich tell it, the closing of Synagro’s Temescal Canyon facility was the result of Synagro’s failure to manage the politics and public relations surrounding toxic sewage sludge, not their failure to properly manage the toxic sludge itself. She shared with us her suspicions that complaints that were phoned in from neighbors (suburban sprawl had placed 7,000 homes within a 4 mile radius of the sludge plant) were “bogus and contrived to get us shut down.”
What Ostoich didn’t share with us was that 37 individual small-claims lawsuits for $5,000 each, the maximum allowable amount, were won against Synagro for creating a public nuisance. This was for 11 years of suffering. One of the plaintiffs, Diana Schramm, told a local newspaper, “We would express our frustration to these people, Synagro, that the odor was so intense that it was burning our eyes, burning our noses, burning our throats. It was so frustrating. They just didn’t seem to care about us.”
As a counterpoint, Ostoich used Kern County as an example of a place where Synagro had done things right: “remote location,” “political involvement,” “proven technology,” and “going into it with the right attitude.” As an example of the community support Synagro received for their project, Ostoich read—in full—a letter from the president of Taft College written to California Senator Florez about Synagro’s generosity: an annual contribution of $25,000 to the college. Oh, and the letter happened to mention that Taft College was of the opinion that Synagro was a superb environmental steward. If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em?
That strategy didn’t work so well with the Taft City Council. As councilman Craig Noble said after the council voted to reject a check from Synagro for $25,000, he felt that accepting the money could have created a conflict of interest.
“I hate to take money from somebody that might try to be buying their way into something later on,” Noble said.
It isn’t easy to go up against a public-private trifecta that is so well-resourced and unscrupulous, but we have to try. If we can’t stop San Francisco, home to the man Organic Style magazine calls the World’s Greenest Mayor, from tricking its citizens into taken poison and growing their food in it, there’s no telling what the toxic sludge industry will try and get away with in other towns. That’s why we’re putting out a national call to all of our members and readers to encourage organic consumers across the country to help us stop San Francisco’s toxic sewage sludge giveaways.
Israeli report claims $2 billion stolen from Palestinians
By Jonathon Cook | February 4, 2010
Nazareth – Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than US $2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have alleged.
A new report, “State Robbery,” to be published later this month, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 and part of the money was supposed to be transferred to a special fund on behalf of the workers.
According to information supplied by Israeli officials, most of the deductions from the workers’ pay were invested in infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories – a presumed reference to the massive state subsidies accorded to the settlements.
Nearly 50,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are working in Israel – following the easing of restrictions on entering Israel under the “economic peace” promised by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister – and continue to have such contributions docked from their pay.
Complicit in the deception, the report adds, is the Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation, which levies a monthly fee on Palestinian workers, even though they are not entitled to membership and are not represented in labor disputes.
“This is a clear-cut case of theft from Palestinian workers on a grand scale,” said Shir Hever, a Jerusalem-based economist and one of the authors of the report. “There are no reasons for Israel to delay in returning this money either to the workers or to their beneficiaries.”
The deductions started being made in 1970, three years after the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories began, when Palestinian workers started to enter Israel in significant numbers, most of them employed as manual laborers in the agriculture and construction industries.
Typically, the workers lose a fifth of their salary in deductions that are supposed to cover old age payments, unemployment allowance, disability insurance, child benefits, trade union fees, pension fund, holiday and sick pay, and health insurance. In practice, however, the workers are entitled only to disability payments in case of work accidents and are insured against loss of work if their employer goes bankrupt.
According to the report, compiled by two human rights groups, the Alternative Information Centre and Kav La’Oved, only a fraction of the total contributions – less than eight percent – was used to award benefits to Palestinian workers. The rest was secretly transferred to the finance ministry.
The Israeli organizations assess that the workers were defrauded of at least $2.25 billion in today’s prices, in what they describe as a minimum and “very conservative” estimate of the misappropriation of the funds. Such a sum represents about 10 percent of the PA’s annual budget.
The authors also note that they excluded from their calculations two substantial groups of Palestinian workers – those employed in the Israeli settlements and those working in Israel’s black economy – because figures were too hard to obtain.
Hever said the question of whether the bulk of the deductions – those for national insurance – had been illegally taken from the workers was settled by the Israeli High Court of Justice back in 1991. The judges accepted a petition from the flower growers’ union that the government should return about $1.5 million in contributions from Palestinian workers in the industry.
“The legal precedent was set then and could be used to reclaim the rest of these excessive deductions,” he said.
At the height of Palestinian participation in the Israeli labor force, in the early 1990s, as many as one in three Palestinian workers was dependent on an Israeli employer.
