“The Financial Destruction Of The Average Man”

http://www.jsmineset.com/ARhome.asp?VAfg=1&RQ=EDL,1&AR_T=1&GID=&linkid=5905&T_ARID=5960

Author: Jim Sinclair

Dear CIGAs, This weekend’s meeting of four heads of central banks communicates the size of the OTC derivative disaster. It is a system that is broken. A bailout will require the printing of trillions of dollars worth of monetary stimulation making Bernanke’s helicopter drop look like chump change. The dollar number of pending derivative bankruptcies is the size of the mountain of garbage paper issued by just those who are to be bailed out.  That number is greater than the total world economies. There simply isn’t enough money in the world for central banks to buy up the mountain of worthless paper sold by those who need bailouts; all of which made fortunes for their directors, officers and key people. When an OTC derivative fails to perform, notional value becomes real value. The notional value of all OTC derivatives exceeds $500 trillion. Credit default swaps (OTC derivatives) alone account for over $20 trillion dollars of notional value and are failing. Major dealers in these items, Lehman and JP Morgan, had their debt downgraded last week. Maintaining the AAA rating on debt of public companies primarily issuing default swaps as credit guarantees is a sick JOKE of fabrication. This is a JOKE that in all probability will lead to litigation that destroys the rating companies. You can be absolutely sure that all the biggies have their money out. No one mentions these firms being bailed out are the ones who created this disaster, making billions for their economic sin. You can be sure the big boys have their money out of the now on-the-rocks international institutions. No one mentions that bailing out the bankers will leave the average man victimized and paying for the pleasure of the economic rape. Meanwhile Derivative Traders (salesmen of perdition, not traders) and their hedge fund managers are all in Greenwich Connecticut with their hundreds of millions and billions, now retired playing tennis on their indoor courts at their waterfront mansions as the mess deepens. Litigation against the officers and directors of these international banking firms, both against the biggies personally as well as the company, will make the biggies occupation one of defending against litigation for the rest of their lives. For those biggies in these companies who trust no one and therefore have wives with no money will lose everything. Some of them I know. What goes around certainly comes around. Litigation against OTC derivatives are slam-dunk victories for the injured plaintiffs. The biggies will pay. This is the greatest act in history of “Public Be Damned” and “Let them Eat Cake.” It will not come about because in the USA it is already the hottest political potato. The problem is that the plan of the US legislative is down right STUPID. It is an embarrassment that legislators are so publicly moronic when it comes to economics. The problem that no one is focusing on right now is the tracking of the mortgage itself to the structured product, which has broken down. That means in these items many can’t connect the underlying mortgage to the structured investment product (derivative). So far courts have held that the only entity that can foreclose is the entity that actually lent the money.  The average guy does not know that with an attorney to protect him he has a free house! The entity that actually lent the money has sold the mortgage and been paid. Therefore where is the incentive for original lender to foreclose? The answer is there is none. Bankers do not help bankers in the same way that sharks do not help sharks. Conclusion: Because of the unthinkable size of the problem it is impossible to construct a Resurrection Trust to buy all these worthless and never to be anything but worthless items. Should any item surface to do this it will destroy all the National currency of the central banks that participate. If there were an attempt to construct such an entity with the cooperation of the USA, the US dollar would go much lower than .5200. Gold would go to many thousands of US dollars. Anyone who last week assumed the problem was over and we would be improving from there on out is simply nuts.

“‘We are living through another Hiroshima,’ Iraqi doctor says”

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/13637

Sherwood Ross

 

The U.S., Great Britain and Israel are turning portions of the Middle East into a slice of radioactive hell. They are achieving this by firing what they call “depleted uranium” (DU) ammunition but which is, in fact, radioactive ammunition and it is perhaps the deadliest kind of tactical ammo ever devised in the warped mind of man.

There’s a ton of data about this on the Internet for the skeptics: from sources such as the 1999 report of the International Atomic Energy Commission to oncologist members of England’s Royal Society of Physicians to U.S. Veterans Administration hospital nuclear medicine doctors to officials at the Basra maternity and pediatric hospital to reporter Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor. Peterson used a Geiger counter in August, 2003 to find radiation readings between 1,000 and 1,900 times normal where bunker buster bombs and munitions had exploded near Baghdad. After all, a typical bunker bomb is said to contain more than a ton of depleted uranium.

For a concise overview on radioactive warfare, read “DU And The Liberation of Iraq” by Christian Scherrer, a researcher at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, published on Znet on April 13, 2003. Scherrer states: “Based on the report of the 48th meeting issued by the UN Committee dealing with effects of Atomic radiation on 20th April 1999, noting the rapid increase in mortality caused by DU between 1991 and 1997, the IAEA document predicted the death of half a million Iraqis, noting that…’some 700-800 tons of depleted uranium was used in bombing the military zones south of Iraq. Such a quantity has a radiation effect, sufficient to cause 500,000 cases which may lead to death.”

Scherrer writes, “In 1991 the DU ammunition was mainly used against Iraqi tanks in the desert near Basra, while in the present war DU is being used all over Iraq, even in densely populated areas including the heart of Baghdad, Mosul, Tikrit and other cities.” He adds that, based on IAEA estimates and his previous research, “the death toll may surpass a million deaths over the next few years, with more to follow!”

Scherrer notes, incidentally, the UN’s Human Rights Commission back in 1996 declared DU a weapon of mass destruction(WMD) and that those who use it are guilty of a crime against humanity. Among its users: the first President Bush, President Bill Clinton, who irradiated the Balkans, and the current occupant of the White House.

Now let’s hear it from Iraqi doctors: Oncologist Dr. Jawad Al-Ali of Basra Hospital and Professor Husam al-Jarmokly of Baghdad University “showed a rapidly increasing death toll in Iraq since 1991 due to cancer and leukemia caused by U.S. radiological warfare,” Scherrer writes, based on their presentation of December 1, 2002 at the Peace Memorial Hall in Hiroshima. Al-Ali, who is also a member of England’s Royal Society of Physicians, is quoted in Feb. 5, 2001, “CounterPunch” as stating, “The desert dust carries death. Our studies indicate that more than 40% of the population around Basra will get cancer. We are living through another Hiroshima.” (Basra is a city of 1.7 million. Does that mean 680,000 people will be stricken? That toll alone would be more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s casualties.)

The same article also reported since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent and, similarly, “The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by American bombs in 1996, has tripled in the last five years” and “NATO and UN peacekeepers in the region are also coming down with cancer.”

Dr. Zenad Mohammed, employed in the maternity department of the Basra teaching hospital, said in the three-months beginning in August, 1998, 10 babies were born with no heads, eight with abnormally large heads and six with deformed limbs, according to a report on World Socialist Web Site of September 8, 1999. And the British Guardian newspaper reported Basra maternity reported cancer cases shot up from 80 in 1990 to 380 in 1997.

Reporter Phil Gardner quotes Dr. Basma Al Asam, a gynecologist, at Al Manoon hospital, Baghdad, stating: “I’ve been watching this for seven years now and it’s increasing. We’re not just seeing babies born with congenital abnormalities, but very late spontaneous abortions because of congenital defects. In the past we used to see, maybe, one a month. Now it is two or three cases per day.” (Two to three cases a day, h-m-m-m, does that equal about 1,000 a year at this one hospital?)

And from American doctors: Colonel Asaf Durakovic, formerly chief of nuclear medicine at the VA hospital in Wilmington, Del., said he found uranium isotopes in the bodies of Persian Gulf War veterans. The New York Times reported on January 29, 2001, Dr. Durakovic said he found “depleted uranium, including uranium 236, in 62 percent of the sick gulf war veterans he examined. He believes that particles lodged in their bodies and may be the cause of their illness.” Once inhaled, Dr. Durakovic noted, “uranium can get into the bloodstream, be carried to bone, lymph nodes, lungs or kidneys, lodge there, and cause damage when it emits low-level radiation over a long period,” the Times reported. The Times article also called attention to the cancer deaths of 24 European soldiers that served as peacekeepers in the Balkans “and the illnesses reported by many others.”

And from a U.S. researcher: Roberto Gwiazda, of the environmental toxicology department at the University of California Santa Cruz, was the lead researcher examining returned Gulf War veterans that had radioactive shrapnel wounds. The university’s “City On A Hill Press” newspaper quotes him as saying, “Of those with radioactive shrapnel wounds, all had significant levels of uranium in their urine seven to nine years after the explosion. Of those who only inhaled the incendiary uranium, a statistically significant number also had high uranium levels.”

And from U.S. veterans: Tom Cassidy, of the 1st Cavalry Division who saw service in Iraq in 2003-05: “After the first gulf war, the level of radiation was 300 times what is considered normal. In this invasion we used even more DU bullets. The effects there are horrible,” he told the UCSC paper. Added Dennis Kyne, from the U.S. Army’s 18th Airborne division and Desert Storm veteran and who suffers from an “undiagnosed illness”: “The scientists call it cell disruption, and they don’t know why it’s happening to veterans, but it’s really radiation sickness, and it’s because the DU is all over.”

