An Ecological Bomb in the Mediterranean
The Ships of Poison Cover-Up
By MICHAEL LEONARDI | January 21, 2011
While the global and Italian national media focuses on allegations of Berlusconi’s latest sexual exploits including reports of hedonistic orgies with teenage prostitutes at his luxurious villas, the much more devastating story of the intentional sinking of ships laden with radioactive and toxic materials into the Mediterranean Sea has quietly developed some new twists and turns in another of Italy’s notorious and grand cover-ups. Surely Berlusconi’s sexcapades make Bill Clinton’s impeachable blow job pale in comparison, but the the tabloid headlines could be replaced by the indignation of the Italian Media at least, with the intentional contamination of the beloved blue waters of the Mediterranean and the dismantling of the Italy’s social democracy rather than dedicating the entirety of their attention to prostitutes being paid to entertain one of our most sick and twisted world leaders.
We pick up this story in June of 2010 with the revelations that there is indeed what Italian state prosecutor Bruno Giordano called an “ecological bomb” in the valley of the Oliva river that flows down the mountains and past the towns of Aiello Calabro and Amantea on its way to the Tyrrhenian Sea. This is where it is believed that the cargo of the Jolly Rosso was intentionally dumped and buried. State agencies found the valley to be contaminated with thousands of cubic meters of industrial mud laced with very high levels of cobalt, nickel, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals. They found the presence of cesium 137, and they found more contaminated locations than previously anticipated, leading investigators to believe that not only was the cargo of the Jolly Rosso dumped here but that the area was then used as an illegal dumping grounds for years. There are no industries in this area that produce these materials so it is clear that they were produced and shipped in from other places. A formal request has been made to the minister of the environment Stefania Prestigiacomo to declare this zone an environmental disaster area and to begin cleaning it up. More than six months later there has been NO response.
State secrets still cloak the investigation into the case of what the Italian’s call the Navi dei Veleni Ships of Poison. State secrets still mask the murders of key investigators into the network of international business men, the Italian military, SISMI (the Italian secret service), NATO and state governments as they worked together to create and hide a network of waste and arms trafficking traversing the high Seas from the major Italian port of La Spezia to Alessandria, Egypt, Beruit, Lebanon and onward to Africa and Mogadishu in Somalia. Key investigators into the story of the Ships of Poison, Naval Captain Natale de Grazia, journalist Ilaria Alpi and cameraman Miran Hrovatin lost their lives for what many believe was their discovering of key truths that could expose an international network involving the Italian government that traded military weapons for the disposal of hazardous industrial wastes. Alpi and Hrovatin were gunned down in Mogadishu on the 20th of March 1994 by a Somali commando unit. Captain Natale de Grazia died of sudden cardiac arrest on the 13th of December 1995 only days before he was to deliver his report on his investigation into the Ships of Poison.
Now fast forward to 2011 and several recent developments that should be grabbing headlines. Two Italian journalists, Andrea Palladino, journalist for the communist daily il Manifesto and Vincenzo Mulè, journalist for Terra (Earth) News, have reported on a secret document that has come to the surface in the Parliamentary Commission on the Cycle of Garbage in Italy. This document dated December 11th 1995 describes financing by the Italian government under Lamberto Dini to the Italian Secret Service for the management of trafficking in arms and nuclear waste. While parts of this document have been acknowledged by the parliamentary commission, it still remains state secret. This document became state secret in 1995 and state secrets in Italy are supposed to be bound by a statute of 15 years that should have been up in 2010, however, this document still remains a secret.
Just this week, in an unexpected move from the Parliamentary Commission on the Cycle of Garbage in Italy, the investigation into the murder of journalist Ilaria Alpi and her cameraman Miran Hrovatin was reopened after being closed since 2006. It is believed that Italians paid the Somalis with weapons in exchange for using their sea and land as dumping grounds for toxic and radioactive wastes and that Alpi and Hrovatin had discovered too much. They were gunned down just days after Alpi had interviewed the Sultan of Bosaso, her notes from this interview were never found. Many believe that Alpi was killed because of what she had discovered about the ties between the Italian military and corrupt elements of the Somali leadership. This was all taking place during the time of Blackhawk down and the U.S. led occupation. According to the mafia turncoat Francesco Fonti, they had seen an exchange involving the Italian military and were assassinated for this reason. Their case was reopened because of a note about their deaths that was found among the belongings of Italian businessman Giorgio Comerio by Captain Natale de Grazia’s investigation.