Israel continued requiring contributions from Palestinian workers after the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, arguing that it needed to make the deductions to ensure Israeli workers remained competitive.
However, the report notes that such practices were supposed to have been curbed by the Oslo process. Israel agreed to levy an “equalization tax” – equivalent to the excessive contributions paid by Palestinians – a third of which would be invested in a fund that would later be available to the workers.
In fact, however, the Israeli state comptroller, a government watchdog official, reported in 2003 that only about a tenth of the money levied on the workers had actually been placed in the fund.
The Finance Ministry has admitted that most of the money taken from the workers was passed to Israeli military authorities in the Palestinian territories to pay for “infrastructure programs.” Hannah Zohar, the director of Kav La’Oved who co-authored the report, said she believed that the ministry was actually referring to the construction of illegal settlements.
The report is also highly critical of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation, which it accuses of grabbing “a piece of the pie” by forcing Palestinian workers to pay a monthly “organizing fee” to the union since 1970, even though Palestinians are not entitled to membership.
Despite the Histadrut’s agreement with its Palestinian counterpart in 2008 to repay the fees, only 20 percent was returned, leaving $30 million unaccounted for.
The Histadrut was also implicated in another “rip-off,” Hever said. It agreed in 1990 to the Israeli construction industry’s demand that Palestinian workers pay an extra two percent tax to promote the training of recent Jewish immigrants, most of them from the former Soviet Union.
Hever said that in effect the Palestinian laborers were required to “subsidize the training of workers meant to replace them.” The funds were never used for the stated purpose but were mainly issued as grants to the families of Israeli workers.
In one especially cynical use of the funds, the report claims, the money was spent on portable stoves for soldiers involved in Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza last year.
In response, the Finance Ministry called the report “incorrect and misleading,” and the Histadrut said it was “full of lies.” However, neither provided rebuttals of the report’s allegations or its calculations.
Hever said the government body responsible for making the deductions, the department of payments, had initially refused to divulge any of its figures, but had partly relented after some statistics were made available through leaks from its staff.
Assef Saeed, a senior official in the Palestinian Authority’s Labor Ministry, said the PA was keen to discuss the issue of the deductions, but that talks were difficult because of the lack of contacts between the two sides.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. A version of this article originally appeared in The National, printed in Abu Dhabi.
Show Trial
By Margaret Kimberley | BAR | February 3, 2010
The United States government has held Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Guantanamo ever since his capture in 2003. He was one of many “enemy combatants” held there without charge or trial. Not only did he suffer from this violation of American and international law, but Mohammed suffered through water boarding torture an incredible 180 times in just 30 days.
In November 2009 the Obama administration Justice Department announced that Mohammed would finally be tried in federal court in Manhattan. The courthouse is located just blocks away from the World Trade Center site that Mohammed is now charged with plotting to destroy.
A collection of reactionary, racist politicians eager to incite hysteria, such as Rudy Giuliani and Congressman Peter King, led New Yorkers and the rest of America to believe that Mohammed and his co-defendants should have been tried by military tribunal. Mayor Bloomberg initially appeared to be supportive of the venue but recently joined his police commissioner in claiming that security measures would require a shut down of all of lower Manhattan. Now the Obama administration has back tracked and no longer promises a trial in New York City.
It probably doesn’t matter where Mohammed is tried. Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder both promised a conviction. Holder assures us. “Failure is not an option. These are cases that have to be won. I don’t expect that we will have a contrary result.” His boss said pretty much the same thing. When asked about those who might be offended by a civilian rather than military trial Obama told everyone to relax, promising that they wouldn’t find it “. . . offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.” The law professor president knew he had made a faux pas and tried to extricate himself immediately. “I’m not going to be in that courtroom. That’s the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury.”
While easily impressed liberals sang praises for the civil trial, the administration has chosen to continue military tribunals at Guantanamo for other defendants. Mohammed is in fact an anomaly for the Obama administration. The Bush policy continues unabated.
In the days of the Soviet Union, Americans and other westerners were quick to use the derisive term “show trial” when dissidents faced prosecution. That term can now surely be applied to the United States if a guilty verdict and execution are presented as foregone conclusions by both the president and his chief law enforcement officer.
Now Obama seems to be backing away from a commitment to civilian prosecution. His press secretary, Robert Gibbs, continues the promise of conviction and death, but not the promise of a trial in a courtroom. “He will be brought to justice and he is likely be executed for the heinous crimes he has committed in masterminding the killing of 3,000 Americans. That you can be sure of.” When pressed on the question of civilivan versus military jurisdiction, Gibbs was less than forthcoming. “The Attorney General believes the best place to do this is in an American courtroom.” (*link Gibbs) Smelling blood in the water, Republicans are determined to prevent any civilian prosecution of Mohammed. Senator Mitch McConnell has threatened to prevent the use of federal funds for a trial to be held in New York City or anywhere else.
