FBI & BUSH ADMINISTRATION SUED OVER ANTHRAX DOCUMENTS

http://www.judicialwatch.org/1967.shtml

FBI & BUSH ADMINISTRATION SUED OVER ANTHRAX DOCUMENTS

Judicial Watch Wants to Know Why White House Went on Cipro Beginning September 11th

What Was Known and When?

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that it has filed lawsuits against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), the Center for Disease Control (“CDC”), the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (“USAMRIID”) and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) for those agencies’ failures to produce documents concerning the terrorist anthrax attacks of October 2001, under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”).

Judicial Watch has additional anthrax-related FOIA requests pending with the White House and other government agencies that will see legal action in the next two weeks.

Judicial Watch represents hundreds of postal workers from the Brentwood Postal Facility in Washington, DC. Until the Brentwood facility was finally condemned by the CDC, Brentwood postal workers handled all of the mail for Washington, DC, including the “official mail” that contained the anthrax-laden envelopes addressed to Senators Daschle and Leahy. While Capitol Hill workers received prompt medical care, Brentwood postal workers were ordered by USPS officials to continue working in the contaminated facility. Two Brentwood workers died from inhalation anthrax, and dozens more are suffering from a variety of ailments related to the anthrax attacks. A variety of legal actions are being planned for the disparate treatment and reckless endangerment the Brentwood postal workers faced.

In October 2001, press reports revealed that White House staff had been on a regimen of the powerful antibiotic Cipro since the September 11th terrorist attacks. Judicial Watch is aggressively pursuing the disclosure of the facts and the decision for White House staff, and President Bush as well, to begin taking Cipro nearly a month before anthrax was detected on Capitol Hill.

“The American people deserve a full accounting from the Bush administration, the FBI , and other agencies concerning the anthrax attacks. The FBI’s investigation seems to have dead-ended, and frankly, that is not very reassuring given their performance with the September 11th hijackers,” stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman. “One doesn’t simply start taking a powerful antibiotic for no good reason. The American people are entitled to know what the White House staffers knew nine months ago, “ he added.

Iraq: Under the former “Dictatorship”

http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2008/03/under-former-dictatorship.html

Painting: Iraqi female artist, Sundus Abdel Hadi – The Battle for Sumer, 2004

I will let you in on a secret that other Iraqi bloggers consumed with false pride and desperately attempting to save face will not dare admit to you publicly…

Namely, that they all secretly long for the Iraq under the former “Dictatorship”…

Five years on, and you can read it in between their lines…a slip of the tongue here, an allusion there, a sigh stiffled and quickly hid somewhere…

But as you have grown accustomed to by now, I shall not make you read between the lines, I will give it to you out loud, and you need not go searching for hidden meanings with me…

But before I do so, I need to tell you something else but still very related.

For the past 24 hours, I have been doing nothing but perusing websites, news articles, videos, blogs…reading on the “5th Anniversary” of the Invasion and Occupation of my country.

I have to admit that almost all of the pieces I read, ranged from very bad to despicably grotesque…

The Independent with its Cockburn’s gross failures, with its reminiscing Fisk, nostalgic for the days of Churchill, to Pepe Escobar who has embraced Iranian Shi’ism, to the nauseating piece by Jim Lobe from antiwar.com, to Al Jazeerah English website with its lukewarm to frankly disgusting analysis and commentary…

I perused them all…

They were all singing the same refrain that I have gotten so used to by now — under the former “Dictatorship” and the adjectives would follow – repressive, tyrannical, oppressive…etcetera….

Of course the intelligent reader, and as always, am assuming that you are, will understand that when a writer juxtaposes verbal images of the before and after in one and the same paragraph, what he/she is telling you is — it was bad then and it is bad now…maybe a little worse but still, it was bad then…

The reader is left with an unconscious message — maybe, if the occupation was not so botched up, it would have turned to be a good thing after all–It did get rid of the former “Dictatorship.”

But the enlightened reader will understand that the violence that Iraq has experienced starting with the American occupation, and degenerating into a “civil war” was nothing but a spit of fire in your collective faces…

It is really telling you, over and over — Your democracy has failed and the former “Dictatorship” has won. Think about it deeply before you blurt out more of your nonsense and lies…

A friend whose opinions I greatly respect, told me “There are good dictatorships and bad democracies…” And Iraq was a good dictatorship and yours is a very bad democracy.