This shady Italian businessman named Giorgio Comerio plays heavily into the reopening of this investigation. Comerio had come up with an idea for disposing of hazardous and radioactive wastes by torpedoing these wastes into the Sea floors. He was notorious for the trafficking of waste and part of a network intent on collecting insurance for old ships that were in need of disposal. His name has been associated with the purchase of the Jolly Rosso, the ship that beached on the shores of Amantea from the Messina shipping company. Old ships it seems are difficult and expensive to dispose of so Comerio and some mafia bosses came up with the bright idea of sinking them and collecting on their insurance policies while at the same time disposing of industrial wastes. Comerio has testified that “disposal at Sea was the only viable option for disposing of radioactive wastes at that time, as sending them off in the space shuttle was too dangerous because of the possibility of an explosion in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
In Captain Natale de Grazia’s investigation he found a report about the killing of Alpi and Hrovatin in Comerio’s files. It has been stated that De Grazia also found a copy of Ilaria Alpi’s death certificate at Comerio’s house on Lago di Como, but that this document disappeared from case files that were in the offices of state prosecutor Francesco Neri in Reggio Calabria. Neri says he remembers this document in the files and that De Grazia’s investigation had discovered it a Comerio’s house but that it has mysteriously disappeared.
Natale de Grazia’s investigation was also focused on another Italian businessman linked to the waste trade from La Spezia. De Grazia was focusing on the major port of La Spezia where NATO operates its undersea research center NURC and where arms and waste shipments are a big business. Orazio Duvia was identified by De Grazia as a key figure in the trafficking of both arms and toxic and radioactive wastes. He was the owner and operator of a mega and quite possibly largest industrial hazardous waste dump in Italy, the landfill of Pittelli on one of the hills overlooking the gulf of La Spezia. According to the research of Andrea Palladino, the CIA looked to the corrupt and criminally operated Pittelli landfill as a model for industrial waste disposal. In May of 1995 De Grazia reported to a group of forest rangers that Duvia’s landfill was one of the logistical platforms for the shipping and sinking of wastes. In this presentation that he made under the code name “pinnochio” in order to protect his identity, he described the sinking of a ship called the Rigel said to be full of nuclear waste and sunk in the waters of the Ionian Sea off the coast of Calabria.
Captain Natale de Grazia was said to be in perfect health by his friends and family. He had however voiced concern about his investigation to his brother in law and had indicated that he may have been treading in dangerous waters as his discoveries led him to conclusions that would be highly uncomfortable for the entire Italian and possibly international power structure. His sudden cardiac arrest happened just days before he was to give his report.
All indicators point to a collusion of forces in this horrific saga of the Ships of Poison, a collusion between SISMI (the Italian secret service), the Italian government, big business, NATO and organized crime families from the Calabrian based crime syndicate l’ndrangheta. Many are now hoping that the reopening of the Ilaria Alpi/Miran Hrovatin case will finally bring the truth to light, but this is doubtful. The Parliamentary Commission on Italy’s Garbage Cycle is being led by a good friend and lawyer of Silvio Belusconi, Gaetano Pecorella. Pecorella began his political career as a radical communist but has moved sharply to the right over the years culminating in what is considered to be the legal mind of the Berlusconi phenomenon. Unless he’s being riddled by some kind of catholic guilt for a life of vile hypocrisy, things don’t bode well for a truly transparent investigation. Pecorella has also defended elements of the Neapolitan based mafia the Camorra noted for its traffic of garbage and creation of the continuing garbage crisis in Naples and surrounding areas.
Italy is at a very critical juncture and whether Berlusconi survives yet again or not is only part of the problem. The Italian economy is in turmoil, the public eduction system is being dismantled and the health care system is under attack while being wrought with corruption. Civil unrest over the past several months has led nowhere but to heightened tensions with an increasingly militarized police state. The country is divided and while a growing majority is crying out for change a large minority still supports the despicable leadership of the neo-fascists running the country. Only time will tell if the mass movement of the past months will bear the fruits of change toward a sustainable economy that are sorely needed. America’s military presence in Italy must be challenged and dismantled for any real change to happen and the center-left has traditionally rubber stamped America’s imperial presence on the peninsula.
Michael Leonardi is currently living in Toledo, Ohio and can be reached at mikeleonardi@hotmail.com
Previous coverage of the Ships of Poison saga.
http://www.counterpunch.org/leonardi09182009.html,
http://www.counterpunch.org/leonardi10092009.html,
http://www.counterpunch.org/leonardi11042009.html .
Related article
Britons protest forests sell-off scheme
Press TV – January 5, 2011
Thousands of Britons have convened a protest in the Forest of Dean against the British government’s plans to sell off some of the country’s forests to the private sector.
