Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism

From The New York Times:

THE traditional face of survivalism is that of a shaggy loner in camouflage, holed up in a cabin in the wilderness and surrounded by cases of canned goods and ammunition.

It is not that of Barton M. Biggs, the former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley. Yet in Mr. Biggs’s new book, “Wealth, War and Wisdom,” he says people should “assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.”

“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food,” Mr. Biggs writes. “It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.”

Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore.

Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

They stockpile or grow food in case of a supply breakdown, or buy precious metals in case of economic collapse. Some try to take their houses off the electricity grid, or plan safe houses far away. The point is not to drop out of society, but to be prepared in case the future turns out like something out of “An Inconvenient Truth,” if not “Mad Max.”

“I’m not a gun-nut, camo-wearing skinhead. I don’t even hunt or fish,” said Bill Marcom, 53, a construction executive in Dallas.

Still, motivated by a belief that the credit crunch and a bursting housing bubble might spark widespread economic chaos — “the Greater Depression,” as he put it — Mr. Marcom began to take measures to prepare for the unknown over the last few years: buying old silver coins to use as currency; buying G.P.S. units, a satellite telephone and a hydroponic kit; and building a simple cabin in a remote West Texas desert.

“If all these planets line up and things do get really bad,” Mr. Marcom said, “those who have not prepared will be trapped in the city with thousands of other people needing food and propane and everything else.”

Interest in survivalism — in either its traditional hard-core version or a middle-class “lite” variation — functions as a leading economic indicator of social anxiety, preparedness experts said: It spikes at times of peril real (the post-Sept. 11 period) or imagined (the chaos that was supposed to follow the so-called Y2K computer bug in 2000).

At times, a degree of paranoia is officially sanctioned. In the 1950s, civil defense authorities encouraged people to build personal bomb shelters because of the nuclear threat. In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security encouraged Americans to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal windows in case of biological or chemical attacks.

Now, however, the government, while still conducting business under a yellow terrorism alert, is no longer taking a lead role in encouraging preparedness. For some, this leaves a vacuum of reassurance, and plenty to worry about.

Esteemed economists debate whether the credit crisis could result in a complete meltdown of the financial system. A former vice president of the United States informs us that global warming could result in mass flooding, disease and starvation, perhaps even a new Ice Age.

“You just can’t help wonder if there’s a train wreck coming,” said David Anderson, 50, a database administrator in Colorado Springs who said he was moved by economic uncertainties and high energy prices, among other factors, to stockpile months’ worth of canned goods in his basement for his wife, his two young children and himself.

Popular culture also provides reinforcement, in books like “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a father and son journeying through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and films like “I Am Legend,” which stars Will Smith as a survivor of a man-made virus wandering the barren streets of New York.

Middle-class survivalists can also browse among a growing number of how-to books with titles like “Dare to Prepare!” a self-published work by Holly Drennan Deyo, or “When All Hell Breaks Loose” by Cody Lundin (Gibbs Smith, 2007), which instructs readers how to dispose of bodies and dine on rats and dogs in the event of disaster.

Preparedness activity is difficult to track statistically, since people who take measures are usually highly circumspect by nature, said Jim Rawles, the editor of www.survivalblog.com, a preparedness Web site. Nevertheless, interest in the survivalist movement “is experiencing its largest growth since the late 1970s,” Mr. Rawles said in an e-mail, adding that traffic at his blog has more than doubled in the past 11 months, with more than 67,000 unique visitors per week. And its base is growing.

“Our core readership is still solidly conservative,” he said. “But in recent months I’ve noticed an increasing number of stridently green and left-of-center readers.”

One left-of-center environmentalist who is taking action is Alex Steffen, the executive editor of www.Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability. With only slight irony, Mr. Steffen, 40, said he and his girlfriend could serve as “poster children for the well-adjusted, urban liberal survivalist,” given that they keep a six-week cache of food and supplies in his basement in Seattle (although they polished off their bottle of doomsday whiskey at a party).

He said the chaos following Hurricane Katrina served as a wake-up call for him and others that the government might not be able to [or want to] protect them in an emergency or environmental crisis.

“The ‘where do we land when climate change gets crazy?’ question seems to be an increasingly common one,” said Mr. Steffen in an e-mail message, adding that such questions have “really gone mainstream.”

Many of the new, nontraditional preparedness converts are “Peakniks,” Mr. Rawles said, referring to adherents of the “Peak Oil” theory. This concept holds that the world will soon, or has already, reached a peak in oil production, and that coming supply shortages might threaten society. While the theory is still disputed by many industry analysts and executives, it has inched toward the mainstream in the last two years, as oil prices have nearly doubled, surpassing $100 a barrel. The topic, which was the subject of a United States Department of Energy report in 2005, has attracted attention in publications like The New York Times Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and was a primary focus of “Megadisasters: Oil Apocalypse,” a recent History Channel special.

Another book, “The Long Emergency” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), by James Howard Kunstler, an author and journalist who writes about economic and environmental issues, argues that American suburbs and cities may soon lay desolate as people, starved of oil, are forced back to the land to adopt a hardscrabble, 19th-century-style agrarian life.

Such fears caused Joyce Jimerson of Bellingham, Wash., a coordinator for a recycling-composting program affiliated with Washington State University, to make her yard an “edible garden,” with fruit trees and vegetables, in case supplies are threatened by oil shortages, climate change or economic collapse. “It’s all the same ball of wax, as far as I’m concerned,” she said.

Scott Troyer, an energy consultant in Sunnyvale, Calif., said he was spurred by discussions of peak oil — “it’s not a theory,” he said — and other energy concerns to remake his suburban house in anticipation of a petroleum-starved future. Mr. Troyer, 57, installed a photovoltaic electricity system, a pellet stove and a “cool roof” to reflect the sun’s rays, among other measures.

Mr. Troyer remains cautiously optimistic that Americans can wean themselves from oil through smart engineering and careful planning. But, he said, “the doomsday scenarios will happen if people don’t prepare.”

Some middle-class preparedness converts, like Val Vontourne, a musician and paralegal in Olympia, Wash., recoil at the term “survivalist,” even as they stock their homes with food, gasoline and water.

“I think of survivalists as being an extreme case of preparedness,” said Ms. Vontourne, 44, “people who stockpile guns and weapons, anticipating extreme aggression. Whereas what I’m doing, I think of as something responsible people do.

“I now think of storing extra food, water, medicine and gasoline in the same way I think of buying health insurance and putting money in my 401k,” she said. “It just makes sense.”

By ALEX WILLIAMS

40 NASA Workers On Same Floor Diagnosed With Cancer

Source: NewsNet5

CLEVELAND — There are 40 cases of cancer among people who work in the same building at NASA Glenn Research Center.

Dozens of the employees fear that their cancer was triggered by years of working in the developmental engineering building, NewsChannel5 reported.

The union that represents hundreds of scientists and other workers said nearly half of the 100 employees on the third floor of the building have been diagnosed with various forms of cancer in the past three to four years.

“What we’ve seen in the way of cancer here has just been astronomical on this third floor alone and we’re just a little scared,” said Dennis Pehotsky, of the Lewis Engineers and Scientists Association.

In a written statement, the head of safety at NASA Glenn said an employee survey shows cancer rates among workers are within the normal range, saying “Glenn management has no evidence of the number of cases that the union is reporting.”

Union officials said they believe many employees feared reprisal for answering the survey honestly.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich represents NASA Glenn’s district and his office is looking into the matter.

“We’re concerned about workplace safety. We want to make sure that the conditions that people work under are not going to damage their health,” said Kucinich.

At NASA, where safety is a top priority, employees said they are still waiting for answers.

NASA officials said they have done several tests in recent years that have shown nothing out of the ordinary in the facility, but union officials want more specific testing done for carcinogens.

Glenn officials said they will work with the union to find out more on the matter.

American Exceptionalism and the U.S. media elite’s defense of the media

From Salon.com:

Several days ago, I documented that the establishment media has virtually ignored new revelations of radical government behavior (the implementation of a torture regime at the highest levels of government, the suspension of the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S., patent falsehoods about the 9/11 attacks and surveillance laws from the Attorney General) while devoting extreme amounts of attention to matters so petty and juvenile that they defy derision (e.g., Barack Obama’s bowling prowess and eating habits, gossip about Hillary and Monica Lewinsky, etc.).

