‘The FBI raids and subpoenas . . . [are] best understood as backlash aimed at silencing our successful movement’
By Maureen Murphy | Mondoweiss | December 26, 2010
The following is a statement given by Maureen Murphy at a press conference on Thursday, December 23 about the government’s ongoing intimidation of anti-war and solidarity activism in the Midwest. Murphy is one of several activists with the Palestine Solidarity Group who have been subpoenaed, and one of several individuals across the city of Chicago and the Twin Cities who are being targeted for Palestine solidarity activism. For more information, and to get involved, see http://www.stopfbi.net/.
On Tuesday morning I experienced what more than twenty other activists across the US have experienced in the past few months — a knock on the door from the FBI. When I answered, one of the two agents outside my building identified himself and said he wanted to speak with me. When I declined, he informed me that I was being subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury on January 25.
I am among 22 other anti-war, labor and solidarity activists who have been subpoenaed and are facing a grand jury since the FBI raided several prominent organizers’ homes on September 24.
I’m proud of the movement we have built here in Chicago and I believe that the FBI raids and subpoenas and the ever-expanding grand jury witch hunt is best understood as backlash aimed at silencing our successful movement.
And if this grand jury fishing expedition is indeed aimed at intimidating our movement, what we have seen so far is that it has had the opposite effect. I’m extremely grateful for the outpouring of support that I and the other targeted activists have received. And as someone who has been leading the support work around the raids and subpoenas here in Chicago, I have seen first-hand that this is not about 23 individuals. There is a mass movement that understands that it is the rights of us ALL that are at stake here, and we have seen a broad condemnation of this attack on our right to peacefully advocate for a more just and less deadly US foreign policy.
I have no intention to participate in the government’s witch hunt. It is very clear that no crime has been committed and that the government’s motivation in issuing these subpoenas is to have us name the names of other activists not only here in the United States, but also in places like Palestine and Colombia, where many of us have traveled to learn about the human rights situations in those places. We can only assume that the US government shares intelligence with the governments of Israel and Colombia, whose repressive military rule the US bankrolls at the US taxpayer’s expense. And it is essentially a prison sentence or worse for human rights activists in Palestine and Colombia to be singled out and identified in this way. And I have no intention in playing any role in that.
I’m encouraged by the outpouring of solidarity from all corners of the Palestine solidarity movement and other social justice communities. I urge everyone to join in the pushback against this attack on our movement and our basic civil liberties.
TSA has no regular testing system for its pornoscanners
Cory Doctorow | Boing Boing | December 23, 2010
Many experts are skeptical that the TSA’s new backscatter pornoscanner machines are safe, but even the experts who endorse them are careful to bracket their reassurances with certain caveats: the safety of the machines depends heavily on their being properly maintained, regularly tested, and expertly operated. Whether or not you’re comfortable with the intended radiation emissions from the scanners, no one in their right mind would argue that a broken machine that lovingly lingers over your reproductive organs and infuses them with 10,000 or 100,000 times the normal dosage is desirable.
But when Andrew Schneider, AOL’s public health correspondent, contacted the TSA to find out what maintenance and testing is in place to ensure the safe operation of the scanners, he discovered that the TSA appears to have no regime at all to ensure that they are functioning within normal parameters. While the TSA claims that entities like the FDA, the US Army and Johns Hopkins all regularly inspect their machines, none of these groups agrees, and they all disavow any role in regularly maintaining and testing the TSA’s equipment (the Army has tested machines in three airports, but has not conducted any further testing). And Johns Hopkins denies that it has certified the machines as safe for operation in the first place — let alone taking on any ongoing testing and certification program.
AOL Investigation: No Proof TSA Scanners Are Safe
… For example, the FDA says it doesn’t do routine inspections of any nonmedical X-ray unit, including the ones operated by the TSA.
The FDA has not field-tested these scanners and hasn’t inspected the manufacturer. It has no legal authority to require owners of these devices — in this case, TSA — to provide access for routine testing on these products once they have been sold, FDA press officer said Karen Riley said…
Two-person teams from the Army unit performed surveys of the Advance Image Technology X-ray scanners at just three airports — in Boston, Los Angeles and Cincinnati, she said. And that was all that the TSA asked the Army to do this year…
“APL’s role was to measure radiation coming off the body scanners to verify that it fell within [accepted] standards. We were testing equipment and in no way determined its safety to humans,” Helen Worth, head of public affairs for the Johns Hopkins lab, told AOL News.