Once again all Americans are made complicit in their government’s crimes. Phony concerns about security costs and whipped up fears of impending terror attacks are used to subvert the legal system that was once held up as a model for the rest of the world to follow.
Barack Obama and the Democratic Party still have solid majorities in the House and Senate. A few off year election defeats have given the president an excuse to cut and run before shots have been fired. Just as he announced a freeze on domestic spending programs that benefit every American citizen, he and the rest of the craven Democrats are now ready to toss the entire legal system under the back wheels of a large bus.
Bill Clinton didn’t begin his retreat away from Democratic Party principles until he actually lost control of Congress. As in all other matters, Obama is out-Clintoning Clinton. The Obama doctrine appears to be, “Why wait for defeat when you can create it yourself.”
The consequences of progressive Democratic capitulation to Obama grow more terrible every day. The military budget balloons, domestic spending vanishes and the Bush doctrine of an imperial president is continued by his predecessor. A show trial is but one symptom of what ails the Democratic Party and the nation.
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com.
UN find challenges Israeli version of attack on civilian building in Gaza war
UN team find remains of aircraft-dropped bombs, contradicting Israeli report on military conduct during three-week conflict
Rory McCarthy | The Guardian | February 1, 2010
A new Israeli report defending the military’s conduct in the Gaza war was challenged tonight after evidence emerged apparently contradicting one of its key findings.
Israel submitted a 46-page report to the UN on Friday saying its forces abided by international law throughout the three-week war last year. It was meant to avert the threat of international prosecutions and to challenge a highly critical UN inquiry by South African judge Richard Goldstone, which accused both Israel and Hamas of “grave breaches” of the fourth Geneva convention, war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.
The Israeli report looked in detail at a handful of incidents, including the attack on the al-Badr flour mill in northern Gaza, which was severely damaged.
The UN mine action team, which handles ordnance disposal in Gaza, has told the Guardian that the remains of a 500-pound Mk82 aircraft-dropped bomb were found in the ruins of the mill last January. Photographs of the front half of the bomb have been obtained by the Guardian.
This evidence directly contradicts the finding of the Israeli report, which challenged allegations that the building was deliberately targeted and specifically stated there was no evidence of an air strike. Goldstone, however, used the account of the air strike as a sign that Israel’s attack on the mill was not mere collateral damage, but precisely targeted and a possible war crime.
The flour mill attack was not the most serious incident of the war: although nearly 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in just three weeks, no one died at the mill. However, because it was a civilian building producing food – the only operational mill in Gaza – the incident received particular criticism from Goldstone, who concluded that the building was hit by an air strike, the attacks were “intentional and precise”, and they were “carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population”. He added that the attacks violated the fourth Geneva convention and customary international law and may constitute a war crime.
In its defence, the Israeli report admitted the building had been hit by tank shells but said it was a “legitimate military target” because there were Hamas fighters “in the vicinity of the flour mill”. It said the mill was “not a pre-planned target” and specifically denied it was hit by an air strike.
“The military advocate general did not find any evidence to support the assertion that the mill was attacked from the air using precise munitions, as alleged in the human rights council fact-finding report,” it said. The military advocate general “found no reason” to order a criminal investigation.
But the Guardian visited the mill days after the war last year and on the first floor of the building saw what appeared to be the remains of an aircraft-dropped bomb in the burnt-out milling machinery.
The UN mine action team said it identified an aircraft-dropped bomb at the mill on 25 January last year and removed it on 11 February. “Item located was the front half of a Mk82 aircraft bomb with 273M fuse,” according to the team. “The remains of the bomb were found on an upper floor in a narrow walkway between burnt-out machinery and an outside wall.” The bomb was made safe by a technical field manager and removed.
The team also provided two photographs of what it said were the bomb remains, marked with the date and time it was identified: “25 Jan, 14:38”. The team did not do a damage assessment of the building to see what other ordnance hit because that was not its task.
Asked to explain the new evidence today, the Israeli military referred the Guardian to an Israeli foreign ministry statement that summarises last week’s report and states that the military is “committed to full compliance” with the law of armed conflict and to investigating any alleged violations.
As well as the heavy death toll, the Gaza war damaged a large amount of civilian infrastructure: more than 21,000 buildings and apartments were wholly or partly destroyed, including more than 200 major factories.
The al-Badr flour mill was the largest mill in the strip, with production lines spread over five floors – each of which were hit. Gaza’s largest concrete factory, at a different site a few miles away, was also destroyed, as were several large food processing plants.
