Will NorthCom take over in Swine Flu Outbreak?

PREMEDITATED MERGER
U.S. under U.N. law
in health emergency
Bush's SPP power grab sets stage
for military to manage flu threats

Posted: August 28, 2007
11:15 pm Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America summit in Canada released a plan that establishes U.N. law along with regulations by the World Trade Organization and World Health Organization as supreme over U.S. law during a pandemic and sets the stage for militarizing the management of continental health emergencies.

The "http://www.spp.gov/pdf/nap_...>North American Plan for Avian & Pandemic Influenza" was finalized at the SPP summit last week in Montebello, Quebec.

At the same time, the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, has http://www.northcom.mil/Avi...>created a webpage dedicated to avian flu and has been http://www.defenselink.mil/...>running exercises in preparation for the possible use of U.S. military forces in a continental domestic emergency involving avian flu or pandemic influenza.

With virtually no media attention, in 2005 President Bush shifted U.S. policy on avian flu and pandemic influenza, placing the country under international guidelines not specifically determined by domestic agencies.

The policy shift was formalized Sept. 14, 2005, when Bush announced a new http://www.state.gov/r/pa/p...>International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza to a High-Level Plenary Meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, in New York.

The new International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza was designed to supersede an earlier November 2005 http://www.whitehouse.gov/h...>Homeland Security report that called for a U.S. national strategy that would be coordinated by the Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Agriculture.

The 2005 plan, operative until Bush announced the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza, directed the State Department to work with the WHO and U.N., but it does not mention that international health controls are to be considered controlling over relevant U.S. statutes or authorities.

Under the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza, Bush agreed the U.S. would work through the U.N. system influenza coordinator to develop a continental emergency response plan operating through authorities under the WTO, http://www.nafta-sec-alena....>North American Free Trade Agreement and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

WND could find no evidence the Bush administration presented the Influenza Partnership plan to Congress for oversight or approval.

The SPP plan for avian and pandemic influenza announced at the Canadian summit last week embraces the international control principles Bush first announced to the U.N. in his 2005 International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza declaration.

The SPP plan gives primacy for avian and pandemic influenza management to plans developed by the WHO, WTO, U.N. and NAFTA directives – not decisions made by U.S. agencies.

The U.N.-WHO-WTO-NAFTA plan advanced by SPP features a prominent role for the U.N. system influenza coordinator as a central international director in the case of a North American avian flu or pandemic influenza outbreak.

In Sept. 2005, http://www.un.or.id/upload/...>Dr. David Nabarro was appointed the first U.N. system influenza coordinator, a position which also places him as a senior policy adviser to the U.N. director-general.

Nabarro joined the WHO in 1999 and was appointed WHO executive director of sustainable development and health environments in July 2002.

In a Sept. 29, 2005, http://www.un.org/News/brie...>press conference at the U.N., Nabarro made clear that his job was to prepare for the H5N1 virus, known as the avian flu.

Nabarro fueled the global fear that an epidemic was virtually inevitable.

In response to a question about the 1918-1919 flu pandemic that killed approximately 40 million people worldwide, Nabarro commented, "I am certain there will be another pandemic sometime."

Nabarro stressed at the press conference that he saw as inevitable a worldwide pandemic influenza coming soon that would kill millions.

He quantified the deaths he expected as follows: "I'm not, at the moment at liberty to give you a prediction on numbers, but I just want to stress, that, let's say, the range of deaths could be anything from 5 to 150 million."

In a March 8, 2006, U.N. press conference that was http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/...>reported on a State Department website, Nabarro predicted an outbreak of the H5N1 virus would "reach the Americas within the next six to 12 months."

On Feb. 1, 2006, http://www.defenselink.mil/...>NORTHCOM hosted representatives of more than 40 international, federal and state agencies for "an exercise designed to provoke discussion and determine what governmental actions, including military support, would be necessary in the event of an influenza pandemic in the United States."

NORTHCOM and other governmental websites document the growing role the Bush administration plans for the U.S. military to be involved in continental domestic emergencies involving health, including avian flu and pandemic influenza.

http://www.jtfcs.northcom.m...>NORTHCOM participated in a nationwide Joint Chiefs of Staff-directed exercise – code-named Exercise Ardent Sentry 06 – to rehearse cooperation between Department of Defense and local, state and federal agencies, as well as the Canadian government.

A pandemic influenza crisis was one of the four scenarios gamed in Exercise Ardent Sentry 06, http://www.jtfcs.northcom.m...>involving a scenario of a plague in Mexico reaching across the border into Arizona and New Mexico.

As has been customary in SPP documents and declarations, the Montebello, Canada, announcement of the North American Plan for Avian & Pandemic Influenza acknowledges in passing the sovereignty of the three nations.

The announcement says, "The Plan is not intended to replace existing arrangements or agreements. As such, each country's laws are to be respected and this Plan is to be subordinate and complementary to domestic response plans, existing arrangements and bilateral or multilateral agreements."

Still, the SPP plan argues the risk from avian and pandemic influenza was so great to North America that the leaders of the three nations were compelled "to work collectively and with all levels of government, the private sector and among-non-governmental organizations to combat avian and pandemic influenza."

Moreover, the SPP plan openly acknowledges, "The WHO's international guidance formed much of the basis for the three countries' planning for North American preparedness and response."

WND previously reported NORTHCOM has been established with a command center at Peterson Air Force Base, tasked with using the U.S. military in continental domestic emergency situations.

WND also has reported President Bush signed in May two documents, National Security Presidential Directive-51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive-20, which give the office of the president extraordinary powers to declare national emergencies and to assume near-dictatorial powers.

Following the Montebello summit last week, the SPP North American Plan for Avian & Pandemic Influenza was published on a made-over SPP homepage redesigned to feature agreements newly reached by trilateral bureaucratic working groups.

www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp

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Jerome R. Corsi is a staff reporter for WND. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972 and has written many books and articles, including his best-sellers "The Obama Nation" and "The Late Great USA." Other books include "Showdown with Nuclear Iran," "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil," which he co-authored with WND columnist Craig. R. Smith, and "Atomic Iran."

There is no reason to imagine that this flu is any more dangerous than any other flu

Deborah Orr
London Independent
Thursday, April 30, 2009

www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/debora h-orr/deborah-orr-we-need-to-be-inoculated-agains t-outbreaks-of-panic-1676345.html

The pork industry is not keen on the name "swine flu" because it fears that it will be bad for its image. Its fears are not groundless. Ten countries, including China and Russia, have now banned the import of pork products, even though the World Health Organisation advises that you can't get H1N1 from eating bacon. Egypt has even ordered a cull of all the country's pigs. Presumably, in a Muslim state, there aren't so very many pigs, and people aren't going to be that upset about them dying in a rhetorical gesture.

Mexican flu, the obvious alternative, is disliked by Mexicans, because it is felt that this stigmatises the whole country. Some Mexican politicians argue anyway that H1N1 originated in Asia, then spread into Mexico via the US. The US-owned, Mexican-based pig-farm at the centre of the story insists that neither any of its staff nor any of its livestock has tested positive.

The plausible theory that H1Ni originated in Mexico is still just a plausible theory. One expert sympathetic to Mexico's worries about blame has suggested that the new strain should be called novel flu. No one involved in the production of literary fiction has baulked at the title, which is a good sign, although it doesn't solve the problem of what to call the next new flu. Meta-novel flu, perhaps.

No, that won't do. This flu, after all, has achieved the quality of a meta-novel already, one that is being written and re-written in all its possible permutations before anyone even knows how the real story will unfold. The absurdity of such an approach was summed up on Tuesday night, on Newsnight. If swine flu "cannot be contained", an authoritative-sounding voice asked, "how can we stop it spreading?" By re-phrasing the question, let's hope.

"We", of course can't "stop it spreading", not at an individual level, until we catch swine flu ourselves. Then we can stay home till the ambulance comes, hoping that our own experience of the illness will be mild, and that we are not responsible for passing the virus on to somebody who is more vulnerable. (This probably isn't the time to remind people that their babies should be immunised against such things as measles, mumps and rubella for similar reasons, but I'm going to anyway.) As yet, barely anyone on the planet has a personal interest in this story.

It is still a prurient global spectacle centred on a small number of individual and far-off tragedies. Even the panic-stricken media coverage has driven only a small number of people to seek medical attention. Weirdly, even some of those with good reason to be worried (like a recent trip to Mexico) were advised to go to their GP, trailing their possible infection with them.

One GP, in Clapham, South London, has told the press that he is in no position to deal with such patients, even though he has had one and is waiting for her test results. He has been given no anti-virals to take himself, is in contact with other patients all day, and none of the local pharmacies have any Tamiflu to supply to patients with prescriptions anyway.

Amid the huge effort to get every detail of this narrative out to the public, there seems to be a gap. No one is telling doctors what to do. Governments are concentrating on talking to the public, via the media. In Britain the government may not be slaughtering pigs. But the huge fuss they are making about "reassuring the public" is a sophisticated version of the same sort of thing.

In part, the great gush of information about this barely nascent new take on an old illness is an impressive consequence of the match-fitness of the international structures that exist to control disease, and also yet another reminder of how astonishingly quickly information can be disseminated around the world.

Mostly, however, it's yet another dreary confirmation of how media organisations love to turn concern into panic into audiences into profit, and how governments, when they see a big running story, want to position themselves flatteringly and busily at the heart of it, when the people at the heart of it really ought to be health professionals.

You wouldn't know it from the already feverish speculation, but there is no reason to imagine that this flu – and 36,000 people a year die of flu on average – is any more dangerous than any other flu. For Britons, in the short-to-medium term, this means a different winter flu shot to the one that vulnerable people already get, and a few other simple precautions. As Michael O'Leary of Ryanair so robustly put it, "the slum-dwellers" are the people at real risk.

Nevertheless, I am interested to note how fears of "beggar-my-neighbour protectionism" melt away when that scary consequence of "globalisation", the pandemic, kicks its way into the global bar-room. Despite warnings from more authoritative figures than Mr O'Leary that it is the poorer countries that will really suffer if this strain of flu turns out to be notably virulent, governments of the developed world are making strenuous efforts to protect their own citizens first.

Those with the money are ensuring that they have enough vaccine, that they have enough effective masks, or that they have, in Britain's case, a comprehensive leafleting campaign and lots of television advertisements. Brown might not be able to save the world on this occasion. But he can save Britain, whether it turns out to need saving, or not.

Yet shouldn't "we", at present, be trying to work out how best to distribute as many of our stocks of vaccine as we can reasonably spare to Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Guatemala, the nations that already are looking most susceptible, instead of working hard at getting our mitts on more? The global effort to stop a pandemic seems political more than practical.

There are as yet unconfirmed reports in Mexico of three doctors dying after treating infected patients. In La Gloria, Mexico, where the outbreak is believed to have started, residents say they have been fighting the disease for months. It's horrible, the sight of ordinary Mexicans trying to "keep calm and carry on" in face-masks that we have already been told in Britain are useless. It certainly puts California's state of emergency, now that it has 13 cases, into some perspective.

As I write the World Health Organisation has not yet decided whether it agrees with California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that 13 cases comprises "sustained community-level transmission", which will notch the alert system up to "five".

When the WHO's emergency committee earlier this week graded the risk of a pandemic at an "unprecedented four", it also had to explain that its system only went up to six. Five indicates community-level transmission in more than one country, while six implies a global pandemic in more than one continent.

More puzzling is phase one of the alert-level scale which signals that "no animal influenza viruses circulating among animals have been reported to cause infection in humans". The WHO advises that in a phase one situation, as well as in a phase two or three, countries should "prepare the health system to scale up". In other words, official advice is to live constantly in fear.

I don't think this is official advice that "we' should take. In the developed world the hard work of gifted scientists will bring a new flu pandemic under reasonable control, as long as government lets it. The hype, like a package trip to Mexico, is just a cheap holiday in other people's misery, but without the much needed benefit to the local economy. As a spectacle it is not at all edifying.

d.orr@independent.co.uk

F. William Engdahl
Global Research
April 29, 2009

If we are to believe what our trusted international media report, the world is on the brink of a global pandemic outbreak of a new deadly strain of flu, H1N1 as it has been labelled, or more popularly, Swine Flu. As the story goes, the outbreak of the deadly flu was first discovered in Mexico. According to press reports, after several days, headlines reported as many as perhaps 150 deaths in Mexico were believed caused by this virulent people-killing pig virus that has spread to humans and now is allegedly being further spread from human to human. Cases were being reported hourly from Canada to Spain and beyond. The only thing wrong with this story is that it is largely based on lies, hype and coverup of possible real causes of Mexican deaths.

One website, revealingly named Swine Flu Vaccine, reports the alarming news, ‘One out of every five residents of Mexico’s most populous city wore masks to protect themselves against the virus as Mexico City seems to be the epicenter of the outbreak. As many as 103 deaths have been attributed to the swine flu so far with many more feared to be on the horizon. The health department of Mexico said an additional 1,614 reported cases have been documented.’ We are told that the H1N1 ‘shares genetic material from human, avian and swine influenza viruses.’1

Airports around the world have installed passenger temperature scans to identify anyone with above normal body temperature as possible suspect for swine flu. Travel to Mexico has collapsed. Sales of flu vaccines, above all Tamiflu from Roche Inc., have exploded in days. People have stopped buying pork fearing certain death. The World Health Organization has declared  a ‘a public health emergency of international concern,’ defined by them as ‘an occurrence or imminent threat of illness or health conditions caused by bioterrorism, epidemic or pandemic disease, or highly fatal infectious agents or toxins that pose serious risk to a significant number of people.’2

What are the symptoms of this purported Swine Flu? That’s not at all clear according to virologists and public health experts. They say Swine Flu symptoms are relatively general and nonspecific. ‘So many different things can cause these symptoms. it is a dilemma,’ says one doctor interviewed by CNN. ‘There is not a perfect test right now to let a doctor know that a person has the Swine Flu.’ It has been noted that most individuals with Swine Flu had an early on set of fever. Also it was common to see dizziness, body aches and vomiting in addition to the common sneezing, headache and other cold symptoms. These are symptoms so general as to say nothing.

The US Government’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta states on its official website, ‘Swine Influenza (swine flu) is a respiratory disease of pigs caused by type A influenza viruses that causes regular outbreaks in pigs. People do not normally get swine flu, but human infections can and do happen. Swine flu viruses have been reported to spread from person-to-person, but in the past, this transmission was limited and not sustained beyond three people.’ Nonetheless they add, ‘CDC has determined that this swine influenza A (H1N1) virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human. However, at this time, it is not known how easily the virus spreads between people.’3

How many media that have grabbed on the headline ‘suspected case of Swine Flu’ in recent days bother to double check with the local health authorities to ask some basic questions? For example, the number of confirmed cases of H1N1 and their location? The number of deaths confirmed to have resulted from H1N1? Dates of both? Number of suspected cases and of suspected deaths related to the Swine Flu disease?

Some known facts

According to Biosurveillance, itself part of Veratect, a US Pentagon and Government-linked epidemic reporting center, on April 6, 2009 local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico. 

They reported, ‘Sources characterized the event as a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February.’ What they later say is ‘strange’ is not the form of the illness but the time of year as most  flu cases occur in Mexico in the period October to February.

The report went on to note, ‘Residents claimed that three pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the outbreak. However, health officials stated that there was no direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they stated the three fatal cases were "isolated" and "not related" to each other.’

Then, most revealingly, the aspect of the story which has been largely ignored by major media, they reported, ‘Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to "flu." However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms.’4

Since the dawn of American ‘agribusiness,’ a project initiated with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950’s to turn farming into a pure profit maximization business, US pig or hog production has been transformed into a highly efficient, mass production industrialized enterprise from birth to slaughter. Pigs are caged in what are called Factory Farms, industrial concentrations which are run with the efficiency of a Dachau or Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They are all conceived by artificial insemination and once born, are regularly injected with antibiotics, not because of illnesses which abound in the hyper-crowded growing pens, but in order to make them grow and add weight faster. Turn around time to slaughter is a profit factor of highest priority. The entire operation is vertically integrated from conception to slaughter to transport distribution to supermarket.

Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) happens to be such a Factory Farm concentration facility for hogs. In 2008 they produced almost one million factory hogs, 950,000 according to their own statistics. GCM is a joint venture operation owned 50% by the world’s largest pig producing industrial company, Smithfield Foods of Virginia.5 The pigs are grown in a tiny rural area of Mexico, a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and primarily trucked across the border to supermarkets in the USA, under the Smithfields’ family of labels. Most American consumers have no idea where the meat was raised. 

Now the story becomes interesting.

Manure Lagoons and other playing fields

The Times of London interviewed the mother of 4-year-old Edgar Hernandez of La Gloria in Veracruz, the location of the giant Smithfield Foods hog production facility. Their local reporter notes, ‘Edgar Hernández plays among the dogs and goats that roam through the streets, seemingly unaware that the swine flu he contracted a few weeks ago — the first known case — has almost brought his country to a standstill and put the rest of the world on alert. ‘I feel great,’ the five-year-old boy said. ‘But I had a headache and a sore throat and a fever for a while. I had to lay down in bed.’’

The reporters add, ‘It was confirmed on Monday (April 27 2009-w.e.) that Edgar was the first known sufferer of swine flu, a revelation that has put La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons’ at the centre of a global race to find how this new and deadly strain of swine flu emerged.’ 6

That’s quite interesting. They speak of ‘La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons.’’ Presumably the manure lagoons around the LaGloria factory pig farm of Smithfield Foods are the waste dumping place for the feces and urine waste from at least 950,000 pigs a year that pass through the facility. The Smithfield’s Mexico joint venture, Norson, states that alone they slaughter 2,300 pigs daily. That’s a lot. It gives an idea of the volumes of pig waste involved in the concentration facility at La Gloria.