Madam Jane predicts the fall of America: Not with a bang but a whimper

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jane_sti_080323_madam_jane_predicts_.htm

America used to be so strong that it appeared to be invincible. But not any more. Currently we are as invincible as a house of cards — or should I say a house of dollars — because the cancer of monetary instability is destroying our country from within. And don’t you find it ironic that the biggest threat to America today is coming from within instead of from outside — and that our hyper-expensive, fabulously up-to-date military technology that has cost us trillions of dollars and is supposed to be a state-of-the-art defense operation guaranteed to keep us all safe in our beds forever cannot even begin to protect us from this danger at all?

There we all were, spending the last whole eight years of our lives fearfully huddled around the six-o’clock news, anxiously watching the Middle East for signs of danger to our country from “terrorists” — while all along our safety was being systematically destroyed by “privatization” and “globalization” and the well-oiled Bush-Cheney-McCain axis of opportunism instead.

The dollar is falling right now — and it’s going continue to fall. You don’t have to be Madam Jane to make that prediction, however. All you gotta do is look at the ads that are flashing across the top of your internet browser right now. “Take advantage of the fall of the dollar!” they scream.

Thanks to the fall of the dollar, America will probably never be a superpower again. But what’s done is done. You can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together. So what we need to do now is to figure out how to salvage what is left of our country and go on from there.

“Madam Jane, what is going to happen to us after the Fall?” Hmmm….

“First we need to take a look at what we have left to work with, boys and girls.” We have approximately 300 million relatively well-educated people, some fairly intact infrastructure more or less, and a lot of land. Will we be able to use these basic ingredients and somehow manage to start over again? Sure. Hey, the Soviet Union did.

In order to rebuild ourselves, however, we are going to have to start thinking differently. Forget about financing a military on steroids that can dominate the world. Those days are gone. Forget about bailing out Wall Street with taxpayers’ money. They had their chance and blew it. Forget about corporate welfare and globalization and insider perks at the White House. We already saw where that got us. If we just keep on trying to re-create the 1950s again and again, we are never gonna be happy in the future and will just end up being some tired old June Cleaver wannabes with no hope and no pride.

Americans need to get a whole new mindset going on if we are ever going to survive after the Fall. We need to start thinking about citizen-democracy on the local level and making things work within 50 miles of where we live instead of on K Street or on the other side of the world. And we need to start thinking about forming crafts cooperatives, building foundries and homesteading family farms.

“Madam Jane, that’s crazy. That’s too extreme. Crafts cooperatives? Family farms? You can’t be serious. I’ll get my hands all dirty. I’ll break a nail!”

Sorry, dears. But it’s just too late for quick fixes by Washington politicians and/or more corporate welfare and “globalization”. The last time the dollar fell this low was in 1929 and we had a major Depression. Think about what people did back then and start doing it now. Do what the Okies and hobos did and become nomadic. Use your $300 tax rebate to buy solar panels, strap them on the back of your hooptie and follow the sun. Or, if you can still afford to stay at home, save all that junk in your closets for barter. Network with your friends. Think outside the box. Forget about malls. Sit down and figure out what your real power base is going to be and what exactly you will need to do to help you and your family survive in this new post-Bush economy.

What will you need as a power base to get you through the Fall of America? “Madam Jane predicts that it’s not going to be television. It’s not going to be CitiBank or Bear-Stearns. And it’s sure as heck not going to be made in China or powered by oil.”

Look around you. What do you value most? What can you hold onto during the coming hard times? And who will help you? Who can you trust?

The America that we know is gone. It was shoplifted out from under us while we were busy watching the Twin Towers burn and focused on Al Qaeda. And while we were distracted, guys in blue suits snuck into our treasury and happily replaced our big bags of gold with big bags of sand. All that stuff is gone. Wave goodbye to it, start looking at your life with fresh eyes and then pray that the rest of the world will help us in some other way than the way that we “helped” them.

Go out and plant some carrots.

Do you live near a park with open spaces that can be plowed? Can you drill a well? Can you put on a talent show when your I-Pod gives out? Did your grandmother teach you how to can? Then you might be okay after the Fall. “Your life may not be like it was in the good old days, but you WILL be all right.” Always remember that 150 years ago, no one had cars and no one even had electricity. But they did okay. So can we.

PS: My trip to North Korea in April is currently on hold because of new travel limitations sent out from the DRNK. But frankly, it’s probably just as well. My days of thinking that if I could only report accurately on what’s going on in Iraq or North Korea or some place on the other side of the world, then I might somehow be able to save America from its own folly? Well, those days are gone too. The Next Big Story is no longer gonna be found in Gaza or Somalia or Afghanistan. The Next Big Story is going to be found right here at home.

I can no longer afford to squander time, money and energy on exposing the various different ways that the Bush-Cheney-McCain axis’s foreign policies have failed us. At this point in time, I need to start using whatever few resources I have left to buy solar panels and root-stock instead.

And you should be doing this too.

PPS: Madam Jane just got some fan mail. “MJ, do you always have to be so gloomy about everything? Lighten up!” And then said fan then proceeded to open up a whole big can of gloom too. Humph.

“What is missing in this prediction,” wrote the fan, “is a tad bit of historical context. If I was you, I would google ‘downfall of nations and empires’ and see if you can’t come up with something universal on why nations crash. Maybe you could write something about over-reach. Historically, powerful and wealthy countries have built economic empires over time which keep getting larger and larger, but also require that they station troops further and further away in order to defend more and more economic interests further and further from home base — to the point where their empires cost more than the economic benefits of said empires and, at that point, the big drain sets in. And the end of the big drain is called the big toilet.”

This fan then goes on to hint that Madam Jane might be misguided. How can that be? Madam Jane sees all and knows all!

“It’s not so much being screwed at home that is sinking us into the toilet. It is the mercenaries screwing us from afar that are draining the piggy bank at home,” writes the fan. “We went into Iraq for oil, for economic interests, for empire — and now it’s costing us a fortune. The empire is now dry. And I’m not talking about being dry for just a year or two and then we’ll bounce back. This drain-to-dry will be going on for decades to come. And in the meantime, there are other empires that do not have the overseas drain that we have and are building up their own power base at home and are raking in the money without having to pay the costs of defending an empire. That would be Europe and China and possibly India.”

Madam Jane predicts that this fan may be on to something here.

“Oh yeah,” added the fan, who now appears to be trying to compete for MJ’s job himself. “Don’t forget to remind people that their kids should be learning to speak French and Chinese.”

Stillwater is a freelance writer who hates injustice and corruption in any form but especially injustice and corruption paid for by American taxpayers. She has recently published a book entitled, “Bring Your Own Flak Jacket: Helpful Tips For Touring Today’s Middle East”. According to Ms. Stillwater, “It’s a fabulous and entertaining book. I loved writing it. And I hope that you will love reading it too.” It’s available at http://www.amazon.com/Bring-Your-Own-Flak-Jacket/dp/0978615719 or you can special order it at any independent bookstore.

One Year Later, Market Where McCain Strolled ‘Freely’ Is Controlled By Sadr, Too Unsafe For Americans To Visit

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/16/mccain-market-iraq/

On April 1, 2007, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) strolled through the open-air Shorja market in Baghdad in an effort to prove that Americans are “not getting the full picture” of what’s going on in Iraq. In a press conference after his Baghdad tour, McCain told a reporter that his visit to the market was proof that people could “walk freely” in parts of Baghdad.

What McCain failed to mention was that he was accompanied by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” He also appeared to be wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit.

Since that trip, McCain has claimed that the situation in Iraq has improved even more. A few months ago, McCain claimed that “we’ve succeeded militarily” in Iraq. Things, of course, are going so well, that he wants to keep U.S. troops there for at least 100 years.

McCain is now back in Iraq for a “surprise visit with Iraqi and American diplomatic and military leaders.” He is joined by fellow Iraq war defenders Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). But it’s unlikely they will be visiting the Shorja market again. Today, CNN reported that they tried to visit the Shorja market, but it was too unsafe and they were unable to go:

We got close to that marketplace today, Jim, but our own security advisers here in Iraq did not want us to go there. They didn’t believe it was safe for an American to be in that area. We were in a thriving marketplace nearby.

But when you show up, the local Iraqis, while it is clear security is better on the street — it is clear there are more markets open, just the traffic jams alone tell you that things are better on the streets of Baghdad — it’s also a very sensitive potential neighborhoods.

That one marketplace, as a matter of fact, you do see Iraqi police, you do see the Iraqi army, but in truth, that area is controlled by the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi army.

Watch it:

Civilian deaths per day in Iraq are up to 39 from a low of 20 last January, while at the same time, there has been “a sharp increase in attacks resulting in the deaths of U.S. soldiers.” Twelve Americans were killed last week over a period of four days, “bringing the overall U.S. military death toll since the start of the war near 4,000.”

The Associated Press recently interviewed Iraqis who “said they were not necessarily changing their daily routines,” but “the growing bloodshed was present in their minds, clouding what had until recently been a more hopeful time.”

Over 70,000 deaths, and over 1 million disabilities among American soldiers attributed to Iraq Wars says U.S. government data

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2008/03/21/02286.html

Peter Tremblay and Libertyforlife.com researchers
The Canadian
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:36 EDT

According to U.S. media reports, there are well below 5,000 U.S. soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. However, this data appears to be very misleading. Why? Because many tens of thousands of American soldiers have apparently been killed to-date, as a result of being exposed to radiation poisoning from the indiscriminate killing machines of U.S. military weaponry. Ironically, the only Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that Americans soldiers have found in Iraq are “Made in America”.