Goldstone said the nature of the attack on the flour mill “suggests that the intention was to disable its productive capacity” and said there was no plausible justification for the extensive damage. “It thus appears that the only purpose was to put an end to the production of flour in the Gaza Strip,” his report said. It is not clear why Goldstone did not use evidence from the UN team in his report.
Rashad Hamada, one of two brothers who owns the mill, gave evidence at a public hearing in Gaza last June and said the mill was hit by an air strike. He said the factory twice received phone calls from the Israeli military telling them to evacuate the building in the days before the strike, but the factory was not used by Hamas or other Palestinian fighters.
Both Hamada brothers possess hard-to-obtain businessmen’s permits to enter Israel and were therefore regarded as credible witnesses by the Goldstone team.
“What happened at the mill is total destruction of the whole production line of the factory,” Hamada said. He estimated his losses due to the destruction were $2.5m (£1.7m) and said he believed that the mill had been targeted because it was working.
Four other flour mills in Gaza that were not operational were not targeted, he said. “As for the targeting, it is because [it was] a flour mill that is working,” he said.
Climategate scientist ‘hid flaws in data’, say sceptics
Professor in leaked email scandal tried to hide fact that numbers he used were wrong
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor | The Independent | 2 February 2010
The “climategate” controversy intensified last night when the senior British scientist at its centre, Professor Phil Jones, faced fresh accusations that he attempted to withhold data that could cast doubt on evidence for rising world temperatures.
The charges follow an analysis of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, of which Professor Jones is the director.
The emails, published online on the eve of the recent Copenhagen climate summit, led to allegations that Professor Jones and other researchers had behaved inappropriately in withholding or deleting scientific information to prevent its disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI). Last week the charge became more serious when the Information Commissioner’s Office said that in withholding information, UEA had broken the law.
The university has set up an independent inquiry into the affair headed by Sir Muir Russell, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow, and Professor Jones has taken leave from his director’s post until the inquiry is completed. But the new allegations go beyond refusing FOI requests and concern data that Professor Jones and other scientists have used to support a record of recent world temperatures that shows an upward trend.
Climate sceptics have suggested that some of the higher readings may be due not to a warmer atmosphere, but to the so-called “urban heat island effect”, where cities become reservoirs of heat and are warmer than the surrounding countryside, especially during the night hours.
Professor Jones and a colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany suggested in an influential 1990 paper in the journal Nature that the urban heat island effect was minimal – and cited as supporting evidence a long series of temperature measurements from Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities, supplied by Professor Wei-Chyung. The Nature paper was used as evidence in the most recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given.
Climate sceptics have demanded the two professors now withdraw their heat island paper. Professor Wei-Chyung was investigated by his university, but exonerated, but the emails indicate there was also concern among Professor Jones’ s colleagues at UEA, including from Dr Tom Wigley, his predecessor as head of the CRU, about the Chinese weather station data and Professor Jones’s contuing reliance on it.
No-one was available for comment at the University of East Anglia last night.
Auditor: TARP rescue failing to meet key goals
AFP | February 1, 2010
Washington – The 700-billion-dollar US government effort to rescue the financial system has failed to meet key goals such as sparking lending and curbing risky activities by banks, a special auditor said Sunday.
The special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said in a report to Congress that it is too soon to measure the overall success of the program passed at the height of the financial crisis in October 2008.
The quarterly report said that because of TARP, “there are clear signs that aspects of the financial system are far more stable than they were at the height of the crisis in the fall of 2008.”
But the report also stated that “many of TARP’s stated goals… have simply not been met” and that the potential for a new crisis looms without major reforms.
“Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car,” the report said.
The program has fallen short in key areas such as boosting credit, curbing home foreclosures and deterring the risky behavior of financial firms that are considered “too big to fail,” said the report from inspector general Neil Barofsky.
Despite the explicit goal to increase financing to US businesses and consumers, “lending continues to decrease,” said the report from inspector general Neil Barofsky.
It also noted that TARP has failed to live up to the “explicit purpose” stated by Congress of “preserving homeownership and promoting jobs.
“The TARP foreclosure prevention program has only permanently modified a small fraction of eligible mortgages, and unemployment is the highest it has been in a generation,” it said.
“Whether these goals can effectively be met through existing TARP programs is very much an open question at this time.”
The report said that by coming to the aid of the troubled housing market, the US government effectively “has become the mortgage market, with the taxpayer shouldering the risk that had once been borne by the private investor.”
More broadly, the report said the underlying problems that led to the financial crisis remain, including the continued existence of financial firms that are “too big to fail” and engaging in practices that can destabilize the system.
“The substantial costs of TARP — in money, moral hazard effects on the market, and government credibility — will have been for naught if we do nothing to correct the fundamental problems in our financial system and end up in a similar or even greater crisis in two, or five, or 10 years’ time,” the document said.