Significantly, according to the Times reporters, ‘residents of La Gloria have been complaining since March that the odour from Granjas Carroll’s pig waste was causing severe respiratory infections. They held a demonstration this month at which they carried signs of pigs crossed with an X and marked with the word peligro (danger).’7 There have been calls to exhume the bodies of the children who died of pneumonia so that they could be tested. The state legislature of Veracruz has demanded that Smithfield’s Granjas Carroll release documents about its waste-handling practices. Smithfield Foods reportedly declined to comment on the request, saying that it would ‘not respond to rumours.’8

A research compilation by Ed Harris reported, ‘According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu.’ However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms.’9 That would imply that the entire Swine Flu scare might have originated from the PR spin doctors of the world’s largest industrial pig factory farm operation, Smithfield Foods.

The Vera Cruz-based newspaper La Marcha blames Smithfield’s Granjos Carroll for the outbreak, highlighting inadequate treatment of massive quantities of animal waste from hog production.10

Understandably the company is perhaps more than a bit uncomfortable with the sudden attention. The company, which supplies the McDonald’s and Subway fast-food chains, was fined $12.3 million in the United States 1997 for violating the Clean Water Act. Perhaps they are in a remote tiny Mexican rural area enjoying a relatively lax regulatory climate where they need not worry about being cited for violations of any Clean Water Act.

Factory Farms as toxic concentrations

At the very least the driving force for giant industrial agribusiness outsourcing of facilities to third world sites such as Veracruz, Mexico has more to do with further cost reduction and lack of health and safety scrutiny than it does with improving the health and safety quality of the food end product. It has been widely documented and subject of US Congressional reports that large-scale indoor animal production facilities such as that of Granjos Carroll are notorious breeding grounds for toxic pathogens.

A recent report by the US Pew Foundation in cooperation with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health notes, ‘the method of producing food animals in the United States has changed from the extensive system of small and medium-sized farms owned by a single family to a system of large, intensive operations where the animals are housed in large numbers in enclosed structures that resemble industrial buildings more than they do a traditional barn. That change has happened primarily out of view of consumers but has come at a cost to the environment and a negative impact on public health, rural communities, and the health and well-being of the animals themselves. 11

The Pew study notes, ‘The diversified, independent, family-owned farms of 40 years ago that produced a variety of crops and a few animals are disappearing as an economic entity, replaced by much larger, and often highly leveraged, farm factories. The animals that many of these farms produce are owned by the meat packing companies from the time they are born or hatched right through their arrival at the processing plant and from there to market.’ 12  

The study emphasizes that application of ‘untreated animal waste on cropland can contribute to excessive nutrient loading, contaminate surface waters, and stimulate bacteria and algal growth and subsequent reductions in dissolved oxygen concentrations in surface waters.’13

That is where the real investigation ought to begin, with the health and sanitary dangers of the industrial factory pig farms like the one at Perote in Veracruz. The media spread of panic-mongering reports of every person in the world who happens to contract ‘symptoms’ which vaguely resemble flu or even Swine Flu and the statements to date of authorities such as WHO or CDC are far from conducive to a rational scientific investigation..

Tamiflu and Rummy

In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the vaccine, Oseltamivir sold under the name, Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.

What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug it had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stock holder in Gilead which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold. 14 When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated something to hide.’ That agonizing decision won him reported added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in weeks.  

Tamiflu is no mild candy to be taken lightly. It has heavy side effects. It contains matter that could have potentially deadly consequences for a person’s breathing and often reportedly leads to nausea, dizziness and other flu-like symptoms.

Since the outbreak of Swine Flu Panic (not Swine Flu but Swine Flu Panic) sales of Tamiflu as well as any and every possible drug marketed as flu related have exploded. Wall Street firms have rushed to issue ‘buy’ recommendations for the company. ‘Gimme me a shot Doc, I don’t care what it is…I don’ wanna die…’ 

Panic and fear of death was used by the Bush Administration skilfully to promote the Avian Flu fraud. With ominous echoes of the current Swine Flu scare, Avian Flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush Administration and WHO blamed ‘free-roaming chickens’ on small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions. Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank.

Now it remains to be seen if the Obama Administration will use the scare around so-called Swine Flu to repeat the same scenario, this time with ‘flying pigs’ instead of flying birds. Already Mexican authorities have reported that the number of deaths confirmed from so-called Swine Flu is 7 not the 150 or more bandied in the media and that most other suspected cases were ordinary flu or influenza.

(To be continued) 

F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (Global Rersearch, 2007, see below) and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His new book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press) is due out end of May. He may be contacted through his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php

Notes

1  Health Advisory, accessed in http://www.swine-flu-vaccin....

2  Ibid.

3 Centers for Disease Control, Swine Influenza and You, accessed in
http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu....

4 Biosurveillance, Swine Flu in Mexico- Timeline of Events, April 24, 2009, accessed in
http://biosurveillance.type....

5 Smithfield Foods website, accessed in
http://www.smithfieldfoods.....

6 Ruth Maclean in La Gloria and Chris Ayres in Mexico City, I had a headache and fever’ says boy who survived, London Times, April 28, 2009.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ed Harris, Bloggers Examine Environmental Role in Mexico Swine Flu Outbreak, April 27, 2009, accessed in
 
http://www.planetthoughts.o....

10 Ibid.

11 The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm

Animal Production in America, accessed in  http://www.ncifap.org/_imag....

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 F. William Engdahl, Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax?, GlobalResearch, October 30, 2005.

Wayne Madsen on Russia Today: Suspicions Over Origin of Virus

www.youtube.com/watch

www.waynemadsenreport.com/

www.youtube.com/watch

Full video interview here:www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200904/20090 427.html

Check out this website for some of the best information regarding CHEMTRAILS.

www.californiaskywatch.com/

Here are some other great links to check out:

www.chemtrailcentral.com/

www.carnicom.com/contrails.htm

educate-yourself.org/ct/

----------------------------------------------

Infowar note: Hey Rollingstone CHEMTRAILS ARE CONSPIRACY FACT.

Prince Does Rare TV Interview, Talks Obama, Chemtrails On PBS

4/28/09, 5:39 pm EST

www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/04/ 28/prince-does-rare-tv-interview-talks-obama-chem trails-on-pbs/

Photo: Shearer/WireImage

Prince made a rare television appearance yesterday, sitting down with Tavis Smiley for his PBS talk show to discuss misinterpreted lyrics, why he doesn’t vote and other insights that could only come from the mind of the man who brought you Purple Rain. As Jezebel points out, one of the strangest moments in the interview comes when Prince is talking about “Dreamer,” an ode to comedian Dick Gregory that features on LOtUSFLOW3R, and brings up “chemtrails,” the conspiracy theory that argues jets drop chemicals through their smoky exhaust.

Other Prince pearls of wisdom: “When I found out that there was eight Presidents before George Washington, I wanted to smack somebody.” On the historic election of President Barack Obama, Prince said, “I don’t vote and I got nothing to do with it. I have no dog in that race.” Prince went on to explain that he doesn’t vote because he is a Jehovah’s Witness, and that “prophecy is what we all have to go by now.”

Prince also related some personal, intimate stuff, including his childhood bout with epilepsy that made him an outcast. “I tried to compensate for that by being as noisy as I could and be as flashy as I could,” he said. Prince also shared his two favorite misinterpreted lyrics: “Dig if you will a picture/Of me, Marvin Gaye and the kids” for “When Doves Cry” and a woman who heard “Pay the rent collect” instead of “Little Red Corvette.” Part two of Prince’s interview with Tavis Smiley will air tonight on PBS, so if you can peel yourself away from Deadliest Catch and American Idol, we recommend you tune in.

The Department of Homeland Security has sent out an alert to health care providers outlining how BATF, FBI, and U.S. Marshals will be called upon to impose mandatory quarantines in the event of a widespread swine flu outbreak in the U.S.

According to the report, “DHS Assistant Secretary Bridger McGaw circulated the swine flu memo, which was obtained by CBSNews.com, on Monday night. It says: “The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines.”

The memo states, “U.S. Customs and Coast Guard Officers assist in the enforcement of quarantine orders. Other DOJ law enforcement agencies including the U.S. Marshals, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives may also enforce quarantines. Military personnel are not authorized to engage in enforcement.”

However, a separate  Defense Department planning document on dealing with pandemics states that the Pentagon will use the forces at its disposal to assist in “quarantining groups of people in order to minimize the spread of disease during an influenza pandemic” and aid in “efforts to restore and maintain order.”

As we reported yesterday, so-called “involuntary isolation” is already being enforced in certain areas of the United States. The state’s health director in North Carolina, Dr. Jeffrey Engel, said that authorities were already involuntarily isolating patients who may have the swine flu virus. He refused to divulge the location of where the victims were being quarantined.

News reports such as this one from MSNBC are prevaricating around the contention that quarantines are a normal event that Americans should be comfortable with. In reality, there has only been one case of “involuntary quarantine” in the U.S. in the last 45 years.

“In 2007, Andrew Speaker, an Atlanta lawyer, was quarantined inside a hospital in Denver on suspicion of having extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis. It turned out that the CDC was incorrect and Speaker had a milder form of the disease,” states the CBS report.

The MSNBC report also falsely claims that quarantines will solely be handled on a state/local level, when in reality, Bush’s executive order 13375 outlines a federal response, and the DHS memo lists numerous federal authorities that will have powers of quarantine.

In addition, the Bush administration’s  National Strategy For Pandemic Influenza, released in November 2005, states that the federal government will impose “quarantines” and “limitations on gatherings”.

With Time Magazine busy preparing Americans to accept enforced mass vaccination programs and telling them to “trust” the government and “forgive” them when the vaccines cause death and injuries, the prospect of mandatory quarantines will likely be the precursor for any such nationwide vaccination program. The vaccine to supposedly combat swine flu is being manufactured by Baxter International, who were caught red-handed last month attempting to release bird flu vaccines which were contaminated with the deadly avian flu virus itself.

Swine flu has caused the death of one toddler in the U.S. and in fact only seven of the supposed 159 fatalities in Mexico have been confirmed as swine flu - meaning the other 152 could have been due to any number of infectious diseases that routinely kill Mexicans in the thousands on a yearly basis.

The comparative threat of swine flu does not correlate with the feverish reaction of authorities, who in the initial stages of the outbreak refused to take any measures to contain it, such as closing the border with Mexico, but after the virus had already begun to spread, they were quick to prepare draconian control measures while hyping the inevitability of a pandemic.

Meanwhile, the hysteria whipped up by the media has spread faster than the actual virus itself.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Only 7 swine flu deaths, not 152, says WHO

www.smh.com.au/world/only-7-swine-flu-deaths-not- 152-says-who-20090429-aml1.html

www.who.int/csr/don/2009_04_29/en/index.html

• April 29, 2009 - 4:34PM

A street performer wears a mask painted silver in Mexico City.

A member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has dismissed claims that more than 150 people have died from swine flu, saying it has officially recorded only seven deaths around the world.

Vivienne Allan, from WHO's patient safety program, said the body had confirmed that worldwide there had been just seven deaths - all in Mexico - and 79 confirmed cases of the disease.

"Unfortunately that [150-plus deaths] is incorrect information and it does happen, but that's not information that's come from the World Health Organisation," Ms Allan told ABC Radio today.

"That figure is not a figure that's come from the World Health Organisation and, I repeat, the death toll is seven and they are all from Mexico."

Ms Allan said WHO had confirmed 40 cases of swine flu in the Americas, 26 in Mexico, six in Canada, two in Spain, two in Britain and three in New Zealand.

Ms Allan said it was difficult to measure how fast the virus was spreading.

She said a real concern would be if the flu virus manifested in a country where a person had had no contact with Mexico, and authorities were watching all countries for signs of that.

"There is no pattern that has emerged at this stage to be able to say that it is spreading in a particular way or it is spreading into a particular country ... the situation is continuing to evolve," she said.

She said the WHO was not recommending against overseas travel, but urged those who felt sick to stay home and others to ensure they kept their hands clean.

No decision had yet been made about vaccinations.

"This virus is not airborne, it's caused by droplets ... so it's not a time for worry. It's a time to be prepared," Ms Allan said.

ABS-CBN News Online Beta

Agence France-Presse | 04/28/2009 3:22 PM

www.abs-cbnnews.com/world/04/28/09/indonesian-min ister-says-swine-flu-could-be-man-made

JAKARTA - Indonesian Heath Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said Tuesday the deadly swine flu virus could have been man-made, as she urged calm over its spread around the world.

The controversial minister did not elaborate but in the past she has said Western governments could be making and spreading viruses in the developing world to boost pharmaceutical companies' profits.

"I'm not sure whether the virus was genetically engineered but it's a possibility," she told reporters at a press conference called to reassure the public over the government's response to the swine flu threat.

No cases of the disease have been reported in Indonesia, the country worst hit by the bird flu virus which has killed about 250 people worldwide since 2003.

Indonesian authorities have increased body temperature scanners at airports and banned imports of live pigs and pork products, amid World Health Organisation (WHO) warnings of a pandemic.

Supari, a cardiologist, also claimed that the H1N1 strain of swine flu, which is believed to have killed more than 150 people in Mexico, could not survive in tropical countries like Indonesia.

"We have to be alert at all times although swine flu in Indonesia is not a cause for panic," she said.

"H1N1 survives in countries with four seasons. The type A H1N1 virus hopefully won't be able to sustain itself once it enters the tropical climate of Indonesia," she added.

The virus has been found in 11 countries including Mexico, the United States and Spain, while several other countries from Colombia to New Zealand are investigating suspected cases.

Supari said the health ministry had prepared 100 hospitals to handle swine flu cases should the disease enter Indonesia.

The minister has refused since 2006 to share all but a handful of Indonesia's bird flu virus samples with WHO researchers, saying the system is being abused by rich countries to develop profitable vaccines which poor countries must buy.

as of 04/28/2009 3:22 PM

-------------------------------------------

Another source:

WHO warns of pandemic as China reports symptoms

www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25401 421-2703,00.html

The FDA has approved “emergency measures” to carry out “mass dosings” of U.S. citizens with antiviral drugs in the event of a widespread swine flu pandemic.

An Associated Press report states that the new powers would allow the drugs to be distributed to  a “broader range of the population” than present measures allow.

The drugs, primarily Tamiflu and Relenza, would be “distributed to larger segments of the population without complying with the approved label requirements,” according to the report.

The announcement follows a similar directive issued last night, which would allow Tamiflu to be used to treat children under the age of 1 and to provide doses higher than originally approved for children over the age of 1.

As we reported this morning, a Time Magazine article prepares Americans to accept mandatory enforced vaccination and says that citizens should “trust” the government and “forgive” them if the vaccination itself results in deaths and injuries, as happened during the 1796 swine flu fiasco, when the U.S. government attempted to mass vaccinate the entire population.

www.prisonplanet.com/fda-approves-emergency-measu res-for-mass-dosing-of-us-citizens.html

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Says public should “trust” government when it institutes draconian measures to deal with pandemic

Time Magazine’s coverage of the swine flu scare has a noticeable subplot - preparing Americans for draconian measures to combat a future pandemic as well as forcing them to accept the idea of mandatory vaccinations.

In an article entitled How to Deal with Swine Flu: Heeding the Mistakes of 1976, the piece discusses how dozens died and hundreds were injured from vaccines as a result of the 1976 swine flu fiasco, when the Ford administration attempted to use the infection of soldiers at Fort Dix as a pretext for a mass vaccination of the entire country.

Despite acknowledging that the 1976 farce was an example of “how not to handle a flu outbreak,” the article still introduces the notion that officials “may soon have to consider whether to institute draconian measures to combat the disease.”

Later we discover exactly what this will entail, namely “when to institute mass vaccination programs,” according to Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and a historical consultant to the CDC on flu pandemics.

Markel notes that the less politically combustible situation in America today compared to the post-Watergate era of Ford would make such draconian measures more achievable.

“Even so, he says, citizens still need to trust that the government is working for the greater good,” adds the article. “The American public has to be forgiving and patient and do [their] part too,” according to Markel.

Americans would indeed have to be very trustworthy and ultimately forgiving in taking a vaccine by government decree manufactured by a company that was been caught red-handed contaminating their vaccines with far deadlier viruses than swine flu.

As we reported yesterday, Baxter International confirmed over the weekend that it is working with the World Health Organization on a potential vaccine to curb the deadly swine flu virus that is blamed for scores of deaths in Mexico and has emerged as a threat in the U.S., reports the Chicago Tribune.

As reported by multiple sources last month, including the Times of India, vaccines contaminated with deadly live H5N1 avian flu virus were distributed to 18 countries last December by a lab at an Austrian branch of Baxter.

Since the probability of mixing a live virus biological weapon with vaccine material by accident is virtually impossible, this leaves no other explanation than that the contamination was a deliberate attempt to weaponize the H5N1 virus to its most potent extreme and distribute it via conventional flu vaccines to the population who would then infect others to a devastating degree as the disease went airborne.

These are the people we are supposed to “trust” and “forgive” according to Time Magazine and Markel when the federal government breaks down our door, guns drawn and dripping needle in hand.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, April 28, 2009

www.prisonplanet.com/time-magazine-preps-american s-for-mandatory-vaccinations.html

Every time there is a pandemic scare, it comes from a laboratory

Previous to revelations just weeks ago that American vaccine company Baxter Inc "accidentally" shipped out vaccines contaminated with live avian flu virus, a similar incident was reported in 2005.

In April of that year, both the New Scientist and AP reported that the virus that caused the 1957 "Asian flu" pandemic, which killed 1 million to 4 million people, was "accidentally" released by a lab in the US, and sent all over the world in test kits.

The New Scientist report states:

The flu testing kits were sent to some 3700 labs between October 2004 and February 2005 by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), a professional body which helps pathology laboratories improve their accuracy, by sending them unidentified samples of various germs to identify.

The CAP kits - prepared by private contractor Meridian Bioscience in Cincinnati, US - were to contain a particular strain of influenza A - the viral family that causes most flu worldwide. But instead of choosing a strain from the hundreds of recently circulating influenza A viruses, the firm chose the 1957 pandemic strain.

Because the 1957 H2 flu strain was replaced by another new strain in 1968, anyone born after that date has no immunity to it.

"...any escape of the virus in the test kits could be as lethal to them as the Asian flu of 1957." the report stated at the time.

Because such test kits are routine and do not contain dangerous viruses, they are not handed at a high level of biological containment. Therefore the chances of the virus escaping the lab were high and scientists scrambled to find and destroy the potentially lethal samples.