U.S. investigative researchers have discovered an official U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs official, but not well publicized count, of 73,846 U.S. soldiers who have perished as an apparent result of Depleted Uranium based bio-chemical warfare exposure. This exceeds an estimate of 58,000 U.S. soldiers who had been killed in relation to the Vietnam War.

Well over 200,000 American soldiers could be killed by 2010, as a result of the after effects of exposure to U.S. dirty bombs.

Over One million U.S. soldiers have apparently been disabled from Depleted Uranium based biochemical exposure. Over one million Iraqis have also been documented to have been killed.

This is what the U.S. ruling elite including U.S. President George W. Bush and U.S. Republican Presidential candidate John McCain calls a “success”. How many sons and daughters of the American ruling class have been sent in harms way of the apparent biological warfare that is being perpetrated in Iraq? Not to many, huh? The Iraq War is a class-and-racial-inspired war that is being masqueraded into being about fighting “extremists” and “terrorists”. The Iraq War is an extension of brutality by the prevailing elites of the global capitalist system, that the 9/11 Truth Movement has accused to be the ultimate perpetrators of 9/11. Indeed, ruling elites are the only group that could pull off the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City which engineers have represented to be specifically designed to withstand being hit simply by aeroplanes. Investigative scholarly researchers who include Dr. David Ray Griffin, present critical evidence of a technologically sophisticated military planning associated with 9/11, including a ‘Controlled Demolition’, that could in no way be executed by the alleged Muslim perpetrators.

More than 1,820 tons (3-million, 640 thousand pounds) of radioactive nuclear waste uranium were exploded into Iraq alone in the form of armour piercing rounds and bunker busters, representing the worlds worst man made ecological disaster ever. 64 kg of uranium were used in the Hiroshima bomb. The very broad human and ecological disaster of the Iraq War has been drowned out by America’s sound-bite driven media organizations, that are owned by the same fascist clique which presides over the Iraq War.

The apparent use of these dirty bombs, could be perceived to a categorical Crime Against Humanity, both against the Iraqi people, and military personnel. Indeed, there are far more people getting killed from these dirty bombs than the alleged terrorist targets of U.S. military propaganda.

©Unknown

U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs official data shows over 70,000 U.S. troops killed in relation to Iraq Wars.

The fascist clique that is presiding over the Iraq War, clearly seeks to perpetrate widespread Eugenics inspired depopulation of Iraq.

Millions of Iraqis could be killed as a result of contamination from the use of U.S. “strategic” “mini nuclear bombs”.

It is apparent that a Eugenics-inspired megalomaniacal fascist clique seeks to further make Iran a toxic nuclear wasteland

The use of these dirty bombs demonstrates that the War in Iraq is not simply about “going after terrorists”, but rather, is the apparent premeditated execution of Crimes against Humanity. The kind of demonic intelligence that is associated with such a Crime against Humanity is consistent with the kind of criminal profile associated with what critically acclaimed author Dr. David Ray Griffin labels as the ultimate perpetrators of 9/11.

What kind of socio-pathetic milieu would seek to inspire jingoistic patriotism in statements about military personnel “defending the Homeland” while wilfully exposing them to the toxic by-products of radiation poisoning?

Libertyforlife.com researchers document: “What the government is doing is only counting the soldiers that die in action on the ground before they can get them into a hummer, helicopter or ambulance. Any soldier who is shot but they get into a vehicle before ‘the die’ is not counted.”

“Uranium poisoning, which can take decades to kill not only the soldier but family members as well” are further cited documents in Libertyforlife.com.

Libertyforlife.com also adds that more than 1,820 tons of radio active nuclear waste uranium were exploded into Iraq alone in the form of armour piercing rounds and bunker busters (also known as dirty bombs), representing the worlds worst man made ecological disaster, over the 64 kg of uranium that was used in the Hiroshima bomb.

“The U.S. Iraq Nuclear Holocaust by mass, represents between fourteen and twenty eight thousand Hiroshima’s from a uranium poisoning perspective. In Hiroshima 70 thousand died from the blast and 70 thousand died from uranium poisoning.”

“The nuclear waste the U.S. has exploded into the Middle East will continue killing for billions of years and could wipe out a third of life on earth.

Winds can and will blow the uranium dust from the U.S. weapons around the world. Gulf War Veterans and civilians who have ingested the uranium will continue to die off from uranium poisoning over a number of decades.”

“So far, more than one million people have been slaughtered and four million are homeless as a consequence of the U.S.’s illegal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Birth defects are up 600% in Iraq – the same will apply to U.S. Veterans children.”

When depleted uranium nuclear waste in the form of a “dirty bomb” is blown up or released into the atmosphere it has the potential of killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Well it turns out that instead of storing the nuclear waste from power plants in proper and very expensive storage facilities, the apparent neo-fascists who have taken over America, have been machining the depleted uranium into dirty bombs in the form of armour piercing bullets.

Libertyforlife.com researchers critically add: “That’s right, those tanks you saw exploding into flame, as our troops invaded other nations, were being hit with dirty bombs. You were actually witnessing “mini atomic bombs” as the uranium armour piercing rounds made out of nuclear waste called ‘Depleted Uranium’ or ‘DU’ hits it’s target.”

“It turns out the uranium from nuclear waste is very dense and possesses pyrophoric properties. That is, it bursts into flame releasing an explosion of heat so intense when the DU bullet hits the armour, it literally melts through armour, ” further documents Libertyforlife.com

Many American soldiers have been literally fried from the intense radio energy released from the mini DU atomic explosions.

“Now our boys in the military have not been firing just one or two of these dirty bomb bullets and bunker busters, they have been letting loose a hail of death. In Iraq alone during the two invasions, more than one thousand eight hundred and twenty tons of Depleted Uranium dirty bomb bullets and bombs were blasted into that innocent nation,” further documents Libertyforlife.com investigative researchers.

Astonishingly, Libertyforlife.com researchers also document, because most Americans watch TV, many still think Iraq had something to do with blowing up the three large World Trade center buildings and the Pentagon. Otherwise they try to suggest that Saddam Hussein had it coming because he murdered the Kurds with the helicopters we provided, the year we gave him a billion dollars.

Now if 64 kg of uranium can poison seventy thousand people. How many people will two thousand tons kill? The numbers are staggering, that’s more than twenty eight thousand Hiroshima’s. Forty percent of the Gulf War veterans are on “Gulf War Syndrome” disability from uranium poisoning. Seventy Three thousand of them have already died.

Every time that U.S troops (and “coalition soldiers) fires depleted uranium against “enemy targets” in Iraq, they are also being exposed to radiation poisoning that is much more intense than the radioactive by-products associated with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima to end World War II in the Pacific.

The U.S. War on Iraq both represents an apparent Eugenics inspired genocide against perceived “lesser breeds” of U.S. combat troops largely made up of African Americans and “poor whites” as well as Muslim infidels. Eugenics seems to be the driving motivation of the U.S. religious-political-military-industrial complex agenda against Iraq.

In the apparent view of the architects of the Iraq War, the use of “dirty bombs” accomplishes an apparent depopulation agenda which “frees up more resources” for the “racially superior” self-anointed rulers of our planet Earth. The Iraq War seems to be an attempt to fulfill in the Middle East the Eugenics inspired military expansionist goals that Adolf Hitler had.

No Conscience: Abu Ghraib’s Lynndie England Interview

http://www.stern.de/politik/ausland/614356.html?p=3&nv=ct_cb

Lynndie England

Seiten 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

“Rumsfeld knew”

 © AFP

One of the pictures that brought her questionable fame: In this undated photo published in late May 2004 US soldier Lynndie England holds a leash apparently wrapped around the neck of a naked Iraqi detainee

Mrs. England, a year ago you were released from jail after serving 521 days of a three-year sentence. How are you feeling now?
Not great but good.

What does that mean?
(She sighs) Oh, it’s just little things going wrong. I’m just trying to get by. Trying to find a job, trying to find a house. It’s been harder than I expected. I went to a couple of interviews, and I thought they went great. I wrote dozens of applications. Nothing came of it. I put in at Wal-Mart, at Staples. I’d do any job. But I never heard from them.

Do you think your name has anything to do with it?
I am starting to wonder if they realize who I am and they don’t want the publicity. I don’t want to lie. On my resume I have a brief little paragraph about what I did in the army and about being in prison and that I’m still on parole. I want to be totally honest. I have to find a job by September, that’s part of the parole regulations. If you break the rules, then they can bring you back. That would be a big deal because I don’t want to leave my son.

How do you get by? What do you live on?
We just got our taxes back. Thank God. Otherwise, I don’t know. I live in a trailer with my parents. My Dad works for the railway and he tries to help out with bills and my Mom helps me with what she gets.

You live in Ashby, a small town with a population of 1300. How do people treat you now?
They don’t treat me any different. I haven’t met a person yet that’s been negative to me. Not since I got home. Most of them back me up one hundred percent. They say, “What happened to you was wrong.” And some even say they would have done the same thing.

What do they mean by “They would have done the same thing”?
That they would have followed orders, just as I did in Abu Ghraib.