“It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.” – AFP
Clare Short: Blair testimony at Iraq Inquiry ‘ludicrous’
Press TV – January 31, 2010
Police guard protesters outside the Iraq Inquiry on January 29, 2010, as former premier Tony Blair gives his evidence.
Two days after former British premier Tony Blair gave his evidence before the country’s independent inquiry into the Iraq war, a former cabinet minister has described his testimony as “ludicrous.”
Clare Short told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that it was fallacious to suggest that al-Qaeda would team up with “rogue states,” after the September 11 attacks.
Short, who quit the cabinet soon after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, defended Prime Minister Gordon Brown, saying he had been “marginalized” when the decision to go to war was made.
Brown was chancellor of the exchequer when Blair ordered the country’s troops to join the US-led invasion.
The incursion was based on a now notorious dossier claiming the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Short said Brown’s political priorities laid elsewhere at the time and that he neither opposed nor supported the invasion but was “preoccupied” by other concerns.
During his six-hour testimony, an unrepentant Blair said he still believed he had made the right decision and would do so again, if it meant deposing Saddam, whom he described as a “monster.”
He said he believed the executed dictator “threatened not just the region but the world,” and that the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, had “dramatically” changed British and US position towards that threat.
Notably, Blair steered away from Iraq towards new alleged threats, including Iran.
He argued that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, which Tehran has repeatedly affirmed is for peaceful purposes such as electricity generation, was dangerous.
Blair urged world leaders to take on a tough stance towards Iran.
On January 12, a Dutch inquiry into Netherland’s support of the 2003 invasion said the US and Britain had rushed to war without sufficient legal backing under international law.
The commission’s 551-page report said UN resolutions prior to the outbreak of the war did not provide a legitimate mandate for the attack.
History of Leaks Imperils Reactor License Extension in Vermont
![[A portion of a cooling tower at the Vermont Yankee reactor collapsed Wednesday, August 22, 2007. A broken 52” pipe was photographed spewing water into the ground, in the latest embarrassment for Yankee owner Entergy Corporation, the nation’s second-largest nuclear utility.]](https://i0.wp.com/www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/vermontcoolingtower.jpg "vermontcoolingtower.jpg")
A portion of a cooling tower at the Vermont Yankee reactor collapsed Wednesday, August 22, 2007. A broken 52” pipe was photographed spewing water into the ground, in the latest embarrassment for Yankee owner Entergy Corporation, the nation’s second-largest nuclear utility. – © 2010 Boston Globe
Search continues for radioactive Vermont Yankee leak
By Terri Hallenbeck, Free Press Staff Writer • Saturday, January 23, 2010
MONTPELIER — Crews will start drilling more monitoring wells today at Vermont Yankee as the Vernon nuclear power plant’s owners continue the search for the source of a leak of the radioactive isotope tritium.
The tritium leak was revealed three weeks ago after heightened radioactive levels were found in a monitoring well outside the plant. Tests continued this week to show a range of tritium — from 14,000 to 28,100 picocuries per liter, Vermont Yankee spokesman Rob Williams said. The most recent tests were at 20,900, he said.
The Environmental Protection Agency safety standard for tritium in drinking water is 20,000 picocuries per liter.
More heightened levels — as high as 2 million picocuries — have since been found in a concrete trench on the plant’s campus. No heightened levels of radioactive substances have been found in nearby drinking wells that are monitored.
Other radioactive isotopes — cobalt-60 and zinc-65 — have also been found in the trench, which is a locked and confined building where radioactive waste is stored and treated. Williams said Friday that those were found in the Jan. 13 sampling along with tritium.
Neil Sheehan, Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman, said 13,000 picocuries per liter of cobalt-60 and 2,460 picocuries of zinc-45 were found in the standing water in the trench. Those are well above federal drinking-water limits of 100 picocuries for cobalt-60 and 300 picocuries for zinc-65. Officials cautioned that the substances aren’t in the drinking water but are in an enclosed part of the nuclear power plant.
Williams said it’s not a surprise to find those other isotopes, nor does the discovery likely help in the search for the source of the leak.
“That’s the kind of material you’d expect to find in the basement of a building that processes nuclear waste,” Williams said. “What we’re looking for is the source of the tritium.”
The leak — and the fact that Vermont Yankee owner Entergy Corp. had told state officials that pipes that might play a role in the leak didn’t exist — have raised concerns about the plant as its owner seeks permission to continue operation for another 20 years after its license expires in 2012. Friday, Vermont’s three-member congressional delegation wrote a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calling for an immediate investigation.