I didn’t expect that anyone would actually defend the media’s conduct here because it’s so self-evidently indefensible — so ludicrous — and because defending it would, by definition, require someone to spout rationale that is just inane. But yesterday, both Megan McArdle (of The Atlantic) and Dan Drezner (a Professor at Tufts) stepped up and showed that none of that would deter them. They both reject the idea that any of these facts demonstrate that there is something wrong with our political press.

The “points” they make along the way are just painfully self-refuting and outright false (self-evidently so), so I’m only going briefly to address a couple of those points for illustrative purposes. I want to focus, instead, on some substantive, broader points which their mentality demonstrates.

McArdle’s principal point is that “Americans care more about [Obama] than John Yoo because, well, John Yoo isn’t running for president” and that “most people don’t care about minor government functionaries.” Just think about that for a moment. Megan McCardle thinks that John Yoo is basically the DOJ version of Lynndie England — just some low-level guy who went off on his own and did some isolated, unauthorized bad things in the past that our political leaders have now corrected.

She quite obviously has no idea that the memoranda John Yoo wrote — legalizing government torture, declaring presidential omnipotence, and suspending the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. — are not merely his opinion, but became the official position of the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. She also quite obviously has no idea that he did all of that in close association with the most powerful political officials in the White House, including David Addington, Alberto Gonzales and ultimately Donald Rumsfeld, nor does she have the slightest awareness that the torture-authorizing memoranda were used to brief Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantanamo who then went to Iraq to train the commanders of American prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, nor that the theories of presidential omnipotence underlying it all remain firmly in place.

And that’s the point. Because we have an establishment media that completely ignores these matters in favor of chattering endlessly about how Obama bowls and the cleavage that Hillary shows, the U.S. Government, at its highest levels, can literally create a torture regime — war crimes by any measure — and explicitly seize lawbreaking powers. And when they do, even people like Megan McArdle — who writes on political matters for the The Atlantic – will remain completely ignorant of even the most basic facts about what the Government did, ignorance which won’t stop her from defending it all and dismissing its significance.

And she wants it that way, as she argues that the media should tell her more about Obama’s bowling score than about these dreary, boring stories about DOJ memos. That’s why the Government can and does continue to do what it does — because our elite establishment opinion-makers aren’t just profoundly ignorant, but happy about it, grateful for it even.

* * * * *

Then we have Dan Drezner. He lists several reasons why the media’s coverage is fine here, but what he writes doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. He argues, for example, that controversies where the target of the controversy comments on it will understandably get more media attention than where the target doesn’t comment (yet, almost immediately, John Yoo did comment extensively about his memos, while Hillary has said nothing about Lewinksy for years and Obama hasn’t commented on whether his bowling prowess means he’s an effete and out-of-touch elitist).

Worse, Drezner’s rationale would mean that high government officials who commit serious crimes will be able — and ought to be able — to keep the press coverage to a minimum simply by refusing to comment on what they’ve done, since all the press should do is report what each side says. If the wrong-doers say nothing, there doesn’t need to be press coverage about it — because, hey, what can reporters do?

Drezner also says that “the press appears to be more interested in events that determine the future . . . than in events that look back at the past” (without saying how Obama’s bowling abilities determine our nation’s future while ignoring the fact that the administration which implemented the Yoo Memos, and the Attorney General who lied about the 9/11 attack and spying laws, are still running the most powerful country on earth for another 7 months and the theories of presidential omnipotence they adopted are still in place).

At bottom, both McArdle and Drezner are defending media fixations on the pettiest and stupidest of matters while ignoring the weightiest. Rather obviously, the issue isn’t that they’re covering Barack Obama too much and John Yoo not enough. The issue is that because of the type of media behavior they defend, more Americans were aware of how much John Edwards paid for his haircut – than were aware that Saddam Hussein didn’t personally plan the 9/11 attacks far more. Does someone who defends that state of affairs — who is incapable of recognizing why that’s so destructive — really merit any serious refutation?

* * * * *

Instead, I want to leave their specific claims behind and focus on what is actually important here. What really underlies the mentality of people like McArdle and Drezner are two pervasive though toxic afflictions — a drooling, self-loving American exceptionalism, along with a self-interested refusal to acknowledge that there is anything truly wrong with our political and media establishment because they both support and are part of that establishment.

As for the first matter, people like McArdle and Drezner think it’s fine that we spend so much time talking about Obama’s bowling scores and Edwards’ hair because things are basically going well in our country. Sure, there are some problems here and there. But it hardly rises to the level of a crisis or anything where we need to be so serious and act as though there are things that ought to distract from our constant entertainment.

Things like war crimes, torture, aggressive and illegal wars, and the destruction of the rule of law are things that, by definition, don’t happen to or in the United States. Those are principles which only apply to the dark, dank, wicked places — not here. Thus, the Yoo memoranda and what they spawned are not a big deal because they don’t reflect anything fundamentally wrong and evil with our government, because, as America, we’re immune from anything like that ever happening. So even when conclusive evidence of those things emerges, there’s no reason to pay attention to it. They’re just isolated matters from the boring past, no reason to act as though there’s anything deeply wrong here and certainly no reason to distract us from the vapid, petty chatter in which they wallow.

And then there is the self-absorbed motivation to defend the establishment which they support. Both of them supported the Bush administration and advocated for the invasion of Iraq. Hence, the absolute last thing they want to face — just as is true for most of our political and media establishment — is that the things they cheered on have spawned grave atrocities and vast destruction.

It can never be the case that there is anything profoundly wrong — fundamentally wrong — with the American political establishment. Why not? Because the McArdles and Drezners both support it and are part of it, and they are Good and thus can’t possibly be responsible for things like “war crimes” or “torture regimes” or illegal wars of aggression. That’s why the political establishment is so desperate to stay in Iraq until we “win” and to convince everyone that the public supports them again. They are desperate to wash their hands of that which they enabled so they can pretend they never did.

As is frequently pointed out by historians and other scholars, the types of aggressive wars that McArdle, Drezner and their fellow establishment mavens support inevitably lead to exactly the sort of war crimes and pervasive government lawbreaking which they want to pretend doesn’t matter. Here is what lead American prosecutor Robert Jackson said in his closing statement at the Nuremberg Trials:

We charge unlawful aggression but we are not trying the motives, hopes or frustrations which may have led Germany to resort to aggressive war as an instrument of policy . . . It merely requires that the status quo not be attacked by violent means and that policies be not advanced by war. . . .

The central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars. The chief reason for international cognizance of these crimes lies in this fact. Have we established the Plan or Conspiracy to make aggressive war?

Aggressive war is the linchpin of war crimes and tyranny and inevitably produces them. And that’s precisely the evidence that is now emerging as a result of the endless, aggressive war people like McArdle and Drezner supported — the systematic implementation of a regime of torture and lawless detention by the highest levels of our government, the assertion of the right to suspend even the most basic Constitutional liberties such as the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the seizure of power even to break the law and to immunize the lawbreakers, and the ongoing willingness of our highest government officials to lie about terrorist attacks and the law in order to obtain still more unchecked power.

But the people who caused and enabled that to happen are — understandably so — desperate to avoid acknowledging what they’ve done. Hence, these are all just irrelevant matters of the dead and worthless past. They’re just the totally unexpected by-products of isolated bad actors like Lynndie England and John Yoo — “low-level functionaries” — and it’s all been fixed now anyway. There’s no real reason to harp on it or have our media investigate it. We have a fun presidential election to watch on the TV and there’s no reason to let dreary, partisan, overheated accusations get in the way of the unfolding soap opera.

Is Obama smoking again? Why can’t he bowl? Did you see the way he nibbled on his chocolate like a girl? Let’s watch those Jeremiah Wright videos again. Hillary was in the White House when Bill played with his cigars!!! “What’s wrong with that?,” ask the befuddled Megan McArdles and Dan Drezners of the world. That’s what they want to focus on so that what they’ve done continues to be ignored, concealed and forgotten.