Despite these facts, the federal government downplayed the possibility of foul play. From the AP report:

Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of the influenza branch at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said her agency was notified of the situation on Friday morning. She also said officials strongly doubted that someone deliberately planted the strain or that it was an act of bioterrorism.

"It wouldn't be a smart way to start a pandemic to send it to laboratories, because we have people well trained in biocontainment," Dr. Cox said.

The New Scientist report also points to another "accident" in 1970 when a H1 flu strain, the cause of the 1918 pandemic, was believed to have escaped from a faulty batch of live flu vaccine prepared in a Russian lab.

Just last month, health authorities and industry groups reviewing European lab safety standards concluded in a new report that research on dangerous pathogens needs to be more strictly monitored.

With all these "accidents" in mind, in addition to reports of the 1918 "Spanish flu" having originated at Fort Riley in Kansas, further scares such as the 1976 swine flu incident which originated at a military base, and clear evidence of attempts by the military to culture influenza as a bio weapon, handling reconstructed versions of lethal strains at less than the maximum level of containment, it is absolutely essential that any new outbreak be questioned with this information in mind.

------------------------------------------------

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, April 28, 2009

infowars.net/articles/april2009/280409Accident.ht m

"Step back and think for a minute before rushing and panicking" is the message coming from Texas Congressman Ron Paul who has warned that the swine flu scare will once again be used as a precedent for big government intrusion.

"It makes me think back to 1976, the first year I served in the Congress," Paul has said in a video update. "We had a vote on the swine flu. Back then there was panic, they said it was going to sweep the nation and they rapidly came up with some flu shots and the government was going to inoculate everybody and save the world from this disaster."

"It turned out that our instincts were correct." the Congressman, also a medical physician, commented. "Not only did we think that the government should be involved in making medical decisions... but the flu came, the flu went and one person died, except for those individuals that died from getting the flu vaccine."

Earlier this week we reported on the events of 1976, highlighting the fact that this last significant outbreak of swine flu in the U.S. originated at the army base at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

President Gerald Ford and then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (a man who has long standing intimate ties with the big pharma companies that have and will reap millions in profits from these scares) instituted a mass nationwide vaccination program. More than 40 million people were vaccinated. However, the program was stopped short after over 500 cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a severe paralyzing nerve disease, were reported. Officially 30 people died as a direct result of the vaccinations, though the real figure is generally thought to have been much higher.

At the time Congressman Ron Paul was one of only two representatives to vote down the vaccination program. His comments were recorded in the book Swine Flu Expose, by Eleanora I. McBean, Ph.D., N.D.

Paul described the move as “a shocking misuse of funds …and an evil political maneuver”, “blatant advertising efforts to panic the people into taking Swine Flu shots will fail.” Paul said.

Some of the fearmongering advertisement campaigns from 1976 are featured in the following video:

Video Link:www.youtube.com/watch

"Here we are once again, swine flu coming up and everybody is panicking." Ron Paul says in his latest update.

"This is not to downplay the seriousness of it. Some people have died, some people might die, yet we've had no deaths in this country, there's seven or eight cases up in New York, but none have even been hospitalised and yet it's practically like we've been attacked by nuclear weapons."

The Congressman put the current panic in perspective by pointing out that last year alone there were 13,000 cases of tuberculosis with the number of annual deaths last recorded in the hundreds.

Paul then opined on how the scare will once again be pounced upon to bolster and further empower big government. He referred to Janet Napolitano's announcement Sunday that the Department of Homeland Security had started "passive surveillance protocols to screen people coming into the country."

"How did the Department of Homeland Security get into the medical business? It's just totally out of control," Paul said, describing the situation as an open door invitation to allow the federal government to deal with medical problems.

The big question is 'Does a bigger government always solve these problems?' No, they usually make things much worse.

Watch the video: www.youtube.com/watch

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, April 28, 2009

infowars.net/articles/april2009/280409Paul.htm

Many people react with incredulity when the assertion is made that the so-called swine flu outbreak in Mexico may be manufactured crisis. And yet history is replete with examples of government using biological and chemical agents for political purpose.

As a primary example, consider the CIA’s secret war against Cuba and Fidel Castro.

In 1975, the Church Committee revealed a CIA memorandum listing deadly chemical agents and toxins then stockpiled at Fort Detrick. “These included anthrax, encephalitis, tuberculosis, lethal snake venom, shellfish toxin, and half a dozen lethal food poisons, some of which, the committee learned, had been shipped in the early 1960s to Congo and to Cuba in unsuccessful CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro,” write Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way, Ocean Press, 2003, p. vii).

Schaap cites the work of Dr. Marc Lappé (Chemical and Biological Warfare: The Science of Public Death, Student Research Facility for East Bay Women for Peace and Science Students for Social Responsibility, 1969), who claims that the U.S. Army had a biological warfare agent prepared for use against Cuba at the time of the Missile Crisis in 1962, mostly likely Q fever (Coxiella burnetii, a bacterium that affects both humans and animals). In 1977, a Washington Post report confirmed that during this time the CIA maintained an “anticrop warfare” program.

In regard to swine flu, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on January 10, 1977, that CIA “operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971.” The outbreak, the first time the disease hit the Western Hemisphere, was labeled the “most alarming event” of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. Cuba reacted to outbreak by slaughtering 500,000 pigs. An intelligence source told the newspaper “that early in 1971 he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the Panama Canal Zone. The CIA also operates a paramilitary training center for career personnel and mercenaries at Ft. Gulick.” The source said he was given instructions to turn the container with the virus over to members of an anti-Castro group.

In 1980, described as “the year of the plagues” by Schaap, “Cuba was beset with disasters. Another African swine fever epidemic hit; the tobacco crop was decimated by blue mold; and the sugarcane crops were hit with a particularly damaging rust disease.”

By 1981, the Cuban population was targeted with hemorrhagic dengue fever, a devastating disease transmitted by mosquitoes. “From May to October 1981 there were well over 300,000 reported cases, with 158 fatalities, 101 involving children under 15. At the peak of the epidemic, in early July, more than 10,000 cases per day were being reported. More than a third of the reported victims required hospitalization. By mid-October, after a massive campaign to eradicate Aedes aegypti [mosquito], the epidemic was over,” writes Schaap. “The history of the secret war against Cuba and the virulence of this dengue epidemic were enough to generate serious suspicions that the United States had a hand in the dengue epidemic of 1981. But there is much more support for those suspicions than a healthy distrust of U.S. intentions regarding Cuba.”

After interviewing officials from the Pan American Health Organization and of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, Schaap states that he believes the “epidemic was artificially induced.”

The epidemic began with the simultaneous discovery in May 1981 of three cases of hemorrhagic dengue caused by a type 2 virus. The cases arose in three widely separated parts of Cuba: Cienfuegos, Camagiiey, and Havana. It is extremely unusual that such an epidemic would commence in three different localities at once. None of the initial victims had ever traveled out of the country; for that matter, none of them had recently been away from home. None had had recent contact with international travelers. Moreover, a study of persons arriving in Cuba in the month of May from known dengue areas found only a dozen such passengers (from Vietnam and Laos), all of whom were checked by the Institute of Tropical Medicine and found free of the disease. Somehow, infected mosquitoes had appeared in three provinces of Cuba at the same time. Somehow, the fever spread at an astonishing rate. There appears to be no other explanation but the artificial introduction of infected mosquitoes.

Researchers believe the Mexican swine flu outbreak may also be “artificially induced.” First, the Mexican outbreak occurred outside of the normal flu season (influenza usually obeys a regularly re-occurring time period – in temperate climate zones, the flu season will typically begin in the late fall and peak in mid- to late winter, while in tropical zones flu seasons appear to be less pronounced, with year-round isolation of the virus). Second, the genetic makeup of the fast-spreading H1N1 strain of influenza — including genetic elements from bird flu, swine flu and human flu covering three continents — appears to be man-made.

“What seems suspicious to me is the hybrid origin of the viral fragments found in H1N1 influenza,” writes Mike Adams. These viral fragments include human influenza, bird flu from North America, and swine flu from Europe and Asia.

This is rather astonishing to realize, because for this to have been a natural combination of viral fragments, it means an infected bird from North America would have had to infect pigs in Europe, then be re-infected by those some pigs with an unlikely cross-species mutation that allowed the bird to carry it again, then that bird would have had to fly to Asia and infected pigs there, and those Asian pigs then mutated the virus once again (while preserving the European swine and bird flu elements) to become human transmittable, and then a human would have had to catch that virus from the Asian pigs — in Mexico! — and spread it to others.

At present, there is little evidence the virus was created in a U.S. lab and deliberately unleashed on an unsuspecting Mexican public. However, there is plenty of evidence the U.S. military and the CIA have used biological agents in the past, including “tests” on the American people.

“More than 200 experiments were carried out in U.S. rural areas to test the spread of non-lethal germs,” writes Joe Allen. “These tests were also carried out in San Francisco in 1950 and in New York in 1966. While the cover for these tests was to study a ‘defense’ against biochemical warfare, U.S. war planners wanted this knowledge for offensive use against an enemy population,” for instance livestock and people in Cuba, as mentioned above.

At the height of Cold War insanity, the U.S. government gave a free hand for its scientists to experiment on anything that could possibly further its military prowess. The CIA experimented with LSD for “mind control.” At Fort Detrick, scientists studied the possibility of spreading yellow fever and plague with insects. Anti-crop bombs were built for the United States Air Force to be used in the Third World.

It appears this insanity did not stop with the Cold War. Last week, the Frederick News Post reported Army criminal investigators are looking into the possibility that disease samples are missing from biolabs at Fort Detrick.

Finally, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has reported that “a top scientist for the United Nations, who has examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS victims, [and] concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission ‘vectors’ that suggest that the new flu strain has been genetically-manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon. The UN expert believes that Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and the current A-H1N1 swine flu virus are biological warfare agents.”

Again, at this time, there is no definitive evidence indicating the Mexican virus is a bioweapon. However, there is plenty of factual evidence pointing to the fact the U.S. government (and other governments) have developed biological weapons and have used them against target populations.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 28, 2009

www.infowars.com/weaponizing-deadly-viruses-histo rical-precedents/

A U.S. based pharmaceutical company that just weeks ago was involved in a scandal involving vaccines tainted with deadly avian flu virus has been chosen to head up efforts to produce a vaccine for the Mexican swine flu that has seemingly migrated into the U.S. and Europe.

Baxter confirmed over the weekend that it is working with the World Health Organization on a potential vaccine to curb the deadly swine flu virus that is blamed for scores of deaths in Mexico and has emerged as a threat in the U.S., reports the Chicago Tribune.

Baxter has previously worked with governments all over the globe to develop and produce vaccines to protect against infectious disease or potential threats from bioterrorism. After 9/11 Baxter helped supply stockpiles of a smallpox vaccine and in 2003 the company was contracted to develop a vaccine to combat the SARS virus. In 2006 the UK Government announced plans designed to inoculate every person in the country with Baxter’s vaccines in the event of a flu pandemic.

However, Baxter has a very recent and most disturbing connection to flu vaccines.

As reported by multiple sources last month, including the Times of India, vaccines contaminated with deadly live H5N1 avian flu virus were distributed to 18 countries last December by a lab at an Austrian branch of Baxter.

A U.S. based pharmaceutical company that just weeks ago was involved in a scandal involving vaccines tainted with deadly avian flu virus has been chosen to head up efforts to produce a vaccine for the Mexican swine flu that has seemingly migrated into the U.S. and Europe.

Baxter confirmed over the weekend that it is working with the World Health Organization on a potential vaccine to curb the deadly swine flu virus that is blamed for scores of deaths in Mexico and has emerged as a threat in the U.S., reports the Chicago Tribune.

Baxter has previously worked with governments all over the globe to develop and produce vaccines to protect against infectious disease or potential threats from bioterrorism. After 9/11 Baxter helped supply stockpiles of a smallpox vaccine and in 2003 the company was contracted to develop a vaccine to combat the SARS virus. In 2006 the UK Government announced plans designed to inoculate every person in the country with Baxter’s vaccines in the event of a flu pandemic.

However, Baxter has a very recent and most disturbing connection to flu vaccines.

As reported by multiple sources last month, including the Times of India, vaccines contaminated with deadly live H5N1 avian flu virus were distributed to 18 countries last December by a lab at an Austrian branch of Baxter.

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, April 27, 2009

www.infowars.com/baxter-to-develop-swine-flu-vacc ine-despite-bird-flu-scandal/

by: Sherri Tenpenny, D.O. 

History Repeating

Within three weeks of Lewis’ death – the only person ever confirmed to have died from swine flu on the entire military base – researchers and public health officials converged in Washington to persuade members of Congress to implement a costly new program to vaccinate the country. A nationwide campaign, launched with the urgency of a five-alarm fire, was started by the CDC which ramped up the vaccine production with millions of government dollars allocated to develop of a novel vaccine for mass vaccination.  

  The same five-alarm fire is happening today. This morning, April 26, 2009, the federal government declared a public health emergency, as the number of cases of swine flu in the U.S. rises to a mere 20, announcing the arrival of the long-planned for and awaited pandemic.

Pharma Protected

 In 1976, the Federal Insurance Company advised Merck that all liability, indemnity, and defense costs associated with claims arising from the new swine flu vaccine would not be covered by its insurance plan. Having absorbed the embarrassment and the economic losses caused by the polio vaccine in 1955, the pharmaceutical industry and their insurance providers were determined that would not happen again.

 This time, there are no worries. Drug companies have completely covered their tracks, and when reports of adverse event and deaths from the new swine flu vaccine start to roll in, they will be smiling all the way to the bank.

 Flu shots were added to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Table in 2003, meaning, if anyone is injured, a claim needs to be filed through the Federal Court of Claims and it will be years before it is adjudicated. And that is just the basic layer of protection. All the drug companies have to do is whisper that this may be a "terrorist attack" and they are home free.

 Before he was voted out of office in 2006, then-senator Bill Frist (R-TN), a physician, drove through a bill that gave drug companies more immunity than any bill ever passed by Congress. The legislation, referred to as "Division-E" was tacked on to a Defense appropriations bill in the final minutes of the Congressional sessions before the Christmas recess. This bill provides at least four sweeping provisions:

 1. Immunity from liability for all drugs, vaccines, or biological products deemed as a covered countermeasure against bioterrorism in the event of an outbreak of any kind. The proposal is not only limited to new drugs or vaccines developed under the umbrella of "bioterrorism" or "pandemic" protection. The proposal is so broad that it could include drugs like Tylenol, Advil…and would have applied to Vioxx.

 2. Immunity for any product used for any public health emergency declared by the secretary of HHS. The authority to declare an emergency now rests completely in the hands of the secretary of HHS— an appointed, non-medical person who has no accountability to the general public. The president’s hand-picked person that is part of his inner circle will have the power to mandate vaccines and other medications given to the American people.

  3. Immunity from accountability. No matter what a drug company do wrong in this arena, they are protected. Even if the company’s dirty facility created a batch of contaminated vaccines that resulted in death or injury to thousands of people, the drug company will not be held accountable.

 4. Immunity from lawsuits. A person who suffers any type of loss will be prohibited from suing the drug companies. Vaccine manufacturers have immunity from almost everything, perhaps even murder. The bill provisions provide a mechanism for filing a lawsuit, but the language explicitly prevents frivolous suits by setting a standard for liability more rigid than any known standard of negligence.

 In simple terms, if a claim is filed by a plaintiff it can only go forward if the injured party can prove that the company performed an act of "willful misconduct" resulting in an injury or a death. In other words, the injured party would have to prove the vaccine maker intentionally caused him harm.

 Division-E goes even one step further. Unbelievably, even if a pharmaceutical company knowingly harms people, the company will be immune from legal prosecution unless the U.S. attorney general initiates "enforcement action" against the drug company in the name of the claimant. This means the U.S. government would have to go to bat for the injured party for the lawsuit to move forward, as unlikely as the current swine flu fiasco being an unplanned pandemic.

New Vaccines Ready to Roll Out

The swine flu outbreak is going to benefit one of the most prolific and successful venture capital firms in the United States: Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Share prices have already risen for two of eight public traded companies in the firm's portfolio of Pandemic and Bio Defense investments. BioCryst, up more than 26 percent, to $2.21 per share, and Novavax, maker of viral vaccines, escalated 75 percent to $1.42 per share on the first announcement of the swine flu outbreak in Mexico.

 Novavax uses genetic information and "recombinant, virus-like particle technology" to rapidly engineer a vaccine. Its technology has only been through Phase II clinical trials but might be released prematurely. Novavax’s CEO, Rahul Singhvi announced Friday, "There is an emergency authorization avenue that is available that would allow us to use the vaccine in an emergency without further testing." The Division-E provisions would protect the company from all liability.

 In the fine print of the Division-E legislation, (available for download at  www.drtenpenny.com so you can read it for yourself), there is a suggestion that a massive, bioterrorist vaccination program could be "voluntary." Will the media make everyone aware of the one-line provision that potentially gives us the right to refuse?

Will government mandates override State exemption laws? The future is unclear but this has been suggested. Your personal rights in this area are growing very thin and activism has never been more important. A quote by U.S. Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) says it all: "When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we, in essence, accept that the state owns our bodies." 

If you don’t have access to an alkaline water machine, be sure to eat large amounts of alkalinizing, fresh vegetables and fruits such as broccoli, carrots, sprouts, avocados and berries. Here is a site with a great list: http://athma-pure.com/alkal...

Sleep

Get at least 8.5 hours per night, every night. Sleep is often overlooked at the key to health. This is simple to do and best of all, it is free.

Vitamin A

This vitamin is one of the best supporters you can have in your cabinet. Mycel A drops given in juice are easy to take for children and adults of all ages. By taking 5,000 IU/day for 5 days is safe for everyone and will give your immune system a protective boost against all types of viral infections.

While these suggestions are not meant to be all encompassing, these some simple solutions for you and your family.

During the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) Summit in Montebello, Canada in 2005, the “three amigos” (Bush, Harper and Calderon) released “North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza,” described as a “collaborative North American approach that recognizes that controlling the spread of avian influenza or a novel strain of human influenza, with minimal economic disruption, is in the best interest of all three countries.”