“This investigation should not only determine whether there was an attempt by Entergy Vermont Yankee to mislead state officials regarding the plant’s safety and underground piping, but also provide a complete and accurate assessment of the full scope of the contamination at and near the plant as soon as possible,” the delegation said.
Meanwhile, Vermont Yankee has constructed a barrier to seal a connection between the trench and an evaporator tank that could be contributing to the accumulation of tritium-contaminated water in the trench, according to the state Health Department, which started posting online updates on the situation Thursday. The seal appears to have stopped condensation of tritium-contaminated water vapor on the corrugated roof over the concrete trench, according to the Health Department.
Engineers are studying the trench’s structural integrity to see if it is contributing to the leak, according to the Health Department.
Also Friday, the NRC extended Entergy’s deadline for spinning off Vermont Yankee and other Northeast nuclear power plants into a new company. Because Entergy has not won approval from Vermont or New York regulators for the move, the deadline has been extended from Jan. 28 to Aug. 1.
UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
By Richard Gray | The Telegraph | 30 Jan 2010
The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.
This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected.
But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC’s use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.
Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.
“Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.
“There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense.”
The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government’s worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.
The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled “Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming”.
It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.
The report also states that the section is intended to “assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects”.
But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.
The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s.
Mr Bowen said: “I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes.”
The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps.
Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.
The IPCC has faced growing criticism over the sources it used in its last report after it emerged the panel had used unsubstantiated figures on glacial melting in the Himalayas that were contained within a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.
It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports.
One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website.
In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature.
In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999.
When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.
The chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has faced mounting pressure and calls for his resignation amid the growing controversy over the error on glacier melting and use of unreliable sources of information.
A survey of 400 authors and contributors to the IPCC report showed, however, that the majority still support Mr Pachauri and the panel’s vice chairs. They also insisted the overall findings of the report are robust despite the minor errors.
But many expressed concern at the use of non-peer reviewed information in the reports and called for a tightening of the guidelines on how information can be used.
The Met Office, which has seven researchers who contributed to the report including Professor Martin Parry who was co-chair of the working group responsible for the part of the report that contained the glacier errors, said: “The IPCC should continue to ensure that its review process is as robust and transparent as possible, that it draws only from the peer-reviewed literature, and that uncertainties in the science and projections are clearly expressed.”
Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the US research organisation Resources for the Future who also contributed to the IPCC’s latest report, added: “The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy.
“It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation tends to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives.”
The IPCC failed to respond to questions about the inclusion of unreliable sources in its report but it has insisted over the past week that despite minor errors, the findings of the report are still robust and consistent with the underlying science.
Swine Flu Didn’t Fly
By Niko Kyriakou | January 27, 2010
For makers of the swine flu vaccine, 2009 was a year to remember. By June, CSL Limited’s annual profits had risen 63 percent over 2008. GlaxoSmithKine’s 2009 earnings spiked 30 percent in the third quarter alone, to $2.19 billion. Roche made a stunning 12 times more in the second quarter of 2009 than of 2008. But in 2010, drug companies may get their comeuppance.
On Tuesday, the Council of Europe launched an investigation into whether the World Health Organization “faked” the swine flu pandemic to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers. The inquiry, held in Strasbourg, France, vindicates a worldwide movement of insiders, experts, and elected officials who accuse the United Nations organization of misleading the world into buying millions of unnecessary vaccines.
“I have never heard such a worldwide echo to a health political action,” Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an epidemiologist who formerly led the health committee for the Council of Europe, said at Tuesday’s hearing.
Dr. Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, hammered his own organization and WHO’s flu chief, Dr Keiji Fukuda, for “producing angst campaigns”.
“With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong…Why don’t we learn from history?” Keil said. “It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the pubic and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health.”
Last year the World Health Organization predicted that H1N1 could infect two billion and claim hundreds of thousands of lives, while President Obama’s science advisers said the outbreak could infect up to 120 million Americans and kill 90,000. But thankfully, H1N1 turned out to be a mild flu. The type-A influenza has taken around 14,000 lives worldwide, according to World Health Organization numbers from January 22. The CDC said in December confirmed US deaths had reached 4,000, although it recently estimated that due to underreporting, the true death toll could be as high as 16,500 – a tragic sum, but less than half of what the CDC attributes to seasonal flu-related illness. In most of the northern hemisphere, hog flu has been on the decline for some about three months. New transmissions are largely contained to North Africa and South Asia, according to the WHO.
Signs swine flu wasn’t much of a killer grew throughout 2009, but WHO and most domestic health agencies around the globe chose instead to man the war bugles at full volume. The result was that governments poured tens of billions of dollars into vaccines. The US alone has spent $2 billion on the drugs and has allocated $7.5 billion in supplemental spending for H1N1 preparedness.