For starters, under the former dictatorship, we were alive, now we are all dead corpses…

Under the former dictatorship and during and in spite of 13 years of the most inhumane sanctions:

We had no ghettoes, we did not know each other’s sect, we intermarried, we had mixed neighborhoods, we could go out without being riddled with bullets from an Iranian militia or from one of your army patrols, we had no checkpoints, we had no car bombs, we had no Al-Qaeda psychopaths, we had no sectarian Shia sadists in turbans and black uniforms, we did not have to dress like a ninja, we were not raped, we did not have acid thrown into our faces, we were free to worship in a church or a mosque, we had jobs, we had homes, our children were fed, our hospitals functioned despite your tyrannical sanctions (today 90% of Iraqi hospitals are in dire need of qualified staff) our roads were not destroyed, our bridges assured safe passages, we did not have women and children begging and sleeping in the streets, we did not have refugees (4.5 million) stranded at borders or rotting away in tents, we had electricity and water and we did not find worms floating in it either…

Our rivers were not dumping grounds for cadavers and our parks were not turned into cemeteries. Our children were not sold or trafficked. Our academics, (over 450 killed) doctors (500 murdered) and professionals (in the hundreds) did not flee or get killed. Our universities still managed to produce graduates and our schools were not attacked by mortar bombs. Our women could drive, work, marry and divorce as they pleased…

Under the former dictatorship our trees were still producing fruits and not razed to the ground. Under the former dictatorship music was still allowed, so were films. Under the former dictatorship we had no drugs, no poppy fields, no drug addicts and no drugs peddlers and traffickers. Under the former dictatorship we had no pedophile rings, no professional killers, no professional drillers and no professional rapists…

Under the former dictatorship, we had no over 100′000 detainees with no trial, no children sodomized in prisons and no women gang raped in exchange for freeing their loved ones…

Under the former dictatorship, our artists, poets, writers, singers, journalists (233 killed since 2003) were not abducted, kidnapped or assassinated…

Under the former dictatorship, we were not rejects. We still earned the respect of others. Under the former dictatorship we had no mass corruption, no public thieves, no fraud…

Under the former dictatorship we had no Israelis, no Iranians and no Americans…And sell out, treacherous Iraqis with foreign political agendas, were silenced, for the greater good.

Under the former dictatorship we had no 2 million widows, 5 million orphans, 4 million wounded, an X number of disappeared, we had no mass graves of a million plus murdered by Democracy.

Under the former dictatorship we were not considered the second most corrupt country in the world and the FIRST most dangerous country on earth…

Under the former dictatorship, we had a country called Iraq. Under the former dictatorship we had a Life. Under the former dictatorship, we were Free.

U.S. government requires banks to forward “Suspicious Activity Reports” on customers, politicians

http://www.newsweek.com/id/123489

When Congress passed the Patriot Act in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, law-enforcement agencies hailed it as a powerful tool to help track down the confederates of Osama bin Laden. No one expected it would end up helping to snag the likes of Eliot Spitzer. The odd connection between the antiterror law and Spitzer’s trysts with call girls illustrates how laws enacted for one purpose often end up being used very differently once they’re on the books.

The Patriot Act gave the FBI new powers to snoop on suspected terrorists. In the fine print were provisions that gave the Treasury Department authority to demand more information from banks about their customers’ financial transactions. Congress wanted to help the Feds identify terrorist money launderers. But Treasury went further. It issued stringent new regulations that required banks themselves to look for unusual transactions (such as odd patterns of cash withdrawals or wire transfers) and submit SARs – Suspicious Activity Reports – to the government. Facing potentially stiff penalties if they didn’t comply, banks and other financial institutions installed sophisticated software to detect anomalies among millions of daily transactions. They began ranking the risk levels of their customers – on a scale of zero to 100 – based on complex formulas that included the credit rating, assets and profession of the account holder.

Another element of the formulas: whether an account holder was a “politically exposed person.” At first focused on potentially crooked foreign officials, the PEP lists expanded to include many U.S. politicians and public officials who were conceivably vulnerable to corruption.

The new scrutiny resulted in an explosion of SARs, from 204,915 in 2001 to 1.23 million last year. The data, stored in an IRS computer in Detroit, are accessible by law-enforcement agencies nationwide. “Terrorism has virtually nothing to do with it,” says Peter Djinis, a former top Treasury lawyer. “The vast majority of SARs filed today involve garden-variety forms of white-collar crime.” Federal prosecutors around the country routinely scour the SARs for potential leads.