Why did you join the army at the age of 17 and against the express wishes of your mother?
I always wanted to be in the military. My whole life. I just didn’t know what branch – Navy, Army, Coast Guard, Marines, Air Force. I just wanted to serve my country and be a patriot, I guess. As a child I mainly grew up on military gung-ho movies so that’s where I got the idea. Old Chuck Norris movies, Delta Force, Rambo, Missing in Action, Platoon.

It was always said that you saw the army as an opportunity to finance your education.
That was a bonus, no more than that. It wasn’t the main reason. Just look at this place. There aren’t very many jobs to be had outside of the army.

You were a reservist with the 372nd MP unit. That is where you first met and fell in love with Charles Graner, the so-called “ring-leader” at Abu Ghraib.
Yes, that was right before we were deployed. I really didn’t even notice him because at the time I was married. He kept following me around, like when I went out for a smoke break. He didn’t even smoke but he started smoking just to hang out with me. I started talking about my problems at home and he suggested I leave my husband. I was dumb enough to listen to him and I ended up believing him.

What did you like about Graner?
I really don’t know.

We don’t believe you.
Even though he was 34 when I met him, 14 years older than me, he sure as hell didn’t act like it. He was an outgoing guy, and he was charming, always said and did the right stuff. I fell in love with him.

Was he in love with you?
I can’t speak for him because apparently he was playing with me the whole time.

And then you were deployed to the Gulf region?
At first they didn’t know where to deploy us. We had no idea right up till the last minute. We left the country on May 13, 2003.

That was at the start of the Iraq War.
No, technically the war was over. I mean, President Bush had already announced “Mission Accomplished.”

What was your first impression of the war?
The heat, the smell, the noise of the mortars. But at least we managed to tame the town we were in, Al Hila. And then around the end of September we got orders to go to Abu Ghraib because they were getting hit with mortars every night. When we got up there, they sent us to guard the prisoners although we really weren’t trained to do that.

What was your first impression of Abu Ghraib?
I remember on our way up they had to shut down the road because there was a reported I.E.D. The prison itself was huge. When you drove up to it, all you could see was this wall and the wall went on for a mile. And then, of course, there were all the prisoners. It was very overcrowded.

What kind of job did you do at Abu Ghraib?
I did paperwork. That was my job in the military.

So why did you spend so much time in the prisoners’ block Tier One Alpha, although that wasn’t part of your job?
Our sleeping quarters were about half a mile away, in the open, and we usually got mortared at night. So I ended up hanging out with my buddies from the 372nd MP unit that was only 50 yards away. That’s where I’d hang out with Graner, Megan Ambuhl, Frederick and all the others. When they’d finished their shift, at 4 in the morning, I’d catch a ride back with them.

What happened during the nights you’d hang out together?
At first I’d just sit in the office and let them do whatever. And then they started getting shorthanded as we got more prisoners so they asked if I could help out. That’s how it all started.

When did you realize that something wasn’t quite right in this block?
Graner told me about some of the stuff they were doing. When we first got there in September the prisoners were already naked, they had them wear women’s underwear, and they had them in stress positions. The company that we relieved was doing the exact same stuff. We just took over from them.

Was Graner already a part of that?
There was a three-week ride-a-long where two of our guys would work with two of their guys to get to know the ropes and during those three weeks Graner would tell me how they were doing this and that.

What do you mean by “this and that”?
Pushing them around, stripping them down, putting them in stress positions, yelling at them.

Why did they choose Graner? After all he had a past history of violence.
Graner had a very commanding voice and they wanted him in that tier specifically.

Who do you mean by “they”?
The people from Military Intelligence.

How did you react when Graner told you how the detainees were being treated?
Of course it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI the pictures and they say, “Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up”, you think it must be right. They were all there and they didn’t say a word. They didn’t wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered.

Which photos did Graner present to them?
All of them. He showed them on his laptop. He’d say, “Hey, let me show you this, this is what we’re supposed to be doing.” And they said, “Yeah, we got great results, keep it up, you’re doing a good job.” He actually got a letter of commendation for the stuff he did.

Where were you when the M.I. guys said, “Keep up the good work”?
I was there, within earshot, or Graner told me about it.

What did you think when you first saw the detainees wearing women’s underpants or rubbing feces on themselves. Did you feel sorry for them?
Well, it was kind of weird at first. But once I started to see the big picture, I thought, okay, here come these guys, the OGAs, the MIs or even officers, and they don’t even look twice at it. If they approve, then I’m not going to say anything. Who was I to argue?

These photos made you famous the world over. Even the Rolling Stones wrote a song about you. You have become a symbol, the face of this war.
That’s how I read about it in the papers. People stare at me a lot. When we talk about the negative things that happened in the war, then Abu Ghraib is one of the first things to come up, and they usually name me by name. Although I was only in five or six pictures, I am the most famous. So I suppose I am a symbol of this war. Unfortunately.

Let’s talk about the photos, especially the one with Gus, the man on the dog-leash. Why Gus?
The MPs who escorted him named him Gus because they couldn’t remember or pronounce his real name. I know that picture happened first. It was in late October. It was like 10 o’clock at night, so I had just gotten off my shift. It was pretty quiet on the tier and all of a sudden I heard a pounding on the door of the isolation cell below us. I said, “What the hell is that?” and Graner said, “We have this crazy guy in there who keeps shouting that he wants to kill Americans.” Gus had been in the cell for four hours already and it was time to bring him out. So Graner said, “You gotta back me up, right? He already had his camera. He always carried his camera with him. Megan Ambuhl and I went down with him. Graner opened the door and Gus is lying on the floor. Graner put the tie-down strap around his neck and said, “Come out of the cell.” Gus was crawling on all fours and then Graner asked one of us to hold the end of the strap because he wanted to document the method of extraction from the cell. So I took the strap and he took three pictures.

Can you understand that people who look at this photo are offended?
Well, they weren’t there. And they don’t know what went on and they don’t know how we felt at the time, in that environment and what we were told to do.

But do you understand the outrage?
To be honest, even if I wasn’t there, I might think, “Yeah, what the hell was going on here? What are they doing to him?” But then I’d realize where it was. And then I’d think, “Oh, well, that’s like standard procedure there.”

Did you feel sorry for Gus?
At the time, I didn’t. No.

He was mentally ill.
Well, now they said that he was. But at the time it was never mentioned. The only English he ever spoke was, “I hate you. I want to kill you.” So I never really felt sorry for him.

Do you feel sorry looking back now?
To be honest, the whole time I never really felt guilty because I was following orders and I was doing what I was supposed to do. So I’ve never felt guilty about doing anything that I did there.

Guilt is one thing but feeling sorry is something else.
(Long silence) Like I said, what he was saying to us, and when he was thrashing out at us, I didn’t even feel sorry for him at the time. And he’s probably out there killing Americans now.

Let us talk about the other pictures, like the infamous pyramid of humans.
None of us knew what Graner was doing. He said he was stacking the men up to control them because it was seven of them in an enclosed area. Once he had got them into that position, somebody said, “That looks odd” and that they wanted a picture. And Graner took pictures too. Nearly everybody took pictures.

What’s the sense in making a pyramid out of prisoners? It has nothing to do with controlling them. It doesn’t make sense.
At the time I thought, I love this man, I trust this man with my life, okay, then he’s saying, well, there’s seven of them and it’s such an enclosed area and it’ll keep them together and contained because they have to concentrate on staying up on the pyramid instead of doing something to us.

You are seen smiling in the picture. What was so funny?
Sabrina Harmon took the picture and she said, “Hey, smile for the camera”. So we did. It was a kind of the moment thing.

Have you never felt regret about smiling at a stack of naked Iraqis next to you?
I never really thought about it.

Do you feel ashamed looking back now?
(Long silence).

Can you understand that it’s demeaning for Muslim men to be naked in front of a female American soldier?
That wasn’t part of the reason of why it was done. It was done to search them and to get them into a jumpsuit.

And why were the detainees forced to masturbate in front of you?
Well, that happened right after. They were standing and kneeling in front of the wall. They still had sandbags on their heads and by this time most of the guards had gone. Frederick and me stayed downstairs to watch them. Freddie went up to the guy on the end and tried to get him to start by touching his arm and moving it back and forth. And when he didn’t really catch on to what he meant he took his sandbag off and motioned to him what he wanted him to do and then he put the sandbag back on. And so he started doing it.

You can’t even say the word “masturbate”.
(remains silent)

You stood next to him and allowed it to happen. Did you not protest just once?
I did. I asked Frederick, “Why are you doing this?” And he told me, “I just want to see if he’ll do it.” So I was like, “Whatever.”

No more?
No. I was like, “Fine, you know, whatever.” Then Graner and Frederick tried to convince me to get into the picture with this guy. I didn’t want to, but they were really persistent about it. At the time I didn’t think that it was something that needed to be documented but I followed Graner. I did everything he wanted me to do. I didn’t want to lose him.

Would you say that what happened at Abu Ghraib was torture?
(Long silence and then she grins.)

Is a smile your answer to that?
Torture? Would I say that what happened there was torture? Hm? To the Iraqis? Definitely, being naked. That wasn’t only torture it was humiliating. Then having me, a female, point at them, that was double humiliating. I wouldn’t say that when we had them running up and down the tier, crawling and just wearing themselves out, that that was torture. It was just to get their mind-set prepped for interrogation. To get them exhausted.

Who told you to soften the prisoners up for interrogation?
The OGA and MI-guys…

…the Other Government Agencies, meaning CIA and FBI…
Don’t ask me their names because I don’t know. They always spoke to Graner directly.