With the disease basically over, however, countries are stuck with millions of unused doses. French and German governments have had to cancel millions of orders of the vaccines due to falling demand and late-breaking news that European health authorities had recommended twice the necessary dosage. The CDC has dealt with the glut in another way. It now says all Americans should go and get the shot – a shift from its earlier recommendation that at-risk groups such as the young, sick, pregnant, and nurses seek injections first. But why should everyone get a shot when that the disease is petering out?
On January 22, WHO issued a statement calling allegations that it irresponsibly stoked H1N1 fears, “scientifically wrong and historically incorrect.” The statement defends figures WHO publicized on transmission rates, mortality, and the virulence of swine flu.
“The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible. We welcome any legitimate review process that can improve our work.”
At the hearing, WHO’s flu director, Dr Keiji Fukuda, denied the accusations against WHO.
“Let me state clearly for the record – the influenza pandemic policies and responses recommended and taken by WHO were not improperly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry.”
Previously, WHO had offered scant response to allegations of corruption, but deigned to defend itself after the Council of Europe meeting was announced. The public meeting to examine accusations against WHO was set up by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which represents 800 million people in 47 countries. The Council’s January 26 meeting involved WHO officials, European drug-makers, and medical experts. PACE’s findings are expected to be announced January 29 and will likely be followed by an in-depth study and recommendations to European governments.
The hearing is just latest in a series of investigations into WHO’s propriety, which also include a 2009 Danish Parliamentary review of links between WHO expert – Albert Osterhaus – and makers of the swine flu drugs. Russian lawmaker Igor Barinov has also started an inquiry into WHO’s ties to H1N1 drug makers. In France, Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot was forced to a Paris court on January 4th over swine flu campaign irregularities – including ordering millions unnecessary vaccine doses. Demonstrations over statistical improprieties have taken place in Scotland and Canada.
Inquiries into WHO misdoing are likely to plunge deep into the statistical methods for data collection, however, it takes no expertise to see that health agencies’ data about H1N1 was wildly misleading.
In addition to bad guesses about how many would be infected, a study released December 7 by the Harvard School of Public Health found that the WHO also estimated the deadliness of H1N1 to be 40 to 250 times higher than it was.
Proving the drug industry squeezed WHO into selling swine flu is very difficult to establish, but the string of clues which points to this corruption is not hard to follow.
Pandemic or just plain Panic?
Swine flu took center stage in June of 2009, when WHO declared H1N1 the first “pandemic” in 42 years. This move caught the eye of every health authority from Tampa to Timbuktu and revved drug company engines. But to do it, WHO had to redefine the word.
One month after swine flu appeared in April, WHO rewrote the definition of “pandemic”. Under the new meaning, a pandemic does not need to cause high numbers of death or illness. A month after changing the definition, with just 144 people dead from H1N1, the flu was given the WHO’s highest threat classification: a “stage-six pandemic alert”. By comparison, the mildest 20th Century pandemic killed a million people.
Before the change, WHO had classified a pandemic as a disease that has “simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” After the alteration, the organization’s website stated that, “Pandemics can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they cause.” In May, WHO spokesperson Natalie Boudou told CNN that the original definition was an error.
The Los Angeles Times writer Michael Fumento called the redefinition “bizarre”. “Such a declaration could render the term “flu pandemic” essentially meaningless — risking lethal public complacency if a bona fide one hits,” Fumento wrote.
Tom Jefferson, Formerly a general practitioner in the British Army who has worked for the well-respected Cochrane Collaboration for 15 years, Jefferson asked in July: “Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic?”
“The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies… They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic,” Jefferson told Der Spiegel, a German magazine with a weekly circulation of 1 million. “There’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions. And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.”
Yet the WHO stands by its decision to label H1N1 a pandemic, citing geographic spread and the virus’ novelty as its primary reasons. Moving ahead, Fukuda said his organization “will definitely consider whether we can define things better.” But some participants in Tuesday’s meeting wondered what the WHO is waiting for, since complaints have poured in from all sides.
The Associated Press reported on May 19, 2009, that China, Britain, Japan and other countries had urged WHO to “be very cautious about declaring the arrival of a swine flu pandemic, fearing that a premature announcement could cause worldwide panic and confusion.”
Critics say what was needed was not a frightful label, but hard scientific data to show how many people were getting swine flu. But on July 10, the WHO quit tracking cases of infection and told governments they should stop testing for individual cases, ostensibly because the speed of H1N1’s spread had already been confirmed.
“Rational scientific independent advice should be supreme, but there was an imperative behind this which was a financial one,” said Paul Flynn, a parliamentary representative in the UK who spoke at the Council of Europe’s hearing.