“Many news articles have said we declared the equipment to be safe, but that was not what we were tasked to do,” she added.
Moreover, the study said APL scientists were unable to test a ready-for-TSA scanner at their lab because the manufacturer would not supply one. Instead, the tests were performed on a scanner cobbled together from spare parts in manufacturer Rapiscan Systems’ California warehouse. …
How Wikileaks Is Effecting American-Israeli Relations
By Hannah McKale | Desert Peace | December 18, 2010
The first and most important question to ask when approaching events on the geopolitical spectrum is to first ask the question, who is to benefit? In the case of the most recent Wikileaks dump that occurred at the end of November, the most obvious party with something to gain from the files and cables exposed is Israel. American and Israel relations have been quite close ever since the end of the second world war.
When the news first broke that Wikileaks would be making another massive dump of information, people could not help but wonder what it may be. Now, it has been revealed to the public, and while it is not nearly quite as scathing as a video of soldiers slaughtering innocent civilians, there is still a definite agenda behind the release of these embassy cables. The cables were between American embassies and embassies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.
A majority of the cables pertain to Iran and potential military actions against the country. Who has been calling for a precision military strike against Iran for months now, if not years? You guessed it. Israel, and at least a portion of the United States Government wishes to bring the surrounding region against Iran. While the overall image of the American government is tarnished a great deal by these leaks, Israels is not affected whatsoever.
While the US is forced to deal with scathing leaked information such as its meddling in Argentinian affairs, Israel’s own agenda is only gaining ground. Some have even postulated a potential Mossad or CIA connection to Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
According to the former Pakistani Chief of Intelligence, Hamid Gul, Wikileaks is designed to act as a controlled release of information, and disinformation designed to manipulate public opinion of Washington, and Iran.
Israel has cause for a strike against Iran in order to curtail its nuclear capabilities. The government of both America and Israel claim that Iran’s agenda for nuclear power will inevitably lead to a nuclear confrontation given that Iran acquires nuclear weaponry. This past August, the Iranian Busherh reactor was reportedly attacked by a virus which was said to be deployed against the installation by a government organization. Israel was fingered as the main culprit in this instance.
Israel and America have always maintained a close relationship in leadership. Both are proponents of the War on Terror, and both are also keenly interested in the Middle Eastern occupation. With Iran remaining one of the few independent states in the Middle Eastern area, Israel is looking to turn the rest of the Islamic world against Iran by using an indirect approach through information warfare. The most horrifying negative aspect of this most recent Wikileaks dump is the opportunity it gives the government to claim security measures are required for cyberspace. It was not entirely surprising how hostile some of the talking heads of the mainstream media appeared to be against Wikileaks, when it is exposing government corruption these imbeciles demand punishment for Assange, the shutdown of Wikileaks, and better control of information on the web.
It appears that the leadership schools of both the United States and Israel both have their agendas in full throttle in this Wikileaks situation. While Israel’s agenda of dominating the Middle East’s future is coaxed closer to the surface for those who have their eyes open, it also appears that segments of power within the United States government are attempting to mar the reputation of the nation in eyes of those around the world. Assange and Wikileaks will be demonized by the establishment, and methods of information control will be proposed by the government, all in the name of national defense.
Hanna McKale is a political scientist hailing from New York, NY. When she is not researching, she advocates for Online Education, and travels all over the world.
DHS Implementing No Work List: Citizens Must Get Government Approval to Work in Private Sector Jobs
You’ve heard of no fly and no buy lists – get ready for no work lists. Millions of workers now must apply to the DHS and prove they are not terrorists in order to be granted permission by the government to work.
By Kurt Nimmo | Infowars | December 16, 2010
On the Alex Jones Show today, a caller pointed to information posted on a union website for ironworkers spelling out details on the Department of Homeland Security’s TWIC and SWAC programs.
TWIC is short for Transportation Worker Identification Credential and SWAC stands for Secure Worker Access Consortium.
TWIC “is a biometric credential that ensures only vetted workers are eligible to enter a secure construction site, unescorted,” Ironworkers Local 361 in Ozone Park, New York, explains. “Before issuing a TWIC, TSA must conduct a security threat assessment on the TWIC applicant. An applicant who, as a result of the assessment, is determined to not pose a security threat, will be issued a TWIC card.”