One of those leads led to Spitzer. Last summer New York’s North Fork Bank, where Spitzer had an account, filed a SAR about unusual money transfers he had made, say law-enforcement and industry sources who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the probe. One of the sources tells NEWSWEEK that Spitzer wasn’t flagged because of his public position. Instead, the governor called attention to himself by asking the bank to transfer money in someone else’s name. (A North Fork spokesperson says the bank does not discuss its customers.) The SAR was not itself evidence that Spitzer had committed a crime. But it made the Feds curious enough to follow the money.

Silver Shortage: 19 dealers reported “Sold Out”

http://news.silverseek.com/GoldIsMoney/1205995646.php

(SOLD OUT!!)

Silver Stock Report

You know me, I don’t send out two emails in one day, so this must be important.  Since my email earlier tonight, where I reported that 5-6 major silver dealers (Amark, Tulving, 2 in Vancouver, my local dealer, NWT Mint) are “out of inventory”, 13 more reports came in, saying that the dealers were out of silver inventory.  Some of these names are big names in the business, Scotia bank, the Perth Mint in Australia, CNI Numismatics in LA, APMEX says they have some items, but are looking to buy.

If there are any coin dealers or bullion shops that have an inventory, in stock, of more than 100, 100 oz. bars, let me know, and I’ll give you FREE Advertising within 24 hours in my next newsletter.

Robert Mish reports that he has 100 x 100 oz. bars still, but he had 250 bars last week.
Mish International
Menlo Park
650-324-9110

Now think:  How can the silver price drop by nearly $2/oz., when all these reports come in saying that the dealers are sold out, or nearly out, of physical silver?  This is the clearest evidence of paper short selling manipulation that I’ve ever seen since I started watching the silver market back in 1999, and I’ve seen a lot of evidence!

Unfortunately, the COT reports only report through Tuesday.  This Wednesday’s action will not be revealed in the COT’s until next Friday.

The public switched and turned buyers after gold hit $1000/oz.  The coin shops normally sell to the refineries, and this creates a large part of the ~250 million oz. of silver recycling each year that meets the deficit between ~650 million oz. mine supply, and ~1000 million oz. demanded by inventory. 

But now, this flow of silver just reversed.  And if the refineries are not getting silver from the coin shops, industry will get squeezed, hard, and so will the major short sellers on the COMEX. 

This is crunch time.  Panic time. 

The Technology That Toppled Eliot Spitzer

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20435/?a=f

Anti-money-laundering software scrutinizes bank customers’ every move, no matter how small.

If there is a lesson from former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s scandal-driven fall (aside from the most obvious one), it is this: banks are paying attention to even the smallest of your transactions.

For this we can thank modern software, and post-9/11 U.S. government pressure to find evidence of money laundering and terrorist financing. Experts say that all major banks, and even most small ones, are running so-called anti-money-laundering software, which combs through as many as 50 million transactions a day looking for anything out of the ordinary.

In Spitzer’s case, according to newspaper reports, it was three wire transfers amounting to just $5,000 apiece that set alarm bells ringing. It helped that he was a prominent political figure. But even the most mundane activities of ordinary citizens are given the same initial scrutiny.

“All the big banks have these software systems,” says Pete Balint, a cofounder of the Dominion Advisory Group, which helps banks develop strategies for combatting money laundering and fraud. “Depending on their volume, they might have thousands of alerts a month.”

Most of the systems follow fairly simple rules, looking for anomalies that trigger heightened scrutiny. Software company Metavante says that its software, for example, contains more than 70 “best-practice” rules, covering a wide variety of transaction types ranging from cash deposits to insurance purchases. The simplest rules might flag large cash transactions, or multiple transactions in a single day.

In Spitzer’s case, the three separate $5,000 wire-transfer payments reported by the Wall Street Journal would likely have triggered one of the most obvious of these rules, without any recourse to more advanced capabilities.

Banks are constantly on the lookout for activity that seems to be an effort to break up large, clearly suspicious transactions into smaller ones that might fly under the radar, a practice called structuring. Spitzer’s transactions almost certainly fit that profile, says Dave DeMartino, a Metavante vice president. Newspaper reports have identified New York’s North Fork Bank, owned by Capitol One, as Spitzer’s personal bank. A spokeswoman for the bank declined to identify which, if any, anti-money-laundering software the institution uses.

But banks, and law enforcement, are also looking for things that they can’t predict and thus can’t write rules for.

“If you’re just writing scenarios, you aren’t going to find things that you didn’t know about,” says Michael Recce, chief scientist for Fortent, another prominent vendor of anti-money-laundering systems. “About 60 percent of the things our customers find are things they knew about. The rest are things they didn’t know about.”

The simplest way to identify the unexpected is by contrast to the routine. A person who deposits just two paychecks a month for two years might be flagged if he suddenly deposits six large checks in two weeks, for example.