More than 3,000 people, backed by celebrities, bishops, leading conservationists and politicians, attending the rally vowed to defend “the people’s” trees from a corporate land grab, the daily Guardian said in a report.
Based on a bill, expected to be debated in the House of Lords within three weeks, to become law, developers, charities and power companies could apply for the entire 650,000-acre forestry commission estate in England.
The government claims it wants more land to be forested and is hoping local communities will buy and manage much of the acreage put up for sale.
But protesters believe the sell-off is short-sighted and fear that woods will be bought by developers and energy companies who will limit access to trails and seek to fell as many trees as possible for a quick profit.
“It is extraordinary that one of the country’s most ancient forests – a place of great beauty that is enjoyed by so many people – is also one of its least protected. The Forest of Dean … should continue to be managed as a whole for the widest public benefit,” said the writer Bill Bryson, president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
“The green heart of Britain is not for sale,” said conservationist David Bellamy.
Today, more than 110,000 people had signed a petition against the coalition’s proposed sale of all Forestry Commission land in England.
Opposition to the sale of nearly 20 percent of all England’s wooded area is fiercest in Gloucestershire where yellow ribbons and posters have been tied around thousands of trees.
More than 30 other crown forests as well as large areas of heathland and bogs currently managed by the Forestry Commission in England are expected to be sold.
“There are no guarantees that income from sales will be used to support forestry,” said Hilary Allison, policy director of the Woodland Trust.
“No decisions have been taken on any particular sites. We will not compromise the protection of our most valuable and bio-diverse forests”, said a spokesman for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
Ukraine’s Tymoshenko under probe
Carbon Credits a Tool for Corruption?
Press TV – December 15, 2010
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been ordered to remain in Kiev as part of a criminal investigation into allegations of power abuse.
“She is under a pledge not to leave town,” the general prosecutor’s spokesman Yury Boichenko was quoted as saying by AFP.
Tymoshenko earlier said that the country’s authorities had opened a criminal investigation against her for allegedly misspending state funds Ukraine received from selling greenhouse emission quotas under the Kyoto Protocol.
“I have just learned from an investigator that a criminal probe has been started against me personally because ostensibly environmental money during the crisis was spent on pensions,” she said, adding sarcastically that the probe had been opened “because I committed a grave crime — because I paid people pensions when the country was truly in crisis.”
The former premier told reporters that investigators had questioned her earlier on Wednesday but formal charges had not yet been brought against her in the absence of her lawyer.
Tymoshenko stepped down as prime minister in early March following her loss to pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych in a hard-fought presidential election battle.
Tymoshenko was a key figure in Ukraine’s 2004 orange revolution but later became tied down with internal political disputes after falling out with former President Viktor Yushchenko.
The Environmental Impact Of War
IMAGES OF DEVASTATED battlefields are all too familiar. A German officer in 1918 described ‘dumb, black stumps of shattered trees which still stick up where there used to be villages. Flayed by splinters of bursting shells, they stand like corpses upright. Not a blade of grass anywhere. Just miles of flat, empty, broken and tumbled stone.’ The ploughs in Flanders fields still turn up human bones every year.
But twentieth century technology, busily applied to the practice of war, has ensured a more lethal harvest. For example, landmines: planted in millions in war-torn countries across the world, killing and maiming long after wars are over, and denying agricultural use of the land in which they lurk. A Khmer Rouge general called them ‘the perfect soldier’: cheap, efficient, expendable, never hungry, never needing sleep. But eighty percent of landmine victims are civilians, not soldiers; and nearly a quarter of those are children.
Clearing mines is laborious, dangerous, and 30 times the cost of the weapon itself. So is clearing unexploded ordnance of all kinds (including worldwide munitions dumps which leak toxic wastes). The most severe UXO contamination in the world is in Laos. Bomb disposal teams have no records to work from. ‘It was America’s secret war and we can’t get the information,’ says a team leader. ‘All you can do is teach people to live with the bomb.’
But it’s the testing and manufacture of the nuclear bomb which has been responsible for some of the most profound and persistent environmental damage to life on earth. “The complex mixture of contaminants found on many military sites is dynamically moving through the environment,’ says a medical expert. Radiation problems affect people near nuclear plants in every country that has them. Repair and maintenance of many installations and equipment are dangerously inadequate.