Note: Google search 'North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza'

The plan outlines how “Canada, Mexico and the United States intend to work together to prepare for and manage avian and pandemic influenza.”

It was hardly a coincidence that at the same time the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, created a webpage dedicated to avian flu and subsequently ran exercises in preparation for the possible use of U.S. military forces in a continental domestic emergency involving avian flu or pandemic influenza.

In 2006, NORTHCOM held an international exercise with more than 40 international, federal, and state agencies “designed to provoke discussion and determine what governmental actions, including military support, would be necessary in the event of an influenza pandemic in the United States.” In addition, NORTHCOM participated in a nationwide Joint Chiefs of Staff-directed exercise code-named Exercise Ardent Sentry 06 to rehearse cooperation between Department of Defense and local, state, federal agencies, and the Canadian government.

In 2005, then president Bush shifted U.S. policy on avian flu and pandemic influenza and placed the U.S. under international guidelines. “The policy shift was formalized Sept. 14, 2005, when Bush announced a new International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza to a High-Level Plenary Meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, in New York,” Jerome Corsi wrote in September, 2007. “The new International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza was designed to supersede an earlier November 2005 Homeland Security report that called for a U.S. national strategy that would be coordinated by the Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Agriculture.”

In other words, any U.S. response to an avian flu pandemic would be directed under WHO, WTO, U.N. and NAFTA directives. Congress and U.S. agencies would be cut out of the picture. “The U.N.-WHO-WTO-NAFTA plan advanced by SPP features a prominent role for the U.N. system influenza coordinator as a central international director in the case of a North American avian flu or pandemic influenza outbreak,” Corsi adds.

Dr. David Nabarro, WHO executive director of sustainable development and health environments, was appointed the first U.N. system influenza coordinator. In 2005, Nabarro said during a press conference that his number one priority was to prepare for the H5N1 virus, known as the avian flu. Nabarro played into the global fear that an epidemic was inevitable.

“I’m not, at the moment at liberty to give you a prediction on numbers, but I just want to stress, that, let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from 5 to 150 million,” said Nabarro. On March 8, 2006, during a U.N. press conference Nabarro predicted an outbreak of the H5N1 virus would “reach the Americas within the next six to 12 months.”

On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stoked the fear of a global flu pandemic. He said the Mexican flu outbreak is the “first test” of the “pandemic preparedness work undertaken by the international community over the past three years.” Ban Ki-moon said if “we are indeed facing a pandemic, we need to demonstrate global solidarity. In our interconnected world, no nation can deal with threats of such dimension on its own.”

For Ki-moon and the global elite, “global solidarity” in “our interconnected world” translates into yet another push for world government. Ki-moon’s dire warning falls on the heels of the G20 summit where plans were announced for implementing the creation of a new global currency to replace the U.S. dollar’s role as the world reserve currency. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others repeatedly called for “global governance” and a “New World Order.”

The current flu pandemic hype serves as punctuation mark between the G20 held in London and the upcoming one to be held in Italy in June. “The G20 summit has agreed to try to kick start stalled Doha trade liberalization talks at the next G8 meeting,” Reuters reported on April 2. So-called “trade liberalization” is code for the neoliberal plan to “privatize” public and private industries around the world, impose “flexibilization” of labor markets (create massive unemployment), “deregulate” consumer and financial markets, and foster foreign buyouts, layoffs, wage cuts, transient employment, higher prices, and potentially destabilizing capital flows.

As noted by the Eagle Forum in October, 2007, the SPP’s North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza “is not only about combating a flu epidemic but is far-reaching in seeking control over U.S. citizens and public policy during an epidemic.” The Plan would give authority to international bureaucrats “beyond the health sector to include a coordinated approach to critical infrastructure protection,” including “border and transportation issues.”

On April 26, Infowars covered the Department of Defense’s “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza” that proposes nothing less than the militarization of health care, military augmentation of civilian law enforcement, and the mass vaccination of the population as directed by the government.

Ki-moon, the United Nations, and the globalists, with the participation of the globalist-dominated corporate media and the ruling elite in Mexico, are hyping the flu outbreak as a possible pandemic in order to sell us their scheme for world government.

It is an ongoing process.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 27, 2009

www.infowars.com/flu-pandemic-hype-another-pretex t-for-world-government/

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must take the crown for uttering the biggest falsehood of the year so far, after she claimed that President Barack Obama has followed words with actions, when in reality his every major policy has mirrored or intensified the Bush agenda.

“I think the President’s actions in these last 100 days do match actions with words,” stated Clinton during a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting yesterday, which is perhaps the most gargantuan lie of 2009 so far.

Clinton was responding to Ron Paul’s comments that the Obama administration should tread carefully in the nuclear-armed country of Pakistan.

As we documented at length earlier this week, on every single major issue that Obama promised he would work to bring “change,” the exact same policies forged by the Bush administration have been continued.

From the failure to prosecute top officials in government and intelligence who ordered torture, to the failure to withdraw U.S. troops “immediately” from Iraq, as Obama promised (his plan would leave tens of thousands in the country even after the “withdrawal”), to the staggering support and continuation for the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program - on every issue Obama has done the exact opposite of what he said he would before the election.

And in some cases he has even intensified the Bush agenda - with 30,000 extra troops being sent to Afghanistan and bombing raids on Pakistan being increased, while Hillary herself warmongers about Pakistan being a “mortal threat to the world.”

Meanwhile, Obama’s war chest demands came to a total of around $800 billion in war funds and subsidiary costs just to cover the rest of 2009, a bigger tab than George W. Bush ever got.

Does any of this sound like a move towards bringing the troops home and rolling back the American empire and police state, as Obama promised before he was elected? Is Obama really following words with actions or merely following orders from the same CFR and Bilderberg masters that Hillary Clinton answers to?

Watch the clip below (sick bag on standby for Hillary’s disingenuous praise for Ron Paul supporters).

Video link: or watch it above in the left hand corner:www.youtube.com/watch

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, April 23, 2009

www.infowars.com/biggest-lie-of-2009-hillary-clai ms-obama-has-followed-words-with-actions/

A newly released Senate Armed Services Committee report is garnering much media attention today, however it only confirms what we first reported in 2005 - that high-ranking Bush officials were responsible for torture of detainees and tried to shift the blame to low-ranking army officers.

The report is “a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse — such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan — to low ranking soldiers,” said Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who led the investigation.

It names former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as approving an initial December 2002 memo that was taken as an approval for torture methods in U.S. run prisons worldwide.

Procedures approved in the memo were adopted in Iraq in a memo issued almost one year later in September 2003 by the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

The  report (PDF), which has been described by some media sources as “explosive“, reveals nothing new, however, and confirms what we’ve already known for over three and a half years.

In October 2005 former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski appeared on the Alex Jones Show to make these very revelations. We subsequently produced an article detailing her claims and also the fact that she was deliberately kept out of the loop and scapegoated to protect higher ups.

Karpinski was the only general punished in the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Her Army Reserve unit was in charge of the prison compound when Iraqi detainees were physically abused and sexually humiliated by military police and intelligence soldiers in the fall of 2003.

Karpinski had previously admitted that rather than being an isolated incident under her command, the abuses were, “the result of conflicting orders and confused standards extending from the military commanders in Iraq all the way to the summit of civilian leadership in Washington.”

Spun as the actions of “a few bad apples,” the Abu Ghraib torture program was sanctioned from the very top.

Karpinski identified the masterminds of the torture policy as occupying the highest rungs of the Bush administration.

“The orders came right from the top, filtered down from the secretary of defense, with the endorsement of the President, the Vice President, whatever advisors are surrounding them, filtered down through the Commanders in the field, these practices were not only endorsed, but were in use at Guantanamo bay and in locations in Afghanistan. And when General Miller visited Iraq he brought those techniques with him. And then he sent contract interrogators who had ‘performed well’ at Guantanamo Bay to Iraq as well.” Karpinski said.

Karpinski also stated in 2005 that even though innocent detainees had been deemed of no further Intel use and were recommended to be released by their interrogators, the higher uppers read the riot act and started a pattern whereby no one was to be released and innocent people were kept locked up without trial or charges.

She went on to speak about the direct links to Bush himself:

“We can trace back now, through documents that were released through court order, back to the original document, the one that Alberto Gonzales reviewed and discussed with the President of the United States, a departure from the Geneva Convention. These are not prisoners, these are terrorists and these techniques will be more effective.” She said.

Though the newly released Senate Armed Services Committee report has taken six months to complete, it’s findings were already public knowledge and had even previously appeared in a PBS documentary.

Enough with the reports and investigations, when will the prosecutions begin?

If the Obama administration gets its way they will never take place.

Upon last week’s release of the torture memos preceding the new Senate report, Obama’s right-hand man, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, told ABC News that top Bush administration officials “should not be prosecuted either and that’s not the place that we go.”

In addition, Obama’s statement that accompanied the release of the torture memos stated, “In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

So no retribution for the people who ordered the torture, and no retribution to the people who carried it out, thus setting the precedent that future administrations are free to order torture - safe in the knowledge that they will face no consequences whatsoever.

www.infowars.com/explosive-senate-torture-report- reveals-what-weve-already-known-for-three-and-a-h alf-years/

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Agency claims waterboarding KSM prevented attack, despite alleged plot being debunked by scores of intelligence professionals in 2006

As the controversy surrounding revelations of the Bush administration’s torture program builds, the CIA has attempted to diffuse the furore by claiming that the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed prevented a terror attack on an L.A. skyscraper, a completely ludicrous assertion since the credibility of the alleged “L.A. attack plot” was debunked by scores of intelligence professionals years ago.

“The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) — including the use of waterboarding — caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles,” reports CNS News.

This claim was made the day after after former Vice-President Dick Cheney urged the CIA to “put out the memos that show the success of the effort….reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity.”

The “planned attack on Los Angeles” refers to an announcement made on February 9th 2006 in which it was claimed that an Al-Qaeda plan to fly a plane into the LA Library Tower was thwarted in 2002. The release of the news that the plot had been prevented by means of tapping terrorist suspect’s phone, and not torture as the CIA now claims, was politically timed to coincide with the start of legal hearings on the Bush administration’s domestic eavesdropping program.

Fox “News,” the White House’s PR mouthpiece, immediately began showing footage from the movie Independence Day, in which the famous tower is destroyed.

Hours after the announcement, the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, went public with his absolute bewilderment concerning the alleged plot.

“I’m amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels,” the mayor said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I don’t expect a call from the president — but somebody.”

The day after the announcement, twenty three separate intelligence experts, all with either CIA, FBI, NSA or military credentials, both in and out of service, angrily disputed Bush’s remarks about the alleged L.A. plot, with one going as far as saying that the President was “full of snap!.”

Another described the claims as “worthless intel that was discarded long ago.”

A New York Times story cited “several counter-terrorism officials” as saying that “the plot never progressed past the planning stages…. ‘To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous,’ said one senior FBI official.”

The New York Daily News cited another senior counterterrorism official who said: “There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought stage.”

The Washington Post also dismissed the alleged plot as nothing more than talk, noting that no actual attack plan had been thwarted.

The LA attack plot arose from the same discredited informant who said that Washington and New York financial institutions were being targeted, which led the White House to raise the terror alert right as the 2004 election campaign was beginning.

“The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world,” said a veteran field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. “He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us Al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington.”

In June 2004 John Pistole, the FBI’s counterterrorism director, said he was “not sure what [the CIA] was referring to,” after a CIA counterterrorism official who testified under the alias “Ted Davis” said that the US had prevented aviation attacks against the east and west coast.

Despite the alleged plot being thoroughly debunked a year prior, President Bush again cited it in his January 2007 State of the Union speech.

Now the CIA has recycled the same hoax in order to try and deflect accusations about its involvement in the torture program.

Indeed, by announcing that the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed led to his “confession” of being behind the non-existent L.A. attack plot, the CIA is only reaffirming the fact that the torture program was designed to elicit false confessions that could then be used as terror propaganda on the fearful and gullible American public.

As Senator Levin highlighted on the back of the release of the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, the techniques (known as SERE) authorized by officials to be used on detainees, “Are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes.”

In addition, the senior Army SERE psychologist warned in 2002 against using SERE training techniques during interrogations in an email to personnel at Guantanamo Bay, because, “It usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain… Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low.”

Little wonder then that KSM confessed to everything under the sun, and only stopped short of admitting to being the real Santa Claus, assassinating JFK and creating AIDS. He even “confessed” to plotting to attack a bank that wasn’t even founded until after his arrest.

The idea that waterboarding KSM six times a day for a month, as well as torturing his children, would lead to anything other than false confessions is absurd on the face of it.

However, by regurgitating the confirmed hoax that KSM “confessed” to a plot that never even existed because of the “success” of waterboarding, the CIA has once again highlighted the fact that not only was the torture program an insult and a disgrace to everything America is supposed to stand for, but that it was also a complete waste of time and only put Americans in more danger because false confessions were taken as gospel so that they could be used not to protect the country from terrorists, but to propagandize to the American people and enlist their support for the thoroughly deceptive and insidious “war on terror”.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

www.prisonplanet.com/cia-ludicrously-claims-tortu re-prevented-debunked-la-terror-plot.html

Insane Cop Arrests ABC News Reporter For Filming Traffic Accident

Some speculate authorities didn’t want involvement of troops in car wreck caught on camera

It’s becoming a disturbingly familiar scene in America - aggressive, overbearing and mentally unstable cops who think that it is an arrestable offense not to obey their every order - harassing citizens who have done absolutely nothing wrong.

The latest example comes from El Paso, Texas, where a local ABC news reporter and his cameraman were arrested simply for something they routinely do every day as part of their job - filming traffic incidents.

The reporters, Darren Hunt and photojournalist Ric DuPont, were standing behind a barrier well away from the car wreck but were quickly approached by the cop - Sgt. Ramirez - who immediately shouted that they had to leave.

As the video shows, despite the fact that the reporters start to back away towards their truck, the cop runs after them after one of them dares to speak - reminding the officer that America is supposed to be a free country with freedom of the press and that the cameraman “can shoot if he wants to”.

The cop then grabs Hunt by his pants and threatens to arrest him, shouting, “I gave you an order,” with the reporter protesting, “I didn’t do anything.”

Presumably, the cop thinks that it is illegal and therefore an arrestable offense not to follow any order given by a police officer - or even worse - because the reporters were actually following his order - the cop thinks its an arrestable offense merely to verbally disagree with a police officer.

Despite the reporter not resisting or attempting to return to the scene of the wreck, the cop tries to slap the cuffs on anyway. “I’m not doing anything, I’m just trying to leave sir,” states Hunt as the cop wildly shrieks behind him and pulls his arms behind his back.

The officer then pushes Hunt up against the fence and turns to grab DuPont’s camera, before he too is arrested. With the two reporters now out of view, more insane shrieking can be heard from the cop.

Upon arrival at the police station, the reporters were released within minutes - proving that they had done absolutely nothing worthy of being arrested in the first place. Sgt. Ramirez has been placed on leave pending an investigation.

Some have speculated that the presence of military soldiers at the scene of the car wreck, which is captured on film near the end of the clip, was something that the authorities did not want to be documented on camera.

As we have previously warned, thousands of active duty military personnel are being brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan to conduct “homeland patrols” under Northcom. The Army Times reported that their duties would include training to “use jaws of life to extract a person from a mangled vehicle,” as well as ” civil unrest and crowd control.”

We have been ringing the alarm bell for years about the integration of the military into law enforcement and have consistently warned that the idea of troops on the streets as a matter of routine will be incrementally introduced to Americans by means of soldiers being used in traffic accidents. This would engender the idea that the troops are here to “help” in times of need.

However, the troops may have just been traveling to or from their army base and happened to come across the accident and offer assistance, which is perfectly plausible.

The major thing to take away from watching this video is the insane behavior of the cop and his belief that citizens must comply with his every order or face arrest, despite them having done nothing wrong whatsoever.

These scenes are becoming commonplace in America. Something has gone seriously wrong somewhere along the line with police training, a fact highlighted by the recent MIAC and Homeland Security reports, which revealed that police are being trained that American citizens who are merely knowledgeable about their rights under the U.S. constitution are considered a threat and potential terrorists.

Watch the clip of the incident:www.youtube.com/watch

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

www.prisonplanet.com/insane-cop-arrests-abc-news- reporter-for-filming-traffic-accident.html

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Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes has given perhaps his most dire warning yet, saying that the Obama administration is preparing to stage terror attacks, declare martial law and cancel the 2012 elections, which is why they are demonizing their political enemies as criminals and terrorists.

Keyes is best known for his  performance during the 2000 Republican presidential debates, when he was accredited by many media outlets as being the clear winner during a series of debates with George W. Bush and John McCain.

“It’s obvious that they will stop at nothing,” Keyes told attendees of a reception in Fort Wayne, adding, “We may wake up one day and there’s a series of terrorist attacks, the economy is paralysed….martial law will be declared everywhere in the United States and it won’t end until the crisis ends.”

Keyes said that Americans should be thankful if they even see another election in 2012, stating, “If we don’t wake up and work to see that it happens, we will not see another election.”

“The minute they think they can get away with it, they will end this system of government and that is their intention,” added Keyes, noting that everyone acting as if the time we are in was just “business as usual” reminds him of the attitude of politicians in the Weimar Republic when Hitler was rising to power or eastern Europe when the Communists were taking over after the second world war.

Keyes said that because the majority of people are decent-minded, they believe others will play by the rules when this simply isn’t the case, warning that this attitude will allow evil to take over before we can do anything about it.

“It is so clear hat we have now put a faction in place - they are not playing by the rules and they don’t intend to play by the rules - if they were playing by the rules they wouldn’t have tried to identify their opposition as criminals,” added Keyes, making reference to the recent controversy surrounding the release of the MIAC and Homeland Security reports, which implied that Americans who exercise and are knowledgeable about their constitutional rights are a threat to law enforcement and potential domestic terrorists.