In other words, construction workers in New York will need permission from the TSA and DHS in order to practice their profession and earn a living. It was much the same in the former Soviet Union and authoritarian states such as China where the government determines all aspects of an individual’s life and where even the mildly rebellious are severely punished.
SWAC is even more draconian. It is “a large-scale collaborative effort among public and private authorities, facility owners, contractors, and labor organizations who are partnering to prevent terrorist activity by creating a trusted contractor community. Over 500 organizations, including the Port Authority of NY and NJ, which manages and maintains the bridges, tunnels, bus terminals, airports, PATH, and seaports that are essential to the bi-state region’s trade and transportation capabilities, have joined this effort,” according to the union website.
SWAC also requires a background investigation by the government, so if construction, port workers, longshoremen, and truck drivers are involved in political activity frowned upon by the feds – for instance, 9/11 truth, considered dangerous and subversive by the State Department – it is likely they will have to find another line of work.
A SWAC PDF specifically mentions “treason” in an exhaustive list of crimes and misdeeds that will result in the federal government denying a person the right to earn a living.
The TWIC Disclosure and Certification form states the following: “I acknowledge that if TSA or other law enforcement agencies determine that I pose an imminent threat to national security or transportation security, my employer may be notified.”
The TSA no-fly list contains thousands of names, including journalists and political activists. If the government determines you hold the wrong political beliefs, according to the TWIC document, your employer will be told and you may lose your job and the ability to provide for your family.
The TWIC application also mentions “treason” and “sedition” as a criteria to put an end to an individual’s employment.
Sedition is defined as overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by officialdom to tend toward insurrection against the establishment. The Sedition Act of 1918 forbids the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces. The Sedition Act was updated on October 26, 2001, when Congress signed the USA Patriot Act into law. In the mid 70s, the Church Committee discovered that the government had carried out an aggressive campaign for decades to neutralize – as FBI director Hoover characterized it – political activity the establishment considered a threat to its monopoly on power.
As noted above, TWIC plans to force an expensive biometric ID on workers. This idea is hardly new. In 2002, the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the Department of Homeland Security in order to get details on then director Tom Ridge’s plan to introduce a biometric national ID card. Ridge and the government have stated repeatdly that “national security requirements would ultimately make such cards a reality.”
Earlier this year, Democrats pushed the idea making a biometric national ID card mandatory for all Americans. “Everyone would have to produce the card to get a job, or keep a job,” the UPI reported on May 9. “On a five-year timetable the biometric cards would replace Social Security cards and would be used to prove eligibility for employment. Card scanners would be issued to all U.S. employers. The cards would at least have the capability of being linked to a central data system.”
TWIC and SWAC represent an incremental effort by the national security state to introduce biometric ID as a prerequisite for employment. In the months ahead, we can expect more intrusions by the government on our rights as spelled out by the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” that document states.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, however, according to the government, will soon be predicated on a national biometric ID card and inclusion of our most private information in sprawling databases.
In the coming Brave New World Order, only citizens vetted by a totalitarian government will be allowed to work and feed their families. All others will be locked out of the system like the mutants in Total Recall, the dystopian movie based on a story by Phillip K. Dick.
Unprecedented: master’s thesis on Jewish white privilege and Israel attacked in Canadian legislature
By Cecilie Surasky | MuzzleWatch | December 10 2010
Canadian grad student, Jewish anti-Zionist activist, and descendant of Holocaust survivors Jenny Peto is breaking new ground with her University of Toronto master’s thesis The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education, though perhaps not in the way she intended.
The Canadian National Post reports:
It has provoked intense debate online, in academia and even the political realm. Progressive Conservative MPP Steve Clark raised it in the legislature Tuesday in response to sharp criticism in the Jewish community, calling it “shockingly anti-Semitic.” Citizenship and immigration minister Eric Hoskins likewise condemned the thesis in the legislature saying he was “greatly disturbed and, in fact, disgusted,” when he read media coverage about it.
These attacks (by some if not many who haven’t actually read it) on a master’s thesis, one that has already been through an academic review no less, are unprecedented. Also from The National Post:
Michiel Horn, a York University history professor and author of Academic Freedom in Canada: A History: “I know not of a single case where a master’s or a phD paper has been subject of discussion in the legislature of any province in Canada,” he said.