Nuclear waste is a global problem that won’t go away, threatening environmental disaster on a vast scale: its poison, and toxic chemicals which accompany all weapon production, have travelled round the globe in the atmosphere and ocean currents; as well as water and air, they harm earth, plants that grow in it, and subsistent livestock and wildlife. Human exposure to nuclear and chemical tests and factories, or via the food chain, results in miscarriages, malformed foetuses, high infant mortality and congenital disorders, leukaemia and other cancers, tumours, thyroid disorders, and complex debilitating and life-shortening syndromes. The number of reports of such harmful effects on health, habitat and culture – always at risk in war – continues to grow.
Because war disrupts social structures, ecostructures are neglected and abused, with lasting and costly consequences.
All along the coast of Somalia huge sand dunes, 20 miles across, have crept from the sea towards the main coastal highway. ‘When the dunes hit the road, a new road will need to be built,’ says a Red Cross agronomist. ‘There used to be government plans to stop them. Now there’s nothing. The communication breakdown will be a social disaster.’ The ICRC, encouraging self-sufficiency and seawater fish in the conservative Somali diet, provided boats, nets, hooks and training – only to discover another of war’s ecological chain effects: the coastal waters off Somalia had become a free-for-all, all protocols for international fishing rights ignored. Resources are being fished unsustainably – ‘almost a mining operation,’ says a UN observer. Illegal fishermen now go armed, to protect what they perceive as their property rights.
It’s widely agreed that Sudan’s 1988 famine was caused by its protracted civil war. Southern Sudan has some of the most productive land in Africa; its people are hardworking farmers and herdsmen. If fighting stopped, they’d manage to survive. Instead, thousands have been forced out of their homes, thousands have died, and their land is uncared-for.
‘Most disasters are like this: a mess of war, displacement, hunger and ignorance,’ says Africa specialist John Ryle. ‘To feed the hungry and treat the sick in such circumstances is to become part of the war economy. Part of what aid workers do involves clearing up the chaos left by the global arms trade. They say they are saving lives – but for what? To be lost in endless wars that feed on aid?’
Meanwhile the worst outbreak of sleeping sickness this century has been spreading through the south-west; disease follows war everywhere.
The earth’s environment is battered by war, its preparation, practice and aftermath. It is destroyed as an act of war; it is used as a weapon of war; and its destruction is expensive and sometimes irreversible. Its integral involvement with war is often secret, widely ignored, and easily forgotten – until now.
Now, some people are beginning to talk and listen. Some people are beginning to act. There is a treaty to ban landmines now. There are moves towards tackling the problems of nuclear waste and weapon stockpiles. There is a growing global awareness – with charters to prove it – that war has created consequences which cross boundaries and ignore territories. Natural disasters are costly enough; the cost of war damage is much higher. Even if politics don’t achieve change, economics might.
It’s the natural tendency of governments to suppress or talk down bad news. So it’s the duty of the rest of us – to uncover and publicise it wherever possible. Without the facts, there can’t be informed public opinion, nor a corporate will to deal with the disasters that war creates – dangerous not only for combatants but for civilians, not only for the duration of the war but far into the future, not for warring countries alone but for the whole world.
In one way or another, everyone is already affected. In one way or another, the still-quickening rush to even greater disasters must be stopped.
And the first thing to go must be war.
Settlements Wiping Out Natural Life in the Jordan Valley
Mazim Qumsiyeh | 18 November 2010
We spent two days in the Auja area north of Jericho on a field trip to survey what remains of the animals and plants in one of hundreds of areas directly devastated by Israeli occupation policies. Our host and guide was Mubarak Zawahra, a father of seven young children who lives near Bethlehem but his mother and many of his brothers live in the Jordan valley.
- The path of Wadi Auja spring, now dry
Before their lives were restricted and devastated by the occupation they usually held two locations (one for the winter months and one for the summer months). They relied on their flocks of sheep and goats that they grazed in the wide open areas around the two locations. They also raised pigeons and chickens and occasionally planted crops.
Mubarak’s father was so successful at what he did that at one point he and his 16 children had over 1000 heads of sheep and goats. It was very hard work. Their life meant covering many miles every day to reduce overgrazing. Spending over 12 hours daily walking rough terrains, Bedouins come to know every path, wadi, tree and cave over vast areas. Their encyclopedic knowledge of their surroundings is astounding. They have stories to tell you about every feature of their landscape, every animal and every plant. Even as a seasoned biologist, I always learn new things about nature from going out with Bedouins. They have unique names even for the different species of desert land snails. They can tell you of natural treatments to different maladies.