Keyes said that the only solution was from the bottom up because our leaders “are so gutless that they won’t even ask that the Constitution be enforced for clear, plain, absolutely unequivocal requirements,” and respond meekly with “their lips shut and their hearts terrorized.”

Keyes also warned of Obama’s agenda to create a civilian security force and said it was part of the ultimate agenda to disarm American citizens and create a police state.

Keyes has been a vocal critic of Obama,  warning that he is a radical Communist who is determined to destroy America, and that if his agenda is not stopped then the country as we know it will cease to exist.

Watch the clip linked below - please forgive the poor sound and video quality. I mean you really have to crank up the volume. 

www.youtube.com/watch

-----------------------------------------

FEMA is preparing to take its martial law exercises to the next level this July. According to a factsheet buried on the FEMA website, the agency will host National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09) on July 27 through July 31, 2009.

“NLE 09 will be the first major exercise conducted by the United States government that will focus exclusively on terrorism prevention and protection, as opposed to incident response and recovery,” the factsheet states. It is designated as a Tier I National Level Exercise, or TOPOFF, which are exercises conducted annually in accordance with the National Exercise Program (NEP), “which serves as the nation’s overarching exercise program for planning, organizing, conducting and evaluating national level exercises,” according to FEMA.

NLE 09 “will focus on intelligence and information sharing among intelligence and law enforcement communities, and between international, federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector participants” in the “aftermath of a notional terrorist event outside of the United States.” So-called “exercise play” will concentrate on “preventing subsequent efforts by the terrorists to enter the United States and carry out additional attacks.”

Such a large and coordinated exercise seems inappropriate, considering the fact there has not been a terrorist attack on the United States since September 11, 2001. In 2007, the neocon-connected Jamestown Foundation chalked this lack of threat up to “stepped-up counter-terrorist efforts after 9/11 and possibly the simple luck enjoyed by government authorities.”

As the Washington Post noted in 2005, the government has a poor record when it comes to apprehending and prosecuting terrorists within the United States. “Except for a small number of well-known cases — such as truck driver Iyman Faris, who sought to take down the Brooklyn Bridge — few of those arrested appear to have been involved in active plots inside the United States.”

In fact, as recently leaked Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and local law enforcement (in particular, the Missouri State Police) documents reveal, the real target is not al-Qaeda or Muslim terrorists, but rather “rightwing extremists” who support the Second Amendment and states’ rights and oppose abortion and open borders. The liberal corporate media has worked tirelessly with the government to demonize activists and supporters of these movements. It has orchestrated a disinformation campaign against the Tea Party movement and has attempted to link the alleged white supremacist cop killer Richard Poplawski to Alex Jones and others erroneously classified as “rightwing extremists.”

The FEMA factsheet states NLE 09 “will focus on intelligence and information sharing among intelligence and law enforcement communities, and between international, federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector participants.” In other words, the exercise will concentrate on surveillance and counter-intelligence targeted at “terrorists” (rightwing extremists) who will – according to the NLE scenario – carry out attacks following a vaguely defined international terrorist event. A FEMA bullet point underscores the need for “counter-terror investigation and law enforcement.” Local law enforcement, through relationships previously established by DHS, the FBI and the CIA, will be on the front lines of this surveillance effort.

The FBI in particular has experience in surveilling Americans. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, the FBI kept a list – dubbed the “ADEX” list – of over 100,000 persons to be rounded up as subversive. More recently, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007. The list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month, according to the ACLU. The list now totals well over a million entries.

Although not specifically mentioned in the FEMA factsheet, NLE 09 will also include exercises designed to round-up and intern suspected terrorists. Under REX 84 and other operations, FEMA, in association with 34 other federal civil departments and agencies, trained to detain large numbers of American citizens.

During Hurricane Katrina, FEMA performed a “dry-run” of this unconstitutional power in New Orleans, not only rounding up “refugees” and “relocating” them in camps, but also testing its ability to confiscate firearms from law-abiding citizens. Blackwater USA, a private mercenary outfit, participated in this illegal confiscation.

InfraGard, the FBI organized “public-private partnership” (classical fascism as defined by Mussolini), will participate in NLE 09, as they have in past TOPOFF exercises.

As Matthew Rothschild documented last March, there are more than 23,000 representatives of private industry working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. InfraGard “may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations – some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers – into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” Rothschild explains, citing the ACLU. The FBI has given the private organization the ability to use lethal force against suspected “terrorists.”

FEMA’s National Level Exercise 2009 represents the next phase of preparations to implement martial law in America under the guise of fighting loosely defined terrorists. As the DHS, FBI, and MIAC reports indicate, the government now defines terrorists as “rightwing extremists” and indicates the threat is not from fanatics with beards in caves half way around the world, but from law-abiding Americans who are opposed to government policies.

The FEMA camps corporate media shill Glenn Beck insists do not exist but are documented to in fact exist around the country are not for Muslims, but the real threat to government – increasing numbers of Americans determined to return the nagtion to a constitutionally limited republic.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 21, 2009

www.infowars.com/nle-09-fema-takes-preparations-f or-martial-law-to-the-next-level/

Seminal hip-hop outfit educates audience at huge California music festival

Public Enemy - one of the most influential rap groups in music history - took an opportunity at the Coachella 2009 festival to warn their audience about “The Obama Deception,” in reference to Alex Jones’ recently released underground blockbuster documentary.

The L.A. Times reports that Public Enemy member Professor Griff, who himself appears in the film, “made repeated references to the “Obama deception,” during the concert in California at which Paul McCartney, Morrissey, the Cure and Leonard Cohen also performed.

Public Enemy’s 2005 album was entitled “New Whirl Order” and included tracks such as “66.6 Strikes Again,” “What A Fool Believes,” and “Revolution”. The band were at their peak in the late 80’s. Their 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back peaked at #42 on the Billboard 200, and at #1 on the Billboard R&B/Hip hop Album charts and is routinely ranked in the top 50 albums of all time, being regarded as one of the most influential and groundbreaking records in history.

Public Enemy, along with N.W.A., were two of the seminal acts in the organic explosion of hip-hop during the latter 1980’s, when the grassroots of the genre was all about black people becoming informed, empowered and strong and breaking free from stereotypical associations with poverty and drugs.

As soon as hip-hop became a vehicle for political and personal awakening, it was seized and devoured by corporate America and MTV, before being gradually deformed into what we see on television today - where black icons rap not about fighting the man or standing up to the system, but about how much money and sex they have while girls with giant buttocks wiggle around behind them.

We continually hear about huge music stars using their gargantuan public platforms to educate the public about the new world order at concerts and gigs.

At the internationally renowned Reading festival In August 2006, Muse front man Matt Bellamy donned a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Terrorstorm,” wearing it for the band’s headline performance which was watched collectively by tens of millions of people worldwide.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, April 21, 2009

www.prisonplanet.com/rap-group-public-enemy-warn- of-the-obama-deception.html

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Watch The Obama Deception for free by clicking here. Or alternatively, support us by subscribing to prison planet.tv to watch the high quality version or buy the DVD and make copies.

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Coachella 2009: Public Enemy brings the noise

Outside the political boundaries that seek to control dissent against the unconstitutional apparatuses of government, lies a group of independent people who have been attacked under the Bush administration as communist terrorists, and under Obama’s as fascist racist.

The people who propagate this fraud are millionaire media shills who push partisan propaganda to the benefit of the owners of both parties, the special interests, military industrial complex and banking oligarchy to name a few. This is extremely evident on the heels of the corporate media co-opting of the highly publicized Tea Party movement. The origins of this  grassroots inspired event, consisted of people from different ethnic and political backgrounds, focused on the true monoliths of power and the architects behind it. Seeing past the deceptive false paradigm pushers of the right during the Bush years, true conservatives joined with libertarians, independents and democrats, to protest the private non-federal reserve system, oppressive taxing by the IRS that is used to pay for the interest of our debt, eroding civil liberties through draconian legislation and wars for empire that further fund the  military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us of.

The presidential run of republican Congressman Ron Paul, presented a problem for the corporate media outlets who seek to pigeonhole issues based on political labels. The rejection of Bush’s policies could no longer be framed as partisan politics with the typical liberal talking points. Media shills had to actually look at the issues and determine why conservatives disagreed with his policies. This resulted in a true debate centered on the issues, instead of the usual posturing by the corporate gatekeepers.

The mass awakening occurring in the conservative movement had to be stopped, therefore these new brazen patriots had to be  labeled as terrorists who hated America. This would be the media spin of the false right pushers on the alphabet news channels. During the Bush years, the left found common ground with the members of the growing liberty movement, but falsely believed that it was all about Bush.

Now with the election of Obama, we see the friends that joined us under Bush, retreat to their liberal corner and take on the role the neo-cons did, in order to shield Obama from criticism. Therefore under Obama, government dissent equates to fascist extremist who hate blacks. This is the standard program that the corporate left uses in order to quell government dissent by hyping militia groups and racists. Just think back to all the subterfuge associated with groups on the right, who were against government corruption under Clinton. An unbiased look at the political environment back in the 90’s would show that they were not all extremist, and the events hyped up in the media had the fingerprints of COINTELPRO all over it.

Just recently in Philadelphia, 2 undercover officers organized a KKK rally and they were the only ones who showed up. Several people showed up to protest these racist who were actually cops. The anti-racist activists smashed the car of the posing skinheads, after they antagonized the protesters. An excerpt of witness testimony to the court is below.

The lone defense witness, law student Sheila Maddali, who was present on July 23, 2007, said anti-racism groups showed up at Love Park a half-hour before the noontime Klan rally.

No KKK members ever showed, but the witnesses said the two undercover officers walked into the park dressed like skinheads.

One activist asked if the two were Klan members and Maddali said one replied, "So what if we are?"

She said others began heckling the officers, calling them fascists and asking, "So you like to lynch black people?"

"We can lynch whoever we want," was the officer’s reply, Maddali said.

This type of operation can be used as a double-edged sword to infiltrate hate groups and identify activists. Another example of Fed operatives in action was displayed by right-wing talk show host Hal Turner. Apparently he was outed by hackers who found emails on his hard drive that showed correspondence to a FBI agent. This was reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center in this excerpt below.

On Jan. 1, (2008) unidentified hackers electronically confronted Turner in the forum of his website for "The Hal Turner Show." After a heated exchange, they told Turner that they had successfully hacked into his server and found correspondence with an FBI agent who is apparently Turner’s handler. Then they posted an alleged July 7th E-mail to the agent in which Turner hands over a message from someone who sent in a death threat against Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.). "Once again," Turner writes to his handler, "my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy." In what is allegedly a portion of another E-mail, Turner discusses the money he is paid.

On Thursday, as the E-mail exchange was heatedly discussed on a major neo-Nazi website, Turner suddenly announced he was quitting political work. "I hereby separate from the ‘pro-White’ movement," he said, adding that he was ending his radio show immediately. "I will no longer involve myself in any aspect of it."

These examples show the deceptive tactics that help manufacture political racial extremism in order to demonize, discredit, and distract from the true pillars of power that continue the agenda under both parties. As for the left, agents will typically infiltrate anti-war, environmentalists, or community outreach groups and push for acts of violence or property damage in order to vilify activists.

With the Tea Parties already hijacked by the neo-cons through the right gatekeepers at Fox news, I knew there would be a high probability of chicanery at the Glen Beck sponsored event. I went to San Antonio to counter this takeover, by passing out DVD’s that expose the parallel political ideology that is used to divide us. The thousands in attendance were fired up about the economic situation the D.C. cabal and banksters have put us in, but sadly were still stuck within the narrow confines of the left-right paradigm. The opportunity to educate the public on the history of the Federal Reserve, IRS and important legislation that would take action against both, was lost with speakers instead talking about the history of the Alamo, religious scripture, or chanting USA!, USA!.

Towards the end of the event I spotted a sign piercing the crowd with the statement "Save White America". Upon seeing this I had to investigate further in order to find out what his objective is for coming to this event with a sign like that. I had no issue with his 1st amendment right to express himself, my concern was that he was a plant that could be used by the media, to associate all the people at the Tea Party to racists. Since this was a large media spectacle promoted by Fox news, it was a perfect opportunity for someone to further propagate the false connection of racist right-wing extremism to the liberty movement, conservatives and anyone who speaks out against the current administration. You can watch video of this confrontation and read my account here.

My assumption that the media would take signs like this out of context and then falsely label the movement was proved correct, by the recent MSNBC interview of Janeane Garofalo by Keith Olbermann. This is type of despicable, irresponsible behavior by the media is nothing new, and we need to be vigilant in exposing these provocateurs who are used as pawns, marginalizing our movement against tyranny. The realization of the true geopolitical paradigm of control is steadily growing, nullifying the predictive programming of the false left-right political spin by the media’s shill world order.

Finally moving past the false paradigm will enable us to identify the people responsible for the controlled financial collapse, bring them to justice, and begin work on Constitutional based solutions that will return the government back to the people.

Harold Gray
JustGetThere
April 20, 2009

justgetthere.us/blog/archives/The-Shill-World-Ord er-Pushers-Of-The-False-Left-Right-Paradigm.html

FOX news trys to win over the massive movement of loosely affiliated groups numbering in the millions. The "Freedom Movement" thanks to the Ron Paul Revolution and the power of syndicate radio and film is gaining momentum. So much so like synchronized swimmers FOX news pundits spanning radio and tv have done a 180, talking about the constitution, gun rights and Ron Paul non-stop. Glen Beck has gone so far as organizing the 9/12 campaign and tea party tax protests, Anne Coulter likes Ron Paul all of sudden. Freaky twilight zone or hardcore psychological op?

Well now here is the kicker, you’re one click away from becoming the "FOX nation". The www.thefoxnation.com/home website is the most blatant attempt yet at how the Right Wing paradigm is trying to reabsorb all of the elements of conservative society who saw through Bush. The very same "fringe" they were just months ago calling   radical, and deserve to be in camps.

The site layout and their "slanted content" is exactly like infowars.com, how low and parasitic these criminals will stoop to maintain control over the political paradigm is astounding to say the least. Unfortunately to them the true patriots of this country will own the boards on this site and FOXnation.com will simply be a nexus point in the battle. Education for the FOXoholic’s will be swift, and will serve only to dethrone what little if any credibility FOX news ever had.

 Lets have a real Tea Party and dump the affront to liberty that is FOX News and quick.

Truth Alliance Network
April 20, 2009

As President Barack Obama approaches his first 100 days in office, the corporate media prepares a new round of fawning idolatry about the Obama administration’s “achievements,” yet a summary glance at what Obama has actually done in that short time with regard to expanding the Bush police state and the Neo-Con empire is worse than even we predicted.

The day after Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States in November last year, we challenged Obama supporters and the administration itself to follow through on the rhetoric of “change” by starting to dismantle the architecture of the Bush police state and beginning to roll back the unwieldy morass of the American empire. Obama has done neither, and in fact his every action has been about ensuring the Bush police state remains in place, that the people who put it in place are protected from prosecution, and that the empire continues to expand.

We presented Obama and his supporters with a series of issues on which to make progress. While we did not expect Obama to accomplish much in his first few months in office, we at least challenged the new President to take the first steps in reversing eight years of what was a de facto dictatorship and plotting the course for the “change” that was so consistently promised.

We asked the following questions of an Obama presidency;

- Will Obama support Dennis Kucinich’s efforts to bring war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney and others for deceiving the country into a war or will he protect them against such charges like Nancy Pelosi has done?

In April 2008, Obama promised that as President he would ask his Attorney General to “immediately review” potential war crimes that occurred under the Bush White House. Obama or his Attorney General have done no such thing, and every noise they have made suggests that top Neo-Cons will be protected from deceiving America into a war.

Similarly we asked;

- Will Obama bring war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney and others for authorizing torture and will the torture of suspects under U.S. detention, a complete violation of both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, cease under an Obama administration?

As we found out last week, the answer was a resounding NO. Upon the release of the torture memos, Obama’s right-hand man, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, told ABC News that top Bush administration officials “should not be prosecuted either and that’s not the place that we go.” In addition, Obama’s statement that accompanied the release of the torture memos stated, “In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

So no retribution for the people who ordered the torture, and no retribution to the people who carried it out, thus setting the precedent that future administrations are free to order torture - safe in the knowledge that they will face no consequences whatsoever.

- Will Obama withdraw American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan without sending them away again to bomb another broken-backed third world country?

The answer again is a resounding NO. Upon taking office, Obama announced that he would be sending another 17,000, and eventually perhaps as many as 30,000, extra troops to Afghanistan.

Regarding Iraq, after the “withdrawal” of U.S. troops in 19 months, a timescale that has since been put back again, “Mr. Obama plans to leave behind a “residual force” of tens of thousands of troops to continue training Iraqi security forces, hunt down foreign terrorist cells and guard American institutions,” reported the New York Times.

In terms of bombing another broken-backed third world country, Obama has beefed the U.S. military role in Pakistan beyond that pursued by the Bush administration and “expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan,” according to the New York TImes, with an increase in missile attacks by drone aircraft.

Meanwhile, Obama’s war chest demands came to a total of around $800 billion in war funds and subsidiary costs just to cover the rest of 2009.

Does any of this sound like a move towards bringing the troops home and rolling back the American empire, as Obama promised before he was elected?

- Will Obama end the warrantless secret surveillance and phone-taps of American citizens?

You’ll be shocked the learn that the answer was a resounding NO. Earlier this month, “The Obama administration formally adopted the Bush administration’s position that the courts cannot judge the legality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) warrantless wiretapping program,” reported the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration’s cover-up of the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a ’secret’ that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again.”

- Will Obama cease his support for the Bush-administration backed banker bailouts, hated by the majority of Americans, and target the real cause of the problem - the Federal Reserve - or will he continue to give taxpayers’ money to banks who are merely hoarding it all for themselves?

Obama’s zealous push for more bailouts, along with increased power for the Federal Reserve and the implementation of global regulations that will effectively end any notion of a free market was perhaps the defining issue of his first 100 days as President. Obama has vigorously promoted the same financial policies that were introduced by the Bush administration in its final few months.