And what was the term they used?
“Soften ‘em up.” “We’re trying to get information out of this guy and he hasn’t been cooperating for so many days.” So they would give us instructions on sleep deprivation, on what we could feed them, and if they wanted them to be naked, we would be told to take their mattress and blankets away so they’re sleeping on the cold floor. After the end of October it gets pretty damned cold.

Did you do any water boarding?
No, I didn’t. And I didn’t witness it. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t done. Because a lot of the time the interrogators would take the prisoners into the showers and close the doors and we would have to put like sheets or blankets up over the windows. We could hear what was going on but we couldn’t see.

You heard screams?
Yeah. Sometimes.

At the time, were you aware of people being killed while at Abu Ghraib? One of them was the guy they called “The Iceman”.
Yeah, I heard about it. Actually, I was there the night the Iceman was killed. I went to Tier One and someone said this guy had been taken to the showers and they had the water running, and you could hear this guy just screaming bloody murder. It got to the point where it was so loud and unbearable that I went back to my room. And the next day when I came back there was this puddle of water outside the shower. And I asked, “What’s that from?” And they said, “Oh, its ice from keeping the body till they could transport him.” The Iceman was one of the “Ghost Detainees” that officially never existed.

And who took care of him?
The Other Government Agencies.

CIA and FBI. Did they kill the Iceman?
I won’t respond to that.

The torturers and the politicians who are responsible for their actions are getting away with it. Does that make you angry?
Yeah, I think they used us because the unit that was there before us, the 72nd MP Company, was pretty much doing the same things we were. Only they weren’t documenting it. I’m pretty sure that it was the same at other prisons. Only there are no pictures.

Why did the people from the intelligence units allow photos to be taken?
I don’t know. They never said, “Hey, you’re not supposed to be taking pictures.” I never heard them say that at all. They never even said, “Don’t get caught.” Everybody knew what was going on. Once they heard there were pictures, they wanted to see. Graner started making copies on floppy disks or memory sticks. And he didn’t even want money from them. So they took it and they showed it to their buddies and their buddies wanted a copy and so on and so on. And the hearsay around was that it was okay. It was approved by MI and the OGA.

And then a sergeant named Joe Darby brought the whole scandal to light.
Darby had those pictures at the beginning of November. Later on, somebody – it was probably Graner – pissed him off about something and he was like, “Okay, I’m gonna get back at him.” So he turned those pictures into the CIA and became a whistleblower. He was with our unit for years. He was our buddy. And then he turned his back on us. He betrayed us.

You just mentioned the word “scandal”. Do you regard what happened at Abu Ghraib as a scandal or just something that happens in war?
I’m saying that what we did happens in war. It just isn’t documented. If it had been broken by the news without the pictures it wouldn’t have been that big.

You apologized for it during your trial. You said that your actions probably led to the death of many GIs afterwards.
Yes. I received letters that accused me of being responsible for their deaths because the insurgents wanted to take revenge by attacking Americans. I can’t say for sure I killed thousands of people. I can say I killed all these people, but I didn’t kill them directly.

Thousands of Americans?
Both. I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the Americans and the British and they attacked in return and they were just killing each other. I felt bad about it, … no, I felt pissed off. If the media hadn’t exposed the pictures to that extent then thousands of lives would have been saved.

How can you blame the media? If you hadn’t committed the crimes in the first place, we would have no reason to report on it.
The government had the pictures in December but they didn’t come out till the end of April.

But you took the photos.
Yeah, I took the photos but I didn’t make it worldwide. Yes, I was in five or six pictures and I took some pictures, and those pictures were shameful and degrading to the Iraqis and to our government. And I feel sorry and wrong about what I did. But it would not have escalated to what it did all over the world if it wouldn’t have been for someone leaking it to the media. Hell, I was at Fort Bragg when the pictures came out and I had no idea.

Can you tell us about the day you heard the pictures had been made public?
The pictures came out on a Thursday, April 27 or 28. I called my Mom on Saturday. I was pregnant at the time, I didn’t have a car, I didn’t get the newspaper, I didn’t have a TV, I didn’t have a radio. I called my Mom from a payphone and she said, “There’s a hundred reporters out in the front yard. You’re all over the news, your face is in the papers, on CNN.” I just said, “What are you talking about?” I didn’t believe it. She started talking about the pictures and describing them. And I’m like, “Oh shit, how did they get out?”

Were you scared when you realized the pictures were out there?
I didn’t really believe it. It was kind of like I was still in shock. I was like “No, me?”

But you knew at that stage that the investigation had been underway since January?
Yeah, but I didn’t know it was so public with America, or even the world. So I went to this buddy I knew in the barracks, and I looked it up on the Internet and thought, “Oh my God.” I couldn’t believe it. And then I started getting paranoid. I was really getting scared at that point and thinking somebody’s gonna beat the shit out of me. And I was only three months pregnant and I wasn’t showing so they could beat the hell out of me and I could have lost the baby. I was pretty much alone, and I was scared. I couldn’t trust anybody. It was crazy.

Did you feel ashamed when you saw the pictures in public for the first time?
At the chow hall they had these two huge big-screen-TVs so you could watch while you were eating. I was sitting there eating and there was this big TV in front of me and they started showing the pictures of me, and everybody in the room turned and looked at me. So I left and went back to my room.

So you did feel shame?
I was scared, I thought “Man, I’m gonna get the shit kicked out of me.”

Any shame, any guilt?
Yeah, I thought, “These people are gonna think I’m horrible and, you know, I am horrible for doing this and getting into that.” But somewhere in my mind I was thinking, you know they don’t really understand the whole story.

Mrs. England, we’ve listened to you for hours. And the whole time we’ve been asking ourselves: Where is your feeling of regret?
Looking back on it, if I could change it I would. I would have never met Graner, I never would have gone over there, I would have stayed in my little work area in Abu Ghraib, did what I had to do.

How did your relationship with Graner end?
We were in Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport. It was February 5 and the investigation was already underway. About that time, he finally decided it was time to break off the relationship. He said, “It’s over. We don’t even have to talk about it.” He had said that he was going to marry me. We were going to have kids. I was just so pissed off with him.

You were pregnant.
Yes, but I didn’t know it.

Did you know that he was having an affair with Megan Ambuhl, one of the other accused soldiers, at the same time?
I only found that out at his trial. Megan and I were friends at the time. He married her later on.

Does your son Carter remind you of Graner?
Yes, I try not to think about it but it gets harder the older he gets. The more he grows, the more he looks like him.

What will you tell Carter about his parents and Abu Ghraib?
I don’t know. I’m trying to get together a scrapbook right now. My Mom kept every single article. And I’ll probably cut them out and put them in a scrapbook and let him look at that. I still don’t know what I’m going to tell him about his father. I guess the truth.

The former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, called you and your colleagues the “rotten apples” of the military. Bush claimed to be ashamed of what you did.
Well, back then I thought: How can they say that when it was happening all over Iraq. The same thing is happening in Guantanamo now and other places. We knew that our officers knew about it and our sergeants. We thought if they know then somebody else knows. And I really do still think that Rumsfeld knew what was going on. I mean he had been there while I was there at that prison. And if he was there I know he knew what was going on. How could he have not known? And Bush? He’s the headman.

Do you feel more like a victim or an offender?
I feel more like a puppet. First I was played by Graner. Then the media portrayed me as their puppet so they could flash my picture out over and over and over and over again. And then I became the government’s puppet because they didn’t back me up, or remotely take my side. They just agreed with what the media said.

Saying you were a puppet again makes you sound like a victim.
Okay, I do take responsibility. I was dumb enough to do all that. And to think that it was okay because of the other officers and the orders that were coming down. But when you’re in the military you automatically do what they say. It’s always, “Yes Sir, No Sir.” You don’t question it. And now they’re saying, “Well, you should have questioned it.”

There is talk about new pictures that are even harsher than the ones we know.
I know there were some harsher pictures they had at the time of the trial that the media decided not to expose.

What was on those pictures?
You see the dogs biting the prisoners. Or you see bite marks from the dogs. You can see MPs holding down a prisoner so a medic can give him a shot. If those had been made public at the time, then the whole world would have looked at those and not at mine.

Was Abu Ghraib the turning point of the war?
I actually thought about that before the pictures came out. I thought, “I hope this never comes out because it’ll change the way people see the war. And the way people see America.” And it did, it changed everything. I felt bad about that. I felt sorry. And I still do.

Did you think three years was the correct punishment for your crime?
No. It’s ridiculous. It was much too long. If you look at my charge sheet, I was only charged and convicted for posing in pictures. Not for physically abusing prisoners.

How were you treated in prison?
Literally, it was like flies on shit, man. When I got there, they were all like, “Oh my God.” They loved me. I was like a celebrity.

How do you live with the burden today?
I don’t know. I try to look forward and not to think about it anymore. If I think about it, then I get down; I get feeling sorry and pissed off.

Do the pictures still haunt you?
Hell, I’m seeing a psychiatrist and a therapist. I’m on antidepressants and meds for anxiety. If it wasn’t for that I’d probably lose my mind. I just get freaked out. I’m paranoid as hell at people.