But software packages also group customers and accounts into related “profiles” or “peer groups,” in order to establish more-general behavioral baselines. Some software might group together all personal checking accounts with an average balance of less than $15,000, or merchant accounts with turnover of less than $100,000 per month. Some might go deeper, grouping together all business accounts specifically tied to dry cleaners or consulting firms.

The most sophisticated software packages can sort people or accounts into several categories at once: a single customer might be compared to other schoolteachers; to people who bank mostly at a single regional branch; and to people who have stable, pension-based monthly incomes, for example.

Each category is analyzed to determine patterns of ordinary behavior. Every single transaction by customers in these groups, and even patterns of transactions stretching back as far as a year, are then scrutinized for evidence of deviation from this norm using measures such as the number, size, or frequency of transactions, among others.

Whether a deviation is flagged will depend in part on a customer’s risk exposure score, a rating assigned by the bank according to the customer’s occupation, geographical location, and other personal details. A retired schoolteacher who has lived in the suburbs of Minneapolis her entire life might have a lower risk score than a 42-year-old import-export businessman from Sicily, for example. So-called politically exposed persons–customers such as politicians, top executives, and judges–will automatically receive a higher level of scrutiny.

Every bank has a group of actual people who personally scrutinize transactions that have been flagged. The vast majority of alerts represent acceptable behavior, and nothing more is done. If the Minneapolis schoolteacher has sold her house, for example, the income will show as a clear deviation from her peer group’s norm. The human investigator will understand why and won’t pursue the matter any further.

“Banks do not want to be in the position of reporting on a customer without good reason,” says Ido Ophir, vice president of product management for Actimize, another large vendor of anti-money-laundering software. “They can’t just send in transactions that have no suspicious merits.”

However, if the human reviewers can’t explain away the activity, they will produce an official suspicious activity report (SAR), including a written narrative describing the transaction, and send it to the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen), the federal group responsible for administering the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act.

Most SARs are ultimately reviewed by regional teams of investigators, drawn from the IRS, the FBI, the DEA, and the U.S. Attorney’s office. But the reports also go into a Bank Secrecy Act database, which is made available to authorized federal law-enforcement agencies. Agents can search for specific names, account numbers, and details, such as telephone numbers, to see if the subjects of their own investigations have raised any financial flags.

FinCen spokesman Steve Hudek says that automated pattern-analysis software also runs on the Bank Security Act database, helping to spot patterns of activity or links between individuals that humans might miss. He declined to say which software or vendors FinCen uses, however.

As the software has gotten more sophisticated–and the government has applied more pressure to highlight suspicious activity–the number of SARs filed has gone up sharply. In 2000, banks (as distinguished from securities firms or casinos) filed 121,505 SARs. In 2006, they filed 567,080, and by the end of last June, the last month for which figures are available, 2007 was on track to set a new record.

Technologists say that future software will be even better at spotting anomalies, analyzing customers’ social networks, tapping into the vast databases of information held by companies such as LexisNexis and ChoicePoint, and using that outside information to help make judgments about customer transactions.

This might be a privacy advocate’s nightmare, but it helps keep banks safe from fraud and regulatory fines.

“We’re getting to the problem of how to digest larger and larger amounts of information,” says Fortent’s Recce. “There is fundamentally an enormous amount of information, and people are trying to hide in it.”

Government’s funding framework breeds scientific conformity

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2004290766_rams19.html

Here is a list of beliefs in the biomedical and climate sciences that must not be questioned if you’re applying for a government grant:

• That global warming is caused by humans;

• That AIDS is caused by a virus;

• That radiation, cigarette smoke and other toxins are dangerous in proportion to their strength, no matter how small the dose;

• That heart disease is caused by saturated fats;

• That cancer is caused by mutations.

This is part of a list offered by a University of Washington professor of surgery, Donald W. Miller, who is a heart surgeon at the VA Medical Center in Seattle. Miller believes that all the above ideas may be false, and ought to be tested. Whether they are false, I don’t know. I have thought they were true, but that is only a belief — and it is the business of science to test such beliefs.

But much of science runs on government money. Some people find the stink of bias only in private money, and see government as free of it, but they are mistaken. Government likes certain beliefs. To get its money, you have to get the approval of the scientists it selects, and you are less likely to get it if they think your idea wrong.

What that means, Miller says, is that “If you say low doses of radiation aren’t bad for you, or that global warming is due to variations in the sun, you can’t get funded.”