- Will Obama repeal Patriot Acts I and II as well as reversing Bush’s signing statement and acknowledging the repeal of the John Warner Defense Authorization Act? Will Obama seek to continue the militarization of America and preparations for martial law through Northcom and the secret government or will he dismantle the police state that has been constructed over the last eight years by the Bush administration?

Despite initial rhetoric about reversing Bush’s infamous signing statements, Obama himself stated that he will continue to use signing statements. The Patriot Act and its additions as well as the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, both core planks of the Bush police state, remain firmly in place, with no sign of any reversal.

Regarding militarization through Northcom, weeks after Obama’s election victory it was announced that, “The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.” Militarization of law enforcement and troops being used domestically in preparation for martial law is continuing apace under the Obama administration.

- Will Obama follow through on his rhetorical support for the second amendment or will he seek to ban guns as he did in Illinois?

Despite Obama promising that he was not interested in going after the second amendment before his election, one of his first actions was to appoint the rabidly anti-gun Eric Holder as his Attorney General. Obama has also falsely blamed the drug war crisis in Mexico on American gun shops. The leaked Obama gun ban list would make millions of Americans criminals for owning weapons such certain types of rifles or pistols. Anti-gun legislation has found its way into stimulus and other unrelated bills as pork barrel. The first steps of the Obama administration with regard to gun control have resulted in record firearm and ammunition purchases across the country.

Upon Obama’s election we made a cynical but unfortunately accurate prediction of how the much vaunted promise of “change” would actually manifest itself. The fact is that the “change” began and ended on the day Obama won the election.

- Illegal warrantless surveillance and wiretapping of American citizens will continue under Obama.

- Top Bush administration officials who ordered torture and those that carried it out will be protected from prosecution under Obama.

- Top Bush administration officials who deceived America into a war will be protected from prosecution under Obama.

- The expansion of the military empire through continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and further military incursions into Pakistan will continue and expand under Obama.

- Banker bailouts, reckless spending, inflation of currency through overprinting and global regulations stifling the free market, all of which were initiated under Bush, will continue under Obama.

- The militarization of the United States and the architecture of the police state that was set up under Bush will be preserved and expanded under Obama.

- The attack on the second amendment right to bear arms will continue under Obama.

“The egregious spending will continue, government will balloon in size, American soldiers will be used as cannon fodder for more interventionist wars of the military-industrial complex, U.S. citizens will continue to have their phone calls tapped and their rights curtailed,” we forecast last year, “and the Federal Reserve will continue to rule the financial system with an iron fist while the middle class is squeezed out of existence.”

Who can deny that all those things have only intensified under the Obama administration?

The honeymoon is over - Barack Obama has proven himself to be nothing more than we predicted all along - another stooge for the global banking syndicate that has controlled every U.S. president since JFK, and nothing more than a black face on the new world order - sworn to continue and intensify the same agenda that the Bush-Clinton-Bush dynasty advanced before him.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, April 20, 2009

www.infowars.com/obamas-first-100-days-worse-than -even-we-predicted/

UN torture investigator: Obama has broken International law

rawstory.com/08/blog/2009/04/18/un-torture-invest igator-obama-has-broken-international-law/

Raw Story
Sunday, April 19, 2009

The United Nation’s top torture investigator has suggested it is illegal under International law for President Barack Obama to announce that the United States government has no intention of prosecuting low-level CIA officers who carried out torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration.

President Barack Obama’s release on Thursday of four Bush administration memos sanctioning torture has been widely praised. However, word that government will go so far as to offer a fully-paid legal defense for agents who applied torture techniques to terror war prisoners has triggered loud criticism.

“Like all other contracting states to the UN convention against torture, the US has committed to conduct criminal investigations of torture and to bring all persons to court against whom there is sound evidence,” Manfred Nowak, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture, told Austrian weekly paper Der Standard.

“They are party to the convention and the convention is very, very clear,” Nowak told the paper. “The fact that you carried out an order doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility.”

“In a brief telephone interview with The Associated Press, Manfred Nowak [...] said the United States had committed itself under the U.N. Convention against Torture to make torture a crime and to prosecute those suspected of engaging in it,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Nowak, who said he would soon travel to Washington for meetings with officials, also called for a comprehensive independent investigation into the matter and added it was important to compensate the victims,” the paper continued.

“Nowak said he did not think the president would not go so far as to issue an amnesty law for CIA operatives. Therefore US courts could still try torture suspects,” reported Earth Times.

“President Obama deserves credit for rejecting arguments that official disclosure of these ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques would set a dangerous precedent,” opined the LA Times on Saturday. “But he continues to hedge about whether the CIA might once again be freed from the standards of conduct imposed on interrogators for the military. Indignation over these shameful documents should convince the president that a double standard for interrogation is intolerable.”

rawstory.com/08/blog/2009/04/18/un-torture-invest igator-obama-has-broken-international-law/

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Infowar note: Obama is going to be set up to take the fall just like Bush. Global government will be offered as the solution.

Countless people... will hate the new world order... and will die protesting against it... When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents..." - H.G. Wells, The New World Order (1940)

www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/new_world _order_hgwells.htm

Video Bloggers Fear “You” Being Phased Out Of YouTube

Viral videos and individual user channels being obliterated by bland corporate promos as censorship and regulation make popular video website unrecognizable from a few years ago

A new You Tube video getting a lot of attention highlights concerns that the “You” is being phased out of YouTube, as individual users are sidelined by regulation and censorship in favor of corporate domination of the popular video website, an eventuality that we first warned about years ago.

The clip makes the case that You Tube has all but eliminated the prominence of individual video channels and artificially suppressed their chances of topping the popular ranking charts.

In addition, the ranking charts themselves have been buried on the website and replaced with an assortment of “featured” videos, a combination of bland corporate promos and inane mindless clips, selected by You Tube bosses themselves, while “viral” videos voted on by individual users have been almost completely hidden.

The top ranking and most discussed categories used to appear on the front page of the website, but are now demoted to a sub-tab, the video claims. However, looking at the You Tube website this morning, small links to these categories have now been added to the main page.

The clip points out that ratings have been removed from the “most viewed” page to prevent bland corporate videos from being voted down by users, which does appear to be the case. Inoffensive political videos are also being flagged for deletion while clips that amount to soft porn are allowed.

The point made in the video about censorship is well received. We have had numerous accounts deleted by You Tube with little or no explanation and we receive e mails every week from people who have suffered the same fate. We have also documented how view counts on our videos have been altered to prevent them from going viral.

The video also claims that You Tube is switching over to a new design which will place corporate-sponsored TV shows and movies on the front page while relegating individual users’ videos to a sub-page. This corresponds with the announcement that, “YouTube…. is partnering with major studios to stream full-length movies and TV shows on its site for free,” according to an Associated Press report.

Watch the clip:www.youtube.com/watch

The growth of community websites like You Tube, Facebook and MySpace brings with it the very dangers that we first highlighted years ago when the social networking and video blogging phenomenon was first taking off, that such sites represented a cyber “trojan horse and the media elite’s last gasp effort to reclaim control of the Internet and sink it with a stranglehold of regulation, control and censorship.”

The domination of user-driven community websites owned by large corporations over websites run and owned by individuals has created the perfect opportunity for corporations to swallow Internet traffic and put individual blogs and websites in the shadows.

Websites like You Tube became so successful because they allowed free reign for users to upload whatever videos they liked and put in place ranking systems determined by users themselves and not at the discretion of You Tube bosses. This meant that truly important videos, along with the usual celebrity trash that is par for the course, were allowed to go viral. However, since You Tube was bought by Google and changes were made to the website, You Tube has been dominated by bland paid-for corporate videos while videos popular with the actual community have been relegated to the sidelines.

This was always the danger of investing so much power and interest in community websites owned by large transnational corporations, as we warned years ago.

However, You Tube’s evolution from a community-driven first amendment outpost to a tightly regulated, corporate mouthpiece will only drive users away to smaller video blogging websites as well as a move back towards setting up their own private websites that aren’t subject to the controls of the corporate media oligarchy.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, April 17, 2009

www.prisonplanet.com/video-bloggers-fear-you-bein g-phased-out-of-youtube.html

ACLU fears Obama Administration may destroy evidence at CIA 'black sites'

Greg Fulton
Published: Wednesday April 15, 2009

rawstory.com/news/2008/Detainee_seeks_torture_evi dence_0414.html

The Bush Administration's legacy of torture interrogation may dip further into obscurity if the Obama Administration's vow to decommission overseas detention black sites means evidence of torture would be destroyed.

That's the fear the ACLU is voicing in a little-publicized letter this week to preserve any and all evidence relating to the recently-disclosed CIA black sites where terrorism suspects were held.

Days ago, it was reported that Spanish officials would seek indictments against members of the Bush Administration for allegedly authorizing torture, and a Wall Street Journal article claimed that the current administration "is leaning toward keeping secret some graphic details of tactics allowed in Central Intelligence Agency interrogations."

"Among the details in the still-classified memos is approval for a technique in which a prisoner's head could be struck against a wall as long as the head was being held and the force of the blow was controlled by the interrogator, according to people familiar with the memos," the paper reported. "Another approved tactic was waterboarding, or simulated drowning."

The ACLU letter specifically wants evidence preserved on behalf of a detainee currently held in Guantanamo, and was sent directly to CIA Director Leon Panetta.

"Although we welcome your decision to cease the secret detention and mistreatment of prisoners of the United States Government, we are concerned that the CIA intends to actually destroy the sites—including the buildings and the equipment used to interrogate and torture Mr. Al-Nashiri—before Mr. Al-Nashiri has had the opportunity to fully investigate his conditions of confinement," the civil liberties group wrote in the letter to Panetta, referring to their client, Abd Al-Rahim Hussain Mohammed al-Nashiri, a former detainee. "We write to avoid the destruction of more evidence—namely the actual secret facilities themselves."

The CIA has admitted waterboarding al-Nashiri during this detention, which lasted from 2002 to 2006, while he was funneled to multiple black sites. He has since been held at Guantanamo beginning in September of 2006. The agency later admitted they'd destroyed recordings of his interrogation.

Panetta announced Apr. 9 he would close the secret facilities.

Lawyers say al-Nashiri was housed in three holding sites during four years. The letter requests that all buildings, interrogation cells, prisoner cells, shackles, water boards "and other equipment" be preserved.

Technically, attorneys say the preservation of torture devices gives al-Nashiri due process to discovery evidence under the U.S. Constitution should he be tried domestically.

"Effectively the CIA 'disappeared' him for four years while it tortured him at will and beyond the eyes of the world," states the letter, which is printed in full below.

A native of Saudi Arabia, al-Nashiri was implicated in the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. The Bush Administration labeled him a high-value detainee.

Panetta's office has not commented on the request.

The full text of letter follows.

April 13, 2009

Leon E. Panetta

Director, Central Intelligence Agency

Central Intelligence Agency

Washington, DC 20505

RE: REQUEST TO PRESERVE CIA DETENTION FACILITIES USED TO DETAIN HIGH-VALUE DETAINEES—A.K.A. "BLACK SITES"

Dear Mr. Panetta:

We are counsel for Abd Al-Rahim Hussain Mohammed Al-Nashiri. Mr. Al-Nashiri is currently detained at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. He has been there since September, 2006. From sometime in late 2002 until 2006 he was incarcerated in the secret prison facilities run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Your predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, has admitted that Mr. Al-Nashiri was subjected to water boarding, which is a form of torture, while in the custody of the CIA. According to the publicly released report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which was dated February 14, 2007, and entitled ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody, water boarding was only one of the many forms of torture inflicted on Mr. Al-Nashiri while in the custody of the CIA.

According to that report, while in CIA custody, Mr. Al-Nashiri was also forced to stand with his wrists shackled to a bar in the ceiling for prolonged periods of time—extending to several days— and was threatened with sodomy and with the rape and arrest of his family members. Many of the prisoners the ICRC interviewed did not want their names used in the report. As such, though the ICRC report lists much more cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment, the report is not specific as to what additional treatment was inflicted on Mr. Al-Nashiri while held in the CIA's "black" sites.

Throughout that time he was not able to communicate with his family, a lawyer or anyone. Effectively the CIA "disappeared" him for four years while it tortured him at will and beyond the eyes of the world.

The CIA and other government agencies also admitted to the purposeful destruction of at least ninety-two video tapes of interrogations and observations of prisoners in its black sites, specifically including the destruction of video tapes of water boarding and other observations of Mr. Al-Nashiri.

Had Mr. Al-Nashiri known that the CIA possessed these video tapes and intended to destroy them, he would have demanded their preservation. However, neither he, his lawyers nor the courts learned of the CIA's plan until after the tapes had been destroyed and now they are forever gone.

In light of the destruction of video taped evidence of the torture inflicted upon Mr. Al-Nashiri and the newly released report from the ICRC describing still more horrific tortures, we noted with interest your message to CIA personnel on April 9, 2009, in which you stated that the CIA would be "decommissioning" the CIA secret facilities.

Although we welcome your decision to cease the secret detention and mistreatment of prisoners of the United States Government, we are concerned that the CIA intends to actually destroy the sites—including the buildings and the equipment used to interrogate and torture Mr. Al-Nashiri—before Mr. Al-Nashiri has had the opportunity to fully investigate his conditions of confinement. We write to avoid the destruction of more evidence—namely the actual secret facilities themselves.

Mr. Al-Nashiri was charged in the Military Commission with offenses that carried the penalty of death. Although those charges have now been dismissed, we fully expect the government to prosecute Mr. Al-Nashiri and again charge him with offenses that could carry the death penalty. In fact the government is now actively working to determine in what forum he will be prosecuted.

Regardless of the forum in which Mr. Al-Nashiri is tried, evidence of his conditions of confinement will be relevant in assessing the reliability of any of his statements and any statements of other prisoners similarly held that the government plans to use against him. This evidence will also be highly relevant during any sentencing proceeding. It is exculpatory evidence under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), and he will be entitled to it.

The CIA's secret prison facilities and the inquisition-like treatment meted out to its prisoners were a tragic, immoral and illegal period in our history that we all hope has come to an end. But its effects are enduring, especially on someone like Mr. Al-Nashiri who, according to the ICRC report, lived through the horror chambers of at least three different secret prisons. Those buildings, interrogation cells, prisoner cells, shackles, water boards and other equipment must be preserved until such time as we have an adequate opportunity to document it and a court can determine the relevance and materiality of this evidence. As a criminal defendant, the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the United States Constitution will entitle him to discovery of exculpatory evidence and this is surely exculpatory evidence.

Therefore, we are requesting that you preserve all the secret sites. By this letter you are now on notice that we will be seeking discovery and inspection of this highly relevant evidence in whatever court Mr. Al-Nashiri finds himself. We have already lost the video tapes which would have allowed a jury to see what happened to Mr. Al-Nashiri in those secret prisons. We cannot lose the remaining tangible evidence of the actual prisons themselves and the instruments of torture within them.

Stephen C. Reyes

Lieutenant Commander

JAGC, USN

Christopher Cazares

Captain, USAF

Nancy Holder and Theresa Duncan

Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg & Ives P.A.

Richard Kammen

Gilroy, Kammen

Don't Fall For the Old Divide And Conquer Trick

The powers-that-be are trying to distract us from the looting of our wallets by the big banks by creating a left-versus-right, us-versus-them drama.

You know, the old divide-and-conquer schtick.

Americans from across the political spectrum are furious at the financial elite who have robbed us blind, and their enablers in government.

While at the moment, conservatives are getting more press, those on the left are just as angry. For example, leading progressive Glenn Greenwald wrote an essay entitled "The virtues of public anger and the need for more" cheering the fact that Americans are starting to get in touch with their righteous anger at being ripped off.

Liberals have launched their own version of the tea party protests calling for the big banks to be broken up.

And many leading economists and policy experts have thunderously railed against Obama's continuation of Bush's cover-up-the-truth, too-big-to-fail, stick-it-to-the-taxpayers approach to the economic crisis.

On the conservative side of the aisle, Ron Paul's media coordinator said that the mainstream Republican party has tried to hijack the tea party movement and has "co-opted" its message. He warns against letting the movement be diverted:

It's important the people at the grassroots level stick to our guns and say no when they try to co-opt our message....

Bringing in someone like Gingrich takes away from the message. Newt Gingrich enabled George W. Bush, he enabled the big spending...

And as Michael Rivero has

written:

Beware this "left wing versus right wing" dichotomy. This is an attempt to trick us into arguing with each other instead of uniting against the common cause of our problems...

The only real divide is the one mentioned at the very top of this article. The one percent that owns it all against the 99% of us being driven into poverty. The poor against the oligarchs.

To my friends on both the left and the right, I urge you to remember that folks on the other side of the aisle are not the problem. As honest people on both the left and the right agree,

the realproblems are:

• Lack of honest disclosure about the shenanigans of the financial giants

• Failing to prosecute the criminal actions of those companies and their big wigs

• Failing to break up zombie insolvent companies

• Slipping trillions of dollars into the hands of the richest and most powerful companies under the table

• Gaming the numbers

• And continuing to pursue failed economic policies even after they've been proven counterproductive

If we fall for the divide and conquer strategy, where idiots on both sides try to focus our anger on the "other team" instead of the real culprits, we will get distracted, lose direction, and thus became easy to ignore and control. Then the powers-that-be will be able to continue pickpocketing us for years to come.

See this and this.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/dont-fall-for-old -divide-and-conquer.html

 Funny how the gov/media are trying to counter the tax protest with all of these random reports of "tax evaders" being arrested.

I just got done watching the chimps on 29 News read from their scripted teleprompter.

They reported on the tax protest briefly during their "top" story. I guess at 6 pm they are supposed to give the "Government official" side of the story.Of course it will be more lies & fear tactics. I bet they give the scumbag lords more media time than they gave the protesters. So far they haven't mentioned the speakers,not that I particularly like all of them,well for the exception of Leslie Mood, he is a real Patriot.

Immediately after that report, they reported on how some tax preparer was arrested for tax evasion. I am talking to people I know across country & they are telling me that their local News Stations are following in step.Typical of the controlled media. After all they do read from a script.

Very little real journalism takes place in the corporate media. Local media is even worse because they simply parrot the larger media outlets. It's one big cycle of government propaganda.