UPDATE: Regarding McArdle’s patronizing justification that the media are simply feeding The Regular People what they want, and what “they” want is lowly trash rather than substantive reporting about their Government, I addressed that in my original post:

Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. They speak for the Regular People, and what the Regular People care about is not Iraq or the looming recession or health care or lobbyist control of our government or anything that would strain the brain of these reporters. What those nice little Regular Folk care about is whether Obama is Regular Folk just like them, whether he can bowl and wants to gorge himself with junk food.

Our nation’s coddled, insulated journalist class reaches these conclusions about what Regular Folk think using the most self-referential, self-absorbed thought process imaginable. The proof that the Regular People are interested in these things is that . . . the journalists themselves chatter about it endlessly.

By Glenn Greenwald.

Liberals Silent on Iraq Atrocities

From Antiwar.com:

In New York, you cannot ride a subway without being bombarded with posters about Darfur and now, Tibet. Of course I have sympathy for those killed and displaced in Darfur, though the numbers have been overblown and other specifics of the situation have been exaggerated. And I am a sucker for all plainly legitimate secessionist movements, as in Tibet. But I am quite sick of being guilted into protest and “action” with the purpose of fixing problems my government is in no way (currently) responsible for.

The Tibet march poster I saw yesterday mentioned the “atrocities” perpetrated by the Chinese government. How about the atrocities carried out, abetted, enabled, and inspired by the US Government in Iraq? The death toll in Iraq beats last month’s entire cluster of clashes in Tibet practically every hour. Why, outside of a few stickers on newspaper boxes around town, is no significant mention made of what’s going on non-stop in Iraq? Are mainstream liberals just so cowed by the see-through rhetoric of the now completely debunked War Party that they still refuse to criticize a war their military is currently prosecuting?

Why are they demurely and cowardly “supporting the troops” in Iraq while wasting their rage on bullsh*t like a police crackdown against rioters in Tibet? This goes all the way up to top liberals in the country — the disgusting Nancy Pelosi tells the President he should boycott the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. Who is George Bush to express moral indignation about anything? France’s Sarkozy is just as ridiculous — he rubs his face in Bush’s crack as the Decider bends over to destroy another piece of Iraq, but is contemplating a boycott of the Olympics opening ceremonies over a few scuffles in Lhasa?

Sick.

How about some priorities reevaluation?

No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11

Project Censored 2008: Top 25 Censored Stories of last year by way of Voltairenet.org:

Osama bin Laden’s role in the events of September 11, 2001 is not mentioned on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” poster. On June 5, 2006, author Ed Haas contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters to ask why, while claiming that bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 1998 bombings of US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the poster does not indicate that he is wanted in connection with the events of 9/11.

Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI responded, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.” Asked to explain the process, Tomb responded, “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”

Haas pauses to ask the question, “If the US government does not have enough hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11, how is it possible that it had enough evidence to invade Afghanistan to ‘smoke him out of his cave?’” Through corporate media, the Bush administration told the American people that bin Laden was “Public Enemy Number One,” responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. The federal government claims to have invaded Afghanistan to “root out” bin Laden and the Taliban, yet nearly six years later, the FBI said that it had no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.

Though the world was to have been convinced by the December 2001 release of a bin Laden “confession video,” the Department of Defense issued a press release to accompany this video in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “There was no doubt of bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks even before the tape was discovered.”

In a CNN article regarding the bin Laden tape, then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that “the tape removes any doubt that the US military campaign targeting bin Laden and his associates is more than justified.” Senator Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said, “The tape’s release is central to informing people in the outside world who don’t believe bin Laden was involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shelby went on to say “I don’t know how they can be in denial after they see this tape.”

Haas attempted to secure a reference to US government authentication of the bin Laden “confession video,” to no avail. However, it is conclusive that the Bush Administration and US Congress, along with corporate media, presented the video as authentic. So why doesn’t the FBI view the “confession video” as hard evidence? After all, notes Haas, if the FBI is investigating a crime such as drug trafficking, and it discovers a video of members of a drug cartel openly talking about a successful distribution operation in the United States, that video would be presented to a federal grand jury. The participants identified in the video would be indicted. The video alone would serve as sufficient evidence to net a conviction in a federal court. So why, asks Haas, is the bin Laden “confession video” not carrying the same weight with the FBI?

Haas strongly suggests that we begin asking questions, “The fact that the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Osama bin Laden to 9/11 should be headline news around the world. The challenge to the reader is to find out why it is not. Why has the US media blindly read the government-provided 9/11 scripts, rather than investigate without passion, prejudice, or bias, the events of September 11, 2001? Why has the US media blacklisted any guest that might speak of a government-sponsored 9/11 cover-up, rather than seeking out those people who have something to say about 9/11 that is contrary to the government’s account?” Haas continues. “Who is controlling the media message, and how is it that the FBI has no ‘hard evidence’ connecting Osama bin Laden to the events of September 11, 2001, while the US media has played the bin Laden-9/11 connection story for [six] years now as if it has conclusive evidence that bin Laden is responsible for the collapse of the twin towers, the Pentagon attack, and the demise of United Flight 93?”

UPDATE BY ED HAAS

On June 6, 2006 the Muckraker Report ran a piece by Ed Haas titled “FBI says, ‘No hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.’” Haas is the editor and a writer for the Muckraker Report. At the center of this article remains the authenticity and truthfulness of the videotape released by the federal government on December 13, 2001 in which it is reported that Osama bin Laden “confesses” to the September 11, 2001 attacks. The corporate media—television, radio, and newspapers—across the United States and the world repeated, virtually non-stop for a week after the videotape’s release, the government account of OBL “confessing.”

However, not one document has been released that demonstrates the authenticity of the videotape or that it even went through an authentication process. The Muckraker Report has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI, CIA, Department of Defense, and CENTCOM requesting documentation that would demonstrate the authenticity of the videotape and the dates/circumstances in which the videotape was discovered. CENTCOM has yet to reply to the FOIA request. After losing an appeal, the FBI responded that no documents could be found responsive to the request. The Department of Defense referred the Muckraker Report to CENTCOM while also indicating that it had no documents responsive to the FOIA request either.

The CIA however claims that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to the request. According to the CIA the fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended. Therefore, the Agency has denied your request pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3).

Many people believe that if the videotape is authentic, it should be sufficient hard evidence for the FBI to connect bin Laden to 9/11. The Muckraker Report agrees. However, for the Department of Justice to indict bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks, something the government has yet to do, the videotape would have to be entered into evidence and subjected to additional scrutiny. This appears to be something the government wishes to avoid.

Some believe that the video is a fake. They refer to it as the “fat bin Laden”video. The Muckraker Report believes that while the videotape is indeed authentic, it was the result of an elaborate CIA sting operation. The Muckraker Report also believes that the reason why there is no documentation that demonstrates that the videotape went through an authenticity process is because the CIA knew it was authentic, they arranged the taping.

It is highly probable that the videotape was taped on September 26, 2001—before the US invaded Afghanistan.

Source:

The Muckraker Report, June 6, 2006, and Ithaca Journal, June 29, 2006

Title: “FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11’”

Author: Ed Haas

http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html

Student Researcher: Bianca May and Morgan Ulery

Faculty Evaluator: Ben Frymer, Ph.D.

Ed Haas

The Audacity of Depression – Rage fatigue, plastic dirt and happy hour in techno-totalitarian America

by Joe Bageant:

During [the past couple of years] I have noticed a change in the nature of discussion with these previously unmet readers. Four years ago, much of it centered on the outrageousness of the Bush administration, the stomach turning criminality of the Iraq War, Cheney The Fanged Man of Wax, with a little rage at our planetary ecocide thrown into the mix. In other words, about what you might expect from a baby roasting alien commie readership such as mine, made up of such folks as school teachers, union members, sociology profs and other congenital malcontents, the sort of people who resent things like student strip searches in public high schools (HR 5295, The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006, which, to its credit, at least bans cavity searches by faculty. You gotta be a cop to do that in our public schools) and other subversive types.

Lately though, I don’t hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called “rage fatigue.” Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it’s true.