While Bedouin life was difficult, it was a life that functioned in harmony with nature for thousands of years. Their generousity and kindness to strangers is legendary. Disputes were mostly solved by traditional tribal laws. The fields were not overgrazed and nature was left unspoiled. Tranquillity prevailed as Mubarak told me in the evening after a very hard day of work in the fields. The best time was to sit after a meal, drink strong sweet tea seasoned with wild mint surrounded by loved ones and look at clear skies dotted with brilliant stars.
That life is slowly ending. The Zawahra’s saga is just an example. Colonial Jewish settlements in two main locations of the Zawahra’s domain (in the hills around Bethlehem and in the Jordan valley) have made it impossible for the Zawahras to continue the Bedouin way of life. In the Bethlehem district, Israeli colonies, security zones, and army bases now control the vast majority of the rich lands. The remaining land is basically the developed Palestinian areas with few open areas. With less than 5% of the open range areas of the Bethlehem district left available for grazing, the effects have been devastating. Animal numbers have decreased significantly (while the human population has tripled in the past 45 years), and overgrazing has had an appalling ecological effect.
- An illegal Israeli colony near the village of Al-Auja.
It is sad to compare biodiversity in the Bethlehem area today with what I saw 40 years ago. Many animal and plant species can no longer be found in the hills of Bethlehem. Some areas are so barren that the only living animals I can see in the late summer and fall months are humans, goats (more hardy than sheep), and flies. 40 years ago, I could show you at least 40 species in two hours.
The second domain of the Zawahras is in the Jordan valley a few kilometres north of Jericho in the Wadi Auja area. Until recently, this valley had until a water flow year round estimated at 9 million cubic meters coming from the hills near Ramallah and flowing into the Jordan valley to feed the river Jordan. It made a beautiful oasis that attracted thousands of visitors year round for recreation. Downstream, agriculture flourished. Farms had been established and the tranquil village of Auja with 7000 Christian, Muslim and Bedouin farmers living comfortably.
My schoolmate Imad Mukarkar took me to his family farm there when we were in high school 35 years ago and I remember bountiful citrus fruit, bananas and vegetables of all kinds. On Tuesday night as we stretched nets to catch bats with his brother Khalid who is struggling to maintain the family farm. He explained how even the well water he relied on is decreasing in output both in quality and quantity while the settlers nearby have unlimited water to grow corn and even watermelons. A way of life is slowly being squeezed for the Palestinians and created for colonial settlers. These settlers looking for short term gains have no clue about the long term consequences of their policies.
Stealing water via pipes at the hills and bringing it to the Jewish settlements dried up the natural flow of water in Wadi Auja. The oasis is no longer an oasis. The valley now has water only in the brief rainy season (two months at best). The crisis of water is so desperate that winter rain runoff is collected via a dam, adding to the changes created by the Israeli water theft. Desertification has thus accelerated. The rich valley fauna and flora was devastated. We did manage to record three species of scorpions, two species of bats, spiny mice, five species of birds, two lizards, a desert fox, and struggling desert trees and shrubs. We were interrupted once by an Israeli military patrol who wanted to know what we were doing and seemed bemused by our scorpions. One soldier stated that they kill many of them. I did not want to argue but I did think in my mind that scorpions are preferable to some people since they kill only for food or to defend themselves.
Comparing field work now and three decades ago, we can see dramatic differences. For example I distinctly recall seeing over 20 species of birds seen in one morning. Now we find no frogs, an important environmental indicator, when there used to be plenty. The loss of biodiversity meant a loss of livelihood for the native Palestinians who live in this area. The Zawahra family who had hundreds of sheep and goats now have few animals and struggle to find menial jobs to make a living. Farmers like Khalid Mukarker who used to get plentiful agricultural produce have seen their costs quadruple and their output decline. Local animals and plants lost are irreplaceable.
The quality of water and air deteriorates each year, which will make it eventually impossible even for the colonial settlers to continue to live here. Short term political thinking of Zionists once again trumps long term planning. There is clearly a heavy economic and ecological cost of colonialism. Urgent studies and documentation are needed for areas like Al-Auja and increased activism to end this colonial occupation as quickly as possible. Time is not on our (human) side. Very soon, the damages done to the environment will make life impossible for all of us (Jews, Christians, Muslims, other animals, and plants) in this (un)holy Land.
Thanks to Mubarak, his family, my wife, my student Michael and his brother Majd for help in making this trip successful.
The History of Agent Orange
SensoryOssuary | May 26, 2008
This is a clip from the French documentary “The World According to Monsanto.” It summarizes the history of Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide produced by Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and other companies. It was sprayed extensively during the Vietnam War, leading to a horrific variety of adverse health effects. Monsanto conducted deliberately flawed and coercive studies to “prove” that Agent Orange was safe, causing many Vietnam veterans to be denied sufficient health benefits.