He says this happened to University of California scientist Peter Dues-berg, who challenged the viral theory of AIDS, and to Harvard’s Willie Soon, who challenged the pollution theory of global warming, and to others. In a paper published in 2007 in the Journal of Information Ethics, Miller argued that conformity is built into the system of government grants.

Another critic of the grants system is Gerald Pollack, UW professor of bioengineering. Pollack’s work in muscle contraction, cell structure and the molecular properties of water has challenged the reigning view in his field.

In 2005, in the scientific journal Cellular and Molecular Biology, Pollack made an argument similar to Miller’s. American science, he wrote, has become “a culture of believers” whose rule is, “just keep it safe and get your funding.”

For science, the result has not been good.

“A half-century ago, breakthroughs were fairly common events in science,” Pollack said in an interview. But who today are the equivalents of Linus Pauling in molecular biology, Jonas Salk in vaccines, Richard Feynman in physics, or James Watson and Francis Crick in the study of DNA? Said Pollack, “Where are the heroes of the past 30 years?”

In his paper, Pollack wrote, “Einstein’s challenge of orthodoxy would probably fail in today’s grant system.” Today’s committees of scientists demand that an individual predict what he will accomplish at the end of year one, year two, etc., all of which amounts, Pollack says, to “an implicit admission that no breakthroughs are to be anticipated.”

If science is likened to a skeleton, the grant system sets out to pay a multitude of scientists each to add a tiny bit of flesh. But what if the skeleton itself is misdesigned?

“I think a lot of the skeleton is erroneous,” Pollack says.

Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, argued famously that science progresses in revolutionary bursts, in which the “dominant paradigm” is overturned. But what if the supporters of the dominant paradigm are the people vetting your application?

The grant system needs to be changed, Pollack says. Short of that, there are ways around it. One, he says, is “to get the money for something else, and do your work on the side.”

Miller predicts that at some point, a major belief like one of those listed above will come tumbling down. “And when it’s acknowledged,” he predicts, “a lot of other science will be called into question.”

Propaganda Alert! Bin Laden warns Europe over Mohammed cartoons

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/151459-Propaganda-Alert-Bin-Laden-warns-Europe-over-Mohammed-cartoons

WASHINGTON – Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden warned Europe Wednesday of a “reckoning” for publishing controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, US monitoring groups said.

In an audio message, addressed to the “intelligent ones” in the European Union, a voice purported to be bin Laden’s said that publishing the “insulting drawings” was a greater crime than Western forces targeting Muslim villages and killing women and children.

Comment: This drivel coming out of the US intelligence centres still get all the airspace possible in the mainstream media. All so that the populace will continue to support the endless bogus war on terror.
See: Osama, Death Squads and the Biggest Lie Ever Told

And the “reckoning for it will be more severe,” he said, according to a transcript of the message provided by the Virginia-based IntelCenter.

Referring to a series of cartoons published in Danish newspapers, the Al-Qaeda leader also warned: “if there is no check on the freedom of your words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions.”

And cryptically he added that the Muslims’ response to the insult will be “what you see, not what you hear.”

The five-minute audio message, titled “May Our Mothers Be Bereaved Of Us If We Fail to Help Our Prophet,” was posted by As-Sahab, Al-Qaeda’s media arm, according to SITE Intelligence Group.

The voice on the tape has yet to be officialy verified as bin Laden’s.

The message said that the cartoons were part of “the framework of a new crusade” in which the Roman Catholic pope “has played a large, lengthy role.”

The Al-Qaeda leader also assailed the king of Saudi Arabia as the “one man who can put an end to these drawings, if it mattered to him.”

The message coincided with the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.

The audio track with English subtitles is heard over a video image of bin Laden holding an AK-47 automatic rifle.

IntelCenter chief Ben Venzke said bin Laden’s message was “a clear threat against EU member countries and an indicator of a possible upcoming significant attack.”

Comment: The intel chief felt to just reinforce the fear factor in case people had started to catch on to the ridiculousness of these regular fake bin Laden media releases.

“However, it is unclear in exactly what timeframe it may occur,” he said.

Protests have raged in a number of Muslim countries since 17 Danish dailies on February 13 reprinted a drawing featuring the Prophet Mohammed’s head with a turban that looked like a bomb with a lit fuse.

The newspapers decided to republish the caricature, originally printed in 2005, a day after police in Denmark foiled a plot to murder the cartoonist.

Bin Laden’s message also includes a nugget for US President George W. Bush, whom he describes as Europe’s “oppressive ally who — along with his aggressive policies — is about to depart the White House.”