One of the best things about the hundred or so book festivals in America is that, with luck, a writer can manage to get drunk with some of his or her readers. And with more luck, the readers pick up the tab. Bear in mind that 90% of all real writers, people for whom writing is their sole income, spend much of their time counting their change in the rest room of the hotels where they are being put up while on tour. Believe me, there are better rackets than writing.

So here I am at the Virginia Festival of the Book copping a smoke on the back dining patio of the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville with one of my readers — a somewhat elegant sixty-plus blonde who runs a small public library financial support group down in ancient marshy Northumberland County, Virginia. Created in 1648, it is the area James A. Michener wrote about in Chesapeake, and a place where, she tells me, periwinkles planted three hundred years ago on the graves of slaves still bloom. My wife, a historical librarian doing colonial African-American research, tells me these periwinkle marked slave graves can be found throughout Virginia.

Immensely energetic and a lifelong activist for literacy and informed thought, this cigarette voiced Northumberland librarian has built the county’s new little library, and even managed to coax enough money out of the local government for two employees. In a county with a population of 12,000, that’s no small political feat.

At the moment though, politically speaking, the Obama-Hillary dirt fight is in full fury, so I asked the obligatory question of the week, “Who will you vote for?”

“Oh, Obama, I guess. It’s so hard to get excited over the elections. Lately I’ve been just plain depressed,” she said.

“About what?”

“Oh just everything. It seems to have become so pointless in America, as if we are entering a Dark Age. I’ve come to wonder why I do anything at all.”

On that melancholy note, we return to the lounge to join my wife for that last drink. The next one always of course being the “last one,” in the early stages of these situations, before all pretense is dropped and people start taking off their clothes or falling off those infernal high stools that replaced good old fashioned chairs — the kind where your feet reach the floor at all times and with arms you could grip if the room starts spinning.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had hundreds of encounters with reading Americans — and by encounters I mean conversations, not falling off chairs — which is to say book loving, thinking people like the Northumberland librarian, people of every stripe. They have ranged from the good ole boy Texas electrician who took me to a real smoke choked pool-table-and-concrete-floor joint to professors of literature and Washington policy wonks who actually use the little red cocktail napkin that accompanies their martinis.

During this period I have noticed a change in the nature of discussion with these previously unmet readers. Four years ago, much of it centered on the outrageousness of the Bush administration, the stomach turning criminality of the Iraq War, Cheney The Fanged Man of Wax, with a little rage at our planetary ecocide thrown into the mix. In other words, about what you might expect from a baby roasting alien commie readership such as mine, made up of such folks as school teachers, union members, sociology profs and other congenital malcontents, the sort of people who resent things like student strip searches in public high schools (HR 5295, The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006, which, to its credit, at least bans cavity searches by faculty. You gotta be a cop to do that in our public schools) and other subversive types.

Lately though, I don’t hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called “rage fatigue.” Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it’s true.

I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I’m no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing. Obama may yet be borne through the White House portico by a Democratic host of seraphim, but he cannot do much without the consent of a bought and paid for Congress. Only George Bush can do that, and we can only hope God broke the mold after he made George. And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the “American lifestyle,” is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely “the entertainment branch of industry.”

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned “Hope” of course — that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition — will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

Compounding everything is the fact that it is quite human and even pragmatic to passively accept reality as it is. Until it’s too late to do anything. As my late friend Virgil the philosophical backhoe operator summed it up: “If we fucked everything up so bad tryin’ to do our best, maybe we oughtta just leave’er be for a while. Quit thinking about it so much.”

More Band-Aids for the trained chickens, please!

Virgil may be popping open a Keystone Light lager somewhere in heaven, or in maybe a much warmer venue. I dunno. But people are thinking about it more than ever. Among sentient people everywhere there is a deep, visceral unease, and among those most aware there is genuinely acute suffering. I hear this expressed quite articulately not only in places such as this Omni Hotel “writers’ lounge,” but in working and middle class living rooms and in emails from Americans and around the world.

Naturally, the bunny and cupcake set of Americans are still oblivious, or at least pretend to be, but even at the more inchoate and private level, there is a growing awareness that things are going very wrong, and doing so on an incomprehensively massive and complex scale. There is the feeling that even if what is happening could be made comprehensible to the majority of humanity, to all those people just trying to keep afloat on the planet, from Zimbabwe to Flint, Michigan, overall it is unstoppable. Unfixable except in the fleeting media/politics Band-Aid sense, and then only in locales rich enough to afford the illusionary Band-Aid fixes politicians dream up when they write their campaign “plans for change.”

All of which is horseshit, of course, since real change would entail undoing most of the machinery of planetary destruction and extreme pressure to standardize humanity that we have come to know as modern civilization and mass society — halting, then reversing the momentum this monolith has achieved.

We now live as the technoculture’s subjects, not its masters and will from here on out as viral technology mediates, homogenizes and monetizes human experience worldwide, in ever more remote corners. I watch it regularly in the Third World, where the power of gadgets such as cell phones is wiping out the core foundations of indigenous or longstanding cultures within a decade or two. The global machine’s technological nervous system and production musculature, the techno grid now embedded in the world, grows in quantum fashion to control every aspect of our lives deeper and more thoroughly than is imaginable by the folks living those lives. It’s so pervasive we don’t feel it at all.

For instance, I just hit the ATM machine in this hotel for forty bucks. And in doing so I joined the Manhattan book editor, the black Carib village fisherman in Dangriga, Central America and the taxi driver in Capetown, South Africa in performing the same activity. We all stand submissively before the global ATM machine network like trained chickens pecking the correct colored buttons to release our grains of corn. Freedom, and to a large extent joy, as we understand it in our common technoculture, is mostly just the grid’s monetized consumer offerings, each with its own type of packaging, its own technologically produced overlay of commercial skin. These choices, by the way, do not include the non-uniform products or experience, unauthorized products or joys such as hashish or deviant sex. Not officially at least, but perhaps when technoculture solves the uniform packaging and delivery problem …

If anybody solves that problem, it will be the Japanese. There seem to be no bigger suckers for technoculture than the people who have given the world plastic dirt (“half as dense as and a thousand times cleaner than real dirt”) the UFO-detecting keychain, the online lie-detector and the hydroelectric toilet, which “assesses what variety of waste you’ve just put into it.” Technoculture is stressful enough, but obsessing over how clean or dense dirt is, and assessing the varieties of you bodily waste (last time I looked there were only two) well, there may be a certain justice in the Japanese suffering the highest levels of anxiety, stress, and depression. It’s so bad that according to Dr. Kunio Kitamura, director of the Japan Family Planning Association,

“Japanese people simply aren’t having sex, and the suicide rate has been rising rapidly.”

Personally, I am not having much sex either, but that has not yet pushed me to toward suicidalism and probably never will. After age sixty sex became perhaps my fifth highest priority, just below the availability of cheap beer or maybe even a double bourbon after six PM, which of course has a helluva lot to do with that fifth priority and its likelihood. All of which is more than you cared to know, I am sure.

Sucking the cuff in Totoland

“Eventually the system will reach a point — where the social cue is ‘integration’ — where the universal dependence of all moments on all other moments makes the talk of causality obsolete. It is idle to search for what might have been a cause within a monolithic society.”
– Theodor Adorno

In other words, Teddy boy, a totalitarian society. Not a nice word, according to our Western Civ instructors. An ironic one too, considering that Americans and Europeans sowed so much of its original seed. But the reality is that totalitarian society (dubbed “Totoland” in my household in a grim effort toward mockery: Dear Dorothy, fuck you and your little dog too! Signed, Bill Gates) is already here. And most of the planet accepts that as long as nobody next door is getting beheaded and at least some grains of corn keep dropping out of that ATM machine. Such is the belief in technology’s supposed production efficiency in dealing with the supply and demand problems of this world’s six billion.