In the late 1990’s, Monsanto changed its focus from chemicals like Agent Orange to biotechnology. It now indirectly controls approximately 60% of the world food supply. Monsanto insists that its genetically modified crops are safe.
Chernobyl region to be put back under the plow for EU biodiesel mandate
RIA NOVOSTI | November 12, 2010
Ukrainian officials are studying the possibility of growing crops in the 30-km zone of radioactive pollution near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, a popular Russian daily said on Friday.
A number of Ukrainian services and departments are conducting numerous studies to establish “areas that could be used for agriculture, some partially and some in full,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta quoted acting head of the Ukrainian Emergencies Ministry Mykhailo Bolotskykh, as saying.
An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 resulted in highly radioactive fallout in the atmosphere over an extensive area. A 30-kilometer (19-mile) exclusion zone was introduced following the accident.
Vast areas, mainly in the three then-Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, were contaminated by the fallout from the major nuclear meltdown. Some 200,000 people were relocated after the accident.
The agriculture revival plan, initiated by the European Union, proposes cultivating rapeseed, also known as canola oil and widely seen as the most popular primary product to produce biodiesel, in the contaminated area. Similar plans have earlier been voiced by Belarus, another country severely affected by the Chernobyl disaster.
“This crop has great potential, with the European Union, the U.A.E., Turkey and Pakistan expressing their readiness to buy it from Ukraine. This is really profitable,” a source close to the Ukrainian government told the newspaper.
Ukraine is currently among Europe’s largest rapeseed producers.
“The problem is that rapeseed depletes the soil. It may be grown only as part of a five-year crop rotation cycle. Or, it may be grown on lands which have no agricultural importance,” he said.
The government did not comment on the information.
The paper quotes an expert as saying that scientists have developed mechanisms of rehabilitating nuclear-polluted soil, which include growing certain crops and combining various types of fertilizers.
“Experiments show that… areas where rehabilitation measures were conducted can produce crops with almost normal radionuclide levels, hundreds of times lower than those where such measures were not taken,” the unnamed scientist told Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
But many experts say that any attempt to cultivate crops in Chernobyl is “simply a crime,” saying that many dangerous isotopes buried in soil could be released back into the air and water when the polluted soil is ploughed.
“It is simply a crime – increasing air and water pollution by turning over polluted soil,” a former official with the country’s radiation and ecology watchdog said.
The plan is expected to be officially announced in March 2011, shortly before the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.
Weapons of mass destruction labs promote GMO’s under the pretext of fighting ‘global warming’
Friends of the Earth denounces algae biofuel development
By James Cartledge – 10/04/10
Pressure group Friends of the Earth has declared war on the development of new strains of algae and bacteria to produce biofuels. The group released a report last week warning of the dangers that genetically-modified microbes could pose if released into nature.
With warnings of “devastating results” if organisms escape into the oceans, including formation of “large dead zones”, Friends of the Earth demanded a moratorium on work to produce synthetic algae strains.
The group suggested that based on the previous spread of genetically-modified crops in the environment, the public health could be at risk. Friends of the Earth also cast doubt on the efficiency of producing biofuels from algae.
Moratorium
Friends of the Earth Biotechnology Policy Campaigner Eric Hoffman said: “Synthetic microbes have no natural predators, and if they escape they may disrupt ecosystems and harm public health. Our report concludes that the federal government should put a complete moratorium on the release and commercial use of synthetic organisms… Full article
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Genetically altered trees, plants could help counter global warming
Study evaluates prospects for boosting carbon sequestration from the atmosphere by modifying natural biological processes and deploying novel food and fuel crops
Forests of genetically altered trees and other plants could sequester several billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year and so help ameliorate global warming, according to estimates published in the October issue of BioScience.
The study, by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, outlines a variety of strategies for augmenting the processes that plants use to sequester carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into long-lived forms of carbon, first in vegetation and ultimately in soil.
Besides increasing the efficiency of plants’ absorption of light, researchers might be able to genetically alter plants so they send more carbon into their roots–where some may be converted into soil carbon and remain out of circulation for centuries. Other possibilities include altering plants so that they can better withstand the stresses of growing on marginal land, and so that they yield improved bioenergy and food crops. Such innovations might, in combination, boost substantially the amount of carbon that vegetation naturally extracts from air, according to the authors’ estimates.