He said the “savage acts” of the US-led military coalition in Iraq and Afghanistan “haven’t ended the war, but rather (have) increased our determination to cling to our right, avenge our people and expel the invaders from our country.”

The last message from bin Laden, who is still at large and believed to be hiding somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border, came on December 29 in a 56-minute recording released on the Internet.

In that message, the Al-Qaeda leader, who has remained elusive since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, warned Sunni Muslims in Iraq not to take up arms against Al-Qaeda and promised the “liberation of Palestine.”

Bush, in a speech earlier marking the war’s fifth anniversary, hailed progress in the “war on terror” and said Iraq was witnessing an “Arab uprising” against bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.

“In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology, and his murderous network. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated,” Bush said.

The president touted what he called “the Anbar Awakening,” when Sunni tribal leaders in the restive province “had grown tired of Al-Qaeda’s brutality and started a popular uprising.”

Bin Laden has claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people and prompted the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Despite a massive manhunt and a 25-million-dollar bounty on his head, he has evaded capture and has regularly taunted the United States and its allies through warnings issued via video and audio, mainly on the Internet.

Prior to his December message, bin Laden issued a message in November that was aired on the Arabic television channel Al-Jazeera, warning Europeans to break with the United States and leave Afghanistan.

Corporate Media’s Virtual Blackout on Iraq Atrocity Hearings

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/80410/?page=entire

Dozens of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars gathered in Silver Spring, Maryland last weekend for the Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan hearings (3/13/08-3/16/08), where they offered harrowing testimony about atrocities they had witnessed or participated in directly. The BBC predicted that the event, organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, “could be dominating the headlines around the world this week” (3/7/08). The hearings were covered as far afield as the U.K. (Guardian, 3/17/08), Australia (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 3/14/08), Croatia (Javno, 3/16/08), and Iran (Press TV, 3/14/08). Yet there has been an almost complete media blackout on this historic news event in the U.S. corporate media.

Despite being noted in the New York Times’ Paris-based International Herald Tribune (3/13/08), Winter Soldier has yet to be mentioned in the New York Times itself. No major U.S. newspaper has covered the hearings except as a story of local interest; the few stories major U.S. newspapers have published on the event have focused on the participation of local vets (Boston Globe, 3/16/08; Boston Herald, 3/16/08; Newsday, 3/16/08, Buffalo News, 3/16/08).

The Washington Post, too, published their account in the metro section (3/15/08). In contrast, the paper published an article about pro-war demonstrators protesting the Winter Soldier hearings in the A section (3/16/08), despite the fact that they were, according to the Post, “small in number.”

None of the major broadcast TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) have mentioned the hearings in their newscasts. PBS has been silent as well.

But for a couple of exceptions (Time, 3/15/08; NPR, 3/16/08), the hearings have been virtually ignored by all but the independent media (Democracy Now!, 3/14/08; 3/17-19/08; In These Times, 3/17/08; Alternet, 3/14-3/18/08) and military publications (Stars and Stripes, 3/15/08 and the four Military Times newsweeklies, 3/15/08, 3/17/08), in a pattern reminiscent of the near complete corporate media blackout on the first Winter Soldier hearings. FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Huffington Post, 3/16/08) traces the beginning of his career as a media critic back to his experience of watching as “one of the rare mainstream camera crews showed up at Winter Soldier … and then abruptly packed up to leave in the middle of particularly gripping testimony.”

While the testimony of soldiers who had served multiple tours of duty was broadcast on Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, Free Speech TV, and the Real News network, the major broadcast networks and PBS instead devoted airtime to the pro-war assessments of Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John McCain, both of whom have only made brief visits to Iraq (NBC Nightly News, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, PBS NewsHour, all 3/17/08).

Given the common media rhetoric of “supporting the troops” to ignore these same troops when they speak out about the horrors of the war is unconscionable. On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, it is particularly important that the media reverse this silence, and include the voices of the vets who are speaking out about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan in national news coverage.

Heads Monsanto Wins, Tails We Lose: The Genetic Food Gamble

http://www.counterpunch.org/weissman03192008.html

There have been few experiments as reckless, overhyped and with as little potential upside as the rapid rollout of genetically modified crops.

Last month, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), a pro-biotech nonprofit, released a report highlighting the proliferation of genetically modified crops. According to ISAAA, biotech crop area grew 12 percent, or 12.3 million hectares, to reach 114.3 million hectares in 2007, the second highest area increase in the past five years.