The media won't give you the full story of why these tea parties are taking place & who started these types of events...of course the original tea party took place in 1773. I am talking about the modern day tea parties inspired by 1973. Yes folks, today's nationwide tea parties are not the first to take place in the past 2 years. The lame stream media also won't tell you how the freedom movement is being co-opted by the likes of Neo-con Glenn Beck & others. These events started with listeners of the Alex Jones radio show (infowars.com) then were expanded with people who supported Ron Paul. Even 9/11 Truthers got these events kicked off. Ron Paul told Alex Jones on his radio show about how most of his support got started from Alex Jones listeners...I digress. Basically the the media never gives you the full story. Do your own research & educate your neighbors,friends & family. These protest are not just about taxes, it's about a much broader issue. Our whole monetary system is run by a pack of evil criminals hell bent on stealing everything the American people have.

Don't let the fear tactics quell dissent. I am not saying don't pay the IRS mafia, UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO PAY THE PRICE OF LOSING YOUR FREEDOM OR LIFE, but don't let them scare you. Keep speaking out & exposing the criminals in the Federal Government & their banker handlers. If you choose to pull an Ed & Elaine Brown type of tax protest....MORE POWER TO YOU.

infowar

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure"

- Thomas Jefferson

Infowar note:  Malkin just radiates evil. Just take a few seconds & look at the picture of her. Every time I look at her I get the chills. She is one scummy person.

Now that the corporate media, the “conservative” bloggers and news sites have taken notice of the Department of Homeland Security’s leaked document on “rightwing extremism,” denunciations of the government are flying fast and furious. Neocons such as Michelle Malkin and establishment insiders such as Newt Gingrich are outraged. Hypocrisy is on parade.

“I couldn’t believe it was real,” declared Malkin on her blog. According to the darling of Fox News, “the piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives.”

She wastes no time blaming Obama and the Democrats for the report. “In Obama land, there are no coincidences. It is no coincidence that this report echoes Tea Party-bashing left-wing blogs… and demonizes the very Americans who will be protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party,” a reference to the grassroots anti-tax movement started by Libertarians hijacked by Glenn Beck and the Fox News conservatives.

One has to ask, where was Malkin when the government was demonizing and snooping on antiwar activists under the Bush regime? Not a word of indignation issued from Malkin when the FBI and DHS “collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads,” as the New York Times reported in 2003 after Malkin’s neocon fellow travelers in the government illegally invaded Iraq and eventually murdered over a million Iraqis. She did not voice outrage when the government shut down nearly two dozen antiwar, anti-globalization web sites on October 7, 2004.

Malkin did not express righteous indignation over  “Left-Wing Extremism: The Current Threat” prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy in 2001 or  “Leftwing Extremists Likely to Increase Use of Cyber Attacks over the Coming Decade” issued on January 26 of this year.

The same applies to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who tweeted his opposition to the DHS document. “The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired,” Gingrich demanded. He didn’t demand such action when DHS officials spied on the DC Anti-War Network and collected and disseminated information regarding political demonstrations and labeled peaceful advocacy groups and other activists as “extremists.”

No defense of Alex Jones was forthcoming from the ranks of the neocon conservatives when bloggers and commentators on both sides of the false right-left construct attempted to link him to the cop killer Richard Poplawski.

Michael “Savage” Weiner dedicated a large portion of the first hour of his radio program yesterday to an attempt linking the document to the “communist” Obama administration. He didn’t explain why the communist Obama has packed his administration with CFR members and Wall Street bankster operatives, but then Weiner believes the CFR and Bilderberg are irrelevant and are basically bingo gatherings for rich people.

Malkin, Gingrich, Weiner, Hannity and the rest really do not have a problem with government assessments formulated in secret, so long as they are directed against their political enemies. The exposed DHS document is little more than a partisan political cudgel for the neocons and “conservatives” now “out of power,” that is to say on the sidelines until the next insider selected Republican is installed in the White House.

Malkin and crew are not philosophically opposed to a police state running roughshod over the rights of the people, so long as the victims are on the “left.” The DHS document is simply an excuse to bitch and moan about Democrats, who are at the end of the day no different than the Republicans, as demonstrated by the Obama administration’s continuation of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama’s support of wiretapping in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and the seamless transition between administrations in regard to facilitating the globalist plan to crash the global economy and allow the banksters to abscond with the nation’s wealth.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 15, 2009

Another book from the 9/11 Commission that claims the whole thing was a fraud, this time from Senior Counsel John Farmer.

The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America's Defense on 9/11

www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0151013764

Product Description
The story that John Farmer, Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, tells is one of monumental bureaucratic failure encompassing our entire government. Farmer exposes "the story behind the story", as the false congressional testimony given by an array of agencies and individuals, as well as misleading reports in the media culminated in the Commission staff's dawning recognition that the public had been seriously misled about what occurred during the morning of the attacks. What emerges with painful, stunning clarity is that "at some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened." The implications of this are profound. And Farmer argues that these lies have prevented real and necessary changes that would make our nation more secure and responsive to subsequent threats and catastrophes--domestic, man-made and natural. Farmer pulls no punches in drawing these conclusions, or making explicit what will have to change to make our nation safe. There is a dispassionate beauty in Farmer's writing and the way in which he allows the facts of this story to unfold. He takes the readers through these terrifying events and revelations with calm, impartial and utterly compelling relentlessness. "The Ground Truth" is the definitive account of all the needs to happen following the tragedy of September 11th.

About the Author
John Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, where his areas of responsibility included assessing the national response to the terrorist attacks and evaluating the current state of national preparedness for terrorist attacks and natural disasters, he also served as attorney general of New Jersey (1999-2002), as chief counsel to Governor Whitman, and as a federal prosecutor. He recently served as a subject matter/rule of law expert on security to the special envoy for Middle East regional security. He is currently a partner of a New Jersey law form and an adjunct professor of national security law at Rutgers University Law School. His editorials and articles have appeared in "The New York Times" and elsewhere.

--------------------------------------------

9/11 Commission Counsel: Government Agreed to Lie About 9/11

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, April 14, 2009

New book from man tasked by government to help investigate attacks unveils how “official story is almost entirely untrue”

The senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission - John Farmer - says that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11, echoing the assertions of fellow 9/11 Commission members who concluded that the Pentagon were engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack.

Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States), and is also a former New Jersey Attorney General.

Farmer’s book about his experiences working for the Commission is entitled The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11, and is set to be released in September.

The book unveils how “the public had been seriously misled about what occurred during the morning of the attacks,” and Farmer himself states that “at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.”

Only the very naive would dispute that an agreement not to tell the truth is an agreement to lie. Farmer’s contention is that the government agreed to create a phony official version of events to cover-up the real story behind 9/11.

The publisher of the book, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, states that, “Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security.”

In August 2006, the Washington Post reported, “Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.”

The report revealed how the 10-member commission deeply suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”

John Farmer

Farmer himself is quoted in the Post article, stating, “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.”

As we also reported in August 2006, released portions of NORAD tapes from 9/11, which were featured in a Vanity Fair article, do little to answer skeptic’s questions about the impotence of U.S. air defenses on 9/11 and if anything only increase focus on the incompatibility of the official version of events with what is actually known to have taken place on that day.

Make no mistake, Farmer is not saying that 9/11 was an inside job, however, Farmer’s testimony, along with that of his fellow 9/11 Commission members, conclusively demonstrates that, whatever really happened on 9/11, the official story as told to the public on the day and that which remains the authorities’ version of events today, is a lie - according to the very people who were tasked by the government to investigate it. This is a fact that no debunker or government apologist can ever legitimately deny.

You Tube
April 13, 2009

www.youtube.com/watch

The mainstream U.S. media isn’t helping in the search for truth, says Luke Rudkowski from the (United States) social justice movement ‘We Are Change’ in an interview with Russia Today.

www.wearechange.org/

&

www.infowars.com/

Jones Report | April 13, 2009

Reporters from INFOWARS.COM were harassed and threatened with arrest in downtown Kansas City, Missouri after filming the local branch of the private Federal Reserve building.

Security guards working for the bank approached the reporters at a city park that houses the National WWI memorial and demanded that they provide their names and disclose why they were filming the building.

After Aaron Dykes refused to provide his full name, he was told to leave public property immediately or face arrest because the bank was concerned about what he was filming-- despite the fact that the female security guard repeatedly admitted he had done nothing wrong. In the face of Free Speech under the First Amendment, as well as common sense, the other reporter, Rob Jacobson was also told to leave despite complying with the request to provide his name.

"Officer Booth", the female private security guard for the Federal Reserve, dared to pronounce that he was "guilty by association."

When this reason was challenged, the stupefied "Officer Collins" told reporters that they were not to ask anymore questions and should in fact leave immediately. What jurisdiction they had-- if any-- is unclear, as the cameramen were approached on city property.

In some respects, this is hardly surprising in the same state that issued the secret MIAC report to police-- instructing them to watch for "potential terrorists" who might be identified by their support for Ron Paul, bumper stickers of the USA flag or who hold sentiments against the Federal Reserve bank.

The Federal Reserve-- who have branches at some 38 locations across the country-- have repeatedly trampled on the rights of free speech and attempted to challenge anyone daring to film their building. It is clear they regard any press as a threat.

It happened to an unaffiliated cameraman outside the Washington D.C. location who was told no filming of any 'federal' buildings was allowed under any circumstances unless special clearance was given by the Fed's press office.

We Are Change founder Luke Rudkowski was also challenged by a security officer outside of the Federal Reserve's New York location who demanded to see what had been filmed under threat of arrest (as documented in his activist film 'Dedicated').

Shockingly, it has also been revealed that military intelligence spied on peaceful demonstrators who met simultaneously at "End the Fed" rallies across the country, including Alex Jones & Wayne Paul, brother of Congressman Ron Paul.

The stifling of free speech and the attempt to intimidate reporters and legitimate protesters is despicable.

The outrage over the privately owned bank has grown as more & more members of the public have realized that this entity-- which has been given the power to print our money-- is not a part of the U.S. government but a deception organization hiding behind the name "Federal."

Rep. Ron Paul, among others, has led the effort to audit this unaccountable bank and end its ability to inflate the money supply, and ultimately to target its value.

Its chairman Ben Bernanke has refused to tell Congress who it has lent money to under the TARP bailout plan, and in what amount-- despite its relevance to dealing with the current financial crisis.

The compounding acts of secrecy-- at the ground level and in the halls of the U.S. government-- should sound alarm bells for the sleeping American people that this bank must no longer control the economic policies of this nation.

It’s not enough the disinfo operative Glenn Beck and the neocons posing as Republicans led by Fox News are attempting to undermine grassroots efforts to undermine and render politically correct — for milquetoast Republicans — the grassroots tea party movement. Now the sinister organization ACORN, funded to the hilt by the globalist George Soros and the one-world foundations, has piled on.

“Some believe ACORN, which has been under scrutiny for accusations of voter fraud, is preparing to crash some of the tea parties. But ACORN says it is only helping to organize dozens of rallies on the same day in support of President Obama’s first budget,” reports Fox News.

ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring pretends he lives in a vacuum where there is no corporate media. “This is the first we’ve heard of these so-called ‘tea parties.’ And, frankly, a bunch of small get-togethers by fringe conservative activists dedicated to simply saying ‘no’ is of little interest to us…. The idea that ACORN is out to disrupt these meet-ups of fringe activists is yet another conservative fantasy.”

On April 7, however, Jeff Poor, writing for the Business & Media Institute, mentioned Fox’s Neil Cavuto’s report on the plan to disrupt tea parties around the country. “Cavuto reported that the Tax Day tea party protests on April 15 will be ‘infiltrated’ by their political opponents and led by left-wing activist organizations. He specifically named Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN),” Poor wrote.

Arianna Huffington has set up a website for so-called citizen journalists to infiltrate the protests, according to Poor. Huffington is also connected to the one-worlder Soros through his Democrat “Shadow Party,” according to the neocon duo of David Horowitz and Richard Poe (Horowitz and Poe are not necessarily opposed to big money networks and political operatives, so long as the networks are comprised of neocons and big war machine government Republicans).

Above:Arianna Huffington will help the Republicans make the tea bag movement a circus sideshow.

“The Huffington Post wants to have citizen journalists at as many of these events as possible,” writes Arthur Delaney for Huffpo.

It is reported followers of the wannabe CIA employee and Democrat operative Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and his Daily Kos crew will also “report” on (disrupt) tea parties around the country. Zuniga posted the following on his website on April 7 in yet another underhanded attempt to link the Fox News faux conservatives (neocons) to the murder of three cops in Pittsburgh:

Dear Conservatives,

If having hilarious tea bagging parties keeps you guys from shooting people up, then I heartily endorse them.

Hugs and kisses,

kos

It is unfortunate the tea party movement was hijacked by neocon Republicans and now serves as a punching bag instead of an anti-tax tea bag for the foundation liberals and the globalist minions of Soros. Fox News, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich and the statist, one-worlder Republicans — who have no problem with government and the bankster debt expanding forever, so long as neocons are running the show — have effectively disarmed a movement originally created by the Libertarian Party of Illinois in 2008.

“Never mind that the original point of the Tea Parties, so far as I can tell, was completely libertarian in nature and was to be as much a protest of the Republicans as it was of the Democrats,” writes Mark Thompson. “Movement conservatives saw an opportunity to co-opt it — and they did.”

Thompson explains how Republicans have loaded up the tea party movement with their pet causes — “gay marriage, affirmative action programs in government hiring policies, and just about everything else that movement conservatives oppose even more vehemently now that they’ve been beaten — badly — in consecutive national elections.”

In fact, the Fox News and the Republican leadership have subverted the tea party movement because it represents an effective grassroots way to organize against the corporatist and bankster plan to increase the size of government and load-up on the federal debt.

Of course, the globalist bankers in control of both the Democrat and Republican parties are not about to let that happen.

On April 15, as demonstrations kick off around the country with Republicans in control and steering the show — and the ACORN, Kos, and Huffpo Democrats in opposition — the tea party movement will be reduced to an absurd and partisan politics circus sideshow of the kind the corporate media loves.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 14, 2009

www.infowars.com/republicans-and-democrats-determ ined-to-turn-tea-parties-into-circus-sideshow/

In the wake of the MIAC report and the Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment, another document issued by the Department of Homeland Security “for official use only” covering so-called “rightwing extremism” has surfaced. The document warns federal and local officials to expect “terrorism” in response to planned firearm restrictions and other points covered below.

Alex Jones called the numbers listed on the document and validated its authenticity. He contacted the “watch captain” at the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Coordinating Center who confirmed the product number on the document as legitimate but would not comment further. A call to the FBI went unanswered.

The following points covered in the document are of particular concern:

Gun Sales

According to the DHS and FBI, local law enforcement’s primary concern should be the high volume of gun and ammunitions purchases over the last few months. The document equates Americans who stockpile ammunition to “rightwing terrorists.” Moreover, stockpiling (merely purchasing) ammunition is an indication of involvement in “paramilitary training exercises” and potential terrorist activity.

According to the Irish Times, the “stockpiling” of ammunition and increased firearm sales are due to the fear Obama will impose new gun laws and other restrictions. “Gun-shop owners and the National Rifle Association (NRA) say the surge is driven by worries that President Obama is planning to ban many types of firearms and that the deepening economic crisis will fuel a crime wave.”

If we are to believe the DHS and the FBI, these Americans, numbering in the millions, are violence prone terrorists and a threat to local law enforcement. In addition, as noted below, concerns about crime due to a worsening economy are paranoid fantasies exploited by terrorists

Job Losses and the Economy

The document states that job losses, home foreclosures, and the collapsing economy are “perceived” by rightwing terrorists and exploited by them to “draw in new recruits” and further radicalize “those already subscribing to extremist beliefs.” According to the document, the economic crisis is a perception without a foundation in reality, merely an exaggerated device used by terrorists.

In other words, if you complain about the faltering economy reported upon numerous times a day by the corporate media you are a rightwing extremist and a terrorist who may resort to violence and threaten local law enforcement, especially if you support the Second Amendment, own firearms, and “stockpile” (purchase) ammunition.

Illegal Immigration

Like the economic crisis, illegal immigration is at best a perception, not reality, and the rightwing terrorists have exploited this political issue as a racist “call to action” and recruitment tool. The DHS document claims the extremists have exploited the First Amendment on this issue in order to foment violence against illegal immigrants and those who support amnesty and other schemes to legalize illegal immigration. The DHS document cites several examples supposedly linked to anti-immigrant violence committed by “militia members” and mentions a “machinegun attack on Hispanics.”

Stated Purpose of the Document

Dated April 7, 2009, the “scope” of the document is as follows:

This product is one of a series of intelligence assessments published by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch to facilitate a greater understanding of the phenomenon of violent radicalization in the United States. The information is provided to federal, state, local, and tribal counterterrorism and law enforcement officials so they may effectively deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks against the United States. Federal efforts to influence domestic public opinion must be conducted in an overt and transparent manner, clearly identifying United States Government sponsorship.

The DHS document — with the unwieldy title  “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” — contains the following warning:

LAW ENFORCEMENT INFORMATION NOTICE: This product contains Law Enforcement Sensitive (LES) information. No portion of the LES information should be released to the media, the general public, or over non-secure Internet servers. Release of this information could adversely affect or jeopardize investigative activities.

Warning: This document is UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY (U//FOUO). It contains information that may be exempt from public release under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552). It is to be controlled, stored, handled, transmitted, distributed, and disposed of in accordance with DHS policy relating to FOUO information and is not to be released to the public, the media, or other personnel who do not have a valid need-to-know without prior approval of an authorized DHS official. State and local homeland security officials may share this document with authorized security personnel without further approval from DHS.

The DHS wanted the document to remain secret but it was leaked, probably by “authorized security personnel” in local law enforcement (as was the case with the MIAC document produced by the Missouri State Police). Information in the document was “provided to federal, state, local, and tribal counterterrorism and law enforcement officials so they may effectively deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks against the United States.”

The DHS document — produced in coordination with the FBI — begins by stating it is “one of a series of intelligence assessments published by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch to facilitate a greater understanding of the phenomenon of violent radicalization in the United States” (it is interesting to note the phrase “violent radicalization” is the same one used in H.R. 1955, entitled the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″).