That belief will remain because the technology will remain. Until it collapses along with the corporate aristocracy that make and own it. Otherwise, it cannot be dismantled without dismantling the world as we have made it and we cannot undo our own evolutionary species trajectory. Regardless of what the New Agers and Earth worshipping goddess cultists believe, we cannot haul six billion people back into pre-technology or support them in any natural sustainable fashion. Most of the world’s common people accept this, however unconsciously, thus the lack of protests and counter efforts on any meaningful scale. The new totalitarianism is its own justification, and nobody in America or Europe is going to kick up much sand so long as the Darfurs and Haitis remain on the goddamned TV screen where they belong.

At the same time, those empowered to do what little can be done, the world’s aristocrats, do what they have always done: surf the crest of power and wealth with their dicks pointed into the sunset of their civilization and their heads up their asses. A delighted nation cheers as a brunette corporate aspirant sucks on Donald Trump’s pant leg on the Donald Trump Show. (“Ya gotta really want it baby!”) As a hobby, the guy owns The Miss Universe Organization, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants. He’ll never want for pants suckers.

Meanwhile, I’ve got forty ATM bucks that have to last me two days at this book bash.

A new Dark Age? Hell, why not?

“A new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new kinds of poverty, merciless remodeling of opinion by media, immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul. Massified, standardizing modes, in every area of life, relentlessly re-enact the actual control program of modernity. Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did.”
– Jean-François Lyotard

I’ve painted a grim picture for sure, made worse by claiming that hope is a sucker’s game, even a religion for millions of “people of faith” who believe hope and faith are the same thing. Ah hope! That fuzzy hearted Hallmark world of mass produced sentiment and emotions, even about “bereavement,” a world where thinking is regarded as a rat in the larder of bourgeois smugness. Thinking gnaws away at everything so relentlessly, until it finally breaks a tooth on one truth or another. And one of those truths is that the technology enabling those digital greeting cards that play “Happy Birthday” is systematically destroying nature and toxifying and maiming the millions of drudgery filled souls whose sole purpose for existence is industrial.

I’m convinced we are watching Lyotard’s illiteracy and impoverishment of language and merciless remodeling of opinion by media and “massified” standardizing in action. I could be wrong — my wife and kids assure me I am wrong about most things. But I have at least one scholarly author type on my side, Dr. Morris Berman, who argues that we are indeed seeing the approach of a new Dark Age. I’m willing to bet that the tens of millions living on less than a dollar a day or any of the women and children sold into the world’s multibillion-dollar sex-slave trafficking (including those under American auspices of Dyncorp and Halliburton subsidiaries like KBR) feel that it’s here already. Not that anyone is asking them or anyone else in the Third World.

Living as I do much of the year in a Third World village, watching daily the cost of the American lifestyle on the village’s people, the technocultural cheapening of their lives, physical hunger, I feel guilty even being in such a posh hotel as the Omni. I should be back in Central America finishing up the water and sanitation project I recently started there (and probably would be if I were not out of money). Yet, through the patio’s glass door I can see the people round my table, the Northumberland librarian, the writer Tom Miller whose moving testimonies of Latino immigrants open up worlds unseen by white Americans, my own good wife who brings to life the truth of slavery by excavating memories in an amnesiac America … These are people who understand that human life is short and history is long, and that their humanly elegant efforts will not only go unheralded by that history, but mostly go unacknowledged in their own darkening time, and be all but eradicated by the sheer impoverishment of language and literacy in their native country during a New American Dark Age that comes cloaked in glittering technology instead of a coarse woolen cowl. Such unassuming and dedicated people are among our best.

This sordid American drama, the one I am calling a Dark Age, will in all likelihood not be completed until well into this century or the next, with a slew of increasingly nasty episodes along the way. Everyone here in the hotel lounge will say goodbye to this world long before America says the Big Goodbye.

Until then, we are left to play out the game day by day. That being the case, we should elect to play it out with the best among us, the ones on humanity’s side, that hidden and unheralded aristocracy — those quiet lamp lighters making their way through the deepening dusk of American civilization.

E. M. Forster described them as,

“Not an aristocracy of power, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes and through the ages, and they know each other when they meet. … Authority, seeing their value, tries to net them and to utilize them. … But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room; Their temple is the Holiness of the Heart’s Imagination, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide open world.”

In this they are deathless.

Like periwinkles.

Remember: They Are Liars

From TruthOut.org:

No one is such a liar as the indignant man.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, along with a slew of administration underlings and a revolving-door cavalcade of brass hats from the Pentagon, have been making claims regarding Iraq for many years now.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, “enough to kill several million people,” according to a page on the White House web site titled Disarm Saddam Hussein.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 500 tons, which equals 1,000,000 pounds, of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of nearly 30,000 munitions capable of delivering these agents.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of several mobile biological weapons labs.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was operating an “advanced” nuclear weapons program.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq had been seeking “significant quantities” of uranium from Africa for use in this “advanced” nuclear weapons program.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes “suitable for nuclear weapons.”

They lied.

They claimed America needed to invade, overthrow and occupy Iraq in order to remove this menace from our world. “It would take just one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country,” went the White House line, “to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.”

They lied.

“Simply stated,” said Dick Cheney in August of 2002, “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

Liar.

“Right now,” said George W. Bush in September of 2002, “Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of nuclear weapons.”

Liar.

“We know for a fact,” said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in January of 2003, “that there are weapons there.”

Liar.

“We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction,” said Colin Powell in February of 2003, “is determined to make more.”

Liar.

“We know where they are,” said Donald Rumsfeld in March of 2003. “They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, south, west and north somewhat.”

Liar.

“The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about,” said Paul Wolfowitz in March of 2003. “Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator.”

Liar.

“No one ever said that we knew precisely where all of these agents were,” said Condoleezza Rice in June of 2003, “where they were stored.”

Liar.

“I have absolute confidence that there are weapons of mass destruction inside this country,” said Gen. Tommy Franks in April of 2003. “Whether we will turn out, at the end of the day, to find them in one of the 2,000 or 3,000 sites we already know about or whether contact with one of these officials who we may come in contact with will tell us, ‘Oh, well, there’s actually another site,’ and we’ll find it there, I’m not sure.”

Wrong.

“Before the war,” said Gen. Michael Hagee in May of 2003, “there’s no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found.”

Wrong.

“Given time,” said Gen. Richard Myers in May of 2003, “given the number of prisoners now that we’re interrogating, I’m confident that we’re going to find weapons of mass destruction.”

Wrong.

“Do I think we’re going to find something? Yeah, I kind of do,” said Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton in May of 2003, “because I think there’s a lot of information out there.”

Wrong.

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, is about to give testimony before the Senate regarding the current state of affairs in that battle-savaged country. He is a political general, one of many America has seen and heard over the last five years, one who would leap nude from the Capitol dome before telling the real truth about matters in Iraq … or who would speak using words fed to him by liars, and thus be wrong.

Remember: they lie. They all lie, from the top man down to the bottom. If their lips are moving, a lie is unfolding. If they say water is wet, get into the shower to make sure.

They lie.

Period.

End of file.

---

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Tuesday 08 April 2008

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: “War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know“ and “The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.” His newest book, “House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation,” is now available from PoliPointPress.

Swiss reject terror sponsor charge by US Jewish group

Never mind that Israel buys oil from Iran.

Source: The Guardian.com:

Switzerland rejected accusations on Tuesday by the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that it could be financing terrorism after a Swiss company clinched a multi-billion euro (dollar) deal to buy natural gas from Iran.

The Swiss Foreign Ministry reiterated that the purchase did not violate U.N. Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme or U.S. domestic law.

The American Jewish group’s full-page advertisement — which follows a complaint lodged by Israel with Switzerland over the deal — appeared on Tuesday in newspapers under the banner “Guess who is the world’s newest financier of terrorism? SWITZERLAND”.

“The reproaches in this advertisement do not correspond to the facts,” Swiss Foreign Ministry spokesman Lars Knuchel said.

The ad — which ran in the International Herald Tribune, the leading Swiss financial daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung and Geneva daily Le Temps — said the deal’s “likely result” was Hamas and Hezbollah “may get tens of thousands of additional missiles”.

Both Hezbollah, the Shi’ite Muslim movement in Lebanon, and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas which seized control of the Gaza Strip last year, are pro-Iranian parties.

U.S. President George W. Bush has accused Shi’ite Muslim Iran of being “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror” and of undermining peace by supporting Hezbollah and Hamas.