So it’s getting worse over time?
According to the psychiatrist, yes. I’m going to blame it on my Mom because right now she is flipping out over little shit, and I don’t know why. She tells me almost every day how she had to put up with my son for a year and a half because of what I did to get myself in trouble when I wasn’t there for him and I was in prison.

But you still live with your parents.
I want to get a house of my own but at the same time I’m scared to do that because what if somebody finds out where I live and they’re against me and they try to do some shit. I can’t protect Carter.

It sounds as if you are a prisoner. A prisoner of yourself and your own actions?
Now it’s like I have to think about everything I do before I do it.

What plans do you have for the future? What are your hopes and dreams?
Living a normal life. Not having to worry about looking over my shoulder every day, about thinking ten years down the road somebody’s going to recognize me and come shoot me because of something I did when I was young and stupid and in love. I’m scared to death because Carter starts school this fall. What if somebody doesn’t like me, and kidnaps him because of what I did.

Have you ever thought about going away to some place where people don’t know you?
I can’t go anywhere because everyone recognizes me.

You’ve let your hair grow.
But everybody recognizes my face and my voice. I even dyed my hair, but even then people still recognized me. They even recognize me when I’m wearing sunglasses and a hat.

So that’s why you stay here in West Virginia?
Well I know more people support me here than are against me. It’s that one crazy one that you don’t know that finds out where you live and comes after you.

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Happy Anniversary America! How Lethally Stupid Can One Country Be?

http://www.regressiveantidote.net/

Watching George W. Bush in operation these last couple of weeks is like having an out-of-body experience. On acid. During a nightmare. In a different galaxy.

As he presides over the latest disaster of his administration (No, it’s not a terrorist attack – that was 2001! No, it’s not a catastrophic war – that was 2003! No, it’s not a drowning city – that was 2005! This one is an economic meltdown, ladies and gentlemen!) bringing to it the same blithe disengagement with which he’s attended the previous ones, you cannot but stop and gaze in stark comedic awe, realizing that the most powerful polity that ever existed on the planet twice picked this imbecilic buffoon as its leader, from among 300 million other choices. Seeing him clown with the Washington press corps yet once again – and seeing them fawn over him, laugh in all the right places, and give him a standing ovation, also yet once again – is the equivalent of having all your logic circuits blown simultaneously. Truly, the universe has a twisted and deeply ironic sense of humor. Monty Python is about as funny – and as stiff – as Dick Nixon, by comparison.

It’s simply incomprehensible. It’s not so astonishing, of course, that a country could have a bad leader whose aims are nefarious on the occasions when they are competent enough to rise to that level of intentionality. Plenty of countries have managed that feat, especially when – as was the case with Bush – every sort of scam is employed to steal power, and then pure corruption and intimidation used to keep it. History is quite littered indeed with bimbos and petty criminals of this caliber. What is harder to explain is how a country of such remarkable achievements in other domains, and with the capacity to choose, and in the twenty-first century no less, allows this to happen. And then stands by silently watching for eight years as the tragedy unfolds before their eyes, all 600 million of them, hardly any of them even blinking.

And so, remarkably, as we mark now the fifth anniversary of the very most tragic of these debacles, the most destructive and the most shameful – because it was the most avoidable – the sad question of the hour is less what is to be done about it than will anyone even notice? Not likely. And not for very long if they do. And, most of all, definitely not enough so as to take meaningful action to bring it to an end, even at this absurdly late date.

But let’s give credit where credit is due. This is precisely by design. This is exactly the outcome intended by the greatest propaganda-promulgating regime since Hermann Göring set fire to the Reichstag. It was Göring himself who famously reminded us that, “Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. …Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Sure worked in Germany. And it worked even better here, because these guys were so absolutely careful to avoid exposing the costs of their war to those who could demand its end. For example, by some counts, there are more mercenaries fighting in Iraq, at extremely high cost, than there are US military personnel. There’s only one reason for that. If the administration implemented the draft that is actually necessary to supply this war with adequate personnel, the public would end both the war and the careers of its sponsors, post haste. For the same reason, this is the first American war ever which has not only not been accompanied by a tax increase, but has in fact witnessed a tax cut. Likewise – to ‘preserve the dignity’ of the dead, of course – you are no longer permitted to see photographs of flag-draped caskets returning to Dover Air Force Base. And the press are embedded with forces who are also responsible for their safety, which is just a fancy way of saying that they’re so censored they make Pravda look good. It is, in short, quite easy for average Americans to get through their day, every day, without the war impacting their lives in any visible respect, and that is precisely what hundreds of millions of us are doing, week in and week out. All of this is courtesy of an administration that couldn’t run a governmental program to save its own life – but, boy, they sure as hell know how to market stuff.

So perhaps there is no excuse, after all, for my naiveté, for my credulousness in wanting to believe that twenty-first century America might be different enough not to follow the smallest of men – a personal failure and a 40-year drunkard who, unlike Herr Göring’s führer, couldn’t even claim charismatic eloquence as the sole virtue accounting for his power – to follow such a petulant child off the deep end of a completely unjustified war. Perhaps Americans and American democracy are no wiser or better than any other people or political system, even today, even after the worst century of warfare in human history, even after the mirror-image experience of Vietnam. Maybe the experience of Iraq hasn’t even changed them, and they’ll once again follow like lemmings when led to war by pathetic creatures such as George W. Bush, fifty years from now. Or five years from now. Or even five months from now, as the creature d.b.a Dick Cheney tees up a confrontation with Iran in order keep Democrats out of the White House, and himself out of jail.

Sure, presidents and prime ministers, no less than kings and führers, will lie their countries into war. Sure, they’re very good at it, and getting better all the time. Definitely a frightened people are more prone to stupidity than those lucky enough to contemplate in the luxury of quiet safety. Without question, it helps an awful lot – if you’re just Joe Sixpack, out there trying to figure out international politics in-between a long day’s work, helping the kids with their algebra homework, and the Yankee game – to have a checking-and-balancing Congress, a responsible opposition party, and/or a critical media helping you to understand the issues accurately, rather than gleefully capitulating to executive power at every opportunity. But that by no means excuses a public who were fundamentally far more lazy than they were ignorant or confused. And lazy is one thing when you’re talking about a highway bill or even national healthcare. But when it comes to war, lazy is murder.

I don’t think it took a giant leap of logic to understand that this war was bogus from the beginning, even based on what was known at the time. The war was sold on three basic arguments, each of which could have been easily dismantled even then with a little thoughtful consideration.

The first was WMD, of course. So, okay, perhaps your average American didn’t know that the United States government (including many in the current administration) had actually once supplied Saddam Hussein the materiel to make these evil weapons, and had covered for him at the UN and elsewhere when he used them. Although this historical myopia is very much part of the problem, of course. Americans are so ready to denounce supposed enemies without doing the slightest bit of historical homework to become acquainted with the slightest bit of history to make sense of the situation. If you don’t know that the US actually canceled elections and helped assassinate a ‘democratic’ president in Vietnam, of course you’re going to support war there. If you don’t know that the US toppled a democratically elected Iranian government to steal the country’s oil and then installed a brutal dictatorship in its place, of course you’re going to be angry at US diplomats being held hostage. And if you don’t bother to learn the true history of Iraq, perhaps you’ll find the WMD argument quite persuasive.

But, in fact, even without the historical background information, it never made a damn bit of sense. Iraq had been pulverized by war and sanctions for over twenty years prior to 2003. Two-thirds of its airspace was controlled by foreign militaries. Its northern region was effectively autonomous, a separate country in all but name. It was in no position to attack anyone. Moreover, it hadn’t attacked anyone – not the United States or anyone else. Indeed, it hadn’t even threatened to attack anyone. Shouldn’t that be part of the calculation in determining whether to go to war? Do we really want to give carte blanche to any dry (we hope) drunkard in the White House who today wants to bomb Norway (“They’re stealing our fish!”), or tomorrow wants to invade Burkina Faso (“They dress funny!”)?

Too often, of course, the historical answer to that question has unfortunately been yes, we apparently do want to do that. But let’s consider the massive warning signs in this case, even apart from what could be known about the administration’s lies at the time. Shouldn’t it have been enormously problematic that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11? Even the administration never had the gall to make that claim. Wasn’t it transparent to anyone that America had plenty on its plate already in dealing with the enemy we were told we had, rather than adding a new adventure to the pile? And why wasn’t this thing selling throughout the world, or even amongst the traitorous half of the Democratic Party in Congress? Remember how everyone at home and abroad – yes, including the French – supported the US and its military actions in Afghanistan only twelve months before? Shouldn’t it have been a warning sign of epic proportions that these same folks wouldn’t countenance a war in Iraq just a year later? That the administration had to yank its Security Council resolution off the table, even after breaking both the arms of every member-state around the horseshoe table, because it could still only get Britain and two other patsies to lie down for this outrage, out of a total of fifteen, and nine needed to pass?

And how about the logic of that whole WMD thing, after all? Did anyone ever stop to think that several dozen other countries have WMD, including some that are pretty hostile to the United States? Did anyone not remember that the Soviets once had nearly 25,000 strategic nuclear warheads pointed in our direction? What ever happened to the logic of deterrence? To mutually assured destruction? And what about the mad rush to go to war, preempting the UN weapons inspectors from doing their job? Are we really okay with the notion that instead of ‘risking’ whatever would have been at risk by giving the inspectors another six or eight weeks to finish up, we’ve instead bought this devastating war down on our own heads for no reason at all? If you stop to think about it, it makes you shudder. Which I guess explains why not too many people stop to think about it.