The researchers stress that the use of genetically engineered plants for carbon sequestration is only one of many policy initiatives and technical tools that might boost the carbon sequestration already occurring in natural vegetation and crops.
The article, by Christer Jansson, Stan D. Wullschleger, Udaya C. Kalluri, and Gerald A. Tuskan, is the first in a Special Section in the October BioScience that includes several perspectives on the prospects for enhancing biological carbon sequestration. Other articles in the section analyze the substantial ecological and economic constraints that limit such efforts. One article discusses the prospects for sequestering carbon by culturing algae to produce biofuel feedstocks; one proposes a modification of the current regulatory climate for producing genetically engineered trees in the United States; and one discusses societal perceptions of the issues surrounding the use of genetically altered organisms to ameliorate warming attributed to the buildup of greenhouse gases.
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”?
German people in unprecedented rebellion against government
1,000 injured in nuclear protests, police at breaking point
By Jane Burgermeister – November 8, 2010
Like the Roman legions vanquished in the Teutoburger Wald in Lower Saxony in 9 AD, the 17,000 police officers that marched into the woods around the nuclear storage facility in Gorleben in northern Germany on Sunday morning looked invincible. Police personnel from France, Croatia and Poland had joined in the biggest security operation ever mounted against protestors against a train carrying nuclear waste to a depot in an isolated part of Lower Saxony’s countryside. Helicopters, water canons and police vehicles, including an armoured surveillance truck, accompanied an endless column of anti-riot police mounted on horses and also marching down the railway tracks into the dense woods. Tens of thousands of anti riot police clattered along the tracks, their helmets and visors gleaming in the morning sun, and wearing body armour, leg guards and carrying batons.
But by Sunday night, those same police officers were begging the protestors for a respite.
Trapped in black, icy woods without supplies or reinforcements able to reach them because of blockades by a mobile fleet of farmer’s tractors, the exhausted and hungry police officers requested negotiations with the protestors. A water cannon truck was blocked by tractors, and yet the police still had to clear 5,000 people lying on the railway track at Harlingen in pitch darkness. The largest ever police operation had descended into chaos and confusion in the autumn woods of Lower Saxony, defeated by the courage and determination of peaceful protestors who marched for miles through woods to find places to lie down on the tracks and to scoop out gravel to delay the progress of the “the train from hell.”
The police union head Reiner Wendt gave vent to the general frustration when he issued a press statement via the DPA news agency last night saying the police had reached exhaustion point and needed a break. Behind the scenes, a battle seemed to be raging between the police chiefs, tucked up in their warm headquarters urging more action, and the exhausted officers on the ground.
The police on the ground won out. The Castor train – called a “Chernobyl on wheels” because it has been carrying 133 tonnes of highly radioactive waste to an unsafe depot – was stopped in the middle of the countryside and NATO barbed wire was placed around it. Lit by floodlights and guarded by a handful of police, the most dangerous train on the planet was forced to a halt after a 63 hour journey across France and Germany.
The defeat of the legions at Teutoburg marked the end of the attempt by the Roman empire to conquer Germania magna. And the failure of the biggest ever police operation two thousand years later in the woods of Lower Saxony to tame women, elderly people and school children protesting the government’s nuclear policy, could well also go down as a turning point.
The Berlin government can no longer rely on the discredited mainstream media to control the way people see issues. Too many people recognise it to be a tool of propaganda. The government now needs to resort to brute force to bludgeon through decisions that enrich corporations and banks and impoverish everyone else. But the police forces at its disposal are simply not sufficient given the scale of the protests now gripping Germany. Only 1,500 police reinforcements could be mustered on Morning from the entire territory to deal with road blockades by thousands of protestors aiming to delay the transport of the nuclear waste on the final leg of its journey.
The police officers were exhausted after shifts of 24 hours or more, often without any food or just a cappuccino and snack bar, and they had nothing to look forward to but more of the same drudgery after a night spent four to a room in a Youth Hostel.
http://newsticker.sueddeutsche.de/list/id/1065325
A leading figure in a German police police union Bernard Witthaut today even lashed out at the government for trying to drive through unpopular policies using the police.
“Whether in Stuttgart or in Wendland today my colleagues are simply not getting out of their anti riot gear because of the wrong decisions by the government,” he said.
Many police officers also expressed sympathy with the protestors’ aims.
The question now is: how long can the use of police to bludgeon protestors continue when the protests are reaching this scale? How long can Germany be governed by a semi authoritarian regime using brute force when the force at its disposal is so small? The German army cannot be deployed on this kind of mission without sparking even more outrage. A false flag terrorist operation will hardly wash when the people are so fed up with the government lies and the media lies. EU soldiers will find it hard to deal with the Germans. The German and EU secret police cannot infiltrate all of the protestor’s organizations when there are simply so many.