You can read Jenny Peto’s thesis yourself by downloading it here. Her abstract states:
This paper focuses on issues of Jewish identity, whiteness and victimhood within hegemonic Holocaust education. I argue that today, Jewish people of European descent enjoy white privilege and are among the most socio-economically advantaged groups in the West. Despite this privilege, the organized Jewish community makes claims about Jewish victimhood that are widely accepted within that community and within popular discourse in the West. I propose that these claims to victimhood are no longer based in a reality of oppression, but continue to be propagated because a victimized Jewish identity can produce certain effects that are beneficial to the organized Jewish community and the Israeli nation-state. I focus on two related Holocaust education projects – the March of the Living and the March of Remembrance and Hope – to show how Jewish victimhood is instrumentalized in ways that obscure Jewish privilege, deny Jewish racism and promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state.
I myself can’t wait to read it. There’s not a lot here that those seriously familiar with these Jewish institutions and Israeli history and politics could really argue with. For too long, the central organizing principle of much of institutional Jewry has been fear, which has been essential in, among other things, enabling an unaccountable Israel. And few programs more dramatically reflect this than the March of the Living which inflicts a proxy Holocaust trauma on Jewish teenagers (without proper context and support, so I hear from friends who have gone) as an essential right of passage into Jewishness.
To the young N. American Ashkenazi Jews especially who can’t help but notice that Jews as a whole occupy places of real economic and racial privilege in their communities, the messages of perpetual victimhood (and the implied privileges that might go with it, as in the case with the free pass that Israel tends to get) just don’t compute.
I’d imagine that in addition to her own experience, Peto had plenty to draw on from work and discussions happening in academic environments these days regarding Holocaust studies, Israeli politics, white privilege and so on. Is it possible that Peto’s crime is to have thought too complexly –in an academic setting.
Wikileaks: A Big Dangerous US Government Con Job
By F. William Engdahl | Global Research | December 10, 2010
The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to a gigantic cyber “leak,” unless the President leaves Julian Assange and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.
It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.
Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.
He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.
Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.
Not so secret cables…
The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document,[1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.[2]
Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.
But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea, with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, sends dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.
Excuse to police the Internet?
What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.
The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.
The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11/2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?
Notes
1. BBCNews, Siprnet: Where the leaked cables came from, 29 November, 2010, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618
2. Ken Dilanian, Inside job: Stolen diplomatic cables show U.S. challenge of stopping authorized users, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2010, accessed in http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1130-hackers-20101129,0,6716809.story
Peace Group not Allowed to Operate Stand at Ben-Gurion Airport
By Alessandra Bajec – IMEMC & Agencies – December 08, 2010
The group Artists Without Walls was denied authorization to set up a stand run by Jews and Arabs ‘who would be open to dialogue with passengers about coexistence.’ in Ben-Gurion airport on Tuesday, Ha’aretz reported.
Artists Without Walls, a joint Palestinian-Israeli peace group, had its request to run a stand at the passenger terminal at Ben-Gurion International Airport like the one operated by the Chabad movement rejected.
The Israeli representative of Artists Without Walls, Eitan Heller, addressed a letter to Israel Airports Authority saying the stand planned by the peace group would “serve free coffee and be managed by Jews and Arabs, who would be open to dialogue with passengers about coexistence and tolerance.”
Heller said having noticed, on his regular journeys abroad, the presence of the Chabad stand, where passersby are asked to put on phylacteries. While claiming to have nothing against Chabad, he stated: “But I cannot understand why a specific religious group has its own stand in an open area in an international air terminal,” he said. “This is a phenomenon I have not experienced anywhere else in the world.”
One of the world’s largest and best-known Hasidic movements in Orthodox Judaism, Chabad maintains thousands of institutions around the world providing outreach and educational activities for Jews.
Ben-Gurion airport manager, Shmuel Kandel, explained in his rejection of the peace group’s request that Chabad provides a service to “religious consumers and travelers who want to avail themselves of this service.” Kandel concluded his response by saying that Chabad “is aware of its obligation not to approach passengers, and airport inspectors make sure this is the case.”
“Artists Without Walls” is a permanent forum for dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians engaged in all fields of arts and culture, who strive to develop a better and more ‘human’ understanding between the two people through nonviolent and creative actions.