The second rationale for war was the bogus linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda. The extent and ramifications of this lie are so significant that the White House, it was just recently revealed, squelched a Pentagon report showing no connections between the two. Is this sort of censorship what the Bush administration means by democracy, the remedy it’s always preaching for the rest of the world but never practicing at home? Anyhow, remember how definitive Cheney and the rest were of this supposed al Qaeda linkage, based pretty much entirely on a meeting between two operatives in Prague which likely didn’t even take place? Now we find out that the Department of Defense has spent the last five years combing through a mere 600,000 documents, and found zero evidence of such a link. Not some evidence. Not mixed evidence. Zero evidence.

But you could tell even then that they had almost nothing to go on. Christ, the United States government itself has had far more interactions with al Qaeda – including helping to build the beast from its inception – than one disputed meeting between two spooks in Prague. Doesn’t it seem that a decision to go to war should hang on more than a single thread like that, let alone a narrow and tattered one? And how many of us are down for attacking any country right now that might have had a single meeting between a low-level functionary and an al Qaeda representative?

Then, once again, there’s the matter of that whole pesky logic thing. Pay attention now, class. What do we know about al Qaeda? They are devoted to religious war – jihad – in the name of replacing governments across the Middle East with theocracies, or better yet recreating the old Islamic caliphate stretching across the region, right? Right. Now if this vision could have more thoroughly contradicted Saddam’s agenda for a secular dictatorship seeking regional domination on his own Stalinist terms, it is hard to imagine how. You don’t need a PhD in international politics to see that these two actors were about as antithetical to each other as the Republican Party is to integrity. Then again, even having one doesn’t necessarily mean you have the foggiest clue about what’s going on in the world, as Condoleeza Rice clearly demonstrated by brilliantly failing to anticipate that Hamas would win elections she had pushed the Palestinians to hold. For someone serving as secretary of state, this idiocy is the rough equivalent of anyone else being shocked when a dropped bowling ball hurtles to the ground, because they’re not yet fully acquainted with the concept of gravity. Evidently, in Texas this is what they call ‘credentials’.

Lastly, Bush’s little adventure in Mesopotamia was supposed to bring democracy to the region, remember? Never mind, of course, that there has long already been a fairly thriving Islamic democracy, right next door. Oops! It’s called Turkey. And let’s not forget Mr. Bush’s long-standing devotion to democracy, as he amply demonstrated in the American election of 2000. Or as he has continually manifested by bravely and publically pushing the Chinese to democratize. Just as he has with his pals in Egypt and especially the family friends running Saudi Arabia, the recipient of more American foreign aid than nearly any other country in all the world. And let’s not forget the several hundred thousand perished souls from Darfur, whom this great champion of human rights has fought valiantly to keep alive by… by… well, I’m sure he’s done a lot behind the scenes. Sure is gonna be hard for them to exercise their precious right to vote from the next world, eh?

What is clear is that the reasons given to the American public for the war in Iraq were entirely bogus. This much is already on the public record, from the Downing Street Memos and beyond. Even if we can only speculate on why they actually invaded – oil, glory, personal insecurity, Israel, clobbering Democrats, Middle Eastern dominance – what we know for sure is that the rationale fed to the public was a knowingly fabricated pack of scummy lies. It wasn’t about WMD, it wasn’t about links to al Qaeda, and it sure wasn’t about democracy.

But even if we can’t identify the true motivations within the administration for invading, we can surely begin to see the costs. Probably a million Iraqi civilians are dead. Over four million are displaced and now living as refugees. Together, these equal a staggering one-fifth of the population of the entire country. Meanwhile, the remaining four-fifths are living in squalor, fear and a psychological damage so extensive that it is hard to grasp. America has lost 4,000 soldiers, with perhaps another 30,000 gravely wounded. Hundreds of thousands more will be scarred for life from their experiences in the hell of Mr. Bush’s war. Our military is broken and incapable of responding to a real emergency, at home or abroad. Our economy will sustain a blow of perhaps three trillion dollars before it is all said and done. Our reputation in the world is in the toilet. We have turned the Iranian theocracy into a regional hegemon. And we have massively proliferated our own enemies within the Islamic community. That would be one hell of an expensive war, even if the reasons given for it were legitimate. It is nearly incomprehensible considering that they were not.

This week, a man died in France, the last surviving veteran of World War I, a devastating conflict that – even a century later – nobody can still really explain to this day. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney, John McCain and Joe “Make-me-SecDef-Mac-oh-please-pick-me-Mac” Lieberman parachuted into Iraq for photo-ops to sustain the war they don’t have the integrity or the guts to abandon. Never mind that their visits had to be by surprise, and that they stroll around the Green Zone wearing armored vests – surely the most powerful measures of the war’s success imaginable. Of course, to be fair, we’ve only been at it for five years now. Perhaps after the remaining ninety-five on McCain’s agenda go by, Americans will finally be safe enough in Iraq to announce their visits in advance.

So, Happy Anniversary, America! You put these people in charge, and then – after seeing in explicit in detail what they were capable of – you actually did it again in 2004! You stood by in silence watching the devastation wrought upon an innocent people, produced in your name and financed by your tax dollars. And you continue to do just that again, now in Year Six.

Brilliant! Put on your party hat, America. You won the prize.

You’ve successfully answered the musical question, “How lethally stupid can one country be?”

New Goverment Campaign against Organic Pastures

Let’s Not Kid Ourselves About What the FDA-Led Grand Jury Probe Is Really About

Last September 20, I posted an item that seemed humorous at the time, about Mark McAfee’s encounter with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the issuance of a press release concerning the recall of Organic Pastures Dairy Co. cream contaminated with listeria monocytogenes. FDA officials had asked Mark to write his version of a press release and, not surprisingly, he came up with language very much at odds with the FDA.

While it’s safe to surmise that no one at the FDA appreciated the humor of that encounter, what is perhaps most important about the matter at this point in time is that there are two press releases that resulted from the back-and-forth process still posted on the FDA web site. Both the press releases, dated Sept. 21 and Sept. 24, contain this sentence:

“The product [cream] was sold in retail stores throughout California and was also available worldwide via phone orders, and is not pasteurized.”

Wouldn’t you think that if the FDA had a problem with what Organic Pastures was doing, it might have adjusted that sentence to say, “…and was also available worldwide via phone orders, in violation of FDA regulations about interstate sale of raw milk products”?

The reason no qualification was included then, or ever related to Mark afterwards, is that the FDA had in fact approved OPDC’s labeling of raw milk for non-California sales as pet food back in early 2005. The whole matter actually started in April 2004, according to an FDA “warning letter” written to OPDC in February 2005 (which I couldn’t locate on the FDA web site, but which I have in paper form), demanding that OPDC discontinue interstate distribution of raw milk “in final package form for human consumption.”

The FDA’s press release of late 2007 said what it said because there was a problem with the cream, and not with anything else.

It would be nice to believe, as Amanda Rose and William Lind suggest, that OPDC brought this latest crackdown by law enforcement down on itself by somehow wink-winking or waving a red flag in front of authorities. Forget about blaming the victim. What we are dealing with here, as a number of individuals point out, has nothing to do with what’s legal or illegal (though it would be helpful, as Steve Bemis suggests, if federal law permitted interstate transport of raw milk into states that allow it).

There can be no doubt, after all that has happened over the last year-and-a-half, that we are witnessing a concerted, and desperate, campaign to place a huge lid on the growth in the consumption of raw milk. Pete Kennedy of the Weston A. Price Foundation called it correctly in my recent “Milk Wars” Nation article, when he pointed out that the authorities realize they can’t scare people away from raw milk, so they’ve moved instead to cripple the supply side.

The campaign is focused like two lasers on New York and California. The battles now going on are truly pivotal. Losses in one or both places will lead the authorities to pull the same tactics in other states. Wins will back them into a corner.

At this point in time, despite the expenditure of huge resources in manpower—the detectives out interviewing low-level employees of a small dairy at all hours of the night are just the tip of the iceberg—the bureaucrats may be getting uneasy that they are beginning to come up short. The California judge’s temporary restraining order issued last Wednesday, on top of the California protests and growing raw milk consumption, are communicating that message.
With their latest escapade, they have to be wondering what the hell is going on here. When FDA criminal investigators secretly question employees of most firms under investigation, the investigators typically find people who resent their employers, and are willing to tattle, and even wear hidden wires. And assuming the employers discover they are under investigation, they almost always want to avoid going public with news of a grand jury investigation—after all, it’s not good PR in most industries.

Yet in the case of OPDC, not only did the employees spill the beans, but the employer went around trumpeting to the media that he’s being investigated! And the request to an employee to wear a wire suggests the authorities don’t quite have “the goods” on Mark McAfee just yet.

The problem here may be that the bureaucrats in charge haven’t communicated to their underlings that this isn’t about violation of any laws, but rather about much more serious matters like rights and freedom and privacy. What the heck, let’s call it for what it is—a government vendetta.