The United States has led international efforts to penalise Iran for failing to allay suspicions that it is seeking nuclear weapons and has been urging other countries to cut trade ties.

The ad said that the contract, signed during a Tehran visit last month by Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, would enable Iran to accelerate and complete its nuclear programme.

“Terrorist cells in Europe, the Middle East and around the globe will have access to new weapons and support,” it said. “When you finance a terrorist state, you finance terrorism.”

The Swiss energy group Elektrizitaetsgesellschaft Laufenburg (EGL) has said its 25-year deal with the National Iranian Gas Export Company was worth between 10 billion euros ($15.73 billion) and 22 billion euros, depending on several factors such as the price of oil.

Calmy-Rey, whose neutral country has worked in the past to find a compromise in the nuclear row, said in Tehran that the deal was important in the long term for both parties.

“This business transaction between the EGL and NIGEC is fully in line with the U.N. sanctions against Iran as well as with the U.S. Iranian Sanctions Act,” Knuchel said on Tuesday.

Never mind that Israel secret buys oil from Iran.

Asked whether the deal might jeopardise neutral Switzerland’s role in handling U.S. interests in Iran, as it has done since the 1979 revolution, he said a State Department spokesman had said last week there was no change in U.S. policy.

The Swiss foreign ministry also pointed out that other powers including the European Union (EU), China and Japan were doing business with the Islamic Republic.

By Stephanie Nebehay
(Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Charles Dick)

CNN Helps Autism Debacle Blow Up in Government’s Face

Vaccine-Autism Link No Longer in Question

Via NaturalNews.com:

On April 2, 2008 CNN spent the day bringing awareness to the problem of autism. Larry King’s segment, which included Jenny McCarthy along with a panel of guests, was particularly enlightening. My hat is off to Jenny, a celebrity mother who is making it quite uncomfortable for the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to ignore parents of autistic children seeking answers. Why does a mom have to do the work of the CDC? The answer is rather simple: our government’s zeal to insist on too many vaccines while ignoring the actual risks is the driving force behind the autism tragedy. Sure there are many related factors – but the bottom line is that our government is causing disease at an alarming and devastating pace.

It is an interesting comment on our society that an outspoken and impassioned mother of an autistic child, along with her partner (actor Jim Carrey), are the catalysts that are likely to cause a warped empire to crumble. Many before them have tried; and typically been burned at the stake. Jenny and Jim are the government’s worst nightmare. They can’t shut down their medical practice because they don’t have one. They can’t financially damage them into silence. And as they lead their autism March on Washington D.C. this June 4th it is quite clear that they haven’t a prayer of shutting them up. A powder keg is about to blow.

Jenny, to her credit, takes a diplomatic view on vaccines. Here main point is that there are too many vaccines given too soon and that the vaccines contain too many toxic components. As both a leading defender of health freedom in this country and a top nutritionist who has helped numerous autistic children, I am more than happy to put the entire problem into perspective and give insights that will help many parents.

A Brief History of Vaccines, Profits, and Politics

Vaccines started the Big Pharma sickness industry over 100 years ago. While the public views vaccines in a preventive health context our government’s position is much more complex. Vaccines and germs are part of warfare, and the issue is deeply woven into national security interests. Military personnel are frequently subjected to experimental vaccines. Vaccines are a key component of herd mentality; i.e., the ability of those in power to get a population to behave. Public health is never in the best interest of any one person, which is why laws are concocted to enforce compliance. Unelected bureaucrats and scientists in our government agencies, tied financially to the profits of the drug industry and linked to the military, have been playing God for many decades. They know full well there will be deaths and injuries from vaccinations; collateral damage that is justified by prevented disease (a convenient and fear-driven argument).

Our government has no problem manipulating data so that the benefits appear to outweigh the risks. Imagine having a calculator that always has the same conclusion no matter what data is entered. How can the risk of injuring 1 in 150 children for life be acceptable to Big Pharma and the revolving door CDC and FDA management? Any business would love to have the opportunity to produce a product and have the government mandate its sale. Government officials find lucrative jobs in the industries they regulate – after doing “good work.” Autism is partly a side effect of the cancer within government agencies.

Our government will never pay the price to screen children at risk for autism – that would be too proactive and expensive on the front end. They won’t even prepare a reasonable patient history checklist that reflects obvious risk for vaccine injury – as too many parents would opt out. Rather, our government specializes in lazy medicine – fire a shotgun and if someone gets injured it is their fault for standing there. Costs are now the burden of families on the back end of the equation; more profits for the sickness industry. If autism didn’t have painful little faces connected with it this problem would simply be swept under the rug, as is the 100,000 Americans (mostly elderly) killed by Big Pharma drugs every year.

The problem for our government is that an admission of guilt on the autism-vaccine link causes the entire paradigm of the Big Pharma-driven Western-medicine sickness industry to collapse. Even worse in their eyes, it would send an earthquake through the brotherhood of Big Pharma, public health, the CDC, the FDA, the global elite, and the military. Other public health programs would be questioned – like polluting our water with a neurotoxin called fluoride that makes a population more docile and controllable.

Unfortunately for parents combating autism, the problems of their child is only a portion of the issue they now must try to solve. They are up against a government dead set on preventing the truth from ever coming out. Once cornered, our government will play the national security card before fessing up to their sins or making any real effort to correct the damage they have done.

A Major Crack in Our Government’s Armor

The case of Hannah Poling is raising quite a stir. She is now 9 years old. As a healthy and normally developing 18-month-old girl she showed up for her well baby visit and was pummeled with 9 vaccinations, two of them containing the mercury preservative known as thimerosal. Her health immediately deteriorated into full blown autism.

Her case was the first to be settled of 4,900 autism cases pending before federal Vaccine Court. She claimed that mercury-containing vaccines were the cause of her autism. In a shocking turn of events the federal government conceded this autism case saying that “compensation is appropriate.”

However, our government refused to admit vaccines caused her autism. Indeed, the government settled the case before there was even a hearing. The last thing the government wants is to put vaccines on public trial, and place pictures of injured children on the news every night, especially when the evidence of the case is so clear that vaccines will certainly lose.

Rather, the CDC is hinting that it was Hannah’s mitochondria that were to blame, not the vaccines. This argument opens another Pandora’s box (more on that later).

The defendant in all vaccine cases is the Department of Health and Human Services. The CDC is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Talk about conflict of interest! A pack of foxes is in charge of the national chicken coop.

How Our Government Defends Itself When It Is Clearly Wrong

It is somewhat unfortunate that those who have helped to champion the cause of our government’s involvement in vaccine injury have placed so many eggs in the thimerosal basket. Of course mercury is a nerve toxin and its involvement in autism is likely as a percentage of the problem. However, neither thimerosal nor any single vaccine is an adequate overall explanation for autism.

Our government is using various studies to deflect the vaccine-autism link. These studies relate to thimerosal and MMR vaccines, but not to the collective number of vaccines given at one time and the overall number of vaccines given so early in life (the real problem). This flimsy government defense is being used to deflect attention away from vaccines as a causative link to autism. (Read their vaccine studies here: http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/vaccines.htm)

This is a classic stalling tactic used by corrupt government and industry when they have been caught red-handed. This approach involves acknowledging certain aspects of the problem, making changes (they took thimerosal out of many vaccines), creating doubt (their “study” defense), and then continuing with the mass vaccination program even though they know it causes harm. This strategy will deflect most of the legal liability from vaccine-related injury, delaying it and then minimizing it over time. A legion of government-funded scientists can be paraded in a courtroom for decades with the sole purpose of creating doubt and delaying taking responsibility for the problem. An admission of guilt opens a floodgate of liability lawsuits.

They think their skimpy studies give them breathing room so that they can now direct attention elsewhere to mysterious possibilities like genetics or environmental toxins that will also take them decades to figure out. True enough, these issues are also a percentage of the problem – so much so that they can be used to confuse the vaccine link for a long time. The government’s defense is always that more research is needed. This is not research that proves what they are doing is safe before they continue to do it; it is research that proves what they are doing is harmful before they stop doing it. Unfortunately, behind closed doors they cherry pick their research results as well as what they choose to study.