Through the joint peace group, several Israeli artists have been able to visit Ramallah for the first time, initiating a process of dialogue with Palestinian artists whom they did not know. Likewise, Palestinian artists have had the opportunity to visit their Israeli counterparts in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
CIA implanted electrodes in brains of unsuspecting soldiers, suit alleges
By David Edwards | Raw Story | November 29th, 2010
A group of military veterans are suing to get the CIA to come clean about allegedly implanting remote control devices in their brains.
It’s well known that the CIA began testing substances like LSD on soldiers beginning in the 1950s but less is known about allegations that the agency implanted electrodes in subjects.
A 2009 lawsuit (.pdf) claimed that the CIA intended to design and test septal electrodes that would enable them to control human behavior. The lawsuit said that because the government never disclosed the risks, the subjects were not able to give informed consent.
Bruce Price, one plaintiff in the lawsuit, believes that MRI scans confirm that the CIA placed a device in his brain in 1966.
At one point, Bruce was ordered to visit a building with a chain link fence that housed test animals, including dogs, cats, guinea pigs and monkeys. After reporting, Bruce was strapped across his chest, his wrists, and his ankles to a gurney. Bruce occasionally would regain consciousness for brief moments. On one such instance, he remembers being covered with a great deal of blood, and assumed it was his own, but did not really know the source. Also portions of his arms and the backs of his hand were blue. His wrist and ankles were bruised and sore at the points where he had been strapped to the gurney. Bruce believes that this is the time period during which a septal implant was placed in his brain.
DEFENDANTS placed some sort of an implant in Bruce’s right ethmoid sinus near the frontal lobe of his brain. The implant appears on CT scans as a “foreign body” of undetermined composition (perhaps plastic or some composite material) in Bruce’s right ethmoid, as confirmed in a radiology report dated June 30, 2004.
According to a 1979 book by former State Department intelligence officer John Marks, The CIA and the Search for the Manchurian Candidate, an internal 1961 memo by a top agency scientist reported that “the feasibility of remote control of activities in several species of animals has been demonstrated… Special investigations and evaluations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man.”
“The CIA pursued such experiments because it was convinced the Soviets were doing the same,” The Washington Post‘s Jeff Stein noted.
In mid-November, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Larson ruled that the CIA must produce records and testimony regarding the experiments conducted on thousands of soldiers from 1950 through 1975.
“The CIA has already claimed that some documents are protected under the state-secrets privilege, but Larson said the agency needs to be more specific,” Courthouse News Service reported.
The CIA insisted discovery was unwarranted in its case, because it never funded or conducted drug research on military personnel.
Larson wasn’t convinced.
“[T]his court rejects the conclusion that the CIA necessarily lacks a nexus to Plaintiffs’ claims, and orders the CIA to respond in earnest” to the veterans’ requests, “particularly because defendants have presented evidence that would appear to cast doubt on that conclusion,” he wrote.
But Larson ruled that the CIA did not have to produce records about devices implanted in some of the subjects.
Gordon P. Erspamer, lead attorney for the veterans, told The Washington Post that he is still pursuing the CIA for implanting devices in his clients’ brains.
“There is no question that these experiments were done but defendants say that they used private researchers and test subjects drawn from prisons, hospitals and nursing homes as subjects, not active duty military [personnel],” Erspamer said. “CIA said it had no one knowledgeable on this topic.”
Erspamer noted that papers filed in the case describe “electrical devices implanted in brain tissue with electrodes in various regions, including the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, the frontal lobe (via the septum), the cortex and various other places.”
“A lot of this work was done out of Tulane University using a local state hospital and funding from a cut-out (front) organization called the Commonwealth Fund,” he said.
“We tried to get docs from Tulane, but they told us that they were destroyed in the hurricane flooding.”
Wake up: Arbitrary rule is all around us
By James Laxer | Rabble | November 29, 2010
We live in a dangerous, disordered time. The flashing signs are there to warn us that, both at home and abroad, those who are at the helm of the socio-political order do not preside over outcomes that make even a modicum of sense. Arbitrariness is the order of the day.
We see this alarming reality in decisions being made close to us as well as in other parts of the world. Here are six stories, some more important than others, that convey the capricious disorder of the times in which we live.
1. In Ontario, the Special Investigations Unit that reviews complaints against police has released a report that concludes that in two specific cases during the G20 summit in Toronto last June, excessive force was used. But just when it appears that the system might work and deliver some semblance of justice, that hope is instantly dashed.