Key Findings

In “Key Findings,” the DHS document states that the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no “no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues [specifically gun control]. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.”

The above text points to a footnote on the page dividing “rightwing terrorists” into two categories — “adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

It is significant the DHS (and FBI) categorize opposition to the government as terrorism. The FBI in particular has labeled various “rightwing” movements as extremist for more than a decade, so this is nothing new or revelatory.

The authors of the document drag out all of the old “rightwing” bugaboos, most notably the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In addition, they mention the “[p]roposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans” resulting in recruiting new members and culminating in the “planning and training for violence against the government.”

In order to underscore this assertion, the authors note the “high volume of purchases and stockpiling of weapons and ammunition by rightwing extremists in anticipation of restrictions and bans in some parts of the country continue to be a primary concern to law enforcement.” In fact, as noted above, the “high volume of purchases,” as the media has reported, is a reaction on the part of Americans in general regardless of ideological persuasion. It is a common sense reaction to the documented fact president Obama is opposed to firearms ownership, even though he claims to support the Second Amendment.

The DHS I&A attributes the purported “resurgence in rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalization activity” to economic factors and the election of Barack Obama. “Despite similarities to the climate of the 1990s [a reference to the militia movement exaggerated by government and corporate media], the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years. In addition, the historical election of an African American president and the prospect of policy changes [i.e., gun registration leading to eventual confiscation] are proving to be a driving force for rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalization.”

The tone of the document indicates that the government plans to impose restrictions on the ownership of firearms. In addition, the document warns local law enforcement that “rightwing terrorists” will violently resist any attempt to register or confiscate guns.

Link to Pittsburgh Cop Killer

In order to stress the point, the authors cite as an example the murder of three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:

The alleged gunman’s reaction reportedly was influenced by his racist ideology and belief in antigovernment conspiracy theories related to gun confiscations, citizen detention camps, and a Jewish-controlled “one world government.”

Following this event, the liberal noise machine, funded in large part by the Soros and Ford foundations, expended an extraordinary amount of energy attempting to link the murders to Fox News and Alex Jones. Jones was singled out by the Anti-Defamation League (Shooter In Pittsburgh Cop Killings Held Strongly Anti-Semitic And Racist Beliefs, April 6, 2009) as having influenced the alleged killer, Richard Poplawski, who frequented the white supremacist website hosted by Stormfront. “According to ADL, Poplawski also frequented ‘Infowars,’ the Web site of the right-wing conspiracy radio talk-show host Alex Jones, where he shared links to its stories with others and sometimes posted his own messages to the site,” the ADL wrote in the above linked press release.

Similarity to SPLC and ADL Talking Points

According to the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, the MIAC documents were heavily influenced by “faulty and politicized research issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti Defamation League (ADL).”

The Southern Poverty Law Center was cited as a research source for the ‘Missouri Documents’. Furthermore, the attempt of these documents to cast suspicion of violent and life threatening behavior on millions of Americans who are concerned about these issues [unemployment, taxes, illegal immigration, gangs, border security, abortion, high costs of living, gun restrictions, FEMA, the IRS, The Federal Reserve, and the North American Union/SPP/North American Community] is consistent with the regularly released political materials of both the SPLC and ADL.

The DHS’ “Extremism and Radicalization Branch” participated in the “Global Summit on Internet Hate Speech” organized by the International Network Against Cyber-Hate and the Anti-Defamation League and held November 17-18, 2008, in Washington, DC. Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, was a key speaker at the event.

The DHS document claims today’s “rightwing terrorists” present more of a threat than those of the earlier period:

Unlike the earlier period, the advent of the Internet and other informationage technologies since the 1990s has given domestic extremists greater access to information related to bomb-making, weapons training, and tactics, as well as targeting of individuals, organizations, and facilities, potentially making extremist individuals and groups more dangerous and the consequences of their violence more severe. New technologies also permit domestic extremists to send and receive encrypted communications and to network with other extremists throughout the country and abroad, making it much more difficult for law enforcement to deter, prevent, or preempt a violent extremist attack.

The document makes it clear the DHS and FBI consider websites such as Infowars and Prison Planet to be vehicles for “potentially making extremist individuals and groups more dangerous and the consequences of their violence more severe.” (Note: Alex Jones has repeatedly warned his listeners against violence.)

Recall a House Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing on “Terrorism and the Internet” held in November, 2007, and broadcast on C-Span, that featured a panel of “experts,” including representatives formerly of the RAND Corporation and the Simon Wiesenthal Center who presented 9/11 truth websites sites alongside sites that celebrate the attacks and offer training in terrorist tactics. “The hearing was chaired by Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, and ranking Republican, Rep. Dave Reichert. It was supposed to focus on the use of the internet by ‘home grown terrorist recruiters’ yet in a shocking move it blatantly related the 9/11 truth movement with so called radical ‘jihadists,’” Paul Joseph and Steve Watson wrote at the time.

Alleged “falsehoods” and “conspiracy theories,” according to RAND corporation director Bruce Hoffman, “have now become so ubiquitous and so pervasive that they are believed, so you have almost a parallel truth, and it has become a very effective tool for recruiting people.”

  Rep. Jane Harman sponsored the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007.

As Alex Jones has noted numerous times on his radio show, the FBI and military intelligence have taken a keen interest in the comment sections on Infowars and Prison Planet. In the last week and a half the liberal noise machine and to a lesser degree the corporate media have kicked into overdrive in an attempt to link Jones and his websites to a deluded and violent individual. It should not be considered a coincidence the DHS document considers the murders in Pittsburgh an indication of emerging “rightwing terrorist” violence, specifically in response to “proposed” gun laws now in the works, as the document indicates.

Conclusion

The document is designed primarily to radicalize local law enforcement and convince individual police officers that citizens opposed to violations of the Second Amendment, draconian gun legislation (including registration and ammunition tracking schemes) and illegal immigration are terrorists capable of committing acts of violence against them. It is a cynical effort to increase the tension between police and the community at large, especially members of the community that exercise the Second Amendment and oppose open border policies.

In addition, the document equates opposition to the policies of Barack Obama to racism. Opposition to "a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use" is characterized as exploiting "racial and political prejudices."

Obviously, the document is part of a larger campaign by the government to circumvent legitimate political activism and characterize such activity as the behavior of a violent minority of terrorists. It is noteworthy that several issues of concern to our rulers — namely firearm possession and the effort to flood the country with lower paid workers and thus undermine the middle class — are highlighted in this until now secret and restricted document.

Left: Video (Audio) Master Mariner Captain Kelly Sweeney talks about the Somali pirate situation 4/10/09

www.maritimeheadhunters.com/

February 4, 2009

www.sfbayview.com/2009/you-are-being-lied-to-abou t-pirates/

You are being lied to about pirates

by Johann Hari

Somali pirate “ships” are small, but the ships they seize are huge. They held one gigantic tanker for months until ransom was paid.

 

 

 

 

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.

But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t?

In his book “Villains of All Nations,” the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the cat o’ nine tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century.”

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live.”

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its 9 million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no cleanup, no compensation and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas.

The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

This is the context in which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia - and it’s not hard to see why.

In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.” William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Program supplies. But the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”

One of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.”

During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coast guard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about “evil.” If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gunboats to root out Somalia’s criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarized by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.”

Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/ Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the U.S., and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. To contact him, email johann@johannhari.com or visit his website at JohannHari.com. This column previously appeared in the Independent and Huffington Post, where the following postscript was added:

Postscript: Some commentators seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn’t this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia’s coastline is vast, stretching 3,300km (over 2,000 miles). Imagine how easy it would be - without any coast guard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals and stirred-up piracy. There’s no contradiction.

Ron Paul: Neoconservatives backing Obama’s foreign policy

Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
Thursday, April 9, 2009

In a little noticed editorial yesterday, Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul fired a shot across the bow of every progressive activist in the U.S., a great many of whom are supporters of President Barack Obama.

Oh, you didn’t hear about this? I couldn’t be any less surprised.

Published to the Campaign for Liberty Web site, the editorial takes up a favored issue for liberty-leaning Republicans: the Budget. Congressman Paul’s message on money is quite unlike any of his Republican colleagues and quite the opposite of the Obama administration’s. Naturally, he predicts unprecedented spending will trigger dire consequences.

But that’s nothing exactly new from Paul, per se. What caught my eye was paragraph three, which reads:

____________________________________

Some may notice that the neo-conservatives who masterminded the policy of global interventions are not complaining about the level of military and foreign spending. This is because rather than drawing down our costly interventions, Obama is largely staying the course on these issues. In fact, this week a group of leading neoconservatives met to discuss how best to support the President on foreign policy! I am disappointed and concerned that, in spite of a change in leadership, we will remain the policeman of the world, placing ourselves at grave danger in many ways.

___________________________

Paul, who has always struck me as one of the few genuine, honest politicians out there, has a gigantic following. In a sense, he represents many, many more people than just members of his district. He’s like the Republican Dennis Kucinich, calling for a return to principles and his party’s original grand ideas.

And he’s got a lot of friends on the Left: people who otherwise fundamentally disagree with Libertarian philosophies of governing, but nonetheless recognize the obvious truths littered throughout his every speech. For crying out loud, HBO’s most favored liberal, none other than Bill Maher, absolutely loves the guy. And from what I’ve gathered in my time as an associate editor for Raw Story, so do many of you guys.

Now, it’s your turn to sound off. I want to hear it from you on two points …

1.) Does Obama really represent change? And… 2.) Is Ron Paul right?

Share comments here: rawstory.com/blog/2009/04/ron-paul-neoconservativ es-backing-obamas-foreign-policy/

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Obama’s White House insists the Anointed One did not bow and scrape before the decrepit King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, even though the disgusting instance of mandatory deference was captured on video. “It wasn’t a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he’s taller than King Abdullah,” insisted an Obama aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Video: www.youtube.com/watch

The Washington Times got it right even if the rest of the fawning corporate media did not.

"Obama preformed a “shocking display of fealty to a foreign potentate” and said it violated centuries of American tradition of not deferring to royalty.

Link to Washington Times Article: www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/07/barack-t akes-a-bow/

In Saudi Arabia the media understands Obama did indeed bow in the presence of King Abdullah and appreciates the deference. “Obama wished to demonstrate his respect and appreciation of the personality of King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, who has made one of the most important calls in the modern era, namely the call for inter-faith and inter-cultural dialogue to defuse the hatred, conflict and wars,” wrote the columnist, Muhammah Diyab.

Link to Diyab's article: www.asharq-e.com/news.asp

Obama also groveled before the two British royal creatures and even allowed the former Nazi youth member Prince Philip to sarcastically ask if Obama could tell the difference between various European leaders.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 8, 2009

www.prisonplanet.com/obama-lies-about-bow-to-king -abdullah.html

Also check out this article:First Black President Grovels To Virulently Racist Royal Family Posted Here:people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/Infowar/43252#co mments

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Obama to push for estimated 20 million illegal immigrants who have already broken the law to be legalized, while federal fusion centers across the country label the most patriotic Americans as terrorists and criminals

While federal agencies across the country write dossiers on how some of the most patriotic people in America are terrorists and criminals, the Obama administration is set to embark on a push to legalize the estimated 20 million immigrants who have already broken the law by entering the country illegally.

The New York Times reports today that Obama is set to launch “a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants”. The real number of illegal immigrants in America is estimated at around the 20 million mark.

But forgive us for pointing out that illegal immigrants, whether they are white, black, brown, or pink with polka dots, are criminals who have broken the law by entering the country illegally - no doubt that Obama kool-aid drinking liberal blogs will now claim that the mere mention of such a thought crime means we are virulently racist and have legions of cop-killing followers.

Indeed, it’s perfectly reasonable for the government to reward criminals who have already broken the laws of the land while training police forces across the nation that American citizens, of whatever race or color, are a threat to society because they have a political bumper sticker, support a third party candidate or are somewhat knowledgeable about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The infamous MIAC report has now been superceded by a new document, The 2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment, produced by the Virginia Fusion Center.

The report smears anyone who is “anti-government,” “anti-abortion,” as potential terrorists, equates people who enjoy rifle shooting practice and hunting with terrorists, and demonizes the use of the Internet and websites like You Tube, Fark and Slashdot as terrorist tools. The use of “e-protests” is also talked about in the context of terrorism.

The document also discusses “special interest groups” who “incorporate a political message” in its section about domestic terrorists, which could be defined as any mildly political organization whatsoever. Despite the report listing political groups that it admits do not espouse violence nor have ever engaged in violence, it defines being “confrontational during demonstrations” within the context of domestic terrorism.

The report also identifies people who identify themselves as “sovereign citizens” and carry documents proclaiming their status as sovereign citizens, as domestic terrorists and links them with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

SInce the Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment doesn’t stretch as far as to equate a sitting member of Congress with terrorists, it might not go the same way as the MIAC report, where it should, and end up in the trash can.

However, it’s yet another clear indication that the government is completely out of control and desperate to send a chill down the spine of millions more Americans who are thinking of joining the burgeoning liberty movement, by smearing members of peaceable political movements as criminals and potentially violent terrorists, while equating them with racist extremists.

Meanwhile, the tens of millions of real criminals who have already broken the law by entering the country illegally are not even mentioned in the “Threat Assessment” as being a threat - and are in fact set to be rewarded by the government with legal status and all the privileges that go with it.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, April 9, 2009

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Glenn Beck’s Lame Attempt to “Debunk” FEMA Camps

Disinfo operative Glenn Beck’s shabby and comical attempt to “debunk” FEMA camps was theater of the absurd at its most revealing. Recall Beck a few weeks ago trying to bait us with a promise to investigate the camps. He came off as alarmed over the prospect of internment camps and this set the hook. Stay tuned, folks, he teased, we’ll get to the bottom of this.

Video Link: (Glenn Beck & Popular Mechanics attempt to debunk FEMA Camps): www.youtube.com/watch

Glenn Beck, the seasoned operative, never intended a serious exposé. He planned to make those of us who know FEMA camps exist look like fools and churls. In order to do this he enlisted the retread James Meigs, editor-in-chief of the washed-up Hearst publication, Popular Mechanics. Back in 2005, Meigs spearheaded an effort to debunk the 9/11 truth movement with a Popular Mechanic cover story. Meigs and his crew of supposed debunkers approached the science of 9/11 very selectively and were more interested in ad hominem attacks leveled against researchers. Meigs concluded his diatribe by stating that “those who peddle fantasies that this country encouraged, permitted or actually carried out the attacks are libeling the truth — and disgracing the memories of the thousands who died that day.”

Meigs turned his “fact checking” (through omission) into a book — Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts. It was published by Hearst, the media corporation famous for its association with the expression “yellow journalism.” Hearst told the illustrationist Frederic Remington during the Spanish-American War: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Nothing much as changed since 1895.

In the video here, Beck says Meigs heads up the “independent group” he assigned the task of debunking the conspiracy nuts who believe in the existence of FEMA camps. As evidence the nutters are way out in left field, Meigs dissects a widely discredited video of a Beech Grove, Indiana, Amtrak facility filmed by the Indianapolis attorney Linda Thompson.

Video link: (Glenn Beck attempts to debunk FEMA Camps)www.youtube.com/watch

You may recall Thompson’s earlier video about the government siege and subsequent incineration of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. She made a series of absurd claims about the siege, for instance insisting the BATF and FBI used flame throwers mounted on tanks against the Davidians. It didn’t take long for Soldier of Fortune Magazine to discredit Thompson’s accusations. She mysteriously vanished into the ether after people began asking if she might be a government operative.

Meigs and Beck say nothing about this. “This footage, which appears in multiple videos on YouTube, is from a ‘documentary’ filmed 15 years ago,” explains Beck’s Fox News web page. “Yet today, it’s been viewed nearly 1.5 million times online. The woman who made the video, Linda Thompson, was one of the pioneers of the militia movement in the United States — except she was so extreme, she embarrassed even her fellow militants. Far from a death camp, Beech Grove is the primary maintenance facility for Amtrak’s long-distance trains, overhauling and repairing approximately 700 passenger cars a year. Company officials, who’ve heard these theories for years, welcomed our film crew, and the superintendent of the facility showed us anything we wanted to see.”

Beck does not bother to mention the fact serious FEMA camp researchers discarded the video years ago. Meigs and Beck are more interested in linking the video to Thompson and the “militia movement” (created as a scary bogeyman by the corporate media in the 1990s) and connecting that up with the ugly specter of the Timothy McVeigh — the same McVeigh photographed at Camp Grafton, North Dakota (the base specializes in demolitions training) in 1993, a mere 18 months before the Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI insisted he was not in the military at the time.

In the second installment of this “definitive debunking,” Beck and his sidekick Meigs show us a satellite photo of a real concentration camp the conspiracy theorists supposedly claim is a FEMA camp. As Alex Jones called it when the photo was used as a teaser at the close of the first installment the previous evening, the camp is located in North Korea (because only communists operate concentration camps, never mind the forcible relocation and internment of approximately 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans by Roosevelt during World War 2, a criminal act lavishly defended by the neocon darling Michelle Malkin, a regular on Fox News).

After “debunking” Camp Grayling, Michigan, where there is a mock camp complete with barbed wire and watch towers for National Guard training, Beck and Meigs begin talking about how the conspiracy theorists are out of touch with reality and refuse to accept the obvious truth there are no camps and our loving government would never do such a thing, not like the evil communists in North Korea (or the evil mullahs in Iran, although our intrepid investigators do not mention the latter).

As expected, Beck’s long awaited “debunking” does not bother to cover more substantial territory and instead relies on old discredited video footage and photos that look good on television.

Beck and his protégé completely ignore solid and irrefutable evidence that does not look good on television and might prompt bored viewers to switch over to the Comedy Channel or actually turn off the idiot tube and read a book.

No mention of the contract awarded in January of 2006 to Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, to build “temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,” (emphasis added) according to Fox News.

It was said Rex-84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, was also about rounding up and detaining illegal immigrants. “The Rex 84 Program was originally established on the reasoning that if a ‘mass exodus’ of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA,” notes