In the mean time these unelected bureaucrats continue to unabashedly administer a vaccine program that injures and kills. Most societies would either call this murder or involuntary manslaughter. Why don’t we hear Bush, McCain, Clinton, or Obama weighing in on this issue? Why don’t they stand on stage with a group of autistic children and tell mothers everywhere how important vaccines are?

When the Hannah Polling case got on the radar map and blew up in the government’s face, a damage control press conference was held. Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director of the CDC, stated, “There’s absolutely nothing changed in the adamant recommendations that we are making to get children vaccinated. This is proven to save lives and is an essential component of health protection for children across America and the world.” Dr. Gerberding should be the first to stand trial. (http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/transcri…)

Why Vaccines are a Problem

It is quite clear that the rate of autism in this country is directly time-associated with the increased numbers of vaccines given to children. The explosion in autism between 1987 and 1992 coincides with the tripling in the numbers of vaccines given to our children. While such data is not proof of cause and effect, it is significant and cannot be ignored by any responsible parent (it is ignored by the government and medical profession).

Numerous parents report taking their healthy child to the doctor, getting a barrage of vaccinations, having their child run a high fever, and their child never again being the same. THAT IS THE REAL PROBLEM THAT PARENTS SEE WITH THEIR OWN TWO EYES.

The current government strategy is to keep arguing about thimerosal and MMR vaccines – as they know they can create enough doubt to win that argument in the majority of the scientific community. What the government does not want to discuss is the adjuvant in vaccines – which will clearly be shown to be the autism trigger.

Vaccines contain weakened “signatures” of a disease. By themselves they are not strong enough for the immune system to mount a response. This problem is solved by adding a “booster” compound called an adjuvant. An adjuvant does not contain any signature of the disease. Rather, the adjuvant initiates an inflammatory reaction (the first step in any immune response). The idea is to get the immune system revved up so that it can see the weakened disease and learn what it looks like so that if it ever sees it again it will be more prepared to fight it. This concept, in and of itself, has validity – but only given the right set of circumstances.

It is clear that those with autism have an excessively inflamed brain. If pressed, the CDC would likely argue that the brain inflammation is a result of the autism and that they need more studies to determine the cause. I will argue that they don’t need any more studies at all and that the cause is blatantly obvious based on an understanding of existing science. The multiple inflammatory insults from the adjuvant in vaccines, at a rate of 1 in 150 cases, sets the brain on fire and causes autism. As an aside, and to a lesser extent (but just as important to society), a minor brush fire causes ADHD and impaired intelligence. References: http://www.wellnessresources.com/newsro…
http://www.wellnessresources.com/newsro…
http://www.wellnessresources.com/newsro…

How Your Brain Works

The crumbling paradigm of Western medicine likes to break down body function according to convenient classifications such as nerves, immunity, hormones, etc. In reality your brain is a central processor of all systems in your body and thus has connections that link nerves, immune function, and hormones into one symphony of function. In other words, it is not possible to study only neurotransmitters like serotonin or dopamine and actually understand what your brain is doing.

Ten percent of the cells in your brain are neurotransmitter related. The other 90% are glial cells, also called astrocytes. For decades scientists thought that 90% of your brain was nothing more than a structural framework, simply because scientific tools were not adequate to understand what glial cells were doing, but that has changed in the past 10 years. Glial cells run your brain and your neurotransmitters. They are the brokers of all information coming into your brain – with direct links to your immune system and endocrine system (hormones).

Glial cells are the inflammation brokers in your brain. When stress, a toxin pollutant, or a destructive food additive (like MSG, aspartame, or food coloring) enter your brain they induce excitotoxic reactions that inflame brain cells. This inflammation is buffered primarily by the hormone leptin and other antioxidants, a process that intimately involves the healthy function of glial cells.

When the buffering anti-inflammatory capacity of glial cells is overloaded, then inflammation becomes chronic. Minimally, this results in brain wear and tear. It is the mechanism behind all accelerated brain aging and, depending on a person’s genetic weaknesses and other health issues, leads to various states of early cognitive decline and nerve-related diseases of aging such as Alzheimer’s.

There is also a point at which low grade brain inflammation catches fire. In adults with an established nerve network this causes a “power outage” in the head, otherwise known as spreading depression. Such an event is typically triggered by emotional pain or physical pain of a prolonged nature or acute intensity (elevating substance P to abnormally high levels). Such trauma pushes struggling nerves over the edge.

The difference in a fetus or small child is that the nervous system is still rapidly evolving. If the brain catches fire at this age proper development of the nerves can be seriously disturbed (the autism spectrum of disorders) or functionally impaired (ADHD, lower IQ).

The adjuvant in vaccine is pro-inflammatory; i.e., neurologically excitotoxic. That is intentional so as to boost the effectiveness of the vaccine. The problem comes about when giving so many of them at once, which can injure even a perfectly healthy child. Giving multiple adjuvants is like playing Russian roulette with a child’s brain. Children with already inflamed nerves are at much higher risk for reacting to multiple vaccines, as their nerves have been conditioned to hyper-react. Don’t think for a moment that Dr. Gerberding and other scientists at the CDC aren’t fully aware of this issue.

Government Responsibility

Our government has the responsibility to prove the safety of any vaccination being recommended for broad public health, as part of an overall vaccine program. Our current knowledge of science, the immune system, and the brain would make it unlikely that broad vaccine programs could ever be approved for use today if they hadn’t being going on for so long.

Our government is not only grossly negligent on the vaccine issue itself, but on numerous other true public health issues that pose a significant risk for brain inflammation in fetuses and children. The CDC, the EPA, and the FDA all play large roles in creating huge autism risk for our population.

Space in this article only allows a few examples; there are many. Environmental pollution that is fat soluble can cross the placenta, exists in mother’s milk, or occurs in the general food supply fed to small children. Fat soluble toxins cross the blood-brain barrier and induce nerve inflammation.

Huge public health risks include widespread contamination of our food supply with fat soluble PCB toxins, a problem that would cost at least 50 billion dollars to clean up. Another example of broad exposure is the neurotoxic pesticides used on food (originally Nazi nerve gas agents). Another example is the military’s poisoning of our water supply with perchlorate, a contaminant now found in breast milk of mothers across the country. This interferes with thyroid function in the baby, resulting in a serious risk for faulty brain development.

Another example is iron fortification of baby formulas, which encourages the growth of hostile bacteria and Candida Albicans in the child’s digestive tract; organisms that produce neurotoxic waste products. Another example is the use of antibiotics before age 1, which also encourages the growth of the very same hostile bacteria and Candida. C-Section deliveries also increased the risk for a hostile digestive terrain in the baby. Candida itself directly communicates to and promotes inflammation in the human immune system causing it to malfunction.

Yet another example is the widespread use of antidepressants by pregnant and nursing mothers, which drastically disturbs the evolving function of nerves and overall health of the fetus or baby. And then there is the vaccine preservative thimerosal (different than an adjuvant), which is a neuro-inflammatory in and of itself. And this is the short list.

All of these issues play a role as a percentage of the problem that induces friction in the developing nervous system of a fetus, baby, or young child and primes the nerves to hyper-react to vaccines. Each of these problems is a true public health problem because they are caused by industry and are allowed to continue by various vested interests. Each one will take tens of billions of dollars to fix. However, that is actually the responsibility of government – to fix costly and broad public health problems – not to make them worse.

The Genetic Red-Herring

The case of Hannah Poling has forced our government to show its hand – and a very weak hand it is. They will continue to bluff and confuse the public with scientific gibberish in an effort to misdirect. Their defense in the Poling case, even though they conceded the case, is that the child had genetic mitochondrial dysfunction.

Mitochondria are the car engines in your cells that produce energy (ATP). ATP is the energy currency in your body, much like money in your wallet. You spend ATP, as needed, to do anything. Inflammation uses up ATP by causing your body to go into a hyper mode (like a 911 phone call). If ATP production is compromised then inflammation can run wild – contributing to the brain fire called autism.

True mitochondrial gene mutations are too rare to explain autism, so the government is trying to blame this mechanism in the Poling case to deflect the idea that vaccines are a risk for the majority.