SIU director Ian Scott has concluded that the offending officers cannot be identified and, therefore, cannot be charged. In the case of one man who was arrested, and sustained a fracture below his right eye, the SIU determined that the police used excessive force. But the badge number on the man’s arrest sheet did not correspond to the assigned badge number of any Toronto police officer. Even Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair has acknowledged that up to 90 officers were not wearing their name-tags during the summit weekend. He says he will discipline the officers who chose to make themselves unidentifiable, but they are not being charged with an offence.
The only conclusion we can reasonably draw is that a large number of officers were out of control during the policing of the summit. Because the police won’t come forward to testify against their fellow officers, the cover up works. Officers who assault people on the street, even when the assaults are videoed, get away with it because follow officers won’t say a word against them. When the police act more like a gang of thugs than like professionals who uphold a set of standards, they become untrustworthy, a force that neither serves nor protects.
And what do those in charge do about this? Next to nothing.
2. A shocking video plainly shows Ottawa police officers violently subduing and strip searching a woman, in an incident that occurred two years ago.
Stacy Bonds, whose only crime was to ask police officers why they had stopped her in the first place was taken to a police station where a male officer cut off her shirt and bra. We only found out about this disgraceful incident because a judge was appalled by the behaviour of the police and ordered the public release of the video. After he watched the security camera video, Ontario Court Justice Richard Lajoie stayed charges against Bonds for assaulting police and condemned the police behavour as a “travesty” and an “indignity.”
What was the crown thinking when it went ahead with the prosecution of Stacy Bonds in this incredible case, in which she was the victim and the police were the perpetrators? In how many instances, where there is no video and no judge who blows the whistle, do prosecutors go along with brutal cops in bringing charges against wholly innocent people?
Now, we are going to get an internal investigation into this incident, an investigation that could take months. What will happen to the officers — a slap on the wrist?
3. The next issue takes us into the realm of national politics.
Why did the federal Liberal Party aid and abet the Harper government’s decision to extend Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan beyond July 2011?
Instead of holding the Conservative government to account for doing a U Turn that will keep close to one thousand Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan after the date when parliament had decided to withdraw them, the official opposition has joined forces with the party in power.
Canadians have long since concluded that the war in Afghanistan is not about a struggle for the rule of law, the rights of women, and democracy, but is being waged on behalf of a corrupt regime that is closely tied to warlords and the drug trade, a regime whose hold on power was sustained in a deeply flawed election. At least, with the passage of time, Canadians had a right to anticipate an end to a mission that has seen 153 of our soldiers killed and billions of tax dollars poured into a bottomless pit.
Now an understanding between the Conservatives and Liberals — a deal in all but name — has arbitrarily extended a mission whose architects know full well that it is military in character. Soldiers, who are posted in a theatre of war, even if they are involved in training, stand in harm’s way. The price of this mission, in blood and treasure, has already been too high as far as Canadians are concerned.
Behind closed doors, Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae have made a mockery of the Canadian parliamentary process.
4. Abroad there are stories that illustrate what happens when the people in charge are so rich that they simply have no contact with everyday human reality.
New York’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg has appointed a millionaire media executive, Cathleen P. Black, as chancellor of New York City’s public schools, the largest public school system in the United States. Black, a corporate executive and magazine publisher, has no educational experience whatsoever. Under New York State law, a candidate such as Black, who has no qualifications for the job, requires a waiver from Education Commissioner David Steiner to obtain the position. The law states that a waiver can be issued only to those “whose exceptional training and experiences are the substantial equivalent of such [educational] requirements and qualify such persons for the duties of a superintendent of schools.”
Not only does Bloomberg’s appointee lack any such “exceptional” training, she did not attend public school herself and sent her own children to private boarding schools in Connecticut.
Continuing the control of public schools by elites who have established about one hundred privately run charter schools in New York in recent years, means more opportunities for profit-making educational institutions, more years of crowded classrooms in public schools, and a future in which those at the helm have no clue about the needs of students whose families are bearing the burdens of the economic crisis.
Let’s see if Black gets the waiver.
5. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, a coalition government is in charge, led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, the descendant of a long line of financiers who intermarried with royal and aristocratic bluebloods. Cameron attended Eton and Oxford.