For the biotech backers, this is cause to celebrate. They claim that biotech helps farmers. They say it promises to reduce hunger and poverty in developing countries. “If we are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of cutting hunger and poverty in half by 2015,” says Clive James, ISAAA founder and the author the just-released report, “biotech crops must play an even bigger role in the next decade.”

In fact, existing genetically modified crops are hurting small farmers and failing to deliver increased food supply — and posing enormous, largely unknown risks to people and the planet.

For all of the industry hype around biotech products, virtually all planted genetically modified seed is for only four products — soy, corn, cotton and canola — with just two engineered traits. Most of the crops are engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide sold by Monsanto under the brand-name Round-up (these biotech seeds are known as RoundUp-Ready). Others are engineered to include a naturally occurring pesticide, Bt.

Most of the genetically modified crops in developing countries are soy, says Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety and co-author of “Who Benefits from GM Crops,” a report issued at the same time as ISAAA’s release. These crops are exported to rich countries, primarily as animal feed. They do absolutely nothing to supply food to the hungry.

As used in developing countries, biotech crops are shifting power away from small, poor farmers desperately trying to eke out livelihoods and maintain their land tenure.

Glyphosate-resistance is supposed to enable earlier and less frequent spraying, but, concludes “Who Benefits from GM Crops,” these biotech seeds “allow farmers to spray a particular herbicide more frequently and indiscriminately without fear of damaging the crop.” This requires expenditures beyond the means of small farmers — but reduces labor costs, a major benefit for industrial farms.

ISAAA contends that Bt planting in India and China has substantially reduced insecticide spraying, which it advances as the primary benefit of biotech crops.

Bt crops may offer initial reductions in required spraying, says Freese, but Bt is only effective against some pests, meaning farmers may have to use pesticides to prevent other insects from eating their crops. Focusing on a district in Punjab, “Who Benefits from GM Crops” shows how secondary pest problems have offset whatever gains Bt crops might offer.

Freese also notes that evidence is starting to come in to support longstanding fears that genetically engineering the Bt trait into crops would give rise to Bt-resistant pests.

The biotech seeds are themselves expensive, and must be purchased anew every year. Industry leader Monsanto is infamous for suing farmers for the age-old practice of saving seeds, and holds that it is illegal for farmers even to save genetically engineered seeds that have blown onto their fields from neighboring farms. “That has nothing to do with feeding the hungry,” or helping the poorest of the poor, says Hope Shand, research director for the ETC Group, an ardent biotech opponent. It is, to say the least, not exactly a farmer-friendly approach.

Although the industry and its allies tout the benefits that biotech may yield someday for the poor, “we have yet to see genetically modified food that is cheaper, more nutritious or tastes better,” says Shand. “Biotech seeds have not been shown to be scientifically or socially useful,” although they have been useful for the profit-driven interests of Monsanto, she says.

Freese notes that the industry has been promising gains for the poor for a decade and a half — but hasn’t delivered. Products in the pipeline won’t change that, he says, with the industry focused on introducing new herbicide resistant seeds.

The evidence on yields for the biotech crops is ambiguous, but there is good reason to believe yields have actually dropped. ISAAA’s Clive James says that Bt crops in India and China have improved yields somewhat. “Who Benefits from GM Crops” carefully reviews this claim, and offers a convincing rebuttal. The report emphasizes the multiple factors that affect yield, and notes that Bt and Roundup-Ready seeds alike are not engineered to improve yield per se, just to protect against certain predators or for resistance to herbicide spraying.

Beyond the social disaster of contributing to land concentration and displacement of small farmers, a range of serious ecological and sustainability problems with biotech crops is already emerging — even though the biotech crop experiment remains quite new.

Strong evidence of pesticide resistance is rapidly accumulating, details “Who Benefits from GM Crops,” meaning that farmers will have to spray more and more chemicals to less and less effect. Pesticide use is rising rapidly in biotech-heavy countries. In the heaviest user of biotech seeds — the United States, which has half of all biotech seed planting — glyphosate-resistant weeds are proliferating. Glyphosate use in the United States rose by 15 times from 1994 to 2005, according to “Who Benefits from GM Crops,” and use of other and more toxic herbicides is rapidly rising. The U.S. experience likely foreshadows what is to come for other countries more recently adopting biotech crops.

Seed diversity is dropping, as Monsanto and its allies aim to eliminate seed saving, and development of new crop varieties is slowing. Contamination from neighboring fields using genetically modified seeds can destroy farmers’ ability to maintain biotech-free crops. Reliance on a narrow range of seed varieties makes the food system very vulnerable, especially because of the visible problems with the biotech seeds now in such widespread use.