What the government isn’t saying is that, independent of a true genetic issue, mitochondria can be taxed into a state of stress that predisposes any child to autism risk. You don’t need to have a gene mutation; that is simply a diversion and cover-up attempt.

Furthermore, the glial cells in your brain use ATP to communicate, a separate function than energy currency. This means that any time you run low in overall body energy, brain function is compromised and tilted into a pro-inflammatory mode. This is why stress makes you tired and causes you to feel physical wear and tear. It is also why any time you exercise, which conditions your body to make ATP more efficiently, your head feels better. When glial cells run low on ATP they enter a low grade chronic inflammatory mode – a condition that seriously predisposes to vaccine injury.

Reducing the Risk for Adverse Vaccine Reactions

The bottom line for any parent is to not expose their child to vaccines under circumstances that are likely to increase the odds of a brain fire that results in autism. Fewer vaccines in general, not giving so many at once, and giving them at older ages are all common sense.

Additionally, proper nutrition during pregnancy, during lactation, and the overall fitness and health habits of the mother have a profound effect on having a child with a stronger nervous system. It is quite clear that the obesity hormone leptin is elevated in the blood of autistic children. This is a risk factor linked to obesity in the mother with consequent abnormal fetal programming of the developing brain which is then handicapped to buffer inflammation from toxic exposure like vaccines. ((http://www.wellnessresources.com/newsro…)

High leptin in the blood means that leptin isn’t getting into the brain. Leptin is the primary buffer in the brain against inflammatory excitotoxic damage. This is why boys have four times the rate of autism compared to girls. Girls have naturally higher levels of protective leptin in their brains, mostly to help them get pregnant and nurse their children in later life. My books on leptin (Mastering Leptin and The Leptin Diet) explain how leptin works in much greater detail. A mother’s health and eating habits, prior to and during pregnancy, play a large role in the health of her baby’s nervous system. ((http://www.wellnessresources.com/Books/…)

Likewise, family stress during pregnancy and early childhood development are important to how a child processes stress and consequent nerve inflammation. Conflicts between husband and wife, in front of a child (including a child in the womb), primes nerves to be inflamed. Providing a stable environment for mother and child is a main reason for the family unit – and in my opinion the responsibility of men.

Thus we see that there are multiple factors, some under your control and many that are not, acting in one way or another to prime the nerves into a chronic low-grade inflammatory state which sets the stage for increased risk of vaccine injury.

One of the very worst times to vaccinate a child is directly after an illness or surgery – which are highly inflammatory events. Unfortunately, doctors don’t seem to understand health very well and it is often the case that the parent has brought the child to the doctor because of an illness or a follow up from some other medical procedure. At that time the doctor says “Oh, your vaccinations are not up to date.” And then gives them to a child who is already neurologically inflamed. Such medical malpractice is a disaster, and common in this country.

Parents who have children with digestive problems, recurring infections, asthma, allergies, or any other sign of immune weakness should not vaccinate until such problems are fully resolved. These problems also indicate a high level of existing brain inflammation.

It is pathetic that the CDC does not publish a list of guidelines for parents that would dramatically reduce the risk for vaccine injury (low cost and low tech). The “more research is needed” excuse is enough to make everyone vomit. Of course we could do far more by screening for inflammatory brain markers and immune system dysfunction ahead of any round of vaccines (high cost and high tech). The days of blindly vaccinating children according to a schedule, while ignoring the child’s state of existing nerve inflammation and immune system function are over. Parents should revolt. This is a national tragedy. The government’s vaccination program is indeed the cause of the autism epidemic.

About the author: Byron J. Richards, Founder/Director of Wellness Resources (www.wellnessresources.com), is a Board-Certified Clinical Nutritionist and nationally-renowned health expert, radio personality, and educator. He is the author of Mastering Leptin, The Leptin Diet, and Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA’s Betrayal of America.

Yoo Memos Prove That The Fourth Reich Is Here

Source: IntelStrike – Lee Rogers

Recent news on the White House torture and spy memos has amazingly received very little coverage in the corporate controlled media. For instance, Barack Obama’s low bowling score has received more coverage than these memos. The media some how thinks Obama’s horrible bowling skills are more important than evidence that could be used to prosecute members of the Bush administration for all sorts of criminality including war crimes. That makes no sense, but of course when you consider that the corporate controlled media creates reality for people it makes perfect sense. Both of these memos were written by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and prove that the Bush administration sought to justify torture and ignore the Fourth Amendment under the guise of the phony war on terror.

In the memos, Yoo concludes that Bush can torture and spy without a warrant if he is doing these things to protect the country from terrorists. Of course, the majority of the so called terrorists that the media and the government claims we are fighting are actually trained and funded by western governments so the whole thing is a big fraud. That of course is a whole other story. In these memos, it is clear that Yoo shows a blatant disregard for both U.S. and international law. Yoo and other members of the Bush administration should really be put on trial for war crimes but since the corporate controlled media thinks that Obama’s low bowling score is more important than smoking gun proof of war crimes, that’s probably not going to happen.

First let’s tackle the spying memo. Below is taken from an excerpt of an Associated Press report on the 37-page secret Justice Department memo in which Yoo concludes that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations.

For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn’t apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.

That view was expressed in a secret Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.

The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.

The 37-page memo is classified and has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,” the footnote states, referring to a document titled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”

First off, domestic military operations at the time this memo was written were forbidden by the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. On top of that, Yoo is essentially saying that the executive branch has the power to search and seize property without a warrant during domestic military operations. Through this memo, Yoo is saying that the administration can disregard the Fourth Amendment so long as they claim that they are trying to protect America from terrorists. This is absurd considering that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and there are no provisions for its suspension just because the executive branch says there is a state of war. This memo represents an attempt to justify spying on the American people without a warrant when there is no justification for it anywhere in the law.

Now let’s go to the torture memo. News on the torture memo actually leaked out to the press back in 2004 following the Abu Ghraib scandal in which pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing and humiliating prisoners were made public. Now, the memo in its entirety has been declassified via a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. Although the memo was eventually rescinded, it gave authority to the Bush administration to legally order torture and ways to get around U.S. and international law that prohibited such activity.

Below is an excerpt from an Associated Press report on the declassification of the torture memo.

The Pentagon made public a now-defunct legal memo that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President Bush’s wartime authority trumps any international ban on torture.

The Justice Department memo, dated March 14, 2003, outlines legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al-Qaida and Taliban detainees overseas — so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captives.

Even so, the memo noted, the president’s wartime power as commander in chief would not be limited by the U.N. treaties against torture.

“Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion,” said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. The memo also offered a defense in case any interrogator was charged with violating U.S. or international laws.

“Finally, even if the criminal prohibitions outlined above applied, and an interrogation method might violate those prohibitions, necessity or self-defense could provide justifications for any criminal liability,” the memo concluded.

First off, torture is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions as well as the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It is against both international and federal law so it is ridiculous that Yoo would try to justify this immoral and illegal activity by using Bush’s wartime authority as trumping any bans on torture. Secondly, Congress hasn’t issued a declaration of war so the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are illegal which means that Bush has no wartime authority to begin with. In fact, the occupation and on-going wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are unconstitutional and illegal. There is simply no moral or legal basis that justifies the arguments in Yoo’s memo.

Yoo didn’t stop there though. In 2006, he said that the President actually had the authority to crush the testicles of children during an exchange with human rights scholar Doug Cassel.

There needs to be an immediate Congressional investigation into this matter. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did not even have the guts to say or put this type of stuff down on paper. The torture and spying memos authored by Yoo is proof that he is not only a criminal but a war criminal. Anyone in the Bush administration military or non-military who used the memo as justification to order or participate in the torture of other human beings should also be put on trial for war crimes. This is proof that the events in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and in secret European prisons were authorized at very high levels in the Bush administration. These events were not the result of rogue low level soldiers, it was in fact policy.

Since we have so many militarized police running around in Darthvader outfits, perhaps they can finally be used to go after the real criminals. They can first pay a visit to Yoo’s office at UC Berkeley and then they can go round up the rest of them at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. It is time to bring down the Fourth Reich.