Milk Wars

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080317/gumpert

David E. Gumpert

For the past sixty years, there hasn’t been much good news for America’s small dairies. Thanks to rising land costs and intensifying price pressures, the bucolic sight of cows grazing in the countryside has become ever less common. Since 1970 alone, the number of dairies has plunged an astounding 88 percent, to 75,000, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The consolidation means that factory-style dairies with between 1,000 and 5,000 cows have become increasingly common.

The one bit of encouraging news for small dairies has been the growing market among health-conscious consumers for unpasteurized milk and dairy products like yogurt, butter and cream. There may be a half-million or more raw-milk drinkers in the United States, with the number growing “exponentially,” says Sally Fallon, co-founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation, which encourages consumption of raw milk for its healthful enzymes, bacteria and proteins.

Small dairies have rushed to meet this need via a completely new business model. Instead of selling milk in bulk to processors who offer take-it-or-leave-it prices of $1.50 to $2 a gallon, some small dairies sell directly to consumers at whatever price the market will bear, typically from $5 a gallon to as much as $10 a gallon. At those prices, dairy farmers actually begin thinking in terms of a long-forgotten word: profit.

In New York state, which regulates direct sales of raw milk to consumers by issuing permits to dairies, the number of raw-milk dairies with permits has doubled to twenty from ten in 2005. The same sort of minirevival has occurred in other states that allow raw-milk sales direct from the farm, like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. In California–one of the few states that allow sales of raw milk via Whole Foods Market and other retail outlets–the largest raw-milk dairy, the 350-cow Organic Pastures Dairy Company, has seen its annual sales climb by 25 percent annually, to more than $5 million.

Arguing that raw milk isn’t safe and that consumers must be protected from its dangers, some government regulators and legislators are targeting small raw-milk dairies for tough enforcement actions, focusing most intensively on dairies in New York and California.

State regulators have supplemented inspections by obtaining search warrants, pushing restrictive legislation and even threatening to throw dairy farmers into jail. They’ve been encouraged by the US Food and Drug Administration, which in a sixty-four-slide PowerPoint presentation posted on its website last March, exhorted “everyone charged with protecting the public health to prevent the sale of raw milk to consumers….”

Barb and Steve Smith see New York’s ever-harsher tactics against their tiny Meadowsweet Farm as closely related to the rising demand for raw milk. They obtained a raw-milk permit in 1997 because they were desperate to extricate themselves and their nine children from the commodity bondage that dominated their lives from the time they purchased the farm in 1995. “We figured by selling milk to the processor we were getting about $1 an hour for our work,” says Steve.

The raw-milk option was slow going until 2005 and 2006, when demand began rising sharply. Anywhere from twenty to thirty customers would regularly visit their lonely outpost near Lodi, most of them from Ithaca, the home of Cornell University, which is about forty-five minutes away.

“But our customers always wanted more things raw–butter, kefir, cream,” says Barb. New York’s Department of Agriculture and Markets prohibits the sale of any raw dairy products except milk and cheese that has been aged at least sixty days.

The expanding customer demands coincided with what the Smiths say was a change in the department’s inspection procedures, beginning in the summer of 2006. Minor violations like a tear in a screen door or excessive weeds outside the barn, overlooked in earlier years, now meant fines of a few hundred dollars and automatic thirty-day re-inspections.

One day in February 2007, they received four letters from Ag and Markets announcing violations and fines. On that day, Barb says, she and Steve concluded, “They were not giving us any way to achieve compliance.”

Ag and Markets declined recent requests for comment about the Smiths’ case, but last July, when a number of dairy farmers with raw-milk permits began complaining about intensified inspections, agency spokeswoman Jessica Chittenden told me, “Even though there is a demand for this product and we have regulations that allow for the sale of raw milk, food safety must come first. Therefore, we take our responsibility in safeguarding consumers from food-borne illness very seriously.”

The Smiths decided over the next few months to pursue an increasingly popular avenue among dairies in states that don’t allow the sale of raw milk or have very restrictive policies: issuing “herd shares” or “cow shares,” legal agreements under which consumers acquire partial ownership of the dairy herd and receive milk and other dairy products from “their” cows.

While some state agriculture officials have challenged these arrangements, they have held up to legal tests in two major states. In Ohio, a small dairy sued the Ohio Department of Agriculture in 2006 over efforts to shut down its herd share, and won in state court. The Michigan Department of Agriculture last year backed off on seeking criminal charges against a farmer who formed a herd share for Ann Arbor consumers, in the face of widespread public opposition.

Last spring, the Smiths established a herd share, in the form of a limited liability company. Simultaneously, they gave up their raw-milk permit. They spread the word in Ithaca that buying shares in the LLC would entitle owners to raw milk and the other high-demand raw-milk products, along with delivery to easy-access drop-off points.

By the summer, they had 130 shareholders paying $50 each for shares, plus the equivalent of $6 a gallon for milk, in the form of fees to feed and house the cows; thirty more customers joined a waiting list for future shares. The Smiths were able to reduce their herd to fourteen cows from thirty, generating the same cash flow but with reduced fuel and feed costs.

New York’s Ag and Markets immediately showed its displeasure by stepping up its inspection and enforcement efforts. In late August, the department notified the Smiths that fines for “unsanitary plant conditions” totaled $1,700 and needed to be paid within fifteen days to avoid legal action.

Arguing that they no longer had a raw-milk permit and were serving only private shareholders, the Smiths resisted. That led to steady escalation by Ag and Markets, including the quarantining in October of 130 quarts of yogurt, twenty bottles of buttermilk and five gallons of whole milk in the Smiths’ cooler.

On December 13, with the support of the recently formed Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the Smiths filed suit against the department and two of its officials. They asked the court to allow members of the dairy LLC to continue to pick up their raw-milk products without harassment from regulators.

The same day, in the middle of a snowstorm, two Ag and Markets inspectors showed up to force the Smiths to dump the quarantined milk, yogurt and buttermilk into buckets while the inspectors poured in bleach. The inspectors returned yet again just before Christmas with a search warrant, but the Smiths’ lawyer advised them to refuse the inspection since the warrant didn’t allow for breaking into the Smiths’ locked cooler.

The entire affair has evolved into a three-front legal battle: an additional Ag and Markets regulatory complaint to shut the Smiths’ dairy, the Smiths’ lawsuit and, most recently, a show-cause order in state court as to why the Smiths shouldn’t be held in contempt for refusing to allow the inspectors access to their locked coolers. If the judge rules in favor of the state and if the Smiths continue to resist, they could be thrown in jail. At a hearing February 28, a state judge took under advisement both the state’s request for a contempt finding and the Smiths’ request to quash the show-cause order.

While New York agriculture officials have been fighting small dairies via regulations and the courts, California regulators have been fighting a legislative battle. There, the marketplace is much different, since retail sales of raw milk are allowed. But because of high capital costs and the state’s tough regulations (for example, requiring automated bottling equipment), only two dairies serve the entire market.

Business was growing so quickly for the largest, Organic Pastures, that at one point last fall, the owner, Mark McAfee, said he was in negotiations with a venture capital firm for funds to significantly expand the dairy.

All that’s on hold now. This past October, at the recommendation of California’s Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), the State Assembly quietly passed tough new standards for nonpathogen bacteria counts that the two dairies argue could make a significant portion of their current milk production unacceptable. The chair of the State Assembly’s Agriculture Committee said she hadn’t realized the implications of the legislation, and last month she backed an effort to repeal the standards.

At hearings in Sacramento in January, about 700 raw-milk consumers showed up to back the repeal, and the Agriculture Committee unanimously passed it. But it died in the Appropriations Committee, where large-dairy and medical industry interests opposed what they termed a watering down of toughened food-safety standards.

The CDFA has already begun enforcing the new standards, and Organic Pastures failed two of its initial three tests. The dairy can continue selling raw milk, but if it fails one of its next two tests in the coming months, it could be forced to at least temporarily halt production. McAfee argues that the bacteria being measured, coliforms, have no bearing on milk safety, and that the state should focus its efforts on monitoring potential pathogens like E. coli O157:H7. “This is destabilizing; it’s a game of harassment,” he says.

His dairy and the other California raw-milk producer, Claravale Farm, have joined forces to sue the state and CDFA to block implementation of the regulations. Among their claims: a “denial of due process” because the tough standard “is not rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest.”

While the FDA and most state agriculture and health authorities have for many years opposed raw-milk consumption and fill their websites with warnings about its dangers, the crackdown on dairies represents a change in tactics, says Pete Kennedy, a lawyer for the Weston A. Price Foundation. “They’re now going after the supply side,” he says, since growing numbers of consumers are ignoring the warnings.

Part of the reason for the growing skepticism is that Kennedy last year used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain data from the US Centers for Disease Control showing that from 1973 to 2005, an average of fifty-nine people became ill from raw milk each year–a drop in the bucket compared with the 14 million the CDC says are known to contract food-borne illnesses each year.

Absent a serious health risk, agriculture agencies are charged with encouraging expansion of local farming. New York’s Ag and Markets says its “mission is to foster a competitive food and agriculture industry that benefits producers and consumers alike.” CDFA says it “strives to support…innovation and agricultural diversity.”

Hundreds of small dairies could benefit financially from agriculture department assistance in making the transition to raw-milk production. The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund estimates it helps two or three dairies each week convert from conventional production to raw-milk herd-share legal arrangements. But when it comes to small dairies trying to take advantage of an opportunity to become viable businesses, mission statements seem to get tossed out the window.