Surrounded by “Old Etonians” on the front bench of his government, Cameron has slashed public sector spending in the most drastic cuts in Britain in half a century. Over the next four years, the UK government will axe half a million jobs from the public payroll, while sharply reducing welfare payments and trebling the tuition fees of university students. The draconian cuts to employment in the public sector are certain to lead to a loss of private sector jobs dependent on the demand formerly generated by the spending of those whose public sector jobs are being eliminated.
In Britain, the income gap between the rich and the rest of the population is returning to levels not seen since the end of the First World War in 1918. The chief executives of companies listed on the UK’s FTSE 100 are now annually paid an average of 4.9 million pounds, an increase in one year of more than fifty per cent. That equates to two hundred times the average wage in the country.
While wage and salary earners are facing very tough times, the wealthy whose economic thinking caused the crash, are doing better than ever.
But don’t imagine that David Cameron isn’t thinking of the mass of the population. He’s declared that the day that William and Kate tie the knot at Westminster Abbey next spring will be a national holiday. The man has a heart.
6. Last week, the United States celebrated Black Friday, the day that retail companies hopefully move over to the black from the red as customers charge through the doors to get their hands on the goodies. Black Friday is now so important that the day notionally begins earlier in the week, before the turkey is served and while it is being served, and it continues all weekend long and into the following Monday.
It took decades for Americans to amass personal debts that today amount to about $12 trillion. The indebtedness of Americans as individuals and the indebtedness of the U.S. government — now about $14 trillion — were hugely important factors in triggering the economic crisis in which the world is mired.
But to save America and its economy, the debt-ridden American consumer needs to be prodded, cajoled, tempted, beseeched and implored to head for the malls to spend, spend, spend. A disproportionate amount of the goods they buy are made in China and their heroic spending efforts will drive up the nation’s trade deficit and its indebtedness.
What we are seeing is lemmings stampeding for the cliff. Call it Lemmingnomics.
These stories of arbitrary rule and of regimes in which the wealthy casually make decisions that hurt most of the population are linked. Brutal cops, governments that violate the norms of parliamentary government and leaders who enrich their own class of people at the expense of everyone else are the consequence of the shocking inequality of our age. The idea of citizenship is in retreat, democracy is declining and money is calling the shots.
Time to do something about it?
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Book Review
Shattered Dreams: The HPV Vaccine Exposed (2019)
By Christina England – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | September 4, 2026
… Gardasil received FDA fast-track approval in 2006, Cervarix followed in 2009, and Gardasil 9 was approved in December 2014 with more than double the aluminium adjuvant content of the original. The commercial context is specific. Merck was about to lose patent protection on Zocor and faced $18 billion in Vioxx injury claims from a cardiovascular drug the company had marketed while suppressing its own data showing a five-times increase in heart attacks. Analysts projected the global HPV vaccine market at $4 billion by 2011, contingent on government-funded national programs for teenage girls. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act had already granted manufacturers complete liability immunity. By 2013, Japan had withdrawn its HPV vaccine recommendation after cataloguing severe adverse reactions in hundreds of girls. No Western government followed. The establishment position across the UK, US, Australia, and most of Europe held, and still holds, that the vaccines are safe and effective, that reported injuries are coincidental, and that cervical cancer prevention justifies the program. The book was published into this position, not against a vacuum.
Shattered Dreams sits alongside Mary Holland’s The HPV Vaccine On Trial and Viera Scheibner’s foundational vaccination work as part of the documented record on what has been done to a generation of teenage girls under the banner of cancer prevention. The full summary unpacks three specific findings: that Merck used the aluminium adjuvant itself as the “placebo” control in 92.5% of trial subjects, making it structurally impossible to detect excess reactions from the adjuvant; that Dr. Sin Hang Lee found HPV DNA fragments bound to aluminium in every one of sixteen Gardasil samples tested, and in the blood and spleen of a New Zealand girl six months after her third dose; and that in every country with high vaccination coverage, including Australia, the UK, Norway, and Sweden, cervical cancer rates have stopped declining and started rising specifically in the vaccinated cohort. Martínez-Lavín’s 2017 calculation puts the number needed to seriously harm with Gardasil 9 at 140, and the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one case at 1,757. Thirteen young women are seriously harmed for every one who benefits. The vaccine was approved on the basis of trials that could not detect what the trials were supposed to detect, and it is still being given to twelve-year-olds today. … Read full review
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