The German people as a whole are on the march.
“Citizens in rebellion,” shouted a TAZ headline.
“Civil war in Wendtand,” fumed Bild.
NGO chief Kersin Rudek spoke for many when she said:
“We have lost faith in the government until they prove that their politics is for the people and not for the corporations.”
She talked about the “anger” among people at the “arrogance of the political class.”
As in the Stuttgart 21 railway protests, it was people from all walks of life, a genuine grass roots movement, that arrived in Wendland to protest the decision by the CDU/CSU/FDP government to ignore a legally binding deadline to phase out nuclear power. Against the wishes of the majority, Bilderberg Chancellor Angela Merkel announced this autumn that 17 reactors would continue for another 12 years at gigantic cost to the tax payer in subsidies.
The tax payers of Lower Saxony even have to foot the bill of 50 million euro for the police operation to protect the nuclear waste – and not the electricity companies making a fortune from the extravagant energy source while the government keeps investments in ground-breaking new renewable energy technologies such as the third generation solar cells at a negligible amount.
As in Stutggart, the police used savage force against peaceful demonstrators reinforcing the impression of a government out of control and refusing to respect the basic democratic right of people to hold protests without being beaten to a pulp. Videos of the Castor transport on Sunday show police beating people with their truncheons, punching them and throwing them to the ground. Police also used tear gas, pepper spray and water canon.
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,727706,00.html
One clip shows a police officer using his fist to punch a man lying on the railway track in the head.
About a 1,000 people were injured, it is reported. 950 people are reported to have suffered eye injuries due to pepper spray and tear gas, according to a spokesperson of “Castor schottern”. Another sixteen protestors suffered broken bones. There were 29 severe head wounds. Two people had to be taken to hospital.
One person had to be taken by helicopter after suffering multiple bone fractures after being trampled by a police horse.
But as in Stuttgart, the people did not give up in spite of the risk of savage beatings at the hands of the police. They insisted on their civic right enshrined in the constitution to hold peaceful political protests.
More than 50,000 people from all parts of the country and all walks of life attended a rally on a field close to Dannenberg. Thousands then marched through the autumn woods, splitting into small groups to descend into the valley, break through police lines to chain themselves to the rails or remove gravel from the tracks to delay the train.
According to Spiegel, 7,000 people alone took part in the road and railway blockades.
An armoured police car was set on fire by masked men but it is not clear if this was an agent pravocateur acting to discredit the protestors. A video shows a man able to walk up to the armoured car and set it alight unhindered.
The overwhelming number of protestors were peaceful.
In spite of the sub zero temperatures and ground frost, up to 5000 protestors lay down on the railway tracks at Harlingen late in the evening and refused to move. Supplies of hot tea, food and blankets were brought to them by mobile kitchens. Fires were lit to help stay warm.
The police worked from midnight until 7 am to clear protestors blocking the track, dragging many to an open air “prison concentration camp” where people were forced to sleep in fields surrounded by police trucks.
This morning, the protestors have regrouped today and thousands are reported to be preparing to block the transport by road of the nuclear waste from Dannenberg to Gorleben.
The organisers of the protest kept journalists and the public informed using live tickers, press releases and at Infopoints so that the whole country could follow the events outside the mainstream media. Radio Wendland is also broadcasting updates on the incredibly heroic resistance of so many people. At great personal risk, tens of thousands of people gave an example of courageous and peaceful non-violent resistance that will surely go down in history.
If this is the resistance for Castor and Stuttgart 21, just imagine what will happen when Germans finally grasp the scale of the banking scam being carried out by their “elite.”
The CDU/CSU/FDP government has already hit record lows in the polls and after Sunday’s savage police operation against peaceful protestors, support for them is sure to plummet further.
The feudal lords without a feudal army to push through their agenda of robbery are facing the end of the road now that their media propaganda apparatus based on the Springer and Bertelsmann empire is falling apart and their strategy of divide and rule through a false left/right political paradigm is no longer working.
A new freedom and power was born in the woods of Wendland. And it belonged to the people who have had enough of the arrogant authoritarian political class.
See also:
German police battle nuclear train protesters
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Fifteen of the 9/11 “hijackers” from Saudi Arabia were CIA agents working for the United States government, which was seeking to destroy the Middle East for Israel and to double the American military budget, says Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American academic who has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003…. continue
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