Corruption in Health Organizations?
Critics of the WHO say they promoted bad data to help drug makers get rich selling vaccines. This attack implies drug makers have a network of influence within the decision-making structure of the organization, a suggestion various officials confirm.
One high-level, long-term WHO employee who preferred to remain anonymous for job security, described the WHO as follows: “WHO is infested by corruption. There is big corruption, like the management of H1N1, and there is small corruption; and between the big and the small corruption there is [corruption] in all imaginable forms. Unfortunately, it’s not only the WHO.”
William Aldis, a retired senior WHO official who worked on the bird flu crisis, said in a Huffington Post article from September 24:
“I am concerned WHO’s communications is corrupted by the fact they push the buttons in the public’s brains that will raise the most funds. That is incompatible with what the organization should be doing: serving the public with technically correct factual information, pure and simple.”
Louise Voller, a journalist at the Danish Daily Information newspaper, has reported that pharmaceutical companies are present at meetings of WHO experts, and, that purportedly independent scientists hired by the WHO are also consultants to the drug companies that make the vaccines.
On Tuesday, WHO’s Fukuda insisted that its swine flu scientists’ were not tainted by their private sector associations. The reason, he said, is that before each meeting, scientists are asked to declare all possible conflicts of interest. “These documents are gone over and examined. If there is some potential conflict of interest we go back and talk with them.”
WHO was initially set up to rely on funding from UN member countries, in recent years, this source has been rapidly overtaken by “voluntary contributions”, which are provided by the private sector, national governments, and NGOs. According to WHO’s 2008-2009 budget, $958 million was supplied by the UN, while three times as much — $3.2 billion — came from voluntary donations.
Dr. Wodarg told the Council on Tuesday that the shift towards public-private partnership which began in earnest in 2001 puts WHO officials under extreme pressure.
“Already then there were very critical voices against the influence. [WHO’s] administration is made of people not well paid who can’t fight against the pay of people in and from the industry – they are simply swept aside…[private] influence is rampant and that is why we can’t understand why the WHO we used to love…has become unrecognizable to us.”
Whether or not WHO officials are being bought off, clearly, the capacity and incentive of drug makers to lean on science are enormous.
Pandemic Profit
All US contracts for H1N1 vaccines went to just five companies: CSL Limited, Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and MedImmune. All five also produced shots for either SARS or avian flu. When swine flu took full flight in the third quarter of 2009, these firms’ earnings skyrocketed. But according to British MP, Paul Flynn, that was part of drug-makers plan.
Prior to winning any contracts, drug makers invested $4 billion in preparations for swine flu, he said. That investment may have gone to developing and patenting new, super-fast methods to create vaccines, such as using a bio-reactor to grow viruses, said Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former health expert for the Council of Europe. These patents were key to drug industry profits, since companies can charge much more for patented drugs than un-patented ones, Wodarg said.
“If you have a patent you can monopolize…and this is what industry did…The alternative is not to have vaccines patented…By decentralizing the production you could be as fast and you wouldn’t have this small way you have to pass negotiating with one enterprise that has monopoly, or with four enterprises.”
Food and Drug agencies in Canada, the UK, France, the US and elsewhere guaranteed vaccine manufacturers that they would be shielded from any lawsuits connected to the vaccines. This enabled companies to fast-track the testing process, reducing some trials to as little as 5 days.
Wodarg and others have also voiced concern that the hastily developed vaccines are not entirely safe. Adjuvanted vaccines, which contain a kind of immune booster shown to produce auto-immune responses in some children, were sold in parts of Europe and Canada, but banned in the US.
The private research group, Markets and Markets, estimated that the global, H1N1 vaccine market will be worth over $7 billion a year by 2011.
The incredible profits associated with outbreaks have sparked a wider shift in medicine from care to profit, according to Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
“Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.”
Angell reports that the drug industry spent around 14 percent of sales profits on research and development in 2000, while spending closer to 35 percent on “marketing and administration”. How that expenditure breaks down is not public knowledge, but 35% comes out to a lot of money. For instance, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Merck alone made $287 billion in 2007, according to the 2008 Pharma Report by IMS, a market intelligence firm.
The larger question begged by health agencies’ bad data, and the media’s dutiful reporting of it, is this: if fears are overstated every time there’s a flu outbreak, when the public really does need a vaccine, who will believe the boys who cried wolf?
What’s more, should the European investigations conclude that the WHO deliberately incited H1N1 paranoia to levels beyond reason in order to help drug makers, the implication is that both the private and public sectors need better oversight before being given any greater control over health care.
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Sam Husseini: The entire US establishment helped lie their way into the Iraq war
By Slava Zilber | American Herald Tribune | October 14, 2019
Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny? … continue
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