For all the uncertainties about the long-term effects of biotech crops and food, one might imagine that there were huge, identifiable short-term benefits. But one would be wrong.

Instead, a narrowly based industry has managed to impose a risky technology with short-term negatives and potentially dramatic downsides.

But while it is true, as ISAAA happily reports, that biotech planting is rapidly growing, it remains heavily concentrated in just a few countries: the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India and China.

Europe and most of the developing world continue to resist Monsanto’s seed imperialism. The industry and its allies decry this stand as a senseless response to fear-mongering. It actually reflects a rational assessment of demonstrated costs and benefits — and an appreciation for real but incalculable risks of toying with the very nature of nature.

Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor and director of Essential Action.

OUR THREE-DECADE RECESSION

http://www.precaution.org/lib/08/prn_quality_of_life_declining_since_1975.080310.htm

Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2008

[Rachel's introduction: By some measures of economic performance, the United States has been in a recession since 1975 -- a recession in quality of life, or well-being.]

By Robert Costanza

The news media and the government are fixated on the fact that the U.S. economy may be headed into a recession — defined as two or more successive quarters of declining gross domestic product (GDP). The situation is actually much worse. By some measures of economic performance, the United States has been in a recession since 1975 — a recession in quality of life, or well-being.

How can this be? One first needs to understand what GDP measures to see why it is not an appropriate gauge of our national well-being.

GDP measures the total market value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given period. But it includes only those goods and services traded for money. It also adds everything together, without discerning desirable, well-being-enhancing economic activity from undesirable, well-being- reducing activity. An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because someone has to clean it up, but it obviously detracts from well-being. More crime, more sickness, more war, more pollution, more fires, storms and pestilence are all potentially positives for the GDP because they can spur an increase in economic activity.

GDP also ignores activity that may enhance well-being but is outside the market. The unpaid work of parents caring for their children at home doesn’t show up in GDP, but if they decide to work outside the home and pay for child care, GDP suddenly increases. And even though $1 in income means a lot more to the poor than to the rich, GDP takes no account of income distribution.

In short, GDP was never intended to be a measure of citizens’ welfare — and it functions poorly as such. Yet it is used as a surrogate appraisal of national well-being in far too many circumstances.

The shortcomings of GDP are well known, and several researchers have proposed alternatives that address them, including William Nordhaus’ and James Tobin’s Measure of Economic Welfare, developed in 1972; Herman Daly’s and John Cobb’s Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, developed in 1989; and the Redefining Progress think tank’s more recent variation, the Genuine Progress Indicator.

Although these alternatives — which, like GDP, are measured in monetary terms — are not perfect and need more research and refinement, they are much better approximations to a measure of true national well-being.

The formula for calculating GPI, for instance, starts with personal consumption expenditures, a major component of GDP, but makes several crucial adjustments. First, it accounts for income distribution. It then adds positive contributions that GDP ignores, such as the value of household and volunteer work.

Finally, it subtracts things that are well-being-reducing, such as the loss of leisure time and the costs of crime, commuting and pollution.

While the U.S. GDP has steadily increased since 1950 (with the occasional recession), GPI peaked about 1975 and has been relatively flat or declining ever since. That’s consistent with life-satisfaction surveys, which also show flat or dropping scores over the last several decades.

This is a very different picture of the economy from the one we normally read about, and it requires different policy responses. We are now in a period of what Daly — a former World Bank economist now at the University of Maryland — has called “uneconomic growth,” in which further growth in economic activity (that is, GDP) is actually reducing national well-being.

How can we get out of this 33-year downturn in quality of life?

Several policies have been suggested that might be thought of as a national quality-of-life stimulus package.

To start, the U.S. needs to make national well-being — not increased GDP — its primary policy goal, funding efforts to better measure and report it.

There’s already been some movement in this direction around the world. Bhutan, for example, recently made “gross national happiness” its explicit policy goal.

Canada is developing an Index of Well-being, and the Australian Treasury considers increasing “real well-being,” rather than mere GDP, its primary goal.

Once Americans’ well-being becomes the basis for measuring our success, other reforms should follow. We should tax bads (carbon emissions, depletion of natural resources) rather than goods (labor, savings, investment). We should recognize the negative effects of growing income disparities and take steps to address them.

International trade also will have to be reformed so that environmental protection, labor rights and democratic self- determination are not subjugated to the blind pursuit of increased GDP.

But the most important step may be the first one: Recognizing that the U.S. is mired in a 33-year-old quality-of-life recession and that our continued national focus on growing GDP is blinding us to the way out.

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Robert Costanza is the director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.